ON TENTER HOOKS, EXETER, 1843.

 Mr. George Maunder was a woollen manufacturer on Exe Island .  On the 17th July, 1843 'a piece of blanket, containing twelve pairs' of his manufacture was hung out on racks in Serge Grounds, St. Thomas.  They were stretched on tenterhooks.  The next morning two of the blankets were found to have been cut. The tightly stretched fabric must have been tempting to slash!  Henry Colman a 'decent looking lad', sixteen years old and an assistant clerk to Mr.Thomas Moss, an Exeter linen draper, was charged with maliciously cutting and destroying the blanketing.  The case came before the Devon and Exeter Assizes of August, 1843.

This was a serious charge, because a particular statute, passed long before, I imagine to protect the nation's vital woollen trade, meant that, if convicted, Henry would be liable to be transported for life, or at least for not less than seven years or to serve a lengthy term of imprisonment.

The only witness against him was another boy,  Francis Braily, aged fifteen.  Who gave evidence thus:

"I am porter to Mr. Rudall, a carrier.  I was in company with the prisoner on the evening of the 17th of July, at a public house, in St, Thomas;  two other boys were in company. We left at twelve o' clock We went into the Rack Field, and sung for about half an hour.   Before we went away Henry Colman went up to the rack, took out his pen-knife, and cut one of the blankets right across. I called him a fool then, and he went to the next blanket, cut it across and cut a piece right out.  I went out of the field, wished him good night, and went home.

Cross-examined -  I told of it because it was not the right thing for the gentleman to have his property cut up.  I'll swear that that's the reason.  No one came to me....  I was took up to the Guildhall  - not by force.... I have been in prison - in the county - on suspicion of a waistcoat - of stealing it.  That was six months ago.  I was tried at the Sessions, and staid in prison a month after the trial.  I was in the service of Mr. Manley, the butcher, after that, I was not turned off for suspicion of stealing.  I was in Mr. Lendon, the cheesemonger's employ.  I was not turned off on a charge of robbing a little girl of three pence-ha'penny  - (laughter).... There was a charge of that kind.  I was turned off from Mr. Lendon on that charge....I am in no person's employ now.  I was in John Rudall's employ; I left about a month ago.  

At this point little Francis Braily was in tears but Judge and Jury found him hilarious and had clearly come to the conclusion that his evidence was worthless.   Henry, moreover, had people ready to give him a good character and so the judge, Tom Pooley's judge, John Taylor Coleridge, discharged  him with immediate effect.

Henry had been in prison for three weeks but no heed was given to that, nor to the fact that he had been three weeks on tenterhooks.

That these little lads were out drinking in a pub until midnight and then singing in a field for a half-hour before they went home gives a glimpse of teenage life in 1843.  Well, it was perhaps not all that unlike some Exeter College teenagers in 2024!

Source:  The Western Times,   6th August, 1843.

A CHIMNEY-SWEEPER, EXETER, 1843.

 "At the Castle,on Friday last, Mrs. Elliott, of Exminster, appeared on a summons, to answer the charge of having permitted a chimney sweeper, named Jarman, who was under he age of 21, to ascend the chimney of her house, and sweep it, contrary to the provisions of the chimney sweepers' act.

"Mrs. Elliott stated that she agreed with Abraham Jarman, brother of the one who ascended the chimney, to have it cleaned, but she didn't know of the younger one being sent up it.  The case against her was dismissed but Jarman was fined £5, or in default, to be imprisoned a month for having permitted his brother to go up the chimney."

The Chimney Sweepers Act had only come into force in 1840.  It was nationally being little regarded but Exeter was quick to see justice done.  Poor Mrs. Elliot only wanted her chimney cleaned but ended up in court.  

We don't learn whether Abraham Jarman paid his, significant, fine or went to gaol.  In any case he lived on in Exeter to witness a new era of chimney-sweeping and in 1849 he was a valued employee of the Vulcan Patent Sweeping Company,  93, North Street.  The Patent Vulcan Sweeping Machine ushered in a climbing-boy-free age.  I wonder if Exeter and Mr. H.W. Frampton, the inventor, can claim to have used the first such machine.  If so, they contributed as much as Lord Shaftesbury to saving young lives.

I don't know what happened to the little brother.  I hope not stuck up a chimney. 

Source: The Western Times,  3rd June 1843 and 12th October, 1850. 

