by Knight, Lynn
Staveley Netherthorpe Grammar School had a long pedigree stretching back to the sixteenth century and had recently resisted attempts to deprive it of its grammar-school status. Shortly before my grandma became a pupil, the school had sixty-six day boys, one boarder, and forty-one girls. Over the next few years, an influx of those wishing to train as elementary school teachers at its newly established Pupil-Teacher Centre further increased student numbers. As befitted a co-educational establishment, the staff was mixed, its female members inspirational New Women in college gowns, teaching their young charges to think for themselves, a lesson my grandma absorbed.
The school syllabus included Latin, Euclid, Trigonometry and Science. Pupils were encouraged to perform their own experiments in the chemistry and physics’ labs and to ‘attack problems with confidence’. Additionally, girls were taught housewifery, dressmaking and cookery; and boys woodwork, to introduce ‘ideas of economy, thrift and careful attention to detail’. Annie’s favourite subjects were English and History – she relished Dickens and Longfellow and devoured Walter Scott; the Kings and Queens of England; the little Princes in the Tower; Alfred burning the Cakes. Aside from the dreaded hockey, my grandma loved her Netherthorpe years.
There were more new friends to make at the grammar school, boys as well as girls, who were just as interested in reading Shakespeare as she was: Maurice Unwin, who had views on most subjects; and a quietly spoken boy, George Walter Hardcastle, who kept his opinions to himself, but generally had something interesting to say. There was slim, fair-haired Gwennie Peat, and, of course, Zoe was a classmate too. Just as Ethel had defended my grandma, now Annie stuck up for Zoe. Whereas Annie had needed a champion to fight with slaps and fists, Zoe was a diffident pupil. Words did not frighten Annie; she knew and enjoyed their power, and spoke up for Zoe whenever she could. Though no fists flew at the grammar school, there were other ways of wounding with intent.
It was quite a performance to walk the five miles to school and back again at the end of the day, and so, for her fifteenth birthday, Dick and Betsy bought Annie a dark green bicycle from Flint’s on Whittington Moor, with dress guards to protect her coat and skirt from splashes. The bike had to be pushed uphill for the first leg of the journey, but Annie could cycle on through Brimington, into Staveley and on again to Netherthorpe.
My great-grandparents were so proud of their grammar-school girl, they had a new studio portrait taken and mounted on the wall, where it joined the panorama of family photographs. The new picture showed Annie in her grammar-school cap and uniform, hair flowing free, trusty bike in the foreground – the independent young scholar cycling into the future. Framed in gilt, with a slim green velvet border, the picture had pride of place on the wall. The first thing you saw when you opened the house door was young Annie.
She and Ethel saw less of one another when my grandma became a grammar-school pupil. Ethel left school the minute she could – she couldn’t have stayed even if she’d wanted – and was soon stacking newly pressed glass at the bottle factory on Coronation Road. Faced with a choice of the sticky, scalding sweetness of the jam factory, fettling crocks at Pearson’s Pottery, the yes/no servility of domestic service, or lugging bottles and crates, Ethel plumped for the latter. Cut fingers and an aching back were preferable to scalded hands and forearms, lungfuls of dust or mountains of some old biddy’s pots. While Annie was walking out in a dress so new its velvet shimmered, Ethel was collecting her first wage and tipping all but thru’pence up to her mam.
Now that she was working, Ethel had more of a voice in her household. Having her say did not make family life any easier, however. If Ethel had a view, she expressed it. She was sick to death of her father’s aggravating ways, his leathering the younger ones, bullying her mam and pouring half his wages down his throat. She put food on the table just as he did. One night, during yet another furious altercation, he lunged at Ethel who lunged straight back at him. Immediately, she was thrown out of the house.
Ethel was tearful and trembling, though defiant still, when she landed on my great-grandparents’ doorstep. Of course she could stay, Betsy reassured her, and made up a bed in the attic, which, until now, had housed assorted sacks of grain, but there was a small table in one corner, an upright chair and a hook on the back of the door which would do for her things. It had a sunny aspect too, with stairs that came right into the room.
Ethel stayed with my great-grandparents for several months, returning home when she knew her father would be out, and washing pots and generally helping Betsy while Annie did her homework. She had always been grateful for the kindness they showed her, now she could not thank them enough. But Ethel could not stay at the corner shop for ever. Eventually, she and her father called a truce. They’d been passing in the street without acknowledging one another, but Ethel had enough of that game, and wanted to be at home for her mam. Which was just as well, because life at the corner shop was set to change. Annie was about to get a sister.
Part Two
3
Pick Me
ON 2 FEBRUARY 1901, QUEEN VICTORIA WAS BURIED WITH state ceremony and full military honours. On the same day, a baby came into the world with no fanfare whatsoever, a daughter born to Emily and Thomas Martin. At least, that’s what the birth certificate says. In fact, although they lived together for some seven years and he gave his name to their four daughters, Emily Ball and Thomas Martin never married, though that’s less unusual for the time than some might think.
