Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  I still secretly thought I was more like Heathcliff than Edgar Linton.

  *

  Later that day in 2009, after we came back from Bowthorn, Bill put a book in my hands. It was Caesar Caine’s Cleator and Cleator Moor: Past and Present. This is, he said, the best history of the area.

  When I had finished with the newspapers at the British Library, and had moved on to the books, Caesar Caine’s history was one of the first I ordered. I soon found that Bill had been right.

  The Reverend Caesar Caine was Cleator’s vicar from 1910 to 1922, but where he truly lived was in the past. He confessed – as Margaret Hartley might also confess – that: ‘I have occasionally moved about in a daydream, more conscious of the Steeles, the Benns, the Towersons, the Litts, the Robertsons and Parson Barnes’ family than of the living people of the present time.’**

  In particular, he was a great enthusiast for the farmhouse at Bowthorn – the situation of which, he said, could hardly be finer. As I read, I imagined how lucky William was to grow up there. ‘To the westward and southward from the farm buildings, situated close to the common, the rolling moorland, rich in heather and gorse, stretched as far as Keekle Bridge in one direction, and as far as Crossfield and Jacktrees in the other. Eastward, there was a splendid view of undulating country with numerous farms, terminating in the splendid assemblage of hills around and beyond Ennerdale Lake.’††

  But Caesar Caine continued on after this, and with his every word my Wuthering Heights-inspired imaginings began to collapse.

  ‘This ancient homestead must have been indeed “lovely for situation,”’ Caine lamented, ‘before the iron industry destroyed the fair prospect by monstrous black furnaces, mountainous slag heaps, and huge chimneys belching forth dense smoke.’‡‡

  Oh dear.

  *

  My imaginings of Bowthorn as akin to Wuthering Heights, and the surrounding landscape as like the pre-industrial world of Emily Brontë’s Yorkshire moors had been, literally, undermined. Cleator Moor sounded far more akin to William Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’.

  Cut off from the rest of the country by the hills of the Lake District, the county of Cumberland has never been affluent.

  Whitehaven, within walking distance of Bowthorn, was a busy port, and there were opportunities for young men to go to sea, and perhaps die there, but not really to become rich. Some young men would have joined the army, fought at Austerlitz or Waterloo.

  Most young men worked the land. Farms were widely spread out; families connected by blood or trade. Many farmers in the borders were self-sufficient, meaning not only they fed themselves but also dressed in homespun cloth of blue. They wore wooden clogs.

  This was the rustic world into which William was born, a world he memorialized in Henry & Mary, but it was not to last.

  William’s figure emerges not only from a local but also from a global background. The dates of his life were to be 1785–1850. These very neatly bracket the dates of the Industrial Revolution, which Eric Hobsbawm in his great book, The Age of Revolution, puts between 1789 and 1848. This was, Hobsbawm excitedly wrote, ‘the greatest transformation in human history since the remote times when men invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the city and the state’.§§

  And Will Litt did not witness the Industrial Revolution distantly. All he had to do was stand on the doorstep of his father’s house and look out at the smelting works and slag heaps. Nor did he witness the Industrial Revolution innocently. It helped pay for his upkeep as surely as antique dealing paid for mine.

  Shortly after William’s seventh birthday, on December 4th 1792, his father John went into partnership with a Jonas Lindow – taking over the Langhorn pits. It was not until 1803 that their labours, or more likely the labour of their workers, started to show a profit. From that year, between one October and the next, 5,374 tons of iron ore were brought out – at a royalty of one shilling per ton.¶¶ The mine came to be known as ‘Litt’s pit’.

  There has been mining in Cleator Moor for over five hundred years. To this day, the ground is prone to sudden subsidence – and to the discovery of forgotten chasms beneath fields and streets. Maps of the area are thick with ‘Mine (Dis)’ and ‘Shafts (Dis)’. But the history of iron ore mining in Egremont has been one of ‘disconnected spurts of activity separated by long periods of stagnation’.|||| And this was true for Litt’s pit. If John Litt hoped to become rich through industry, he was to be disappointed. 1803 was the mine’s only truly productive year. When Jonas Lindow went bankrupt in 1815, the mine had to be re-let.

