The Story of England, page 44
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.
