From Stockbroker to Peasant: the Kings and the Sings

It is reported that Joseph King's grandfather founded the Liverpool Stock Exchange, The Provincial Stock Exchange (Thomas, William Arthur, Routledge, 2012) explains "Sing, White and Company was formed in 1825 by Joseph King, one of the first brokers in Liverpool, and Chairman of the Stock Exchange from 1840-44.  In 1877 the business was continued by his nephew Alexander Millington Synge, and since then a member of the family has held a connection with the firm."  Sing, White and Company merged with Tilney, Parr and Rae in 1966.

Liverpool Stock Exchange building,
situated in the East Wing, on the right
from The Liverpool Picture Book

Thomas explains that "The leading movers in the establishment of the Association were probably the nine sharebrokers given in the 1835 Liverpool Directory.  Richard Dawson entered the stockbroking profession in 1827 having been a "gunpowder agent" and one time agent to Norwich Union Fire and Life office.  Thomas Barber, Thomas Harris and Thomas Read became brokers in 1834, John Fletcher in 1835, as also did Jonathon Flounders who gave up his previous profession of being a "Gentleman".  Joseph King described as an accountant in 1825 took to share dealing around 1827, as did William O'Kill, also an accountant.  Thomas Coglan was certainly active in share dealing in 1827 and was also the proprietor of the Floating Bath in the Mersey.  In addition to the twenty-one at the first meeting, ten new members joined in April, and a further fifteen during the remaining months of 1836.  ...At subsequent meetings held at the Mersey Coffee House and "Mr King's office" the admission fee was fixed at 10 gns" 

It seems strange that King did not include his name in the company Sing, White and Company, if he formed the company himself.  However looking at the family tree it would appear that the 'Sing' is Joshua Sing, who was King's brother-in-law.   According to The family of Synge or Sing online here Joshua was a Justice of the Peace.  Alexander Millington Synge who continued the business was Joshua's second son.  Alexander's second child was Mary Florentia Synge, she is marked "Of Haslemere" in The family Synge or Sing and therefore I feel confident in identifying her as Flora Synge.  It was Flora's weaving that was used to unveil the Blue Plaque at Green Bushes Weaving House a few years ago, see here for more details.   And so in two generations the stockbroker became a peasant, in what the movement would have called the third group of the future peasantry "These are the men and women whom a surfeit a civilisation has left healthily dissatisfied, and who will be peasants by choice, not by birth" (The Vineyard, New Series, Christmas 1918).

'Miss Flora Synge at her spinning wheel at Kings Road, Haslemere in 1917' 
from  Janaway, John,  Surrey: A Photographic Record 1850-1920, Countryside Books, 1984

Alexander lived in Dawstone, Windermere.  This was a notable Arts and Crafts house designed by Dan Gibson in 1903. It features in The Arts and Crafts Houses of the Lake District (Hyde, Matthew and Whittaker, Esme, Frances Lincoln, 2014) "built high above the town of Windermere on the outskirts of Heathwaite, is typical of the arts and Crafts houses occupying elevated sites.  The distance of the site from Lake Windermere, in comparison to the properties which line the lake's banks, would have been compensated for by the views that were afforded from this position.  As the writer Lawrence Weaver observed in the magazine Country Life, it is 'perched on the hill like an eyrie from which the vision sweeps round a complete panorama from Helvellyn to Morecombe Bay'.  The owner of Dawstone, the Liverpool stock and share broker Alexander Millington Sing, had purchased the site, known as Undermillbeck Common, from G.H.Pattinson." The house is now called Gillthwaite Rigg, a part of which is now a B&B.  Interestingly there is a photograph that purports to be a "ventilation grille incorporating the initials of the house owner at Dawstone", see below, although I am puzzled by the sequence ASM and not AMS if this is the case.  Joseph King, Alexander's cousin, also liked to put his initials on his buildings, and perhaps this was a family trait.

from The Arts and Crafts Houses of the Lake District,(Hyde, Matthew and Whittaker, Esme, Frances Lincoln, 2014)

Dawstone ground floor plan from
Built from Below: British Architecture and the Vernacular,
(Guillery, Peter, Routledge, 2011)

The Independent Labour Party, Harold Monro & Arthur Romney Green

There were numerous lectures at the Independent Labour Party, Haslemere on Kings Road, held in Arthur Romney Green's workshop and showroom.  In addition to the Ramsay MacDonald and Joe St  Loe Strachey, chaired by the Lord Bishop of Dorking written in a previous post here, there is a record of Harold Monro giving a lecture.

