Three short talks (15-20 minutes each), reporting the results to date of research being undertaken by Lewes History Group members:

1. Peter Atkins: Lewes at the Old Bailey
2. Ann Holmes: All change or more of the same? Life for the paupers of Lewes after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834
3. Paul Myles: The Sussex Weekly Advertiser & Lewes Journal digitisation project

Venue: The new King’s Church building on Brooks Road, Lewes. (Between Tesco car park and Homebase)

See the Meetings page for a list of  forthcoming monthly talks organised by the Lewes History Group.



The Ewyas Lacy site says:

“As we enter the New Year, our website reflects an important shift towards offering direct access to selected original documents in a digital archive. Our Digital Images Collections have expanded greatly as our project with the Herefordshire Record Office to photograph local records and make them available for study on-line continues to go well.

“The inclusion of Parish Registers [with the kind permission of the various Parochial Church Councils], local School Registers and Manorial Court records will be of particular interest to local historians and family history researchers. We hope to complete the upload of these for all the Ewyas Lacy parishes in the near future, although for data protection reasons [in consultation with the Record Office] we have imposed a 100-year cut-off on personal information, so entries after 1910 are normally excluded.

“The continuing work of the Ewyas Lacy Study Group in 2011 will see the range of documents in our images collections expand further. We will also be taking a fresh look at some of the technical issues of presenting document images, to ensure that picture quality is as good as practically achievable on the website.”

The site now has images of some of the parish registers of Clodock, Llancillo, Rowlestone, and St Margarets, as well as some school registers, parochial lists, and poor rate books. There are also transcriptions of the Hearth Tax records of 1664 and 1665, and many other documents and records of interest to anyone with ancestors who lived in this English/Welsh border area.

Under the Old Poor Law everyone was settled in a particular parish, in the same way that today we are citizens of a particular country. You might be allowed to live outside your “home” parish, but if you fell on hard times it was that parish’s responsibility to look after you. You were liable to be deported back “home” to receive this care – though “home” might be somewhere you had left decades previously, or sometimes never lived at all.

Parishes were proactive in trying to prevent the poor belonging to another parish gaining a settlement, and in exporting their own poor elsewhere. Lawsuits and appeals between parishes were commonplace. Sometimes the results were hilarious; the situations in which other people found themselves make your heart ache, even across the centuries.

Many parish chests, including some Lewes parish chests, still contain records created in the operation of this system. Where they survive, they offer unparalleled insight into the lives of ordinary or unfortunate Lewesians two or more centuries ago, and in their aggregate they offer an important insight into late Stuart & Georgian society.

This talk is a programme change from:

Mark Perry-Nash: Daily Life in a Medieval Sussex Castle

Venue: The new King’s Church building on Brooks Road, Lewes. (Between Tesco car park and Homebase)

See the Meetings page for a list of  forthcoming monthly talks organised by the Lewes History Group.

Findmypast.co.uk, the UK family history website, has been awarded the contract by Manchester Archives to digitise cemetery registers plus institutional (gaol, school, workhouse) records of Manchester, and will work with FamilySearch International, the world’s largest repository of genealogical records, to make them fully searchable online for the very first time.

Findmypast.co.uk and FamilySearch will be digitising an estimated 130,000 images and 8,000,000 records over the next two years. The records will cover all of Manchester and some parts of Lancashire, due to boundary movement over the centuries. The records will include entries going back to the sixteenth century. In the collection being released, the 19th century prison registers of the area will also be made available.

Every record from cemetery registers and institutional (gaol, school, workhouse) records of Manchester will be available free at any City of Manchester library. The records available will include:

• Manchester Overseers of the Poor Apprenticeship Indentures;
• Giles Shaw transcripts for parish registers including Oldham St. Mary: Baptisms 1662-1796; Marriages 1662-1816; Burials 1662-1826;
• Private cemeteries (now closed);
• Ardwick Cemetery: burial registers, 1838-1950;
• Rusholme Road Cemetery: burial registers, 1821-1933;
• Cheetham Hill Wesleyan Cemetery: burial registers, 1815-1968;
• Withington Workhouse: Creed registers 1869-1898, birth registers 1857-1911, death registers 1857-1949;
• Withington Workhouse: Creed registers 1898-1911;
• Withington Workhouse: Interment Registers 1898-1915;
• Withington Workhouse: admission registers;
• Manchester Workhouse, New Bridge Street, 1881-1899;
• Manchester Workhouse, New Bridge Street, Creed Registers 1900-1911;
• Manchester Industrial Schools: admission registers 1866-1912;
• Manchester Schools: admission registers c.1870-1915;
• 19th cent. prison registers.

FamilySearch will scan original images of the registers for Findmypast.co.uk to then make available online at Findmypast.co.uk with an index search on FamilySearch.org.

Richard Seymour has spent a good deal of time dedicated to working David Cameron out. And there is a lot to do, since he is not like the other right wing politicians who have led the Conservative party; Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard.

Seymour in a blog entry back in February of this year, asking what is progressive about David Cameron, notes that:

Will Hutton likes Cameron’s ideas. The current editor of the New Statesman says he takes Cameron’s claim to progressivism seriously. The centre-left Prospect magazine has been carrying puff-pieces for Philip Blond’s ‘Red Toryism’, the bland mood music for Cameron’s leadership. Some liberals really want to believe the best about Cameron’s conservatives.

For a while I thought I knew what the problem was. What made Cameron a

Tories, LibDems: They all look the same to me

progressive was his pursuit of compassion. When Cameron told us he cared about this or that, you could almost believe him. After all, he didn’t seem like a rage-ridden, xenophobic moral right winger like had occupied the Tory party before, but was somewhat consumed by the politics of day, of liberal democracy, multiculturalism and welfare (or the concerted attempts of).

