by J.D. Marshall [Ed: This is an amalgamation of three separate magazine articles]

The old Ward Lock Guides to towns and regions of England were in the habit of remarking upon ’Literary Associations’, and upon authors of note who had written about the districts concerned. Should these things concern a serious local historian? It is true that far too much of our time is spent in front of a flickering screen, which trains us in mental rubber-necking which does not, at the same time, involve us in any real effort, ‘we are too accustomed to the ‘ooh-think-of- that’ kind of appeal, to the satisfaction of idle curiosity. To what extent, then does it matter that famous people have trodden our lanes and looked at our magnificent scenery and – perhaps – written about it?

I think (with some reservations) that it does matter. A good and vivid writer will tell us things about our own historic landscape that we might not appreciate, or that we might not have noticed. Sometimes such a writer’s descriptions have real documentary value, and, at the very worst, a rather unfashionable or stilted author will at least tell us something about the attitudes and values of his or her own age.

Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell

The Mourholme Society’s territory is exceptionally blessed in that it has had some literary attentions from remarkable people. In at least one case, the writer’s observations were not meant to be published, but appear in private letters. Many readers will know that Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell, one of the most famous ‘social novelists’ of Victorian England, was in the habit of taking holidays at Gibraltar Tower, Lindeth, in the 1850s, and, fortunately for us, she wrote about it at fair length. Her letters were published in 1966, edited by Chapple and Pollard, and they contain numerous insights into local life. The difficulties of getting supplies of provisions are mentioned in June 1858, and Mrs Gaskell wrote:

‘Silverdale is so wild a place we may be happy to get a leg of mutton at all. I have had to dine 15 people as hungry as hounds, on shrimps and bread and butter and when they asked for more to tell them that there was no bread nearer than Milnthorpe 6 miles off, and they had to come down to oatcake and be thankful.’

Mrs Gaskell, in the original letter, even gives us the the pronunciation of Milnthorpe (‘Milthrop’), and, for the rest, we are sharply reminded that carrier’s carts were apt to be slow or non-existent, and that a Victorian family could face real privation in taking a holiday.

The habit of fairly well-to-do Victorian families was to rent houses for holiday purposes, and to stay away from home for up to a month. Hence, in an undated letter (c1850), Mrs Gaskell writes about ‘our annual migration to the sea-side’, and, during a longish stay, one could acquire numerous guests. Mrs Gaskell added: ’And we are keeping holiday in (the) most rural farmhouse lodgings, so that our children learn country interests, and ways of living and thinking.‘ In 1852, she was at the Lindeth lodging again, and she remarked: ‘We may have the tower-house at any time, but there it was so close’. (Here, then, is solid evidence – she did stay in this edifice, as the story goes, but historians are often right to distrust literary folk, and there is considerable tension and suspicion between the two interests! The history of the Lake District is bedevilled by scribblers who repeat each other’s stories, but let that pass). Nor was the closeness, or fug, in the Tower the only problem; letters tended to get lost in the country lanes, and the place swarmed with poultry, and, no doubt, their characteristic scents. But Mrs Gaskell helped in the tasks of the adjoining farm as well as entertaining guests. She also used Silverdale as a base for visiting eminent friends in the Lake District, and travelled to Kendal, and then to Windermere to meet, among other people, Mrs Wordsworth and the widow of Dr Arnold at Fox How near Rydal.

She was again at Silverdale in the August of 1855, and seems to have been in and out of the place from July to early September. She was excitedly collecting material for her famous Life of Charlotte Bronte, Three years later, she explained why the Morecambe Bay scenery so entranced her (in a letter of 25 July 1858):

I think – and it is pleasant to think — that one is never disappointed in coming back to Silverdale. The secret is I think in the expanse of view – something like what gives its charm to the Campagne – such wide plains of golden sands with purple hill shadows – or fainter wandering cloud-shadows, & the great dome of sky – (We have not sate up all night on our tower this time, partly because there have been no tranquil nights…)

So, we know what the Gaskell family did as a special treat when the weather was suitable. They sat on the top of the famous tower, doubtless watching the moonlight spraying across the damp sands when the moon was in the right quarter, and, perhaps, watching the sunset in the evenings, and feeling the impact of the dawn to landward in the early morning. And here is a comment on the changes of over a century. The countryside really was quiet in those days, and one could find blessed peace and solitude. This passage could have been quoted to the irresponsible and insensitive people who wish to dam up the Bay and to turn it into a still pond for motor boats.

