by Byron Rogers
When anyone wants to know anything about the village, it is to him they write. Eight years ago, a letter came from Florida, from a man named Stone who had found reference in the library of Congress to a Hussar officer of that name, and to a Blisworth connection. George had grown up seeing that name on graves dug when the Stones were the village squires. One by one he traced them to the royal library at Windsor and Gwent county council (‘The Stones got everywhere’).
It has been an extraordinary eight years of letters in George’s exquisite calligraphy going weekly across the Atlantic. Then one summer the American came to meet his unpaid genealogist, and it was something of an anti-climax. ‘He was the sort of man who could go out of my life next week and I wouldn’t want to see him again. But I’ve loved the quest.’ George Freeston is a happy man. ‘I think this village will survive,’ he said. ‘And, it’ll even survive in a form which we would recognise. The old people, they would never have complained about anything; but these, they’ll organise petitions. I think that is one of the biggest changes. The man who moved in yesterday, he’ll see to it that Blisworth survives.’
An academic historian would ask, what has the man written? There is the amazing scrapbook, 3 feet by 2, which he submitted in Coronation Year for a competition on local history; a march-past of Blisworth’s parsons, brides and bargees, illustrated by his own watercolours. Apart from that he has written nothing.
But from lectures delivered without notes in a hundred schools and church halls, and from the way he responds to people who turn up at his door (‘Ah, then you must be the great grandson of so and so’), he has aroused more enthusiasm for the past than any academic historian. When I think of him, I am reminded of R.S. Thomas’s lines on the country clergy:
They left no books
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men’s hearts and in the minds
Of young children. . .
A happy birthday, George. I doubt whether I shall meet anyone like you again.
England and a Wake
T WAS STRAIGHT out of Kind Hearts and Coronets, and all that was missing was Alec Guinness. The generations of admirals and generals, of vicars and colonial magistrates, had so filled the church that the family in this century took to recording its deaths in a book; they keep this in a locked glass case. ‘’Straordinary how few people know their eight great-grandparents,’ brooded the 14th baronet. He would not have been able to avoid his had he tried. At home they stare down at him from the walls, faces flicking back into lace and shadow. In church, when his attention wanders, there they are in marble.
‘They used to bury us under the organ,’ said Sir Hereward Wake of Courteenhall. ‘When that filled up we went into a big hole in the churchyard. I think there’s a dozen of us in that, the last of them my great-aunt Lucy. But this is a parish church, we accentuate that strongly. We’ve only been here 350 years – this time.’
This year, for the first time in the history of local government, a county council presented one of its poll-tax payers with his family history. Not a pamphlet. The Wakes of Northamptonshire by Professor Peter Gordon (Northants County Council, £19.50) is the size of a family Bible and a thing of beauty. Yet it is still nothing more nor less than an account of a single family. Only there happen to be 29 generations of this family, without break or illegitimacy, or even descent in the female line. The one surname is carried like a horse’s skull through the centuries, tweeds giving way to brocade to slashed velvet to ironmongery. ‘We started in Normandy. . .’ writes Sir Hereward in his preface, like a man with a bus timetable.
An old family. . . There is of course no such thing, for all families are old, otherwise none of us would be here, and, as the 14th Earl of Home pointed out in his one recorded joke, even Harold Wilson had to be the 14th Mr Wilson. But it mattered. . . God, how it mattered once. ‘What is an old family but ancient money?’ sniffed Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s minister, but then, as a first generation grandee, he would have had trouble with his full complement of great grandparents. Sir John Wynn of Gwydir, sixteenth-century Welsh squire and rogue, would have had no trouble with his, or with anyone else’s. ‘A great temporal blessing it is, and a great heart’s ease to a man, to find himself well descended,’ purred Sir John, quietly grafting a few more princes on to his family tree.
What lies they told, those hard-faced men who had done well out of monasteries or sheep or army catering, and if they lacked the imagination, the quick-witted genealogist could accommodate them. But what if there were a family with no need to lie, a family with the generations stitched into the centuries and not a banker or a brewer in sight, just the unbroken line going back to the Norman knight? David Williamson of Debrett’s says that at most there are only six families in our old class-conscious England. What is it like to belong to one and never have had anything to prove? ‘Nothing special about us,’ said Sir Hereward Wake. ‘It’s just that we have records.’
