While the blitz decimated the commercial heartland of the Southampton book trades in 1940, subsequent urban renewal erased the traces of many of our fine bookmen and women. In particular, the homes of many of our bookworkers, collectors, and readers have vanished. Take The Chine on Northland Road, for instance, lovingly documented by descendant John Hurrell Crook. Fred and Mary Brown opened the grounds and main floor of their substantial house to WW1 troops training on the Common. Calling it ‘Soldiers’ Rest,’ rank and file military personnel could come in for tea and coffee, indulge in various recreations, have their photograph taken and turned into a postcard, write letters, and borrow books from the library: all marks of social and cultural normality in a world upended by politics and war. All that remains of these readers in the Southampton City Archives is a single notebook leaf recording several books and borrowers. A haunting glimpse of soldiers who may never have made it home. ‘Hailstede’ was the Archer’s Road home of Henry March Gilbert before he moved to Winchester in 1896 to continue his bookselling trade. As historian Roger Ottewill notes, “In addition to Henry and Mary, the household consisted of four daughters, a governess, two apprentice booksellers who were designated ‘boarders’ and a general domestic servant. Clearly, they were relatively well off.” Enumerated in the 1911 census, the house drops off the map thereafter and no photographic evidence survives. Tantalisingly, ‘Hailstede’ evokes the name of the place Gilbert was born in 1846: Halstead in Essex. 34 Winn Road is well known to Titanic aficionados, being the site of Captain Edward John Smith’s home, ‘Woodhead,’ sadly hit in one of the WWII German bombing raids and eventually demolished to make way for a block of undistinguished flats. Despite Woodhead’s genteel Edwardian comforts, few know what was contained in Smith’s personal library, nor indeed, whether there was a catalogue of books in the first and second class libraries on board his final ship. Intriguingly though, in the Cawte and Cox bookbinding ledgers there are a number of entries for one Capt Smith dating from 1909 to 1910. With repeat orders, this client was reputable enough to warrant credit (CR) being noted beside his name.
The titles are exclusively reference works ranging from the History of England to London Past and Present, and from Engineering Wonders of the World to the Childrens’ New Encyclopedia. All the orders are at the pricey end of the bookbinding spectrum: cased (leather); half purple calf neat cloth sides; 1/2 morocco cloth sides (brown) gilt roll up side. Did Smith train up his officers and reward them with books as prizes? Or did his philanthropy extend to local schools and other charitable institutions where knowledge was the passport to success and civic responsibility? Like our mysterious Capt Kent, did he also have a morocco-bound Holy Bible that provided comfort in his last hours? References John Hurrell Crook, ‘THANK YOU MRS BROWN! The ‘Soldiers’ Rest’ in Southampton during the Great War. 1914-1918. The ‘Chine Helpers’ in War and Peace,’ Southampton Local History Forum Journal, no 18, Autumn 2011, p33-67. Roger Ottewill, ‘Henry March Gilbert 1846-1931: ‘Staunch Liberal and Nonconformist,’ Journal of the Southampton Local History Forum, No. 22 (Spring 2014), 11-18. https://southamptonlocalhistorycentre.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/lhf-journal-22-spring-2014.pdf https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/heritage/titanic/trail/locations/9462821.Winn_Road__Southampton/
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Since my previous post, new information has come to light that complicates the life story of Charlotte Rayner. I recently paid a visit to the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester to take a look at the last wills and testaments of our various bookworkers. It was a revealing read. Not only were books, machinery, personal items, and real estate listed, but nominated executors and trustees were often fellow members of the trade.
