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All the Best Rubbish

Page 21

by Ivor Noel Hume


  96. Hulks at Portsmouth aboard which felons from English jails and prisoners from British wars were confined. From a colored print of about 1800 drawn by a French inhabitant.

  Like the rest of the crew, John Nicol soon chose himself a shipmate—in the pleasing shape of Sarah Whitelam, “a girl of modest reserved turn, as kind and true a creature as ever lived.” Her crime had been the mere “borrowing” of a mantle, and the punishment a seven-year stint in the penal settlement at Port Jackson, Australia. She would bear John Nicol a son before she got there, but though he would later return in search of her, he would never see either of them again. But there was little thought of the future as the Lady Juliana cut across the Atlantic in fine weather and with morale as high as a milkmaid’s petticoat. The prisoners proved more noisy than dangerous, said Nicol, and when the ship put in for water at Tenerife, St. Jago, and Rio, she was warmly received—as she had been by two slavers from Santa Cruz that heard the call of the sirens and “sailed thus far out of their course for the sake of the ladies.”2 The Lady Juliana had become an erotic Pied Piper of the high seas, and it is tempting even now to hoist sail in her further pursuit. Alas, however, she is a digression whose purpose has already been served, a demonstration that even a list of forgotten names may conceal the stuff of drama, in this case an unexpectedly comic interlude in an otherwise grim chapter of British colonial history.

  The salvaged prison papers were signed by Newgate’s jailer and governor, Richard Akerman, a man whom James Boswell described as exhibiting “a tenderness and a liberal charity which entitles him to be recorded with distinguished honour”3 (Fig. 98). Similar assessments were made by Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, and during his governorship Newgate came to be known as “Akerman’s Hotel.” He was twice commended by another celebrated figure of his day, John Wilkes, who was Chamberlain of the City of London during the period covered by the documents. The present deputy keeper of records has stated that the papers probably were “Chamber vouchers” relating to payments authorized by the Chamberlain on behalf of the City, and that other extant records show that the Court of Aldermen authorized the payments to Akerman described in the salvaged bundle. Furthermore, Dr. L. L. Robson, senior lecturer in history at the University of Melbourne (and author of The Convict Settlers of Australia), has noted that other lists of the prisoners shipped to Australia are preserved in the Home Office archives, and that it is unlikely that these papers contain information not preserved in another form elsewhere.4 But can the same be said for the rest of that roomful of documents? If the top shelf on the right-hand side contained data on convicts shipped to Australia in the 1780s and ’90s, is it possible that bundles on the bottom shelf in the far left-hand corner recorded the names of other convicts transported to America and the West Indies in the seventeenth century? If so, that would be information not now available to American historians.

  97. Part of a list of female felons delivered aboard ships lying in the Thames in 1787 and 1789, the latter being the Lady Juliana transport ship destined to be part of the Second Fleet bound for Australia. The blitz- and weather-damaged documents were saved when the London cellar in which they were stored was demolished during postwar rebuilding.

  The decision to let the cellarful of London records be destroyed may have been justified on the grounds that the papers would have cost a great deal to transcribe before they fell apart, and even more to preserve. Besides, the City had a very real space problem resulting from the extensive wartime damage to its offices, library, art gallery, and museum. Lack of space is perhaps the commonest reason used to explain the disposal of records that do not interest the person charged with their retention, and today consciences are quietened by first microfilming the material to be destroyed. States, cities, and institutions of all kinds take this easy way out, little realizing that unless the papers are grouped by subject and placed in chronological order, the microfilm is useless without the subsequent compilation of indexes that may take years to complete. In truth, with the film out of sight and out of mind, the chances of either funds or scholarly indexers being found to do the job are as remote as finding a palm tree pruner in Alaska. Nevertheless, organized or not, the future of the records of our own age must inevitably depend on microfilming, in part because the volume is so great, but more importantly because modern paper is not nearly as stable as were the rag-based papers of previous centuries. Documents less than twenty years old are already falling apart without any assistance from fires or floods, reproduction processes have proved to be unstable, and many photocopies made a decade ago have faded into illegibility. One has only to leave the daily newspaper out in the sun for a few hours to see the exposed pages turn brown and brittle. Consequently, in spite of modern technology, the future of our own past is very much in doubt, and we can expect that nine-tenths of everything written about us will go out with the trash.

  98. The signature of Richard Akerman, the famous humanitarian jailer of Newgate Prison, as it appears on one of the salvaged documents. 1790.