Monro (1879-1932), see Wikipedia here, was a poet and proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop, an influential shop that sold and published poetry in Bloomsbury, London.

Harold Monro and the Poetry Workshop (Grant, Joy, University of California Press, 1967)

In Harold Monro and the Poetry Workshop (Grant, Joy, University of California Press, 1967), online here, Grant writes:

"Through James Guthrie, Monro came into contact with the community of weavers, embroiderers and other craftsmen who inhabited Haslemere at that time, and were trying to conduct their lives on the principles of Ruskin and Morris.  He was especially friendly with Romney Green, the designer and carpenter, who made superb tables and chairs out of ponderous baulks of oak, and who later supplied the furniture for the Poetry Bookshop.  ‘This rugged, fiery, somewhat intractable yet generous creature’, Arundel del Re writes, ‘loathed all forms of aestheticism and literary cant.’  He believed, with Whitman, that art was for the regeneration of man.

"There were thus kindred souls of progressive outlook near at hand, and we hear of Monro going to Haslemere to lecture to the Independent Labour Party there.  

"…The interior (of the Poetry Bookshop) fulfilled the promise of the outside.  Monro called in Romney Green to provide bookshelves, tables and settles in his characteristic style – massive but finely proportioned furniture hewn from great baulks of oak.  It added to the homeliness of the  shop and with its flavour of rus in urbe suggested the character of the proprietor."

Why Peasant? Part 2 - the future 3 groups of peasantry

The editorial of The Vineyard (New Series, Christmas 1918) continues in it's explanation of why the movement used the word "Peasant" by explaining about their vision of the future 3 groups of peasantry:

"This future peasantry will mainly consist of three groups.  there will be the land labourers, survivors of centuries of neglect or brutal legislation; and those other survivors - or some of them - from the War.  To the first we owe amends for immemorial abuse and neglect, and a share in the earth where they grew our bread under conditions we now shamefully acknowledge.  To the second we owe gratitude for immeasurable heroism: and since they took into their sacred flesh the wounds that kept us and our country whole, a foothold in it is surely none too high a reward.  - Let us hope that the politician and patriotic landowner are getting ready for the steadily increasing land-hungry crowds of them.  - Many of the settlers, being Cockney born, or with a city bent from early days, will not enter fully into their country inheritance; but their children, born in the country, should inherit to the full.  But this they certainly will not unless we see to it that they are born into right rich country conditions and not into one of the schemes newly devised for "brightening rural life," where the "Cheapest Cottage Competition," the Cinema and Extension Lecture, as compensation for dung-hill duties, loom so large.  The country-born, in right conditions, will not play by proxy, asking for tram or motor to carry him to football or cricket-field or music-hall, where the tired factory hand gapes at the professional whom he pays to express his emotions for him.  Traditional country life, being rooted in the vital earth and therefore capable of indefinite growth and enrichment on its own lines, will, as ever, blossom in seasonal festivals and inspire its own arts and games.

