Category: Chapmanslade: Gleanings

1867 – 1874

Farthing Bundles By Clara Grant.
The first chapter of Clara’s autobiography Farthing Bundles features Chapmanslade, where she was born in 1867. She lived in Chapmanslade, until she was seven years old, when her family moved to Frome.

Chapter I.
My Wiltshire Home.

“We lose a proper sense of the richness of life if we do not look back on scenes of our youth with imaginative warmth.” (Quoted by John Morley.)

I am one of those Wiltshire moonrakers of whom the world is not supposed to hear any more, but, deep down in our hearts, we allow our ancestral story to comfort us with the faith that “we bain’t such vools as we do look.”

As some villagers “up Devizes way” were escorting home a trapful of smuggled brandy the donkey bolted and the kegs rolled into the pond. Whilst trying to rescue them with some hayforks the excisemen appeared and were told by the wary yokels that they were raking out a cheese. The moon, shining down beneficently on the side of the smugglers, the unwary officers of the law roared with laughter at the “zilly vools” raking out the moon and rode away, leaving my countrymen to carry their brandy triumphantly home.

North and South Wiltshire, known of old as the “cheese” and the “chalk” are thus summed up by an old writer, John  Aubrey :-

“According to the severall sorts of earth in England (and so all the world over) the indigenae are respectively witty or dull, good or bad. In North Wiltshire (a dirty clayey country) the aborigines speake drawlinge; they are phlegmatique, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit; hereabout is but little tillage or hard labour; they only milk the cowes and make cheese; they feed chiefly on milke  meates, which cools their braines too much, and hurts their inventions. These circumstances make them melancholy, contemplative, and  malicious; by consequence whereof come more law suites out of North Wilts, at least double to the southern parts. And by the same reason they are generally more apt to be fanatiques; their persons are generally plump and feggy; gallipot eies, and some black; but they are generally handsome enough.”

“Contrariwise on the Downes, Etc., the south part, where ’tis all upon tillage, and where the shepherds labour hard, their flesh is hard, their bodies strong. Being weary after hard labour, they have not leisure to read or to contemplate of religion, but goe to bed to their rest to rise betime the next morning to their labour.”

Chapmanslade. Happily for me I was born in the chalky South, at Chapmanslade, a village standing in two counties, two dioceses and five parishes, the latter facts accounting perhaps for its rather forlorn religious history.

The origin of its name is unknown and its early history uncertain, but it was probably settled by Flemish weavers brought from Flanders in Queen Elizabeth’s reign to assist in the manufacture of the famous West of England cloth. I can remember the last of the village weavers, Jack Gore, working at his large handloom in his wide cottage window.

My ancestors being simple country folk kept few family records, but an old chest, dated 1606, was brought by the Grants when they came south from Scotland to work in the  forests at Longleat, the famous seat of the Marquis of Bath.

(We like to think that General Grant, the American President, belonged to us, his folk having also come south from Scotland before migrating to the States.)

In these days of educational advantages it is interesting to look back upon the struggles our forbears made in their pursuit of learning, and, viewing the elaborate apparatus and methods devised  by the modern infants’ teacher for teaching small children to read, it is refreshing to recall how much was achieved of old by simpler means.

Education is, to me, the creation of the right hungers. Our ancestors possessed the hunger and had to forage for their food. In modern days we tend to provide ample food whilst stifling the appetite, and thus there are many who starve in the midst of plenty.

 An aunt of mine (later, one of the unofficial pedagogues of the village) recalls the little dame school (the type so vividly described by Crabbe the poet) kept in a cottage by a poor old soul with a cripple husband, and her chief memory is of “Bounce Open Day” at Christmas time, when each pupil took a huge log of firewood and hurled it at the school door which, duly prepared for the attack, bounced open, and thus did the old lady supplement her scanty income.

I remember the postman bringing the letters from Westbury, spending the day at some industry in the village, and walking back at night, sounding his horn for us to bring our letters out as he passed. In my mother’s day the postman worked at tailoring with her uncle, and had his dinner with my grandmother, who got him to put some writing copies in books for her children, and, my mother adds: “there were some very good morals in them.” Like the family Bible, the oak beam of a cottage ceiling was often found useful for recording family dates.

My mother remembers many books in her home, and her grandfather Biggs was one of three residents sharing The Times, costing then 7d. by post.

Later on the National School at Corsley was opened and was taught by an old schoolmaster with one leg, who used to run round the school shouting “Give over tah’ken!” (talking).

 Multiplication tables were dictated by a “good scholar” standing on a stool, and were accompanied by certain violent physical jerks, very warming. One aunt was reputed to have mastered as far as 12 x 12, but, as the little monitor always said “Twice 1 or 2″ she wondered to the end what it all meant.

My father at the age of nine gave a chum 3d. for an arithmetic book which he studied hard during breakfast time, munching his toast at the window to get the light, and to the end of his life he was an omnivorous reader. (At seventy he  reread both the Bible and Shakespeare.)

