by Toby Litt
PART TWO
WRESTLING
2
BEGINNING
William Litt was born the 8th of November 1785, a Tuesday. He was christened six days later at St Mary’s, Cleator.
I’d seen the church, very near Litt Place, a squat stone building on a rugged plain between high hills and grey sea.
The Hartleys had provided me with a chronology, and I began to work out what the dates meant.
His father, John Litt, was born 1744, and so was 41-years-old when William was born. His mother, Isabella Litt, born 1751, was 34-years-old.
Isabella was Scottish, from Dumfriesshire, and it seems likely that her father was one William Rome* and that her mother was Henrietta Holiday. (What a wonderfully happy name.)
The chronology gave me very few details about the women in the family. Their lives were not recorded as the men’s were.
John Litt’s father – the son of a Scotsman – was also called John Litt. His mother was Eleanor Beeby.
By the time William came along, John and Isabella already had four children: Eleanor (1778), who was to have nine children of her own; John (1780), who became a farmer and corn inspector; Joseph (1781), later a surgeon; and Thomas (1783), who was to die at Montego Bay, Jamaica, having become a mariner.
After William, two more children joined the family: Isabella (1788) who died in the eighteenth year of her age, and Nanny (1792), who also did not live to see nineteen.
Having decided I would write about violent physical engagement, body against body, I immediately fled to my comfort zone: books.
Wrestling – seeing it and doing it – I would leave for later, as late as possible. Maybe avoid it completely.
My first task was to read everything by and about William. I had a heap of photocopies done by the Hartleys, but I needed to see where all this stuff came from. For a newspaper article, say, I wanted to know what had been printed around it. What was the news? What was being advertised?
Normally, I work at home, in my study. My usual research method for novels is to assemble a large number of important books on whatever subject I’m writing about, and then ignore them completely.
I buy authoritative works of reference, with very good intentions, and for the security of having them to hand. But over the years I’ve realized that, for me to say something alive about a subject, I need to be energetically ignorant and still enthusiastic rather than exhaustedly well-informed and bored to death. I always felt it was better to write confidently with errors of fact, then correct them later, than to write a tentative note here and a doubtful sentence there, and then try but fail to make it come to life.
This would have to change. I was now dealing with facts, real lives.
I would have to go to the British Library.
Although some of the fiction writing I’d done did involve ‘research’, nothing before had taken me into the Newsroom.
This long, L-shaped balcony within the British Library is quietly filled with the whirrings and occasional screechings of microfilm reading machines. The people sitting at them look like they never wrestle with anything tougher than a hard sudoku. As I walked in, I immediately felt at home.
Outside was a dank, clammy November morning. I’d stuffed my coat in a locker and found my way to a corner of the building I hadn’t known existed.
From the librarians waiting behind their high counter, I collected a few small cardboard boxes. Then I went confidently over to one of the microfilm machines, sat down, unboxed the long filmstrip and began to fumble with spools and knobs.
Other, more experienced researchers, sitting nearby, winced at the thought of damaged celluloid.
One of the librarians, having spotted me for a newbie, hurried over and showed me how to feed the microfilm over and under the metal reels.
She pressed a key on the keyboard, and upon the large flatscreen weeks of pages began to whiz past. There’s no other way of describing it than as a March of Time shot from a movie. Whirling black and white text, whirling-whirling, and then, when it stops, a masthead.
The Cumberland Pacquet.
I thanked the librarian, then began to look for the pages I needed.
‘Wow,’ I thought, ‘this is proper research.’
Luckily for me, William Litt was famous. His doings, as well as his wrestling bouts, were reported in all the newspapers of the north-west. He also contributed to The Cumberland Pacquet. The writings of his contained within its pages included letters defending his reputation as a wrestling umpire, a beautiful account of the 1824 Regatta on Lake Windermere and, between 1812 and 1840, eighteen songs and poems.
