The cockpits were in general a hurly-burley place where all social classes mingled intent on their frenzied betting and the matches. Though every town of any size boasted a cockpit, country gentlemen were known to hold matches in their drawing rooms. This pastime was a common enough practice to prompt furniture makers to offer cockfighting chairs. It is said that the new wife of the Earl of Derby prevailed upon him to end the practice of cockfighting in their drawing room.
For all the evils inherent in the fighting sports, they did play an incidental role in the movement of sport towards more equitable competition. Cocks fought in a ring and were precisely paired by weight in all the more heavily staked cock fights, much more so than were their human counterparts in bare-knuckles bouts. Gamecocks were also thoroughly trained for their match long before any but rudimentary training was thought necessary for human fighters. The popularity of cocking and the large sums staked on the contests were a strong incentive to refine and balance the competitions. The current set up for tournaments had its genesis in cock-fighting
By the end of the 18th century regard for the sport divided along class lines. The aristocracy and the labouring class rather favoured the sport whilst the liberal educated middle classes rather frowned on it. Local Miners a hardened breed in those days tended to support cockfighting and would flock into Newcastle in race week in June. The convention being that cock fighting at the ample yard in the Cock in the grounds of St Giles take place in morning before the bloods went off to Knutton to watch the races. Other popular venues included the Green at Penkhull and a secluded spot near Salverley Green between Cresswell and Fulford. There is a local story that a posse of local police raised the establishment and pursued the local gentry across fields in a vain attempt to catch participants
.
Leek itself was a popular place for blood sports in the early 19th century. An 80-year-old man writing in the 1880s recalled the Leek of his youth and the raucous atmosphere that followed sporting activities
"I can remember the block of stone in the centre of the market place to which the bull was tethered, and also the crowds, which used to assemble to see the "game" though I was too small to venture there. At Wakes Time there used to be bear baiting on Ball Haye Green and in the Black Swan yard. Wakes and Fairs have not altered greatly in character, except that the presence of the police has checked the old times battle which took place between "town" and "country" and between different sets of men from different villages. I have seen as many as three of these battles take place simultaneously in the Market Place and though fists were the only weapons used, the combatants carried marks for many days afterwards".
But even by 1820 the sport was falling out of favour and by 1849 the practice was made illegal. Scotland followed by the end of the century. This does not mean the blood sport ended participants still carried out the nefarious activity even up to the present day.
The story of John Nadin executed for the murder of his master Farmer Robert Brough in August 1731 is a very well known one in the area. Nadin came to work as a labourer at White Lee a farm owned by Robert Brough, initially it is said that the two men got on well. There is a local legend that Nadin saved the life of the farmer when he fell into a flooded River Dane. However, a woman comes into story with fatal consequences. Brough’s wife, Julia was so passionately in love with the labourer she eventually persuaded him to murder her husband, only to betray him to the police after the deed was done. The evidence was stacked up against him and after a short trial at Stafford, he was found guilty and returned to Leek to face the gallows. The judge ordered that he was to hang at his master’s door and afterwards his body to be conveyed to Gun Hill, and hung in chains. Nadin spent his last night in a pub- the Cock- which stands on the site of the present Tourist Information Office in Leek. No doubt in his misery he will have heard the drunken carousing of the townspeople anticipating his lingering death. He was the last person to be hanged from the public gibbet locally and witnessed by the choir of Leek Parish Church and a large crowd of morbid onlookers. According to Henry Miller writing in his book Olde Leek it was said that the body hung on the gibbet until the body fell apart.
But what exactly was meant by gibbeting? The hanging up of a body by chains and in an iron framework became more commonplace after the 18th century. It is thought by historians to be a response to a crime wave. Lawmakers thought that by displaying the body of the criminal in this way that it would serve as a deterrent to others who might be thinking of a life of crime- think of the gibbet as a Georgian form of the CCTV. The body of the criminal was displayed either at the place of the crime or at a prominent spot to attract as much horror as possible.