I once wrote in a blog entry, for all Cameron’s faults, what he did display was the process whereby the establishment had accepted what the left knew about crime all along; that there is a moral equivalence to a street robber robbing a person’s handbag on the street as there is to, in Cameron’s own words, “the highest executive in the biggest firm who’s been swindling the books.”

To look at that today, you would think it went without saying that there is an equivalence in these two, and that even the latter has some part to play in causing the former crime. But you don’t have to look too far to find views that moral decay is the sum total of crime at street level.

Of course Cameron had his faults, but I felt at least a sea change had been occurring in politics today which largely vindicated the view of the left and the severity of white collar crime.

But I can see the error of my ways now. I retain the opinion that the very right wing and moral conservatism of say Tebbitt is perhaps even slightly embarrassing for this and the next generation of conservatives (at least in public, not forgetting Don’t Panic Magazine’s and Laurie Penny’s outings) but Cameron doesn’t seem to be significantly different politically to his predecessors. I suspect those people who Seymour mentions at the beginning of the aforementioned blog entry are confusing a sea change in the political landscape with a Tory leader who has said he cares and looks like he means it. In other words, some of our best political commentators, reaching their peak in the era of Blair, have been consumed by image and are confused thus.

Throw in a Cameron speech about caring for hooded young people and calling for those, like himself, in suits making more of an effort to understand why young people commit crime, then it’s hardly surprising that the Will Hutton’s of the world are going to get themselves in a bit of a kerfuffle.

But when you consider how similar Cameron’s views on poverty and obesity are to views of mainstream Victorian society we start to see a very different picture to the one held on to by those happy to refer to Cameron as progressive.

Cameron to an audience in Glasgow East during a by-election campaign in July 2008 spoke despairingly about the way in which:

We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being ‘at risk of poverty, or social exclusion’: it’s as if these things – obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction – are purely external events like a plague or bad weather … Social problems are often the consequences of the choices that people make.

These aren’t the words of a progressive, or of someone who wants to dig a little deeper and ‘understand’ the reasons why there is social decay, but someone who believes only appearances and not reality.

(Coming back for a moment to a recent topic of my interest, the type of people this speech might appeal to can be loosely defined as right wing without, strictly speaking, being conservative, those who restrict how conservative the Conservative party can be while being electorally relevant – a product of what I have called the Conservative party’s epistemic closure.)

In his essay An Unjust Law, Jon Trickett, MP for Hemsworth, likened the views expressed by Cameron in the above speech with those of the Board of Guardians, the authority that administered the Poor Law from 1835 to 1930.

Trickett notes that: “…the Guardians who were charged with mitigating against poverty set their faces from the start to the end of the struggle against assisting the poor.”

This necessitated the need for a government based upon welfare and was the impetus for the socialism of the Labour party.

Trickett recalls a case in the history of his constituency when the Guardians refused to hand out relief for out of work miners, deciding that the workers were voluntarily out of work, despite the fact that the pits had been closed off. The establishment, so to speak, composed of magistrates, landowners, the mine company, the Guardians, the police and, according to Trickett, even some parts of the church, “stood by whilst men, women and children were left to their own devices”.

The crossover between Cameron’s speech and, as Trickett calls it, the “Victorian idea that the poor were responsible for their own poverty because of moral failure” is quite clear, and should not be ignored.

One cannot help sometimes think that the cuts agenda by the Tories, juxtaposed with an idealistic idea of a booming voluntary sector, is Cameron testing the thesis that the poor can help themselves. The cuts, which have fallen upon the poorest in society hardest, appear like an experiment where we are all guinea pigs; the issue here is that this might have been Cameron’s philosophy the whole time, even when people were unapologetically observing his “progressive” credentials.

FamilySearch has made information from Cheshire workhouse admission, creed, birth and death records available online at its Record Search pilot site.

If you have ancestors from Cheshire, you’re very lucky, as FamilySearch have already indexed and transcribed parish registers, bishop’s transcripts, non-conformist registers, probate records, electoral registers, school records, and Land Tax assessments for the county.

The tailor would have plenty of work repairing clothes and making clothes for new inmates, the shoemaker would have a similar task. The presence of a tool store indicates the need for large numbers of tools to work the fields behind at the rear of the workhouse.

The Mount Pleasant estate was in the process of being built and streets of new terraced houses would eventually obliterate this viewpoint. The left hand side of the picture shows the original barrack blocks built in 1861 and 1862. This workhouse was developed and enlarged to meet the increasing demands placed upon it. The buildings on the right are part of the 1884 enlargement. The fields at the rear of the complex were farmed by the Poor Law Authority and worked by the inmates. Between 1861 and the early 1900s, the fields were carefully managed by successive generations of inmates. Even today the soil is of extremely good quality and devoid of the small stones that characterise the surrounding hills: Probably testament to the large numbers of children and old men who would have been put to the task of removing stones which were then used to build the terrace walls and field boundaries that can be seen in the background.

Although it was expected that the fields would enable a degree of self sufficiency in terms of food supply,  it is unlikely that they contributed much to the running costs. However, the fields did supply a useful source of employment for inmates, an important priority for the early workhouse masters who were expected to make inmates work for their keep.

The reason for ordering a copy of the certificate was to try and find the name of Mercy’s husband. Under the occupation heading it should have told me that she was a widow and given her ex-husband’s name.

Unfortunately the informant who registered the death didn’t know what her husband’s name was, so all I have is Widow of — Steadman Occupation unknown. Not very helpful to say the least.

It hadn’t occurred to me that because Mercy’s husband had died before 1891, there would be a good chance that whoever registered the death, possibly four decades later, probably never knew who Mercy’s husband was.

The confusion came from the place of death, 2 Upper Shoreham Road, Kingston-by-Sea. This wasn’t the same as her address that was also given on the death certificate (97 Wellington Road, Portslade-by-Sea).

