staffordshirebred

When the rose was more famous than the shop – an American plantsman’s catalogue of 1920 from my own collection.

There are fashions in rose cultivation, just as there are in habits, costume, and coiffure.

A nameless, ancient, pale shell pink rose used to ramble at will all over the old brick barn where my dad’s family lived at Keepers Cottage, Footherly. It had been planted in some distant season without reference to the preferred palette and naturalistic planting schemes popularised by Gertrude Jekyll at the turn of the 20th century, even though it typified them.

“iceberg,” “Blue Moon,” “Peace,” I could recite the names of all my mother’s roses. At the front of 155, Bosty Lane, Aldridge, in the 1960s.

I was a young child when my mother lovingly stocked our front garden at 155, Bosty Lane, Aldridge with all the latest varieties of “Hybrid Teas”. We really appreciated their virtues: the exquisite form of the bloom, with the classic pointed bud, whose shape endures as the petals around it unfold, and the startlingly intense colours of the latest introductions: “Uncle Walter”, (1963) , a vivid red; “Grandpa Dickson”, (1966), sunny yellow – and “Blue Moon”(1964)- in reality a blueish violet, but even now the nearest approximation of the elusive blue rose.  “Ena Harkness” invited a diminutive Susan to lean in to its ruby flowers to inhale a powerful fragrance, undaunted by the earwigs lurking at the base of the petals.

Hybrid Tea roses are sparse of foliage, and whole beds of them present as a dismal cluster of bare, upright sticks in the winter months, because they sulk if underplanted. These shortcomings mean that are now out of favour with gardening cognoscenti.  All roses, from the wild dog-rose to the florist’s confection give me too much pleasure to criticise them for their faults, unlike Vita Sackville West, who really had it in for a rose called “Dorothy Perkins“. This endearingly bright Barbie-pink rose, a generous bloomer,  she described as an “old enemy”, in her column for “The Observer,” and as  ”… a blaze of color; a long, angry, startling streak … I blink on seeing it; and having blinked, I weep.” Oh dear!

The “real” Dorothy Perkins was the grand-daughter of American rose-grower Charles H. Perkins, who named his creation after her back in 1901, fostering a trend for naming roses after people.  The vigorous plant immediately began to win prizes, and become so famous and popular that the H. P. Newman Stores changed their name to “Dorothy Perkins” in 1919.

Nearly 100 years later, the name “Dorothy Perkins” is still emblazoned on shopfronts the length and breadth of Britain. I reckon I would have been about 16 or 17, in the 1970s when I first sloped in to make a purchase of a pretty blouse or some lacy tights in the Dotty P. shop in Park Street, Walsall, but a member of my family had crossed that threshold some 25 years before at a similar age, with much more purposeful a step, let alone far superior deportment and grooming.

My Aunt, Irene Thackeray, nee Sheldon. Born Walsall, 1932.

My mother’s next youngest sister, Irene, was a tall, slender, personable girl in a cheap print frock when, she recalls, she was making herself useful by running errands for a near neighbour by the name of Mrs Alice Brown.  Mrs Brown was the manageress of the Walsall branch of Dorothy Perkins, and, despite Irene’s tender years, persuaded her to be recruited into the sales force as a trainee manageress. At first, she was obliged to sport the dreaded greeny-beige button- through uniform of the sales girls – “it was horrible, like a prison dress,” Irene says vehemently.  Soon, in deference to her training she was allowed to wear her own outfit of an impeccably tailored dark suit, and stylish peep-toed court shoes.  She relished the fact that her income enabled her to choose her clothes  for the first time in her life.

The staff of the Walsall branch of Dorothy Perkins in the early 1950s. A young Irene Sheldon, second row, left, has one hand on the shoulder of Mrs. Rathbone, the cleaner. Mrs. Brown, manageress, is at the front.

If dainty, now obsolete items of trousseau such as bed-jackets and girdles had been your desire in 1950′s Park Street, you would have been greeted, Madam, at the door of the Dorothy Perkins store by a young lady at once uncannily similar to my mother, but, in Mother’s own words, sweeter and more ladylike. In the role of “First Hand”, the elegant Miss Sheldon would then have shown you to the department you required, be it hosiery, corsetry, blouses, nightwear, or the comprehensive range of knitting yarns which Dorothy Perkins purveyed at the time. Miss Butler, Miss Brazier (whose husband never allowed her to wear make up) or Miss Cooper with their proficient knowledge of the stock behind their own glass counter, would courteously have served you, and neatly hand written the record of your purchase – each ticket being countersigned by the manageress.  A dedicated cashier would have completed the financial transaction. Mrs Rathbone, the cleaner, was an integral member of the team, and appears prominently on group photographs of the staff.  I remember Mrs Rathbone in later life as she lived next door to my grandmother in Bentley.  She was the matriarch of a large family, which, I was uneasily aware, struggled against ill health and poverty.

The Dorothy Perkins girls of Walsall on an outing in the early 50′s at an unrecalled location. Trainee manageress Irene Sheldon is centre back, Mrs Rathbone is centre front.

When a relief manager was required at West Bromwich, the company had an opportunity to assess Irene’s ability to run a shop.  Acquitting herself well, and not quite nineteen years old, she was offered the position of manageress of the Worcester branch.  Reassured that The Church was able to find a respectable Catholic family for her to board with, my grandfather gave his permission for her to go.

Mr Farmer, a member of the family which owned the company, made regular visits to the larger stores, including Worcester.  He was also present (and it looks like it is a terrible chore for him)  at a conference attended by Dorothy Perkins manageresses and area supervisors from far and wide. Worcester seemed cosmopolitan to Irene after Walsall, but arriving by train in London she feared to leave her hotel at all, in case she got lost in the streets of the capital.  A coach arrived at the hotel in the morning to transport the delegates to the impressive Ashridge conference centre in Hertfordshire.

Irene Sheldon, right, manager of Worcester branch, attended a conference for managers in the Dorothy Perkins organisation at Ashridge in Hertfordshire. Mr Farmer is the thorn amongst the roses. Mrs Brown, the manager at Walsall branch is front left, and area manager Miss Marriot is front right,

The Worcester branch of Dorothy Perkins, managed by Irene Sheldon, photographed for the company magazine.