The body of the executed man was covered with pitch which acted as an effective preservative. There is a story of an executed murderer in the 1760s near Coventry whose remains could still be seen 60 years after his death. The conserving effects of the bitumen were not always so effective. The body would often be picked at by birds or insects and gradually disintegrated birds sometimes nested in the cavities of the body that had open up.
Even more terrible were stories of criminals found guilty of particularly heinous crimes of being locked alive in the iron cage of the gibbet and left to starve to death although this cruel practice was dispensed with by the time of the first Elizabeth.
By the 19th century the sight of some wretch hanging from a gibbet was a common sight and hard it is to believe children were sometimes given time off from school to see the edifying spectacle of a criminal’s remains treated in this way.
There were many gibbets scattered around the country. They were often marked on maps. It is recorded that nearly 100 were erected on Hounslow Heath- an area west of London and a haunt of highwaymen- alone. A gibbet still stands on Caxton Heath on the road between Cambridge and St Neots and one can well imagine how the siting of the gibbet and the rotting human remains carried within its chains must have shocked the locals. Dickens captures the sense of the supernatural that gibbets exude well in Great Expectations. At the beginning of the novel Magwich the convict is described as lumbering towards the gibbet on the forlorn marsh, its chains holding the skeletal remains of a pirate. They were generally seen to be haunted places as the ghost of the miscreant yearned for a Christian burial. Gibbets were often situated on parish boundaries stopping the troubled soul from wandering too far.
The last occasion that a body was gibbeted occurred in 1832 and this is an instance when the old world met the new in that the victim was a trade unionist William Jobling, who had led a coal strike in the North East. He was arrested and convicted of a trumped up (or at least this is what his supporters say), charge of murder. Shortly, afterwards the law changed and gibbets began to be taken down although it is reported that the gibbet on Gun Hill was still standing as late as the 1870s.
The 1999 film "Sleepy Hollow" starring Johnny Depp features a headless horseman who terrorises a remote community in upstate New York during the early years of the 19th century. The phantom slaughters the locals before being packed off to hell by the actions of the hero. Tales of headless ghosts often crop up all over the country and Staffordshire Moorlands has its own examples of such a phenomena which panicked the people of the area over hundred years ago. One winter’s night in the 1900s an Onecote farmer was returning from Leek market. He had a successful day at market and did not notice the sound of thundering hooves on that lonely moor coming up fast behind him. Suddenly, he was picked up and found himself seated on horse back behind a headless horseman. The horse galloped over hedges and through fields clearing obstacles effortlessly. Eventually the farmer was thrown from the horse dazed and injured near to his home, and shortly afterwards he died. Another local shortly afterwards encountered the dreadful spectre and survived the experience, but his horse and dog both died of fright.
Seven clergyman were got together to exorcize the spectre and managed to compel it to speak. The horseman told them that he was one of four evil spirits that were compelled to wander the earth until the end of time. A writer recording in the 1940s added two other elements to the story. It was suggested that it was the ghost of a peddler murdered by robbers who as a macabre joke cut off his head and set the headless body on a horse; or it was the ghost of a knight killed in the wars with the Scots whose horse was bringing his master home to the Moorlands
.
I can well imagine on a dark night people in the remote country areas listening out in a state of fear for the sound of a neighing house and the clatter of galloping hooves on ice hardened ground thinking that the phantom was in the area.
Another headless ghost on a white horse and clad in armour is also alleged to hunt the lanes between Farley and Alton and in the neighbouring county of Derbyshire a lane between Great Longstone and Ashford in the water is said to be haunted by a procession of 12 men carrying an empty coffin thought by a folklorist to be a death omen.
The headless ghost is one of the classic ghost stereotypes present in folk tradition throughout Europe. It has been suggested that it is a shorthand way of talking about apparitions, like ghosts being dressed in white or rattling chains. It is a curiosity because death by decapitation was a rare form of punishment from the Middle Ages onwards and it was a fate usually reserved for the aristocracy as readers of the "Orrible History" series will no doubt remember. Such stories however do crop up throughout the country and for some authorities it was believed that they were often used to keep people off the streets so that criminals could engage in their nefarious activities. In 1804 a correspondent in the Morning Chronicle noted that a smuggling gang operating along the Pembrokeshire coast travelled in a hearse drawn by the imitation ghosts of six headless white horses in order to frighten off custom officers.
