CUTTING ROADS TO FORTUNE WITH EDGE TOOLS
PART 1 FROM DUDLEY STREET TO LONDON ROW
'Never meddle with fools or edge tools. That depends upon the way you handle them. More than one hundred years ago, Thomas Gilpin meddled with them both and so handled them that the result was a fortune for his son and the foundation of a trade in Wolverhampton in which other men have made and are making fortunes, and without which a goodly portion of its present population would be poor indeed.
That same Thomas Gilpin was a worthy and thriving innkeeper and butcher in Wolverhampton, who out of the profit he had gained by the buying and selling of many another cow, found himself the lawful possessor of the then and still Red Cow, in Dudley Street, of not the Metropolis of the Black Country; for the country was green enough then. Even the town itself was green. It was all green behind the Red Cow whence one could look over pretty gardens across Pipers Meadow, now cut up into streets, and manifold in houses, Bilston Street was a country road, entirely free from houses on the north side, except one at the town corner where the town ended, unless the be-walled and be-moated Old Hall, with a tree planted plateau opening down to Snowhill could be called part of the town. There were a few houses on the opposite side of Snowhill, but all was green country behind and beyond.
A very country like inn was the Red Cow, the inn being on one side of the street door and the butchers shop on the other, so that in every sense of the term Thomas Gilpin was a victualler, licensed and unlicensed. In build and person he did justice to each half of his calling, and had a 'better half' who was better still in these respects - tall and stout and adding to female attractions a touch of masculine burliness and muscular proportion. Among their customers there numbered many whom they regarded as belonging to the first in the category of persons and things that the 'old saw', I have quoted said should be avoided. They were not however unacceptable at the Red Cow for they were frequent customers; and added to the income of the house, however much they diminished their own. Among such customers was one Mr. Bradney, a 'coal higgler,' that is to say one who bought coal at the pit's mouth and took it about the country in baskets on a horses back, selling it from his baskets to his customers, chiefly for domestic purposes. Such a trade has vanished before good roads in all parts of Staffordshire and especially before railroads in all parts of the kingdom. But those were days that preceded the application of coal to the smelting of ironstone by John Wilkinson at Bradley; and wood was more used for domestic purposes than coal, even in the 'Black Country' unless the good housewife lived near to a coal pit. That a horse was used instead of a cart for the conveyance of coal is accounted for by the fact that there were very few good roads in any part of the country which cart or coach could traverse. Those were the days when pack-horses were still in use for the transport of goods and merchandise; and he or she who travelled otherwise than as a pedestrian must go ' a horseback'. So the coal higgler had his horse and dassetts, as the panniers still occasionally to be seen hanging on each side of a donkey's back in the neighbourhood of Gornal, if no were else, were called; and in those dassetts he piled his coal and could live cheerily, by the way , on the difference between the buying and the selling price of this underground grown fuel. But Bradney had an exaggerated notion of the need for cheering his way by long and frequent stoppages at inns along the road he traversed and the longer he, by such stoppages made his journeys the less business he did , and the less profit he made. One day his horse was idle behind or before the Red Cow, while Bradney was in the sanded parlour before a big coal fire and other refreshment out of the pelting of a rather pitiless storm, as Bradney was thus sat, a well dressed rider dashed his horse up to the house, reined it in so suddenly as to nearly throw the animal on its haunches, descended from his saddle by a graceful and voluntary volition, and throwing the reins negligently into the hands of Thomas Gilpin, whom the rattling of the hoofs had brought to his door, jauntily walked into the house. Gilpin transferred the reins to the pig-sticker, brewer and general handy man of the establishment saying, 'There take this horse,' and followed his guest into the sanded parlour, guided, if he had needed any guidance by the trail of water that streamed off the ample folds of the travellers cloak. Said Gilpin seeing the higgler acting the part of a screen to the fire, 'Now Bradney, make room for the gentleman' and then turning to the gentleman, somewhat obsequiously enquired what 'His honour would be pleased to command.'. The host's wife, who came in at the moment re-echoed her husband's, something like authoritative request to Bradney, and a highly respectful inquiry of the stranger. In a moment the higgler was off his seat and in a moment more was on the road with his horse and dassetts. Thomas Gilpin had meddled with Bradney as a fool; but it did the higgler good. However foolish ,for wasting at the inn, that time which applied to business would have made money and built up respectability, Bradney was no fool. 'Make way for the gentleman' and 'his honour too' he muttered. 'I'll see whether I can be a gentleman' and have my 'honour' too, when I go to an inn, by not going to one so often as I have done.' He kept his word and realised his wish; laying a foundation for the fortune of Gilpin's oldest son, and helping to make him famous, though you may be sure that as he laid his plans for the future along the road that heavily rainy day, such a result of his manly and honourable resolution formed no part of his plans.
The boy was born about the year 1764(ACTUALLY BORN ABOUT 1755) and not very long after Bradney had struck out a new path from the Red Cow; and fourteen years afterwards the lads career was influenced by a compact his father entered into with another customer. His name was Feildhouse and when he was not in the Red Cow getting 'screwed' on it's most potent of ale, he was in his little smithy at the back of his little house in Hollow Lane (now Bell Street) making shell augers ,( the screw pattern not having then come into shape) for the shipwrights in his Majesty's dockyards in London.
The only edge tool makers in Wolverhampton in those days were blacksmiths, who confined their operations mainly to shovels and axes and never made augers as many a good edge toolmaker does now. Still neither William Gilpin nor his father, Tom, could hardly have chosen auger making on account of its lighter labour and requiring more skill than strength; because there were buckle, watch chain and steel toy making needing still less strength and much more skill. Perhaps the father saw what money Feildhouse could make if he did not spend so much at the Red Cow; and perhaps he also thought that the big score on the back of the cupboard door tailing off to an immoderate length at the end of Feildhouse's name might go a considerable way towards paying the boy's premium. Be this as it may, the score and the premium were paid at one and the same time, and William Gilpin inaugurated his career as an auger maker. I shall be told that auger making is not edge tool making; but who would raise such an objection, is a man who might assert that an auger is not an edge tool and might as logically sell a chisel that would not cut; for what, after all, is an auger but a broad thinnish chisel turned into semi cylindrical form with its edge lipping under to undercut the wood? When a pair of snuffers can rank as 'steel toys' surely an auger may keep company with a chisel or chopper!
Of course there are edge tools, and edge tools; the two great divisions being the lighter and more cutting instruments for which Sheffield is famous, and the heavier and more striking than cutting implements such as axes, adzes, pickaxes, spades and shovels of which Wolverhampton is now the great manufacturing emporium. It was not so a hundred years ago. Then what there was of general and especially foreign manufacturing trade in such heavy tools was mainly to be found in Gloucestershire. Frenchhay near Gloucester, and the Underwood works of Coaley near Dursley were famous edge tool making places before Wolverhampton took the trade; and it never could have mastered the business, as we shall see but for the men from Gloucestershire. Then too it lingered on the borders of the county at Brades near Oldbury, before it reached here in any fullness. There a bradawl making works was established in 1770, the village taking its name Brades from the 'brads' it made. Ten years after that scythes and other agricultural tools were made there, and have been made there ever since. Previously the neighbourhood of Stourbridge was the great scythe making district; the manufacture coming as near Wolverhampton as Wallheath, which in the memory of not very old men now living, was very busy cutting its way with that cutting implement, but afterwards took to working with heavier tools and went into another trade. Thus just before our hero William Gilpin was born namely on 22nd February 1760, there was, I read in a very old newspaper, a meeting of the scythesmiths of Worcester and Staffordshire at the Talbot Inn, Stourbridge, where it was agreed ' that public notice to be given that on account of the enhancement of iron and coal, an advancement of not less than 2 shillings per dozen of the price of scythes to take place at Christmas last (sic)and that such advance will be continued .' One would judge from so retrospective a resolution , passed ,as it was some seven weeks after the said 'Christmas last' that the scythe makers of Worcestershire and Staffordshire in those days gave long credit, and had the upper hand of their customers.
But it is time to return to William Gilpin and the way he was making with augers. Unlike the poetic buckle maker, whose life and genius I described in a former sketch William was not born above the work to which his father had put his hand. He was no poet and very little of a scholar. The taste and the talent that made his way in the world are not taught at school, and, in his case at least, had all the freer scope and were all the more successful from not being tramelled with much learning. For mere money making and self accumulation the mind is more capable for being circumscribed to the dealings with the object out of which the money is to be made. The man of such learning of many things, or of genius of much comprehension has, as a Yankee once coarsely put it, like a dog whose skin is full of irritating parasites, 'too much to attend to.'
William Gilpin went to school and took in a due quantity of 'the three R's' taught outside the grammar school in which in those days, they were rather swallowed up by a 'Little Latin and less Greek..' But he was a burly, bustling, pushing boy, developing early the type of a man able and willing to work himself, but evidently shrewd enough to know that more is to be got by the careful direction of the work of others, on sound economic principles, which proceed more from natural sagacity than out of school books. There was no field for the exercise of this talent of William as yet. His hands rather than his head were in request, shaping out shell augers for the busy work of his Majesty's dockyard in the building up of 'the wooden walls of Old England.' William's master found or thought he found, it would be better to make those augers near to the same dockyards, and removed to London taking William with him. So far as mere handicraft skill was concerned the sojourn of the boy in 'the great metropolis' does not appear to have benefited him much; for as hinted above, he had more capacity for directing how work should be done than the mere ability of doing it himself; but there can be no doubt as can easily be presupposed of such a capacity, he made the most of the opportunity thus opened up for him for observing the different uses and makes of different edge tools, where they were made, who made them, how they were made and what was to be got by making them.
Another thing is certain, too, that while in London he determined to become his own master, and that London was not the stage on which he could most successfully make his first appearance in that character. So as soon as his apprenticeship was at an end back he came to Wolverhampton, and the Red Cow in Dudley Street. 'Forward 'he said, and he would have started a business that would have swallowed up the Red Cow from the point of her horns to the tip of her tail if his father had been such an easy going butcher as to have parted with it for a promise to pay drawn on futurity and accepted by the anticipations of an enthusiastic youth just 'out of his time.' The father thought a little more time and some little experience would be useful to all concerned; and keeping the Cow, offered his son a sow and her litter of pigs.
How many an elder son would have turned up his nose at such an offer of assistance from his father and gone about shiftlessly for the rest of his life, looking for something else to 'turn up;' and how many a father has set his son up in a large way of business, or left him such a business, which the son, much larger than the business, has treated as much too small to be worthy of his attention, coming to look hungrily for a dinner from neglecting to take care of the beast when he had it? Such fathers and sons have come and gone, even in Wolverhampton, since honest Tom Gilpin, at the Red Cow taught his boy how to take care of fortune by training him to the trouble and trial of making it.
Possibly the offer of the sow and her pigs was made on the ground that the ground on which she suckled and brought up her numerous family was required for the little smithy in which William was to essay his fortune in auger making at he back of the Red Cow, for William lost no time in replacing their grunt with the blast of his bellows. Of course, 'the governor,' as a modern William of higher education, under such circumstances would put it, had to 'shell out' considerably more money than the sow and her pigs brought, before William was in a position to make a shell auger. All that however adjusted to the satisfaction of both, the son was soon at work, and the result of the experiment was pleasing to the eyes of the father. There was soon enough to do for two work men, and an overhand was found in Edward Smith. That worthy was a horse nail maker by trade, but the family had been for centuries auger makers elsewhere in South Staffordshire district, and Smith was enabled to lend a hand at the Red Cow anvil, and soon proved a skilful hand too. Business increased, until there was more work to do than could be conveniently done at the back of the Red Cow. Then room was wanted for grinding the tools which it occurred to the enterprising William he could more economically do himself than by paying for having them ground elsewhere. So he shook the fatherly hand with something in it, and removed from Dudley Street to London Row in 1786.
He did not go far for London Row was the thoroughfare from Bilston Street to Five Ways, Wolverhampton, now called Pipers Row. It had not a complete row of houses on the east side then, and none on the other. There was a substantial block of buildings at the corner turning into Horsley Fields, which were fields at that time, and it was somewhere at the back of these or immediately adjoining houses that William Gilpin put up his rather rudimentary first edge tool works - a sort of first step towards St. James's Square. Here he never had more than three hearths, Edward Smith bringing up one Morgan to skill in auger making at the third hearth. For grinding purposes Gilpin had to content himself with a gin horse mill, steam then not having been thought of for that purpose, and no water power being available. Now as the efficacy of grinding edge tools depends very much on the rapidity with which the grindstone revolves and gin horses not being given to the pace of a trotter, much less than that of a racehorse, I'm afraid that the tools were anything but well ground, and that the horse not being able thoroughly to counteract the natural tendency of all parts of the revolving stone to fly off at a tangent some parts of its grinding surface must have more often than others come into contact with tools to be ground, and gradually come to do duty for a raised map of the Black Country, with its hills and hollows. A modern grinder would laugh at the idea of turning out his work on any stone so turned; but had he lived when and where William Gilpin set up his business in Wolverhampton, like him he would have had to have done the best he could under the circumstances.
