Cowards Die Many Times

by Peter Hey

  Jane decided to take stock of everything she knew about him and the world he lived in. If she could build a profile, some clue might emerge.

  Thomas Ramsbottom was born in Lancashire in February 1836. His parents were of a denomination that does not practise infant baptism, so the church record was simply a registration of his coming into the world. His father was a hand weaver and his address was given as Quebec. Jane was initially thrown by the Canadian connection, but research showed it to be the name of a farmstead high on the Pennine hills, presumably named after General Wolfe’s famous victory the previous century. The Internet provided a view of the building as it now looked. It had been refurbished and gentrified but its antiquity was clear. Even today, its location was remote, the surrounding countryside windswept and bleak. It would have been a cold and lonely place to live and give birth in one of the last winters of Georgian Britain.

  On the 1841 census, the Ramsbottoms and their five children were still living at Quebec, but Thomas’s father was described as a labourer and the house was also shared by an elderly farmer and his wife, presumably the owners or main tenants.

  By 1851, Thomas was a 15-year-old coal ‘drawer’ along with his 13-year-old brother, Benjamin. The family had moved to a small hamlet, little more than a ramshackle cluster of buildings, a few hundred yards away. There were three more children and Thomas’s father was now elevated to the rank of ‘labourer and farmer’.

  In 1856, 20-year-old Thomas married Sarah Hargreaves, a woman three years his senior. The ceremony took place in the Anglican parish church despite them both being Baptists. The original marriage register had been scanned and it gave a Jane a tantalisingly personal link to the past. The bride and witnesses had touched that page and signed it with awkward and scruffy crosses, their marks indicating their presence and agreement. Thomas alone had been able to write his own name. But this was not the faltering script seen on some of the adjacent entries. It was confident, fluid and elegant. The man who had been working down a mine since he was 13 or younger had the most beautiful handwriting. Where, thought Jane, had he learnt that? She looked again at the photo of him and his family taken some 15 years later. His fair hair and delicate, attractive features seemed to say sensitive and artistic. This was surely not the face of a man who laboured beneath the ground, filthy and sweating and bruised. Studying the expression more closely, however, she thought she could see another side to his character, an ‘I’m clever and handsomer than you’, an arrogance that might explain a subsequent act of selfishness.

  Jane found herself on a tangent, researching the schooling available to ordinary people in early Victorian England. It was a time of population explosion, when workers had large families, partly in response to the insatiable demands of the new mills and factories, and there was a move away from the countryside and into industrial villages and towns. Prior to a parliamentary act of 1870, elementary education was mainly provided by voluntary bodies with greater or lesser religious affiliation: the Church of England had its National Schools, British Schools being the main non-conformist, non-denominational rival. Both those institutions were eventually established in the area where Thomas grew up – one still stood and was now a care home for the elderly – but on the earliest map available, dated 1849, neither was marked. At that time, only the Sunday school of the Baptist church was indicated as a place of learning. Thomas’s wife, Sarah, and most of their children now lay in the graveyard of the same church. Jane could only assume that was where Thomas had been taught, not only biblical scriptures, but also to read and write. If Sarah had attended alongside him, she had not benefited equally. Perhaps boys were treated differently, or perhaps Thomas was a clever and gifted child singled out for special tuition. The economics of his background soon condemned him to a life of manual toil, but those bright genes might have found their way to his youngest son and be the reason he could hold his own amongst more privileged classmates at medical school.

  Returning to the marriage register, Jane noted that Sarah’s father was a farmer and mason, whereas Thomas’s was once more reduced to being a simple labourer. Maybe he was prepared to exaggerate his status to a census enumerator but not to a man of God. Two decades earlier, he had been a hand weaver. He would have worked in his own wide-windowed cottage producing cloth from the fleeces of local sheep, on the face of it a more rewarding, independent and creative occupation. Jane assumed he was forced to seek unskilled menial work when industrialisation and mechanisation had supplanted the old handlooms. She found an article describing a nearby uprising just before Thomas’s birth. Mills and power looms were destroyed and the army summoned to quell the disturbance with cavalry sabres and artillery. Six people were killed and the 41 lead rioters were initially sentenced to death before being transported to Australia for their futile attempts to thwart the inevitable destruction of their livelihood and lifestyle. Perhaps Thomas’s father had taken part or at least sympathised with their cause and could not bring himself to be subjugated by the new machines and chose to work on other men’s land.

  Thomas and Sarah had their first child, George, towards the end of 1856, less than nine months after their wedding. Jane stared once more at the family photograph. George was a mirror of Thomas, blond and handsome. Sarah was altogether more swarthy and plain, looking much older than her husband, far more than the three years that actually separated them. The dates said they had to get married. Jane wondered if it was something Thomas had always resented, such that it precipitated his subsequent flight to America while he was still young enough start a fresh life.

