My paternal great-grandfather was a bastard.
You don’t need to excuse my language, because it is a technical fact. My father is called Walter and his grandfather was also named Walter. But he was born out of wedlock in 1856, to Alice Crooks in Horsley Woodhouse, Derbyshire. Alice was about 19 years old when she gave birth. The registry of Walter’s baptism - well over a year later, on February 7th 1858 - simply names Alice as his mother. There is no father’s name.
Alice was a nailmaker, just like her father George and her grandfather Jacob, all from the same village. When Alice was born, the village had 709 inhabitants and was known for nailmaking.
My father visited the area a few years ago to do some ancestry research. He met up with a distant cousin (Louise) who presented him with an old nail salvaged from a local building. If was iron, about 5" long, with a flat head and flat-rectangular in section, a quarter-inch near the head. It was probably used to fix floorboards to timber joists. It may have even been made by my forebears, but there is probably no way of ever knowing.
I don’t know much about nail making. It seems to have remained a cottage industry in the 18th and 19th centuries focussed around south Yorkshire, north Derbyshire and Lancashire as well as the Midlands. There is actually a ‘nailer’ museum in Belper (south Derbyshire, not far from Horsley Woodhouse) that I really must visit.
The industry would require a local supply of iron ore, and coal/charcoal to smelt then work the iron. The wet valleys of the Derbyshire hills also provided running water to power the rolling and slitting mills. Slitting involved rolling the flat iron bars between slitted cutters to produce 'rods'.
My great-great grandfather, George, would have been self-employed, working in a small workshop close to, or even attached to, his cottage. He would buy 6-foot-long iron rods from a nailmaster at the slitting mill. Maybe George was a nailmaster himself, but we don’t know. The iron rods were sold in bundles weighing 56lbs. George turned the rods into nails by cutting the rod and giving each length a point and a head. He had to sell them back to the nailmaster, in boxes. He was expected to produce 45lbs of nails or face a fine, so there was little allowance for error. In addition, George had to buy the fuel for the furnace and possibly pay rent for the nail shop.
Nailmaking was a closed-shop, with a long apprenticeship and provided a low income. Volume 17 of The Monthly Magazine (or British Register) of April 1814 (the year before George was born), contains the following extract:
“At a general meeting of the nail masters of and nail makers, in Horsley Woodhouse, It was agreed that no lad shall learn the trade of making nails, unless he be bound by a legal indenture for the term of seven years; and everyone who attempts to learn shall be bound, or give up the trade when he has been two months on trial; and that no boy who is now learning, and has not been more than twelve months at the trade, shall continue to learn, unless he be legally bound for seven years; and the masters hereby agree not to employ any hands who have not served a legal apprenticeship.”
George’s tools would have been rough and hand-made, and his stone anvil would have been packed with sods of earth to steady it. The whole family would work together. Alice would have carried fuel for the furnace and help to work the bellows, while George, stripped to the waist, the elder sons, and possibly even his wife Mary, made the nails. (The younger sisters went into other trades, such as pottery). The family might have produced 1,000 nails on a good day: that’s 43,000 blows of the hammer!
Apparently, nailers were a strong stubborn people (which explains a lot!) Nailers (in south Derbyshire at least) were a notoriously unruly bunch. They gained a reputation for hard-drinking, trouble-making, and rebelliousness.
When Alice became pregnant out of wedlock, it would have been frowned upon at the time. But more practically it was a curse, as it meant that she would be out of action for a while and unable to help the family survive. It was not uncommon for young female nailers to ‘lose’ their babies for reasons of economics. So, it might be fortuitous that the baby Walter was allowed to live, and that I am here to write this at all. The fact that she was one of many siblings was mitigation.
Alice was sent off to service in Lancashire (in disgrace?) to work for a joiner named William Baxter. Her young son was left behind to be raised by his young uncles and aunts in the Crooks' home.
But all this got me to thinking about iron nails again. I was reminded of my previous blog, where I related the discovery of compass deviation. When these wooden ships were being constructed from keel upwards, the orientation of the keel and hull would have affected the magnetisation of all the ‘soft iron’ nails in the ship, which was being hammered into place. The similar alignment of a huge number of iron nails in the hull and decks would have had a material draw on the ship’s compass needle.
But iron nails held an even greater fascination than simply holding timbers together. My friends – the Woodds – recently gave me a book on that most famous of Yorkshiremen, Captain James Cook (by American author Tony Horwitz). Cook’s three circumnavigations make the adventures of his namesake, James T Kirk (in his own ship Enterprise) look a bit tame. One recurring theme of the book is how the local natives were fascinated by modern trinkets, such as buttons and shiny beads. The sailors could easily trade a few beads for food, local products, and even sex!
