PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
Pictured: Grannie Morshead / Her house / The Rev. Punker and Holy Trinity Church, Oswaldtwistle.
The inner spirit of the Northern region, for me, resided in a grandmother who never sat any way but bolt upright, straight as a principle. She is black in memory ~ black cotton stockings, black cotton skirts - and she kept behind her brass-knobbed bed at 8 Duke Street (right), Oswaldtwistle, in Lancashire, a painting of some great uncle who lost his eye at Waterloo. He was painted in profile, his good eye to the fore.
She spread butter thinly, rather like a precision engineer with a micrometer, made a penny last, maintained a clean tongue and a clean table, wore a pinafore which she called a brat, had numerous children whose names she never got right first time, and observed at least 20 commandments, all good although only ten belonged to God. I expect she assumed that when Moses originally carried them down from the mountain he became careless and dropped one or two so that it was up to a woman to make up the discrepancy. I do not suppose that she was in any way different from thousands of other Northerners caught in the warp and weft of a precarious existence. Like them, she laughed a lot, and there was a particular time, at Christmas, when the laughter became a danger to those around her. She would thump the old board table before their eyes as if resurrection day had arrived and hallelujahs were called for .
After such meals, she got out an old cylinder gramophone, with a large horn to amplify its sound, and played such tunes as, "Silver threads among the gold." The slate-grey days of my early life. And yet, through all the laughter, this Lancashire I knew was stark in home and h
abit
I came across a book on the history of the textiles industry , huge in fact, and it reminded me of my ancestry and touched the nerve ends of recollection: "The masters would recommend that all their workpeople wash themselves every morning, but they shall wash themselves at least twice a week - Monday morning and Thursday morning - and any found not washed will be fined 3d for each offence."
Here, another instruction to folk at the mill: "All persons in our employ shall serve four weeks' notice before leaving their employ; but the proprietors shall, and will, turn any person off without notice being given."
There were, of course, good employers as well as bad, but even kindness had its abrasive qualities. I do not remember past employers in any detail apart from one, who used to give his servant half an apple for lunch, although my grandmother - a Howard who married a Morshead, he being an incomer from Cornwall, where they had a tin depression - would have remembered them well enough. She died in her eighties, the last loaf risen, the last prayer said, more than 50 years ago and rests for ever more in Great Harwood cemetery, which is near Blackburn. Only now comes the realisation that I never knew her for what she really was. And this is the way of things: first, the incomprehension of the very young; then their scepticism of older values, followed by rebellion, followed, in turn, by the dawn of understanding; and fin
ally, everything full circle, the point at which they begin to comprehend their own parents at the precise time that their own children no longer comprehend them: the great wheel of inner conflict endlessly in motion down the centuries.
My grandmother would know hardship whereas I would see it only as excitement. There was the great strike, when police horses around the mill pushed back crowds, and workers who were idle spat at those who were not idle. To me, a good time, because it represented a change of routine. To her, a graveyard of foundering hopes.
Dark mornings which were really late nights, and in them the scrape of clog on pavement, people working for shillings... On Sundays, they went to church and said, straight-faced, "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want." And this is the drama and contradiction of it, though there was little drama at the time. It was a fact, a circumstance, and life was not without blessings. Health was regarded as the greatest blessing, and there were times when there was not a lot of that about.
There was nothing beyond those grey streets but Blackpool or Morecambe, the further limits of life on earth. Nettle beer in Heysham. Thursday a good day, baking day, when the big brown mixing bowl perched before the fire. Rocking chairs, rag carpets, solid sideboards, kitchens with ceiling clothes racks, back yards, open doors, neighbours, lorries with solid tyres... My grandmother was, then, of cotton and her children were of cotton. Boys to the pit, girls to the mill. There was little else. She referred to Disarella, meaning Disraeli, whom she had observed speaking on Accrington market place. She approved of him. I discovered this affinity after I had written a piece in which I said that she found him a disappointing fellow. Memory had played tricks and I was duly put down by older relatives with better recollection. It was not her opinion of Disraeli that I had, as a child, considered important. The important thing was that, to me, he was history, deep and way back beyond human recall and yet here was this old and ramrod woman speaking ofhim casually as a contemporary.
