Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract
Hic liber pertinet, deny it who can
Ad Georgeum Atkinson, ye honest young man
In opido Temple Sowerbie he is to be founde
Si non mortuus est, if not laide in ye grounde
The book is a yardstick of the Atkinson family’s social mobility during the seventeenth century. George’s grandfather John, who died in 1647, had signed his will with the rudimentary ‘mark’ of an illiterate man; John’s grandson George, on the other hand, could read and write Latin.
History records neither how George met his wife Jane Hodgson, nor when or where they were married, but it must have been relatively late for both of them, since their first child was born in 1701, when he was forty-four and she was thirty-one. Jane came from Threlkeld, near Keswick, in the heart of the Lake District. Perhaps George encountered her on his way to take delivery of a consignment of raw hides at the port of Whitehaven; or maybe he knew her from expeditions to purchase oak bark, a commodity in which the coppiced woods of the Lakeland dales were rich.
The sandy incline known as Whinfell, just across the river from Temple Sowerby, was the most convenient source of the bark that was essential to the tanning process. Around thirty families, including the Atkinsons, cultivated a large open expanse of the fell, although the land was too scrubby – ‘whin’ being another word for gorse – to be much good. Beyond the villagers’ strips, up the hill, lay Whinfell Forest, the domain of the Earl of Thanet. Since medieval times the forest had been renowned for the aristocratic sport of deer hunting, and for its ‘prodigious oaks’, including a trio known as the Three Brothers.[8]
Sadly, these giants would soon be slain. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Whinfell’s oaks had been earmarked for the shipyards of the Royal Navy, which, having consumed vast tracts of ancient woodland in the south, was now sourcing its timber from further afield. Accounts kept by Lord Thanet’s steward, Thomas Carleton, record the felling of fifty-four oaks at Whinfell during the winter of 1701, and twenty-three more the following spring. After being peeled and sawn on the spot, the timber was loaded on to sixty waggons that were dragged thirty miles up the old Roman road to Rockcliffe, at the mouth of the River Eden, where it was transferred to two barges and ferried round the coast to Whitehaven, to be warehoused ‘till the Queen’s Shipp Come for it’.[9] Meanwhile, the bark from these ancient trees was sold to a syndicate of five tanners, one of whom was George Atkinson.
Little went to waste in the rural economy. Animal hair, a by-product of the tanning process, was a commodity in its own right, used to add bulk to the mixture of lime, sand and water that made up plaster. Hair recycled from the tannery at Temple Sowerby found its way into the fabric of some of the area’s finest properties; half a ton of the stuff was used in 1718 in the walls and ceilings of the Red House, Thomas Carleton’s residence in Appleby.[10]
Over the course of his relatively long life, George’s tanning business prospered, and he was able to buy two farms, one at Hilton Bacon, ten miles up the valley, the other at Hesket Newmarket, twenty miles in the other direction. By the time he was ready to be ‘laide in ye grounde’, when he was sixty-six, he had acquired sufficient property to provide for both his sons.
George’s funeral was held on Whitsunday in 1723, and the parish record throws up a curiously intimate detail about his interment. A law had been passed in 1666 requiring corpses to be buried in woollen shrouds, rather than the linen sheets in which they had previously been wrapped; only victims of the plague were exempt. This was a protectionist measure, aimed at reducing linen imports from abroad, with a harsh £5 fine for non-compliance, payable out of the estate of the deceased. (Half the fine went to the informer, the rest to the poor of the parish.) Even so, some fancy folk were prepared to flout the law so that they could be interred in finer fabric. But the Atkinsons were plain people and thus – as the register certifies – George was buried ‘in woollen only’.[11]
Following George’s wishes, control of the tannery passed to John, his elder son. Matthew, the younger son, inherited the property beyond Temple Sowerby as well as bonds representing money owed to his father. A few years later, after his brother’s premature death, Matthew took over the tannery.
SOMETIME IN THE mid-1720s, Matthew bought the farmhouse in Temple Sowerby that would be home to the Atkinson family for the next 250 years, and he immediately embarked upon a programme of building works that included the addition of the upstairs corridor which became known, rather grandly, as the gallery. He married Margaret Sutton of Kirkby Lonsdale in April 1727; as though declaring his intention to establish a vigorous new branch of the family, Matthew ordered his and his bride’s initials, and the year of their wedding, to be chiselled into the red sandstone lintel above the front door.
