Though far away from the imperial conflicts in India, China or Africa in the Victorian age, the people of Kibworth nonetheless were not untouched by the great events of the day. Like any English village the drama of the national story impinged on people back home. Thomas Gamble had been on the blood-soaked decks of the Temeraire at Trafalgar. Will Post and Robert Shaw had been with Wellington in the Peninsular War, fighting ‘Boney and the Mounseerrs’. Even more exotic, William Fletcher and David Roddis had rejected a life of framework knitting or digging canals to sign up with the East India Company in the wilds of ‘Hindustan’, marching the sweltering plains of north India from ‘Muttra’ and Cawnpore in the Maratha wars and spending the year of Waterloo in Ghazipur, where the British established their biggest opium factory. Mrs Knapp went out to the Crimean War with her husband and came home with tales of the savage winters when she contracted the chronic rheumatism which left her bent double as she walked to the shops. John Chaplin, later the founder of the Kibworth golf club, won the village’s only VC, at the siege of Taku fort in China during the second Opium War in August 1860, planting his regimental colours on the smashed bastion by the Hai River over spreadeagled heaps of Chinese dead.
Living in mid-Victorian England, even in the countryside, it was impossible to escape the presence of the empire, whether across the counter in the village shop, in the milliner’s store, or at the newsagent. Veterans like Roddis and Shaw regaled wide-eyed village children with their stories of ‘wonderful doings in a mystic past’, smoking their long clay pipes on the railway bridge on Station Road on summer evenings while the kids threw their cloth caps into the air as the engine smoke whooshed into their faces above the parapet. For the likes of Will Fletcher, who had signed up when he was fifteen, and returned nineteen years later after more than half a lifetime in India, there must have been an unsettling sense that the ‘dear familiar place’ was no longer the village they had left. But this was no mere effect of age and distance. All history is change, but it was the pace of change that observers remarked: Kibworth was indeed changing fast. This after all was a village which still had many mud houses such as had been lived in by its medieval occupants; its people still performed the traditional St George and the Dragon mummers’ plays and danced in their Plough Monday processions; yet this was also the new world of railway timetables, telegraphs and daily newspapers.
The coming of the railways
During the Victorian period the population of Kibworth rose steadily, from a total for the ancient parish of 1,232 in 1801 to 1,975 in 1871. The population of Smeeton Westerby reached a peak figure of 567 in 1841, which it has not attained since. But the most rapid rise was in Kibworth Beauchamp, which was most marked in the years 1851–81, when it passed the thousand mark. The village’s position on the main route from Leicester to Market Harborough and onwards to London ensured that, for a rural community, Kibworth remained literally on the fast track. And just as the transport revolution of the canal age had reached Kibworth parish, so did the much greater and more lasting revolution, ushered in by the coming of the railways carved directly through the village on the line from the East Midlands to London.
The plan produced in 1836 proposed driving the track through between Harcourt and Beauchamp, down the little stream bed in the low ground where Beauchamp’s medieval fishponds had been, south of the church and the rectory. By the time that the railway surveyors first appeared in Kibworth in 1845, it was fifteen years since the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway – the first line running a fully timetabled service of steam locomotives – had inaugurated the railway age. By this time railways had been built from Italy to Russia and from Canada to Cuba, but Victoria’s England was at the forefront; and whereas elsewhere government often played the leading role, the British Parliament looked on only as arbiter (and not always an assiduous one), allowing private enterprise to develop a national system that was almost entirely haphazard and opportunistic in its growth. From the mid-1830s, and particularly at the end of the 1840s, handsome dividends being paid by the pioneering railways drove a railway fever as infectious as the canal mania which had preceded it, and a good deal longer lasting.
In May 1844 three previously competing companies, the Midland Counties Railway, the North Midland Railway and the Birmingham and Derby Junction Railway, merged by Act of Parliament to form the Midland Railway Company, led by the unlikely pairing of the Leicester Quaker and reformer (and later MP) John Ellis and the dynamic but less scrupulous ‘Railway King’, George Hudson. It was the surveyors of this amalgamated company who descended on Kibworth in 1845 to assess the route of a proposed line from Leicester to Hitchin, which would pass through Wigston and over the ‘Kibworth summit’ to Great Bowden Junction. As had been the case with the canals, by no means all locals were in favour of this dramatic new development in the village – particularly those owners and tenants whose land was directly affected. And the canal proprietors, whose predecessors had been outraged fifty years previously at hidebound opposition to their schemes, were outraged in their turn at this new and threatening technology. Coach proprietors, turnpike trustees and the keepers of Harcourt’s dozen coaching inns were also alarmed: their livelihoods depended on the twenty-four coaches a day that stopped in Kibworth and which they foresaw, correctly, would dwindle with the impact of the railway. Far from endeavouring to appease these protesters, some of the surveyors behaved with arrogant disdain, refusing to give their names and blithely levelling crops and hedges in the presence of disgruntled landlords. Fearing significant unrest, a police unit was placed on standby. (This was another new development in a fast-changing country: the Leicestershire Constabulary had been created only six years previously, in 1839 – one of Britain’s first professional county forces.)
The bill for a Leicester & Hitchin Railway – joining the Great Northern Railway at Hitchin to run into London’s King’s Cross – was passed in 1853 and the first barrow was filled with Kibworth earth on 1 June 1854. Each Sunday during the following weeks crowds of villagers wandered down to the line to inspect the progress made during the week, leaving infuriated church and chapel preachers bereft of their accustomed audience. Eventually the Methodist preacher, drawing no doubt on the tradition of outdoor services in the Nonconformist community, resorted to preaching in the ‘gully hole’ near the line in an effort to stem the outgoing tide of his congregation. So once again, as they had during the construction of the canal during the 1790s, teams of ‘navvies’ descended on Kibworth, providing custom for the tradesmen as well as disruption and unease for the inhabitants generally. It was reckoned that a navvy might move up to twenty tonnes of earth in an average day; and, paid once a month, not surprisingly he would spend his earnings straight off in the local inns, unwinding afterwards by rioting and fighting in the streets. Camped in tin huts erected alongside the line, a dozen or more to a hut, the navvies stood out by virtue of their customary dress: moleskin trousers, canvas shirts, velveteen coats, coloured waistcoats, hobnail boots and felt hats. Many shared their huts with ‘wives’ married according to their own unconventional ceremony, in which the couple jumped over a broom and straight into bed as the party continued around them.
On the evening of 2 July 1856, the first engine came through Kibworth on a trial run, and 200 people from the village massed above the line to see it. The following April, Kibworth station – built in typical mid-nineteenth-century ecclesiastical gothic – was formally inspected, along with others on the line, by a local dignitary, Colonel Yolland. And on 7 May 1857 the line was officially opened, with some 5,000 tickets being sold for inaugural trips on special trains. A normal timetabled service commenced the following day. And just as the local innkeepers had feared, the last of the stagecoaches from Harborough to Leicester had rattled through Kibworth on the previous Saturday.
