Fourpenny Flyer

by Beryl Kingston

  So he was grateful and relieved when he met a man in a Salford tavern who said he knew of a place where skilled weavers were in demand. It was a mild evening in May, and the gentleman was as mild-mannered as the weather, even though he was really rather extraordinary to look at, having fine fair hair and ginger whiskers. He said his name was Mr Richards and claimed to be a friend of the great Easter family, ‘I lodge with cousins of theirs in Bury St Edmunds, damne if I don’t’ and a supporter of universal suffrage, what’s more ‘I was here at the time of Peterloo, so I was. A parlous business!’

  ‘You were saying you knew where weavers were in demand,’ Caleb prompted.

  ‘Aye, so I do. I’ve a friend there crying out for skilled men.’

  ‘Might I ask where, sir?’

  ‘Why Norwich, sir. Do ’ee have a loom?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Then permit me to give you the address,’ the gentleman said. ‘By great good fortune I have it here in my pocket.’

  So Caleb went to Norwich and found to his considerable relief that the amiable Mr Richards had spoken the truth. There was a job for a cotton weaver and lodgings to go with it. He accepted both at once, even though they were in one of the many weavers’ houses in King Street, right in the path of all the stinks and smells from the breweries to the north and the dyeworks by the river and the tanneries and slaughterhouses in Ber Street. It was a long, narrow, dirty street that ran parallel to the River Wensum and well below the castle, and the houses in it were mostly ancient and rickety, their roofs patched and pantiled, their walls rough-plastered and their attic rooms through-lit by long weavers’ windows.

  Caleb’s room contained a bed with a straw mattress, a battered table, one cane-bottomed chair and a chipped jug and basin. It had one small shuttered window which gave out onto the discoloured walls of the house opposite, a miserably small fireplace with an adequate coal-hole beside it. And it was verminous. He started to do battle against his unwanted companions with turpentine and camphor on the day he arrived, but the weather was too warm and he knew they would breed faster than he could kill them. No matter, he thought, flinging himself down on his rough bed at the end of his first long day at work. He’d clear them all out once the cold weather set in. He’d make sure to light no fires until they were all dead and gone and swept away. For although he could endure most hardships willingly enough, bedbugs were an abomination to him.

  Nevertheless there were blessings to count. His loom arrived safe and sound thanks to Mr Pickford’s new delivery service, there was plenty of work and, although it was badly paid, something could be done about that too. He would set about the task of organizing his fellow weavers as soon as he could. I’ll achieve summat in this city, he promised himself, higher wages or better conditions, or both. One way or t’other, I’ll better t’ lives of t’ workers in this town.

  But first there was the summer to live through.

  In Norwich, in summer, the River Wensum smelt like an open sewer, which to all intents and purposes it was, being sluggish and evil coloured and full of bobbing garbage, offal reeking from the shambles, straw foul from the stables, and the filth from countless privies. It could be smelt all over the city, for there was no breeze to carry the stink elsewhere, and down in King Street Caleb and his fellow workers had to sleep with closed shutters.

  As always in foul weather, the weavers grew more and more discontented with their lot, working long hours in their stifling attics by day, bug-bitten by night, eating rancid food and paid a pittance on Saturdays. But although Caleb and his new friends from the Norwich Hampden Clubs argued that they should take to the streets and protest, they grumbled and did nothing. It wasn’t until 6th July when their employers suddenly cut their wages, that they finally took action, and then things happened very quickly and with unexpected power.

  Wages were docked on Saturday evening and that night the streets were full of angry men and women protesting to one another and saying something ought to be done. The next morning Caleb and his friends went from door to door in King Street knocking up their neighbours and calling them to a meeting in the local inn.

  A hundred and fifty turned up, angry and hot and frustrated, and decided almost at once that they should start their campaign by petitioning against the reduction of their wages.

  ‘Ask reasonable,’ one man said. ‘’Tis always the best way.’

  But who should carry the petition and to whom?