  The Litts – Caesar Caine tells us – took a lease on Bowthorn in 1798, after the death of Edward Steele, the last of the male line of the Steeles. But the Litts were living there before then, because it is listed as the birthplace of their children.

  Bowthorn is not a big house. It would have been crowded and noisy; two or three to a bedroom.

  I tried to imagine William’s early life.

  Pulling together all the sources available, this was what I found:

  Will was a healthy boy, strong, energetic, yet also given to indolence. He lay upon the village green, watching the wrestling matches of the field workers and craftsmen. As soon as he was able, he joined in. His later writings are always a rough and tumble. If his character has a keynote, it is combativeness.

  But Will was a listener, too – and in particular he liked listening to the old folk. His knowledge of wrestling went as far back as his grandparents’ generation. I imagine him, a young fan, pestering anyone who might have details of legendary bouts from thirty or forty years before he was born.

  Will was a happy boy who loved his mother and respected his father. In a poem of 1839, ‘The Bells That Hang in the Old Church Tower’, he called his childhood ‘a golden time / When the heart was gladsome, it knew not why’.*** He referred to himself (ignoring the Industrial Revolution for a moment) as one ‘rear’d ’mid the mountains wild / Where the grey thrush sang, and the heath flower smil’d…’

  One scene from Henry & Mary, vivid and tender, seems to give us a picture of Bowthorn as William remembered it. On the clean white-washed walls of the comfortable sitting room hang prints of The Ark and the Tower of Babel. There is a brass tea-kettle, candlesticks, &c. The father’s books for reading, or noting down the transactions of the day, are lying open on the green cover of his desk. And is this a glimpse of mother Isabella? If so, she seems central, occupied, inscrutable. ‘While her rosy children of different ages, are innocently amusing themselves by… endeavouring to attract… attention from their parents’. ‘She, whether listening, or bearing a part in the conversation between her husband and brother, is busy with her needle’.†††

  In the same poem of 1839, mothers are a byword for the most loved thing: ‘And he loves, like a mother, his village bells’.

  Even after reading everything William wrote, I cannot find a similar statement about fathers or about his father; nothing that would suggest love separate from respect.

  In fact, almost everything John Litt did in his life came under public attack, at one point or another, by his son. The assaults seem systematic.

  John Litt was a farmer. Here is what William had one character in Henry & Mary say about the farming life:

  If you commence farmer, you may toil yourself from morning to night; perform the labour, and subject yourself to the drudgery of a brute beast, to procure a scanty subsistence – that is, if you are fortunate…‡‡‡

  John Litt’s main income came from his position as ‘Commissioner for the Inclosure of Waste Lands’. This was a lucrative job, but one that risked making Will extremely unpopular with some locals – like being the son of the man charged with closing down the village playground, or paving over the allotments.

  In both his books, William digressed – with no apparent need – into long condemnations of the removal of land from common ownership. Looked at in one way, William’s entire life was centred around these spaces, for it was on common land
s that his beloved wrestling took place; including William’s own most famous bout, that against the cobbler Harry Graham.

  What could be more direct than this, from Wrestliana?:

  In the vicinity of Whitehaven, the best wrestling was at Arlecdon Moor; but the inclosure of that common has now put a stop to it.

  In Henry & Mary, the lament is overt – perhaps the most gushingly heartfelt and bitterly comic thing William was ever to write:

  Hail! scene of exalted triumphs, immemorialized in the pages of Wrestliana, long shalt thou live in my remembrance! What though the green tops of the best of vegetables now wave over the place where the mighty have fallen! … Yet what is all this to those sensitive thrills of delight, which, emanated from thy listed ring, have made hundreds forget for a time there was such a thing as eating, or even drinking, in existence?

  The implication, to me, is clear: William’s father – because he helped enclose of the Moors of Arlecdon and Cleator, annexing them for the aristocracy, for the Lowther family – killed the people’s pleasures. Put a stop to them.

