Easter Memories from Tunbridge Wells

Last week we spent a sunny Easter Sunday at home.  We ate roast lamb in the garden, we had an Easter egg hunt, we went for a walk.  As always happens on such occasions my thoughts wandered back to my own childhood and the memories of Easter days gone by filled my head.  So this week, rather than delving into the world of Charles Dickens, I thought I would be more self indulgent and share my memories with you.

As we came downstairs to breakfast the table would be groaning under an impossible weight of chocolate eggs.  It makes me positively ill now to think about how much there was.  There were luridly wrapped eggs from Cadbury’s containing buttons, and there were beautifully crafted chocolate animals wrapped in transparent cellophane.  The sound of that cellophane rustle was like no other, and comes clearly to me now, all these years on.

Breakfast itself was made up of ham, toast and boiled eggs but before we could eat the latter we would decorate them.  Each of us had a tea towel so as not to burn our fingers and then as soon as the eggs were out of the boiling water we would scrawl patterns on with felt-tipped pens.  Some of us decorated them in the style of a wrapped Easter egg with colourful chevrons, circles and stripes, others created faces representing those who sat around the table (dad with his big red beard was easy!), others drew countryside scenes with trees, fences and soaring birds in the sky.  My brother Ian was always the most artistic (he would go on to study photography at the Medway College of Art and Design).

Either mum must have had a brilliant sixth sense about the cooking of eggs, or we drew very quickly, because by the time we had finished our masterpieces and had proudly shown them to the rest of the family amid guffaws of laughter, the yolks inside were never over done and oozed glutinously to obscure our artwork forever.

After breakfast (and I imagine we were allowed to make a start on the chocolate, even at such an early hour), we would set to carefully decorating more eggs, this time hard boiled, ready for the next part of our day – the pace-egging ceremony staged in the Calverley Grounds.

Tunbridge Wells is an interesting town whose fluctuating historical fortunes are displayed in a geographical timeline.  The first iteration of a settlement came in 1606 when Dudley Lord North, a dashing young nobleman from the court of King James 1, stumbled over a natural spring which stained the soil around it red.  With a knowledge of the sciences Dudley recognised this as an iron-rich spring and having taken a long draft of the cool water realised that this would be a perfect spot for the London gentry to spend their summers.

Over the next hundred years or so the wells near Tonbridge grew in popularity and a town grew up that rivalled Bath in its respectability.  However when the Prince Regent built his magnificent Pavilion in Brighton the nobility decided that sea bathing was much more efficacious and the little spring at the bottom of the hill fell into obscurity.

The village of Tunbridge Wells bumbled on until a dashing high flying- architect decided to reinvigorate it. Decimus Burton had already made his name by re-designing the great London Parks as well as creating The Marble Arch which would eventually form an impressive gateway to Buckingham Palace.  His plan for Tunbridge Wells was to ignore the original settlement in the valley but to build a brand new town at the top of the hill with large villas, elegant town houses, impressive crescents and a beautiful park.  The whole development was called the Calverley Project and the park became The Calverley Grounds.

 

Making use of the hillside the pleasure grounds boasted formal gardens at the top and a bandstand in the bottom of the natural amphitheatre.  Generations of respectable folk strolled in the gardens and sat in deck chairs on a Summer Sunday listening to brass bands playing.

The Calverley Grounds also were a perfect setting for the annual Pace Egging ceremony which was organised by the local morris dancing side, The Royal Borough Morris, which soon became part of our Easter tradition.  The crowds would start to gather around the bandstand at around 10am, and soon after the first dances would begin.  White hankies were waved and rustic sticks cracked together showering the audience with splinters.  A terrifying hobbyhorse made out of a genuine painted horse skull crept up behind unsuspecting watchers and snapped its jaws shut with a loud ‘CLACK’ eliciting screams and laughter.

When the first set of dances were complete the egg games would begin.  Firstly any children with a decorated egg would be invited forward and the individual judged as the best would be declared the winner and awarded a chocolate egg (more chocolate!).  I was fortunate to win on one occasion and the victory pose was recorded on film:

 

After the eggs had been judged it was time for the main event, the egg rolling competition.

Egg rolling has its routes in a pagan ceremony welcoming the spring and celebrating re-birth but the tradition had also been adopted by the Christian faith to represent the rolling away of the stone from Jesus Christ’s tomb on the day of his resurrection

Such historical detail meant nothing to the children in the Calverley Grounds as all of the participants climbed to the top of the hill, stood behind a rope and on the shouted command ‘GO’ rolled the eggs.  It may sound simple but there was quite an art to the egg rolling.  The prize went to the egg which went furthest so the sensible thing to do was to throw it as hard as possible, but the rules specified that the egg had to be largely unbroken, so a gentle roll was maybe the way to go.  The winner was somebody who could balance these two techniques, who could send the egg skimming over the grass in a  sort of Barnes Wallace bouncing bomb style.

