The Horsekeeper's Daughter Read online

  When I visited Edie as a child with my mother and younger brother, Edie would bring out of the china cabinet a heavy trinket box, made simply out of rough wood, varnished and painted with an image of a ship in full sail on the lid. As children, we had always referred to it as the “Sea Captain’s Box” because it had been made by Robert Threadkell on one of his voyages. Whether Robert ever actually captained a ship is unknown but it seems unlikely – there is no record of him ever having done so. The box was full of brass buttons and old coins – copper pennies and thre’penny bits – the sort of things small children enjoy sorting and playing with – but it also contained Robert’s service medals from the war and various other tokens. When Edie died, the box passed into the possession of my younger brother, another Robert, and he has it still.

  Robert Threadkell’s marriage to Fanny Marshall was not his first. As a young man, he’d married Ellen Kinross, from Seaham Harbour and they’d had three children, Isabella, Maria and Elizabeth. Their descendants, Currys and Hudsons, still live in the town. Ellen died in October 1893 aged forty two. Elizabeth, their youngest daughter, was only three years old at the time. How Robert had met Ellen and why he had chosen to settle in Seaham Harbour is unclear. Perhaps his ship was a regular visitor at the small but busy harbour here.

  Seaham. Where to begin? How is it possible to describe with objectivity the town where I grew up and have lived almost my entire life? I have loved and hated this place, in equal measure. A small former mining town of some twenty-two thousand souls, it clings to the Durham coastline, battered by the North Sea, surrounded by farm land and bordered by the two ancient villages of Seaton (known locally as, simply, “the Village”) to the north-west and Dalton-le-Dale to the south-east.

  I have longed to escape this town. I have yearned to return. Wherever I travel in the world, it calls me back like a fretful lover. In my younger days, I was desperate to get away. As a child and then a teenager, I despised its shabby, run-down main street, the endless brick-built terraces and sprawling council estates, the town’s three collieries, which were its lifeblood, the coal-stained beaches, the small-town mentality and its narrow-minded people.

  As an adult, my perceptions have changed. And so has my town. Today, Seaham is a busy, thriving, pleasant place, which its people are proud to call home, a location outsiders want to visit. Visitors flock here, perhaps whiling away a few hours on the sandy beach, investigating the rock pools, hunting for sea glass, or people-watching sitting at one of the seafront cafes, maybe visiting the lifeboat museum and the attractive little marina.

  There is now no sign of the coal industry which created the town and provided employment for thousands of its sons for one hundred and fifty years, no clue left behind of Seaham’s industrial heritage, save for the occasional smudge of coal dust in the sand and in the lungs of those who remember some other life. Where there were once pit shafts and spoil heaps and railway tracks, there are now executive houses, nature reserves, cliff-top walks, rare orchids and picnic spots. The town even boasts a five-star hotel with a luxury spa, beloved of footballers and visiting pop stars. This miraculous transformation has occurred in a single generation.

  I have fallen in love with the very place I detested and with its warm-hearted and generous people. Shame has been usurped by pride. It’s not just the town that has changed. I have too.

  For two decades, I have lived in a house overlooking the pretty village green and the manor house in Seaton. The Village predates the main town of Seaham by centuries. There has been a settlement here probably since Roman times – a hoard of Roman coins was unearthed in the village stream a century or more ago – but the village itself has existed for perhaps a thousand years.

  In many ways Seaton is the archetypal English north-country village, with its white-washed houses and farmsteads clustered around the small green, and overlooking it all, the village pub, the Dun Cow. For over one hundred and sixty years, the Dun Cow has been the centre of village life. Officially voted the best country pub in County Durham by CAMRA in 2016, unofficially it’s the best pub in the world. Log fires, real ales, live music, no food, no jukebox. It’s the kind of pub where you have to step over several dogs to get to the bar, where every patron will announce his arrival to those already present with the standard greeting in these parts – “Alreet?” Strangers don’t remain strangers for long – within ten minutes of crossing the threshold and ordering a pint of Northumbrian Blonde, you can expect to be interrogated by locals who will extract your entire life story and declare that you must in some way be related.