  Fathers, like farmers, are boring drudges. Fathers put a stop to fun. They fence in playing fields, and make them profitable. They end waste.

  When I reached this conclusion, I began to doubt myself. How could I be certain these digressions referred to William’s father?

  But I knew that if I were to publish something about antique dealers, to say – for example – they were all crooks, that couldn’t be about anything but my father.

  I began to suspect a boyhood crisis for William – a crisis against his father.

  It involves the death of a hare.

  * Whether Isabella Rome’s maiden name suggests an Italian or Roma origin is unclear. The Litt men subsequently have tended to be olive skinned with dark hair.

  † The Diary of John Bragg from Whitehaven, Cumbria Family History Society, 1999, p. 121.

  ‡ Caesar Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor: Past and Present, Michael Moon, 1973, p. 160. A bay mare is chestnut with black ‘points’ – meaning lower legs, ears, mane and tail. The ‘nicked but not nicked’ suggests the pony’s tail has not been cut, to make it carry high, but naturally looks that way. The plum-sized lump seems large rather than small, but perhaps plums were smaller then.

  § The Diary of John Bragg from Whitehaven, Cumbria Family History Society, 1999, p. 122.

  ¶ Caesar Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor: Past and Present, Michael Moon, 1973, p. 54.

  || This is a line from ‘Freedom – An Apologue’, published in the Cumberland Pacquet, 18 November 1812.

  ** Caesar Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor: Past and Present, Michael Moon, 1973, p. v.

  †† Ibid., p. 45.

  ‡‡ Ibid.

  §§ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848, Vintage, 1996, p. 13.

  ¶¶ Very unusually, coal as well as iron ore was also produced by Litt’s Pit; it stands on a geological border above haematite and coal.

  |||| The Egremont Heritage, Egremont Town Council, 1982, p. 17.

  *** Cumberland Pacquet, 12 February 1839.

  ††† Henry & Mary, 1st ed., pp. 342–343; 2nd ed., p. 194.

  ‡‡‡ Henry & Mary, 1st ed., p. 258; 2nd ed., p. 148.

  3

  HARE

  Hare coursing was the great pastime of Cumberland in the late 1700s. Back then, sport meant bloodsport. All classes were devotees – the yeoman and the labourer, the gentleman and the beggar. Because of the roughness of the terrain, foxhunting on horseback was too dangerous – or too likely to result in a half-dozen lamed animals rather than a single dead one.

  The hunt gathered early in the day, and looked for the hare’s tracks. When they had followed these to where she was hiding, the hunt began. (The hare was always referred to as ‘she’.) There was no formal pack, as for foxhunting. Instead, farmers brought their greyhounds and terriers, mongrels and whelps. The tradition was for a swarm of onlookers to pursue the pursuing hounds.* Caesar Caine writes, ‘The interest and excitement which could be aroused by a hare hunt seems incredible. I have an account of a Whitehaven Hunt in December 1787. Two thousand people, horse and foot, followed…’†

  We know from an advertisement‡ that William’s father was one of the organizers:

  Oct 13, 1790. Cleator Hunt. The annual hunt at Cleator will be on Monday, the 25th day of October inst., the hounds to be cast off at the usual time [8 o’clock in the morning], and dinner upon the table at Wilson’s, precisely at 2 o’clock.

  Mr. Thomas Curwen/Mr. John Litt } Stewards

  I can’t prove that 4-year-old Will was present at this hunt. But, from the account of hare coursing he gave in Wrestliana, I am sure he was taken along on many similar mornings. He knows every fleck of ritual, and writes with an intimacy almost matching his disgust.

  From the first time I read it, I’ve thought that this passage contained William’s best and most passionate prose§ – and so it’s only fair to let him run beyond bounds.

  When he stretched his legs, William could be a fine, muscular writer: personal as well as polemical; always ready with an image to back up his argument.

  And as I hurry along with him here, breathlessly following the tonguing hounds, I feel I am approaching a kill – a kill witnessed in early boyhood. Here is horror.

