Ramblings
Saunterings
Ramblings: about North-West England
Ramblings is a set of articles about North-West England, of unknown authorship and
indeterminate date, believed to have been written for amusement on rainy days,
which are not unknown in North-West England.
3. The Way We Were, with Silas Jessop
Now that our mollies are well and truly coddled in the paradise
that is modern Lakeland we ought to remember the pioneers
who laboured and suffered on our behalf. I have been rummaging
through the archives of the Cumberland Courier and have found
some old interviews that may help. Here, for example, is one with
Silas Jessop, a charcoal burner.
“My dad was a charcoal burner, and so was his dad, and his
dad. So, as soon as I could, at eight and a half, I became one too.
The pay was good, 4s 6d a week and all the charcoal you could eat.
I walked fourteen miles to work.
“One morning, after my gran had died during the night, I was
ten minutes late. The boss, Mr Grimes, said “Next time you’re late,
you can turn round, walk home and never come back”.
“But he was alright, Mr Grimes. We knew he had his rules to
follow. We did what Mr Grimes told us; Mr Grimes did what the
Lord of the Manor told him; and the Lord did what the Lady told
him.
“Another rule we had was that we could not talk while we were
working. So we decided to sing to each other. The Lord and Lady
were happy, because they thought we were happy in our work; Mr
Grimes was happy, because we weren’t breaking his rule; and we
were happy, because we could put whatever words we wanted into
our songs. Mr Grimes knew this but pretended not to.
“One of our gang, Titus Gobbie, had a wonderful voice - the
deepest bass you ever heard. It reverberated around the fells for
hours, like the sound of stags in the rut. One day, the Lady had
some friends up from London and they heard this voice and said
“We must take this man to sing opera in London”. So they did,
although Titus hadn’t been further than Staveley before.
“It was not a success. Titus couldn’t break his habit of putting
comments into his songs. The audience didn’t mind. It was all
foreign to them anyway, Italian, German, Russian, Cumbrian - they
never understood a word of it. But the other singers couldn’t cope.
Titus would be booming away as Boris Goodenough when he’d
stick in a bit about the fat man asleep in the front row. Marina’s aria
would just come to a stop.
“So Titus came back to the gang. He preferred to be with his
own kind of people, even though he got a lot more than 4s 6d a
week in London.
“Another character I remember is old Sid. He must have been
about seventy when I started. He only had one leg and one arm,
one each side. Nobody knew what happened to his other limbs.
Someone said a tree fell on him fifty years before. But old Sid never
said, or sang, anything about it.
“Nobody knew where he lived: he just seemed to shuffle off (if
you can shuffle on one leg) somewhere into the woods. He was not
much use, really. He sat there, staring at the ashes all day: he was
very good at that. When he died, we really missed him. But we put
him with his ashes so that he was still with us in a way.
“We worked from eight to eight, summer and winter. On very
cold days the bath of water they gave us to splash the worst of the
muck off would freeze solid. It was my job, being the youngest and
lightest, to lie on the ice for half an hour to melt it a bit. I liked this:
it was restful after a hard day’s work.
“One day I feel asleep on the ice. And they went off and left
me there. Eventually, of course, I fell in the icy water. So I got
some old rags and put them in the bath, knowing they would be
all frozen over by the morning. I came in early and hid behind
the huts, watching. When I didn’t turn up, the gang became quite
upset when they found me frozen at the bottom of the bath. That
was nice.
“After that, I was accepted as a proper member of the gang. A
few years later, I was allowed to stay in the huts overnight, which
we had to do sometimes when we had several fires to keep an eye
on. We’d stay there for weeks. There was nothing much to eat
unless we caught a badger or an otter. They were the best nights
of my life.
“These huts, by the way, weren’t proper buildings, with walls
and windows and so on. They were just rough pyramids of logs,
with turf on top, which we could crawl into. Not much different,
in fact, to the charcoal fires, which sometimes they became, and
sometimes with us still asleep in them.
“The work was tough and dirty, and there was a lot to learn.
For one thing, charcoal burners didn’t actually burn anything at all.
The whole point of covering the logs with turf was to stop them
burning. The logs smouldered for days to get rid of everything
except the carbon, which made the charcoal. That was the basic
idea. But the skill was in knowing which mixtures of wood and
which temperatures produced the various delicacies of charcoal. It
took years to learn this.
“And once you had, after about thirty years, you could become
the boss somewhere else, which I did. But I never allowed any
singing with my gang”.
Photo:
Silas Jessop (centre) and mates. This photograph of
Silas Jessop was taken by Herbert Bell. Where to is not known.
Comments:
• What a fascinating piece of oral history!
• It's a pity you couldn't give
us the names of the other two characters
in the photograph. Neither looks like Titus or old Sid.
Ramblings
Saunterings
© John Self, Drakkar Press, 2024-
Top photo: Rainbow over Kisdon in Swaledale;
Bottom photo: Ullswater