TOM POOLEY'S RESCUER.

 “Christains Cast me Into Thir Dungons.  But who Delievered me?  Not Christains but what Christains calls Infidles,”   Tom Pooley   

The name of George Jacob Holyoake was new to me but I was soon astonished that it should have been so.  He was undoubtedly a great man who was a power for good in the land.  As will be seen in this chapter, there would be no story of Tom Pooley without him.  All that is positive that can be said about Tom, all that I have written about him, was recorded by Holyoake.  Without his intervention Tom would have served his sentence and, if he had survived prison, would have emerged to vanish into the same obscurity which he had known before.   Having said this, Holyoake at this stage of his life was a journalist with some of the journalist’s determination not to let the truth stand in the way of a good story.  He was an idealist with an end in view and did not overly examine the means that contributed to this end.   His own experiences had, understandably, embittered him.   He was, nevertheless, perhaps the greatest of all the agitators of the Victorian age and his name and his work surely deserve to be better remembered.  He tirelessly pursued, on behalf of the working class, the liberty, equality and justice which so many British men and women craved.   He worked to improve the conditions of the worker, and reform was badly needed.  

A labourer like Tom Pooley, was given a perfunctory, puerile education or none at all.  He had few opportunities for recreation and he worked long hours for five days of the week.  He had no political power, no voice or vote and the established church of the nation bade him be content in the station to which he was called.  Holyoake supported improvement in all these respects and, by the time he died, in 1906, there was a veritable new deal for working men to which his work contributed.  Holyoake, however, was never a revolutionary but rather a visionary who believed in the inevitable victory of peaceful evolution and rational progress. He worked tirelessly for any cause he believed would contribute to a better world and he earned the respect of many allies and many opponents alike.  Today he is best remembered as the man who coined both the word secularist and the word Jingoism.  He is also remembered as a founder of the Co-operative Movement, to the extent that the Co-op’s national headquarters, which is in Manchester, is named Holyoake House.  When he died the Co-operators of Great Britain gave him a worthy dismissal and he was buried in Highgate cemetery where, not too far from Karl Marx, there is a grand marble headstone and a portrait bust of George in stone.  As an agitator, Holyoake had the weakness that he could always see the other person’s point of view.   The question, moreover, which ran like a thread through the whole of Victorian society of whether one counted as a ‘gentleman’ or not, was one which made George Holyoake pull his punches much to the frustration of some of his fellow agitators.

Holyoake had been a remarkably clever child and he represents the very archetype of the self-made man who rose through his own merit to claim that all important Victorian rank of ‘gentleman’ and to act as the equal of any other ‘gentleman’ in his life’s work of troubling of the Victorian Tory establishment.  He had been born in Birmingham in 1817.  His father had been a ‘whitesmith’, a finisher of metal goods, and George’s upbringing and education could not have been more different than that of the Coleridges, father and son.  George’s father laboured in the Eagle Foundry in Birmingham and George, at the age of eight, began working at the same foundry and was later apprenticed there but he was not going to spend his life at a bench in the Eagle Foundry.  The young George Holyoake had quite literally begun to scratch out an education for himself in his childhood by way of dame’s school and then at a Wesleyan Sunday ‘sand school’ where children made their first letters in a sand tray with their fingers for pens.  At the age of eleven, there was a tragedy at home which, writes his biographer, Joseph McCabe, “probably lay like a charge of powder in the magazine of his memory.”   “It was a year of commercial panic and great distress,and the means of the family suffered heavily.   The rector of St Martin’s sent in his charge of fourpence for church-rate; but coppers were scarce, and were all needed to save a younger sister from death.  The next week the charge came again, with a half-crown added for costs.  Fearing that the bed might be taken from under the child, as a neighbour had experienced, the mother hurried to the office to pay.  She was kept waiting for five hours, and found her child dead when she returned.”

The years of George’s youth were years of protest in Birmingham.  Socialists, Chartists and other would-be reformers competed and co-operated to work for better work conditions and to eradicate poverty.   As a very young man, George was, in quick succession, Chartist, Socialist and Owenite.  He witnessed the unrest near to revolution that was the workers’ reaction to the failure, as they saw it, of the first Reform Bill.  For many months the workshops were hotbeds of political agitation and George soon found himself involved in political life.  He was to spend his long life fighting causes and it was not surprising that he took an interest in the case of Tom Pooley.  