The key to this puzzle is the Steyning Union Workhouse. It appears that the address of the workhouse was 2 Upper Shoreham Road, and the informant who registered the death was H[orace] W[alter] Cawcutt, the master of the Steyning Poor Law Institution.

I know that when Mercy died in 1929 her estate was valued at £404 12s 2d, so she wasn’t exactly a pauper, so my guess is that she was in the workhouse due to ill health (the workhouse would later become part of Southlands Hospital).

So I didn’t find out who Mercy’s husband was, but I haven’t quite given up hope of finding out his name. Records from the Steyning Union Workhouse are apparently held at the East Sussex Record Office, including admission and death registers, there may be a clue held within their pages.

‘Making Poverty History’,  and the ‘Live 8’  campaign of ‘80’s ‘Live Aid’ promoter, Sir Bob Geldof has captured the media headlines. It always was the biggest blockbuster around. Billions spent while billions die. Who needs a Terminator when you’ve got Brad Pitt campaigning for Africa? The new vanguard of the poor is no longer the working class or even the petite bourgeois intellectuals, but pop culture celebrities. For liberals like Jeffrey Sachs more aid is in the interests of the rich as well as the poor. For left media gurus like Naomi Klein mass pressure from below can ‘force’ the G8 to deliver justice. But what if poverty is the only policy for capitalism?

So Bush and Blair have persuaded the G8 to ‘forgive’ 18 African states’ $40 billion in debts (equivalent to 20 days Pentagon spending). What happened to the poorhouse? Isn’t Africa one giant poorhouse suffering the equivalent of 10 Asian Tsunamis every year? Africa is supposed to be an object lesson, like Iraq. This is where you end up if you fail the civilization test, morally and economically bankrupt. Why abandon this cautionary tale?

The fact is the West isn’t giving up on debt. When the new World Bank head, Paul Wolfowitz is a key player you can be sure of that.

The imperialists are recognizing that their global interest does not depend on actually eliminating the human race, but exploiting it. Dead people do not produce much surplus labour. Born-again liberal Jeffrey Sachs puts the case well. Western aid needs to be increased to sustainable levels. If the US spends $20 billion (instead of $3 billion) a year to keep Africans alive this would still be 10% of Bush’s tax cuts to the rich.

It’s like the poor law, you create a bread line for people who work. If they don’t work they fall below the bread line. While it’s easy to blame the neo-colonies of Africa for their own fate, it doesn’t make profits. Africa needs a workhouse. So along come the celebrities to provide more and better charity for the New African Century.

Brendan O’Neil makes this point about MPH.  

. . .The first thing to note is that Make Poverty History, even by its own admission, will not make poverty history. Indeed, that is not, strictly speaking, its aim. Its goal is to eradicate extreme poverty by putting pressure on nation states to ensure that the Millennium Development Goals – which every member of the United Nations officially endorsed in 2000 – are met.

The first Millennium Development Goal on poverty is to cut by half the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day by 2015 – which, if achieved, would still leave hundreds of millions of people living below the one-dollar threshold. The World Bank has set up a website dedicated to explaining and winning support for these Millennium Development Goals, and even that site admits that achieving goal number 1 would not make poverty history. ‘[W]hile poverty would not be eradicated, [it] would bring us much closer to the day when we can say that all the world’s people have at least the bare minimum to eat and clothe themselves’, the site says. …Even if Make Poverty History is successful in pressurising governments to stick to their Millennium Development promises, half of the world’s poor will still live on less than a dollar a day and half will still ‘suffer from hunger’. In short, poverty will not be history – far from it. The other Millennium Developpment Goals – relating to making primary education available to more children and reversing the spread of HIV-AIDS and the incidence of malaria – are also notable for their lack of ambition.

. . .Live 8 is little more than the pop wing of G8, and Make Poverty History is little more than a management committee making sure that America, Britain, France and the rest push through their Millennium Development Goals. There is little radical or even independent about Make Poverty History and Geldof’s coinciding global pop jamboree. They might consider themselves punkish and edgy, but these pop and rock acts are merely shouting at the world powers to do what they had already planned to do – slowly and incrementally eradicate only the worst instances of poverty and starvation in the world today. Bob, Bono and the rest simply provide the soundtrack to officialdom’s slothful anti-poverty campaign.

Naomi Klein goes one step better. Aid is not enough. It doesn’t touch the roots of poverty. She says Africa is a rich continent made poor by rapacious western corporations. True enough. So what about ‘using’ Africa’s own mineral wealth to save it? ‘Using’? Does that mean the West has to change its policies from pillage to patronage? Yes, and the united social movements can do it. Klein talks about the moving examples of the Ogoni people fighting Shell oil in Nigeria [when Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed], Evo Morales fighting the oil companies in Bolivia, and the General Union of Oil workers of Basra fighting the privatization of oil in Iraq. All these movements need is unity. A symbolic statement of this can be the G8 demonstration at Edinburgh on July 2’.

Bob Geldof and the Make Poverty History crew have called for a million people to go to Edinburgh and form a giant white band around the city centre on July 2 – a reference to the ubiquitous Make Poverty History bracelets. But it seems a shame for a million people to travel all that way to be a giant bauble, a collective accessory to power. How about if, when all those people join hands, they declare themselves not a bracelet but a noose – a noose around the lethal economic policies [neo-liberalism] that have already taken so many lives, or lack of medicine and clean water, for lack of justice. A noose like that one that killed Ken.

Unfortunately for Klein, the Nigerian people, the Bolivian masses, and the Iraqi oil workers, poverty is NOT the result of the wrong, bad news neo-liberal polices of the West. Poverty is the ONLY policy for capitalism. As Marx proved, Capital’s wealth is the masses immiseration. It cannot be fixed by simply ‘forcing’ (how?) the ‘multinationals’ to change policies. Their profits dictate that Africa, Latin America and Asia continue to be plundered and pillaged. Poverty is the result of systematic expropriation of the labour of peoples and classes for profit. 500 years of colonization will not be conjured away by the World Social Forum or civil society making symbolic nooses to ‘force’ imperialism to negotiate better terms of exploitation.

