Thomas became a celebrated doctor. He received a Gold Medal at Edinburgh University in 1904 for his MD thesis on the histology of lymphatic glands and went on to establish a general practice in the West End of Newcastle as well as being the pit doctor at Montague Colliery in Scotswood and a pioneer in the new science of radiology.
Bunting remembered his father later in life:
He was a doctor – a rather remarkable one. At that time [around 1903] he would be still busy preparing the thesis … in a tiny surgery with a desk about 2 feet by 18 inches and a microscope. He managed to compare the histology … of the lymphatic glands of very nearly all the mammals, and a good many other creatures too. There was in those days an animal shop in Newcastle and he had an arrangement: when an animal died he would be called at once and go and remove the particular glands he wanted to examine before anything else was done. So he managed to have lions, tigers, leopards, monkeys, all sorts of things on his list besides the small animals he could buy for the purpose. The house was sometimes full of lizards that had escaped from their box in the cellar.14
Bunting was born in the family home, 27 Denton Road in Scotswood, a couple of hundred yards from the busy River Tyne. Denton Road is now the A191, entirely unrecognisable from the photographs of the early twentieth century, and the building in which Bunting was born no longer exists. Like so many parts of Tyneside Scotswood suffered uncontrollable decline in the latter part of the twentieth century as industries disappeared and mass unemployment and antisocial behaviour rose. It is now a very long way from Geordie Ridley’s nineteenth-century vision of ‘lots o’ lads an’ lasses there, all wi’ smiling faces/Gawn along the Scotswood Road, to see the Blaydon Races’.15 In 1900, however, Scotswood was a separate colliery village for the Montague coal works and, colliery aside, it was a predominantly rural environment. Bunting remembered salmon being unloaded onto carts from the nearby river16 and that in order to get to Newcastle itself he needed to take a fairly long walk (about eight kilometres) across farmland. The house itself was not large. One of Thomas’ former patients recalled the dark entrance of the Denton Road house and a contemporary photograph of the junction where the Bunting house stood suggests a rather gloomy atmosphere.17 With Thomas’ menagerie inside and the pall cast by the heavy industry outside it would have been a surreal environment in which to start life.
The Northumberland Bunting was born into was large but relatively sparsely populated. Though it was at the time the fifth largest county in England its population was relatively low; in 1891 it was just over half a million, but that population was concentrated almost entirely along the north bank of the Tyne, from Newburn to the coast, and from the mouth of the Tyne along the coast to the mouth of the River Wansbeck. It was, overwhelmingly, a coal county. Nearly nine million tons of coal were raised in 1895 and, with the expansion of the coalfield, its rapidly growing labour requirements caused increasing rural depopulation as young men and families streamed into mining towns such as Ashington and Blyth.18 Bunting felt connected to the mining communities of the north east for his entire life: ‘I knew several miner’s leaders at one time and another,’ he told Ezra Pound in 1934,
from checkweighmen to old William Straker (the chap who had found out in the course of fifty years or so of mining politics that billiards was worse than booze). I even talked once or twice to old Charley Fenwick, before he died, a man who had been a Northumberland miner’s official since the middle of last century and went down the pit to work at the age of nine. Damn it, I was brought up in all that, Joseph Skipsey is said to have dandled me when I was a baby, and he’d been down the pit before the first factory acts touched them. I was on the spot when the View Pit was flooded and forty-five men drowned, I heard what the men had to say about it and the whole cursed system when there wasn’t any question of politics, mining or otherwise, but just sheer human commonsense. My grandfather, whom I knew pretty well when I was a kid, was a miner, son of a miner. I know the solidity of those people, and I watched it break up in ’26, when I was all the time in a mining village, took the chair at one of Cook’s meetings, stuck a knife in the tyres of a government strikebreaking lorry and tried unsuccessfully nearly every paper in the country to get the scandalous faked benches of magistrates who condemned the strikers to long terms of hard labour shown up. Not even the independent labour party’s rag would publish the facts.19