  Jane continued to work her chronological way through the records. In 1861, Thomas and Sarah had three children, and he was still a coal miner. Ten years later, there were six children and he had switched to working in a cotton mill. 14-year-old George was also a mill hand by this stage. Jane found herself consulting the old maps again. When Thomas and Sarah had married, he had moved down from the hilltops and they established their family near her father’s farm on the outskirts of a small but growing village. Blackwell Holme was set in a steep valley which cut into the moors, and above it lay a colliery with a straight, mile-long tramway leading down to the road. The coal presumably powered the four mills which were in reasonable walking distance. One in particular was right on the Ramsbottoms’ doorstep, at the head of a long gulley. Its location suggested it might once have been water powered but even the earliest map showed a separate building labelled ‘Nabb Engine’, Nabb being a geographical feature close by. It was a name that led Jane to a potentially pivotal revelation in the history of the Ramsbottom family.

  She found an online document headed ‘More Boiler Explosions’. Amongst a gallery of disasters was a somewhat blurred photograph showing an early three-storey mill with a tall, square chimney. One end of the building lay in ruins and several figures, including what looked like two top-hatted constables, were standing amongst the rubble. One had climbed onto a dark cylindrical object lying at a 45 degree angle to the ground. At first Jane thought it was a section of a second chimney, but then realised it was a steam boiler that had been blown off its base. The photograph was annotated ‘Nabb Engine Mill, June 1872, 4 killed’. Armed with the date, Jane searched a collection of 19th-century newspapers and the full story emerged.

  The Blackburn Standard reported on the inquest into the deaths, held a week later in a nearby pub, the Graver’s Arms, and with a jury formed ‘of the most part of men conversant with boilers’. Evidence was presented that the blast had occurred at 10:00 am when about 100 hands were at work. The 30-foot long boiler was ‘forced’ a distance of 60 yards, knocking down the boiler house and embedding itself in the ground. A second boiler was tipped on end. A five-foot length of steam pipe was blown through the weaving shed and the ‘buildings presented a most ruinous appearance’. There were a number of injuries and four fatalities. The boiler engineer, a warehouse boy and a throstle spinner, a girl of 16, were killed instantly. A 15-year-old weaver named as George Ramsbottom
‘expired the same night from grievous scalding about the body and face’.

  Jane had known that Thomas and Sarah’s eldest son had died in 1872, but seeing his name in the fuzzy black and white of old newsprint still came as a shock.

  The article continued at some length, discussing the technicalities of boiler construction and steam pressure. The conveniently dead engineer seemed to be getting the blame for ‘incidents of intemperance’ and ‘neglecting his duties’ rather than his employers and their somewhat aged equipment and lax management. Jane merely scanned the text, her head full of images of a handsome boy, looking so full of life in the photograph that might have been taken only days or weeks before his death. In her mind, Jane saw that beautiful face horribly burnt as he died in his distraught mother’s arms. Sarah was already pregnant at this stage. It was perhaps little wonder that she would name her last child in memory of the one she had lost so painfully.

  George Ramsbottom, the second George Ramsbottom, was born later that year. Despite his humble origins he would somehow rise to be a man of medicine. His great-grandson, Guy, would continue in the same profession and enjoy a very different status and lifestyle to that of his early forebears. Jane was no nearer understanding how that initial switch from labourer or mill worker to doctor had been funded, though she felt she had a better understanding of the characters involved. And her antipathy towards Thomas Ramsbottom, who ran off to America leaving behind a grieving wife with a young baby, was intensifying. She needed to track him down more than ever. But she was struggling to do it on her own.

  Help

  Hi Jane

  Sounds like you’ve made some solid progress. Forgive me, but do you mind if I don’t look at this properly until next week? That new contract I took on has turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. There’s a new version of client’s chosen software development tool (technically it’s messaging middleware) and it’s riddled with bugs. I’m having to find workarounds, but we’ve got a major project milestone coming up close of business this Friday (effectively that means first thing Monday morning) and I’ve got to burn the candle at both ends to meet it. And I can do without being dragged away to attend their stupid meetings. It’s getting me a bit stressed again to be honest, but if I can finish this component, I’m hoping it’s going to be relatively downhill thereafter.

  Sorry to moan. Here are a couple of quick thoughts re finding Thomas Ramsbottom:

  1. 1873 wasn’t a great year to emigrate to the US. It was the start of what they used to call the Great Depression until it was overshadowed by the 1930s.

  2. In my experience, people didn’t often make such life-changing journeys completely on their own. They went with a brother or a cousin, or they already had family over there. If you dig around the tree you might find some links to help you better understand where Thomas would be heading to in the States.

  I’m sorry can’t give this more time at the moment. I feel really guilty for letting you down.

  Apologies

  Tommy x

  Hi Tommy

  I tried to call you, but I think you might have your phone off.

  Don’t worry about the family history thing. I’m not working to a strict deadline and it’s my responsibility not yours. You’ve given me some good pointers and I’ll work on those. Ultimately, if I can’t find what happened to Thomas Ramsbottom in the States, the world won’t come to an end. It’s only a job; it’s certainly not life and death.