Irene thrived at Worcester. Her salary of £30 per month enabled a single girl to live well and to save for the future.  She became great friends with all the girls who worked for her, including Miss O’Connell, Miss Thatcher, and Worcester branch’s cleaning lady Mrs Turbeville.  This lovely shot of the staff in their shop was taken for the Dorothy Perkins company magazine. The young photographer who took the picture returned to the shop several times, for what he insisted were vital retakes. He had, Irene remembers with amusement, “The biggest ears you ever did see.” Eventually, he plucked up courage to ask Irene to go out with him.  But an evening at the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, and afternoon tea with his parents in their Worcester flat were insufficient to impress. On New Year’s Eve 1954, Irene was to meet her future husband, at the exclusive staff ball held at the Powick Asylum. As midnight chimed, a net of balloons was released from the splendid ceiling of the Victorian ballroom. Irene watched a girl sip from a glass of port as she sternly warned a defiantly grinning young farmer in a sparkling white dress shirt to desist from popping the balloons with his lighted cigarette.  Despite the big sticky red stain he had earned for the front of his shirt, Irene accepted a lift home on the back of Trevor Thackeray’s motorbike……………….

Then this happened..but Irene’s career at Dorothy Perkns continued, and Miss Marriot suggested further promotion…

…..but then this started happening as well.

The Guardians’ Building is the only remnant of the Walsall Union workhouse, whose infirmary evolved into the adjacent Walsall Manor Hospital.  In its early Victorian, Italianate splendour, it is something to admire, whilst waiting on the car park for festive visiting hours to begin on Ward 9 – perhaps, noting the leafy growth from the roof, while I still may.

Respecting the season,  car parking charges have been waived during the 25th and 26th of December, which I find an incongruous gesture. Mother seems quite gleeful, as if this were a Christmas gift, or that we were getting away with something we oughtn’t to. Despite the iron grey skies, and our anxious sympathy for the patient we have come to spend time with, these visits are definitely not the darker interludes of the 2012 holidays. There is sporadic cheerful chatter between the two of us and it is my delight to be free of a hostess’s teeth-gritting obligation to make meaningless small talk with people you are forbidden from disliking. My mother’s youngest sister, although confined to bed, tetchy and in pain, has got some colour back in her cheeks, and we are optimistic about her chances of recovery.  The car park is large and level, and although we are looking through leafless trees onto industrial premises, their careful planting amongst grass and shrubbery gives the impression that the environment around the building has been considered important.  I do hope the suitably empowered realise the uplifting potential of preserving the Guardians’ Building.

We have been in and out of here too frequently in the last few years, and remember the mud and pot-holes we used to struggle to park up in: an extra flake of irritation in 2007 –  tiny, beside the gigantic gouge of loss we were experiencing.

The new Manor Hospital. Does the architecture of the new hospital make a faint nod towards the style of the Guardian’s Building?

Now, the redeveloped hospital is bright and impressive, with lofty halls, light-filled corridors and a reassuring emphasis on cleanliness. We used to associate our local nursing heroine, Sister Dora, with the old General Hospital, but now she is commemorated here at “The Manor.” There is a prominent board bearing information about her life and significant contribution to nursing, and a plaster cast model of her strong, noble features, identical to the bronze statue by FJ Williamson on The Bridge, which has been familiar to me for the whole of my life.

“The Spirit of Sister Dora”

Just inside the entrance, The “Spirit of Sister Dora” is a 2010 work by Steve Yeates, which, very appealingly, has been created from glass from the windows in the old infirmary.  There is something very fitting and moving about the sculptor metaphorically capturing the troubled stares of the sick paupers of long ago through those old panes, from their sick beds to the busy world outside, and incorporating them into this lovely work of art.

As the wintery minutes ticked on until two o’clock, me and Mom gazed, in companionable silence, across Pleck Road, through the rain beaded windscreen of the silver Ford Fiesta, my late dad’s final car, which I inherited, I calculated, five and three-quarter years ago, the day he didn’t come back out of The Manor Hospital. Ghosts tend to rise at Christmas.

The site where my great-aunt Louisa’s house stood in the first half of the 20th century.

“My Aunt Lou used to live over there, just where that blue building ends,” my mother said, unexpectedly.  My mother’s memories stretch back to 1930′s Walsall, but supposing that my great-aunt, Cecilia Louisa Ruddell, nee Sheldon, had moved to the little house in Pleck Road early in her marriage to Uncle Ted?

View of the Guardians’ Building from the site of Louisa’s house. The Union workhouse buildings stood where grass and trees have been planted.

It would have been business as usual in the Union workhouse in those days, and how must it have felt to peep round the lace curtain in the tiny parlour to see a downcast queue shuffling in the cold immediately opposite, outside the Receiving Ward? Was it a sight so commonplace that it did not merit notice?  Did my great-aunt, with her industrious husband, and manageably sized family of three, view the inmates as feckless and lacking in pride?  Or did she clutch little John, Eileen, and Kathleen to her skirts, and remember with a shudder that she had been told that her own great grandparents had ended their days in the a Union workhouse?

The Sheldon family in the 18th and 19th centuries populated the area in and around Ocker Bank, the very heart of the Black Country.  My great grandfather and his Irish wife migrated slowly eastwards, first to Wednesbury, where my grandfather and his sister, great-aunt Lou, were born in the 1890′s, and by 1911 they were living at 196, Queen Street, Walsall.  This is a house my mother remembers well.  Steps up to the front door, parlour, living room and scullery.  Mom’s grandmother, born Maria Egan, spoke with a strong Irish brogue.  Her white hair was piled up on her head in a bun, and over her long black dress she wore a sparkling white pinafore.  She would stride from the back door, past the outside lavatory and shed, over a small thoroughfare to the garden, where she kept her chickens. Her fierce devotion  to the faith she was brought up in reverberates down the years.  There was no question that her son Edward, my grandfather, would have all his five children brought up as Romans Catholics.  His youngest daughter, my currently hospitalised aunty,  remained both unmarried and devout.  She has had a long career of unpaid service in the church, and “Fathers,” and “Sisters” may both be encountered at her bedside at visiting time.

A little way down the road from the Sheldons in 1911, census returns reveal 185, Queen Street to be the home of the Ruddell family, including great-aunt Louisa’s future husband.  His occupation, like that of my grandfather at the time, is described as “Caster’s helper.” Was the man Louisa married her brother’s foundry workmate, as well as her neighbour? Meanwhile, 18 year old Louisa works as a “Jappaner of Harness Furniture”, a typical Walsall occupation in the “Town of 100 Trades.”

