TOM POOLEY'S LISKEARD.

 

“O Christains Male and female, Ponder on the Laws of this globe!  For ye have Pawned it, Sold it by auction, ye have Drenched it with human blood,  Ye have made it a wilderness of sin, vice, injustice, hordom, misearey and Blasphamey.”  T. Pooley

I visited Liskeard in March 2015.  The town was very much what I had hoped, a place very conscious of its own history and especially proud of its Victorian past.  On my first walk into town I wandered into the municipal graveyard and, to my amazement the first gravestones I gazed upon, right by the gate, bore the names of Tom and Mary Pooley in what was a generous family plot.  Another stone had been raised to the family of Tom’s youngest son, William, who did well in life and I allowed myself to believe that a further space in the family plot, now without a stone, was where Tom’s little boy had been buried.  I could not find any further record or memory in Liskeard of Tom or of Tom’s blasphemies.  I had the impression that even today the good people of Liskeard would rather not know about him or them.  The overall impression that I received was that Liskeard, in Tom’s time must have been amazingly busy with a changing population and with churches and chapels and domestic houses springing up everywhere.  It was a town where the strong and wealthy saw progress everywhere but the poor and ignorant found themselves living in chaotic conditions.   

Cornwall before the railways was a remote region and famously conservative and reactionary.   Many Whigs thought of Cornwall as a seedbed of bigotry and petty injustice.  Some Tories saw it as a last bastion of treasured values.  In Liskeard, times were hard for the common man but the middle-classes were thriving.  As the century moved towards its midpoint more middle class families were employing servants, more middle class homeowners were securing an independent water supply by causing wells to be dug in their grounds, more homes were equipped with a private cesspit not too close to the house, and no doubt Thomas Pooley would have been employed, with pick, shovel and spade, to help construct such improvements.  New houses with large gardens were being built on the edge of town where the air was fresh and the views were pleasant.  There was money to be made by working in or investing in the local mining industry.   It was possible to live in Liskeard in the fifties and enjoy its elevated and sheltered position and its moderate but bracing air but to do so one had to steer well clear of the seedier parts of the town.

The wealthy prospered but  throughout the forties and the fifties the conditions of the poor worsened dramatically year by year.   Tom Pooley was aware of this disparity: “for it’s nothing but fair play” he wrote “that the rich man should taste the bitter cup of the poor man’s misery.” From Tom’s view-point the world did not improve.  Liskeard was becoming at the same time more Christian and less comfortable and Tom was happy to confuse cause with concurrence. He was by nature and from experience a deteriorationist.   He had begun life as a country boy in a quiet country town and now he found himself surrounded by ‘Christians’ and struggling to survive in chaotic and filthy living conditions.  For the latter he blamed the former: “How a Christian can die happy I am at a loss to know for to see the misery, the wretchedness they have sown amongst the human family.” 

Throughout much of England the negative consequences of Victorian industrialism were unmitigated.  The towns and cities were overcrowded, the labouring class lived in sooty slums, disease was epidemic and the atmosphere was shockingly polluted.  In Liskeard these negatives were not only present, they were aggravated by the essential remoteness of Cornwall, by the suddenness with which the discovery of new copper and lead mines had been made and by the influx of hundreds of miners from West Cornwall and elsewhere.  The town was changing before Tom’s very eyes

No less a personage than the author of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, passed through Liskeard in 1850, before the mining boom, and found it peaceful enough.  Wilkie was twenty-six and was a sweet-tempered, fastidious man, five foot and six inches tall who had come to Cornwall  with the young artist, Henry Brandling, as his companion, to write the first light-hearted travelling book describing the county.  The book was to be called “Rambles beyond Railways or Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot”.   The railway line in 1850 went no farther than Plymouth although all that was about to change from 1851.

