Gravedigger - Grave Stories

Gods of Small Things:Thomas Carr, Thomas Gadd Mathews, Robert Recorde, Richard “Stoney” Smith, Jethro Tull, Frederick Wolseley

On September 1, 2024

In Inventors, Industrialists and Innovators

With which inventions do you associate the above names? None of them appear on those ubiquitous lists of A Hundred Inventions which Changed the World, but they all made a significant impact in their own spheres.

Thomas Carr (1824-74)

Thomas Carr was responsible for The Disintegrator. A catalogue from the London Exhibition of 1862 describes this wonderfully named machine as “capable of pulverising various unfibrous materials, whether hard or soft, such as artificial manures, coprolites, zinc ores, rock asphalte, peat, cement, and fire clays.” Between fifty and two hundred tons per day of these materials could be reduced to a granular powder. Different size machines were sold around the world to grind guano rocks, bone, chemicals, and to pulp fruit.

While coarse grinding machines served the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, Carr wrote with particular affection of his grain milling machine:

“The Disintegrator is Contrasted with and Proved to Bear No Resemblance Whatever to Other Mills, Ancient or Modern…it is the Most Novel Discovery and Invention in Mills, the Most Versatile in its Applications, and for Many Purposes the Most Efficient Also, Since the Invention of the Flour-mill Stones Upwards of Thirty-three Centuries Since.” (Thomas Carr, Grain Milling, 1866.)

Circular discs of metal were set face to face and studded with alternating circles of projecting bars. The discs rotated in opposite directions and the grain passing through was shattered and reduced to flour. Carr estimated that one of his machines could do the work of twenty-seven pairs of millstones.

Thomas Carr is buried in Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol. At the base of his grave marker is a stone reproduction The Disintegrator.

Grave of Thomas Carr in Arnos Vale, Bristol

Thomas Gadd Matthews (1802-1860)

Also in Arnos Vale lies Thomas Gadd Matthews, another man with an enthusiasm for grinding things down. In 1840 he took out a patent for a machine which reduced wood, bark, and leaves to the fine powder used by dyers and tanners. His most successful product was made from indigo leaves imported from the West Indies. His customers boiled and fermented the powder he supplied to obtain the dyes used in the manufacture of clothing, particularly in the production of naval uniforms.

This must have been lucrative, for in addition to a house in Bristol and a summer villa in Portishead, Matthews bought shares in the newly formed Bristol General Cemetery Company and had a grade 2* listed tomb built there for himself and his wife. Since he was a member of the Church of England while she was a Congregationalist, the tomb was built straddling the consecrated and the unconsecrated parts of the cemetery so that they could be buried together but according to the rites of their respective churches.

Tomb of Thomas Gadd Matthews, Arnos Vale

The tomb straddles the consecrated and unconsecrated sections of the cemetery to accommodate the differing religious affiliations of Matthews and his wife

Robert Recorde (1510-1558)

Robert Recorde was a Welsh physician and mathematician.

In 1557 he wrote The Whetstone of Witte, a treatise on algebra, while composing which he invented the equals sign. He realised that he could avoid the constant repetition of the words “is equal to” by replacing them with two horizontal parallel lines, chosen “bicause noe 2 thynges can be more equalle,” for if necessary, they could be drawn all the way around the globe and still not join together.

But in addition to practising medicine and teaching mathematics, Recorde had also acted as Controller of the Royal Mint. In this capacity he refused to divert money to support English troops engaged in suppressing the Western Rebellion, a rising in Cornwall and Devon against the Enclosures, the poll tax on sheep, religious change, and the threat to the Cornish language. As a result, William Herbert, the first Earl of Pembroke, accused him of treason. When Recorde in turn accused Herbert of malfeasance in his role as Commissioner of the Mint, Herbert conducted a successful libel suit and Recorde was faced with a massive fine. Unable to pay it he was arrested for debt and died in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark.

His burial place, probably an unmarked, communal grave, is unknown but there is a memorial to him in St. Mary’s church in his native Tenby.

The equals sign was not generally adopted until after 1700.

Memorial to Robert Recorde, St. Mary’s, Tenby

Richard “Stoney” Smith (1836-1900)

I came across Richard “Stoney” Smith serendipitously in Highgate. As his gravemarker details, he came from Stone in Staffordshire, later moving to Macclesfield in Cheshire, and then to London. Born in the Mill House, he became the third generation of his family to work as a flour miller.

Traditionally the wheatgerm had been discarded when making flour to prevent the bread from going rancid. Stoney perfected a method of steam cooking the wheatgerm, to prevent rancidity, without destroying its nutrients. He then blended it back into the flour, resulting in a brown bread rich in vitamin B from the germ, with a unique nutty taste, and without the grittiness of other wholemeal breads.

In 1887 he trademarked his new product as Smith’s Patent Germ Flour. He launched a national competition to find a new name for it – perhaps the connotation of “germ” seemed ill advised in association with a food product. The £25 prize which he offered for the winning entry was won by an Oxfordshire schoolmaster who proffered “Hovis” from the Latin phrase hominis vis (strength of man).