Initially no through trains were run to London; villagers wanting to travel to the capital alighted at Hitchin and bought a ticket for the Great Northern train which took them on. But as passenger numbers boomed, along with the strength of the Midland company, in 1862 it was decided to build a new line into London which passed through the Chilterns at Luton before skirting Hampstead Heath to arrive at a new terminus between King’s Cross and Euston: a soaring Gothic hymn to the railway age completed in 1868 – St Pancras station.
Back in Kibworth the impact made by the railway’s arrival in the village was far-reaching. Special sidings with cattle pens were built outside the station where local graziers’ herds could be loaded straight on to cattle wagons to be taken down to feed the ever-growing demand for meat in the capital; so finally ended the centuries-old custom of the Midland cattle-droves down to Smithfield. In decades to come noisy crates containing tens of thousands of chickens from the hatchery on Harborough Road would also be despatched by rail from Kibworth station. Coal, timber and other goods were brought into the village much more readily, deposited in large sheds by the sidings and handled by local merchants, among them Tom Iliffe, who, as Francis Woodford recalled, was the local coal carter in the 1860s. Small factories and businesses, furthermore, could now base themselves in the village and rely on the railway to deliver their raw materials and their finished products.
The railways also of course affected the ability of the villagers to travel. The inhabitants of Kibworth could now move with unprecedented ease to the local towns: Leicester, in less than thirty minutes; Harborough, only eighteen minutes; and even down to London, five hours. The surviving weekly shopping receipts for the Grewcock family shop, preserved at Market Harborough Museum, testify to the normality of routine visits to the local towns.
And of course the railways saw the birth of that characteristically modern creature – the commuter. The middle-class element in the population of well-situated villages like Kibworth now grew as urban people sought the tranquillity of rural living, which, as they read in their periodicals, was now within easy reach of sedentary jobs elsewhere. In August 1875 the Market Harborough Advertiser noted that the population of Kibworth ‘unlike that of many villages in the county, has, during the last decade, considerably increased’ (though this was more true of Beauchamp than it was of Harcourt). Earlier the paper had commented on the much increased value of property in Kibworth, which had now become ‘a desirable neighbourhood for villa residences’. For the local builders John Loveday and John Mason these were boom years and the former in particular rose to a position of considerable prominence in the village. But it was Mason who built a row of six fine houses with walled gardens for the affluent middle class above the railway in the 1870s; they are known to this day as ‘The Villas’, and were commended by the Advertiser as ‘not only eminently commodious and convenient, but an ornament to the village’. With them, modern middle-class housing arrived in the village, just as it had in previous eras with Brown’s Place in 1385, and Priory Farm in the early Tudor period, or the brick and stucco Old House in the days of William and Mary.
Last, but not least, the trains running through the village provided a fine source of diversion for young and old alike. Woodford remembered the railway bridge as a place where ‘old men congregated to smoke and talk’, while boys massed to watch the trains – ‘a never ceasing wonder then’ – or to ‘occasionally throw a cap over in order to see it blown up again by the snorting monster, sometimes to lose it altogether by its being blown on to the moving train’.
Momentous as it was, the railway was not the only element in the communications revolution which transformed the Victorian village. The postal service was another, which from the earliest days of rail shaped its needs to the rail network. A variety of limited regional and national postal services had existed in Britain since the Civil War. But it was the radical reforms overseen by Rowland Hill, who in 1840 introduced the affordable penny post, prepaid using a system of adhesive stamps, which inaugurated the first modern postal service. Opposite Kibworth church the nineteenth-century Rectory Cottage served as the village’s first post office until about 1900. At about the same time the electrical telegraph system came into use – much popularized by the successful arrest in 1845 of a murderer thanks to a message telegraphed to London that he had boarded a train dressed ‘in the garb of a kwaker’ (the machine did not accept Qs). This too further mitigated the sense referred to by Philip Doddridge a century before of being ‘confined in an obscure village’. On 7 December 1869 the Market Harborough Advertiser reported:
It is now some years since a ‘Royal Mail’ was seen in the streets of Kibworth but on Monday week there was one came to the Post Office here with workmen to prepare for the connecting of the telegraph with this office. No doubt Kibworth will be a place of considerable business. Letters are now received here twice a day, and it would be a further improvement to have two dispatches a day, as there is every convenience by railway.
At the same time modern technological progress was being brought to bear on the daily experience of life in Kibworth itself. One key change was the introduction of gaslight in homes and on the streets. Public street lighting had been demonstrated in London during the Napoleonic Wars, and the Lighting & Watching Act of 1833 gave councils the right to install street lighting if they so wished (as well as to establish a paid local police force). But it was in the early 1860s that the question became a live one in Kibworth. The fact that agreement would be required to fund the amenity by the local rates ensured that in Kibworth – which was as disputatious a village as any, and perhaps more than most – the matter was cause for fierce controversy.
In January 1862 the turnout for a vestry meeting to discuss the issue was so large the rowdy gathering had to adjourn to the schoolroom. In Beauchamp at least the leaders of the progressive camp – John Loveday, the builder, and Thomas Macaulay, the village doctor – secured the necessary support, and the streets were lit for the first time in the winter of 1863. A lamplighter was employed whose task it was to light each lamp at dusk before returning around 10 p.m. to turn them off. An attempt in 1864 to convince enough people that the village should adopt the Lighting & Watching Act so that street lighting could be provided through the municipal rates failed, however, and the lights were paid for by private subscription. Evidently enough residents objected to what would have been an increase in rates for an ‘improvement’ which it was felt would benefit some more than others.
In Kibworth Harcourt, meanwhile, darkness continued to prevail, it proving impossible to raise the funds by subscription. The contrast in ethos between the neighbouring halves of Kibworth seems as marked as ever in these years, when the new railway line through the centre left the rival villages quite literally on opposite sides of the tracks. A local paper reported that:
the inhabitants of Kibworth Beauchamp often laugh and chaff those of Kibworth Harcourt, or more properly speaking those of ‘dark’ Kibworth, as it is now very familiarly called, because they cannot, or will not, raise the £15, which is all that is required to light the few street lamps in that part of the village.
The fact that the local gas company, having installed lights in Harcourt, then proclaimed its intention of removing them since the necessary money to run them could not be raised was recorded with withering scorn in the Market Harborough Advertiser: ‘That this proceeding should be necessary in the present age of progression and general acceleration is certainly no small stigma on the inhabitants of this aristocratic and so-called enlightened village.’ When the lights briefly returned in 1873 the paper suggested that the village would appreciate an end to a ‘total eclipse’ by lighting ‘which people in their right mind would never have submitted to have done without’. In Harcourt the dispute dragged on, or erupted sporadically, until after the First World War.
