E.S.RADCLIFFE. 1798.
Last week, strictly as a stress-reducing measure, I did what anyone else would do and researched the life of a nineteenth-century pastor.
100% to blame for all the time I wasted, and the time you are currently wasting, is Adele Curness, who tweeted an image of a graffito from the choir stalls of Brasenose College Chapel. E.S. Radcliffe, who had expended such loving care inscribing his name there, was easy enough to find once I opted for Edmund over Edward: he turned out to be Edmund Stringfellow Radcliffe, who was born on February 23 1775 and died on January 20 1826. A Lancastrian from a prosperous background, he was typical of the intake to Brasenose College at this period in its history.
Entering the church, like many of his student contemporaries, Radcliffe lived a comfortable and uneventful life, to all appearances. He secured the living of Walton-le-Dale near Preston in 1803, and adding a Perpetual Curacy of Burnley in 1817. This was pluralism, the holding of multiple offices, but a comparatively benign example if Radcliffe was also able (unlike many of his clerical contemporaries) to serve the parish of Burnley, around 25 miles away. In 1810 he married Frances Ford (born 1789, seemingly of a similarly well-to-do family), and between then and Edmund’s death they had a large family, nine children (by my count) in total. It was these that I found myself, in an entirely unsystematic fashion, chasing through the census records this week.
Here they are:
1. Edmund Ford, born 1811, dies as an infant in January 1812;
2. Edmund Ford, born 1812;
3. Frances Emily, born 1813;
4. Sarah Ann, born 1815;
5. Dulcibella, born 1817;
6. Robert Parker, born 1819;
7. Charles Wilbraham, born 1821;
8. John Randle, born 1823;
9. George Travis, born 1825.
After Edmund Stringfellow Radcliffe’s death in 1826, his widow Frances moved from Lancashire to Rugby, where all her sons went to school. Rugby School was enjoying its heyday under the direction of Thomas Arnold, headmaster from 1828, and by settling in Rugby Frances was ensuring that her sons enjoyed the free education available to local boys or “foundationers”. A few years earlier the mother of William Webb Ellis, left all but destitute after her husband’s death in the Peninsular War, had moved to the town and secured the same for her son: the rest is very dubious history. Of Florence’s children I’ve spent most time this week reading about Charles Wilbraham Radcliffe (no. 7) and his violent fate, but the other children also illustrate in their way nineteeth-century English not-so-genteel lives.
Frances’ first surviving child, Edmund Ford Radcliffe, who had been given exactly the same name (memorialising his father and mother) as his dead brother, subsequently entered the the Civil Service in Bengal, and became a judge: at the time of the 1851 census three of his daughters, all born in the “East Indies”, are staying with grandmother at Elm Cottage, Church Walk, in Rugby: this house, now listed, I think. He died in 1864, his place of death given as Rugby, presumably in his mother’s house.
Frances Emily Radcliffe (No. 3) married the heir to the tea firm Richard Twining III at the family’s local church in Rugby in 1831, at the age of 17. She lived a very privileged life in the Twining family house on the Strand (she, her husband and three children are all there in the 1841 census), but she died in childbirth in 1847.
Neither Sarah Ann nor Dulcibella (nos. 4 and 5, the latter, I think, a family name on her mother’s side: a couple of her nieces certainly share it) marry. When Frances their mother dies in 1872 (she was 83), they live on at Elm Cottage, describing themselves in the 1881 census as “annuitants”. Sarah Ann dies in 1895, Dulcibella in 1901. Meanwhile Robert Parker Radcliffe (no. 6), whom we find visiting his mother in Rugby in the 1861 census, was an officer in the Royal Artillery: he lived until 1907. Leaving no. 7 (Charles Wilbraham Radcliffe) aside for a moment, John Randle Radcliffe (no. 8) followed his father into the church, the only one of Edmund’s children to do so. He is staying with his mother and sisters (and nieces) in Rugby in the 1851 and 1871 censuses, “Studying for the Church” in 1851, holding various curacies in the vicinity of Rugby before becoming vicar of Snitterfield, close to Stratford-upon-Avon and thus not far either from Rugby, in 1877. He served the parish until his death in 1898, never marrying.
The youngest of the siblings, George Travis Radcliffe (d. 1904), is another India hand, rising to command the 7th (later called the 3rd) Madras Light Cavalry. As an officer in the Indian Army he was following in the footsteps of his older brother Charles Wilbraham Radcliffe, to whom I turn. Charles has left the fullest record out of all his siblings, for the worst reasons.