Such was the popularity of Hovis loaves that by the 1930s pubs and teashops frequently displayed signs advertising “Teas with Hovis.” The company coined the catchphrase “Don’t just say Brown, say Hovis,” as part of a successful advertising campaign. Even more profitable was the nostalgic television advert launched in 1973: set in the early twentieth century, a boy pushes a delivery bike laden with Hovis loaves up a steep cobbled hill as Dvorak’s New World symphony, rearranged for brass, reaches a crescendo. The loaves delivered, the boy free wheels back down the hill as a voice-over, the boy in old age, reminisces:

I knew baker’d have the kettle on and doorsteps of hot Hovis ready. ‘There’s wheatgerm in that loaf,’ he’d say, ‘Get it inside you boy, and you’ll be going up that hill as fast as you came down.’

The advert ends with the aphorism, “Hovis, as good for you today as it has always been.” Repeatedly voted the nation’s favourite advert, it was digitally remastered and rereleased in 2019 once again boosting sales while delighting its many fans. Sad that Stoney was not around to see it.

The inscription reads: After years of patient investigation he patented on 6th Oct. 1887 his improved treatment of the wheatgerm and broken wheat which made the manufacture of Hovis bread possible.

Although the famous Hovis advert was supposedly located in a northern town, it was actually shot in Shaftesbury in Dorset. The boy pushed his bike up the steep incline of Gold Hill, now often described locally as Hovis Hill.

Shaftesbury has embraced the association, capitalising on it to with a giant Hovis money box at the top of Gold Hill raising money for local charities

Jethro Tull (1674-1741)

Jethro Tull is probably the most well-known of these inventors, forever rubbing shoulders with Turnip Townshend in school texts on the Agricultural Revolution, and further immortalised by the eponymous rock band. The latter were given the name by their agent, a history graduate, just at the time when they were finding fame with a week’s residency at London’s Marquee club.

At his Berkshire farm, the original Jethro Tull invented the mechanical horse drawn seed-drill, acclaimed as the first agricultural machine with moving parts. Seed had for centuries been broadcast by hand leading to much waste. Tull devised a system whereby the seed was stored in hoppers, and fed by rotating, grooved cylinders into a funnel which directed it into furrows at the correct depth and space. The furrows were dug by a drill plough moving in front. A harrow moved at the rear to cover the seed. Later Tull also devised a horse drawn hoe to remove weeds and loosen the soil around crops preventing compaction.

Tull’s gravestone, in St. Bartholomew’s churchyard, Lower Basildon, Berkshire, is a replacement for the original, but it too has become difficult to read on account of the lichen. Fortunately the delightful bas relief of a horse drawn seed drill can still be distinguished.

To the Memory of
JETHRO TULL,
Pioneer of Mechanised Agriculture,
Author of Horse-Hoing Husbandry.
Baptised in this Church
30th March 1674
Buried here 9th March 1740

Frederick Wolseley (1837-1899)

When he was seventeen years old the Irish born Frederick Wolseley left home for Australia where he worked on a sheep station near Melbourne. Subsequently he acquired extensive properties of his own, and in 1884 he took out a patent for his invention, the first sheep shearing machine. The device had a power source originally driven by a horse gin, later replaced by a stationary engine, which was connected by belt, pulley and drive shaft to the handpiece held by the shearer. It clipped wool relatively quickly, and at its full length, doubling or tripling its value. And while traditional shears had clipped the fleece it into small pieces Wolseley’s machine removed the whole fleece. From the sheep’s point of view, it had the added advantage of reducing the number of cuts they received. Wolseley established the Wolseley Sheep Shearing Company in Sydney, and opened a branch in Birmingham, England.

Herbert Austin joined Wolseley’s company as chief engineer, taking over the management of the company when Wolseley resigned owing to ill-health in 1894. Two years later Austin began to design cars alongside the sheep shearing machines to stabilise a business at risk of seasonal fluctuations. This sideline was soon abandoned in Australia, but Austin purchased the car building activities of the business and moving to England established the Austin Motor Company at Longbridge near Birmingham. There he produced some of Britain’s first cars, still bearing the Wolseley trademark, so that for most of us the name is more associated with the car than with Wolseley’s own invention. In 1922 the incomparable Austin 7 also emerged from Longbridge, but that is another story.

Wolseley visited England for cancer treatment in 1894, and never returned to Australia. Dying in Surrey in 1899 he was buried at Elmers End Cemetery in SE London.

Frederick Wolseley, Elmers End, SE London. Reflections in the shiny black marble give the grave a rather spooky appearance

The enthusiasm of the Wolseley enthusiasts is somewhat misplaced, for it was Austin who developed the cars albeit under the Wolseley trademark.

Gods of small things only maybe, but they have all left their mark.

Le Corbusier: A Great Architect; A Disastrous Urban Planner; An Implacable Male Chauvinist.

By Gravedigger

On August 18, 2024

In Architects and Engineers

Though I have chosen to live in a quirky old house in an English village, yet I am susceptible to the attractions of a minimalist, modernist, city apartment. So I was eager, when on holiday in Marseilles, to visit Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation.

