Part 20

In 1859 James Blackwood, of Paternoster Row, published a small volume of poems entitled, _The Flirting Page, a Legend of Normandy, and other Poems_, by Charles Dranfield and George Denham Halifax. “Charles Dranfield” was the pen-name of RICHARD FOSTER SKETCHLEY, who was born at Newark on 23rd July 1826. He was of far-reaching Newark ancestry, and was educated at the Magnus Grammar School, from which he proceeded to Exeter College, Oxford. In 1864 he was appointed Assistant-Keeper of the Science and Art Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington, and held that post for thirty years. He was on the staff of _Punch_ for many years. A memorial notice of him was contributed to the _Magnus Magazine_ by Mr. T. M. Blagg, another old Magnus boy. It is clear from the testimony of his friends that Sketchley was a man of great charm of manner and singular modesty; his serious poems show that he had a cultured mind, refined and sensitive; that he had no common gift for humorous writing is evident from his connexion with such a paper as _Punch_, He died at Seaford in Sussex, and was buried there.

His chief poem in the volume mentioned above is _The Flirting Page_, in the style of the _Ingoldsby Legends_. It is amusing and well written, with a great command of rhyme, and shows that the writer had an extensive acquaintance with men and things. The more serious poems deal with incidents in the Crimean War, or with feelings aroused by memories of the far-off days of happy youth. Quotation is not easy; the poems should be read as wholes. These lines, from the Introduction to _The Flirting Page_, will illustrate the author’s gift of rhyme:--

“Leave business, and bullion, and British Bank bubbles For woods and plantations, for fallows and stubbles: Leave barracks and chambers, the clubs, and ‘the House’ For the mountains and moor, for the deer and the grouse, For jungles and prairies, and lonely savannahs, With rifles and pale ale, and lots of ‘Havanahs’; Leave the porter of Barclay, the water of Thames, For vin ordinaire and the waters of Ems: Leave station and bridges, by railway and steamer, For Keswick or Conway, for Antwerp or Lima; For the Rhine or the Rhone, Or the winding Saone: For the valley of Chamouni, bent on pic-nicing On the top of Mont Blanc with champagne and chicken; For Rome to buy bronzes and gaze at the Pope; For Naples whose king’s not so good as its soap; For the Dove or the Danube, for Malvern or Mecca; For the banks of the Wye, or the banks of the Neckar.”

And as specimen of the shorter poems, we may take to illustrate the writer’s sympathetic insight, two contrasted verses from “Peace and War (Sunday, November 5, 1854)”:--

“In the carved chancel stalls Knelt a maiden in the sun; And the marble on the walls Told of fields her fathers won: She was pleading in her love That her lover might not die: And the angels wept above For they heard his dying cry.

* * * * *

Underneath the pollard oaks, Clustered on a grassy knoll Where the woodman’s ringing strokes Never slash the slender bole; Meeting death among his men, Grasping still his father’s sword, Never more to charge again, Lay the loved one on the sward.”

It is clear that Sketchley’s work is too good to pass over without remark. He had the gift of rousing the emotions and kindling the imagination by a skilful touch of scenic colour, as when he speaks of “the grange beyond the wold” (perhaps a recollection of Tennyson’s “old mill across the wold”), and again,

“Where the rectory roses cluster, where the whitened cottage peers, In the old manorial mansion, eyes were filled with thankful tears.”

The mention of Newark calls up the names of several writers whose works were published in that town when it was a publishing centre. For a more detailed account of these authors and their works the reader is referred to Mr. T. M. Blagg’s chapter on “Newark as a Publishing Town,” in his little book of Newark history.

In 1810, _Besthorpe, a Descriptive Poem by a Young Native_, was printed by Hage. Charles Snart, solicitor, angler, and poet, brought out a _Selection of Poems_, containing several pieces by himself. They have many allusions to the Trent and the writer’s love of the rod and line.

In 1823 John Atkin, of North Muskham, published _Jonah Tink_, the title being an anagrammatic transposition of the letters of the writer’s name. In 1830 appeared _Cambria, Raymond, and other Poems_, by a Lady; and in the same year _The Power of Gold_, by H. N. Bousfield, undergraduate of Queen’s College, Cambridge; and in 1862 _Sonnets_, by Thomas Lester, a schoolmaster at Ossington. At an earlier date (1793) Allen and Ridge had produced _Miscellaneous Poems_, by R. P. Shilton.