At the time of the so-called “Indian Mutiny”, the uprising against British rule in 1857, Capt. C. W. Radcliffe found himself in Lucknow, serving with a regiment of Bengal cavalry. When elements of it started to desert and the regiment was disbanded, Radcliffe took command of a unit of Volunteer Cavalry in actions against rebels near Lucknow, and then joined the rest of the British combatants and non-combatants (including his wife Emily and three children) as they took refuge in the Lucknow Residency, starting a siege that lasted from June until November 1857.
Many of the survivors of the siege, rapidly converted into a classic imperial story of triumph snatched from disaster, subsequently published diaries or memoirs, and we hear a lot both of Capt. Radcliffe and his wife and family. A prominent figure in the defence of the Residency, he was killed the night before the “first relief” (really a reinforcement) on September 25, 1857, when a British force fought its way through to the Residency, but were too depleted to attempt evacuating it. The siege would not be broken for another 61 days.
In the diaries of Lady Inglis (wife of the commanding officer for the first 87 days before the “first relief”, not published until 1892), we hear that Radcliffe was severely wounded, and needed his arm amputated. A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow, Written for the Perusal of Friends at Home by Mrs. James P. Harris, published in 1858 by John Murray (who had cornered the market with the Afghan War diaries of Lady Sale and Vincent Eyre a few years before), confirms that the injury was fatal:
September 25, Friday
The enemy made two attacks during the night. Captain Ratcliffe of the 7th Cavalry was mortally wounded at the Cawnpore battery by a round shot. He will be a terrible loss to his wife and a very large family.
Continued firing in the city all day.
Kaye in his History of the Sepoy War III.542 talks of “one of the very best of our officers … ever foremost in attack and defence, whose cheerfulness, under all depressing circumstances, had set a gallant example.” The conditions within the Residency during the siege were appalling, food in short supply and disease running rife, over and above the constant threat of snipers, artillery and mines. One of Radcliffe’s children, Ada Maud, had died of cholera during the first part of the siege.
We could hardly be further away from Edmund Radcliffe patiently carving his name during chapel services in Brasenose. But a much more recent Brasenose student, J. G. Farrell, based his Booker-winning novel The Siege of Krishnapur on the Siege of the Lucknow Residency. In it he shows the trappings of “civilisation” progressively falling away from the British defenders as the appalling siege drags on, and I couldn’t help thinking of that as a couple of internet searches took me from an Oxford college chapel to the unspeakable brutality (on both sides) of the “Indian Mutiny”. A church in rural Lancashire, a public school, the desperate privations of a beleaguered British outpost, some tea, is not an outrageous summation of the Victorian scene. I remain deeply intrigued by the contradictions of “the peculiar lives led by the British officer class in nineteenth-century India, privileged, violent and above all precarious.”
A couple of grandchildren to remind us that life goes on. Eva Mary Radcliffe, daughter of Charles, was born after her father’s death in 1858: her daughter Eva Mabel Radclife Freeth lived until 1960. William Scott Warley Radcliffe, son of Robert Parker Radcliffe (no. 6), like his father an army officer, died in 1954. Another Dulcibella, Dulcibella Eden Radcliffe, daughter of George (no. 9), married Charles Owen Hore in 1889, and died in 1946, longterm resident of a grace-and-favour apartment (formerly occupied by Lady Sale) within Hampton Court: take a look at this fascinating document, pp. 21 and 44.
Where there’s a will…
This is the last will and testament of William Hulme of Kearsley, a well-to-do but otherwise fairly nondescript Lancastrian gentleman who died on this day (29 October) in 1691: the will is dated a few days earlier. It caused quite a flutter when it was brought to my college, Brasenose, a couple of weeks ago.
Hulme had been a student at Brasenose, and the most important stipulation of his will was designed to support scholarship here. The income of his reasonably extensive land holdings (in Heaton-Norris, Denton, Ashton under Lyne, Reddish, Harwood and Manchester) was to be used to support “four of the poor sort of bachelors of arts takeing such degree in Brazen-Nose Colledge in Oxford, as from time to time shall resolve to continue and reside there by the space of four years after such degree taken,” the students by implication originating in the North West. In other words, the money was to help scholars who had earned a bachelor’s degree to work toward a master’s, and Hulme’s intent was seemingly to ensure high-quality representatives of the Church of England in a part of the world, Lancashire, where Nonconformism was making inroads.
