On their bikes

The Durham miner project has some personal histories ,I liked especially the diary of Joseph Pickering.

Joseph Pickering doesn't leave the north, but he moves from coalfield to coalfield in the period of slump in miners' employment that lasted from the general strike until the war, and describes the black listing of some militants - the conditions driving the migration to the kent coalfields.

Even so, after coming to Kent, many left again, 300 families within the first two years alone- the heat of the mine, the lack of amenties, the chaotic frontier feel of the new town all contributing-

Grandad - A Vigilante?

I've ditched a personal visit to Kew to find Grandad's service records. I can ask a researcher to find it for me, and if I'm lucky, and he's quick- may cost me just 15 pounds. Less then a trip would cost, even given that I'm going to the UK anyway.

Also plan to order Uncle Reggie's Inquest report from Kent Archives.Sure I've got the newspaper report( linked in the sidebar) -but I need to tackle the question I have been avoiding up to now-was my family protecting their crops or were they out for trouble?

I don't think so- but then I wouldn't? would I?

I have only the vaguest memories of Grandad in early childhood-the family blamed him for these events,I think.-(interesting that Aylesham-ers remember Misery farm as a place where a father accidentally shot his son)

I have got to like grandad, his comments seem dignified here and he is not tempted to use Reggie's death to inflame the situation . We'll see.

Go tell it to the Marines

Dissatisfied with my sense of Grandad's character,I decided to get his military record, expecting it to come easy, after all,I have his military number.

My search took me to the national archive at Kew.Spent an hour or two fruitlessly, but persistently entering William Clark's service number, name, birthdate etc into the Royal Naval Seamens records online, before realising that marines records were not included.

I have learnt a lot researching this story, that's possible because I started from a base of astonishing ignorance, with a history education mostly by Hollywood.

Hollywood confused me because how could Grandad have been in a marine band? , he wasn't American!

But I learn- marines are naval soldiers who defend their ships, (American or not even the ancient Athenians had marines.) They were generally considered an elite force, but you have to counter that with one of my maternal grandmothers favourite sayings, 'Go tell it to the marines' (19th century British seaman thought Marines to be gullible).If Gran was also comenting on her daughter's father-jn-law, I can't say-it's possible she was a sly one.

Grandad must have run away and joined the Navy in the 1880's, the Royal Marine Band was not formed until 1902, up until then he would have been part of one of several naval bands.

I hope to get to Kew when I visit Mum shortly and find Grandads service record.

Well, now I know that Grandad ended up in Kent because it was the Royal Marine band's base , there he met Amelia, and retired to farm life, an old soldier's dream...

Victorians with 'Tude

I've put some more photos in the library, my grandmother Amelia's parents marriage certificate and their grave in Ospringe churchyard.

But the only picture that sheds light on character in this saga is I think this grim picture of William Clark's parents whom he abandoned in Scotland when he was a boy.

See Miners Sword Dance!

British pathe have a wonderful collection of old films, you can download previews for free. One public information short for farmers on'Speeding up agriculture' (1916) which involves a puzzling pythonesque finale with explosives, also an' elder' miners choir, miners performing a sword dance, ladies in bonnets learning to race tractors, a couple of films aiming to recruit miners post nationilsatio/. I particularly liked the one which ended: 'Join the miners, the skilled men the nation will always need' and a school for young miners, and they look way too young. It took me hours to drag myself away.

But the potato farming films would not download, which is a tragedy. my writing is cruelly hampered by my lack of knowlege of potato farming techniques in the twenties..

My fictional miners are becoming a bit too sarcastic about the cluelessness of my fictional family..

Trouble at the Pit

Some notes on the trial of Hughie Owen cited by miner's leaders,Turner and Lawther here


On July 6th 1929 Hughie John Owen was tried for assaulting John Allcock, a deputy at Snowdon. He was sent to stall 105, he refused, he could not get on with the other men, they were from Derbyshire, he was Welsh. After arguing a little he left the pit.

When the deputy left Owen followed him to the railway bridge, where Owen said he tried to talk to Allcock. Allcock wouldn't listen:" Don't bother me." Another miner gave testimony against Owen, (this seems unusual)

The account says Owen struck a blow that caused Allcock's nose to bleed for sixteen hours, then hit him in the face again when Allcock was lying on the ground.

I don't have a transcript of this account, the gadget fur copying microfilm wasn't working on my second day in the library. It's a pity as my notes, taken from the Express trial report differ in two respects to the report linked above (written the following month), firstly the Express in it's later account claims a chest blow as well as the facial blows in my notes, Lawther says he got 2 months hard labour, I noted one month.