George fervently believed that political change could be achieved through the education of the masses and he consciously set out to make himself an exemplar of what schooling might achieve.  In his teens.by attending evening classes and the  classes of the Mechanics’ Institute, George gained a first-rate command of language and mathematics which he ever afterwards used to his advantage.  He read widely, taught, lectured, corresponded, wrote copiously and published.  Along the way he made the acquaintance of many other agitators and progressives of the age and he befriended every kind of liberal cause.  His energy was boundless and his self-education, scrimped at first from his few leisure hours, had soon rescued him from the foundry and, by 1857, he was the respected, by many, bookseller and publisher and editor of The Reasoner, Journal of Freethought and Positive Philosophy, a serious journal, published from 147 Fleet Street which sold for one penny and which had a circulation of about two thousand copies a week.  The Reasoner was always ready and waiting to pounce on what it considered to be injustices toward freethinkers, particularly when the injustice was being perpetrated by clergymen or in the name of religion.

Holyoake was forty years old in the year Pooley was handed down his sentence by Sir John Coleridge.  He was that much more interested in Pooley’s case because he himself, at Cheltenham in June 1842, had fallen foul of the blasphemy laws and had been imprisoned for six months.  At the time that George had been imprisoned in Gloucester Gaol he had been an ‘Owenite Social Missionary’ preaching Robert Owen’s peculiar brand of socialism.  He had taken this job without altogether subscribing to Owen’s gospel but the salary was steady and by now he had a wife and family to support.  The job took George on lecture tours to places that were likely seedbeds of Owen’s socialism.  Cheltenham seems to have qualified and there he was billed to give a lecture on “Home Colonisation, as a means of superseding Poor-Laws and Emigration.”  ‘Home colonisation’ was the dream of housing workers in village communities like Robert Owen’s Lanark mill.   This was not a particularly inflammatory subject but the Anglican authorities were sufficiently alarmed at the prospect of an Owenite missionary being in town that they sent three men to detect heresy.   For some time Robert Owen had been anxious not to upset religious people in general and the Church of England in particular.  His ‘social missionaries’ had been instructed to back away from discussions of religion and to give no offence to believers.  Holyoake, however, had a mind of his own.  He was impatient with what he saw as Owen’s lack of interest in the cause of secularism.  He firmly believed that men must be freed from the doctrines of sin, guilt and dependence on God.  Only then could they hope to create equitable social institutions.   The Church’s agents, however, could detect no heresy in Holyoake’s address but, at question time, one of them, a clergyman, asked the irrelevant and provocative question why there had been no mention of chapels in George’s description of the home-colonies that were being advocated.  It was George’s spunky response to this that landed him in court and in prison.  He is reported to have said “While Southwell is in gaol”, Charles Southwell was a fellow Owenite ‘missionary’ then serving a twelve month sentence for blasphemy “I flee the Bible as a viper,  I wish not to hear the name of God and revolt at the touch of a Christian.”  

Conditions in Gloucester prison were terrible and Holyoake was desperate.  At one stage he planned carefully how he might kill himself if he felt unable to continue. There are some parallels to be made between his experience and that of Tom Pooley.  Holyoake was brought before Clergy Magistrates and remanded to the Assizes.  He was found guilty by an upright Christian judge.  He too rebelled against the prison disciplines and refused to wear the prison clothes.  He contended with the prison chaplain and like Pooley was offered relief if he would renounce his beliefs and he too emerged from prison more certain than ever of the rightness of his own opinion.  But George’s trials were much greater than Tom’s.  He was a younger but frailer man and he served his full six months and he suffered perhaps the heaviest blow that a man can suffer when the news was brought to him how, while he was being punished for his blasphemy, his little daughter, Madeline, a child of “much beauty and promise,” had died of a fever exacerbated by the poverty that his absence brought upon the family.  

In 1850 Holyoake published a book about his trial and imprisonment with the wonderful title, ”The History  of the last Trial by Jury for Atheism in England, A Fragment of Autobiography submitted for the Perusal of Her Majesty’s Attorney-General and the British Clergy’.   Now, seven years later, Pooley’s case had come to his notice, a case which challenged the grand title of his work and not only recalled to him the injustice, as he saw it, and the bitter experience of his own confinement but which also made him fear for the liberty of freethinkers all.  Holyoake, unlike Pooley, had not gone out of his way to offend Christians. His lectures were circumspect,  his manner was guarded,  but he had been convicted under blasphemy laws that he hoped and believed would never be invoked again.   Pooley’s case had reminded the world that the charge of blasphemy could be brought against anyone at any time. 