(The relation between Brasenose and Lancashire is not coincidental: there were connections going back to its founders early in the 16th century, Sir Richard Sutton and William Smyth, Bishop of Lincoln: Smyth, a protégé of the Stanleys at Knowsley Hall, was born at Farnworth, as it happens only a couple of miles from my own birthplace at Whiston Hospital. Meanwhile Sutton was apparently a Cheshire man, from Macclesfield. Brasenose in the 17th century was the obvious choice of Oxford college for a young man from the North West, as it had been for Hulme himself. Farnworth’s only other other claim to fame, as far as I know, is as the alleged inspiration for Paul Simon’s Homeward Bound.)*
So it was a generous but comparatively modest bequest to my college, and given with a fairly narrow aim in view. So what? I hear you cry. Well, what makes Hulme’s will of more than strictly local interest is where some of the land he bequeathed happened to be located.
Manchester in Hulme’s day was a small town clustered around the Collegiate Church, now Manchester Cathedral. In the next two centuries, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, the agricultural land that Hulme had owned on its outskirts would become some of the most valuable real estate in the country, massively increasing the original bequest.
But first, Hulme’s will at the top. What we are looking at is the probate copy of the will held by its executor, his cousin William Baguley: you can just see the corner of the probate notice attached to it in the photo at the top. There is a great explainer of the process of obtaining probate in this period on the University of Nottingham website (and my thanks also to our archivist Helen Sumping and Dr Thomas Olding of the University of Winchester for making sense of this for me):
“When the will was sent to the probate court or registry to be proved, it was copied into a register. A certified copy of the entry was written out by a clerk for the executor to take away with him. Attached to it was a probate certificate, which was the official authentication and permission allowing the executor to deal with the testator’s estate.”
Our document is sealed by the Bishop’s surrogate Edmund Entwistle, and signed by Henry Prescott, deputy registrar. So this is the copy of Hulme’s will that Baguley took away with him from “the probate court or registry”, and with reference to which he realised the testator’s wishes in the shape of the Hulme Trust: a truly remarkable survival.
William Hulme’s will is now safely in the College archives, but just a few months ago it was up for sale on eBay. My eagle-eyed colleague Chris McKenna spotted it there (it had already at that stage been sold, for a princely £75) and I contacted first the vendor, and then via him the purchaser, offering to buy it from him. To our good fortune the purchaser, Mike Buckley, turned out to be a historian with a particular interest in William Hulme, and he himself had been stunned to see such an important document on sale. When I contacted Mike he spontaneously offered to present it to the College, his only concern being that it be safely preserved. All he’d let us offer him in return was dinner in College, and we’re greatly in his debt. Meanwhile the vendor was able to tell me that he’d bought the will along with a lot of other legal documents from a dealer at the Newark Antiques Fair, and that he assumed the original source was a solicitors’ office. He has promised to look out for the dealer at future fairs to find out where these documents did originate, but wherever it was must represent some kind of continuity with the executor William Baguley or his lawyers at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, and that’s an exciting idea.
At any rate, this piece of parchment kicked off something remarkable. The history of the Hulme Trust is excellently told by I.B. Fallows in William Hulme and his Trust, but it is essentially the story of a comparatively modest arrangement to support the proper education of clerics which within a hundred years was generating so much money that the trustees didn’t know what to do with it. Fallows tracks the ballooning revenues of the Trust as Manchester expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries, £95 in 1693, £280 in 1750, £1,176 in 1794, and £5,161 in 1825 (with accumulated savings and investments of £40,782). In Fallows’ words (p. 84), expressing the situation in 1770,
Suddenly large amounts of land were required for new factories and for the housing of the workers who manned them. Struggling farms in the damp, cotton-friendly estates of long-dead Hulmes could be leased or sold to the new manufacturers. Coal mining and associated heavy industry suddenly exploded. Trustees of the Hulme estates were controlling an asset whose revenues were likely to spiral beyond all their conceivable needs in the next generation. A trust which had been started with the modest aim of assisting four poor scholars and improving the quality of Anglican preachers now had far more money than it required.