_Jonah Tink_ has no claim to the title of poetry as the elegant expression of subtle or deep feeling, and the idealized description of nature, character, and action; it is merely a rhymed and not over-grammatical account of the rise of an industrious and well-conducted farm-servant to wealth and an influential position; it is a kind of rhymed commentary on Hogarth’s Industrious Apprentice. Its value lies in its descriptive touches of the life of a certain section of society at the time it was written, and its incidental allusions to social abuses and customs. From the preface it appears that Atkin was originally a carpenter and joiner by trade, and afterwards became master of the Free School in his native village. He mentions a visit to a “personally unknown bard,” Mr. Benjamin Kemp, of Farnsfield. He had his full share of pedagogic authoritativeness, and it is amusing to read that he “disbelieved the theory” of Sir Isaac Newton as to gravitation. He makes a disparaging reference to Southey,

“I should ’tis sure Like S--th--y gain a sinecure,”

adding in a note, “In the year 1818 no fewer than four Marriages of the Royals took place, which formerly would have caused the Laureate to invoke the Sackbut, but not a line had been produced by the State Poet.”

Bousfield’s _Power of Gold_ is more literary in its form. It deals with the warping and corrupting influence of wealth on naturally good dispositions, and is religious in tone, as are many others of Bousfield’s poems. Among the subscribers to the book were Michael Thomas Sadler, M.P.; Dr. Sleath, Master of Repton; and Henry Willoughby, M.P. One line in the poem on wealth, “To temper earth with antepast of heaven,” suggests by its archaism that the writer was familiar with the earlier writers of verse. It is perhaps not without interest to mention that, as the scientific imagination of Erasmus Darwin anticipated the invention of aeroplanes, so John Atkin foreshadowed the era of the bicycle and motor car by his allusion to the actual use in his time of the “velocipede”--a beast which “wanted neither corn nor hay.”

Other local verse-writers who in this paper must be only names are:--Matthew Unwin [1755–1786], Sidney Giles [1814–1846], Charles Hooton [1810–1847], Edward Hind, Lucy Joynes [1781–1851], William Calvert, John Wright, Frank Browne, Mary Ann Carter, William Powers Smith, E. G. Pickering, Samuel Mullen, and H. Bradbury Mellors. Nor should we forget David Love [1750–1827], packman and ballad-monger. He was a Scotchman by birth. Two portraits of him were exhibited by the Thoroton Society at the conversazione held in 1900.

A cursory glance at the work of our local poets will make it plain that they reflect the dominant literary tendencies of various epochs, “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when sonnets expressed the amours and gallantries of the Queen’s Court; the dramatic impulse and fantastic compositions of the early Stuart period; the satirical poems of the age of Dryden; the simplicity, fondness for nature, and reflective poetry of Wordsworth and Browning. There do not appear any clear traces of the influence of Keats and Shelley.

It may be objected that much of the verse spoken about is not poetry at all. But the objection is scarcely valid. Great gifts of vivid imagination and creative genius, with the power of apt, vigorous, and melodious expression, are granted to few. Minor writers can, however, act the part of the ancient pædagogos by leading us on to the great masters of thought and song; or, to vary the figure, they dig from the deep mines of thought gems to polish and set for daily use by busy, practical, unlearned men. They change the pure gold into current coin. And though Spedding speaks “of the tricks of these versifying times (about 1842) born of superficial sensibility to beauty and a turn for setting to music the current doctrines and fashionable feelings of the day,” it will be found that, with few exceptions, our writers are honourably distinguished for their independence of thought, and truthful spontaneous naturalness.

In conclusion, this paper lays no claim to exhaustive treatment of its subject, either in respect of the writers enumerated or the short notices of some of them. Time, space, and opportunity have been against both the one and the other. The writer has done his work amid a pressure of other occupations; and he craves the indulgence which is usually shown towards errors or omissions--

“Quas aut incuria fudit, Aut humana parum cavit natura.”

If his work should be another step onwards towards a complete anthology of the native verse, and should lead Nottinghamshire men to a fuller knowledge and keener appreciation of their county writers, it will have its full reward.

