MR ATKINSONS RUM CONTRACT EB

Richard Atkinson

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780007509232
• eBook ISBN: 9780007509256
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Shortlisted for the RSL Christopher Bland Prize 2021

'Rarely has family history been so vivid' JENNY UGLOW

'An extraordinarily original work' AMANDA FOREMAN

Like many well-to-do Georgian families, the Atkinsons' wealth was acquired at a terrible cost, through the labour and lives of enslaved Africans. Drawing on his ancestors' private correspondence, Richard Atkinson pieces together their unsettling story, from the weather-beaten house in Cumbria where they once lived to the ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica. This extraordinarily original work of detective biography is also a uniquely personal account of one of the most disturbing chapters in Britain's colonial past.

PART I

The Temperate Zone

ONE

A Tangled Inheritance

SOME OF MY earliest memories are of Temple Sowerby House. I remember the line of tarnished servants’ bells in the passage outside the kitchen door, the tap tap tap of buckets catching rainwater that dripped through the ceiling, the mint-green porcelain of my grandmother’s 1930s bathroom suite; but most vividly of all, I remember the gallery. This was the light-filled corridor up narrow stairs at the back of the house, with three windows looking down on to the overgrown walled garden below. As a small child, on wet days – not unusual in this part of north-west England – I would run up and down the gallery, stomping on the floorboards, pausing only to examine the zoological specimens on display, which included two stuffed crocodiles, a rhinoceros horn and a narwhal tusk. I was particularly drawn to the glass domes filled with birds, their feathers all the colours of the rainbow, although I had no idea where they might have flown from.

This was the early 1970s, by which time dry rot was consuming the Georgian part of the house. In the entrance hall, burnt-orange brackets of fungus bloomed like a ghoulish botanical wallpaper; in the drawing room, many of the floorboards had been pulled up, and much of the ceiling plasterwork had fallen down. My grandparents, Jack and Evelyn Atkinson, had long since retreated to the rear of the building, the original seventeenth-century farmhouse on to which the handsome front wing had been added during more affluent times. Here the parlour, with its low oak beams and red sandstone chimneypiece, and the kitchen, with its blue enamel range cooker, were the only rooms where they managed to keep the damp remotely at bay.

Jack was quite unfit to be the custodian of such a property. When he moved up to Westmorland from London in the late 1940s, having inherited the 200-acre family farm, he was nearly sixty. Too old and impractical to take the land in hand himself, instead he let it out, and was too soft-hearted to put up the rent for twenty years. As a result, my grandparents were always strapped for cash and invariably in arrears with local tradesmen, who made the classic mistake of confusing gentility with liquidity. They reckoned themselves too poor to have slates replaced or gutters cleared – which is how it came to be that water was coursing through the roof and walls. Even so, every Christmas they ordered a hamper from Fortnum & Mason, London’s most exclusive grocer, to make sure they were adequately provisioned during the festive season.

Jack exuded old-fashioned charm; at eighty, as he ambled about the village, tipping his hat to the neighbours, his handsome features were still apparent. Evelyn, on the other hand, had the air of someone constantly disappointed by life, and there was little that did not provide the raw material for complaint. The pair of them rattled around the house, which was largely empty, since most of the contents – beds, tables, sofas, pictures, carpets – had been sold off long ago. They kept strange nocturnal hours, rarely going to bed before three in the morning, and rising in the early afternoon. Sometimes, after breakfast, Jack would wander down to the village shop, only to find that it had already closed for the day. Evelyn, who was obsessed by security – not that there was much worth stealing – roamed the corridors with a big bunch of keys, locking up behind her wherever she went.

My father John, their adored only child, used to dread visiting Temple Sowerby; as the next in a long line of Atkinsons who had inhabited the village for at least four hundred years, he was all too conscious that the house would one day pass to him. Already his parents had started offloading their money problems on to him, often sending begging letters that made him feel guilty and miserable. His salary as a book editor living in London barely met his own needs.