 The two companions were enchanted by the seaside town of Looe but they did not like Liskeard. Wilkie wrote: “Fresh from the quaint old houses, the delightfully irregular streets and the fragrant terrace-gardens of Looe, we found ourselves, on entering Liskeard, suddenly introduced to that ‘abomination of desolation,’ a large agricultural country town.  Modern square houses barren of all other ornament; wide, dusty, deserted streets; misanthropical-looking shopkeepers in rusty black, standing at their doors to gaze on the solitude around them,  greeted our eyes on all sides.  Such samples of the population as we accidentally encountered were promising.  We were unlucky enough to remark, in the course of two streets, a nonagenarian old woman with a false nose, and an idiot shaking with the palsy.”   Wilkie Collins and Henry Brandling spent only one night in Liskeard and were glad to walk away in the morning.  Everything they experienced was poor and unsatisfactory.  Their landlady, “very thin and careworn”, cautioned them not to open the window of their room “because of the smell”.

The smells of the town were generally pretty bad although Tom Pooley evidently found the pig stink of Duloe more offensive yet.  Pig-keeping was still common in Liskeard and pig-owners could be fined when their animals fouled the streets.  Beasts of many kinds were driven daily through the town centre. Worst of all, the sanitary arrangements for the growing population had changed little since the Middle Ages.   They were not much better for the wealthy than for the poor.  Privies had to be emptied and the contents taken either to a dung-heap or a cesspit.  The emptying of privies, so said the bye-laws, had to be done between eleven at night and four in the morning and there must have been an endless succession of sad journeys through the dark streets to the municipal accumulations of human excrement. 

A report of 1849 by Edwin Tregelles concluded that: “the periodic occurrence of disease in Liskeard may in a great degree be attributed to the ponds or catch pits which are allowed to exist in the valley, and also to the filthy condition of many of the street drains which, in the summer months, when there is but little rain to wash them, become filled with offal of the most offensive kind.”

In the years up to Tom’s trial, the miners had been flocking into Liskeard.  There had been some mining in the area around Liskeard at least since the fourteenth century but the new improved mining methods of the nineteenth century changed Liskeard from a quiet market town to a miners’ town. Rich deposits of copper had been discovered at South Caradon as early as 1836 and in 1843 lead was discovered around Menheniot and elsewhere and where there was lead there was silver. Between 1845 and 1850 the village of Saint Cleer, three miles from Liskeard grew to become effectively a mining camp and within Liskeard the working-class population virtually doubled.  The miners were coming to town and, until their wives and children caught up with them, they were a rough lot.  “A bigger set of scoundrels than the miners never trod this lower world.” wrote John Allen, whose history of Liskeard was published in 1856, “these rascals by their uncouth manners, abominable dialect and cheating habits have considerably altered the face of society in this town.”  These miners, though poor enough, commanded steadier wages than the general labourers like Thomas Pooley and the least wealthy in Liskeard society found or felt themselves further depressed by their coming. 

Basic housing had been thrown up to accommodate the incoming miners and other labourers alike and the ‘court’ where Tom lived was housing of this kind.  Moon’s Court was to the North side of Dean Street and was very much in the centre of town where the wealthy and the impoverished still lived close to each other but where the poor were tucked away behind the main streets, down narrow alleys and around corners in small insanitary, overcrowded courts and rows.  

The need for more and improved accommodation, for an improved supply of pure drinking water and for better sanitation was apparent to all.  The town authorities, however, were loath to spend the ratepayers’ money on the poor.  The times were revolutionary and the property-owning class was more nervous and panicky than it usually is and was loath to dispense charity and quick to respond to anything that seemed to threaten its ancient ascendancy.   In Liskeard a discontented but increasingly literate and vocal working class perceived the worthies, the property owners and other gentry, as greedy opportunists practising injustices, petty and momentous. Pamphlets and newspapers were taking up the causes of working men and women and old certainties were being challenged. Indeed, the whole county of Cornwall was on the defensive.  In reaction there was little mercy being shown by magistrates and other gentlemen to defaulting tenants, committers of nuisance, vagabonds, poachers and other petty wrongdoers.   In the town and the county, by and large, the ruling classes still condescended, the lower classes still generally deferred and life was made difficult for any common man who challenged the system, transgressed or had ideas above his station. 

