The Horsekeeper's Daughter Read online

  6

  A Twist of Fate

  No matter how carefully we plot our desired future course, no matter how methodically we map out our hopes and dreams, so often fate intervenes. This intervention can take myriad forms. A chance meeting may cause us to fall hopelessly in love with someone entirely inappropriate, someone who may turn our lives upside down, yet cause us to see the world and ourselves in a completely different way for the rest of our days. A single conversation with a passing acquaintance may result in an unexpected but welcome opportunity to change our career and the entire direction of our lives.

  But fate is not always kind. The sudden loss of a loved one or dear friend can destroy an entire way of life in the blink of an eye. The safe, the secure, the familiar may disappear in an instant, never to be replaced but never to be forgotten. So it was for the widows and orphans of Seaham and Seaton. So it was to be for Sarah Marshall.

  Life for the inhabitants of these small villages went on, though forever changed. Coal production at Seaham Colliery resumed and was soon back to pre-disaster levels. New workers gradually replaced the dead and the injured – there was always some needy soul with mouths to feed willing to step into a dead man’s shoes. Miners were recruited from further afield, Scotland, Yorkshire, Wales, Ireland, Somerset, Kent and even Cornwall. Anyone going about their business amongst the colliery village’s streets in the 1880s would have encountered a plethora of different accents and dialects. Despite – or perhaps even because of – the suffering of its citizens, Seaham was thriving. Expansion and development continued apace, fuelled by the ever-increasing national demand for coal in Victorian Britain. New municipal buildings, shops, homes and places of worship continued to spring up around the Harbour, including a new Co-Operative store in Castlereagh Road. The trade directories of the time paint a picture of a bustling little town, which catered for its populace’s every need and want. There were bakers and brewers, blacksmiths and dressmakers; chemists and confectioners; fishermen, greengrocers, hairdressers, photographers, ship’s chandlers and sailmakers.

  The town was even home to the French, Swedish, Norwegian, Hanoverian, Russian and Danish Consuls. The docks were teeming with ships of all sizes and nationalities, bringing goods in and taking coal out, and ferrying passengers and workers between the various ports of the north-east coast. Other industries prospered, including shipbuilding just near the Featherbed Rock, slightly north of the Harbour, rope works, gasworks, and the famous bottle works of industrialist and politician, John Candlish.

  Candlish, born in 1815 and the son of a Northumberland farmer, was quite a character. He pursued numerous business ventures with varying success, including newspaper publishing, shipbuilding, coal exporting and the gas industry. However, it is for his famous bottle and glass works that he is now remembered. In the early 1850s he took over the Seaham Bottle Works; the business enjoyed the favour of the Londonderrys and was renamed the Londonderry Bottle works and would expand to become, for a time at least, the largest bottle works in the whole of Europe. Up to 20,000 hand-blown bottles and glass receptacles were produced every single day. Seaham glass bottles were exported the world over and the bottle works continued to churn out glass until 1921. Candlish is remembered in street names in Sunderland and Seaham – there is still a Candlish Terrace in Seaham, and still a Bottleworks Road.

  If you walk along Seaham beach as the tide goes out, revealing barnacle-encrusted rocks draped with seaweed and glittering rock pools, you will spot folk shuffling slowly, eyes fixed on the sand beneath their feet, hands grasping plastic bags, occasionally bending to pick through the shingle, searching for sea glass. Once the waste products of John Candlish’s Bottleworks, these precious pebbles of turquoise, emerald green, opal white, medicine-bottle blue and occasionally citron and ruby are now prized and exported to jewellery makers and craftsmen the world over. On holiday in Maine in 2011, I stumbled upon a little art gallery and craft shop in Bar Harbor, which had on display necklaces and bracelets all crafted from Seaham sea glass. As children we would pick up these pretty nuggets, play with them a while then cast them aside without a thought. In those days, the beaches were littered with them; today sea glass is much more difficult to find. Almost a century after production at his Seaham factory ceased, Candlish’s glass is still sought after, though perhaps not in the form he intended.

