CHAPTER THE EIGHTH.THE BLUE-COAT SCHOOL.
THE children of the poor begin early to earn their bread. Legislature has stepped in to regulate the age and hours for labour in manufacturing districts, and to provide education for the very humblest. Jabez Clegg was not born in these blissful times, and he only narrowly escaped the common lot.
He was not eight years old, yet Simon, on whom war-prices pressed as heavily as on his neighbours, began to discuss with Bess the necessity for sending the lad to Simpson’s factory (where Arkwright’s machinery was first set in motion).
“He mun goo as sune as the new year taks a fair grip,” decided Simon, and 1805 was at its last gasp as he said it.
But the new year brought Jabez a reprieve by the uncourtly hands of Joshua Brookes. Meeting Simon and Jabez at a stall in the Apple-market, where, the better to bargain, he had laid down a pile of old classical school-books (Joshua was a collector of these, which he retailed again to the boys at prices varying with his mood, or his estimate of the purchaser’s pocket), he accosted the former.
“Well, old Leathershanks, what are you going to make of young Cheat-the-fishes there? I suppose he’s to follow your own trade, he began totan hidesso early?” And the glance which shot from under his shaggy brows caused the boy to blush, and shrink behind his protector.
Simon’s eyes twinkled, but he shook his head as he answered:
“Nay, Parson Bruks, we’n thowt o’ sendin’ him t’ th’ cotton fact’ry; but it fair goos agen th’ grain to send th’ little chap through th’ streets to wark Winter an’ Summer, weet or dry, afore th’ sun’s oop an’ abeawthiswark. But we conno’ keep him bout it—toimes are so bad.”
“H’m! Then what a stupid old leather-head you must be not to think of the College, where he’d be kept and fed and clothed and educated!—educated, man—do you hear?”
Simon heard, and his eyes again twinkled and winked at the new idea presented to him.
“And apprenticed!” he echoed, with a long-drawn, gasping breath.
“Ay, and apprenticed.”
The parson, cramming his pockets with apples, for which he had higgled with much persistence, handed one to Jabez with the question—
“How would you like to be a College boy, Jabez, and wear a long blue coat, like that fellow yonder” (pointing to a boy then crossing the market on an errand), “and learn to write and cipher, as well as to read?”
“If you please’n, aw’d loike it moore nor eawt.” And his animated face was a clearer answer than his words.
Joshua then read the lad a brief homily to the effect that only good and honourable boys could find admission, winding up with—
“If you’re averygood lad, I’ll see what can be done for you.”
He interrupted thanks with—
“Easter’s very near, Sim, so you’ll have to stir your stumps to prove that ourhonourableyoung friend came honourably into the world. I’ll get the forms and fill them up for you, and his baptismal register too.”
He snatched up his books and was off, the tassel of his collegiate cap and the cassock he wore flying loose as he hurried away muttering to himself—
“What an old fool I am to bother about the lad! I daresay he’ll turn round and sting me in the end, like the rest of the snakes I have warmed. As great an idiot as old dame Clowes!”
Chetham’s College, or Hospital, is a long, low, ancient stone edifice, built on the rock above the mouth of the Irk, with two arms of unequal length, stretching towards church and town, and embracing a large quadrangle used as a playground, which has for its fourth and southern boundary a good, useful garden.
It is needless to grope upward from the time when the Saxon Theyn built a fortified residence on its site; sufficient for us that Thomas de la Warr, youngest son of the feudal baron ofManchester, was brought up to the Church, and in the fourteenth century inducted into the Rectory of Manchester, his father being patron. His elder brother dying at the close of the century, the rector (a pious Churchman) became baron. And then he put his power and wealth to sacerdotal uses. He petitioned the king, obtained a grant to collegiate Christ Church, erected the College, endowed it with lands; and here at his death the Warden of the Collegiate Church had his residence. Of these wardens, the celebrated Dr. Dee, whose explorations into alchemy and other occult sciences brought him into trouble with Queen Elizabeth, was one; and Dr. Dee’s room is still extant—in occupation of the governor.
In 1580, at Crumpsall Hall, Humphrey Chetham was born; and he, a prosperous dealer in fustians, never marrying, at his own expense fed and clothed a number of poor boys; and, by his will, not only bequeathed a large sum of money to be expended in the foundation and endowment of a hospital for the maintenance, education, and apprenticing of forty poor boys for ever, but one thousand pounds to be expended in a library, free to the public—the first free library in Britain.