As soon as the eggs had been rolled or thrown we all rushed down the hill trampling our rivals’ efforts on the way.  With my grown up head on now I cannot imagine how difficult the task of cleaning up after the event would have been, or how detestable the sulphurous odour of rotten eggs must have been in the weeks following.

Once the winner had been announced and they had been awarded with, guess what, a chocolate egg, so the Mummers play would be performed in front of the bandstand.  We loved the stock characters of good St George, the doctor and the evil Turk.  When George was slain the doctor would try to revive him by pouring an elixir (ale)  into his throat via a large funnel and length of rubber tubing.  When this treatment proved unsuccessful the doctor decreed that the only cure possible was the kiss from a princess and he would run into the crowd and pull out some young beauty who would be encouraged to place a kiss on the lips of the patient.  Naturally George would wake and all of the other characters would fall flat on their backs, necessitating a kiss for each from the poor girl.  It never changed and we loved it.

After some more dancing we drifted home and got ready for our Easter lunch of roast lamb and all the trimmings.

I remember that one year my eldest sister Liz indulged me by agreeing to perform a special morris dance for the rest of the family.  Unfortunately all of the chocolate that I had consumed during the morning was having a most unfortunate effect on my tummy and instead of the traditional accordion and fiddle accompaniment I seemed to have provided an entire flatulent brass section complete with rather unpleasant odours to boot.  When Liz complained I reassured her: ‘don’t worry, it only happens when I’ve eaten chocolate and when I jump up and down!’  Morris dancing on Easter Sunday wasn’t the perfect time to test this theory….

Sadly it seems now that The Calverley Grounds is to be redeveloped once more.  The beautiful slopes down which we rolled eggs, the bandstand around which we gathered, the Victorian pavilion that served teas are all due to be flattened to make way for a brand new council office block.  Of course progress is inevitable and I am sure that Decimus Burton’s Calverley Project plans met with an outcry too, but this will be a tragic loss to the town which I will always regard as home.

In the afternoon came the Easter egg hunt.  Whilst we made inroads into yet more chocolate the curtains would be closed and Dad went into the garden to hide hundreds of mini eggs.  He loved it when Easter fell later in the spring because there were lots of flowers in bloom within which he could cunningly disguise the prizes.  There were standard places that we knew and would instantly head for: the bumper of the car and the plastic handle of the wheelbarrow.  A curled piece of hosepipe was perfect as was a little stack of terra cotta flowerpots.  But each year there would be new hiding places and fifty-odd years on I now realise how seemingly lazily untidied rubbish had in fact been carefully laid in place weeks before in readiness for the great day.

When the hiding was complete we would be led to the back door clasping bowls and with our eyes closed (maybe even blindfolded) until the starting order was given and there was a rush to pick up the first egg.

My sister Nicky always won.  Always.  Every Year.  If we were to hold a family Easter reunion and stage another egg hunt I am sure that she would still win.  How did Nicky do it?  Well quite simply she was more focussed, more competitive, more stealthy than the rest of us.  There was never any hint of cheating, or barging her competitors out of the way as they headed for an egg.  Nope, she was just brilliant at finding tiny foil-wrapped eggs.  And playing card games.  And board games.  The same qualities and her attention to detail have turned her into an astounding businesswoman who has created the most amazing bar and restaurant in Ireland.

In preparing this piece Nicky kindly sent me pictures from her photo album, the above one captioned ‘Me winning Easter egg hunt’ was sent four times just to make sure I had it.  That competitive drive still runs deep!

And so our Easter day drifted from afternoon into evening and I cant recall any specific details of that time but I am sure that it involved yet more consumption of chocolate, if there were any left.

On the Easter Monday we would pack a huge picnic (mum’s picnics were extraordinary creations!) into our mustard yellow Hillman Hunter estate, or later into our midnight blue Chrysler Alpine, or later still into our gold Vauxhall and head off to the local point-to-point races, where we would park right next to one of the jumps and watch as powerful horses with brightly attired jockeys on their backs thundered past throwing great clods of earth into the air.

The state of the weather was immaterial and if the wind blew and the rain lashed down dad simply rigged up some old sheets of tarpaulin on some cut tree branches (tied with knots perfected during his days in the Royal Navy), onto our car thereby fashioning a shelter for our feast.

 

When the racing started we would study the listings for each event and chose our favourites to cheer on based purely on a name we liked.  We were even occasionally allowed to place a 50p bet with one of the bookies who stood in front of their little stalls waving their arms about using the traditional tic-tac sign language to communicate.

The race was held on farmland and the toilet facilities were basic in the extreme meaning that many people preferred to use a nearby Bluebell wood for quick relief.  One year a member of our party attending the races for the first time decided that she would do the same and disappeared among the trees, only to hear an indignant voice barking at her in the tones of a retired military officer ‘Excuse ME!  Don’t you know, this is the GENTLEMAN’S wood?!’

Such happy memories from more innocent times.

