top of page

 

                                                         Eight: Of Famous Men

 

                         Charles Darwin and Me – Coalbrookdale and the Darby Dynasty

                                                How Many Rowland Hills? - Philately

 

TALKING TO DARWIN

 

CHARLES DARWIN: . . . and to be talking about the earlier years of my life instead of endlessly beating off the tiresome arguments and objections of other scientists and public figures over my theories of evolution. I can assure you it makes a very welcome change simply to recall parts of my childhood and reflect on them with someone else, whether or not I have anything much in common with them.

GRAHAM BROWN: Well, yes, in most important senses we probably have very few things in common. After all, you are widely acknowledged as Shrewsbury’s most famous son. Nothing of that kind could ever be said about me. On the other hand, there are a few common – incidental - points that I felt would allow me to talk to you about your childhood and so, indirectly, about my own. For example, you were born in Shrewsbury; I was not - but, born in the same month 130 years apart, we were both brought up and went to school there. Could we begin with a word or two about your father, Dr Robert Waring Darwin, and his effect on family life?

CD: Ah, my father. Well, I was the fifth of his six children. One could correctly imagine that six young persons together in the same house would require some stern discipline at times. But my father seemed consistently – what should I say? – indifferent to his children. I believe he found our very existence an embarrassment and a nuisance to him. His severe presence in the household was felt instantly the moment he appeared. This would affect everyone present, not just the children.

GB: I was an only child, you know, a rather different situation from yours. It was certainly in my father’s nature to be serious, quiet and distant, but you could never doubt his interest in me and pleasure in doing various things with me. A writer named Alan Moorehead published a book in 1969 about your great voyage of discovery, called Darwin and the Beagle, and he confirms what you say: ‘Dr Darwin’s overwhelming presence forced a certain gravity on his family.’ And your most recent biographers, Desmond and Moore, in their biography Darwin (1991) provide a fuller picture of this dominating figure in your young life:

 

When the Doctor arrived from his rounds, there was no escape for anyone. His portly presence, like some immense gravitational field, made life whirl about him. It was a vertiginous experience, and nobody felt at ease. . . . [after his wife’s death] His tenderness could still inspire love, but his tactlessness made the children fearful; he grew fastidious and opinionated, overwhelming them with his prodigious memory and his power to read minds, which ‘seemed almost supernatural’. He interrogated and pontificated by turns; to be summoned was like being hauled before the Most High . . . Everyone had to conform to the Doctor’s ‘orderly and correct’ standards. He was harder on the boys whose untidiness repulsed him, but the girls suffered too.

 

CD: Oh, yes, they’ve got him – ‘nobody felt at ease’, they say. And they are quite right in giving the impression that the whole house was somehow – mmm - infected almost by his presence. Everybody felt it, and a massive sigh of intense relief could be felt all round the house when he went out.

GB: Were you born in that house, The Mount?

CD: Yes, I was born there. If you leave Shrewsbury by the Welsh Bridge, going roughly northwest, you proceed up Frankwell - some locals always called it ‘The Little Borough’ – which leads you today into the thoroughfare now also called The Mount. The road begins to climb along the crest of a cliff roughly a hundred feet above the river. My father bought some five acres of land there in about 1800 and had a house built for the family, with extensive gardens. As you say, the house itself was called The Mount, and I described it in my very brief Autobiography as ‘a large, plain, square red-brick house . . . charmingly placed on the top of a steep bank leading down to the Severn.’  In time, I was to become extremely fond both of the house and of Shrewsbury itself.

GB: Yes, I came across a comment by your daughter who accompanied you on a return visit to Shrewsbury in 1869. It seems you left her with a strong impression of your love for your old home. Now, talking of your childhood home brings us to a real coincidence. The building is used by the District Valuer and Valuation Officer today, but when my father came to work in Shrewsbury in 1939, it was called Darwin House, and accommodated the headquarters of the Post Office Telephones office for the Shrewsbury Area. This was my father’s employer, when the telephone service was a branch of the Post Office, a major department of the Civil Service, and -

CD: - the telephone? That was being discussed only in the last few years of my life – based somehow on converting the sounds of the human voice into electrical impulses. Amazing – obviously it was successful. So your father worked every day in the very house where I was born and brought up?