Upon death and once the will was proved, the document also provided gross and net values of the estate. A standout figure is George Phillips, printer, bookseller and stationer, who left £10,000. Our friend James Tucker was not far behind with an estate under £5,000. The versatile engraver and printer Henry Rose left a gross value of estate £8,920.15.0 and net value of personal estate £1,781.7.3 1/2. George Cawte, stationer, tobacconist and son of our bookbinder George, left £1,497.3.8 and £820.3.2 respectively. At the other end of the scale, printer and bookbinder William Budden left £194.0.0; Benjamin Home, printer of Above Bar, was assessed at under £20. In contemporary figures, Phillips' heirs would be £625,000 better off; Home's relations would have £1,250.00. Charlotte's husband, Charles Woodhouse Rayner, left an estate valued under £2,000 but there is an interesting catch. Here's a partial transcription of his will: This is the last Will and Testament of me Charles Woodhouse Rayner of the Town and County of the Town of Southampton Bookseller and Newspaper Agent made whilst in good health and of sound and disposing mind memory and understanding. I direct that all my just debts funeral and testamentary expenses and the costs and charges of proving and executing this my Will shall be fully paid and satisfied by my Executrix hereinafter named as soon as conveniently may be after my decease And subject thereto I give devise and bequeath All and singular my real and personal estate and effects whatsoever and wheresoever which I shall be possessed of interested in or entitled to at the time of my decease unto my dear Wife or reputed Wife Charlotte Rayner …. 'Reputed' wife??? Read on. And whereas doubts have arisen whether Samuel Charles Horsfield a former husband of my said wife was or was not living at the time of my marriage with her Therefore if it should be the fact that the said Samuel Charles Horsfield was living at that time and that my marriage with my said wife was on that account invalid Then I give devise and bequeath All and singular my real and personal estate and effects whatsoever and wheresoever which I shall be possessed of interested in or entitled to at the time of my decease unto her my said wife or reputed wife by her then name of Charlotte Horsfield to her own use and benefit absolutely. Charlotte a bigamist??? Whatever the backstory, the forward-looking Charles was insistent that her portion remain totally under her control: any previous or future husband would be unable, by law, to access any of her funds for his own "debts control or engagement." And too right: Charlotte inherited the equivalent of £125,000 in today's money. No wonder she proclaimed herself 'sole proprietress' of the Southampton Observer business on Bridge Street. And with such a complicated marital history, it is no wonder she didn't marry her foreman, George Buxey, as was usual in the trade. Granted, he was already married... References Registered copy will of Charles Woodhouse Rayner, 1871. Hampshire Record Office 5M62/11 page 742. M254. Currency Converter 1270-2017, National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/# Women are notoriously difficult to track in the archives. In the nineteenth-century, they had no legal identity apart from their fathers, brothers, and husbands. Nor were they part of compulsory education until 1880. They rarely owned property nor were they entitled to be part of local or national government decision-making. Unlike New Zealand who led the world in giving the vote to women in 1893, they were not enfranchised in the UK until 1918. However, women were included in decanal census returns and registers of births, deaths, and marriages. As widows, they often continued their husband’s businesses until their children came of age or until they remarried, often to someone already in the same or related business, thus creating powerful book trade dynasties. In nineteenth-century Southampton, there were a number of successful businesswomen who made their mark. Richard Preston has unpacked the life of E. Skelton - once assumed to be a man - until he uncovered her story. Ann Bown, Mrs Martin, and Mrs Hazleton all ran prosperous bookselling and news agencies, retailing religious periodicals, weekly digests, and popular magazines. A cluster of booksewers, like Miss Kinton below, populate the day books and ledgers of the longstanding bookbinding firm of George Cawte and H.D. Cox. Young, unmarried female bookworkers are sprinkled throughout the 1911 census, many of whom were employed at the Ordnance Survey Office. Charlotte Rayner is another one of these compelling, under-researched women. When her husband died in 1871, she became ‘sole proprietress’ of the family firm which published, amongst other things, the Southampton Observer, the pages of which are filled with advertisements promoting their stock in trade as well as local businesses including bookbinder Kelito Job Broadbere and Henry Rose, Printer, Engraver, India Rubber Stamp Manufacturer, Fancy Repositories, Bookseller and Stationer. Charlotte also set up a bookstall at the docks to rival W.H. Smith’s ubiquitous railway kiosk. When she died in 1879, she bequeathed the business to her faithful foreman, George Buxey who, along with his son, later published important pocketbook maps of the town.