  Tommy, sweetheart, I’m worried about you. You’ll make yourself ill again if you stress too much. If the client chose duff software (messaging middleware?? WTF?!!), surely that’s their problem? They can’t expect you to slave all hours to keep their project on schedule. I know you’re a computer genius and you’ve got your pride, but they’ll have to let their dates slip. Isn’t there a project manager running this thing? Tell him/her to do their job. Give me their phone number and I’ll do it. Okay, I know you’d never let me, but maybe you should be brave and have that conversation with them.

  You’ve been here before, you know you have. It sounds just like what you described in those group therapy sessions. I understand what you do is all about logic, intricacy and minutiae, but you let yourself get consumed by it. Sometimes you need to take a step back. You push yourself too hard in the expectation that once you’ve solved the current problem then it’ll be okay ‘next week’. But a new set of issues will come up and you’ll be so damned tired your ability to cope will start to evaporate. You know you get obsessive about things, Tommy. You don’t want to get weird again. The answer can’t always be to work round the clock. Please try to take a break, even if it’s just going for a walk and getting away from that bloody computer.

  Lecture over. Please call me back.

  Love

  Jane xx

  Time out

  Jane had been living on instant coffee and tinned soup. She was out of both. She realised she also needed a break and having some healthier food in the fridge would probably be a good idea too.

  There were a few clouds in the sky, but they didn’t threaten rain. Jane threw her shopping bags onto the passenger seat then climbed in and lowered the roof. Her head was getting clogged with names, relationships and dates and a good blast of fresh air might clear out the fog of detail and hopefully let her focus on the bigger picture.

  She scanned left and right, and seeing only an absence of traffic, pulled the bright-green Mazda out into the road. She couldn’t resist blipping the throttle and hearing the engine growl as she accelerated sharply away.

  If she were drawing attention to herself, it was unintentional. Nonetheless, she was being watched.

  The face had quickly pulled back from the window for fear of being seen. It now leant forward again and the eyes flicked from the disappearing car back to the house on the other side of the street. The evidence had been taken in and a calculation made. She would be gone some time.

  And the eyes saw something else. The favourite expression of a lecherously crude school friend came to mind. The face mouthed the words, ‘sex on a stick,’ and then quietly sighed.

  Unpleasantries

  Jane had reached the far end of the supermarket. It was designed around a wide central aisle with shelving and refrigeration units radiating off to left and right. She habitually meandered back and forth down the side further from the entrance, before returning on the other, which was nearer the tills and the way out. Apart from a few rebellious individuals fighting against the tide, most people seemed to follow the same route. There were no signs or arrows offering directions; it just seemed natural. Was it a case of following the crowd or were there subliminal cues in the layout to which most human brains automatically responded? She suspected the latter. And for some reason, the retail thought controllers put the alcohol halfway round. Was that so there was still space in your trolley, but there would already be sufficient food and other products onboard to avoid you looking like a sad wino who was just loading up with booze?

  Jane glanced down at her own collection of items: a few toiletries, dairy products, pre-packed fish, one portion of chicken and a big tin of instant coffee. She used to buy a lot more, but then Dave had eaten like a Shire horse with a gut full of worms. He also liked a beer, or four, and was ridiculously fussy about the brand and type. As far as Jane was concerned, it all tasted roughly the same, bad, and once in a glass an IPA or golden ale was indistinguishable from a lager. Dave had taken great pains to explain what he would or wouldn’t drink, but whenever Jane did the shopping on her own, they’d inevitably have moved everything around and she always seemed to pick the wrong one.

  ‘I told you that stuff was horrible! It’s virtually undrinkable,’ was his most common assessment, ‘Maybe you should buy own beers in future,’ her standard response.

  Looking at the collection of bottles and tins now, she almost missed the excitement of taking something home and awaiting his verdict, like a child presenting a school report to ambitious but supportive parents
. And now, right in front of her, she recognised Dave’s favourite brand, the one she had so often failed to find. She thought of buying it for old time’s sake, but resisted. When exactly would it get drunk?

  Directly behind the beers were two long shelves of wine bottles. Jane had a slight preference for sauvignon blanc, but in truth would drink pretty much anything as long as it was white, chilled and not too sweet. She wasn’t a serious drinker, in either sense of the word, and had long ago resisted the temptation to develop a more sophisticated palette. It seemed like an unnecessarily expensive affectation. And who could tell the difference after a glass or two anyway?

  She was studying the sauvignons, following her default formula of finding the second-least expensive, when her eyes drifted onto a woman a few feet away, transferring several fizzy proseccos into her trolley. She was wearing heavy makeup and had short hair two-toned in blonde and coppery brown. Her clothes looked expensive, but in a tacky, blatantly labelled, designed for someone a damn-sight thinner than you kind of way. Jane’s subconscious immediately pigeonholed her as common. She felt a brief pulse of guilt and then realised the woman looked familiar. It was two or three seconds before the face registered; Jane immediately turned away, but it was too late.