Le Corbusier was the pseudonym Charles Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1965), architect, urban planner, painter, writer.

Le Corbusier had a great deal of confidence, boundless energy, and a talent for memorable epithets. “A house is a machine for living in,” he declared and set about creating houses and apartments in accordance with his dictum. Buildings he reasoned should be purely functional, with form following function. (This would appeal to my friends in the museum world who rail against architectural egos failing to consider the needs of their exhibits.)

In Vers Une Architecture, a polemical collection of essays from the 1920s, he elucidated the approach of the Modern Movement, outlining his Five Points of a New Architecture, enumerating the principles on which his designs were based. His houses were to be lifted off the ground with pilotis – slim, reinforced, concrete columns – bearing the weight of the structure, allowing free circulation at ground level, and avoiding dark and damp parts of the building. There should be a flat roof terrace with potential for a garden. The façade should be free of decoration, without ornament: dismissing the then popular eclecticism and art deco, he argued that “modern decoration has no decoration.” Ribbon windows should run the length of the building to provide light and views. There should be an open floor plan with no load bearing partition walls.

For his materials, Le Corbusier embraced glass, steel, and concrete, in pursuit of stronger, lighter buildings.

Contending that houses should be built on a human scale, he developed his Modulor Man to determine the ideal amount of living space required. The Modulor was an anthropometric scale of proportions based on the human body, specifically that of a six-foot-tall (1.83m) man with his arm raised to a height of seven feet and four inches (2.26m), segmented into the golden ratio (1. 61) and scaled up or down using the Fibonacci series. This universal system of proportions, he inferred, would reconcile mathematical order and human function, bringing rationality and harmony not just to buildings but to all aspects of design from doorknobs to cities. Critics have pointed out that the height of six feet was a rather arbitrary choice and Le Corbusier did not deny this, joking that he had chosen that specific height because “in English detective novels, the good-looking men, such as policemen, are always six feet tall.”

Le Corbusier’s early commissions were private houses for wealthy individuals, but in 1947, Raoul Dautry, the Minister for Reconstruction and Town Planning, commissioned him to create an apartment block in Marseilles. Completed in 1952, the Unité d’Habitation, better known as the Cité Radieuse, is the embodiment of the five points of modern architecture which he had outlined twenty years earlier: it is elevated above the ground with pilotis; on the flat roof is with a running track and a small theatre; there is a free facade; and uninterrupted banks of windows form a horizontal band around the building.

Into this béton brut (rough cast concrete) framework Le Corbusier slotted his modules “like wine bottles in a rack.” Each module was three stories high and contained two apartments, both with dual height living space, interlocking around a corridor, so that corridors were only required on every third floor. Every apartment was dual aspect, running the full width of the building, with its own terrace and brise soleil. Residents had a choice of twenty-three different interior configurations for their units, which ranged from one person to family sizes. The open floor plan came with steel columns which could be moved and removed, to form partitions. Two double width corridors like interior streets ran the length of the building, with shops, eating places, a hotel, an art gallery, nursery, and recreational facilities.

Le Corbusier designed all the furniture, fittings, carpets, and lighting for his apartments. The kitchens were equipped like laboratories. The furniture was mass produced, for he embraced Fordism. Leather chairs were made with a tubular steel frame, they were not decorative, but “useful tools.” Deploying his habitual bombastic maxims he proclaimed, “chairs are architecture, sofas are bourgeois,” and favoured “objects which are perfectly useful, convenient, and have a true luxury which pleases our spirit by their elegance and the purity of their execution and the efficiency of their services.”

And if his hortatory writings are a little wearing, still there is no question that more than seventy years since its inception this building remains a delight with its light filled apartments, labour saving devices and clever minimalist furniture. It comes as no surprise that though they were designed as affordable housing, the apartments today are mainly occupied by long-term middle-class residents who are passionate about their vertical garden city.

Roof with ventilation shaft like the funnel on a liner

View from the roof towards the Mediterranean

And yet, while I delight in this architectural gem, with its views of the Mediterranean from the roof, and at its feet a verdant park, I would not live there, for it is in suburbia, surrounded by dull streets far from the glamorous, edgy beating heart of Marseilles. Offer me the Barbican, gloriously ensconced in the very heart of London and I would wave my rural life goodbye without a backward glance, but not for dreary, unnatural, stifling suburbia.

Small wonder then that Le Corbusier’s work as an urban planner holds none of the allure for me that his architecture does. He may have had the laudable aim of improving living standards in overcrowded cities by providing cheap public housing, but his planned cities repel me. In 1922 he presented his model Ville Contemporaine, an imaginary city for three million inhabitants who would live in identical sixty storey apartment blocks, a “city in the sky.” He envisaged zoning with strict divisions of the city into commercial, business, entertainment, and residential areas. In 1925 he elaborated on this with his Plan Voison for the redevelopment of a large part of Paris. He planned to bulldoze the narrow streets, monuments, and overcrowded houses in the working-class neighbourhoods, replacing them with giant towers, symmetrical, standardised skyscrapers, uniformly laid out in regimented settings in an orthogonal street pattern, with wide traffic corridors running between the vertical architecture. Absurdly he asserted that “a curved street is a donkey track, a straight street a road for men.” Again, zoning and the separation of activities was at the heart of his plan. Happily, neither model was ever realised.