The illusion that poverty can be negotiated out of existence is the illusion that capitalism can be reformed. These are the illusions that hold back the independent, armed organizations of the workers and poor peasants in Nigeria, Bolivia and Iraq. Not until the masses free themselves from these illusions can they act to solve the problem of poverty – and take back the wealth that was created by generations of labour and to socialize and plan the world economy in the interests of people and not profits.

From Class Struggle 61 May-June 2005

Poor Law records are among the most valuable of all sources for genealogists, yet underused. They can contain a mass of biographical detail unavailable anywhere else.

British Origins are making available a series of Poor Law Records for the City of London.

The second set of this series, transcribed by Cliff Webb, covers the parish of St Sepulchre. The index to the first two parishes, St Botolph Aldgate and St Sepulchre, now contains over 20,000 names. We will be regularly adding to this collection.

LMA’s Poor Law records are now accessible online at Ancestry.co.uk, and you can read more about them and watch a video clip at the BBC website.

The records available include:

• Admission and discharge books of workhouses;
• Registers of individuals in the infirmary;
• Creed registers;
• School registers;
• Registers of children boarded out or sent to various other institutions;
• Registers of apprentices;
• Registers of lunatics;
• Registers of servants;
• Registers of children;
• Registers of relief to wives and children;
• Registers of inmates;
• Registers of indoor poor;
• Registers of deserted children.

British Origins is initially making available a series of Poor Law records for the City of London. The first part of this series, transcribed by Cliff Webb, covers the parish of St Botolph Aldgate, a large but poor parish with a highly transient population. The index to these records contains nearly 12,000 names. British Origins says it will be regularly adding to this collection.

Alan

Above the CD collection of mixed ownership hangs a certificate, testifying that the quarter acre or so which I now tend was once registered as a wildlife garden.

Qualification – twenty five years ago – required us to have five ‘wildlife features’; long grass, woodpiles, bog areas, ponds and the ilk. I think it likely though that had the registering body known that our original ‘pond’ was a bath, we’d have been more likely to have been certified than certificated.

My father was pretty wild too; having manhandled the cast-iron hulk down the steep quarry steps and spent hours sinking it in at ground level as a ‘surprise’ for his beloved-who-wanted-a-pond, his beloved’s reaction was not quite what he expected. The clincher for my mother was probably the taps, but even without the no-longer-running H&C it was always going to be a buried bath – which of course now had to be exhumed and hauled back up the steps, my father leaking good karma with every riser.

His subsequent silence – anger and hurt invariably manifesting themselves in a lowering rather than a raising of the volume in our household – lasted for several days, during which time mum no doubt had time to reflect that he had, after all, meant well. Not a word of protest was raised then when a neon turquoise plastic sheet later appeared lining the rather sinister, coffin-shaped indent.

I swear the imported tadpoles wore sunglasses that first year – they looked, after all, as though they’d ended up on a Club Med holiday. Time, however, is a great fader, and today, bar the shape, it looks almost like a pond. Only algae seem to thrive in it, but I suppose they’re wildlife too

Oh! I just discovered something courtesy of Word… I’d started that last sentence ‘only algae seems…’ to be rewarded with one of those annoying little green squiggly underlining. Wondering indignantly what it was objecting to now, I right-clicked, only to learn after all these years that that the singular of algae is ‘alga’. The option it offered me – ‘an only alga’ – must be one of the loneliest phrases I have ever encountered, but I will go to bed wiser courtesy of Microsoft tonight. ‘Tis such a reversal that I shall consider fragmenting…

Anyway, back in the garden the pond still blooms, the bath overflows with francoa and life is as wild as ever it was. A little wilder, in fact, this year, for the triumvirate of robin – seagull – crow which rule its airways have been joined by an usurper; a male blackbird anxious to elbow in on the pecking order. It started by stalking the robin and has now graduated to stalking me, venturing to within a foot in its determined quest for mealworms.

The indignant crow watches from a short distance, hunched on the wall like a sulking hoodie and Tig is definitely struggling with it all. If she half closes her eyes she can just about convince herself that something as small as a robin isn’t really fluttering fearlessly around her, but the blackbird’s on a bigger scale altogether and as such much harder to ignore, especially as it will insist on punctuating its every darting movement with an anxious, piercing ‘twick’.

Sammy’s sanguine enough though – he, after all, has never relied upon a diet of worms. No, his prime source of nourishment is cat food – or to be precise, the bits of alleged ‘meat’ left after Tig has sucked the jelly off her Felix. All Sammy has to worry about from his haughty perch is ‘will it be beef or will it be salmon in cat saliva gravy?’

The robin hardly seems to notice either – its brood hatched around a fortnight ago and it has, since, become a bird driven. I treasure being close enough to pick up on these changes in his life; he has, after all, been carrying mealworms to courtship-feed his partner for some weeks now; had I been less familiar with his behaviour I might well have concluded that he already had young.

After seven years of watching though, I spot the difference that announces break-out from eggshell Alcatraz immediately. Suddenly, instead of helping himself to a mouthful he’ll pick up a single grub, manipulate it from side-to-side-and-back-again across his beak like some macabre mouthorgan and then break it into shorter lengths before flying off with a meal made-to-measure – the perfect pecked lunch.

I suspect that he’s feeling both the width and the quality, ensuring that there are no choking hazards in these small parts. The dexterity though with which he manoeuvres and then sections the worm leaves me with renewed respect for the precision engineering of his beak; true wormsprung durch teknik.