Through this entrance, a narrow passage opened into low rooms on either side. To the left was the main living space, with mullioned windows and a large fireplace, and a ladder leading to a loft. To the right, a cosy parlour led through to the smoky kitchen, where hams and other hunks of curing meat dangled from hooks in the ceiling, and peat smouldered in the hearth; also off the parlour, a creaking staircase led up to the gallery and the sleeping quarters. Matthew and Margaret’s five children soon filled the house with noise: Jane, who was born in 1728, followed by George, Margaret, Matthew and last, but emphatically not least, Richard in 1739.
The oak cradle in which the Atkinson children spent their first years.
Andrew Davidson
Details of their childhood must remain blurry, since the paper trail from this period is non-existent. Much of their growing up would have taken place outdoors, as there were always chores to be performed – cows to milk, pigs to feed, fields to dig, fruit to pick, wood to gather, peat to cut. Certainly, the boys fished in the nearby river; the shooting in the fields and woods around the village was off limits, however, since their father, not being a freeholder, did not have the right to kill game. Likely they played ‘Scotch and English’, a game in which the players of two teams launched raids into the territory of their opponents in order to steal their coats, meanwhile running the risk of being captured and taken prisoner. This ‘active and violent recreation’, which was popular in the border country, would have gained further significance for the village lads after 15 December 1745, when a Jacobite force passed through Temple Sowerby – one Atkinson legend tells of family members being forced to give up their pocket watches by the Scots rebels.[12]
What the Atkinson children received by way of education is a matter of conjecture. It’s very possible the boys attended the excellent free grammar school at Appleby, but their names are nowhere to be found in the school’s (extremely patchy) historical records. The Rev. Carleton Atkinson – no relation – who was a graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, and rector at Temple Sowerby for forty years, may have tutored them at some point. They were all bright, but the youngest boy, Richard, was exceptionally so. It must have been obvious that his talents transcended the confines of the Eden valley, since somehow – I have no idea what chain of connections might have led to this – he landed a position as a clerk at the house of Samuel Touchet, a merchant of considerable influence based at Aldermanbury in the City of London.
Few traces remain of Richard’s earliest years in London. The first evidence I have unearthed of his existence there comes at the end of a legal document relating to the transfer of some land in Temple Sowerby, which he witnessed in London on 14 September 1755.[13] This is also the first sample of his handwriting that I have come across. At sixteen, his signature had not yet developed its ultimate panache, but it already showed considerable self-confidence, underscored by a succession of delightfully superfluous loops – and only slightly undermined by a few blotches, which reveal its author not to be in full command of his ink.
The most conclusive proof of Richard’s association with Samuel Touchet would be his contract of apprenticeship. Because stamp duty was imposed on the premium charged by a master, such contracts were registered by the authorities; details of all the apprenticeships entered into between 1710 and 1811 can be found in the National Archives at Kew, contained within seventy-nine bulky volumes that are also, mercifully, searchable online. But here’s a puzzle. There’s no evidence that Richard was ever apprenticed to anyone. Yet it was while they were both working for Touchet that Richard forged a lifelong friendship with a young man who definitely was an apprentice: Francis Baring, the son of a prosperous Exeter wool merchant. (Baring’s widowed mother paid £800 for his seven-year apprenticeship, which started on 20 November 1755, when he was fifteen; the hefty premium reflected Touchet’s prestige in the City.)[14] So how did Richard manage to get his foot in the door?
