Piddingworth Greg Benton |
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| 'Piddingworth...where St. George's Cross is not yet banned.' --Mark Steyn |
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| Live as free people, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil; but live as servants of God. (1Peter 2) |
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| The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911, is a social history by Juliet Nicolson. It seemed to me to be the ‘perfect summer read’ and not just because of the current trend to be more pre-occupied than usual by the weather. The ‘weather’ of the summer of 1911, the hottest on record at the time (even before ‘Global Warming hysteria’), is a backdrop to, another, more profound ‘climate change’ that had occurred in that year, namely the last great gasp of Edwardian society and the emergence of the dark clouds of a world that would so thunderously emerge with world war one. It is the summer of fuss over the coronation of George V and Mary, his Queen whilst his cousin, the Kaiser, flexes the threat of German ‘interests’. The ‘impertinent’ working classes, the labourers, at the docks and railways, went on strike shutting down as summer holiday travellers became stranded and unloaded meat and other perishables rotted in the extreme heat off the dockyard. The ‘Perfect Summer’ is, in a way, an allegorical reflection upon the collapse of once-perceived notions of English society and the ‘good life’ that, like every child’s own summer, seemed ‘eternal’, unchanging, warm and wonderful and was so keenly felt by most in the ‘Pax Britannica’ that was it’s umbrella. For the idle rich, there was the enjoyment of playing at being rich whether in ‘town’ and taking in the Russian ballet of Najinsky or those ‘Saturday to Monday’ gatherings at the country house where excess in clothing and in dining was de rigueur as were the multiple footprints between bedrooms; very well travelled and providing much entertaining fodder f or the servants. For the working poor, aspiring, even desperately, for some greater comfort, it was a significant year of challenge and change, if only by a shilling and the somewhat thin ‘security’ of a ‘National Insurance Act’ that was popular with the unions but not for ‘servants’ whose lives depended upon a traditional, centuries-old and unwritten covenant. Nicolson refers to vignettes that include stories of her own grandparents, Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West where their lives illustrated those times. She dwells mostly in reference on the aristocracy or nobility but gives the occasional nod to the ‘working’ classes and the transformation that applied to them all. Her insights permit the reader to imagine one’s own family in that same summer and to ‘picture’ them in the streets, towns, cities, homes and places of work and leisure. So it is for me as I reflect on my grandparents, each in their own diverse situations in England in that hot summer and as well as the aforementioned ‘shadow’ into which they, with the rest of their world, would soon become immmersed. |
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| St. Mary's Harborne, Birmingham |
| In the summer of 1911, Grandfather Harold Joseph Benton, age 19, is a silversmith’s apprentice in Birmingham. Tall, slim and handsome with his jet-black hair, broad smile, and ‘street-smarts’, he is already a skilled talker and shrewd dealer with aspirations, never to be realised, ‘well above his station’. Living in a crowded tenement with his mother, Jane, who stamps brass in a factory, his older brother William and young sister Ethel, they labour daily in the great industrial black cloud of dust that surrounds them in the tough part of the city that is Catholic and poor. Far removed from the bucolic delights enjoyed by most in Nicolson’s story, the Birmingham of the working class is dripping in the vulgarity, struggle, sweat and meagre living of the poor where the most feared of men, the parish priest, rules and especially on Saturday nights with the brawls outside the taverns and warnings for attendance at the morning Mass. |
| Mary Rose O’Leary, age 16, my grandmother, lives with her mother Bridget (Curran), her father John and brother Jack in the ‘Black Patch’ of London. Irish transplants from Cork, uneducated and without skills amidst the squalor, stench and misery of the Thames embankment, they are the underclass, the ‘untouchables’ of Britain. The official history of Bermondsey recorded in 1912, that the ‘place had acquired a character even more repellent than that which it bears at present. A thickly populated district along the waterside was inhabited by coal porters, whippers, longshore labourers and jobbers, corn porters, costermongers, watermen and sailors, whose earnings were irregular. The rest of the parish was occupied by working tanners, fellmongers, leather-dressers and other labourers. Four to five persons, on an average, slept in one room, standards of cleanliness and temperance were low, and the population subsisted