  By the time of the 1881 census, when Sarah Marshall was living in Seaton Village, the population of Seaham Harbour had grown to over seven thousand; New Seaham, the cluster of streets around the colliery was home to some three thousand souls, with a further one hundred and ninety-six in Seaton Village and one hundred and eighteen in Dalton-le-Dale. Sarah Marshall’s family had grown too. By now the horsekeeper, Thomas Marshall, and his wife Margaret had six daughters, the youngest, named Margaret after her mother, just four years old. Such was the life of a domestic servant, however, it is very unlikely that Sarah would have seen her family often, maybe once a month or so but possibly less frequently; in all likelihood, she would barely have known her much younger siblings. She had probably gone “into service” at around age fourteen, some five years before the time she was recorded as living in the household of Thomas and Jane Boland at Seaton Village Farmhouse.

  Thomas Marshall and his family were then living in Page Bank, a tiny colliery hamlet to the west of Durham city, between the grand house of the Shaftos at Whitworth Hall, and the rambling fourteenth century castle at Brancepeth. It is some thirteen miles or so from Seaton Village as the crow flies. Perhaps Sarah occasionally took a train from Seaton station to Durham, then another the short distance to Brancepeth, and then walked the remaining two and half miles to Page Bank – it’s very unlikely that such a return journey could have been easily accomplished in an afternoon. It is much more likely that Sarah kept in touch with her family by letter, with the occasional visit home. We know from her Brisbane emigration records that she could read and write, as could her mother Margaret. Compulsory primary education had been introduced in England in 1870 and although Thomas Marshall and his family moved around County Durham from colliery to colliery during Sarah’s childhood, she would have had a rudimentary education at the very least, and would have been one of the first of her generation to benefit.

  The life of a young female domestic servant was an incredibly hard one, by any standards. It is difficult for us to imagine a life which involved household chores from the very moment of waking to the very moment of falling asleep, exhausted and bone-weary, with little or no free time other than perhaps a Sunday afternoon off once or twice a month. We do not know whether Mrs Boland was a fair and kind mistress. We do not know how well Sarah and the farmhands were treated. There is little doubt, however, that Sarah’s day would have been long, full and back-breaking. Sarah was the only domestic servant employed in the Boland household at that time, and would therefore have been a “maid-of-all-work”, the lowest of the low. The Victorian writer Mrs Isabella Beeton described the lot of the maid-of-all-work in her famous work The Book of Household Management, published in 1861:

  “The general servant or maid-of-all-work is perhaps the only one of her class deserving of commiseration. Her life is a solitary one and in some places her work was never done. She is also subject to rougher treatment than either the house or kitchen maid.”

  Perhaps the most telling account of the life of the maid-of-all-work appears in the 1858–1859 edition of The Dictionary of Daily Wants:

  “A domestic servant, who undertakes the whole duties of a household without assistance; her duties comprising those of cook, housemaid, nursery maid, and various other offices, according to the exigencies of the establishment. The situation is one which is usually regarded as the hardest worked and worst paid of any branch of domestic servitude; it is, therefore, usually filled by inexperienced servants, or females who are so circumstanced that they are only desirous of securing a home, and of earning sufficient to keep themselves decently clad. In many
of these situations, a servant may be very comfortably circumstanced, especially if it be a limited family of regular habits, and where there is a disposition to treat the servant with kindness and consideration.”

  This tome goes on to describe how a maid-of-all-work could expect to rise by half past six in the morning at the very latest. She would be expected to first light the kitchen fire, and put the kettle on the range to boil; then she should sweep, dust, and prepare the room ready for the family to have breakfast. After cooking and serving the breakfast, the maid would strip and remake the beds, empty the chamber pots, and clean the bedrooms, before going back to the kitchen to wash up the breakfast things and prepare and cook the lunch.

  Once lunch is over and done with, “she is at liberty to attend to her own personal appearance, to wash and dress herself.” The afternoon could be spent blacking the kitchen range, perhaps keeping an eye on the Boland children, doing the family sewing and mending, preparing the vegetables for the evening meal, or perhaps Mrs Boland would send Sarah down into Seaham to purchase necessities and run errands. One wonders if whilst shopping and gossiping with the other domestic servants in Church Street Sarah ever bumped into Robert Threadkell, the man who would become her future brother-in-law, before walking the two miles back up to Seaton Village.