Let Mrs Gaskell make a few more comments. It should be mentioned that she visited Poulton (Morecambe), Grange, Seascale and other places in the area. But she and her family were still visiting Silverdale in the summer of 1861, and their connection with Morecambe Bay plainly lasted for over a decade. Their descent on Lindeth, which commenced in the July of that year, had its disadvantages. The post was not only dreadfully slow: the postman rode a pony ’almost as old as himself to Lancaster every morning to fetch the letters; delivers them to Yealand; walks here; gets thirsty on the road; drops his letters, or forgets in which of his various pockets he has put them…’ The family, it appeared, were starved of reading matter, and our local resorts had a long way to travel before they became more than ‘adventure playgrounds’ of a testing kind.

Elizabeth Gaskell died suddenly in November 1865. Many members of the Mourholme Society will have read her Mary Barton, or North and South, or Cranford (a description of her home town of Knutsford, and the most delightful of all). Her home at 84, Plymouth Grove, Manchester, is safely in the hands of that city’s university, and has become a museum dedicated to her. When we visit it, we shall also remember that she forsook it sometimes to visit our own lanes.

Edwin Waugh

The opening of the railway line from Carnforth to Ulverston (1857) brought numerous travellers and settlers on the fringes of Morecambe Bay. One of the most remarkable visitors by rail, one who had a great affection for Silverdale and its district, was the Lancashire dialect writer and topographical author, Edwin Waugh (1817-1890).

Waugh is perhaps best known for certain dialect poems, like ’Cum Wham to thy Childer an’ Me’ and ’Besom Ben’, and he lived through, and partly created, a great resurgence of dialect writing in his home county. Like many of his fellows, he had to ’addle’ a living in ordinary pursuits for much of his life, and until the age of forty, he worked as a journeyman printer, secretary and salesman, chiefly in the environment of industrial Manchester, which he heartily disliked. Like many thousands of intelligent artisans, he had a profound hankering for the countryside, and had, as a young man, been drawn into the exploration of the Lancashire moors. In his first published volume, Lancashire Sketches (1855), he exploits the possibilities of local speech to the full, and, just as interestingly, he was later enabled to do so in the case of Lonsdale and the Lake Counties, especially when he published a further volume, Rambles in the Lake Country and its Borders (1861)¹.

It will be noticed that this was written soon after the opening of the through coastal railway route. Indeed, the last mentioned book contains numerous references to the railway:

’Before the railway was made, the old way of crossing the sands from Lancaster to Ulverston must have been very striking..,(p.44); ‘the new line of railway from Lancaster to Ulverston winds by Silverdale, with the grand features of land and sea full in sight’ (p.47).

Surely this sounds just like a guide book? Yes, indeed, this is just what Waugh was really writing. He was advertising our quiet corner of England in persuasive style, resting his approach on the new accessibility of the area and the growing taste for travel which was now reaching to the artisans as well as the ‘middling’ groups in society. He has a highly personal style, loaded, it is true, with the usual Victorian clichés and phrases; but, all the same, it succeeds in being fresh and lively, and one can be sure that he has really looked at the area he is writing about. His evocation of Grange-over- Sands is superb, giving us a picture of the Crown Inn before it had reached its later uninteresting respectability. And, of course, one should never forget that he helped to make our own area popular, or fashionable. Since the great majority of our students of local history are ’offcomers’, we must feel some sympathy with Edwin Waugh.

In Rambles in the Lake Country, there are three complete chapters, making a ‘Book’ on its own near the end of the volume, with ‘Silverdale’ as the subject. In the opening sentences, Waugh remarks

‘I sometimes think it strange that I should have lived so long in Lancashire without hearing of the place before’.