chiefly on bread and potatoes. The streams which surrounded Jacob's Island were built over after the outbreak of cholera in 1850. It is the place upon which Charles Dickens based the 'adventures of Oliver Twist'; the veritable icon of the misery of industrialised Britain. From here, the O’Learys will seek an ‘escape’ by steerage on a ship to Montreal where confronted by signs posted with ‘Irish need not apply’ and ‘No Irish’, they are equally estranged from the mainstream and inevitably find their way to the poorest place by the river. With as little prospect in Canada for a better life as might be in London, John and Bridget will soon return to England leaving their son and daughter to make their own way. This summer, like all the others for them, is at once, both hopeful and perfectly grim. |
| In contrast, Ernest Michael Leonard, my beloved granddad, age 21, handsome, athletic and looking very smart in his ‘straw-boater’ enjoys the breezes and sights of sails from the boardwalk by the Hoe in Plymouth, Devon. An ironfitter by trade, he supports the union movement for the betterment of the life of the working man. He also plays football and two years earlier was on the 1909 district championship team, Torquay United. His father, William, a coal merchant in the city, and Methodist Lay-Preacher, has afforded his Welsh wife, Lydia Powell, and their children an education as well as a somewhat ‘better’ life. His summer is full of optimism, adventure and, according to Olive Leonard, his young sister, was adept at charming the ladies of Plymouth. The family can afford to travel and some of Ernie’s sisters have gone to Toronto, Canada to live. They will soon invite Ernie to visit them. |
| My dear grandmother, Rosie Margaret West, age 16, lives at Piddingworth, a cottage near Plumpton, on the estate of the Earl of Chichester, Stanmer, East Sussex, where her family are employed as servants. George Ambrose, her father and stockman for the farm, is tending to the cattle whilst his wife Sarah Ann, a woman of great faith and long-suffering, is devoted to her husband and children and the parish church that helps to sustain them. Rosie, pretty, devout, a ‘young lady of the Church’, and well-schooled, works as a maid in the Earl’s house, where she enjoys the friendship and kindness especially of Lady Ruth Mary Pelham, the 5th Earl’s daughter who is to later became a nun at Ascot Priory, Berkshire. The Pelhams are not quite like most others of the nobility described by Nicolson in that they are for the most part a deeply religious and ‘modest’ family who, though they are of considerable means and stature, are not given to the self-indulgent ‘excesses’ that provide much entertaining reading in the book. Eldest sister, Annie Louisa, age 26 has left Piddingworth and is married. Rosie’s brothers Joseph, age 23 and George, age 20 having shepherded for their father in the care of the cattle and sheep are seeking new opportunities in elsewhere. Brother John, age 18, will one day open a bake shop whilst Minnie, Rosie’s little sister, age 12, dutifully assists her mother with the chores. The very occasional ‘escape’ to Brighton Beach affords some relief in this hot summer, but there is much illness in the family and, with it, much suffering. Rosie, who was confirmed and received her first holy communion a year earlier, finds comfort in the Church at Falmer and Stanmer as does her devoted family. They are frequently visited by the distinguished Rev’d H.V. Bickersteth. |
| From the English summer of 1911, my grandparents, in deeply contrasting ways, enter the ‘shadow’ to which Miss Nicolson refers even as they are all touched by the common events that are of significance: the beginning of the decline of the British Empire and the emergence of the darkness of German nationalism and war followed by depression, totalitarianism and war again. On the other hand, with considerable social and economic change, they will all have a greater, if still limited, independence as well as opportunities for a ‘better living’. Their experiences, personal triumphs and tragedies, sewn together, will lay the foundation for a very different world for their children and grandchildren. |
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| An 'old' woman in poor London cares for a child whilst the mother is at work. |
| ON THE IDLE HILL OF SUMMER
by: A.E. Housman (1860-1936) ON the idle hill of summer, Sleepy with the flow of streams, Far I hear the steady drummer Drumming like a noise in dreams. Far and near and low and louder On the roads of earth go by, Dear to friends and food for powder, Soldiers marching, all to die. East and west on fields forgotten Bleach the bones of comrades slain, Lovely lads and dead and rotten; None that go return again. Far the calling bugles hollo, High the screaming fife replies, Gay the files of scarlet follow: Woman bore me, I will rise. from A Shropshire Lad. A.E. Housman. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1896. |
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| INTO THE SHADOW- THE SUMMER OF 1911 |