EMMA GURNEY SALTER (1875-1967) AND THE STEAMBOAT LADIES

I have inherited books from my late father and my late uncle, and now have two copies of several volumes written by or about the family. Particularly well represented on my shelves is their only aunt, Emma Gurney Salter. They both adored her, my father particularly. Emma, who never married, was very fond of her nephews too, although that didn’t stop her warning my mother just before her wedding that my father might not be suited to marriage. (They divorced six years later.)

Emma Gurney Salter (1875-1967) in 1912 on the occasion of the publication of Nature in Italian Art (from the Illustrated London News)

She was an archetypically bookish maiden aunt, a scholar in the field of Italian ecclesiastical history. She was an authority on St Francis of Assisi, and in her publications she often blended medieval history and art – I have editions of at least eight of her works including two copies of Tudor England Through Venetian Eyes and three of Nature in Italian Art. The subtitle of Nature is “a study of landscape backgrounds from Giotto to Tintoretto” and it is a comprehensive survey of landscape, flora and fauna depicted by artists from all the Italian schools of art from 1250 to 1590.

My father’s copy of Nature was his father’s, signed “to F.G.S. with love from the author, April 1912,” a gift from sister to brother soon after its publication that year. Uncle John’s copy, “to John Gurney Salter from his aunt,” has a letter to him from her tucked inside the cover, in which she writes

I daresay you know it was accepted by Trin. Coll. Dublin as a thesis for their Litt.D.? I submitted also my earlier book on Franciscan Legends & an art. in the Edinburgh Rev. and some translations also.

Emma studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Women had been allowed to take courses at Cambridge University, and even to sit exams, since 1881, but were not awarded degrees. Oxford finally recognised female graduates in 1920; Cambridge was then shamed into granting diplomas to women from 1921, but did not give women degrees until 1948.

At Trinity College, Dublin, however women had been eligible for degrees since 1904. From then until 1907, brilliant scholars like my Great Aunt Emma at both Oxford and Cambridge were able to sail to Dublin (then still part of the United Kingdom), where Trinity College was happy to recognise their studies in England and to confer on them the degrees which the English universities refused. These women became known as "steamboat ladies." Steamboating great aunt Emma’s Trin. Coll. Litt.D. was built on her Trin. Coll. MA.

I found my third copy of Nature in Italian Art in Cumbria around 2005 on the shelves of a relative stranger, the friend of a friend, who had bought it and a few hundred others from a second-hand bookshop purely for their decorative spines. My delight at finding Emma’s book was compounded when I took it down and read the flyleaf dedication, “to F. Reyner, from the mother of the authoress.” What a find – Frederick Reyner, Lancashire cotton magnate, was my great great uncle, brother of my great grandmother Jane Salter née Reyner, Emma’s mother.

Three copies of Nature in Italian Art by my great aunt Emma Gurney Salter, the former properties of three generations of my ancestors: my grandfather, my uncle and my great great uncle

FREDERICK GURNEY SALTER (1876-1969) AND THE CONSTANCE GARNETT VERSION

I am struck by how many of these articles are bookish. The subjects have in many cases written books, or been the subject of books, and copies of many of them are in my possession. It has set me off on a new project, a more formal survey of all the books on my shelves with family connections. Several came from my father’s library. He was an English Literature lecturer and he inherited hundreds of his books from his father and aunt. They in turn … and so on, back into the eighteenth century.

Every book with an inscription in it adds to the family story. My grandparents for example seem to have conducted their courtship through the gift of books. There are several volumes of poetry to F.G.S. (Frederick Gurney Salter) from E.M.C. (Eleanor May Castle), including a collection called Georgian Poetry 1912-1915, published by the Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street, London, in November 1915. It’s intended to be a survey of “poets of the newer generation” and has works by DH Lawrence and Rupert Brooke among others. It is dedicated in part to the latter, who had died in the war in May that year.

Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 and 1913-1915 – F.G. Salter already owned the first volume when E.M. Castle gave him the second

May’s brother was Tudor Castle, himself a rising poet and a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury set, who had given to Fred one volume of Brooke’s work (Poems, the only one published in Brooke’s lifetime) in February 1913 and to May a companion volume (1914 and Other Poems, published posthumously) in October 1915. I don’t know, but it’s very possible that Tudor and Rupert knew each other.

