Standish – Resonation

I only have a few memories of my great-grandfather, Horace Barker. He was one of only three people I met whom I know to have been born in the 19th Century and he died a few weeks before my 5th birthday so we didn’t have a lot of time to get to know each other.

There are only a few facts about him I can recall: he was a kindly old man in his late seventies, married to my great-grandmother, Hilda. They lived in a bungalow with an immaculate garden and a greenhouse full of the sweetest tomatoes you’ve ever smelled. Unfortunately, my own insight ends there and I have to rely on other data sources to complete my picture of him.

If you know where to look, you can find out more about him. Various census sheets and official documents confirm that Horace was born in Pemberton, Wigan on 29th October 1897, he was a coal-miner, man and boy. He married Hilda in 1921 and together, they had a daughter, Marjorie, on 21st March 1924. He went to seek his fortune in Canada for a few months in 1929 but while he was there, Wall Street crashed – which may have influenced his decision to return home. At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Horace was recorded in the National Register as living at ‘Marus Bridge Shop’ and working as a “Colliery…Chargehand” (under-supervisor) and also a first-aider and an Air Raid Patrol warden. His wife Hilda was listed as a ‘Grocer and Confectioner’.

He was hardened by his experiences at the unforgiving coalface and later, as Colliery Manager, he bore the responsibility of the lives of the men who worked under him. The daily obligation to make life-or-death decisions undoubtedly shaped his outlook – and it’s no surprise to reflect that coal-mining was a formative part of some of the most revered working-class heroes of his generation; men like Matt Busby and Bill Shankly.

It’s not a fatuous comparison. Pop’ (as he was known in later life) once told his grandson – my Dad – during a callow attempt to make ambitious structural changes to a farm building “tha’ll ne’er do it” [You’ll never do it], knowing well that saying so would provide the extra determination to succeed. It worked. Like Shankly and Busby, he was what footballers would call a ‘psychologist’: adept at understanding and motivating others with a mixture of high standards and a gruff, uncompromising demeanour. By all accounts, he was a formidable character – and it’s easy to see why he needed to be.

Today, more than half a lifetime after his death, the world is a vastly different place. Fossil fuels – and their effects – are (literally) unsustainable and we’ve made great strides to power out future by harnessing the natural resources around us. That which we used to have to mine out of the ground to add value to our lives is necessarily diminishing in long-term value. And yet, over the same five decades, humanity has also created something in such a vast quantity that it now forms the most valuable mined resource than anything based in carbon.

Since 2017, it’s become widely accepted that data has become the world’s most valuable commodity, overtaking that long-standing former favourite, oil. The world’s most valuable companies now trade in quadrillions of bits, rather than billions of barrels. Carbon is just so finite, so boringly elusive, so…analogue. Data is different: it’s so dynamic, so ubiquitous, so…sustainable. And, just as with coal, the very juiciest bits of all this data, that inform decisions which can make or break fortunes, are there to be mined from the vastly more voluminous, less valuable stuff, all around it.

To do that, you need to be able to find relevant data, verify its accuracy and understand its meaning. For this you must also have a clear understanding of the problem that the data is being used to solve. You must also be aware of the statistical pitfalls of sticking different data together and making logical conclusions that clearly show that the correlations in the data unambiguously answer the questions being posed. To those who are not familiar with it, data mining may seem like a very indistinct process, maybe even a pseudoscience. But it’s simply a case of trying to create a ‘picture’ of knowledge about a group or an individual, based on available facts, cross-tabulated with other known information, to build a profile. If that still sounds unhelpfully abstract, then re-read the first five paragraphs above and you’ll see that’s exactly what I was doing there; turning documented fact into reasoned propensity.

Obviously, data-mining is not remotely dangerous; the work is not back-breaking work and there’s little chance of contracting long-term health conditions due to the working environment but it’s essentially the same principle – although I’m not sure that miners of old would see it that way. In ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’, George Orwell describes at length the awesome physicality demanded of coal miners, even comparing them to Olympic athletes. Pop once said of his own brother-in-law (whom he considered to be a less capable individual) “I’d durst let him’t strike at mi arse wi’ a pick”. If you cut through the old Lancashire dialect and the, er, slightly industrial language, it was a scathing put-down: ‘I’d dare to him to swing a pick-axe at my backside’ – believing him be too weak to do any harm.

**Horace “Pop” Barker’s miner’s lamp.** Photo: Paul Bentham

We still have his miner’s lamp, although the reason for its presentation (long-service, retirement or just his actual working lamp, polished up) is now lost in the mists of time. There’s also a brilliantly evocative picture of him, arms folded, his coal-blackened face staring defiantly into the camera, taken at the pit-head – I believe at Chisnall Hall Colliery near Coppull. He died in 1978, before the final decline of the industry that sustained his whole life.