  ‘To Mr Robbards,’ Caleb suggested. ‘’Tis true he’s nobbut t’ deputy chairman of t’ manufacturers’ committee, but he’s like to be t’ most amenable.’

  ‘Will you deliver un for us, Caleb Rawson?’

  ‘With t’ greatest of pleasure.’

  So he was deputized at once. And when he pointed out that their petition would have more force if it came from even more people and suggested that two men from the meeting should go to each parish in the city to call out all the weavers and spinners to a grand meeting on Mousehold Heath the following day, the suggestion was passed on a roar.

  Monday was hotter than ever, but for the first time since Caleb’s arrival the looms were silent as the weavers and spinners of Norwich walked out of their houses and up to the great heath outside the city, crossing the Bishop’s Bridge in a vast, determined crowd. The time for action had indisputably arrived.

  It was an enormous gathering. Speeches were shouted through homemade megaphones, and cheered whether they were heard or not, and the weavers and spinners sat in the sun as their petition was signed and gathered, and the written sheets mounted on Caleb’s trestle table until the pile was bigger than a book. And the upshot of it all was that Caleb and eleven others were deputized to deliver that book to the meeting of the manufacturers’ committee that was going to be held at the Guildhall on the following day.

  By Tuesday afternoon, when the meeting at the Guildhall began, the heat was intense and passions were running very high. The marketplace was packed with people, who booed or cheered as the manufacturers or their delegates struggled up the steps into the building. One of the manufacturers, a certain Mr Arthur Beloe. made a speech on the steps and said he thought the reduction of wages had been ‘ill advised’, which earned him a special roar of approval. But inside the building, once the weavers’ delegates had left and so could not be privy to what was being said, negotiations were fraught and ill-tempered and went on far too long.

  By four o’clock tempers in the marketplace were frayed to breaking point. A chant began, ‘Return our wages! Return our wages!’ Hastily painted banners appeared and were waved defiantly. And finally one of the manufacturers was attacked.

  He’d arrived late and had been jostled as he went up the steps, and when he fell it was as if his vulnerability was a signal for violence to erupt. He was kicked and beaten and tossed from hand to furious hand, and as he struggled to get away, his hat and coat and shoes were pulled from him and thrown into the air. Caleb and the other delegates tried to force their way through the crowd to calm things, but they were too tightly packed in to move more than a foot or two. Somebody called out that the troops were coming, but the rage continued and the chanting grew louder, and neither abated until their victim had managed to escape and Mr Beloe appeared on the balcony with a paper in his hand.

  ‘The committee have agreed,’ he called down to them. ‘We are to return to the old wages. Your petition is granted.’

  Then what a roar went up! Mr Beloe was called down from the balcony and carried off in triumph on the shoulders of two strong weavers, and a procession formed behind them and a band arrived and the great crowd streamed out into Castle Meadow singing and dancing and quite restored to humour, with dogs yelping at their feet and the sun bright on their banners. ‘Victory!’ they yelled to one another. ‘Victory!’

  But Caleb and the eleven deputies were not in the procession. At the very moment the march moved out of the square they had been arrested. The constables had arrived so quietly and seized them all so quickly there
was no time for struggle or argument. And the next day when they came up for trial before the local magistrates, there was no time for justice either. It took twenty minutes for the magistrates to find them all guilty of common assault and causing an affray. The eleven were sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment. Caleb, as ‘the acknowledged leader’ was given three years.

  As the new King George progressed beneath his triumphal arch and Harriet wondered where her hero was, he was sitting on a bench in a stone cell in the dungeons under Norwich Castle, picking oakum, dirty and ill-fed and not thinking of her at all.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘I can’t say I think very much of your Cousin Thomasina’s lodger,’ Matilda Easter said, unlacing her chemise.

  Billy was already in his nightshirt and waiting ardently for the moment when the chemise would be pulled over her head and thrown aside, but he realized from the expression on her face that he would have to make some conversation first. ‘Mr Richards?’ he said. ‘Why, what’s up with him?’