Others have proposed that the preponderance of "headless" ghost sightings in the west of the country is that it is an echo of pre Christian beliefs. The Celts practised a cult of collecting heads as they believed that the soul was located there and at death the head is separated from the body as the soul departs. The severed head was a powerful symbol from them as indicated in the medieval Welsh tale of Bendigeidfran or Bran the Blessed whose head lies buried in the foundations of the Tower of London as a palladium against foreign invasion or the decapitation of the Green Knight in the poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" the climax of which is played out some experts believe at Ludschurch in the Staffordshire Moorlands.
I have always appreciated Ken Dodd and recently I summoned up enough courage to write to him. Ken Dodd has been an entertainer as long as I have been alive. He started the year before I was born in 1954. I recall him on TV in the 60s and of course the Diddy Men. There used to be a TV puppet series in around 1965. When we were only holiday in Wales we found a rather battered copy with Mick the Marmiliser and Dicky Mint. Phoebe has the copy now. My letter to Dodd tells all, but in chatting away to others it is clear that for many he has been a central part of their lives. Someone in their early 50s was telling me that they saw him on Morecambe Pier when he was 7. Another friend of mine determined not to like him because of Dodd’s supposed Tory sympathies went to a Christmas event in Burslem determined not to like him but Ken won him over. I suppose I like him because he is last of a breed that stretches back to the Victorian times. The torch has been passed from Dan Leno to George Robey to Max Miller to Sid Field and on to Ken Dodd and from then perhaps Peter Kay.
Dear Mr Dodd,
I thought that I would drop you line because I am a great admirer of your work. Truth is I have been working up the courage to write to you and the opportunity presented itself when I was researching an article for a local newspaper on the 1950s. I saw an advert in the Leek Post and Times dated July 1956 for the summer show at the Central Pier at Blackpool. You were second on the bill below Jimmy James and above Jimmy Clitheroe. I suppose most people were, physically anyway, were above Jimmy Clitheroe.
I will always regard a show I saw you do on the "Good Old Days" that was recorded on Norwegian Television in September 1975. I was living in a remote part of the country and feeling a little home sick when you came on following the typical orotund introduction from Leonard Sachs. You stopped half way through the show to remove a coat hanger, which I still think one of the funniest things. It made me very happy and for a time forget my loneliness.
I have seen you a few times live including a performance at Ellesmere Port- "Ellesmere Port is not twinned with anywhere, but it does have a suicide pact with Grimsby". And at the Victoria Hall in Hanley as you warned we did get home to Leek as the milkman was arriving. However. I often think that the idea of a suicide pact could be extended to include my hometown Stoke on Trent but the suicide pact would also involve Hull and Burnley.
I work part time on the tills at Morrison’s in Leek so I try to work in a bit of your material especially when someone buys a cucumber. "What a wonderful day to push a cucumber through a neighbours letterbox and shout the Martians have landed".
If it is a good day I manage a bit of my own material. A man bought two bottles of wine and a tin of Brasso. I warned him of the consequences of getting them mixed up ""a terrible end, but a lovely finish". I hope you approve.
Regards
What was Charlie Chaplin's early life like?
Thus by the time he was ten, he had encountered a range of experiences greater than most of us know in long lifetimes. He had known abject poverty and hunger, and the loneliness and deprivation of life in workhouses and children's homes. He had witnessed at close quarters alcoholism, madness and death. For much of the time he survived only by his own initiative and wit.
It was a life, which would simply have killed many ordinary children. But this child was not ordinary. He had a strength and resilience, which appears phenomenal.
And then at ten years old, his life changed. He went to work. And his work, like his parents', and thanks to his father's connections, was in the music hall. He was engaged to dance and sing with a juvenile act called 'The Eight Lancashire Lads.'