In his will, dated 6 March 1755, Matthew Atkinson bequeathed £200 to each of his two elder sons, George and Matthew, and £100 to Richard, which suggests previous expenditure on the latter’s behalf. Matthew would die ‘of a Jaundice’ on 15 April 1756. ‘He was not only one of the largest Dealers in his Way in the North,’ noted the Public Advertiser, ‘but also one of the most honourable.’[15]
THE MOTTO ENGRAVED on the face of the longcase clock in the gallery at Temple Sowerby was an hourly reminder of life’s brevity – ‘Remember Man / That Dye thou must / And after that to / Judgment Just’ – and perhaps its message had rubbed off on George Atkinson, who was eager to enter the state of matrimony. He had been visiting his neighbour Biddy Shepard one day in 1756 when he first encountered Bridget Maughan, and was so taken with her that he soon found it convenient to call on her at home in Wolsingham, fifty miles away in County Durham. Theirs would not be a smooth courtship.
Bridget’s father, Michael Maughan, had been a mining agent, prospecting for lead and copper on the Duke of Queensberry’s estates in Lanarkshire, but died when he was twenty-six. His widow, Dorothy, who hailed from old Cumberland gentry, raised Bridget and her younger daughter Jenny at Kirkoswald, a village twelve miles down the valley from Temple Sowerby, in an extended family surrounded by cousins. Dorothy was a controlling mother who would resort to tears when other methods of coercion failed; as a result, perhaps, both girls were notably secretive when it came to matters of the heart. Apart from a stint at Mrs Paxton’s academy in Durham, where they were schooled in the wifely arts of sewing and linen-dressing, the Maughan girls received no formal education. I would guess it was Dorothy who taught them to read and write, for Bridget’s writing was almost identical to her mother’s; furthermore, her spelling was wildly erratic, and she would remain more or less a stranger to punctuation her entire life.
In October 1755, when Jenny Maughan was nineteen and staying with friends in Newcastle, she fell in love with James Graham, and the couple were hastily engaged. Their idyll lasted a fortnight before Dorothy heard about it, pronounced Graham unsuitable, and commanded her daughter to sever the connection. Jenny’s broken heart cast a long shadow over the family during the following months, and it was under its lingering influence that George Atkinson started courting Bridget, a compliment which she rewarded with a robust brush-off:
Sir, I had your Letter and do remember what you said when you were at Wolsingham but you’ll excuse me when I tell you I know your Sex a Little better than belive one word of it. When I was Last at Temple Sowerby I was told you courted Miss Thomson of Bowes and I belive it is so. I have the greatest reason to respect you for your great civility both to my Sister and myself. I shall always esteem you as a friend but no pitty for I am very sure your Heart is as safe as ever it was at Least for me.[16]
As a matter of fact, Bridget liked George more than she let on, but was afraid to encourage him, foreseeing her mother’s disapproval. Dorothy, who was proud of her pedigree – which included a smidgen of Plantagenet blood – would no doubt say the Atkinsons smelled of trade, and an odoriferous one at that. Gentry they most definitely were not. There was, however, another reason for Bridget’s guardedness during the summer of 1756 – for her heart was already under siege.
Earlier that year, Dorothy had moved to Wolsingham, the home of her parents-in-law, perhaps after falling out with one or more of her sisters. In these new surroundings, she might have felt that two unmarried daughters reflected badly on her; in any case, when a local gentleman started courting Bridget, Dorothy pressed her to accept his hand. So far as the daughter was concerned, though, the match was unthinkable. In the ensuing battle of wills, Bridget’s friends feared she would be the one to give way first.
