by Toby Litt
She was delighted to be in touch.
She had been trying to track down descendants of the people buried in those graves, but had only ever seen William’s name written as ‘Lett’.
We agreed to meet the Monday after I arrived in Quebec, and together to visit the parish of Saint-Martin, where William had been buried.
Vicki said she knew the exact place.
As the plane banked over Montréal, I strained my neck to look out the window. How hilly was it? How tall was Mount Royal? What would William have seen when he arrived? What would he have felt?
I have immigrated only once. You’ve already heard a little about it. On the 15th of April 1990, I left England (after leaving Scotland) and moved to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which changed its name, a few days later, to the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic.
I wasn’t simply going there to work: England disgusted me, I wanted as little to do with it as possible. Margaret Thatcher was about to begin her tenth year as Prime Minister.* The Poll Tax, which had been introduced in Scotland on 1 April 1989, was coming to England the same silly date, one year later. (We joked, the English teachers that I met in my first months, that we were Poll Tax exiles. It was cheaper to buy a coach ticket to Prague than pay up.)
When I set out for Prague, I thought I would never live in England again. I had left once already, when I went to live in Glasgow. What was England to me? England was Oxford, and Oxford was smugness, inwardness. I wanted to be a writer, how could I write in England? I was so full of hatred for the whole disgusting enterprise zone it was becoming that I wanted to be anywhere else.
I was going to an old city, an established place; William arrived in a country that wasn’t new but that was still essentially defining itself. Would Canada become English- or French-speaking? Protestant or Catholic? Loyal to the Crown of England or to whomever was ruling France or, even, independent of all outside influences?
By the time he died, William had seen two parts of a country join into one, as Upper and Lower Canada unified, in 1848; I witnessed the splitting of the two parts of Czechoslovakia, as the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic fairly amicably separated on 31 December 1992.
Absurdly, and fittingly, I arrived in one country,† lived in another‡ and left a third.§
All of this, my mini-exile, is nothing. When William sailed for Canada, he was 46-years-old and had seven surviving children. Hannah had died, aged five months, in 1828. The youngest of them, also called Hannah, was a baby when he said goodbye to her. His oldest child, William Jnr, was 14-years-old.
The family explanation for William’s departure, passed on by my father, was that he’d ‘fallen out with the local lord’.
A far more extreme reason is given in Wrestling and Wrestlers. It is ‘banishment’.¶ The authors actually say ‘forced banishment’, but what banishment isn’t forced? The emphasis is telling, though; it suggests physical threats.
Depending upon how well-informed these authors were, this suggests that some time, early in 1832, Lord Lonsdale or his underlings sent William a clear message: Clear off, and don’t come back! Or else…
William may have left in a hurry, but he did not go secretly. There was no midnight flit.
Bill Hartley reads a lot into the scene of William’s departure. ‘His wife’s parents were living in the Olde Castle Hotel, and the morning he went away he knocked them up to say “Goodbye.”’||
Bill reckons that William, far closer in age to his mother-in-law than to his wife, was also far closer to her full stop. Perhaps she was the woman he would miss most, in his new land.
The account, given by Mrs Cubby, William’s granddaughter,** in an interview reprinted in the Cumberland Pacquet in 1929, is the most kindly disposed towards William. She said he had ‘decided to go abroad’, rather than been forced. He did not desert his family, who were then living in Main Street, Hensingham. Instead, ‘he went abroad with the intention of founding a private school, and left his family well provided for’.††
The Memoirist is sympathetic, but suggests it wasn’t a free decision. William was ‘induced’ to emigrate by the ‘gradually-increasing embarrassment of [his] circumstances, and the difficulties that everywhere seemed to hem him in at home…’‡‡
More urgent still, a Whitehaven native recalled years later, that William left ‘on some differences arising between him and the overseers of Hensingham, by whom he was employed’.§§ This is getting closer to falling out with the local lord.
I decided William jumped rather than be pushed, perhaps pushed very hard – under a cart.
The first confirmation that William had left comes in the form of a minor disgrace. On 7 May 1832, a small notice in the Cumberland Pacquet, chronicler of so many of William’s triumphs, announced that he had been ‘replaced as Assistant Overseer’ after he had ‘absented himself from this situation’. No further monies were to be paid to him.
He was a free man.
To sail the Atlantic at that time was to risk your life. That time, for William, as far as I could tell, was March 1832.
William’s advice to those about to cross the Atlantic – given in his ‘Letters on Canada’ – suggests he was well prepared, and didn’t find it an extreme experience.¶¶
Shop around for a ship, he wrote.
Common prudence will teach any person of ordinary understanding, that if he has the choice of two or more vessels, a little inquiry will readily determine his selection…
Pack sensibly.
As for the provisions, his own taste and circumstances will evidently be his best guide…
Food:
In general, a couple of hams, with a sufficiency of potatoes and biscuit; some flour, oatmeal, eggs, sugar, and tea – if the latter be principally herbs he will find the beverage less sickly; and whatever trifling dainties he may fancy will assist in mitigating the nausea of the sea-sickness, or refreshing him after it…
The one cautionary note I found, which suggests William himself made a misstep, came at the end of his notes for travellers.