Thomas was a colliery hand, a hewer. By 1901, he and Emily were living in the Derbyshire town of Eckington, having had as many houses as they had children, and in as many years, just about. Life looked set to be the same for Emily as for her own mother, who gave birth to eleven children, her youngest born when Emily was already a mother herself; at one point, mother and daughter were pregnant at the same time. Thomas was also one of eleven children, born to Irish parents living on the outskirts of Chesterfield.
In 1903, Emily was pregnant again, a pregnancy she did not survive. A fifth pregnancy in seven years was not that unusual for a working-class woman of her day, nor was death in childbirth: maternal mortality was a major cause of death among married women. In October of that year, at the age of twenty-seven, Emily haemorrhaged following her confinement. There is no record of what happened to the baby she was carrying.
The tragedy of Emily’s short life was not quite over. The following day, Thomas went to register the death and, as is the custom, was required to state his own name along with hers and define his relationship to the deceased. There are two ways of interpreting what happened next. A sense of propriety, a need for truthfulness at the end; shock or exhaustion, or perhaps a combination of all these, made Thomas give her correct name: Emily Ball, and not the surname, ‘Martin’, which she had given on recent documents and for the purpose of the census two years earlier. A less generous interpretation is that by giving her correct name, Thomas not only told the truth but also distanced himself from further responsibility for their young children. This naming left him with a problem: how was he to account for his relationship with Emily? Faced with the recording authority, Thomas chose the term sometimes used to acknowledge a settled but unsanctioned relationship. And so the mother of his children, with whom he had lived for at least seven years and who, twenty-four hours earlier, had bled to death in childbirth, is defined on her death certificate as: ‘Housekeeper’.
‘My mother died at thirty-eight. She left six of us. I was only six years old. She died with childbirth… There was no information at all on birth control. If it happened, which it did very, very often in my younger days, that a woman went into hospital for her confinement and the doctors said if there was a recurrence of pregnancy the woman would die, that woman was sent out without any information as to how to avoid that. The law forbade them to give information on birth control…’
– Elizabeth Dean, interviewed aged 101, in Angela Holdsworth, Out of the Doll’s House: The Story of Women in the Twentie
th Century, 1988.
It was almost impossible (though not unheard of) for a man to bring up four daughters by himself. These were the days before welfare provision and Thomas had to work to survive. He had sisters who could have helped him, however, and I suspect that one of them did, because his eldest daughter was separated from the other three and disappears from this story. Not so Kitty (aged four), Margaret (three) and Annie (three months off her third birthday). For whatever reason, Thomas Martin could not or did not provide for his youngest girls.
These three little girls lost their mother in desperate circumstances (and may well have been in the house when Emily died). They were about to lose their father and their oldest sister too, who, despite her youth, had probably taken on the mantle of protector. Their births were registered as ‘Martin’, but they now acquired their mother’s surname, Ball. However, Emily Ball was dead and could not help them. They were about to become nobody’s children; children of the Poor Law Union.
A long straight path led from wrought-iron gates to the doorway of Chesterfield’s Industrial School on Ashgate Road. A broad straight line, from which there was no deviation. I can see Kitty, Margaret and Annie walking down that long, hard path, Annie too young to walk the distance unaided; three little girls holding hands, as fragile as a string of paper dolls. Annie had no idea what they were walking towards, but Kitty knew: the Industrial School, coming closer and closer.
Industrial Schools were instruments of the Poor Law, designed to house destitute and vulnerable children. The majority of their young charges were removed from their parents because of neglect (though the death of a mother could constitute ‘neglect’ in itself, the children being left to their own devices). Those admitted to the Schools were to be trained in ‘suitable occupations’ and so steered from the bad influences that might lead them to be a continuing drain on the public purse when they grew up. Children in the care of Poor Law Guardians were to learn to become ‘useful’ members of the community, not paupers. Much was made of this intention when, in 1881, the Chesterfield Industrial School – one of the first in the country, second only to St Pancras, a local newspaper was pleased to announce – opened its doors. ‘A boy trained not only in ordinary learning of a rudimentary character, but in such trades as tailoring or boot-making, and also in the rudiments of agriculture and gardening, and a girl able to read, write and cipher, and also to wash, iron, get up linen, cook and sew, need hardly re-enter a Union poor-house again.’
A report of the opening ceremony described the buildings as well as their purpose. A central administrative block separated the girls’ wing from the boys’; the ground floor held classrooms, teachers’ apartments, an infants’ dining room, bathrooms and lavatories, while, on the floors above, dormitories, accessible via stone staircases, extended the full length of both wings. Each child had their own bed, a fact considered noteworthy – as, indeed, it was. For many children, including little Annie Ball, this would be the first time they’d had a bed to themselves, recipients not of comfort, but of the adamantine care of the Union.
The emphasis on the lack of ornamentation, ‘the utmost care taken to secure good ventilation’ – ventilation is stressed more than once – and the insistence that no unnecessary money had been spent, conjures as grim an admonishment as any Poor Law Union could wish for. And translated into plain walls, plain fare, plain everything; draughty corridors, insufficient heating, icy water and blasts of cold air. At least one orphanage matron of the period favoured wide-open windows, regardless of the snow drifting on to the beds.
