The Horsekeeper's Daughter Read online

  The

  Horsekeeper’s

  Daughter

  Jane Gulliford Lowes

  Copyright © 2018 Jane Gulliford Lowes

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

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  ISBN 9781788034968

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  “The Horsekeeper’s Daughter” is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Jim Groark.

  He made me curious about everything.

  Acknowledgements

  I always wanted to write a book, so I did; however, I am not a historian, nor am I a writer. This is not an academic work – it’s simply a story I wanted to tell, a story that I hope others might enjoy. I have used my best endeavours with my historical research but if any of the facts are inaccurate, I bow to those with greater knowledge.

  So many people have helped me tell this story, but in particular I wanted to thank the following:

  In Australia, Gary Balkin – if I hadn’t spotted his article about the Campbells, there would be no book; Catherine and Rob Marsden for their unending kindness and generosity; Bob Campbell for all the help and information he provided, and for showing copies of the letters and photographs to his dad, Jimmy Campbell; Wendy King, who’d already done so much research into the Campbells, for her superb research skills and for the numerous trips to the Queensland State Archive on my behalf; Muriel Shepherd at the Mount Tamborine Historical Society, and Margaret for showing me around the museum; Iain Hollindale for his wonderful book, Life and Cricket on the Coomera, for taking me to the Campbell farm and for showing me around Upper Coomera; Ann Rowley for locating the grave site; Coline Murphy for travelling all the way up to see me in Noosa with very helpful information about the Antrim Campbells; Kate Wall for her fabulous photography which inspired the cover of the book (you can see her work at www.thelightchaser.com.au) and Kayla and Cheryl at the Local Studies Unit, City of Gold Coast Libraries, for helping source images of the Campbells and Bignells.

  In England, my family, Marcus, Alan, Moira, Geoff and Robert, for their unending patience and support (moral and financial) for yet another of my mad schemes; Merry the spaniel for his constant companionship, being a general pest and draping his ears all over my keyboard; everyone from Seaton Village who helped with information, in particular Beatrice Lewis, Alyson Slater, Joyce Pescod, Joan Hutchinson (nee Boland) and Stafford Linsley for his very helpful comments and lecture notes on the history of Seaham; Brian Slee for historical photos; my late uncle George Clyde, for information about Edie Threadkell and Caroline Street – sadly he passed away before the completion of this book; Ray Armbrister for information about his ancestors and St Mary the Virgin; all friends (you know who you are) who supported me through this project and put up with my endless ramblings and obsession with the story of Sarah Marshall, especially Alison Fawell, Jackie Stoker, and Jill Rose (for keeping me sane). Also, thanks to everyone who assisted in the production of the book, including my editor, Ben Watson; the staff at Durham Records Office/County Library for permission to use extracts from Troubled Seams by John McCutcheon; Jennifer Maine for the beautiful hand-drawn maps; and the staff at Matador Books.

  Space in the book is limited but you can see more photographs relevant to the story on my website justcuriousjane.com.

  Let’s do it all again sometime.

  Contents

  1.Pandora’s Box

  2.Coal Dust

  3.The Girl Next Door

  4.Troubled Seams

  5.Heaven and Hell

  6.A Twist of Fate

  7.The Long Goodbye

  8.Precious Cargo

  9.Brave New World

  10.Ghinghinda

  11.The Good Wife

  12.Jondaryan

  13.At the Foot of the Mountain

  14.Topsy

  15.On Caroline Street

  16.The Turn of the Screw

  17.The Gunalda Hotel

  18.Broken Threads

  19.Full Circle

  Bibliography

  Notes

  1

  Pandora’s Box

  It’s a shabby, tattered old thing, fairly nondescript – the sort of mass-produced, cheap, old attaché case you might find sitting abandoned in the corner of a charity shop or on the bric-a-brac table at the village jumble sale. Designed to look like leather, but in fact made of cardboard, it was stitched around the edges in an attempt to give it an air of quality. The spring had long since sprung from its two catches, which were rusted and stiff. The handle was loose and broken, and the faux leather covering had begun to peel away at the edges several lifetimes ago. Inside, the case was lined with a faded raspberry-pink paper with a geometric design, speckled with brown spots. Both the case and its contents smelled old, musty, the smell of antiquarian bookshops and forgotten memories.

  This was Aunt Edie’s box. It had always been known as Aunt Edie’s box. For at least fifteen years it had lived in the storage compartment under the spare bed, surrounded by old bank statements and revision notes and rolls of wrapping paper. Once every few years, usually while looking for something else, I would stumble across it, and spend half an hour or so looking through its contents – faded old photographs of vanished histories, of people I never knew and whose stories meant nothing to me. Letters, official documents, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, even wills; all that remained of the entire lives of long-dead strangers.