 

Thanks to Ian and Nicky for the  pictures and in loving memory of Dad, Mum and Liz

 

 

 

 

 

It Was the Best of Times…Losing Heads and Hearts

Last week the eyes of the world were focussed on Paris, and many feared that they were watching the death of an 800-year old (or 859 year-old from the pedants and 1,000 year old from the sensationalists) cathedral. There was a feeling of desperation on Monday night as the spire and roof collapsed and a sense of euphoria on Tuesday morning when the main structure, including the great bell towers, was seen to be still standing.

 
Instantly social media went into overdrive with pictures of a single golden crucifix among the charred remains being posted as proof of divine intervention or socialist horror being expressed at the amount of money instantly pledged by major corporations as poverty continues to wrack our societies.

 
In many ways it was a news story of our time played out in less than twenty four hours on our phones, tablets and computers. Beginning, middle and end: move on.

 
In the world of Dickens thoughts turned to another great Parisian fire which raged in 1789 at the heart of the Bastille and which would bring inspiration to Charles in 1859 for a new novel: A Tale of Two Cities.

 
But exactly what was it that created the world of Lucy and Doctor Manette, the Defarges, Charles Darnay and Sidney Carton? What led Dickens to dip his pen into the ink and scrawl: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…..’?

 
Well, as was the case with the various Miss Havishams that I spoke of a few weeks ago, the truth lies not in a single source but in many, the most famous of which is Thomas Carlyle’s ‘The French Revolution. A History.’ written in 1837.

 
Carlyle inherited the work from his friend John Stuart Mill who had been commissioned to create a history of the Revolution but had been unable to meet his commitments. Mill suggested that Carlyle may be the man for the project and handed all of his research over. The Scotsman took to the project enthusiastically and worked for over three years until his masterpiece was completed. The style of the book was far from the staid, factual, dusty fare usually offered up by historians, Carlye often used a first person perspective thereby putting himself and the reader in the very heart of the action and creating a real sense of danger and drama. It was this style that Dickens loved and he carried a copy of ‘Mr Carlyle’s wonderful book’ with him as he worked on A Tale of Two Cities.

 
As well as dedicating A Tale of two Cities to Thomas Carlyle and praising him in the preface Dickens also paid tribute to the work by holding it when he sat for the photographs in the garden at Gad’s Hill Place. Dickens would have chosen the pose and the prop with great deliberation so this was a major honour for Thomas Carlyle.

 
But Dickens was not only influenced by Carlyle’s work for there were other works that dealt with the same subject and the similarity of A Tale of Two Cities to one of them almost landed Dickens in court.

 
Through the 1850s Dickens had delighted in staging ‘Amateur Theatricals’ alongside his friends from the world of the arts. He formed the ‘Guild for Literature and Arts’ which was ostensibly an organisation to raise money for the impoverished families of writers. However the group really existed to satiate Charles’ need for the stage and he took little notice when the family of deceased actor Douglas Jerold pleaded with him that they really were NOT impoverished and would rather that a their perceived plight was not broadcast to the world.

 
One of the leading lights of the Guild was Wilkie Collins and it was he who created the script for ‘The Frozen Deep’ a drama that told the story of a doomed polar expedition and was based on that of John Franklin who had gone in search of the North West Passage in 1845, all the members of which perished.

 
In reality it was reported that the last survivors of the team resorted to cannibalism in their efforts to survive, but in Collins’ script the final scenes were much more uplifting – more British, indeed!

 
Dickens played the lead role of Richard Wardour and as he lay in the arms of his beloved Clara and with his last breaths delivered a moving soliloquy explaining how he was sacrificing himself to save the other members of the expedition, he must have realised what a powerful plot device this was – in the moment of death his thoughts were on those who would be spared. ‘It is a far far better thing I do….’

Following a particularly successful performance of The Frozen Deep the entire ensemble decamped to Brighton for fun and frolics.  Whilst in Sussex the group were entertained by the actor Benjamin Webster as he read them the script of a play in which he been appearing in London.  The play was called ‘The Dead Heart’ and had been written in 1857 by Watts Phillips.  The plot of the play certainly has a familiar ring to it being set in the heart of the French Revolution and culminating in the hero changing places with a condemned man as he prepares to mount the scaffold to meet Madame Guillotine.

The play was staged in London 10 days before the final episode of A Tale of Two Cities was published and suddenly the city was awash with scandal – Dickens supporters swore that Webster had changed the ending of The Dead Heart to ‘scoop’ Dickens’ own denoument, whereas those who were in the Phillips camp were outraged that the great author should have stolen such a moving plot.

Watts Phillips’ sister went to her grave convinced that A Tale of Two Cities actually represented the brilliance of her brother.