An apology to purists, incidentally, for the heavy reliance on hand-based metaphor in the previous two paragraphs, but seek a synonym for ‘dexterity’ and what are you offered? ‘adroitness’, ‘dextrousness’, ‘legerdemain’, ‘handiness’… the results of some word searches, it would seem, are as empty as the sound of one wing flapping…

As days pass and the robin’s beak-loads grow larger and larger, I use their swelling and frequency to measure his brood’s progress. His current winged message hints at two to three well-fed young roblings – no mean feat when you consider that each one will demand around 140 small grubs or insects a day. It’s lucky then that it’s the time of year when I’m almost a fixture in the garden myself; an ever ready worm-o-mart where the only bills are full ones.

Of beauty, beasts and burial…

It is, you see, the start of the iris season. I am entranced.

I like spring flowers, or course, but having long ago lost the bulb battle to starch-seeking badgers and squirrels, my early-year garden boasts little impact after the fading of the hellebores.

The contrast, come May then, is sudden and startling. Clematis montana fleshes out the old pig sty roof, pale paper hats of astrantia crown shady borders and honeysuckle ‘Graham Thomas’ pours its scent into the waiting glass of evening. Awakened by bluebells, the garden’s getting up at last; ghostly globes of clematis Miss Bateman yawn open, meadow rue and chives comb out their shaggy locks and the perennial cornflowers stretch wide. In the borders, the first cranesbills and Cambrian poppies compare their crumpled, just-out-of-bed skirts.

And then the irises begin to bloom. The dozen-or-so varieties I grow will unfurl in waves from now until July, each spiralling a fresh charm of fascination as they corkscrew open. For one who photographs they are a delight, a muse of which I never tire whether viewed face on, from above, from below, lit by the setting sun or bejewelled by raindrops. I adore their complex form, the intricacy of their markings, the depth and breadth of their colours; small wonder that they are named for the winged messenger of Greek mythology who personified the rainbow.

In fact considering the beauty – and the inexplicability at the time of the phenomenon of rainbows – it surprises me a little that Iris wasn’t a bigger player in the Pantheon. But no, her role was very much that of trusted go-between, a B-list deity conveying the messages of A-list gods with accuracy and alacrity. Mentioned a few times in the Iliad – and called upon to deliver Stygian water to Mount Olympus, come the Odyssey she seems to have been largely usurped by Hermes, almost as if Zeus and Hera had decided to change their utility supplier.

The Theogony – a didactic ‘who’s who’ of the gods by Hesiod – gives Iris’ parentage as the Titan Thaumas and the nymph Electra. And if he is right, it means that she was a bit of a Cinderella in other ways too, for she had, you see, some very ugly sisters.

Exactly how many ugly sisters depends on who you read; Homer only mentions one, Hesiod two and later writers three or more, but whatever their number, they were, collectively, known as the Harpies; loathsome, ravenous creatures with the heads and sometimes bodies of women but the wings and claws of terrifying birds.

Originally associated with the sea, wind and storms, the name ‘Harpy’ comes from the Greek ‘harpazein’ -‘to seize’ – and this was very much their role in myth. Be it children, the wounded, food or souls, the harpies were always lurking, ready to smash and grab.

One of the best known stories tells how Zeus sent them to plague Phineus the seer as punishment for his revealing things that should only be known to the gods. Every time Phineus tried to eat, the harpies would swoop from the heavens and make off with his fare, befouling any scraps left behind with their vile guano. I look around the high perches of my home and wonder whether I should rename Sammy and the crow Aello and Celaeno…

They’ve been joined in the last couple of days by a dark rash of Corvidae; I woke this morning to find two magpies within feet of the bedroom window looking on whilst a jackdaw grappled with a birdfeeder half its size and yesterday I watched astonished as a jay made repeated visits to the enclosed confines of the back, gathering up peanuts spilled during replenishment. It’s only the second time in my life that I’ve known a jay venture so close-up here; that the last time it happened was during a bitter, snow-clad snap hints at the stress that adult birds are under at the moment.

For we’ve had, you see, three consecutive days of rain and at times gale-force winds too. Providing for the needs of baby birds is a difficult task full stop, but in conditions like these it becomes exhausting and at times impossible; small wonder then that adults are willing to take unusual risks to access food either for themselves or their young.

The hideous weather also explains the odd behaviour of a blue-tit I watched yesterday evening. Humming-bird like it hovered around doors, window frames and under sills, clinging momentarily here and there, probing and pecking. I can only assume that heavy rain and wind having washed the caterpillars, grubs and aphids from the trees, it was searching out the spiders which spin between the angles of buildings; they would, after all, be relatively protected from the elements.

The message conveyed by the blue-tit’s flutterings was not an optimistic one though; even if they come in multi-packs, there’s not much meat on spider drumsticks and I’m sure that many, many baby birds will have perished either from hunger or hypothermia over the last few days. Apparently only one-in-ten eggs laid ever goes on to become an adult bird and consecutive days of bad spring weather must up these already sad odds considerably.

The baby robin I buried today though fell prey, I’m ashamed to say, to Tig. Well would have fallen prey had I not heard its cheeping and opened the back door on the beaming cat. I’ve wondered since whether it would not have been kinder to have left it shut, but once face-to-face with the bedraggled mite I had, of course, to scoop it up. I did so with heavy heart though as I know from experience that bird-saving is not my forté. From abandoned ducklings to numerous cat and weather casualties, my record is in fact just two successes over quarter of a century of trying – but hey, there’s never two without three, is there?

So over the space of 30 minutes I warmed it, I dried it, I tried – and failed – to feed it. I even sat it in a makeshift paper-lined nest-bowl and played it a recording of my robin’s song to try to make it connect me with bird-dom and food, but its beak remained stubbornly shut whilst its heart thumped and its eyes gazed wide. So I took it back to the garden and left it, in some shelter, near its parents. Half an hour later it was dead. Such a very short life.