Both newspaper accounts make the assault sound brutal, but of course,the reporter is not on Owen's side. The incident also illustrates another difficulty facing the newcomers, miners were coming from depressed coalfields all over the UK.

Radio and mass transport were only just beginning. Some areas of the UK were still very isolated, not only were they coming to a 'strange land', but the other miners were foreign too, with many different dialects and ways. Some would have left their home village for the first time.


It's also possible that Owen was being baited, perhaps because he was a Welshman, perhaps because he had been mouthy,he may have been deliberately given a stall where he was unpopular. Unwanted stalls were sometimes a method of punishmentl.

Misery Farm- a Recap

This is the beginning of a recap of the Misery farm Story.I intend to finish it and cover Snowdon and Aylesham in 1929 when I get back.

13/8/06

Strangers in a Strange land- The Story so far

Title is stolen from Arthur Cochlin, an miner, who, at the conclusion to the inquest into his wife's suicide (debt and illness)held in the Greyhound Pub, Aylesham in May 1929 quoted the bible:” I am a Stranger in a Strange Land.

A Family Myth

My Dad’s funeral in 2001 did not run smoothly, Mum’s dementia and my grandchildren’s ADHD/aspergers all happened to be at their loudest and most disruptive.I’d best not mention the shenanigans with Auntie Z and the priest, I have yet to scatter Dad’s ashes because I want to be sure they’re his- but I guess who ever it is in the box on top of my wardrobe deserves a better view.

.

In spite of all this was a bit of quiet time for conversation , plus the best gluten free buffet ever, the pace barely interrupted by Mum removing her incontinence pad.

It was then that the talk turned to a tragic episode in dad’s adolescence, a story Dad never told, one the family was so reticent about that my cousin(son of another brother) said he had never heard it.

An incident to which the family ascribed - (without ever mentioning or clarifying the Incident- in that clever way families have), any character defects perceived in Dad; his shyness or forgetfulness -

It went like this-

Points every story teller agreed on (but not necessarily true)-

1/ One night Dad was camping with big brother Reggie

2/ Dad was 13 years old

2/ Reggie, was handsome, cool and Reggie Clark would have taken Hollywood by storm had he survived that night.

3/ Uncle Reggie was shot.

4/ The family had a farm

5/ The shooting was accidental

Where the storytellers conficted

1/ The farm was on Dartmoor .

2/ The farm was in Kent

3/ Or Maybe Devon (Anyway Somewhere South)

4/ The Brothers were on a pleasure trip- hunting, perhaps OR

5/ The brothers were defending their crop from striking miners.

6/ A mine had opened at the end of their farm, or maybe housing for miners.

7/ A dog knocked over the shotgun causing the accident.

8/ The Dartmoor version , was especially touching-it was a dark and stormy night, the brothers were twenty to a hundred miles from help. And poor 12 yr old Dad could do nothing as his brother bled slowly to death.

That year my cousin tracked the farm down to Ackholt in Kent. The mine was Snowdon, adjacent to the farm.The village of Aylesham was built to house the miners in 1927 The year of the accident was 1929 ( puzzling as there was no strike that year.)

Last summer(2005) I returned to this story.(perhaps in an attempt to make up to Dad for the funeral business)

Ackholt farm and Nonington 1821

Canny Poacher

I have grown fond of Basil Newington ,the poacher . He is older, wiser and cooler then the other miners hauled before the courts that week. The youngsters are angry, in the press reports their anger is used to make them sound foolish,he knows confrontation will get him nowhere. His friend gives a false name and gets away with it, that ploy won't work for Basil, the police and game keepers know him. But he maintains the fiction of 'Jackson's name.

Interesting that the courts never make an issue of miners naming the ones that got away.

Both the apprehended poachers are off sick , I'm guessing it would be really tough to put in a full week at Snowdon, even for a man just a bit under the weather. And there were severe pay penalties for missing a day.

I suspect that Basil is now a semiprofessional poacher, providing the miners families with the rabbit, which East Kent Memories would suggest was the major protein source for Kentish miners in the twenties and thirties.

His laconicness makes him seem different to the other miners, the Aylesham miners are extraordinary: a never ending source of energy powes them, they work in those conditions and then they come out and play football and cricket, the brassband, whist, garden, box, run a half marathon, drink, protest, sing the red flag at a Nancy Astor meeting, go to church, these guys have some mythic source of energy, but my Basil's energy reserves are running low.

Could the heat of the mine speed their metabolism? Or were all miners like this?

A fictional character based loosely on Basil has started to take root for me.

He's currently called Edmund, he was once active in the union but is tired , rather then disillusioned. He's canny,and a countryman, a birdwatcher, he has have been around a bit. Got a Flemish widow pregnant in Ypres, stayed there for a while after the war, tempted by a cow , a cottage , a horse a field. I'm not sure yet if he has returned to his English wife, or brought the Belgian girl to Aylesham.

