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Kaye McGann
Features Writer
12:29 PM 12th March 2021
fiction

Grandad’s Mother

 
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If you’re expecting to be amused, you’ll be disappointed, as this account is anything but. So as they say on television, ‘Look away now.’

Manchester's Royal Exchange building
Manchester's Royal Exchange building
To understand Grandad, and the person he became, you need to know about his background. Take his father’s side of the family, the Lords. They were in cotton. I don’t know much about Grandad’s Grandad, not even his name. He was what was known as a ‘Manchester Man’ a mill owner on the Manchester Cotton Exchange. He and his extensive family – he brought up seven of his own, and six of his late brother’s children – lived in a large house in Heywood, a small town between Bury and Rochdale. As grandad said, “There were bells in every room.” He told Grandad that he remembered Napoleon escaping from the island of Elba in 1815 when he was a child. Napoleon had been imprisoned there since the previous year. ‘Th’owd Lord of all’, as Grandad’s Grandad was known, said, “There were panic on’t streets,” which seems a bit extreme, even for Heywood! Th’owd Lord’s son, Joseph was a drunk, and alcoholic, who squandered everything. This was Grandad’s father.

Grandad's Grandad remembered Napoleon escaping from the island of Elba
Grandad's Grandad remembered Napoleon escaping from the island of Elba
Grandad’s mother was an orphan, the child of Irish parents who’d left their home and all their possessions because of the potato famine. They managed to get to England, and promptly died. Their two young children, Francis and Margaret, grew up in the Workhouse.

At eight years old, Margaret was given away to a farmer as an unpaid servant – in other words a slave. She was treated worse than the dogs, and was always hungry. Every day she had to carry the milk to the village. One day, she tripped and dropped it. The farmer, coming along behind her, saw this, and began to whip her. At that moment, a gentleman riding past saw what was happening, dismounted, and knocked the farmer down. He picked up the little girl, put her on his horse, and took her back to his home and wife at Rishton. They were childless, and loved Margaret as their own. Thus could children be treated as commodities at the time, and Margaret was fortunate that she had found a loving, comfortable home, after the horrors she’d endured. Grandad always referred to Margaret’s foster father as Uncle Ted, but I’ve forgotten his wife’s name.

A rather gentrified workhouse - this one is at Ripon
A rather gentrified workhouse - this one is at Ripon
When she was seventeen, Margaret accompanied her foster-father to Burnley, and was waiting in the inn yard whilst he sorted out the stabling, when she became aware of a young man staring at her. He was almost a mirror image of herself.

“Margaret?” he asked tentatively.

“Francis? Is it really you?” she cried.

Yes, it was her brother, not seen nor heard from since she was six, and she’s been sent out from the Workhouse. Francis was now a fine big young man, a coachman with livery. It was only by chance they’d broken their journey at Burnley: fate indeed.

It was not long after this that Margaret caught the eye of Joseph Lord, who set out to woo her. They made a good-looking pair, and by the standards of the day it was a dream match for Margaret, an orphan with nothing, to marry into a moneyed family.

But Joseph had started down his path to ruin. Every penny he earned went on drink. They had to keep moving house, to a smaller one each time, as each one they lived in became too expensive for their dwindling resources. Joseph’s father stopped giving him money, in the hope Joseph would shoulder his responsibilities. It didn’t happen.

It was the era of large families. Some children in each family were not expected to live. It was not uncommon for a mother, asked how many children she had, to say, ”Had ten, buried three.” Just look round any Victorian graveyard, read the gravestones, and you’ll see this for yourself. Margaret had five – Emma, George, Johnnie (Grandad), Ratcliffe, and Jane. By the time Jane was born, all seven were living in a two-roomed house in the Leavengeave area of Whitworth ( between Rochdale and Bacup).

The great upheaval in the family’s lives happened when Jane was five weeks old. It was pay day, and instead of coming home with his wages, Joseph had gone straight to the inn. There was no money in the house, and no food. The children were crying with hunger, and Margaret knew her husband would not come home until every last penny had gone.

So she did the only thing she could think of. She went out to the yard where Joseph kept his racing pigeons, took two out of the pigeon loft, wrung their necks, cooked them over the fire, and fed the children.

When Joseph eventually reeled home, and found what Margaret had done, he took off his thick, studded leather belt, and beat her mercilessly, and locked her in the cellar with the baby. Then he stacked as much of their belongings as he could onto his handcart, and went off. He was never seen nor heard from again.

Margaret, rescued by a neighbour Emma had fetched, was facing utter destitution. She was determined, though, that neither she, nor any of her children would ever go in the Workhouse. First, she went to Joseph’s father, who gave her a bit of money, ‘to tide her over’, whilst making it clear that was it, and he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – subsidise the family. He considered his son ‘had married beneath him’, and now there were all these black-haired, blue-eyed Irish-looking children.

Margaret was resourceful, as we have seen. She knew her options were limited, with such a young baby, so she made the heart-breaking decision to let Jane go to be fostered by a good family, hoping to get her back as soon as she was able. (By the time this happened, Jane knew only her foster parents, and refused to leave them). I don’t know their surname, but strangely know they lived in Grimshaw Street, Darwen.