The music halls of those times provided an incomparable schooling in method, technique and discipline. A music hall act had to seize and hold its audience and to make its mark within a very limited time - between six and sixteen minutes. The audience was not indulgent, and the competition was relentless. Every performer had to learn the secrets of attack and structure, the need to give the act a crescendo - a beginning, a middle and a great exit - to grab the applause. He had to learn to command every sort of audience.
By the time he was 14 Chaplin was touring with a company in the role of the Billy in a play written by Conan Doyle based on his great character Sherlock Holmes.
"Sherlock Holmes" was remarkable for its staging. There was total darkness during which the scenes changed, an unprecedented use of blackouts; and a mass of electric equipment to provide such novel lighting effects as the glow of Holmes' cigar in the darkness. The part of Billy was a good part for him. Chaplin made a half a dozen appearances in the course of the play, and has quite funny dialogue, elaborately written in cockney dialogue. It toured the provincial theatres of the north and the Midlands and it arrived in Hanley at the Palace of Varieities, the Theatre Royal for a 6-day tour beginning on the 12th April 1904
" Some 50 years ago the basin was a scene of bustling activity with limestone being broken into ballast grades by large groups of men: limestone was burned into agricultural lime. On the other side of the canal brick making was practised and further into the valley coal was mined from galleries running into the valley sides"
I have been an advocate of expanding the railway for some time and think that this development has excellent potential for the area along with the tourism scheme at Whiston on the site of the quarry.
Both plans offer the possibility of jobs sorely needed in the area. It also could also cut down on car usage to Alton Towers. On the same day you carried as the Churnet Valley protestors meeting you carried a report on the latest unemployment figures of 1,100 for the Moorlands and 8,000 for the Potteries.
I am sure that many of the unemployed as well as some of the under employed locally would relish the prospect of new jobs. Or are the well-heeled protestors bothered about the lot of those without jobs?
As an incurable "bleeding heart" I would like to comment on Martin Tideswell article on the review of incapacity benefit the Government is undertaking. I might take a benevolent view on this but I am not naïve a trap that martin falls into. He assumes that the authority has the best interests of the claimant at heart and that this exercise is either cost or target driven. I can assure him it is and the private medical companies contracted by the DWP to carry out the tests on claimants are motivated by such considerations. It also reduces the welfare bill as JSA is at a lower rate than incapacity benefit. That is the driver in this review.
When I was a volunteer at a local CAB I was certainly aware under the previous Government that people were being passed fit who seemed not to be. This was particularly evident as far as people with mental health problems were concerned. The test as I understood it was crude in determining an individuals mental health state and on appeal many of the cases were won by organisations such as the CAB. I believe that the guidelines have been tightened further.
The target culture is also responsible for removing clients arbitrary from JSA according to a national newspaper if they are deemed not to be trying hard enough to secure employment without right of appeal pitching people into poverty.
And of course nothing is said of the welfare dependent private companies who are set to make large amounts of money from contracts delivering a questionable "welfare to work" service. The Chief Executive of A4E, for instance, is set to make £1.4 million a salary that dwarfs any senior local government officer.
Of course it is in everybody’s interest to return to work and again to answer Martin’s dismissal of the evidence there are not many jobs out there. In Leek recently there have been reports of hundreds of people applying for a handful of jobs at a local rendering company. I was speaking to a man in his late 50s who has been out of work for nearly 12 months despite many applications. If it were not true how come the job supplement has fallen from 8 pages from a few years ago to only a hundred of jobs now? This position will probably worsen when the scores of former public workers joining the register in the next few weeks.
It is not a question of blame and if it is it is not appropriate to fix it on the poorest and the most vulnerable for the state the country is in. We need to rebuild the local economy as Martin states but we need a plan and vision objectives lacking when large sums of money have been handed out previously by Government have failed to deliver.
I have been unemployed and I know people who are unemployed. It is a miserable experience and contrary to popular belief the level of benefit is not high. £65 a week is not a lavish amount to try and live on. Most of the people who know what it is like to be out of work hate being in this predicament. And to answer his last question, like his friend, yearn escape it.