In October 1966 John married my mother, Jane Chaytor, who provided a much-needed burst of energy and hope. She took control of her in-laws’ chaotic finances and arranged for a review of the farm rent, which at a stroke doubled their income. She paid their bills – they were amazed to find that the butcher would look them in the eye again. It was she who had the range cooker installed in the kitchen. Jack was captivated by his pretty, practical daughter-in-law, making it all too clear to Evelyn that she was exactly the sort of woman he wished he’d had the good fortune to marry.

A few weeks after I was born, in June 1968, Jack wrote to my father: ‘Dear Old Boy, we were delighted with the photos; please thank Jane very much for them. Richard, understandably, didn’t show much interest in the proceedings, but you looked, also understandably, as if you were holding the most precious bundle in the world. Quite right too.’[1] Two months later my parents took me up to Westmorland to be baptized in the church at Temple Sowerby.

AROUND THIS TIME, my father started waking in the night with a dull ache in his gut, and hospital tests revealed a tumour; but following surgery his prognosis seemed quite positive. My sister, Harriet, was born in the spring of 1972. That autumn, after four years of good health, my father developed jaundice; the cancer was back. Soon he was too weak to climb the stairs, and a bed was made up for him on the ground floor of our terraced house in Pimlico. He was a sociable man, and over the following weeks a succession of friends and colleagues came to say goodbye. He died at home on 24 February 1973. He was thirty-eight. His funeral took place a few days later, on Harriet’s first birthday.

Three months later, Jack too was dead, and buried alongside his son in the graveyard at Temple Sowerby. Suddenly, following the custom of primogeniture, Temple Sowerby House was mine – not that I knew it. As for the farm, the line of succession was not so clear. Under the terms of my great-grandfather’s will, written in the 1920s, Jack had been left a life interest in the property, which allowed him to enjoy the income it generated but prevented him from putting it up for sale. This same document stipulated that on Jack’s death, the farm would pass to his eldest son or, failing that, his eldest daughter – but no such person now existed. What the will did not anticipate was the possibility that Jack might leave grandchildren who could inherit the farm. So instead the estate was split equally between the principal heirs of each of my great-grandfather’s three children: the niece of Jack’s elder brother George’s late widow; the son of Jack’s younger sister Biddy in South Africa; and me. In short, the premature death of my father, and the restrictive language of my great-grandfather’s will, meant that the farm passed out of the family’s hands.

The bleak practicalities of probate fell to my poor mother. Her first instinct was to hold on to the house, so I might one day have a chance of living there; but given that she had no money for repairs, the idea presented formidable difficulties. The most obvious solution was to pull down the rotten eighteenth-century wing and retain the relatively habitable oldest part. Following the local council’s rejection of her planning application, however, my mother realized that only one viable option remained. After moving my grandmother into sheltered accommodation, and suffering many sleepless nights, she called in the estate agents. It was a conclusion for which I will always be grateful.

Temple Sowerby House was by no means an easy sell. Quite aside from its state of semi-dereliction, it had another major drawback. The busy A66 trunk road that crosses the Pennines, linking Penrith and the M6 motorway in the west to Scotch Corner and the A1 in the east, cut straight through the village, not twenty yards from the façade of the house. Just the thought of a thousand lorries thundering past every day was enough to deter most buyers. But finally, in the summer of 1977, the Atkinson family home was sold to a developer who envisioned for it a future as a hotel – the passing trade, for once, counting in its favour.

Apart from the crocodiles, which she banished to a Penrith saleroom, my mother put the contents of the old house into storage; in particular, the three oak court cupboards in the gallery, each carved with the year of its making (1627, 1658 and 1729), which were far too bulky to fit into our small London home. The Atkinson chattels also included two large blanket chests, two broken-down longcase clocks, a well-worn rocking cradle, a spinning wheel and a set of Chippendale mahogany dining chairs, as well as a bookcase full of well-thumbed eighteenth-century volumes on a variety of practical subjects, and heaps of Chinese blue and white porcelain plates, bowls and soup tureens, many of them chipped. Just as I am relieved that my mother got rid of Temple Sowerby House, I’m thankful she kept this motley assortment of objects – baggage they may be, but they are still my most treasured possessions.