  ‘He’s got a deal too much side,’ Matilda said, ‘that’s what’s up with him. I passed him in the Buttermarket this morning, and he stopped and talked to me, if you please, for all the world as if we were acquaintances.’

  ‘Well then, I daresay you put him down fast enough,’ Billy said easily, enjoying the sight of her plump bosom.

  ‘That ain’t the point, Billoh. The man’s an upstart and a rogue. Anyone with half an eye can see that. Why do your cousins endure him? They should send him packing.’

  ‘John was of the same opinion once I remember,’ Billy said, remembering vaguely. ‘Something to do with that Cato Street business. Mr Richards knew someone involved in it, or somesuch. I don’t recall the details, but at any rate John thought he should be told to leave. The cousins wouldn’t have it.’

  ‘They’re a deal too kindly, that’s their trouble,’ Matilda said sagely. ‘What does he do?’

  ‘Do? Why he’s a gentleman, I suppose.’

  ‘Tosh!’ Matilda said. ‘If he’s a gentleman, I’m Chinese.’

  ‘He writes a good deal, I believe.’

  ‘Well there you are then. That proves it. Writers are rogues to a man.’

  ‘Are you ever coming to bed?’ Billy said plaintively.

  ‘Ooh! Is that how ’tis?’ she teased. ‘Is my Billoh getting impatient?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he stood up to show her exactly how impatient.

  She threw the chemise over her head in her lovely abandoned way, chuckling in her throat, Mr Richards forgotten. ‘How could I keep ’ee waiting so?’

  ‘Delectable creature!’ he said, gathering her lovely plump nakedness towards him. Waiting was one of the delights of the game, and now that she’d lost interest in the objectionable Mr Richards he could enjoy it to the full.

  In his quiet front bedroom in the Misses Callbecks’ house in Whiting Street the objectionable Mr Richards was writing a letter. It was addressed to Lord Sidmouth, who was his employer and mentor, and it was full of information.

  ‘The Hampden Club in Cambridge is much diminished. It has not met for more than six weeks to my certain knowledge, and the secretary informs me that ’tis his opinion ’twill soon be disbanded. He has no plans for any activities whatsoever.

  ‘The weavers’ riot in Norwich has been successfully put down. Caleb Rawson has been jailed for three years by the magistrates and his eleven associates with him, having stirred up trouble among the hand-weavers, as I predicted to you in my last letter. I therefore claim bounty for his arrest, but not for the eleven others since their leadership emerged during the course of the riot. I will keep careful watch upon all twelve when they are released from their present incarceration, you may be sure.

  ‘In Thetford John Owens, Obediah Mullins and John Patrickson are …’

  John Easter was in his mother’s private dining room in Easter House, in the middle of a blazing row and suffering violent indigestion. The quarterly meeting had gone on until long past dinner time, so they had dined at their work-place, and now they were fighting over the decision she had announced at the meeting.

  ‘You gave me your word,’ he was saying, trembling with fury. ‘You promised me that if I opened up the Irish trade you would not sell space for advertisements.’

  ‘Squit!’ Nan said, brown eyes flashing. ‘I did no such thing. I said I would reconsider. Well I’ve reconsidered and the space is to be sold. Have some brandy and cool your passion.’

  He ignored the brandy. ‘By your own admission we sell more papers now than we’ve ever done. What were last year’s figures? Nearly a million copies of the Advertiser and a million of the Morning Chronicle, one and half million Couriers, two and a half million Times. What more do you want? Why should we degrade ourselves by taking in advertisements? We might as well take in washing.’

  ‘What we will take, Johnnie, is any opportunity that offers. That’s the way to do business, I tell ’ee.’ That determined chin of hers was jutting ominously but he was too far gone to heed it.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he cried. ‘That’s the way to lose business. We shall appear common, don’t you see, mucky, catch-penny. We shall lose all our good custom.’

  ‘Allow me to be the judge of that,’ she said, coldly. ‘I think I know my own business better than you do.’