The final gap in the jigsaw is filled by an Edward Buller Lytton shaped piece, more specifically his 1842 novel Zanoni. Bulwer Lytton and Dickens were close friends and indeed the Guild of Literature and Art used Lytton’s home Knebworth House to stage some of their ‘fundraising’ events.  A few years later it was Lytton who would convince Dickens to change the end of Great Expectations, feeling that the original was too downbeat (the replacement isn’t a bundle of laughs it must be said).  It was clear then that the two men were familiar with each other’s work.

In Zanoni the titular character is immortal but can only retain that happy state if he does NOT fall in love with a mortal.  Guess what?  A young opera singer called Viola (daughter to a violinist who presumably had hoped that she would follow his own musical path) comes onto the scene and of course Zanoni loses his immortal heart to her.  Despite warnings from his master, Zanoni marries Viola and they conceive a baby which spells the end for him.  Sure enough Zanoni loses not only his heart but his head too for his days on earth end in 1789…in Paris….beneath the guillotine.

A Tale of Two Cities certainly uses elements of all of these works but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts for it is the Dickens work that has survived the test of time and  remains a much loved volume on many a book shelf, whilst the others have faded into relative obscurity.

 

From the Rev Awdry to Capt Rich RE in a Week

Two weeks ago we went to our local ‘Day out with Thomas’ day at the Didcot Railway centre, our local preserved historic railway.  It was a fun day with everything you’d expect from such an event, with a jolly Sir Topham Hat (aka The Fat Controller in less PC days) taking control of proceedings whilst his assistants Rusty and Dusty performed a series of slapstick comedy routines which also involved the might of a GWR diesel train shuffling up and down a short length of track.  Thomas himself was smilingly giving rides on another stretch of line.

Along the platform were bookshops selling volumes that only the most committed of railway enthusiasts would understand, there were engine sheds in which one could gaze up in awe at the majestic pieces of engineering that are steam locomotives and there was a museum that displayed signalling equipment from the nearby town of Swindon.

As I walked in the door to view ‘The Swindon Panel’ exhibit I was faced with something that immediately resonated, for on a shelf I saw: ‘a telegraphic instrument with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of which he had spoken.’ These words of course come from The Signalman which is a major part of my repertoire.

I have often wondered what the inside of the signalman’s box would be like and how the solitary man went about his duties through the long hours of his shifts.  He talks about there being little manual labour, and of the bell which sends and receives messages from the nearest station and which is his constant companion as well as his tormentor when it is supernaturally rung by the malevolent spirit that haunts the line.

I studied the equipment on display and was delighted to discover that it was actually wired up and when the little handle was pushed a bell on the other side of the museum rang.  A helpful young man showed us how a signlaman would set the dial to ‘Train on Line’ and ‘offer’ that train to the next signalbox by pushing the little lever which rings the bell.  The other signalman then accepted the train by returning the message and then everyone set their signals accordingly.   Both dials showed ‘Train on Line’ and in theory there could be no risk of a collision until both boxes went through the system of messages again and set the dials back to ‘Line Clear.   Each bell had a different tone so at very complicated junctions an expert signalman would know instantly which stretch of line was busy or clear’.

In the week following the visit I emailed The Swindon Panel organisation and asked if the equipment on display would have been similar to that used in Dickens’ day and I received a very helpful reply from a Mr Robert Heron confirming that it was.  With a rather nice touch Mr Heron opened his email by pointing out that he was familiar with my work having seen me perform on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railway a few years ago.

Now I have new levels of knowledge and have discovered that the equipment that Dickens describes is in fact a Block Signalling system and that I can buy a complete one, including the bell, from a dealer in railwayana for around £700!  I think that my next project is to source some oak display boxes and mock one up for my set.  At least I know where I can go to confirm the exact measurements and details of the device.

The discovery of the signalling equipment brought ‘The Signalman’ very much to the forefront of my mind and I decided to undertake a little more research into the circumstances of the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865 which is generally supposed to have inspired Dickens to write his most intense ghost story.

The basic facts of the story have long been known to me and indeed feature in my performance:  A viaduct over the River Beult was being repaired and so a stretch of line had been removed.  The train travelling from Folkestone to London arrived at the scene unexpectedly and the resulting derailment killed ten and injured forty.  Charles Dickens had been travelling in a first class carriage with Ellen Ternan and her mother and had assisted in the rescue operation.  In a letter to his close friend Thomas Mitton written just a few days after the crash he described he scene, naturally embellishing it with his delicious prose:

‘This is precisely what passed.  You may judge it from the precise length of the suspense: Suddenly we were all off the rail, and beating the ground as the car of a half-emptied balloon might.  The old lady cried out ‘My God’, and the young one screamed.  I caught hold of them both (the old lady sat opposite and the young one on my left), and said: ‘We can’t help ourselves, but we can be quiet and composed.  Pray don’t cry out.’  The old lady immediately answered: ‘Thank you.  Rely upon me.  Upon my soul I will be quiet.’  The young lady said in a frantic way, ‘Let us join hands and die friends.’  We were then all tilted down together in a corner of the carriage, and stopped.  I said to them thereupon: ‘You may be sure that nothing worse can happen.  Our danger must be over.  Will you remain here without stirring, while I get out of the window?’  They both answered quite collectedly, ‘Yes’ and I got out without the least notion what had happened…’

Dickens then clambered out and assisted the workforce and the train guards in pulling the dead and wounded from the wreckage.