GB: Yes, he did, for twelve years, and every summer, his office would put on an Open Day and Fete for the wives and children of the staff. Inside The Mount were displays about the telephone service and how the telephone works. Outside on the lawns were stalls with things for sale, raffle prizes and refreshments. Children like me would run about all over the lawns and around the trees - the very lawns and possibly even some of the same trees that would have provided similar diversion for you and your brothers and sisters more than a century earlier.

CD: Well, that is an interesting connection. And what has happened to the land? Is it still attached to the house?

GB: The steep bank reaching down to the river is still there. It’s called Doctor’s Fields and is preserved as open public space. But most of the land formerly belonging to The Mount was sold off long ago. There are small estates of houses there now, though the name ‘Darwin’ appears quite frequently in the names of streets and houses in the vicinity. Now, I wonder if we could talk a little about your school days.

CD: Yes, of course. My mother died in 1817, when I was only eight. In the spring of that year I was sent to a day school in Shrewsbury, kept by Rev G Case, the Unitarian minister, in Claremont Hill. I stayed there for a year. I have been told that I was much slower at learning than my younger sister Catherine, and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy.

GB: Mmm. That may be, but your latest biographers, Desmond and Moore, also comment on your early interest in natural history. They say:

 

Many of the boys were older. Charles, reserved and rather chunky, shrank

from the ritual wrestling matches and hurried home in the afternoon, dodging

the dogs in Barker Street . . . He told tall tales about natural history [he was

already a committed collector of specimens of all kinds] reported strange birds,

and boasted of being able to change the colours of flowers . . . It was a boy’s

way of manipulating the world.

 

CD: True, I was always making collections of things. Well, in the summer of 1818, I went to Dr Butler’s great school in Shrewsbury – said to be next in size and opulence only to the schools of Eton and Harrow – and remained there for seven years till Midsummer 1825, when I was sixteen years old. I boarded at this school, so that I had the great advantage of living the life of a true schoolboy. But as the distance was hardly more than a mile to my home, I very often ran there during the longer intervals between the callings over and before locking up at night. I have heard my father and elder sister say that I had, as a young boy, a strong taste for long solitary walks. I often became quite absorbed, and once, while returning to school on the summit of the old fortifications round Shrewsbury, which had been converted to a foot-path with no parapet on one side, I walked off and fell to the ground, but the height was only seven or eight feet. Nevertheless, the number of thoughts which passed through my mind during this very short, but sudden and wholly unexpected fall, was astonishing.

GB: We’re sometimes told of brilliant men and women who were seriously underestimated while they were at school. Their teachers would make dreadful predictions about the likely inadequate and pathetic course of their later lives. Were you one of these?

CD: Yes, I think I was. Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr Butler’s school. It was strictly classical, nothing else much being taught, except a little ancient geography and history. The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank - and I believe I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.

GB: That is remarkable. And then you were packed off to become a doctor?

CD: Yes, I left Shrewsbury School at sixteen. By then, I had developed the Shropshire passion for shooting birds out of the sky and I recall my father saying: ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’ So he shoved me off to Edinburgh for medical training in an effort to clothe me with some sort of professional respectability. Well, that propriety did indeed lie ahead of me, though it was realised by very different routes from those imagined by my ultimately well-meaning and buttoned-up father – and, also, rather more by chance than through any conscious efforts on my part.

GB: Yes, something of the kind occurred in my life in a similar way, and at very much the same age - though of a far less momentous nature. But I remember reading Moorehead’s comment at this stage in his Beagle book. You’ve reached the age of 22, and he calls you:

one of those men whose careers quite unexpectedly and fortuitously are decided

for them by a single stroke of fortune . . . luck steps in, or rather a chain of lucky

events, and away he soars into the blue.

 

CD: He is right about the ‘chain of lucky events’ but there were many, many periods after that when ‘soaring into the blue’ was the very last emotion I was experiencing. If only my life had contained a few more moments of that nature.

GB: So how did this chance of a lifetime come to present itself?