He was able however to implement his city planning ideas on a huge scale when, after Indian independence, Nehru invited him to design the new city of Chandigarh. There, putatively seeking to raise the quality of life for the working class, he built his city with segregated residential, commercial, and industrial areas, government buildings and parks. These disconnected rectangular sectors separated by broad streets and fast-moving traffic are bleak and depressing. Moreover, he consciously isolated poor communities displaying casual contempt for the people he was supposedly helping: “The technocratic elite, the industrialists, financiers, engineers, and artists (will) be located in the city centre while the workers (will) be moved to the fringes of the city.” There are individual treasures in Chandigarh, not least in the Capitol Complex, but the housing projects are regimented and inhuman with no reference to local tradition, and the overall impact is one of sterility.

Of course, a lack of enthusiasm for his urban planning did not deter me from seeking out Le Corbusier’s grave. He is buried in Roquebrune in a cemetery overlooking the Cote d’Azur where he bought a plot when his wife died in 1957. He designed a grave for them both, and it comes as no surprise to find a béton brut slab sitting alongside a cylindrical plant holder of the same material. A blue and white enamel plate, the blue representing the sea, commemorates his wife. A second plate in yellow and red, representing sunlight and sky, records his own death in 1965.

The graveyard looks out over the Mediterranean

But behind his presence there in Roquebrune lies a story which does not present him in a very edifying light.

Eileen Grey, the Irish architect and furniture designer, had designed a villa, E-1027, at Roquebrune Cap Martin in 1929 for herself and her then lover Jean Baldovici. When they separated Baldovici kept the house and invited his friend Le Corbusier to make use of it. While he was there in 1938-9 Le Corbusier, without seeking permission, painted eight murals over the white walls of the villa. For Grey this was an act of vandalism, a violation of her creation.

Ironically Grey’s villa was much like Le Corbusier’s own early works, a modernist building raised on pilotis, with a roof garden, horizontal windows, and a free façade. Originally, Le Corbusier had admired it, and Grey had been gratified by his praise. But the architectural critic Rowan Moore suggests that Grey’s work was superior to that of le Corbusier, with a softer, more naturalist interior making the home a living organism as opposed to the colder, harsh, angular lines of his machines for living. Moreover, Moore describes Le Corbusier’s murals as crude and garish with sexist undertones making snide references to Grey’s bisexuality and relationship with her ex-partner. He suggests that Le Corbusier was outraged that a woman could create work in the style he considered his own and, “seemingly affronted that a woman could create such a fine work of modernism…asserted his own dominion, like a urinating dog over the territory.” “As an act of naked phallocracy Corbusier’s actions are hard to top,” Moore avers. Others have suggested that the murals reflect a psychosexual obsession with Grey and Corbusier’s frustration at being unable to possess her. Certainly, he was disturbingly obsessed with the house making repeated attempts to purchase it. When this failed, he bought land right up against the boundary wall of E-1027 and built his own cabanon de vacances there, overlooking the villa. He visited every summer from 1953-65, swimming every day beneath the house. Indeed, it was while swimming there that he died of a heart attack.

When I visited, attempts to restore E-1027 after years of neglect had been unsuccessful and there was no access to it. One of the white walls can just be seen behind the trees. But it is possible to see Le Corbusier’s Cabanon encroaching as far as it can.
In 2021 a restoration of the villa was completed.

Eileen Grey chose to locate her villa in a remote, private spot. Much has changed today, but Le Corbusier violated the privacy long before the rest of the buildings arrived. The red arrow points to the location of E-1027 and the Cabanon.

Ici repose Le Corbusier, architect and urban planner

Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (first published 1923)

Rowan Moore, Eileen Grey’s E- 1027 in The Guardian, 30 June 2013, and 2 May 2015

The Matthews Family: Past Times in Norton Saint Philip

By Gravedigger

On August 4, 2024

In Children, Work and Play

At the end of my street stands Church Farm House. There is no farm today, but in the late nineteenth century John William Bissie Matthews was the third generation of his family to grow crops and keep livestock on the surrounding fields. John and his wife Emily Etta Matthews lived with their eight children in the four bedroomed house. Attached to the house was a cottage to accommodate farm labourers, and behind, surrounding the yard, were byres, stables, a coach house, a three storey malthouse, wash house and woodshed. Beyond lay kitchen and flower gardens.

Church Farm House and the attached cottage, today a separate residence

Two of the Matthews children, Ida (b.1891) and Gwen (b. 1901), recorded their memories of their childhood and early adulthood on the farm and in the village of Norton Saint Philip.

They attended the village school, which children left at fourteen, or more commonly at twelve when their labour was needed. Their play area was beneath a tree on a small green between the school and the church. Ida remembered the school closing in 1900 to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking. Gwen recalled her misery at being set to knit kettle holders and socks, and to sew aprons which were sold once a year around the village. When their brothers, who had to take the cows to the fields before school, arrived late they were caned. Children coming from the hamlet of Hassage walked two miles each way across fields and along a sunken lane bringing their lunch with them.