F.G. Salter's and E.M. Castle’s volumes of the poetry of Rupert Brooke

Tudor died in a gas attack at the start of the Battle of the Somme on the 31^st August 1916, another dead poet. Fred himself only lost a leg in the war – a note on his war record says “eligible for S.W.B. 20.11.15” and the S.W.B., the Silver War Badge, was awarded to soldiers who were honourably discharged from service through injury.

The Silver War Badge

“For King and Empire, Services Rendered”

The inscription in Georgian Poetry is dated 29^th January 1916. Another book confirms that Fred was convalescing in March 1916. It’s a Longman’s Pocket Library edition of William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope and Chants for Socialists, published in 1915. The copy I have inherited from my father has an inscription: “1916, to F.G. Salter, from May Morris.” A long letter dated 13^th March 1916 from May, William Morris’s daughter, is tucked inside the small volume, in which she writes: “Lately I heard sad news of you, and scarcely knew what to write, feeling so grieved, and yet knowing that like all the other men I know who are fighting, you are taking the thing that has come to you with fine courage and serenity.”

Letter and book from May Morris to F.G. Salter

Fred Salter and May Castle were married on the 16^th May that year. They raised a family of three sons and continued to give each other books. On Fred’s 46^th birthday in 1922 he received not one but three volumes of the Heinemann edition of the novels of Dostoevsky. From his parents he got The Idiot, rather formally inscribed “To F.G. Salter, with best birthday wishes from W.H. Gurney Salter and Jane Gurney Salter;” and from May, now signing herself E.M.S., Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Kramazov.

Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett

Britain had only just begun to discover Russian literature. The earliest translations appeared in 1894, and they were all made by Constance Garnett – the Heinemann Dostoevsky’s, first published just before the First World War, were by her. Garnett, who had once worked as a reader for Heinemann, translated 71 Russian works in forty years after meeting two Russian revolutionary exiles, Sergei Stepniak and Felix Volkhovsky, in 1891. She learned Russian and travelled there on several occasions. She deserves great credit for introducing the works of Gogol, Checkhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and others to an English-speaking audience.

She is not however without her critics. Working at speed, she would sometimes gloss over difficult or sensitive passages “for readability,” and if she did not understand a word or phrase, she was quite likely simply to omit it from the text. This was particularly true of the versions of Dostoevsky which Fred received on his 46^th birthday. In general, she tended to ignore matters of individual style, to the extent that post-war Russian poet Josef Brodsky, remarked: “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett.”

FREDERICK REYNER (1852-1915) AND THE BRICK KILN BED

My great great uncle Frederick ran Reyner’s Ltd in Ashton under Lyne, at first with his brother Joseph and then after Joseph’s death in 1891 as sole proprietor. The company was what was known as a combined firm: Reyner mills both spun cotton and wove it. His large workforce made him a significant figure in the local community and as a result he also served on the local bench as a magistrate. Many of his cases were recorded in the local newspaper The Ashton Reporter, mostly the sort of petty misdemeanors that itch the skin of a well-ordered patriarchal society such as Ashton’s.

The Ashton Reporter building on Warrington Street

(the site now occupied by Marks & Spencer)

By the end of the century Reyner’s was finding it hard to compete with more modern weaving operations. In 1903 it closed one mill altogether and in 1912, having let out its weaving sheds to another firm, concentrated on spinning alone. It was against this background of decline in the industry that Charles Allen appeared before Frederick on Monday 24^th February 1902.

Mr Allen, a middle-aged man, still regarded himself as a weaver; but the fact was that he hadn’t worked in that capacity for three years. Instead he scraped a living filling and delivering bags of coal. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, and of course thirsty work.

A lodging house, or doss house (this one in London)

where often beds were used in shifts by different men throughout the day

Mr Allen, who I think was relatively new to the area, was staying at the Model lodging house in Scotland Street, Ashton, built in the 1890s to accommodate itinerant cotton workers. At no more than a few pennies a night its facilities were, one assumes, basic, and it seems that Mr Allen had planned to indulge himself with a little luxury the previous Saturday night. He left a full shilling, twelve pence, with the mistress of the Blue Bell inn down the road. But he went drinking elsewhere and found himself locked out of the Blue Bell when he returned there after closing time.