As for the Church of England, these were the years of that ruffled, anxious Church which Anthony Trollope so graphically depicted in his novels.  It was in 1855 that The Warden had been published and Barchester Towers followed in 1857.  A parson with the right connections could still hope to make himself secure and wealthy within the Church but increasingly churchmen everywhere were feeling vulnerable and their rich livings and benefices were coming in for much criticism   In Cornwall the clergy were more intimately identified with the landed gentry than anywhere else in England and Cornish clergymen were often themselves wealthy landowners living in fine rectories and receiving overgenerous stipends. Many clergymen were also magistrates which made them the natural enemies to the labourers in their parishes.  In the mining towns and villages it was being made virtually impossible to live the kind of life that was the Anglican parson’s traditional ideal, that is:  to serve as a humble clergyman ministering to a small devout flock.   Now the parson was having to deal with a new and growing population and with many other challenges posed by rampant industrialisation.  Some parsons withdrew from the good fight and lived private lives remote from their flock.  A combination of fear, ambition and greed had produced a breed of clergyman that was seen to be neglecting its pastoral duties and to have become bitter and unsympathetic to any improvements or reforms that might give power to the poor.  There was of course also a host of good men who laboured faithfully to serve their parishioners and their church.  There were saints as well as sinners and It was not always easy to tell the difference.  Tom, of course, was content to damn them all at one sitting “For I have wept to see the filthy, disgraceful and lamentable condition that the Bible and Christian tyranny has bound the human family in.”

For a hundred years the Wesleyans had been competing with the Anglicans to minister to the Christians of Liskeard.  The success of non-conformity had nibbled away at the congregations of the Established Church although it was still the case that a third of all church attenders were Anglicans.  Two thirds, however, were Dissenters.  A great many others, perhaps a third of the townsfolk as a whole and particularly of the poor, were altogether untouched by religion and attended no church whatsoever.  It might be thought that a poor, religious, thoughtful, honest, in so far as we know, working-man like Tom Pooley might have found a home with the Methodists.  Tom’s rebellion, however, had gone too far for that. His identification of Christianity with oppression was complete and embraced all sects and denominations.  He had worked out his own creed and his own salvation: ”..my deeds and works will stand the test when Christian tyranny will be no more and what will those Christian tyrants do to keep their tyranny and unjust deeds dark?”.  ‘Bible Tyranny’ was everywhere and his world was endangered.   Tom’s own gospel, he believed, would prevail and put the world to rights.  

Chapels had been springing up like mushrooms in the forties and the fifties.  The Wesleyans alone boasted four chapels in the town.  They had built a fine chapel in the centre of Liskeard in 1841, just around two corners from where Tom lived, but it had been burned to the ground in 1845, not by Tom but probably by one Thomas Thimbelin, only to give place to an even grander Wesleyan ‘church’ on the same site designed by the tireless Liskeard architect Henry Rice.  The Congregationalists’ chapel dated from 1802.  The Quakers’ Meeting House was being enlarged in 1826.  The Bryanites met at the Temperance Hall and the Bible Christians had their own chapel.  Wherever Tom looked there was evidence of Christians and Christian activity.  The incoming miners, many of them, swelled the non-conformist ranks.  The activists of the different congregations were in the business of preaching, lecturing, improving and converting. The Wesleyans held sporadic Revivals, enthusiastic meetings where many were saved and where the chapels were full of worshippers crying aloud about the anguish of their souls and calling for the mercy of God.  The preachers were often ‘special lights’ sent down to Cornwall to preach to the benighted and the enlightened.  The preaching could be crude. An echo of the style of preaching from these years is preserved: “I have been in Heaven and seen my crown;” said the preacher, “it is so bright I could not look upon it.  My poor wife has been there too, but hers only had one diamond in it and she was put outside heaven’s gate on her trial - never mind, poor sinner, she will succeed.”    Tom’s enigmatic comment on these jamborees was: “Christians tells what good they do by their Revivals,  They are only trying to wash a black man white.” The preachings and prayers could go on for days at a time.  Revivals were hard to ignore but Tom found it easy to dismiss them: “for their Revivals proves that they are mad men fit for mad houses.” 

