GEORGE HOLYOAKE'S PAMPHLET

 “I Have Been throw All the Christain traps and snares and the one Allmighty and Holyoake ‘as brought me throw and Trampled Christain Tyranny under foot.” T. Pooley 

The county of Cornwall welcomed George Jacob Holyoake.   He wrote that “The whole country, clothed in verdure and autumnal gold, was delightful to look upon.”  He was to spend only two full days in the county but from his investigations he managed to produce an impressive pamphlet of thirty-two dense pages on ‘The Case of Thomas Pooley, the Cornish Well-sinker.’  His ‘Report, made at the instance of the Secularists’, first appeared in instalments in the pages of The Reasoner in the issues of the twenty-third and the thirtieth of September and then, ten days later, with very little editing, as a sturdy booklet to be distributed to Freethinkers throughout the land.  This detailed yet undoubtedly somewhat rushed and biased publication is the direct and indirect source of practically all the personal details that we know about Tom Pooley, his wife and his family.  George Holyoake, however, was not the most determined investigator in the world and he allowed himself too short a time in Cornwall.  He singularly failed to interview Tom Pooley.   He did not speak to any of the local parsons who had ‘persecuted’ Tom.  He did not seek out Mr Grylls, the attorney, who had left his fingerprints everywhere in the case and his only informants were persons whom he met casually in the street.  Most of his information about Tom, one suspects, came from daughter Mary who was his companion for most of the time that he was in Cornwall.  He nevertheless, like any good journalist, did not let lack of information stop him from writing a racy pamphlet.  He summoned to the aid of his small, first-hand knowledge of the case his lively opinions and persuasive prejudices and every kind of verbiage.   He praised Tom Pooley wherever he could and with his purple passages he appealed to the sympathies of his freethinking readers.  In this way, and in a very short time, he produced for them a convincing pamphlet that was to have consequences.   

Holyoake’s writing in The Case of Thomas Pooley gives the impression that he was enjoying the adventure of being out and about in the South West.  It was perhaps the nearest that this busy man ever came to a holiday and when, on the fourteenth of September, he arrived at his destination he discovered that “a September Monday in Liskeard was warmer and brighter than a July Sunday in London.”    He had by now taught himself to be a lively and engaging correspondent and it is clear that he took great satisfaction from telling his version of Tom’s story.  His tale sparkles from the front cover, where there is an engraving from a pencil sketch made by him of the offending gate at Duloe subscribed “THE WRETCHED GATE OF THE REV. PAUL BUSH, to his concluding sentence: “Poor Pooley was sentenced to twenty-one month’s imprisonment.  ‘My Lord,’ cried the prisoner, with a majesty lent to him by the severity of the sentence, ‘I beg of you to put on the black cap at once,’ If that had been done , the inaptness of the sentence would only have been more signally exposed.”

Holyoake’s coach rolled into Liskeard and he stepped down at Channon’s Hotel in the Market Place and having secured “the good offices of the presiding genii” of the house, he strolled in sunshine the few hundred yards along Barrel Street, as it was then known (today it is Barras Street) and along Dean Street to visit the humble house in Moon’s Court where he found Mrs Mary Pooley at her wash tub, laundressing.    He chatted to Mrs Pooley and concluded that she was “an interesting woman of great simplicity of character who must have been very good looking in her youth.“  Also at home was Tom’s younger son,  thirteen year old William, the cabinet-maker’s apprentice;  him George considered to be “a fine healthy lad”  and, true to form, he gave of his time to encourage young William to go to a night school and improve himself and his prospects.

That same morning George walked the streets of Liskeard and talked to those he met.   He found that the appearance of ‘a gentleman from London’ attracted a good deal of attention “and led to much enquiry as to who were the Secularists and what were their principles.”  Tom and his story seem to have been known to many.  “Everybody seemed surprised that so much trouble should be taken about a poor man, and many gentlemen did not conceal their dislike that so much ‘fuss’ should be made when they flattered themselves that Pooley had been quietly disposed of.”  He found several who had employed Tom and had found him to be a good worker and who “wished he were free to return to their service.”  The working-men were of the opinion that Tom’s sentence was out of all proportion to the offence of scribbling on a gate but all the gentlemen he spoke to considered it “a natural punishment for Pooley’s contumacy.” and, wrote George, “I believe had Mr Justice Coleridge ordered him to be hung, that nobody in Cornwall would have stirred to save him.”

He talked with people from every walk of life and he was resolved to find “bad blood between the rich and the poor” and he found what he was looking for.   He concluded, from a few hours of casual conversation on the streets of Liskeard, that in Cornwall “the awe of clergymen and magistrates is excessive among the people.”   Labourers whom he met had ready tales of poor men who had been denied justice and rich men who had behaved high-handedly.  Gentlemen, when a poor man displayed his antagonism, “instead of remembering that as gentlemen they should be above retaliation and never forget the dignity of justice, are apt to retaliate upon ignorance, and show the poor man ‘who is master.’”  Pooley’s case was to be told in this context.  It was “the old story of country magistrates and gentlemen in collision with independent working-men.”    

