by Knight, Lynn
My mum’s dance dresses are long gone, but I live surrounded by everyday objects that tell their own stories. There is something of the past in every room: the squat Gray, Dunn & Co’s Biscuits tin, a reminder of the corner shop; the wooden box with a sketchy cottage scene on its lid that my great-grandfather bought years ago; the huge chest of drawers that was Betsy’s and then Annie’s before it came to me, and it was my turn to tug on its large glass handles or prise open its secret drawer. (‘When I die,’ Annie told me, more than once, ‘don’t forget to look in the secret drawer.’)
In my attempts to uncover further stories about my family, I’ve been discovering distant histories, but also exploring those closer to home. When I started writing this book, I knew little of my mum’s birth mother, and had no idea if I – and, far more importantly, she – would ever know more. Writing about people you love is a tremendous responsibility; stranger, still, is the act of taking someone’s childhood and playing it back to them, as I’m doing here, with my mum’s.
My grandma made the dress in which Cora was photographed shortly after her adoption. Annie also made a ‘weighty’ for her pram, just as she and Betsy, my great-grandma, made weighties for their own beds: eiderdowns named for their comforting heft and bulk; layer upon layer of fabric. Each layer told a different story – the cotton print Eva wore to stride across the gala field with her sweet tray; a strip of silk from Annie’s favourite sash; the yards left over from serviceable flannel petticoats and Dick’s work shirts; the crimson brocade Betsy favoured for best curtains. To sleep beneath a weighty was to be embraced by the past and the security of knowing you were home.
Some of my family stories, like those layers, are as light and colourful as silk or sprigged cotton; others, darker and heavier. Some belong to the people without whom the family could not exist, who, though invisible, are present all the time as shadows behind their narratives – the stories of those who gave up their children for adoption. If I could, I’d invent a different beginning for at least one of the adopted children. But that part of the story comes later. The best place to start is when my great-grandfather was brought to the town.
Part One
1
I Deliver My Son
20 July 1865 was one of those fine mornings that promise heat by lunchtime. Even before the sun reached anywhere near its full height in the sky, the day shimmered with a sense of possibility. It was not just rising temperatures that marked out this date. From an early hour, the road from Chesterfield was crammed with flys and barouches, gentlemen on horseback and pedestrians in holiday mood. The Derbyshire Courier was there to record them: ‘Everything was hurry, bustle and excitement.’ This was the start of the Chesterfield Races.
Spectators streamed past the town’s lace and cotton mills, its gingham and check manufacturer, grubbier workshops, earthenware potteries, tanneries and foundries. By midday, shopkeepers were putting up their shutters and escorting wives and daughters to the course, and the town’s straw-hat makers turning out to count the numbers showing off new bonnets. Race Days were not merely sporting occasions, but opportunities to promenade and be seen, and to enjoy the general carnival atmosphere descending on the town. The Theatre Royal provided a special programme throughout the week, while the Assembly Room boasted performances by Messrs Leclercq and A. Wood’s Dramatic, Burlesque and Ballet Company.
For two days each year, Chesterfield Racecourse rang with thudding hooves and expectation. One of the oldest fixtures in the sporting calendar (and more usually taking place in the autumn), the Chesterfield Races were established by the end of the seventeenth century, and regularly reported from 1727. During their heyday, the Races enjoyed as considerable a following as those at Doncaster, or the Derby, on which the town’s remodelled Grandstand was based.
The course extended for two miles on the outskirts of Chesterfield and crossed the Sheffield–Chesterfield Road in four places. One of its more remarkable features was its situation: the track circled land on Whittington Moor. What was originally a strip of pasture, with all aspects visible to the eye, came to be interrupted by washing lines and chimneys as more and more houses were built. Until the races were disbanded in the 1920s, their occupants had ringside seats. Fortunately, the race-goers of the 1860s still had an unhindered view of starting flag and finishing post.