CD: Well, when Captain FitzRoy’s round-the-world surveying expedition was being planned in 1831, my botany tutor at Cambridge, Professor Henslow, was approached first to be the ship’s naturalist. He declined but both recommended and pressed me, his student, to take the position. My father was as stern and dismissive as ever. He did not completely forbid me to accept the offer but opined that no one with any common sense at all would be likely to recommend me for it. This is where my uncle Josiah Wedgwood, the second of that name in the great Potteries dynasty, entered the picture. Disagreeing with my father, he fired off a letter from Staffordshire that successfully demolished the objections point by point. He then drove the thirty miles from his home to The Mount to reinforce the case personally with my father.

GB: You’re saying that, without uncle Josiah’s intervention, your father’s view would have prevailed, you would not have sailed with the Beagle, and the history of evolutionary theory would have been very different?

CD: It is very difficult to say exactly how evolutionary theory might have developed. Others were working on it as well as myself. But as for my contribution to it – well, I simply cannot say, but the Beagle would certainly have sailed without me.

GB: I gather the rest of the family were very enthusiastic and excited about your venture.

CD: Oh, yes, they were all thrilled by it. They devoted several weeks to helping me in every way they possibly could, getting me ready to leave home.

GB: You may like to hear what Desmond and Moore say about this:

The Mount had often seemed like a prison but now it wore a different aspect.

This great stone pile, built by his father, was home, not FitzRoy’s bobbing bark.

Security was a family and four solid walls, a refuge from the tempestuous world.

Yet he was giving it all up, and with it ‘half a chance of life.’ They would be

years apart; perhaps he would never see his father and sisters again. They meant

more than ever to him, and he let them know. The Doctor was now ‘much more reconciled’ to the voyage and his blessing made parting easier.

 

CD: I think they put it very well. Of course The Mount was the very centre of my personal security, however much I may have found it so emotionally uncomfortable at times. Yes, my father did accept it in the end. Going off to the Beagle would have been so much harder if he had not – so very much harder.

GB: And Shrewsbury never really left your mind throughout those five long years away, and despite the amazing diversity of your experiences.

CD: It was always there, often as something warm and solid to cling to when things were not going well. I remember once in the Andes, when FitzRoy was in a completely despairing depression, I even contemplated cutting the expedition short and going home. I wrote in my journal: ‘One whole night I tried to think over the pleasures of seeing Shrewsbury again, but the barren plains of Peru gained the day.’ Later on, by this time away from home for nearly four years, I wrote ‘Everything about Shrewsbury is growing in my mind bigger and more beautiful.’

 

GB: And when you and the Beagle arrived back at Falmouth in October 1836, you rushed straight back to Shrewsbury.

 

CD:  Oh, yes, I raced back by coach and reached The Mount late at night. I went into the house quietly without waking anyone and simply presented myself at breakfast the following morning. You can easily imagine my reception. I wrote to Professor Henslow, revealing my love of the town, after an absence of five years: ‘I am sure you will congratulate me on the delight of once again being home. The Beagle arrived at Falmouth on Sunday evening and I reached Shrewsbury yesterday morning.’

GB: And I see that you wrote to your cousin, WD Fox: ‘You can’t imagine how gloriously delightful my first visit was at home: it was worth the banishment.’

CD: Yes. And I think that is about two things: Shrewsbury itself, but something much more – the simple fact of coming home. 

GB: And then your home became Down in Kent, while other family members still occupied The Mount for thirty years more. Then it was auctioned in 1866, following the death of your sister Susan – and that finally broke the Darwin connections with Shrewsbury. But then, after two or three years, I gather the effort of working on the fifth edition of the Origin through the winter of 1868-69, and the concentrated writing of Descent of Man, finally forced you to take a holiday, which included a brief visit to the town.

CD: Yes, I remember that visit. We were en route for north Wales in June 1869. I stayed a night in Shrewsbury and went back to look at The Mount. I wonder now whether it was something of a mistake. The new owners insisted on looking round with me, rather spoiling what was, for me, a deeply personal moment of recollection. If I could have been left alone in the greenhouse for five minutes, I know I should have been able to see my father in his wheelchair as vividly as if he had been there before me.

GB: You lived until the age of 73. Did you ever go abroad again?