If you’d like to find Charlotte’s final resting place, check out the Southampton Cemetery and do send us a picture! References Richard Preston, ‘A Precarious Business: the Skelton Family of Stationers, Printers and Publishers….’, Southampton Local History Forum Journal, no. 21, Autumn 2013, p3-14. http://sotonopedia.wikidot.com/page-browse:skelton-family http://sotonopedia.wikidot.com/page-browse:rayner-family In the wake of the resounding defeat of Hampshire Liberals in the January 1835 general election, John Wheeler established the Hampshire Independent as a Whig alternative to the staunchly Tory Hampshire Advertiser run by John Coupland, formerly printer on the anti-radical British Monitor. Wheeler (1807-1854) was part of a multi-generational newspaper printing, publishing and bookselling dynasty who cut his teeth as a printing apprentice on the family’s Manchester Chronicle. He was also a colleague of Charles Dickens, having worked with him as a Parliamentary reporter in London on the Morning Chronicle.
Wheeler was appointed editor, publisher, printer, and sole proprietor of the Hampshire Independent. The newspaper had financial backing from a number of illustrious personalities - Lord Palmerston, John Easthope, John Bonham-Carter and other local and regional MPs - as well as prominent Southampton Liberals including Richard and George Laishley, Charles Maul, Henry Buchan, Arthur Atherley, Rushworth Keele and William Colson Westlake. The paper was first issued on 28 March 1835 from the printing office at 41 Above Bar Street, later relocating to 52 Above Bar in 1841. The competition at 28 High Street was certainly not far enough away to do political, personal, and financial damage. The tit-for-tat battles waged in the pages of these two Southampton-based newspapers were said to have provided the model for the Eatanswill Gazette and Eatanswill Independent newspaper satire in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers published in 1837. Wheeler’s later fall from grace and vituperative retaliation make for equally engaging, if sobering, reading. By October 1835, a contemporary caricatured him as a 'Disciple of Faust': “he is apt to abuse a fellow one week, and fawn upon him the next. I do not quite understand his steering.” As Wheeler fell into debt and eventually bankruptcy, the newspaper was finally bought by Thomas Leader Harman on 5 September 1840, with John Traffles Tucker engaged as printer and publisher and Jacob Jacob assuming the editorship. Wheeler went over to the dark side, writing for the Hampshire Advertiser and providing unauthorised reports of private reform meetings. By May 1841, Wheeler was exposed as a “traitor and a spy … a crawling loathsome thing that lampoons for gold.” After spending time in the Queen’s Prison, London, for debt, he resurfaced in the newspaper trade, concluding his controversial career as publisher, editor, and proprietor of the Liberal weekly, the Durham Chronicle. Down, but not out. References: Richard Preston, “John Wheeler and the Hampshire Independent, 1835-40,” Southampton Occasional Paper No. 12 (Dec 2015). Richard Preston, “Thomas Leader Harman: a gentleman of fortune in mid-nineteenth century Southampton,” Journal of the Southampton Local History Forum, no. 16 (Winter 2010): 3-27. F. David Roberts, “Still More Early Victorian Newspaper Editors,” Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 18 (vol.5, no.4) Dec 1972: 12-26. http://sotonopedia.wikidot.com/page-browse:wheeler-john John Traffles Tucker was a successful Southampton printer who vied for business in a highly competitive environment. In 1843, he and several of his colleagues petitioned the Town Council for access to the lucrative corporation printing contracts. Each year, the Council put out tenders and a rota or schedule was drawn up which cycled equitably through local printers. Minutes from Corporation meetings and Reports from the Finance Committee provide exceptional detail about the printers employed, their specific jobs and the amounts spent. Many of these jobs were the bread and butter of the trade: blank forms, tickets, programmes, pamphlets. Even extant ledgers such as that of the Police Watch Committee (and note Tucker was on this Committee in the 1870s) enable us to paint a picture of the health of the local book trades. Tucker along with his co-signatories William Brooks, Nicholas Hort, Henry Cozens, Charles Ball, G.L. Marshall, and Thomas Henry Skelton felt shut out and demanded a voice. Some 50 years later, similar complaints were still being made. This time, fair trade at a fair wage was the call to arms. At the March 1895 meeting of the Southampton Town Council, a letter was read from D. Lang, secretary of the Southampton branch of the Typographical Association. It demanded that trade union rates be paid and working conditions observed for all corporation printing; that firms tendering for jobs employ local labour and be allowed to join the Typographical Association; that infringements - whether low wages, excessive hours, or boy labour - be penalised; and that a uniform scale of wages should be drawn up and enforced to “put a great check on the undercutting which existed in the town.” The Mayor referred the letter to the Finance Committee with the suggestion that some action would be taken. By 1902, however, the local branch was suffering from apathy. As the Association’s trade journal The Typographical Circular reported, fair wages were still needed to combine and recruit members to improve trade and have a unionised voice, even when "there was every indication that Southampton was becoming a very important commercial centre."