A WATERCRESS MAN, EXETER, 1843.

 "Prior, a watercress man, was fined ten shillings, and in default of payment committed to the treadmill for a fortnight on the complaint of the Rev. Charles Rodwell Roper, for using indecent and obscene language.  

"A woman, who had refused to buy his cresses incited the wrath of defendent;  and he avenged himself by a torrent of excessively bad English.

"The reverend gentleman remonstrated with him; but reproof led to no reformation, and hence the result." 

I have not met a watercress man before in the golden realm of The Western Times but they would have been busy here with their baskets of cress in or around the Higher Market.  I imagine the cresses in Exeter would have been foraged, raked from local streams and ponds rather than farmed, although the Victorians did have watercress farms.

Two weeks imprisonment with hard labour seems a stiff sentence for effing and blinding, but then there was an Anglican parson involved and no doubt Prior was 'disrespectful'.  I smell something of what Tom Pooley would call Bible Tyranny in the case.

I have blogged the Tractarian, Reverend Rodwell Roper before.  He was the Rector of Saint Olave's who made Mr Ferris take off his hat in the vestry.  https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3897615916165646799/3234197303490926862 (THE CLERICAL COMMAND).

20th May, 1843

DANNY'S BOY, EXETER, 1843.

 "A bill-sticker named Thos. Dadds, summoned Mr. H. O'Connell, soi disant son of the great agitator, for the non-payment of 10s. due to him for the exercise of his profession.

"Mr O'Connell, in Sept., 1841. had bills posted about the city, stating that he would deliver a lecture on the Drama, the Immortality of the Soul, and the State of the Country, all on the same evening!  and the price of admission was two shillings only! 

"Those, however, who put their trust in these posters were doomed to be disappointed.  Mr O'Connell did not appear on the evening fixed; and so the minds of the liberal and discerning public were left unenlightened on these important subjects, and Thomas Dadds, the bill-sticker, was not remunerated for fixing in conspicuous situations the aforesaid delusive placards.   Mr. O'Connell not appearing before the Bench, the case was deferred to Monday."

"MONDAY, -  Mr. H O'Connell now appeared to answer the complaint of the bill-sticker, and said that as he was under age when this debt was incurred, he was not answerable for it.  The bill-sticker must therefore apply to his father, the great liberator.

"He, however, was willing to pay 5s.  He was now about to deliver a lecture on Astronomy (at which he would be happy to see their worships).  He intended to pay the expenses this time, and he thanked God he had the means to do so.

"After some chaffering, this was agreed by Dadds, who stipulated, however that he should have (as we understand) a few dozen of his admission tickets over and above the 5s."

This is fun, because this young man is assuredly Henry Simpson O'Connell the soi disant, as The Times elegantly puts it, son of Daniel O'Connell,  the  great and famous Liberator of Ireland, by Ellen Courtenay, a clever lass from Cork, who claimed to have been raped and thereby inseminated of Henry by the fragrant, 40 year old, family-man and liberator, Daniel, in Dublin when she was only 15.  She, like Henry, subsequently, survived as an itinerant lecturer as well as being an actress, a writer and a poet.  Daniel denied fatherhood of Henry but the boy's physical appearance was said to have given the lie to The Great Liberator.

If, as seems probable, Henry was living in Exeter between 1841 and 1843 we would perhaps not have suspected it, were it not for Mr. Dadds the unpaid bill-sticker. 

A writer, Trina Wills, in 2022, supplied a truly fascinating paper, on-line, about Ellen Courtenay, (https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/item/94z00/the-voices-of-ellen-courtenay-the-life-and-work-of-ellen-courtenay-as-helen-steinberg-poet-actress-appeal-memoirist-and-lecturer) who Ms. Wills discovered, did not, as the world imagined, die in 1836 but who secretly transmogrified to one 'Helene Steinberg' (with the accents!) and lived until 1864. 

Source: The Western Times, 20th May, 1843.  

THE CORDWAINER AND THE RECTOR, EXETER, 1843.

 The Western Times, as here of 11th February, 1843, in its sceptical coverage of all religion, took a mischievous delight in reporting the advance of Puseyism and the local reaction to it: 

 "PUSEYISM is going a head in Exeter.  At St. Olave's church, the rector preaches in a white surplice, to the great horror of the old inhabitants:  a couple of parsons go to the communion table - 'the altar' they will have it, one turns his back to the people in reading certain portions - and the clerk Colman has been deposed from the duty of giving out the venerable Sternhold, by the ruthless hand of the rector.