Of vagabonds, vagrancy and varied diets…

Things being cold and wet have always bothered me. When little, my ambition in life was to be rich enough to buy a house big enough to home all gentlemen of the road. Whether they would actually want to be homed or not didn’t even occur to me. It also never occurred to me that I would need anything more than a single, very large building with perhaps twenty bedrooms at most at my disposal; I must have assumed at the time that almost every tramp in existence eventually found his way to our front door.

In my defence we did seem to get more than our ration of hopeful callers looking for food and perhaps some old clothes; in fact my mother swore that our dwelling had something she called ‘the mark’ on it, identifying it as one where there was welcome to be found. It would, she said, be carved in a spot ‘known to the wise’ – and it sounded even more thrilling when she said it in Welsh.

For years I thought I’d found it on the talcen wall but said nothing; I liked our strange visitors and loved the idea of a secret symbol. It was quite a let-down then when I eventually discovered that the arrow I’d kept to myself all that time was nothing more romantic than a benchmark inscribed by travellers from the Ordinance Survey, proclaiming the house to be precisely 228.2 feet above sea level. I consoled myself by reflecting that perhaps people living at that altitude were particularly renowned for their generosity of spirit in vagabond circles.

I’ve since learned that a circle is exactly what I should have been looking for, for that was the sign of a welcoming house (although how long that welcome would extend if the owners caught you chiselling into their masonry is of course a moot point…) A circle bisected by a line was a sign of warning, and a ‘Z’ an even more definite ‘do not call’. A triangle denoted a police house which could be a mixed blessing; a particularly bitter night might, after all, be better spent at her majesty’s pleasure than in the bite of the elements.

Anyway, signposted or not, our regular irregulars returned starling-like with the fall of the leaves each year. In spring and summer casual farm work would provide them with both both board and bedding but once harvest had passed, rural pickings were poor.

I don’t remember my family making any great distinction between the tramping folk and the gypsies who were also regular callers, although in a household where money was often scarce I suspect that the latter’s entreaties to part with hard cash in return for clothes-pegs, charms or frivolous glimpses of the future were less easy to comply with then requests for food.

There was, after all, always food to share – 95% of the garden was given over to vegetable production and a further 4% to chickens and bees. Eating and cooking apples in abundance, pears, blackcurrants, strawberries, gooseberries and rhubarb cocked a further snook at greengrocers whilst the surrounding countryside yielded blackberries, whimberries, elderberries and mushrooms.

Every Thursday morning my father would rise at five thirty and go and help one of the butchers at the local market to unload and set up his stall. The payment – always in kind – provided ample protein to last until Sunday and buttered the family bread for the week. On Sunday a chicken was eaten roasted, on Monday cold and on Monday night the carcass would be boiled to make cawl for Tuesday and Wednesday.

We actually paid for very little then; flour, sugar, milk, dried fruit, lard, margarine, tea and coffee were the staples whilst the occasional luxuries came in tins – baked beans, spaghetti, Goblin hamburgers, and Nestle’s cream. The cream – slightly grey and oily – would be served at teatime on a Sunday along with tinned ‘fruit cocktail’ – a syrupy mass in which only colour and texture distinguished peach from pear from pineapple. The punctuation marks of palid grapes and day-glo cherries tasted no different either, but were to be coveted all the same.

I must have thrown the family economy into crisis then when, at the age of five, I decided that for tea I would eat a dry currant bun with a glass of orange squash and that my supper would be a tin of Chef beans and sausages; every day; for years. I suspect that what triggered it was starting school dinners and the trauma of being forced to eat things I truly disliked to the point of retching; children’s taste buds can be such drama queens.

At home then I craved predictability and my parents, themselves fairly traumatised by picking a beetroot-faced child up from the school gates each day and dragging her back there the next morning, capitulated. There must have been times though when their patience was as sorely stretched as the household budget and I clearly remember my brother’s calm suggestion that I should be ‘given to the Lovells’.

The Lovells were our ‘local’ gypsies. I know that sounds a little unlikely, but for travelling folk they seemed to spend an awful lot of time in the area. They were headed by ‘Queen’ Marjorie, a weather-haggard crone who was generally held in awe by adults and children alike in spite of her diminutive stature.

My brother’s threat was made all the more credible because goodwill between our families was high. Perhaps my parents experienced sufficient prejudice as a result of my father being German to make them more tolerant than most of ‘difference’ – even to feel a camaraderie with those who hovered on the edge of exile. And my grandfather had long been a favourite with Marjorie since, whilst waiting outside chapel to troop in with the other deacons one Sunday morning, he had obliged her with a light for her clay pipe. The act prompted her to declare ‘Morgans’ to be ‘a gentleman’ – and once Marjorie declared something, it was so.

They’re all gone now; long gone in fact. Today I’m forced to buy my clothes pegs in the supermarket and the old tramps call no more. And so, with my chosen career path of hostelier to the homeless closed due to lack of demand, my current post of mental health Welfare Rights Worker is probably as near as I’ll get. I don’t house or feed people directly, but I do try to ensure that the sate fulfils its duty to do so, even if I fear that Government plans to introduce a much tougher test of ‘sickness’ this autumn will once again see growing numbers estranged from the safety net of social security.

I despise the way politicians play with people’s lives to meet their own ends. I’ve seen thriving communities and industries crucified in the name of free enterprise and generations of people lose their self-worth and hope as a result. I’ve seen people told that they’re sick because that’s cheaper than providing them with work and less embarrassing than having them join the millions of jobless and I’ve since seen them grow more and more unwell as a result, whilst first Conservative and then Labour Governments told them that they weren’t really ill at all. And now, when the Government have themselves concluded that fraud amongst sickness benefit claimants is actually negligible, what do they do? They move the goalposts. You’re almost all genuinely sick? OK, let us show you what sick really means.

