Cold supper at the launch of the Wellington administration?

Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, third marquess of Lansdowne.
  Illustrated London News, 14 February 1863.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lord_Henry_Petty.jpg

As British politics lurches into an alarmist general election campaign already high on accusations of conspiracy siege mentalities, it might be as well to be reminded that sometimes governments can be more gently subverted.

At the end of January 1828, George IV succeeded in persuading Arthur Wellesley, first duke of Wellington, to form a government. The previous administration, led by Frederick Robinson, Viscount Goderich, had been weak domestically and incompetent overseas. The king judged correctly that Wellington, whom most of the population at all social levels regarded with awe if with differing quantities of respect for his political views, would be better at managing a coalition of fractious personalities. His new government had to hold back as far as possible demands for political reform, quelling allegations of corruption among office-holders, and restoring Britain's reputation as an arbiter of Europe after Goderich had nearly drifted into war with the Ottoman Empire.

Inviting new colleagues to dinner, would, one would think, be one of the easiest tasks for a new prime minister of imperial Britain. However, The Examiner of 27 January 1828 reported:

The new Ministers were on Tuesday in attendance at the Royal Lodge, to receive their appointments. They remained till near eight o'clock in the evening, expecting a Clerk of the Council to arrive, to enable them to hold a Privy Council, but the orders for summoning a Council had, through some omission, not been issued. The Ministers did not arrive in London till ten o'clock at night, when the dinner given by the Duke of Wellington had been kept waiting for three hours. The omission to summon a Council rests, it is understood, with the Home office. - Court Circular.

Wellington had been among the new ministers at the Royal Lodge, Windsor, expecting to be able to begin the formal business of government immediately. Several of the departing ministers had been at Royal Lodge immediately before Wellington, including the outgoing Home Secretary, Lord Lansdowne (Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, third marquess). Lansdowne was one of the leading whigs who had been willing to serve under George Canning and then under Goderich in the two short-lived ministries of 1827, but was no admirer of Wellington's conservatism. Perhaps failing to arrange for a privy council to be held immediately on the appointment of the new ministry was a deliberate snub. In a time well before microwaves, when a nobleman was judged by the quality of the food served on his table, there was perhaps no better revenge than letting food either go cold or be overdone.

The Oxford Dictionary of Ponteland Biography

In the past few days I visited Ponteland Methodist Church to give a talk to their Men's Forum entitled The Oxford Dictionary of Ponteland Biography. This was an exploration of how the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a major reference work covering over 60,000 lives from Britain, Ireland, colonies and other associated territories, can illustrate the history of localities including Ponteland. I've been associated with the dictionary for nearly twenty years, including seven years on the research staff and over ten now as a consultant. I grew up in Ponteland and return regulary.

A search for Ponteland under the 'People' tab revealed a limited sample. Only six subjects had life events located in Ponteland, all concentrated at the end of the period. The earliest was the Newcastle banker Ralph Carr, who was buried in Ponteland in 1806, and the most recent the paediatrician Hugh Jackson, who died in 2013; his final address was Ponteland Manor residential care home.

Searching for Ponteland in full text was more helpful. Although this query still only revealed eleven subjects, the first four of these were all connected with Merton College, Oxford, whose church Ponteland was and is. These included Walter of Merton himself, but also John Ashenden (d. in or before 1368?), who probably came from Ashington in Northumberland, but spent most of his life in Oxford as a fellow of Merton College and a member of Oxford's circle of astrologers and astronomers. William Heytesbury (d. 1372/3) was another Merton fellow, whose journey from Oxford to Ponteland in 1337 or 1338 was accounted for in a document which survives: Heytesbury and his colleague covered 246 miles in seven or eight days, and the cost of their food and drink, the fodder for their horses, and of crossing major rivers can all still be examined.

Other articles suggest questions which deserve further exploration, such as Sir Nathanael Brent's (1573/4-1652) tenure of Ponteland rectory as a private leaseholder (though holding it on another's behalf) during the Commonwealth, revealed in his will at his death. While Brent had been no admirer of the politics and churchmanship of Charles I and William Laud, and at first complied with the demands of the Puritan regime, he was eventually forced from his wardenship of Merton by the parliamentary visitors, and one wonders whether he held property from Merton that might have actually benefited others out of favour with the regime. The engineer Thomas Sopwith (1803-1879), grandfather of the aeronautical pioneer, laid out a route for the Ponteland Turnpike in 1830, still largely the line the modern A696/A68 road from Prestwick Road Ends to Carter Bar, but later became an agent for the lead mines owned by the Beaumont family in Allendale, His clashes with striking and (of specific interest to the audience) largely Primitive Methodist miners led to large-scale emigration from the dale in 1849.

I also looked slightly further afield to Stamfordham. Results are skewed by the decision of the royal private secretary Arthur Bigge to take Stamfordham as his peerage title; but of the eight articles which concern the village and not the lord, there are many hints about early modern Northumberland's make-up, such as the Presbyterian Widdringtons of Cheeseburn Grange, just east of Stamfordham, one of whom (Thomas) was speaker of the House of Commons under the Cromwellian Protectorate, and another the scholar Ralph Widdrington, who rode out the Civil Wars and Interregnum at Christ's, Cambridge, despite gaps in his tenure, with appoitments under Cromwell and then Charles II. Nearby Bitchfield was the home of a branch of the Fenwick family who produced John Fenwick, a Covenanter prominent in the Scottish administration of Newcastle in 1640-1, and subseqently a parliamentary army officer, though his career in the 1640s and 1650s seems to have been that of a distinguished elder statesman.