No one knew better than our hero the disadvantages of his position; and as work increased this son of Vulcan sighed like a lover for his mistress for some mill by a flowing stream that would turn a grindstone more to his advantage and by the side of which he could more profitably build up his hearth and set up his anvil. And while he was looking and longing and sighing, but as yet without an amorous glow in his heart, it was cupid that came along London Row and showed him the way to his wish.
PART 11
THROUGH THE MAZE OF LOVE
When cupid did come down London Row it was Fanny (HER NAME WAS JANE) the eldest daughter of his father's old acquaintance Bradney, the coal higgler, that he pointed out to the quickly enamoured gaze of William Gilpin.
Of course the mischievous young love god did not come that way in propria persona; had he done so even all the dirty little boys, without shoes and stockings (and there were plenty of them without them in those days) would have been scandalised by the appearance of another little boy without the slightest approach to 'nether garment, and his wing would have been plucked from his shoulders until he had not a feather left to fly with, while his arrows, had he shot them, would have fallen pointless on the hearts around him, his bow would have been bent to harmlessness in the struggle for its possession; while William Gilpin would never have fallen in love, never perhaps have made a fortune, and never have been handed down to fame as one of the 'Bits of the old Black Country.'
No! no! Cupid was too wise to trust himself in such guise amongst the gamins of Wolverhampton of those days, or amongst those of anywhere else of any days, for love stands in terror of little boys. What young lady would go a 'spooning' with Adolphus in the presence of her younger brother? Small boys, even when they get to swallow tailed coats and large top hats, are impervious to Love. And yet Cupid is a small boy? Precisely so, as a perennial small boy, that never grows, for every inch his stature grew his life would be shortened, and maidens all forlorn would be hopelessly worshipping at his shrine who thanks to his heartless boys art, are being themselves worshipped. Love being a little boy, cannot be affected by his own art; his heart is impregnable to force with which he takes all other hearts; he cannot fall in love, and so he never reigns, a little mischievous boy plaguing all men and maidens.
So Cupid is wise as he is mischievous, did not come down London Row in his own undress person, but in the somewhat dandily dressed dapper person of a more than one sense small 'factor' with whom William Gilpin was doing a little business in augers; and the smart little factor, with that logic of love which is always so illogical, thought that William Gilpin should assist him in his love affairs. If William Gilpin could have looked out from the dingy corner that served for an office in his little smithy with something more than mortal gaze, he would have seen little Cupid frolicking and gambolling about in all ways with delight in the Five Ways, just as though in exuberance of mischief, he did not know which way to go; for that young rascal had been down to the factors office and shot the poor little factor right through the heart, knocked him off his stool, and taken him to the Red Cow, where the sight of Fanny Bradney did him good and made him worse. He, in fact, ages before Habneman was born, conceived the idea of the homeopathic system of medicine - at least for love-like cures like.
But the case of the factor was one of a complicated character. He was as deep in business as he was in love; and not until he discovered that the father was rich did he wish to wed the daughter. Not being rich himself he was afraid the father might not fall in love with his suit. He might love his daughter, he would not love his would be son-in-law; and if that adventurous young gentleman could win the love of the daughter, that of the father might be secured. It was the mixture of the business with love that set the little factor upon the idea of employing the eldest son of the landlord of the Red Cow to further his suit with the charming Fanny, as he would have employed an 'outsider' to extend his business in Liverpool or Bristol.
He was anxious to know, too, how much the old gentleman was worth. He knew she was ' good match,' for her father was reputed to be wealthy. He had set himself to make money as soon as he had set out from the Red Cow on the memorable rainy day referred to in my last, and had been at it ever since. A score of years at that work by a shrewd man who has his chances and makes the most of them in a business that pays, mounts up to a decent sum in twenty years.
Bradney had not, however, made his money by coal higgling. When he had made more by that than he had made before Thomas Gilpin had told him ' To make way for a gentleman' he put it to use by using a good deal of information he had gathered during the time that he and Thomas had supposed he had waited at the Red Cow and other inns, especially at market and fair times, as to buying and selling cattle. This added to what he knew of the business from having been born and bred in an agricultural district enabled him to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, and to thrive as a cattle dealer.
After getting gradually and surely on from small ventures to large purchases that met with a ready and profitable sale, he took a large farm, managed it wisely, and well and reared cattle and grew crops, for which he could always get the best price in Wolverhampton, or any other market that he visited.
Wednesday normally saw him at Wolverhampton, and at the market ordinary at the Red Cow, where butchers and buyers of cattle usually congregated. That fact would have settled any little spleen that Bradney might have entertained against the Cow and it's owner, for, though feeling what he had felt there had gone a good way towards making him the flourishing man of business that he was, it had made too good a man of business to allow his feeling to interfere with his profits. Then, too, Thomas Gilpin was himself a good customer to Bradney, not that he had sought that custom, for Thomas Gilpin had brought it to his door, being impelled there by the flattering accounts which his brother Frederick, who lived in the neighbourhood of the farm, had sent him of Bradney's stock. Then, perhaps, one of the great attractions to Bradney was that as the place where he once (perhaps foolishly he would own to himself) felt humiliated , he could better feel and guage his gradual exaltation. There he could see that money was making ' the gentleman ' as well as 'the man' and profit was setting him 'honour,' not only in his own country, but in the very place where he had been somewhat looked down upon as negligently, therefore profitlessly, pursuing a not very profitable calling.
As was and is the custom, farmers would on many occasions bring their wives and daughters to market with them, and one of Bradneys two daughters (the elder Fanny by preference) would very frequently accompany her father to Wolverhampton, dining with him at the Red Cow ordinarily. The factor was astonished to find that William Gilpin had not particularly noticed either of the daughters, and so far from being smitten by the, in the factors eyes, superior attraction of Fanny, did not know her from her sister until the factor, eloquent alike with avarice and love, described her features and her charms. The factor was somewhat disconcerted, as well as surprised to find that his friend knew less than himself of the position of the father. The fact was that William had been for a long time too busy to think of love and his speculations had been too economical, looking out for some good customers to pay him plenty of money, to think of looking out for a wife, who, be she ever so good, could only spend it; for it had never occurred to him that money and matrimony, like man and maiden; had the same initial letters, and might come and go together. The factor, however, shrewd man! let none of this light upon what he regarded as the blindness of William Gilpin; commended him, rather, as a far-seeing man who nevertheless, would do a foolish fellow a good turn, if he could, to secure the choice of his heart. So he urged him, as the son of the landlord of the inn where that choice would be put up with her father, to contrive, not only to give her the billet doux of her lover, but also to say, unheard by other ears than her own , a nice word or two in his favour. William Gilpin first looked astonished, the laughed heartily at such a commission; but finally promised to carry it out.
It was Wednesday morning, then, and not far from dinner time, and William lost no time in proceeding to the execution of his commission, in all good faith. He caught himself, however , more anxious about his dress and personal appearance than ever he had felt before and could not account for it. Equally unaccountable was it, how, in such a short period of time, he managed to make himself presentable . His own mother looked with astonishment at him as he walked into dinner at the Red Cow. She might have thought he was 'going a courting' but for the fact that when a volunteer 'goes a courting' for another, unlike the true soldier of love who goes into the field of a courtship for himself, he carries no haversack full of heavy doubts and fears and cares to bow his back and bend his knee. So William, with all sprightlyness, looked taller, felt stronger, and more of a man as he looked out, with a humorous curiosity in his eyes, for the citadel he was to attack on commission for the man who had not the courage to attack it for himself; and his mother looked at him and loved him all the more for how he looked, whatever the maiden he was seeking for a friend might do. Unfortunately for him, that friend did not look half so fine, or so 'nice' whichever word my lady readers might choose, to the average female eye as William Gilpin. In height build and manner which William had suddenly put on, he knew not why, with some at least of his best clothes, that friend was his contrast. Moral:- If you get a friend to go a courting for you, be sure that he is not a better looking fellow than yourself.
But I must be careful or I shall be tempted to spin out the material of my story into a three volume novel, and that would be a mistake; because it is the very nature of the story of the fortunes of love to end with matrimony, while it is the nature of this story of the fortunes of edge tools that the matrimony only begins it so that it would require much more than three volumes. Hence we will hasten to a speedy narration of facts.
Fanny was at the ordinary, and guided by the description given by his friend William had no difficulty in discovering her. He did not make so good a dinner as he had done at previous ordinaries, because when a man dines with farmers and cattle dealers he must look sharp after his plate if he is to get a good dinner, and not be constantly putting his knife and fork down, and looking at the eyes of a young lady, however pretty they may be, as William Gilpin did as often as he could observe them without being himself observed. He managed to look at Fanny's eyes until he thought that such a pair of eyes were nowhere else to be found for the looking for; that the face was as pretty as the eyes, and that all the rest of the young lady, which it would be my duty to describe were the aforesaid three volumes before me, were equally recommendable.
When dinner was over and farmers and salesmen had scattered to finish up the day's business, William had no difficulty in finding Fanny alone in the little parlour which the Gilpin family usually reserved for itself; and the young lady found that William Gilpin - well to put in a few words she confided to her sister when she got home-'a very nice young man'. The factors commissionaire took advantage of his opportunity to faithfully execute his commission, not only to deliver the billet doux but to put in a word for his friend. The young lady, however, only tossed the billet doux and her head on one side, saying with a toss and a look that anyone more experienced in women's ways than William would have conveyed a double meaning. ' I like a man speak for himself.'
William without taking the hint, laughed heartily, and then rattled away, saying not a word more for the poor factor, but as he might honestly have sworn, not a word for himself, though as Fanny further confessed to her sister confessor in love's confessional at home, every word he uttered was to his own advantage. Fanny being equally sprightly, and as her sister averred 'a perfect tease' she only added fuel to the flame of Gilpin's loquacity, and there was many a merry point and happy retort, in which master William was not always the most fortunate, and, therefore piqued and prompted accordingly to further encounter.
How long the rattle would have gone on rattling there is no saying, if the father had not suddenly made his appearance in the snug little room, when, if the young people before him had been his own children under five years of age, and had taken advantage of his absence to storm the preserves in a corner cupboard, they could not have rattled down more quickly, or presented unconsciously, a more guilty appearance. Their look seemed to confirm the thought that flashed across farmer Bradney's mind, and the word rushed to his lips as he looked anything but kindly on Tom Gilpin's son - Make way for a gentleman'. He how ever bit his lips, and simply said, 'Come Fanny; we must be going.' And off the father and daughter went, with never a word from the father to William, but with a saucy look from his daughter which said as plainly as eyes could express it ' We shall meet again.'
It must be confessed that William did not feel quite so saucy. In fact the force of strength with which he had approached the lady-love was only exceeded of weakness born of complexity with which he perceived the approach of the gentleman who loved her, to the dingy little place that did duty for an office in London Row. Of course, in the, to himself, inexplicable state of exaltation to which the merry little tongue of the charming Fanny had stirred his feelings, he would, had he have known how little there was of gold in the love of the factor and how much of base alloy, have at once got out of his perplexity by suddenly kicking the little fellow out of the office for having inveigled him into such a dirty bit of business; but, believing that the love of the factor was all pure and that the glitter of his anxiety was all love, he felt about as clumsy and as uncomfortable and as incapable of issue as a rascally fox caught in a trap. Had he not lived long before Longfellow, and had not the reading of poetry been as foreign to him as to the auger trade, he might have felt as John Alden; and believing in the factor as John Alden had faith in Miles Standish, he might have done as nearly as possible, under the circumstances, as John Alden did, and taken a fond farewell of Ned Smith, turned his back on London Row and the Red Cow and gone -anywhere, anywhere out of the way. And those eyes, those saucy eyes, that had said 'We will meet again,' might have been for long after (until the approach of the third volume hurried up the story), drowned in tears, looking for him in vain. My hero was William Gilpin, but not John Alden- not a poetised, etherealised embodiment of reverential rectitude, agonised between the conflicting claims of love and duty, but only an auger maker, and maker of shell augers too, the earliest and roughest of augers, and he felt more clumsy than the first auger he had ever made, and in his clumsiness the only way he saw out of his difficulty with the factor was to deliver the lady's reply, much less prettily than she had given it. When the factor heard it he changed his mind as to the blindness of William, and went to the opposite extreme, so that in the end William found a wife, and lost a friend and customer.