  In addition to these domestic chores it is of course likely that Sarah, being a servant in a farmhouse, was expected to help out on the farm, perhaps feeding the hens in the yard and chasing them out of the kitchen, gathering the eggs, working in the fields at harvest time, filling the water troughs, assisting with the milking and fetching water from the pump. Carrying water was an endless and back-breaking task, even worse on a Monday, the traditional washing day, when the family clothes and sheets and table linen had to be washed and scrubbed by hand, rinsed, put through the mangle and then hung out to dry, ready to be aired, ironed, folded and put away on a Tuesday. Every day, every week, followed a regimented pattern, hard and monotonous labour interspersed with the occasional light relief of a trip down to Seaham Harbour or a rare visit home to see loved ones. Every night Sarah would climb the steep back stairs next to the pantry to the tiny servant’s bedroom overlooking the farmyard, the railway track and the fields beyond.

  It is hardly surprising that given the unhappy state of affairs that prevailed in Seaton and Seaham in the early years of the 1880s, the political and social unrest which followed the explosion at Seaham Colliery, and the drudgery of her every day existence that a change began to take place in Sarah Marshall.

  The spark of an idea, the seed of a dream – how many of us wish for a different life? We look back with regret on the what-might-have-beens, ponder the infinite future possibilities and yet are unwilling or unable to take that first precarious step into the unknown, to take control of our own lives and change our futures. How often do we simply drift along, grudgingly accepting the status quo because our heads tell us to be sensible, yet all the while our hearts yearn for something more? The hours turn to days, the days turn to weeks, the weeks turn to years and before we know it our lives are almost over, a catalogue of missed opportunities, dashed hopes and faded dreams.

  For the vast majority of poor servants like Sarah, whom polite society considered to be the dregs of humanity, there was only one way out of domestic servitude, and that was marriage – frequently to the first young (or not so young) man who came along, swapping one form of drudgery for another. Sarah Marshall, it transpired, had different ideas.

  It is impossible to know precisely when the idea of making a new life on the far side of the world first occurred to Sarah, but the stories of two people, one from her past, and one from her present, undoubtedly captured her imagination and she began to conceive of the possibility of a monumental adventure.

  In 1879, in his late thirties, Sarah’s uncle, Mark Thornton, (her mother’s younger brother) had left behind the coal mines of East Durham for a new life in the gold fields of America, settling in the city of Grass Valley, Nevada, with his wife, also called Sarah. They had married as teenagers but had no surviving children. Quite why he chose Grass Valley is unclear, as the gold mining boom was already at an end when he arrived there. Perhaps the Thorntons ended up there accidentally, washed along on the tide of circumstance, as they moved wherever they could find work. In the United States Federal census of 1880, Mark Thornton is described as a labourer. In the 1910 census, he was still there in Grass Valley, aged seventy one, living on Union Hill Road – the stark description, “emigrated 1879, no children”, the story of two lives, summed up in four simple words. Mark Thornton never came back to England, and never saw his sister Margaret, or Sarah and his other nieces, again. His occasional letters back home would no doubt have been the subject of intense family discussion, and perhaps provided Sarah with her first imaginings of a wider world, far beyond the village green of Seaton and the pits of County Durham.