The same school building is still in use today for infants and juniors. It has its own playing fields, its gates are firmly locked, and the green where Gwen and Ida played is eroded by the twice daily assault of a crush of cars as parents convey their children between home and school.

The village school, built in 1827. In front is the green, where the Matthews children played under the tree, recovering a little during the summer holidays from the term time assault by cars.

The sunken lane along which the Hassage children walked to school

Monday at Church Farm was washday, when the wife of one of the labourers would light the boiler to heat water from the rainwater tank if it were clean enough or from the well outside the backdoor. She would boil the whites and scrub other washing on a board. After rinsing the laundry by hand in a tin bath she rung the wet clothes through the mangle before hanging them out to dry in the garden. It was a full day’s work.

According to their age the children had their own weekly tasks: milking cows, scouring milk pails, straining the milk through muslin cloth, scrubbing tables, cleaning knives, polishing brass, peeling potatoes.

“On the milestone near our house was “London 108 miles” and I wondered if I would ever get there,” wrote Gwen. It must have seemed a world away to most of the villagers, when even trips into Bath, a mere seven miles away, were rare. John Matthews drove a horse and cart into Bath every Friday taking produce – eggs, cheese, bacon – from the village farms to sell in town. While there he would shop for his neighbours’ needs, including the weekly delivery of newspapers for the rectory. Gwen was charged with delivering the latter and describes a household where the cook, boots, or one of the housemaids would take her to the kitchen for milk and cake.

The milestone which Gwen knew is still in place but either London has come a little closer or she misremembered the exact distance.

When the first motor bus arrived in the village, a double decker with no roof, the children were taken from school to see it. Ida and her friends rode it to the neighbouring village of Hinton Charterhouse…then walked back again. The bus plied between Frome and Bath but lacked the horsepower to convey its passengers up Midford Hill where they had to get out and walk. When they left school, Ida and another sister, Dora (b.1896), were apprentice milliners in department stores in Bath but the bus service was not frequent enough for them to use it, and they lived at the YWCA in Bath during the week, cycling home on Saturday afternoons and returning on Sunday evenings.

That first open top bus in Norton High Street

Yet if there was little contact with the wider world, the village itself throbbed with activity. Though most of the population worked on the land, there was also a corn mill and two sawmills, and Gwen enumerates two cobblers, three bakers, a policeman, a blacksmith, a wagon builder, an undertaker, a butcher, cheese and cider makers, a post office and two grocery shops. Today we count ourselves fortunate to have a Co-op store incorporating a post office counter.

The doctor, who lived in the neighbouring village of Beckington covered five villages on horseback until he acquired the first motor car seen in the area. On call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he held his Norton surgery in Mrs. Millet’s coffee house and shop on the Plain, made house calls, and dispensed his own medicines.

When I first came to the village in 1998, the last vestige of this service survived with a partner from the Beckington practice holding a surgery one morning a week behind the stage in the village hall. There was little question of any confidentiality, but since ailments were discussed freely and loudly in the waiting area this was immaterial. Now there are eleven doctors and a wealth of other staff in Beckington… and requests for telephone consultations may be submitted online.

Most of the village buildings which the sisters describe are still in existence albeit modified to suit new uses. On Sundays the Matthews family would fill their pew in the church, the girls peering round to compare their outfits with those of their neighbours. Externally the church is unchanged but the pews which held the Matthews and other large families are gone, replaced by a flexible, central space to accommodate meetings, concerts, playgroups.

The Old Rectory is now a private residence, with a new extension, “The West Wing.” Today’s rector is housed in a modern bungalow. There is no policeman in the Police House nor any sign of teachers in the Old School House. Manor Farm, once the grandest in the village, boasting a large staff, carriages and shire horses, has been converted into holiday lets, its barns and other outbuildings into private housing.

The Plain. Somewhere here Mrs. Millet had her coffee house and shop, and the doctor held his surgery. Today it is an annex of The George Hotel.

In the church the pews which served the Matthews and other large families have disappeared

The Old Police House, today a private house

The Old School House, today a private house

Outbuildings of Manor Farm, now private housing

The Matthews knew the two pubs which still serve the village. Ida describes how “when sent on an errand we used to hold hands, hold our breath, avert our eyes, and hurry past the Fleur de Lys, an ale house on one side of the road, and the George on the other – in case we saw a drunken man because the casual labourers drank strong cider.”

More attractive to the Matthews children was Tom, the last of the heavy horses kept at the George to haul weighty loads up Bell Hill. A rope ran from the foot of the hill to a bell in the courtyard of the George. When it rang Tom would make his way unaccompanied down the hill, draw up the heavy load and return unescorted to his stable. Those using the service placed the payment of 3d in his pouch.

Recently refurbished the George now offers boutique rooms, fine dining, and a much reduced bar area, but not too many drunken men.