"The sun bonnet"
from Old West Surrey
Gertrude Jekyll, Longmans, Green and Co.,
1904

To these two groups will be gradually added another; at first in individuals and families, and later, when the pioneers have tackled the first difficulties, in increasing numbers.  These are the men and women whom a surfeit a civilisation has left healthily dissatisfied, and who will be peasants by choice, not by birth.  Certain of them have money, some are poorer since the war, and all will probably become much poorer still: but by no means is it money or its lack that is going to determine the choice in most cases.  Here and there pilgrims from the City of destruction have long ago found salvation in the rigours and joys of land life.  With others, the war-time handling of broom and spade has been a bit magical, convincing them that the slavish grind in city office and over-furnished house which the upkeep of snobbery used to demand was sheer waste of life.  For them, if it is permissible to misquote Shakespeare in a good cause,

"Life has suffered a war-change
Into something rich and strange."

one of the best firsts of poverty being the discovery of the richness and the strangeness of daily life when quit of this silly tyranny and with its face toward adventure.  If as parents they will no longer wear themselves out to send boys to Harrow and girls to Roedean, but are content that farm and carpenter's workshop and smithy should widen earlier scholarship, who that knows the Scottish peasantry will fear lest this preclude the better sort of culture?

In this coming country revival, the Vineyard and the Peasant Arts Guild are ready to play a real if unpretentious part.  They will advocate and teach useful and beautiful handicrafts: but to affect the atmosphere in which revival and reform are brought about is still more nearly their concern: to show why the best traditional peasant life is vitally desirable, and why certain thriving social enterprises manifesting themselves in model barracks which radiate through neat public gardens from the vast co-operative factory in their midst (while admittedly less evil than what went immediately before) are not desirable, and are quite incompatible with the building of Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.

Ticino spinner,
early 1900s postcard, online here

...Beautiful things" that is, good art and craftsmanship, "cannot be had for the asking or learning, but are the natural outcome of healthy conditions and innocent feelings...The love of money is the root of all evil.  It made machines and it made the modern manufacturing city.  If you are one of their victims, struggling for freedom, do not rest your hope on any possible turn of fortune's wheel which might lift you into the seat and circumstance of your masters.  That would make you only ten times more the servants of Mammon.  Aim, instead, at something equally remote from the minds of both master and servant, employers and employed.  Place what faith you can summon in a new motive for your labour, however distant its realisation may seem to be, in the resurrection of the life you have lost, the birthright of the imagination you have bartered away.  Resist the temptations of novelty, luxury, and competition.  Make for simplicity and peace, for kindness and enthusiasm, and for those good things which are summed up in the real business and the real delights of country life."

Why Peasant? - Part 1 - the Ideal

from The Vineyard, Christmas 1918

The phrase 'Haslemere Peasant Arts' tends to be met with puzzlement and derision, so what does the word peasant mean in this respect?  The Peasant Art movement's respect for Tolstoy and Peter Rosegger is a large part of their use of this word I think.  In the editorial titled 'Revival' for the New Series of The Vineyard in Christmas 1918, it is explained thus:

"The word peasant strikes the key note, sets the tune for the whole movement.  But there are certain people who while they irresponsibly enjoy and use the fruits of its craftsmanship, still kick against this word.  It savours of Arcadian affectation; or it suggests nothing livelier than a drab inarticulate agricultural labourer; or, as another cheerfully asserts, "We have no peasants" ; and therewith an end.

"The word as we use it is prophetic rather than descriptive of latter-day English fact.  We chose it because it creates a desirable atmosphere in which to work, and it holds up an ideal.  The peasant as we think of him, and as he is at his best in the less industrial countries and districts, in Norway, Sweden, Brittany, Tuscany, gets the inspiration of his play, his art and his festivals from the same sources as his labour and bread.  He is, in the main, a reverent and resourceful being, blest with energies which are not exhausted in his tussle with nature but still run over in singing and dancing and carving nice patterns on the potato bowl or his baby's cradle.  So was it with the English peasant in other centuries and that although certain of the conditions of his existence were very cruel.  And he made innumerable songs out of his daily life and labour - ploughing, reaping, shearing, lambing, harvesting, courting : songs of such sweetness, pathos and grandeur that a fine musician will travel England over to-day to beg an old labouring man, dying in the workhouse, to sing them to him.