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Books are wonderfully portable and can appear and disappear under the strangest of circumstances. In December 1878, a fourteen-year-old lad was found in possession of a book valued at 2s 6d lifted from H.M Gilbert & Son’s bookshop on 26 Above Bar Street. It was only when his mother returned the object that the crime was reported to the Police and published in the local newspapers. Edward Brown was given a one-month reprieve to lift his game and suppress his biblio-urges. Whether he lusted after an early Christmas present, wanted to impress a girlfriend, or just couldn’t resist the allure of the forbidden, we’ll never know. Nor are we any wiser as to the title. We do know, however, the details of another book that found its way into Gilbert’s shop. W.H. Saunders’ Annals of Portsmouth was printed by Hamilton, Adams & Co., London in 1880. This ‘Historical, Bibliographical, Statistical’ compendium was in the collection of the Royal Yacht Squadron Library at Castle, Cowes, Isle of Wight. Henry March Gilbert included it in the Catalogue of the Library dated 1911 that he compiled and printed for members. The octavo volume is now living in the University of Southampton’s Cope collection emblazoned with several marks of provenance and urgent admonishments. It also boasts Gilbert’s iconic bookseller’s ticket. How did this particular book journey from Cowes to Southampton? The jury’s out. But as Walter Benjamin asked in 1916: “What if things could speak? What would they tell us? Or are they speaking already and we just don’t hear them?” References Southern Observer, 21 December 1878; 3. Royal Yacht Squadron, Catalogue of the Library. Southampton: H.M. Gilbert & Son, 1911. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 1916. Historical research is an intense, all-consuming, at times frustrating, yet rewarding part of our day-to-day project routine. Just when you've given up hope ... the mere mention of a name, the echo of a faraway phrase, or a shadowy figure peering out from a darkened doorway ... greet and tantalise you. No wonder Arlette Farge called it the 'allure of the archive' which she describes as 'searching for what is buried away in the archives, looking for the trail of a person or event, while remaining attentive to that which has fled, which has gone missing, which is noticeable by its absence. Both presence and absence from the archive are signs we must interpret in order to understand how they fit into the larger landscape.' During a recent seminar at the City Archives for University of Southampton Masters of Creative Writing students, we explored many different kinds of ghosts: the blind emboss of a bookbinder's stamp; plate marks from Directory business advertisements; rubbings of lost bookbindings; the mysterious Cap'n Kent; females in the book trades; The Atlantic Daily Bulletin newspaper from the R.M.S. Titanic; the poignant record of a missing - presumed drowned - crew member in a ship's log book from 1913. One photograph, in particular, is crying out for its story to be told. Southern Daily Echo Offices, Above Bar Street [3475], ca. 1910s Image courtesy of Southampton City Libraries At first glance, the sheer amount of painted and printed signage might seem astonishing, but we live in a world of ghost-signs that even today out-do neon and plastic with their visual symphony of memory and nostalgia. But look more closely. Who is the figure in the doorway? A young lad, maybe; wearing an apron, possibly; having a smoke, who knows. A printer? A compositor? A delivery-boy? He's standing in the middle yard of the Hampshire Independent, that rebel newspaper established in the wake of the Southampton Liberal candidates' general election routing of 1835. Here's a fire insurance map of the business premises from 1893, so you can orient yourself to the physical layout of the firm. detail from Goad's Map of Southampton, sheet 2 [1893] image courtesy of the British Library via Wikimedia Commons The Printing and Advertising Office at 52 1/2 Above Bar is facing the street. The typesetting or 'composing room' is at the back of the block with banks of skylights positioned for the delicate, eye-straining task of hand-setting 10-point (or smaller) lead type. The noisy printery is at the front with an inner courtyard spacious enough for deliveries of paper and other supplies as well as for the congregation of newsboys, milling around, waiting for their daily dose of news sheets to hawk through the town. In fact, it wasn't so long ago that the Mayor had to listen to a deputation from local businesses complaining about the antics of these young rapscallions.