Alas, they have felt obliged to go back even beyond these. We were standing in the churchyard at Courteenhall looking at the graves of his grandfather Sir Herewald, the 12th baronet, and of his aunt Thurfride. Up until then the Wakes had names like Charles or Hugh or Baldwin. ‘Then the family read Charles Kingsley,’ said Sir Hereward.
The first known Wake is Geoffrey Wac, an eleventh-century Norman knight, who must be spinning like a top in his unknown grave at the news that his descendants now claim as an ancestor someone he would have remembered as a Saxon terrorist. But then Sir Geoffrey had not read Charles Kingsley’s novel Hereward the Wake.
The claim is not entirely batty, for Geoffrey did marry an heiress of Bourne in Lincolnshire, and an historical Hereward is known to have held land in Bourne. But a nineteenth-century professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford thought it was, and said as much in a letter to Sir Herewald. ‘The whole of this story is highly suspicious. . .’. Undeterred, Sir Herewald went on christening his children with names he had found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and wrote back to say that the Wakes all had distinct Saxon features: ‘light coloured hair and eyes, and nez retrousse.’ The present baronet, with light-coloured hair and eyes and nez retrousse, was nicknamed Toby until he inherited, when he became Sir Hereward, like his own father. They are a dogged family. This is a story about hanging on.
The Wakes appeared in Northamptonshire in 1265, when they inherited Blisworth just down the road from Courteenhall. From here they rode out to fight the Welsh and the Scots, died in French sieges and on Crusades: most of them died young. But the carts creaked up Watling Street bringing new heiresses and they hung on until Bosworth when they fought on the wrong side. The Wakes, as usual, were for their King. Sir Hereward has just had the tomb restored in Blisworth Church of Sir Roger, the man who made that mistake. ‘A man shouldn’t let the tomb of his great-great-great. . . whatever it is. . . grandfather look a disgrace,’ he said.
It is not the oldest Wake tombstone. That turned up in Stamford in 1969 when a house was being demolished, and had been used at some time for building material. This was to a Lady Wake who died in 1380 in the heady days when, his grandmother a Wake, cousin Richard was King of England. The relationship was not close enough for him to drag the family down with him at his fall. ‘Stamford were kind enough to give me a copy of the stone, only I didn’t know what to do with it. . .’. Not surprising, considering how the family has filled Courteenhall Church. ‘In the end I put it in the belfry.’
After Bosworth, the family sold up and went walkabout. There was a fortunate marriage which set them up in Somerset and allowed them to buy one of James I’s new-fangled baronetcies. But oh calamity, as the actor Robertson Hare used to say, there were the Civil Wars: the Wakes rode out to fight for their King and lost the lot in one of Cromwell’s gaols.
William Wake, a later Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote movingly to his son, ‘Tho’ it has pleased God to reduce us to a very moderate Fortune yet somewhat there will occur . . . to ins
pire us with a desire of reviving us again the honour of a name that once was so great in the annals of our country. . .’. And the ‘somewhat’ did indeed turn up. His name was Sam Jones. Today he kneels in alabaster in Courteenhall Church, one of only three tombs not to a Wake. Sir Hereward has also had this tomb restored, but then, as I suggested, he has a lot to be grateful to Jones for. ‘Indeed,’ said Sir Hereward with feeling.
Sam Jones was a London merchant, and a rich one. ‘The trouble with us Wakes is that we never had money, we were never in commerce,’ grumbled Sir Hereward. During the Civil Wars, Sam was a Parliamentarian, and picked up Courteenhall at a bargain price. The King came into his own again, and Sam turned Royalist; unlike the Wakes, he knew the right side. He was a landed gentleman now and interested in other men’s family trees, even those of ruined baronets. His great-niece married the second baronet’s son, and inching its way slowly across the family, Courteenhall came to the sixth baronet who promptly changed his name to Wake-Jones. But the seventh had no such scruples, so the name Jones was sent spinning away, like a piece of discarded space technology.
