The Local Historian Volume 46 Number 3 July 2016

By Alan Crosby

As we progress through the sequence of anniversaries and commemorations in what has been described in Ireland as ‘the decade of centenaries’, the range and breadth of published work by local historians which focuses on these events and their impact in individual communities continues to expand. I think the only comparable generator of research and writing was sixteen years ago for the millennium, but so much that was published then was general and unfocused, or was of the ‘then and now’ variety. In contrast, what we have seen since 2014 and will continue to encounter for several more years is the investigation of the specific and, very importantly, the linking of the local with the national and the international. In fact, this is one of its hallmarks—nobody working on the themes of war and conflict, loss and survival can possibly be unaware of the wider context and the underlying issues and themes. A criticism frequently (and often quite unjustly) made of local history is that its practitioners pay too little attention to, or are apparently unaware of, the bigger picture and the framework within which local experience is placed. That certainly cannot be said of most of the Great War-related work now being researched and published.

I find it particularly interesting and encouraging that this awareness extends to the broader themes and questions which are actively discussed by historians more generally. In this issue of The Local Historian, for example, John Buckell looks at conscientious objectors in Northampton, tracing the examples in detail and looking at their social, religious and economic background. This theme, and the one of desertion and ‘cowardice’, have been widely investigated by national historians in recent years as they probe the questions of outright opposition to the war, and fear and terror and abject disillusionment during its course. Similarly, there has been a growing awareness among historians of the extent and significance of social dissent and economic turmoil in Britain during the First World War, including rioting over food supplies and price inflation—a subject with a very prominent local dimension. In the January 2015 issue Bonnie White highlighted her case study of food protests and ‘the inequality of sacrifice’ in Devon, and work from other parts of the country, such as the coalfield and coastal towns of West Cumberland, shows that these phenomena were very widespread.

Some familiar notions of the Great War are being revisited with greater depth and sophistication. For a hundred years the role of women on the Home Front has been almost a clichéd image (‘they drove the trams ... they cleaned railway engines’) and photographs of women performing these tasks are a mainstay of books which cover the period. But historians now engage with this topic from a longer-term perspective, questioning the idea that it really changed forever the place and status and, crucially, the freedoms of women. In 1918 most women over 30 were given the vote—it would be good to see more local studies of the suffrage movement and of the way in which the partial emancipation of 1918 was received in individual communities. Popular histories of suffragism tend to focus on the national celebrities and give little attention to grassroots involvement and to local political activism by women. Roger Smalley’s book on Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, a politically-committed Lancashire mill girl, is reviewed in this issue—but there were many others like her whose names are almost forgotten and whose activities are perhaps overshadowed by the absolute dominance of the war in the thinking of contemporaries and of later historians.

We can also seek to exploit local archival resources which include much material relating to the war that has not been tapped by ‘mainstream’ historians, or is under-used. Overwhelmed by the terrible and hideous statistics, and with the inevitability of hindsight, we often fail to appreciate the way in which the stark and grim story unfolded, day by day, in each community. I have been researching two places in North West England—one in Cumberland, the other in mid-Lancashire—where the war’s evolving horror, and the ever-growing intervention of centralised bureaucracy and government regulation, are charted in a variety of sources which are not often used for this purpose. School logbooks are comparatively familiar, but I have also been using parish council and district council minute books, and parish and deanery magazines, to see different perspectives, building up a picture of the different ways in which the community responded to the loss of young men, the torrent of ministry circulars and the pressure of growing shortages alike. These sources have an immediacy and I feel that, because they were written by people who had no idea of the outcome of it all, they reflect more authentically the changing emotions involved. In the Cumbrian village which I have investigated, the tone of the parish magazine moves from excited jingoism and religious fervour, to the dawning realisation that death might come aplenty, to an exhausted and slogging weariness. That was, of course, the experience of every community across the kingdom, but to trace this on those cheaply-printed and yellowed pages was deeply moving.

No less moving in its way was another piece of my research, looking at the building of the war memorial in the nearby market town. As Kate Tiller has observed in her definitive book, Remembrance and community: war memorials and local history (BALH, 2013), ‘There is much to research and much to tell, both in recognising the original intentions of those who created the memorials and in preserving and reflecting on them in the present’. Her case studies demonstrate that what might fondly, at this distance, be imagined as a coming-together of the community, unanimous in its desire to cherish and commemorate the departed in a public memorial for ever more, was in reality often contentious and divisive. Far from promoting harmony between all groups in a community, the proposals for a war memorial frequently generated acrimony over siting and location, style and design, funding, ownership or sponsorship, and the social and military hierarchies which might be expressed or reflected in how the names were ordered and set.