With just tuppence in his pocket he wandered up to the Model – but all the beds there were occupied, and he had no choice but to walk away. It was a bitterly cold winter’s night, and Charles asked a policeman where he might find a bed. All the constable could suggest was that Charles keep walking. This he did “until he was tired and done up.” At about half past three in the morning he found himself passing a brick kiln belonging to one George Barlow. It must have been recently fired because it was open, empty and – most importantly – still warm.

A brick kiln (this one in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire)

Charles gratefully stepped in and lay down, and it was there an hour later that Constable Cameron found him fast asleep. Although he may have been new to the area, Mr Allen was, it emerged, no novice at sleeping rough. Speaking for the prosecution at the hearing, a certain Superintendent Hewitt reported that Allen had seven previous convictions, six of them for sleeping out. “For a time,” Hewitt recounted, “Allen has kept teetotal, but he has broken out again.” Lugging coal sacks is thirsty work. It may have been in part a charitable act by Frederick Reyner, the mill owner with no work for weavers, when he sentenced the prisoner to seven days’ detention in a warm cell.

JANE REYNER (c1850-1938) AND THE COCKBROOK MILL

My great grandmother Jane Reyner came from one of the oldest mill-owning families in the Lancashire cottonmill town of Ashton Under Lyne. I would like to know more about the family business which spanned the whole of the nineteenth century in an industry absolutely central to the social and economic changes of the times.

Jane Reyner (c1850-1938) with two of her sons, 

Fred and Frank Salter, c1914

Jane’s grandfather Thomas Reyner was a haberdasher in London who decided to move from selling cotton goods to making them. In the first decade of the nineteenth century he saw opportunities in the north and brought his young family to Ashton: his wife, after whom my great grandmother Jane was named; and among their children their infant son Frederick, Jane’s future father after whom she would in time name her eldest son, my grandfather Fred Salter.

By 1811 Thomas was listed as a muslin manufacturer at Bank Top in the town. Ashton’s earliest mill, Throstle’s Nest, was probably built around the 1780s, and it was powered by a water wheel on the Cock Brook. Later, the Cockbrook Mill itself was built by Tom and James Wilson, straddling the beck just downstream of Throstle’s Nest. The Cockbrook Mill was state-of-the-art, powered by a 12 horsepower steam engine, and by 1832 it had changed hands. Now it was owned by Reyners: the family was on its way up.

Thornfield Hall, the Reyner family home in Ashton Under Lyne

(now demolished)

By 1861 when Jane was 11, the family had made it and was living in Thornfield Hall, built on a gentle hillside overlooking Cockbrook. At some point Reyners took over the running of another long-established manufactory, the vast Albion Mill on the River Tame in the town. Over the years the family firm survived many business crises – the cotton famine of the 1860s when the supply from the US was interrupted by the American Civil War; and two disastrous fires at Cockbrook Mill, after both of which it was rebuilt and enlarged until it covered 22,000 square yards and was operated by 100 employees working 20 pairs of spinning mules (the machines that spun the raw cotton into yarn).

But in March 1903 the decision was taken to close Cockbrook down and move all its machinery to Albion. By then Cockbrook (and the Reyners’ association with Ashton) was nearly 100 years old and, as a spokesman told the local paper, “it has no chance with modern factories.” 

It really was the end of an era. Now the Cockbrook Mill is long gone, although Reyner Street which ran down alongside it marks the site. Thornfield Hall lies under sports fields; and even mighty Albion has been swept aside for a supermarket. One branch of the family diversified into road haulage, and until very recently Reyners articulated wagons could be seen on motorways the length and breadth of Britain, playing a continuing part in the Reyner family’s contribution to British industry.

Reyners – two hundred years of selling, then making,

then delivering the goods

ARTHUR EDWARD REYNER (c1846-1902) AND THE BROOKLANDS AGREEMENT

When we were growing up, the only family “heritage” of which my father spoke was the line of his great grandmother, the staunch non-conformist Gurney family. There was never any mention of the more recent (and, you might think, more influential) lines of his Castle mother or Reyner grandmother – or indeed of his own male line, the Salters of Hertfordshire. From a purely genealogical point of view this seems like a terrible waste of ancestors!