So he has learnt some farming, is careful about crops and sheep, until that disastrous month Basil may have benefited from some of the farmers toleration. It may not have been easy to have the landowners protected game on their fields.

Maybe they even tipped him off in a manly sort of way:" if you are walking near old court tell Mr Hope(gamekeeper...)"

He will offer a more modern viewpoint off the other characters, he has the ability to lead to smooth things over a bit, I'm not sure he will, he is his own man.

Call Bird: the Crow, the Human Being

My guide to Kentish dialect says that scrumping kids appointed a look out called a call bird, after the habit of jays and other crows of having one bird on guard when feeding on a crop.

It brought back to me wryly the confusion at the inquest- if the shot gun was to scare miners or rooks?

In this story of migrants, subject to prejudicial judgments, fuelled by economic necessity- birds are a metaphor of sorts-

From the condemnation of magpies on circumstantial evidence damning them for songbird declineto to the destruction of skylarks nests as the economic rewards for industrial methods by farmers intensifies(In Kent in the twenties farmworkers marked the position of the nests.)

Miners, small farmers and many bird species have this in common, they have passed through the mill of the twentieth century with their numbers in steep decline.

The Super Incredible Shrinking Pay Packet

There were national miners strikes over reductions in miners pay in 1920 and, later in 1926 In 1922 Snowdon mine was on strike over reduced pay locally.The company went into receivership. Pearson Dorman and Long took over and planned a new miners village. Work was started auspiciously in 1926. In the General Strike of that year Snowdon went back earlier then the other Kent coalfields.( possibly since the mine had only just reopened they had fewer resources to survive on strike pay of a 1s a day} .

Miners militancy that year brought a lively fear of revolution to the wealthier classes, more so than in any other year last century.

By the end of 1928 snowdon miners were on strike again. They had been promised a higher rate of pay in Snowdon.- A guaranteed rate of pay of 11sh 6d per shift working 5 to 6 shifts a week, the district rate was 11sh 4d a shift or less. The higher rate for Snowdon reflected the greater depth of its seams, the shift rate was for an 8 hour day but did not include travel time, which could be considerable when the seam was 3000 feet down. Also the rate reflected the conditions of working and difficulty of mining those seams

The strike began on 16th November 1928 , the company reopened the mine 10 days later- 96 men reported for work passing a bitter crowd at the pithead,a blackleg was injured, despite 70 strong police protection the next morning just 40 men reported for work .

By midJanuary of '29, the pit was back at work, forced to accept lower pay. But rumours of another strike ballot persisted through the Spring, Tillmanstone and Chislet decided not to join Snowdon in another strike, they were afraid it would provide an excuse to attack wage rates further. Frank Turner, never one to resist a challenge, wanted to take the company to court on behalf of the men on reduced pay.

1929 was for Snowdon , a year as bitter as '26.

Aylesham Romeo lived next door to Grandad

Clive Webb of the history of Nonington site has clarified some points for me:-

• He is clear that this picture is not Ackholt farm , he says- farm house looks nothing like. land too flat. he doesnt and there are no buildings such as the ones shown.

He adds:-

I have seen a copy of this photo before, neither myself or my late father, who was born in the parish in the 1920's, nor my mother, who lived in Aylsham in the 1930's have been able to identify the view.

Thanks, Clive I'm not yet totally convinced. I grant you the house does look very wrong, but even in the picture is in the process of alterations, I think. The cottages could be the ones demolished in the fifties? if you stand to the left of the house with Ackholt wood behind you cant the farm lokk pretty flat?

I guess I just need time to give up my claim to this photo.

• Clive confirms that the the farm is still part of the Fitzwalter estate, so my family would have been tenant farmers ( not owners as we first thought).

On the Aylsham Romeo-

• Clive says Frank Turner married the daughter of a Mr Hope, a gamekeeper of Lord Fitzwalter's and lived opposite Ackholt farm in keepe's cottage

Clive, my server is blocking your aol address, I have had to send a reply to the Noning ton site, hope you get it.

Early History of Misery

Here's a link to a Nonington history site, and a page on Ackholt, it's history as a hamlet and farm, mentions Misery farm, apparently Grandad would have pronounced Ackholt differently to the migrants of the twenties, whose new pronounciation holds to the present day, and at the bottom -a map of the farm in the twenties.

Labouring in the Fields of Asparagus

Letters written by children of market gardeners living in Badsey in the Vale of Evesham in 1922.

Growing mostly asparagus and fruit , kids had beautiful handwriting and worked very hard.