During the voyage, any unnecessary familiarity with the seamen beyond common civility, will sometimes subject him to liberties and references he had better avoid.||||
I pictured a scene on deck – ‘Think you’re a bit of a fighter, do you?’ – the impoverished, ex-wrestler William, being mocked by sarcastic tars; in the worst version, one of them has just decked him.
He was already a long way from home.
*
Like Timbuktoo, Canada was something a byword for out-of-the-wayness. Thomas De Quincey, a genius of hyperbole, wrote of ‘the farthest depths of Canada’, where he imagined ‘many a young innocent girl… looking now with fear to the dark recesses of the infinite forest’ and reading Shakespeare, ‘the infinite poet’.***
When I first heard that William spent his last years – the mid-1800s – in Canada, I imagined that he was moving away from things; that he would almost immediately have found himself sat in a small log cabin, reading Shakespeare, watching the seasons turn: I was quite wrong.
At the funky-looking Pointe-à-Callière Museum in Montréal, they have a theatre where a son et lumière show is projected half hourly down onto an excavation of some of the city’s earliest buildings.
I paid a visit.
The digits of the years were projected for the small audience. They raced downwards, through the glacial periods, and then upwards through the time of the Native Canadians. With the arrival of the French, the dates began to slow. There was more of a written historical record. Certain events were dramatized. But they were mostly the signing of treaties.
When 1832 came up – the year of William’s arrival – the show reached its high point.
Bright red and orange flames were projected onto the stones. The soundtrack played angry patriotic shouts.
Québec was entering its most unstable, violent era.
I enjoyed it. This was the stuff of my research, being brought to digital life.
*
Necessary background: In 1832, Canada was not yet a single country but, as I mentioned earlier, was divided into Haut-Canada and Bas-Canada – Upper and Lower. This, confusingly, didn’t mean north and south. Upper meant further up the St Lawrence River, so mainly Westward; that is, the area above America’s Great Lakes. Upper Canada was wilder, more dominated (in terms of population, if not political power) by the French-speaking Canadiens. Lower Canada, where William was headed, was a lot more developed.
Just outside the Pointe-à-Callière Museum was the Laval Canal, already completed by the time William arrived.
When the writer de Tocqueville saw the farms and fields along the banks of the St Lawrence river, they reminded him of the French countryside. ‘All trace of wilderness is vanished.’†††
That didn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.
By the time William’s ship docked, the British authorities in the Canadas had been working for several months to prevent the arrival of cholera.
Unless his captain was sneaky enough to avoid being delayed, William made landfall thirty miles east of Québec City, on Grosse-Île. Here, he entered quarantine – mixing on the small, hilly island with passengers from other boats.
Their voyage across the Atlantic, depending on winds, would have taken six to nine weeks. Passengers who had travelled in steerage were always exhausted, and – if their ship had been delayed beyond the usual – might be starving.‡‡‡ Quarantine regulations required new arrivals be examined for signs of cholera; vomiting, diarrhoea. They then had to clean themselves and their baggage, and wait several days before continuing upriver.
One visitor, a couple of years earlier, wrote of her first sight of Montréal, ‘all the buildings are roofed with Tin, which causes it to glitter in the Sun, like a City of Silver’.§§§ Beneath these light-effects, the walls were grey stone. The tallest building, the Roman Catholic Church, ‘rises with an air of grandeur, to a height which appears almost gigantic’.
Closer in, her positive impression might have changed. Here was a city perfect for the spread for water-borne diseases. Open sewers ran alongside roads and paths; garbage lay in piles.¶¶¶
Flooding was frequent.
Despite the quarantine, the 9th of June 1832 saw Montréal’s first recorded death from cholera. Ahead of this, there had been official denials; confirmation of the worst was terrifying. A French-language newspaper, the Canadian Courant, reported that ‘a panic of an almost indescribable nature [took] hold of the whole body of citizens and […] deprived them of presence of mind to an extent exceeding anything of a similar nature which had ever been witnessed in Montréal’.||||||
The paper also passed on a recipe from ‘a friend in Edinburgh – pour out one bottle best brandy onto a quarter pound of rhubarb, place over a slow fire for ten hours, then add 120 drops of spirit of lavender and laudanum’.
Newly arrived immigrants, such as William, were the object of deep suspicion. Food became scarce because the farmers were too afraid to come to market. Many people, in fear, fled the city – taking cholera with them.
I could not discover how just-0ff-the-ship William made his way through this, and whether his early days in Canada involved friends and somewhere to stay, or, instead, confusion and sleeping rough and hunger.
Of course, I was frustrated not to have any private letters from William, to give me details. In one of his public ‘Letters on Canada’ he mentioned ‘the risk every person must incur who leaves the place of his nativity to sojourn in a far distant land’. This sounded quite casual. The risk wasn’t a sweating, screaming death.**** So perhaps William did whisk past it all, riding a borrowed horse out into the countryside, but equally, perhaps – unemployed – he helped to hurriedly bury the dead, without ceremony.