"Clerk Coleman is a cordwainer by trade, and the sensible people in the parish do say, that all the rector hath done by this new move of deposing the clerk from the discharge of of one of his most important functions - is to break the heart of a most worthy shoemaker, and prove him but an indifferent 'psalm-smiter.'

"The rector may see the last of the shoemaker, but we doubt whether the public will see the last of his folly just yet if he go on as he hath begun."

It seems amazing these days that good church-going citizens in 1843 were bothered by a white surplice and by 'you say communion table but I say the altar' but there you are now!

I read the ambiguous second paragraph as meaning that the Puseyite rector of St. Olave's has  dispensed with 'Sternhold' altogether.  Sternhold being the Anglican Church's metrical psalmbook dating from the time of wicked Henry Vlll. 

Need I say it?   The rector may see the last of the shoemaker is an outrageous pun and the hath and the cordwainer are consciously archaic.

In our local parish registers for the eighteenth and early nineteenth century cordwainer is the word mostly used, shoemaker hardly at all.  The etymology, a worker in cordovan leather, is fun! 

Going a head  meaning, as here, to prosper is another Americanism that may well have travelled from Devonshire.  It is subtly different from going ahead and I would bet my boots this is not just a typographical error.

TEN OR TWELVE PAUPERS BREAKING STONES, EXETER, 1843.

 On 28th January, 1843, this letter from 'A SUBSCRIBER' was published in The Western Times:

"Sir, 

Some gentlemen of Exeter, styling themselves Commissioners of Improvement, have for months allowed a most abominable nuisance in the shape of a depot for stone for the road to be brought into upper Paul-street; and as myself and my family are daily and hourly annoyed by the incessant hammering of 10 or 12 paupers in breaking these stones, I should wish to know for what length of time, the Commissioners alluded to, intend to further trespass on our patience and forbearance.  A spot of ground so valuable ought surely not to be appropriated to such an illegitimate purpose and one so disgraceful to the city.

"If a spot for stone-breaking be necessary, let the Commissioners go on Northernhay, where they would annoy no one and at the same time show a little feeling for their neighbours and payers of the improvement rate."

I have been weighing in my mind whether I would rather have ten or twelve paupers breaking stones outside my city residence or ten or twelve homeless hanging thereabout swigging from bottles and rolling  cigarettes.  It seems to me the stone-breaking paupers then were perhaps of  some use to the city in a way the  homeless now are not. 

Noise pollution in the city, like city-centre residents' concerns generally. gets little consideration I think.  There is a lot of unnecessary noise that I could catalogue.  For example there is a new breed of ghetto-blaster that can produce as much volume as a symphony orchestra playing Brueckner,  there are the Exeter College, juvenile motor-cyclists with defective silencers to their machines, there are car-radios blasting the peace of a car-windows-open,summer's day,,  there is the depressing rattle and roar when the bottle-bins are emptied; there are, of course, for ever,  the road-works to be done and, not least, there is Exeter's speciality, the rowdy  drunken crowds and individuals' 'acting out' in the city streets every evening, mornings too,  shouting and screaming and altogether unchecked. and unchallenged. 

And we are promised a Winter Wonderland coming to provide an abominable nuisance for any one who lives, moves and pays council tax within half-a-mile of Northernhay Gardens about which one might borrow from SUBSCRIBER the comment: a spot of ground so valuable ought surely not to be appropriated to such an illegitimate purpose and one so discreditable to the city.

I much enjoyed the subjunctive in the SUBSCRIBER'S last paragraph.

 

A LAMP LIGHTER, EXETER, 1842..

 "Two youngsters were charged by Mr. Waterman, a respectable lamp-lighter, with causing him divers annoyances whilst he was out in pursuit of his nightly business.

"Their names were Cumins and Thorn - the former was considerably the biggest of the two, but the latter was more perverse.

"They are apprentices to a turner in the Island, and were in the habit of pelting the plaintiff.

"Cumins received an excellent character from his master,  who believed he had been led away by the youngster, whom he charged with being a very bad boy.