‘No imagination can conceive the ruin of the carriages, or the extraordinary weights under which the people were lying, or the complications into which they were twisted up among iron and wood, and mud and water.’

The scene was somewhat fancifully illustrated by the popular press casting Dickens in the role of a super-hero.

All that I know about Staplehurst has been derived from various biographies of Dickens but I had heard that there was a transcript of the full Board of Trade investigation into the accident available and I was very keen to read it.

After a little hunting around on the internet I tracked the report to Leicester University and was able to download a four page document which had been written by Captain FH Rich of the Royal Engineers and which had been originally published on 21 June 1865, just 12 days after the crash.  It made fascinating reading.

I have always understood that the foreman of the works (the foreman of platelayers, to give him his official title), had incorrectly read the timetable book which dealt with the vagaries of the boat train which, because of the tides in the English Channel, arrived in the vicinity of Staplehurst at a different time every day, and this fact was confirmed by the report:

‘When at breakfast on the morning of the 9th inst. he informed some of the men sitting near him that the tidal train would not pass till 5.20pm that day.  He had the time service book in his hand at the time, and was seen to refer to it, but he mistook the time the tidal train would be due at Headcorn on the 10th June, for the time it was due on the 9th, and read the time as 5.20pm instead of 3.15pm, about which time it arrived.’

But what I hadn’t known until reading the report is that this mistake should not have allowed to happen, for a second timetable book given to the leading carpenter could also have been checked and the foreman’s error would have been seen, however the carpenter’s book had been…

‘…cut in two by a wheel passing over it, and as he was working under the orders of the foreman of platelayers, who had a similar book, he did not consider it necessary to ask for another, in place of the one that had been destroyed.’

There then follows a great deal of technical information regarding baulks, chairs, sleepers, beams, girders, sleepers and ballast all of which relates to the nature of the repairs that were being carried out, but then the Capt. Rich talks about the next failsafe that was incorrectly observed.  Whenever there was a breach in the line the South Eastern Railway Company had a regulation that a labourer would be sent 1000 yards up the track to display a red flag in the event of a train unexpectedly using the line.  On 9th June 1865 John Wiles was given the flag and sent on his way.  I have always believed that the method of measuring the 1000 yards distance was to count a certain amount of telegraph poles, and that outside Staplehurst the poles were placed too close together meaning that the requisite distance was not reached.  The report however makes no mention of the placement of the poles but does suggest that Wiles rather lazily decided that 10 poles was probably about right and set himself up there.  The reality of the situation was 10 poles only took him 554 yards from the breach leaving a speeding train no space to stop.

The final check that failed was the presence, or non-presence, of the inspector of the railway from the South Eastern Railway Company.  In the case of a ‘protracted repair’ the inspector should have visited the sight regularly to ensure that all of the procedures were correctly followed.  Even though the repairs to the Beult viaduct took over ten weeks the foreman did not regard it as a protracted repair, his reasoning being that each day of work was a separate project.  Captain Rich strongly disagreed with this assumption.

With so many procedures ignored or incorrectly carried out it was inevitable that the tidal train from Folkestone to London should meet its doom on June 9th 1865.  Captain Rich takes up the story again:

‘The train passed Headcorn station at 3.11 pm about two minutes late; she reached the viaduct about 2.13 (this must be a typographical error for as far as I’m aware Headcorn and Staplehurst are not in different time zones!).  The speed at which she reached the viaduct appears to have carried the engine over that part of the road from which the first length of rail on the bank had been removed…..Her right wheels remained between the up line of rails; and the left wheels between the up line and the boundary fence of the railway.

The tender remained attached to the engine and stood across the up line.  The van next to it was unhooked, but remained on the bank standing across the up line, in an opposite direction to the tender.  This van remained coupled to the second-class carriage next to it, which had its leading wheels on the viaduct and the hind wheels suspended over the bed of the river.  The first-class carriage next behind hung by its front end to the second-class and the other end rested in the dry bed of the river (this was the one that Charles Dickens and his companions were in).  The next first-class carriage was turned bottom upwards in the dry bed of the river.  The five next first-class carriages were in the mud and water…..

‘The train consisted 80 first-class passengers and 35 second-class.  Seven women and 3 men were taken out dead and 40 others with injuries of various kinds, some of them very serious…..

Seven of the carriages were completely destroyed from falling over the viaduct….’

I have visited the site of the accident and the ‘viaduct’ is not high, and at the time of the crash the speed of the train was low, although Capt. Rich didn’t trust the driver’s testimony:

‘The driver of the tidal train….states that he had reduced his speed from 45 or 50 miles per hour to 10 or 12 miles per hour when he reached the viaduct.  I consider that his estimate of the speed  to which he reduced his train is erroneous; and considering the time that would be lost before the brakes came into action, and the rest of the catastrophe, it appears probable that he had not reduced the speed of the train below 30 miles per hour, when he reached the viaduct.