As the pace of change increased, similar amiable or less than amiable rivalry between the two villages recurred on all manner of issues, serious or trivial. In 1885 when the new vicar, the ebullient Bangalore-born Merton man Edmund Knox, took on the parish of Kibworth, the rivalry between the two Kibworths was one of the most striking, and challenging, aspects of his new living. Beauchamp, he noted, the home of ‘stockeners’ and predominantly ‘radical’, was in stark contrast to Harcourt, ‘the home of the sporting squirearchy and retired businessmen of Leicester’. Between the two ‘was kept up a half-playful antagonism’, with even the most minor disagreement eliciting ‘fiery eloquence’ poured forth with ‘passion such I had never heard in Oxford’. On one occasion, he recorded:
The vestry debated warmly the plan of a sewer which was to run down a road that divided the two villages. It was even suggested, with a fine disregard of costs, that two parallel sewers should be constructed, that the sewage of one village should not be ‘contaminated’ by the waste of the other.
Woodford’s ‘Personal Reminiscences’
As always in history, the raw sources of the ‘official’ history of the time – censuses and gazetteers, local government, education and Poor Law papers – can take us only so far. What the historian really hopes for is some sense of the inner life of a community. For Kibworth an account like this survives in a vivid portrait of the mid-Victorian village which was written by F. P. Woodford at the beginning of the First World War and published in 1916. Woodford’s book is a description of the village in the 1860s, remembered house by house, with portraits of many of the ‘characters’. The village he describes is an agricultural place remembered in a young person’s imagination in an affectionate and it might be thought idealized fashion but for a realistic undercurrent of class tension, especially his dislike of the pretensions of the rich and powerful, ‘enlightened and obliging authorities ever ready to bow the knee to wealth’. Woodford for example preserves a stark village tradition of the 1779 enclosures as having been ‘sheer robbery’. He is frank too about drink and violence: the club feasts at the Old Swan at Whitsun for example were an excuse to get ‘beastly drunk and quarrelsome’, with the biggest fights adjourning to a nearby field, where things could get quite out of hand. Though a churchgoer, Woodford was not hostile towards Nonconformists, many of whom he liked. And like many a reform-minded Victorian Protestant he had a real admiration for radical politicians like the builder John Loveday. But most of all he was sympathetic to human foibles. His main design was simply to record house by house who lived where, and what they did, and in doing so he gives an intimate portrait of a village on the cusp of modernity: a village with railways, telegraph and newspapers but which only did away with its stocks and whipping post in 1865 and which still had Plough Monday dancing and mummers’ plays.
Kibworth in the 1860s was a still agrarian society which had moved into the world of Victorian retail shopping: there was Branson’s grocery store, Mrs Weston’s sweet shop (‘where she sold sweets of her own making, whose flavour and sweetness readily induced any youngster to part with any cash they possessed’) and Wardle’s newspaper shop, the only one which sold papers in Kibworth. Miss Weston ran a high-class milliner’s shop, ‘a large millinery and dress making establishment who employed a number of young lady apprentices who generally lived with her, and from whose establishment two or three romantic elopements were made’.
There were a surprising number of schools, including the old grammar school, the parish school, chapel schools and three schools for infants, run by the Goodales, by Mrs Kesson and Miss Cotton, and the best-known headmistress, Mrs Allen. For a time there had even been a girls’ boarding school, whose failure had led to the suicide of the head, Miss Brake. There were a village constable, a stationmaster, and a popular nurse and midwife, ‘Nurse Warrington’; there were two surgeons, two chemists, a plumber and glazier, a fishmonger, a saddler and an expert woolwinder; in Beauchamp, where there were many framework-knitters, the framesmith did a lively trade mending frames. ‘Dizzy Green’ was the proverbially honest rag and bone man who died in the workhouse. The village had shoemakers, seamstresses, a vet, a tailor, three coal hawkers, and the carpenter and cabinet maker John Wilson, who did the beautiful restoration of the fourteenth-century oak screen still to be seen in St Wilfrid’s church.
Most of those shops and businesses reflected the new times and have their equivalents today. But mixed with these there were still many workers, artisans and craftspeople whose jobs are mirrored in the village documents as far back as the thirteenth century. Mrs Mattock, for example, was the laundress and, just as Alice ‘the washerwoman’ did in the 1280s, in good weather put the wet clothes on a drying ground behind her house. Doctors too were no new thing in the village: there was one in the village in the thirteenth century; and one of the two chemists or druggists, Mr Potter, was, says Woodford, ‘a good model of the now extinct apothecary’ (an early Merton charter is witnessed by a ‘Henry Hwen apotacarius’). Among other traditional workers the miller was still important: the Smeeton miller, Ebenezer Weston, lost his mill in the Great Storm of 1860, leaving only Charles Smith at the post mill on the Langton road which ground its last grain in 1925, and still stands. There were also still smiths, masons, coopers and wheelwrights, a brewer and a sheepwasher, David Atkinson, who was much in demand in neighbouring villages. And in a village where there were still several old-fashioned yeoman farmers, there were still full-time agricultural workers, including a trio of mowers who used not the new-fangled mowing machine, but scythes, ‘swinging along in rhythmic time … with the musical swish of their scythes’.
Woodford identified with the churchgoers, virtually all of whose placings in the pews he could remember fifty years on; but Nonconformity then was also very strong; as represented by the Bromley family, for example – Eileen today is a preacher at the Methodist chapel – who were ‘one of the oldest families, here for more than 400 years’. A cluster of the Bromleys’ poor cottager neighbours are described as ‘sturdy Nonconformists, worthy descendants of Cromwell’s best men – straightforward, honest and afraid of no man’. Their beliefs Woodford contrasted with the spread of ‘Socialism and irreligion’, which he saw as an inevitable result of injustice and oppression, and of the progressive growth of disparity in wealth since enclosure. ‘The time will come,’ he wrote, ‘when the possession of great wealth will be looked upon not only as a disgrace but as a great crime.’ The death of one framework-knitter evidently made a particular impression on the young Woodford: Joseph Bailey, who hawked his homemade socks and stockings round neighbouring villages, froze to death when caught out in the countryside one night during the terrible winter of 1860–61, the worst for fifty years.
Striking in the narrative is the mix of old and new. In the very heyday of empire of course many village people had seen other worlds. Many of the men had fought in imperial wars across the globe, the curate Phillips had worked as a missionary in India. But back home the old still remained for now. The mummers’ play was still done as it was in ages past with certain families like the Bromleys traditionally playing particular roles. (Harry Bromley was the dragon in Woodford’s childhood.) Plough Monday and harvest festival were celebrated in the ‘old English way’. There were many annual village events, of which the most famous locally was the flower show. Kibworth still had an open-air village feast in the 1860s; there were ‘club feasts’ at Whitsun in Beauchamp at the Old Swan and at the Admiral Nelson in Harcourt. Traditional customs were also observed among the farmers such as George Gray, who was ‘the last one whom I remember used to celebrate harvest home in the old English way, decorating the last load of corn with green boughs duly sprinkled with water and poppies, finishing up with a supper to all his hands’. Gray, said Woodford, ‘was one of the few farmers by the 1860s who regarded the Mosaic law by not reaping the corners of his fields, which he left to be gleaned by the poor’.