In her children's time men in bowler hats ate black puddings from street stalls. Their families lined up like marble statues to have their likeness taken for posterity by cameras which were in terror of the slightest movement. Not a smile anywhere. To smile during a picture was an insult to the art. Nowadays,s everyone has to smile. Smiling is obligatory. At what mysterious point in time did everything change? Males in those days all seemed to look like Lord Kitchener: moustaches taut, eyes stern. Kitch-
When the Salvation Army first walked through Rishton, a place which always looked uncertain about whether it wishes to remain where it is, the leader wore a top hat and the people kicked it all around the village because it was judged to be a princely thing not of this world.
Description of a weaving shed, 1873: "The overlooker is stimulating and driving the weavers all day long and on making-up day, he goes round to each weaver with a slate and asks the amount of the week's earnings. But before going round, he will generally ascertain, either from the books, or some other source, the highest earnings of any weaver in the shop and everyone who is not up to this mark will receive a severe chastisement at his hands."
Ah, the long history of the tackler! Mill rules, Haslingden, 1851: " Any person coming too late shall be fined as follows-for five minutes, 2d, ten minutes, 4d, 15 minutes, 6d. For any bobbins on the floor, 1d for each bobbin. For waste on the floor, 2d. For any oil wasted or spilled on the floor, 2d, each offence, besides paying for the value of the oil."
Harshness at the mill, goodness in the streets. There was always a woman there to ease your birth and another to lay you out in death. Inbetween, the family, invariably large, so that the long board table creaked with Christmas and grandmother presided, a woman so awesome that her children, middle-aged themselves, called her "Mama" to the end.
She recognised no sex distinction. When she took her youngest daughter, Edith, and husband, Harry, to live with her, she shouted regularly to them, "Nine 0' clock, lasses, and time for bed." The world, in her opinion, was up to no good if it squandered good sleep for there was another early day ahead. How she knew what time it was is still a mystery to me. The sequence seemed to be that when the clock struck seven and the fingers stood at 9.25, it was, without doubt, nine o' clock. Or maybe eight. I am as confused now as I then was. Nowadays, everyone knows the time because they have radio and TV. In those days, people did not merely look at watches. They consulted them. Watches were profound instruments to be hauled, slowly from waistcoat pockets by chain. A button had to be pressed to release a silver cover. Only then could the delicate fingers be observed as cog and spring in delicate juxtaposition impelled their progress. The slow and sonorous tick and tock are fast vanishing from our world as quartz proliferates. A house silent but for the heavy feet of a clock marching into infinity is a sure reminder of judgment to come. Preacher and clock-maker, I suspect, were in collusion.
We stoned Stanhillers (nearby villagers) across the delph and all the world was centred on this one place, Oswaldtwistle; all life there, with London a million miles away. It seemed good then. Few left it. The first to go abroad in any number died there. They were always fighting for freedom, of course. That is always a good thing to fight for, although I do not, to this day, know who defines what freedom is. I suspect it is just a word, like any other, but it has the merit of being emotive. I do not suppose those soldiers of freedom knew precisely where they were when the end came. Their betters had put them there and their betters knew what they were about. Or so they thought.
The teeth were indifferent, but the hearts were sound. The food was eyed with dedication and respect, not slung about, or left to birds. The starch was stiff and Sunday was the day when Mr. Punker or Mr. Cameron, preachers both at the Free Church of England (right), were the direct intermediaries between man and the Almighty, with not another soul between. A church worthy delivered Sunday school homilies on loaves and fishes and spat through his teeth, so that you were showered and instructed at one and the same time.
"Should any tackler speak to a weaver about his earnings at any time or place, or speak unjustly when fetched to tackle the loom, we request such weaver at once to report..."
It all changed, of course. Unions gaining strength to the point (in industry in general) of becoming despotic in their turn. Few wear clogs now, but a little of the parsimony, a little of the respect for authority-these evidences remain to underscore the memories. Some Northerners still apologise when someone stands on their feet and they step beyond their county boundaries with apprehension. All is success now, or at least, relative success: weavers knowing St Tropez and Tuscany and the Algarve and the Costas. They drink wine, and pubs make sure they get the worst ofi t at a price which makes them imagine they are getting the best of it.