It was, however, not George Holyoake himself but one of his admirers and regular contributors to The Reasoner, one who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Lionel H Holdreth’, who was to fire the first shot in what was to become the campaign in Pooley’s behalf.    Later on in life Lionel Holdreth was to revert to his real name, Percy Greg, and become a Spiritualist, a Christian and an early writer of space fiction, but at this time he was a fiery twenty-one year old, convinced of his own sceptical opinions about religion and busy with writing portentous letters to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, the Attorney General, Sir Richard Bethell, and to any other worthies who, he imagined,  might read his letters and whose names he then liked to drop.  A man so various needs some explanation.   Percy Greg was the son of one William Rathbone Greg who had gained reputation and notoriety by writing, in 1850, The Creed of Christendom. a thoughtful book which cautiously challenged Anglican orthodoxy, Unlike Holyoake, Percy Greg had been born to many advantages.   His father was from a wealthy family and decidedly a ‘gentleman’ and young Percy had enjoyed a privileged education.  Percy had been raised to be sure of his own opinion and to be confident of his own place in society.   He feared nothing and nobody and, with all the energy of his twenty-one years, he saw himself as the Rottweiler in George Holyoake’s kennels. 

Percy found time to write about Pooley’s case although he was already in the middle of a fit of indignation concerning the troubles of the German, Baron de Gleichen Tettenborn,, whose case against his manservant had been dismissed by an English police-magistrate because the baron had professed himself an atheist and had refused to take the oath.   The manservant had apparently stolen his master’s gold watch but, in the circumstances, was allowed to keep it.  The unfortunate baron suffered not only the loss of his gold watch but also received about three pounds weight of letters in the post from Christians endeavouring to convert him, “the majority written in the most abusive language” as well as being visited by a great number of “fellows in black dress and white neckties” all intent on saving his soul.  Tettenborn claimed to be amazed that the law did not allow him to plead his case.  He wrote: “It is indeed a strange law , and only to be found in England.  No one is to blame but the people themselves, who seem to consent to being priestridden.”

The day after the Times reported Pooley’s trial, Percy wrote to the editor of the Times and to the editor of the Daily News.  Of Thomas Pooley’s case he thundered that ‘a worse case I have seldom heard of’’  and he protested against  “the meanness and wickedness of attacking this poor and defenceless man, instead of grappling boldly with the Atheistic leaders in London.”   He challenged the Christian establishment to bring cases of blasphemy against his own father and George Holyoake for their blasphemy but we do not know how far these two gentlemen approved of young Percy’s bright idea.

By the nineteenth of August the Liberation of Thomas Pooley, Prisoner for the Said Offence of Blasphemy in Bodmin Gaol was the subject of Holyoake’s leading article in The Reasoner. In fact by then, although still under sentence, Tom Pooley was already sitting comfortably enough in the Cornwall Lunatic Asylum but Holyoake did not yet know this.   Holyoake was, naturally, as himself a sometime victim of blasphemy laws, interested in the legal niceties of Pooley’s case.   Holyoake reviewed the legal situation as he knew it.  He recalled his own case and those in 1840  and 1841 of Henry Hetherington and Edward Moxon.  Henry Hetherington had been indicted for selling libels on the Old Testament in penny numbers.  Hetherington had been sent to prison for four months but not before he, in the belief that what was sauce for the penny number would not be found to be sauce for the guinea volume, had indicted Edward Moxon, a respectable publisher, friend of the greatest writers of the age, who produced English classics for the nobility and gentlemen of England.  To much surprise and consternation,  Moxon was also found guilty of blasphemy for having published certain passages in Shelley’s Queen Mab,  but, as Holyoake put it,  “The West End could not be reconciled to the idea of an aristocratic publisher picking oakum for the crime of selling English classics,”  and Moxon received no punishment.   Certainly some of Shelley’s words would have seemed shocking to Judge Coleridge.  The beloved poet had, for example, put these words into the mouth of Ahusuerus, the Wandering Jew: 

  “The vulgar, ever in extremes, became persuaded that the crucifixion of Jesus was a supernatural event.  Testimony of miracles, so frequent in unenlightened ages, were not wanting to prove that he was something divine, The belief rolling through the lapse of the ages, met with the reveries of Plato and the reasonings of Aristotle, and acquired force and extent until the divinity of Jesus became a dogma, which to dispute was death, which to doubt was infamy.” 

