Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

Inside the casks is French brandy, real cognac, Scottish and Irish whisky, Dutch gin known as ‘Hollands’. They also bring off salt, tobacco, light and transparent French lace, anything subject to heavy excise duties.

  This is not a small business. Every year, the crown invests hundreds of thousands of pounds to support the excise-men. But, for all this outlay, the excise-men only seize goods worth tens of thousands of pounds.

  Horses have been provided for the occasion, with carts. These are quickly filled. The air smells of sweat and sea-salt. It is time to be off.

  As usual, the smugglers judge it prudent to avoid the road. Instead, lanes are taken. Farm tracks between hedgerows, sheep standing quiet in the fields beyond. The men move inland, Eastwards.

  Trusty scouts are dispatched in different directions. The smugglers have to be cautious. There may be watching eyes nearby, informers. Eight or ten resolute men surround the cargo. William is anxious, the axle-tree creaks like a crow.

  Someone might spot them, run off to tell the excise-men, but farmers and their families are superstitious. Smugglers are fond of raising rumours of ghosts in churchyards and evil spirits that haunt old mansions. Better not to say anything, if you hear flittings in the night.

  The men continue on through the night, making their way past Press Gill.¶ They go along Thistlegill, which William may have invented when he fictionalized his smuggling days in Henry & Mary – if he had called it ‘Thorney Beck’, all his likely readers would have known where it was. A gill is a ravine, a beck is a stream. The men feel the weight of the casks alongside them. It is good stuff, whisky – warmth amid snowfall, distraction from troubles, encouragement when there is pain; it helps. A hand touches smooth, gently curved wood; other hands feel smooth leather reins.

  The outskirts of the parish of Cleator are reached. So far, they have encountered no difficulties. Ahead of them is Wediker, a high, dark ridge. They will be exposed when they reach the summit, but they will be closer to their destination: Salter Park.

  Some of the men begin to relax, laugh; they are told to quiet themselves. William is enjoying this. If his investment is successful, his money will be more than doubled. He can smell the peat-reekie perfume of the kegs; ‘athol brose’ meaning mountain dew, also known as ‘Scotch soup’.

  As he strides confidently through the night, William is surrounded by pit-falls, old quarries, peat-holes, cattle-wells. There are a thousand places booty might be concealed, and never discovered. Not unless one of the party peached to the revenue officers.

  The moon, which is not full, this gang are not that daring, comes out from behind scudding clouds. The breeze, already carrying the lugger back toward the Isle of Man, wraps tendrils around William’s fingers – it is cool but warming, like whisky.

  The smugglers crest the hill and descend into shadow, and the rest of their journey is uneventful. The booty is safely concealed. Men part with handshakes, words curt but warm. William is asked how he reckoned it. He realizes he has become one of them, and cannot unbecome. Not even when he writes in his novel Henry & Mary about smuggling being ‘a pursuit so often attended with the most pernicious consequences’.|| Not even when he self-condemns by saying, ‘the business… had made him a very coward’.**

  But, perhaps, like Henry, William did what he did for the purest of reasons – so he could marry the woman he loved.

  * Christopher Cook Gilmore, Atlantic City Proof, Penguin, 1981. Read it, it’s a lot of fun.

  † Elizabeth Mossop, daughter of John Mossop and Hannah Southward, born in 1798 at Blacklands, Whillimoor, Arlecdon, and baptised – as was William – in Arlecdon Church.

  ‡ Betty Mossop’s mother was landlady of The Ship Inn, Corkickle.

  § Henry & Mary, 1st ed., p. 258; 2nd ed., p. 147.

  ¶ This location was not searchable on Googlemaps: I had to ask Bill Hartley where it was. He told me it’s now known as ‘Priest Gill’, and is between Hensingham and Moresby. And then Googlemaps found it, in a completely different place.

  || Henry & Mary, 1st ed., p. 339; 2nd ed., p. 192.