Though after this, farmer Bradney's by no means unfounded suspicions, that an attachment was springing up between William Gilpin and his daughter, rendered it somewhat difficult, they yet managed to meet, and meet very frequently. Bradney would not have brought Fanny so frequently to the town, but she had been too long her own mistress in that matter to be easily subjected to any new rule, and the good old farmer made a sad mistake when he thought to interfere with any possible courtship, by never taking Fanny to Wolverhampton, unless she were also accompanied by her sister, for next to having a secret lover of one's own the most charming and attractive thing to a young lady is to be the curator of the secret love of her sister, and so Fanny's sister became a great aid in the furthering of the love-fortunes of William Gilpin.
The old gentleman, too, only made matters worse when one day he more bluntly than discreetly asked Fanny if she were not in love with William Gilpin, because in such matters daughters were ever reluctant to make confidants of their fathers and are never likely to admit to them that which they have withheld from their lovers. With that perversity, too, as common to Adam as to Eve's nature - the increased attractions given to fruit by the forbidding of the taking thereof - Fanny felt more than ever anxious for William ' to pop the question,' that she might have decorous opportunity of confessing to him how much she did love him, when her father, speaking of him in anything but the terms she thought alone applicable to such a man, declared he would never give his consent to William becoming his son in law.
Considering the express speed at which Cupid generally travels, having so many young people to look after in the world -so much to do in getting them into difficulties, and so much to do in getting them out of them, the opportunity that Fanny thus became so anxious for was comparatively slow in coming, and was all the slower because every time William Gilpin looked as though he would 'pop' Fanny looked as though she would not like it; and laughed him out of his resolution - and then went home crying to think how she played with and grieved what she knew to be a true and manly heart.
All this was over one day. The usual avowal was made, in the usual clumsy way; reciprocated with the usual blushes; and the usual vows were exchanged. Thenceforward there was less teasing ; for William told honestly and truthfully of his business trials and difficulties - how much an expansion of his purse was to produce an expansion of business; and oh! most proposals of lovers, he would desecrate the poetic beauties of cupid's bower by introducing that horrid grindstone, and anything but noble gibber in the gin that could not turn the stone fast enough. But the scene was changed, when after somewhat matter of fact and business-like portrayal of the pecuniary benefits that would result from the transformation of a creeping horse into a running stream. Fanny told of Blades Mill, with some two acres of land, near Cannock, where once corn was ground and edge tools might be ground in the future, but where nothing was ground then, her father had purchased it two or three years previously, not having as yet decided upon the use to which he should put it. There was nothing very poetic about the old mill and its surroundings, or the description she gave them, but it sounded, with the hopes it raised, as charming to William as the description which Claude Melnette gave to his promised one of the castle and lands that were never the property of his ancestors.
As a necessary consequence there was a little of his friend the factor in William Gilpin when he resolved, seen after his geographical discovery of Blades Mill in the hitherto little defined country of Cupid's Arcadia, to ask Bradney for the hand of his eldest daughter; for he trusted that the hand might be full of Blades Mill. Fanny did not discourage him by informing him of the determination her father had expressed that the hand, with his consent, should never be given to William Gilpin, for she had no wish to discourage her lover, and had hopes that her father would be as little faithful to his promise as he had been to many another assurance that he could not, or would not, do that which his little Fanny wished him to do. Such hope, however, vanished, when William told her how bluntly and how unceremoniously her father had refused his request, and equally refused to give any reason for his refusal. Then dismissing all word of her father, and all hopes of the mill, he urged Fanny to consent to a secret marriage, telling her how with her by his side, he could fight the battle of life, and bravely, and ride into the thickest of the fight .though he had known no better charger than that old gin horse, and how he would return from the contest in a triumphal car, made out of the old grindstone.
This was not exactly the way he put it; but this was rather the light in which the laughing eyes of Fanny, though she was ready to cry, saw the colours with which William, with all the inarticulate clumsiness of a fervid lover, better used to tools than poetry, is apt to bedaub the figures of his imagination. She made a conditional promise that if she could not move her father to give his consent, she would marry without, shrewdly concluding that if her father objected to give her away, he would not altogether part with her, though she herself played the part of Benevolence as well as Bride before the bymeneal altar.
Her father would not give his consent, saying nothing more than that she was too good for a son of Thomas Gilpin, and fit for any gentleman who loved her, and she loved him, should have her with a good dowry. 'Then' said Fanny with an air and grace that puzzled her good old father, as such airs and graces have puzzled fathers good, bad and indifferent at all times, 'Then in that case I shall never marry, and all my dowry may go with my sister.'
'That case' - Bradney v Gilpin - was his case; her own - that of Bradney and Gilpin v Bradney was another; and in that case she did marry without troubling her head about dowry.
It was easily arranged. A license was procured, and a not very distant church fixed upon; and one market morning, soon after she arrived with her father at the Red Cow, he went one way without his horse, and she another, on a fast trotting pony that was her own, and which never trotted so fast as it did when it carried her to church and a husband.
Farmer Bradney was wrathful at first, but his own rebellious daughter was among the first to make known to him her rebellion, and assured him at the same time of all the love that was not due to the man she had taken for her husband, he was fain to take the kiss she gave him, and thought he punished her sufficiently by leaving her and William to struggle on as best they could with the old smithy and the old horse in the gin mill, at which the aristocratic pony turned up his saucy nose.
For herself, there was no pain to Mary(should read Fanny) in this punishment. She remembered how she had shared the struggles of her father before fortune crowned his efforts, and all the pain she felt for her husband was softened by the pleasure with which she contemplated the patient perseverance with which he plodded on; and she loved her father none the less and her husband all the more that, in all his struggles, out of love for her he never spoke of Blades Mill. She, too, spoke not of it to her father, knowing there was a voice coming which added to her own would ask the boon, and that it would not be withheld.
Part 111
FROM LONDON ROW TO BLADES MILL
The voice came in due time. It was the voice of Fanny Gilpin's first baby. The loud, shrill, and masculine voice of Master George Bradney Gilpin spoke in the midst of his threefold nomenclature with all his mother's affections to his maternal grandfather. Not that this young voice was very effective at first - it never is with masculine ears. As a matter of sight the little fellow was pleasing enough to Farmer Bradney; all the more pleasig for the light that the child lit up in its mother's face; but the voice grew more melodious and appealing as it began to prattle; and one day for that child's sake, Farmer Bradney without being asked for it, gave William Gilpin Blades Mill, and some little help towards fitting it for auger making processes. To Blades Mill William Gilpin moved his works from London Row in the year 1791.
I have already indicated that the Mill was situated on the Watling Street road, not far from Cannock. It was one of old standing and the artificial water course on the side of the Watling Street that turned the mill is mentioned in an earlier date in history as a convenient place on the high road for the watering of horses. The natural flow of water in it's courses from the springs at Hednesford was across the Watling Street, in the valley below the Longhouse, and a deep cutting had been made to turn it in the direction of the mill. There was another mill of which there are still some remains, about 300 yards to the south, then called the Leather Mill, while a little to the west stood a brick manufactory, believed to be the first of the kind in the parish of Cannock. The oldest mill in the neighbourhood is what is still known as the Walk Mill, having been given with Cannock to the Cistertian Monks, who were lords and masters of the domain, until Henry V111 gave it to new masters, who, he thought, might better serve the State. The mill is now the property of Mr. Hawkins, coal master, of Cheslyn Hay, who rents it to the present tenant for corn grinding purposes.
As the church registers of Cannock prove the mill to which William Gilpin 'took' was at the time that he took to it called 'Blades Mill,' doubtless because one Blades had formerly been its proprietor.(IN ACTUAL FACT THE TERM BLADES MILL INDICATED THAT BLADES OF SOME SORT HAD BEEN MANUFACTURED THERE PREVIOUSLY, PROBERBLY SCYTHES) Blades must have been long dead, for Farmer Bradney had bought it of a Wedge, and strange to say, years after it had ceased to be the property of Wedge, and had become the property of William Gilpin, the name of Wedge, though its bearer himself was dead, became attached to the mill, which was thenceforward known as Wedges Mill until the Methodists got into the habit of putting the noun in the plural; and in defiance of all grammatical expression, the place is known as Wedges Mills.
That is the name of the village as well as the manufactory now. There was no village when William Gilpin went there, because nowhere in England do three houses and two of them public houses constitute a village. The two public houses were roadside inns, and the oldest was the Holly Bush, still flourishing as the Red Lion, on the Watling Street, just below where it crossed the Wolverhampton Road; and seems to have been first licensed for the sale of ales and spirits in 1730; while the old Black Cock Inn, which stood at the corner of the Wolverhampton Road and Watling Street, began business in 1717, when Robert Jackson, a famous huntsman, in the employ of Colonel Walhouse, was licensed to sell ales and spirits, and to provide the needful accommodation for travellers.
Though to all appearances it had been a corn mill for many ages, when William Gilpin came to inspect; and distribute the ground of Blades Mill for the purpose of needful alterations, it soon became highly probable that it had originally put up for a different purpose, and had at one time, so far as the trade went, been identified with the trade of the country. He found the main building of the mill better adapted for an ironworks than a corn mill; and beds of furnace cinders found under and about the grounds led to the belief that long, perhaps centuries previously ironwork had been carried on there the water power being employed to work the furnace bellows, or what rude machinery might be in existence in those days. The remains of those furnace beds showed that, as was the case in all ironworks in the olden time, the fuel used was charcoal; and probably, one reason for the works being carried on there, was the near proximity to Cannock, then amongst the sixty six large forests at that time flourishing in England, and presenting in its extent from Penkridge to Sutton Coldfield no lack of material for the charcoal burners. Adjoining the mill was a meadow still bearing the significant name Furnace Meadow, from which a piece of olden time worked iron was dug up many years ago. As to the question 'Whence did these iron workers get their metal?' the only answer is that in the olden time ironstone, we are told, was got at Wyrley Bank.
Doubtless from lack of capital the alterations made by William Gilpin, at Blades Mill, were not very extensive at first, and seem to have been confined to the erection of a house for himself, and putting up three or four hearths, the adaptation of the mill to grinding purposes appearing to have been delayed, because for some time after he had commenced making shell and prod augers there, he would, once a week, fill them into the panniers attached to a horse, and ride with them to the grinding mill at Bentley, where water power is now superseded by steam.
Eventually, however, came into the concern. whether it was before William's father in law died, and was an indication of the improvement in the disposition of Farmer Bradney towards his son in law, or whether it was the result of testamentary disposition of his property, I know not; but when the money came there was bustle in the old mill, and its clack was soon again heard, grinding iron instead of corn. Large workshops were erected for men, and small houses for their wives and families quickly made their appearance on the road; and there was soon for those days a large works in a small village, for William Gilpin had resolved not to confine himself to making augers, but to enter at large upon the manufacture of the heavier descriptions of edge tools.
That he might bring to bear upon that trade all the new mechanical appliances then known, William Gilpin mounted his horse one fine morning, and rode on until he got to Coaly in Gloucestershire, whence he returned in triumph with Richard Newman, of the Underwood Works, who well understood the erection and working of the forge hammers then newly introduced, and working at Coaly Mills. There was soon such a forge hammer at work at Blades Mills, and a number of men, well experienced in the making of adzes, axes, ships carpenters tools, and makers of the heavier sort of edge tools, were brought from Gloucestershire and domiciled with their families in the neighbourhood of the mill; and when accommodation failed them there they overflowed into Cannock and Cheslyn Hay, the latter place having a quaint and moving history of its own, which I shall relate in some future sketch.
It was around the mill, however, and in the village now known as Wedges Mills, that the Gloucestershire folk chiefly encamped, and it around the mill that the memories of the present older workmen at the works cling to the eccentricities of manners and speech of those first emigrants from Gloucestershire. At once puzzled and amused were the natives with the novelty of the dialect of the newcomers and instances are still given of the quaint talk, long since died out, at Wedges Mills. Here are a few if the Gloucestershire 'Tit bits' which some of the oldest of the Staffordshire inhabitants treasure up. A young Gloucesterite passing a flock of geese, was set upon by an old gander, and had to beat an ignoble retreat. This rather affected his self esteem, and he determined to have his revenge.The next time he went the way of the geese, he filled his pockets with stones, and when he came within throwing distance of the enemy vigorously discharged his artillery, putting the enemy to flight and doing some slight injury to General Gander. When admonished for this, young hopeful blubbered out 'What gossman's chicks father bit I'se legs the other morning?'
