Victorian Theatre

In the final weeks of the year that saw the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens it is appropriate to revisit an aspect of life that the writer loved -the Theatre. I am thinking particularly of the provincial touring company immortalised in “Nicholas Nickelby”.

 The Inns of Leek would have seen real life characters unlike the fictional Vincent Crumles the actor- manager who appears in the book. They would have been part of the local scene especially as improvements in roads made travel easier from the late 18th century onwards. A favourite revenue of the actors was the Swan and the Red Lion. I have seen a playbill from 1843 for a production of “Othello” in the Red Lion. In the 18th century the Swan had a theatre at the back of the pub and was used by a number of touring companies. It is thought that the first performance in Leek of Richard Sheridan’s play the Rivals was performed.

It most famous association was with a celebrated 18th century actress Harriet Mellon who first appeared at the Swan in 1789 and then two years later when the company wintered in Leek. In late 1790s she broke into the West End Theatre and her fame was assured.

 Sometimes things could go wrong and the same venue much later saw a performance of “ King Lear” in 1878 which was bought to an abrupt halt when one of the actresses was accidentally stabbed. Fortunately the injury was not serious.

A report in a Derbyshire paper in 1850 described a company in Ashbourne on enroute to Leek with productions of “Macbeth”, “Romeo and Juliet” and the “ Rose of Ettrick Vale” with Mr Thornton, of which more later, “playing the pantaloon”

What the quality of performance witnessed by audiences of the time can be surmised by character sketches of the actors who appeared in “Thespian Dictionary”

Mr Henry Thornton: “As an actor he boasts of that merit which constitutes a good country performer, for he can bustle through a part with considerable ease, though unacquainted with the authors words”.

Mr George Cooke: “This actor has experienced both the frowns and smiles of fortune; he is consequently soon conquered by the Tuscan Grape”

Harold Davies MP for Leek and a trip to Vietnam 1965

It is a very rare occasion that the antics of a Leek MP would be the subject of a question at a US Presidential Press Conference, but it did happen. The President was Lyndon Johnson, the Leek MP and the extraordinary incident was a secret peace mission to North Vietnam undertaken by Harold Davies at the behest of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in July 1965.

But first a little explanation is required Davies a fiery left wing MP from south Wales was first elected to the Leek constituency in the Labour landslide of 1945.

He was a very assiduous MP, which is proved by the incredible hard work he put into a constituency, which at the time included a part, of what is now Stoke on Trent. Reading the newspapers from the 1950s and 60s it seems that Davies was everywhere. He was involved in rural issues especially the supply of water to the remote parts of the constituency, helped secure the main office site for the Britannia Building Society, and a keen interest in comprehensive education were just some of the many initiatives that wore the Davies stamp.He was an ardent supporter of public housing in areas of the constituency such as Weston Coyney as well as keeping the Post and Times regularly supplied with copy of his parliamentary exploits. He was a regular contributor in debates. It seems he had to be as his parliamentary majority leastways in the 50s barely rose above 1,000 votes.

Davies was also well connected and during the 50s a stream of principle Labour Party figures spoke in the constituency including future Labour party leaders in Jim Callaghan and Michael Foot. But perhaps the greatest coup was during the 1955 General Election when the great hero of the left the creator of the NHS and fellow Welshman Aneurin Bevan spoke at Kidsgrove Town Hall.

However one thing is certain Davies was an expert on South East Asia and wrote frequently on the subject often in learned journals which were carried fatefully by the Post and Times.

Davies wrote critically of American action in Korea especially the gung ho tactics of the American general McArthur during the early 50s. The Leek MP visits Moscow in 1952 commenting that he had previously visited the Soviet Union capital in 1938 when he was a WEA Lecturer. He seems remarkably uncritical of life in Moscow in whet was the last year of the tyrannical rule of Stalin. Davies writes about the happy citizenry when the reality for many Soviet people was terror and repression and the Gulags, but then many on the left were blind to the cruelties of the Communist system.