  ** Ibid., 1st ed., p. 282; 2nd ed., p. 161.

  12

  HUSBANDMAN

  Like most children, I wanted to know what my parents were like before they became my parents.

  My mother said very little on the subject, although she gradually let me understand (when I was old enough) that my father hadn’t been her only boyfriend. My father, without meaning to, gave me quite a deep glimpse into one of his might-have-beens.

  By the time these revelations happened, I already knew about my father’s life after he finished doing National Service. A friend called David Sutherland, who was studying at Trinity College, Dublin, had said to him something like, ‘Come on over, the craic’s great, and they’ll let just about anyone in.’

  The young David, mostly – I expect – to please his mother, began a law degree. The craic was great. This was Dublin in 1958. He had digs in the Merrion Square house where Oscar Wilde was born.* He bought the writer Brendan Behan a pint – everyone did. After a year, he gave up on the Law and switched to German and geography. (This was easy for him – he already spoke German and had a photographic memory, so could remember maps at a glance.) He wrote a play. He began to haunt the antiques shops.

  One Trinity-era story has my father-to-be drunkenly attacking a privet hedge, along the front of college, only to find it pristine the next day. Further attempts to desecrate its infuriating perfection were only met by further miraculous moonlight repairs.

  Another story finds him arrested on O’Connell Street for crawling on hands and knees, barking like a dog, or perhaps for being so drunk he thought this normal behaviour. The Dean of Trinity is brought to the police station, to bail out the disgraced undergraduate. When he appears in the cell, Dad looks up at the Dean and says, ‘I see they got you, too’.

  David Sutherland, the friend who enticed my father to Dublin, was rich – he drove an Aston Martin, and his father part-owned the company. I think there was a certain amount of whizzing very fast down country lanes. My father still has friends from this time, male and female. But he hadn’t kept touch with ex-girlfriends.

  My father met my mother, Helen Grindley, in digs – again – in St Albans, where she was working for the company that made the Contac 2000 cold remedy, and he was helping run an antiques shop. They were married almost immediately, within three months, so later on they could never tell me I was moving too fast, when I wanted to move straight in with a girlfriend.

  They were, though, disappointed that I didn’t get married – as both my sisters did. Once I’d met Leigh, though, a conventional church wedding was never going to happen. Leigh’s bookshelves, when I first stayed over at her flat, were full of a scary number of feminist classics. She wasn’t going to love, honour and obey any husband – not unless, she used to joke, I bought her an extremely big diamond. (That was never going to happen, either.) And so I am not, and am not ever likely to become, a husband.

  I enjoyed my sisters’ weddings. The dressing up was fun and the vows were moving, but the part that got to me emotionally – the part I was sorry I wouldn’t be doing with Leigh – was cutting the cake.

  This is because, growing up looking at my parents’ wedding album, there was a great series of photographs of them cutting their cake.

  In these few little moments, I could see their whole long, happy marriage. There’s humour, there’s a little bit of hamming it up, there’s extraordinary tenderness and affection.

  David Litt married Helen Grindley at St Paul’s Church, Hereford, on September 18th 1965 – a Saturday.

  William Litt married Elizabeth Mossop at St James Church, Whitehaven, on November 7th 1816 – a Thursday.

  St James stands halfway up a hill, looking straight down one of Whitehaven’s grid of streets – and, if this was how William approached the church, riding in a carriage on his wedding morning, he would have had plenty of time to put things in perfect perspective. The building, small
at first, would have loomed up and up.

  Nearly two hundred years later – in August 2015 – I stood at the top of the hill, looking back at my imaginary William. My day was a beautiful one of blue sky and light breezes, his may have been more overcast.

  I felt melancholy. Weddings often make me feel like this. Everything about them is optimistic, and that makes me expect that everything’s going to go wrong. But I was especially sad because I knew what happened to William and Betty, after their – I hoped – happy day. I knew how difficult their lives were going to be.