Two Gloucestershire men after long separation unexpectedly met in the village and stared at one another long in astonishment before mutual recognition was completely established. One of them giving an account of the interview, exclaimed :- 'He now'd I, and I now'd 'e and upon my zoal I daont nown 'e at ahl.'
As one may easily suppose there was a great deal of jealousy between the natives of the two counties, and that where the favour of the fair sex was at issue, sometimes strong, and always strange expressions were used. Said Gloucestershire to Staffordshire, 'What yeow bin zain to that ere girl abut I ? Staffordshire replied 'I banna said anything to the girl about yer.' Gloucestershire : I do now yeow have; and if I da pick anything out yeow bin zain to that ere girl abu I, yeow shant work for I any longer.'
As will be seen from this the Gloucestershire men, necessarily from their greater acquaintance with the work, were with a few exceptions, the 'over-men;' and had rather 'the upper hand' of most of the Staffordshireites, who found some little difficulty in understanding the commands of their masters. One of them one day, ordered his Staffordshire help to 'Sott tha wottsey.' Wottsey was not he name of a thing, but a word used by the Gloucestershire man when he had forgotten the name of the thing he wanted, and was equivalent to the 'what is it.' The Staffordshire help thinking his master wanted a barrow, went a quarter of a mile in search of one; and when he returned, trundelling a load of smiling satisfaction, was hailed with the exclamation, 'Dawkey Vools! Hey-eye! That baont the wottsey' The Gloucestershire men were a little proud of their better knowledge and skill in work, however deficient in words, and of their consequent higher positions compared with the larger number of the Staffordshire men. One thus admonished his son:- My zun Will, an yeow da mind what I da tell 'e an doo as I doo bid 'e I'll mack a genelmon on 'e.' The son proved dutiful; so of course his father made an edge tool maker of him.
In drinking, if not in working, the Staffordshire men were on more equal terms; and the consumption of intoxicating drinks was so great that the two inns above named still did emphatically a ' roaring trade ' when Lord Brougham's Act opened beer houses in the village in the vain hope of increasing sobriety by withdrawing the folk from spirituous to malt liquor. If legendary lore speaks truly, the majority of men and youths in the olden times at Wedges Mills must have been great drinkers. Saturday afternoon when wages had been paid, was the time for a saturnalia, drinking being diversified by gambling at cards and nine pins. Differences would arise from either or both processes, and adjourned fights from public house kitchens and skittle ally would last until after midnight, making a Bedlam of the village. All the more of Bedlam was there in these encounters when women, with hand or voice, or sometimes both, took part in the fray. The fray would become more furious if the rival county breeds came into collision. Shrieked out a Gloucestershire mother to her young hopeful on the point of yeilding to the attack of a stouter son of Staffordshire, 'Kick'n, Kick'n ! Flank'n, flank'n ! Hit'n under, hit'n under!'
Here and there a meeker and milder wife and mother would be at home looking wearily for the return of the husband and father, and mournful at the supper she had prepared for him. There is one who had baked her weekly batch of bread and brewed her weekly supply of malt for table beer cowering in the corner, while her drunkenly infuriated lord is pitching the bread into the warm wort. There is another good wife, who has made a small barrel of elder wine which she is busily, but quietly, removing out of the house, while her husband is drunkenly deaf to everything but the sound of the bellows with which he is blowing the fire to make the kettle boil, with the sworn determination to increase the strength of the wine by doubling the quantity of water.
Some who were sober were none the better for it so far as morality defined by law was concerned; for many who when not at work, were not drinking or gambling, were poaching. The Leather Mill pond was a favourite resort, and with the possibly benevolent intention of preventing any injury to their lawful owner as well as to the fishes, the poachers would barricade the issues of the mill, and empty the pond without let or hindrance. They had no difficulty in finding a market for their fish in those days, when even those who were well circumstanced, but not themselves the owners of the privileged fish and game preserves, were willing, in the scarcity of fishmongers or poulterers to buy a dish of fish or brace of birds without enquiry whether or not they came from their neighbour's pond or grounds with his consent.
In those days, too, the working class of South Staffordshire in general, as previous 'Bits of the Old Black Country' have shown, regarded millers as the enemies of mankind, intercepting the food of man in its way from the hand that gave it to the mouth for which it was given, and there were many around Blades Mill who would not the count it a sin to take from a miller any of his gains. It is at least an historic fact that when during the second decade of the present century, corn was scarce and flour bad, and scarcely fit for bread, the miller was credited in this part of the country with having avariciously raised the price and wantonly and wickedly deteriorated the quality; and nowhere was this feeling shown more strongly-and the stronger from its utter want of any alliance with judgement- than at Blades Mill; for many millers were booed by women and children as they travelled along the open road, while more than once men seized upon the loaded carts, and took forcible possession of grain and flour.
PART 1V
FROM BRADES MILL TO CHURCHBRIDGE
I have no doubt that all concerned in the boisterous enjoyments at Blades Mill so many years ago found justification for their proceedings on the ground that 'all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,' and edge tool makers certainly worked hard enough in those days. They were between fire and anvil from early to late. So used were they to beginning early that many a help or 'striker' in the old times got 'the sack' as dismissal from service was called, for 'being late,' though it had only just struck five o'clock in the morning; while he would be threatened with the loss of 'a quarter' if he left at six o'clock in the evening without the sanction of his master, the forehand who, coming to work at five o'clock in the morning, had often to remain until eight at night to make what now would be thought by a workman much less than a good days work, so far as wages were concerned.
And then the work was all done by hand, with a more or less heavy hammer in it. Even the big hammer that Newman laid down did not too materially affect this toil; for there was no tilt hammer, no Rost's blower, or blowing fans; but the help must swing and swing his long and heavy sledge until he had beaten nearly all the breath out of his body, and then take a long 'spell' at the bellows and blow himself out like a furnace for the next heat. Even when at last the tilt hammer came into pretty general use, there would be but one to a dozen men, and many must work on the anvil, or leave their work to ruin in the welding fire, waiting their turn at the mechanical hammer. Hence much more practice than most men get in these days of multiplied mechanism made edge tool makers of even half a century ago perfect in the use of the light hammer, and they prided themselves upon making it rise and fall as nimbly as a lamb's tail.
Ninety years ago work was harder still and hours longer. Even the forehand had to begin at four in the morning and work on until eight in the evening to earn thirty shillings a week at edge tool making, and out of that he must pay six shillings in the pound to his helper leaving him a guinea for himself. His days work was a 'stint' that brought three shillings so he had to get nearly two days into one to get even this small wage.
One knows not which one to commiserate - such a small master or his lesser man. Reports would go to show, that the was latter the more deserving of commiseration , for even if the hammer and the forge released him early in the evening , his master would expect him to go and dig his garden; and improvements in materials and manipulation that brought him as well his master more wages, added much to the man's work. When coke came to be used, instead of coal, while it decreased the enervation of heat, especially in summer time, it, at the same time, for a long period added to the labours of the striker, who, had to break, riddle and sort the coke upon the hearth during meal times. In those hours or after the days work was done, he must also cut or split up large bars of iron into small, cut from bar iron requisite mould, prepare and draw down steelings, or split them in the case of augers, for next days use; and last but not least, stop to harden up the tools. Even when the splitting mill came into general use there are men still living who can recollect the extra work that had to be done to bring into shape the rough split rod or bars. No workman too, in those days, was ever paid for the tools he had to make for his own use; he had also to provide shafts for his hammers, and the 'rods'for fixing around other tools he used, while if his anvil requires grinding he must himself pay for the work.
The burden of the heavy rougher work would of course fall to the lot of the poor help, whose position was not to be envied forty or fifty years ago, when if he were a skilful striker, his wages would not exceed 16 shillings a week. His master was financially better off, for in the days of hardest work and poorest pay he had the privilege of taking apprentices, and making something out of their work as soon as they could do it decently. Then experience bringing more skill, and new methods, abridged the time in which he could do 'the stint' of a days work, and enable him to do more work and earn more money in his twelve or sixteen hours.
For most of such aids to lessen labour Gilpin's edge tool makers appear to have had to trust mainly to their own skill and observation, for William Gilpin was not a Wilkinson, and had neither science nor invention. Beyond the introduction of Newman and the forge hammer from Coaly the only experiment he was known to have made was an attempt to cut chequer on the face of a lathe hammer at one blow; and he went on making old shell augers until 1820, when one Simeon Shorter of Wyrley Bank, who had been apprenticed to Ned Smith, and then gone to Sheffield for improvement, came back to Wedges Mills with much knowledge and skill in twist auger making. Such knowledge and skill were the more readily utilised because William Gilpin's eldest son, George , had just returned from time he had spent, on his own motive improving his own knowledge of edge tool making in other parts of the country, notably with a then large and flourishing firm in Liverpool.
So despite the waste and riot in which the majority of the workmen at Blades Mill spent ill for themselves the time they could get from labour and sleep, all the rest they spent well enough so far as hard and intelligent work was concerned.
Among some of the best of these were Staffordshire men, for, though the Gloucestershireites came with a prestige that gave them a good start in the race of local industry, they were in several directions they were soon passed by the natives of the county born for heads after all, will and must control and direct hands, and among the Staffordshire men were heads that were admirably fitted for particular and general management. Ned Smith for instance never lost his head or his headship in the concern. .He ruled more especially in auger making, being most knowing in that, as he needs must be, being of a long line of auger makers in Staffordshire. It was a Smith that taught auger making to Gilpin's master Fieldhouse; and William Belcher as destitute of parents as shoes, had been rescued from driving a gin horse at Tipton, and made one of the smartest auger makers first on the grounds at the mill by a Smith, William Cooper inspired by the blaze that Ned blew up in the Red Cow yard devoted himself to augers in particular and edge tools in general after he had got all he could inside and out in Wolverhampton Blue Coat School, into which he was more readily admitted on account of the laurels his father had won as a 'full private' in his Majesty's Royal Marines, though it must be confessed that the said laurels grew yellow in the little house in the Red Cow yard, to which the worn out soldier retired at last. But out of that blue coat his son got to readily on account of the red coat his father had worn, the boy as we shall see hereafter, managed by becoming a manager at the Mills, to clothe himself well for the rest of his life; for a very little learning carried a man much further in those than it does in these days. John Parsons added more skill in many ways and branches of the edge tool trade to learning, and took the lead when workmen took to 'cutting roads to fortunes' for themselves from Wedges Mills, Cooper modestly following at his heels. Then there was more than one Henshaw, relatives to Mrs. Gilpin on her mother's side, who distinguished himself as a foremost workman, and subsequently wrought out prosperous mastership in the edge tool trade. The Grooms did clever things with their hammer, and afterwards made profit by finding hammers for other hands, while there were two families of Whitehouse - harmonious blacksmiths, two at least of the number, as full of music as technical invention. Then last and certainly no means least, in the manly quality of courage was Jerry Partridge from West Bromwich, whose wit saved his head from many a blow from idle boast. He asserted one day that he had made the best man in West Bromwich run, 'How did you do that Jerry?' was the astonished query, 'Why, I ran away and he ran after me,' was the ready answer.v
But Ned Smith was ever the man whom William Gilpin loved to take counsel, for he inherited the capacity of his family to deal shrewdly with other things than edge tools. A Smith had the honour, as the family rightly esteem it to this day, of making the cast- iron work for the handsome Summit Bridge, near Smethwick, and when the hostess of the neighbouring Swan Inn mourned the loss of a fine well by the disturbance and raising of the ground, that Smith comforted her by the promise that he would bring some powerful 'jacks' put them under the well, and raise it to any height that would be most convenient to her.
Ned showed a grimmer humour than that of his ancestor towards an innkeeper, when, on a journey to London with his master, he upset the rascally reckoning between the coachman and the landlord of the inn, at which the coach stopped for dinner, by seizing a fowl and other materials for a good meal for himself and Gilpin when the horn sounded for the coach to start almost immediately after the purposely delayed dinner had been laid on the table. He very often accompanied his master on his journeys for orders, for he very often succeed in getting them where Gilpin failed, and when the latter did fail he knowingly stimulated Ned by betting him half a dozen of wine he could not succeed, the wine being drunk at night with fellow travellers in the commercial room.
