i
I'm still doing the Death Cleaning process with my dad. We have now got into a rhythm; we know how many files we can manage in a morning; we know we need a walk around the garden; we know we need a short simple lunch break of blue cheese and Ryvita whilst looking out of the kitchen window at the birds on the bird feeder; we know that by 4.00pm dad will be flagging; we know its good to do some private paperwork incineration and then go to the re-cycle centre (or 'the tip', as my dad still likes to call it), to offload old magazines, half empty paint tins, a defunct home printer and rotting cardboard boxes (with scattered mouse droppings in the chewed corners).
Rotting cardboard boxes. Dad, to my frustration, has never quite got the fact that a cardboard box stored in the cellar won't actually protect anything from the damp. His cellar sometimes has a mild flood. The floor is ancient flagstone. He puts bits of old carpet under boxes to keep them dry. The mouldy carpets eventually had to go to the 'tip'. The contents of the boxes were in various states of decay. He ponders whether an old board game (with missing pieces and brown water-stained instruction booklets) might go to the Charity shop. Chuck it, dad! He reluctantly agrees. There's a small amount of family silverware. The sheen has dulled on most of it; time's tarnish. It's silver, but not really that valuable, as he knows from watching the Antiques Road Show on TV. We leave it for future consideration, but he picks up a small elegant milk jug. It is surprisingly untarnished. I can use a milk jug, my old one is cracked, he says, satisfied to bring the ancestral ghosts into practical use. It could do with a polish, but I wash it in soapy water, and there it is, in the cupboard, next to the familiar old cracked jug, which I suspect he will continue to use.
Stacked up, against a wall, in the cellar, are various framed pictures, all in some sort of state of decay, glass cracked, corner joints out of kilter. Dust and cobwebs all over. Two oval frames have portrait photographs in them. They look Victorian. Dad isn't sure who they are, but knows they came from Forncet, the Wem based family house he was born and brought up in from the 1930's onwards. Then we figure it out - they are his grandfather and grandmother; my great paternal grandparents. On closer inspection the ornamental gold painted plaster cast frames are crumbling. Damp has ingressed onto the photographs creating some surreal patterns on the faces of the sitters. We are briefly tempted to send them to the 'tip'. Better sense avails as we realise these might be the only images of this generation of our family. To my mind the water damage is an artistic palimpsest of meaning; watermarks of antiquity. How easy it is to wash away history. Dad is keen on my offer to get them reframed. We pack them up carefully and load them in the back of my car.
Back home, I cautiously remove the warped wooden back panels of the portraits. I'm surprised to find the images are not actually printed on paper, but on an opaque glass medium. Some research indicates they are 'milk glass positives', otherwise known as opalotypes - a technique patented in 1857 by Glover and Bold of Liverpool. They look beautiful removed from the decayed supporting frames. They strike me as delicate sepia watercolour paintings. The portraits capture a confident strength. They are people who know what they need to do. The damp ingress has added a leopard-skin stole to my great grandfather's jacket. Either that or a bulky boa constrictor. Other parts of his jacket look mud encrusted. His skin remains remarkably clear, a complexion of good health. His beard is impressive: soft-wired down to his sternum. In the corner of his left eye is a stain that has become a dark tear, trickling halfway down his nose.
My great grandmother's dark hair is tied back in a loose bun, probably coiled into a chignon at the back. The Queen Victorian strong middle parting is of its time. I imagine her hair is sumptuously long when let down. I long to see it so. I imagine her as a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting, though he would have had her gazing out of frame and dreaming inwards. In the opalotype she holds her Victorian gaze so I can project Emily Dickinson mystery onto her. Is she holding her breath? If she was allowed to relax, she might hang out with the Pre-Raphaelites. If my grandfather relaxed, his posture might have softened into the slumped shape of Rossetti as captured in a photograph taken by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) thirty years earlier in 1863.
ii
My great grandfather was Edward Bygott (1844-1916). His wife, Helen Florence Pechell (1856-1940) was born in Matlock, Derbyshire. Edward was born in Barton on Humber, Lincolnshire, just over the river from Hull. In his lifetime there was no bridge spanning the Humber; that would only come decades later when it was opened officially by Queen Elizabeth II on 17 July 1981. After the death of his father, James Bygott, a Barton farmer, he moved south west to become an article clerk to his brother Robert, a solicitor, in Sandbach, East Cheshire. He moved over to Shropshire in his twenties and was admitted as a solicitor in 1869. In 1871 he lodged in Market Street, Wem, with landlady Mary Walmsley, just round the corner from Trentham House, where his grandson Edward and great grandson, myself, would be living exactly one hundred years later. For me, it is significant to finally trace my home town roots. Edward was the first of three generations of Wem based solicitors - his son, Edward, my grandfather, and Edward, my father covered over a hundred years of legal service to the area. My middle name is Edward, but strangely, I didn't inherit the legal gene.