Whatever happened, he must – at least to begin with – have regretted his decision to decamp to this dangerous, chaotic land.
Deaths from cholera were soon occurring so often that the churches stopped ringing their bells, so as not to increase despondency. On the 17th of June, one hundred died; on the 19th, one hundred and forty-nine. But that day was the peak. By the time it was over, around 3,400 would have lost their lives – almost one in seven of Montréal’s inhabitants.
More were coming to replace them, however. 1832 was the busiest year yet for emigration. 66,339 made their way to the North American colonies from the United Kingdom. As compared to 28,808 the following year. Only one other year, 1847, had a higher number.††††
From Ireland particularly, thousands were sailing. Many of those struggling to survive around William had not been there much longer than he had. One fifth of the population of Montréal had arrived, from abroad, within the previous five years. The majority of the city – already the largest in Canada – was British in origin. But the different nations had formed their own ghettos. In the West were the Scots and English; South West, the Irish; and the Canadiens, French-speaking, held on to the East.‡‡‡‡
The surrounding countryside was French – French-speaking, Catholic, and extremely angry about seeing their country stolen from them by immigrants. Among the Canadiens was where William would end up living, but not immediately.
The ‘next news’ of him ‘came from Hull, near Ottawa – where he stated that he had decided to make Canada his destination’.§§§§ This is interesting as it suggests he might have intended moving on to America, but took a look around Canada, liked what he saw and decided to stay. It also may be plain wrong; there’s no other mention of William travelling as far as Ottawa. All other records have him sticking in Montréal.
The writers of Wrestling and Wrestlers suggested his plans when he left Whitehaven were firm. William set off intending to ‘retrieve his broken fortunes in taking the cutting of canals, and works of a like description’.¶¶¶¶
The Memoirist agreed that he hoped to join in with this industrial boom. What job middle-aged William thought he might do is unclear. He had no qualifications as a hydraulic engineer, and no aptitude as a business manager. Did he really want to engage in extremely hard manual labour? Probably he thought he would find something in a growing city. He was mistaken.
In 1825, the rapids on the St Lawrence river – an awesome sight when I visited them, a whole horizon of white water – had been bypassed by the construction of the Laval shipping canal. But if William was hoping to join in a major new building project, he had – with typical bad timing – arrived in between one boom and the next. It was only in 1843 that work began on enlarging the canal.
Very bluntly, the account of his life in Wrestling and Wrestlers has it that, ‘A breakdown again occurred’.||||||||
What kind of breakdown could this have been? One of those nineteenth century episodes people wrote about in their diaries, ‘William has had a complete break down in health?’ Or was this a euphemism for an alcoholic relapse?
After convalescing, for a time – how long is unclear – William tried journalism. The Memoirist says, ‘he fell back again, as in England, on his literary abilities. Writing for the press, however, is a still more precarious source of income in Canada than at home…’*****
Back home, I’d spent several days at the British Library, scrolling through contemporary issues of the Montreal Gazette, looking for the initials ‘W.L.’, before I came across this sentence in an authoritative reference work on the history of publishing in Canada. It said, ‘the practice of the time was not to sign articles, or to sign with only a pseudonym…’†††††
After reading that, I’d given up looking for William’s contributions. It was most likely impossible that I would ever find anything William wrote for the Canadian press. Probably he wrote very little. Probably, most of the little he wrote wasn’t wanted.
Wrestling and Wrestlers said of William’s attempt to live by journalism, ‘This failing, he became a teacher’.‡‡‡‡‡
When I moved to Prague, with no qualifications beyond an English Degree (2.1), it was to be a teach
er. I had got a job ‘doing TEFL’ – that’s ‘Teaching of English as a Foreign Language’. In those days of the Wild East, totally unqualified teachers were welcome; now, you would need to invest several thousand pounds in training yourself before you’ll be employed.
My employer was Milena Kelly – a remarkable and extremely energetic woman. (In her forties, she had a baby and was back at work three days later.) She had gone into exile after 1968, grown up in America, and had returned to Prague around the time of the revolution. A few weeks after this, Milena went on Czechoslovak television to talk about her ambition: to start the country’s first private language school. In the days after her appearance, she received over five hundred letters from people desperate to learn English. These ultra-keen bods became the first cohort of Angličtina Express students. (You might translate Angličtina Express as ‘English for the Impatient’.)
I began by teaching four hour-long classes of them, one after another, at the Archbiskupské gymnázium on Namesti Míru (Peace Square). And I did, I think, what any unqualified teacher does – I tried to make my students love me, so they wouldn’t rebel and kill me.
My ethos was simple: if they are laughing, it probably means they’ve understood the joke. I may not have a teaching qualification, I thought, but I have watched Good Morning, Vietnam. I treated the first couple of classes as a way of trying out material – they were the slightly dour, straight-from-work people. The seven o’clock lot, however, had often spent a brief while in the pub before arriving. They were a very good crowd. I became friends with several of them, and went out with the niece of one of them, Magdalena.