The estate was vested in feoffees, and with them lay the power alike to elect boys and officials. From the townships of Manchester, Droylsden, Crumpsall, Bolton-le-Moors, and Turton, the boys were to be elected between the ages of six and ten, and were required to be of honest, industrious parents, and neither illegitimate nor diseased; and baptismal registers had to be produced. They had to be well maintained, well trained, and carefully apprenticed at fourteen, a fee of four pounds (a large sum in Humphrey Chetham’s time) being given with them. The churchwardens and overseers were to prepare lists of boys, doubling the number of vacancies, stating their respective claims, which lists they had to sign.
Easter Monday was the period for election, after which the feoffees dined together in Dr. Dee’s quaintly-carved room.
Joshua Brooks was as good as his word. He procured a blank form from the governor, and, Simon being no great scholar, filled it in for him. He found him the baptismal register without charging the regulation shilling, got the name of Jabez inserted in the churchwardens’ list, and such influence as he had with the feoffees he exerted to the utmost, for the case was one involving doubt and difficulty.
Nor had Simon Clegg been idle. He and his crony Matthew scoured Smedley and Crumpsall, and more successfulthan in their quest for Tom Hulme, discovered the nurse who presided at the birth of Jabez. Her testimony, so far as it went, was important. He had interested both Mr. and Mrs. Clough in the election of the foundling, and where the influence of the gentleman failed, that of the lady prevailed; so that when the important Easter Monday arrived, two-thirds of the feoffees were fully acquainted with his peculiar case, and more or less impressed in his favour.
It was on the 18th of April, bright, sunny, joyous. Compared with its present proportions, Manchester, then was but as a cameo brooch on a mantle of green; and that green was already starred with daisies, buttercups, primroses, and cowslips. By wells and brooks, daffodil and jonquil hung their heads and breathed out perfume. Bush and tree put out pale buds and fans of promise. The tit-lark sang, the cuckoo—to use a village phrase—had “eaten up the mud;” and the town was alive with holiday-makers from all the country round about.
It was the great College anniversary, not only election day, but one set apart for friends to visit Blue-coat boys already on the foundation, and for the curious public to inspect the Chetham Museum.
The main entrance in Millgate (said to be arched with the jaw-bone of a whale) and the smaller gate on Hunt’s Bank, were both thrown open. A stream of people of all grades, in festival array, poured in and out, and College cap and gown seemed to be ubiquitous.
The pale, sad widow or widower, holding an orphan boy by the trembling hand, the uncle or next of kin to the doubly-orphaned candidate were there, standing in a long line ranged against the building, and representing hopes and fears and eventualities little heeded by the shifting stream of gazers.
For the previous week Mrs. Clowes and her assistants had been working night and day: her shop was in a stage of siege. Every boy, and every boy’s friend, seemed to have pocket-money to spend, and to want to spend it over her counter. Then it was the great wedding-day of the year, and the churchyard swarmed like a hive; from every one of the many public-houses round College and Church, music and mirth, clattering feet, and loud-voiced laughter issued. “The Apple Tree,” “The Pack Horse,” “The Ring o’ Bells,” “The Blackamoor’s Head,” were filled to repletion with wedding guests; whilst “The College Inn,” and the old “Sun Inn,” held a less boisterous quota of the Collegians’ friends and relatives.
On those wet days when outdoor play was impossible, the boys, besides darning their stockings, occupied their spare hours in carving spoons and apple-scrapers out of bone, in working balls and pincushions with coloured worsted in fanciful devices, and a stitch locally known as “colleging:” and with these, on Easter Monday and at Whitsuntide, they reaped a harvest of pocket-money, having liberty to offer them for sale. And when it is remembered that our notable female ancestors, poor and rich, wore indoors a pincushion and sheathed scissors suspended at their sides, it is not to be wondered that these found ready purchasers as memorials of the visit.
But in that College Yard were anxious and expectant as well as buoyant faces. And there in that line, waiting to be called when their turn came, stood Jabez between Simon Clegg and Bess, with Matthew and the nurse on either hand. And ever and anon their eyes went up to the oriel window which faced the main entrance, for in the room it lighted the arbiters of the boy’s destiny sat in judgment on some other orphan’s claim. At length the summons came for “Jabez Clegg.”
With palpitating hearts—for any body of men with irresponsible powers is an awful tribunal—they passed under the arched portal at the western angle of the building, following their guide past the doors of the great kitchen on the right hand, and Dr. Dee’s room and the boys’ refectory on the left, up the wide stone staircase, with its massive carved oak balusters, along the gallery, at once library and museum, where gaping holiday-folk followed a Blue-coat cicerone past shelves and glass cases, and compartments separated for readers’ quiet study by carven book-shelf screens, hearing but heeding little of the parrot-roll the boys checked off: “Here’s Oliver Crummle’s sword; theer’s a loadstone; theer’s a hairy mon; theer’s the skeleton of a mon;” and so forth, but following their own guide to the nail-studded oaken door of the feoffees’ room—that door which might open to hope, only to close on disappointment.