NOTTINGHAM

BY W. P. W. PHILLIMORE

The first historical reference to Nottingham which we possess is but a little more than a thousand years ago, and though it is likely enough that there were at a very much earlier date some few dwellings along the southern slopes of the hills upon which the city stands, or cave dwellings hewn out of the soft sandstone rock, it is unlikely that it had become of any importance before the Saxon period, to which it is obvious that its name, anciently Snotingaham, belongs. It is apparently tribal in its origin, indicating the home or dwelling of the descendants of Snod; possibly the early form of our modern surname of Snow. There are but few other places in England whose names may have a similar origin. In Kent we find Snode Bridge and Snodland, in Dorset is Nottington, and in Hampshire, a few miles west of Andover, is an obscure hamlet called Snottington. Snenton, now an integral part of Nottingham, is said to have the same derivation, and the local historians identify it with the Notintone of Domesday. Medieval writers have ascribed a much greater antiquity to Nottingham, and have given it the strange name of Tiguocobauc, said to mean a place of caves. The tradition of King Ebranc and of the slaughter of the Britons here points to a belief in medieval days in the great antiquity of the town. But beyond the existence of cave dwellings, which after all may be quite modern in origin, and the discovery of a few bronze implements, we have no tangible evidence of any higher antiquity, and the physical characteristics of the site further militate against the claim. With the forest coming near the town on the north, and the alluvial marsh lands on the south, the site must in early times have been very inaccessible, a fact which doubtless attracted those who first selected the Castle rock as a military stronghold. The Castle and St. Mary’s and Snenton churches form the ends of a double horseshoe. Between them lies the town facing the south, with the rock dwellings of Snenton Hermitage at one end, and those under the Castle rock, known in later times as the Papist Holes, at the other end. Until destroyed by the Great Northern Railway extensions in recent years, the rock dwellings at the foot of the rock at Snenton, on which stands St. Stephen’s Church, were an interesting characteristic of the village.

The Danish invasion of Mercia brought Nottingham into prominence. It became one of the five principal towns of the Danelagh--Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, and Stamford, being the other four--and though the Danish dominion was not of long duration, it left a very permanent mark on the town. The gateways in the town walls were known as “Bars,” instead of “Gates” as in the south of England, and the last of these, Chapel Bar, pulled down in the eighteenth century, still survives in name, forming a familiar part of the great western outlet of the town. The other trace of the Danish occupation is the almost universal use of “Gate” instead of “Street.” Two hundred years ago the only streets were Stoney Street and Pepper Street, the other principal thoroughfares being known as Gates or Rows, while the lesser ones were called Lanes. Wheeler Gate, Goose Gate, Peter Gate, Mary Gate, Long Row, Smithy Row, and Friar Lane are familiar to all Nottingham people, and within the last half century we still had Sheep Lane and Chandlers’ Lane. These last have given place to Market Street and Victoria Street, just as in the previous century Sadler Gate, the continuation of Bridlesmith Gate, very inappropriately became High Street, and Cow Lane and Girdlesmith Gate were renamed Clumber Street and Pelham Street.

Although there was right in the centre of the town one of the largest market-places in the kingdom, the ways out in every direction were remarkably narrow, and even within recent years two carts could not pass one another in Pelham Street, the principal eastern exit. The widening of Cow Lane, now Clumber Street, in the eighteenth century, followed by the demolition of Chapel Bar, improving the ways out on the north and west, were the earliest attempts at town improvement. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw the construction of Albert Street and the widening of Lister Gate on the south, the conversion of Chandlers’ Lane into Victoria Street, and the change in Sheep Lane by widening it so as to form Market Street. King Street and the widening of Wheeler Gate are the most recent of the street improvements in the centre of the town.

As a military post in early times, Nottingham was of considerable importance. The great rock, upon which stood the Castle, with its natural means of defence, was obviously well suited for a military stronghold. The Castle, built or rebuilt by William the Conqueror, was guarded by William Peverel, and somewhat more than a hundred years later it became the stronghold of John, when Earl of Mortein, in his rebellion against his brother, King Richard I, by whom it was besieged in 1194. It was at Nottingham Castle, in 1330, that Edward III struck the blow which ended the usurpation of Isabella and Mortimer, through the help of Eland, the Governor, who revealed to him the existence of the secret passage down into the valley of the Leen, which ever since has borne the name of Mortimer’s Hole, now so familiar to Nottingham people. Throughout his reign Edward III was often at Nottingham Castle, and held some of his Parliaments here. It continued to be a royal fortress and residence, but after the Wars of the Roses was allowed to fall into decay. From the description which Leland the antiquary gives of it in the reign of Henry VIII, the buildings must have been of great extent and importance, but no illustrations of it have been preserved, and there now only remains the entrance gateway of this famous fortress as an indication of its former greatness. A plan of it is given in the local histories, upon which the late Mr. T. C. Hine based an imaginative picture of it. In the reign of James I it was granted to the Earl of Rutland, and so became private property. It was then so ruinous that that King, on his visit to Nottingham, could find no suitable lodging in it, and was obliged to stay in the town itself. Only once again was Nottingham Castle concerned with military matters, and that was in 1642, when King Charles I here raised his standard against the Parliament. The next year it fell into the possession of the Parliament, and was held by the famous Colonel Hutchinson, who defended it against royalist attacks. Of the siege we have the well-known narrative related by Mrs. Hutchinson in the _Life_ of her husband, which she wrote. After the Civil War the Castle was dismantled, and its military history ended. It was afterwards bought by the Duke of Newcastle, who demolished the remains, and in 1674 commenced the erection of the present stately building, which was completed by his son in 1679, but was occupied as a residence by the Newcastle family for hardly a hundred years, being afterwards let to tenants. At the time of the Reform Riots in 1832, it was burnt down by the mob, and remained a blackened ruin until, in 1878, it was acquired on a long lease by the Corporation of Nottingham, and converted into an art museum.