In 1955 Davies undertakes a long and difficult trip to Mao’s China writing regular articles to the Post and Times on what he found in the People’s Republic

“ China is not a side-show in world affairs. She is a living and powerful reality. The West must adjust itself to the regime of Mao Tse Tung and it is here to stay.” He visited farms, factories and mines in China and praised the economic development in the country barely a decade from the time that the Communists had taken power.

“ The miners would have been home in the North Staffs Coalfield. The seam I saw was at an angle of 45 degrees and some six feet in height was being cut at a time. I crawled for some thirty yards to the main conveyer belt and followed it to the main loading belt where a Russian diesel engine puffed along, pulling some twenty or more trams to the pit bottom”

“This is China the old and the new tumbling incongruously into the lap of history”

In 1959 Davies was on his travels again to the Philippines and Viet Cong when he met the leader of the North Vietnamese Communist Party Ho Chi Minh. Ho had fought in campaigns firstly against the Japanese during the Second World War and in the early 50s against the French. The French colonialists were beaten and the country became involved in a civil war between the Communist North and the Non Communist South. 1959 involved North Vietnamese in insurgency actions in South.

To his credit Davies at an early stage did not believe in the prevailing military doctrine espoused by elements of the American Government that Vietnam was another piece in the falling dominoes following China and Korea and that the country was rife for a communist take over. Davies believed and history has proved him correct in this analysis that Vietnam was a civil war.

By the early 60s it was clear that Britain would soon see a return of a Labour Government and with a new Labour Party leader Harold Wilson in 1963 the return of a Labour Government at the General Election in the following year occurred. However the Labour Government was not in a strong position with a majority of 4. The new Prime Minister had to appease the left wing of the Labour party represented by people like Harold Davies and there was also the problem of the Americans. The US President in this period was a no nonsense bluff Texan Lyndon Johnson who had succeeded the assassinated Kennedy in 1963. Johnson was convinced of the need to escalate the war in Vietnam and wanted to involve British troops. Wilson pointed out to the President that Britain was doing its bit fighting Communist rebels in Malaysia. This would not rub with the President and Wilson conceived of the idea of a secret peace mission to involve a man who was known to have a keen interest in the region. He asked Davies to take part in a secret peace mission.

In July 65 Davies was prepared to take the long trip to South East Asia. The hope was that Davies would be allowed a visa to visit Hanoi and be able to see the senior political figures in the North Vietnamese capital. However it was important that the trip was kept secret from both the British and Vietnamese perspective. According to Wilson the details of the visit were disastrously leaked to the British press. By the time the Leek MP got to Hanoi there was bitter recrimination and Davies was ostracised seeing only minor officials and no meeting with Ho Chi Minh.

The Americans were highly critical of the visit and had no confidence in the Welshman. They were that Davies was travelling on his own, did not have diplomatic experience, did not speak French was a talkative left wing sympathiser and “ and is not noted for his judgement”

Some British Foreign Office officials agreed with the judgement of the Americans and the British Ambassador to the US David Bruce believed that Harold Davies was a person who “ could be easily used by the communists” and that the Prime Minister should never have supported the proposal. One of the Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman damned the initiative as a gimmick. Another Barbara Castle was aware that Harold Wilson feared the press leak undermined the secrecy of the visit but was “well satisfied with the gesture” mainly because it put some distance between the British and the Americans. The central problem was that neither the Vietnamese nor the American were in the game of going down a path of a negotiated settlement. The Hawks outnumbered the Doves and both were committed to escalating the war. President Johnson still felt that there was something to gain by building up American military involvement in South East Asia. News came from the White House that “ further British initiatives such as the Davies trip would do more harm than good because it undermined the American position and gave an impression to the Communists that the Americans were suing for peace.

Back in Leek the Post and Times carried a small article headlined “ Leek MP hits world headlines with visit to war torn Vietnam”. The article mentioned the visit in the briefest of details.


The Vietnam War of course dragged on throughout the 60s and is regarded as part of the iconography of the decade. It effectively wrecked the political career of President Johnson and ended with the South Vietnamese capital Saigon to Viet Cong forces in 1975. Many millions of Vietnamese were killed, as were 60,000 Americans and it has taken for some time to recover. Harold Davies finally lost the Leek seat following boundary changes in 1970 and went to the House of Lords as Lord Davies of Leek

On reclaiming William Morris

During the early 80s my parents visited the dacha or summerhouse of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky outside Moscow. My father commented about the homosexuality of the composer. Despite all the evidence to the contrary the guide declared that Tchaikovsky was not gay.

