We’re always hearing that with the onset of age, our
short-term memory deteriorates, as our long-term memory strengthens. With my
Senior Citizen status having long lost its novelty value, I must confess that
age is quickly becoming my strong suit, but that doesn't mean I believe that
old squit about short-term memory failure. I don’t recall forgetting anything,
recently; Not a damn’ thing. Deferably not.
I do agree
though, that the long-term memory improves. In fact, I can remember three
generations before I was born. Yes, all right, with a little help from Charlie
and Jane, and Betty; okay and a few others, but I’ve never forgotten 1842, and
I never will.
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| Leaving Home |
In Frankfurt on the River Main, a group of families, cutlery workers by trade, all decided to flee their oppressive landlord/ masters and seek a better life in England. Because of their occupations, they fetched up in Sheffield, City of Steel. Where the four rivers Sheaf Porter Rivelin and Loxley all run down their respective valley courses before joining together in the River Don. The rivers are quite shallow and fast flowing- ideal for harnessing to give power.
From time out of memory, before Noah taught his lads to swing an axe, before David scoured the stream for his pebbles, man had crossed these rivers, not with bridges but with weirs. A weir is a sort of dam but not so bumptious. It doesn't rise high and steep. It doesn't aspire to grandeur. It is a much more casual, laid-back affair, literally laid back. Often it is no more than a man’s height, though it can be three times that, depending on the stature of the river. The important feature is that with stone cut in large ‘boxy’ lumps, raking the face well back, and back filling with gravel and rubble as you go, it is possible to raise your weir in the flowing water, using no mortar, just a little clay, both to bed each course on the one below, and to stop any leaks until the back fill has compacted itself.
So when the weir has pushed the river bed to a satisfactory height, just one more course, or heavy kerb will enable the river to be diverted sideways into a channel, to lead to a freshly dug reservoir, cistern or pond. When this pond is full, the excess will resume its old course, which now lies over the weir. With that big parcel of water now held in the pond, waiting to go somewhere, waiting to obey gravity and move downwards, you have what science teachers call potential or kinetic energy. So we let it obey gravity and move downwards, but on its way we make it fill a chain of buckets built round a wheel in such a way that the weight and force of the water in the buckets will turn the wheel and keep it turning. Once the mill is turning we can make it drive a millstone, a grindstone, a tilt wheel, a beam hammer.
When the whole caboodle is up and running, whether the wheel is engaged or not, the water will always be flowing, either over the wheel or over the weir, so the flow isn't impeded, and similar establishment further downstream aren't adversely affected.
So there you have a perpetual source of energy, free, pollution-free, readily available, no waste products, and the energy source makes no noise other than running water. I ask you, how could that fit into modern living. No wonder they got rid of it.
Some say that the first wheel was built by the monks of Beauchief Abbey in the abbey dale in the field by the side of the river Sheaf. This was after they had done building the Church of St James, at Norton, for Sir Robert FitzRanulph to give to the abbey as expiation for his part in the murder of Thomas Becket. Others say they merely repaired the ruined wheel, which they found already there.
But in what is now called the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, there is a tree stump serving as an anvil base, and carbon dating puts that stump back in Moses’ time, give or take a small prophet margin.
Some folk think that charting the past is just a matter of stringing a tape from tree to tree, scratching a line in the dust from one stone to another, following the flow of a blood line from scion to scion, crawling down the tunnels of memories, yours or anybody’s, until the ceiling hangs so low and its so dark that you can’t drag yourself any further, even if you could see which way to go.
The past isn't a line, bent or straight. It spreads in all directions, like water on a stone flagged floor, or dry sand blown across a n empty waste, and scudding across its face, like sweetmeats in twists of tissue paper come all the memories, not in a manageable, straight line, but in untidy, sporadic, irregular bunches of associated people, places, events, happenstances. Sometimes the flow is sparse, and other times, one needs a shrimp net to catch them all. Some are sweet, some are strange and some are sour, but they are all served on the one platter, and it must be eaten clean. One can chase the flow of time backwards or off to the left, say, and find oneself coming back in from the right, and up front. If you want to know where you are at any one moment, looking at the stone beneath your feet don’t help. It’s marked ‘NOW’. Wherever you are in the past, it is now. I suspect that when the word ‘now’ is no longer visible, then you have joined the past for good, and a team of cherubs is already hurtling towards you to measure you for your tissue paper twist.