In August 1756, Bridget received a diverting parcel of books from her cousin James Tinkler, a merchant in London, accompanied by a letter full of family gossip and news of the opening salvos of a war with France. James was clearly worried about Bridget, for the letter to his ‘Dear Coz’ opened with the admission that he had been ‘perplexed with a Thousand Fears’ for her welfare. With regard to an ongoing commission, he could report only modest success: ‘I have Collected a Few more Shells which I shall Send with the Other Things, and I Promise you I Lett nothing of that kind Slipp that I Can Procure. But it’s now Fashionable for the Ladies to decorate their Rural apartments with Them, which makes them Both Scarse and Dear.’[17]
James Tinkler was not the only one with concerns about Bridget’s beleaguered state of mind. By September, she had still not decisively turned down her suitor’s proposal, and her standoff with her mother was now the subject of local tittle-tattle. ‘How hard it is to think that people might be quite happy and there own parents make them quite miserable,’ wrote Biddy Shepard, who knew that Bridget was soft on George Atkinson, and was keen to promote his suit:
If you can only try for a littel bitt of More Spirit and Resolve to fight throw it and not Sink under the weight of what Some people would only Look on as trifels and who knows but you may yet make that worthy fellow happy that would be willing to be seven times hanged and let down agane for you, and if not him Some body else that disarves you. Never however throw your Self away on a munkey that all the World agrees is not worthy of you.[18]
TEA ARRIVED IN England in the 1650s, and was initially a luxury enjoyed only by the very rich. Over the following century, however, tea drinking turned into a British obsession, so much so that high-minded individuals began preaching against the moral consequences of the habit. One forthright critic of the beverage was the reformer Jonas Hanway, whose Essay on Tea, published in 1756, pinned many social ills on it, including rotten teeth, a soaring suicide rate and a loss of bloom in chambermaids. (He had a point about the teeth; the growth of tea drinking went hand-in-hand with a boom in the consumption of the sugar used to sweeten it.) The East India Company, as the holder of the monopoly on trade with the Orient, ought to have entirely fulfilled the nation’s demand for tea; but the commodity was so exorbitantly taxed that around half of the leaves landing on British shores were imported illegally from the continent. James Corbet, a merchant and shipowner from Dumfries, is known to have smuggled tea from the Swedish city of Gothenburg via the Isle of Man. His business ledgers record that George Atkinson – a regular visitor to Dumfries – purchased a pound of ‘Singlo green tea’ from him for 8s 6d on 30 September 1756.[19]
For George, the following winter was purgatorial, for he heard not a word from the object of his affection. On 4 March 1757, after months of silence, he could stand it no longer, and decided to enlist Bridget’s sister Jenny to his cause, placing a small package addressed to her on a cart to Wolsingham. ‘Good Tea I know is a thing not very common in your country, yet an article which I think Ladies ought always to be Indulged in,’ George wrote in his accompanying letter. ‘I have lately met with a parcell which takes my fancy vastly, yet knowing my Deficiency of Judgement in those things, I have sent a sample which I hope you’ll give me your opinion of the first time I see you. I have every week since Christmas been expecting News from your Place of some Conquest this Winter,’ he continued, a note of despondency creeping in, ‘but I find you keep these things too closely amongst yourselves. Oh Jenny (as the Scotchman says) keep a good gripp of your heart, for after that’s gone I now find (by Experience) uneasyness, Jealousy &c follows, and always assure yourself of this, that it’s much easier for a person not in Love to persuade his Mistress he has a Passion for her, than for those who Loves with the greatest Sincerity.’[20]
Poor, lovelorn George – such an appeal carried its risks, but perhaps he felt he had little to lose. Certainly, his petition appears to have done him no harm. Over the following months, Bridget made it clear that one way or another, whether her mother liked it or not, she would marry George Atkinson.
On the morning of 7 January 1758, George rode out from Temple Sowerby, following the Eden ten miles downstream, past the ancient standing stones known as Long Meg and her Daughters, to St Michael’s Church at Addingham. The village itself no longer existed, having been washed away when the river changed course in the fourteenth century; only the parish church remained. There he met Bridget, who was staying with her Tinkler relations in Kirkoswald and had stolen away for a few hours. Their wedding ceremony could not have been more discreet. At this solemn, lonely place, in the low midwinter light, they must have believed their secret to be safe.