The Victorian village also had many organized sports and leisure activities. Cricket had been important from the 1840s, as it still is. There were Whitsun games and wrestling tournaments on a platform at the Bank (a ‘brutal exhibition of holding and kicking’, says Woodford). There were several accomplished painters and, as might be expected given the strength of church and ‘chapel’, music was also a very big feature of village life: several villagers were excellent instrumentalists, among them Fred Iliffe the organist, who went on to Oxford to study music. The village had many good singers and a twelve-piece brass band, which still continues today. There had also been a long tradition of theatre in the village. In the late eighteenth century visiting companies played Shakespeare and Sheridan and topical shows like the anti-slavery play Inkle and Yariko, apparently in one of the inn yards which had a gallery and pit. But in Victorian times there seems also to have been a vigorous amateur theatrical tradition at village level; in addition to the mummers’ plays, and the ‘travelling players’ who did shows in a large old brick barn off Main Street, Woodford mentions penny concerts organized by the village.
In its resolute ordinariness as a portrait of the world before radio, television and mass newsprint, Woodford’s account makes fascinating reading. Our view of Victorian England tends to be dominated by the picture of the city created by journalists and writers like Dickens. A large rural village like Kibworth had its share of class conflict, wild drunken brawls and ‘fierce fights between the rowdy boys of Kibworth and Smeeton’. But it had its sports and plays and festivals; and it also had a huge amount of voluntary public service from the likes of Edward Cayser, an ‘old fashioned draper’, a cricket umpire, shareholder and supporter of the new village hall, and chairman and contributor to the village Penny Readings, ‘a popular and useful man, and one of those people who did so much to make village life pleasant and attractive.’
Alexis de Tocqueville had observed thirty years before of the English that they were a nation of clubs and societies, where a huge amount of social action at a local level was voluntary. One gets the same impression from Woodford, from the elementary schools to the flower shows and musical tuition. But perhaps there is something more: he also shows ‘strange and diversified scenes’ of which a Victorian novelist might make a vivid picture. May we call it English eccentricity? Or is what he describes really typical of many modernizing societies at the point when they are still in touch with their peasant roots? The quality of life we catch in Woodford, despite the enormous social differences of the period, has a great deal of diversity, tolerance and eccentricity, and a notable amount of personal expression: nonconformity not just in chapel but in personal mores: the blind fiddler Billy Parsons, ‘dressed in old fashioned cord knee breeches buttoned at the knees’, with his worsted stockings, heavy nailed shoes and scarlet waistcoat topped by an ‘old fashioned beaver hat’, sang his strange songs about the poor; the mummers performed their medieval mystery play; the storytellers were Mary Miles and Mrs Linnet the seamstress, who was ‘possessed of a wonderful imagination and an unfailing supply of witch or fairy tales’; Sam Burditt, the jolly and kindly shoemaker, was an instrumentalist in church, but, so the child Woodford had heard, was an atheist and hence really ‘a very wicked person’; Ebenezer Weston, the miller, grew vines and made wine and in front of his house had a carved ship’s figurehead showing a woman; Robert Shaw, the Peninsular veteran, invariably got roaring drunk on pension day, and told fantastical tales of his days as ‘eddy camp’ (aide-de-camp) to the Iron Duke no less, ‘and could himself have been a Dook!’ One of the most affecting village characters was the eccentric and peculiar deaf mute Burgess, who each year published his homemade almanac and was ‘locally regarded as a fair guide for the weather’; he transfixed children in the street by gesturing to the sky and conveyed his meaning with ‘peculiar sounds and shakes of the head’. A cleaner and mender of clocks and watches, Burgess was also a green-fingered gardener who always produced the first peas and potatoes in the village.
Best of all in this gallery of characters worthy of Dickens is perhaps the blacksmith John Collins, a Heath Robinson inventor who made all his house furniture himself out of iron. Collins wore a black velvet coat with buttons made of silver fourpenny pieces; his working vest was buttoned with copper farthings; and he had soled his boots in iron so the eerie clack of his boots on the cobbles always heralded his approach. Collins was a self-taught genius eccentric, ‘a very clever allround man’ who made his own tools, shod horses, could tackle any mechanical job, from locks and keys to complicated machinery, and was a great admirer of Spurgeon’s sermons – the populist preacher of the day whose weekly penny sermons were bestsellers; these ‘he would underline with quotations of his own written in hieroglyphics decipherable only by himself’.
Perhaps there was nothing out of the ordinary in such people, within the wide range of mid-Victorian society. But such characters reinforced Woodford’s childhood sense of the society of the village as a kind of wonderland still in touch with a ‘mystical past’, where fairy tales mixed with deeds of derring-do at Corunna and Cawnpore, and where archaic rural customs were tenaciously maintained that, as he observes, mostly died out in the last half of the nineteenth century. His glimpses down the Kibworth lanes of his childhood reveal strange scenes: John Carter, the coalman, who kept two ‘Egyptian frogs the size of small cats like those which came up out of the Nile at the command of Moses’; and Carter’s lodger, William Noble, ‘a famous local negro comedian and one of the principal and favourite entertainers in the village’, who sang American minstrel slave songs. ‘Jonty’ Jesson, the former framework-knitter, is perhaps typical: ‘a unique character’ whose autobiographical letter we encountered earlier. Jesson was especially prominent as ‘a character and a dancer’ in the Plough Monday processions with his friend the scythe mower, Tom ‘Mate’ Tolton. Tolton, ‘dressed as a countrywoman and fairly primed with drink, would dance grotesque country dances with his partner Jonty Jesson till fairly tired out’.
Vital, boozy and anarchic as well as conformist and ‘chapel’; with its reading rooms and political agitation – this all realistically suggests a robust working people’s culture which was perhaps typically the product of a village with such distinct halves, ‘country’ in Harcourt and ‘radical stockeners’ in Beauchamp. Sex is the only thing about which Woodford is reticent. As a snapshot of Victorian village England, the record of one insignificant place, Woodford’s account is a window on to something so close to us, only 150 years distant, yet which seems a lost world; except that with its cricket and clubs, allotments and eccentricities, its popular entertainments and the generally tolerant humour of its hustings, it is still perhaps recognizably Kibworth – and, indeed, still recognizably England.
Education, education
More serious though, and more deeply divisive, were the matters of political and social reform. One such was the Education Act of 1870. Up till the nineteenth century, the village, like most places in England, had made its own provisions for the education of its children, just as it had organized its own charity, albeit hand in hand with the Church. Ever since the 1620s there had been a permanent school building in Kibworth, with a fine new grammar school built in 1722. Traditionally the school had been administered by trustees drawn from the village, a mix of ordinary farmers and wealthier local gentry. But in the later Victorian age there was a massive shift towards state control over these areas of life, and the 1870 Act laid the basis for universal elementary education between the ages of five and twelve. By the terms of the Act, local ratepayers could petition the Board of Education to investigate educational provision in their area, comparing the number of available school places with the number of children of school age; in the event of a significant shortfall, a school board would be set up to create and run additional non-denominational schools.