  I had come up again to Cumberland, for a longer trip. This time, I was going to stay with Bill and Margaret, and go with Bill to visit again all the places connected with William. We had already been to Bowthorn, where he was born, and Cleator Church, where he was Christened, and now we were here at St James’s.

  Like Whitehaven’s other big churches,† Holy Trinity and St Nicholas, St James was shaped like a small briefcase with a whisky bottle still in its box standing at one end.

  Bill was careful not to let my imagination run away with me. He knew the church well, and as we walked through the large glass doors and into the lobby, he started to point details out and say, ‘That wasn’t there then.’

  The wall plaques for divines and parishioners who died years after William’s wedding day – those weren’t there.

  But what would have been there, to scoop William in like elegant cradling arms, were the two staircases to the left and right. They are a little bit French chateau, and – in between them, through the door where the boxiness and straight lines resumed – awaited William’s bride-to-be, Betty.

  Bill and I walked through, me doing my best to imagine William’s arrival. He must have been impressed, if not overawed. St James’s is big inside – William and Betty could easily have had three hundred guests in the wooden pews on ground level, and another two hundred in the balcony, column-supported, on all three sides excepting the altar. I doubt there were that many.

  Before I took the train up, I had done weeks of research, and now I was trying to give it some colour.

  William, as he strode in to be married, was six feet tall and just past his thirty-first birthday. Up ahead of him stood the Reverend Richard Armistead.

  If William could have glanced over his right shoulder, into the future where I was standing with Bill Hartley, he’d have seen us looking at Richard Armistead’s wall plaque. This would have told William what was going to happen in the life of the man about to say, ‘We are gathered here today, in the sight of God…’

  The Reverend Richard Armistead would, like William and like William’s own father John, become father to many children. The dates of their births and deaths start off appallingly close together – as if the first three poor little ones, who died so young, were experiments, necessary to set up the last three, who lived into their sixties.

  In my research, I had found out a lot about the man who married William and Betty. Much more than I could use. Richard Armistead began his ecclesiastical career in high style. He had only been 24-years-old when he was appointed to St James. But he had impressed the Bishop of Carlisle. He was ordained in the ‘magnificent’ St George’s chapel at Windsor Castle and ‘received the Sacrament afterwards in the King’s private chapel’.‡ Afterwards, he ‘had repeated opportunities of seeing the whole Royal Family both at Chapel and on the Terrace… and of associating with very distinguished characters in an easy, familiar way’.

  That was twenty-six years before William’s wedding day, and the Reverend Richard Armistead had done nothing in that time to make him anything but respectable. Which made the choice of William and Betty’s two witnesses slightly curious – if I wasn’t making too much of it, which was definitely possible.

  The first witness was Hannah Walker, who Margaret Hartley had told me was William’s first cousin (his father’s eldest sister’s daughter). Margaret knew very little else about her, apart from that she had married a Henry Sharp in 1789. And that her age for William’s wedding, was 54-years-old. She seems to have been illiterate, as she signed the register with ‘her mark’, a firm X.

  I could only assume that Hannah Walker was a woman William liked and trusted. If William had wanted, he might have chosen a grander or more influential person.

  The other witness I knew more about, but he was an even more curious choice. Robert Hogg was – if not on William’s wedding day, then very soon afterwards – a proponent of a much hotter, harder Christianity than the Reverend Armistead. By 1821, he had become minister to a rival congregation within Whitehaven, United Presbyterians, numbering around three hundred.

  I thought he was very odd company, this Hogg, for easy-going, drinking, gambling William. In 1823, Hogg even wrote an extremely puritanical Appeal to the Christian Public on the Evils of Theatrical Amusements.§

  Reading all the evidence, but even more standing in the large space up by the altar of St James’s, I get the idea of William’s entire nuptials as a piece of theatre. The staging, the cast, everything was set up to give the reassurance that these are respectable goings on. No rush job, no shotgun in sight.