Surrounding these were reports of the Napoleonic wars and of Lord Byron’s escapades, accounts of mining tragedies and ships lost at sea, advertisements for skilled farm labourers.
I found William’s poetry, always on the top-left hand part of the page – Poetry Corner. It appeared as by ‘W. Litt’ or just ‘W.L.’ Those initials alone were enough to identify him locally.
But most of what we know about William, from his own pen, appears in his two books – Wrestliana, a history of wrestling from its origins, and Henry & Mary, a novel expansively subtitled:
A LOCAL TALE;
ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE PECULIAR HABITS, CUSTOMS,
AND DIVERSIONS
OF THE
I N H A B I T A N T S
OF
THE WEST OF CUMBERLAND,
DURING THE GREATER PART OF THE EIGHTEENTH
AND PRECEDING CENTURY
Wrestliana – published in 1823 – contains some very small snippets of autobiography, particularly to do with William’s life in the ring. He’s not modest about his achievements, but then – he says – wrestlers have no need to be:
… supposing two individuals, one a celebrated wrestler, and the other a distinguished football-player, [are] present at any place of amusement where there is a large collection of people; the wrestler will be noticed and gazed at by almost every person present; while the other will be regarded with comparative indifference.
I could easily imagine a scene from this: William, at a county fair, the centre of admiring attention. And the voice that spoke in Wrestliana was one that was used to being listened to, taken seriously.
Henry & Mary, much more suggestive of William’s early life, appeared in two editions. The first, published in 1824 – a year after Wrestliana – kicks off with a couple of pages of ‘Preliminary Observations’. In these, William confessed that there was ‘more truth than fiction’ to his Tale. He had observed ‘real dates and facts’.
If you were to categorize it now, you would say that Henry & Mary was a romantic paranormal adventure story. It isn’t just influenced by the internationally bestselling Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, first published about ten years earlier, it’s a wholehearted attempt to re-do them within a Cumbrian setting. Elements of the plot are very similar to Scott’s Guy Mannering – both have a witch-like figure who pops up and makes predictions, both have a beefy hero who suffers many reversals. This is very much within the genre Scott was inventing and developing.
But Henry’s physical achievements, his great love Mary, his falling among smugglers and his repentance – all of these come out of William’s own youthful experience.
It’s very hard to talk about Henry & Mary without using clichés. So, I may as well give in and describe it in nothing but.
Henry & Mary is the tragic story of a pair of doomed lovers, Henry Clementson and Mary Armstrong. Henry, a strong, handsome young man, meets and falls head over heels in love with beautiful, kind Mary. Their first encounter takes place at a lively County Fair in Arlecdon, where Henry wrestles against Mary’s weak-willed brother Tommy. Henry defeats him with ease. Tommy and all his family are heavily involved in the contraband trade. Among their associates, present at the Fair is one Kadgie Brown, a great brute of a man now entering his dotage. Henry is befriended by the whole lot of them. He has fallen in with a bad bunch.
On th
e night of their first meeting, Henry and Mary take a romantic moonlit stroll with another couple. Their wandering takes them past a spooky graveyard. Suddenly, they are addressed by a witch-like figure. It is the tragic Eleanor Anderson. Years before, Eleanor’s fiancé mysteriously disappeared, and she haunts the spot where she believes he was murdered and secretly buried. Mad-looking Eleanor mournfully prophesies that Henry and Mary have met under a bad planet; they may avoid its evil influence but…
Eleanor becomes terrified at what she sees in their future, breaks off, and flees.
During the weeks that follow, Henry wins Mary’s affections, and she promises to be his bride.
Encountering Eleanor Anderson again, one dark night, Henry hears her prophesy her own death – in seven days’ time.
Come the seventh night, Henry is stationed outside Eleanor’s desolate house when the ageing giant Kadgie Brown arrives. Kadgie confesses that it was he who murdered Eleanor’s fiancé, and says he intends to ensure she leaves behind her no evidence of his guilt. If necessary, he says, he will kill her, too.
