A Different Day, A Different Destiny (The Snipesville Chronicles)

by Laing, Annette

  I enjoyed a lovely summer’s day in 2007 at the Kensal Green Cemetery Open House, in the agreeable company of my student Shannon McLeod, not to mention the ladies of the WRVS and a crowd of Goths. The Friends of the cemetery gave an informative and truly creepy tour of the Anglican Chapel catacombs, and also of the main grounds. It was a uniquely British day out for Shannon and me. I also owe the Professor’s details about Kensal Green to the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery Web site,

  http://www.kensalgreen.co.uk/

  Fiona Cormack in the archives at the Museum of London Docklands told me about Dundee Wharf in Limehouse, in the East End of London, which was leased or owned by the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Co. It was next to Buchanan’s Wharf, where tea was handled. Neither dock exists today. However, it turns out that Hannah’s ship would have docked at the DPL’s earlier London base, Hore’s Wharf in Wapping, a fact I discovered in Graeme Somner’s book on the DPL (see bibliography, below.)

  The Thames Tunnel still exists, and remains part of the East London Line of the Underground (subway) system, which at time of writing is closed for major renovations.

  After the Great Exhibition ended, the Crystal Palace was moved to a new site in south London, where it was enlarged and remained a popular attraction and venue. It burned down in 1936. It is still memorialized by Crystal Palace railway station.

  Some of the exhibits from the Great Exhibition formed the starting collection for the South Kensington Museum, opened by Queen Victoria in 1857, and later renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum. If you visit the V&A today, you can see some of the original pieces from the Crystal Palace.

  Thanks to Dr. Jon Bryant for loaning me a working replica of the revolver exhibited by Samuel Colt at the Great Exhibition. I still can’t work it.

  New Lanark

  Aynsley Gough, Education and Access Officer for the New Lanark Conservation Trust, diligently researched the sanitary arrangements at the beautiful New Lanark Mills in the mid-nineteenth century. Talk about a loo with a view… Hannah should have been more grateful. My family and I enjoyed staying in New Lanark at the SYHA hostel on Wee Row, although we imagine that our digs, however Spartan, were a little better than conditions at Mrs. Nicolson’s. Thanks to the staff of this superb industrial museum.

  The Midlands and the Black Country

  Heather and Bob Salway, and their kids, Hannah, Daniel and Michael, graciously—and perhaps foolishly-- loaned me their house in Walmley, West Midlands, while they were away on holiday. It made a splendid base for visiting the Black Country and the Midlands, and I was also able to make serious strides on the first draft while sitting in their living room! Many, many thanks. My son, Alec, and I spent two splendid days at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, eight months apart. Both visits were a great deal of fun. Brandon’s coal mine was inspired by visits to the impressive reproduction 1850 mine here, and to the drift mine at Beamish Open Air Museum, near Newcastle and Durham. We also enjoyed our canal boat ride at the Black Country Museum.

  Joyce Harper has a fine command of the English language, and, indeed, was my public speaking coach at school, more years ago than either of us would care to recall. Her skill with standard English is especially remarkable since her first language is the tongue-twisting dialect of England’s Black Country, the area to the west of Birmingham (and very definitely separate from it, as Black Country folk never tire of telling us…) Many thanks to Joyce, a native of Netherton, who corrected my misuse and abuse of Black Country dialect, and so helped me devise a modified version of the Real Thing that would nonetheless be intelligible to my readers. All the inaccuracies are entirely my doing.

  The song sung by the miners is The Miner’s Petition, quoted in Jon Raven, The Urban and Industrial Songs of the Black Country and Birmingham (Broadside Books, 1977)

  Roma, splendid guide at the National Trust Birmingham Back-to-Backs, answered my questions and objections without wincing. The NT effort to preserve working-class housing is commendable, although, as I said on the day, it needs to be less Trustified and precious.

  The Southwell Workhouse of the National Trust was a great example of the innovative approach the NT has taken toward adding to its portfolio of buildings in recent years. It was a fascinating and memorable tour. Thanks to the welcoming staff. Oh, and by the way, Americans? It is shameful that our version of the NT is so tiny, and far more pompous. C’mon, we have historic buildings, too, and we need to stop being so stuffy about history.