  Although the village has changed significantly in the last thirty to forty years, with new houses on the periphery where farmyards and barns once stood, it has never lost its character. Or its characters. And there are plenty of those. There are still farmers in the village, but it’s now largely populated by teachers, solicitors, doctors, police officers, businessmen and the occasional Premier League footballer. My house stands on the site of the barns which formed part of Village Farm; the close of houses of which it is a part, follows the layout of the old farmyard. The Village Farmhouse is still there, yards from the pub, a six-bar-gate’s width from my home, and still occupied after two hundred and fifty years or so.

  Despite the metamorphosis of Seaham in my lifetime, there remains much that Robert Threadkell and his daughter Edie would have recognised.

  The modern town is in fact made up of a number of older villages – Old Seaham, the original ancient hamlet, of which nothing remains but the beautiful Saxon church of St Mary the Virgin, its vicarage and Seaham Hall, now a luxurious hotel; half a mile to the south, Seaham Harbour, constructed to export coal from the Marquis of Londonderry’s County Durham coal mines at Rainton; New Seaham, a mile or so inland, the mining village which sprung up around Seaton (later Seaham) Colliery, and the two agricultural villages of Seaton and Dalton-le-Dale which, due to their respective locations (on top of a hill and in a small valley), have retained their separate identities.

  Old Seaham had existed for at least a thousand years when Sir Ralph Milbanke constructed Seaham Hall on the site of Seaham Cottage in 1792. The tiny Saxon church, with its flag of St George permanently aflutter in the stiff sea breeze, is overlooked by so many passers-by. It is well worth a visit. The churchyard is filled with the bones and the names of parishioners from Seaton Village, for which it served as parish church long after Old Seaham disappeared – Thompsons, Hodgsons, Bolands.

  When I was a child I visited the graveyard around the church, searching for the pirate’s grave, so-called because it was carved with a skull and crossbones. Whether it ever actually belonged to a pirate is highly unlikely, but it certainly captured my imagination. The village is described in detail by Elizabeth Grant, the daughter of the Scottish Laird of Rothiemurchus, born in 1797, in her Memoirs of a Highland Lady. The book, published in 1898, three years after her death, includes recollections of childhood visits to Seaham, playing on the beach and making necklaces of seaweed, rose-covered cottages, the surrounding farms, and paints an idyllic scene.

  Seaham Hall itself is an imposing white Georgian pile, perched on the cliff tops overlooking the North Sea, surrounded by lawns where the old village once stood, with terraced gardens sloping down to the wooded dene on its southern aspect. It is perhaps most famous for being the location of the wedding of the famous poet and infamous society dandy George Gordon, Lord Byron to Anne Isabella (known as Annabella) Milbanke, Sir Ralph’s daughter, in 1815, and the couple lived there for a short time after their wedding. I’ve always been quite entertained by the fact that the civic authorities in Seaham have done so much to try to preserve the memory of its most illustrious resident. Over the years we’ve been blessed with a Lord Byron’s Walk, a Byron Terrace, a Byron Terrace School, a Byron Lodge Estate, and most latterly, Byron Place, a small, ugly, soulless shopping centre constructed of steel and glass, overlooking the busy docks and the grey North Sea beyond.

/>   Byron lived here less than a year and is rumoured to have detested the place. It could not have been further from his debauched, high-society celebrity lifestyle, his numerous lovers and his fancy London literary friends, and he couldn’t escape from the place fast enough.

  It appears that Byron quickly grew to detest Annabella, having married more for money than love, and their marriage lasted barely a year, although it did produce a daughter. Ada, Countess of Lovelace (known today simply as Ada Lovelace), was something of a prodigy and became a famous mathematician, working with Charles Babbage on one of the world’s first computers, the mechanical Analytical Engine. In January 1816, Byron turfed Annabella and their child out of their Piccadilly home, making some excuse about having to sell the house because of financial difficulties. Annabella and Ada travelled to Leicestershire to stay with her parents; Annabella never saw him again. Eventually Byron famously fled to Europe and his beloved Greece, where he joined the War of Independence. He died aged thirty four of fever at Missolonghi in 1824, a national hero to the Greek people.