Many local historians have produced excellent work on the people themselves—asking ‘who were those young men and sometimes young women’—but to understand fully the war memorial as an object or artefact in its own right, its history must be investigated. In doing that, the researcher may learn a great deal about the structure of the community, its social orders and antagonisms. My research on the Cumbrian market town revealed that in this place of about 5500 people there was a bitterly-fought and extremely public argument which set the large majority of the townspeople against a self-appointed ‘memorial committee’ of the great and good. Recorded in a remarkable collection of letters, petitions, newspaper cuttings and minutes, it showed how grief and sorrow overflowed into anger and dismay, a sad coda to the war and one which lasted until 1922. There is much for us to do, in rescuing these stories and by doing so giving new local dimensions and highly-focused new perspectives on one of the most terrible periods in world history.

[Hide]

By John Buckell

In January 1916, sixteen months into the Great War, the Military Service Act brought in automatic conscription for all unmarried men aged between 18 and 41. Implementation began in March, but not everybody was prepared to fight—significant numbers refused on religious, ethical, political and social grounds, or argued on the basis of their employment. To assess these applications for exemption, tribunals were set up over local areas (individual boroughs, urban districts and, rural districts) with county appeals tribunals having the last word. The records for many of these have been lost, but those which survive are a particularly valuable source for the long-overlooked theme of opposition to the war, and the challenges to particular aspects of it.

In this article John Buckell studies the evidence from the Northamptonshire and Northampton Tribunals, among the very few to have survived almost complete. He describes the organisation, structure, membership and work of the tribunals, looking at the range and variety of individual cases which came before them and the very diverse reasons which were given to justify the claims for exemption from military service. The article then focuses on one key group, the so-called ‘absolutists’ who on the grounds of conscience refused any form of involvement in the military system. They contrast with those who accepted alternative but non-combatant work and were known as ‘alternativists’ under a Home Office scheme which is explained in the paper. The former were frequently subjected to draconian prison treatment, and Buckell quotes Northampton examples in detail.

He then turns to public reaction, including hostility and contempt, and to the support networks which developed between conscientious objectors and with the groups and organisations to which their religious, political and other beliefs were affiliated. He explores the motivation for their stand, showing that the reasons were often complex and frequently idealistic, and finishes with a revealing section which shows how some Northampton objectors eventually achieved respect and status, as local and national political leaders.

[Hide]

By Susan T. Moore

The records of the courts of equity contain an extraordinary variety and immense quantity of material which is of the greatest relevance and potential interest to local, regional and family historians. But they are also extremely complex in their structure and organisation (matching the complexity of the courts which created the records) and to make full use of them requires a considerable degree of technical knowledge and understanding of the ways in which the courts operated. Susan Moore’s article begins by summarising the history of the various courts of equity (namely: Chancery; Court of Requests; Star Chamber; equity side of the Court of Exchequer; and the equity courts which operated for varying lengths of time in the palatinates of Lancaster, Chester and Durham, and in Wales and the North).

The paper then sets out the procedures in the courts of equity, explaining how the differed from those in courts of common law. The following key phases, and their accompanying documentation, are summarised: pleadings; interrogatories and depositions; affidavits; petitions; decrees and orders; masters’ reports; masters’ exhibits; masters’ documents; masters’ accounts; and cause books.

The third section of the article provides examples of six case studies drawn from different parts of the country, showing how the documentation of the causes sheds important light on questions and issues of interest to local historians, and provides rich evidence for the analysis of institutions, buildings and families.

[Hide]

By Roger Ottewill

In the introduction to this important article Roger Ottewill argues that ‘local electoral history has the potential to be a research area of considerable interest and significance. Yet until relatively recently, it has been a ‘no go area’ eschewed by electoral historians and local historians alike’. Ottewill explains the scope of the concept of ‘local electoral history’, which includes the formal legal framework governing the conduct of elections, as well as ‘behavioural aspects’ such as the identity and backgrounds of candidates, the turnout, the politics and, of course, the results. He also emphasises that it includes elections for all types of authority, from county councils, via borough and district, to parish level, together with specialist bodies such as school boards and boards of guardians. There is also an overlap with the local dimensions of national elections.