After that, Margaret got a job at the local cotton mill. She was a quick learner, and soon became one of their best weavers. She was determined to earn enough herself to keep her other four children fed and safe, which she did. But they were dirt-poor, the poorest in the neighbourhood. A woman’s wage was a small fraction of a man’s, for doing the same job, and not intended to be sufficient to keep a family. They moved again, still in Leavengreave, to the cheapest place there was, a back-to-back on Spring Gardens.

Few people today know what a back-to-back was. It wasn’t terraced houses with another row behind, as in Coronation Street. It was rows of tiny houses, where the back inside wall of one was the back inside wall of another. Usually there was one small room downstairs, and one above. In Spring Gardens, there was no running water, and the well at the end of the street, filled with water from a spring, served all the houses. At the end of each row was a communal privy, a ‘tub’ lavatory, which the council took to be emptied each week, leaving a clean one for the next week. (Even as late as 1962, when I was eighteen, I had a friend who lived in a house like that, at Smallbridge in Rochdale, but they are long gone now, thank goodness.)

Margaret made the boys’ trousers out of old sugar bags, and Grandad told me how he felt the humiliation of having Tate and Lyle stamped on his bottom. He and his brothers would go early to Sunday morning chapel, so they could be sitting down before anyone else arrived, and thus hide their shame. They couldn’t afford clogs, but went barefoot in summer, with sacking round their feet in winter. Perhaps the strange thing is how happy they were. The children were devoted to their mother. They always had the best food she could afford, even if they went short of other things. She had known hunger herself when she was a child, and now she often didn’t eat, to make sure there was enough for all her family. Sometimes she would collapse unconscious through hunger. Fortunately, the loom overlooker knew he had a good weaver, so he kept her job for her.

Margaret was at the mill one cold winter’s day when she got an urgent summons. The children of the neighbourhood had been playing in the snow, and a snowball had hit Ratcliffe in the face. There had been a stone in the snowball, and it had knocked his eye out.

Margaret wrapped her shawl round her, put the injured nine-year-old child on her back, and set off to walk the five miles through the snow to Rochdale Infirmary – where she was told there was nothing to be done, other than to clean out the socket. She put Ratcliffe on her back again, and trudged home, whereupon she collapsed. She was ill for over a week. Emma took care of the younger children, and the neighbours, poor themselves, saw that the family didn’t starve.

When Grandad was eight, he started work in the cotton mill. The Education Act of 1870, two years before his birth, stipulated that all children should receive a state-funded education from age five to thirteen. Prior to that, Sunday Schools had usually taught children to read and write, so as to be able to read the Bible. Grandad, like most children in the northern mill towns, was a ‘half-timer’. This meant he had school for half a day, either morning or afternoon, and worked in the mill the other half a day. Meanwhile, other children were at work when he was in school, and in school when he was at work, which meant that only one teacher was required for double the number of children who could reasonably be accommodated in school at any one time. There were never fewer than forty in a class at any one time, and sixty was not uncommon.

Although the leaving age was thirteen, children who passed their ‘standards’ could leave once they’d reached the specified level, which was pitifully low. To pass a ‘standard’, pupils had to be able to read, write, and do Arithmetic. A lot of the preparation for the inspectors’ visits to assess ‘Standards’ involved learning by rote, and one of the tests was to recite what they’d learned. Into his nineties, Grandad could still remember some of the things from that time. This is an example he liked to quote:
‘Solomon Slow was the son of a wise gentleman. He lived on the borders of a very wide forest. His mother called him Solomon, because, she said, “He is a wise child, slow but sure, and sure to do well.” “Ah”, said his father, “but he is TOO slow, and unless he becomes a little more quick, and a little less lazy, I shall never make a man of him.”

Grandad couldn’t pass his ‘standards.’ He could remember everything, and was obviously intelligent, but when he tried to read and write, all the letters were muddled. Today he would be diagnosed with dyslexia, but no-one knew the term then. So Grandad was at school, half-time, until he was thirteen, whilst his siblings were able to leave at ten.

(Grandad couldn’t get his head round me being at school until I was eighteen. He’d say, “Aren’t you learnt up yet?” and shake his head.)

At the mill, the children began by crawling under the looms, collecting the cotton waste for re-use. There were many injuries, and some deaths. Their overlooker used to wait at the mill-gate, and the first child in got a clout round the head, and the last one a kick up the backside with his iron-shod clog. The boys would bunch round Billy, who’d been born with a humped back, to protect their frail friend from these assaults. Grandad’s mother lived in fear of her children suffering injury, but all were ‘savvy’, and escaped without hurt. The only actual illness any of them suffered was when Grandad contracted typhoid. The River Spodden had flooded, and people’s poultry (many had hen-pens) were being carried away, and Grandad, aged ten, plunged into the foul waters, among the mill’s effluent, to rescue as many as he could. Other than that, the family thrived.

The children adored their mother: her fortitude, bravery, and loving kindness. Their favourite song was a music-hall one,
‘There’s no-one like Mother to me,
No matter how poor she may be.
I’ll go back to my home o’er the sea,
For there’s no-one like Mother to me.’

All the children grew up strong and independent – and not afraid to speak out. I’ll tell you about some of their exploits another time. All were good-looking. But still, it is surprising that Grandad, one of the poorest in the village, married the granddaughter of the man who owned most of the valley, its quarries and drift-mines. If ever he was asked how he’d managed to charm her, he’d say, “Look at these legs! You don’t see legs like this every day!” I think, though, it was his black hair and blue eyes.

All these episodes are as Grandad told them to me, so far as I can remember.
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