  I imagine he’s spinning in his grave at the thought of the local populace celebrating his memory by popping into Greggs in Byron Place for a steak bake and a cheese pasty. Byron, a man who devoted his entire life to the pursuit of pleasure, would have, however, been more impressed by the fact that his former home is now a luxury five-star hotel, complete with oriental spa and outdoor hot tubs. There’s a delicious irony in the fact that guests at the hotel can trample at will over Byron’s most famous works. Quotes from his poems are woven into the very fabric of the carpet which sweeps along the upper corridors and down the grand staircase…

  “She walks in beauty like the night… Upstairs, to the right, and into the ladies’ powder room.”

  Or something along those lines.

  The rural idyll described by Elizabeth Grant and experienced by Byron did not persist for long after the poet’s departure. After his new son-in-law had worked his way through a fair proportion of the family money, and in dire financial straits as a result of funding his own political campaigns, Sir Ralph was forced to sell his estates. In 1821, Seaham Hall and the surrounding land was sold off to Lord Charles William Vane, Baron Stewart at that time and British Ambassador to Vienna, who would shortly become the Third Marquis of Londonderry, mine-owner and industrialist, after his elder brother and heir to the title slit his own throat.

  The fate of the hamlet was sealed, the industrial revolution finally arrived and Old Seaham was changed forever. Coal was now king. In the words of a local historian

  “The Black Death of the pit… was spreading eastwards like the plague.” 1

  The town’s street names and public buildings still bear testimony to the Marquis and his family – Londonderry Street, Castlereagh Road, The Londonderry Institute, Viceroy Street, Tempest Road, and the Londonderry Offices which for many years served as the town’s police station and which are now luxury flats overlooking the harbour; the Vane Tempest Colliery was named in memory of his second wife Frances-Anne Vane Tempest, a teenage heiress and society belle who owned land and collieries throughout the county. However, the Third Marquis was a tyrant and ruled his estates and his business interests with a rod of iron, seeking assistance from the Home Secretary to suppress the fledgling “Union of Pitmen” in 1826. In 1844, during the four-month-long strike by the Northumberland and Durham miners, the Marquis wrote the famous “Seaham Letter”, forbidding local tradesmen and shopkeepers to extend credit or any other form of assistance to the impoverished strikers. The Third Marquis died in 1854, and the formidable Frances Anne took control of his land, estates and industrial concerns, choosing to live at Seaham Hall rather than her country estates or London mansion.

  Coal mining created the town of Seaham, and as I delved deeper into Edie’s past searching for a connection to the Campbells of Tamborine Mountain, I began to discover that her story and that of Bill and Topsy Campbell had their beginnings in the Londonderry-owned collieries and villages of County Durham.

  It was then that I stumbled upon an incredible coincidence for which I was totally unprepared.

  3

  The Girl Next Door

  Amongst the photographs in Edie’s box, there was one to which I had not paid much attention. It isn’t a portrait, a family group or even an attractive landscape, and so I had merely glanced at it and cast it aside on the pile of anonymous faces. One cold winter evening, sitting on the floor in front of my wood stove, I took out the box and began to re-read Bill’s correspondence for what seemed the hundredth time. Bill’s words were now so familiar to me I could recite parts of his letters in my head. Frustrated, I felt no nearer to finding the connection between Edie and Bill than when I’d started. I folded up the letters and placed them back in their old brown paper envelope. As I did so, on the top of the pile of pictures and Robert Threadkell’s will, my attention was drawn to the photograph I had discarded.

  It’s a very boring photograph, in black and white, of a single plain white gravestone. Nothing fancy, arched at the top and surrounded by low rectangular wrought iron railings. There are no flowers or shrubs, and the unkempt patch of ground within the railings is covered with rocky soil. The cemetery in the middle of the Queensland Bush in which the grave lies looks overgrown, neglected, perhaps even abandoned. The simple inscription on the gravestone reads:

  “In Loving Memory Of

  Sarah Campbell

  Gone but not forgotten”

  No “loving mother of”, no “beloved wife of” – there was nothing to link this poor soul to any other person, living or dead.