  The best of documentary rubbish is that which was not intended for our eyes; it has the piquancy of a secret discovered; it stimulates the imagination and creates a bond between writer and reader no matter how great the time or distance dividing them. I recall finding an unfinished page of a letter shut inside a Gideon Bible in a New York hotel room, a letter written on the hotel’s stationery by an unnamed girl ending an affair with a married man back home. I tried to imagine what she looked like and speculated as to why the letter was never finished. Did she decide to call him and say on the phone what she so clearly had difficulty writing? Did she decide, instead, to let the affair go on, or did she plan to step out of the man’s life without a word? The letter was undated, but this sad and solitary little drama had been played out in the room not too long before I occupied it, yet it posed the same questions that I would have been asking (and failing to answer) had the letter been written centuries ago.

  The same intriguing possibilities were posed by a small leather-bound notebook found by a laborer demolishing a house in Great Smith Street, Westminster, in the 1920s (Fig. 99). He told me about his discovery thirty years later, saying that the book had fallen from behind a fireplace mantel, and that he had taken it home and put it in a closet where it had remained until found by his children, who tore out some of the pages. When he discovered the loose sheets and found that they contained “bits of writing” unsuitable for children, he had locked the book in a drawer where, as far as he could remember, it still resided. I pressed him to be more explicit about the “bits of writing,” but he would say only that they were very old and “a mite too ‘ow’s-yer-father to leave lyin’ around.” Some weeks later he brought me the book and offered to sell it for twenty-five shillings (Fig. 100). The leather binding was in shabby shape, many of the pages had indeed been ripped out, and those that remained were heavily damp-stained; but there was enough of the book surviving to be worth the price.

  99. Westminster in the eighteenth century. The manuscript notebook (Fig. 100) was found in a house in Great Smith Street at the bottom left of this detail (lower circle). Park Prospect, which figures in the book, is to be seen close to the top left edge where the houses give way to St. James’s Park (upper circle). From Richard Horwood’s Map of London, 1792–99.

  One page was dated November 12, 1718, and other entries related simply to three November days:

  Nov 8th A Bill for Otes

  Nov 8th ________ 3 strike

  Nov 10Rump________ 1 strike

  Nov 13 __________ 3 strike

  The reference to a rump and strikes had a magisterial look—until I discovered that a strike or strickle was a corn measure. The injection of “Rump” was not so easily explained, but its presence was no more peculiar than was a great deal more of the book’s contents. There was a scattering of names, often repeated and differently spelled, though seemingly in the same hand; thus, for example, “Mr Willoughby at Aspley near Nottingham,” and on the same page, �
�To Mr Willoghy at…” There is still a country mansion near Nottingham named Aspley Hall, and it is probable that this Mr. Willoughby was the grandfather of Sir Nesbit Josiah Willoughby of Nottinghamshire who distinguished himself in the Napoleonic Wars. Also named was “Sir John Stathams in Queen’s Street, Park Prospect, Westminister [sic], London,” the address twice repeated and correctly spelled the second time around. Contemporary maps of London did not identify “Park Prospect,” but it is shown on Richard Horwood’s map of 1792 as a block of houses at the junction of Great and Little Queen streets and facing St. James’s Park (Fig. 99). So it is reasonable to conclude that Sir John Stathams lived in or was staying at one of the houses with a park view or prospect. So far so good. But as the book was found in Westminster and almost certainly was written in London, why were both so carefully included in Sir John’s address? He, however, is easier to pin down. With his country home at Wigwell in Derbyshire, Sir John Stathams was recorded in 1714 as being deputy lieutenant of the county and a justice of the peace. Later he was to become Member of Parliament for St. Michael’s in Cornwall, First Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and just before his death in 1759 he had been chosen British envoy to Turin. What, then, was the relationship between Sir John and the semiliterate notebook scribbler, most of whose attention seems to have been directed toward the creation of seemingly maniacal poetry, some of it mildly obscene and some strongly Tory and rejoicing in a July election victory:

  100. The notebook of an untalented poet found during the demolition of a Westminster house in the 1920s. An entry in the book is dated 1718. Page length 5⅛ inches.

  Last night as I musing

  Did sit by ye fire

  ye true hearted Tories

  Now now ye may See

  The wiggs and Fanaticks

  cant have their desire

  Sing tantararah boys

  up go we.

  Many of the verses occur two or three times on scattered pages and in different versions and degrees of completion, yet there is no obvious creative progression. Thus, for example, the complete version of something entitled “A Paradox” comes before another seemingly preliminary version. For what it is worth, it reads as follows:

  Before my father was begot

  I’m sure I was begotten

  And Born before my Mother

  Ye Both are dead & Rotten

  And now I’m Lying in ye be [d]

  Where I got my Grand

  mothers Maiden head.

  Other verses dwell on death, on whores, copulation, and the gods of mythology, sometimes incomprehensibly omitting key words at the line’s end.