  For me, the capping theatrical moment comes when William signs himself as ‘Husbandman’. This seems to have been mischievous; not only a pun on his newly married state, but also a play – half despairing – on his status. He couldn’t properly sign wrestler or winner of 200 belts, and couldn’t yet sign writer (and it’s unlikely he ever would have done). He might, though, have put brewer.

  In William’s poem ‘Freedom’, published four years before his wedding, on the 18th of November 1812, he observed that he had been prompted by Napoleon’s recent defeat to write ‘Heroic verse!!’ even though he was only ‘a drowsy brewer.’

  A letter dated 14th December 1812 or 1813 – from John Gibson, who was to become the publisher of William’s books – gives some more information. ‘William Litt,’ it says, ‘has taken Russell’s brewery’¶ and a few days later that he ‘has began the brewery business and does very well’.

  So, William could have signed himself as brewer, but perhaps he was not yet certain of that identity. ‘Husbandman’ makes his social position absolutely clear. A husbandman was not a gentleman, an inheritor of land. He was not even a yeoman, a renter of land. Instead he was a free tenant farmer – the exact meaning being ‘master of the house’. (Even this was not true of him: William was master of no house; after they were wed, he and Betty went to live with his parents at Netherend farm, where their children were to be born.) But husbandman was, I think, a cover – as we know, William had other, less respectable, identities.

  What about the most important person there that day, what about the bride? How did she look as she signed the register? Was she happy?

  As I stood in St James, after months of looking for clues, I still had no idea.

  All I’d been able to find out about Betty, apart from when she was baptized, married and how many children she had, and where she later lodged at the time of the national census, was that one day, years later, she was to be blinded – and was to spend many more years bringing up her children alone.

  The thought of her fate made me feel even worse than the thought of William’s. But all this was far in her future. On the day she said ‘I do’, she was very young – only 17- or 18-years-old.

  The dinner in honour of Lord Lonsdale’s birthday where she’d met William, on December 29th 1814 or 1815, had been held in a large hall opposite Hensingham church, and reported at length in the Cumberland Pacquet.

  In his vivid poem, ‘Arlecdon Filly Fair’, probably dating from the 1840s, the Cumbrian writer William Dickinson explicitly warns young men off marrying young women they’ve met in such alcoholic circumstances:

  An’ ye who want a prudent wife,

  A partner for your future life,

  Seek not amang thur haunts o’ strife

  For sec a blessin’,

  For those wi’ modest virtue rife

  Will oft be miss
in’.||

  Was William and Betty’s marriage as happy as my mother and father’s? I didn’t know. I thought so. But all I had been able to do was build up speculations on top of the dates of births, deaths and marriages that Bill and Margaret had found in church records.

  There were certainly plenty of births – William and Betty’s first child, William, was born exactly one year after they married, and their second, John, eleven months after that.

  Other babies followed pretty regularly. But did this give me a glimpse into the conviviality of William and Betty’s bedroom, any more than William’s parents’ eight children gave me a glance into theirs?

  Not really.

  Similar speculations came from the dates of death. William’s father, John, died on the 19th of October 1817 – after ‘a long and severe illness borne with entire resignation and uncommon fortitude’. He was 73-years-old, and his death certificate gave his occupation as ‘Gent.’ It was a title he had for some time only been clinging on to.

  In May 1817, William had been – along with his older brother John and another man – one of the witnesses to his father’s will. It is a gentleman’s will.

  My children all having been previously assisted at their outset in life. Unto my dear wife Isabella Litt I give and bequeath all my Real and personal property whatsoever and wheresoever that I may die possessed of, out of which I order all my just Debts and Funeral Expenses to be paid.

  But John Litt’s finances, like his health, had been collapsing for several years. The Memoir of the Author says, William’s father’s ‘large speculations had latterly been less than usually successful, and [he had] become involved in a heavy chancery suit’.

  John’s partner in mine ownership, Jonas Lindow, Spade-Manufacturer, was declared bankrupt in March 1815. It’s also possible that John also had investments with John Drape, a Whitehaven stockbroker who went bankrupt one year after Jonas.