Where in the seventeenth century tensions between episcopalian and Presbyterian in Northumberland might break out into armed conflict relating to disputes within England and Scotland, in the Stamfordham of nineteenth-century Britain matters were more measured. Two Presbyterian ministers from nineteenth-century Stamfordham are in the dictionary, Robert Gillan and William Fisken. Both came from Scotland and while Gillan returned, eventually holding a professorship at the University of Glasgow, Fisken remained, inventing a steam plough and also serving as secretary to Stamfordham Endowed School. What precisely happened to that, one of the endowed grammar schools of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reformed in the nineteenth, I have yet to find out. 

Friendliness and curiosity from an audience are always welcome and the enthusiasm of those present for the dictionary's live search facility and the capacity for expansion of the online dictionary was palpable. A tour of popular culture figures, Methodist laymen and businesspeople not only reminded me to show the only article to mention Darras Hall, that on Sir Lawrie Barratt, whose company built many of the homes in the area - there were cries of 'Greensitt and Barratt' from the audience who remember the company before it was Barratt Developments - but also draw attention to the portraits used in articles which are often not straightforward headshots, as seen in Mike Owen's progression of rectangles within which Barratt, arms themselves suggesting a right angle, is incorporated.

Other topics of discussion involved prominent Methodist laymen, with one candidate for future inclusion receiving wide support, the leading Methodist preacher of the early nineteenth century, Mary Porteous, and Methodist churchmen whose careers took them through the north-east such as Gordon Wakefield. We could all happily have continued, I suspect. This was one of the last hurrahs for the old search mechanism, as a new public interface for the Dictionary should be online later in 2017. It was good to put the present one through its paces again - it's still very effective in its thirteenth year.

Revised 1703 to include more text and links to ODNB articles (if logged in) or the Oxford Index (if not).

Revised 12 April 2017 to include details of my personal connections with Ponteland and with the ODNB.

Woodstock and Bladon News: cafes and buses

Woodstock and Bladon News,
February 2017

About 500 of those who read my irregular posts here have visited for my history of Ponteland newspapers (of which the printed version in Pont Island News for 2012 adds more context ), but in these ages of regionalised news hubs an increasing amount of local journalism is voluntary. The Woodstock and Bladon News has been published for several years, but has recently acquired a new editor and publisher, Peter Jay, former mayor of Woodstock and sometime British ambassador to the United States, but whose first public role in my memory was as presenter of London Weekend Television's Sunday lunchtime current affairs programme for ITV, Weekend World, although my memory doesn't stretch quite as far back as this interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It's encouraging to see the Woodstock and Bladon News evolve over the two months Peter Jay has conducted it - the publication is now printed rather than photocopied, has colour on the front and back pages, and has attracted several new correspondents. Rachel Phipps of The Woodstock Bookshop has written on new retail arrivals, particularly cafés - I had no idea Woodstock now has a vegan café next to the church, for example, and will try it.

An issue which makes a subtle mark on the front cover is the current competition for bus passengers in Woodstock. This is not as major a conflict as the series of intermittent commercial skirmishes between the Oxford Bus Company (since 1994 part of Go-Ahead) and Thames Transit (since 1997 owned by Stagecoach and trading under local variants of its parent company's name) which lasted between 1987 and the establishment of joint ticketing on major city routes under the Oxford Bus Partnership in 2011. Nevertheless, the decision of Oxford Bus Company to extend their Park and Ride 500 service (which never seemed to me as well-supported as their other Park and Ride routes) north from Oxford Parkway railway station through Kidlington and Yarnton, and the response by Stagecoach in Oxfordshire, who for several years have had a monopoly on Woodstock to Oxford bus transport on a lone route via Begbroke and Yarnton, to defend it by launching their own route 7 largely duplicating the extended 500 route, risked disruption. As the cover shows, Oxford Bus Company have chosen to turn their buses around at the Town Hall rather than proceed further north to the quieter and less congested Vermont Drive; this has caused traffic problems, including issues with disabled drivers parking in extremis on yellow lines at times when there is no on-street parking available, as is the case for much of the day. The 7 timetable shadows the 500 closely and the two buses often reach the Marlborough Arms stop at the same time.

Oxford Bus Company Park and Ride 500
 behind Stagecoach in Oxfordshire Gold 7,
outside the Marlborough Arms, Oxford Street, Woodstock,
 pictured by Matthew Kilburn on 6 February 2017

In the case pictured here the 7 was able to park first, but most waiting passengers seemed to want the longer-established route, now numbered S3. So far neither the county council nor the bus operators show signs of sorting this out; at the moment a useful connection to Kidlington and Oxford Parkway, which will surely be busier in spring and summer as tourists find a new public transport route to Blenheim Palace without having to navigate central Oxford, seems endangered by the splitting of a small clientele between two firms. A further advantage is the increased connectivity between Woodstock and Oxford in evenings which will surely help the literary and poetry festivals and other events.