Thomas had picked his location well. It is likely that he moved to the North East at the encouragement of his university friend, Andrew Messer. Messer was another highly successful doctor with a deep commitment to public health, but the real driver of social welfare improvements in the region was Dr J. W. Hembrough. Hembrough had been appointed Northumberland’s first County Medical Officer in 1894, a position he retained until his death in 1919, and started a small health care revolution in the region. Hembrough was convinced that improved public health was dependent on better housing, cleaner water supplies and proper sewage facilities. His own careful investigations repeatedly showed that the spread of then common infectious diseases such as smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid and the county’s biggest and most expensive health problem, tuberculosis, were fundamentally connected to poor living conditions, and particularly to unpaved yards, inadequate and insufficient water and ventilation, uncovered drains, festering piles of refuse and overcrowded accommodation. However damning Hembrough’s reports, the lack of political will to spend ratepayers’ money on the problems he revealed was a persistent problem and his heroic and ceaseless battles with the local district councils on behalf of the poor must have been inspirational to the young left-leaning doctor Thomas Bunting. Although it was a time of increasing overcrowding, as the coal and arms industries blossomed, until 1904 just one man held combined responsibility for the offices of Road Surveyor, Manager of Waterworks and Sanitary Inspector. The sanitary component of this omni-job alone required him to inspect slaughter houses, cowsheds, common lodging houses and workshops while simultaneously being responsible for clearing sewers and rubbish, unblocking drains and all the other impediments to healthy urban dwelling. Thomas would have appreciated Hembrough’s campaign to pave footpaths. In mining communities children would go to school with wet feet that would stay that way for the entire day. Gradually Hembrough’s tireless lobbying began to bear fruit and conditions for the urban poor improved, although preventable outbreaks of typhoid and diphtheria continued to claim lives.20 Bunting never forgot the poverty of the community in which he grew up.
Tyneside was industrialising rapidly during Bunting’s early years. The Newcastle engineer George Armstrong had opened his Elswick works (a mile or so from Scotswood) in 1847 and when he moved into the arms business his workforce grew from one hundred men to over twenty thousand by 1900. Elswick shipyards opened in 1883 and eighty-four ships were launched there in the following thirty years. According to local historian Jimmy Forsyth, in the ten years leading up to the First World War eight major navies spent £670 million on warships, a significant proportion of which was built in Elswick, which could build ‘an entire battleship from raw materials on site, with steel plants, engineering works, ordnance factories and plenty of cheap labour all under virtually the same roof ’.21 During Bunting’s childhood the Scotswood Road was the Silicon Valley of the early twentieth century arms race, as Armstrong opened a second factory in Scotswood itself and the banks of the Tyne were turned into a heavily polluted industrial wasteland. The salmon that Bunting apparently remembered being unloaded from the Tyne disappeared very quickly and during the war a workforce of twenty-five thousand produced one-third of Britain’s guns in Elswick and Scotswood. It was a gritty place in which to grow up.
Bunting described his early schooling to Jonathan Williams: ‘I suppose about 1906 I did start school. I used to be taken by the housemaid. It was a long walk, about a mile and a half to the tram terminus, and then a considerable ride in the tram, and away up the hill to a part of Newcastle that is now all slums, which was then slightly s
habby middle-class. There was an old lady who kept a school, a very old-fashioned kind.’ The school, at 24 West Parade in Rye Hill, was owned by Miss A. M. Bell. She called it a kindergarten but Bunting doubted that she had ‘the faintest notion what the word implied in the history of education. It was just a fashionable word. It was what you would call a day-nursery school in the old style.’22 His favourite books at the time were Grimm’s Fairy Tales, ‘and there were a whole series of books by E. Nesbit; and a few things like ‘Two Bad Mice’ by the lady from Near Sawrey [Beatrix Potter]’.23 Bunting also mentions the fact that he and his sister, Joyce (born in January 1902), had a governess called Miss Wraith, who was kind and loving but unsparing in the application of her cane.24 As usual with Bunting’s recollections one needs to be wary of exaggeration. Northumberland’s Education Committee ruled in 1909 that there should be no corporal punishment in local infant schools and that it should be used in other schools only as a measure of last resort. All head teachers were required to keep records of any cases of corporal punishment so it is likely that cane-happy sadists, even among privately employed governesses, were on the wane by the time Bunting was twelve.