At the very last moment, having overheard the whole scene, Henry leaps forth and dashes Kadgie to the ground, foiling his evil plan. Her reputation vindicated and her prophecy of her own doom fulfilled, Eleanor dies. It remains to be seen whether her prophecy for Henry and Mary will also come true…
Weary months pass, and Henry becomes increasingly impatient to marry Mary, but does not have the wherewithal to do so. However, Tommy Armstrong persuades Henry to make a sound investment… in contraband goods. The Armstrong clan are always looking out for muscle and money.
The first night’s smuggling goes well, a large profit is made. But the second time Henry goes along to unload the boats, the Customs Men attack and Tommy is shot.
Henry manages to get the rapidly fading Tommy home to his father and mother. After witnessing the senseless violence, Henry has resolved to quit smuggling. He confides this in Mary, who is pleased but inwardly heartbroken over her mortally wounded brother.
Disgusted with all he has become, Henry sails for Virginia on the Balfour with his good friend Captain Harrison.
One night during the return voyage, Henry dreams a terrible dream of Mary, waxing thinner, her skin lustrous as pearls. At the climax of the dream, Mary dies.
Almost immediately, the Balfour comes under attack from pirates. In bravely fighting them off, Henry sustains a deep cut to the head and a bullet wound above the heart.
Soon after they dock in Liverpool, a friend arrives with terrible news for Henry. Henry already knows what it will be. ‘Tell me when Mary Armstrong died,’ he says. Mary expired, it turns out, at the very moment he was dreaming of her.
A broken man, Henry returns to Cumbria to make his final farewells. He then enlists and voyages to Cuba, where he dies heroically in the attempt to retake Havannah for the British.
With his death, Eleanor Anderson’s prophecy is fulfilled. Henry and Mary, who met under an evil planet, were destined never to be together.
A second edition of Henry & Mary was printed in 1869, twenty years after William’s death. Along with William’s own ‘Preliminary Remarks’, this contained an anonymous ‘Memoir of the Author’. It’s clear that the Memoirist (as I soon began to think of him) was one of William’s literary circle in Whitehaven. The most likely candidate is Robert Gibson, the town’s main publisher. Robert Gibson was editor of both of William’s books; he also ran The Cumberland Pacquet. Whoever the Memoirist was, he knew and admired William.
In person, Mr. Litt possessed a rare combination of physical strength, with the most perfect symmetry of form. His height was about six feet, and his countenance and manner were manifestly thoughtful and pleasing. His conversational powers were also remarkable. His voice was singularly fine and powerful; and one accomplishment he possessed above all men we have ever known – he was, without exception, the very best reader we ever listened to.
A far more aggressively critical account of William’s life appeared in a book whose full title was Wrestlers and Wrestling: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring; to which is Added Notes on Bull and Badger Baiting. The authors were Jacob Robinson and Sidney Gilpin. ‘Sidney Gilpin’ was the pseudonym of a Carlisle printer, George Coward. Coward seems to have been a dodgy character, accused of plagiarism. Wrestlers and Wrestling didn’t come out until 1893. However, it does contain some gossipy details about William’s life that aren’t elsewhere.
Their conclusion is brutal.
… from the time he left the paternal roof, his course through a checkered life to the bitter end, was marked by a series of disastrous failures.
For a man born over two hundred years ago, William’s is a very full record. But not the whole way along. Until he begins to speak – that is, to write – for himself, William is a figure against a background; and the background is far more detailed than the figure.