Once, the likes of them grew cold before the hearth, gas lamps flickered on cobbles, and old drinking men in faded caps were ill against ginnel walls.
The affluence, such as it is, came too late for my grandmother , dead with her black stockings and her principles. When she was ill in her brass-knobbed bed, long before her terminal affiiction, my father, who knew nothing of her ailments but only of her predicament, suggested champagne and chicken. It was a gesture as grand for its time as suggesting a specialist from China. She settled for stout, which was pragmatic, though drink was something of which she did not normally approve.
Her church still stands, Holy Trinity, at the bottom of the hill. The Rev. Punker is long gone. The house, her house, spruce in a row of such houses, is seen by me at increasingly long intervals, and there are cars all over the place. Imagine that! Cars in the street! Nothing else of her remains except her portrait.
Addendum: 23 February 2006
It is hard to resist the temptation to seek out ancestors these days. Jeremy Paxman shed tears for one of his on TV and I never saw him cry for anyone living. One of the major web sites offers instant access to more than four billion names and more than 10 million U.S. Federal Census images and boasts 23,000 genealogical and historical databases. If you can't find one or two there, you might have serious worries about your origins and start entering search critea such as, "Rain forests," or "Third tree from left." Seeking ancestors is rather like turning over large stones in remote areas: you never know what kind of monster is going to pop out.
I did not really wish to risk it but it was a slow day with not much happening, so I thought: What the hell? and dived in to the 23,000 geneoalogical and historical databases without fear of a tear. Unlike Paxman, I was already familiar with ancestors dying young from disease and over-work because Lancashire specialised in such things. People had large families, lived in two-up-two-down houses, had black iron ranges, baked on Thursdays, washed clothes on Mondays, had possers in their kitchens (implements for pounding the clothes in a hot tub), wringers (for squeezing out water from clothes), and, if they were lucky, best butter. You still hear people in Lancashire talking about "best" butter as if there were a worst. It comes about, of course, because in former times people selling butter had
large chunks of it which they cut into smaller pieces. Some was "best". They still have high-class confectioners and high-class butchers for some reason obscure to me because I have never heard of any other designation for either.
As for work, the choice was clear enough: cotton mills for the girls, pits for the lads. The grandmother on my father's side sat just outside her front door on pay day and her working children queued up to throw their wage packets into her extended pinafore. Then the money was emptied onto a table inside the cottage and carved up
for the week. My father and his brothers went into the pit where the manager preferred to employ married men. It gave him greater leverage when he wanted to exert pressure.In the evenings, they wrestled in the fields until they were tired, then went to bed. I barely remember my maternal grandfather. He was part of the Cornish invasion of Lancashire when tin mines were going through a hard time. Up they came to go into the mills and face hard times there. They had never heard of the maxim: As one door closes, another closes. I can not recall him dying, since I was young at the time, but I do rremember his pipe case, which was leather, and hinged, with a purple felt interior. It must have been expensive, and a mighty event that caused him to acquire it.
The 1901 census revealed him (he is pictured above) and the others clearly enough. In the careful hand of the time names were crafted into the official form and ages were given. Grandfather from Liscard, born around 1863, as was my grandmother. On my father's side, the story was much the same. Small house, big family, no-one moving out of the town unless called upon to sort out bother in France and die in the process.
My maternal grandparents had moved house at some stage, and my wife looked up the street they had gone from. "They didn't move far in those days," she said (because the street was no more than a few hundred yards from their new address). "No, they wouldn't," I said, "because they had to walk to the mill."
The clatter of clogs in the early morning was like hail and some people walked many miles to work. One who did told me, "When we crossed moors, we gathered kindling for the fire next morning. And if you forgot, you didn't get any tea."
So that's it - the search so far. It did not progress overmuch because I lost my password to that vast website. It sulked and would not let me back in. But one big thing I did discover -
My maternal grandfather was an overlooker. That, in plainer terms, is a tackler - a man who tackled faults in mill machinery; a person often considered gormless.
I wrote a book called Tacklers' Tales,so I thought it appropriate. Even more appropriate is that, even now, the book is on sale in a cotton mill converted into a store. In Oswaldtwistle, of course. Most things in my family happened there.
My father said after the 1939-45 war that mills were doomed because they introduced canteens. He was right
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007