So who is our mystery man? I'd put money on a journeyman printer not long out of his apprenticeship. It's taken some considerable digging, but we have finally found records of the Southampton branch of the Typographical Association. Until 1893, there was not enough local interest or incentive to unionise: compositors and printers were just getting along, happy to be employed, touting for business, keeping the presses running. On 16 July of that year, a meeting was called at the Bank Inn. By the end of August 1893, 42 men had signed up to the TA, ranging in age from 20 to 41. The rest, as they say, is history. References: Farge, A 2013. The Allure of the Archives. trans. Thomas Scott-Railton. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. "Southampton is one of the most intemperate towns in England!" Mr Joseph Chamberlain, M.P. Printers were notoriously heavy drinkers and, in many places, employed a dedicated pot boy to fetch the liquor of choice. Although drunkenness obviously interfered with typesetting and the operation of heavy machinery, alcohol was considered an antidote to lead poisoning and beer a suitable expense to draw down from a printing chapel’s income (Greenwood, 2015: 75). It was also embedded in the trade’s culture of sociability: lubricating meetings, underpinning trade rituals, and accompanying celebrations. Historian Phil Withington (2007) comments that “sociability was the flux which made the whole system work,” and Clive Behagg (1982) has described the workplace and the pub as “twin streams feeding the same collective values and beliefs” (157). Throughout the nineteenth century, you may not have wanted to drink the water, and sanitation was certainly top of the civic agenda in Southampton as elsewhere, but it was difficult to avoid the ubiquity of public-houses, alehouses and breweries. As printer Charles Timperley remarked, it was like running the gauntlet to work every single day. In 1878, Canon Basil Wilberforce, grandson of the famous abolitionist William, issued this Southampton Drink Map on behalf of his St Mary’s Church of England Temperance Society. Handed out to disembarking sailors, the gesture backfired royally. The map highlighted the teetotal zone in Wilberforce’s parish, but it more clearly identified all the local drinking establishments: 522 in the space of eight square miles. In effect, it ended up being the best kind of Lonely Planet Guide for parched sailors swaying to the tune of disposable income (Campbell). And, like much ephemera from the time, it was read almost to death; only one copy remains in the Tudor House Museum, Southampton City Archives. Southampton joined drink maps issued by temperance movements in Birmingham (1877) and Norwich (1878), and preceded those of York (1882), Newcastle (1883), Liverpool (1883), Glasgow, (1884), London (1884), and Manchester (1889). Moreover, in a new era of spatial mapping of diseases like cholera and typhus, the density of red spots made towns appear as though they were infected with scarlet fever (Beckingham, Hyde, Brown).
For one of our digital narratives, we will overlay the Drink Map with printers’ places of work and residences and analyse the topography of the trade. We will identify the associational cultures that pitted non-conformist abstainers against conservative, establishment industrialists, convivial masculinity against manly respectability (Greenwood, 89). And, we will demonstrate the ways in which the temperance movement infiltrated the ranks of printers and the allied trades - sometimes in unexpected and surprising ways. References Beckingham, David, “Mapping Drink: Temperance and the spatial logic of social reform,” in The Licensed City: Regulating drink in Liverpool 1830-1920. Liverpool University Press, 2017. Behagg, Clive, “Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. by Robert D. Storch. London: Croom Helm, 1982: 154–79. Brown, J.R. "Landscape of Drink: Inns, Taverns and Alehouses in Early Modern Southampton." PhD Thesis, Warwick U, 2007. Campbell, George, "The Drink Map of Southampton," Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, Newsletter 48 (Autumn 2007): 20-22. Greenwood, Emma L. “Work, Identity and Letterpress Printers in Britain, 1750-1850.” PhD thesis, U of Manchester, 2015. Hyde, R. “Cartographers versus the Demon Drink,” Map Collector 3 (1978): 22-27. Withington, Phil, 'Company and Sociability in Early Modern England', Social History, 32:3 (2007): 291–307. |
AuthorSydney Shep, Reader in Book History & The Printer, Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ ArchivesCategories |