One remarkable feature continued in Nottingham right into the eighteenth century, and that was the division of the town into the English and French boroughs. The English part of the town was that surrounding the mother church of St. Mary; the French, or the new town, comprised the districts now forming the parishes of St. Peter and St. Nicholas. For the two divisions of the borough, between which the market-place was divided, it was customary to elect separate juries. Indeed, the custom of electing two sheriffs and two coroners, which prevailed until the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, has been thought to have a similar origin.

In the middle ages Nottingham was a place of military rather than of ecclesiastical importance. Town and county until the nineteenth century owed allegiance to the far-off cathedral of St. Peter at York. The Grey Friars and the White Friars, as well as the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, had houses here, but of these establishments all traces save street names have long since disappeared. And of the great priory at Lenton, founded by Peverel, there are left only the fragments of two Norman pillars to indicate the strength and majesty of that building. Until the last century there were but three parish churches in the town. St. Peter’s structurally is the most ancient, for parts of it appear to date from the twelfth century, and it may be regarded in some respects as more interesting than the more important church of St. Mary’s. St. Nicholas, the smallest of the three ancient churches, demolished for military reasons in 1647, was rebuilt some thirty years later, and is notable as being one of the comparatively few examples there are of late seventeenth century church work built in the pointed style. But the glory of Nottingham is the great church of St. Mary built in the middle of the ancient English borough, its tower rivalling in prominence the castle at the other end of the town. From an architectural point of view this splendid cruciform church has the advantage that, with the exception of the chancel, which was built at a somewhat later date, the whole of it belongs to the best period of the Perpendicular style. Its present internal characteristic, lightness, was noted by the antiquary John Leland, in Henry VIII’s time, who described it as having “so many fair windows that no artificer could imagine to set more.”

In the early nineteenth century began the building of additional churches necessitated by the growth of the town, and of these the first was St. James on Standard Hill, which in its name commemorates an ancient chapel that had long before disappeared. Of the many new churches which have been built in the past century, or of the efforts of the various nonconformist bodies who similarly have sought to supply the religious requirements of the town, it is impossible here to do more than allude.

The great increase of Nottingham during the past hundred years has been due to the trade of the place, but this is no mere modern development. In the middle ages the “little smith of Nottingham who doth the work that no man can,” was as famous as his successors at the present day upon whose skill depend the great staple trades of lace and hosiery. Smithy Row, Bridlesmith Gate, Girdlesmith Gate, Bellar Gate, and Bellfounders’ Yard point out to us where the ancient craftsmen in metal carried on their industries. Many other trades have been carried on from time to time, and one of these, dyeing, left us a picturesque reminder in the fields of saffron which, in springtime and in autumn, were, until the great extension of building on the southern side of the town, so conspicuous a feature of the Nottingham Meadows.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century the growth and prosperity of the town was greatly restricted by the commonable lands surrounding it which could not be built upon; but in 1845, under an Inclosure Act, the commonable rights were extinguished, thus permitting the needful extension of the town. So long ago as 1787 the need of inclosure was realised, but steadily and persistently opposed by the Corporation, whose past action largely contributed to the creation of insanitary areas, which in recent years have in some measure been swept away at a vast expense, partly by railway extensions without cost to the town, partly under improvement schemes at the expense of the ratepayer.

The population of Nottingham, less than 25,000 at the end of the eighteenth century, has increased at least tenfold in the past hundred years. An ancient borough by prescription, now a titular city, it has a series of charters from the time of Henry II, and for more than 600 years has had a mayor and the right of returning members to Parliament. It is also a county in itself, though through the supposed exigencies of the case the site of the Shire Hall in the middle of the town belongs to the county. The Corporation is a very wealthy body, possessed of large estates producing more than £30,000 a year, besides the revenue which it draws from the profits of its commercial undertakings, such as the trams, the gasworks, and the waterworks, not to mention the contributions of the ratepayers, whose burdens, despite the Corporation estates, are not less than those of other towns. In 1877 the area of the borough was extended by the inclusion of the neighbouring parishes of Snenton, Lenton, Radford, Basford, and Bulwell, and in 1897 it was by royal charter created a city.