purplecat

I can't really be bothered to hunt out a photo for Throwback Thursday so I instead looked back through my LJ to see what I was doing in June 2007 (the first year of the blog). It turns out I was reading history:

"I read The Claycross Calamities by Terry Judge largely because my interest in genealogy has revealed that a number of my ancestors were miners living in Claycross (or neighbouring Pilsley) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Claycross Calamities documents three of the pit disasters at the Claycross company mines: one inundation and two explosions. The first gets considerably more detail, probably because the progress of the disaster was spread out over a longer period whereas coverage of the explosions really only deals with the aftermath. The book hints darkly at company cover-ups and the growth of miner's representation but can't really make the events support this thesis. It seems clear that the Clay Cross pits were some of the best run (for their time) and the use of candles, as opposed to safety lamps, which were the likely cause of the two explosions was part of a conscious pay-off in the minds of both management and miners of the risks of poor lighting versus explosions in pits where "firedamp" was rarely encountered. The Inundation was probably caused by inaccurate pit mapping (the miners breached a previously closed and flooded pit when they should have been 40 metres away from it) for which nowadays the company would almost certainly be held liable but it wasn't clear to me that their exoneration was because the jury was not composed of miners (the case implied by the book) or simply because Company/Health and Safety legislation was not appropriately in place at the time. The book was well-written however and an interesting and reasonably technical read should you be interested in the history of mining."

I read Trends in School Design entirely because it was written by my grandfather. It is a fairly slim volume published by Macmillan in 1972 as part of The Anglo-American Primary School Project. Small abuse the University of Liverpool's online access to JSTOR netted me Malcolm Seaborne's review* of A `Golden Age' of School Building? by Stuart Maclure which at least let me place Trends in School Design in some context.

( I'm going to discuss the design of English primary schools in the 1950s and 1960s under the cut. Don't say you weren't warned! )

*Malcolm Seaborne. A `Golden Age' of School Building? Oxford Review of Education, Vol 11, No. 1, 1985, pp. 97-103.

It transpires that my great, great, great, great grandfather's brother, German Buxton, managed to get himself transported to Australia for his participation in the Pentrich Uprising which John Stevens rather grandly terms "England's Last Revolution". Being the particular kind of geeky person that I am this has naturally lead to a fair amount of internet searching and a moderate investment in books about said Uprising.

John Stevens' book on the subject came as something of a shock. I read a fair number of history textbooks both for A Level and when I did an OU course on Early Modern Britain and France a few years back so I have some kind of feeling for what to expect. What I got was something much more straightforwardly narrative - which in some senses was good since my interest was primarily in what happened to German and not on debates about the wider context. I dimly remember Sir Gawain claiming to be an "old-style" narrative historian and wonder if this was the sort of thing he was referring to since it was written in 1977.

It's not that the book peddles a 1066 and all that style good king/bad king (or in this case good workers/bad government - or, of course, vice versa) approach to the story*. However it mostly contents itself with what is thought to have happened and the sources of that information and the speculation it indulges in as to why seems quite narrow in scope. It also contains quite lengthy quotes from original sources which I, at least, rather appreciated.

In short therefore the Pentrich Uprising consisted of about 300 men from Pentrich in Derbyshire (many press-ganged by the ring-leaders) and the surrounding villages who, convinced the entire country was on the brink of revolution, marched on Nottingham on the evening of the 9th June 1817. The revolution ended about eight miles later when a rather smaller group met up with soldiers near Kimberley, promptly turned and fled. About 40 were taken captive immediately and many others rounded up in the ensuing days. Although I say they met up with the soldiers only eight miles away from Pentrich it took them a good four or five hours to get there which seems a long time even allowing for 19th century roads and the fact it was the middle of the night. It transpires that they stopped at no less than four pubs en route!!! Revolution, it seems, was thirsty work. Three of the revolutionaries were hanged, fourteen, including my probable great great great great grand uncle were transported and a further six were jailed for periods between six months and two years.

One of the reasons Stevens may have opted to steer clear of too much analysis of the event was the rather murky involvement of "Oliver the Spy" an agent provocateur who had spent the winter of 1817 travelling all over the north and midlands of England generally both stirring up and reporting upon the 9th June plans for revolution. It is obviously difficult to gauge the extent to which the government was aware of the 9th June plans and even the extent to which the revolution was stage-managed. Stevens devotes a whole chapter to documenting Oliver's activities but at the end of the day it seems moderately clear that he hadn't met any of the Pentrich marchers in person and that while he may have encouraged a wider revolution while doing his information gathering thing, ultimately that wider revolution didn't happen. Oliver's involvement generated much excitement at the time, being exposed in the Leeds Mercury mere days after the uprising, but there certainly doesn't seem to be a simple story to tell about government manipulation of working class discontent for its own political ends.

As for my ancestor's brother, I learn from Stevens' book that the local ironworks manager, Goodwin, having pronounced Thomas Bacon, one of the ringleaders to be "a rascal", considered German to be "a worse". However in 1826 the Reverend John Dunmore Lang in Australia was to describe him as a "sober, industrious man". Mind you by that time German Buxton was running a quarry in Australia and had been ordered to cease work. The Reverend John Lang wanted his church finished and so perhaps his support of German in the dispute was not entirely disinterested.

* for this I refer the reader to the Socialist Appeal's write up of the event. It even has a moral at the end.**

**And when I just went to look the rather bizarre "stop press" headline that Stalin Cartoonist had just died. I can't help feeling that not much can be happening in the world of far left socialism if that counts as exciting news.

It turns out that one branch of B's family come from Erbistock, near Wrexham.

I thought certain people might like to know.

One of the more irritating aspects of B.'s family (from a genealogy point of view) is a tendency to refer to people as, for example, "Great Grandpa Lloyd" without making it clear whether they mean their great grandpa Lloyd, your great grandpa Lloyd, or your child's great grandpa Lloyd. Case in point is the central photograph below. On the back my MiL's father has written "Great Grandpa Lloyd". Now if it is indeed his great grandpa Lloyd then it is the same gentleman as the drawing on the left. If on the other hand it is MiL's great grandpa Lloyd then it is the gentleman on the right.



What does my flist think?

My great grandfather was called (according to an essay I wrote age 10 following a phone call with my Nana) William Henry Edny Sims. I've found his marriage certificate and know he was born about 1875. Could I find his birth certificate? *phzzt* I found a couple of potential William Sims' in the census and pursued the mostly likely ones. I found a cousin several times removed of the most likely who told me that Hendy (not Edny, but hey!) was a traditional family middle name. I find this family in various documents displaying an incredibly lax attitude to surname. So far I think I've identified members going by the surnames: Sims, Seemes, Hendy, Hendey, Bobb and Bubb indeed John Hendy Sims, my gg-grandfather, assuming all this is correct, in fact at one time or another used all of Sims, Hendy and Bubb.

So eventually I decide to search for all the William's (any surname) born in the Keynsham Registration district of Gloucestershire (most likely location) between 1874 and and 1876... and I find William Henry H Seams (b. Jan/Feb/Mar 1876) - birth certificate now on order - if that second H is for Hendy I reckon I have my man!!