The article explains clearly and succinctly the sources which can be used to investigate these themes, noting that these are often quite limited and problematic, and it then sets out a series of eight key questions which researchers might ask as a framework for their own research and analysis. The paper draws attention to the work which has been done in recent years to identify, collate and publish election results, for a small number of individual areas and authorities and under the long-term project to cover all 83 interwar county boroughs. This section links with an exploration of the ‘discusses the range and approach of the secondary and analytical literature: a) treating elections as major political events, but focusing almost exclusively on national coverage (only the first county council elections being seen as significant); b) using local data to explore the ‘grand narratives’ of political history, such as the rise of the Labour Party; c) exploring the formal and procedural aspects, such as the impact of the franchise changes and voting arrangements; and d) looking at specific hotly-fought contests for parliamentary seats (such as Winchester 1945 and high Peak 1885).

The final section returns to research frameworks, asking broader and more open-ended questions about the existing (and generally quite inadequate) treatment of local electoral history, and suggesting more challenging and ambitious approaches on the part of local historians.

[Hide]

By Ann Redshaw

Ann Redshaw observes in the opening sentence of her article that ‘The preservation of a rare eighteenth-century charity school register in the archives of a formerly large Northamptonshire estate has provided the opportunity to examine the composition of a small rural school in a period for which very few primary sources usually survive’. The school, in the village of Rockingham, was run under the auspices of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK: founded 1698) within the context of the great estate of the Watson family of Rockingham Castle, and its surviving register covers ten-year period 1763-1773.

The article begins by explaining the local history background and then describes the principles of the SPCK and its work in the area of charitable education, including the credentials which were laid down for the qualification of its teachers. It then provides a detailed and thorough analysis of the Rockingham School, looking in turn at a series of key themes: funding, finances and patronage; the arrangement of classes and the curriculum; the ages of scholars; progression through the school, and evidence of attendance; the teachers; the children and their families; and, finally, the advantages of education and the rationale for its provision among the rural poor. The decline of the school after the 1780s is noted, and the evidence of (for example) the government commission which investigated education in 1818 is used to highlight the changing nature of provision in Rockingham and adjacent communities.

The paper argues that the school had a powerful impact upon village life, and that there is an identifiable link between the education of the poor and, for example, the emergence of Methodism and the Baptist denominations. It is clear that this source is a most unusual one—such registers very rarely survive—but the lessons it teaches may have a much greater validity and application.

[Hide]

By Peter Austin

In previous issues of The Local Historian (May 2013 and July 2014), and as part of his major and extensive research into woodland management and exploitation, Peter Austin has published papers on pollarding and coppicing, using South-East Hertfordshire as his case study area and exploiting the archives at Hatfield House. In this present paper he focuses on one of the key elements of the exploitation of woodland resources—the production of charcoal in the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The sources used are the account books of the Hatfield and related estates; other estate records; and a wealth of published primary and secondary material on trade and woodland management.

The paper explains the rationale for charcoal-making, including the preferred types of wood, and then provides a valuable detailed account of the techniques involved, beginning with agreements between woodland owner and charcoal-maker and continuing through the selection of site, choosing of wood, making of hearths, vigilant management of the burning,  and removal and carting of the charcoal. These activities are identified in the accounts, with numerous examples quoted. From this, Austin moves on to consider the economics of the industry, looking at the returns for the landowner and the sale prices and production costs involved. Again, the theoretical discussion is illustrated by many specific examples of transactions.

The paper then addresses the practical aspects of charcoal production within a changing landscape—one changed by the industry, but also managed for a range of other purposes. Much of the landscape impact depended on the quantities that were produced in a given area over a certain period of time, and this aspect is analysed in considerable detail. The sale of, and trade in, charcoal is analysed, as is the use made of it (though it is emphasised that the article does not include analysis of the industrial use of the commodity). Finally, a paragraph looks at the end of the trade. There is a large and comprehensive set of references which will be valuable for any local historian wanting to pursue the themes discussed, in his or her area.

[Hide]

By Jane Platt

Using two scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings, held by Cumbria Archives and Carlisle Cathedral Library, Jane Platt traces the events at Christ Church, Carlisle over a 35-year period which saw bitter feuding between factions of the congregation and their minister. The conflict was part of a much wider and far-reaching battle within the Church of England, between the Anglican Evangelicals who were strongly opposed to ‘ritual’ in any form, including the liturgy itself but also the arrangement, order and decoration of the church, and on the other hand the Anglo-Catholics who no less strongly supported its use and whose theological and liturgical foundation remained the post-1559 form which incorporated key elements of pre-Reformation Catholic worship.

Jane Platt begins by setting out the principles which underlay the arguments, including the five major areas of (as far as the Evangelicals were concerned) unwelcome change: faith [tradition versus scripture]; justification [via the sacraments or by direct access to God]; Church ministry [apostolic succession versus congregational ministry]; the Eucharist; and ‘mechanical acts of spirituality’ such as confession. She then shows how between 1854 and 1906 a series of decisions by Church courts, commissions, the privy council and other agencies changed the legality of many key aspects of Anglican Eucharistic worship, each one of which was both preceded and followed by fiercely antagonistic debate.