He made the most of what he learned about Tom as a steady man, one who did not go to public houses and one who did not swear and who excelled as a provider for his family.  He lauded Tom’s industry and his honesty and he had harsh words for Sir John Coleridge’s sentencing of a poor man.   He wrote in his report “Judge Jeffreys never behaved worse!” which was far from being a fair comparison, the “Bloody Assizes” of 1685 having demanded the lives of some five hundred misguided West Country men and women. 

His investigations were naturally partisan.  He had come to Cornwall to make a case against what he saw as religious bigotry and to decry a sentence imposed by Sir John Coleridge as being shockingly severe and, although he would record nothing that he knew to be untrue, he was determined that his readership, the Freethinkers, would sympathise with Tom Pooley and conclude with their champion that judge, jury and Cornish clergy had acted outrageously. 

In the afternoon of his first day the indefatigable investigator took a chaise and, with young Mary Pooley by his side, he was driven along the narrow lanes to Duloe to see where Tom had committed his crime and to visit the Rectory. They must have made strange travelling companions, the ‘gentleman from London’ and the simple young countrywoman.  No doubt it was a rare treat for Mary to ride in a cab. 

At Duloe Rectory, Holyoake ‘desired to see’ the Reverend Paul Bush and to have words with him.  He came to Duloe in the mistaken belief that it was Bush who was the arch-villain in the persecution of Tom Pooley.  Bush, according to Holyoake, had set out on an ‘ignoble pursuit’ of Tom and had ‘finally captured him.’   This was hardly the truth of the matter considering that it was Tom who had come wandering to Duloe, chalk in hand,  and Paul Bush seems not to have needed to pursue him at all.    Holyoake further claimed that Bush had ‘induced’ Mr Justice Coleridge to hand down a heavy sentence of imprisonment, whereas it should have been clear to him that Sir John needed no inducing and that all Paul Bush had done was to supply to the magistrates the information that several clergymen had already shown, from their advertisement in the Cornish Times, was generally sought after.

Paul Bush was not at home so, Holyoake tells us, he had to content himself with standing in the portico of the Rectory where he composed a passionate and devastating rebuke in quasi biblical language, invoking God and Heaven more than one might have expected from one who had suffered imprisonment for atheism, and addressing a Rector whom he had failed to find.  

“O, Reverend Paul Bush, go down on thy grateful knees every morning, and thank that Heaven who, for no apparent desert of thy own, hast made thy lines to fall in pleasant places, and has, as David says, given thee a goodly heritage; while thy fellow creature, of the same flesh and blood, - Thomas Pooley - demented and poor, is, at thy (sic) instigation, struggling with gaolers, is despised, hated, punished, shut up in dark cells, with the poverty of his wife to embitter his lucid thoughts , the gloom of one year and nine months of wretchedness before him , and the darker gloom of a wandering intellect oppressing his soul.   O Reverend Paul Bush, where is the finger of God in all this frightful contrast?  And thou hast uttered no word of repentance for thy harshness and error, nor signed any petition to undo the misery thy hand has wrought.”

Having failed to speak to Paul Bush, Holyoake drove to Tredinnick, to Mary Bowden’s house.  She was not there but was back at the Rectory farm.  Holyoake asked his cabby to take him back to the Rectory and found that Paul Bush had still not returned home,  There, however, he saw Mary Bowden working for the Rector.  Alas! The dogged detective decided not to speak with her.   “I thought I had no right to interfere between a gentleman and his servants.  There was no question of those I intended to put to her which would not have brought her into collision with her master.”   Having made this delicate decision there seemed nothing for him to do in Duloe.  He did not seek to find and examine Bush’s other witness William Michell, the man to whom Mary Bowden had shown the writing but he satisfied himself by visiting the fateful gate, a quarter of a mile from the Rectory, and making the sketch which was to become the etching on the title-page of his pamphlet.

The next day, a Tuesday, Holyoake engaged a four-seater phaeton drawn by two greys and travelled to Bodmin Asylum in style.   Mary Pooley came with him to visit her father and chattered away to him. Holyoake records that “the journey enabled me to learn necessary particulars of her father’s life and conduct.”   At Bodmin, Holyoake viewed from his carriage the prison where Tom had festered for a fortnight and found it gloomy enough and then he drove to the Asylum which he found pleasantly and healthily placed a mile beyond the town.  Here he met William Robert Hicks,  the celebrated Governor of Bodmin Gaol.   What Hicks was famous for was the telling of funny stories in the Cornish dialect.  Books of his stories, nowadays not so funny, were published after his death.  Hicks was an uncommonly fat man with a sparkle in his eyes and an anecdote for every occasion.  He dined with the rich and famous worthies of the County because of his gift as raconteur.   Holyoake found Hicks to be “genial and courteous and of that robust sanity himself which communicates itself to his patients.”  Hicks was famous too for the humanity with which he ran the Asylum.  When, 1n 1845, he had become Governor he had found the place run on brutal lines and he had taken pains to introduce a liberal regime which proved successful in restoring the wits of many of his inmates.   It was Tom Pooley’s good fortune to have arrived during a golden age of the Asylum.   Mechanical restraints had been abandoned and moral treatment was the order of the day.   Tom’s experience lay happily between Bethlem-like horrors - the shackling, bed-strapping, strait waistcoats, bloodletting and induced vomiting of the Georgian madhouses and the disillusioned custodialism that came with the overcrowding and under-spending that were characteristic of the Asylums during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Holyoake had nothing but praise for Hicks and also for Doctor Richard Adams, the young Medical Superintendent.  He noted that, “Nothing is to be desired as to the humanity and intelligence with which Thomas Pooley is treated at their hands.  His food is good - his room clean and comfortable - the grounds and garden, in which he is free to work or walk as he pleases, afford every physical condition for his restoration.”