The dominant role of the Church of England in providing schooling, and its influence on the education given, provided strong motivation for dissenting opposition. For a village like Kibworth, with its large Nonconformist congregations – which had a strong and longstanding culture of education – the issue was an explosive one. The reforming contingent in the village was led by the socialist builder John Loveday. Loveday was described by an admirer as ‘one of the earliest and most energetic supporters of the Franchise, Free Education Act, the Nine Hours Movement, and kindred measures; a man of ready wit, unfailing good temper and full of energy.’ Supported by many village ‘sturdy radicals’, Loveday made several attempts to win a vote for a school board in Kibworth, but these were repeatedly frustrated by what was openly called the Church party, including the long-serving rector, Montagu Osborn. In 1872 the staunchly conservative Market Harborough Advertiser reported a parish meeting held at the village hall to discuss the matter, brought to a head for the second year running by the ‘turbulent spirits’ in the village. Defeated in his motion at the meeting, Loveday requested a poll of all the ratepayers. The paper was withering. This local ‘Solomon’, it commented:
aims to be the political saviour of the working men of the parish, and on their behalf he undertakes most absurd things. This is striving to gain popularity with a vengeance, and in a way which none but a rustic ‘Buzfuz’ [a verbose barrister in The Pickwick Papers] would ever dare to adopt. It is a great pity that there is not a proviso in the Act, so that individuals, factiously putting a whole parish to expense, when they have no chance of gaining their end, and simply to be thought clever and active – should be mulcted in the whole expense themselves!
The poll was held on Whit Monday (20 May) and the village was energetically rallied by the opposing factions. As the magnificently partial Advertiser observed:
Loveday and his motley crew tried all kinds of efforts, persuasive and otherwise, to bring voters to the poll … considerable excitement prevailed in the parish; vehicles of all kinds were brought into requisition to fetch up voters, and visitors from Harborough, Wigston, and other places testified to the general interest felt in the proceedings.
The final result was 71 votes in favour of Loveday’s motion, 131 against – ‘a sound drubbing’. Opposite the hall, said the Market Harborough Advertiser, the school bell ‘tolled out the termination of the School Board farce’.
Across the country similarly acrimonious debates were held in the wake of the 1870 Act. In the subsequent decade well over 3,000 schools were either founded or taken over by newly established school boards. In some places, as in Kibworth, the creation of boards was delayed by local votes; elsewhere boards were set up, but churchmen and their supporters secured seats on them in order to obstruct the creation of secular board schools and to divert funds towards the church schools. In 1880 primary education was made compulsory to the age of ten – but the school boards were abolished by a Conservative government’s Education Act of 1902 (roundly opposed by Nonconformist campaigners), in favour of some 300 Local Education Authorities.
The Education Act of 1870 was the product of wider movements in British society at both national and local level. In some degree, the Act of 1870 was a response to a fundamental political reform of three years earlier: the 1867 Reform Act, which sought to quell growing unrest by a significant further extension of the franchise. The inclusion of most of the urban working class, as well as a county franchise dependent on a £12 property qualification, caused concerns among the governing class about the competence of the new electorate to exercise its democratic right. In the light of the 1867 Act, the Liberal politician Robert Lowe famously remarked that it became necessary ‘to educate our masters’ – a view which successfully challenged the long-dominant assumption that education for the lower orders was both unnecessary and potentially destabilizing (since an educated working class might chafe at their inferior station). In Kibworth the villagers’ literate medieval ancestors – village clerks and chaplains like the Polles and Sibils, book-reading Lollards like Walter Gilbert and William Brown – would no doubt have agreed with the idea that it was the ‘masters’ who needed educating.
By the time of the 1870 Act literacy was already quite widespread in the village, helped in part by three small private infants’ schools run by village women which offered basic instruction in reading and writing. The ethos of self-improvement, which was so strong in Victorian culture, particularly in the Nonconformist community, had produced already in Kibworth a reading room for the benefit of the ‘working classes’. Based initially at the National School, after its founding in 1853, it moved to the village hall (that characteristically Victorian institution) when the latter was built as a joint stock venture in 1866. After the reading room’s members took over its management, its library was increased by over 200 volumes and it took twenty daily and weekly papers: testimony, itself, to the profusion of print journalism in Victorian England. It was open daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and (in concession to less intellectual, if still cerebral, relaxation) possessed ‘well-occupied’ dominoes, draughts and chess sets.
For a village as engaged, and divided, as Kibworth, the 1867 Reform Act only increased the political temperature. As the population continued to expand, efforts were made by the rival contingents to ensure that as many of their persuasion as possible were enfranchised. On 25 March 1873, Joseph Arch, the controversial president of the influential National Agricultural Labourers Union, spoke at a meeting at Kibworth Village Hall, where he discussed for the benefit of local workers their best means of acquiring property and so gaining the franchise.
In July that year an organization was founded which called itself the Kibworth and Smeeton Working Men’s Association and Land Society, electing the indefatigable John Loveday as its chairman. Its aim was to buy up unused land on the edge of the village which could be used for building small houses (which Loveday, a successful builder himself, could oversee). Its early successes were flamboyantly proclaimed, to make sure that local opponents took note. After a drawing of lots for properties on the first estate, which was held at the new Working Men’s Institute in January 1874, the society’s sixty-odd members processed to the ground, led by the Kibworth Brass Band playing ‘You Dare Not Turn Us Out’. There Loveday and other leaders held aloft a yellow banner proclaiming ‘Unity in Strength’. Needless to say, the rival Conservative grouping was quick to follow suit, buying land and building properties of their own for sale only to those who could be relied upon to use their vote ‘responsibly’: that is, for the Conservative Party.
So Kibworth ‘New Town’ was created on the western edge of the village over a few years in the 1870s and 1880s in an atmosphere of intense political partisanship. The houses (which still stand) were plain red brick terraces for working people. The names of the newly laid-out streets tell their own reforming story: Rosebery Avenue, Gladstone Street, Palmerston Close, Peel Close, Disraeli Close. Jonathan ‘Jonty’ Jesson, the engaging framework-knitter whom we met earlier, managed at this time to earn and borrow enough to acquire a plot of land on Fleckney Road on which he built four houses. These he prominently named ‘Beaconsfield Cottages’, in tribute to the Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield – another political gesture in partisan Kibworth. But for decades afterwards, in spite of the efforts of Jesson and others, the New Town was known locally simply as ‘Radical’ Kibworth, a name still remembered among older members of the community.
