Savage (9 page)

Joseph Wigram was one of Sir Robert's twenty-three children, all of whom lived at some time in the grand setting of Walthamstow House. Theirs was new money, accumulated through hard work and speculation, not the sophisticated old money of the landed gentry. On meeting one of Joseph's brothers, Jane Austen wrote to her sister that he was ‘not agreeable. – He is certainly no addition … They say his name is Henry. A proof how unequally the gifts of Fortune are bestowed. – I have seen many a John and Thomas much more agreeable … Mr Wigram does no good to anybody.'

But just as there were rich, there were also poor in Walthamstow. The village almshouses catered for the ‘widows of decayed tradesmen', and charitable organisations made small donations or gifts of coal and bread to the neediest, and also eased the consciences of the flourishing bourgeoisie and squirearchy – Robert Wigram, for example, arranged the release of a prisoner from the local gaol every time there was a birth in the family.

Charities aside, though, the inequity in local society meant that crime was a growing problem. It was not as grievous or as all-pervasive as that which confronted the citizens of London, but large houses were tempting targets for those who could not make ends meet. In 1854, when Walthamstow's population had risen to 5,000, 147 people were arrested: 51 for felonies, 39 for wilful damage, 17 for assault and 40 for drunkenness.

To combat crime, an early form of police force, known colloquially as ‘Charlies', or watchmen, would have been familiar to the Fuegians. From 1819 to 1831 a police committee, supported by local subscription, employed armed Charlies to patrol the winter nights. During the uneasy days of 1830–31 they were augmented by day patrols. In 1831, following the Lighting and Watching Act, the parish appointed inspectors to oversee the employment of a sergeant and a squad of constables. These men roamed the streets and their cries of ‘Twelve o'clock midnight and all is well', echoed through the night air.

For those on the lowest rung of Walthamstow's ladder there was an alternative to crime: the workhouse. Like every other parish in the country, Walthamstow tried to palm off its poor to other districts, but here in this dark, foreboding building at the edge of the village, up to eighty people lived and were employed on a strict regime of oakum picking, brewing and gardening. Above the door of the workhouse a plaque warned:

THIS HOUSE ERECTED

AN DOM MDCCXXX

if any would not work

neither Should he eat

It was a message that would return to haunt Jemmy Button in the last years of his life.

*   *   *

Jemmy, Fuegia and York were greeted in Walthamstow by Mr and Mrs Jenkins, the master and mistress of the infants' school they were to attend. As well as being their teachers, the Jenkinses would double as their hosts for the next eleven months. They took an immediate liking to the Fuegians and Fuegia became the special responsibility of Mrs Jenkins, but little else is known about the couple. The 1831 census has a William Jenkins ‘professional' living in Church Lane, as head of a household of three men and four women, and it is possible that this was him.

The infants' school they ran had been established by William Wilson in 1824. Wilson was an evangelical preacher of some renown. The son of a wealthy Cheapside silk manufacturer, he was a father of eight who had come to the village in 1822. He had a large personal wealth which was inflated by two livings: he was vicar of Walthamstow in winter and of Worton, near Woodstock, in the summer. The migration from one ecclesiastical money-pot to another involved servants, wagons and geese in a logistical exercise that was a byword for complexity and military precision.

Wilson had been encouraged, even goaded, by the famous nineteenth-century educator Samuel Wilderspin into opening an infants' school in Walthamstow. In the early part of the century National Schools took children from the age of six or seven, but Wilderspin believed that this wasted both time and opportunity. He felt a gulf in education could be bridged by preparing children as young as two for a life of learning. Valuable time could be saved in the higher schools, he argued, if children arrived at them already familiar with the alphabet and elements of arithmetic, as well as an understanding of the behaviour expected of them in the classroom. He also believed that this early period in a child's life was crucial for impressing upon them social and moral values that might otherwise be lost or debased by the beliefs and actions of crudely educated parents.

Wilderspin approached Wilson and asked for help. After some initial reluctance the vicar agreed to open what became the country's first Church of England infants' school in a barn at the back of his house. It was so successful that by the time the Fuegians arrived in Walthamstow it had been transferred to a permanent, specially constructed Georgian building on glebeland adjoining the graveyard of the church, paid for out of Wilson's own pocket.

*   *   *

The experience of St Mary's infant school for the three Fuegians must have been fascinating, exhilarating, at times frustrating and frequently bewildering. The school consisted of a large room and two smaller classrooms off to the side. There was living accommodation upstairs for the master and mistress, but it appears that the Jenkinses did not need this part of the building for themselves. Perhaps this was where the Fuegians lived, for the Jenkinses' social standing was hardly so great that they would have had a large home, able to accommodate three visitors for a long time. Besides, the overwhelming convenience of having the Fuegians living above the schoolroom might have been too strong to resist.

The school was busy six days a week, with up to 150 children attending lessons. What they thought of their new classmates is nowhere recorded, but young children are often quicker to accept and absorb differences than adults. Nevertheless if Jemmy and Fuegia seemed odd to their classmates, one wonders what the children made of the twenty-six-year-old York Minster, a surly and increasingly antisocial man.