This post marks the second anniversary of this weekly blog, in which I try to recover and celebrate some of those lost ancestral souls. Since my father took whatever he knew about his non-Gurney forebears to the grave with him, it has not always been a simple matter to snatch even a glimpse of the lives of some of mine. The Reyners are a case in point. They too were liberal non-conformists, a family of Lancashire cotton mill owners for several generations. But I am not in touch with any Reyner cousins (if you’re reading this, Reyner cousins, please write!); and for a long time I knew only the name of my great grandmother, Jane Reyner.

Arthur's sister, Jane Reyner (1850-1938)

my link to the world of Lancashire cotton

This morning however I stumbled across three of her brothers and sisters of whom I had previously never heard. Better still, one of them is described in the sort of detail which no amount of FreeBMD or Ancestry statistical records can convey. I now know I had a great great uncle Arthur, who was

a bachelor of uncertain health, and lived at Thornfield Hall near to Ashton-under-Lyne, with a mother whose strength and stateliness of spirit, coupled with extreme personal fragility, advanced years, and only occasional visibility through the bevelled glass of an ancient brougham, constituted her one of those occasional reproductions of Queen Victoria which appeared during the reign of that monarch, his life being one in which music, travel in Switzerland, Gladstonianism, a perilous habit, for one of his weight and build, of riding to hounds, and the current number of the Nineteenth Century, played a great part.

It sounds as if Arthur was a bit of a playboy. He certainly doesn’t seem to have played any active part in the running of the family mills, and only appears on one British census return throughout his adult life (suggesting that he travelled aborad a lot). He never married, and clearly enjoyed the good life, judging from the weight and build which made riding to hounds such an ill-advised hobby. The Nineteenth Century was a monthly literary magazine which from 1877 to 1972 published debate by leading intellectuals of the day.

Brougham carriage 

as occupied by Queen Victoria (left) and Helen Reyner nee Bayley (right)

The description of his mother Helen Reyner, née Bayley (1816-1892) is tremendous! How  I wish I had more pictures of this pair of ancestors. Helen was 15 years younger than her late husband Frederick Reyner and outlived him by just that length of time, shutting herself away in Thornfield Hall, the family home, and mourning Frederick (who died in 1877) in perpetuum just as Queen Victoria had been mourning Prince Albert since 1861. Arthur died only ten years after his mother.

These descriptions come from a 1917 article about industrial relations in the northern cotton mills, and it was in this sphere that Arthur did make a mark in public life. He was the president of the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ Associations which represented the mill owners, although he seems to have fulfilled the role with mixed results:

In his speeches on the public platform great fluency of thought and expression struggled with anguish against a marked defect of utterance. He had Robert Lowe's inability to perceive the effect he was making on his audience, and his position as leader at once of a Liberal organisation which wanted all sorts of democratic changes, and an Employers' Federation which wanted a reduction of wages, was a vexatious inconsistency, and probably accounted very largely, though it was not suspected at the time, for the recurrent Conservatism of the borough in which he lived.

The tension between his liberal non-conformist inclination to help the working man and his capitalist responsibilities to the family business must have been hard to balance. Around the time of his mother’s death Arthur was one of three employers appointed by the Federation to negotiate a new deal with employees about working practices in the mills. The deal, following a bitter dispute over wage cuts, was thrashed out in a room at the Brooklands Hotel outside Manchester in one all-night session in March 1893 and became known as the Brooklands Agreement. Arthur was the first signatory, but in fact his ill health (perhaps made worse by his mother’s dying days) meant that he was absent from the negotiating table for much of the process.

Sir Charles Macara (1845-1929)

closer of the 1893 Brooklands deal

(and in 1891 creator of Lifeboat Flagdays)

In fact the absence of Arthur and his “defect of utterance” from the final stages made the agreement possible. He had adopted a much harder line over the 5% wage cut and subsequent 20 week strike than his conservative colleague Charles Macara; with Arthur indisposed, Macara was able to take a more flexible approach with the trade union leaders and reach a satisfactory compromise. The Brooklands Agreement introduced a structure of negotiation, conciliation and appeal procedures which remained in place for more than 20 years.