Though William Gilpin had thus got about him some of the best and hardest working men, as well of Staffordshire as of Gloucestershire, in the great and growing edge tool trade, he had to improve, or rather increase, his facilities for getting coal and iron before he could reach that extent of profitable trade to which he eventually attained.
It was the water power which took him to Wedges Mills from Wolverhampton, and that took further from where coal and iron were the more readily presented. But he left coal further than iron behind him, for the need for water power in those non steam engine days drove ironmasters from the Black Country mines to running streams and rippling brooks in the country green. In William Gilpin's time there was a forge and mills at Coven, and ironworks clattered and run at Congreve, where the poet of that name was born and first sang melodious verse; Ironmaster Barker, however, making more money by hammering and rolling out iron by the hands that he employed than the poet did by hammering out rhymes and rolling out with his own brains. Perhaps Bishop Hurd, who was also born at Congreve might have made capitol out of both in a sermon on inhibition. There was a rolling mill at Penkridge and two at Rugeley, all these places being chosen for iron works on account of the facilities they offered for the use of water power, and all being rescued from the horrors that came upon the 'Black Country' by the application of steam mining and manufacturing purposes, thus enabling the iron to be made where the coal was dug and ironstone brought to the surface.
At any one of these place Gilpin could get his iron, but generally patronising the works at Rugeley; buying his coal mostly at the nearest coalfield- Essington Wood. It did not, however, escape his lynx eye that all about Wyrley, coal had been cropping out for centuries coquettishly peeping forth here and there from the surface like sprites of the underworld, saying, if they could speak, 'Follow and find me.' William Gilpin, though he had nothing of German romance with which to follow up this hint if it could ever have occurred to him that tongues of fire might speak as well as blister, he had plenty of Teutonic plod in him to get him following up,in his mind eye, those seams of coal unstiched to the sun by surface workers, and to reveal in the black diamonds he might pick up could he dig deep enough down into subterranean riches. So he kept sharp and hungry eyes on all the country around, and came to the conclusion that the richest fields that his neighbour farmer Brown, owned at Wyrley were under those which he cultivated. In the whole ' the jolly old farmer' was lord of some four hundred acres,and William Gilpin felt pretty certain that under sixty or seventy of them were beds of coal which, if reached by an enterprising man and duly shook up with pick and spade, would assure him rest from fear or want for the remainder of his days.
I have characterised Brown as 'jolly.' He was not the 'jolly dog' of those days, being more of a ruminating than erratic being; his greatest delight being to smoke a large pipe and quaff a huge tankard of good home brewed ale. Give him these and he would ponder over any question you could to him as carefully, as slowly and almost as mechanically as any of the bovine race on his farm chewed the cud, and if the ale were good he would, out of respect for the ale and the man who brewed it, give to questions, answers that might be as pleasant to the questioner as the ale brewed was to himself.
William Gilpin had not been brought up at the Red Cow in vain. He too, loved good ale and knew how to brew it. He was too, as hospitable a host as he were good brewer, and the tap he had benevolently set running in the snug and substantial dwelling house he had built for himself at Blades Mills was a stream of delight to Farmer Brown, who was often at the source whence to him so much pleasure flowed. There was a very nice garden to the house, and in a corner of the garden overlooking the road was a shady bower, where away from the house and high road, William Gilpin could sit and, while keeping an equal eye on the highway and byway of his life, could smoke a pipe and drink ale with his neighbour Brown, and talk over matters of interest to both, while more especially consulting his own interests. He watched and found favourable opportunity of discussing the, to him, important coal question, and discussed it so judiciously that the conversation ended in agreement in which Farmer Brown on his part, agreed to let to William Gilpin for the purpose of getting coal that was to be found beneath the surface of that portion of his lands which Gilpin thought most favourable for his purpose on lease for 99 years, or as long as any coal remained ungotten. The speculation, so far at all events so far as Gilpin was concerned, was of so excellent and profitable a character that, though diligent workers have been getting it ever since, it is not yet all gotten, for the Great Wyrley Mining Company are now getting coal from the same estate, and an adjoining one which they have added to it for coal getting purposes. They were the upper measures which William Gilpin got, and it took him all his time to get them though he spared no means or expense in the labour, and put up eventually the first water pumping engine ever seen in Cannock or its neighbourhood for the draining of its mines. He went, however cautiously to work at first, and his first experiment for sinking for coal was as anxiously watched by his wife as himself, for she had shared the labour with which her father had got his money together, and was as desirous as her husband that it should go to make more, and both were considerably relieved when the richest coal of the new field of enterprise upon which they had entered was put beyond all doubt. He soon had some thirty miners at work, and opened a large wharf at Churchbridge, which found a profitable market in the more immediate neighbourhood. That wharf has lately disappeared, the company now working the mines sending the bulk of their coal by railway which passes through Wyrley and connects Walsall with Rugeley and the main lines of the London and North Western Railway Company.
Tasting the sweets of being his own coal master, and pocketing the profits which once went to Essington Wood. set Mr. William Gilpin longing to be his own iron master and as far as he could, fortifying his trade with iron and steel of his own manufacture. An eligible site at an easy price, for such works on the side of the road nearly opposite his coal wharf advantageously presenting itself, Gilpin closed the bargain, and soon there were mills for working iron and steel as flourishing at Churchbridge as were the mills called 'Wedge's,' where the iron and steel were worked up into edge tools. In size and comprehension both works have been far exceeded since iron working were commenced at Churchbridge in 1806, but for the period at which Churchbridge works took their rise, and the then undeveloped state of the trade with which they and those at Blades Mills were connected, they are highly creditable monuments of the skill and enterprise of their founder.
PART V
AT WEDGES MILLS.
It is refreshing, while turning up the remains of old memories still clustering about Wedges Mills, to come upon odd bits of good nature, good fellowship and kindly intercourse between master and man, native and stranger, to the relief and light of the somewhat dark picture of seeming sordid toil, truthfully sketched in my last, and to find that the master spirit stimulating all such weary work-himself hand and soul deep in it more than anyone about him, and looking keenly for the pecuniary gain- had higher thoughts and better feeling, and that he and his household were no mere money grubbers, but knew how to give as well as get, and were not so intent upon their own conception of their own needs for the future as to pass without aid the pressing needs of others in the present.
Those were the days when there was, more than now of fellowship, to say nothing of good feeling between master and man, and when they sometimes exchanged views of their common interest over a cup of ale at an inn. We have seen how intimate was the intercourse in this respect between William Gilpin and Ned Smith; and William would often when weary of his own company in the garden arbour that overlooked the road, adjourn to the Black Cock that stood on the other side of the road and faced his house. When business did not require him at the mills Ned Smith was bound to be found there, for, unhappily for himself, Ned's notion of a busy life was to divide the day into three portions - one for work, one for sleep and one for eating and drinking; but it is due to him to say that however much the other two might draw upon the middle and dividing part, the first was never sacrificed for to the third, for if the first were peculiar exigent at any time, Ned had a happy, or unhappy as the reader pleases, knack of combining the two - at all events as far as drinking was concerned., much business, for instance, would be talked between master and man over a little ale at the Black Cock, the easy familiarity of the master, who nevertheless to hold his own, doing more than any relaxing influence of the ale cup to win the confidence and excite the zeal of the man, in the firms wellbeing and progress.
There was another in his employ whom William Gilpin liked to meet there - the first man who ever made adzes at Wedges Mills. But for William Gilpin he would have been transported - was, in fact, out on a 'ticket of leave,' of those days to Gilpin, of Wedges Mills; no very reputable character this, some hastily scrupulous reader will say, for a large manufacturer to associate with. But we must remember that those were the days in which they hung people for very small matters, when it was much more easy than in these days to convict an innocent person, and when guilty one had not the facilities for, nor the right to, a fair trial he now possesses. What was the offence laid to the charge of this adze maker, I know not, nor whether he was or was not justly found guilty of it, but a judge had sentenced him to transportation, and to a penal settlement he would have gone, if Gilpin had not done what was very common in those days, got this man transferred to his service, he being bound for the convicted man's good behaviour.
That William Gilpin was actuated by not merely selfish and sordid motive in thus acting was evident from the fact that he did not, as too many of those days did, under like circumstances, treat this ticket of leave man like a 'nigger,' and make a 'white slave' of him. He gave him work and paid him wages as he did any other man, but he found himself bound to look more closely and kindly after his wellbeing and good conduct, at all events in the eye of the law, than he would that of any other man in his employ, who could claim a better legal right to be his own master, for, some way or other, it is evident the man had 'fell among thieves' and William Gilpin though he was no professing Christian, set himself, in that case at least, to do what many professing Christians omit to do, or think they can do more decently by deputy - work out the parable of 'The Good Samaritan;' and it says something for a pretty general conception of at least one phase of practical and genuine Christianity there, that no one about or around Wedges Mills ever made it a reproach to William Gilpin that in the pursuit of his mission, he mixed with 'publicans and sinners.'
The mission was not in vain. Whatever manner of man the adze maker had been, he was all the better for what Gilpin had done for him - for there never was a more skilful, conscientious adze maker at the mills - one who did more work, or did it better.
I am rather afraid from the fact that Gilpin was not very particularly of any church or chapel - being rather as a matter of birth than profession a Churchman, yet not of them at Cheslyn Hay - that his good nature was more natural than regular, and that his good Samaritanism was rather Samaritan than orthodox. It is very certain from sundry little bits that have come to my knowledge, that he did not wait always for a man to fall among thieves before putting his hand in his pocket in search of a penny to get him free; nor confine the exercise of his better nature to particular colour or classes. In fact his good nature was nature, and being nature it ought, orthodoxically considered, to have been bad if it were not. So it flowed spontaneously, instead of according to any known ecclesiastical rule or art. Hence it happened one evening as he was sitting with the adze maker in the Black Cock, never consoling himself for a moment with the reflection that he was a much brighter being than his man, both man and master were rather startled by the coach for the north pulling up at the inn door. This was a most unusual occurrence, for though in after years William Gilpin and his son George would often get up at Churchbridge and be set down at their own door, Wedges Mills was no stopping place for the coach that ran north or south. It changed its horses at Walsall, Four Crosses and Ivetsy Bank, but ran through Wedges Mills at its best pace; an extra smack of the coachman's whip being the only recognition vouchsafe as a rule to the old Black Cock. That it should stop at the door of the inn was a remarkable exception, rendered still more exceptional by the announcement made to mine host of the Cock that he must find room for nursing a lady who had been taken seriously ill on the journey, and who could proceed no further. Mine host vowed and declared that there was no such accommodation in his house, and that the coach must drive on to some more likely place to find it . William Gilpin heard the dispute and could see the face of the sick lady from the inn window. He did not see but somehow felt it might have been Fanny's face. It looked very much like that face when he first saw his first baby, when the face made him think a great deal more of the mother than the baby, and he now got the two faces and their relative situation mixed up in the, at least for the moment, clumsy mind of his, very much too small for the great, big, clumsy heart, that went bumping and thumping into it, all in a moment, that he rushed to the coach and called to Ned Smith and the adze maker to assist him to carry the almost inanimate form of the sick lady to his own house, just as though she were Fanny herself, and had a right to go there, or that the house were the accident ward of a county infirmary open to the receipt of all casualties in the neighbourhood, or which the London or Liverpool coach might bring that way, and he the mere partner of a charitable Providence, bound to dispense to all comers the mercies placed at his command. Clumsy fellow, too - never stopped to think, as he and his two men went across the road with their burden, staggering with fear lest they should let it fall, what Fanny could do with a sick woman, and her hands so full of the large little family thronging in about her? True she had her cousin Elizabeth Henshaw, with her in the house; but she was little more than a girl in years, and what could she know about nursing, being only one of those rough ranting Methodists, and never orthodoxedly trained as a sister of Saints Siphonia to the nursing business by a Lady Superior under the patronage of the Bishop of the diocese? Then, too, he never paused to inquire who the passenger was - whether she was gentle or simple, rich or poor. Why! She might lie in the house for months, as she lay there, helpless in those great sinewy edge tool makers arms, more bending in the very delicacy of a strong man's commiseration for a weak thing under her featherweight, than ever they had felt when grasping the huge sledge hammer, and have no friends or relations who could pay a penny of the cost of her illness would put him to! Besides who knew what was the matter with her? Why it might be some contagious disease which would be the death of Fanny and the children! Yet on he went without any respect to any one of these or any other consideration that would have made any other prudent mind pause. Strange to say, that at that moment Fanny's heart was as much larger than her head as that of her husband, and seeing from the window what was coming across the road, she ran to the door and opened it wide with that of her big heart, to the poor lady.