His memories of nursery school days were chiefly of a girl who was a couple of years older than him (and who helped him cheat at spelling tests) and tapioca. He wasn’t a fan:
You learned your ABC and got thoroughly rapped on the knuckles if you made mistakes. You learned by copying pot hooks into exercise books. You were supposed to learn good manners by eating up everything that was put in front of you, but I couldn’t do that because she included a great deal of tapioca pudding in her menu – and tapioca is something I could never endure. I spent an awful lot of time sitting and looking at platefuls of tapioca. It would be there in front of me from the beginning of dinner time until the middle of the afternoon. If I hadn’t eaten it by then I got spanked.25
Other than these scant details we have little material on Bunting’s early years. He was characteristically unhelpful in providing more. His claim that he attended Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School between 1909 and 1911 is not confirmed in the school’s records but it isn’t implausible.26 The son of middle-class professional parents is unlikely to have reached the age of twelve, when he started at Ackworth School, on a combination of nursery school and a governess, although it isn’t impossible.
THE SONG OF THE ACKWORTH CLOCK, 1912–1916
Ackworth School was (and still is) a co-educational Quaker school. It was founded near Pontefract in Yorkshire in 1779 by the distinguished physician and botanist John Fothergill. Bunting considered it extremely old-fashioned and decided that it hadn’t changed any of its rules since Fothergill’s time though it had, at least, finally introduced holidays: ‘Twenty years or so before I went there, you didn’t get home on holidays at all. You went to school at the age of twelve and came home permanently at the age of sixteen – meanwhile you never saw home …’27
Ackworth welcomed seventy-nine new scholars on 12 September 1912. Nearly half that year’s intake was female.28 Bunting’s application had been approved at the School Committee meeting of 5 March and the minutes record that the annual fee was £54 (as it was for the other four ‘Non Members [of the Society of Friends]’ whose applications were approved at that meeting).29 Among the seventy-nine scholars were Bunting’s new friends Ernest Cooper Apperley Stephenson and John Allen Greenbank. All three left, according to the school’s Admissions Book, on 25 July 1916. His friendship with Greenbank changed Bunting’s life.
It is widely thought that Bunting came from a Quaker family but neither Thomas nor Annie was a Quaker and we can only guess at their reasons for sending their son to Quaker schools. His sister Joyce went to Central Newcastle High School, where she was a contemporary of the playwright and actress, Esther McCracken, and then to St Leonard’s School in St Andrews. Neither is a Quaker establishment. Joyce went on to study at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1924 with a degree in medicine and surgery.30
We will return to Bunting’s complex relationship with Quakerism but there is no denying that his secondary education was in Quaker schools. Ackworth School developed progressively during the first twenty or so years of the century. Writing in 1929 the General Committee of the School congratulated itself on the fact that ‘freedom and elasticity’ had been the guiding principles of the management of the curriculum; that world history and geography had supplanted ‘narrower national studies’; that modern foreign languages claimed a full share of pupils’ attention; that more academic and professional training was demanded of teachers and that ‘more is demanded from the pupil in individual thought, reasoning and criticism’; and on the ‘striking advance’ that activities formerly reserved for the rich and privileged (music, singing, gymnastics, drawing) had been made available to all. As we shall see music was a very powerful force in Bunting’s life and work and it can only have been encouraged by the prevailing Ackworth philosophy: ‘The music offered to all pupils to-day in aural culture, instrumental lessons, and class singing and sight reading shows more advance in educational outlook and method than in any other subject that could be mentioned.’31
Ackworth naturally instilled ‘the general Quaker attitude’ and it was here that Bunting discovered the powerful rhythms of the King James Bible and particularly the second book of Kings, although he had been introduced to the Bible at nursery school: ‘Every morning you had to get a large lump of the Bible by heart before breakfast At breakfast the Bible was read to you. At dinner the Bible was read to you. At tea time, after tea, the Bible was read to you again. And on Sunday there were very large lumps of the Bible, besides Scripture lessons in between.’32 Although it is difficult to see how he found the time to write poetry with all this Bible he was clearly moved by the rhythms and narrative skills of Job, the Song of Songs, and 1 and 2 Kings in the Authorised Version.
