
Published in December 2020, Reverend Duke and the Amesbury Oliver, ISBN 978-0-9562870-4-5
In the early 1960s—possibly the late 1950s—my father chanced upon the previously unknown record of a secret four-day enquiry that had taken place in 1844 at the the Amesbury Union Workhouse. A historical novel based upon his discovery was never published.
After his death I decided to review what he had found out, and these findings have resulted in this new account, which is written as a factual narrative. The background surrounding the original discovery and the subject of the enquiry itself are explained in the introduction to the book, which is reproduced below.
Introduction
When I was quite young, I remember accompanying my father to Somerset House where he wanted to consult the national indexes for births, marriages, and deaths. To show me how the system worked, we looked up my own birth, which had been listed in September 1945. Father had become interested in the genealogy of his family, and had come in search of the record of one or other of his forebears. I recall a room full of great tomes ranged on shelves, some in galleries with wrought-iron railings.
The process of locating a record was relatively straightforward. When a range of years for the search had been determined, the large and heavy volumes covering that period, four to a year, had to be taken from the shelves and searched alphabetically for the record, using special inclined desks designed for the purpose. Even then, only a name, date, and registration district could be found, but these enabled a copy of the appropriate certificate to be purchased from the General Register Office. These centralized records had commenced only in July 1837, so anyone wishing to look further back in time was obliged to search the many individual parish records (there were over 15,000 parishes in England and Wales), and this meant visiting the parish in question. The process was fraught; permission to view the register books had to be sought from the parish priest or one or other of the parish officers. Some were friendly and disposed to help, others were not. Some charged a fee, some just requested a contribution to the poor box. The process could be difficult and success was far from assured.
My father was particularly interested in the part of his family that had lived on Salisbury Plain in the vicinity of Stonehenge. His grandfather, Frank Maggs, son of a Wiltshire shepherd, had been born in that area, and the close association of the enigmatic stone circle with the family fascinated my father. In his eyes, Stonehenge lent a special resonance to the significance of those particular forebears. When he could spare the time and money, Father would travel to Wiltshire and, facing down the indifference or open hostility of the keepers of the parish records, would attempt to assemble the family history from the local churches of Maddington, Rollstone, Shrewton, the Orchestons, and Tilshead.
It was particularly difficult for him. My father had committed several cardinal sins in the eyes of people in the various social strata with whom he came into contact. He had had little formal education having left school at the age of thirteen, but continuing his education himself, he was widely read and able to hold an intelligent conversation at all levels of society. He had taught himself French and German to a very high standard. He could also write clear and elegant English and had, just before he left school, won an all-London essay competition organized by the RSPCA. But he was always fairly scruffily turned out, rejecting smart clothes believing, as Solzhenitsyn put it, that they ‘embellish the ugly and disguise the wicked’. Thus the educated thought him a dangerous upstart, the not so educated thought him a ‘smart Alec’, and his unkempt appearance raised suspicion at all levels. Distant relations thought he was after their money, and the Oxbridge educated clergy no doubt suspected him of being a dangerous Communist with subversion in mind.
Nevertheless he persisted, and slowly a picture of the Wiltshire part of the family emerged. My father was able to augment this with visits to the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane where the early census records could be viewed on microfilm. These provided family groups with ages and occupations, greatly assisting in establishing who was who, and who was related to whom. Such a process can seem to some to be a fairly sterile activity; a list of names and their relation to each other tells us nothing about what the people were like or how they lived. My father wanted to know more, and his enquiring mind led him to the records of the Amesbury Union Workhouse. He knew from the parish records, the census returns, and his grandfather’s first-hand testimony, that most of his immediate Wiltshire ancestors had been either shepherds or agricultural day labourers. Their incomes would have been subject to the vagaries of the weather and fickle employers, and they would probably have been on ‘short commons’ for much of the time. He reasoned that there was a strong possibility that some of them had been given poor relief, and wondered whether there were records of those transactions.
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 required that henceforth, relief to the destitute and infirm was to be provided through a central workhouse which served a number of parishes; twenty-three around Stonehenge had been subsumed into the Amesbury Union, with its new workhouse at Amesbury. The Public Record Office held the correspondence between the guardians of the Amesbury Union and the Poor Law Commissioners, and my father scanned the files eagerly looking for records relating to his ancestors. He was not successful; the only paupers’ names appearing in the records were related to special cases where the local guardians were unable to decide how to proceed and needed guidance. He did though, find something else. He described it to me as the record of a secret trial. It concerned an enquiry to determine whether the workhouse master had cruelly ill-treated a crippled boy who had subsequently died. Around 100 pages of evidence taken over a period of four days were contained in the files.
This was potentially a most interesting discovery and eminently publishable. The trial at Amesbury had taken place in 1844, just a few years after the publication of Oliver Twist, and one year before the notorious scandal at the Andover Workhouse; Andover was around twelve miles from Amesbury and the adjacent union. The affair at Andover ultimately brought down the Poor Law Commissioners. Furthermore, one of the senior players caught up in the Andover scandal, Henry Walter Parker, had conducted the secret enquiry at the Amesbury Union. His perceived misconduct at Andover led to his forcible resignation as an assistant Poor Law Commissioner under very acrimonious circumstances.