We have a friend in Belgium for whom the thick white asparagus preferred here to the thin green english favourites brings back only the memory of daily drudgery and back pain on his parents farm. Once a year we get a gift of a parcel of it, he always winces as he gives it as if offering something loathly.

-I am not sure why onions needed so much laborious tying?

Aylesham's Romeo and Juliet? Miner and Gamekeeper's Daughter

Here's a nice surprise-


One miner was after bigger game then conies: Frank Turner, who chaired the miners meeting condemning the apple theft sentence and whose letter the Express refused to publish with such maidenly indignity, courted and married a game keeper's daughter. She isn't named so I can't say yet if it was one of the gamekeepers involved in the prosecution of miners for poaching in the week following Reggie's death.

Farmers, Potatoes, Shotguns, A Pattern forms

Shropshire County Council has an excellent website on coal mining in Shropshire

It has clear explanations of mining in general: techniques, machinery, dangers and some great audio archives.

Listen especially to Reuben Cope talk about mining in the twenties in a soft potteries accent, and the intake of breath that marks pneumoconiosis.I startled to hear that his first mine was alongside a potato field- he liked his baked.

Also a story about a farmer shooting a government man which I didnt quite follow. I thought for a moment that Reuben must have gone to Aylesham looking for work- but these were shropshire stories.

Temperature rising -Snowdon 1913- Beresford Seam

Body Heat

At the Royal commission in 1919 a medical witness said he had visited a seam where the temperature was over 90 degrees. He took the temperature and pulse rate of the miners' during a meal break, even resting both was over 100 in every case.

Of Tilmanstone colliery:

'My father often told us how the men who wore only briefs and boots perspired in the terrific heat. One day out walking with him we passed one of the outlets from the mine with water gushing out and I asked if it was the miners' sweat.'

(I think the little girl was mislead about the briefs, 1920's underwear was large coarse and woolly in the pictures I've seen the men are wearing only boots,( cap- I think not a helmet?) and a leather tool belt)
We are not told which pit the medical witness visited, but I'm betting Snowdon was both hotter and more humid.

Sweating is a less effective method of cooling when humidity is high, if the body cannot losef excess heat the core temperature rises. the ability to concentrate is lost, (accident rate increases) usually irritability increases (murder rate goes up in a heat wave), there's nausea, al loss of the desire to drink ( that could be fatal- miners needed to drink about 24 pints of water in snowdon colliery) In the short term this could lead to heat cramps, rashes , heat exhaustion and stroke. In the long term it's hard to say, so few men today do hard physical labour under these conditions.
Snowdon miners took salt tablets. Getting the balance of water to salt intake was essential, too much water , too little salt could cause hypernatria(Sodium imbalance)

Long term exposure to excessive heat is thought to cause infertility, damage to brain chemistry and the nervous system, increased susceptibility to diseases especially kidney, liver, heart digestive system and skin. U.S. Military records suggest that soldiers who have had one incident of heat stroke are more likely to have mental difficulties, to drop out early and so on.

Even leaving aside the devastating and better known effects of coal dust on the lungs or of darkness on the eyes, forgetting the social factors: it's just remarkable that men lived and worked in such conditions- and given the association between heat irritability and violence- it's remarkable how peaceable Aylesham was.

What's that word for a place where fried fish is sold?

I have posted 'the Dissapointment of Aylesham' a Dover Express article quoting the archdeacon of Canterbury on Aylesham in 1929. It was published three weeks before Reggies death and the series of arrests and apparent stake- outs we have seen.

Be warned- Archdeacon's style is wordy- does he mean by ' a place where fried fish is sold' a chippy? Also is tiresomely keen to exonerate the colliery company from blame for building an amenity- less town, providing amenities would be 'unecononomic' he tells us (Does that mean anything - providing wages could be said to be uneconomic?)

Otherwise much that is interesting about the boredom and isolation and high prices in Aylesham in the twenties

mystery of the flower show

I have confirmed that the flower show was on the 10th. It was in my hand written notes for Dover library: 'Last entrants for the flower show...' , 'the flower show will be on the 10th' . Naturally, I wouldn't have thought of looking in my own notes....

Still seems odd that show was not cancelled in view of the night's events on the farm....

I realised yesterday, that I have gathered or been sent a lot of stuff that I had not planned to post because did not seem directly relevant to the Aylesham/ farm story- but may well be of interest to others: maybe family history researchers and to the Coalfield Heritage project, (which is sadly not yet underway because of funding hold ups) . So I 've started posting these to Uncle Reggie's library, that way these documents will be publically available if I stop researching. When the archives get unwieldy, I'll install an search engine..

And photo William in old age here