I often wonder what he would have made of the miners’ strike of the 1980s, of Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers, of Health & Safety law, of the demise of ‘Old King Coal’ and even of the shift to renewable energy.

More than anything, I’d love to explain to him the parallels between his industry and mine: the intricacies of data, profiling and algorithms. With the arrogance of (relative) youth, I might expect the ‘wonders’ of the digital age to blow his Victorian mind. I’d tell him how confidently I could pinpoint the addresses of all the greenhouse-owning pensioners in Standish, based on a few data sources and the internet. I’d like to think he’d tell me I’d “ne’er do it”.

But then I shouldn’t be surprised if it left him largely unimpressed – a lot of statistical inference could easily be termed ‘common sense’. If you’ve had any experience of retail, as he did, you soon develop a sense of what ‘type’ each customer is, based on their buying history and their responses to different stimuli. Grocers in 1939 didn’t need a suite of linked tables to understand which customers would be best suited to which products; their database was in their heads. Computers have merely added the capability to make the same predictions on a far greater scale and with ever-increasing complexity.

Nor would he necessarily be a stranger to the more contemporary concerns of wholesale data collation. As a coal miner in Wigan in the 1930s, he is likely to have been well aware of the famous Orwell book about his hometown. If he were to have discussed Orwell’s most famous novel, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, just over a decade later, he would have become well-acquainted with that age’s most prescient description of data use and misuse – and a delicious historical irony would have followed. I remember the death of the aforementioned ‘pick axe’ brother-in-law in December 1983. At his memorial service, in the days after Christmas, the sermon made reference to the incoming new year (1984) and the parallels in the book of the same name that we should consider. Two or three weeks before Apple Computers famously did it, a vicar in Wigan was riffing on the warnings of the coming year.

There’ll always be a limit to what I can know about Horace Barker, and what I can reliably surmise, There are many closed-off avenues that, tantalisingly, could be re-opened with the provision of just a little more data. That’s the frustration of genealogy – the suspicion that one small discovery may set off a chain reaction of greater understanding. Exactly the same can be said of data mining – which makes the quest for the knowledge it can provide all the more enticing.

If you’ve ever watched the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, you’ll know that sooner or later, the path of genealogy will lead to an ancestor with a less than edifying bit of family history.

And so it was the case when my cousin and fellow genealogy enthusiast came across the story of the events at (our great-great-great grandfather) Henry Bentham’s yard in 1875. This story appeared in the The Wigan Observer and District Advertiser in July 1875. It concerns the inquest in Standish, relating to death of a 14 year-old boy, Charles Renshaw.

DEATH FROM A BLOW WITH A BRUSH AT STANDISH

Mr. Gilbertson, district county coroner, held an inquest at the Wheat Sheaf Inn, Standish, yesterday evening, on the body of Charles Renshaw, who died on Thursday morning from the effects of injuries inflicted the previous Tuesday by a man of the name of Thomas Healey. Mr. Super Intendant Beetham, Chorley, was present. Healey was present in custody.

Ann Bentham, wife of Henry Bentham, grocer, Standish, said the deceased lived with her as a servant for the last two years. He was about 14 years of age; and had told her that his father was a hairdresser and was in Australia, and that his mother, who was addicted to drinking, was in Liverpool. On Tuesday last he went out about half-past seven in the evening, and was brought home about half-past nine o’clock; but she did not see him till the following morning. He was then insensible, and he grew worse and died Thursday morning.

Seth Ollerton, Standish, son of John Ollerton, collier, Standish said he knew the deceased. He was with him near the Wheat Sheaf when the omnibus came up, about half past eight o’clock on Tuesday evening. They afterwards went into the yard, and witness and deceased and some other boys began to unfasten the horses. Wm. Bentham, or as he was called ‘Billy Dog’, who was the driver, got hold of the deceased and put him down on the ground, and rubbed his head with some straw.

The prisoner, Thos. Healey, was present, and got hold of the driver’s whip and laid on deceased with it, after telling him he had no business in the yard. Deceased refused to go out, and picked up half a brick and threw it at the prisoner, striking him on the back of the hand. Bentham, the driver, came up and took the whip from prisoner, who seized a brush that was standing at the stable door and going up to where the deceased was, struck him on the back of the head with it.

Witness was close by at the time, and could see that the deceased had another piece of brick in his hand, ready to throw at the prisoner. Deceased fell on the ground after receiving the blow with the brush, and blood came from his nose. A woman who lived in the street opposite, came and lifted the deceased up.