CD: No, never. As you say, I had a tremendous amount of work to do, research, writing, constantly defending my position. But you know, for the remainder of my life after the Beagle’s return, I was beset by persistent ill health. I can barely recall a single day of my remaining forty odd years of life when I was not in pain or at least far from comfortable. I tried every treatment suggested, including some very peculiar ones, but we never really found the solution. I think the lack of an accurate diagnosis was the main issue. Some suggested that I may have contracted an unidentifiable malignant condition during the five years I was away. What is certain is that my poor health was a major and relentless preoccupation, especially annoying as it frequently interfered with my ability to work. Much of it was physical, though some symptoms were also the result of my nervous energy. I had an immense capacity for worry, you know, but now, fortunately, all that is over.

 

MY COMMENTS: On fathers, it’s hard to imagine Darwin’s father ever engaging in the flashes of wit, humour and humanity – or the sociable beer drinking – of which my own father was readily capable. In fact, some of my father’s attitudes were probably more modern than those of many of his own contemporaries, who were still dragging along with them the remnants of their own Edwardian or Victorian parentages.

 

At age 21-22, I didn’t exactly ‘soar into the blue’ as Moorehead wrote of Darwin, but a significant move in my own life did take place at age 22 entirely ‘by a single stroke of fortune’. In 1961 I had a relatively menial clerical position with a large subsidiary of Unilever. Our company traded with many of the most well-known countries (some then still colonies) in North, East and particularly West Africa. I worked in a long, narrow, open-plan office, lined on one side with banks of filing boxes on metal shelves. Probably rather bored one afternoon, I was standing at these files, looking for an order or an invoice in one of the boxes. Mr Hunt, our Office Manager, walked down the office, asking out loud in an undirected way - and just as he passed me - ‘Does anyone speak French?’ For once, I reacted spontaneously: ‘Yes, I do’. ‘Oh good, come into my office.’

 

I didn’t really ‘speak French’. I had a grade B in ‘A’ level French and thought that would be good enough for the purpose. It was. The former Belgian Congo was being torn apart in its now well-documented independence birth throes. Our Brussels office had decided to transfer some of its administrative functions to London without delay to protect itself from potential anti-colonial reprisals. Knowing what we know now of King Leopold’s legacy, who could blame them? The company wanted to send two French-speaking employees over to Brussels to learn some of the ropes and help to begin the transfer process.

 

This whole episode belongs later in my story. Enough at this point to say that events moved fast and my life was changed. Unlike Darwin, I encountered no opposition. Two weeks later, a BEA Viscount flew me to Brussels, my first flight anywhere. The next five years of my working life, like Darwin’s, were significantly different from anything previously imagined. This had happened, not through any foresight or planning on anyone’s part, and certainly not mine, but because, quite by chance, I had heard the question asked, and answered ‘Yes’ immediately without another thought.

 

I share Darwin’s fond feelings for the town and the home I lived in during my first, formative years.  Concerning health, I can record considerable relief that I haven’t shared that aspect of his life. Only recently, aged 62, have I needed to consult a doctor for the first time in my adult life.

 

*

EXTRACT FROM WORKING SCRIPT FOR A TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY    

NARRATOR (VOICE-OVER): Stand on the summit of the Wrekin, your back towards Shrewsbury, look ahead of you to the southeast and you should see, only a few miles away, what is widely accepted as the cradle of the entire Industrial Revolution. This is one of the most distinguished sites of its kind anywhere in the world: Coalbrookdale, down in the Severn Gorge.

 

The name most people probably think of first is Ironbridge and nowadays this part of the river is called the Ironbridge Gorge. The Iron Bridge itself was one of the most spectacular cast iron innovations but it was not built until between 1777 and 1781, nearly 150 years after the original blast furnace was in use in the Coalbrookdale Coalfield. Industrial developments along this stretch of the Gorge during the 18th century, where places such as Coalport, Broseley and Madeley figure strongly, determined the way forward worldwide in mining, iron making and engineering. This is why it has been designated a World Heritage Site.

 

While the Gorge had long been worked for its limestone and coal, the 16th century saw a noticeable increase in coal-mining and primitive iron production. The first blast furnace was in use in 1638, close to local ironstone, coal for fuel and water for power. By the end of the 17th century you would have seen a busy industrial scene, with coal mining, limekilns, brickworks, manufacturers of tobacco pipes, glass and pottery, coal distillation producing tar and pitch, lead smelting and iron making, with barges on the Severn transporting both raw materials and finished goods.