My grandparents’ first child was born in the family home in Queen Street, but by the time my mother came along they had moved out into rooms in Countess Street.  In Deepmore Avenue, Bentley, their address lost its aristocratic connotations, but a spacious, new, council house was theirs, where three more children arrived.

At the bottom of Queen Street is the small cemetery, now overgrown, where Dorothy Pattison, “Sister Dora”, was laid to rest in some grandeur following her death on Christmas Eve 1878.

My maternal grandfather, Edward Sheldon, in about 1927, with his first child, Winifred. At the rear of the house in Queen Street, Walsall

I felt that I had mildly special reasons to be excited about Terry Herbert’s discovery of The Staffordshire Hoard on Fred Johnson’s land in the summer of 2009. It fired my imagination to think that numbers of my family might well have crossed those very fields for generations, oblivious to the glowing garnet and gold treasure beneath the stride of their working boots.

And all that talk of shields and sword pommels adorned with cloisonne and filigree brought back memories of hedonistic, full grant, London University days.

It was during the spring of 1983 that I made a futile attempt to compensate for my dedicated and thoroughly reprehensible time-wasting during the preceding 27 months. The core of the course was English Literature, up to 1880. For my “special subject”, inspired by mesmerising fragments of Anglo Saxon poetry, I made the maverick choice of Anglo Saxon Archaeology. The course was conducted in Bloomsbury, necessitating a weekly, teatime, bicycle-train-bicycle dash from my campus in leafy Surrey.

I was an indolent and distracted student, but it was well worth the effort of the journey to listen to Vera Evison, who illustrated her lectures with grainy slide projections. These showed a still recognisable Miss Evison, all tweed skirts and brown brogues, offering up to the camera some small but significant bits of glass and metal from the depths of a sepia tinted trench in the 1920s and 30s.

I was entranced by the experience, deeply impressed by the outfits, and fascinated by archaeology, but had hardly taken in any facts.

Fortified by pork pie, and swilling Courage Directors’, I scoured past exam papers for hints and clues and cheats which might, hope beyond hope, assist me in my finals. The Anglo Saxon examination was to include a “picture round” detailed on a large, glossy, black and white, pull-out page.

Artifacts from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, excavated in 1939, predominate on the 1970s papers.

A few Saxon church towers, and the unprepossessingly rusty looking “Benty Grange Helmet”, found way back in the 19th century, appear repeatedly.

Each year a different one of the five decorated faces of the “Franks’ Casket” was given an outing. The inscriptions on that were also a handy resource for those setting tests in runic translation. The casket was made around the 8th century out of whale bone, but was cavalierly being used by a French household as a sewing box until shortly before Augustus Wollaston Franks bought most of its sorry remains in a Parisian antique shop in 1857. They were all old news, these finds, and not very numerous. But that was before what we like to call The Brownhills Hoard. Setting exam questions must be much more interesting these days.

You really can’t imagine how all that lustrous gold, thrust roughly into the ground near the Watling Street escaped notice for so long, especially now that we know that the hoard was scattered by ploughing activity. Once “detected” and dug up, though, it would have been impossible not to notice that you were holding precious things in your hands.

So, I think that huge credit should be given to a young girl who, in 1954 Lynn, in the “Big Field” of Owletts Hall Farm, noticed a smooth, dull, stone protruding from a post-hole which she had been digging to position a horse-jump, and instantly recognised it as an archaeological find. Lichfield Museum Services were less than interested, but the “Friary” schoolgirl was happy to exchange it for a fat Postal Order from Birmingham Museum. According to “Discovering Stonnall”, produced by the Lynn and Stonnall Conservation and Historical Society, my cousin Rosalind had discovered the only Neolithic axe that has so far come to light in the parish of Stonnall. This is a little disingenuous of them, since, when I paid Ros’s axe a visit recently at the Museum’s fantastic storage facility, it was nestling companionably in a drawer with some other Neolithic axes from very closely adjacent Shenstone. These were finds by Mr Charles Foden who, luckily for we interested parties, made a habit of following his ploughman to see what might turn up on the land of Shenstone Hall Farm. He made donations to Roman as well as prehistoric collections.

We pulled up at Birmingham Museums’ secret, extra building on a bright winter’s morning. We have been in a fair few warehouses over the years, foodstuffs, car parts, workaday and boring. This visit, however, was an unforgettable and surprisingly emotional experience, following Collections Manager, Phil Watson through the serried rows of archived exhibits, to the drawer which holds our axe. Ken and I made slow progress down the aisles, looking from from side to side and back again, in something approaching awe. A Dali-esque array of ships’ figureheads, perambulators, engines, stuffed birds and framed embroideries seemed to be bursting forth from the racking, but, within some arcane cataloguing system, all was in absolutely perfect order, and solicitously protected by fire suppression systems and parasite traps. Phil Watson allowed himself a wry smile at the looks on our faces – he says he is quite used to visitors to this establishment being quite overwhelmed by it.

Here is the object. An axe. A tool for felling trees. Ken has a fearsome collection of metal bladed axes at home – weapons used daily in the constant battle to feed our greedy Rayburn. He could only imagine this stone axe wielded day-long until it achieved the pulverisation of bark and wood. Not what you would describe as “cutting”. But without recourse to metal tools, this beautiful object would achieve exponentially more than bare hands. The stone is from Charnwood Forest, I learned. This tangible evidence now enables me to contemplate our ancestors – many, many generations ago in what is now called Staffordshire, trading stone along an ancient track, shaping and polishing stone with a high degree of skill, and clearing the deeply forested land to farm it for food.  I admired another object in the drawer: mossy-green, mottled, highly polished, right beside the Owletts Axe. Within such a small sample, it was startling to see that the location of its discovery was Orgreave, where we live. Its asymmetrical appearance is due to its sharp edge having been repolished following use. Phil Watson had showed us larger scale examples of these tools which would have been impractical in use, had not been worn, and could be surmised to be ceremonial objects, serving as status symbols, or even currency. He took us to a nearby cabinet, and removed a knapped flint tool over a hundred times older than than the others. This, I was allowed to hold. Ergonomic is the word. My hand folded around it, an exact fit. My thumb found a perfectly placed depression to assist me to grasp it.  Objects with the patina of 50 years handling can excite me.  To touch this 500,000 year old object was overwhelming.  There were tears!