His great passion, however, was music. A cousin having taught him his notes, he and a boy friend got leave to practice on the wheezy old Baptist organ. For six months my father “blew” and his friend played, then they changed places, and it was soon clear that it was not worth while for my father to “blow” again, and at fourteen he became organist at the little chapel.

Organ-blowing was regarded as a vital part of the playing – as indeed it is! – and one proud mother, dilating to my uncle on her son’s success after a few lessons, said, “But then, you know, ‘e blowed the organ zix months avore that.”

It was not until I was five years of age that Chapmanslade’s own National School was opened. No suitable site could be found until a fire destroyed a cottage, from which large baskets of newly laundered clothes were rescued by neighbours, and my eldest brother, then not three, remembers vividly the  beautifully goffered cotton sunbonnets rolling gaily up the hill in the wind, my mother chasing them.

Of that little school I was one of the first pupils. Our schoolmaster, Daddy Irons, was a tall, stooping, grey-haired man with a sad domestic history. In his garden grew apples of a  specially sweet, pale yellow kind, useful as wages to boys    pulling up his weeds or fetching his daily beer. Often on a    Saturday he would cross over to our house with a lapful of apples for his “little Clarrie” (I being his pet), and my mother would then make them into dumplings and send me over with them.

I was six when I committed my first act of rebellion against the established order of things. Daddy insisted on our taking five whole minutes over each line in our copybooks. It seemed to me an unwarranted waste of time and I surreptitiously worked in an extra line, for which Daddy, not inclined to birch me, “kept me in.” On another occasion, having scratched me accidentally with his birch on its way to somebody else, he  consoled me with half of one of the famous apples.

Logbooks in those days were serious documents and entries had to be made daily, even though, as on most days, nothing happened. Among Daddy’s entries read by me many years later I found the following:-

“The work of the school going on favourable.” “The time for attendance is better and the school visited by the Reverend the Curate.” “The elder children are required by the Parish on the garden work.” “The number of attendances has improved as some has returned from work.” “A small attendance this  morning as the caravans of a wild beast show passed through the village.” (Wise children!)

 And then, alas! comes the painful verdict of H.M.I. (true of so many of us) that “Mr. Irons is more vigorous than successful as a disciplinarian.” No wonder he once sent for my mother to act as his deputy with one of her own flock!

Religious Life. It was only in the year of my birth – 1867 – that the little church of SS. Philip & James was opened, but there were two chapels – the “Upper” Baptist and the “Lower” Congregational.

I found amongst my father’s papers a document dated 1827, containing a poignant appeal for funds to the “Managers of the particular Baptist Fund” in London –

“We enjoy our publick meetings constant and regular by our beloved Pastor and though we have no additions the past year yet we hope there are some amongst us that are asking the way to Zion with their faces thitherwards. We are all in general poor labouring people with familys principly employed in the woolen manufactory in which there is such a increase of machinery that has occasioned such a decrease of manual labour that we are reduced to such a state of penury that we can give but very little towards the support of the ministry and at the same time be honourable in the world.”  . . . . “We remain your poor unworthy but affectionate and obligated Brethren.” William Eacott, Pastor. John Watts. Anthony Wilkins. William Holloway. James Minty.

Later on, in the ’40’s, there came a remarkable minister named Leask, who wrote his “Struggles for Life,” in which Chapmanslade is described as “poor, beautiful, romantic Willowfield round which the gentle willows bend by the brooks, like so many patient anglers with theirrods.” He, too, started a school for boys in his largest room, being “paid in  potatoes and cheese.”

He describes the excitement caused at the post office and general shop by the arrival of his packets of proofs and the guesses made as to their contents. “Was it a summons from Government?” “Were they railway shares, because if so they would all be ruined.” Mr. Leask became a D.D. and died in London in 1884.

His book gives a vivid picture of the spiritual destitution of the village and of his own ardent efforts among his people, the fame of which reached the neighbouring rector officially responsible for its spiritual welfare. Eventually a curate arrived and paid a series of calls involving acute doctrinal controversy, and incidentally we find one of those curious libels on the Church of England of which she has had, perhaps more than her share. Pressed to visit a poor man who had fallen from a high building, the harassed curate pulled out his prayer book and, turning over its leaves, said: “No, I must decline at present. I find there is no prayer here for broken ribs.”

In my young days the Baptists were “served” by local preachers, one Benny P. being quite a character. “Dooin’tee go to zleep, Vred” he would call out. Driving from Warminster he passed the turnpike at Thoulstone Farm, through which, if alone and on ministerial business, he could pass free. Preaching once on “Enter in at the stray-it gate” he said: “I doant mean thic there gate down Dolls’on that when I and my wife do come droo on Zunday morning she do get down and walk zoo that we wunt pay the toll.” I think it was he, too, who, in thanking my father and his choir for a selection from the Messiah, including “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?” with its runs and trills, said: “We be grateful to the choir for comin’ but we diden know they wur comin’ to zing comic zongs!” In another village when one of my father’s  soloists was greeted with “Encore! Encore!” an old man sang out: “What be ‘ee making all that noise vor? Let ‘er zing it again.”

