God Is an Englishman (44 page)

As autumn ended, the third autumn since he had made his first haul into the London suburbs, he decided to spend a few days in each of these territories, discussing with Ratcliffe and Lovell, the area man agers, what could be done to improve the turnover, but it was not to be, for suddenly trouble flared up in the Polygon, and he found him self faced with a problem no one could have foreseen when he ap proved Catesby’s sally into the cotton belt.

It began with a letter from a firm called Higginbottom, big spinners owning a string of mills not far from Seddon Moss. One of the directors wrote informing him that his manager in the district had re fused to handle goods north of the Manchester-Liverpool line, even though a verbal agreement had been arrived at and the first of the deliveries made. Thinking there must be some misunderstanding Adam telegraphed Catesby at the Salford depot and the manager re plied the same day. The telegram read: “
Will you wait for a report or come north?
”

a message that Adam found so unsatisfactory that he decided to postpone his trip to the west and go north at once. A sullen, uncommunicative Catesby met him at London Road, and Adam could get very little out of him until he agreed to eat lunch at a restaurant Catesby patronised in the Shambles, one of the few remaining quarters of the old Manchester that had resisted the march of King Cotton. When they were seated over their beefsteaks he could contain himself no longer and said, flourishing Higginbottom’s letter, “Look here, Catesby, all I want from you is whether or not Higgin bottom’s letter is true? What’s behind this confounded mystery?”

“You could say no more than a principle, Mr. Swann. I asked you to come because I backed you to uphold it.” Catesby glanced at the letter and handed it back. “It’s quite true. I did break the contract, if you can call a verbal agreement GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 230

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a contract. I refused to handle their bales, just as they say.”

“Why! Do you suspect them of short-changing us?”

“Nay,” Catesby said, with a grin, “nowt like that, but those bales they want us to haul came in by a Confederate blockade-runner. Every cent they make on them in a city starved of cotton helps those bloody plantation-owners maintain slavery.

Aye, and kill men trying to stop it.”

“You mean it’s that kind of principle? A political principle?”

“Not political, Mr. Swann. Human, for it concerns every man, black, white, or yellow, who earns bread by the sweat of his brow. I take it you don’t approve of slavery as an institution? Well, no more do I, nor any one of the operatives up here, not even those with empty bellies. What’s more they’ve proved it. I’d like you to meet someone who’s in the thick o’ this fight. That’s another reason I got you up here.”

“Wait a minute,” said Adam. “Before we get involved with a third party, tell me this. If we don’t haul those bales someone else will, is that so?”

“To be sure they will,” said Catesby, “but what’s that to do wi’ it? We make a stand alongside others who have refused to touch them, never mind the greedy bastards calling themselves Christians, who can square their consciences by the road you just pointed. There’s plenty paying lip service to the North, who are telling each other t’bloody bales might as well be used now they’re in the country.”

“I’m not sure that isn’t a sane point of view,” Adam said but Catesby suddenly looked as if he was having some difficulty keeping his temper and when he spoke his voice had the bitterness Adam had noticed on the first occasion they met. He said, with an effort, “Listen here, Mr. Swann. I told you when you signed me on that I knew the folk up here. Well, I thowt I did, but in a way I were wrong, for while it’s as true now as it was years ago that Lancashire has its share o’ scabs ready to work men like the blacks on those planta tions, it’s also true that a majority of folk are ready to put principle before the next meal and the roof over their heads!

If it wasn’t so there wouldn’t be folk like Johnny Biglow, yonder.” He pointed to a balding man sitting at a table across the aisle and as he did the man half-rose, and Adam realised that he had been awaiting the summons.

Catesby, however, motioned him to stay where he was.

“You ever set foot in the States, Mr. Swann?” and when Adam shook his head,

“Well, I did, soon after I come out of gaol that time. I worked a schooner in and out of Savannah and New Orleans, and I watched slave auctions on the levees. I saw a man sold upriver from his wife, and the wife parted from children. It’s not pretty, Mr. Swann. You ever hear what Lincoln said on the subject?” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 231

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“No.”