No wars now, these were years when the Park was landscaped and the house built which now stands there. No travels either. Richard Wake, who as the second son is vicar of Courteenhall, comes running across the Park to assure his brother Sir William, on his death-bed, that he is going to Heaven. ‘I don’t want to go to Heaven,’ said old Sir William. ‘Courteenhall’s good enough for me.’ The railway came, cutting through their estate, and they objected to that, just as they would object to the motorcar which would bring the M1 through the estate. But what interrupted the idyll was the fertility of the family. The 10th baronet had twelve children, so the Wakes were off to the wars again.
‘You can find out a lot about the British Empire just by reading the wall above our old family pew,’ said the 14th baronet. ‘Not that I was interested in such things when I was a boy. I kept getting stuck on the inscription to Emily, aged sixteen. “She leant upon the cross and died. . .”. Never could work that out, I used to read it over and over.’
Yet just beyond this is Drury’s Ride. Sent with despatches from Constantinople on the eve of the Crimean War, Drury Wake rode across the Balkans in six days and seven nights and permanently damaged his spine. Then there is Herwald’s siege (their variations on a name were endless). Holed up in a bungalow during the Indian Mutiny this amazing man actually kept a diary, ‘written with the stump of a pencil, on the wall, at any moment that could be snatched, in case we should be scragged. . .’. Philip, a mounted policeman, rode into the riots of the Australian Gold Rush but cheerfully wrote home. ‘The heat is fearful and being very fat, it tells on me. . .’. As they become recognisable personalities, the Wakes emerge as very human people.
Baldwin, a bad sleeper, was in the habit of drinking his hair shampoo, which contained chloroform. Only one night he drank too much and, peacefully blowing bubbles, Baldwin passed into what the old Welsh chroniclers called the long sleep. But the brother who gave the family most cause for alarm was William, the heir. A century and a half on, the 11th baronet still causes alarm, for this was the man who could have lost the lot. ‘The 11th was no damned good, he made a complete hash of things,’ said the 14th. ‘Luckily he died young.’
William married the daughter of a man who kept a hotel. His father got a doctor’s certificate (‘Mr Wake is now labouring under a state of delirium tremens combined with imbecility. . .’) but William got his Margaret. In 1847, staying in Jersey, he also got a human skeleton for some reason, was unable to pay for it and got clapped in gaol, from which he made an amazing escape; he ordered a piano then sent it back, having first concealed himself in the packing case. William died on the eve of having every tree in the park cut down for ready cash.
And then there was the 12th, Herewald, he of the retrousse nose and the Saxon ambition. Outwardly a hunting squire (‘When you’re going to take a fence, throw your heart over and jump after it. . .’) he was also a man who could put up this hand-written notice in his woods, ‘If there is any bird-nesting this season at all, the little boys or girls will not be my friends any longer. . .’. Then the real sanction: they will also not be invited to his parties. He thought scythe blades should be attached to the axles of the hated motor-cars, but when he saw young men marching to the Great War there was no play-acting. ‘Cannon fodder,’ he was heard to mutter.
His eldest son was part of that by then, who had made the Army his career and was just old enough to have met the antediluvian Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, who asked, ‘They tell me you need brains in the Army now. I never had any. Do you?’ ‘No sir.’ ‘I thought not,’ said the Duke approvingly. Hereward was actually a bright man whose forecasts on the war impressed Lloyd George. During World War II he got Courteenhall Parish Council to form its own Invasion Committee (‘Food and Cooking. Miss T Wake: Fuel. Sir Hereward Wake: Housing and Population. Lady Wake. . .’).
P.G. Wodehouse could have invented that. And he would have been proud of inventing the curious figure astride the motorbike accelerating through the park en route for the dust of someone else’s attic. The 13th baronet’s sister Joan Wake spent her days rescuing historical documents from the gale of the world and virtually single-handed set up the Northamptonshire Records Society. So what did it matter if, applying face powder, she forgot she was wearing spectacles and powdered these so that she collided with the furniture?