 

ABRAHAM DARBY I: I took over the Coalbrookdale works in 1708. In the following year I was responsible for the major technological breakthrough: successful iron ore smelting using coke. My techniques were refined side-by-side with the development of the steam engine during the 18th century. During my son’s time, Coalbrookdale became the leading supplier of cylinders for engine manufacturers elsewhere in Britain, and the largest steam engine to James Watt’s design was constructed here in the early 1780s. Steam engines later worked the bellows of blast furnaces here and helped improve the productivity of mining and ironworks. I was not to know it but, by 1800, over 200 steam engines would be at work in the Gorge.

 

ABRAHAM DARBY III:  I was the grandson of the great founder. I managed the Iron Bridge project, designed some of it and paid out for most it. We needed an act of parliament, which was passed in 1776, but there were tremendous delays in getting it implemented. Some sections of the bridge were fired in a modified version of the old Coalbrookdale furnace, and the bridge itself was eventually opened on New Year’s Day 1781. By then, the ironworks were supplying the expanding railways, churning out iron wagon wheels and iron rails. Later they contributed to making iron barges and ships, including wrought iron plates for the ss. Great Britain. Many of the greatest engineers of my day visited the Gorge, including Trevithick, Matthew Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood and McAdam. Notable artists such as Rowlandson, Cotman and Turner came and depicted the Gorge in their paintings. By the end of the century things were quietening down. We had no further innovations and the great industrial boom in the Gorge gradually settled into relative decline during the 19th century.

 

Of course, it was well after my lifetime but the industries of the Gorge eventually went into complete dereliction.  It is all very different now. What you can see there today is the result of the massive restoration and refurbishment undertaken by the Telford Development Corporation between 1967 and 1991, as well as to the monumental commitment of the Industrial Revolution historian Barrie Trinder. While the bustle and buzz of the former industries have disappeared, today’s Gorge reflects all the familiar signs of the late 20th century’s developments, the tourism and ‘heritage’ industries. Like their predecessors, the factories, mines and mills of my time, they engage with thousands of ordinary people. Unlike them, they are clean industries: and all you have to do now is pay your money, walk round and look.

 

NARRATOR: A developing feature of the contemporary heritage industry is the provision of re-enactors, people dressed in period costumes, apparently going about their everyday tasks in commercial, industrial or domestic settings. For example, at Coalbrookdale you can find a cottager who will tell you what she’s cooking, what time she has to get up in the morning for her man to go off to work in the ironworks or the coal mine, and what else she has to do today after feeding the chickens and the pig and so on.

 

We know the Gorge went through phases of considerable and, by the standards of many other parts of England, exceptional prosperity. We know too that early industrial working and living conditions in most places were brutally hard, filthy and frequently dangerous. The heritage industry rarely, if ever, shows us that kind of reality. It seems that, for learning of this kind, a visit to what is actually a vast open-air museum has to be turned into ‘entertainment’. We are not left to engage our imagination for ourselves. Like most television, everything is done for us and presented, accurately and truthfully or not, on a plate. Instead of something approaching the reality, it gives us educated, 21st century middle class actors who, when the ‘attraction’ closes at five o’clock, will get out of their costumes and go home in their cars to the deep freeze, the microwave oven, the telly, the Internet, the central heating and the cell phone.

 

Does this really matter? Many think it does, seeing it as dishonest - diminishing, even dismissing, the large scale suffering of masses of working people during so much of the Industrial Revolution. Objectors claim we are not getting the truth about the shameful way the masters of coal, iron and rail exploited the lives of their generations of powerless employees while they made their millions. Purporting to show us what working life was like, the heritage industry actually gives us a fake: a cosy, sanitised and false representation of our past.

 

MY COMMENT:  We never went to Ironbridge when I was young, and there was clearly no good reason to do so. During the 1940s and 50s most of the Gorge would have been a scene of dilapidated and ruined buildings, rather like the abandoned industrial remnants you can find, for example, on parts of Dartmoor or in the Peak District.

 

Today, not everything in the Gorge is tourism. A significant part – some would say the most important part - of the Development Corporation’s work involved bringing derelict buildings back into commercial or residential use. They set up a number of Trusts and Foundations to ensure the future maintenance and preservation of the Gorge’s tremendous assets. Scholastic work is included, with support for continuing archaeological recording and wide-ranging research into the industrial, economic and social aspects of the area’s long and intensive period of habitation and activity. Over 200 years later, the Ironbridge Gorge is thriving again, in more ways than ever.