“He said the same thing as I’m saying now—‘If I ever get a chance to hit that, then by God I’ll hit it hard!’”

“Perhaps, but isn’t the war being fought to preserve the Union? The North hasn’t freed the slaves yet.”

“They’ll get round to it, and if it falls to me to do what I can to help then I’ll do it, and to hell wi’ your bloody wages if need be.” He made a sign to the bald man who shambled over, moving like a wrestler in the ring, knees bent and hands hanging loose. He seated himself beside Catesby, and the latter said, “This is my gaffer, Johnny. Him I were telling you about. He’s had a belly-aching letter from that scab Higginbottom.” There was nothing apologetic about the way Biglow eyed Adam, looking him over as he might an opponent in the ring. He said noth ing, however, except a long, dubious “Ahhh,” and then grinned, showing a row of broken teeth. Catesby said, “Johnny and I worked at t’same loom as nippers. He were in clink wi’ me too, time o’ the riots. But now he’s on a different tack and legal as near as dammit.

He’s organiser for six thousand hands in mills along the Manchester-Liverpool line, and it were him who started t’collection.”

“What collection?”

“The money we’ve sent over. Upwards of two thousand, and more coming.”

“You’ve collected two thousand pounds for the North?”

“It’s gone to Washington for the wounded. There’s a woman there name o’

Barton, who tags on to the Federal troops with ambulances.”

“Who subscribed it?” Adam asked, and Biglow said, “Who but the Lancashire field-hands, Mr. Swann? And most of ’em laid off at that.”

“You collected two thousand pounds from among unemployed cotton operatives?”

“Why not? It’s their cause in t’long run. We had a rally in St. Peter’s Square, and went round with the hat. But that’s nobbut the start of it. We got a headquarters now and full-time collectors.”

“Willard and Slade,” Catesby added, naming two of the Polygon’s waggoners.

“And there’s another thing I’d best mention, since you’ve been civil enough to listen. Headquarters for the Washington Ambu lance Fund is your yard.” The two men waited for him to absorb this and when he did, with out comment, they looked relieved. He said, at length, “You’re an impudent devil, Catesby, and you take a hell of a lot of liberties, but I don’t see why I should subscribe since you’re using my premises rent free, and have already cost me a contract.

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What do you expect me to to do about Higginbottom? Send him a copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
?”

“You might do worse,” Biglow said, and then, to Catesby, “Heard from your lad, Jack?”

“Aye,” said Catesby, “a week since. He’s in a unit they’re form ing of volunteers from overseas, Germans mostly, he tells me.”

“Your son is out there fighting?”

“He’s done none so far, and wasn’t welcomed as he reckoned on. However, after the whipping the North got at Bull Run, they weren’t so particular, so I daresay he’ll see his share before it’s over.” It seemed strange that one of his own overseers had to bring him up to date on a war being fought three thousand miles away, and to hear someone talk of Bull Run as though it had been Balaclava. He had read brief reports of the early fighting but, until that moment, it had not impinged on his mind as a war in which Englishmen would be likely to take sides, especially those who looked to cotton for a live lihood. But now that he did think about it, it seemed logical, and cer tainly characteristic of Catesby to identify himself with what was happening out there; characteristic and somehow touching. He said, presently, “If there’s no work in the area move your teams north,” and to Biglow, “I’ll take it up with Higginbottom, and since the Salford yard is likely to be empty during the cotton famine you might as well use it.” He took out a sovereign and laid it on the table.

“That’s not a subscription, Catesby. It’s a reminder to keep me informed about everything that goes on up here. And in the States too if you get further word from your boy. I’m still professionally interested in wars. From a safe distance, that is.”

He nodded to Biglow and went out into the street, but Catesby did not follow him. He was learning about Swann.