From time out of memory, before Noah taught his lads to swing an axe, before David scoured the stream for his pebbles, man had crossed these rivers, not with bridges but with weirs. A weir is a sort of dam but not so bumptious. It doesn't rise high and steep. It doesn't aspire to grandeur. It is a much more casual, laid-back affair, literally laid back. Often it is no more than a man’s height, though it can be three times that, depending on the stature of the river. The important feature is that with stone cut in large ‘boxy’ lumps, raking the face well back, and back filling with gravel and rubble as you go, it is possible to raise your weir in the flowing water, using no mortar, just a little clay, both to bed each course on the one below, and to stop any leaks until the back fill has compacted itself.
So when the weir has pushed the river bed to a satisfactory height, just one more course, or heavy kerb will enable the river to be diverted sideways into a channel, to lead to a freshly dug reservoir, cistern or pond. When this pond is full, the excess will resume its old course, which now lies over the weir. With that big parcel of water now held in the pond, waiting to go somewhere, waiting to obey gravity and move downwards, you have what science teachers call potential or kinetic energy. So we let it obey gravity and move downwards, but on its way we make it fill a chain of buckets built round a wheel in such a way that the weight and force of the water in the buckets will turn the wheel and keep it turning. Once the mill is turning we can make it drive a millstone, a grindstone, a tilt wheel, a beam hammer.
When the whole caboodle is up and running, whether the wheel is engaged or not, the water will always be flowing, either over the wheel or over the weir, so the flow isn't impeded, and similar establishment further downstream aren't adversely affected.
So there you have a perpetual source of energy, free, pollution-free, readily available, no waste products, and the energy source makes no noise other than running water. I ask you, how could that fit into modern living. No wonder they got rid of it.
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| Endcliffe Pond - Holm Wheel |
But in what is now called the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, there is a tree stump serving as an anvil base, and carbon dating puts that stump back in Moses’ time, give or take a small prophet margin.
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| Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet (A Small Prophet Margin) |
The past isn't a line, bent or straight. It spreads in all directions, like water on a stone flagged floor, or dry sand blown across a n empty waste, and scudding across its face, like sweetmeats in twists of tissue paper come all the memories, not in a manageable, straight line, but in untidy, sporadic, irregular bunches of associated people, places, events, happenstances. Sometimes the flow is sparse, and other times, one needs a shrimp net to catch them all. Some are sweet, some are strange and some are sour, but they are all served on the one platter, and it must be eaten clean. One can chase the flow of time backwards or off to the left, say, and find oneself coming back in from the right, and up front. If you want to know where you are at any one moment, looking at the stone beneath your feet don’t help. It’s marked ‘NOW’. Wherever you are in the past, it is now. I suspect that when the word ‘now’ is no longer visible, then you have joined the past for good, and a team of cherubs is already hurtling towards you to measure you for your tissue paper twist.
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| Holm Wheel Plan |
If our immigrants had approached the town via the Sheaf field and followed the river down the Abbey dale road until it joined the Porter, before flowing into the Don, on their six mile journey they could have counted maybe 30 water wheels on the Sheaf, all supporting a variety of trades, cutlery among them. As it was, they eventually found shelter in the area of Eyre street and Eyre Lane, a slum area where housing and small industry were so fused together as to be inseparable. In fact, many small industries were operated in the home, the difference between a kitchen and a workshop being determined simply by what implement was currently in use, on the table.
The Eckhardt family included a matriarch, Christiana, midwife, and her 3yr old son, Johann, soon anglicised to John. The ‘Eckhardt’ however remained intact and still does in two brothers, Daren and David, great, great grandsons of Johann.
The name first appears in1350 and means Sword hard, Sword strong, or more pertinently, Sword sharp. For the name to appear 500yrs later, on a family of cutlery workers is, to my mind, one of the binding stitches in life’s tapestry. Alas the stitch has since worn, sundered, and that particular scrap of tapestry is long consigned to the shoddy-sack of the ragman-reaper. The last Eckhardt cutlery worker was Betty, my Mother, more than 20 yrs gone.
Another family in the group counted in their roll call an 8yr old girl by the name of Elisabet Grau. She it was who, on the first convenient day in their new home, climbed the stairs to enrol in the ‘National School’ over a workshop, in Carver Street, but the girl who was told to find a vacant seat and sit there was not Elisabet Grau, but Elizabeth Grey.