The George Inn, boutique rooms rather than drunken labourers

From the back terrace of the George the view across a field towards the church remains almost unchanged. Until well into the twentieth century cows grazed in the field, but nonetheless Gwen reports the presence of a cricket square. Today the Mead it is used purely for recreation: the cricket square is still there in summer, the bonfire in November, children play on the swings, and dogs chase balls.

View from the terrace of The George across the Mead to the church

Ida recalls gathering Bath asparagus in Wellow Lane and listening to nightingales there in May. There is still Bath asparagus, but even during the Covid lockdown when the village became again a place undisturbed by either cars on the roads or planes in the sky, and when I regularly met hares and deer strolling, almost tame, down the lane, and when the spring birdsong burst from the trees with no competition, I never heard a nightingale. Though I once met an old lady who told me that during her courting days she and her future husband would take blankets and lie in the fields listening to them.

At one of the periodic re-enactments of the Battle of Norton Saint Philip, the last victory for Monmouth’s rebel forces against the king in 1685, Ida was terrified by the noise and the sight of soldiers on horseback with steel helmets, waving their swords as they advanced down Chevers, locally known as Bloody, Lane. Having witnessed a similar re-enactment I can vouch for the irrational fear which even a playacting army can engender as the sound of drums and marching draws closer, and the first troops appear over the hill.

Chevers, aka Bloody, Lane, peaceful on a summer evening, but once the site of a violent battle.

But in 1914 there was no playacting, and the Matthews time at Church Farm was ending. The two oldest brothers, Bertram (b. 1892) and Sydney (b. 1890), had emigrated to Canada but both signed up with the Canadians to fight in the First World War. They were killed within three days of each at Vimy Ridge in 1917. The younger brothers, Cyril (b. 1894) and Leslie (b. 1899) also signed up. Cyril was taken prisoner and Leslie was injured. There were no celebrations at Church Farm when the war ended.

Cyril found his way home: Gwen wrote, “Now when I look back, I think how casual we all were. Cyril came home, just walked in the back door…mother asked how he had got on to which the answer was “Alright”. Years later we learned that he had walked miles across Germany before being picked up.” Leslie was discharged from a hospital in the north with shrapnel in his foot.

Ida had married and moved to Wales before the war began. Dora married and went to live at Row Farm in Laverton in 1920. Cyril became a farm manager in Portishead. Ethel (b.1888), the eldest sibling, who had trained as a teacher, died at home of tuberculosis in 1924. Gwen, only thirteen years old when the war broke out, had driven a lorry with two horses throughout the war years, carrying twenty churns of milk every day from Norton Dairy to Trowbridge for the London train. After the war there was no job for her.

In 1927 John Matthews retired to Wellow with his wife and Gwen. Leslie, the youngest son took over the farm for a few years before moving to another in Woolverton. Gwen married and left Wellow for Oxford in 1936.

There are no farms in the heart of the village now, cars not cows move along the High Street and Church Street. Though as summer turns to autumn the combine harvesters from the outlying farms briefly dominate the roads, processing through the village with a stately, proprietary air. And the Matthews still have a presence in the village. In the churchyard Bertram and Sidney are remembered on the war memorial, while Ethel, her parents, and Dora are buried together. Viewed from where they lie, beside the church and looking across the Mead towards The George, their village is not so much changed.

…remembers Bertram and Sidney Matthews who had emigrated to Canada, together with others from the villlage who fell in the Great War

Ethel, the eldest sister, died of tuberculosis in 1924

John William Bissey Matthews and Emily Etta Matthews

Dora Matthews buried with her parents and sister under her married name

Looking from the Matthews family grave towards the Mead and High Street

See Gwen Harries – Memories of Norton Saint Philip 1902-1930

Ida Matthews – Memories of my early childhood until the age of 15

“We Raise The Watchword Liberty. We Will, We Will, We Will Be Free.”

By Gravedigger

On July 21, 2024

In Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

Red-Letter Days marked on the calendar commemorate religious and royal anniversaries. They do not resonate with me, but in their stead, I measure the year through secular and socialist festivals. This, the third weekend in July brings the Tolpuddle Festival, celebrating Trades Unionism and remembering the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Rural poverty was endemic in nineteenth century England. Between 1770 and 1830 landowners annexed the common land on which villagers had grazed their animals and the plots where they had grown vegetables. The Enclosures brought wealth to those who owned the land and hardship to those who worked it. The latter became casual labourers, a precarious existence where they were hired and fired by the day or the week with no guarantee of work.Their impoverishment was exacerbated after 1815 when the rural labour market was swamped by soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars, enabling employers to keep wages low while raising rents. Alongside this the mechanisation of farming, particularly the advent of the threshing machine, increased unemployment, facilitating further wage cuts, and bringing farm labourers to the brink of starvation. In 1830 wages of only nine shillings a week had left agricultural workers struggling to survive on a diet of tea, bread, and potatoes. Yet year by year these wages were successively reduced to eight shillings, to seven shillings, and in 1834 to six shillings.

In southern and eastern England desperate men organised the Swing Riots, destroying threshing machines, firing hayricks, and damaging property, in a bid to pressure employers into improving wages. But the riots were put down by the militia, and executions, transportation, and prison sentences meted out.