For instance, in my library research, I discovered there was a severe drought during the months William’s mother, Isabella, was pregnant. I found this because John Bragg, a Quaker shoemaker living in Whitehaven, kept a diary. He wrote, ‘a general complaint of want of water prevails all over England’.†
I also learned that three months before William was born, a pony belonging to his father was stolen – probably from the commons of Cleator Moor. This, from The Cumberland Pacquet, may be the only surviving piece of writing by John Litt. It is gruffly vivid, grumpily humorous:
Aug. 9. 1785. A bay mare, 13 hands 3 inches high, star in forehead. Flock mane. Seemingly nicked but not nicked. Small lump on the back the size of a plum. Information to John Litt, of Bowthorne.‡
No anecdotes of William as an infant have survived. Nothing has come down through family rumour about feats of strength or early scraps with his brothers. I knew from the Hartley materials that his family called him ‘Will’ or ‘Willie’. On his first birthday, as John Bragg the shoemaker noted, an earthquake was felt across the whole northwest – ‘preceded with a rumbling noise – very calm & quiet air, very alarming to most of people’.§ But I could find out nothing more, not for certain.
Yet easily available – from books and maps – are all the old names of the fields of Bowthorn Farm near Cleator Moor, William’s birthplace.¶ They come from a language still half Danish: Crugarth; Fir-garth; Land Heads; Well Dale. I found these names, in their hard matter-of-factness, extremely evocative. Stone Field; New Moss; How Guards; Hingrihow Croft. William later referred to himself as a ‘broken plough-boy’.|| So from an early age he would have been out on the land, helping with the harvest. Ley Field (Far); Ley Field (Near); Gill-Gap. He would have walked to and fro, down Water Lane to the Watering Place, along Ley Field Lane. My imagination began to range. Perhaps Willie had taken Hingrihow Island for his summer castle, and imagined it rivalled the ruined medieval castle at nearby Egremont. He may, cold, wet and bored, have brought in the sheep from Croft.
The names of the farms surrounding William’s father’s farm suggest a windswept wilderness: Netherend, Low House, Galemire.
But the most suggestive of all was Bowthorn.
As I sat in the library, looking at the maps, I remembered visiting the territory itself.
In 2009, Bill Hartley had driven my father and I the short distance from his bungalow to Bowthorn.
Bill had showed us that above the door were carved the date ‘1685’ and the initials ‘E.M.S.’
And I had felt, for a moment, as if I were standing outside Wuthering Heights – over the principal door of which, as readers of the opening of Emily Brontë’s novel will know, are carved the date ‘1500’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw’.
In the whole of that first trip up to Cumberland, this was my deepest moment of connection with William. I imagined him, as I had often imagined myself, sitting eating his supper near the fireplace in the kitchen of the Heights.
Figure 4. Distant hills, so we are facing east from William’s birthplace, Bowthorn Farm.
&n
bsp; Figure 5. Bill Hartley, left, looks on as my father, right, walks up the hill towards the front door of his great-great grandfather’s birthplace.
Remembering this, five years later, from a desk in the British Library, I felt slightly hopeful. If the boy Will had had a childhood like that of Heathcliff and Cathy, in a rural wild, then perhaps I had a way of understanding him, writing about him. Wuthering Heights was a place with which I’d once been obsessed.
The set books for my A level in English – the books that, along with Keats’s poems, made me want to be a writer – were about as bleak and perverse an assembly as English Literature houses: Hamlet, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Emma’ poems, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Death, death and a smidgeon more death. But it was Emily Brontë with whom I became infatuated, and Wuthering Heights that I really loved. I was, I thought, a bit like Heathcliff.
The English teacher who led me through Wuthering Heights was keen – for reasons of his own – to douse this self-love. Like a sandy-haired Abraham Lincoln, stiff in body and accent, Earnest Carwithen stood at the front of class. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but for myself I have the humility to know that I’m more Edgar Linton than Heathcliff.’
Edgar Linton is wild Cathy’s fake husband – a disgusting, sickly milksop who likes reading poetry. Heathcliff, you probably don’t need me to tell you, is a dark, virile destroyer who likes causing pain.
In the mid-1840s, Emily Brontë was dividing men into two types: mental and physical. For her, the physically weak are worthless.