Thou Who Made this Richard Fort, Be Bold, be Bold, but Not Too Bold... Katherine Langrish

People often assume there aren’t very many English fairy tales.  There are, of course, but they were eclipsed in popularity by the much better-known German and French tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. During the 19^th century the English were, on the whole, keener on translating other peoples’ fairy tales than collecting their own: possibly (as I say in another place) because the Europe-wide fashion for collecting traditional tales was driven by nationalism, and Victorian Englishmen didn’t feel they had anything much to prove. So generations of English children grew up knowing about Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella, and nothing about Tom Tit Tot and Ashie-Coat.

  

It took an Australian Jew, Joseph Jacobs, to notice this and do something about it. ‘Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?’ he asks in the introduction to his 'English Fairy Tales’, 1898. ‘The present volume contains only a selection out of some 140, of which I have found traces in this country. It is probable that many more exist.’

 

One of those tales is an all-time favourite of mine, ‘Mr Fox’.  It’s the oldest known version of the ‘Bluebeard’ story, and I wrote about it in my recent book ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles’, where I explain why I think it’s about a million times better than ‘Bluebeard’. It’s about a girl called Lady Mary who becomes curious – maybe even suspicious – when her fiancé, the suave Mr Fox, is unwilling to let her visit his castle. So when he announces he has to go away for a day just prior to their wedding, she sets off deep into the woods to find the place for herself.

And there it is, a beautiful castle: but above the gateway a strange motto is carved into the stone: ‘Be bold, be bold’. Lady Mary passes under the gateway and into the courtyard. The place is quite empty, not a soul anywhere about. Crossing the yard to the the doorway of the keep, she finds the same motto again, this time longer: ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’.  On she goes:

Still she went on till she came into the hall, and went up the broad stairs till she came to a door in the gallery, over which was written:

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold

Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.

But Lady Mary was a brave one, she was, and she opened the door, and what do you think she saw? Why bodies and skeletons of beautiful young ladies all stained with blood. So Lady Mary thought it was high time to get out of that horrid place…

As she hurries down the stairs she sees Mr Fox himself coming into the hall, dragging a beautiful young woman behind him who seems to have fainted. Lady Mary hides behind a cask, and witnesses Mr Fox cutting off the young woman’s hand:

Just as he got near Lady Mary, Mr Fox saw a diamond ring glittering on the finger of the young lady he was dragging, and he tried to pull it off. But it was tightly fixed … so Mr Fox cursed and swore, and drew his sword, raised it, and brought it down upon the hand of the poor lady. The sword cut off the hand, which jumped into the air, and fell of all places into Lady Mary’s lap. Mr Fox looked about a bit but did not think of looking behind the cask, so at last he went on dragging the young lady up the stairs into the Bloody Chamber.

Lady Mary runs home, but that’s not the end. Next day this self-possessed and steely heroine meets Mr Fox at a splendid family breakfast where the contract of their marriage is to be signed. ‘How pale you are this morning, my dear,’ exclaims Mr Fox.

‘Yes,’ said she, ‘I had a bad night’s rest last night. I had horrible dreams.’

‘Dreams go by contraries,’ said Mr Fox; ‘but tell us your dream, and your sweet voice will make the time pass till the happy hour comes.’

‘I dreamed,’ said Lady Mary, ‘that I went yestermorn to your castle, and I found it in the woods, with high walls and a deep moat, and over the gateway was written:

               Be bold, be bold.’

‘But it is not so, nor it was not so,’ said Mr Fox.

As Lady Mary continues and the mottoes intensify their warnings, so Mr Fox’s denials become stronger: ‘It is not so and it was not so. And God forbid it should be so’ – till finally Lady Mary springs to her feet.

‘It is so and it was so. Here’s hand and ring I have to show,’ and pulled out the lady’s hand from her dress and pointed it straight at Mr Fox.

At once her brothers and her friends drew their swords and cut Mr Fox into a thousand pieces.

This is a great story with a brave, intelligent heroine, and it’s beautifully structured. I’ve told it aloud many times to children and they always love it. But where did Joseph Jacobs find it?  Well, he found it as an addendum to Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition of the complete works of Shakespeare ( ‘Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare’).

This of course isn't the original 1790 edition, which I couldn't find, but from 1821.