  Alec and I spent a lovely time in the stunningly beautiful village of Stoke Bruerne, where we had a delicious pub lunch, visited the National Waterways Museum, rode in a canal boat, and watched several narrowboats pass through the traditional lock (a process I found very hard to describe!) Today, canal boats are floating RVs, and we were tickled to see the pretty gardens some boat owners had planted on the roofs of their floating homes! The village is close to the M1 Motorway, and well worth a detour: http://www.nwm.org.uk/stoke/

  Dundee

  I have set part of my book in the very real city of Dundee, Scotland, and I am standing by to receive complaints from the large number of local historians who have chronicled its history. Most of the parts of Dundee that I describe are long gone, demolished in the name of slum clearance and not-always-successful urban renewal. I relied on old photos and drawings for my descriptions, along with my knowledge of urban conditions in early and mid-Victorian Britain, and imagination. The Royal Arch, which was completed in 1851 to celebrate the visit of Queen Victoria many years earlier, was torn down in the 1960s to make way for an exit road from the new Tay road bridge, a loss which Dundonians still mourn many decades later. In other acts of civic vandalism, the Town House and the houses behind it, including the Vault and Castle Lane, were demolished to build Caird Hall and the underwhelming city square. To get a sense of what Dundee was like in the 19th century check out the photographs of early twentieth-century Dundee at the city’s Photopolis site at:

  http://www. dundeecity.gov.uk/centlib/photopolis/index.html Fiona Sinclair, senior curator at Dundee’s McManus Galleries and Museum (formerly known by what I shall always consider its proper name, the Albert Institute, named for the creator of the Great Exhibition), helped refer me to other sources of information while extensive and disruptive renovations are carried out on the building.

  Eileen Moran and Deirdre Sweeney proved unflappable when I descended on them unannounced one August day in 2008 at the Dundee City Library Local History Room. They quickly assembled material, both from my requests and their own suggestions, for what proved to be the most productive and enjoyable few hours I have ever spent in an archive. Thanks to them, my descriptions of Dundee and its people drew much more on mid-nineteenth century sources than would otherwise have been the case.

  My great-grandfather, James Harris, kept a grocery store in Dundee in the early twentieth century, so I borrowed his name. Hope he wouldn’t mind.

  I was gobsmacked to learn that the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company is still very much in business, and still headquartered in Dundee, almost two hundred years after its founding. I am grateful to Alasdair Chalmers and his secretary Ann Bain for information about the time it took for a company paddle steamer to make the journey from Dundee to London, and the likely conditions onboard. Alas, they were unable to help with a description of the steamers’ passenger accommodations, so I have improvised, based on contemporary accounts. Hannah’s ship would most likely have been the Perth.

  Jessie Gordon and her weaver daughters were inspired by a photograph I have of my great-great-grandmother with her husband and their six weaver daughters (and one son), taken in 1927. The family story is that the daughters were all able to become weavers because my great-great-grandfather, John Simpson, was a supervisor at Caird’s Mill. Mina Simpson was a union organizer. Two of her sisters emigrated to New York with their husbands, one of whom was a pierrot, or seaside entertainer. Oh, and the youngest sister, Barbara, was my great-grandmother, who died in 199
2. The Simpsons were far more respectable than most of their fictionalized Gordon selves, but by the time they were born, the Scottish upper working classes had become thoroughly Late Victorian.

  According to the 1851 Dundee census, Whitehall Close, where Maggie lived, was among the worst slums in a city notorious for the worst housing in Britain. It was inhabited mostly by immigrant Irish laborers who, without capital or connections, and facing anti-Catholic discrimination, had small chance of getting out of poverty.

  Hannah’s riot was inspired by a news item in the Dundee, Perth and Cupar Advertiser in 1851. The two ads for voyages to San Francisco and Dundee really did appear on the same page of the Dundee, Perth and Cupar Advertiser on April 11, 1851.

  The information about Moon and Langlands’ shop was drawn from the 1850 Dundee City directory.