Her paper then turns to the case of Christ Church, Carlisle, and she charts the career of the central figure in its small civil war, the Reverend John Compton Butterworth (vicar 1895-1904) and its longer-term consequences. The account is full of rich quotation from contemporary newspapers, and the tendency of Butterworth to ride rough-shod over the preferences and expectations of his parishioners is highlighted, as he sought to impose an Anglo-Catholic form of worship on a hostile congregation. Throughout, the local events and arguments are placed firmly in the context of the ‘big issues’ which beset the contemporary Church of England, so that this study exemplifies the importance of providing other dimensions to local history studies. It concludes by noting that the Anglo-Catholicism which Butterworth imposed was sustained after his death, such that the church acquired a statue of Our Lady, paschal candles, incense, crucifixes and other features which even today would be regarded as ‘high’. But, Jane Platt, notes, the irony is that in 1952 the church was demolished, its arguments long forgotten and its congregation dwindled to only a handful.

By by David St John Thomas (Railway and Canal Historical Society 2015 232pp ISBN 978 0 901461 63 6) £25

[Hide]

By Ann Alexander (Thoresby Society 2015 254pp ISBN 978 0 900741 75 3) £18

[Hide]

By Brian Lancaster (Proceedings of the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society vol.19 no.8 2015 115pp ISBN 978-0-90647-30-9) £6.95 + £1.

[Hide]

By John Crummett (New Mills Local History Society: 2015 ii+20pp no ISBN) £3

[Hide]

By Gillian Cookson (Boydell and Brewer/Institute of Historical Research 2015 x+332pp ISBN 978 1 904356 44 8) £95

[Hide]

By Rose Wallis (Boydell and Brewer/Institute of Historical Research 2015 x+119 pp ISBN 978 1 909646 10 0) £9.50

[Hide]

By Brian Short (Boydell 2014 468pp 9781843839378) £75

[Hide]

By Roger Smalley (Regional Heritage Centre, Lancaster University 2014 157pp ISBN 978-1-86220-317-4) £12.95

HOW RAILWAYS CHANGED BRITAIN: a new social and economic history edited by David St John Thomas (Railway and Canal Historical Society 2015 232pp ISBN 978 0 901461 63 6) £25

This new book, produced by the Railway and Canal Historical Society and edited by the noted railway historian the late David St John Thomas, commendably aims to provide the non-academic reader or researcher with an understanding of how the railways and their development transformed the British nation from 1830 to the present day. Each of the nine chapters, authored by respected railway historians among whom are M.C. Reed and David Hodgkins, touches upon a wide range of subjects relating to railway development in Britain. The reader is taken on a journey starting with construction and financing; the impact upon financial systems; how railways altered the nation’s leisure habits; their impact on the landscape; the establishment of railway towns; and railway management.

The text is well written and informative, and every chapter has a sense of the issues involved, and interesting points or examples raised, though on occasion the focus could have been improved. While the work is a useful compilation of research examining the railways and the social-economic environment in Britain, the potential breadth of the chosen themes means that it inevitably becomes a victim of its own remit. Some subjects are given less attention than would be hoped for from a book with this title—for instance the impact of railways on demographic change and migration;, female railway employees; and developments in the twentieth century. These reservations should, however, be tempered by the fact that this is not intended to be a work providing full coverage of the different subjects, but rather a collection that draws on the knowledge and experience of the contributors, who clearly demonstrate a deep understanding and passion for their subjects throughout.

A noted weakness of the book, which limits its ability to provide insight for the researcher, is the omission of in-text references. That editorial decision means that the reader cannot easily discover where a statement, fact or argument came from. This is, however compensated, by the inclusion of useful bibliographies at the end of each chapter and for the book as a whole. The lack of in-text references is also problematic when considering a statement in the introduction, that the book was to draw on knowledge the authors had acquired ‘without necessarily recalling when’. This leaves the work open to the suggestion that some of the material came from that sometimes dubious source, memory. 

But overall, these criticism are minor when considering the book’s intended purpose, its informative nature and the achievement of the Railway & Canal Historical Society and David St John Thomas in compiling a useful guide for individuals starting to explore the broad impact of the railways on British life.

DAVID TURNER

David Turner is associate lecturer in railway studies at the University of York’s Centre for Lifelong Learning where he teaches its on-line postgraduate diploma in railway studies.