*

 

FROM THE MEMOIR

When you leave Shrewsbury across the English Bridge, going more or less east, you find The Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1083 by Roger de Montgomery. Because it was long used as the local parish church, the Norman nave survived the Dissolution and it remains a parish church even today. Beyond it, at the further end of Abbey Foregate, stands The Lord Hill Column, opposite the Shirehall, headquarters of the Shropshire County Council. The Column is said to be the tallest Doric column in the world at 133 feet high. People living in our part of the Shrewsbury suburbs very rarely seemed to go in that direction. I doubt whether my parents knew anyone who lived over that way. To me, going across English Bridge meant really leaving Shrewsbury in a serious way. By contrast, crossing Welsh Bridge either took you into Shrewsbury proper or back out to familiar territory. Going ‘the other side of The Column’ was almost to venture abroad.

The Column was built between 1814 and 1816 to commemorate the life and career of Rowland Hill, later Lord Hill, 1st Viscount, Baron Hill Of Almaraz And Of Hawkestone (And Of Hardwicke, where he died in 1842). He was born at Hawkstone (spelt variously with and without the middle ‘e’) in 1772, became a general and was one of the Duke of Wellington’s right-hand men in the Peninsular campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars. (He could never be mistaken for another Lord Hill of my early years, who, as the ludicrous Radio Doctor, gave us health advice on the BBC Home Service during and long after the War. He would remind us, in a silly, faux-bedside-manner voice, to keep inventing exciting things to do with old potatoes or the rotting shreds of last week’s lettuce, and told us through a crude personification device – and even sillier voice - how the stomach works and how indigestion is caused.)

Like Darwin, Hill had already laid the substantial foundations to a serious reputation by the age of thirty, receiving his first commission at 18. Becoming brigadier in 1803, his actions in many operations in Spain during the first decades of the 19th century made clear that he was probably Wellington’s most able senior officer. In the action at St Pierre in 1811 he achieved a victory over 30,000 men with a force of half that number. He was made a Knight of the Bath and became Shrewsbury’s MP in 1812. At the Battle of Waterloo, ‘he led the charge of Sir Frederick Adam’s brigade against the Imperial Guard; his horse was shot down, and for a time he was lost in the confusion.’

    

His kindness to his troops motivated tremendous loyalty and cooperation among his subordinates, who referred to him affectionately as ‘Daddy Hill’. Wellington approved of him particularly because he lacked the opportunistic ambition of so many other men, and could be totally relied upon to carry out his commander’s orders promptly and with great efficiency. He became a full general in 1825. In 1828 Wellington became Prime Minister and Hill replaced him as commander-in-chief, resigning in 1842 aged 70, shortly after being created a viscount. He died on December 10th of that same year, having never married, and the title went to a nephew.

    

Coming for the first time to look properly into The Column and the statue on top of it, I discover three Rowland Hills of some repute or other, whose lives all straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From a branch of the same family as the famous soldier comes Rowland Hill the popular preacher and composer of hymns. He founded the Surrey Chapel in Blackfriars Road, London, the base of his ministry for nearly 50 years. His connection with me is far from spectacular: Blackfriars Road was simply the location of the export office where I worked during the 1960s, and of some of the pubs I used then, such as the Noah’s Ark, the Windmill, the Brunswick Arms and the Rising Sun.

    

This Hill was educated at Shrewsbury School, then at Eton and St John’s, Cambridge. Like the other two Rowlands, he was long-lived, born at Hawkstone in 1744, eventually dying in London at the age of 89. For twelve years he served as an itinerant preacher through the English countryside and attracted huge audiences. He helped to found the British and Foreign Bible Society and the London Missionary Society and was ‘a stout advocate of vaccination’. His prose work Village Dialogues, first published in 1801, reached its 34th edition in 1839.