This being so, it is plain that the quality of the stuff of the peasant's life is of first-rate importance.  And now - since the war has so speeded up politics and forestalled our sluggish national evolution that even those people who used to describe the gradual extermination of agriculture by industrialism as "inevitable progress" have been made to understand that a nation cannot live for long without peasantry any more than a tree without roots - it is timely to consider who will be the peasant of the future, and what will be the stuff of their life.

For many centuries, but especially since the beginning of the industrial era, all so-called progressive nations have been ill-using those on whom their life depended, the bread-growers; but none have done this so systematically as England.  Our folk must have been virile and spirited indeed to quit themselves so bravely as fighters, craftsmen, pageant-players, singers and dancers, in spite of feudalism Tudor tyranny, Game laws, Land laws, Poor laws, and Enclosure Acts.  And yet the mediaeval peasant was a freer man than his descendant who sought escape from the worst agricultural conditions in industrialism: at least his hand was the master of his tools, and his outdoor labours were a perennial spring of feeling and fancy.  "Out of the ground God made all things grow, including Art."  Out of the factory might come smoke, strikes, and ultimately higher wages: but God Himself could not make anything grow there.  There the man, the master of tools, became tool of the machine, a hard taskmaster that had no use for his heart, or his hand, except as a slave.

None the less when we consider the countryman's martyrdom in the eighteenth century, we do not wonder that when a note of hope sounded along the green lanes, only too many of them, now serfs once more, tramped away towards "freedom" among the dark satanic mills.  There, in the devitalising or exciting air of factory work and city crowd, the rustic lost his creativeness, his energy for personal play; he blurred his type and forgot his songs.  With those of his kin who stayed behind life went hardly enough.  But here and there among the older folk to-day - in their racy talk, their stoicism, their hedgerow thrifts and humours, their exquisite skill in the arts of thatching, huddle-making, hedge-binding, etc. and among the very young children, too, before the town-made schools have drilled them into uniform clerk hood - we get the gleam and grit of a once great peasantry.

And now the world's war - the fine flower and logical result of mechanical civilisation - has in four short years rushed the race nigh such ruin as the slower, surer processes of industrialism in peace time could have accomplished only one or two more generations.  we still have a population of swarming millions, indeed: but out of that incomparable rally of devoted youth and vigour, beauty and genius, who went into the war, comparatively few have lived long enough to hand on life to children.  This sudden almost irreparable loss it is, rather than the slow attrition of industrialism, that has shocked the sleepiest awake to the urgent need of national repairs, as well for the body as the soul, in the re-planting of peasantry.

Godfrey Blount in Kirtlington, 1894-5

Kelly’s Directory of Oxford, 1895 records Blount living in Nutlands, Kirtlington.  Blount was elected as a member of the Kirtlington Parish Council 1894, as written in my previous post here.  This is a Grade II listed building on Bletchingdon Road (OX5 3HF) which is now converted into flats.  The building is described by British Listed Buildings (here) as:

“House. c.1830 with later additions. Coursed squared limestone and some brick; Welsh-slate roofs with brick gable stacks. Probable central-stair plan with rear ranges. Regency style. 2 storeys.  Symmetrical 3-window front has large 12-pane sashes flanking a central half-glazed door and, at first floor, has smaller 12-pane sashes linked by an ashlar sill band which returns around the gable
ends. A hipped-roofed slated verandah extending across the front has ornamental trellis panels including segmental arches in front of the windows. Interior not inspected." 

Nutlands, Kirtlington, Oxford,
home of Godfrey Blount 1895

The first reference to Blount’s work that I have found is in Studio International (No. 13, April 1894) "A chest with panel in repousse work, is one of an admirable series of similar work by Mr Godfrey Blount, of Kirtlington, Oxford.  From the photographs we have seen it is possible to speak very warmly of the quality of Mr Blount’s work, especially the proportion of the framing and the massing of the ornamental details, without injury to the dignity on the whole.  It is so easy to fritter away the effect of decoration by too ornate adjuncts, that this reticence deserves commendation.”