An important question for my father was the form in which an account should be published. He decided to write it up as a historical novel, called The Amesbury Oliver after Dickens’ boy hero. The book never saw the light of day. Several publishers turned it down and eventually my father lost interest, concentrating instead on factual descriptive writing on social history. Decades later and after his death, I re-read the text of his novel and the evidence transcripts, and decided to look first-hand at the source material on which he had based his account. The original files were requested from the National Archives at Kew, where all the public records had been moved after the closure of Chancery Lane, and I spent many hours poring over them. What I found was astonishing. My father had included in his book only details of the enquiry and the immediate build-up to it, but he had barely disturbed the surface of what had been a simmering cauldron of resentment. Edward Duke, the person who made the accusation against the workhouse master, was himself a guardian of the workhouse and a Wiltshire magistrate. He had spent the previous nine years criticising the Amesbury Union and its officers, of which he was one, and this was the third occasion on which there had been a formal hearing into his complaints. None of this background was mentioned in my father’s account, in which Mr Duke was portrayed as a patrician, sympathetic figure, frustrated in his quest for justice for the poor.
In fact, Edward Duke was far from being sympathetic; he was a grievance-hunting, petty, and disputatious busybody, subject to fits of caprice and petulance, and not short of hubris and ego. The quirky nature of his personality illuminates his many letters and the two rather bizarre books that he paid to have published. It is quite clear from the extant correspondence, that the 1844 hearing was the culmination of an enormous amount of frustration, bitterness, and resentment on both sides which had been building up over a number of years. This was a story that just had to be told.
Apart from a few miscellaneous letters, there are three primary sources of information about Edward Duke’s character and behaviour in public life. Firstly, the newspaper reports of his activities during the Wiltshire Quarter Sessions detail his participation in the debates concerning the governance of the county with his brother magistrates. Then there is the extensive correspondence, some of it very vexed, between the Amesbury Union, Edward Duke, and the Poor Law Commissioners; it is from these documents that details of the enquiry were obtained. Lastly, Mr Duke speaks to us through the letters he wrote to the Gentleman’s Magazine, the 26-part exposition of his grand theory on Stonehenge in the Salisbury and Wiltshire Gazette, and his two books. The books are, in different ways, odd in the extreme. One of them, The Druidical Temples of the County of Wilts, has a portrait of Duke holding a book with Stonehenge printed on the spine. I remember quite well my father showing this picture to one of his pals at the British Museum Reading Room (the old home of the British Library) in my presence, and asking something like: ‘Is that not a picture of a just man with a sense of charity and mercy?’ Through Mr Duke’s first book, Prolusiones Historicae, it is possible to deduce a sardonic personality not taking itself too seriously. Less so in the second book, where he lays forth his grand unified theory explaining the origins of Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, and Avebury. Nevertheless, in both books he portrays himself as an experienced and knowledgeable antiquary with his classical education very much on show.
There should have been a fourth primary source of information about the Amesbury Union, namely the minutes recording the proceedings of the meetings of the guardians. Those for the period 1835, when the union commenced, until 1839 are extant and deposited in the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, as are the minutes for 1845 and thereafter. For the period 1840 to 1844, covering the date of the alleged assault in 1840 and the build-up to the enquiry of 1844, the books containing the minutes are missing. They have not been abstracted by an overenthusiastic researcher— for a short while I even wondered whether my father might somehow have removed them. The prosaic truth is that they were never deposited in the archive. Was there a conspiracy? Did the Amesbury Guardians suppress them because of an incriminating entry? Did Mr Duke ‘acquire’ them, perhaps to use as evidence in an action against the union following the 1844 enquiry? It is tempting to suspect skulduggery given the turbulence of those four years in the life of the union, and adherents to the conspiracy theory of history might be satisfied with that explanation. Perhaps an enthusiastic guardian or clerk in later years borrowed the minute books with the intention of writing up the saga of Edward Duke and George Wheeler, and ‘forgot’ to return them. It is intriguing to speculate whether those records of the guardians’ meetings would be able to throw any further light on events, and it is not impossible that they may turn up someday.
I have frequently asked myself whether this narrative is, or should be, a biography of Mr Duke. After all, much effort has been expended in searching the records for references to him and his life and works. On the bench, and with the exception of his intransigence over the removal of one of the assize courts to Devizes and an unwarranted accusation against a prison governor, Mr Duke’s performance as a magistrate was unremarkable enough. But in his capacity as a Poor- Law guardian, he made the lives of virtually everyone who came into contact with him a misery. He was responsible for the dissipation of thousands of man-hours dealing with his unsupported proposals and groundless complaints, and this was time and effort which should have been used in the care of the poor. George Bernard Shaw observed:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
He might have added that progress can be overrated, and that the population of the planet might live more peaceful and contented lives without people like Edward Duke.