And even more shamefully, they’re also planning to remove safeguards which have, until now, protected the most unwell from the random quality of government medical testing. It may no longer be legal to hang someone for a repeat offence of begging but some are sufficiently vulnerable to take the rope into their own hands.

It’s nothing new, of course, to classify and persecute the poor in justification of inadequate opportunity or state provision. As early as 1383 the Statute of Cambridge made every parish responsible for the care of people too unwell to work, but demanded that unless vagabonds could, if required, ‘display their means of support’ they should be thrown in gaol. Somehow I suspect pulling out a battered guitar or accordion wouldn’t have sufficed.

Keeping people in gaol cost money of course – and could provide many with a better lifestyle than they enjoyed at liberty – so by 1495 the punishment for vagrancy became three days and nights in the stocks followed by banishment from the parish. Whipping replaced the stocks from 1530.

Employment and Support Allowance recipients of 2008 are probably the closest equivalent of the ‘impotent poor’ first recognised in statute and allowed licence to beg in 1537, whilst Jobseekers would be the ‘sturdy beggars’ – capable of work but wilfully incompliant. At least today we only have monetary sanctions – unlicensed begging in the 1530s was punishable by two years’ servitude and branding, with the death sentence for a second offence. By 1572 first offenders were ‘bored through the ear’ – and not by an Elizabethan minstrel strumming James Blunt’s greatest hits – whilst persistent offenders faced the noose.

Things got a little easier after the 1601 Poor Law recognised that as well as the ‘idle poor’ and the ‘impotent poor’ there were also ‘able bodied poor’ and established Houses of Industry for the latter as well as Houses of Correction. We have to wait until 1795 though to meet the precursor of Tax Credits – the enlightened ‘Speenhamland System’ under which a poor family’s wages could be topped up depending on the number in the household and the cost of a loaf of bread that week.

The Poor Law of 1832, for all the well-meaningness of its authors, looks positively draconian by comparison. All outdoor relief was banned, families were broken up with separate workhouses established for women, men and children and conditions further toughened to try to ensure ‘lesser eligibility’ – it was vital, politicians felt, to make life within the workhouse walls tougher than it was on the outside. Fortunately they eventually concluded that the living conditions of the poorest could simply not be replicated without starving people to death which would, of course, rather have defeated the purpose and by 1842 outdoor relief was once more legalised.

‘Doles’, too, were an important aid to survival for the poorest – whether in cash or in kind – bread, cheese, blankets and coal being amongst the most common commodities distributed, often ‘in memoriam’ of a local dignitary. How many making provision in their wills for these annual hand-outs were driven solely by the wish to alleviate the plight of the poor is questionable – many of them would, no doubt, also have been motivated to perpetuate their own memory or even shorten their stay in purgatory. The difference they made though was significant.

The beneficiaries of doles varied from ‘the poor’ to very specific recipients – ‘four old men’, ‘ten youths born within the parish’ or in one case ‘six women who had lost their husbands through drowning’. Often though a distinction was still made between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor – ‘as for beggars by trade and election I give them nothing’ stated a will of 1687.

A more random way to deal with the distribution of a dole was to simply throw the goods to an assembled crowd and allow them to scramble for them. If the dole was one of coins, it was common to heat them first, no doubt adding to the enjoyment of spectators. Examples of ‘scrambling’ doles still survive in several parts of Britain, often now attached to civic ceremonies such as Mayor Makings. Health and Safety considerations have been taking their toll for some time though; many of the scrambling doles were eventually moved from indoors to outdoors and a decision was taken in Harwich in the 1960s to wrap buns in cellophane before they were thrown to the crowd…

The only state provision for ‘my’ tramps in the early 70s would have been a daily amount of either 30 or 40 pence, paid at the discretion of the local DHSS. The distances between offices were considerable though, so most failed to claim daily and many preferred not to claim at all. Why tramp? Well, I suppose their survival depended on maintaining the goodwill of strangers, many of whom might willingly share their repast once or twice a year but who might feel less inclined to do so if requests were made monthly or weekly.

Where are they now? Well, judging from their ages I suspect most of them turned to vagrancy either as a result of post-war trauma or during the depression of the 20s and 30s and that death has long since accompanied them down their last road. I hope it was a gentle companion.

Of ewes, earthworms and angels…

I found myself thinking similar thoughts up on the Preseli Mountains a couple of weeks ago when, excited by a group of stones I’d not previously noticed, I began an enthusiastic yomp to a ridge. Anticipation and ascent both warm the blood, so that I didn’t notice the wind until I stopped. Once I did though, it rapidly began to dissect my folly with cutting remarks. But there was glorious clarity to the day and the cloud-studded sky was just yelling ‘take me, take me’… I fumbled over my camera, trying to adjust my fffffff-stops.

And then salvation flapped at me from a gorse bush where, entangled, lay a long length of agricultural black webbing. Remembering Abraham and giving thanks for my temporarily numb fingertips, I set about prising the makeshift shawl from the spiky shrub.

Once freed it glistened in the sunshine – its weave was fine, its texture soft and the elements had fringed its edges deep. The true gift of the wrap was time though – its warmth allowed me to dawdle amongst the stones, to study the lichen and investigate the hollows between.

The bones were almost all on the sunless lea-side. Most of the long ones I left behind, but I gathered up two of the skulls, thinking as I did so of the sheep dying there, alone, trying to shelter from the wind. Not with lasting sadness though; their calm hypothermic slide into unknowing was probably far kinder than mass transportation to slaughter.