She, too, is straight out of Ealing comedy and would have been played by Margaret Rutherford. When the village water supply failed and no action was taken, she simply telegraphed the Ministry ‘Cholera imminent’, and of course there were civil servants leaping out of the hedges. Yet she refused to write the family history, saying it would be too boring. ‘She was more interested in other people’s families,’ said her nephew.
He is at the Hall now, a bit deaf after the war (‘Someone asked, shooting accident? I said yes, Germans mainly’), and at 76 more interested in his ancestors than when he day-dreamed in the family pew, trying to understand why a girl should have died from leaning on a cross. The book was his idea, but only as a record of his immediate family. It was just that the Professor found he couldn’t stop.
‘We Wakes wear our descent like our shoes.’ It is an image Sir Hereward has used before. ‘We don’t like to look at them.’ The shoes gleam. ‘We’re not better than anyone else, it’s just that we’ve always been around. I’m an ordinary human being but people seem to expect a lot of me. “Oh Sir Hereward, will you open this?”’ But it does allow him some fun. The story is told that he once came upon a new vicar putting up the hymn numbers in Courteenhall Church. ‘No. Mistake there. We never have more than two hymns, one psalm, and I read the lesson.’
According to Church law. . .’ began the startled cleric.
‘The only law here is Wake law.’
The dead are closer now, his grandchild in the churchyard and his sister killed in a point-to-point accident (‘It was the darkest day. The whole family was there watching’). We hovered over the book in the locked case. ‘That was my father’s idea, he said we couldn’t go on putting Wakes up all over the church.’
‘Do you have the key?’
Sir Hereward, who has the key to everything, did not answer. ‘It’s given us an opportunity to write a few home truths, that book,’ he said. ‘Things we couldn’t put on a wall.’
‘Do you have the key?’
After a while he said, ‘Look, I’m worried about you. I’ve read the things you write. . .’. He unlocked the case, and there were pages of exquisite calligraphy but no home truths. ‘Look at that, my father gets five pages. Can you image five pages on a wall?’
Over tea his wife said, ‘Didn’t you manage to stuff a sexton into that church once?’
‘I believe so,’ said Sir Hereward vaguely.
He has had the Leper Window unblocked and proposes to have this inscription cut into the stone, ‘Remember the lepers and all outc
asts’. It is such a poignant message, I was still thinking of it when I got outside and heard the motorway. The M1, a mile away and screened by trees, is an even band of sound as though some huge creature beyond the park were trying to clear its throat. Northampton also gets closer every year.
Norman St John Stevas Chooses a Title
S YOU WOULD expect, he chose his new title with care, Lord St John — adding ‘of Fawsley’. It must have appealed to the romantic in him, for this is a name out of mediaeval chivalry. But there is something else. Because of his title, the former Mr Norman St John-Stevas now enters English history forever linked to one of its blackest moments.
You find that place-name on road signs in the lanes south of Daventry and on the green footpath markers, but it is only when you follow these that you find there is no Fawsley. There is a lake, yes. And a manor house. And a church. Nothing else. Even a century ago the Northamptonshire Gazeteer was puzzled. ‘There is no village in this parish; it contains but four houses altogether.’
When I first saw it I thought it one of the most beautiful places on earth — the lake at sunset with the swans upon it; the Tudor mansion with its great oriel window; the medieval church, its door so tiny you stoop to enter, standing in grassland with no road leading to it. But nothing prepares you for what is inside the church, the alabaster and brass of the tombs which occupy two-thirds of it, one of them taking up most of a wall. And all to one family, the Knightleys. They were as proud as the Hapsburgs, these Knightleys, with the 334 armorial quarterings to show their descent. At the edge of the woodland the stone arch shows where their world began, the 700 acres of their park.
And yet there is something odd about it all. For instance, the church is centuries older than the manor house, so Fawsley was there long before that. Also nobody built a church in a field. In a closed little world like this, no grandee would have walked 300 yards across his park to worship in his own family church. But there is one clue. When the sun is at the right angle you can see bumps in the grass near the church — not many, for the lake has covered most of the evidence, but enough to show that there were once buildings here.