The driver had shut off steam and realising that he was not losing sufficient speed had whistled to the guards in other vans to apply their brakes too.

‘None of the guards perceived the “danger” signal before reaching it.  Their first intimation was the driver’s whistle, and they state that they immediately commenced to apply thwir brakes….’

‘…The train had probably got over half the distance between the signalman and the viaduct from which two rails had been removed, before the brake came into action.’

A small drop into a muddy river bank and a relatively low speed but the devastation of the tidal train was horrendous, and Dickens was truly lucky to have survived.

The effect of the accident on him was profound and often the memory of it came back at the most unlikely times.  I have been told that modern experts have identified Dickens’ reaction to Staplehurst as  one of the first recorded cases of post traumatic stress disorder.

His daughter Mamie later described how Staplehurst continued to haunt Charles:

‘But my father’s nerves never really were the same again after this frightful  experience.  At first it was natural that he should suffer greatly, and we have often seen him, when travelling home from London, suddenly fall into a paroxysm of fear, tremble all over, clutch the arms of the carriage, large beads of perspiration standing on his face, and suffering agonies of terror.  We never spoke to him, but would touch his hand gently now and then.  He had apparently no idea of our presence; he saw nothing for a time but that most awful scene.’ 

Adding to his terrible associations with the railway Charles’ beloved dog Turk was run over and killed by a train not long after the crash.

In his considered and unemotional conclusion to the official report Capt. Rich points out that the train ‘…would have reached London safely had the rules of the South-Eastern Railway been adhered to.

‘It appears however that for the last ten weeks these rules have been daily disregarded.’

‘The result of the coroner’s inquest is a verdict of manslaughter against the foreman of platelayers and the district inspector of permanent way.’

It seems certain that Staplehurst must have influenced the writing of The Signalman, although Dickens probably also knew the details of another crash four years earlier in which two trains collided in the Clayton Tunnel near Brighton and which resulted in a much greater death toll than on the River Beult viaduct.  Certainly the Clayton Tunnel matches the scene in the story much more closely than the flat open marshland of Staplehurst:

‘On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air’

It has been an interesting week of research which has taken me from the famous creation of the Rev. W Awdry through the personal recollections of Charles Dickens and his daughter to the sober and factual account by Capt. Rich.

I have  thoroughly enjoyed learning so much more about subjects that I have spoken about for many years.

 

 

Sources:

The Swindon Panel Exhibition at Didcot Railway Centre

Letter from Charles Dickens to Thomas Mitton

Charles Dickens by his Eldest Daughter, by Mamie Dickens

The Invisible Woman, by Claire Tomalin

The Board of Trade Report compiled by Capt. FH Rich. RE

Jarndyce and Jarndyce: A Story For Our Times?

Although A Tale of Two Cities always takes the plaudits with its ‘It was the best of times,   it was the worst of times’ opening, I think that it is Bleak House that boasts the greatest, the most intriguing and the atmospheric introduction of any Dickens novel:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

And then the fog – the fog that shrouds everything and renders any form of navigation or direction impossible:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

From a city shrouded in fog Dickens then leads us to the heart of the story:

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

It could equally be the seat of government on the bank of the Thames.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

The High Court of Chancery ‘most pestilent and hoary of sinners’.  That is how many look upon our present parliament!

And what is being heard in Chancery?  What is it that is causing the court to grope and flounder?

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

How does the World view Great Britain now?

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was “in it,” for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, “or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers” — a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.

Have those in power become so wrapped up in their own procedures and conventions that there can never be a solution?  Never be an end? Will the case simply go on and on and on until the real reason for it is obscured by the fog of legality?

In 2019 Britain I need say nothing, for as ever Charles Dickens has said it all before.

 

 

This week….

The week since my last blog post has been a quiet one and subject matter for a new essay has not readily presented itself to me.  I realised yesterday that I missed a trick on Monday and should have written an April Fools post, describing how I had discovered the handwritten conclusion to The Mystery of Edwin Drood in an old suitcase – I could have had lots of fun with that and may tuck the idea away for another year.

Instead I decided to look at Charles’ reading tour schedule and see what he was doing, and where he was doing it, during the week commencing Monday 25th March in years gone by.  It would be interesting to see if any of the venues brought to mind any particular memories;  it maybe that the pieces he performed have a relevance to me, or it maybe that I have never performed them and need to investigate.

This is what I discovered:

26 March

26 March 1858.  Edinburgh Music Hall.  A Christmas Carol.

Of course A Christmas Carol has meant more to me than any other work by Dickens.  Since 1993 I have been performing my one man version of The Carol each Christmas and this ‘ghostly little book’ has taken me all over the world.  By now you would think that I know everything there is to know about the story and yet each year I discover something new.  This is not to say that I discover passages that I have never read before, but what I search for are new slants.  By slightly changing the emphasis in a sentence it can completely alter how a character feels or acts in a scene and thereby effect the tone of the whole story.