There’s a bit in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ Act I, Sc 1, where Benedick says to Claudio: ‘Like the old tale, my lord: it is not so, nor ‘twas not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so.’  A certain Mr Blakeway contributed a note to explain this reference:

I believe none of the commentators have understood this; it is an allusion, as the speaker says, to an old tale, which may perhaps still be extant in some collections of such things, or which Shakspeare may have heard, as I have, related by a great aunt, in his childhood.

Mr Blakeway then recounts the whole tale, though with less artistry than Joseph Jacobs: he’s supplying a note, after all, not writing a story:

Over the portal of the hall was written: ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold:’ she advanced: over the stair-case, the same inscription: she went up: over the entrance of a gallery, the same: she proceeded: over the door of a chamber, – ‘Be bold, be bold,but not too bold, lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.’ She opened it; it was full of skeletons, tubs of blood, &c. She retreated in haste…

Blakeway concludes,

Such is the old tale to which Shakspeare evidently alludes, and which has often ‘froze my young blood’ when I was a child. I will not apologize for repeating it, since it is manifest that such old wives’ tales often prove the best elucidation of this writer’s meaning.

John Brickdale Blakeway was born in Shrewsbury in 1765, the eldest son of Joshua Blakeway and Elizabeth Brickdale. He studied law, was ordained in 1793, became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1807 and died in 1826. His great-aunt probably told young John this tale when he was about ten, and she must have heard it in her own childhood some time between say 1710 and 1725.  This is still over a century since Shakespeare’s death, but the story happens to be one which is very easy to remember, full of repetition – the tale is actually told twice – and memorable phrases. (I’ve known children who could tell it well having heard it only once.) In 1598 Shakespeare’s Benedick quotes one of these phrases:‘It is not so and it was not so and God forbid it should be so’, and calls it an ‘old tale’.

Edmund Spenser’s immensely long narrative poem ‘The Faerie Queene’, references the other quotable quote from 'Mr Fox' in Book 3, Canto XI, verses 50 to 54: when the gallant ‘warlike Maid’ Britomart (allegorically Chastity) is exploring the House of Busirane (the House of Violence and Lust) to find and rescue the enchanter Busirane’s tortured victim Amoret. As Britomart makes her way through room after room decorated with pictures and tapestries of ravished women (and one boy), she notices something else:

Over the door thus written she did spy

Be bold: she oft and oft it over-read…

Just like Lady Mary, Britomart is not dismayed - ‘But forward with bold steps into the next room went’. And just as in ‘Mr Fox’, the castle is silent and empty - ‘Strange thing it seemed’!  Eventually,

…as she looked about, she did behold

How over that same door was likewise writ

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere Be bold,

That much she mazed, and could not construe it

By any riddling skill or common wit.

At last she spied at that room’s upper end,

Another iron door, on which was writ,

Be not too bold…

The first three books of ‘The Faerie Queene’ were published in 1596. This therefore appears to be the earliest reference to the ‘old tale’ of ‘Mr Fox’.  It must once have been very well known.  But if John Blakemore hadn’t written it down, it would have disappeared. His account is the only complete source for this English fairy tale.

I was talking about all this with a good friend, the author John Dickinson: in fact it was he who pointed me in the direction of ‘The Faerie Queene’. He then electrified me by telling me that in his local church of St Mary in Painswick, Gloucestershire, the words ‘Be bold, be bold’ are actually cut into one of the pillars. Local tradition has it that the words were carved by one of a group of Parliamentarian soldiers besieged in the church during the English Civil War, and that they are a quotation from ‘The Faerie Queene’. I was so excited about this that John invited me to come over and see the inscription.  And here it is.

TH.

WHO. MAD

THIS. RICH

ARD FORT

BE BOLD BE BOLD

BUT NOT TO

BOLD AND WHE

                                             RB          

Let’s take the first bit first.  In modern spelling: ‘THOU WHO MADE THIS RICHARD FORT BE BOLD BE BOLD BUT NOT TOO BOLD’. Some man named Richard Fort is addressing God (who ‘made’ him) and adding an – appeal? a prayer? a command? a warning? – perhaps to God, perhaps to himself, to ‘be bold, be bold, but not too bold.’