The excellent Phil Watson, with a drawer full of Neolithic Axes found in Staffordshire

Ron and Betty Mowday, Bunty their dog, and Mother with her “Italian Boy Haircut”.
Taken in the 50′s, adjacent to a now abandoned stretch of the Wyrley and Essington canal, near Lichfield.

Fairbourne is a small Welsh seaside town boasting an attractive two-mile stretch of golden sand and a Victorian miniature railway, and a not-very-Welsh name. Much like Westward Ho! in North Devon, the resort was superimposed on a quiet rural community during the 1860′s: in Fairbourne’s case, by the flour magnate Sir Arthur McDougal, upon a settlement originally called Morfa Henddol.

Mr and Mrs Booth’s commodious bungalow in Fairbourne provided several letting rooms for holiday-makers, and my parents were one of the young couples enjoying Mrs Booth’s bustling, motherly hospitality, bright and breezy hikes, and terrifying (according to Mom) ferry trips across the bay to Barmouth one year in the early 50′s.

Billeted in one of the other rooms were Ron and Betty Mowday from Birmingham.  Ron was a bit older, and had seen active service at Montecassino.  My dad had enjoyed his time in the First Battalion of the Welsh Guards, and was posted to the Middle East towards the end of the conflict. As is often the case with ex-servicemen, an easy camaraderie grew up between the two men, and the couples shared a wicked sense of humour and continued to socialise with each other when they returned to the Midlands after their holidays.

Ron, Betty, and Mom, acting daft for my dad’s camera in the “Duke of Wellington” pub on the Birmingham Road, Lichfield. 1950′s.

Ron didn’t drive, and weekend jaunts angling or walking were taken in “Old Bodge”, my dad’s 1935 Morris Eight tourer, registration number BOJ 473. When Betty and Ron moved from their flat at the top of a Victorian mansion in Handsworth to their own little place in Wharwell Lane, Landywood, the interesting old house known as Little Wyrley Hall was only a short distance away, and an ideal venue for an outing. My mother remembers a shocking quantity of animals’ heads gazing down glassy-eyed at her from the walls of a majestic beamed hall that afternoon….but little else. Which is a shame, because following a super evening in the Methodist Church Hall in Brownhills recently, listening to the knowledgeable and entertaining local historian Gerald Reece, I have a special interest in the old house, fascinating in its own right, which was home to the movers and shakers in the early history of mining in the Brownhills area.

Never mind – I retrieved one of my boxes, and blew on the top, raising dust like a puff of magic powder, because inside was a copy of Country Life nearly contemporary with my parents’ day out in “Old Bodge”, containing an illustrated article which describes the hall, and some of contents and occupants, in as much detail as anyone could wish for……

LITTLE WYRLEY HALL, STAFFORDSHIRE

The Home of Mr and Mrs Frank Wallace. By Gordon Nares. (from “Country Life” magazine, 1952)

To the Tudor, Carolean, and William-and-Mary nucleus of his forbears’ house Phineas Hussey made numerous alterations about 1822, when he was High Sheriff of Staffordshire.

Many a country house, and often the most endearing, possesses character not because it is an unaltered example of a definite style or period, but because it has been built piecemeal at different times, wing by wing, or even room by room, as the size, wealth or ambition of the owner’s family increased. When such a house has been in the possession of one family for many generations and has been filled with the accumulated possession of one family of centuries – and Little Wyrley Hall is as good an example as any – it achieves a degree of liveableness that is the antithesis of the famous lines:

I find by all you have been telling
That tis a house, but not a dwelling.

The manor of Little Wyrley, which lies just to the south of the Watling Street mid-way between Lichfield and Wolverhampton, has belonged to the same family since the reign of Queen Elizabeth, descending in the female line through the Fowkes and the Husseys to the present owner, Mrs. Wallace. The Fowkes’ predecessors, either the Blunts or the Levesons, built the Tudor core of the house.

Soon after the Restoration of Charles II, Ferrers Fowke and his wife cased this old half-timbered building in red brick and enlarged it considerably, while at the same time they built the near-by farm buildings. In 1691 Dr Phineas Fowke added the rooms on the east side of the house. The house then remained unaltered until the end of the Napoleanic Wars, after which Phineas Hussey made various additions, notably to the interior. There is thus work of four periods embodied in the house. Of these the most prominent are the two middle ones, for most of the exterior and much of the interior was built in the late 17th century by Ferrers and Phineas Fowkes..

LITTLE WYRLEY HALL BEFORE PHINEAS HUSSEY’S ALTERATIONS. AN OIL PAINTING OF ABOUT 1790

Little Wyrley Hall can be seen much as they left it in an attractive little oil painting dating from about 1790, which hangs over the fireplace in the library. This view, from the south, shows Ferrers Fowke’s kitchen and brew-house wing on the left and the refaced nucleus of the house in the middle; the junction between the old part of the house and Phineas Fowke’s east wing can be clearly seen on the right hand side of the painting. The main block is shown with its original casement windows and without finials to the gables. The existing finials, hich are such a picturesque feature of the elevation, were copied from those of the Catolean brew-house dormers and were added by Phineas Hussey, who also substituted sash windows for many of the casements. Prominent in the painting are what the Rev Stebbing Shaw in his “Staffordshire” (1801) calls the “phalanx of elms and other large trees” – which stand to the north and east of the house and earned it the name of Wyrley Grove until 1928 – and also the charming cupola, which unfortunately had to be taken down in 1914.

THE WIND INDICATOR SURMOUNTING THE STAIRWELL

The cupola originally surmounted Ferrers Fowke’s staircase, and its hexagonal wind-indicator can still be seen in position. The staircase is situated in the south-east corner of the entrance hall, which is probably the hall of the Tudor house and lies immediately inside the porch. The space in which the stairs make their ascent is more restricted than appears at first sight, for, although the stairwell has three bays, one of them is open to allow an uninterrupted view from the ground floor to the wind-indicator on the roof. In the other two bays the stairs make their tortuous journey from the ground to the second floor, providing at each landing and half-landing different views of steep mounting steps, sturdy newels, simple turned balusters and arcades. Despite the economy of space and materials, this staircase provides a remarkable visual effect by comparison with others of about the same size and date.