    

One or two extracts from ‘Eccentric Preacher’ (from the website The Spurgeon Archive) reveal something of his character:

 

He was not reared in the lap of luxury as a preacher, nor was he surrounded

by the society of unmingled aristocracy, so as to be guarded from every whiff

of the air of common life. He mingled so thoroughly with the people that he

became the people’s man, and for ever remained so. With all the high-mindedness

which ought to go with nobility he mingled in an unaffected simplicity and

benevolence of spirit , which made him dear to persons of all ranks. He was

thoroughly a man, thinking for himself with all the freedom of a great emancipated

mind, which bowed only at the feet of Jesus; but he was essentially a child-man, a

Nathaneal in whom was no guile -  artless, natural, transparent, in all things

unaffected and true.

 

The following specific occasion is quoted ‘as an instance of the manner in which he turned every little incident to good account’:

 

When at Wotton [Wotton-under-Edge, where he built a chapel where he often

preached] he heard of a woman who was noted for her sausages, and therefore

called in upon her, and bought a supply. “Now, my good woman,” said he, “how

is it that you make such good sausages?” “Why, sir,” said she, “I think it is a gift

from the Almighty.” Mr Hill shook his head at this, and began to repent of his

bargain, as well he might, for the articles turned out to be stale. He told the story

afterwards as an instance of how people try to pass off their bad goods by

canting talk, and as a proof of the fact that fanaticism is often in alliance with

knavery. “A gift from the Almighty!” said he, “and yet the produce of this

precious gift is good for nothing.”

 

 

All of that is a very different sort of account from any we might encounter about the illustrious career of Viscount Rowland Hill, Wellington’s Lieutenant-General, born at the same address. However, the most alarming and confusing discovery about these Rowland Hills was to find that, throughout the early years of my life, I had unquestioningly assumed and believed – and so, I suspect, had all my contemporary friends – that the statue on top of The Column represented yet another Rowland Hill (1795-1879). He was born in Kidderminster and was the originator of the Penny Post in 1840, enabling pre-payment of postage rather than requiring the letter’s recipient to pay the postage. Hill, later Sir Rowland, was most notably responsible for the famed-above-all-other stamps, the Penny Black, and for first dividing London into ten major postal districts in 1856. Without embarking on this memoir, I might never have stumbled across the true Rowland Hill of the Column who, by any account, certainly deserved a statue.

The Sir Rowland of the penny postage is germane to this account because, for small boys in those days of the mid-late 1940s, collecting foreign stamps was one of the things we all did. Without knowing it then, like those who also collected birds’ eggs, foreign coins, railway engine numbers, car registration numbers by county, all the Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton or Beatrix Potter books, we were the proto-nerds. Whatever you collected, you had to have more of them, and claim to know more about them all, than everyone else. Reading all the Enid Blyton books was not the issue. Owning them all was what mattered most.

    

Our school encouraged us to generate pen-friend relationships with kids at schools in France and other countries, though Germany may have been quietly discouraged. Your letter writing produced a genuine, though fairly feeble, flow of foreign stamps from a single country. It did mean you had envelopes (called ‘covers’) with real stamps on them along with your own name and address. My Uncle Bill, travelling the world by sea, was an excellent supplier, both in variety and quantity.

    

We got most of our stamps by sending for ‘approvals’. Small companies with exotic addresses in Kent or the north of England advertised their services in newspapers and magazines, inviting you to send for books of stamps ‘on approval’. There would often be a special offer on things like the latest British Honduras Commemorative set, a normal issue with overprinting for a natural disaster, some unperforated pairs or issues with unusual printing defects. You received the books of stamps, selected and kept what you wanted and returned the rest with a postal order covering your purchases. Very trusting, the approvals people in those days.

    

What you could buy and boast about to your friends depended on how much pocket money you got. This was one of my earlier lessons in life’s unfairnesses – that, through no fault of their own, some got more – or less - than others. I wouldn’t blame my parents for a moment, but I did seem to have less pocket money than many of my friends who proudly paraded the latest Royal event set or First Day Cover. When we compared our collections, which the others often wanted to do and I did not, we found that most of them had hundreds more stamps than I had. I wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated to accuse them of a serious lack of discrimination or of simply buying quantity for its own sake. Even so, they were probably doing exactly that.