Painswick Church was indeed besieged in the year 1644. There’s an account in ‘A Cotteswold Manor; being the history of Painswick’ written by the wonderfully named Welbore St Clair Baddeley and published in 1907. In 1644 the countryside around the city of Gloucester (which had survived a siege by Royalist forces the previous autumn) was in turmoil, with Royalists and Parliamentarians exchanging raids and committing atrocities on both sides. Enter the fearsome Colonel Mynne, leading a regiment of Royalist Catholic infantry raised in Ireland. Arriving in Bristol, Mynne and his men stormed their way across Gloucestershire and in February 1644 arrived at Painswick. The Parliamentarian Attorney General, Backhouse, quartered in Gloucester, writes:

‘We heard … that Colonel Mynne and St Leger with the Irish forces march’t to Painswicke for subsistence,  but indeed to plunder the country, to prevent which, our Governor (Massey) drew out a party of Horse and Foot, where there was a skirmish and some losse on both sides.’

Whether this skirmish was successful or not, some time later Mynne’s Royalist forces withdrew and a garrison of Massey’s Parliamentarian troops moved into Painswick. In the back-and-forth of that wretched time, they were not to remain there long. The King’s man Sir William Vavasour marched on Painswick with ‘a strong brigade’ and two ‘culverins’ or light cannons. The Parliament soldiers, who had taken up a defensive position in a house near the church, were not strong enough to hold off anything much bigger than a plundering party, and had been told to make good their retreat down the steep hill towards Brookthorp if the Royalist force was substantial. But the lieutenant commanding them, ‘… not understanding the strength of the (opponents) army’ and encouraged by ‘many willing people of the neighbourhood in that weak hold’, instead of withdrawing, remained to fight. Finding himself overwhelmed ‘upon the first onset’, he deserted the house and took his men into the church. It was a move from the frying pan into the fire: the Royalists burned down the door and threw ‘hand-granadoes’ into the church where ‘some few were slain in defending the place, and the rest taken prisoners.’  [This contemporary account is quoted in the ‘History of the Church of St Mary at Painswick’ by Welbore St Clair Baddeley, 1902]

Here, then, is the likely scenario for the cutting of those words ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’ on the church pillar at Painswick. Richard Fort – whether he was one of the ‘willing’ neighbours or a Parliamentarian soldier – was holed up inside St Mary’s with the other men who were the victims of their lieutenant’s mistake. They’d barred the doors, they couldn’t get out, and they were listening to the yells and jeers of the Royalist force outside in the churchyard – and wondering what would be the next move.

How long did they have?  Was it really long enough for Richard Fort to carve all those words? And why did they spring to his mind in the first place? Had the lieutenant urged his men to ‘be bold’?  (See what had come of that!) Parliamentarians called Royalists ‘malignants’: Painswick people had already had a taste of the ravening Colonel Mynne. Perhaps two things came together in Richard Fort's head – the adjuration to ‘be bold’, and the enclosed stone trap of the church, with the enemy about to burst in.  Perhaps Richard was an educated man who had read ‘The Faerie Queene’ and remembered the armed figure of Chastity, Britomart, waiting for her enemy, afraid to lay her weapons aside:

Thus there she waited until eventide,

Yet living creature none she saw appear:

And now sad shadows ‘gan the world to hide,

From mortall view, and wrap in darkness drear.

Yet n’ould she doff her weary arms, for fear

Of secret danger, nor let sleep oppress

Her heavy eyes with nature’s burden dear,

But drew herself aside in sikernesse [assuredness]

And her wellpointed weapons did about her dress.

Or it may be Richard simply remembered the story of ‘Mr Fox’ told to him in childhood by his mother or aunt or sister, and saw its relevance, and began cutting those words to distract himself.  Did he even feel his God had let him down? ‘Thou who made this Richard Fort be bold be bold but not too bold…’ I think he did carve the words while he waited, especially as you can see at the end of the inscription on the pillar the shallow-cut beginning of two more words: ‘AND WHE…’

What was he going to say? We’ll never know. He didn’t have time to finish, so perhaps he was interrupted: perhaps, before he could grind those letters any deeper, the church door began smoking; perhaps it burst into flame. Perhaps these unfinished letters resemble those found in another stone trap, the fictional Chamber of Mazarbul in Tolkien’s ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’: 

‘The last thing written is a trailing scrawl of elf letters: they are coming.’

