What I like best is to lie whole mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain, without any object before me, neither knowing nor caring how time passes, and thus ‘with light-winged toys of feathered Idleness’ to melt down hours to moments. Perhaps some such thoughts as I have here set down float before me like motes before my half-shut eyes, or some vivid image of the past by forcible contrast rushes by me...At length I rouse myself from my reverie, and home to dinner, proud of killing time with thought, nay even without thinking.
William Hazlitt, ‘On a Sun-Dial’ (1827) xvii, 245 1
i
I'm not particularly good at dates and facts. At my first boarding school my headmaster and history teacher, Mr. Carr, would line the class up in front of his desk and fire a random date quiz at us. It was usually Kings and Queens, key laws and battles of British history. I can still hear his jolting voice - Jones - George III?; Edwards - Battle of Britain?; Bygott - Repeal of the Corn Laws...? Despite all my efforts to learn a simple year date I always went blank and panicked. WRONG! He shouted with what seemed to me a genuine anger, his bottom jaw protruding and face reddening. A second or third WRONG was often accompanied by the hurling of a chalky blackboard wiper, the concave curved wooden side of which might clip a head too slow to duck.
So, I'm still terrible with dates, including birthdays and anniversaries. For some reason I can always remember 1066; 1914-1918; 1939-1945 and my own birthday. Because I've read and written about it so much, I can remember that Allen Ginsberg was in Manchester in 1973 and 1979. I can remember that he hung out under the Statue of Eros in August 1979 and also some time in 1965. I've got the year my dad was born, 1933, but June and July, beginning with the same two letters, get mixed up in my head, so I have to double check. Maybe it's post-traumatic history class syndrome, or a specific form of dyslexia, being left handed, or maybe I'm just inherently chronologically impaired. Though….
...boys who shine at school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out into the world. The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at school, and on which his success depends, are things which do not require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties of the mind. (William Hazlitt, ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned’, Table-Talk; viii, 71.)
ii
My dad has always loved history. He's a retired successful conveyancing solicitor from the small market town of Wem, in Shropshire. He took on the business before he had completed his articles, as his father was ill. He built the business up to a partnership with several offices around Shropshire. But I'm sure he's a frustrated historian. He could have been a good lecturer and academic researcher. For me, the association of dry facts with history, meant it took me a long time to see why he's so passionate about it. The key, so obvious really, is story. History without story is a mortuary. Narrative navigates us away from a dead past and into a living field of depth, connection and meaning.
My dad's speciality is local history and Charles the Martyr. The combination of Anglican high church Christianity and a committed monarchist such as Charles I still makes me a bit queasy. Charles Stewart, king of Scotland, England and Ireland was beheaded on 30 January 1649 for trying to bring a bit more Catholic colour and ritual to the Church of England. It was a bit too papal for many. But the charge was perhaps equally political as he refused parliamentary collaboration, preferring the good old system of centralised monarchy. After his public beheading Oliver Cromwell was kind enough to allow the king's head to be sewn back on again out of respect for the family. Items of royal clothing seem to have been preserved and now reside in various archives. Objects of dubious account are scattered, including a possible throat lozenge found in the King's pocket, post-execution. (For more on that, see my Substack post, On Memory: Dry history, juicy history and sucking on a King Charles throat lozenge.)
My dad lights up talking about it. He's making connections, trying to make sense of the past, of God, of religious tradition. He's taking adventures with friends, doing online history forums, being part of a community of interest: The Society of King Charles the Martyr (founded in 1894 a year after the unveiling of the Shaftesbury Memorial Monument / Statue of Eros ). He's travelled quite a bit, but apart from his army conscription, never lived outside Shropshire. He knows the county very well. He's done the legal conveyancing of god knows how many properties. I'm not sure how he got into the Royal Martyr thing, but a dedicated King Charles the Martyr Church, in the hamlet of Newtown, is only three and a half miles to the west of his, and my, home town of Wem. It was originally dedicated in 1665 (five years after the Restoration of the Monarchy) and is one of only six English Churches dedicated to Charles Stuart. The present building dates from 1868. So, for him it's about finding familiar reference points, riffing on them, bringing texture to the context of his life. The text in texture; the text in context.