Against this background in 1833 six men gathered under a sycamore tree on the village green in Tolpuddle. George Loveless, James Loveless, James Hammett, Thomas Standfield, John Standfield, and James Brine founded the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, a benefit society and self-help group seeking to improve their conditions and reverse the wage cuts without resort to violence. Already rattled by the Swing Riots and made nervous by the French Revolutions the reaction of their employers, supported by the government, was swift. The six men were arrested on 24th February 1834, tried at the Dorchester Assizes in March, and sentenced to seven years transportation to Australia. The Home Secretary, Melbourne, wrote with satisfaction to the king that this would strike a mortal bow at the root of Unions.

There were no legitimate grounds for the trial and punishment. Trade Unions were by this time legal; the Combination Acts had been repealed in 1824. A spurious argument that the men had administered an illegal oath of allegiance as part of their ritual initiation was the basis of the sentence. Part of the preamble to an Act of 1797, which designated the swearing of oaths of allegiance to anyone other than the king as treason, was invoked to establish their guilt. But this Act had been specifically designed to prevent mutiny by sailors press-ganged into the navy. Outside the navy the swearing of oaths remained widespread in societies, charitable organisations, and clubs of all kinds, confirming new members, and establishing contracts where standards of literacy were low. Certainly, the government never questioned this practice when employed by Free Masons or the Orange Order.

At the end of their trial George Loveless voiced the men’s defence: “We have injured no man’s reputation, character, person, or property. We were uniting together to preserve ourselves, our wives, and our children, from utter degradation and starvation.”

As they left the court following the conviction Loveless threw a paper into the crowd bearing verses he had composed, The Song of Freedom:

God is our guide! From field from wave,

From plough, from anvil and from loom,

We come, our country’s rights to save,

And speak the tyrant’s faction doom:

We raise the watchword “Liberty”

We will, we will, we will be free!

God is our guide! No swords we draw,

We kindle not war’s battle fires,

By reason, union, justice, law,

We claim the birthright of our sires;

We raise the watchword “Liberty”

We will, we will, we will be free.

In chains the men were transported in hulks to Botany Bay as convict labour for landowners there.

Almost immediately Robert Owen instigated a meeting of the General National Consolidated Trade Union, and a national protest attended by 200,000 people was organised in London. Melbourne responded by turning out the Lifeguards, Household Troops, detachments of the 12^th and 17^th Lancers, two troops of the second dragoons, eight battalions of infantry, twenty-nine pieces of ordnance and cannon, and 5,000 special constables. He found no excuse to use them as the peaceful march proceeded in absolute silence from King’s Cross to Whitehall, to the Elephant and Castle and on to Kennington Common. The marchers presented a petition bearing 800,000 signatures requesting a pardon for the Tolpuddle men. Melbourne refused to accept it. But in Parliament William Cobbett and Joseph Hume continued to exert pressure and eventually the new Home Secretary John Russell recognised the force of feeling and persuaded the king that it would be wise to grant a pardon.

After their return to England in 1837 five of the men moved first to farms in Essex where they organised a Chartist association leading the local squirearchy to alert the Home Office to the fact that they were “still dabbling in the dirty waters of radicalism.” Later they emigrated to Canada with their families.

Only James Hammett remained in Tolpuddle where he became a builder’s labourer. As a new agricultural depression swept the country in the 1870s villages like Tolpuddle lost between a quarter and a third of their population as their inhabitants chased work in the industrial Midlands and the North, in Canada and Australia. Men continued to be sacked and evicted if they joined unions. Dying in the Dorchester workhouse in 1891, Hammett was buried in the churchyard of St. John the Evangelist in Tolpuddle. It was stipulated that there should be no speeches at the graveside.

The Trades Union Congress began to organise annual gatherings at Tolpuddle in the 1930s, and in 1934, on the anniversary of the arrests, erected a gravestone carved by Eric Gill and unveiled by George Lansbury. Six memorial cottages and a library were built for retired agricultural workers, the cost born by the unions paying a farthing per member for two years.

Since 1998 the TUC has held a festival alongside the rally, and today thousands gather from Friday to Sunday in the tiny Dorset village. But this is no commercial Glastonbury with extortionate prices and dubious sanitation. Entry fees for Friday and Saturday are deliberately kept low to ensure that the festival is accessible to all, no profit is made, and any deficit is covered by the TUC. Entry on Sunday is free. There is music, of course, but also drama, artists, talks, discussions, lectures, debates, stalls of socialist literature,and rousing speeches from Union leaders and sympathetic MPs. There is beer in the pub and tea and cake in the village hall. In 2015 the first Tolpuddle wedding took place, the couple surrounded by union banners and photographed under the martyrs’ tree. But the high point is always on Sunday afternoon when the unions process along the village street with banners and brass bands, and lay wreaths at the grave of James Hammett remembering the role that he and the other martyrs played in the long struggle for fair wages, freedom of association, justice, and liberty.