Picture credits

Mr Fox, illustration by John Batten from Joseph Jacobs' 'English Fairy Tales' 

Britomart in the house of Busyrane, by Walter Crane

'Be bold', inscription on pillar, St Mary's Painswick, photo by Katherine Langrish

Siege artillery of the mid 17th century, Battle of Edgehill, http://www.brit

Life in History by Debra Daley

So much of my own life is history now. I was listening to a podcast about Kunming, the capital of the Chinese province of Yunnan, which lies north of Vietnam and east of Myanmar. Two millennia ago, it was an important city on the southern Silk Road. The podcast was an account of how the city had changed rather violently in the last decade after the city’s planners instigated an epic modernisation programme of street-widening to make way for cars. New roading, I heard, has ploughed right through historic neighbourhoods. And the old quarters had been pulled down and replaced with apartment buildings and shopping centres. That means I wouldn’t recognise Kunming now. In 1984, my then husband and I spent several months travelling independently through China, returning from Sydney to our London flat. It was quite an undertaking in those days. There was little tourist infrastructure. And the week before we left on the trip I discovered that I was pregnant. But I was young and strong and I figured it would be fine – and so it proved.

An old quarter in Kunming.

We stayed in Kunming and its vicinity for about ten days. In 1984, the medieval town structure and rows of historical housing around the bird market were still extant and traffic consisted mostly of bicyclists. I have only a few photographs of my time there. It was before phone cameras, of course, but even so – when I was travelling I often didn't take many photographs. I told myself it was because I didn't want to look at people and things through a lens, that I wanted to Be Here Now, and that these experiences would live in my memory. But I did not realise when I was a young woman how undependable memory can be. Fortunately, I always kept a journal.

A Yi woman walking down Dongfeng Road

MONDAY 27 AUGUST, 1984. I walked down Dongfeng Road East this morning, following a Yi woman to see where she would go. As I made my way, I noticed a surprisingly large number of elderly women hobbling along on tiny feet encased in black bootees. Their feet resembled hooves and I supposed them to be among the last of China's foot-bound women. The Yi woman entered a dimly lit haberdashery and I did too. I tried on a black velvet beret that was too small and watched her while she bought a length of braid. There were bolts of fabric and racks of padded Mao jackets in the store and creased western-style suits. There was a poster on the wall of the ideal one-child family – a fat-cheeked boy perched between smiling parents. Next to the poster were diagrams of uteruses and a cross-section of a penis being vasectomied. The shopkeeper and the customers gawked at me as well they might. 

I was pregnant on this long trip through China and I did  a lot of sleeping.

TUESDAY 28 AUGUST, 1984. I slept late, until eight-thirty. The cleaner in the guesthouse was not pleased with this decadent behaviour and roused me so that she could get on with not cleaning the room. I woke with the desire to add some calcium to my diet. A German tourist had told me the day before of a shop that sold goat’s cheese. I walked along Dongfeng Road again, passing the tall hemp plants that seem to perform the role of municipal shrubbery here. I couldn’t find the shop, but I liked wandering around the old quarters with their two-storied red and green wooden buildings. Every so often a whitewashed alley intervened and led me down cool, quiet passageways that arrived at maze-like courtyards surrounding small houses.

The courtyard compounds are called yi ke yin, meaning 'seal'. When viewed
from above, the squared layout of these compounds brings to mind the
traditional rectangular seals used to stamp documents and paintings.   

Other doorways, back on the main street, offered glimpses of scary dentist’s rooms with foot-pedal drills and ancient equipment.

A dental surgery.

In the evening we were joined by C and V, two students from St Martins art school in London. We went out to a food stall in a marketplace we had spied nearby, and ordered a dish of diced potatoes, steamed green beans and chilli. It cost about eighty pence. As we were eating, at a trestle table under a droopy canvas awning, an elderly man approached us with one of the cooks from the stall at his back. He said in British-accented English, ‘The cooks want to know what you think of the food.’ We answered that it was delicious, which it was.