"The evidence did not bring the case home to the boys, who were dismissed - the Bench sharply rebuking Thorn, and advising his master to bring him up when he misbehaved"

We are not told how old they were, these little apprentice lads, larking in the dark on a winter's evening.  Mr. Waterman the lamplighter was fair game in the deserted(?) streets as he went around with his pole, half an hour after sunset but what did they pelt him with?  Their master, a turner on Exe Island, then Exeter's industrial hub, had taken a very bad boy in Thorn but a good one in Cumin.

Is biggest for bigger a slip or is it, in 1842, acceptable usage?,   

A YOUNG HEBREW, EXETER, 1842

From the same column that I quoted from the day before yesterday in The Western Times of 26th November, 1842, we learn that the Mayor of that year, Samuel Kingdon, began his career as Chief Magistrate at Exeter Guildhall by summoning drapiers of the Hebrew Persuasion for hanging out their clothes in front of the line of their walls and windows.  Rumour had it that there was one such business opposite Sam Kingdon's house and it irked him..   

In any case he rounded up four of the Hebrew persuasion and fined them five shillings each for this misdemeanour.  They were none of them too browbeaten by their day in court and, as so often in Exeter Guildhall, one has the impression that there was a certain levity about the proceedings, or maybe that is only 'the way The Times tells them'.

One of them, a Mr. Marks, looked around the Court and delivered the commendable sentence: I am a free-born Englishman as much as any gentleman here.  (A sentiment I have yet to hear from any of the many Islamists that share our small island.) 

But my favourite was young Mr. Mordecai Hart, who, it seems, preferred to be called Mark, who clearly was as sharp as a needle:  

MARK HART was the next Hebrew summoned; but it appeared that they had given him the wrong name - Mordecai and not Mark was he called by.  He was summoned for hanging out his clothes.  Mr Mordecai was very fiery and peppery - he declared that when the officer came he had his clothes all in - he had a pretty sharp eye of his own - in fact a Jew's eye - and he could see the officer.  

"LASCELLES, the active officer, who has a decent orb of his own, averred that the offence was actually seen, whereupon Mr. Hart asked how he was to get his living if he could not expose his goods.

"THE MAYOR could not see what difference it would make if they were all put upon the same footing.

"MR HART - I've seen Mr. Kingdon's key hanged out - I shall have a summons for him - (laughter)

MR. SAM. KINGDON. - I have no objection—you are little sharp —how come you keep two shops ? 

MR. HART—Because one won't answer. 

"MR. HART -  KINGDON - You are very sharp—l could say a sharp thing upon you. 

"Mr. HART—Very well, sir—l should have some answer for it. 

"Mr. SAM. KINGDON would not take up the challenge to this keen encounter of wits, and so the public are not able to decide which is sharper. 

"His withdrawal from the combat appeared to excite the young Hebrew to deeds of daring.  He waxed warm, took off his coat, and we feared that he was about to prove his English descent and challenge to the collective Bench to step out and let him maintain the reputation of tbe Hebrew school after the fashion of Mendoza,  Aby Belasco, and Dutch Sam.

"After flourishing the garment to and fro he tendered it to the Bench,  saying, 'you had better take my coat next.'

" THE MAYOR—l cannot hear any indecent language— you are fined five shillings. 

"He offered his coat in payment, but there was not a Magistrate on the bench that could by any means get into it—and if it had fitted any one they could not have permitted so gross a breach of the truck laws as to have received it.  Defendant was first inclined to resist the law even to imprisonment, but eventually put on his coat and paid the fine."

To be worth a Jew's eye, was apparently a common idiom meaning that something was worth a great price.

Daniel Mendoza, Aby Belasco and Dutch Sam were all champion boxers of the Regency years.  They were all Jewish.  Dutch Sam was known as The Terrible Jew.   Here they are being remembered long after their pugilistic careers. 

Incidentally, the only man who managed ever to beat Dutch Sam was Bill Nosworthy, an Exeter baker,  who met Dutch Sam before a record crowd at Mousley Hurst, on Tuesday 8th December 1814 - I quote from For Love of Williamina,  Agre Books, 2001: 'Before the fight Dutch Sam was reported as saying to Nosworthy: 'So help me Cot!  Bill.  I will not only fight you first but I will afterwards take you home and nurse you like one of my  own children!'  So, it would seem the 'staredown' is no new phenomenon.  Bill Nosworthy died in Lympstone in 1816.

I can't work out what is meant by truck law but it sounds like something Keir Starmer should have observed.