Methods softened over the years; labels softened with them. By the time my great-aunt walked through its vast iron gates, the Industrial School had been renamed the Chesterfield Children’s Homes. Within a few years, the new title had stuck, but, for now, the name recorded in the Committee’s monthly meetings depended on which member was taking the minutes. For all the renaming of the Industrial School, ‘shades of the workhouse’ were never far away. However well-intentioned individual committee members, they were working within the constraints of the Poor Law and answerable to the local Board of Guardians. Dietary regulations (which determined which foods the children and staff ate, and in what quantity) were those of the workhouse; the workhouse Master and Matron took charge during the School Matron’s annual leave. The workhouse by any other name… there was only a thin veneer between them. Regardless of which title officialdom preferred, as far as my great-aunt was concerned, she spent her childhood in The Orphanage. Another picture keeps coming to me, although it’s one I’d prefer not to see, of a little girl not yet three years old, sent to that drab institution, with its scratchy frocks, strict regime, echoing stone corridors and ever-present discipline – Walk, Don’t Run; Stand Straight.
The Orphanage could accommodate 124 children. Numbers fluctu ated, but in the 1900s, it held around 100 ‘inmates’, including my great-aunt and her sisters. They were fortunate, apparently. Around 1903, the institution came under the care of the Madins, a married couple who were complimented on the marked improvement in the children since their appointment as Superintendent and Matron. True, questions were asked, in Mr Madin’s first year, about his severe use of corporal punishment, but these concerns were quickly brushed aside. The Committee expressed its full confidence in his judgement and authority: the Superintendent should administer discipline as he thought fit. Some may think it even more fortunate that Mr Madin died three years later, leaving his wife in sole charge.
Other residential staff included a Labour Master (for the boys), an Industrial Trainer (for girls) and a Girls’ Attendant and Infants Teacher (one post). There were some half a dozen Girls’ Attendants in four years. Miss Turner, Miss Berrington, Rose Church, Alice Butler, Mrs Blagdon, Marion Shawson – one after another, they traipse across the Minutes. One attendant lasted only three months, another was dismissed for insubordination after five days. These were the women responsible for the welfare of the youngest girls, the women my great-aunt should have known best, and felt able to turn to. One face after another departing: no mother, and no motherly figure to rely on (although at least the careless and cruel attendants departed as swiftly as the kind ones).
My great-aunt said she was neither happy nor unhappy during her orphanage years – both states seeming too extreme for the kind of nothingness she lived in, which was neither one thing nor another, but just Tuesday following Monday and her left foot following her right in the slim crocodile heading to and from the Catholic Church on Spencer Street on Sunday mornings. As Catholics, she and her sisters were in a minority; theirs was a longer walk to church, more fresh air and a longer time away from Ashgate Road, but greater opportunities for chapped hands and chilblained feet. Her cuffs never quite reached her wrists, no matter how hard she tugged them; her boots were generally too large or too small, with the rare pair that fitted shaped by someone else’s feet before hers. She was never quite warm enough and there was never quite enough to eat. She had known it for so long, my great-aunt did not even recognise that the stone in the pit of her stomach was hunger.
Friday breakfasts consisted of 6 oz of bread, a pint of milk and a pint of porridge – glutinous, thick grey porridge that stuck to the bowl and made her gag. With the children struggling to swallow this tepid mess without the sugar that would have helped to make it edible, much of the ration was wasted. Orders were issued that Friday porridge be replaced with three-quarters of an ounce of jam. Friday’s stone became even larger. Though, however much she loathed the inedible porridge, my great-aunt was lucky to be given fresh milk and in such quantity – a splash of condensed was a more frequent offering for most working-class children at this time.
For all the ghastly food and insufficient everything, attempts were made to humanise institutional life. There were fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Night (costing a sum not to exceed £2), annual trips to the seaside, plus the ‘usual extras’ at Christmas. Benefactors donated greenery, crackers, oranges, sweets, figs and – on one occasion – d
olls, though there were not enough dolls to go round, and some little girls had no idea how to play with a doll, having never had the chance until now. Figs and oranges, though appropriately festive and a vast improvement on the usual fare, disappeared with the season and were, anyway, not things you could play with. And even figs and oranges could not be relied on. Nothing nice was guaranteed. It is impossible not to consider the following year, when the youngest girls wanted dolls and none appeared.
For anything out of the ordinary, the children were dependent on someone’s generosity: on upstanding citizen and committee member Miss Swanwick providing shuttlecocks and three dozen tennis balls, or the Reverend Templeman supplying footballs, a cricket bat, magic lantern slides, and so on. People living nearby sometimes donated a shilling or two for sweets, or brought in magazines they’d done with. One year, the Mayor gave £1 for Christmas games, prompting the Committee Chairman to dig into his own pocket and match it.
Christmas entertainments provided by church and chapel were gradually supplemented by more colourful treats: a trip to the dress rehearsal of The Mikado one year; a rehearsal of The Gondoliers the next, to watch Chesterfield’s Amateur Dramatics Society do its finest. In 1907, the children were invited to the pantomime at the town’s Corporation Theatre (no mere dress rehearsal on that occasion). At the end of the performance, when the lights went up, each Industrial School child was presented with an orange.