Morpathia: An 1842 Christmas

Robert was an active reformer and a friend of William Cobbett, the radical journalist, and in 1832 Cobbett stayed at Robert’s house at the corner of Bennett’s Walk.

As well as speaking, writing and attending meetings in support of parliamentary reform, Robert took the lead in two important developments in the town.

The first was the founding of the Morpeth Mechanical and Scientific Institution, or Mechanics’ Institute, in 1825. Its first home was a building in the Scotch Arms Yard, next to the Town Hall; Robert purchased the initial stock of books from Edinburgh on one of his visits there and made sure it had a wide range of reading material, including novels – many mechanics’ institutes did not allow such things.

The Town Hall was rebuilt in 1870 and the Institute was found two rooms opposite the Council Chamber. There were classes in scientific and literary subjects and, in later years, popular lectures during the winter months. It also became the umbrella organisation for local astronomers and microscopists, and of a field club.

It was a force for good in the town, but fell on evil times during the First World War and closed soon after.

His other important contribution to Morpeth was the Corporation Schools – an infant school, now Wellway Accountants, and a girls’ school, long since demolished, which stood at the back of the adjoining car park. Mary Hollon, née Trotter, after whom the Hollon Tea is named, was a pupil at it.

Robert was one of the original councillors when Morpeth Borough Council came into existence on January 1, 1836. Amongst the properties the council took over were Morpeth Common, a number of houses, shops and small fields, and two schools, one for infants and one for boys. Both were in cramped, unhealthy premises.

On November 9, 1836, Robert became the second Mayor of Morpeth. Eighteen months later, in May 1838, he wrote:

“The Corporation Schools were now finished, and pretty well filled with scholars. They will prove expensive, but money cannot better be laid out.

“If they should prove troublesome to some parties in town who have had the money to borrow to build them with, I shall regret, for I was the principal cause of their being built.

“At first, the proposition for the building of them was rejected by the Town Council and the second time the matter was brought before that body there was considerable opposition against the speculation. I was Mayor, and could not properly either debate the question or propose anything.

“However, I broke through the ordinary rules, and addressed the Council, pointing out the benefit the schools would effect, and the great obligation the Council lay under to build them. I was surprised to find I had made an impression, and the consequence was that I got a motion unanimously agreed to for the immediate building of these two schools. I came home quite delighted with my victory.”

The erstwhile boys’ school moved into the Chantry, as the English department of the Grammar School, for boys wanting a more practical education. My wife’s researches show that the school in Wellway – by then for infants only – finally closed in the 1940s because of bad toilets, the children being transferred to Goosehill.

In 1838, Robert bought the Northern Liberator, a radical newspaper published in Newcastle, which rapidly became the voice of Chartism in the North East. But despite this, and despite his membership of the council, his freehold house on Bennett’s Walk and his two businesses, he had a longstanding ambition to live in scholarly retirement. He was, in fact, already a published author, with books on Free Will, Logic and the History of Moral Science.

In 1840, he left Morpeth and moved to London with his wife and four children. His intention seems to have been to semi-retire, keeping on the wholesale fur business, overseeing the London end of the Northern Liberator, and spending as much time as possible in the British Museum Reading Room.

It didn’t work out. The Liberator was too radical for the government’s liking so they suppressed it, bringing a charge of seditious libel against Robert for an article that had appeared in the paper, and then sparing him a prison sentence if he closed the paper down, which he did. This was not made public, of course.

Lord Normanby, the Home Secretary, bragged that the Northern Liberator went out of business because of declining circulation, which was not the case.

Worse was to come. He had opened an account with a joint stock bank in Newcastle that began to fail. The manager, a personal friend, asked him to sign certain ‘notes’ to assist the bank, but retired soon after.

The new manager and the bank’s solicitor then connived to bankrupt him by charging vast amounts of interest and other charges, the details of which they refused to divulge. Robert took them to court, but in the end still had to surrender his freehold properties.

Now a poor man, he retired from business and moved to France with his wife and family, where they could live more cheaply. “Here,” he wrote, “I resolved to devote all my time and energies to philosophical literature. The extensive libraries in this country opened out what seemed to me a novel and inexhaustible field of knowledge and research.”

He visited libraries all over France and Belgium, and a few in Germany, eventually producing a major four-volume work on The History of the Philosophy of Mind. They were desperately poor for a lot of the time, but eventually, in November 1843, his luck changed.

He met a wealthy dilettante who was willing to pay handsomely for a six-volume work, published under his name, to be called A History of Social and Political Philosophy, from the time of Charlemagne to the period of the French Revolution in 1790.

Robert wrote in his Memoirs, “This year (1844) commenced under rather more favourable auspices than the preceding one and I was able to keep my Christmas and New Year in English fashion, with a little roast beef and plum pudding.”

Plum pudding yes – but beef? Yes, beef. Turkey was for the well-to-do. It only became associated with Christmas after Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol came out in December 1843.

In it, Ebenezer Scrooge’s down-trodden clerk, Bob Cratchit, has a goose for Christmas, but on Christmas morning the dramatically reformed Scrooge secretly sends Bob the biggest prize turkey from the poultry shop.

Books by Roger Hawkins make ideal presents for anyone interested in local history. Available on Amazon, or from the Old Herald Office and Newgate News in Morpeth.