  I turned over the photograph and there in the faded familiar longhand I now recognised as Topsy’s were the matter-of-fact words, “This is Willie’s mother’s grave. This photo isn’t a very good one, the sun was too hot for the camera.” Then, intriguingly, “For Grannie and you xxx.”

  Willie? Who was Willie Campbell? Why was Topsy sending a photograph of this woman’s grave to Edie and her grandmother? What a bizarre thing to send to someone ten thousand miles away.

  Then of course it dawned on me – Willie Campbell and Bill Campbell were one and the same person. But what of his mother Sarah Campbell? Where did she fit into the story? Why would Edie and her grandmother Margaret (the old lady in the witch photograph) be interested in seeing a photograph of her grave?

  For days, I pondered this conundrum, but the more I thought about it the more I tied myself up in knots.

  A few days later I received an email from a lady by the name of Wendy King, from Brisbane. It transpired that a copy of my original email to Gary Balkin had been forwarded to Wendy. Wendy’s son Jason was married to one of Bill and Topsy’s great-grandchildren, Rebeca Campbell, and Wendy had already spent some time researching the Campbell family tree. Wendy was a godsend and a mine of information; it was she who provided the crucial piece of information that changed everything. Bill’s mother, the woman who lay buried in forgotten cemetery, was Sarah Marshall.

  Sarah Marshall. Edie’s mother Fanny had been a Marshall before her marriage; her grandmother was Margaret Marshall. Sarah was the link between Edie Threadkell and Bill Campbell, the golden thread that connected Seaham and Tamborine Mountain.

  Now that I had a name my research began in earnest. My search for information about Sarah Marshall became an obsession. I would spend hours every day pouring over birth, death and marriage certificates, census records and family trees. How was Sarah Marshall connected to Fanny, Margaret and Edie?

  In a sudden moment of clarity, I realised that Sarah was Fanny’s much older sister. Edie was her niece, and Margaret Marshall her mother. Topsy had sent the photograph to show Margaret her daughter’s final resting place, perhaps at Margaret’s request, perhaps simply as a kindly gesture. What possible chain of events could have resulted in Sarah Marshall being laid to rest in a seemingly remote country cemetery, thousands of miles away from home?
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br />   Sarah Marshall was born on 29th July 1863 in the County Durham mining village of West Rainton, within sight, across the meadows, of the mighty Norman cathedral that towers above the beautiful and ancient university city of Durham. The parish church of St Mary the Virgin, in which Sarah was baptised on 29th November 1863, still stands, its lofty spire visible from miles around. Sarah’s parents, Thomas and Margaret Marshall, were itinerant mining folk who had come to Rainton from elsewhere in the county to work in Lord Londonderry’s Rainton pits. Thomas, a Yorkshireman, had married Margaret in 1861.

  Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, until the nationalisation of the coal industry in 1947, it was not uncommon for miners and their families to move around from mine to mine; the sinking of a new pit would create a demand for workers, and they would bundle up their families and their few possessions and move on to the next colliery, perhaps in the next village or in the next county, on a promise of better wages. Those involved in the new trade union movement were frequently labelled as troublemakers and blacklisted by colliery owners, sacked and evicted from their mine-owned cottages and forced to move on, sometimes changing surnames as they went, as a man with a “bad name” was likely to find that his reputation preceded him.

  My four times great-grandfather, Tom Bamborough, had come from Rainton with his brothers to work on the expansion of the harbour at Seaham for Lord Londonderry in the early 1840s. He and two of his brothers each had a son called Tom, and the three Bamborough cousins were known as Fair Tom, Red Tom and Darkie Tom, distinguished by their hair colour to avoid confusion. Fair Tom, born in 1852, went to work in the Seaham pit, the first of five generations of my forebears to do so. Whether we like it or not, coal is in our blood.