  In some countries they hunt for subsistence, – in some for safety, – and in others for pleasure only. In the United Kingdom, the last is the only motive; and generally speaking, the objects are three – the stag, the fox, and the hare. Of these, the hare is the most general… Hunting is equally esteemed as an exercise as well as an amusement, combining two of the greatest earthly blessings, – health and pleasure; and we will not detract from the pleasure it affords, by stingily urging the consequences which may result from the pursuit of it; such as overheating, catching cold, breaking a limb, or possibly a neck, &c.

  Caesar Caine notes that Wrestliana, here, ‘“runs down” hunting in order to “run up” wrestling’ – because wrestlers, as William always stresses, very rarely get injured.

  What spectacle can be more animated and alluring than a well-attended chase? The sight and music of the dogs, eagerly followed, directed, and encouraged by horse and footmen, form such an overpowering combination of incidents as supersedes by its irresistible impulse almost every other consideration! The traveller and the labourer, the gentleman and the beggar, will all equally gaze on the enchanting scene, and often tempted by its magic influence, deviate from their immediate avocation for the pleasure of witnessing it a few minutes longer. But does the sight instil into the breast of any generous and reflecting man one praise-worthy sentiment, or furnish him with any example of noble or manly emulation? Alas! no. We fear when duly considered, it is a striking proof of the frailty of man, and his deplorable proneness to be led away by sensual propensities. The fear of one animal, and the ferocity of others, are the sole cause of the pleasure he experiences. The hare, the most timid of quadrupeds, aided by speed and very circumscribed natural sagacity, endeavours to elude its pursuers, and preserve itself from a death the most terrific and horrible even a reasonable mind can possibly suggest. The dogs, guided by instinct and natural ferocity, and capable of enduring much greater fatigue, preserve the same tract, and mutually guide and encourage each other in the work of destruction. The little animal, instructed by self-preservation, retraces, or traces over again, nearly the same ground, and would often baffle its ferocious pursuers; – and what hinders it? Man, endowed with reason and reflection! Man! the boasted lord of the earth interposes! For what motive? To preserve the weak from the strong? No! Quite the contrary! To guide and impel the latter to the work of blood and murder! Thus not only encouraging, but joining on terms of equality with dogs and horses in the deed. But surely it is some powerful motive which thus induces him to derogate from his natural dignity? Some means of acquiring honour, profit, – or benefitting the community at large? No! We are again reluctantly obliged to answer in the negative. No ho
nour can be acquired either in the pursuit or the death of so weak and timid an animal, except that false notion of the term which arises from the circumstances of tempting Providence more than his companions, by some dangerous leap, or other similar cause; which even then he must share with his horse: and between profit, – the desire of benefitting others, – and hunting, we need scarcely observe there is an insuperable bar. – Aided by man, the final result is generally as follows: – The poor helpless animal, quite exhausted with terror and fatigue, is no longer capable of active effort. It lays itself down in the vague expectation of concealment, and there awaits its fate; or rises only to meet a death replete with terrors. A few terrific squeals nearly drowned by the exulting cries of its pursuers, announce the termination of its cruel fate. The note of triumph is sounded by its generous and pitying enemies, who congratulate each other on the sports of the day, and point out the respective merits of the meek and gentle assistance, which are often distinguished by the names of Charmer, Lovely, Comely, &c.; and sometimes enlighten and edify each other, by seriously asserting that the hare hearkens with pleasure to the pursuit! and that the moment she is caught the terrors greatly subside! We will subscribe that they are not long in doing so, as they will vanish with life; – but we cannot say we ever heard any of those instructive and very knowing gentlemen contend, that the dying shrieks of the wretched animal, were notes of satisfaction and pleasure!

  Am I wrong to place John Litt, the steward, among those ‘very knowing gentlemen’ guilty of ‘the work of blood and murder’? Probably not, when the owner of the ‘Cleator Greyhounds’ was one Jonas Lindow, John Litt’s business partner. Is it pushing things too far to see, through this incident, Will’s brutal detachment from his father? Even more, his disgust and dismay? The boy who grew up to be the man who wrote these words was looking to be furnished with noble examples of honourable deeds worthy of manly emulation. He found none of this in hare coursing – he found only wretchedness and terror.