  A couple of doors down from the farmhouse, the widowed shoemaker, Bryan Hodgson, lived with his three unmarried daughters, Hannah, Eleanor and Jane. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the family, except at the time of the 1881 census, Mr Hodgson also had living with him his daughter – yet another Sarah – and his son-in-law, the magnificently-titled Rector of the Parish of St Thomas, St Kitts, Bahamas, Thaddeus Augustine Constantine Armbrister, and their two young children, Percy and Irene. According to the census records, Percy and Irene had been born in St Kitts in 1875 and 1878 respectively. Quite how the daughter of a shoemaker living in a tiny village near the Durham coast ended up in St Kitts, married to the son of colonial landed gentry and plantation owners was initially something of a mystery. Thaddeus had been born in the West Indies in 1837; his family were plantation owners on Cat Island in the Bahamas. It seems that the family had some sort of connection with North-East England – another of the Armbrister children, Beryl, who had been born in St Kitts in 1873, was recorded as living in Earsdon in Northumberland in the 1881 census, presumably with relatives. The Armbristers’ descendants retained close links with the Church though – their great-grandson Ray is the current churchwarden of St Mary the Virgin, once the parish church of Seaton Village and the final resting place of the young Knox brothers, killed in the pit explosion. I spoke to Ray, and he explained that Thaddeus had been sent to England by his parents in the Bahamas to study for the Church; upon completing his studies, he was offered the position of curate at Christ Church in Seaham. Whilst serving as curate, Thaddeus had met and married Sarah Hodgson, and took her back to St Kitts with him on their wedding day, when he took up his appointment as rector of St Thomas. The family returned to Seaham on several occasions to visit Sarah’s family, and came back to live in Seaton Village in 1891, shortly before Thaddeus passed away.

  Seaton was (and still is) a close-knit community – no doubt Sarah Marshall chatted to Mrs Armbrister during her visits, perhaps as they hung out their washing on the village green, listening to her stories of a far-off island, her tales of life in the Colonies and on board the sailing ships that plied the trade routes from England, across the Atlantic Ocean to the islands of the West Indies. Perhaps the adventures of the Armbrister family, in particular Sarah Armbrister herself, captured Sarah’s imagination and she began to dream of the possibilities of making a new life for herself in the Colonies – maybe in America, like her Uncle Mark, maybe in Canada or South Africa. Or maybe even in Australia.

  Day dreams are all very well, but the events of 1882 would seal the fate of the horsekeeper Thomas Marshall and his family and act as a catalyst, forcing his daughter Sarah into making the hardest decision of her life.

  8th March 1882 saw the birth of another child to the Marshalls, their seventh daughter, Fanny Hood Marshall. Thomas was still working at Page Bank Colliery (also known as South Brancepeth Colliery) when Fanny was born, as a cartman, his days as a horsekeeper now over. We cannot know how the birth of Fanny was greeted – was it a joyous event? Was her arrival tinged with disappointme
nt at the birth of yet another daughter instead of a much longed-for son? Did her parents secretly despair at the thought of having yet another mouth to feed? Sarah and the next eldest girl, Ann, were of course both already “in service”, but the Marshalls still had five small daughters to care for. It is likely that both Sarah and Ann would have sent home a proportion of their meagre wages. Their circumstances were not of course unusual, with the average family at that time having five children, but there is no doubt that their lives were a constant struggle.

  In early June 1882, just three months after Fanny’s birth, Thomas Marshall began to feel unwell, suffering from a urinary infection. Being the hardened colliery man that he was, no doubt he passed it off as a minor complaint and continued to work, in increasing pain and discomfort. However, Thomas began to grow feverish and had to take to his bed – a real worry for Margaret and the children as this would have meant Thomas’ wages were stopped. Margaret sent word to Sarah and Ann, summoning them home to see their father, who by the third week in June had become gravely ill. What constitutes a minor illness today, easily resolved with a short course of antibiotics, was to prove Thomas Marshall’s undoing. The infection spread, and septicaemia set in.

  Observing the change in the face and demeanour of a hard-working man as his days grow fewer is exquisitely painful. First comes the bravado, the fighting spirit, the “Don’t worry lass, I’ll be alright”; slowly the spirit begins to diminish, gradually giving way initially to acceptance and then ultimately to a longing for the end to come. The fleshy, rosy cheeks gradually sink and grow paler by the day, until they become hollows, features pinched and skin tight, the colour of travertine stone; the eyes that once danced and sparkled now staring, distant and dimmed, the lips which bestowed kisses and laughter and stories in equal measure, now silent apart from occasional delirious murmurings, the name of a loved one the only comprehensible word. His hands, once so strong, skilful and scarred, now barely able to grasp the comforting hand of a wife or daughter. And so, we watch and we wait, we wait and we watch, selfishly hoping against all hope and reason that he will stay with us a while longer – another week, another day, another minute, yet praying for his suffering to end and his soul to be set free.