They had hoped to keep it under wraps until Whitsunday, but news of their marriage somehow reached Wolsingham a few days later. Bridget, in palpable distress, dashed off a note to her sister: ‘I beg Dear Jenny you will use your intrest to paceffy my Mother and to prevaill with her to alow me to come home a Little whille indeed my happyness depends upon it. I beg you’ll write soon and tell me the worst.’[21] Her aunt Barbara Tinkler also wrote to Dorothy: ‘Dear sister, Whether the News of your Daughter Bridget’s being married to Mr. George Atkinson may be so Gratefull to you, as I could wish, I cannot Conjecture. But as I understand, She formerly acquainted you with her intentions I hope it will not be so Surprising to you. The man has a very good Character, and we all hope will make a kind and indulgent husband.’ On the reverse, Bridget added a mournful paragraph of her own. ‘Dear Mother,’ she implored, ‘till I have a Line from you I can never be easy. Alowe me once more to desire your Blessing and Leave to come over which if you do not grant will make me very unhappy perhaps to my Lives end.’[22]
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER made their peace. The Gentleman’s Magazine recorded the match in the mercenary language of the day:
Mr. Atkinson, tanner, near Appleby – to Miss Maughan of Wolsingham, Durham £3000.[23]
Bridget brought a tidy dowry to the marriage. George immediately set about enlarging the house at Temple Sowerby, which must have felt gloomy and old-fashioned. If his aspirations or his budget had been greater, he might have opted to pull the whole thing down and start again from scratch; instead he tacked on a symmetrical front extension built of brick, two storeys high and five bays wide. The new front door opened into a double-height hall; to either side was a well-proportioned reception room, and on the floor above were two commodious bedrooms. The old and new parts of the house connected to each other via a narrow corridor. The extra living space would soon prove its worth, but from an architectural point of view the overall effect was clumsy. It was as though two very different houses were huddled too close together, each treading on the other’s toes.
While George supervised a succession of bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers and painters at Temple Sowerby over the spring and summer of 1758, Bridget stayed at Wolsingham, where she greatly missed her warm-hearted husband. George soon made a favourable impression among the Maughans’ circle in Wolsingham by sending over some leather to help a struggling cobbler. ‘He was stunned and could not tell how to express his gratitude and I hear says he never had so much given in his Life,’ Bridget reported back. ‘In short my Dear George has made a poor Family happy which is to me a greater pleasure than I can express, much more so than when you tell me you have Wainscoted the parlour to Oblidge me.’[24]
By the autumn, the house at Temple Sowerby was habitable. Newly installed as its mistress, Bridget duly received and then returned social calls from all the neighbours, which necessitated much sipping of tea. Such proprieties were especially tiring for her now that she was in the early stages of pregnancy. In mid-November, George wrote to sister-in-law Jenny at Wolsingham to say that while Bridget was well and cheerful, she was so busy completing her local visits before winter set in that she hoped her mother would forgive the lack of a letter that week.
In January 1759, the entire Atkinson family converged on Temple Sowerby to celebrate the feast of Twelfth Night. Matthew, who was George’s partner at the tannery, had picked up a cask of West Indian tamarinds for Bridget at Whitehaven on his way back from a business trip to Dublin. Richard had come up from London, stopping off to meet sister Margaret (a woman of almost suffocating piety) and her husband George Taylor at Bowes in County Durham; the three of them had travelled together the last thirty miles over the desolate pass at Stainmore and down into the Eden valley. Two hours after the arrival of the Bowes contingent, Bridget wrote to Jenny with a pithy assessment of her youngest brother-in-law, whom she was meeting for the first time: ‘Dicky is a very Smart Youth.’[25]
Over the winter Bridget kept Jenny occupied making baby clothes. ‘As I knew you were very busy working for me,’ Bridget wrote in late January, ‘I shall say nothing about your not answering my Letter. I fancy you will be at a Loss for directions about the Little things. The Long Lawn I intend for skirts and some ordinary caps which you may border with what Leaves of the Cambrick of which you may make six caps, four Laced ones of the fine and two plain ones of the coarse. You need be in no hurry as I hope if all be well we shan’t want them before May.’[26]
A boy was born in June 1759, but would die in infancy. A second child followed in February 1761, a girl called Dorothy. Two weeks after his daughter’s arrival, George sent off a bulletin to Jenny, reporting on the happy progress of Bridget and ‘her little Dolly’.[27] Alas, at this point in the narrative, the family correspondence dries up, a drought that would last more than a decade. To state the obvious: for old letters to provide the basis for a story, they need not only to have been written, but also to have been preserved. Now that George and Bridget were living under the same roof, they no longer had reason to write to one another; meanwhile most of the extended Atkinson family were in regular contact with each other in or around Temple Sowerby. Richard’s communications from London were rare and wondrous happenings. ‘I am glad that you have heard from Brother Richard,’ wrote Margaret to eldest sister Jane on such an occasion. ‘I think you are highly favoured.’[28]