This anecdote came into my mind following a visit to the National Trust property Wightwick House just outside Wolverhampton. It id a splendid Arts and Craft inspired house built in the 1890s by the paint manufacturer Manders family. It was inspired by a Oscar Wilde lecture that one of the family attended in 1884 on the House Beautiful. The house is filled with the art of the Pre Raphaelite Movement central to which is William Morris. The influence of Morris in the place was palpable. There was a plaque of Morris with the words “artist, craftsman and designer” surrounding his image. The house and its contents were certainly beautiful. But there is one think that is missing in all the displays that was that Morris was a socialist and a Marxist one at that. Incidentally so was Oscar Wide!  In the same way that the Soviets were pained by Tchaikovsky’s sexuality it seems that the National Trust appear embarrassed by Morris’s political belief. It was central to his work. A driver of the Arts and Craft movement was a rejection of the excesses of late capitalism of the Victorian era. Fiona McCarthy’s biography that came out in 1995 has a chapter on the impact that witnessing the living conditions of the workers in Leek had on leading Morris to embrace a radical response. We do a great injustice to Morris if we attempt to neuter him by overlooking his politics. He saw his passion for the cause as an extension of his work as an artist and a designer. He put it very simply: "nothing can argue me out of this feeling," he wrote, "which I say plainly is a matter of religion to me: the contrasts of rich and poor are unendurable and ought not to be endured by either rich or poor." It could serve as a creed for today

Beating a deadly disease

Ellastone Parish records state that it was Katherine Bott a servant to Mr Hugh Sheldon who was the first to die. She must have thought she had the flu when she fell ill in May 1636. There would have been headaches, tiredness and sickness. At this time, she would have been too sick to carry on her normal duties.  Small red spots later emerged on her tongue and mouth. These spots develop into sores that broke open spreading the virus. At this time she was highly contagious. Death would have followed by the second week. It may have come from the intense fever causing dehydration, kidney and heart failure. The disease that Katherine succumbed to was a scourge- Smallpox. The disease entered into the country the previous century although it had been known about since Roman times. The parish record in Ellastone chronicles its progress that summer of 1636 with Katherine the first victim. John Weston, John Smith, quickly followed her until the 10th victim Prudence Walker died on August 10th. The disease was to become a frequent visitor to the Staffordshire Moorlands with epidemics breaking out regularly. Even as late as 1878 there was a report of an outbreak in the West End part of Leek.

Smallpox was particularly successful in virgin populations. The Spanish inadvertently owe much of their success in conquering the Aztecs in the 16th century to smallpox. Unlike the Spanish, the native Indians had no immunity to the disease, having never encountered it before. It wiped out millions of them.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is credited with introducing variolation to Britain in 1721. Severely pockmarked herself after surviving the illness, she learnt about the method in Constantinople, where her husband was the British Ambassador. She had her children inoculated- the first Westerner to do so, She is buried at Lichfield Cathedral. It was Edward Jenner who later developed vaccination that proved the turning point

 The fight against smallpox, one of the great killers of mankind, proved successful .A concerted effort by the World Health Organisation to eliminate the disease through vaccination triumphed. In the 1950s 2 million people were dying of smallpox throughout the world. By 1980 the disease had been eradicated- surely one of mankind’s better moments

Horace Barks's War 1914-8 Part 1 Mobilisation

I knew Horace Barks in the last years of his life. In 1982 I was elected as a Councillor in Stoke and put on the Museums Committee. Horace was a former Chairman of the Museums Committee and an Alderman of the City. He had been born in Ipstones in 1896 and I knew about his First World War service and that he had been involved in the Somme. Horace was also a strong supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He was press officer at the time and he proved an able spokesman and given his service in the trenches he validated the pacifist position. One of his last acts was to send a food parcels to the Greenham Common women.