More dead than alive the sick woman was put to bed and a messenger on a swift horse went for the doctor, whose scientific diagnosis of the case would have convinced William Gilpin, had he been at all open to conviction that he had done about the most unwise thing he could possibly have done, for, left to the shaking of a few more miles on the coach, or to the tender mercies of a hired nurse at an inn, she would not have 'troubled' anyone very long; but with such nursing as Fanny and her cousin could and would give, she might possibly recover, but it would be a very long while first, and moving her would be out of the question for many weeks to come.
All this was said by the doctor over a pipe and a glass downstairs, and the only affect the announcement of the lengthened stay the patient would make had upon Gilpin was to set him thinking of her children, for she was the mother of many. When the doctor suggested that, as the husband and father was a comparatively wealthy tea merchant, of London, he would not only know how to repay all expenses, but for all his kindness handsomely rewarded Gilpin, who had not only not arrived, but was only a very short way on the road to fortune, the irascible William rejoined to the effect that a man who put his kindness out to pecuniary interest must be a miserable starveling with nothing to lose, and everything to gain in the shape of capital; and would find it an investment in which the interest would destroy the capital if there were any. He that only did good to get something by it here or hereafter was only self seeking or selfish after all and had no good in him. With all which the doctor agreed, as he did with the suggestion that it was quite right that the lady's husband should pay him if he could, and if he could not then Gilpin must do it for him, because gain was the soul of business, as giving was the soul of good apart from business.
If ought on the earth could have done Mrs. Christian good in the sense of restoring her to health and home, it must have been the good nursing with which Fanny Gilpin and Miss. Henshaw seconded the skilful and careful treatment of the doctor; and when Mr. Christian had been brought down from London to her bedside, his deep concern at learning that she could not be moved was greatly relieved by knowing that he could not have found better hands in which to place her than those to which she had been brought by good fortune and three good edge tool makers. But nothing which human aid could do could keep the poor lady in this world, and she herself realised the fact that she must prepare for another. It was at first a terrible fact for her, for her life was so young as yet, had been so blest, and was so much needed for her dear children that it would have been strange, abnormal, against the rule of wise Providence who orders life out of life, its continuity being carried by the life which one thing gives to and invests in another, if she had even thought of death. In this great crisis of her being Elizabeth Henshaw was a ministering angel to her, having a fresh young living faith and hope of a hereafter made somehow, she did not exactly know how, much better for pain in this life; and listening to her simple faith, and looking at her steadfast hope, yielded the dying woman a peace and consolation not to be got from any stereotype or formulary printed or unprinted, ready to hand for each occasions. The secret of her influence lay in the fact that Elizabeth had known religion and ' trouble ' very early. Her mother taught her for the first, and Providence the other when it took the mother away from earth, and left the daughter to play a mother's part to a young family, which her father struggled hard to feed, but, after much ' short commons ' ended in an empty cupboard. Like his brother in law, Fanny's father he was a farmer; in fact a better farmer than Fanny's father; but with no great aptitude for business, and a cripple on his feet. So thanks to Fanny and the generous heart that beat in the bosom of her husband, Elizabeth found a pleasant life in William Gilpin's house, and her brother Tom a master who laid for him the foundations for well-doing in the edge tool trade in Dublin. Then something had to be done for the father, who failing in food growing in Northfield, near Birmingham, had come to pass in which even good men sometimes find they can do nothing for themselves. He was brought to a house at Wedges Mills, where his second daughter cared for his comfort, and his agricultural tastes were consulted with a cow placed at his command in a field behind the house.
The house was not a very large one but it was large enough for a school for so small a village as was gathered around the mill, and in one room Henshaw flourished - over the boys - with a remarkable wooden instrument very much like a busk of those days, of which my lady readers will need no further description. For purpose of discipline, a stroke edgewise with this instrument, the boys called ' cheesecake, ' while one with the flat side went by the name of 'custard, ' and these delicacies were administered to his scholars according to a system of scholastic dietetics peculiar to the pedagogue who having put his hand to the plough changed it for the ferrule. But as schoolmasters went in those days, he was a good one and scholars for some distance around were attracted to his seminary. In a separate room Elizabeth ruled and taught a goodly assemblage of girls, who were not treated to tastes of either ' cheesecake ' or ' custard. '
The lesson that Elizabeth learned thus from early experience, which she became too wise and too good to call 'sad, ' filled up many gaps and smoothed much of the roughness in the circumscribed views of Universal Providence she had heard, and the motherless child was to the dying mother a living epistle from ' Our Father,' telling how she might leave her little ones in His hands; and ere she died she learned to love Elizabeth as though she were her own. Of that affection her husband partook, and cast light upon the shadow of his mourning by giving Elizabeth a life interest in some of his real estate, and so setting her above pecuniary want for the remainder of her days. He knew that he dared not have offered William Gilpin any reward for his kindness, but he soon learned that if he had, he could not have offered anything more acceptable to the uncle than the gift to his niece, for she was a light amid the darkness that was to be found in his , as it is in many a better man's house. Her brother was as good a Christian as his sister; and both must have done much to control and direct for good the courageous and daring impulses of George Gilpin. He was a fiery customer , as one fiery Gloucester workman found to his cost; for George disdaining to take advantage with his father of the workmen who had offended him, challenged him to a fistic encounter, thrashed him when the challenge was accepted, and was his friend ever after. Offended, while riding to Darlaston one day, by a rough on foot, he dismounted and thrashed him. George and Thomas Henshaw were fast friends, and one night when awakened with the conviction that there were burglars in the house, they came for the only time in their lives to near a quarrel, disputing which one should go first, to shield, if needs be, the life of the other.It is evident that the religion he found in the Henshaws affected George for good, for when he, too, had a son George he would have made him a clergyman, but that George was so genuinely religious, that he preferred the obscurity of the Plymouth Brethren to the position and honours that were open to him in the Establishment, and never repented his choice. Another son of William Gilpin was more immediately and visibly affected by Thomas and Elizabeth Henshaw, for Edmund became a professing Methodist with them at Cheslyn Hay, and united with them in most of their good works. It was during this son's later life that his father went most to chapel at Cheslyn Hay. But that life was a short one ; for by 1819 Edmund Gilpin was in his grave.
Soon after the death of Mrs. Christian the wheel of fortune, or in this case of misfortune, brought both uncle and niece another object for the exercise of duty and goodness, for in one of its earlier revolutions the fly wheel of the first coal winding engine Gilpin erected at Wyrley caught a boy who was coolly cracking nuts by its side, and struck him into the mill-race, where his head coming into contact with the wall and the 'hones' of the drum upon which the pit chain was wound, the wood had to be sawn off before he could be released from his perilous position. When released he was all but dead, but thanks much to that which failed for the time with Mrs. Christian, young Job Whitehouse was rescued from death at the age of ten, and lived to the age of eighty one. Sixty years of that life he worked out at the Mills, for the Gilpins owed him something, and he owed something to the Gilpins, and both were honest enough to pay their debts. I am inclined to think he owed to Elizabeth Henshaw the thought that he also owed some of the long life thus providentially snatched from early death to God and his fellow man: and to the best of his abilities and opportunity he paid that debt, and never thought he had paid enough.
Always humble and at a distance he followed Miss. Henshaw's example of doing good, and judging by the tones of his weakened voice, and the glints of goodness in every furrow of his face at three score years and ten, he must have been as kindly and as gentle and cheery as he was a good Christian. His religion like that of Miss. Henshaw. took the outward form of Methodism, and made him a member of the society of that denomination, which met at Cheslyn Hay. He had not the means which Mr. Christian had placed at her command, for materially aiding the sick and the fatherless, and finding in the Sunday School fit recipients or clues to need for such help, but such help as he could give he gave. One wish he had - that was to bring religious instruction to Wedges Mills, by establishing there a place of worship of the cause he espoused. He soon found many of the same opinion; notably his wife who had been in the service of William Gilpin, and seen the light Miss Henshaw shed there. When her father gave up the school and life in 1829 Job and his wife took the house; and many good Methodists often met there to discuss how to raise ' a cause .' Of the number was Mrs. Edward Smith . The masculine of that name was no Methodist, but his wife had zeal enough for the cause for two. She was excelled in usefulness by Mrs. John Lawson, the wife of a workman at the Mills, himself an earnest Methodist, and whose son became an acceptable local preacher, and did much to keep alive the fire, his mother so materialy helped to light there, until he was removed from life a few years ago by death. Like his father he lived and died in the service of the Gilpins.
Eventually the patience of Job of Wedges Mills in waiting and longing to meet the growing religious wants of the place with a Sunday school and chapel was rewarded when he met the wants of his increasing family by removing to a larger house, for connected with that house was a somewhat capacious place, which was originally for a bake-house, but which the Gilpins converted to the purpose of scythe making when they added that branch to their edge tool making. Finding it empty, Job Whitehouse, mainly with the aid of John Lawson and his son James, made it into a little chapel and schoolroom ; and it pleased the good Job to sit there and teach the rising generation of young edge tool makers within walls that once resounded to the echo of hammer and anvil, and had been merry with the shadows cast by fiery furnace, or to sit and watch the influence of ' the Word ' written on the face of many a rough worker, whose hands had struck the blow that made the echo and set the shadows dancing. Still more pleased was he with the results of his faith and patience when he found that many came from other places, notably Cannock, and were all the better for coming; for many a rough life was made smooth there, many a drunkard made sober, and many a husband and father once a curse at home, was made a blessing to his household. But good old Job was fated to be the last teacher of his Sunday school, and to live to see Wedges Mills once more without a place of worship. How the chapel itself brought about that collapse, how it was for the better, and how Job Whitehouse's sons helped to bring it about, and identified still more not only religious but musical progress with the progress of edge tool making, will be matter for my next.
PART V1
FROM WEDGES MILLS TO BRIDGTOWN
'Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast ' and when music is allied to religion, as it was at Wedges Mills, it is doubly charming. Old Job Whitehouse came of a musical family, and as a boy, when his days work at edge tool making as an apprentice to Ben Hill, Ned Smith's grandson, was at an end, he would hie him home, and hammer out as best he could, musical notes for a number of instruments, including clarinet, flute and violoncello, the latter being his favourite instrument, and the one upon which he ultimately became the more expert and finished player. He was the only musical mind at Wedges Mills until Simeon Shorter came back from Sheffield with the screw auger, and dabbled a little with Job in vocal music, and joined the choir of the Methodist chapel at Cheslyn Hay.
A trio of musicians came upon the neighbouring ground of Churchbridge in 1817 in the persons of Joseph Ault, George Thomas and Jerry Partridge, whose running exploits at West Bromwich I have already chronicled . When the edge tool trade grew too large for Wedges Mills and accommodation had to be provided at Churchbridge, William Gilpin with a shrewd eye to the still further extension of his business, brought those three skilful workmen from Weeford, in the neighbourhood of Lichfield, where at that time was an edge tool works, the principal implements there made being improved hoes for the foreign market. The men were good Methodists, and not bad musicians. Ault playing the oboe, Thomas the violoncello and Partridge the flute. The three, each with his several instruments, were a great gain to the Methodist chapel orchestra at Cheslyn Hay, and when the local musical force at Wedges Mills became strengthened, they would occasionally of an evening swell the volume of private concerts in that locality.
Job Whitehouse's musical undertakings with Shorter were first strengthened by the advent of James Lawson and his brother. James was a born musician, and there are ears living, though dull of hearing to present sounds, which still thrill at the recollection of the lingering sweetness and clearness of the notes he blew from a small instrument, upon which he played with considerable skill. The man, however, for whose musical talents the good Job had the most respect - a respect which, in his gentle and simple nature, amounted to almost veneration - was Cornelius Whitehouse, who came with his brother John, and their father Edward, to develop the increasing skill in edge tool making at Churchbridge. Each was more or less musical, but Cornelius had compassed of the art more than the others in the neighbourhood, and his good voice and knowledge of vocalisation soon raised him to the leadership of the Methodist choir at Cheslyn Hay. He was, too, like his father, an ingenious mechanic, an additional attraction in the eyes of Job Whitehouse, who loved his work as much as he did his musical ' play,' and when his first son was born to him, though Cornelius was no relative, he, in grateful memory of, doubtless no little aid to his musical studies, and in general admiration for his friend, named the boy Cornelius. The genius, alike for music and mechanics, seem, as we shall see, to have been transferred with the name.
