by Anne Choma
The two women found their way to bed together, but for Anne, the sex was mediocre, only ‘tolerable’. It was spoiled, in part, by Anne’s fear that she would catch a sexually transmitted infection from Mariana (who contracted it from her husband) as she had done some years before in 1821. Now, Anne described how she ‘felt hot after it, it frightens me though I have washed twice . . . she is not, I fear, to be touched with impunity’. A few days later the situation had not improved: ‘Mariana still thinks me altered and fine, and feels restrained, I am sure, and this has destroyed our chance of our being together – she would live and die where she is’ (7TH MAY 1832).
These desperate detours could only put off the inevitable for so long. Halifax and home beckoned. On 7th May 1832, at twenty-five minutes past eight in the evening, Anne arrived back at Shibden Hall. She was physically as well as emotionally weary, having chosen to alight her carriage and walk the final few miles from the turnpike.
The following morning, she had breakfast with her aunt. Aunt Anne was taken aback by her niece’s unusual despondency. When Anne asserted that she might as well up sticks and move to America, her advice was immediate and touching: ‘There is all England for you to be in.’
CHAPTER 2
Shibden Hall, Trespassers, George Playforth’s Death, Miss Walker of Lightcliffe and Coal Talk with Jeremiah Rawson
‘Nothing is wanted but a little energy and determination to set your mind to rights’
Hidden behind one of the oak panels in a downstairs room at Shibden Hall is a rough, white-washed wall. To its right is a finely hewn inglenook fireplace, its opening forming a handsome, curved arch, which is almost tall enough to walk through standing upright. It is a relic of the old Shibden, which was built in 1420 as a modest yeoman’s property, and a reminder to visitors today of how different the hall would have looked before Anne made it over with dark oak panelling as part of her grand renovation in the late 1830s. It offers a glimpse at the Shibden Anne inherited, an opportunity to imagine the house in its original condition. It was this Shibden that Anne returned to. It was shabby and scruffy, and she felt ashamed of it.
Anne’s relationship with her ancestral home was complicated. Its cluttered rooms, eccentric layout and draughty windows were a physical reminder of the gulf that existed between her grand aspirations and reality. She felt stifled by it: there was some truth in Mariana Lawton’s assertion, in a letter referencing her friend’s desire for frequent adventure away from home, that Anne would succumb to the ‘Blue Devils’ [become depressed], if she stayed there for too long. Anne responded:
I cannot imagine why you are so bent upon thinking and believing that I shall never live here long together. You have never seen my interest in the place decrease, even though both you and I have lived to see the hope that cheered me on in early days blighted for ever. You ask ‘what makes you so devoted to a foreign clime’ because as I have said I wish not to make myself a home in England except at Shibden. However lovely the green Alp near Grenoble, it could not seem to me a restful place.
30TH NOVEMBER 1832
Here is an insight into the complexity of Anne’s feelings about Shibden. Despite her dissatisfaction with its condition, and though she would have to defer to her father for permission at every stage of her efforts to improve it, the idea of being parted from it permanently was unbearable.
The Lister lineage meant everything to Anne. Her identity and self-esteem were dependent on Shibden because it was a visible manifestation of the connection between her family and an ancient landed class. For hundreds of years, her research told her, there had been Listers at Shibden Hall, and it was a continuity that Anne would endeavour to maintain at all costs. Her snobbish streak prevented her from publicising the family’s historic involvement in the cloth trade, which she judged common.
Later, following Anne’s full inheritance of the hall in 1836, she would go as far as establishing a Lister family motto. ‘Justus Propositi Tenax’ – ‘just and true of purpose’, inspired by her admiration of the poet Horace. It can still be seen today in finely carved panelling on the oak stairs leading off the central housebody of the hall. The initials A and L are carved on either side, as a permanent reminder of Anne’s role in the reinvention of the Lister seat.