Many natives craved iron nails, which they would have never seen before, and found quite useful no doubt. The ship’s carpenter would have kept a good supply of iron nails on board for making running repairs; you can’t simply pop into the next chandlers when you are in the middle of the Pacific in the late 18th century. But the sailors would have been lashed if they had been caught stealing them to trade with the natives. In fact, Cook did use the cat on sailors who had actually removed nails from the ships timbers to barter with the local ‘beauties’ (or more likely their parents). They were removing so many that it was a wonder the ship remained intact.
The number of nails required to construct a wooden ship would have been enormous. I am currently reading a book on the history of Venice (“City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire” by Roger Crowley, Faber and Faber 2011). The republic was the main player in the Fourth Crusade (and the shameful sack of Constantinople). The doge, Enrico Dandalo, had made a contract with the Frankish crusaders, to transport them by sea to the Levant, or maybe even Alexandria. It was an enormous undertaking for the republic en-route to attempt to re-take Jerusalem. And a huge risk, because basically its maritime commerce was diverted for a year to make the preparations. As Crowley relates:
“The scale of the operation dwarfed any of the city's previous maritime expeditions. It required Dandolo [the Doge] to order the immediate suspension of all other commercial activities and to recall merchant vessels from overseas as the whole population threw itself into the preparations. They had thirteen months to complete the work. The shipbuilding and refurbishment alone were a huge project, which required immense quantities of wood, pitch, hemp, ropes, sailcloth, and iron for nails…”
This project would have led to a significant deforestation of the Venetian hinterland and the Dalmatian coast. I suspect that the Venetians did not manufacture their own nails, but - as the merchants they were - bought them in. But the manufacture of such a large amount of iron somewhere would also have led to the cutting down of many more trees to make charcoal to fuel the furnaces. (I was reminded how I had learned last season that the forests of Cyprus may have been decimated in as little as 50 years to make charcoal for the iron industry.)
Venice and the Venetians will be the subject, of course, of a future blog, as the republic played a huge role in the fortunes of Byzantine Greece for hundreds of years. We plan to sail into many old Venetian ports on Missy Bear this season.
Anyway, the stubborn nailmakers of Derbyshire eventually succumbed to the industrial revolution, and to the mechanisation of nail making. Many would have become redundant. My fatherless great-grandfather, Walter, knowing his living was going or gone, moved - probably walked – northwards into South Yorkshire looking for work.
He found it as a coal miner. He married Lettice and had nine children, one of who was Fred Crooks, my grandfather. Fred lived and was killed on the local railway. His job was a 'ganger' and he walked the railway lines with his team (gang) armed with a sledgehammer to hammer in any loose wooden pegs that kept the rails attached to the sleepers. It seems like being able to handle a heavy hammer ran in the genes! Fred's gang worked together and also spotted approaching trains on the 'up' and 'down' lines for each other. One foggy morning, Fred's gang were blindsided by one train on the 'up' line, and thus failed to spot an engine passing simultaneously on the 'down' line where Fred was working. You can guess the rest... My father had to identify his father's body!
Postscript
A couple of years ago I had my Y-DNA sent off to an American company called FamilyTreeDNA in a wild attempt to track down Alice’s lover, and Walter’s father. Only males have a Y-chromosome and it is passed down from father to son. Recently, I was informed that an American (called Michael H Barker) had a distant match to my Y-DNA, meaning that we probably have a shared ancestor many hundreds or even thousands of years ago, However, Michael had traced his own paternal line back in England to a John Barker who was born in Norton, Derbyshire in 1611. The Derbyshire link struck me as interesting.
So, I used the website ‘Ancestry.co.uk’ to build the family tree of John Barker as best as I could. My father’s family tree is already on the site, along with his autosomal DNA (a mixture of DNA from mother and father). Could the software identify a DNA link to the Barker family?
I traced the Barker paternal line forward in time, until I came across a George Barker, who was three years older than Alice and lived in Derbyshire, about 30 miles from Alice. George Barker was sickle grinder and this trade also needed plenty of running water to power the grind-stones.
I then 'hitched' George to Alice on the software, by pretending they were married And then I waited, not very expectantly. But, hey-presto, we have recently started getting some distant DNA matches to ‘shared ancestors’, via George’s mother (a Thorpe) and his paternal grandmother (a Wildgoose).
Our search is now called the “Wild Goose Chase”!
It’s not conclusive yet, and we are still searching for a closer living relative to prove the theory. We have not quite “nailed it”!
Post Postscript!
Dad has found one of the wooden pegs that his dad, Fred, used to hammer back in place. It’s about 6” long and an elongated, hexagon in section. He has labelled it as follows:
“Wooden key to hold rail tracks in place. Dad used to knock these tight with either a 7lb or 14lb hammer. He walked the ‘length’ every day; 6 miles, 126 yards return total.” [Ed, actually it was over 12 miles round trip from Bolton upon Dearne to Frickley and back.]
Brilliant piece. Very interesting; well written.