During the reign of one “Lower Chapel” minister, who refused to resign even when his hearers had dropped to his wife and the chapel cleaner, the Upper and Lower congregations achieved a happy union “in love and fellowship,” but on the arrival of a worthier pastor the division again took place. A pathetic letter on the Upper Chapel door in 1928, bemoaning the dwindling numbers, would seem to suggest that union might again be sought with benefit to all. In these days, when probably few congregations in town or country could illuminate each other on their points of unity or divergence, they might all do well to commence each service with their Master’s prayer “That they all may be one.”

Being rather delicate after we removed to Frome, I paid long visits to my native village, and I love to recall old friends, their words and their little tales. Parish Pay was half-a-crown per week, and I remember shopping for old Ann-Noah (so frequent was inter-marriage that a wife’s Christian name made a       convenient prefix to her husband’s). The old lady’s order ran “½d. o’ Tay (tea), ½d. o’Tyape, ½d. o’ Writin’ pyaper and a ½ lb. of Vat Byacon.” Total 2½d. Fat bacon was a great stand-by for supper, and one old lady replied to her husband’s “Lah, Ann, how thy tongue doo hring.” “Well, and han’t I just well greased ‘un?”

Blancmange was a novelty, and my uncle, serving it at a Club supper, was asked: “See ‘ere, is that pudden or lard?” Sweets were “pops,” a mole was a “want,” a rat was a “hrot,” to bother was to “caddle,” to be cold was to be “shrammed,” and to have “spreathed hands,” but I only once heard “housen” for houses. “Look-zee at ‘e, a lookin’ at I,” said a Frome woman recently at an outdoor meeting. We may, perhaps, smile at the “look-zee,” but, for the few who seem able to see without   looking, there are all too many who look and do not see, so there may be value in the double appeal.

Broad dialect as I remember it must inevitably die out, but it has a directness and a picturesque all its own and is worth  preserving – if only by the few who love it.

Astronomical discoveries were received with scorn. “You tell I that anybody do know the zize and weight of they stars? ‘Tis all lies. The zize of the stars, indeed. Have anybody ivir bin up there to measure ’em?” “What do ’em say, that the earth do goo round the zun? Then if thic hawk zeed a mouse down under ‘en, by the time ‘e got down to ‘en thic mouse’d be over to Short Street.”

Surplices were unknown until the opening of the little church. There being no school and the vestry being small, the “robbing” took place at our house, and the solemn procession of white-robed clergy and choir struck fear into at least one heart. “They do look like angels. Is it the Judgement Day a-common’?” The feeble tinkle of two church bells, however, could scarcely be mistaken for the Last Trump.

Children and even grown-ups were afraid of seeing ghosts in the chapel burial ground, but my mother remembers her grandfather’s consoling logic: “Ghosts can’t possibly return to earth since if people were good and went to heaven they would never wish to return to this life, whilst those who went to the wicked place the bogey man would see that they never came back.”

Life was simple and natural, but it was narrow. Chapmanslade is still as cut off from the railway as when two of uncles walked three miles to Westbury and three back from Frome for the novelty of a ride in a train between the two towns, but it has now motor buses, its Memorial Hut, its Women’s Institute, though it has as yet no Cinema, and alas! no resident clergyman.

I have dwelt on these early memories because they account for a habit of mine which puzzles London teachers. I had, in those days, two great yearnings – to be a teacher and to live in London. From a certain hilly spot I used to gaze longingly at a wide view with the smoke of a town on the horizon. “That may be Bath,” I used to say, “but at least London is next.” Long years after  I spent one memorable and crowded day in the city of my dreams. We saw all its biggest sights and glories, but the one impression I took back with me was that of the streaming multitude of London’s citizens crossing and recrossing London Bridge and – never a sign of recognition! I once heard the late Dr. Rudolf Steiner explain why the first seven years of life  matter so much. In our later years we pursue selected interests with varying parts of our being, with divided forces as it were. In our early years we embrace and assimilate impressions and experiences with the whole of our being, and that is why our first environment of right manners, habits, speech, religion, relationships (as distinct from informative lessons) are so    important, because lasting.

I owe to my village childhood that instinct for intimate    personal friendships which make “living near school” neither unnatural nor supernatural, as some would have it, but just natural and inevitable. It is a joy to greet and be greeted in our own streets, to be escorted by cheery children in my goings out and comings in, to meet in a seaside teashop our friendly   dustman, and to have my bus ticket from Victoria Station handed to me without asking for it, with a kindly “You’re a long way from ‘ome, Miss Grant.”

Life, at its richest, is the firm art of relationships, widening, as well as deepening, as the years roll on.