Initially an assistant to Henry John Barker, Edward took over Barker's Solicitors of Wem in 1872, when the previous partner's had either died or retired.
By the 1881 census Edward was 36, unmarried and living with his sister Alice and Frances Griffith a servant, at Crossfield House, on the Soulton Road, right next to the railway crossing, to the east of the town. The house was probably named after the medieval surrounding common land.
Two hundred years ago there were three common fields belonging to this town. They consisted of arable land, and were divided by stones or other land marks, so that each proprietor knew his own ground which he ploughed and sowed, but when harvest was gathered in, their cattle ranged in common, and fed promiscuously. The Cross field at the east end of the town towards Soulton, took its name from a cross erected on that road, as was usual in popish countries.
(The History of Wem by Samuel Garbet, MS 1750-55, pg239)
I wonder what happened to that ancient cross? Was it a stone cross or wooden? Either way it was likely destroyed in a puritan purge of post-pope-ism, following Henry VIII's break with Rome.
In the 1880s Edward started building a large house in a field further up the Soulton Road. It is not clear why Edward built his house on this side of the town. There were only a few houses on the east side of the railway level crossing at this point, and very little other development. Perhaps the railway, built in 1858, was a natural, or psychological barrier to others. Probably he was forward-looking and saw a sensible investment in some land that may have been relatively cheap. Perhaps Edward wanted a reminder of the fields that were his farming family background in Barton on Humber. His father, James, had a large farm of 270 acres. Edward, age 16, and just starting out as a solicitor's clerk, had also lived on his elder brother James' 150 acre farm on the Brigg road outside Barton. On the 1861 census it is called Bygott's Farm, but it is likely to be Barton Field Farm. What we do know is that by the time he's building the new house, he's into his mid-forties. He names the new house 'Forncet' - another clue to his need to keep historical links with his ancestral past.
The name Forncet is linked to the deep history of the Bygott family. Forncett is a civil parish in South Norfolk. Forncett St. Mary's is listed in the Domesday book as owned by Roger Bigod of Norfolk. Roger, father of Hugh Bigod, 1st Earl of Norfolk was a Norman knight who came to Britain as part of Norman Conquest. His descendants were the first five Earl's of Norfolk. Roger founded Thetford Priory and built Framlingham Castle - Ed Sheeran's 'Castle on the Hill'.
Driving at 90 down those country lanes
Singing to Tiny Dancer
And I miss the way you make me feel, and it's real
When we watched the sunset over the castle on the hill
iii
Whilst Edward was at Crossfield House and working hard to develop his business, and expand his property holdings, a twenty-four year old woman called Helen Florence Pechell, was living at Fleetgate in Barton on Humber. Her father, Alfred Henry Pechell, a landowner and barrister had sold the house, known as The Tower House, in Matlock, Derbyshire, where Helen was born, and relocated up north. His own wife, also called Helen, was the daughter of William Goodlad Todd a landed proprietor from Hull. By 1891 Edward was 47 and Helen Florence 35. Helen's father had died and she had moved across the Humber to live with her mother, brother and three other sisters at Rosemont Villa on the Beverley Road, in Hull. It is about 160 miles from Wem to Hull. How Helen and Edward got to know each other and the nature of their courtship is unclear. Maybe there was an ‘arrangement’? The Todd family must have known the Bygott family. Somehow, the Lincolnshire-Shropshire family networking must have been in action. In December Edward travelled up to Hull and married Helen Florence at St. John's Parish Church in Newland, Hull. A Shropshire journalist reported the celebrations:
After the wedding breakfast at the residence of the bride's mother, the newly-married pair took their departure from Hull, amid the congratulations of their friends, en route for the south. The bride’s and bridegroom’s presents were numerous and costly. At Wem, merry peals were rung at intervals during the day.
[Wellington Journal & Shrewsbury News - Saturday 19 December 1891]
By October the next year, their daughter Ellen is born and at some point, the following year, in 1893, they take a trip to Buxton in Derbyshire 55 miles from Wem and only 20 miles from Matlock, Helen's birthplace. On that trip Edward and Helen step into T. Steward & Co., a photographic studios at 6, The Quadrant, and sit for the camera. Here is the origin of the opalotype images Edward's grandson and great-grandson have rescued from a damp cellar 130 years later, in 2022. Their second daughter, Alice is born in November, so it may be that Helen Florence is pregnant in her photograph. My grandfather is yet to be conceived.
Roger- Thanks for sharing these striking family pictures from the days of yore. I very much appreciate the archival narrative.