My dad’s death was the defining event of my childhood; not a day went by when I didn’t somehow sense his absence. Because he had been an only child, there were no aunts or uncles to pass on Atkinson stories to my sister and me. (In fact, except for our elderly bachelor cousin in South Africa, who sent us a large, oozingly sticky box of crystallized fruits every Christmas, we were unaware of having any relatives at all on our paternal side of the family.) After the house at Temple Sowerby was sold, the only reason we had to stop off at the village – passing through in the car en route to holidays in the Lake District – was to place flowers on my father’s and grandparents’ graves. Although these visits lasted a matter of minutes, they loom large in my memory. Every time, as we approached, I would feel fluttering excitement; and every time, as we drove away, I would feel sadder and emptier than before. Temple Sowerby came to represent all that I had lost during my early years; it was a place where it seemed I would always have unfinished business.

WHILE I WAS growing up, people who had known my dad often told me how much I resembled him, so it was perhaps inevitable that I would follow him into a career in book publishing. In many ways I felt blessed to be like him, since it meant I always carried him around with me; occasionally it felt like a curse. In my thirties, I suffered from digestive problems that caused me much discomfort. Bowel cancer can run in families, and for several years I was sure that I was destined to follow my father to an early grave. When I finally celebrated my thirty-ninth birthday, in 2007, it felt as though a weight had lifted, even as another pressed down; for that year Sue and I finally grasped, after seven years of marriage, that we would never have children of our own. This was a fate I had not imagined, and I felt rudderless, as though robbed of my purpose. My emotions turned raw and unpredictable; for no clear reason, I would break down crying in the street. I now realize I was mourning the sons and daughters I would never know.

While my contemporaries looked to the future, and threw themselves into the all-consuming business of raising families, I turned towards the past, and decided that perhaps it was time I found out about those who had preceded me. One day, while rummaging around in my mother’s house, I discovered, gathering dust on top of a cupboard, a scruffy old cardboard box which contained several hundred letters tied up in tight bundles with pink legal ribbon. Most of them were addressed to a ‘Matthew Atkinson, Esq.’ at Temple Sowerby and dated from the first decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time I came across a family tree, mapped out on a roll of graph paper about twenty feet long, which traced the Atkinsons back to the late sixteenth century. It was in my father’s handwriting – I guessed he must have compiled it some time before his marriage, since right at the bottom I noticed he had added my mother’s name, and then mine and Harriet’s, in slightly different shades of blue-black ink. Looking over past generations, I soon realized how presumptuous I had been to assume that I would have children; while some branches of the family tree were ripe with offspring, others withered to nothing. Below the names of all those whose marriages had not borne fruit, my dad had written the sad little genealogical acronym ‘d.s.p.’ – decessit sine prole, the Latin for ‘died without issue’.

I found the prospect of delving into the box of letters quite daunting, but one evening I took a deep breath and started reading. Instantly I felt the exhilarating rush of throwing open a window to the past. Even so, my progress was slow while I got used to the handwriting. For every letter penned in an impeccable copperplate, another resembled a spidery scrawl. Sometimes the ink had faded to a ghostly sepia. Occasionally, to save the cost of a second sheet of paper, the correspondent had simply rotated the page ninety degrees and carried on writing, creating a dense lattice of words. No envelopes were used; sheets were simply folded, addressed on the front, sealed with wax and dispatched, often in evident haste.

I had observed on the family tree that my ancestors were quite unimaginative when it came to Christian names. George, John, Matthew and Richard had been standard issue for Atkinson boys since the seventeenth century. Right from the start, this small pool of names threw me into confusion, for I made the mistake of assuming that the Matthew Atkinson to whom most of the letters were addressed was my three-times great-grandfather, who had died in 1830. Only some months later did I gather that they related to another Matthew Atkinson, his first cousin, who had died in 1852; it would be several years before I discovered how these papers from a collateral branch of the family had ended up in my hands.

Matthew’s correspondence mostly concerned business local to Temple Sowerby, and offered tantalizing glimpses of various trades – banking, farming, mining – which the family had been engaged in. Until then, I had always imagined my forebears as head-in-the-clouds types, rather like my...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Family Tree
• Maps
• Part I: The Temperate Zone
• Part II: The Torrid Zone
• Picture Section
• Appendices
• A Note on Language
• A Note on Money and Measurements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher