God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  2

  About seventy yards south of the house Sam had instructed his Manchester architect to raise an artificial knoll and crown it with a summerhouse. The summerhouse did not face the woods, as one might expect, but the monstrosity that Sam Rawlinson had tortured from the hunting lodge that had stood there for the last century and a half, a two-storey building of red Cheshire brick, with a portico supported by two truncated Doric columns and a façade of tall windows, the lower section opening on to a verandahed terrace.

  The original hunting lodge, local men recalled, had been an inoffensive building, but Sam Rawlinson, after buying out the last defunct partner of Seddon Moss Mill, had set himself to amend that. The monster that resulted from a marriage of Sam's notions of domestic grandeur and the fumblings of an inexperienced architect was possibly the most eye-catching structure in the world, not excluding some of the new municipal townhalls that were being run up with cheap, ready-made materials made available by the new railway network.

  The renovated Stannard Lodge, as it was marked on eighteenth-century maps, just escaped being a folly but was the poorer for it. Seddon Moss operatives, who sometimes walked the eight miles simply to gape at it, knew it by another name. They called it “Scab's Castle,” a name derived from a rumour that the new owner had obtained his start in life by leading a counter-revolutionary work force at the Rochdale mill where he had begun his career as an eight-year-old coal-comber and had progressed, through bale-breaking and furnaceman, into the lower grades of management.

  Nobody in the Warrington area knew the facts of Sam's rise from the coal-comber to the mill owner, but it had been achieved in a matter of thirty-five years. There was nothing very spectacular about that. In the decades leading up to the late eighteen-fifties the same rate of progress had been accomplished by hundreds of men, most of them cottagers’ sons. The only thing singular about Sam Rawlinson was his willingness to leave production in the hands of a few, higher-than-average mechanics, and divide his tremendous vigour between administration and salesmanship. He had sold his first small mill at a handsome profit during a boom season and then ploughed everything he possessed or could borrow into Seddon Moss, a business that had been steadily running down owing to the reluctance of its elderly owner to replace the outworn plant.

  That was in 1850, and in less than two years the decline of Seddon Moss Mill was halted and reversed, and the town had had to adjust to the impact of Sam Rawlinson's restless energy. He reorganised the mill from top to bottom, installed machinery that had not even been patented, signed on all the hands he could get, and went out after big oriental orders that called for quantity rather than quality. The home market he ignored, preferring to deal through his Liverpool brokers with customers who were too far off to complain in person or press claims for refunds.

  He worked, on an average, fourteen hours a day, having no interests outside the mill apart from the embellishment of his new home. The word “embellishment” played no part in his commercial life, where he was concerned exclusively with facts and figures, but it featured largely in his domestic background and even his pliant young architect had been astonished when Sam told him to add a third storey to the Lodge, then decorate the south-facing frontage with four Gothic turrets. After that he added a castellated balustrade to the top of the portico, and then a row of arrow-slits to the buttresses between the windows, so that when it was finished the building looked like a top-heavy mediaeval fort balanced, none too securely, on a squashed red box. He then knocked twenty-eight per cent off the architect's fee and brought in a landscape gardener to cut back the encroaching timber, lay down an acre of lawn, excavate a large duckpond complete with an islet populated by roughcast herons, and raise the small hill so that he might have a convenient perch from which to survey his handiwork.

  Nobody ever discovered whether it pleased him or not, but in his limited spare time he went on looking at it as though it did. He had no friends, other than old Goldthorpe, the ground landlord of the area in which Seddon Moss Mill was situated, and even Goldthorpe, a notorious miser and rentier, had been heard to say that Rawlinson would dry, process, and sell the skin of a grape if he could find a market for the end product. Men of business in the area came to respect him, however, as by far the biggest employer of unskilled labour hereabouts. His small team of executives, locally known as “The Strappers,” tolerated him, if only because he could be absolutely relied upon to back them against the operatives on every occasion. In the men, women, and boys who formed his labour force he inspired a compound of hate, derision, and naked fear, but also a certain awe that one man, and him a widower without sons or local background, could have acquired so much power so quickly, and exercise it with such damnable attention to detail.

  For although Sam Rawlinson rarely appeared on the factory floor he gave ample evidence of knowing everything that happened down there, and every word spoken that was relevant to his concerns. He might, indeed, have been watching them individually from the moment they arrived at six-thirty a.m., until they trooped out twelve to fourteen hours later. He knew when one of them was a minute late in arriving, or ten seconds early in shutting down. He knew to a fibre how much wastage occurred every day, how many breaks were detected on a particular machine every hour, and often such irrelevant data as which unwed operative was pregnant and who was the likely father. They hated his powers of concentration, and they hated his unrelenting grasp of their personal lives, but almost all of them, deep down, regarded him as a reliable provider, particularly after Seddon Moss had ridden out the last slump without resorting to short time, as had a majority of mills in the area.

  Perhaps it was this certitude of regular employment that kept them so long from mutiny, and helped them to resist the exhortations of men like Cromaty and McShane to bluff the Gaffer into increasing the overtime rate by one penny an hour, and authorise a relief system for the ten-minute breakfast break, at present spent standing beside the chattering machines. In the end, however, the persuasions of a hard core of rebels prevailed and there was a ten-day walkout. Sam's reply had been a nine-week lockout, that had now lasted from May into July.

  Sam Rawlinson's obstinacy seemed likely to outlast the heatwave. Indeed, its breaking-strain was linked to the thermometer for he reasoned that, whereas seven hundred operatives might well feel the pinch of privation in high summer, the nerve centre of his unruly mob would not be touched until rain fell on their slate-loose hovels, an earnest of what was in store for them in November and December.

  He was now losing, at his own calculation, about a hundred pounds a week and that apart from orders that were going elsewhere, but although this appalling price exasperated him it did not daunt him. For one thing he could afford it. An overall loss of, say, two thousand pounds, would make no more than a dent in his invested capital. For another his commonsense, which he thought of himself as possessing in abundance, told him that in the long run the lockout would show a profit, for once the mill was working full-time again no man or group of men would dare to challenge him in the future. There would still be strikes and stoppages at neighbouring factories, so long as employers turned a blind eye to the engagement of men with truculent records, (a policy he consistently opposed at local federation meetings), but there would be no more penny-an-hour or breakfast-break deputations waiting upon him. Whenever the whisper circulated that one was about to assemble, the single men and girls would remember the penniless summer of ’58, and the married men would heed wives with half-a-dozen bellies to fill. To walk through his mill now, to contemplate ten thousand pounds’ worth of modern machinery as idle as his hands, was a depressing experience to a man who, in his teens, had worked a sixteen-hour-day for fourteen shillings a week. He found it, however, less irksome than living under the threat of extortion from troublemakers like Cromaty and McShane, both of whom, he noted, had absented themselves from the deputation that had trudged out here two days ago, begging him to reopen on any terms short of a cutback in daily rates.
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br />   He knew millworkers, and he flattered himself that he knew Sam Rawlinson. Under present circumstances acceptance of the deputation's terms would amount to a compromise, and a compromise was half-way to surrender, perhaps all the way if one thought in terms of years rather than months. He could hold on, if necessary, until Christmas, and neither loss of orders nor the hint of violence that that bloodless old stick Goldthorpe had dropped when they had last met, could shake his nerve. He had studied the rules of the game of industrial bluff. During the ’47 riots, that had spread north from the Midlands like a heath fire, erupting in every town within a day's ride of Manchester, he had been running a mill with less than seventy operatives, and although he kept his mill open he had heard some of his own hands sounding off at street corners during the troubles. But in the end he had seen those same men crawl back to work after the military had reinforced the police and the yeomanry. A few factories had been gutted, a certain amount of plant damaged, and acres of local palings had been torn up and used as weapons against batons and bayonets, but within hours of the North Western Railway depositing the Guards at the Manchester terminus there had been no more talk of “Moscowing the town,” whatever that meant. He had even had the sour satisfaction of erasing the names of street orators he recognised from his tally book.

  As for the present upset, a short strike and an extended lockout, it was a personal not a national demonstration. Cromaty, McShane, and a few like them, had staked their reputations on wresting that penny-an-hour and that ten-minute breakfast break from him, and he knew what lay behind the demand. They were hoping to use these piddling concessions as a recruiting slogan for their newly formed Spinners Alliance, a David pitting himself against the Goliath of the Local Federation and in this sense, or so Sam told himself, he was fighting everyone's battle. For if the Bible story repeated itself in Seddon Moss then God alone knew what price employers all over the country would pay in cash and lost working hours in the approaching winter.

  So the Seddon Moss deputation had trudged the dusty road to Daresbury in vain, arriving and departing empty-bellied and empty-handed. It had been a rare pleasure to watch McEwan, his Scots gardener, hosing the half-moon flower-beds only a few yards from the front steps while the men argued and pleaded. He had not given them so much as a drink of water and it must have been a leather-tongued sextet that trailed back to town, for all the streams on the plain were dry and every cottage was hoarding well water.

  Meantime he had plenty to think about. Enforced idleness had given him an unlooked for opportunity to weigh every aspect of Matthew Goldthorpe's hint of a dynastic alliance, and the prospect of having Goldthorpe's poop of a son as the father of his grandchildren took priority over even such a matter as the shutdown of Seddon Moss Mill.

  Up here in his summerhouse, with his back to the trees, he could choose a highway for his thoughts and march along it, shoulders squared, pugnacious jaw outthrust, prominent blue eyes—“marble” eyes his rivals called them—bulging balefully at his unlikely castle that always had the power of focusing his attention, if only because it represented proof that anything was attainable providing you wanted it enough.