In the autumn of 1981 Horace gave an account of his war service to a local historian Michael Ollershaw who produced an account in a local magazine in 1988

On the wars outbreak Horace enlisted into The Reserve Battalion, which was later, became the 2/5 North Staffs part of the 46th North Midland Division. Horace recalls spending Christmas at Saffron Walden in Essex. An incident that happened on Christmas night made an impression on the young Barks.

“ I remember sleeping in a house similar to this, but the walls between the walls were very thin. We were there at Christmas 1914. There was a father and son called Jones and the father got very drunk. He was in his late 30s. I suppose that they were doing a little bayonet charging on the wall and the bayonet came through the wall above my head. I was a bit worried by Jones”

He narrowly missed going over the top in the Neuve Chappelle offensive in the spring of 1915 but a transport problem- they were supposed to be conveyed to the front by London buses meant there section in the line was taken by the Duke of Wellington Regiment. That regiment suffered badly in the subsequent engagement.

Horace had a rough calculation of the losses one could normally expect “going over the top”

“ If you were over 800 strong the normal thing we would mean between 100-150 would be killed, about three times would be wounded and about 150 would come back”

Part of the problem with the failure of the attack was a shell shortage. Horace spoke to a man from Leek in an artillery battery who told him that “they got a shell a gun a day perhaps”.

King’s regulation always unsettled him..” each morning we had to listen to them being read out and at the finish. and shall be shot or such less punishment as the act decrees those last words. I must have heard them so often”

There is an interesting account of the “Live and Let live” way in which both sides engaged

“ I was on the firing step. There was an old soldier from the Notts/ Derby next to me. I could see the heads and shoulders of three German soldiers wearing the pork pie hat in a gap in their parapet. The old soldier said, “ what’s up chum”. I had got it into my head to shoot that sort of game”

“ I was not a blood thirsty fellow. I was an Internationalist but on the other hand that was what I came for I suppose”

The old soldier suggested that I shoot at a chimney He said that we had it pretty quiet and we want it to remain so. If you manage to hit anybody- he did not think I would- they might reply with shells.

“ Live and let live could be disturbed by the arrival of a young officer referred to as a Thruster”. Barks recalled a conversation with Sir George Wade of the pottery firm and an officer in the Machine Gun Corps who wanted to pursue the war with more aggression.

“ When I relieved a bunch of French soldiers south of Armentieres one of the chaps asked if I wanted a wash in the morning. We went over the top and there was a brook running through No Man’s Land between the two lines and they said if you went out to wash the Germans would be on the other side of the brook. 

Sir George said that I would stop that when I am in charge. The British fired over the heads of the Germans. I thought that it was a bit filthy to shoot to kill although a nice wound would have done some of them good”

The earth moves in Flash lane

North Staffordshire is an area beset with earth tremors. It has a number of geological faults to the west at Apedale and the Red Rock fault, which, may have had a bearing on the problems, faced during the 70s. However earthquakes were known even before the large-scale mining. One of the earliest earthquakes ever investigated was one centred in the Midlands in February 1575, which was felt as far away as York and Dublin. And Boswell the biographer of Doctor Johnson noted a minor earthquake-hitting Leek in September 1777 causing the locals to flee into the streets.

 But it is with the advent of deep coalmines after the Second War, which saw acceleration locally of the recording of earth tremors. At the start of the 1970s movements were felt in Normacott and Longton felt to be caused by mining activity at Hem Heath but the real centre of the disturbances was Trent Vale where disturbances were happening almost on a daily basis

Frequent convulsions led to a two-year investigation by Edinburgh University, whose findings eventually placed responsibility on the National Coal Board. Evidence from seismic tests showed that the tremors were caused by underground workings at Hem Heath Colliery. Tensions underground caused energy to be released which resulted in tremors at the surface. The Edinburgh findings as well as other local research were initially opposed by the National Coal Board who believed the effect was caused by the natural faults in the area. Locals resisted this view. Mining was taking place near the Apedale fault and this was exacerbating the situation. Barrie Seckerson a long term resident of the area was equally convinced that the Coal Board were to blame as the tremors only occurred during the working week “ every resident is convinced that we are dealing with a problem created by the NCB. If it is a problem caused by Mother Nature then she appears to be on a five day week,” he wrote in a letter of July 1976.