THE FOOT OF THE CAROLEAN STAIRCASE IN THE SOUTH EAST CORNER OF THE HALL

FROM THE GROUND TO THE FIRST FLOOR

THE UPPER PART OF THE STAIRCASE

Opening off the hall at the foot of the staircase is the library, which occupies the south-west corner of the house and was formed by Phineas Hussey early in the 19th century. It seems likely that there were two rooms here before Mr Hussey began his alterations and that he made on large room out of them by driving a wide opening in the parti-wall. Some of the old ceiling beams were retained, but all the windows were altered and the walls were clothed from floor to cornice with bookshelves, which display the fine collection of leather-bound volumes collected by Phineas Hussey and his literary great-great uncle, Dr Phineas Fowke. Even the back of the door from the hall is panelled with dummy books. A door opens intot he smaller of the library’s two bays. Facing is a window, and on the left is the door into the drawing –room. On the right is the book-lined opening which joins the two parts of the library and which frames the view looking west towards Phineas Hussey’s bay window – a charming piece of Regency design with slender Gothick sashbars and a hand painted floral border in deep orange and sienna.

THE LIBRARY FORMED BY PHINEAS HUSSEY ABOUT 1822

The scene of Phineas Hussey’s other principal contribution to the re-decoration of Little Wyrley is the dining room, occupying the north-east corner of the house on the ground floor of Dr Phineas Fowke’s east side. Doubtless it was once panelled with fat bolection mouldings, like the rooms on the first floor on this side of the house, but as it stands to-day it is a good example of plain late Regency taste, complemented by solid Victorian furniture. The ceiling is divided by a number of sparingly moulded transverse beams, which give it a coffered effect. The north wall is slightly bowed, with a central window (since removed) and flanking niches. The windows on the long east wall, containing the coloured heraldic glass, have red velvet curtain, and the walls are pale green. The central window originally held a further fine example of this heraldic glass, but unfortunately, when Little Wyrley was let to a family of local ironfounders after Phineas Hussey’s death, certain guests drank too much wine at dinner one night and hurled the empty bottles through the window.

THE DINING-ROOM. REGENCY DECORATION VICTORIAN FURNITURE

On the the walls hang a number of portraits including those of Phineas Hussey, his second wife, Sophia Ray, and his brother, William, a surgeon in the Royal Horse Guards, who is said to have had a love affair with one of George III’s daughters. The last painting, which is in the manner of Hoppner and has been attributed to him, portrays the sitter against a pillar backed by a red curtain, one corner of which is folded up to reveal a distant view of St Paul’s Cathedral in a stormy sky. In his hands he holds an easily identifiable drawing of the Colosseum, across the bottom of which is written, “1803, Colosseo Hussey.”

The two brothers bear little resemblance to each other. William is handsome, tall and spare; Phineas short and corpulent. The latter is painted sitting at a table, with one arm resting on an open book, and he is staring sternly at the spectator. A mor human picture of him is given in Mrs. Charles Bagot’s memoirs, “Links with the Past” (1901), in which she recalls that “The squire (of Little Wyrley) was one of the last of the old sort of country squires. As a child, I dreaded his dining at Hatherton, and after dessert chasing me round the dining-room table to kiss my. I always thought then that he had dad too much wine, as had been the fashion of his youth.” In the same work Mrs Bagot quotes an extract from the diary of her aunt, recording (rather patronizingly) a visit to Little Wyrley in 1827. She describes the house as “a curious dwelling of red brick, gable ends, small windows, and heavy stone ornaments,” and her hosts “seemed to take me back a hundred years at least, as to civilization. Great cordiality and hospitality, a love of good cheer and field sports.” She goes on to express her surprise at “a fine collection of print which have been amassed at great expense by the master of the mansion.”

Phineas Hussey was twice married: first to Mary Fowler, who died when he was quite a young man and is commemorated in the garden at little Wyrley by an urn on a pedestal, and second to Sophia Ray, who bor him a son and heir in 1822, in which year he was high Sheriff of Staffordshire. It seems likely that the re-decoration of the house took place in preparation for his shrievalty. Among Mr Hussey’s friends was Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield, who enjoyed a considerable vogue as a poetess, although Horace Walpole associate her with Helen Williams and “a half a dozen more of those harmonious virgins” whose “thoughts and phrases are like their gowns old remnants cut and turned.” One of her rings, inscribed with her name, was given to Mr Hussey, presumably after her death in 1809, and is preserved at Little Wyrley with a number of other literary relics, such as a lock of Garrick’s hair surrounding a miniature of Shakespeare in a diamond locket.

Phineas Hussey seems to have been an extravagant man, and his estate was seriously embarrassed after his death in 1833 at the age of 71. Little Wyrley was for a time in Chancery and the house was let, but the heir, Phineas Fowke Hussey, was a minor when he inherited and the family finances had evidently improved by thetime he attained his majority. At all events, he returned to live at Little Wyrley, and turned his attention to cattle-breeding .

OLD ENGLISH CATTLE AT LITTLE WYRLEY: AN OIL PAINTING SIGNED BY E.M. FOX AND DATED 1855

About 1850 he married Elizabeth Clementine Carmichael, who bor him two daughters before she died giving birth to a son in 1857. The son and mary, the elder daughter, died as infants and Little Wyrley devolved upon the younger daughter, Elizabeth, after her father’s death in 1867. She married Lachlan Andrew Macpherson, of Biallid, Inverness-shire, in 1885, and died in 1927. Owing to the untimely death of her two sons, the manor of Little Wyrley has now descended to her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, the wife of Mr Frank Wallace. His collection of big game heads is housed in the near-by barn, a fine timber-roofed building which was built by Ferrers Fowke and his wife Frances, whose triple F initials and the date 1664 are on a shield set in the north gable.

SPORTING TROPHIES IN THE BARN WHICH WAS BUILD IN 1664. ITS DIMENSIONS ARE 70 BY 19 FEET.