The challenge for the Trust through the 19th century was to find an application for the vast sums they found themselves managing that was broadly compatible with Hulme’s wishes. The letter of his will was certainly observed: between 1691 and 1881 a total of 641 young men (not exclusively “of a poor sort”, but the trustees did on the whole observe the original purpose) were enabled to continue their studies at Brasenose, the numbers of exhibitions awarded increasing over time along with the value of those awards. Fallows tracks a representative selection of the scholars, the overwhelming majority of whom took holy orders. One example is William Webb Ellis, perhaps the most famous product of Brasenose after Michael Palin. Ellis was the son of an officer killed in the Peninsular War who attended Rugby School as a foundationer (a non-fee-paying local resident, as his mother had moved her family to the town with that in view) and there, allegedly, invented Rugby the sport. Whether he really did is doubtful: the story seems to develop after his death, in the context of the split between Rugby Union and Rugby League in the 1890s. But he certainly was a young man of straitened family circumstances who went on to have a successful career as an evangelical rector of various parishes in London and Essex.
Funding MA’s like William Webb Ellis still left lots of money unused, however, and the Trustees tried various ways of spending it. For a long time from the end of the 18th century they attempted to persuade Brasenose College to let them use the money to build special accommodation in Oxford for the Hulme Exhibitioners, but rather to their credit the College was unwilling to introduce this distinction between the undergraduates, Exhibitioners and others. That option closed off, the Trustees set about purchasing advowsons, the right to nominate their choice as priest in a parish, thereby providing livings for the men who had benefited from the exhibitions at Brasenose. But while that could be considered a reasonable extension of the terms of Hulme’s will, as the wealth of the Trust grew so did the desperate need of the new north-western cities for an educational infrastructure, and pressure increased to direct the funds more to the benefit of Manchester in particular.
As the story was told to me years ago, the good citizens of Manchester diddled Brasenose out of its rightful inheritance, leaving only such reminders as Brazennose St in central Manchester. In fact Brasenose and its students had benefited greatly from the Trust, and might have benefited more had they agreed with the Trust’s plans at an earlier stage. A series of Acts of Parliament had extended the capacities of the Trust, and finally in 1881 the Charity Commission proposed, and an Act of Parliament confirmed, a radical new plan which saw funds directed to a range of schools in the vicinity of Manchester, including Manchester Grammar School, Manchester High School for Girls, William Hulme’s Grammar School (also in Manchester), Oldham Hulme Grammar School (Mike Buckley’s old school), Bury Grammar School (the alma mater of Fallows), and what would develop into Manchester University. Fallows estimates that 120,000-150,000 young people, female and male, between the ages of 11 and 21 have benefited “directly (through personal scholarships) or indirectly (through help given to their school or college)” since 1881. Brasenose continued to benefit, too: one corner of New Quad was built with Hulme money and we still draw income to support our educational activities, along with a collection of beneficiaries in the North West.
A striking thing about William Hulme from the perspective of my college is how invisible he is. There’s no portrait of one of our greatest benefactors in the Hall, and when I asked the archivist what material there was related to him to show to Mike Buckley when he visited, the answer was very little. We have a long grace for special occasions which names all our benefactors: Gulielmus Hulme was apparently only added to it in 1975. The Hulme Common Room for graduate students was established in 1963. Aside from that, the only physical memorial to him in College is a Latin plaque (below) put up at one end of the Hall by Church of English priests who had benefited from Hulme Exhibitions, in 1902, when that role of the Trust was reaching its end.
The peculiar absence of Hulme from the College narrative no doubt tells us something about privileged Oxford’s relations with the country’s industrial heartlands, but it also reflects the sheer oddity of this whole story, in investment terms the ultimate “sleeper”. Everything after all hinges on a massive fluke, that a quiet backwater in an undeveloped part of the country, and that is undoubtedly what the market towns of south-east Lancashire were in the 17th century, would become the dynamic engine of the Industrial Revolution. The impression one gets is that in Brasenose the impact of Hulme’s legacy for a long time just didn’t really register, yet Fallows calculates that a total of somewhere in the region of £20,000,000 has been disbursed by the Trust since its inception. I suppose the story of Hulme’s legacy in turn is a microcosm of Britain’s story in the 18th and 19th centuries, but who could possibly have predicted the colossal impact of a minor Lancastrian landowner’s will?
*I could not be more wrong: a truckload of famous products of Farnworth thanks to @tokyodave2, here and here.