The interesting thing about Charles’ 1858 performance in Edinburgh however is that it came at a time when he was making wholesale changes to the script.  Edinburgh was one of his final ‘amateur’ charity performances before deciding that he should tour professionally.  There is a whole world of difference between giving a reading for charity, when the audience are sympathetic to ones motives and are willing to forgive some flaws in your performance, and how they might react when they have parted with their hard earned cash and are demanding to be entertained.  Dickens knew that there was a huge potential income from the readings which would most likely also result in increased sales of his novels thanks to a resurgence in his visibility, but it had to be successful – he had to get it right.

By the 26th of March Dickens must have already tweaked his script and come up with a version that he was satisfied with.  Originally his reading took in most of the book and lasted an eye-watering (or eye-closing) 3 hours.  Charles Dickens was at heart a theatrical man and knew that a commercially viable show would have to be tighter and shorter not only for the audience’s sake but also for his own health.  He edited and adapted the script so that by the time he stepped onto the professional stage it was down to 2 hours.  By the end of ’58 he made more tweaks to bring it to 90 minutes, which is coincidentally the length of my current show.

On that evening in March Dickens walked to the centre of the stage in the Edinburgh Music Hall  and saw 2,000 faces looking up expectantly at him.  Surely he must have felt a surge of adrenaline within him as he began and when the audience stood and cheered him at the conclusion of the performance he must have known that he was ready to realise his longest held ambition: to become a professional actor.

When I stand on a stage at either the St George’s Hall in Liverpool or the Mechanics Hall in Worcester Mass I always feel an amazing sense of connection when I think that across the centuries Charles and I are looking at the same view and I always silently ask him to look after me!

 

26 March 1867.  St James’ Hall, London.  Doctor Marigold & The Trial from Pickwick

By 1867 Dickens had established himself as a performer par excellence and indeed his tours were now his main source of income for he hadn’t written a major novel since Our Mutual Friend which had been completed during the Summer or ’65.  Although he hadn’t performed much between ’62 and ’66 he was now on the road almost constantly and his tours had slotted in to a well-oiled groove.  A tour would typically start in London at The St James’ Hall and he may well take the opportunity to introduce a new reading which would generate plenty of publicity and excite the audiences in other venues around the country.  He had done this in ’66 with the introduction of Doctor Marigold, would do it again in ’67 with The Barbox Brothers and The Boy at Mugby Junction and most famously in ’69 with ‘Sikes and Nancy’ also known as ‘The Murder’.

The performance on 26th March did not come at the start of a new tour however, but was just one date in the middle of a flurry of travel.  Since the 15 January (when the tour DID begin at St James’)  he had performed in – take a deep breath – London, Liverpool, Chester, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Leeds, Manchester, Bath, Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York, Bradford, Newcastle, Wakefield, Dublin and Belfast.  The performance on the 26th March must have been a chance for him to metaphorically wash his socks and to figuratively sleep in his own bed.

What interests me about this date are the two pieces that Dickens chose to perform for I have widely differing experiences of them both.  Regular readers will know of my love affair with Doctor Marigold which has become a major part of my repertoire.  Back in 2014 I wrote a blog post entitled ‘Dad and Doctor Marigold’ which can be found at:

https://geralddickens.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/dad-and-doctor-marigold/

I love the joy it brings to modern audiences and how much I feel every conflicting emotion of the fast-talking market cheapjack. Last Summer I performed the piece in a peaceful Oxfordshire garden in front of an old gypsy caravan as the audience sipped drinks and sat on bales of straw – it was one of the most memorable settings of my career and brought Marigold alive even more.

But the other reading on 26 March 1867 is one I just have never felt comfortable with.  ‘The Trial, from Pickwick’ or ‘Bardell and Pickwick’ is a short comic piece that brought a Dickensian evening to a riotous and hilarious conclusion (this was the way that Charles worked – one major reading, a short break and then a much more light-hearted performance that would send the audience home with smiles on their faces.)

The Trial was the reading that Charles performed more than any other and featured throughout his reading career.  He first performed it in 1858 and it was also on the playbill at his final farewell performance in 1870.  The scene is in court as Mrs Bardell, encouraged by her solicitors Messrs Dodson and Fogg, is suing Mr Pickwick for a breach of promise of marriage.  It is Dickens poking fun at the legal profession at his absolute best.

The chapter in the original novel is brilliant and filled with fantastic characters.  Quite apart from the central protagonists we are treated to Mr Justice Stareleigh who is a perfect stereotypical judge who dozes through much of the evidence, is unaware of popular culture and is unable to discern whether Mr Winkle’s real Christian name is Nathaniel or Daniel:

‘Have you any Christian name sir?’

