A STRONG WOMAN WITH A BIT OF SIDE
My grandmother, Cheshire farmer’s wife Sarah ‘Sally’ Darlington, was a daunting, formidable but ultimately good-hearted lady who jousted and sparred with my mother. My mother was sometimes driven to fury at the things that were said – and in turn she gave as good as she got.
Of course, there is a very long tradition of strong women in the North West of England.
Cartimandua was the prototype. As mentioned by Tacitus in AD 51, she ruled the Brigantes of the North West with a succession of weaker husbands and consorts. Of "illustrious birth", she seems to have inherited her power by right rather than through marriage.
She handed the resistance leader Caratacus over to the Romans in chains, secured great wealth from the Romans, and then divorced her husband and married his young squire. Having seized her ex-husband’s brother as a hostage and fought off attempts to tame her, she was involved in further wars, treacherously playing off the local male leaders against the Romans.
Eventually she retired to the family hill fort to terrorize her sons and daughter in laws.
The tradition has also been illustrated repeatedly on the TV Soap Opera ‘Coronation Street’ with characters like Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner, Annie Walker and Blanche Hunt - and laconically mocked under their breath by comedians from the North West:
"My mother-in-law said 'one day I will dance on your grave'. I said 'I hope you do, I will be buried at sea.'" [Les Dawson]
"My mother-in-law fell down a wishing well, I was amazed, I never knew they worked." [Les Dawson]
"I haven't spoken to my mother-in-law for eighteen months. I don't like to interrupt her." [Ken Dodd]
"A police recruit is asked during an exam, "What would you do if you had to arrest your own mother-in-law?" He replies, "I'd call for backup." [Bernard Manning]
"My mother-in-law has come round to our house at Christmas seven years running. This year we're having a change. We're going to let her in." [Les Dawson].
I still feel guilty making these kinds of associations – perhaps I will be called to account in my dreams tonight.
Both my mother and my grandmother had strong ideas about things and Sally liked ruling the roost with her three boys George, Horace and Richard. She intimidated them and Horace was 32 years old when he broke away. His younger brother Dick took even longer to fly the coop. And the boys’ father Herbert Darlington benefited of course from their ‘labours of love’ on the family farm Hoolgrave Manor, Church Minshull.
I still have very immediate memories of Hoolgrave Manor as it was in the period 1949 – 1955. With oil lamps as the only form of lighting and no external source of entertainment like TV, there was a tribal sense of hunkering down in the dark winter evenings by the open range fire in what seemed to me to be a vast farm kitchen, overshadowed by bacon curing among the rafters.
The conversation ranged over the offspring, weddings and funerals of the local farming families; farm sales and tenancies; auction prices for stock; milk and cheese prices; harvest prospects: fox hunting; point-to-point and steeple chase horse breeding and racing; and the follies and foibles of the local aristocracy.
Family history and genealogy provided the essential information for judging whether individuals were ‘oreet’ (i.e. alright or suitable). Sue and I, being orphans, were never quite sure that we measured up.
For all that, Sally sometimes Sally framed a lovely smile to light her deep set eyes and I felt very privileged to visit her in hospital with my father when she grew frail.
Sally was born Sarah Price Kinsey and I will now tell something of her story, with some comments on the social changes that her family experienced in the 19th century. The account can also linked to my next post which provides a brief review of the history of dairy farming in South Cheshire and summarizes the findings of some research that I did as a student back in 1965 on the agricultural economy that Sally’s sons faced.
THE KINSEYS AND PRICES OF BURWARDSLEY AND TATTENHALL
Sally was born in 1877. She was christened Sarah Price Kinsey. Her father, George Kinsey (born in 1843) was a dairy farmer. In 1891, George was farming Cambridge Farm, Burwardsley (pronounced ‘Bozley’) near Tattenhall, Cheshire, and in 1881 he was farming Grindley Brook Farm, Bunbury, Cheshire.
The 1881 Census records that Grindley Brook was a farm of 65 acres and that George was employing 2 labourers (one of whom, Joseph Clutton was ‘living in’ at the farm house). There was also a girl who was a house servant and who probably assisted with milking and cheese making.
Sally’s siblings were Thomas (b 1872), Elizabeth (b 1876), Frances May (b 1879) and Ada (b 1885). All of the children took Price as their middle name.
In the 1851 Census, George is recorded as a 7 year old boy, with siblings Robert, Ellen, Ann and John. His father George Kinsey (Snr) had been born in 1816 and the family farm at Burwardsley is recorded as being 20 acres. Living with the family was Moses Ellson, ‘retired farmer’ who was the father of Sarah, George’s wife. Moses would have been born around 1781.
As for the elder George Kinsey’s father, we find no trace of him in the censuses, though it is likely that George’s mother Mary is recorded as living independently in Bunbury in the 1841 Census (having also been born around 1781).