But Holyoake did not speak to Tom Pooley.    It seems from his account that Doctor Adams thought it best for him not to communicate with Tom but it also seems that Holyoake did not demur at this and was quite content to stand among the trees and watch Tom from a distance as he walked in the garden.   Mary, on the other hand, spent the day with her father and ate two meals with him.  No doubt she gave Holyoake a full account of her meeting with her father on the journey home. 

Holyoake’s remarkable description of their night ride home from Bodmin to Liskeard,  Walter Scott could not have done it better, added nothing to his readers’ understanding of the Case of Tom Pooley but it carried to the world the message that he, George Holyoake, was as romantic and sensitive and big-hearted as anyone around, which indeed he was:  “The sun had long gone down, and rain during the day had left that autumn dreaminess over the face of nature, which surpasses in contemplative interest, the brightest evening of the retreating summer.   The deep mist of the valleys enveloped the carriage.  Now we drove through a Spanish looking gorge, where nothing but a bandit was wanted to make it romantic; then we came upon a turnpike gate, where a little girl came peering out, with a small bit of candle flickering before her face, just strong enough to show up her rosy cheeks and her two eyes, blacker than the night and brighter far than her light.  The grey horses smoked themselves into visibility, resembling a small mist in our front, and the darkness beyond seemed like the ancient darkness that could be felt.  Anon we dashed forward and were lost in what seemed a ravine; then an elevation gained, the Queen of the night was seen curiously through openings in hill top forests.  At last the summit of a hill was gained which revealed a vast valley of light, and above shone, full and clear, the Liskeard moon.”

George Holyoake delivered Mary Pooley to her mother’s house and, the next morning, returned to Devonport where he began to write his pamphlet.  The report of his ‘investigations’ was necessarily thin.  He padded it out with charming irrelevancies, with anecdotes, unconnected with Pooley, that illustrated the harshness of Cornish magistrates and clergymen, with detailed legal objections to the way Pooley’s case had been conducted, with comparisons between reactionary Cornwall and enlightened cities such as London and Manchester and comparisons between the living conditions of the privileged class, particularly of judges and clergymen, and those of the poor, labourer.  He laboured the case that justice lay heavier on the poor and the powerless than on ‘gentlemen’.  

When it came to political action Holyoake was an old hand.  He was, together with his investigation, preparing a Memorial or petition addressed to the Whig Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, and was looking for as many signatures as possible to be sent to London.   It was his opinion, quite rightly, that it was the unsatisfactory nature of the trial, from a lawyer’s point of view, that might sway the great man and in his address to Sir George he listed the following observations:  “That the words written upon the field gate were not established by the clearest evidence, the witnesses not agreeing as to what the words were…...That the conversation with the labourer, the Counsel for the prosecution admitted might have been a jest,  and the judge put this view to the jury…..That the conversation with the policeman took place after Thomas Pooley was in custody.  The words indicted were spoken under irritation and excitement, and , being spoken after Pooley was in custody, is a peculiarity which, we are informed, was never made the subject of an indictment before…...That upon these grounds, and upon the further count that it has been necessary under the Secretary of State’s warrant to remove Thomas Pooley from Bodmin Gaol to the County Asylum in consequence of the appearance of insanity, we the undersigned respectfully submit that his sentence ought to be annulled forthwith.”   

There was, no doubt, truth in all of Holyoake’s objections.  It had been, as the Reverend Paul Bush had written, by no means a clear case and fine points of law impress legal minds. For the judge on the day, however, and the prosecuting counsel and the Cornish jury in this case there had been no doubt that Tom Pooley was the blasphemer who had been troubling the local parsons and others.  He and no-one else was clearly the guilty man and, apart from anything else, he had condemned himself to be an infidel during his trial.     

In short time Holyoake had produced a passionate and convincing document and he sent it out into the world.   Great men read his pamphlet and were convinced by it and swallowed the hook with the line and the sinker.  The celebrated philosopher, John Stuart Mill read it.   He was putting the finishing touches to his great work, On Liberty.  The case of Tom Pooley seemed to him immediately relevant to his opus and worthy of a sentence or two.   Before very long Pooley’s case was to be made known to a far wider and more critical public than the sparse readership of The Reasoner.