He pressed his hand to his chest. ‘It is Yunnan food. Will you order another dish?’ We agreed to that and presently a plate of sliced egg and tomato and sweetcorn arrived, accompanied by two small bowls, one of salt and the other of crushed, dried chilli. We asked the old man to sit down with us. He asked where we were from. He had a way of repeating our answers as if they were a delightful revelation.

‘Ah, you’re from London!’

He was a railroad engineer who had learned English at university in Shanghai. He had been assigned (he uttered this word with a raised eyebrow as if we might get its import) to Kunming in 1976. ‘The dialect here is particularly impenetrable,’ he said. We called for the bill and a cluster of people came forward to speak to the old man. He satisfied their curiosity about us and then said, ‘It is a pleasure to practise English. Usually I have to rely on Voice of America broadcasts.’ He waved a hand at the marketplace. ‘This has only been here for a month. They tore down the Working People’s Cultural Palace, which was erected during the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is over, you know.’ He asked us if we would accompany him to an ice cream parlour. ‘There are young people there who would like to talk to you.’

Our entrance caused a stir at the ice cream parlour. A group of young people, about ten of them, shuffled towards our table. The engineer invited them to sit down. He turned to us and said, 'They are glad to have the opportunity to ask questions.' They wanted to know: where we were from, the average wage in Britain, our impression of China, an account of the weather in London, the incidence of typhoons in London, and the difference between public architecture in Britain and in China.

But the subject they were most interested in was our appearance. C wore over long and one short earring (it was the eighties!) and we were both dressed in black. Our interlocutors wondered if we women belonged to a sub-group of society – they had not seen other tourists dressed as we were – and if this was a particular London style? We replied that it was and other westerners might recognise us as belonging to a sub-group. I saw that our style intrigued this group just as we were fascinated by the appearance of minority tribespeople with their striking costumes. They saw us, in our fashionable outfits, as anthropological or sociological constructs. They wanted to know the significance of everything. What did C wear one long earring and one short earring? Did it matter? Why was I wearing a hat and C not? Did this denote that one of us was married? Why were we wearing black? What did it mean? When C explained that she tinkered with her look just to be different, to express her individuality, some of our questioners indicated that it was a lot of effort for such a trivial outcome.  

Did low-class people, they inquired, eat while they were drinking or was it only high-class people who took food with alcohol? They asked us if we ever drank champagne. When we said that we sometimes did, they sucked in their breaths and nodded knowingly.

And the end of the evening, everyone in the group thanked us. They wished us a long and happy life. One young man said he hoped that a typhoon would not strike London and laughed to indicate that he knew he was making a joke. 

It all seems so distant now. The ice cream parlour is gone without a doubt, the people scattered, the engineer long dead. But I like to remind myself as often as I can of these small human-to-human encounters. Those young workers in their Mao jackets and we tourists in our western costumes, somehow managing to become if only fleetingly a part of one another's history.  

  

 

Grave Matters, by Gillian Polack

Australia can be besotted with tombstones. This expresses itself in interesting ways. When I was in my teens, my parents decided to join a project that mapped every single Jewish gravestone in the state of Victoria It was a perfectly acceptable hobby and they shared it with a few friends and with a few relatives. 

All the families involved had ancestors who’d lived in rural Victoria, because in the nineteenth century many Australian Jews did just that. The first Australian Governor-General, Isaac Isaacs was one: Australian, Jewish, and raised in a country town. 

This is why it was perfectly natural for me to discover a series of stones for the family Hamburger, caved by the family Macdonald when I visited Ballarat with my mother. We were researching the town because I thought that one day I might use the location for a novel. I’ve loved the town itself ever since I was a child, and was using my fiction as an excuse to visit it and to spend time with my mother. I wrote that novel some years later: it was, of course, The Wizardry of Jewish Women. Some aspects of the Ballarat cemetery in Wizardry were invented, but not many and certainly not that tombstone. 

When I was a teenager, I thought this obsession with dead people was particular to my family and their friends. This meant I felt fated to be a historian or a museum curator, or something along those lines. I was teased about it a lot by the parents of my schoolfriends. They didn’t see that their fascination with graves was part of the reason I was so firmly attached to history. There was a group of adults who compared notes from their journeys into rural Victoria, and were rather proud of finding a rare grave the way a butterfly enthusiast would be proud of spotting a rare butterfly. My parents sent the butterfly enthusiasts to our front garden, where a small colony of Emperor Gum Moths lived, but it was graves they took notes on.