Not too surprising, for the author was raised in Rochdale, a very different place, and was a young man when the first railways were built. He goes on to say that ‘the life of this retired spot is all rural repose‘, and he keeps to the theme consistently. He writes of the ‘quaint manners, language and peculiar way of life of the inhabitants’. He used the Silverdale station as his starting point, and turned left towards Slackwood and Silverdale Green, but remarks that Silverdale itself is hardly a village; there is only a ‘village part… nearest to the sea, where the two hotels, and the little hat-full of a post office, with three or four other dwellings, stand within a few yards of one another’. The author asks for ‘Mister Fawcett o’ th’ Victoria Inn’, and there was indeed such a place at that time, as well as a post office and grocery – both appear in the Mannex Directory of North Lancashire for 1865. The ‘Victoria’ was ‘a large, plain white-washed building upon high ground’, and the author discovers later that his bedroom in the inn was used by the Salford M.P. Joseph Brotherton, a famous campaigner against the Corn Laws. There are other bits of local history: ‘This is the table ‘at old Lord Derby’s steward used to receive his Arnside rents on’.

Waugh, like Mrs Gaskell, looked with fascinated eyes at the awe-inspiring sweep of the tide-empty sands: ‘Out towards Lancaster the water was in full sight, bright and smooth as a mirror’. He noted the existence of a solitary cottage known as ‘the Bath House’. More strikingly, he noticed a drove of cattle on their way from Kents Bank to the Warton shore, another piece of striking lore, because one does not usually think of the Bay as a drove road! Yet it plainly was one, and, of course, cattle regularly crossed the Solway sands in the same manner. The landlord later tells him that ‘if you’ll be up in good time i’ th’ mornin, you’ll see maybe eighty or a hundred fishin’ boats in the bay – like a fleet cornin’ up to tak th’ place’.

So, the shrimping and other vessels were as numerous as that, even in 1860, before Morecambe had properly appeared. These evocations of rural peace and quietude were, of course, enjoyed when the Carnforth furnaces had not been built, and when Barrow’s first ironworks was only beginning to smear the horizon with its smoke. Meanwhile, it is not likely that Waugh was inventing many, or any, of these observations, because he had a remarkable ear for speech, and he paints pictures of individuals emitting dialect and strange expressions. The impression, much of the time, is of a silence so unearthly that one can hear the sea going out or coming in across the Bay – not something that most of us notice today. At the same time, it should not be thought that Waugh was so sensitive that he painted scenes different from those of most other people; it was simply that he came from industrial Manchester, where the iron tyres of drays and lorries were beginning to make a frightful noise on the flags of the streets, and where hooters, whistles and buzzers were becoming the rule. Likewise, Silverdale was very thinly settled; one had to look hard to pick out the houses. We need the assistance of vivid writers to interpret the quality of life and scenery in the past.

Local history is not all ’facts’ of a down-to-earth kind; it calls for imagination in order that it can be properly understood. We are lucky that Edwin Waugh visited the district when he did.

Many of the ’literary associations’ of our area are mere accidents, glancing and fortuitous. How could it be otherwise? Hundreds of distinguished people have passed through Carnforth station on their way round the Bay, all of them carrying their own unforgettable impressions of the district, and some of them taking away images that were less than pleasant.

I recall that Lord Bullock, somewhere in his writings, describes how he stood on Grange-over-Sands station and heard the news of the outbreak of the last war. Our area has attracted distinguished scholars of one kind and another, and one only wishes that more of them had written about it. On another occasion, however, one of the most gracious of our novelists in this century did leave a charming note behind her. Many members of the Society will have read, and been enthralled by, Winifred Holtby’s South Riding. Much of Winifred’s story is told in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Friendship, and her personality is immortalised in Winifred’s own letters, which have been published (Letters to a Friend, 1971). One can imagine this tall, eager, unspoilt young woman journeying through Carnforth one autumn day in 1922, when memories of the war, and university, were still keen. Alas, she did not say anything about Mourholme territory, but, on her way to lecture in Seascale, she did stop in Grange, and wrote a letter ’On a rock by the sea at Grange-on-Sands, Oct. 9th:

‘The station comes right up to a rocky beach, and is practically washed by the sea. It’s a glorious day, windy and sunny, with seagulls blowing about the air, so down I came to a rock…The sea in front of me is molten steel. The sky is a faint, steelish blue, and there are sea birds crying. I wish that my paper could smell of salt for you…‘

Published in Mourholme Magazines Issue 5 Autumn 1983, Issue 6 Winter 1983 and Issue 7 Spring 1984