James Grounds and Edward Pennington were present in the yard at the time:

“We were driven twice out of the yard by you and we came in a third time, and were told by you that it was time we were at home and in bed. We went outside the gate way and deceased cursed the prisoner, and said he would not go away for him.

“Prisoner then took up the brush and said he would make him go, and struck deceased with it. All of the boys ran away but the deceased. The deceased told me that he had had a pint of whiskey that day.” – The Coroner: “I cannot put that down.” – The Sergeant of Police: “Mrs. Bentham can prove he had had no drink.”

James Grounds (13), son of James Grounds, shop keeper, Shevington, said he lived with the deceased at Bentham’s. He was with him on Tuesday night, and waited about at Chadwick’s till the omnibus from Wigan came, about 23 minutes after eight o’clock. They followed it into the Wheat Sheaf yard, and deceased began to act as if he were drunk. “‘Billy Dog’ rubbed deceased’s face with straw, and prisoner seized a whip and struck him with it. Deceased thereupon seized a stone or brick and threw it at him, and the driver took the whip from prisoner, saying he could lay on with the brush.”

Prisoner accordingly went to the stable door and got the brush, and the deceased meanwhile picked up half a brick. Witness went into the stable, and when he came out deceased was lying on the ground, near the gateway, bleeding from the nose and mouth. Prisoner said he had dazed deceased. – By the prisoner: “There were ten boys in the yard. Deceased told me he had had a sup of drink, but he did not seem to be the worse for it, as he ran a race with me a short time before this.”

Mary Sutton, wife of Robert Sutton, Standish, labourer, said she lived opposite the gateway leading to the stable yard of the Wheat Sheaf. She saw the prisoner whip the boys out of the yard at about nine o’clock on Tuesday night, and amongst others the deceased, who stood at the gateway, while the others ran away. “Prisoner whipped the deceased twice, and after the latter had thrown at stone, which hit the prisoner on the hand, he went towards the stable and returned with the brush and struck the deceased in the back of the head. The deceased fell down, and witness ran across the road and saw he was bleeding from the nose and mouth. He did not speak; and he was carried away.”

John L. Price, surgeon, Standish, said he was sent for to attend the deceased shortly after nine on Tuesday night. On arriving at the Wheat Sheaf yard he found the deceased, who was insensible, supported by two men. A plank was procured and the boy laid upon it, his head being raised by some straw. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth, and he seemed in a dangerous state. There was some ashes about his face, and on washing away the dirt he found a swelling behind the left ear.

Finding that the boy did not rally he got four men to carry him to his own home. He last saw him at nine o’clock the night previous to his death. The deceased never regained consciousness. He had made a post-mortem examination of the deceased’s body, and found a fracture of the skull at the point behind the ear where the bones meet. Death resulted from compression of the brain caused by the fracture of the skull, and might have been caused by a blow.

The Coroner summed up the evidence, and recommended a verdict of manslaughter, but the jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

Henry Bentham doesn’t come out of this story particularly well, as the owner/operator of the Omnibus – his 1871 census entry under ‘Occupation’ was ‘Grocer and Omnibus Proprietor’. His wife Ann (née Grounds) seems to have been more connected with the grocery mentioned in the census. Her brother James was also grocer, in Shevington and it is his son James (Ann’s nephew) who is the 13 year-old lodger mentioned in the story.

Henry and Ann’s eldest son, William sounds like a particularly undesirable person. Aside from cultivating the nickname ‘Billy Dog’, it is he who, at best, fails stop stop Healey from attacking the boy – and may even have encouraged that kind of behaviour. These event take place two years before the publication of Black Beauty, a story of common Victorian attitudes to animal welfare. One can only imagine if ‘Billy Dog’ was the kind of horse owner that compelled Anna Sewell to comment on the horse cruelty of the day.

Henry and Anne’s second son and William’s younger brother was James Bentham, my great-great grandfather. You can read about his exploits as he travelled across the United States, 37 years later. Their youngest brother, George had his own tale to tell of travels in North America, which I’m still researching.

Rather depressingly, this incident paints a picture of the cheapness of life and the inevitability of casual violence against children in the 1870s. Incredibly, the jury delivered a verdict of accidental death and weren’t invited to consider any charge greater than manslaughter. It’s worth considering that the facts established in this case might today support a charge of murder. Almost forty years after the publication of Oliver Twist, many of the themes that Dickens explores in that novel still seem to exist in Standish. ‘Billy Dog’ seems similar in nature to ‘Bill Sikes’, the story’s main antagonist – even though the accused in this case is his sidekick Thomas Healy. Charles Renshaw, while not an orphan, is said to have been abandoned by an absent father and a feckless mother. As with ‘Nancy’, he meets a brutal end at the hands of an abusive man.