Adjusting to life back at Shibden after the disaster of Hastings and Vere proved challenging for Anne. On 17th May 1832, she spent almost ten hours secreted away in her room, ostensibly sorting out her books. Having ignored her aunt, father and sister all day, she found her family intolerable over dinner: ‘sat with them all . . . all vulgar. My aunt the best, but with all her goodness to me sadly tiresome as a companion. The rest – insufferable to the point of vulgarity. Marian’s emphasis in speaking terrible.’
As for Halifax, it was ‘vulgar’ too. The pull of domestic and foreign travel had meant that Anne had been away from her home town for long periods of her adult life. On returning, she found its society parochial and insular. Though much of Halifax had grown accustomed to the eccentric figure Anne cut around the town, she herself could never shake the feeling that she didn’t quite fit in.
On 30th June 1832, only a month after returning home from Hastings, Anne found herself tempted by the idea of leaving again. She was drawn to an advertisement in the local newspaper ‘of a cottage and 12 acres of land to sell near Missenden, 3 miles from Wendover, 6 from Aylesbury and 8 from High Wycombe – under the Chiltern Hills in a pretty glen’. Ironically, the area happened to be home to a side of Vere Hobart’s family. ‘Have been musing about this,’ Anne wrote in her diary, ‘It is a nice neighbourhood’.
The Halifax of Anne’s day was home to appalling poverty as well as a burgeoning industrial middle class. The urban poor and the privileged of the countryside lived side by side. Anne had only had to step out of her front door, walk up the hill to Conery Wood and down the Old Bank past the parish church of St John to find herself among the filth of Woolshops, one of the town’s worst slums. Sanitary provision was non-existent; slops and effluent ran down narrow, cobbled streets, spreading disease among the stone cottages and densely populated cellars and over-dwellings. Any person who dared venture down the back streets of Woolshops would have experienced an abominable stench. Mortality rates, needless to say, were horrifyingly high.
Anne Lister seldom strayed into the dark, dirty alleys of the Halifax slums, but she was not ignorant to the contemporary arguments surrounding the experience of the poor working class in her town. It was a period in which the use of child labour in local mills and factories was beginning to be challenged. Anne denied gaining anything herself by the forced labour of the local worsted cloth mills (some of which belonged to her business rivals the Rawsons). She wrote to a friend:
Our respectables say there is much misrepresentation about the factory children. I, myself, no judge. Would rather err in ignorance on the side of humanity than, from want of experience, sacrifice the innocent. No politician, or should hope, Mrs Norcliffe, would not find I had got any wrong-sided warp.
28TH APRIL 1833
While the Listers’ patronage of various local charities indicates that they were not indifferent to the suffering of the poor, like many of the landed gentry who had assets to protect, the family were keen to keep the town and its people at a safe distance. One of Anne’s long-term preoccupations was the network of public footpaths that ran through the Shibden estate. With the help of her solicitor, Mr Parker, she was able to have many of the paths stopped up or redirected. She recorded every success in her diary. ‘Ordered a plan to be taken of the new footpath I have made of James Smith’s Brow, and of the Daisy Bank footpath and Lower Brea wood, Bridle Road, that I wish to stop,’ she wrote on 28th November 1832. A day later, ‘Took Washington’s plan of the footpath and Bridle Road in Lower Brea wood that I wished to stop – explained all.’
Anne’s biggest victory was to close a public path near to the hall which she had long seen as a
magnet for thieves. According to her journal, she had frequently hung out of the upper windows of Shibden with a shotgun threatening to blast the head off anyone who contemplated stealing her chickens. The fact that she was known to be a competent markswoman was handy in frightening people away. She kept a loaded gun at the ready for all eventualities, though in reality her targets were most often the rats that populated the Shibden kitchen.
Trespass was a persistent threat on the Shibden estate, and the undesirables who encroached upon Anne’s land came from all quarters of society, not just the poor. Shortly before she left for Hastings in September 1831, Anne took the landowner and businessman Christopher Rawson to task over the errant behaviour of one of his gamekeepers. Out walking with Mr Sunderland, a local doctor, Anne was infuriated to find a dead bird at the top of one of her fields. ‘If one of the fellow’s dogs had been near enough,’ she had told her walking companion, ‘I would have begged the loan of his (Mr Sunderland’s) double-barrelled gun and shot the dog myself.’