The course was a babble of noise and commotion: official vendors waving race cards, bookmakers calling the odds on Countess, Picaroon, Locket Lucy, Maid of Usk. Who’ll stake their money on Pretty Queen in the Nursery Handicap or King Tom in the Chatsworth Stake? Publicans heaved casks of ale into booths specially auctioned for the event. The Britannia Inn had secured the best spot, the Grandstand booth in Cundy’s Lot, at a cost of £3 5s, and expected to make its money back from the gentry. Elsewhere, dotted about the course, smaller booths vied with one another for the attentions of the lowlier crowd and their winnings.
We found Derbyshire not indeed so extensive a county, but as more romantic it’s more pleasing than Yorkshire, and though at the same time remarkable for producing many commodities in great plenty. The finest lead in England, iron, etc, ’tis full of quarries of free stone, greatstone, brimstone, black and grey marble, crystal, alabaster, and sometimes there is found antimony. The vales produce great quantities of corn, and the mountainous parts coal pits; but what adds beauty to this county is the parks and forests, and inequality of hills and dales that so diversify the landscape… About a week after our large party arrived…there came two other ladies and four gentlemen to the races, which were to begin on the next day… On the Wednesday, having dined early, we set off in different carriages, and seven gentlemen on horseback for the course, about three, came back to tea about eight…about ten we went to the Assembly Room, where the Duke of Devonshire always presided as master of the ceremonies, and after the ball gave an elegant cold supper…We got home about five. The next evening were at the concert…and on the third day again went to the course…That evening’s ball was equally brilliant as the first night, and both gave us as strangers a high idea of these annual assemblies at Chesterfield, which town in itself has but a poor appearance.
– Description of Chesterfield Race Week, by diarist, Mrs Lybbe Powys, 1757
The Grouse Inn, the Spinning Wheel, the Red Lion, the Griffin – landlords the length and breadth of Chesterfield turned out in best bibs and tuckers to supply champagne, fine spirits, ale and porter. Some enthusiasts were so ardent in their support of the local hostelries they missed the actual races. Revellers seeking more substantial fare could frequent the gaily painted stalls circling the perimeter, selling piles of gingerbread, sandwiches and dubious cuts of meat. Darting among the snobs and swells that afternoon were the light-fingered Johnnies who could snaffle a pocket watch without so much as blinking, and the ‘spots’ for the numerous card sharps setting up trackside scams. There were many ways to lose your shirt on Race Days.
The local aristocracy had well-worn seats in the stand, but Race days also attracted well-heeled outsiders, and had done so since the mid-eighteenth century when Derbyshire joined the tourist itinerary. Ladies and gentlemen touring the Peak liked to take in the Chesterfield Races. A morning surveying Chatsworth House, Haddon Hall or Hardwick; the dour Romance of Curbar Edge, or the Blue John Mines at Castleton (the latter providing the especial titillation of the mine known as the Devil’s Arse), could be followed by an afternoon’s idling at the racetrack, and an evening’s cold collation at the Angel Inn, courtesy of his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, long-standing friend of the turf. (His annual purse for the Chatsworth Stake was fifty sovereigns.)
Racing was one of the few sports which enabled the social classes to mix. Chesterfield Race Days produced scenes every bit as vivid as William Frith’s famous painting of The Derby Day. Mechanics and day-tripping clerks rubbed shoulders with school teachers, domestic servants and gypsies selling lavender and pegs. Colliers, chancing a day’s pay, stood feet away from ladies trying not to crush their crinolines,
and school children granted a holiday. This was a chance for the gentry to view the hoi polloi and for the hoi polloi to thank their own good fortune when regarding the numerous beggars working the course and the poor unfortunates on show – entrance, one halfpenny – in assorted curiosity booths.
Special trains from Sheffield, Nottingham and Derby disgorged passengers, who, in these still relatively early days of locomotion, were thankful to reach their destination unscathed. In the years before the railways, poorer race-goers had walked enormous distances from one race to the next; the advent of excursion trains changed all that and delivered larger numbers to the course.
By day, the rowdiness was good-natured; come nightfall, it could thicken into something less benign. Few wanted to find themselves at the shadowy margins of the racetrack as daylight drained away. The brawling and carousing that accompanied this annual shindig led to frequent debates about vice and immo rality, but although the occasion was a focal point for gambling and the fleecing of fools, and doubtless attracted ‘nymphs of the pave’, loutish behaviour was not confined to Race Days. Even a cursory glance at the Derbyshire Courier reveals accounts of drunkenness on the part of both sexes, and in boys as young as eleven, as well as fist fights and stabbings.