The lessons the Fuegians joined were active: clapping, singing, walking and chanting were the order of the day. When we look back on education in the nineteenth century we do so with a notion of its tyranny and abusive practices, harsh discipline and cowed children. But this was not so with the Walthamstow infants' school: lessons had a high religious, scriptural and moral content, but the ethos was liberal and child-centred, even by today's standards.

In his book
The System of Infants Schools
William Wilson laid out the guiding principles of his Walthamstow enterprise. It was essential to get children as young as possible, in the

most impressible years of our existence. The evil which is within us is then fomented, or the principles of religion and moral excellence were then first inculcated and encouraged …

[Education] must be conducted under the conviction, that it does not require a more judicious care to select the food of the body, on its entrance into life; to check the disease which threatens it; or to guide its earliest efforts into action, than it does to choose what may afford the best nourishment to the mind, and to watch over and regulate the first energies which it may put forth.

His system, he claimed, was designed to look at the child as a whole, to instil powers of judgement, discrimination and memory at the same time as putting a check on passions and moral uncertainty. It was designed to create ‘a class of persons, who … would have their minds imbued with the love of moral excellence and religion, and their heart prepared under the influence of the best principles for all the changes and chances of this mortal life'.

And the way to achieve this was not to make children fear and loathe either their schools or their teachers, but the opposite: they should want to come in every day. Classrooms were to be light and airy, with plenty of space, to provide a contrast with the children's home conditions. The school walls were to ‘speak' with pictures of animals, drawings illustrating Bible stories and short passages from the scriptures:

FEAR GOD – I Peter ii 17

HONOUR THE KING – I Peter ii 17

GOD IS LOVE – I John iv 8

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL – Eighth Commandment

GOD IS A SPIRIT – John iv 24

A CHILD IS KNOWN BY HIS DOINGS – Proverbs xx ii

Singing and clapping were powerful tools in learning, both to help children enjoy their lessons and to help their teacher keep order. Punishment was judicious and not brutal: it was understood that if a two-year-old committed an offence, the teacher was as culpable as the child. In his book Wilson gives the following example of punishment meted out in his Walthamstow school, to which the Fuegians would have been accustomed. A five-year-old who was caught stealing is placed on the central rostrum:

The child was then made to stand alone for a short while and told to pray.

Lessons lasted a quarter of an hour – not long enough for young minds to wander – and were taught with the children sitting in a semi-circle by either a teacher or a monitor. Girls and boys would be placed apart at different ends of the room. They learned reading, writing, arithmetic and the scriptures. There was also a major emphasis on the health of the child. Wilson wrote that

Muscular action is made a component and necessary part of the system. Every lesson is accompanied with some movement of the person … the whole frame is at different periods called into action and restored to rest. The beat of the foot, the clap of the hands, the extension of the arms, with various other postures, are measures of the utterance of the lesson as they proceed. The position is also frequently changed. The infants learn sitting, standing or walking …

Hygiene was taught by a morning ‘purification' in which children sang ‘This is the way we wash our hands; this is the way we wash our face' accompanied with gestures.

Chapter 8

As already noted, FitzRoy's instructions to the Jenkinses were to teach the Fuegians ‘English, and the plainer truths of Christianity … and the use of common tools, a slight acquaintance with husbandry, gardening and mechanism…' and for eleven months that is what they did, with varying degrees of success.

The younger two, Jemmy and Fuegia, achieved much and made many friends. York Minster, on the other hand, was a problem. He didn't want to be in this foreign land and was uncooperative, bad-tempered and hard to influence. Only the extra-curricular mechanical lessons, such as woodwork and animal husbandry, roused him. Lieutenant Bartholomew Sulivan, an officer of the
Beagle,
said of him that he was ‘too old to take to reading, but he was quick at discerning and catching practical hints'. FitzRoy confirmed this when he wrote that the older Fuegian ‘took interest in smith's or carpenter's work, and paid attention to what he saw and heard about animals; but he reluctantly assisted in gardening work, and had a great dislike to learning to read'.

There were other problems with York: his age, curt attitude, lack of manners and resistance to change all combined to create, in English eyes, a rather charmless package. He had also developed an unhealthy interest in Fuegia. The twenty-eight-year-old man had fallen for the ten-year-old girl, and whether it was love or simply a man asserting property rights over the only suitable female, he followed her everywhere, watched her every move, guarded her from the attentions of other men and hid behind her social ease in public situations. At this stage there is no suggestion of anything sexual occurring between the two – it seems that York treated her in the way that he might have cared for a new spear or canoe, but his jealousy occasionally flared, with harsh stares and grunted words of admonition aimed at those he deemed rival suitors.

However, if York was potential trouble, then the other two made a stark contrast. Once again age seems to have been the important factor. Both Jemmy and Fuegia were less abrasive, less fixed in their attitudes and, perhaps, more eager to please. They were still young enough to be flexible in their approach, to absorb new influences and to fit in at the school. Many of York's problems arose from his being forced to spend his days with children, all more than twenty years his junior. His growls and scowls must have been threatening and disturbing, but the youthful enthusiasm of Jemmy and Fuegia made them the darlings of all who met them.