But her real venom was reserved for Mr Rawson. She wrote a letter to him as soon as she got in:
Dear Sir. A man of the name of Mark Wilcock, calling himself your gamekeeper, after being discharged 3 times in the course of today from shooting on the grounds belonging to Shibden Hall, persisted in returning, and shot 2 partridges to my knowledge, one of them under my own eye, and that of several other persons. I can hardly believe such a man to be your keeper, but, if he is, I think it right to inform you of his conduct, and that I have given instruction to Messrs Parker & Adam to summons him before the magistrates on Saturday, if the matter can be so settled, and if not, to bring an action against him. I am, dear sir, very truly yours, A. Lister, Shibden Hall.
1ST SEPTEMBER 1831
At 7.45 the next morning Anne received a limp reply. Mr Rawson clearly hoped to put the matter to bed quickly:
Dear Madam. I was very sorry to hear Mark Wilcock had been trespassing over the grounds at Shibden Hall, as he ought to have known better, and I think must have been in a little liquor. But, will take care he does not offend again in the same way. Yours truly, C. Rawson. Hope Hall.
2ND SEPTEMBER 1831
The response did not pass muster, and Anne was having none of it:
Dear Sir. I am much obliged to you for your note of this morning. Nothing can be more satisfactory as to the future conduct of Mark Wilcock, who, I am happy to find, is your gamekeeper, as in this case, you will doubtless be able to settle the matter for me. I am sorry this annoying business has occurred, and still more so to feel obliged to say the man was not in liquor when I discharged him, and that such was the man in which he set me at defiance in the presence of the two men who had before discharged him by my authority. I am really called upon to beg you will be so good as insist on his coming here, and giving me a proper written apology in the presence of the two men in question, and of such other persons as I may choose to have present. Had you said ½ a word about the game, I should have had the greatest pleasure in giving you run of the estate. I am dear sir, very truly yours, A. Lister.
2ND SEPTEMBER 1831
Mark Wilcock did come to apologise. A week later, Anne visited Rawson’s Bank in Halifax. Under the auspice of making ‘good friends’ again with Mr Rawson, she could not resist a little gloating:
Saw Mr Rawson – very good friends. Very sorry I had not seen his mother – going away tomorrow after church. He thought I should be quieter in France than they would here – no trade – people turning off the workpeople – there be a sad winter. Said I had near gone to spend winter with a friend in Spain, but the journey so long and sure to be robbed near Madrid and Seville, that we had given it up. Said I had let off his gamekeeper as easy as for example’s sake I could – better for us all to keep people in some sort of order.
Christopher Rawson was a prominent figure in Halifax, and his influence was felt widely among its people. In fact, it is highly likely that if Anne had brought an action against Mark Wilcock for trespass, Mr Rawson would have been the Justice of the Peace called upon to preside over his own employee’s trial. Anne’s solicitor Mr Parker knew this; it is probably the reason that Anne chose to not take the matter further.
Rawson had clout. To a landowner, banker and magistrate of his standing, the Mark Wilcock episode was probably nothing more than a minor annoyance. For Anne, it was more important. She needed to demonstrate that she was not a person to be messed with. It was an approach that was to stand her in good stead in the coming years, as she locked horns with Christopher Rawson in complex coal negotiations.
Today, as you walk through Halifax town centre, the Rawson influence remains visible. Christopher Rawson’s home, Hope Hall, stands as a monument to Georgian grandeur, with fine fluted pillars and handsome porticos still intact. Rawson’s Bank, on Rawson Street, retains the architectural impact of its former days, despite its current use as cafes and offices.