It is a far cry from the Little Wyrley of the 17th century to the Little Wyrley of to-day, but Ferrers and Phineas Fowke would have no difficutley in recognizing the exterior of the house, and the interior must contain much that they would remember. Phineas Hussey, indeed, would be quite at home: his furniture is still in its place, his books on their shelves, his pictures and engravings on the walls. Changing times have nevertheless brought changes to Little Wyrley; for instance, Ferrers Fowke’s kitchen and brewhouse wing which in his and Phineas Hussey’s day would have teemed with servants, has now been converted into several flats. The most significant changes, however, have taken place in the house’s surroundings. According to Ekwall’s Dictionary of English Place-Names, Wyrley(pronounced Wirley) is derived from the Old English wir-leah, meaning “bog mytle glade,” but the impression created by this delightful name is dispelled even as early as 1801, when Shaw published his Staffordshire. The best that he can say about the neighbourhood of this “picturesque and curious specimen of the hospitable mansions of our forefathers’ is that the “situation can by no means be extolled wither for the beauty of its prospects, or excellence of soil.”

One wonders what Shaw woud say to-day, when the prospect westwards from the front door is terminated in the middle distance by a monumental slag-heap and when colliery workings have encroached to within a few hundred feet of the east side of the house. In the 1920s, indeed, it was proposed to mine underneath the house itself, but this threat has so far happily been unfulfilled and the old red-brick house still stands, witnessing to the old way of life amid its predatory surroundings.

THE ENTRANCE FRONT WITH THE KITCHEN AND BREW-HOUSE WING ON THE LEFT

The Lichfield Mercury featured Ros and her books. At that time The Librarian of Cheadle and Blyth Bridge libraries, Ros has had several volumes published on the subjects of Staffordshire Crimes, Curiosities, and Castles.

It is a universal human tendency to see meaningful patterns in this life of cruel randomness. If we are lucky enough to spend a winter’s evening sitting in front of an open fire, we see faces in the flames.

Most people “believe” in meaningful co-incidence.

On rational reflection, it is no co-incidence at all that I should have happily lived my married life in a little old brick house with a big garden in the Staffordshire countryside that goes by the name of “Keeper’s Cottage”.  It was fortunate that at a timely moment, the widow of Mr Harrison’s last Gamekeeper had decided that the day had come when she would prefer the convenience of village life, and that the Trustees of the Wychnor Estate elected to auction off this small part of their property which thus became empty.  It seems almost inevitable when its photo appeared in Winterton’s advertisement that the sisterly resemblance of this cottage to pretty, if primitive, Keepers Cottage,  Footherly, where my Dad was brought up, would attract my parents’ attention, and lead to Ken and I buying it.

Less predictable was that when we told my cousin Rosalind that we would be living in this place called “Orgreave”, she said knew this very  spot most intimately, having just completed research here for her forthcoming book! Her reaction made a refreshing change, back in 1991, from having to inform someone – “No not that Orgreave,” and sigh, as conversation turned to heated political debate.

“Capital Crimes – Staffordshire Hanging Offences” included a chapter about a dramatic and dastardly double murder which took place only a score of yards from our front gate, just less than a century prior to our arrival in this small, sleepy, Staffordshire community.

Reassuring security measures on our bedroom doors.

We had wondered why even the internal bedroom doors in our cottage sported such hefty Victorian bolts on their interiors – and the heavy planked oak back door can be additionally secured with a bar threaded through fastenings on either side of the jamb.

Now that we knew, we were interested and somewhat  excited – not emotions you would imagine that we would share with our predecessors in the area in the days following the fateful morning of 31st May 1895, but the reporter sent from the Tamworth Herald only the following week relates the news with a barely suppressed air of delight:

“On Friday morning last, in the tiny hamlet of Orgreave, in the Trent Valley, about a mile and a half from Alrewas, was committed, as reported in last week’s Herald one of those awful crimes which come once in a generation or two to thrill the whole of a quiet country side, and furnish a tale of horror for many years to come.”

In short, an armed man had approached a cottage in the hamlet at about 9 o’clock in the morning, and shot through the heart one George Hackett, who in one press account was washing himself outside the back door.  George’s stepfather, Mr. Frederick Bakewell was sitting at the table taking his breakfast, and was fatally shot through the back.  Mrs. Bakewell was shot at twice but survived.  As she undressed for bed that night, no doubt already in a terrible state of shock and grief, a bullet fell to the floor.  It had been embedded in her elaborate underclothing.  As Ros put it in her chapter’s title, Sarah Bakewell owed her life to a “Stay of Execution”.

“Capital Crimes”by Ros Prince (nee Cooper) includes a comprehensive, well researched report of the criminal career, capture, trial, and execution of Thomas Bond for the double murder at Orgreave in 1895.

Until June 14th, when the perpetrator, Thomas Bond was arrested, there was rumour, speculation, and abortive arrests were made.  Amongst other suspects were an unfortunate “imbecile”, and someone whose only crime proved to be that he was “a Frenchman”.  The Tamworth Herald reporter relished describing the atmosphere in the district during this fevered fortnight, which may have led to the speedy installation of the extra ironmongery on our doors:

“The tragedy has caused great excitement in Lichfield and Tamworth and in some of the villages near Alrewas, the inhabitants have been in a state of terror.  They have kept the doors of their houses locked and when anyone has knocked they have refused to answer it without having first satisfied themselves as the the character of the enquirer by going upstairs and looking out of the bedroom window.”

The cottage in question no longer stands, but is described in detail in contemporary newspaper reports, as every detail of the circumstances surrounding the murders was being pored over eagerly by readers:

“The kitchen in which the murders were committed is the only living room, and is a large and comfortable apartment.  It opens into a small grocer’s shop, to which entrance is gained by a door which abuts on the lane in front.  It is a picturesque cottage in a very pretty spot, and windows of the upper rooms jut out through the sloping thatch about.”

Mrs Bakewell had been born as Sarah Gaunt in the nearby village of Hammerwich.  She married John Hackett of Orgreave in 1857, becoming a member of a family which had remained numerous in the immediate area for many decades. John and Sarah had a family of six children, and when he died in 1878, she stayed on in the family cottage, making a living by running a grocery business from the premises.  Meanwhile, Frederick Bakewell, an Orgreave man by birth, had lived in Norton Road, Pelsall, and worked as a plate-layer. His wife Sarah Dolman, from an established Alrewas family, had died in 1873 after bearing him at five children.  We presume that Frederick renewed connections with his birthplace in middle age, and married and moved in to the Orgreave cottage with the widow Sarah Hackett in his 56th year.