  I’l Range all round ye Shady and Gather of all ye

  I’l streap ye Garden and to make a Garland for my

  And yn at night to rest

  I’l make my Love a Grassy

  And wth Green Boughs yt nothing may her rest

  But if this nimph whom

  Should Ever false and

  I’l seek some Dismall

  And never think on woman

  FINIS an End

  Of all the antiquarian puzzles that have come my way, this book and the identity of its author have been the most baffling. I have searched for cryptographic meanings, codes based on the upper-case letters, and messages in the letters omitted, but all to no avail. The political lines seemed to be the most useful clues, in that they were written at a time when political clubs were common in London. At their meetings it was usual for the members to entertain their fellows with newly composed songs and verses. Jonathan Swift was a member of the Brothers’ Club, and on publishing The Fable of Midas, he described it as “a poem printed on a loose half sheet of paper. I know not how it will take,” he added, “but it passed wonderfully at our Society to-night.”5 A year later “T.B.,” a fictitious contributor to The Spectator satirizing club practices described the activities of the Amorous Club at Oxford, declaring that “A Mistress, and a Poem in her Praise, will introduce any Candidate: Without the latter no one can be admitted; for he that is not in love enough to rhime, is unqualified for our Society.”6

  It might be argued that the owner of the notebook was a clubman who found versifying rather beyond him; yet so many of the compositions are not only bad but utterly senseless that it is hard to accept them as the products of any rational mind, and perhaps this is the real clue. It seems fair to assume that the writer was male, for most of the lines are written from a masculine point of view, and in the early eighteenth century relatively few women were even remotely interested in politics. Nevertheless, a few of the verses are distaff-oriented, as is one beginning “I’l marry wth a Person if Ever I marry man.” Just to confuse the issue further, the most effective (and perhaps revealing) poem in the book begins in what one assumes to be a masculine first person singular and then quickly shifts to the female:

  As through Moor fields I walked

  one Evening in ye Spring

  I heard a Maid i’bedlam

  most Sweetly for to sing

  And wth her hands she rattle

  ed her Chains

  & thus Reply’d she

  I Love my Love because

  I Know my Love Loves me

  My Love was fouried from

  me with friends yt was

  unkind

  and now hes sent

  beyond sea

  wh most torments my mind

  Although I’m

  Ruind yet constant

  will I be I Love my

  love because I know

  my Love Loves me

  The idea of love being close to lunacy was a common joke even in those days, and in an otherwise forgettable play produced at the Theatre Royal (of Rose Tavern fame) in 1674, the author had one of his characters say “Taken by my short experience, I find a man is in Love and in Bedlam both at one minute.”7 The Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane had been moved to Moorfields, north of the old city wall, in 1676, and it was a common divertissement to walk in Moorfields as in a public park and then to visit the lunatics and engage them in amusing conversation. One begins to wonder, however, on which side of the bars the Westminster poet belonged, and it is frustrating to realize that we know the names of people who could have given us the answer. Even if Sir John Stathams and Mr. Willoughby were unaware that they had any contact with him, Rebecca Bassert knew his face for she sold him “6 Loaf 2 white Loafs,” as must John Bomford from whom he was to obtain “A pair of riding gloves” and a “barbers razor.” So, too, must Dr. Gells who sold him “halfe an Ounce of Coffey.” The small quantity of the coffee is itself curious. By the 1730s approximately seventy tons of coffee beans (then called berries) at a value of £300 a ton were annually imported into England. The fact that the poet was getting his small supply from a doctor (of something or other) might suggest that the half ounce was for medicinal purposes, and it might therefore be pertinent to note that “clysters” of coffee were sometimes used to cure apoplexy. However, according to Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1738) coffee’s principal medicinal use was pretty much as it remains today: “It carries off fumes and disorders of the head arising from too much moisture, dissipates megrims, and absorbs acrimonies of the stomach, whence its use after a debauch of strong liquors.”

  The mantelpiece which had concealed the notebook for the best part of two hundred years was located on the second floor (in England called the first floor), and the fireplace was a large one, but the exact location of the house or who had lived there will never be known. Impoverished poets traditionally lived from hand to mouth in garrets and not on the second floor, but it is equally true that gentlemen of substance would hardly have been buying their own bread or “halfe an Ounce of Coffey.” So there the trail ends, the mystery just as tantalizing as it was when I first attempted to unravel it; yet, in its way, it remains no more intriguing than does the untold story behind that unfinished letter shut in a Bible in a modern New York hotel room. It is true, of course, that in both cases there is a real danger that if the full tr
uth were known, neither the London poet nor the lady lover might really merit our attention. But that is an accepted hazard of the game; it is the speculation that titillates—like a whisper in the dark.

 

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