Wandering among the crowds that day were Thomas and Sarah Walker, and their three-year-old son, Richard Dorance. The Walkers were fairground people, Romanies possibly, for whom Chesterfield was just another stopping point on the road. Race Days attracted a rich mix of entertainers: practitioners of ‘the noble art’ drummed up custom for the ring, ‘photographic studios’ promised exact likenesses for sixpence. Tumblers performed feats of strength and agility; conjurers bamboozled the crowd, balladeers serenaded it. There were rifle galleries, peep shows, Aunt Sallies and coconut shies, as well as stalls selling cheap toys and gaudy trinkets. I don’t know how the Walkers plied their trade – whether he was Thomasino with his Raven-Haired Assistant, or she, Gypsy Sarah, weaving fantastical tales of good fortune while gold bangles played up and down her arms, but, for showmen reliant on the fairground calendar, the hectic camaraderie of Race Days provided an essential way to turn a shilling.
Entertainers travelled between the country’s racecourses and the larger town fairs, taking in village feasts and wakes along the way. The nearby villages of Dunston, Newbold and Hasland scheduled their feasts for Chesterfield Race Sunday; there were also opportunities to entertain the town’s theatre queues or to perform at the edge of the bustling market square. (In the years when the Chesterfield Races took place in the autumn, the Walkers could also tag on to the town’s annual Feast, and link up with Nottingham’s famous Goose Fair.)
Many showmen drifted into the roving life because of harsh circumstances elsewhere: the past left behind and good riddance. Successful fairground entrepreneurs were few, however; for the majority, theirs was a precarious existence. The poorest showmen travelled miles on foot, carrying their belongings and staying in the kind of the hostelry where the cutlery was chained to the table. The open road could rapidly lose its romance.
Whether good takings prompted the Walkers to change their lives that year, or hunger and a pittance drove them to it, they decided to leave England and make a fresh start in America. Entertainers regularly crossed to mainland Europe, lured by advertisements like this one: ‘Wanted, for Bell and Myer’s Circus, France, a Stud-Groom and 2 Under Grooms. Liberal Salaries to competent men; also Equestrians and Gymnasts, for future Engagements. No Stamp. Silence a negative.’ By the 1860s, America was also beginning to attract entertainers. All that was needed, according to one confident theatrical report, was ‘a day’s notice, a wide-mouthed bag and your ticket’. The new country had circuses and fairs aplenty, and anyone good with their hands could find work in that vast, expanding economy. Steam ships had reduced some of the terrors as well as the length of transatlantic crossings, although travelling in the confined and claustrophobic spaces of steerage was still a fairly desperate enterprise. Whatever their intentions, and however unsure their scheme, one thing was certain: Thomas and Sarah Walker planned to travel without their son.
At three years old, Richard was perhaps judged to be both too young and too old for the journey – too big, too lively, too inquisitive, too hungry – too much of everything to be anything but an encumbrance en route, though this was not a decision most emigrant parents reached. If Thomas and Sarah had already removed themselves from square walls and solid ground, however, they may have found it easier to remove themselves once again, and on this occasion, relinquish their child.
Thomas Walker was illiterate, but someone had taught Sarah her letters, plus a vague understanding of the law. Her writing has a hammy style, with extra ‘hs’s, in which I hear the call of the impresario summoning his audience. If Sarah was the woman who haunts nineteenth-century stories and songs, and who cast off the corsetry of Victorian propriety to run away with the raggle-taggle gypsies, I doubt she was leaving a comfortable home. But casting off was evidently something Sarah was good at. Fairground life was about moving forward always, even if following an annual circuit: the next town, the next audience – who will surely be more appreciative than the last: keep looking forward, not back. And what could be more forward-looking or a more complete way of severing the past than a passage to America?