Among certain of the middle and upper class of the village – especially in Harcourt – there was nervousness at the workers’ response to the rising tide of radical ideas in the early 1870s. The difficult conditions which produced what Marx referred to as the ‘Great Awakening’ of agricultural workers in 1872 were capitalized on by the national union agitator Joseph Arch. A benevolent supper at the Rose and Crown on Main Street (reported by the Market Harborough Advertiser) was organized for the labourers by the local landowner (and Methodist preacher) Mr Haymes, who dispensed fatherly words of advice with the beef and pork pie. He ‘cautioned the men not to join the Unions and be led away by agitators, who only wished to set class against class’. In the countryside this was a particularly difficult time, when farming and other industries were depressed, as is suggested by the heightened level of antipathy to itinerant Irish farmworkers who appeared looking for work at harvest-time. Among long-favoured forms of protest were outbreaks of ‘incendiarism’ and the posting of anonymous threatening letters, such as one that was found attached to a bush in Kibworth in July 1870 and was reported in the Mercury: ‘If you don’t raise wages this week, you won’t have a chance next. If there is any Irish left here after this week they will have to have a fresh gaffer. This is the last week of low wages.’
But if political rivalry and division could at times be bitter, and class tensions resurfaced at times of economic hardship, it seems that personal relations in the village were not invariably soured by Kibworth’s passionate political engagement. In spite of the derision heaped upon him by hostile elements of the local press, John Loveday was remembered long after as a well-meaning and good-natured man who would ‘talk and argue with his heated opponents with greatest good humour’. He was, Francis Woodford recalled, ‘in seventh heaven when expounding his views to the large audiences which used to gather to hear him, either in the Village Hall or from a platform erected at his own expense on the Cross Bank’, where he was well attended by admirers – Tom Iliffe, John Grant ‘and other sturdy Radicals’.
Leisure pursuits
Political rivals met, moreover, at the increasing range of social events and entertainments which characterized Victorian life, as statute limitations on working hours began to create for the mass of the population the reality (and indeed the very concept) of leisure. The ‘weekend’ came into being for the first time as a secular concept, still incorporating the religious sabbath but also involving free time to be spent in pursuit of worldly pleasures. It was this era which bequeathed, to England and to the wider world, the lasting legacy of organized competitive sport which has come to play such a significant role in modern culture. Association football and rugby football were both popular in Kibworth – two sports whose rules were codified in the Victorian age from the numerous local forms which existed in the days before the railways.
But it was for cricket that Kibworth acquired significant local renown during the nineteenth century, though the fortunes (and indeed existence) of the club ebbed and flowed. As early as 1847 the Leicester press carried references to a Kibworth Cricket Club, consisting, the Leicester Journal noted in May 1848, ‘of many of the farmers, as well as the tradesmen and the working classes’. It seems indeed that the social division between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’ for which the Victorian game is renowned was felt in Kibworth only by the ‘gentlemen’ absenting themselves from the action – sticking, though in a different season, to the fraternity of the hunting field, for which Leicestershire in general and Kibworth Harcourt in particular were well known. At an annual dinner in 1880, the cricket club secretary, Frank Loveday (John’s son), regretted that ‘many of the upper-class people of Kibworth would not support the club.’ But it is doubtful whether they were much missed. A match organized, for instance, between ‘the Framework Knitters’ and ‘the Builders’ in 1877 (won comfortably by the former, belying their reputation for poor physical conditioning!) testifies to the interest of working men in the sport, which also attracted many of the middle class of the village.
Cricket was not always the gentlemanly pursuit we might imagine. In 1873 the Leicester Chronicle reported ‘disgraceful proceedings’ at a match between Kibworth and Gumley, which had degenerated into a pitched battle: ‘the fight went on for some time until at length a perfect riot took place, and bats, which for some time had been flourished in the air, began to alight on the nasal organs of the combatants.’ But in this case, as in so many similar, an excess of refreshment was held responsible: ‘the greater portion of the rioters were apparently maddened by drink; and their conduct will probably induce the members to forswear the future admission of intoxicating drinks on the ground.’
For many in Kibworth such a tale would have seemed no laughing matter. The popularity of the many inns in the village, particularly no doubt on days of ‘leisure’, was the cause of much agonizing for a strong local temperance movement, which founded a Band of Hope club and held tea meetings in the village hall as often as other groups enjoyed less abstemious dinners in the Old Swan. The village stocks may have been gone for decades, but public exposure as a drinker could still be quietly embarrassing. Thomas Knapp, a framework-knitter who was accustomed on pay day to making a lengthy visit to the Old Swan, suffered the indignity of having his teetotal wife Harriet coming to sit accusingly next to him in the pub while he drank, until he felt sufficiently shamed to come home.
The temperance movement in Britain grew fast, inspired by Joseph Livesey’s movement in Preston in the 1830s, and religious Nonconformists were at the forefront, with many Baptist and Congregational ministers advocating abstinence. (Just as beer and the Established Church were associated with the Tory party, so temperance and Nonconformity were associated with the Liberals.) One enthusiastic Baptist and temperance campaigner who was active in Leicester and Market Harborough, and preached regularly at Kibworth’s Baptist chapel on Debdale Lane, was – legend has it – waiting for a stagecoach in Kibworth in 1841 when he had what would prove a world-changing idea: an excursion by train for over 500 temperance campaigners from Leicester to a rally at Loughborough. The man was Thomas Cook, and the tourist business for which this campaign outing was the seed would have a vast impact on the changing tastes and expectations of the British public. Package tours to the British seaside (a remarkable innovation from inland Leicestershire), and even to the Continent, attracted soaring numbers – though the temperance roots of the English package holiday ceased, at quite an early stage, to exert a defining influence on the future shape of mass tourism.
More local entertainment of a reliably edifying nature was laid on by the committee who ran the village reading room, in the form of a regular series of concerts, or ‘penny readings’, held at the village hall and often chaired by the vicar. A variety of performances were given by villagers: classical recitals, readings from Dickens, Mark Twain and others, popular songs, including ‘English and Irish songs, Scotch and Welsh ballads, comic and “buffo pieces” … the whole forming a brilliant and amusing entertainment’. Their efforts were written up in unfailingly flattering reviews in the local press which cast a fascinating light on Victorian village entertainment:
A string band gave some pieces, and Mr Macauley gave a reading ‘How to Cure a Cold’ on which he, as a professional gentleman, could speak with authority. Mr E. Miles gave the song ‘The Goose Club’ which was rather amusing and was encored, being similarly complimented when he sang ‘The Old Bachelor’. Mr Taylor gave two recitations and Mr Caysar a reading. Mrs Osborne, Mrs Heygate and Mrs Allen gave a trio. Miss Turner sang ‘The Bird of the Wilderness’ with great taste and received a deserved encore. Mrs Taylor sang with great precision ‘Silver Threads among the Gold’. Mrs Taylor, Mrs Allen and Messrs Aitkinson and Bryant sang ‘The Belfry Tower’ and ‘The Skylark’s Song’. Miss Redsall and Miss Martin gave the ‘Qui vive’ duet. The whole entertainment was quite a success and no doubt will prove so to the society.