But Job had other sons born to him until they numbered five; a family that was increased by two girls. They were all born with a greater or less capacity for music, which the father lost no time in calling into activity. It was not long before their voices were toned to sacred music, and each several pairs of little hands was busy with the instrument of its choice. The hands of Isiah when they grew to manly size, made for themselves a huge double bass, or double violono, nine feet high, and played upon it so well that it was the musical wonder of the country round. Not content with this achievement later on the same hands made an organ of ten stops, upon which the elder brother played.
That elder brother confined his mechanical skill to the patenting of improvements in edge tools, and his musical invention to the rendering of the original music that possessed him. There was plenty of education for the former faculty in his every day work at the Mills, and Cornelius took every advantage of it. He is the inventor of the machine now in use for twist augers, of a double action floor cramp, of the present form and mode of making garden shears, besides having improved other processes and tools in the trade. Several of the more valuable he has patented. The more important is ' Improvements in boring bits and augers,' patented in 1868, providing for those tools being so constructed that their barrels consisted of a forked frame open on opposite sides, the nose end being provided with a helical or inclined blade or blades, or cutting edges, and two sides or limbs, constituting the frame, united at the shank end to form a tang for connecting with the handle, and such a modification thereof as will admit, in certain cases, of one limb, or fork, being dispensed with, but retaining the cutting parts, in connection with the remaining limb and tang. Bits or augers constructed according to this invention can be made without a central worm or point, and the nose or acting end of the auger or bit may be flat, convex or pointed. In using the wood or material cut or bored out enters the fork, or frame of the tool, and thereby prevents the cutting out parts from offering any resistance to its action. Then instead of making the fork or frame with parallel, it may be made with taper sides, the taper fork or frame being widest at its junction with the stem or tang, and instead of employing the two sides of the fork or frame, one side only may be used. By this invention boring bits or augers are not only more easily manufactured, but rendered more endurable, at less expense.
There are other inventions which I have found, and the technical reader may find them, too, recorded in the collection of specification of patents stored at the Wolverhampton Free Library, but I have no space for lengthy description uninteresting to the general reader, and will merely mention three more. One is of October 1868 for first forming augers and such tools of steel, homogeneous iron, or other compounds of carbon and iron, in moulds then decarbonizing them, bending and fitting them whilst thus soft, and then hardening them again polishing etc. In the same year Mr. Cornelius Whitehouse took out a patent for improving in mill bills and picks for dressing millstones, and dressing stones for other purposes, Ordinarily such tools are made in one piece but this invention provides for making the chisel end separate from the head and making the head on two parts, between which the chisel end is fixed by an ingenious arrangement, rendering it easy to replace the chisel or cutter without laying aside or dispensing with the tool in its entirety. A similar plan is by the same patent applied to picks. The last patent granted is but three years ago and provides for improvements in cutting tools known as 'brushing bills, hooks or slashers and is applicable to all like tools. It consists of an improved method for connecting the handle or shaft to the tool, to prevent injury to the former and render the tool stronger, and more durable, economical, and presentable.
In arriving at the technical evolution of musical invention Cornelius Whitehouse had little or nothing to aid him. Those were the days in which the schoolmaster was not abroad, and the properly and accredited and diploma'd teacher of music was absent from a long way around Wedges Mills. There was no library there until long after the little chapel was opened, and he was grown a very big boy and knew a good deal about music when Mr. T.Crockett of Cannock. who became a hearty supporter of the place, formed a small library, and Miss. Julia Gilpin, who, like her brother Edmund , was a non-conformist, readily lent her stock of books to those who wished for them. Somehow or other however, amid all the hard work of making edge tools as they were made, and all the hard work of finding out how to make more excellent tools, and most tools in a more excellent manner, Cornelius learnt well how to compose good and original music as a dozen of his compositions I have procured from the publishers, and others I could not procure, because they had all been bought up, testify. They are modest compositions, intended for improvement of chapel choir and Sunday school music, and the diffusion of a higher musical taste amongst worshipers at church and chapel; and, judging by the sale of the pieces, as well as their character, hundreds of towns and villages in many parts of the globe must of late years have been tuneful at Christmastide at least, with Cornelius Whitehouse's music.
Many of the pieces deal with verses that have been set to music by nearly every composer of sacred music and it is surprising how much of originality Mr. Whitehouse has imparted to themes so comparatively hackneyed, the melody and the harmony being in all instances original and telling, and showing the composer to be one of natures songsters, who can chant sweet and tuneful lays, giving expression to the pleading and pathos of prayer, or the exalting and exulting joy of praise. For one with so few opportunities, and only the leisure time that hard manual labour left for musical culture one is surprised at the amount of knowledge that he possesses of the art, and the facility with which he uses it. He has like many a great composer, his models, and he must have studied much had he only studied them; but if the least generous of critics found nothing ' strikingly original,' he would find nothing 'cribbed.' 'Lead kindly Light' and ' Jubilate Deo' have, in this composers setting, a grace and beauty that is found nowhere else, while his 'Te Deum Magnificat' is a composition that any church choir could sing with credit, and any congregation listen to with pleasure and improvement. From his faults many composers well known to the musical world might take lessons for the correction of their own, and when one considers the rubbish that is published by highly educated musical people, one is surprised at the ability of this self taught ' harmonious blacksmith' of Wedges Mills, and cannot withhold from him the greater praise.
That praise is all the more deserved that he has sought not to be great but to be useful -to add to the beautiful, the true, and the ennobling which music is so well fitted to bring to the homes and the haunts, the hearth and the altar, of the labouring and the hardworking many in the town or sparsely populated centre of some toiling industry.
Ambition is a good thing, but it is all the better for a mixture of 'charity' in the apostolic sense of the term, and charity that has a base of musical ambition commences more often at home than any other form of charity.
It was so with the musical family of the Whitehouses for all the five boys but one became more or less good musicians; and if they had to go afield to Cheslyn Hay to find 'choral union ,' and take their unpaid parts in public concerts for charitable purposes, the folks at Wedges Mills found pleasure and profit in gathering outside Job Whitehouses garden and listening with delight to the anthems and hymns of praise that toned out from the voices and instruments of the Whitehouses, the Lawsons, and others in the arbour, and echoed with birdlike melody in the woods, and floated away sweetly on the surface of the murmering brook. It told of better natures and better life at Wedges Mills and how they were going to build up a society elsewhere that should not know that which had there soiled so many souls, and give means for good the Mills had never known. That place was what within the last quarter of a century has become Bridgtown.
That town had no existence then, the only house that occupied its site being an old dilapidated farmhouse, standing on thirty acres of land. The Wolverhampton Building Society, of which the late Alderman James Walker was secretary and manager, purchased the land, and many of the lots soon became the property of the numerous better men who had grown up in and around the Gilpin works, at Wedges Mills and Churchbridge, That the goods they found in education and religion might be increased, one of their earlier thoughts was the erection of a chapel and school. The chapel like that at Cheslyn Hay, was raised in connection with the New Connection Methodists, and was built by general subscription, the responsibility being mainly borne by the immigrants from Wedges Mills.
It was a great day for the neighbourhood when the foundation stone was laid by Alderman Walker, the Methodists, and many were not, marching headed by a band from Cheslyn Hay, and marching back again to tea and public meeting, whereat they rejoiced in the good order and good feeling. Christian teaching was, as they knew from experience, so well calculated to produce in the projected new township. Shortly after Mr. James Walker laid the cornerstone of the schoolhouse, and both buildings were in working order in 1864the latter being used as a day and Sunday school. The former was place under Government inspection, and continued to be carried on by the enterprising New Connection Methodists until the formation of a School Board for the district relieved them of the expense and the labour. To the chapel has been added places of worship which have since been opened by the Church of England, the Weslyans, and the Primitive Methodists, with attendant Sunday schools, for Bridgtown is not only now a township of many well made streets, bristling with neat, some handsome, all well drained and well sewered private residences, but having many factories and workshops. The first and perhaps still the main, or staple trade was and is edge tool making, started humbly enough by Job Whitehouse's sons, but now grown into two considerable firms, one headed by Cornelius and known as the Cannock Edge Tool Works, carried on by him and his two sons, who are worthy alike in musical predilection and mechanical skill of such a father; the other the firm of Messrs. Whitehouse Brothers all good and capable men in the trade, who are the owners of the District Edge Tool Works. There is also the boiler making works of Messrs. Woolham and Sons; the timber yard and turnery of Messrs. Wootton and Sons, and workshops for file and lock making.
To Bridgtown come most of the collieries in the great and growing Cannock and Hednesford coal districts for pit timber; the brush trade of Walsall seeks its wood there, and it supplies a variety of tool handles and shafts to all parts of England. It is, in fact, the principal manufacturing place of Cannock, in which parish it is situated, and it is fast increasing in manufacturing importance.
As one travels along the old Watling Street, which some of Bridgtowns best houses picturesquely skirt, one can tell the town from afar by the smoke and stacks of its several larger manufactories pour out,and heard by the roar and the thud of blast and hammer the Whitehouse edge tool works send forth.But nature, as yet, prevails over art. The breezes from the open country disperse the smoke as it rises, while gardens are plentiful and flourishing, and there are no back slums, no wretchedness from such orgies as prevailed at Wedges Mills, when good Job Whitehouse began the seeming hopeless task of of making it better, little thinking that ere he removed from earth, and when he only removed some half a mile away, his 'works' would follow him, a blessing, not only to his children, and those and their children their labour providing trades more and more gather round them, but to all who would be neighbour to them.
PART V11
FROM WEDGES MILLS IN MANY DIRECTIONS
William did not live to see how the seeds of manufacturing progress he had sown around the old tenantless mill that once called Blades master, fructified even to the old farm land now called Bridgtown; did not live to see even the first brick of the first house deposited, for it was not until 1869 that the Whitehouses started and William Died in 1835,(THE RECORDS STATE THAT WILLIAM DIED IN 1834) just 45 years after he came to Wedges Mills, for the date of his coming there appears to have been 1790 and not 1794, as I have previously reason to believe. He was active to the last, and seemingly full of health and strength, which always show well in a stout, broad shouldered, well built man, of six feet high, be his age what it may. Add to these constituents of a good presence of sense of success, a gratified feeling of possession as a man sees many and much of men and things around him that he can call his own, and one can readily conceive that William Gilpin was the picture of what the Scotch would call 'a pretty mon.' a picture too, that took some tone from the colour of the dress of a well to do man these days - a white hat, picturesquely posed rather on one side of the head, blue swallow tailed coat, white waistcoat, and a capacious white neck-cloth of the same hue; and nankeen 'continuations.'
The hat is a very important part of such an adornment, and nothing is so likely to disturb the presence of such a man as an accident to that crowning article of dress. There is an old boy who remembers, and never can forget, how when a young boy he was the cause of such an accident to William Gilpin's hat. The boy was on a hay-rick preparing to pitch some of its contents upon the field beneath. He did not see his master, nor his master the boy, who unconsciously pitched something like a truss of hay, which pressed the hat over eyes that had a minute before been contemplating possessions well calculated to raise a spirit of self importance in the owner. The wrath of William Gilpin was great as he flourished his stout walking stick he had ever with him out of doors, and bade the lad come down, and down on his knees, Gilpin was too sensible and too kind hearted to put one mistake on another by thrashing the lad.
It was a morning requiring a greatcoat that William Gilpin prepared for the passing coach that was to take him to Birmingham for the last time, and when the coach came he required, as well he might, having passed three score years and ten, the aid of a faithful servitor to help him mount to the top of the coach. 'Push up ,' were the last words that anyone at Wedges Mills ever heard him utter. They were appropriate in the place, where by nearly half a century of hard 'pushing' he had raised himself to a proud and envied position. He went well enough to and about Birmingham but, when he went to the hotel at which he usually put up, he fell suddenly ill, and, as suddenly dying, was brought home a corpse to Wedges Mills, and his remains were interred at Cannock Churchyard.
A thronging procession of those who had laboured with and under him told that no common or ordinary man had passed away from their midst, and a piece of the old oak shaft from the gin frame of his first grindstone mill at Wolverhampton, now preserved and conspicuously displayed at Wedges Mills as a family heirloom, tells how well his children understood and esteemed the spirit and character of him who made Wedges Mills and Churchbridge so thriving, and bred, as it were, their rising colony at Bridgtown. The land around, too, bears other evidence of the influence his character and career had upon the face of the country. When he went to Wedges Mills the river Penk flowed through the village as it in old times had made its path, and when the rains had swollen its volume, or the floods came down, it required the daredevil courage of old Tom Morgan to ride upon the fore horse of the team that had to ford it. The importance which the manufacturing enterprise of William Gilpin gave to the place soon brought the county to the rescue, and a bridge was built there. Another dangerous pass was where the water flowed from the old mill wheel, and to avoid the danger the Wolverhampton Road was carried from Watling Street to the right of the present road down to somewhat level crossing at the head of the stream, and the turnpike road at that place suddenly turned to the left at the side of the stream to get on the straight road by the Old Mill House. Such perils and dangers of old were ultimately removed by the County building an arch over the stream, and so making the turnpike road straight from the Watling Street to Wedges Mills.
