innit

• Harriet the character

Happily it was not necessary to be able to read and write to succeed in life. The village midwife of Ilketshall St Margaret, mother of 13 children, kept the pub and owned several other properties in the village including the Post Office despite being illiterate. But she slipped up when her son emigrated to Australia. Not realising that he would be making the long journey by sea she begged him not to go fishing, as he had in Lowestoft as a boy with his brothers. Jack in fact may have kept his promise - he went straight to work on a farm in rural Queensland upon his arrival there aged seventeen (1898).

This chapter starts with a letter sent from a coffee plantation in the Port Royal Mountains, Jamaica in 1853. Polly Martin was sitting at home in her mother's smart drawing room in Woolwich when her brother-in-law's words reached her. Lowry, trying his luck as a mine agent, gallantly offered to find a husband for Polly, "to turn mademoiselle into madame" if she and her sister would come out too. She would meet many nice people, he said. However, Polly had no need of brother Lowry's help to meet a suitable bridegroom: the field was far wider in London where her father worked as a Methodist minister. Polly did not fancy the life of her sister, Mrs Lowry, sewing for the Dorcas group in Cornwall while her husband sent money home from overseas. The very next year Polly married the heir to the Allcroft & Dent gloving empire, J D Allcroft, Esquire. His estate grew to over half-a-million pounds and he accumulated considerable lands in Shropshire. The church he founded at St Martin's, Gospel Oak, is noted by a journalist of The Times as being one of the thousand best churches in England. It was founded by Allcroft as a memorial to his late wife - Polly. Yes Polly, I'm afraid, never got to enjoy the Allcroft money, rare honour though it was to have a church built in her memory. She died age 25 leaving no children. I bet she caught TB ministering to the sick. One hundred and forty years later the Allcroft dynasty at Stokesay Court came to a close in 1994 with a blaze of publicity. The sale of the Allcrofts' Edwardian travel souvenirs came to a total value of $3 million. I have since been to the church on a cold winter's night walking past the gluesniffers by the bins to this piece of Victorian beauty. Polly's corpse will be somewhere in a London cemetery, her beauty forgotten.

Rejoice!

In 1784, my ancestor, Joseph Padfield, a young man of 21, coal-carrier at Holcombe, Somerset, experienced conversion to the Methodist church while at his uncle's prayer meeting. Joseph rose six-foot high with the chair at which he had knelt, and throwing it at the cottage ceiling shouted "Uncle I am glorified!" Uncle said "Hush, Joseph, hush! Thee will soon know better than that!" However, "I was made very happy and went on my way rejoicing", recorded the convert. I do enjoy this story. 

When a mother dies the heritage can be lost. Kay Lee was brought up by her aunt after her mother died. Looking through the family album with my aunt we saw a picture of a young girl with her bicycle on a hilly street in Salford. We realised she must be cousin Edith who had later died leaving four small children including Kay. When we sent Kay a copy of this photograph, she confirmed that this was indeed her mother, whose picture she had never seen.

My favourite tale of 'strong women' is my great-grandmother doing another evening shift at the family grocery in West Worsley Street, Salford in the 1890s. A man came into the shop, an ex-soldier or a warehouse labourer who had lost his job through drunkenness. "I'm a desperate man, give me bread", he said, thrusting a knife towards the woman behind the counter. My great-grandmother snatched a carving knife and held it near his face. "Two can play at that game", she hissed. 

This picture, from the National Archives, is from a cinematic image of Salford from about 1901.

Adultery. Talk about doing your washing in public. Quite some time before my relative was being murdered with a sledgehammer in Ansford, an adultery case was just hotting up the other side of Cary Moor at North Barrow. It was May 1719. A maidservant had gone to a new situation on Lady Day as she could not tolerate the constant attention Mrs Creed paid to the parchment-maker and the whole village was talking about it. They say that moonlight is the friend of lovers. In this instance the moonlight flooding in through the kitching window was enough for the two servants to see quite clearly what the couple were doing. Mrs Creed spent a quarter of an hour in the ox's stall with her neighbour Mr Webb and returned, her back covered in straw. She was 'surprised' to be questioned by the maidservant as to her behaviour. The two servants agreed to keep each other informed. They certainly did. On St Barnaby Eve Mary and Webb were at it in the Kitching, lit up by the moonlight. The maidservant was looking at them through a hole in her floor while John Ludwell (17), the manservant, was halfway up the stairs and had a direct view into the kitching. Both had been in the house just a few weeks. Six weeks later lusty Ludwell determined to have it out with Webb. After Mrs Creed's encouragement he accepted a guinea from Webb the morning after provided he should see no more of it. The matter came to Thomas Creed's ears and he brought the case to the Quarter Sessions six months later. What he hoped to accomplish by this we cannot fathom. He let out the family home and went to live with his brother while Mary went to live with her family at Henley Grove. Whether Thomas died or a divorce was granted I do not know, but Mary was given a licence to marry her parchment-maker a year or two later and to come back to live in North Barrow. When questioned, Mary confessed she had kept Webb company ever since her youngest child (now four or five) was a quarter old.

Arthur Smith was probably an alcoholic.  He was a labourer in Bermondsey and his prim sister, her of black satin, and house in Hornsey, never mentioned him.  This is the Blue Boar at Walsham, where Arthur's aunt Sarah battled a blaze in about 1881 just before she died.  I speculate that the pub now produces much gas, perhaps after a curry night such as the one advertised.