At times the reading room committee laid on an improving lecture, though this wasn’t always as big a draw as had been hoped. In November 1872 the Reverend Hipwood gave ‘a lecture, or missionary address, illustrated with diagrams on the Indians of North America’ – but the hall was half empty: ‘At the close, Mr Kirby proposed a vote of thanks to the lecturer and regretted that so few attended to hear it, while for anything light and frivolous there was generally a large attendance.’ Strangely enough though, a talk on ‘Arab Life and Manners’ drew a packed house, perhaps because of its theme as ‘an illustration of eastern life and Bible customs’. The speaker was one Seyyid Mustafa ben-Yusuf, an Arab convert studying medicine at Cambridge who spoke in full Arab costume having roped in ‘some dozen natives (not Arabs) dressed in Arab and Turkish costumes’. Seyyid Mustafa brought with him a collection of interesting Near Eastern objects, including a hookah, a Damascus spear, an Arab musket, a Muslim prayer carpet and even a copper coffee pot. Whether the hookah was actually put to use is not stated, but the people of Kibworth were perhaps fortunate that their committee took a less frosty attitude than was taken by the nearby vicar in Market Harborough, who made plain at a similar event there that ‘the object of these meetings be to afford instruction and amusement, and that they be called “Penny Readings” and not “Popular Entertainments” ’ – and that singing or reading ‘in costume must be excluded’.
More to the general taste was one popular local performer, William Noble, who was long remembered as a ‘famous local negro comedian’. No photograph of Noble has yet turned up but he was almost certainly a white man ‘blacked up’ in the style of the minstrel groups whose popularity had spread from the US in the 1840s, and which remained successful in Britain well into the twentieth century. (Many thousands of black men did arrive in Britain in the late eighteenth century, in return for fighting in the defeated colonial armies in America, but they congregated overwhelmingly in London or the port cities.) At a concert given at the village feast in November 1873, the Market Harborough Advertiser reported, ‘the well known popularity of Mr Noble again secured him a full house … Mr Noble, who is always at home here, sang several fresh songs, causing much laughter.’ Kibworth also welcomed visits by the ‘Kentucky Minstrels’ of Leicester. One local man, James Hawker, recorded later in life how he had joined a minstrel troupe in Oadby, on the main route between Leicester and Kibworth, playing bones (castanets) along with a banjo player and two violinists – charging threepence admission for performances in a local pub.
Such was popular entertainment in an English village before the age of television, and a strange and wonderful mix it is too, from anthropological lectures to comic turns, from Mark Twain and Dickens to Haydn and temperance songs. Contrary to what one might now assume, minstrel entertainments, now so insensitive and demeaning, were at the very respectable end of the spectrum, and were loved for their pathos, their humour (they are an important source of modern stand-up comic routines) but also for their sometimes egalitarian themes. The world of ‘music hall’, however, in which bawdy songs and risqué jokes were performed in an atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke and enlivened by purposeful drinking, took off during the second half of the nineteenth century, and served to sharpen the disapproval with which some viewed stage entertainment. If such evenings took place in Kibworth, then they were certainly not in the village hall, under the chairmanship of the vicar – and nor were they politely recorded in the local press! But no doubt the village inns, like the huge and now decaying Rose and Crown on the London road, played host to performances of a less decorous nature. The coming of the railways, indeed, and the resultant collapse in the stagecoach network, left former coaching inns with unused outbuildings, which it paid to rent out for social events. The vicar and the local temperance society would not have approved, but even in a village dominated by ‘chapel’ there were no doubt many working men who enjoyed a rougher and less moralizing kind of amusement.
‘Brave, voteless women’
While entertainments in the village hall appear to have been faultlessly respectable, the venue also played host to political meetings of which many in Kibworth must have disapproved – like the visit of Joseph Arch, the controversial founder of the National Agricultural Labourers Union and an energetic franchise reformer. Early in the new century, however, a new kind of political gathering was held in the hall which raised many eyebrows, even though the message was squarely within the village’s proud radical and dissenting traditions. On 5 March 1910 a meeting was organized there by Mrs Mary Taylor, who for over ten years had lived at Westerby House – a large, red-brick Georgian residence on the old boundary between Smeeton and Westerby. Mary – or Nellie as she was known – was a suffragette, and that day in Kibworth the largely female audience listened to passionate addresses by the suffragettes Alice Pemberton-Peake and Dorothy Pethick. On 19 March a second meeting was held in Kibworth, and on 22 April open-air meetings were organized across Leicestershire. During the early months of that year large groups of women travelled from Leicester to villages around the county, by a means of transport as radical in its design as it was in its social impact – the bicycle – bringing with them the message of the Women’s Social and Political Union.
On 4 March, the day before the first Kibworth meeting, the paper Votes for Women paid tribute to the preparatory work of Mrs Taylor, in language which aptly expressed the movement’s quasi-religious zeal:
The Mission is occupying all the workers’ thoughts as the next piece of work which they have to accomplish. More canvassers are urgently needed to bring to women householders a personal invitation to the Mission to learn the moral and social meaning underlying the movement. Will volunteers call at the office? This week new ground has been broken at Kibworth, where great interest has been aroused by a local member, Mrs Taylor, who has worked hard in canvassing and speaking.
Nellie, who came from an old Nonconformist family herself, must have found sympathetic ears within the non-Anglican congregations which had long been attracted to social radicalism and even to the rights of women. In 1911 the WSPU promoted a boycott of that year’s census. All-night entertainments ensured that women were not at home, and Nellie Taylor and her daughter Dorothea are duly missing from the Smeeton return. The census document was filled out by her supportive husband Tom, who entered himself and his two sons before writing defiantly across the bottom: ‘Women absent protesting No Vote No Census.’
The campaign for women’s suffrage had in fact been gathering momentum over the last forty years. In 1869 the philosopher and MP John Stuart Mill published an essay, ‘The Subjection of Women’, calling gender discrimination ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’. But his fellow Parliamentarians – all of them men – were resolutely deaf to such arguments. The Third Reform Act of 1884 extended the borough qualification of the 1867 act to the countryside, but still left some 40 per cent of men and – the more fundamental omission – all women without the vote, though the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 had done away with the argument that since married women did not own property in their own right, they could not qualify for a property-owning franchise. In 1897 seventeen groups merged to form the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. It was members of this organization, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, who left six years later to form the Women’s Social and Political Union, believing that waning interest in the issue required the adoption of more sensational tactics. When hopes of a compromise agreement under the Liberal government came to nothing by 1911, the temperature further increased.
At 10.29 p.m. on 4 March 1912 Nellie Taylor sent a message by telegraph from Victoria Post Office in London to her husband, who was in Nottingham with their three children. It read simply: ‘Quite safe but business satisfactorily completed. Nelly.’ No doubt Tom knew, at least in broad terms, what this ‘business’ was. The following day he received a letter from Westminster Police Court:
Dearest Tom and my dearest children. I was arrested last night with Miss Crocker and Miss Roberts for breaking the windows of Knightsbridge Post Office. I understand we are to receive fairly heavy sentences this time, so that I think you must be prepared for me to get a month’s sentence … Goodbye my darlings, your loving mother.