Looking at them now, side-by-side, I’m not wholly convinced that they’re both sheep’s skulls; if they are, they came from significantly different sheep. Or it could be, of course, that one was just much prettier than the other…

I did notice a couple of cars slowing as I descended once more but there’s very little traffic on that mountain. It wasn’t until I got back to our car then – dark cloak billowing out behind me and a skull in each hand – that Tom’s slightly scared but not altogether surprised expression said more than words could. ‘We were cold…’ I explained.

Please don’t assume that I’m a mad old woman… well not yet. anyway. Although I’m thoroughly enjoying the carte blanche that being over a couple of foothills seems to confer, I’ve only just turned 45 and have always been prone to acts of the unusual.

In my youth for example, when not worrying about chilly tramps, I turned my attention to earthworms. They were cold, they were wet – they were my friends. They went everywhere with me, usually in my pocket, although they did turn up in other ‘nice warm places’ too – gloves, hats and occasionally – but long enough apart for him to forget about checking – my father’s slippers.

And they weren’t the only things that accumulated in the pockets so carefully sewn onto each and every dress my mother made me when I started school to ensure that I always had a clean handkerchief to hand. For a long time I was concerned about the little bits of litter which accumulated in the school yard being cold and lonely so they came home with me too, along with any pieces of lunch which were simply beyond swallowing. My later school frocks had no pockets.

This was all of course some time after the angel.

The angel lived in the graveyard about half a mile from my home. In pre-school years a daily walk ‘to the cemetery and back’ was customary so I’m not quite sure at what age I did a Pygmalion and fell in love with the statue – certainly too young to appreciate the difference between animate and otherwise, doll and grave-marker.

I adored it. I climbed its plinth and picked snails from the concave angles of its wings. I talked to it and brushed cobwebs from its face and when winter came and I had to leave it there in the cold I clung to it and sobbed. I was faithful, too, in my taphophilia – I’m told that my tears continued for weeks after walks took a determinedly different direction. My mother, no doubt, considered the Boswells.

And I was specific as well as faithful, for angels in general have long disturbed me. I think it started when I first encountered the particularly reassuring bed-time prayer which invites four of them to stand guard over you whilst you sleep before adding the killer line ‘if I should die before I wake…’ Well gosh, thanks, I’d never really considered the possibility of failing to make it through the night before, but now that you mention it…

Neither did the awesome messengers – and often deliverers of eye-for-an-eye retribution in the Old Testament so beloved by our chapel ministers – bear any resemblance to the benevolent, parrot-like guardians so often depicted today. In fact ‘angels on your shoulder’ sounds more like a warning than a blessing to me – a sinister dandruff to be brushed off with haste. For those of you who watch Dr Who I’ll simply add ‘don’t blink’…

Of death, haar and fret…

This has, I know, been too long in the writing; a couple of weeks ago it became clear from the winged messages of the robin that all of its brood died that evil spring bank holiday weekend. He’s carrying mealworms again, but now only to his mate.

There’s been poignancy then to his recent company – inferred I’m sure rather than implied – and my will to blog of that which robin behaviour tells me has slumped. If I’m honest though and try to suspend my anthropomorphism, what it actually tells me is that the driving urge to reproduce swiftly supersedes any ‘grief’ parent birds may – or may not – experience.

I have my suspicions that there is though at least a brief recognition of passing; my mother, writing in a diary of 1997, records the reaction of a female blackbird coming across the lifeless body of one of its offspring thus:

‘the mother flew down, stood motionless and then ‘sat’ down with both wings fully extended, drooped her head and stayed without moving for a couple of minutes whilst I cried for her… The silent grief of the mother was one of the saddest scenes that I have ever witnessed…”

That much of my mother’s own experience would have been brought to the emotion of that account is beyond question, for she too had borne the death of one of her offspring. I trust her observational skills absolutely though and the honesty with which she would have recorded the facts of what she witnessed.

The day the robins’ demise dawned on me was marked by the coming of a sea fog so thick and so unmoving that it shrouded the coast for three days. Of all the weathers we endure here on the Atlantic coast, fog is beyond doubt the most lifeless – as if someone took essence of November and concentrated it before serving it chilled. The sombre accompanying toll of the fog bell is precision tuned to its presence; it may guide boats safely home but I’d rather not meet the ferryman.

The ability of bells to sound either ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ – or, indeed, alarmed – only really struck me on the third day of the fog. How can a single note convey such intense and bleak tristesse? It only sounds its vacuous knell once every couple of minutes, so it took a cold wait to make sure I had its note correctly stored before heading back to the house la-la-la-ing.

‘La- la – I- can’t- actually- speak- now’ I sang to Tom like some monotone diva ‘it’s- the- note- of- the- fog- bell- and- I’m- going- to- find- out- what- it- is – la- la…’ As I dashed up the stairs to my keyboard, I felt as though a doleful chorus should have closed behind me (no, not clutching buns wrapped in cellophane…)

It turned out to be a ‘B’. Surely not, I thought to myself, for the ‘B’ I was playing held none of the desolate sound fixed in my head. B flat perhaps? No, too low; what I was looking for was definitely a B natural, but one with an overwhelming air of melancholy to it.

I found the answer online later that night. I don’t pretend to understand the physics involved but it would seem that what we hear as the ring of a bell and interpret as a single note is actually made up of many variables – its ‘nominal’, its ‘hum’, its ‘prime’, its ‘tierce’ and its ‘quint’ – and I suspect that our fog bell has a ‘flat prime’. Follow the link beneath the irises below, listen and understand!

And on that note… (a B with a flat pun, I know…) I shall wrap up this post, send it on its way and go sample some late afternoon sunshine. Who knows, perhaps I’ll even find a mark on a wall with a definite ring to it…

Post Script – four days later

My robin is gone.

Links:

www.bench-marks.org.uk/  - do you know of a benchmark? Register it here!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/3354825.stm  - one of the last tramps to call here

www.hibberts.co.uk/ears.htm  - the sounds of bells