    

My method of defeating them, at least in my own mind, was to play the value card. The stamp collector’s unique source of reference was the Stanley Gibbons catalogue. From its address at 399 The Strand, London, Gibbons was, and still is, the world-respected authority on both the existence and likely market value of every single postage stamp issued in the whole world. It was the stamp-collector’s ‘Bible’. We swapped or traded stamps with one another according to the Stanley Gibbons values and periodically valued our entire individual collections by the catalogue. (I was reading the Belfast writer Ciaran Carson’s memoir The Star Factory recently. About ten years younger than me, he was seriously absorbed in stamp collecting at the appropriate age - rather more seriously than me, by the sound of it. He too refers to Stanley Gibbons, calling it ‘the Vatican of the philatelic world’.)

    

Mostly, we found that the huge majority of the very common stamps we had were valued in the catalogue at no more than 1d. or 2d. each. Now and again there was a slightly less usual one, unused and in mint condition, worth several pence or even up to a shilling. My proudest possession was a Brazilian stamp, considerably larger than most of the more usual stamps, valued at 2/6d if in mint condition. For a long time I took it to be unused and wrote ‘2/6’ in pencil, as we did, on the stamp hinge beneath the stamp in my album. Showing it proudly to somebody one day, we both noticed, though I tried to pretend otherwise, a small black line on the bottom right-hand corner. It was just the whisker, but a whisker nonetheless, of a postmark that had nearly missed the stamp completely.

    

Until that rather distressing moment, I pompously defended the relatively small size of my collection by telling the others that, although I had nowhere near the number of stamps they had, their total value probably equalled, if not surpassed, any of their collections. Fortunately, we never tested this claim which could so easily have been shown to be false – and doubtless was. At least it helped to smother my feelings of philatelic inferiority and probably envy as well.

    

Fifty or so years later, I can’t imagine very many 21st century boys aged between seven and fourteen being remotely interested in collecting foreign stamps. They will have the same energies and curiosities to engage, but direct them now towards things we didn’t have then: among others, pop records and their performers, posters and other merchandise; football; cartoons on television; and computer games. Stanley Gibbons still exists – I walked past the shop in the Strand the other day – and the great international rare stamp market still flourishes.

    

At the level of the ordinary amateur collector, I imagine a gradually but irrevocably ageing and diminishing clientele, rather like the membership of the Conservative Party, or those who still operate electric model train sets on detailed table-top layouts with tiny trees and tiny people standing on the platforms alongside tiny milk churns. They’re men in late middle age and beyond who never quite relinquished certain of the drives of their early youth, men who remain, in part, boys. A significant thread in feminist thought holds that this is true of all men. It may be true.

    

My stamp collecting stopped for ever round about the age of fifteen, though I never got rid of my last stamp album. Inspecting it recently, I notice that it was a present from Uncle Bill and Auntie Kit for Christmas 1949. A spring-backed album, size 11¼ x 9¾ inches, it’s called The Weston “666”, a disturbing number in itself, made by A. and S.M. Dixon Ltd of Weston-Super-Mare. At the back is the Method of Operation where, with the help of a diagram, you are shown ‘the CORRECT procedure’ for inserting or removing loose sheets. It still contains the considerable number of stamps waiting to be stuck in that had accumulated inside the front cover decades ago.

 

My attempts to interest two daughters in it during the 1970s were entirely without success. Until they come to read this, those two may never have heard of any of the Rowland Hills, let alone all three of them. Still, there they were, and, in their quite accidental ways, the three of them slightly touched my life: the national military hero and his column; the peripatetic preacher; and the man who both dramatically reformed the workings of the British Post Office and was indirectly responsible for one of the most widely pursued hobbies known to small boys.

    

POSTSCRIPT 

When you believe you’ve finished your research, something like this happens. During one phase of writing this, I was reading Michael Holroyd’s family and personal history Basil Street Blues (Little, Brown, 1999). I quote this extract from the Abacus edition (page 167) to show that, in fact, the job is never complete. At this point in the account, Holroyd’s father proposes to marry one Marie-Louise:

 

- once he has divorced my mother. In the summer of 1946 he hired a London

detective who soon came up with the evidence he needed. The decree nisi cites

Rowland Hill as co-respondent. It is not a name that appears in either of my

parents’ accounts or that I ever heard them mention. In the London telephone

directory of 1946 there is one Rowland Hill. He is living in the Marylebone

Road, but disappears at the time of the divorce.

Thus is demonstrated the unpredictability of pure coincidence.

Click here for

 

Click here for

bottom of page