Chest with panel in repousse work by Godfrey Blount
Studio: International art (No. 13, April 1894)

Peasant love-songs

Mary Mudie wrote in The Vineyard in May 1914 the lead article entitled 'The Woman's Part in Peasant Life'.  This was the write-up of an "address given before the Peasant Arts Fellowship, March 11, 1914".  In this article, Mudie states:

Spine design from
The Vineyard

"The position and influence of women in any country, it seems to me, may best be shown by its love-songs, because they reflect man's ideal of womanhood.  Tried by this test Italy would stand high, for her love-songs set woman on a throne, and they are true folk-songs made by the people.  Women may well bear themselves with dignity whose lovers court them in such home-made lyrics as those sung among the Tuscan hills.  One begins:

O shining star!  O soul serene and mild,

I trust to make with thee a lasting peace ....

and the lover goes on to describe her gentle manner and lovely ways, and the speech so sweet and so noble that the birds stop their singing, the river its flow to listen to her words.

Even the best translation fails to render the simple yet exquisite music of the originals, but in her Folksongs of the Tuscans Hills, lately published, Miss barrack's translations may give some idea of the peasant woman as her lovers and her neighbours see her.  In one of the Fiori a little maid says to her lover:

Nettle flower fair!

Please do not mind my dress that is threadbare;

It is not in the clothes that Love doth dwell,

It is within the heart, - thou knows well.

His answer is:

For riches, O Sweetheart, I'd love thee ne-er,

Not if three mountains all of gold were thine;

But for thy lovely looks, thy manners fair:

Thy nobleness is worth a Duchy old,

A pearl thou art that's threaded in the gold:

Thy nobleness is worth a treasure found,

A pearly thou art upon a golden ground.

Sometimes it is the lover who regrets his poverty; he sings:

I'm born in poverty and have no claim
To court a maid so noble and so bright
For poverty indeed spoils every aim.
I've set myself upon too great a height.
Yet gentlehood I have in seeking thee,
So thou - for poverty dismiss not me.

What is her answer?:

How many folks there be who wed for wealth!
But he can work for goods who has good health,
Our goods they come and go as doth the wind -
What use for them without content of mind?
Riches!  they, like the sea, return, depart.
What use for them without content of heart?

When he has to go away to work he tell:

When from my village late I did depart,
Weeping I bade my love farewell - but she,
Who is most noble, courteous of heart,
Held me to ask when my return should be.

And I made the answer with such words as these:
My coming back shall be when God doth please -
And I made answer with humility,
 The coming back shall be unless I die - 
And I made answer with these words of faith,
The coming back shall be - unless for Death.

She, grieved at his tears, tries to keep up his courage and says:

Be happy, love, and if you needs must leave,
Do not take gloom upon you heart for load.
See! if I knew it 'twould be mine to grieve
That sadly you should go along your road.
By all means go - and quickly come again.
Leave sighing unto me - who must remain.

That is how the lover thinks of his girl; she is gentle, noble and courteous; she is to be the high white column of his home, and he longs for the day when he shall bring her, as the peasant custom is, to his father's house:

O! when will that one day of glory come
When softly thou shalt mount my stair and stand
With all thy brothers round thee in our home!
I shall be first to take thee by the hand.
O when will come, Sweetheart, that glorious day
When to the priest we go, our yes to say.

Long after they are married he still sings to the wife of many years, how she is like an olive tree which sheds its fruit but keeps its silver leaves; like the sea which winds and waves may trouble, but which keeps its level, however much rain may fall; she is like the tender grass of spring that every day grows lovelier to the sight."

Haslemere Peasants & the Appleton's weavers

I have been unable to find any direct reference between the Haslemere Peasants weaving on Kings Road, Haslemere and the manufacture of braid a few hundred metres further down the road at Appleton's, Sickle Mill, Sturt Road.  It would be remiss not to mention this similar manufacturing industry taking place in Haslemere at the same time as the Haslemere Peasant Industries.