There were many people like the Walkers: ordinary, undistinguished emigrants who crossed the Atlantic in the hope of making something new of themselves. (‘Go West,’ the New York Times advised immigrant hopefuls.) In 1865, 264 ships left Liverpool for America and transported nearly 5,000 cabin and around 90,000 steerage passengers between them. Several hundred steerage passengers each voyage; typically, one third single male adventurers, the remainder married couples with children: whole families uprooting themselves and what little or nothing they had, crammed into airless spaces and headed for America and the promise of a better life, undeterred by news of its civil strife. (Even the Derbyshire Courier carried reports of the Civil War.) The Walkers took up that promise.
The landscape of the fairground was changing. Three London fairs, most famously, Bartholomew’s Fair, had come to an end in the past ten years. With increasing urbanisation, fairs were no longer so plentiful, nor so significant in people’s lives: the railways offered new forms of pleasure-seeking and more accessible entertainment. Old-style attractions were dwindling; mechanisation had yet to make its mark. Perhaps the Walkers decided to get out while they could, although, ironically, 1865 was the year in which the steam-driven roundabout, which would shortly revitalise fairgrounds, made its first appearance.
In Chesterfield, the Walkers met a barber, Joseph Nash, who lived and worked a short distance from the racecourse. Joe’s barber’s shop may not have run to a striped pole and fancy lotions, but my understanding is that his was a proper shop with a window on to the street. Perhaps Joe’s shop was the occasion of his first meeting with Thomas Walker: confidences exchanged during the false intimacy of a friendly lather and clean shave. For whatever reason, and by whatever means the two men met, Joseph agreed to take Thomas’s young son.
Joseph and his wife, Mary – with two such names, how could they possibly refuse the Walkers’ request? – had a son of their own, though, by the time the Walkers came to Chesterfield, William Nash was seventeen and would shortly take up lodgings in a different part of town, nearer to the colliery that employed him. Mary was some nine years older than Joe, time enough to have a whole other adult life before she met him, but if she did, it can only be guessed at. Their own circumstances were complicated enough. Joe hailed from Hertfordshire; Mary, Worcestershire; their son William was born in Warwickshire at the end of the Hungry Forties. This couple knew about travelling to secure a life, and could surely sympathise with the Walkers in that. But many working-class families of the period were sticking pins in the map, and they weren’t all taking on other people’s children. Perhaps Mary wanted another child to mother – it was unusual for a woman of her generation to have only one,
though she may have had others that did not survive: these were the years in which women spoke in one breath of the children they’d given birth to, versus the number still living – but whatever Mary’s feelings on the matter, the actual agreement to take young Richard refers only to Joe.
It seems altogether extraordinary, but this arrangement between a fairground couple and a jobbing barber was written down. Though it may be less extraordinary than I imagine. Genealogy is said to be particularly valued among showmen because of the lack of other continuities in their lives. But, if the Walkers shared this view, they were about to lop off the youngest branch of their family tree.
The consequence of this momentous decision was recorded on a small piece of paper; on the back of black-edged mourning paper, to be precise, which raises further unanswerable questions. Fragile now and long since secured with tape, its spidery handwriting tells a vital story: ‘I Thomas Walker, Deliver my Son Richard Darnce in to the hands of Joseph Nash to keep as his Son and I remain your affectionate friend Sarah Walker.’
Though precarious by today’s standards and with no legal foundation – the Walkers probably did not realise that Richard remained his father’s responsibility – the ‘adoption’ (and I use the word in the loosest sense) was nonetheless a solemn pact.
I hope they loved him. I hope the Walkers left Richard behind because they loved him and felt they were doing the best they could for their son. The fact that the exchange was documented suggests a proper sense of responsibility and thoughtfulness, rather than a desire to get rid. But there is no reference to a loving mother, heartbroken at the thought of surrendering her child. For all the emotion expressed, Sarah might have been an amanuensis recording an everyday transaction on her husband’s behalf. But, perhaps I’m being unfair: this was a formal statement in which sentiment had no place: she was setting down the bare bones of their arrangement. Sarah evidently believed that Joe Nash might require some proof of their understanding, although, in the 1860s, children appeared (and disappeared) all the time with very few questions asked.