Trouble at t'mill

It's not been a good year at the Kilvert Society.

It's just a small literary society. No, tiny. The youngest member is probably well over 50. Numbers are inevitably falling. There is no plan to expand the membership, and the society is in terminal but cosy decline. 

It's a very sad picture indeed.

Not everyone is happy, as this recent letter shows. I think I must be one of the 'vociferous minority' who want change.

The organisation is 'dynamically conservative'.  I think the definition of that is: 'will fight like mad to stay the same'. Right now, the committee seems to be frozen in the headlights of an alarming present and terrifying future.

Some of us think it might be useful to have a plan. Whoa ! Way too radical.

Anyway, this is the state of play right now:

You can see that the committee is strong on blame, but not so clear about any strategy to move forward.

I should add that Mr Boase is a tireless enthusiast, a brilliant former editor of the Society's journal, whose huge energy is matched only by his passion and integrity. He dared to think that there might be another way, and was crazy enough to think that the society might want to stick to its constitution.

Oh dear.

BBC, Dawn Chorus, Kilvert

Did you hear last Sunday's Dawn Chorus programme on Radio 4 ?

Terrific radio.

May is the month for the dawn chorus. Here the first birds begin just after 0400, and there are more voices than I can recognise or even count.

The dawn chorus always makes me think of Kilvert's fantastic description on 7 May 1870.

And that always make me wonder what else William Plomer cut out of the diary for incomprehensible reasons. 

A couple of years ago I send David Attenborough the Dawn Chorus entry in the diary, thinking that there was just a chance that even an enthusiast such as he might not have come across it.

I was amazed to receive a reply, and delighted to find that he had not been aware of it.

 

Handwriting

From 'Kilvert's Cornish Diary', ed Maber and Tregoning, 1989

'Kilvert's Cornish Diary' is a little gem.

I don't think there is any work on the manuscript which is more carefully researched, clearer, and more insightful.

The pages seen here come from Kilvert's original notebook of his holiday with the Hockins in Cornwall in 1870. 

Most useful is the glimpse of Kilvert's technique which the pages reveal. He left gaps which were to be filled in at some time after the initial entry. Some of the gaps are not completely filled, leaving smaller gaps, and sometimes he had more information than could be squeezed into the space he had allowed.

Perhaps most vainly hopeful is the thought that he clearly carried with him a small notebook which contained jottings for the day, from which he wrote up the diary notebooks at home later. There might just be a cache of these unregarded notebooks gathering dust in a loft somewhere.

If you wanted to get hold of just one Kilvert book, 'Kilvert's Cornish Diary' would be the one. It is a rich delight.

The urge to research my family history led me into using the computer to help, and I was struck by the awesome power of modern technology to search records at a rate which would have been unthinkable even five years ago. Census information, records of births, marriages and deaths, and now even phone books - all are available online. Searching has never been easier, cheaper, or quicker – and it is getting better all the time.

Barry Smith’s 1992 piece ‘A Walk to Britford’, reprinted in the Kilvert Society Journal  mentions the Morres brothers, ‘soldier and priest’ who married the Hills sisters of Britford Vicarage. Looking in the Journals, I couldn’t find anything on the Morres brothers, and my Kilvert Who’s Who was silent, so I thought I might use the computer to see what I could find.

This family was much troubled by spelling – other people’s. Morris or Morres ? Francis or Frances ? Elliot or Eliot ? Enumerators were often inaccurate in recording information, and across the years the family appear with either spelling, as Frances ducks in and out of sight in both male and female forms, and Eliots are allotted different numbers of consonants. Even Kilvert – or was it William Plomer ? – does it. On 27^th August 1875, Kilvert began his memorable walk to Stonehenge with ‘Morris’ and later that day Major Fisher invited ‘Morres and myself to come to his hawking lodge’.

This slight confusion makes searching tricky but exciting. Here goes.

The Morres brothers

The two Morres brothers were Arthur Phillip and Elliot J Morres, sons of Beatrice and Eliot Morres, who appears is the census with one ‘L’, while his son has two. Eliot senior was born around 1795, and enjoyed a military career. He is described in the 1871 census as a Commander in the Royal Navy.