Appletons, Sturt Road and the Haslemere Peasant Industries, Kings Road,
Haslemere, an 8 minute walk apart (Google Maps)

Appleton's mill in Haslemere would have been long established before the Haslemere Peasant movement began.  It's existence and proximity to the Haslemere Peasant Industries on Kings Road would have been known to the Kings and Blount's, and I wonder what part that knowledge played in their decision to establish a Weaving House and Tapestry Studio on Kings Road?  The journey between the two sites is 8 minutes on foot (according to Google Maps), and at the time there were no recorded buildings between them.

Kelly's Directory of Kent, Surrey & Sussex 1891 (p.211, online here) stated that "the principle trade or manufacture of the place (Haslemere) is hoop making."  Kelly's 1913 Directory, the next one I can find online, records a dramatic increase in the town and that the principal trades are "brick and tile making and the makings of braid, bindings and cord etc."  The reference to braid, bindings and cord being a reference to Appletons and not to the Haslemere Peasant Industries.

Military braid, perhaps similar to braid that was manufactured at Appletons,
Sickle Mill, Haslemere c.1900

The Shottermill Scrapbook records “Mrs Dunce died in 1944, at the age of 95.  It is interesting to recall that in her young days, she was employed by Mr Appleton, at Sicklemill, where he carried on a mill for making braid for soldiers uniforms and for making wick for candles.  It is believed that at one time, this was the only mill in the country making this braid, and in Mrs Dunce’s time, a good many people were employed there. 

Plaque outside Sickle Mill,
Sturt Road, Haslemere

“Sicklemill was a paper mill in 1762, and passed into the Appleton family at the beginning of the 19^th century.”  (Haslemere Society website, online here)

Winter and Collyer record that “Sickle Mill was owned by James Simmons who made paper there until 1870.  Through the second half of the century Henry and Thomas Appleton manufactured braid for decorating military uniforms….Messrs Appleton, who also manufactured braid at Elstead, sold Sickle Mill at auction in 1911.” (Around Haslemere and Hindhead in Old Photographs, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1991).

Sickle Mill (Winter & Collyer, Around Haslemere and Hindhead in Old Photographs,
Alan Sutton Publishing Limited, 1991)

The industry was described as “the manufacture of worsted lace and epaulettes for the trimming of military uniforms” by Surrey’s Industrial Past (online here).  The Appleton family of father Henry and son Thomas from London first set up machinery for spinning and weaving in Pitfold Mill, Haslemere in 1835, a mill owned by James Simmons, a local papermaker.  Thomas Appleton moved to nearby Elstead and began manufacturing there in an old corn mill.  In 1851 Thomas Appleton, then 35, was described in the census as “master manufacturer of small ware employing 100 hands”.  In 1854 he bought Sickle Mill from Simmons.  Surrey's Industrial Past reports that the firm left the district in the 1880s.  By contrast Winter and Collyer report that Appleton bought Sickle Mill c.1870 and sold the mill in 1911.  However Kelly's Directory in 1913 records a John B. Appleton, surely a relative of Henry and Thomas, residing at Sickle Mill.

Sickle Mill today, from Google Maps

Appletons is still in business today!  A few years ago I got in touch with Diana Cawdron, the current owner, to see if she had any information to share, unfortunately she had none and explained "I bought the company in March 2013 and it had been in the family for 180 years.  Very little of the company history was preserved but I do know that it was very involved in military uniforms such as embroidery and goldwork so I’m sure there would have been braiding too.  I met an elderly lady whose mother as a girl had made plumes and cockades for military hats for Appletons.  Unfortunately I have no record of connection to Haslemere.  When we took over the company was reduced to selling only tapestry wool and was based in Chiswick and Epsom."

Looking at their website today, it is interesting to read that Appleton's recently provided the tapestry wool for completing the missing sections of the Bayeux Tapestry!  I wish the continuation of the firm every success.

from Appleton's website here