Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (4 page)

There were two documents, not just one. The second, a letter, is unfortunately – tantalisingly – incomplete, a veritable dot, dot, dot. Its concluding page or pages no longer exist. Writing from a village on the outskirts of Nottingham, Sarah, who had been ill, hoped that Richard was keeping well, and planned to visit the Nashes the following week; a seemingly casual enquiry, not the sentiments you would expect from a mother who was about to say goodbye for ever. If desperate loving words came afterwards, these have been lost to the ages.

All my great-grandfather was left with – though it is a great deal more than many in his situation – was the evidence of his being handed over to Joseph Nash, and his mother's letter. Richard
knew his name, and that he was three years old when he was brought to Chesterfield, but he had no idea of his birthday. He did not even have that date to carry with him into the future.

The Walkers were fortunate in their choice of adopters. Childhood was cheap in the 1860s. Demands for entertainers were not the only advertisements making an appeal in print. Newspapers contained requests from those wishing to adopt small children, some of them genuine, others placed by unscrupulous individuals whose heart-tugging pleas concealed a desire to acquire an infant drudge, or worse. This was an era rife with baby farming: children deposited with kind or careless ‘carers' for a fee, babies quietened with one too many teaspoons of Godfrey's Cordial (the widespread use of cordials to quieten babies even had ‘Mrs Beeton' counselling her highly respectable readers to ensure that nurse-maids did not overdose their infants). Some children were inadvertently left to die, or ‘adopted' with that end in mind: the premium pocketed, no questions asked, the baby disappears or fails to thrive; the mother is relieved of an unfortunate burden, the baby farmer makes off with the cash. Indeed, a few years after Dick's adoption, the trial of the Brixton Baby Farmers would attract notoriety and appal the general public with revelations of desperate and unsavoury goings-on among the poor.

The casual attitude displayed towards children at this time is hammered home in a tiny detail in Luke Fildes'
Houseless and Hungry
, an engraving commissioned in 1869 for the first edition of
The Graphic
, a magazine with a mission to convey the brute reality of nineteenth-century life, its poverty and squalor. The subject of the engraving, a disparate group queuing for the workhouse, includes a drunkard, a beggar and a mother with a toddler
and a babe in arms. Adjacent posters on the wall behind them offer rewards: £2 for a deserted child; £20 for a lost pug dog.

This was the decade in which Thomas Barnardo first became aware of London's abandoned children: during the 1860s, some 30,000 homeless children were estimated to be living on the streets of the capital city. Had my great-grandfather not been adopted, he could so easily have become a street-urchin himself or been swept into Chesterfield's Scarsdale Workhouse, a building as capable of tormenting the thoughts and empty stomachs of the town's poorer inhabitants as any Poor Law Union institution elsewhere.

It was trusting of the Walkers to bequeath their son to Joseph Nash – trusting, foolhardy, or downright careless. Though Sarah signed herself ‘your affectionate friend', she and Thomas were not long-standing friends of the Nashes; her letter was not written to ‘Mary', but ‘Mrs Nash'. The only thing my great-grandfather learned about his parents was his fairground origins; he knew nothing else of their lives and received no letters once they left. When the Walkers disappeared, it was for good.

One day, Richard was a fairground lad; the next, the son of a barber. My great-grandfather's life changed beyond recognition overnight. He also acquired a shorter version of his name. From now on, he was known to his new family as plain ‘Dick' – a more serviceable name for the life ahead of him.

There was a new security in having a fixed address and in being protected from the elements by thicker walls, but, at three years old, Dick could talk and knew his Ma and Pa; knew the feel of his mother's skirt clutched in his small fingers, and the familiar smell of her body and hair. I wonder how long it took him to realise his parents were never coming back?

My great-grandfather always spoke fondly of Joe and Mary Nash. He remained in close contact with them until their deaths and became a great favourite among his adopted family, but childhood was brief as well as cheap in the nineteenth century, and all the shorter for those with reason to forget their beginnings.

Dick told only two stories about his childhood years with the Nashes. One was that his new life enabled him to acquire the smatterings of an education. A small dame school stood across the road from the barber's shop; Dick zigzagged his way in and out of passing carts to reach it. The dame swished her cane and
pursued her pupils around the room, but she managed to teach my great-grandfather his letters and how to cipher. Throughout his life, Dick read slowly, almost as slowly as when he chalked his first words on a slate under that schoolmarm's watchful eye. But, thanks to Miss Alvey, Dick learned how to read, and for a working-class boy of the time (and a fairground lad at that), this was achievement enough.

His other memory concerned the barber's shop. On dark afternoons when he'd finished school, Dick was required to stand on a crate and hold a candle steady so that Joe could see to shave his customers. Too small to hold the candle aloft without this extra elevation, too young to stop himself from nodding off, he was not the most reliable assistant. When sleep got the better of him and Dick swayed, a friendly shove from Joe revived him and saved them all from going up in flames.

All too soon, a more demanding occupation called him. At the age of twelve, my great-grandfather started work down the pit. The mines had swallowed boys far younger than Dick and just as fearful. When Lord Salisbury produced his 1842 report into working conditions, the Derbyshire coalfields were employing boys as young as five and six, but, by 1860, the legal age was twelve, though that did not mean all colliery owners observed it.