There was an hour to wait for a train so he retraced his steps down the station approach and poked about until he found a post office, buying one of the new, franked letter-cards, and taking it across to the rest beside the post-box. With the watery ink and half-crossed nib supplied he wrote, “
To Messrs, Higginbottom, Dawley
Mills, Nr. Warrington. Sirs, Reference your letter, dated 3rd November, alleg ing breach of
contract. My manager informs me the arrangement was verbal, and I am satisfied that this was
the case. You may therefore regard it as cancelled but thank you for drawing the matter to my
attention. Faithfully, Adam Swann. Man. Dir. Swann-on-Wheels Carrier Service
.” GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 233

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He blotted it, dropped it in the box, and went up the hill to the station entrance.

In a way, it was as final a committal as turning his back on India.

5

It was the Catesby-Higginbottom incident that was instrumental in broadening his mind. It caused him to take an outward as well as his habitual inward look at men and their affairs.

Until then the narrowness of his horizons as soldier and mercenary, and later, the deep concentration demanded by the business, had en couraged insularity, perhaps a certain amount of intolerance with things that did not have much relevance to him, or to England. Now, with the example of starving cotton operatives in the forefront of his mind, he began to take a lively interest in all foreign news items, particularly in the fratricidal war being waged in Virginia and the Mississippi Valley. He watched, with some concern, the international crisis that followed the removal by a Federal warship of the Southern emissaries from the fancied security of the British vessel
Trent
that seemed, at one time, likely to bring Britain into the war on the side of the Confederates. When it became known that the Prince Consort had risen from his sick-bed to persuade Palmerston to tone down his reply, and enable the North to withdraw without too much loss of face, his opinion of the tall, gloomy German soared, so that he kept an eye on the Windsor bulletins concerning Albert’s illness.

The alliance between the young Coburger and his pop-eyed, trivial wife, had always interested Adam. He was far from being a blind worshipper of royalty, and had enjoyed the spate of bar-room stories of the Queen’s frantic dependence on her husband, reflecting that they might well be true. After all, Victoria was a Hanoverian, and her ancestors had been a sensual tribe, but he thought the royal relationship must be based on something more substantial than that, for he was old enough to have heard stories of the Queen’s irrespon sibility and political naïveté before Albert took her in hand. He remembered the change in climate concerning the Prince once his genuine enthusiasm for the sciences had inspired the Great Exhibi tion, providing the country with such an impressive advertisement. Now it was being said that the Consort was working himself into the grave, that his Teutonic obsession with thoroughness, and his insis tence on personal involvement in State affairs, kept him at his desk from first light until dusk, and also that he was having parental trouble with the Prince of Wales, said to take after his disreputable great-uncles.

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It was probably Prince Albert’s deliberate and much-publicised identification with the new machine age that stimulated Adam’s interest in him, setting him apart from the Court, and from the hard-case professionals, like Palmerston and Lord John Russell. Almost alone among their generation, or so it seemed to Adam, he and Al bert were utterly impatient with past traditions and present con ceits, each seeking a way to establish a working partnership between master and man, and the means of increasing the nation’s lead in technology and social reform, that would surely succeed the doctrine of
laissez-faire,
so dear to men like Palmerston. For
laissez-faire,
as Adam saw it, and as he believed the German saw it, properly be longed in the last century, or the century before that. There was surely something more to life than making and investing money, and using brute force and chicanery to secure new overseas markets. Identifi cation with a great industrial democracy like modern Britain should offer an experience to be shared on equal terms by intelligent adven turers like Avery, sober, earnest men like Keate and Tybalt, the harassed and dispossessed, like Blubb and the carrier Fraser, and even incipient revolutionaries like Catesby and his friend Johnny Biglow. The lead, he supposed, could only come from the top, from someone like Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and, at a lower level, from men like himself.

It was thoughts such as these that exercised his mind one frosty night in mid-December of that year as he sat late in his eyrie, looking down on the necklace of lights marking the broad curve of the Thames.