Residents in Flash Lane recalls the tremor in July 1975 which detached the gable end of a house from the roof, leaving a gap of seven feet. Alice Evans of Riverside Road, Trent Vale recalled a series of tremors in the summer of 1976, which caused the TV aerial to shake, and made teacups and saucers to rattle. And in another incident a chimney pot collapsed narrowly missing a nursery, which had to be closed. Local MP Jack Ashley was involved early on and felt a tremor himself when visiting constituents in Flash Lane. He raised the matter in Parliament, which led to an investigation of the phenomena. The Minister Peter Shore set up a working party with the brief of investigating the causes of the disturbances

Seven monitoring stations were set up, covering an area which included Trent Vale, Hanford, Trentham, Clayton, Oakhill and Penkhull, all linked to Keele University.

In June 1976 a geological team from Keele staged a test tremor of their own with a 100 lb. bomb was buried 90ft below a field at Clayton to help scientists find out the cause of the earth movements. This event did not prove conclusive, as the explosion did not lead to seismic disturbances in the immediate area

The Head of Geography, Mr B Whittaker at Edward Orme School involved himself in the brouhaha who believed that the low rainfall might have had an impact on the waterfall.

“ It is conceivable that any shrinkage of the strata as a consequence of it drying out and the readjustment of the strata will lead to an increase in earthquake. He wrote in a letter to the Sentinel in the summer of 1976.

Some years before the earth tremors shook Trent Vale, Keele's Professor F Wolverson Cope conducted his own research into "shakes, vibrations and unusual noises" detected around the area. In the early 70s he reported his conclusions that they were caused by old mine workings and calmed public fears about the possibility of a major earthquake in the district, saying this had been overstated.

The story had a positive ending as householders affected by the tremors in the vicinity of Flash Lane received compensation from the NCB after negotiations in the late 1970s.

But the issue of earth movement in the area continued even after the last pit closed. In 1984 many areas of North Staffordshire and South Cheshire were affected by a widespread earthquake centred in North Wales which measured around 5.2 on the Richter Scale. The quake was described as the biggest ever recorded in Britain. A sequence of earth tremors hit Smallthorne in the late 1980s and even last month the Keele Seismological Unit picked up a 2.4 reading centred on Light Oaks.

 The earth continues to move in North Staffs

Another Child is bored in the grotto

"Laurence Olivier was once asked to play Santa for a friend's Christmas party, but his portrayal was so frightening that children at the party ran screaming in terror into the street. My performance as Santa at a north-west shopping centre was not so Grand Guignol, but simply sitting there was enough to scare some of the children who passed through the grotto.

"I now have a good in-depth knowledge of the consumer habits of young children and as I have a two-year-old daughter I was able to trade knowledgeable banter about Peppa Pig and Bob the Builder. The intricacies of Game Boy and other computer games escaped me but I was able to turn the conversations with older children around by asking whether they enjoyed school or what was their favourite football team.

"Sometimes you could see the neuroses of the parent transmitted to the child. A rather grave little boy looked at the bench I was sitting on and declined to sit with me for his photo on the grounds that it was not safe. A future career in the Health and Safety Inspectorate beckons, I thought.

"The last time I played Santa was when I was an education welfare officer during the 80s. A school caretaker had played the part for years before being rumbled by one of the older boys. Looking into the old gentleman's eyes he blurted out: 'It's bloody Bill Bates.' I became briefly Mr Bates's replacement.

"This latest shift as Santa reminded me of my old education welfare job as it was obvious that many of the kids were playing truant with acquiescent parents and I felt like revealing myself as an undercover truancy officer at the right moment to the surprised miscreants.

"The most touching moment was when a woman with severe disabilities came into my grotto. She held my hand and told me that Abba was her favourite group, and her favourite track was Dancing Queen. I told her mine was Voulez-Vous.

"At the end of the day I caught the train and tucked into the novel I'd bought to read on the journey. Resurrection by Tolstoy: another elderly geezer with a long white beard."