The cottage, its neighbours, and even a little chapel are remembered as ruins of their former selves in the 1930s by the oldest residents of present day Orgreave.   Around the Wychnor Estate, pairs of boxy 1960′s semi-detached dwellings for “tied hands”, welcomed enthusiastically in their day for their indoor plumbing and electric light, have been erected on the sites of tumbledown thatched cottages. Other accommodation, like the Bakewell/Hackett cottage, was not replaced because it was no longer required.  Like many rural villages, Orgreave’s population has vastly reduced over the last hundred years or so, as fewer and fewer man-hours are required to farm a given acreage. Nothing now is left of the “picturesque cottage” which saw so much blood pooling gruesomely on its kitchen floor, other than concentrations of broken masonry thrown up in certain patches each year by ploughing.  The site is a small unkempt field lying in front of  Orgreave Farm.

View across the site of the Bakewell/Hackett cottage in Orgreave to the upper windows of Orgreave Farmhouse, from which Mrs Barton watched Thomas Bond commit murder.

At the time of the murders in 1895, what is now known as Orgreave Farmhouse was inhabited by a Mr. Morris Piddocke Averill, noted in press reports to be a guardian of the Lichfield Union.  On the day of the murder, Mr Averill’s mother-in-law, Mrs Barton, watched the horrible drama unfold from the upstairs window of the house.  ”Mr. Averill’s residence and grounds,” the Tamworth Herald explains, “are separated from Bakewell’s by the village roadway and a fine view is obtained of the country to the south and over Bakewell’s cottage.”  The view of events from what is now my own bedroom window would have been only slightly more obscure.

Frederick Bakewell and George Hackett were buried, side by side, in the graveyard of All Saints Church, Alrewas.

What is described in reports as the “village roadway” dividing Orgreave Farm from the cottage is in fact a very ancient track down which goods have passed for thousands of years.  On foot (or in dryer times, bicycle), it can still be followed all the way to Alrewas, and may have been the route down which some of the “large and sympathetic crowd” reached the funeral and burial of Frederick Bakewell and George Hackett at Alrewas Parish Church. “The proceedings,” we are told, “were very solemn and impressive”.  and that “The mourners consisted of relatives from Chesterfield, Donisthorpe, Pelsall, Bloxwich, Walsall, Kings Bromley and elsewhere”

On August 20th, Tommy Bond’s corpse was subject to a contrastingly ignominious interment within the precincts of  Stafford Gaol, following his trial, conviction and execution by hanging.

Bold, beautiful and flame-haired. A young Mary Horton sports the “Eton Crop” in 1920′s Walsall Wood.

No corsets! Bare legs! Short hair! It’s hard to realise from the distance of nine decades just how radical the young women of the post Great War period seemed to their contemporaries when they refused, in a simultaneous and victorious revolution, the constraining sartorial conventions of their elders. Short hair for females may have existed in earlier eras, but only beneath wigs and hairpieces. Luxuriant tresses, like the wearing of skirts had always been a reliable signal of femininity in England (The Celtic Fringe – pardon the pun – having maintained a slightly variant tradition.) Suddenly, in the middle of the 1920′s, hemlines soared, waistlines dropped, and the most extreme of the new “bobbed” hairstyles, called the “Eton Crop” was in vogue. Fashion was newly democratic: the modern, simply styled, shift dresses could easily be “run up” at home or by a local dressmaker, as opposed to the elaborate, long and full, couture gowns of two decades before. Back then, it had been only mature, wealthy women who could flaunt their ability to keep up with the trends. Now, a gaggle of lively young teenaged girls in a small South Staffordshire mining community could be as “up to the minute” as everyone else – much to the consternation of their families:

Easter time Cousin Sis ( fair haired), Louie (black) me (red) all went to the barbers at Walsall Wood to have the very latest Ladies Haircut.. the “Eton Crop”! When we came out, snow was falling and our heads were bare. When we got to Sis’s we waited a few seconds, but Aunt Alice didn’t shout. Got down to Louie’s – she was expecting a row – I went in to No. 1 confident I could handle the situation. I think my Dad said something like ” Weer’s your trousers ?” Mam said, ” What a bloody mess. “

Louie – Louisa – Beardsmore, was my Aunt Mary’s neighbour, schoolfriend, and confidante. It was to Louie she turned for some advice about dealing with the opposite sex now she had reached her teens. Mary wrote about receiving this stern warning from Louie:

I must not let lads kiss me or kiss them back ; I must never put my hand in their trouser pocket ; I must never let them put their hand in my coat pocket; all or either of these things could result in a baby

 

Louie Beardsmore was a couple of years older than her friend Mary. Louie had been born in 1910, which enables me to scrutinise her family situation, detailed on the 1911 census. It makes interesting reading, and it sheds some light on her extreme caution in avoiding, at all costs, the risk of untimely procreation!  The Beardsmore household shared a dwelling comprising just four habitable rooms in a house on Aldridge Road, Vigo. It totalled four adults and eight children. Louie’s father, Joseph, and his wife, had come to Walsall Wood from Gornal in the heart of the Black Country, and had, so far, six children. The Beardsmores also harboured four “boarders” in the little house, also migrants from Lower Gornal. Isaiah Hughes was a miner like Joseph, and also living in this intimate proximity was “Miss” Teresa Hale, who was Mrs Beardsmore’s sister. Teresa earned her living as a dressmaker, and squeezed in with her, somehow, were her two young and, presumably illegitimate,sons, Reuben and George. It isn’t easy to visualise how these few rooms, even subdivided and screened off with curtains, could provide any privacy, or even sufficient floor space for the occupants to sleep comfortably. However, their situation was by no means unique in the area.

I see from later records that Isaiah Hughes and Teresa Hale married each other in 1913, which I hope was a happy outcome for them.

The “Eton Crop” was named for its similarity to the the style adopted by the schoolboys of Eton College, who deliberately wore their hair a little longer than normal male convention dictated. The height of its popularity with women was relatively short-lived, and by 1929, their hair was already being styled in slightly longer, wavier, bobs…. with the honourable exception of the occasional monocled Sapphist.

My Aunt Mary’s beautiful, copper coloured locks grew back again.

There is something universally seductive about a full, long, feminine head of hair. As a child, Aunty Mary had been prepared to risk angering her mother to admire at close quarters the “crowning glory” of her neighbour, Mrs Muschin.