  Aunt Edie wasn’t my aunt at all. In fact, she wasn’t anybody’s aunt. Edie was one of those elderly ladies, known to all and beloved by most, a close friend of the family, who had, it seemed to me, been around forever. She was a friend to my great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother. And they all called her Aunt Edie. “Aunt” – a term of affection, a badge of honour, a title denoting ties of love and friendship where ties of blood do not exist. Is this a particularly North-Eastern thing, like stotties and plodging and proggy mats and ha’way? Growing up, I had numerous aunties, none of whom were even slightly related, but who were all close friends of my mother and grandmother.

  Edie was a tall, stout woman with a kind face, a high-pitched gentle voice and thick ankles. She was one of those sorts of women who had always been old. Dressed in a housecoat and apron and slippers – at least that’s how I remember her – she lived in a downstairs flat on a small housing estate in Seaham Harbour, between the railway line, the colliery and the sea, and was very deaf. Her house was full of curious knick-knacks and memories and every time I visited her I would ask to see the box. Off Edie would shuffle to the back room to fetch it. As a child I was fascinated with the “olden days” and would
spend hours listening to my grandparents’ tales of growing up in Seaham Harbour in the 1920s and 30s. Edie’s little attaché case was a treasure trove to me. It was Pandora’s box.

  Two photographs in particular captured my imagination. The first was of an elderly lady with a gentle smile, dressed in heavy, black Victorian garb, hands placed on a book upon her knees, her white hair tucked up in a pointed bonnet. As a very small girl I always thought she must have been a witch, though perhaps a kindly one. The second, a small sepia photograph with crimped and crumpled edges, of a group of Sunday School children, dressed in their Sunday best with unsmiling faces and frilly bonnets, with the date in the bottom corner – 26th May 1912. I often wondered who these children were and how Edie came to have this photograph. There were vague mentions of “relatives in Australia” but she couldn’t really remember.

  It was my fascination with this photograph that would ultimately take me on a journey through a hundred and thirty-five years of history, as I uncovered an incredible and unexpected tale of hardship, bravery, love, loss, tragedy and coincidence, of ordinary people enduring extraordinary circumstances.

  Some years after Edie passed away, the box came into my possession. Whilst researching my own family tree, I resolved to check the box to see if it contained any photographs of my grandparents, or my mother as a child. It didn’t. For the first time, I began to pay proper attention to its contents, and spent an afternoon sorting through the collection of photographs which spanned a hundred years. Gentlemen in uniform with mutton chop whiskers; children in starched pinafores; stony-faced women in Edwardian dress; numerous wedding photos of smiling couples from the 1920s to the 1970s; groups of middle-aged ladies on bus trips to Blackpool, laughing and smiling, all wearing hats and wielding incredibly large handbags. The names of these people had been lost forever. There was not a name, a note or a date, nothing to identify the subjects, nothing which might tell their stories.

  There was one small brown envelope containing letters and photographs which differed from all the rest. It was addressed to “Miss Edith Threadkell, 6 Caroline Street, Seaham Harbour, Co. Durham, UNITED KINGDOM”. On the back of each of the photographs, faintly written in faded brown ink, were names, dates, places, and detailed descriptions, each one signed either “Bill” or “Topsy”.

  Whenever I took out Edie’s box and began to look through the contents, my fascination and curiosity were always tinged with regret. These letters, these photographs, these reminiscences, they didn’t belong to me. I did not recognise in the faces that looked back at me any familiar features; nothing but the smiles of strangers, no recognisable family characteristics, no “you have your great-grandad’s eyes”. I thought of my own family and my treasured memories of my grandparents, and the photographs and tales of their forbears, all carefully collated and cared for and loved. I felt sad for these long dead souls, ten thousand miles away. And then it became obvious to me. These items had come into my possession not by coincidence but for a clearly defined purpose. There was a story here, a story which was demanding to be unearthed and told. Who were these people and what was their connection to Edie and to Seaham?

  In all, there are twenty-five photographs and two letters, written by Bill and Topsy Campbell to Edie in the first six months of 1936. The photographs span the period from 1912 to 1936, and were taken mainly around and upon Tamborine Mountain in South-Eastern Queensland. A man and a woman sitting in a horse-drawn cart, a baby on the young woman’s lap; the same couple in their Sunday best, sitting proudly on the veranda of their homestead with their new baby; a man ploughing a field with horses; two small children wandering through the bush; a family group, on the same veranda, years later, the children all grown up; and then the subject and the setting of the photographs seemed to change. No more pastoral scenes, no more smiling family groups. In their place were photographs of the same moustachioed man, plumper, older, careworn, tired, at his work in the far north of Queensland, axe in hand, in the depths of the rainforest.

  The photographs and letters stopped abruptly in 1936.

  I must have read the letters a dozen times over, scouring the pages for details of names and dates and clues I had missed. Although Bill Campbell’s letters listed his children and even their birthdays, my initial enquiries drew a blank. Endless internet searches revealed no information at all. I tried names, birthdates, places, all with the same result. I began to wonder if the details Bill had written were incorrect – was he somehow mistaken (as fathers sometimes are) about his children’s dates of birth? Were the names he described actual names or just the children’s nicknames? For that matter, I could find no trace of Bill or his unusually-named wife Topsy. My task seemed an impossible one, the obstacles of time and distance too great. Edie’s box returned to its place beneath the spare bed, amongst the old photo albums and other possessions I no longer needed but that sentiment would not allow me to part with.