Born in Reading in 1832, Elliot J was the soldier. Elliot J was an Oxford graduate, and was, like his father, a military man. The rather blurred page of the 1881 census notes that he had formerly been a Lieutenant of the 47^th Regiment.

Arthur Phillip was born in 1836 in Wokingham. He was the priest and Morres minor. In 1861, aged 25, he was boarding with the schoolmaster in Bishops Lydeard where he himself was curate.  More of him later.

The Hills sisters of Britford Vicarage

Richard Hill was born in 1801, and appears in the first census (1841) as ‘Clerk Curate’ of Britford. Richard had married Mary Barton (born 1811) and by 1841 their family was already growing. Mary’s mother, also called Mary Barton (born 1786), lived with the family.

The Hill family was large by today’s standards, and eventually 11 children are recorded in the census records. The first child, John, was born in 1828. The second was Susan P Hill, born in 1830, followed by her sister Mary Ann in 1835. They were followed by Robert (1837), Walter (1839), Jane B (1841), William (1843), Frances J (1845), Geoffrey (1847), Alfred (1849), and Arthur (1851). The regularity of the dates between the children’s births suggests that there may have been an additional child somewhere between Susan’s birth in 1830, and Mary Ann’s in 1835, and that this child died in infancy.

By 1851, Richard Hill was Vicar of Britford. His mother-in-law was still a member of the household, but, with his youngest son aged just 10 months, there is no sign of his wife, though his marital status was recorded as ‘married’, rather than ‘widower’. Where was his wife ? Had she fallen ill following the birth of their latest child ? Or had she perhaps already died, and for some reason Richard’s marital status on the census was inaccurate ? None of the above.

Mary Ann Hill, described as ‘Clergyman’s wife’, is living with her three daughters in Bournemouth. Both she and her husband each employed two servants one of whom, Eliza Bugg, remained with the family for at least the twenty years between 1841 and 1861.

By 1861 Richard is described as a widower and the family was reunited at Britford. His daughter Mary Ann, aged 26, is described as ‘B.A.: Oxford’. By 1871, Richard disappears from the census, and his son-in-law, Arthur Phillip Morres, had succeeded him as vicar of Britford.

Marriages

When such research was more arduous than it is now, the indefatigable Teresa Williams discovered the 1862 marriage of Mary Ann Hill and Arthur Phillip Morres.

Elliot J Morres had already married her sister, Susan P Hill, and in 1881 they were living at Raglan Villas in Bath, with daughters Mary Ann (aged 22) and Susan E (aged 20). Also living with them was Frances Hill, who is described as ‘wife’s sister’.

The two families were united exactly as Kilvert describes: two bothers marrying two sisters. 

Francis Hill

On 26^th May 1875 (Vol 3 p192) Kilvert finds ‘the Morreses at dinner and Francis Hill with them.’  Francis was Frances J Hill, the younger sister of Susan and Mary Ann. Alone of her siblings, she was born at Coombe Bissett in 1845. Dogged by her final syllable, Frances wanders through the census records, appearing in 1851, living with her mother and sisters In Bournemouth. Ten years later, she is still at home, as might be expected at age 16. By 1871, she is living with Arthur Phillip and his wife, and in 1881 changes teams, living this time with Elliot and Susan Morres, with whom she remained until at least 1991, when, aged 46 and unmarried, she is described as ‘living on own means’. In 1901 she is living with her brother Walter in Oxfordshire, where he was a ‘Clergyman of the Church of England’.

Soldiers and priests

It seems likely that Elliot and Arthur Morres were not the first brothers in the family to be soldier and priest. Eliot Morres senior had been born in Isleworth. A Thomas Morres was also born in Isleworth in 1796. They may well have been brothers. Thomas was Chaplain of Lucas’ Hospital and Perpetual Curate of Wokingham in 1851, and by 1871 is described as Rector of Wokingham and Master of Lucas’ Hospital.

Missing link

Let’s go back to Kilvert’s Stonehenge expedition with ‘Morris’. It is 1875, and Kilvert is staying at Britford with ‘the Morreses’. The Morreses in this case were not the brothers, but Arthur Phillip and Mary Ann Morres. Arthur Phillip had been vicar at Britford since at least 1871. As they walked through the meadows towards Salisbury, Arthur Phillip told stories of Edward Hill hunting grizzly bears. Rev Edward Hill was Rector of Ashurst in Sussex between at least 1871 and 1891. In 1871 he is living at the Rectory with his brother, Alfred Briscoe Hill. Born in 1833, Edward fills the gap between his sisters Susan (1830) and Mary (1835) that the census information threw up. So why was he missing in 1851 ? A quick check shows him at Magdalen College, Oxford, aged 19.