There were people in the street we were not allowed to speak to. One lady, Aggie (Agnes) Muschin’s Mum used to let me in through her back door and say ” Does your Mam know ?” I would whisper “No”. I would play with Aggie, then we would brush and comb Mrs. Muschin’s hair. When she sat on a chair and undid the plaits, it hung down to the floor, it was like a coal black wavy shawl, we could plait it; roll it round her head; tie it up on top of her hair in a big bun…. She would say ” Better go home before your mother misses you.”

Where did the Muschins come from? The name is absent from the census returns in Staffordshire. There was to be a woeful end for Mrs Muschin.

Mrs Muschin became ill, I gather doctors had said she was not to have any more children, Muschin had been warned a baby would kill her. When the ambulance came for her I rushed up our stairs and looked down on her being loaded onto the ambulance. Never saw her again, or Aggie. The children went during the night.

I can imagine Louie Beardsmore shaking her head sadly, and taking note.

I’m very near the edge of the parish of Aldridge, in the November dusk – looking north-east from the rise which is “Lazy Hill”. To the left, out of view, is the bosky mound of an Iron Age Fort. Beyond it, and behind me, are the sites of former collieries. Dominating the middle distance is the triple spired cathedral of Lichfield. The fields and hedges of Stonnall, Shenstone, Lynn and Wall lie between. They are changed, but perhaps not unrecognisably so, and wandering ghosts of the last several hundred years could still find their way home down the deep lanes.

What a touching thing it is to have sight of the census return forms from the middle years of the 19th century, when the enumerators knocked on the cottage doors of my ancestors in this same landscape. I imagine that I can hear the very voice of my great great great grandfather William Horton, mason, of the hamlet of Lynn, speaking his response to the well dressed, literate stranger – his name is recorded in 1841 as “Orton” and not “Horton. Born in 1796, he may not have had the opportunity to learn to read and write – even his own name. Or perhaps the enumerator simply wrote down the aitchless word he had heard, and the humble man did not have the confidence or the interest to correct him.

“Ag Lab”, or “Mason”, “Bricklayer” or “Nailer’ were frequently jotted in the column headed “Occupation” on these visits. There was some diversity of the manner in which my father’s family earned their living,  but most were bound to the agricultural industry. Horton families were large, no doubt wages were small, but thanks to the geology and customs of the area, the cottages were brick built, weatherproof, and substantial enough. Of all the counties which Richard Heath toured in the 1870′s, chronicling the poverty and degradation of the lives of the rural working classes, Staffordshire does not get a mention. Did these good, warm-red brick cottages provide him with no sensational tales of hardship? The talk in Heath’s articles is all of damp, crowded, vermin-infested cob and thatch. Nevertheless, the assertion that “in the process of modern civilisation, the English agricultural labourer has been the constant loser” is as applicable to South Staffordshire as elsewhere. When coal mining began in earnest at the Walsall Wood and Aldridge collieries, the newly dug shafts seem to inhale deeply, and draw in the sons of the soil from surrounding villages. Living conditions in the “Buildings” and “Rows” clustered around the collieries may have been poor, but it was the comparatively favourable wages which enticed men.

“Sons and Lovers,” is D H Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical account of life in the Nottinghamshire Coalfield at the end of the 19th century. In it, Walter Morel points out that even as a white collar worker, his clever son William will not earn as much as he could at the pit: “Put ‘im i’ th’ pit we me, an’ ‘ell earn a easy ten shillin’ a wik from th’ start,” he says. But William will earn only 60% of that, that is, six shillings, “wearin’ his truck-end out on a stool” instead. (Not that it does him a lot of good in the end, as we know!)

Obviously, there are other considerations than wage levels when choosing a job. In Yorkshire, my late father-in-law told his three sons: “I’ll break your chuffin’ legs before let you go down that pit.” And none of them did. Ken, my husband and his youngest, born 1943, quite contentedly started work as a farm labourer on 60 shillings a week.  Mr Ward senior had loved, as a young man, his work with the draft horses on the farm.  But fatherhood and family pressure cajoled him into a 40 year symbiotic relationship with The Colliery. Here, to Clifford Ward, were offered wages more fit to keep his inexorably growing family on, in return for his health and most of his waking hours . “Double’uns” were available, and so 18 consecutive hours could and would be worked on weekdays, high-days, and holidays.

By the turn of the 20th century, the “Occupation” column of the census returns of my father’s family are  sparsely interspersed with “brick maker”, but overwhelmingly dominated by “miner”. We know that my grandfather, Alfred Noah Horton, just like his cousins and second cousins, and third cousins in Walsall Wood, was coal mining at the time of the 1911 census. He was rejected from army service in the Great War because of a missing eye.  Was he then obliged, I wonder, reluctantly to continue in the pit for the duration of the war? His eldest child, my Aunt Mary, looked back to around 1918, and remembered him working in the sandpit at Shire Oak. Later, she describes him as working in the building industry, which is what I understood he had done.

That not all of their neighbours were miners had been the source of my great grandfather, Enoch Blann’s haulage business in Walsall Wood High Street – near the bridge, the family remembers. His pony and trap loaded coal at the “Dry Bread” pit to sell to those who did not benefit from the miners’ coal allowance. He kept a shop, too, listed in Kelly’s Directory of 1912. My grandmother had taken great notice of these activities, and put her knowledge and initiative to use to “keep the wolf from the door” in Aldridge Road, Vigo.  This is from Aunt Mary’s memoirs:

We moved into Number 1, a shop. We sold fruit, veg. and think we sold fish. A stone had made a small hole in the thick glass window large enough for me to pass nuts through to a girl named Flora James. The people next door had a fish and chip shop, they closed and we had the fryer from them. All the miners used to come in in their pit-black, buy fish and chips, then stand in the shop and eat them. As the miners all came off the afternoon shift , that meant 10.30 at night – and I saw them – goodness knows when I went to bed . Mother went into Walsall on the first tram to buy fish ( and ice at week ends) that’s when she made ice cream which was sold from a sort of churn fixed to the front of a bike. A man sold that, she sold it from the shop.

When she fetched the fish and ice I had to take the pram down to meet the tram at the terminus where the conductor always helped to load up the pram. The same pram went to help her carry her bags.