I had a poor sense of humour and sang a song I learned at primary school whenever my parents went on a tour of graves and left me behind. “He was buried on Sunday, deep deep down, “ it began. “Under the gravestone, deep deep down.” I still remember all the words.

When I was a late teenager I discovered that my family and their friends not working as a social group: they were part of a project run by a cousin. The idea was to find Jewish graves and to document writing on the headstones before the writing faded to illegibility was part of a wider fascination with graves. Other groups documented other graves or visited them and took care of them. More than a hobby, documenting gravesites and preserving them or information about them was a path into history and into belonging. Papers were even written about it. 

 

Graves are still important to Australia. One surviving from 1795 Sydney show how we value, what to us are old relics of our recent Europeanheritage. 

Every single First Fleeter (first UK settlement in Australia)’s death is recorded online and if their gravestone still exists, there are pictures. My sense of humour still creeps in, in an untimely and possibly disrespectful manner. One of the oldest surviving gravestones in Australia belongs to someone with the surname Graves.

The plane came down here.

Our war deaths are also chronicled carefully. I once took a set of pictures of the field in which my great-uncle’s plane came down in France (he didn’t die there – that’s another story) and a museum wanted copies. 

I visited Great-Uncle Max and his crew in 1995.

Just as my parents’ hunt for tombs was not just a hobby, graves are more than they seem for Australian culture. To the rest of the world we are a young nation. Almost without written history. The long Australian history, of the people who’ve lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years, doesn’t have carved gravestones to note death. 

Why are we so obsessed with tombstones? It’s not because we’re besotted with death. It’s because we’re besotted with history. Not just any history. Australians visit Europe a lot, The UK and Ireland in particular, but Europe too. We look for Europe’s past and say “We don’t have this.” We mourn for Jane Austen and Richard II. It’s personal.

Some years ago, I was talking to other Medievalists at an international conference. The general consensus around the circle was that if you answered “What do you do?” with “I’m a Medieval historian” you might not get the most appreciative response. Except for me, as the only Australian in the circle. I have been instantly engaged in long conversations by random people in Australia. We are passionate about history.

The same happens when I do research for my novels. If I mention the Australian history side, I’m told all about families and be asked to tell them about my first doctorate and… it’s an easy way to get a happy conversation going. When is say I write novels, most people will talk about how they write private journals, but historians are an instant focus for questions, just as graveyards here or overseas are important places to visit. 

It’s the history. We want it.

A Tale of Two Teas

 “The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.” Bill Bryson

Do you know who first popularised tea-drinking in British society? No, not Queen Anne, though in my time every schoolchild knew:

Here thou, Great Anna! Whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.
Alexander Pope. The Rape of the Lock III.7-8

(Giving one a fair idea of how the word was pronounced in the 18th century. The "here" was Hampton Court).

We were taught it as an example of the trope Zeugma; does anyone learn that sort of stuff today?

I digress. The first queen who was so fond of tea was Charles ll's unfortunate wife Catherine of Braganza, who had developed the habit of tea-drinking in her native Portugal.

Catherine's favourite hot beverage became popular in her heyday, half a century before Pope's little satire, and was soon being served in 17th century coffee houses. Some also sold loose leaf tea, thus enabling middle class people to hold tea-parties in their own homes. Crucially, it also meant that women, who did not frequent coffee houses, could enjoy a cup in private.

Tea was so expensive that it became a favourite item for smugglers. In 1785 the government slashed the duty on tea, thus undercutting the smugglers and wiping out their trade in the leaves. It was around this time that people started adding milk to their cups of tea, because quite a lot of it was adulterated with other leaves or already once-brewed leaves and probably did not taste very nice! Sugar had always been a popular addition but that was as expensive as tea itself.

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

Tea was not popular with everyone. John Wesley inveighed against it in 1748. The  preacher and founder of the Methodist movement, argued for complete abstinence from tea, on the grounds that it gave rise to 'numberless disorders, particularly those of a nervous kind'. He cited the example of himself, claiming that tea drinking had caused in him a 'Paralytick disorder', which had cleared up since he began to abstain from the beverage. Wesley urged that the money previously spent by an individual on tea should instead be given to the poor, and as an alternative hot infusions could be made from English herbs including sage or mint.