The army, the navy, the church and the stage. The Morres family had links with the first three. If any of them were actors, I have not tracked them down yet. And I have no clue as to when Edward was shooting grizzly bears. Even computer technology has its limits.

There are no words ...

Mrs Frances Essex Theodora Hope (1879 - 1964) was Frank Kilvert's niece.

I wish she hadn't been.

After Kilvert's death his widow took scissors to the pages to remove material she clearly did not wish to preserve for posterity. We can only guess what was on her mind.

22 notebooks then passed, after his widow's death, to Percival Smith, Kilvert's nephew.

It is these 22 notebooks which William Plomer edited in the late 1930s, removing two thirds of the content. The three-volume diary we now have is what Plomer shaped from the 22 notebooks.

He wrote:

If it had been published as it stood it would have filled nine stoutish volumes, running to well over a million words

William Plomer managed to lose the typescript copy of the whole of the contents of the 22 notebooks, and Mrs Hope received the originals after Plomer had done with them.

In the 1950s Mrs Hope set about disposing of the materials passed to her. She destroyed 19 of the original 22 notebooks, and distributed three to people she knew, against Plomer's advice.

These three notebooks are all we have of the unedited originals.

The silver lining, as paltry as it is, is that these volumes can be compared with Plomer's edited version in the three-volume diary. We get to see the original, which is a treat, but we also get to see something on Plomer's editing technique. Lastly we get a tantalising picture of the sheer quality which he chose to omit from his three-volume edition.

The three surviving notebooks have all been published. They are:

April to June 1870 ed Kathleen Hughes and Dafydd Ifans; The National Library of Wales 1982

June to July 1870 ed Dafydd Ifans; The National Library of Wales 1989

July to August 1870 (Kilvert's Cornish Diary) ed Richard Maber and Angela Tregoning; Penzance: Alison Hodge, 1989

 They are well worth tracking down.

Bright clustering curls blown wild and golden

In early July 1875 Frank Kilvert was at the seaside. He had hoped to meet his mother, brother and sister at Shanklin station, but 'to my disappointment they did not come'.

When he went to the beach, 20 minutes after they had failed to arrive, he had family much on his mind.

He threw himself into building sandcastles and trenches, enjoying the tide , and watching the children playing at the fringes of the sea.

And then the tone changes:

Oh, as I watched watched them there came over me such a longing, such a hungry yearning to have one of those children as my own. Oh that I too had a child to love and to love me, a daughter with such fair limbs and blue eyes archly dancing, and bright clustering curls blown wild and golden in the sunshine and sea air. It came over me like a storm and I turned away hungry at heart and half envying the parents as they sat upon the sand watching their children at play.

Remembering that he did not actually write this entry on the beach, but wrote it up at some later point, the two exclamatory 'Oh's are interesting.  He wanted to record something of the depth of his feeling, and set it next to the vivid memories of what he had seen at the beach. His description of the daughter he longs for isn't some Platonic  and theoretical ideal, nor a simple amalgam of the children he had seen at the beach. Rather he selects the almost cinematographic images from the beach which appealed to him and uses them to frame the daughter he never had.

His imagined child was not those we see in studio photographs of the era, starchily dressed, posed formally, and holding a smile-less expression for the long exposure to catch the image. (A smile was so much harder to hold successfully, and early photographers avoided smiling shots.)

There is, instead, fun here. There is archness in the eyes, and a hint of the uninhibited in 'curls blown wild and golden'. This is an outdoor child, enjoying life unconstrained by the conventions of school or the dining table.

It is hard not to wonder if Kilvert wanted to be that child himself, if he wanted greater freedom that his calling and social status allowed him. Perhaps he was regretting his own lost childhood, a sheep remembering gambolling lambhood. There is such powerful vicarious pleasure in the children's happy exuberance.

He was 35, still single, and, one feels, unfulfilled.