So ended the career of the first William Gilpin that had aught to do with the edge tool trade. There have been four and there still are two- of the same name. The second, the son of the first, was taller than his father, being 6 feet 21/2inches high. The surviving grandson , William ( son of the first William Gilpin's eldest son George) has passed, or is nigh unto his three score and ten years; and the great grandson, William, is the son of Mr. Bernard Gilpin, of Wedges Mills. That the Gilpins are a long lived family is evidenced by the fact that a daughter of the first William Gilpin is still living in Shropshire at the age of 93, that there is another daughter of 83 at Cannock, who is neighboured by a brother four score years of age.
William Gilpin's brother in law, William Henshaw, the schoolmaster preceded him to the grave, having died in 1829. His daughter Elizabeth, who made so benevolent use of the little fortune her Christian care for Mrs. Christian had brought her, continued to reside for a time with the Gilpins, and then removed to Kendal, where she died in 1844. William Newman who brought so much from Gloucestershire to William Gilpin, died one year after him; but stout Tom Morgan, Ned Smith's first apprentice, lived until 1858 thus surviving his master 41 years, for Ned Smith himself left the world in 1817.
William Gilpin the first lived long enough, however, to see some who had helped him to cut a road to fortune with edge tools go off to cut such roads for themselves, or help others to cut them. The first to do this was one of his own household - that same Thomas Henshaw who was apprenticed to Gilpin, and resided with his sister Elizabeth in Gilpin's house. In 1827 he thought he saw an opening for an ironmongery business in Dublin, and set forth on the road, accompanied as far as Wolverhampton by George Bradney Gilpin; and the road led him to good fortune for not only did the ironmongery business prosper at Dublin, but he added to it edge tool manufacturing, which prospers there to this day, being carried out by his nephew, Alfred Henshaw, who was born and bred to the trade at Wedges Mills. He was the son of William Henshaw, Thomas's brother. When the father of both failed as a cultivator of the soil at Northfield, and came to the culture of the uneducated intellect of Wedges Mills, it was Francis Gilpin, William's brother, who succeeded to the general victualling business of the Red Cow, at Wolverhampton, who charged himself with the present and future of William Henshaw; but he pushed his way to Wedges Mills, and learnt edge tool making, leaving the Red Cow behind him, that same cow coming at the death of Francis, who made a testamentary disposition of his property among his nephews and neices, to F.H.Gilpin, now an octegenarian at Cannock who sold it for £1100.
William Henshaw himself, tried his hand at edge tool manufacturing in a small way, even at Wedges Mills, turning the Black Cock Inn into a workshop; but William Gilpin did not live to see this competitive cock crowing at his own door; and William Henshaw found it advantageous to give up manufacturing for mercantile work, and go elsewhere, with son George, between the years 1845 to 1850 to buy and sell edge tools instead of making them.
William Gilpin lived to see Daniel Wood, who had learned shell auger making by apprenticeship to Thomas Belcher, leave the 'Mills' to try his fortune, in 1834, at Sheffield, where he eventually established himself as a general edge tool manufacturer, but not to see another of his men, Henry Thomas, go to Birmingham, and to found a manufacturing and mercantile trade in edge tools there.
The latter years of William Gilpin's career, however, must needs have been troubled by the way in which the Eagle Works at Wolverhampton came swooping down upon his edge tool nest at Wedges Mills, and carried off some of the best of his busy birds. True the Wolverhampton works were not known by the name of 'Eagle' during the time of William Gilpin, whatever of the nature of that bird he might have found about them; but John Parsons after he left Wedges Mills for Wolverhampton, had year by year grown in prosperity, until he was, when Fryre and Whitmore were beginning to grow weary of the House of Commons, though both had not sat there long for the new made borough, flourishing at 'The Bilston Street Bridge Works' as they were then called, as a 'manufacturer of all descriptions of spades, shovels, plantation hoes, light and heavy edge tools, gentlemen's, carpenters, sportsmen's, and shoemakers tools; and heavy steel toys, hinges, scale beams, and steel yards, Brazil tools of every description made to order.'
THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE IS ONLY EXTRACTS FROM PRATT'S ARTICLES AS MUCH OF THE DETAIL ONLY DEALS
WITH JOHN PARSONS SO THE RELEVANT PARTS ARE PREFIXED WITH ------That was how John Parsons, the founder of the Eagle Works, advertised himself just fifty years ago in Bridgens Directory for Wolverhampton for the year of 1883. ----------------Mr. Parsons added it to his other enterprises at Bilston Street Bridge, and the readiness with which he procured some of the best 'hands' from Wedges Mills, show that he had been familiar alike with its ways and its men.---------------------Finding Gorsbrook Mill suitable for the purpose, John Parsons there built three hearths and put down a forge hammer in 1833,and soon had three men from Wedges Mills to work there.---------------------The three workmen whom Job(should be John) Parsons induced to exchange Wedges Mills for Gorsbrook were our old friend Job Whitehouse, Richard Jennings and Edward Tonks. The latter remained at Wolverhampton, and his son William is now employed at the Griffin Edge Tool Works of Messrs. W. Edwards and Son in Horsley Fields, but after fifteen months absence Job Whitehouse at the pressing request of his old master, returned to Wedges Mills, and ended his long and arduous working life where he began it. What became of Jenning I know not. Probably he went to Bilston Street Bridge, where bthe making of the tools was taken to the works were they were always ground.
--------------- There came soon after to the Bilston Street Bridge Works another old boy from the Blue Coat School, William Cooper, who as already related, followed William Gilpin out of the Red Cow Inn yard to Wedges Mills. He was a useful foreman to old Gilpin becoming, as he did, a clever man who understood the edge tool trade in all its branches, and was a noted shrewd manager, as well for William(should be John) Parsons for a short time as well as William Gilpin, a long time previously. The only objection ever urged against him was made by the man who found that he was too keen in the interest of the masters. That he was a famous judge of good work, they all allowed; but they alleged that he would frequently chalk good work as bad from wanton exercise of authority, and in support of this allegation they would tell how often they merely rubbed the chalk marks out, showed him when he was in a better mood the work again, and then he passed it without demur.
He left Wedges Mills for Bilston Street Bridge Works in company with another able manager, Richard Henshaw, cousin of the other young Henshaws, who grew and flourished at Wedges Mills until they were transplanted to still more productive ground. He wsa the son of a Henshaw who failed like his brother, in business but not in the agricultural line. He was a factor in Wolverhampton until 1797, when his factoring came to an end, and he presently place his son with an ironmonger in Lewes, where the lad gained an extensive knowledge of shipbuilders tools, which his relative William Gilpin, ever keen, utilised by inducing him, when the boy became a man, to accept a good position at Wedges Mills. That position Richard Henshaw sought to mend by entering the service of John Parsons at Wolverhampton, and William Cooper went with him - out of natural affection for the daughter of the said Richard Henshaw, whose son in law he in due course of time became.
Neither father in law nor son in law were long content with their places at Parsons works. Henshaw turned publican, and for some time kept the Saracens head in King Street, to assist his own head in devising the cutting of a shorter road to fortune than it appeared to him for the time being he could cut with edge tools. His son in law was some help to him for William Cooper compensated for the inequality of his arms, one being long than the other being short, by the quality of his voice, which was a good tenor, and which he could use with much taste and effect, although, unlike the Whitehouses, he had not studied music as an art. But neither Richard Henshaw's good head nor William Cooper's good voice attracted sufficient money to the King Street Inn to prevent their leaving it. The father in law returned to edge tool making so far as to join Richard Groom who had learned edge tool making at Wedges Mills, in a journey to Birmingham, and there setting up a hammer making works, and flourished, the son in law taking to a partnership in buying and selling iron.
The said Richard Groom was a native of Wedges Mills, and had been one of the many lads who had been attracted to the 'Mills' at first by the bare necessity of seeking amusement in a change of work. There were no other resources to such an end but those of the public house and the beer house; and the works were open and men at work long after the toilers by road and field had ceased to toil. The bright glow of the fire on the hearths in the long winter nights, the sparks that danced about when the bellows were blown, and the hammer fell upon the red hot metal on the anvil, and the clang and the clatter attracted stout youths who would help at much of the rough and unskilled work that had to be done in those days to the profit of the workmen, while the shrewder and more skilful would go on until what began in pleasure ended, as with Richard Groom, in profitable business.
How much further Mr. J. Parsons cut his way to fortune with edge tools, and how he suddenly cut a road in the other direction and came to grief, while other men held on their way in Wolverhampton , and had prosperous journeys, I have yet to tell.
PART V111
IN WOLVERHAMPTON
(AGAIN ONLY PART OF THIS RELATES TO THE GILPINS SO WILL BE DEALT WITH AS THE SECTION ABOVE)
Thanks to information I have this week received from an unquestionable source I am enabled to add to and in some measure correct my details of the earlier career of Mr. John Parsons. He never worked at Gilpins, but about the year 1824he left his father who was a shoe pincher and compass manufacturer at Birmingham and with whom he had worked at that trade, and established himself in Wolverhampton. --------------------while Gilpins provided a clever grinder named Latham whose son William, is now the manager of that department in the same works, grown to the same proportions of 'The Eagle.' Tyher was another Latham, a wood turner, who came to Parsons to make helves, and with came the father of Mr. Hollins, erstwhile Cooper of the Bilston Road and now a pawnbroker of Dudley. William Horton from Gilpins made adzes, while his brother John came from Wedge Mills to make axes. For auger making recourse was had to Job Smith of the Smith family of auger makers. Subsequently Isaiah Belcher son of old Thomas whom the Smiths found astray at Tipton and turned into an auger maker, took that branch of the business, and great interest in the big 'tommy shop' which Parsons kept, that he might, as was the custom of masters in those days, make money out of his men as well as his customers. Isaiah loved what were poetically called 'the good things of this life,' and compounded for an utter absence of the poetical in his nature by his attachment to the pork and politics. To him a 'fat pig' was ' a thing of beauty' and a 'joy' for as long as his share of it lasted. His politics were thorough Free Trade, but pork prevented him seeing that truck and tommy could never consistently make triumvirate with that principal, so Belcher denounced the protectionist farmer who bred the pig as an enemy to humanity, while he whose workmen must needs buy in the dearest the pork he had purchased in the cheapest market, was a ' friend of the people,' and Isaiah was never weary of repeating, Ah! there's nothing like a good tommy shop !' To have seen him there in the grey of a Saturday morning contemplating with fiery eyes the porcine titbits he had picked up as ' unconsidered trifles ' from a fresh slaughtered pig and was cooking in a pan over the fire, one would have felt that to a man of his keen appetite such inconsistency was far more pardonable than in many a more prominent local politician of those days.
………………….The profitable contract with the Government went, when Mr. Parsons failed, to the Walker firm of factors, in Temple Street, and many men in the Eagle turned small masters to make many of the goods for that firm. Isaiah Belcher and his sons made the augers, first on the premises he had built in Waterloo Street, with the aid of Mr. James Walker's Building Society, and next to his works in St. John's Square. He boasted that he had afterwards political influence enough to get from the Government direct separate contract for augers, but according to his own account, politics failed to keep it, he tried pork in the shape of pie. He loved to tell the tale how the contract being stopped on the alleged complaint of bad workmanship, and failing to find out by personal visit to the docks who complained of, or what was complained of in, his augers, he resolved to go to the headquarters, at Somerset House. Before setting out, he purchased of Mr. Reynolds, in Queen Square three of his best pork pies. One he ate on the road, and each of the other two he deposited in a pocket of his ample frock coat. The first thing he did at Somerset House was to offer what no Londener, Belcher believed, could refuse - a pork pie, fresh from the country. It was accepted and the second one settled the business, and sent Isaiah, who adduced the result as proof that he was 'as good as a prophet, 'home rejoicing. But the rejoicing decreased as the increase of iron ships decreased the Government demand for such augers as Mr. Belcher made, and, so far at least as he was concerned, ultimately ceased…………………….
More Gilpin Information.