But Dr Johnson was a chain-drinker of tea, his kettle scarcely having time to cool before being boiled again. 25 cups a day was nothing to him, especially in the company of his friend Mrs Thrale.

In the first half of the 19th century, tea was touted as the solution to the perceived excessive alcohol consumption of the working classes and so  was promoted by the Methodists as part of the Temperance movement. Later in the century there was a rise in tea-shops, alongside coffee houses, with the former now catering for less wealthy patrons.

This was also the era of the genteel, invariable female, tea-party, indoors or out.

After Kate Greenaway, Wikimedia Commons

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady 

During WW2, tea was rationed to 2oz per person (over the age of five) per week and this didn't stop until 1952. (There were extra rations for those in the armed forces and certain occupations such as firefighting). After the end of tea-rationing, an American import changed the nature of British tea-making for ever. The humble tea-bag no accounts for 96% of all cups made in the UK.

“Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.”
― George Orwell, Smothered Under Journalism: 1946  

To turn to my two teas: the first was on the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. It was husband's birthday present from last November, given by our middle daughter and son-in-law. So, long anticipated.

Many people feel the romance of steam trains and if you add to that the element of taking a meal - and that most traditional of meals, the afternoon tea - you have a delicious excitement about which not even Bill Bryson could could wonder. 

But here's a thing: I grew up next to a steam railway line, literally. I lived in a ground floor railwayman's flat in Clapham Junction and nothing but a high brick wall separated us from the track and the smuts of what my mother called the "stinking billies." They were the bane of her life, as she needed to hang washing out in our back yard.

So "romance" was not exactly in my mind.

 

What was so interesting was that the whole experience was presented as a bit of history. The platforms, signage, waiting room, even the loos were all lovingly preserved or reconcontructed to be exactly as they were in 1960 when the line reopened for private travel after it had been closed three years earlier (nothing to do with Dr Beeching). 

Now, depending on your age, you will regard that as an ancient date or only yesterday and we fell into the second category. We could both remember train carriages with wooden panelling on the inside and I could recall the windows that let down with a leather strap. As a railwayman's daughter, I travelled everywhere by train; we never had a car and our holidays and day trips were determined by their reachability from Clapham Junction, Waterloo or Victoria.

So we sat at our linen-clothed table for two in the dining car, watching the beautiful Sussex countryside out the window, expecting our tea and reminiscing about train journeys of our youth. Husband could recall silver coffee pots and as soon as he mentioned them, I could too.

For the young child having a birthday party with balloons and cake a few tables down from us it must have been a quite different experience.


It is a weird feeling to find your past firmly established as history and one I shan't forget. I'm sorry to say we didn't discuss Catherine of Braganza or John Wesley but Dr Johnson was definitely mentioned.

The route that the Bluebell railway takes, from Sheffield Park station, built for and named after the Earl of Sheffield, to acknowledge his financial contribution to its construction, to East Grinstead, is only eleven miles long. It was first built in 1877 so this bit of the line lasted 80 years. 

My second tea within the week took place at this establishment:

So no swaying movement to contend with but almost contemporary with the beginning of the Bluebell Railway.  The Randolph hotel in Oxford, familiar to millions of TV viewers round the world from the Inspector Morse series and its spin-offs, was opened in 1866, to accommodate a visit to the city by the then Prince and Princess of Wales. Its Victorian Gothic idiom, designed by William Wilkinson would have been familiar to those late 19th century rail travellers eleven years later.

I was there as a prize. I had offered "tea at the Randolph" and a discussion of any of my books to the highest bidder in the #authorsforgrenfell auction, which eventually raised nearly £200K for the Red Cross to use with survivors of the fire that will certainly remain a historical landmark of our time. 

It looked like this, apart from the prosecco (though I have to admit the free glass offered on the Bluebell railway was not refused).

Bridget Blankley, who won the 2016 Diversity Award for writing for children, and I had a very good afternoon talking about Amazing Grace and tucking into a tea of finger sandwiches, scones with cream and jam and so many cakes that doggy bags were required.

“Wouldn't it be dreadful to live in a country where they didn't have tea?”
― Noël Coward



Bluebell Railway
Red Cross Grenfell Tower appeal