A report survives, filed by Ernest Bowden, the detective who followed her on the night as Nellie, with two fellow suffragettes, Nellie Crocker and Gladys Roberts, left a restaurant on the Strand used for WSPU meetings and walked towards Charing Cross. The women knew they were being followed. They took the tube on an indirect route, emerging eventually at Sloane Square, where they ducked into the Royal Court Theatre and entered the auditorium. Shortly after the performance had begun, at 8.38 p.m., they rose quickly and left, walking across Sloane Square towards the King’s Road. They had not shaken off the assiduous Detective Sergeant Bowden though, who reported seeing the women run suddenly across the road towards the post office and smash its large windows with hammers concealed in their clothing.
Arrested and taken to Gerald Row Police Station, the three women appeared next day at Westminster Court (Nellie having given the false name Mary Wyan), where they were denied bail and taken to Holloway Prison. The three-month sentence they later received was stiffer than Nellie had expected. They were far from alone: over 200 women were arrested in early March during a window-smashing campaign in London, many of them sentenced to terms in Holloway. Emmeline Pankhurst heralded this ‘time-honoured method of showing displeasure in a political situation … The argument of the broken pane of glass,’ she urged, ‘is the most valuable argument in modern politics.’
Nellie’s letters from prison were later deposited by her daughter at the Women’s Library in London and reveal a loving wife and mother driven to extreme measures by her faith in the suffragette cause. (It was perhaps more than just a wry joke when she entered her religion on prison documents as ‘Votes for Women’.) On Westerby House notepaper she bid her children farewell for the duration of her sentence: ‘Goodbye my darlings, it is not for long. Keep the flag flying.’ After they had visited her in prison she confessed to struggling at first:
I was so glad to see you … I felt rather bad the first day – but I think it was caused by the effort to bring oneself up to the point of breaking a window at all. I believe it was the strain of this that left its after effects. I feel better now.
She was shocked though by prison conditions – ‘the most extraordinary system’ – and became an advocate of reform: ‘You feel more like a little child … the place looks more like one would imagine a lunatic asylum might look like.’ The suffragette cause and prison reform became associated in her mind: ‘the whole [prison] system will be swept off the face of the earth when we get the vote.’
Photographs exist of Nellie and other suffragettes taken as they walked in the prison yard at Holloway by a police surveillance camera concealed in a van. As it happened, this was the first such camera that Scotland Yard owned. Prisoners had been routinely photographed since 1871, but as suffragettes increasingly refused to pose (in one shot, a jailer’s arm is seen round the neck of the Manchester suffragette Evelyn Manesta – clumsily doctored to look like her scarf – while she grimaces to distort her face), a request was put in for a Wigmore Model 2 reflex camera and an 11-inch Ross Telecentric zoom lens. The Home Secretary personally authorized the purchase, ‘to be used for the purpose of photographing suffragette prisoners’. Police then compiled photographic lists of known militants, with the aim of combating their acts of vandalism. So Nellie Taylor of Smeeton was the proud subject of one of the first surveillance photographs in British history.
Protest continued within the prison. Cell windows were smashed, and many – Nellie included – went on hunger strike when visiting and correspondence privileges were withdrawn. Her subsequent letters are etched in tiny handwriting on small squares of paper smuggled out by sympathetic fellow prisoners who passed them to visitors of their own. ‘I must not write it long,’ she penned in miniature, ‘as there are so many to pass through.’ She drew succour from her faith in the cause, from the contact with fellow campaigners, and by clinging to small pleasures: ‘The moon shines into my cell. It looks glorious. They can take the small things away from me but they cannot take away the big things which we all share in common.’ Her proud husband Tom, meanwhile, hammered out at his typewriter a stream of letters to newspapers and leading politicians. The latter, he concluded, were ‘afraid of the pluck, determination and resource of these brave voteless women’. No protester by temperament, he steeled himself to heckle Lloyd George at a public meeting and was hustled out of the room by a ‘horde of hooligans’, his glasses knocked off and rudely trampled on. He tried to explain his conduct to his devout Nonconformist mother:
I am afraid that you and the others find it difficult to understand and impossible to approve my action … You can well believe that to a modest self-conscious man all this publicity is hateful as I know it is to refined suffragettes. But there comes a time when, as with Christ, it is necessary to do the hateful thing in order to maintain a principle and express an idea which makes for progress.
During 1913 across Britain the bitterness of the struggle escalated, as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ allowed hunger-striking prisoners to be released to recover, then be rearrested. Emily Davison, notoriously, ran under the King’s horse on Derby Day – and was captured on film doing it. The suffragettes’ increasingly violent and vociferous campaign, however, was brought to a sudden end by a much more serious crisis, the outbreak of the First World War. The Great War (as it would become known) would mark the true dividing line – psychological, cultural and political – between the age of Victoria and the twentieth century.
As if already aware of this, it was during the first year of the war that F. P. Woodford, who had grown up in a cottage close to the church in Kibworth, set down his remarkable account, based on his own memories, of the Victorian village in the 1860s. At this point in the winter of 1915, the very idea of civilization itself, so confidently appropriated by the Victorians, had become profoundly problematic: a source even, as one great contemporary put it, of deep anxiety, even of ‘mourning and melancholy’. Woodford had set out to write a simple History of Kibworth but to this he appended his ‘Reminiscences of my Childhood 1860 to 1868’, which is a far more significant document. His detailed look at one place, his native village, became a comment on what England was, or at least what it was believed to be, and in particular what made the English village community tick. By then Woodford had moved away with some regrets, and change was his theme: the transformations of time and society. ‘The old seasonable customs,’ he wrote, ‘rapidly began to lapse and disappear’ after the 1860s. He acknowledged social and political change (and was grateful for much of it), he mentioned the political battles and sometimes bitter class antagonisms, as well as the unquestionably hard life of many of his poorer childhood neighbours, the framework-knitters and coal-hawkers; as we have seen, he was scathing about the greed of those rich people who were not motivated by feelings for the community as a whole. But Woodford still portrays the village, warts and all, in the mid-Victorian era as almost a golden time. He is sensitive to what one might call the givenness of the past, the continuity of life lived in that place, what he calls the ‘unseen presence’ of the people of the past: this idea no doubt lay behind his compulsive recording of every person in the village. ‘If it were possible to obtain a glimpse of Heaven on earth, surely it was to be found there.’ It is hard perhaps to recognize that image in the Kibworth depicted in the raw archives of the Victorian era: the Poor Law volumes, the censuses, the newspaper reports from the village he portrays so touchingly and affectionately. But he was a good observer, and the core for him evidently was in the community itself, and the glue that bound it together, and he was surely right in that.