  He thought first of the bloodless Goldthorpe, reputedly the richest ground landlord between Salford and Birkenhead, and then, reluctantly, of Goldthorpe's son, Makepeace. What a damned silly name to christen a boy! What a gratuitous handicap to fasten upon a stripling due to walk into an income of several thousand a year once they trundled the old man away. Makepeace! Who wanted peace and, if peace was thrust upon a man, who wanted the odium of bringing it about? He remembered asking Goldthorpe what the devil had prompted him to penalise the boy at birth, and the old man had told him that his son was named after the novelist, Thackeray, who was, it seemed, distantly related to Goldthorpe's hoity-toity wife. To Sam it was an inadequate explanation, but he felt obliged to admit that it suited Goldthorpe's son and from here it was a short step to the contemplation of Makepeace Goldthorpe's loins.

  It seemed unlikely, at first glance, that the boy would be capable of siring anything more aggressive than a jack-rabbit. He was thin, shambling, toothy, and completely subdued by the prospect of his father's wealth. He had a moist handclasp, a wispy moustache, and a faint stammer, but did physical disqualifications matter? Admittedly the prospect of grandsons was important, but was that prospect limited to the womb of the one child his own wife had brought him and died, most inconsiderately, in the process? He was only forty-seven and would probably marry again when he could spare time. The lack of a wife over the past nineteen years had not troubled him overmuch. He spent very little time at home, retained the services of Mrs. Worrell, an excellent cook-housekeeper, and had access to any number of lusty operatives glad to satisfy his occasional needs for the price of a shilling. He had no regular mistress (the maintenance of one not only gave women grandiose ideas but invariably got about among the chapel people and was bad for business), but, by his own computation, he had probably sired half-a-dozen bastards. The claims of all had been silenced by a routine arrangement he had with Doig, his lawyer. Having satisfied himself that there was a chance of a claim being established, a small lump sum, and a statement exonerating his client from any further responsibility, disposed of the matter. Lately, on Doig's advice, Sam had taken care to find his fun in Manchester, among some other mill-owner's employees. It was, perhaps, an expensive way of going about things, but Sam Rawlinson was not averse to spending money on himself. The arrow-slits and the four Gothic turrets embellishing Stannard Lodge proved that.

  By now, however, with the prospect of finding a well britched husband for Henrietta, Sam's thoughts had been turning more and more to bringing order into his private life, and there seemed to him no reason why he should not begin looking around for some healthy young woman who would get him a string of heirs to compensate for his wife's extreme carelessness in dying after producing a single child and that a daughter. As for Henrietta, she could make herself useful by marrying young Goldthorpe, or somebody like Goldthorpe. By so doing she would not only make fresh capital available but take out insurance in the matter of grandchildren.

  He made a guess at Matthew Goldthorpe's pile. It was probably in the six figure bracket, even though most of it reposed in bricks and mortar of which half was property on the point of falling down. Not that that mattered. The real value lay in the sites and the Goldthorpes, who had been landowners about here for two generations, were known to own a great slice of the eastern sector of the town and to have pocketed upwards of twenty thousand when the railway came through twenty years before. On the face of it he was hardly likely to improve on Makepeace, particularly as Matthew also owned the strip of rubble-strewn land between his offloading bays and the railways goods yard. He wondered, remembering this, if Goldthorpe could be talked into making this over to him as a wedding pledge and decided that it was possible. As always, when he was assessing a problem, he identified with his opponent, and on this occasion the result was encouraging. Matt Goldthorpe was copper-bottomed but he was also greedy. Unlike Sam he did not think of himself as a rich man but continued to behave as though the odd sixpence represented the difference between a herring supper and going to bed on an empty stomach. The prospect of marrying into the family of the district's largest employer of labour obviously attracted him. Had it been otherwise nothing would have induced the close-fisted old buzzard to make the first approach. Deciding this Sam also made up his mind on the spot but in doing so gave a passing thought to the couple themselves. Makepeace, he knew, would marry a woman with two heads if his father gave the command, not because he was filial but because, endowed with his father's extreme fondness for money, the prospect of running contrary to its source, with younger brothers in the offing, was unthinkable. Apart from this, if he was a man at all, he would not find the prospect of marrying Henrietta displeasing, irrespective of any settlement Sam might make. Henrietta was a shapely, spirited girl, with her mother's refined features and his own clear skin and matchless h
ealth. With the minimum of assistance from Makepeace she could, he was sure, produce a flock of children, and old Goldthorpe, a slave to tribal prejudice, would respond to that and be likely to observe the rules of primogeniture when it came to making his will. Sam did not know, neither did he care, how Henrietta would react to the bargain. Their relationship was humdrum. Most of his time had been spent at the mill, or drumming up orders, and because she was only a girl he had left her education, such as it was, to a succession of nursemaid-governesses. She could, they told him, tinkle the piano, sew a little, cook a little, and while away her time on other woman's pursuits, like pokerwork, crocheting, and dressmaking. Unlike her father, she had been able to read and write since she was a toddler, and no man in his senses would give a girl who promised to be pretty more than a minimal education.