  My own business, he thought bitterly. Am I never to inherit, never to take command? Very well then, if this is how she means to go on. I will fight her. I will go round to all the shopkeepers in one of our areas and ask them what they think about it, tactfully of course, for it would be wrong to put pressure upon them. And of course the area he would choose would be Norfolk, for then he could stay with Harriet and Will while the work was being done. It was an admirable solution.

  ‘What a wonderful surprise!’ Harriet said, tripping out of the rectory, arms outstretched to greet him and kiss him. ‘I didn’t think to see you for days and days and now here you are. Oh my dear, dear John! Will is in the kitchen with Pollyanna. Annie thinks she and Mr Jones are a-courting. Oh I’ve so much to tell you.’

  Even if I find no evidence to support me, John thought, holding her happily against his side as they walked into the rectory together, I shall not care. It is enough to be with her again.

  But the evidence was forthcoming. It was quite gratifying to note how many of his shopkeepers disapproved of advertisements, ‘nasty untidy looking things’ and clearly didn’t want them in their shops. ‘’Twould mean more work for someone, Mr Easter sir, what I hopes en’t me, if you takes my meaning.’ For the next three weeks he travelled from town to town, writing every comment in a notebook neatly labelled ‘Opinions’. By the end of October he had collected thirty-four disapprovals to nine approvals, and all from one region alone. Surely that would be evidence enough.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘Yes, I daresay,’ Nan said, when he finally showed her his notebook at their next business meeting. ‘’Tis as I’d expect. They know nothing of the benefits so they oppose the idea out of hand. What of it? They’ll learn better sense when the advertisements are in the shops and trade improves.’

  ‘With respect,’ John said, keeping his temper with considerable effort, ‘none of us may know for certain what the effect will be. Only time will tell us that.’

  ‘Squit!’ Nan said. ‘What do you think, Billy?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Billy said affably. He didn’t want to take sides. Let them fight it out between them. He was comfortable in his leather armchair.

  ‘Cosmo?’

  ‘Well,’ Cosmo said diplomatically, ‘since we are in the realms of conjecture and opinion, it is difficult, you must admit, to form any very clear policy upon the matter. The subscription list for the new reading-room does seem to bear out your contention, ma’am, that advertisements will not deter trade; howsomever it might prove otherwise out in the provinces where opinions are always a good twenty years behind those in the capital.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Nan said forcefully.<
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  ‘But we cannot be sure,’ Cosmo insisted. ‘That is so, is it not?’

  ‘If we always waited until we were sure,’ Nan said, ‘no business would ever get done, let me tell ‘ee.’

  ‘True,’ Cosmo agreed. ‘Very true. But it does not solve our present difficulty.’

  ‘There is no difficulty,’ John said stiffly. ‘The shopkeepers do not want advertisements. Surely that much should be plain and obvious even to the most foolhardy. In my opinion ’twould be folly to insist.’

  But his mother had an answer for him and a very fierce one. ‘In my opinion ’twould be folly not to.’

  ‘We shall lose trade.’

  ‘On the contrary, Johnnie, we shall gain it.’

  ‘I know we shall lose it.’

  ‘You know nothing,’ she shouted at him, sharp with fury. ‘Deuce take it, am I to be told my business by my own son?’

  He jumped to his feet, his control breaking under the combination of her fury and his own impotence before it. ‘Yes, you are,’ he shouted back. ‘You are. I know as much about this firm as you do, every bit as much, oh yes, for I work every bit as hard. And if I can’t tell you you’re wrong, then who can? See sense, Mama!’

  She stood up too and took a deep breath, eyes glittering while Cosmo winced and dropped his eyes, and John stood facing her, white-faced at his own presumption. And Billy spoke into the pause.

  ‘Can’t see what all the fuss is about, damne if I can,’ he said mildly. ‘Why don’t you both do what you want and have done with it?’

  Nan turned to vent some of her fury on him, and Cosmo looked at him, face peaked with anxiety, but he went on before any of them could speak. ‘Seems quite simple to me. Let those who want advertisements have ’em, and those who don’t can go without. Run it for a year or two. See what happens.’