  Please do visit Dundee, my birthplace and arguably the most Scottish city in Scotland. I go there every year to visit family and touch base. There is still much lovely Scottish architecture, despite all the demolitions. You can also check out Verdant Works (the museum of the now-departed jute industry), and the soon-to-reopen city museum at McManus Galleries (a magnificent Victorian Gothic building, originally known as the Albert Institute, in honor of the prince). Don’t miss the fabulous bakeries of Fisher & Donaldson and Goodfellow & Stevens, who have sold Dundee’s (and Britain’s) best cakes and pies for decades, including the meat pies and rhubarb pies of which Hannah and Maggie were so fond. The meat pies, in 1851, would have been made from mutton: Today, the usual filling is ground beef, and they are to die for. Take home some freshly-roasted coffee from J. Allan Braithwaite, who have been selling from the same location and even the same shop fittings since the 1860s! Poverty continues to plague Dundee, but Dundonians remain among the friendliest people to visitors, and you will be charmed by the accent and the attitudes. If you liked Mina, you will love Dundee.

  Balesworth

  Distant Writing, Steven Roberts’ exhaustive online history of early Victorian telegraphy companies in Britain, was extremely helpful: http://distantwriting. co.uk Once again, Barry Attoe, Archives Officer at the British Postal Museum and Archive, helped make sure I didn’t reveal my ignorance of the postal system.

  You won’t find Balesworth Hall in Hertfordshire, or on the National Trust’s web site at nationaltrust.org.uk, because, like Balesworth itself, it doesn’t exist. What I had in mind was an amalgam of historic manor houses I visited in the run-up to the book, including Sudbury, Hanbury Hall, Audley End, and so many more. The Chatsfield peerage, as well as its allied titles, is entirely fictitious, as are the members of that family: The “Chats” part of the name was an unconscious nod to Joseph Paxton, architect of the Crystal Palace, who based his design on the greenhouses he built for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. If you are embarked on a serious study of aristocracy and land inheritance, please do NOT use this book as your starting point: I bent the rules a bit.

  Thanks to Wikipedia for the quick look-ups: If there are any mistakes, blame me for using Wikipedia.

  Select Bibliography

  Just a few of the books I consulted. I recommend only the most readable, but let me reiterate that my work would not be possible without that of academic historians, including their more boring stuff.

  New Lanark

  Donnachie, Ian L. and Hewitt, George, Historic New Lanark (Edinburgh University Press, 1993)

  Dundee Lewis, George, Impressions of America and the American Churches ( Edinburgh: W.P. Kennedy, 1845);

  Rice, Alan J. and Crawford, Martin, Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 1999)

  In the 1840s, Reverend George Lewis of Dundee really did visit the American South, including Savannah, to solicit contributions for the new Free Church of Scotland. What’s more, Frederick Douglass really did visit Scotland, including Dundee, on a triumphant tour of Britain. He explained to Dundee people that the contributions to Rev. Lewis had come from the proceeds of slavery. Of the warm reception he got, Douglass wrote home from the Royal Hotel, Dundee, “It is quite an advantage to be a ‘nigger’ here.” (quoted in William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995))

  Miskell, Louise, Whatley, Christopher, and Harris, Bob (eds.), Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000)

  Somner, Graeme, The DP&L: A History of the Dundee, Perth & London Shipping Co. Ltd and Associated Shipping Companies (Kendal: World Ship Society, 1995)

  London and The Great Exhibition of 1851

  Auerbach, Jeffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) Drew, William Allen, Glimpses and Gatherings During a Voyage and Visit to London and the Great Exhibition in the Summer of 1851 (Augusta, Maine: Homan & Manley, 1852) My description of 1851 London, and of the Thames Tunnel especially, is primarily dependent on Drew’s super account. I am grateful to the Wikipedia contributors who made me aware of it, and to Google Books for making the entire text available. Leapman, Michael, The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation (London: Headline Publishing, 2002)

  Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (London: Hambledon & London, 2006) Savannah

  Jones, Jacqueline, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008)

  This splendid and readable account was an invaluable source of information

  about pre-Civil War Savannah.

  About the Author

  Dr. Annette Laing was born in Scotland, raised in England, spent many years in California, and now lives in rural Georgia. She was a professor of early American and British history before resigning in 2008 to concentrate on her work for children’s history. She is director of Imaginative Journeys, a program that runs creative day camps for kids in South Georgia.

  To learn about Annette’s books, summer camps, school visits, and consultancy, please visit www.AnnetteLaing.com.