‘Nathaniel, sir’

‘Daniel, any other name?’

‘Nathaniel, Sir – my Lord, I mean’

‘Nathaniel Daniel, or Daniel Nathaniel?’

‘No, my Lord, only Nathaniel – not Daniel at all.’

‘What did you tell me it was Daniel for then, sir?’

‘I didn’t my Lord’

‘You did sir.  How could I have got Daniel on my notes unless you told me so, sir?’

It is great stuff!  Then we have Serjeant Buzfuzz who argues on behalf of Mrs Bardell, and who twists and turns every action of Mr Pickwick to suit his case:

‘Two letters have passed between these parties, letters which are admitted to be in the handwriting of the defendant, and which speak volumes, indeed……. Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear Mrs. B. — Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, PICKWICK.” Gentlemen, what does this mean? Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious heavens! and tomato sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away, by such shallow artifices as these?’

And so it goes on.

My problem with the Trial is not that it is unfunny because it isn’t – it’s brilliant comic writing – my problem is that I have never managed to do it as well as it deserves.  I don’t feel natural and relaxed when I perform it.  Perhaps a reason is that I still give it as  a reading whereas other items such as Marigold or The Signalman are now performed ‘off the book’ but I committed to learning both of those pieces because they had been successful as readings, so that argument doesn’t work.

Perhaps the reason can be found in Philip Collins’ introductory notes to the script in his book ‘Sikes and Nancy and Other Public Readings’:

‘Since 1837, this had been a favourite comic episode, often adapted for the stage, and ‘done to death’ in Penny-readings and other such performances.  Every public reader, amateur or professional, had it in his repertoire.  Dickens’ rendering topped everyone’s, it was generally reported, both in narrative powers and in characterizations less hackneyed and more credible than those of platform-tradition.’

Collins then goes on to quote the Bath Chronicle from 67:

‘Those public readers or actors who have read or performed this scene have unavoidably given it an air of burlesque or farce.  Mr Dickens, with the privilege of the author, has done what no one else has ventured to do…..The humour is still exaggerated but it no longer runs riot with excess of caricature’

Maybe that is what I do, I allow the characters to become too big thereby missing the actual joy of the writing.  I have performed it at a legal dinner where there was a collective gasp of horror when the verdict of guilty was announced and an even louder one at the severity of the damages awarded, so it is believable and it does work.  Maybe there is no problem at all and the issue is in my perception of the performance rather than the reality.

The Trial has frustrated me for too long and having left it at the bottom of a drawer for years I think it is time to look at it with fresh eyes and try again!

 

31st March 1868.  The City Hall, Portland.  USA.  A Christmas Carol and The Trial

The rest of the week shows Dickens performing on the 27th at the Ashford Railway Institute in ’55,  London in ’62 and in New Bedford in ’68.  On the 28th he was in London again in ’61 and in Cambridge in ’67.  After the Cambridge show he travelled to Norwich and performed there on the 29th.  But the date that jumps out at me and means more to me than any other is his performance in Portland Maine on 31st March in 1868.

Dickens was in the middle of his exhausting American tour and to ease the pressure of performing at  huge venues in New York and Boston he had taken bookings in smaller halls along the way, of which the City Hall in Portland was one.  The city was full of excitement as the day of the great event arrived and crowds flocked to the hall on a cold, snowy evening to witness the great man perform.  But in a truly Dickensian scene there was one small girl left outside. In the darkness her face must have had a yellow glow as she stood on tiptoes and peered in at a window hoping for a glimpse of her hero.

The girl was called Kate and she adored everything that Charles Dickens had written, even naming her pets after her favourite characters (her dog was called Pip and his companion Pocket).  Even the family sledge had been christened ‘The Artful Dodger’!  On the evening of 31st of March Kate’s mother was inside the hall listening to Dickens but the family could not afford an extra ticket so Kate shuffled sorrowfully home to her bed.

On the next morning Kate and her mother boarded a train to Boston and when they stopped at a station along the way Kate noticed Mr Dickens standing on the platform talking animatedly.  Dickens was on the same train as her!  This was far too wonderful an opportunity to let pass and in no time Kate had slipped into Dickens’ carriage where she stood staring at him.

This excitement would have been enough for most little girls but Kate wanted more, so when she saw that Charles was alone for a moment she rushed through the carriage and sat down next to him!

What followed was recalled by Kate when she wrote a reminiscence of her journey and called it ‘A Child’s Journey With Dickens’  It is a most charming story and one that I perform on occasion and beacause it is not by Dickens but about Dickens it gives me a sense of seeing him through another’s eyes, which is fascinating.

On my book shelves is a slim volume of A Child’s Journey and on the title page Kate has actually signed it: ‘I was the child. Kate Douglas Wiggin’ and it is one of my most treasured volumes.

It has been fun meandering through a random week in the life of Charles Dickens and it has brought a lot of things to mind, not least that I HAVE to nail The Trial once and for all!