One rather happy side effect of the rancourous 20-week dispute was also described by the same 1917 writer. As the dark satanic mills, and their chimneys, stopped working, pollution levels began to fall:

[The lock-out] lasted long enough to clear the sky, and nearly long enough to clean the earth. Distant objects acquired that startling visibility which in South-east Lancashire usually signifies nothing more serious than " the wakes," and the operatives wandered up and down amid unfamiliar tracts of morning and afternoon, and were, for all their faith and fortitude, in the suspended and deeply disordered state of those who are all dressed up with nowhere to go.

FREDERICK REYNER (1852-1915) AND THE ASHTON BENCH

Call me romantic or call me nosey, I often find myself wondering how my ancestral couples met – how any two strands of my family tree bumped into each other and became one. In the case of two of my great grandparents for example, what connection was there between William Salter the London-based employee of Gurney & Co, shorthand writers to the Houses of Parliament, and Jane Reyner the daughter of a Midlands cotton mill magnate?

Jane Salter née Reyner, and

William Henry Gurney Salter,

in 1920, 50 years after they got married

The answer, I thought, was the old boy network. I found out that William Salter had exactly the same education as his future brother-in-law, Frederick Reyner. They were both at Amersham Hall, an “Academy for the Sons of Liberal Gentlemen” (by which they meant non-conformist gentlemen); and then both at University College London, the university established by non-conformist gentlemen to give their sons the further education they were barred from at England’s other universities. (William’s grandfather, and perhaps Frederick’s too, had bought shares in its foundation.) Naturally I put two and two together and assumed they were classroom friends.

Unfortunately William was Frederick’s senior by fourteen years. When Frederick was graduating at UCL in June 1869, William had been working at Gurneys for nine years. He and Jane were probably already engaged – they got married the following year – but if William did meet Jane through Frederick, it wasn’t as school or university chums. (Jane, two years older than Frederick, was still twelve years younger than William.)

William’s path at Gurney’s was mapped out. In 1872 he would become head of the firm, following his uncle, grandfather, great grandfather and great great grandfather in the position. Frederick’s future too was assured. Reyner’s Mill in Ashton under Lyne was a large concern, employing (in 1871) 1319 men and women. Frederick’s father took control of the business in 1871 (following the death of Frederick’s uncles), and Frederick and his brother Joseph helped with the running. They ran it together after their father’s death in 1877; and when Joseph died at the age of only 49 in 1891, Frederick was left in sole charge.

The Ashton-under-Lyne Working Men’s Co-operative Society

founded in 1857 by a group of overlookers and weavers

at Reyner’s Mill (pic from Tameside.gov.uk)

Their first joint purchase was a chest of tea

which was sold among the members.

Frederick, an important local employer, was in due course invited to sit on the bench as a magistrate, where he discharged his responsibilities as a pillar of the community. With such a large workforce, he must have known some of the defendants brought before him. Some of his sittings are recorded in issues of the Ashton Reporter newspaper, and some of the cases are more serious than others. Here’s one from the edition of Saturday 10^th October 1903:

THE TRIALS OF A LODGING-HOUSE. — Before the Ashton County Court Justices on Wednesday, Matilda Barlow was charged with being drunk and disorderly at Bardsley on the 18th of September. Matilda, in a confidential tone, told the magistrates that “she had gone down a bit in the world, you know, and she wanted to rise, but she was now living in a lodging-house, and — well, their worships knew what life in a lodging-house was.” — (Laughter.) “Now,” she said in a wheedling tone, “will your worships treat me leniently? You can bind me over for as much as you like.” — (Laughter.)

The Magistrates’ Clerk: You do not seem to know what being bound over means. You have been up before. Mrs Holt, the court missionary, stated that prisoner had a bit of money, but seemed to spend it all in drink. — A constable: She has a bit of property that brings in about 7s a week. — Prisoner, who had been reciting her troubles to Superintendent Hewitt during the evidence, vehemently broke in saying that she would attend chapel while she was in a lodging-house. — (Laughter.) — She was fined 5s 6d for costs.

Thanks to the Rhodes Family for their painstaking work of transcribing the Ashton Reporter.