The unlawful use of her footpaths was not the only estate matter occupying Anne on her return to Shibden. Partially to prevent herself from dwelling on how things had ended with Vere, she threw herself into dealing with the eviction of an elderly tenant, Benjamin Bottomley. From Hastings, Anne had already brushed off Marian’s concern that Bottomley was too old to be ordered off the land, writing to her aunt that:
I really hoped he was wise enough to be persuaded that at his age (nearer ninety, I presume, than eighty) it was time to give up farming, as much for his own sake as that of anybody else. Marian herself told me of his being obliged to go to bed after returning with his milk cans from Halifax, and considering the strong symptoms of decrepitude, and how unaided he is for anybody in whom one can place any confidence, I had supposed Marian herself must, on reflection, be of the opinion that if he has no money, he is unfit for the farm, and if he has money, the farm is unfit for him.
9TH DECEMBER 1831
Anne had a hard nose for profit. Her uncompromising treatment of Bottomley exposes the harsh reality of the power imbalance between the nineteenth-century landlord and tenant. Anne’s father, she decided, had given away too many concessions during his years of managing the estate. She would not follow suit.
Anne was firm, and sometimes merciless, but she always believed herself to be fair. Each decision she made was backed up with careful reasoning. She valued openness in her communication with her tenants, offering praise for good farming as well as admonishment where she felt it was needed.
Rent collection day, hosted at the Lister’s Stag’s Head Inn about a mile from Shibden Hall, was a significant site of interaction between Anne and her tenants. Accompanying her father and land steward to the twice-yearly event, Anne would have cut an unusual figure in an inn full of burly working men. But once the business of collecting the rents had started, there was no mistaking that Anne was the one in charge. The publican knew it, her father knew it and so did the tenants.
‘Saw poor George in his oaken coffin, very neatly shrouded with greens and laurels round his head – this struck me more than all I had seen of him before – poor fellow! It was for the last time’
In June 1832, not long after Anne’s return to Shibden, the Listers experienced a tragedy: the sudden death of their coachman, George Playforth.
George had been in the Listers’ employ for many years. Though he was a loyal servant, his relationship with Anne was dogged by what she called his ‘forever stupidity’. She had accepted that he could never ‘speak or look beyond the grade of a stable boy’ (19TH APRIL 1829). Early on, she had taken exception to his filthy nails. Anne did not like dirty hands on anyone; it was one of the first things on which she judged those who made her acquaintance. Her most recent contretemps with George had occurred a few months earlier, on 11th February, when he had got drunk and scared a gentleman’s child in the street in Hastings.
In the past Anne had often complained of his incompetence as a footman and his over
-use of the whip on her horses, for whose welfare she was always concerned. Yet when he had come over the reins of Anne’s beloved horse Percy, injuring himself quite badly, she had been quick to get him medical treatment:
Percy came down. George flew over his head and sprained his knee – the horse wanting shoeing. Sent George off with him to Blamires and desired [him] to go to the leech woman and have six leeches set on his knee while the horse was shod.
24TH MARCH 1824
Clearly, some affection had built up over the years between mistress and servant.
In June 1832, Anne and George had travelled to Langton Hall, the country home of Anne’s audacious, snuff-taking, hard-drinking friend (and ex-lover) Isabella Norcliffe. The accident in which George ultimately lost his life was outlandish and improbable. It is described by Anne in characteristically gory detail:
The half hour bell had just rung at 3½ when a man was seen returning up to the house . . . come for a ladder – the keeper had shot a man in a tree – all in alarm – soon learnt it was George – shot in the head – was dying – prepared for the worst. He was soon brought up and laid on a bed in the dressing room down stairs . . . By 4¾ Mr [Dr] Cobb and his son arrived – no wound of any consequence but for one gram of shot that had entered the socket of the left [eye] – small shot – at the distance of about 30 yards – in the top high tree near a carrion crow’s nest – the keeper shooting the old birds – this one shot must have pierced the socket, from the stupor and insensibility, and the catching convulsive clothes-pricking motions of the hand and arms – this always takes place in cases of apoplexy and any pressure on the brain from extravasated blood or otherwise.