In the next generation, her daughter-in-law to be, Jane, would sit in the same school room, and would glance out of the window to watch the last of the funerals in the little, walled, segregated, Jewish cemetery, across the road. Though disused, neglected and forgotten, the cemetery remained secluded, inconspicuous, walled, inviolate, until sometime in the 1980s, when some bureaucrat (Goyim, most likely) found the legal means to sweep it down into Scheol, to make room for some really useful and valuable offices.
John Eckhardt and Elizabeth Grey grew up together in their loose, Teutonic enclave, until they married in 1865 to live with John’s mother, Christiana, now 59yrs old and, widowed.
Christiana had learned just enough English to acquire British nationality, and so to practice her midwifery at Mr Jessop’s newly founded Hospital for Women, in Fig Tree Lane. At Home, however, she cast off the English corset and relaxed into the comfort of her native German which remained the language of the house for another 30yrs, until her tongue was stilled for ever. Before then, she had acquitted herself so well at her midwifery that, on her retirement, the hospital trustees created a precedent by awarding her a pension. Family lore has it that her ‘portrait’ (probably photograph) graced the vestibule of the hospital for several years, probably until 1914 when German names suddenly became unpopular.
Elizabeth soon produced two children, in short shrift, William and Kate, then some years later, they begat Charles Henry, by which time William and Kate were of marriageable age. They did indeed marry, William to Ada, and Kate to Bill Dyson, and it wasn’t long before young Charles Henry (Charlie) could boast a clutch of nephews and nieces no more than 5yrs his junior.
By the close of the century, Charlie’s grandmother, Christiana, and his mother, Elizabeth, had both crossed the Jordan or the Rhine, depending on which route they took to the ‘Feste Burg’. John, Charlie’s father, is recorded as being employed as a ‘stone breaker’. I believe this was a matter of smiting rocks with a heavy hammer to render them of a small enough size to be rolled into a hard road surface. It certainly necessitated the wearing of a full length, stout leather apron, which sounds incommodious, but legend says he was never seen without it. Indeed he would often sleep under it.
He spent his leisure hours entertaining theatre queues with his ‘German Band’, he leading with his violin, while passing the hat for an un-named charity. In fact the name was ‘John Eckhardt’s Private Beer Fund’. He had given up the house, and slept where ever he could scrounge a bed, sofa, or just floor space in front of a stove. All of this left young Charlie being shunted back and forth between the homes of brother Bill and sister Kate. He would prevail on the good will of one, until hints were dropped that his space would make a welcome change to his company. He would then gather up his pitiful bundle of spare clothing, and go and foist himself on the other .
The Eckhardt family included a matriarch, Christiana, midwife, and her 3yr old son, Johann, soon anglicised to John. The ‘Eckhardt’ however remained intact and still does in two brothers, Daren and David, great, great grandsons of Johann.
The name first appears in1350 and means Sword hard, Sword strong, or more pertinently, Sword sharp. For the name to appear 500yrs later, on a family of cutlery workers is, to my mind, one of the binding stitches in life’s tapestry. Alas the stitch has since worn, sundered, and that particular scrap of tapestry is long consigned to the shoddy-sack of the ragman-reaper. The last Eckhardt cutlery worker was Betty, my Mother, more than 20 yrs gone.
Another family in the group counted in their roll call an 8yr old girl by the name of Elisabet Grau. She it was who, on the first convenient day in their new home, climbed the stairs to enrol in the ‘National School’ over a workshop, in Carver Street, but the girl who was told to find a vacant seat and sit there was not Elisabet Grau, but Elizabeth Grey.
In the next generation, her daughter-in-law to be, Jane, would sit in the same school room, and would glance out of the window to watch the last of the funerals in the little, walled, segregated, Jewish cemetery, across the road. Though disused, neglected and forgotten, the cemetery remained secluded, inconspicuous, walled, inviolate, until sometime in the 1980s, when some bureaucrat (Goyim, most likely) found the legal means to sweep it down into Scheol, to make room for some really useful and valuable offices.
John Eckhardt and Elizabeth Grey grew up together in their loose, Teutonic enclave, until they married in 1865 to live with John’s mother, Christiana, now 59yrs old and, widowed.
