The Story of England, page 45
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.