  There they remained, for a decade, forgotten.

  I have no idea what made me suddenly think of the Campbells again after all those years. In January 2016, on a Tuesday morning, I was sitting at my desk in my large basement office in a stately Victorian terrace in Sunderland, the sort of street which is lined with the once grand houses of doctors, shipping agents, “the middling sort”, now populated with solicitors’ offices and orthodontists. My view is an uninspiring one, of iron railings and damp mossy brickwork sprouting ferns, litter and the legs of people queuing at the bus stop. On my desk lay sheaves of legal documents, correspondence, medical records, each case an indictment of the industrial heritage that built the city. Shipyard workers slowly dying of mesothelioma, fabricators and welders with hands rendered useless due to years of exposure to vibration from the tools of their trade. I glanced up from my work, distracted by a seagull picking at a discarded fast food wrapper caught in the railings and suddenly thought, “I need to find Bill Campbell.”

  That evening I retrieved Edie’s box and set out the photographs and letters on the floor before me. Bill, with his bushy moustache and a twinkle in his eye, was as charming as I remembered. I took out of the envelope his crumpled old letters, and unfolded his fragile old words. At once familiar and strange, my memories of his stories began to return. With renewed purpose, I resumed the task I had begun ten years before.

  My search revealed nothing. Not a hint, not a birth certificate, not an obituary. Not a trace. It appeared there were as many Campbells in Queensland as there were in Glasgow. I decided to take another tack. One of the photographs showed two young girls, maybe twenty years old or so, stood on either side of a handsome young man. On the back of the photograph was written “Jean and Kathleen with Jean’s husband, JH Balkin of Gunalda”. Balkin. An unusual name. I entered his details online and there it was – the marriage of Jean and Jimmy Balkin, Queensland, 1932.

  This was the gateway, the key to the Campbells. I followed the Balkins through trade directories and electoral rolls as they moved around southern Queensland, from the 1930s to the 1960s, and had children of their own, including a son, Gary. After hours of searching, I stumbled upon an article in the New Farm Village Magazine (December 2015) by one Gary Balkin.

  I opened up the article and couldn’t quite believe my eyes. There looking back at me was Bill Campbell – a photograph of Bill winning a logging competition at a country fair in Queensland in 1917 – young, handsome, in his prime, bristling with pride and muscles. The original of that photograph was lying on the floor next to me. I poured over the article, hungry for information, devouring every detail. I contacted the magazine’s editor that same evening, asking if he could put me in touch with Gary. I hoped for but didn’t expect a response. When I awoke the next day, there was an email from Gary – curious, delighted, fascinated.

  I had found the Campbells of Tamborine Mountain and I thought my task was almost at an end. I couldn’t have been more wrong. As I delved further into the Campbell family history, I began to unea
rth a story that weaves back and forth between Seaham and Queensland for decades, a saga of industrial unrest, destitution, adventure, opportunity, love, tragedy, bankruptcy, grief – and one mind-blowing coincidence.

  2

  Coal Dust

  Over the subsequent days and weeks, emails and photographs and information began to flood in from Bill’s grandchildren and assorted descendants, and I began to piece together the story of the lives of Bill and Topsy. The answers to some questions still eluded me. What was the link between Bill and Edie? How did a spinster living in a small mining town on the Durham Coast come to have all of these photographs and letters? Why were they so important to her that she had kept them for a lifetime, locked away in a battered old box?

  I knew my story would ultimately end in Australia, but for the answers I sought I had to look much closer to home.

  Edith Threadkell was born in Seaham Harbour, County Durham on 20th September 1906, the second but only surviving child of Robert Threadkell, a mariner, and his wife, Fanny Hood Threadkell (nee Marshall). Edie was a plain-looking child, devoted to her mother – Robert was absent from the family home for months, sometimes years at a time, away at sea serving with the Merchant Navy. Edie saw little of him as she grew up, at least until his retirement from the seafaring life at the end of the First World War.

  The relationship between Robert and Fanny was perhaps an unusual one. Robert, who was born into a seafaring family in Woodbridge, Suffolk on 10th January 1853, had married Fanny in the County Durham port of South Shields in April 1904. She was twenty-two and worked as a housekeeper at the lodging house in Oyston Street, South Shields, where Robert stayed when his ship docked in the Tyne ports. Robert was twenty-nine years older than Fanny. Both their ages are incorrectly recorded on their marriage certificate. Robert was fifty-one, not fifty; Fanny was twenty-two, not twenty-three. What brought them together? Perhaps financial necessity – a girl in domestic service and from a poor family was unwise to turn down a proposal from a gentleman with a secure income in those days; perhaps a genuine affection for one another. In reality, it was most likely a combination of the two. Certainly, this was no marriage of convenience and produced two children, one of whom died in infancy, the other, Edie.