The fact that the Bible played such a central role in Ackworth life can partly be explained by the encyclopaedic knowledge of it possessed by the then headmaster, Frederick Andrews. There is a story of two boys attributing their obvious lack of attention to Andrews to the fact that they had been comparing their thigh muscles. Andrews
smiled and rubbed his long nose with his finger, then told them to look up the tenth verse of the hundred and forty-seventh psalm and write it down. That was the end of the matter. When the boys found the text, it read:
He delighteth not in the strength of a horse:
He taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man.33
This story says a lot about the culture of Bunting’s early teenage schooling. It is characteristic of that culture that one of the biggest celebrations planned during Bunting’s time at Ackworth was that to commemorate one hundred years of peace between Great Britain and the United States.34 It isn’t surprising that Bunting was happy at Ackworth. One hundred years ago the general culture of British education was still more Wackford Squeers than Frederick Andrews. In a memoir of Bunting’s next school, Leighton Park School, written in 1940 the writer reflects on the style of education in the previous generation, ‘The old tradition of the classical grind, the mental gymnastic of distasteful tasks, corporal punishment, fagging, excessive compulsory games, the whole of a boy’s life directed on the principle that he should “work, play or sleep”, no moments of leisure – this view of education was almost universal at the time.’35 At both Ackworth School and his next Bunting escaped the worst of this.
My delight from the first time I set eyes on her
A few miles west of Sedbergh, on the north-west frontier of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, a narrow lane leads south from what is now the A683 that starts in Heysham, on the Lancashire coast, and ends near Kirkby Stephen in the Upper Eden Valley. The lane leads to the peaceful Quaker hamlet of Brigflatts, high in the Pennines. At the end of the lane the River Rawthey snakes past on its journey from Baugh Fell to the River Lune at Stangerthwaite. On the right-hand side of the lane is the stable which was built for the horses of visiting Qua
kers, with, as Mary Dawson described it,
stone steps leading to an upper room where in the 18th century there was a school for the village children, run by Friends … Near the schoolroom is the farmhouse built in 1745 by a Quaker farmer. This house was called Middle Briggflatts. Its rooms have the graceful proportions of buildings of the period. Here lived Mr. Greenbank, the stonemason, who had managed the quarry at Stonehouses in Dentdale, making black-marble mantelpieces for Victorian drawing rooms, until these dropped out of fashion and the Greenbank family moved to Briggflatts … At the bottom of the lane was the oldest building Low Briggflatts farm, where George Fox found hospitality in 1652.36
Set in the middle of nine imposing yews, now as then, one wonders if it was designed in 1743 to be a place of the spirit. Brigflatts is within a couple of miles of the birthplace of the Quaker movement, Firbank Knott near Sedbergh, where George Fox delivered his great sermon in 1652. In 1652 Fox was ‘moved of the Lord to go atop’ Pendle Hill in Lancashire, where he had a visionary experience of ‘people in white raiment’. 37 Elfrida Vipont Foulds takes up the story:
Travelling through the Dales, George Fox came to Brigflatts, where he spent the night with Richard Robinson. Next day he attended a meeting of the [Westmorland] Seekers at Borrat, near Sedbergh, the home of Gervase Benson. When the great Whitsuntide fair at Sedbergh was in full swing, he stood under a yew tree in the churchyard and preached to the crowds which gathered round him …[Fox] attended a great gathering of Seekers on Firbank Fell. Francis Howgill and John Audland were preaching in the little chapel near the summit, but he did not feel free to enter. Instead, he waited outside until the congregation had dispersed for their midday meal. Later he spoke to them from a great rock close to the chapel … A thousand Seekers listened to him eagerly, amongst them many of the Valiant Sixty who later carried his message all over the known world.38
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