[Hide]

By Maureen P. Cubitt (author 2014 128pp ISBN978-1-907750-88-5) £10 from www.mancroftbells.co.uk or from Simon Smith, 23 Beatrice Road, Norwich

THE NOTEBOOKS OF ROBERT POUNDER edited by Ann Alexander (Thoresby Society 2015 254pp ISBN   978 0 900741 75 3) £18

There are few published autobiographical writings of workers from the first half of the nineteenth century. That in itself makes Robert Pounder’s notebooks of more than local interest, though those with a special interest in the West Riding textile industry will particularly appreciate their publication. Robert Pounder (1811-1857) already has a fragment of literary immortality in that he is quoted by Frederick Engels in his Condition of the Working Class in England of 1845. However this ‘anikdote’ is not representative of the writings in Pounder’s notebooks: it is a secondhand account of a Manchester, a place of which he knew little, whereas his notebooks are full of immediate and intimate details of his own life in Leeds.

Like many autodidacts, Pounder had a magpie mind and that is reflected in the jumbled miscellany of material he recorded. His highly erratic orthography is also a reflection of someone self-taught but, for a man who was relatively literate, the idiosyncratic spelling of even familiar words like ‘America’ would suggest some degree of dyslexia. Deciphering this script must have been a difficult task and it would be pedantic to point out errors and misinterpretations that have crept in as a result. Ann Alexander, the editor, should be congratulated for her dedication in bringing Pounder’s writings to the attention of historians. Her introduction, summarising the content of the notebooks and various aspects of Pounder’s life, and the numerous footnotes, are indispensible, although not without omissions.

The notebooks record material from 1827 to 1847 and include some earlier biographical details. It is perhaps easier for the reader to start with the ‘small notebook’ first, although it is second in the volume, since it contains information about Pounder’s early life.  As well as references to contemporary events, the notebooks contain recipes for medicines, poems, inventories of belongings, snippets of financial accounts, notes of acts of charity he received, genealogical details, records of wages and teazle prices. An anthology of Pounder’s own verse fills 75 pages of the 193 pages of transcribed notebook content. As a working-man poet Pounder is not in the league of Ebenezer Elliott or John Clare, but as a record of the intimate thought and ideas of someone in his station of life his work is invaluable. His political and religious beliefs, his joy, his grief, his love of nature and hatred of oppression all find naive and ingenuous expression in his verse.

The tantalisingly laconic references to political events and social movements can be frustrating, since although Pounder’s life touched on many aspects of working-class radical activity of the time, he chose not to record them in detail, at least in the surviving notebooks. That he was capable of such detailed journalism, notwithstanding his spelling problems, is clear from two letters which Richard Oastler published in his ‘Fleet Papers’ and which are reproduced as an appendix to this volume, including that reproduced by Engels.

Pounder was a teazle handle setter, and therefore part of the cloth finishing branch of the woollen industry. For a time he worked at Oatlands Mill at Woodhouse, which in January 1812 suffered an arson attack attributed to the Luddites. However, his writings throw little light on what it was like to be in the cloth finishing trade in the years when hand-finishing finally gave way to machinery. In the 1830s he was involved in the trade union movement, but his entry for 10 May 1834, when Yorkshire trade unionists were locked in an epic battle for survival with the manufacturers, says only that ‘This day 24 mills stopt on perpes to breck up the traids uinon which thee was 3,000 men and upwords thrown out of imployment besides children and women which...’, ending in mid-sentence. He was also a founding member of the Commercial Order in Leeds, a little-known venture in cooperative production linked to the Owenite trade union, about which he records nothing other than this fact. 

A staunch supporter of the Ten Hours Bill and opponent of the New Poor Law, Pounder was also a personal friend of Richard Oastler (who visited his home and who referred to him as ‘Robert’ in a letter to the Northern Star) and of the leading West Riding radical and Chartist Lawrence Pitkethley, but he adds little to our knowledge about them.  Similarly, although he shared a platform with the Chartist George Julian Harney, Pounder’s other involvement in the movement is unmentioned. He is also modest about his own role in the allotment movement, of which he was a leading promoter in Woodhouse.

Although Pounder may be reticent about his political activity, his stoical record of personal suffering in the 1840s as a sick and unemployed worker, compounded by loss of his wife, are vivid and moving. In his jottings and verse he provides a greater insight into the  ‘Hungry 40s’ than any economist’s account does or could, and is worth reading for this alone.

ALAN BROOKE

Alan Brooke is a member of Huddersfield Local History Society and co-author, with the late Lesley Kipling, of Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites in the Huddersfield Area.

[Hide]