There was consternation at the conviction of Moxon because it made clear to influential people that no author, publisher, vendor or librarian was secure against a casual charge of blasphemy.   Holyoake had believed that his subsequent trial would be the last of the kind and that subsequently the power of indictment for blasphemy would be restricted to the order of the Attorney General who would be very loth to initiate any such proceedings. Now Pooley’s case alarmed the ‘positive philosophers.’ who were the readership of The Reasoner.  Since his own conviction sixteen years before, there had been no prosecutions for blasphemy in England but now, Holyoake wrote, “Mr Justice Coleridge, .. has the ominous distinction of reviving these infamous sentences.  Bigotry has slept for sixteen years in England.  We believe it never had so long a nap before, and little thanks to Mr Justice Coleridge for awakening it. Perhaps we shall be indebted to him if he awakens also the Freethinkers of the country to a sense of their insecurity.” 

The Reasoner was merciless in its attack on Sir John Coleridge: “The real offenders are in London” wrote Holyoake,  “ he flogs a bill--sticker at Duloe as a warning to them. Professor Newman,  R.W.Mackay, W.R.Greg are the Marquises of Freethought, who must not be flogged.  Mr Justice Coleridge belongs to a party in the Church who would lay the cane on their backs despite the temperateness and decorum they observe in their criticisms of Christianity.   But as it is happily impossible to flog gentlemen sceptics of wealth and influence down goes the rattan on the shoulders of a humble Cornish infidel.”  

At the same time young Lionel H Holdreth also thought that he was snapping at the Coleridges’ heels.  He wrote an open letter to Sir John again inviting the prosecution of freethinkers who were ‘gentlemen’ and asking the question: “Is it true that an English Judge thus grossly abused his magisterial power for the purposes of the religious faction to which he belongs? ... that an English gentleman was so far forgetful of himself as to take advantage of a theological antagonist?”   

The Coleridges claimed to have been unaware of any attacks upon them or open letters to them until May 1859 but it seems unlikely that so many barbed missiles flung at Sir John week after week altogether missed the mark.  Besides there had been other attacks on Sir John’s judgment, notably in the Spectator of August 8th where it had been written: “it is of importance to all of us that no undue severity should be inflicted upon any man however obscure, and of still greater importance that the authority of the law should not be damaged by applying its most solemn machinery to trifles or to getting up a burlesque upon the Inquisition.”  Even though we can be quite sure that the Coleridges did not allow copies of The Reasoner, into the house it seems improbable that they did not have the kind of good friend who would have let them know that they were being vilified in the press. 

Holyoake, on behalf of the Society of the Promoters of Freethought, wasted no time in getting up petitions to each of the Houses of Parliament and he wrote to Pooley addressing his letter to the prison.   The letter passed to Dr Richard Adams, the Superintendent at the Cornwall Lunatic Asylum and he, thinking no doubt the receipt of it would disturb his patient, passed it on to Tom’s family in Liskeard.   Holyoake’s letter to Tom was short and to the point.  He included this paragraph: “We think your language thoughtless and likely to prejudice the cause of Freethought.   But this is not the time to dwell upon this point.  We think it possible to obtain from the Government a pardon, or a mitigation of your sentence.”   Tom’s teenaged daughter, Mary, replied at once. She wrote on the nineteenth of August.  Things were moving quickly: 

“Mr Holyoake, Sir, we received from the Doctor of the Asylum at Bodmin the letter that you sent to my father, The Doctor did not give it to him. He told my mother that he was not to see it.  Sir, in your letter you said he was to send you an answer.  Sir, my father is a poor man.  He has three children.  He is a steady man and a kind husband and one that likes to enjoy his own opinion. Sir, I am his daughter that writes this imperfect letter and if you would get my father home again to his family we would give you our most heartfelt thanks and we remain, your humble servant, Mary Pooley.”

Holyoake was pleased by Mary’s note.  He corrected her few mistakes and published it in the next edition of The Reasoner with the comment, “The simple character of it will, without any remarks of ours, elicit the sympathies of our readers.”   Simple things can have surprising consequences.   Mary’s charming letter was the first of the inducements that brought about Holyoake’s decision to visit Liskeard in person and to present a report in his own hand to the Promoters of Freethought on the case of Tom Pooley.  True, at about this time, one of The Reasoner’s correspondents, in a letter to that journal, had suggested that something of that kind should be done.  It was the kind of letter which makes one suspect that it may have been solicited.  In any case George Holyoake was ready to resolve the matter.  He would set off, like Samuel Pickwick but without companions, notebook and pencil in hand, by boat from Brighton to Plymouth and by coach to Liskeard where he personally would  investigate The Case of Thomas Pooley.  the Cornish Well-sinker.