In 1628 Charles I prefixed a royal declaration to the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England. This amendment forced a literal interpretation of the beliefs and fixed the principles of ordination to be necessary upon them.
iv
In 1787 one Reverend William Hazlitt, would come to minister in Wem, my home town. He and his family had returned from Boston, Massachusetts having influenced the founding of the first Unitarian Church in America. He persuaded the members of the church that the congregation could ordain ministers, thereby freeing them from an obligation to the thirty-nine articles with which they disagreed, in particular the doctrine of the Trinity. The Hazlitts lived in a house on Noble Street in Wem. The historical white house was visible from my childhood home a few doors down.
It was only later I learnt who William Hazlitt junior was - an acclaimed intellectual essayist. It transpires that the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had stayed with the Hazlitt family one night in 1798.
On a raw and comfortless January morning in 1798 the young enthusiast rose before daylight and walked ten miles in the mud to hear Coleridge preach and that it was an epoch in his life; that Coleridge came back to Wem on a visit to Hazlitt's father; and that whilst there he decided to abandon the ministry and give himself to letters. So young Hazlitt had heard the poet's last sermon; and he accompanied Coleridge six miles on the way back to Shrewsbury, heard him talk rapturously, confided to him that he too had literary aspirations, and then and there came to a momentous resolution as to his own career, just as Coleridge had done a day or two before; and thus, as Hazlitt afterwards said, the road from Wem to Shrewsbury was the one by which he first set out on his journey through life. If spirits haunt the scenes they loved, assuredly the spirits of Hazlitt and Coleridge must hover about the hilly solitudes of North Shropshire and the shady road to Shrewsbury.
(Hazlitt's Walks With Coleridge by J. Cuming Walters2. From The Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, Vol. XLII, 1916, published by Sherratt & Hughes, 34 Cross Street, Manchester.)3
I also learnt that the decaying garage, that I could see also from my bedroom window, between the back of Hazlitt House and The White Horse pub was originally the Non-conformist chapel where William Hazlitt senior preached and ministered. The chapel/garage was converted to modern apartments in recent years.
iii
Of course: like father, like son. Though that often only becomes more apparent later in life. Some men find that a painful realisation. I resisted the notion for ages, but now I have come to understand a deeper value and wisdom in the process of father-son similarities. I was baffled and bewildered by the concept of paternal love for most of my life. I've done a lot of personal growth workshops over the years. Most have helped to some degree. But it took a long time to really get closer to the heart of the heart-matter in relation to my father.
I'm not going to get over excited about a pro-hierarchical Anglican monarch from the 17th century, and my dad probably isn't going to be too fired up about my obsession with Allen Ginsberg, a Jewish, gay, American beat poet from the 20th century. Or, why Eros is more interesting to me than Jesus. But that's to miss the point. Sometimes it takes the coincidence of a father's retirement and a son's disillusionment with what he's tried to do with his life, for a heart bond to eventually emerge.
From: Hazlitt’s Learning: A Real and Negative Education by David Halpin, The Hazlitt Review Volume 2, 2009
John Cuming Walters (1863-1933), journalist and author, was a prodigiously energetic man who participated fully in the cultural life of Northwest England during the early twentieth century. He edited the Manchester city news (from 1906 to 1932) and Manchester evening chronicle and published numerous books on a variety of subjects including social housing, psychic phenomena, English topography, and King Arthur. Walters' primary interests, however, were literary. He wrote and edited works on Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson and Marie Corelli and was a central figure in the Lancashire Shakespeare community. He lived at 71 Lansdowne Road, West Didsbury.
34 Cross Street is currently a Santander Bank. Interestingly, it is directly opposite the Cross Street Chapel Unitarian Church. The original Chapel erected in 1694 on this site was probably the very first building erected for Non-Conformist worship in Lancashire. Of particular note is the long Ministry from 1828 to 1884 of Rev. William Gaskell, who exercised wide influence within and outside the Unitarian movement alongside his wife, the novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell. Also of note is the fact that the Manchester Guardian newspaper was founded at the Cross Street Chapel in 1821.