James Hammett, Tolpuddle Martyr, Pioneer of Trades Unionism, Champion of Freedom. Born 11 December 1811, Died 21 November 1891

James Hammett’s grave after the wreath laying

Procession of Trade Union Banners at Tolpuddle

Dorset Rail Branch Salutes the Tolpuddle Martyrs

General Municipal Boilermakers and Trades

National Association of Schoolmasters, Union of Women Teachers

Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen

The Tale of Charles and Mary Lamb

By Gravedigger

On July 7, 2024

In Writers

A particularly pretentious estate agent, more than usually given to hyperbole, is currently offering for sale the “former home of Charles and Mary Lamb.” The sixteenth century Clarendon Cottage located on the quaintly named Gentleman’s Row in Enfield was never the Lambs’ home, but they spent their summer holidays in the then rural location between 1825-27. The house they actually bought in Enfield in 1827 was The Poplars at Chase Side.

The siblings were born and spent their early lives in the Inner Temple where their father was employed as a lawyer’s clerk. Charles (1775-1834) became a clerk to the East India Company, a job he held for twenty five years, alongside publishing poetry and prose. His sentimental poetry, even The Old Familiar Faces, the most celebrated of the poems, is little read today, but the Essays of Elia still have their admirers. Familiar to a far wider audience however are Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Designed to introduce children to Shakespeare’s plays they are clear, readable prose summaries, which nonetheless retain much of the Shakespearian language, while leaving out subplots, violence, and sexual references. The approach is reverential, reflecting Lamb’s strange belief that the plays should be read rather than staged to avoid misinterpretations. Charles tackled the tragedies and Mary the comedies, although they were all originally published under Charles’ name. The history plays they avoided. The Tales were published and sold by William Godwin and his second wife who specialised in juvenile literature, also publishing a children’s version of the Odyssey and volumes of poetry for children. And, despite their limitations, the Tales were an immediate best seller and have never been out of print.

Moreover, the Lambs held a weekly salon attended by literary figures including Southey and Coleridge with whom Charles had been at school. Through Coleridge they became friends with Wordsworth although the latter clashed with Charles who did not share his romantic fascination with nature and the countryside. In a letter to Wordsworth Charles wrote,

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of you Mountaineers have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness about Covent Garden, the very Women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself, a pantomime, a masquerade. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much Life.

How then did Charles Lamb come to buy a property in the former market town of Enfield in Middlesex, reduced to little more than a village surrounded by green meadows in the years that he lived there, far from the sounds, shops, and entertainments of London? A family tragedy lies behind this, the penultimate of many moves which the siblings made.

Both Charles and Mary had periods of mental illness throughout their lives, Mary’s the more severe and more likely to lead to aggression. Charles had spent six weeks in an asylum in 1795. Mary meanwhile was caring for their senile father and incapacitated mother, while supplementing their income with dress making. One day she lost her temper with her young apprentice, treating her roughly. When her mother reproached her, Mary responded by stabbing and fatally wounding her with a kitchen knife. Following their mother’s death Charles took responsibility for his sister, refusing to have her committed to a public mental institution. She was released into his care, and they remained together for the rest of their lives, she caring for him during his bouts of drinking, he for her during her recurring illness. The burden must have been considerable: when they travelled, they took a straitjacket, and Mary was periodically confined to an asylum. Yet it was during the early years of the nineteenth century that their writings became successful, their financial position improved, they expanded their literary and social circle, and established their salon.

But with Charles’ drinking and Mary’s madness they were not popular tenants, often subject to malicious gossip, and easily evicted from their accommodation. They moved from Holborn, back to the Inner Temple, to Covent Garden, and to Islington, before Charles decided that although he would miss London, rural Enfield with its fresh air and quiet would be better for Mary’s health.

Their final move from Enfield in 1833 was to Bay Cottage, Church Street, a private asylum in the nearby village of Edmonton where Mary was the sole patient. Her brother moved into the cottage with her, but following a fall a year later, he developed a streptococcal infection in a cut and died. He was buried in All Saints churchyard, Edmonton where his stone bears an epitaph composed by Wordsworth at Mary’s request. Mary lived on until 1847 when she was buried beside her brother.

The cottage in Edmonton, today bearing a blue plaque and renamed Lambs’ Cottage, still stands, as does the fifteenth century church. And lingering in the precincts of the verdant churchyard I found it easy to imagine that the stout tower and the graves drowsing under a mantle of ivy still lay at the heart of the village which Charles and Mary knew.

But it is long since the sprawl that is Greater London engulfed both Enfield and Edmonton. After the railways and the trams reached the former villages in the 1840s industrialisation followed and they became part of the conurbation of north London. New housing in the interwar period led to their merging with other towns to form the London Borough of Enfield. So, in the end Charles Lamb was surrounded by his beloved London albeit an outer suburb, not the glamourous, raucous heart of it that he loved so much.

By the 1970s the industry and manufacturing had gone again, and today estate agents try, with dubious veracity, to reinvent the small conservation areas in the tired, rundown suburbs as the villages they once were, enlisting the help of famous names to make their properties seem more desireable.

Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Author: Gravedigger Page 3 of 15

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The Tale of Charles and Mary Lamb