Christiana had learned just enough English to acquire British nationality, and so to practice her midwifery at Mr Jessop’s newly founded Hospital for Women, in Fig Tree Lane. At Home, however, she cast off the English corset and relaxed into the comfort of her native German which remained the language of the house for another 30yrs, until her tongue was stilled for ever. Before then, she had acquitted herself so well at her midwifery that, on her retirement, the hospital trustees created a precedent by awarding her a pension. Family lore has it that her ‘portrait’ (probably photograph) graced the vestibule of the hospital for several years, probably until 1914 when German names suddenly became unpopular.
Elizabeth soon produced two children, in short shrift, William and Kate, then some years later, they begat Charles Henry, by which time William and Kate were of marriageable age. They did indeed marry, William to Ada, and Kate to Bill Dyson, and it wasn’t long before young Charles Henry (Charlie) could boast a clutch of nephews and nieces no more than 5yrs his junior.
By the close of the century, Charlie’s grandmother, Christiana, and his mother, Elizabeth, had both crossed the Jordan or the Rhine, depending on which route they took to the ‘Feste Burg’. John, Charlie’s father, is recorded as being employed as a ‘stone breaker’. I believe this was a matter of smiting rocks with a heavy hammer to render them of a small enough size to be rolled into a hard road surface. It certainly necessitated the wearing of a full length, stout leather apron, which sounds incommodious, but legend says he was never seen without it. Indeed he would often sleep under it.
He spent his leisure hours entertaining theatre queues with his ‘German Band’, he leading with his violin, while passing the hat for an un-named charity. In fact the name was ‘John Eckhardt’s Private Beer Fund’. He had given up the house, and slept where ever he could scrounge a bed, sofa, or just floor space in front of a stove. All of this left young Charlie being shunted back and forth between the homes of brother Bill and sister Kate. He would prevail on the good will of one, until hints were dropped that his space would make a welcome change to his company. He would then gather up his pitiful bundle of spare clothing, and go and foist himself on the other .
I don’t know how long this went on, but in 1904 he met a slip of a girl, Jane Bartram, who was living in similar straits in that her parents were both dead, and she too oscillated between the homes of older brother and sister. All she had of her doting father was the child’s spindle-back rocking chair, which he had given her for her 6th birthday. 80 yrs later, when my mother passed it on to my infant son, she explained, apologetically-
“It wasn’t new when your Grandma got it, you know. It was only second hand”.
I still have it, of course, and it is ‘beyond rubies’
All Jane had of her mother, Emma, were memories of her feeblemindedness. Two examples survive. One recalls the now lost practice of the ritual of the ‘Tray of Tea’. In markets and at the seaside, into the late 1950s and possibly early 60s, one could buy a tray of tea from a tea stall, and receive on a tin tray all the necessary impedimenta (crocks etc.) pot of tea, jug of hot water for topping up, paying for the tea per head, plus a refundable deposit of say 5/- on the returnable goods.
One day, Emma had gone shopping in the market. She reappeared at home, after a long absence, bearing not shopping but a tray of tea. A stallholder had plucked her from the crowd, pressed money in her hand, and told her to fetch him a tray of tea. He must surely have known his mark, but his impertinence didn’t profit him because she couldn’t remember where his stall was, so she eventually came home with a tray of rapidly cooling tea.
The other incident happened thusly. After a worrying absence of several hours, Emma returned home somewhat flustered, and noticeably damp, in spots. She excused her late return by saying she had been scrubbing someone’s stairs. A woman had suddenly grabbed her in the street, hauled her indoors, and set her to scrubbing stairs, starting in the attic, scrubbing down three flights to finish at the foot of the stone cellar steps. When she had finished, she was given one penny piece for her reward, then set at liberty. Again one feels that the victim must have been known to the predator, but the reverse wasn’t the case.
It is possible that Emma had been as ‘passively casual’ shall we say, in her relationships as in her labours. On Jane’s birth certificate Emma names herself as Emma Bartram, late Simpson, formerly Blackburn. Old echoes of family gossip suggest to me that she is not claiming Simpson and Blackburn as previous marriages. The latter could have been her maiden name. Jane occasionally spoke of her brother, Dennis, Betty of Uncle Dennis, but the only Dennis on record is Dennis Simpson, not Bartram. Was he, in fact, Jane’s half-brother?
Alas, by the time Jane met Charlie, Emma’s journey through this vale of tears was over. Like Charlie, Jane’s domestic arrangement was that of shuttling between the homes of older brother, Dennis, and older sister, Nellie.