On reflection, although aspects of this account are probably closer to a very imperfect biography than anything else, it lacks many of the characteristics of a ‘good’ example of that genre; no attempt has been made to enquire into Mr Duke’s personal life other than a broad outline of his immediate family. The biographical detail that it does contain, quite intentionally serves only as background to the various controversies in which he involved himself. It is the 1844 enquiry that is the raison d’être of this narrative, and the material on Duke’s antiquarian activities and his time on the bench serve mainly to illustrate his quirky personality, although his extraordinary theory of Stonehenge is worthy of record on its own account. I did wonder whether I had devoted too much effort to an analysis of some of the absurdities in Druidical Temples, but took comfort in the words of the review of the book by William Maskell:
Mr Duke has adventured too great an experiment upon the [supposed] ignorance and credulity of modern readers to pass his book over—as we had intended—with a single sentence of condemnation.
So if it is not a biography, and it is clear from the record that Mr Duke was neither a great achiever nor a great villain, and had few attributes in which anyone might be interested other than being a consummate troublemaker, why have I gone to all the effort of doing the research and writing it up? The original motivation was to finish the work started by my father. It was to be an homage, a memorial to him and the time and effort he expended in his investigations, and his many years as a regular at the British Museum Reading Room where he did his writing. But as my own researches progressed and details of the quite extraordinary behaviour of Mr Duke began to emerge, the narrative took on a momentum of its own. Duke’s bizarre theory of Stonehenge and other Wiltshire monuments was not so remarkable for the time, coming as it did from a country clergyman with time on his hands. Oddities in his behaviour at the Quarter Sessions could be put down to a certain eccentricity of character. But his eight-year campaign against the Amesbury Union, and latterly the Poor Law Commissioners, was surely unique for its relentlessness, ferocity, and lack of cohesion. Whether or not it was true that he had never been heard to say a bad word to any member of his household, he would accuse individuals of wrong-doing based on the flimsiest of evidence, and was impervious to the concept of decision-making by majority vote. That people like Duke were, nevertheless, able to hold important positions, unchallenged for decades, and influence the daily lives and livelihoods of hundreds of people, needs to be placed on record.
Mr Duke certainly stress-tested the Poor Law Commission and, in an indirect way, might even have contributed to its downfall; this may be of interest to students of the Poor Laws. What is clear from Duke’s campaign against the Amesbury Union, is that the Poor Law Commissioners were quite incapable of dealing with what was effectively a rogue guardian. In this respect the Poor Law Amendment Act itself was probably at fault in the restrictions it placed on the commissioners, as well as the apparent invulnerability enjoyed by the ex officio guardians.
A final reason that I think justifies the effort expended in the current work, is what it reveals about the workhouse in general, and the Amesbury Union Workhouse in particular. The Victorian workhouse has had a very bad press. It was the universal ‘bogeyman’ of the nineteenth century—even the early twentieth century; entering the workhouse was seen as a humiliating disgrace, only slightly less degrading than prison. The intention of the architects of the scheme was that the workhouse should be seen as a place of last resort, with strict rules and minimal food and clothing provided. A letter to The Times in 1836, no doubt from an unsympathetic ratepayer, stated that the workhouse should be ‘held “in terrorem” over the idle and dissipated’.* There were stories of misery and deprivation, cruelty and abuse in workhouses, and many people would sooner die in the streets or fields than enter into one. The newspapers, those that disapproved of the New Poor Law, regularly printed stories of the destitute dying in misery because they had been refused assistance outside of the workhouse. But at the risk of giving away the ending of this story, if the evidence of many of the inmates is to be believed, the Amesbury Workhouse at least appeared to be a safe and sympathetic refuge for the poor. It is appropriate,therefore, to place on record first-hand evidence that there was there a place of real sanctuary for the young, old, destitute, and infirm. The inmates at all workhouses were clothed, fed, housed, and given access to healthcare, and the children were educated in ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, and the principles of the Christian religion’. The sexes were segregated, intoxicating liquors were strictly forbidden as were cards and dice, but the general workhouse rules did not forbid tobacco, although smoking inside the house was not allowed and matches were forbidden to the inmates.** It is abundantly clear from the testimony of many witnesses that there was also cleanliness and order, even an element of comfort, at Amesbury, and it was superintended by a sympathetic master and mistress. If proof were needed that the education was effective, there was ample evidence from the younger witnesses during the 1844 enquiry. Most of the paupers signed their testimony with an ‘X’, but the majority of the young inmates were able to sign their names, and in handwriting far superior to that of Assistant Poor Law Commissioner Parker.
* The paupers’ ‘work’ in a workhouse varied according to its geographical location. The women generally did domestic chores like cleaning, cooking, and laundering, and sometimes also spinning and weaving and other craft activities. The men could be used for agricultural work, or other low-skill manual tasks like stone-breaking and oakum-picking. From workhouse. org.uk
** The rules also allowed, at the discretion of the guardians, for infirm or aged married couples to have separate private rooms.