Dick's first job was at the Dunston pit, one of three collieries owned by the Sheepbridge Coal and Iron Company established by William and John Fowler. At its flotation in 1864, the company was also responsible for twenty-eight ironstone pits, twenty-three coke ovens, a calcinating plant, four blast furnaces, a large foundry and a mechanics shop, and was linked to the Midland Railway and to the Chesterfield Canal by eight miles of track. By the 1870s, when my great-grandfather started work, Sheepbridge already
employed 2,000 men and boys. This rapid industrial growth was reflected in the outlying village of Whittington, where Dick lived: in the years between 1851 and 1861, its population expanded threefold, and during the next decade almost doubled again, thanks to the industrial might of coal.

Sheepbridge's Dunston pit at Cobnar Wood was a small pit producing 250 tons of coal a day, from two shafts 100 yards deep. Mining was a terrible initiation for a young boy, working as much as a twelve-hour shift, alert always to any unusual shifting of the pit props, his nostrils filled with that close, dark smell with its incipient heat and incendiary dust. Boys of Dick's age, and older, often worked as putters (‘putting' wagons into place where a crane could transfer them to trains for delivery to the shaft), a task with its own gang hierarchy and Dickensian job titles, such as ‘foals', ‘half-marrows' and ‘helpers-up'. Putters dragged tubs of coal weighing between six to eight hundredweight along the underground road, some sixty yards, sixty times a day; arduous work, considered by some to be, alongside hewing, the most strenuous in the pit.

My great-grandfather soon had company underground. By the 1880s, Joe Nash had joined him. The barber's shop barely outlasted Dick's childhood. Joe had worked in a colliery before, so the routine came as no shock, but it was far easier to dust off his lamp and find a bait tin than to toughen hands softened by hot water and bend his back into the crippling positions demanded by narrow seams of coal. It must have been particularly difficult for a man in his fifties to return to that life and to hear the familiar squeal of the cage, a sound he'd hoped never to hear again. The devil drives, however. Joe was finding it impossible to make a living as a barber.

*

The world of coal and iron and engineering was continually overhauling Chesterfield and opening up new vistas. A town which, before the advent of the railways, had only ‘two societies of note' – one devoted to agriculture, the other to literature and philosophy, which gathered ‘on the evening of every Wednesday nearest the full moon' – was transforming itself with all the swank and vigour of a thriving economy. Chesterfield's Institute of Engineers now boasted over 300 members (mostly mining engineers and colliery managers) and, by 1879, the town had erected its Stephenson Memorial Hall – complete with lecture rooms, a free library, billiard rooms and so on – in honour of the pioneering railway engineer, George Stephenson, who had spent his last days looking down on Chesterfield's seething chimneys from the more elevated heights of Tapton House.

Train lines were scoring further criss-crosses of iron and steam in the Derbyshire hillsides, cutting through limestone, sandstone and millstone grit to attach the town and its surrounding collieries to distant places. Market days testified to the fertility of surrounding farms, while the rapacious expansion of the coal and engineering industries predicted a confident future. When, in 1889, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (later the Great Central Railway) further extended its reach, it traversed a coalfield estimated to contain no less than 800 million tons of coal. The landscape that seduced – and still pleases – countless Romantics has always had a solid girth.

My great-grandfather's coming to maturity, as a man and a worker, is part of this industrial story. By the mid 1880s, he was no longer down the mine. Dick was never happy below ground and much preferred to work with industrial engines, tending the iron steeds that sunk shafts, operated pulleys and powered innumerable
workshops and foundries. He was good with his hands and with machinery; any work with industrial engines attracted Dick and, at the turn of the century, there was plenty. Industrial engine tender, driver, fitter, mechanic, engineer – over the years, my great-grandfather laid claim to all these occupations – but, at the time of his marriage, in 1885, at the age of twenty-two, Dick described himself as an engineer tender.

Betsy Ward courted someone else before she knew Dick, and I put it that way round because, even as a young woman, Betsy was the one who did the choosing. She gave this impression straightaway. In part, this was due to her stature: she was a big-boned woman and tall – all the Wards were tall – and she carried herself with a dignity beyond her station. Though her father was a collier, her eldest sister Annie had worked as a lady's maid and knew what it meant to be a lady. The lessons in decorum and the occasional cast-offs she brought home gave Betsy and their younger sisters a glimpse of another world and its ladylike ways.

All working-class schooling was haphazard at this time, but my great-grandma's was more haphazard than most. Betsy had not mastered reading and writing before being told to stay away. The height that became an advantage to her as a young woman was a distinct disadvantage as a child: ‘You're too big to be at school now,' her schoolmistress informed her. ‘Go on home and help your mam,' an instruction so devastating, Betsy still spoke of it seventy years later.

Home was rooms in Speedwell Buildings, Staveley, another of Chesterfield's outlying villages, where Betsy's mother took in sewing and brought up nine children. Much of what Betsy learned was gleaned from home and her mam was extremely grateful for her help. The third child and third daughter, Betsy soon knew
how to manage the household and her five younger brothers and sisters. She had a fund of common sense and grew into a strong and capable young woman. When her chores were complete, Betsy helped her mother with the dressmaking, although that word gives perhaps too grand an impression of all the unpicking and cobbling together that went on inside their Staveley home. The skills involved were real enough, nonetheless. Betsy learned how to make the best of what was available and how the merest strip of braid could lift a worsted jacket out of the ordinary.