The Price’s were an equally well-established family. Sally’s mother Mary Price was born in 1842, the daughter of James Price (b 1813) and Frances Miller (bca 1818). It seems that Mary’s mother died at a young age. In the 1861 Census, Mary (19) was living with her mother’s sister Elizabeth (b 1815), and her grandfather John Price (b 1786) who was farming 30 acres at Tattenhall, Cheshire. Elizabeth was unmarried and John was widowed. No doubt Mary was helping out with dairy tasks.
In 1861, Mary’s father James was recorded in the Census as a butcher living with his brother George (39) at the latter’s public house the Bear and Ragged Staff Inn at Tattenhall. Also living with them were unmarried sisters Mary (47) and Jane (43), together with two house servants Martha and Margaret Clarke.
Further back in 1841, James is recorded as being 28 working as a butcher but living in Tattenhall with his innkeeper father George Senior and mother Martha (born born circa 1789) and siblings Thomas, Mary, Jane, Sarah and Hannah. Almost certainly, the management of the Bear and Ragged Staff Inn was handed down from father to son.
A simple story then it seems of Cheshire farmers, butchers and innkeepers all living within a very small compass. But this summary hides rapid change in dairy farming over the period 1840 to 1890 – of which a glimpse is caught in shift from 20-30 acre farms (which in the early part of the period sustained a family and several workers) to farms of double this size and greater in the second half of the 19th century as holdings were consolidated.
Even though there is a strong sense of continuity from the various censuses, there was plenty of change afoot – change that decimated the old half-timbered farmhouses and dispossessed hundreds of poorer families.
THE TOLLEMACHE ESTATES
Both Burwardsley and Tattenhall were very much part of the area that was ‘ruled’ by the Tollemache family.
John Jervis Tollemache (born John Halliday), 1st Baron Tollemache (5 December 1805 – 9 December 1890), was the son of Admiral John Richard Delap Halliday and co-heir of Lionel Tollemache, 4th Earl of Dysart. He was elected to the House of Commons for Cheshire South in 1841, a seat he held until 1868, and then represented Cheshire West from 1868 to 1872.
John Tollemache was the largest landowner in Cheshire in the 19th Century, owning 28,651 acres (115.9 km2). His estate exceeded those of the Duke of Westminster who owned 15,138 acres (61.3 km2), Lord Crewe with 10,148 acres (41.1 km2) and Lord Cholmondeley with 16,992 acres (68.8 km2).
He was considered by his peers to be a good estate manager and British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (who had an estate at nearby Hawarden) described him as "the greatest estate manager of his day".
Tollemache had over fifty farms and many cottages built on his Cheshire estate, at a cost of around £280,000. This formed part of a grand scheme to consolidate the estate into larger farms that were better able to develop high quality cheese making.
But the downsides of all this were also serious. In the first place, the new farm houses meant the destruction of over 50 ancient buildings – though to be fair the new buildings have proved both durable and highly attractive.
And secondly, many small farmers and small-holders were dispossessed by the consolidation process.
To counter the social upheaval that he created, he encouraged the augmented class of labourers to rent 3 acres (12,000 m2) of land to farm to supplement their income.
Apparently, his catch-phrase for this was "three acres and a cow".
As written up his admirers: ‘He was generous to his tenants and advocated improvement of their social conditions. He believed in a self-reliant labouring class and made popular the idea of his tenants having a cottage with sufficient land to keep a few animals’.
[In 1844 – 1850, Lord Tollemache built Peckforton Castle on a massive scale as a replica of a Crusader castle. Set on the ridgeline of the Peckforton Hills, it cost around £60,000 and has been described as the last serious fortified home constructed by the nobility in England.
Built around a walled courtyard with battlements and towers, the castle stands opposite the genuinely medieval Beeston Castle, and is surrounded by a dry moat. George Gilbert Scott, the Victorian architect called it "the very height of masquerading".
Uninhabited since the Second World War, the castle has been used as a film and television location, and as a venue for civil weddings and live-action fantasy role playing. For example, it featured in the opening scenes of the 1991 movie ‘Robin Hood Prince of Thieves’ starring Kevin Costner].
So it is disturbing to reflect that much of the architecture and landscape that I knew as deeply historic when I was a boy was actually rather new in its form. The Victorian-era castles with their surrounding manicured estates attempted to recreate a feudal sense of stability and continuity – masking the severe social and economic disruptions that were imposed from above by the large landowners.
It seems then that the ‘sturdy and independent yeoman farmers’ that I idealized – and idolized - when I was young were partly creatures of myth. The Kinseys and Prices really had to struggle to stay ‘oreet’ among the Middling Sort.
Having said that, there is always the story that was handed down about my grandfather Herbert Darlington being so vexed that his aristocratic landlord had not met a promise about paying for house and farm improvements when he took up a tenancy – and so bothered no doubt by his young wife’s sharp tongue on the subject – that he took his pony and trap and drove it across the garden in front of the ‘Big House’, ruining all the flower beds.
When all is said and done, faced with choosing between angering the toffs and fending off the nagging of his young wife Sally, Herbert really didn’t have any sort of choice.
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