The feoffees’ room—now the reading-room of the library—deserves more than a passing notice. It is a large, square, antique chamber, with a deeply recessed oriel window, opposite the door, containing a table and seats for readers. There are carved oak buffets of ancient date, ponderous chairs, and still more ponderous tables, one of which is said to contain asmany pieces as there are days in the year. Dingy-looking portraits of eminent Lancashire divines stare at you from the walls; but the left-hand wall contains alone the benevolent presentment of Humphrey Chetham, the large-hearted clear-headed founder. Its place is over the wide chimney-piece, which holds an ample grate; and on either hand it is flanked by the carved effigy of a bird, the one a pelican feeding its young brood with its own blood, the other a cock, which is said (and truly) to crow when it smells roast beef.
But we smell the feoffees’ dinner, and must not delay the progress of Jabez and his friends. A large body of feoffees were present, many in the uniforms of their special volunteer regiments.
“So this is the little fellow who was picked up asleep in a cradle during the flood of August, 1799,” observed rather than inquired one of the gentlemen, who appeared as spokesman.
“Yoi, yo’r honours,” answered Simon, making a sort of bow.
“Who can bear witness to that?”
“Aw con”—“An’ aw con,” responded Simon and Matt Cooper in a breath. “It wur uz as got him eawt o’ th’ wayter.”
“Anyone else?”
Bessy stepped forward modestly.
“He wur put i’ moi arms on Tanners’ Bridge, an’ aw’ve browt him oop iver sin’.”
“Have you never sought for his parents?”
“Ay, mony a time. Matt an’ me have spent mony a day i’ seekin’ ’em,” said Simon promptly, “an’ we could fand no moore than that papper tells”—referring to a sheet in the questioning feoffee’s hand.
“Then how do you date the boy’s age with such precision?”
The nurse now sidled confidently to the front.
“If it please your honour’s worship, aw wur called to stiff-backed Nan’s dowter in the last pinch, when hoo wur loike to die, an’ that little chap wur born afore aw left, an’ that wur o’ th’ fifth o’ May, seventeen hunderd an’ noinety-noine. Aw know it, fur aw broke mi arm th’ varry next day.”
“And the mother died.”
“Yea!—afore the week wur eawt.”
“And you think she was lawfully married? Where was her husband?”
“Ay! that’s it! Hoo had a guinea-goold weddin-ring on;an’ owd Nan said it wur a sad thing th’ lass had ever got wedded, an’ moore o’ the same soort. An’ aw geet eawt o’ her that they’n bin wedded at Crumpsail, an’ a’ th’ neebors knew as th’ husbant had had a letter to fatch him to Liverpool, an’ had niver come back. Onybody i’ Smedley knows that!”
“And you think they were honest, industrious people?”
“Ay, that they were, but rayther stiff i’ th’ joints, yo’ know—seemed to think theirsel’s too good to talk to folk like; or mebbe we’d ha’ known th’ lad’s neäme an’ o’ belongin’ to him. They owed nobbody nowt, an’ aw wur paid fur moi job.”
Jabez was called forward and examined, and he came pretty well out of the fire. They found that he could read a little, knew part of his catechism, and they saw that he was a well-behaved, intelligent boy, with truthful dark grey eyes and a reflective brow.
There was a long and animated discussion, during which the boy and his friends were bidden to retire. It was contended that the marriage of the boy’s parents was not proven—that his very name was dubious,—and that the founder’s will was specific on that head.
Then one of Mrs. Clough’s friends rose and grew eloquent. He asked if they were to interpret the will of the great and benevolent man, whose portrait looked down upon them, by the spirit or by the letter? If they themselves did notfeelthat the boy was eligible, as the nurse’s testimony went to prove? That this was a case peculiarly marked out for their charitable construction. And he wound up by inquiring if they thought Humphrey Chetham would expect his representatives to be less humane, less charitable, less conscientious in dealing with a bounty not their own, than that poor struggling, hardworking tanner and his daughter, who had maintained and cherished the orphan in spite of cruelly hard times, and still more cruel slander. And then he told, as an episode, what Sally Cooper had confessed, and how and why Bess had lost her lover.
This turned the quivering scale. “Jabez Clegg and his friends” were called in; the verdict which changed the current of his life, was pronounced—Jabez Clegg was a Blue-coat boy!
Before the night was out, while the flood-gates of all their hearts were open, Matthew Cooper, though nearly twenty years her senior, asked Bess to be his wife!