No blind eye

In 1832, eight years before Francis Kilvert's birth, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in Daresbury. His rather forbidding and Germanic middle name was inherited from his mother, whose maiden name it was. Charles was rather awkward socially, and had a pronounced stammer, but was a precociously talented child, and showed real potential in mathematics.

As an adult his stammer was noticeable and it bothered him. Interestingly, it was not at all evident in conversation with children.

Charles went to Oxford and graduated ahead of all his contemporaries in mathematics. He stayed on at Christ Church to undertake further studies and to teach. He took holy orders and became Rev Charles Dodgson. He seems to have found social relationships more complex and challenging that maths, and felt more comfortable in the company of children. He never married.

One of Charles' Oxford colleagues was Henry Liddell, Dean of Chirst Church, who complied the Greek-English dictionary which carries his name and is still in use today: Liddell and Scott. Charles became enamoured of one of Henry Liddell's children, Alice, to whom he told the stories which became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Charles Dodgson published his stories under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll which served to protect his professional work as a logician.

The much-loved stories, so brilliantly told, disguise what appears to be an unhealthy obsession with Alice, who was twenty years younger. Had they met as adults, marriage would have been a possibility. But Dodgson's obsession came when Alice was still very much a child.

Dodgson was an early and accomplished photographer, and some of his images of children now produce profound unease, however unremarkable they were at the time.

Kilvert, who was also educated at Oxford (Wadham) shared with Charles Dodgson an interest in children - particularly in girls - which we find uncomfortable today. There is no getting around this problem. Kilvert's interest in girls would not now be viewed as at all healthy. He was, of course, kind and avuncular: a man who genuinely cared. But there can be no doubt that part of his interest was sexual. His descriptions of young girls, and of his thoughts about them, are indisputable. (Check out, as an example, his description of Carrie Britton, aged 7, on 23 August 1871.) He was interested in spanking, and, indeed, offered to spank the daughter of a parishioner, or to watch her spanked naked, with the specious intention of adding to the girl's punishment of humiliation.

Kilvert had a sincere love of children, and huge sadness at the suffering he saw them undergo. His description of visiting Little Davie after his death is amongst the most humane and touching passages in the diaries. 

But his descriptions of 'Gypsy Lizzie' and his confession that he had walked ten miles for a kiss of a girl in school are unmistakably unhealthy.

Infantilised adult views of sexuality seem to have been common in the Victorian era. The previous century had enjoyed a far more earthy approach to sex, but the Victorian period had an up-tight ignorance of sexuality which it was simply too outre to discuss. Dodgson, Kilvert, Ruskin all shared unrealistic and slightly ill-educated views of women. Ruskin's six-year marriage was famously - perhaps notoriously - finally annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Effie herself noted that her husband:

had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening

That is, adult sexuality had been blocked by maladaptive ignorance. (And perhaps also by too profound a veneration of Greek sculpture which lacked pubic hair.)

Kilvert described a rural world which had survived in Wales long after industrialisation and the flight to the cities had destroyed it in England. It is a world which now feels light years away, even though it is a mere 150 years distant. Today it is hard to imagine daily life in Kilvert's world, hard to imagine the soft footfall of a non-mechanised society. Impossible to imagine the deference which was given unquestioningly to authority.

Similarly, it is difficult to feel confident that one has understood the then accepted propriety of adult views of children, especially when such views would be the focus of immediate, if not hostile, suspicion today.

Today, we do not know what the standards of fifty years in the future will be. We can be sure that they will be different, but we cannot begin to guess what they will be. And our lives now can be lived only by the standards of the past or present, not by those of the future.

It is a temptation to judge Kilvert's interest in children harshly, to apply to him accusations of paedophilia. The word itself was unknown in his era. Perhaps we should at least slow the pace of our rush to judgement. Like all of us, Kilvert was trying his best by the standards and expectations of the period in which he lived.

We should perhaps, acknowledge the uncomfortable truth of some of his more febrile and even over-heated passages: we should even have some sympathy with the sexual frustrations he clearly felt throughout most of his adult life. But we should not let the dark complexity overcome the light. We all live in subtle chiaroscuro, and too monochrome a judgement would deny us the pleasure and enrichment offered by the whole of the Kilvert picture.