In the spring and summer of 1857 then, and for many years before that, according to one reliable account for fifteen years, Thomas Pooley was writing his defiant messages on walls and gates and in the endpapers of Bibles and in other places.  His outdoor chalk messages to the world, though seldom read, had been known to have puzzled children and disturb adults.   His idiosyncratic writings appeared here and there and it was a challenge to make sense of them.  Because he wrote closely and in chalk and because his messages were soon washed away, his words were generally not remarked upon.   Nevertheless, this was a pedestrian age when many people walked the streets and walked along the country lanes to and from their work.  Whole crowds of miners and labourers and country folk set out on foot every day.  Crowds walked in and out of Liskeard of a morning and of an evening and many must have seen and deciphered Tom’s writings and understood enough of them to be truly shocked and hurt.  The count of how often Tom chalked his messages differs but there is no doubt he left many messages.  One source claims: “the practice had so far increased in 1857, that frequently on six or seven gates, in the course of a few days, sentences of a most offensive sort would be written.”  

Only a dozen or so of the words that he had written at this time have been recorded but his subsequent writings disclose what was the flavour of them.  It seems likely that Tom had indeed written on a parson’s gate the words: “Duloe stinks with the monster Christ’s Bible – Blasphemy – T. Pooley.”   He had, no doubt, written far more offensively elsewhere. He was inclined to describe Christ as a blackguard and another source claimed that over many years Christ’s name had been associated by Tom with the words, “ ‘monster’, ‘villain’, ‘theft’ and ‘whoredom,’ with other words as bad.”  He had certainly written quite enough to be guilty, in the eyes of the law, of blasphemy and he had upset many powerful people, in particular, a number of local clergymen.

The troubling nature of the developments taking place in Liskeard does something to explain Tom’s remarkable behaviour.  He was frustrated by the changes that he saw around him and he was undoubtedly an embittered and ignorant man who blamed Christianity for making his life painful and difficult. His writings were his defiant response. A great many additional explanations might be offered to account for his singular behaviour. He may well have enjoyed the very practice of writing and been proud of his skill, many of his working-class neighbours were illiterate, and perhaps he had nowhere more convenient to write than on walls and gates. His motivation may have had something to do with the attitude of local clergymen when, five years earlier, he had needed to bury his child.   This had certainly upset him but his antipathy to all things Christian seems to have been of much longer standing. Perhaps, like most of us, Tom wanted to ‘do something’ with his life and chalking on gates had become his purpose, his point in view, the thing he did.  He genuinely wanted to change things for the better.  He also wanted other people to know that he had passed their way.  He wanted to convince himself that he, Tom Pooley, was alive and active in the world. He was, like any graffitist, leaving his tag as graffitists have done since ancient times.   Perhaps too he was desperate to be noticed by his fellow men, perhaps he was actively seeking a reaction.  He might have felt that there was danger and therefore heroism in what he was doing.  He might have found this exhilarating.  He might even have anticipated some draconic response and looked forward to it.  Something of all of this had convinced him that he must write, that he must fulfil his destiny and later to be able to write grandiosely of himself: “The Cornish well-sinker has done that work he was born to do.”  Whatever the case, Tom made sure that he had chalk, a lump not a stick, in his pocket whenever he was wandering about, bill-sticking or on his way to and from his labouring work and, given the right time and place, he wrote the words that offended.