All this, it is true, was much later, in the 1870s – Sarah, indeed, was a long time adying – when the brothers themselves were past their peak and young Arthur, Sarah’s grandson, George’s son, was already the driving force of the Atkinson machine. Yet even in 1820, the year of the shocking event, it was put about by certain omen-loving and sourly witty parties that when Thomas Atkinson devised his company emblem, so neatly denoting both his Brewery and Navigation interests, of the crossed barley ears over a symbolic representation of water, and cast
about for a motto to go with it, he chose unwisely. For the motto which he chose –
Ex Aqua Fermentum
– which was once engraved in huge arched capitals over the main entrance to the New Brewery and which appeared on the label of every bottle of Atkinson beer, does indeed mean, simply, ‘Out of Water, Ale’, and can even be construed, as perhaps Thomas intended, ‘Out of Water, Activity’; but it can also be interpreted, as surely Thomas never meant: ‘Out of Water, Perturbation’.
Children, you are right. There are times when we have to disentangle history from fairy-tale. There are times (they come round really quite often) when good dry textbook history takes a plunge into the old swamps of myth and has to be retrieved with empirical fishing lines. History, being an accredited sub-science, only wants to know the facts. History, if it is to keep on constructing its road into the future, must do so on solid ground. At all costs let us avoid mystery-making and speculation, secrets and idle gossip. And, for God’s sake, nothing supernatural. And above all, let us not tell
stories.
Otherwise, how will the future be possible and how will anything
get done
? So let us get back to that clear and purified air and old Tom tucked up in his new white grave. Let us get back to solid ground …
In 1830 – when in Paris the barricades go up again, the mob once more invades the Tuileries and the air is full not only of smoke and revolution but of the heady scent of
déjà vu
– George Atkinson marries Catherine Anne Goodchild, daughter of the leading banker of Gildsey. A marriage in every way predictable, laudable and satisfactory. In 1832 – for the brothers conducted their lives to a pattern and in almost all things Alfred, being two years the junior, did what his brother did, only two years later – Alfred married
Eliza Harriet Bell, the daughter of a farmer who owned land on both banks of the Leem to the west of Apton, once drained and sold to him by Thomas. A marriage less predictable and laudable for though everyone can see how Alfred is consolidating the navigation interest, this is not a prosperous time for farmers of the likes of James Bell.
Was this Sarah’s work? Was it she who saw what a handsome profit James Bell’s wheat would fetch in the post-Repeal era of the ’50s and ’60s? And was it she who saw how the Norwich, Gildsey, and Peterborough Railway, which in 1832 was but a tentative pencil-mark in some planner’s rough-book, must one day pass through James Bell’s land, either north or south of the river? When the time came, James Bell would be readily persuaded to hold out for two years to the railway company – not just so that, when he finally sold, it would be at double the price, but so that Eliza’s husband and brother-in-law could complete in the interval the replacement of draught-horses, quant-poles and sails by steam-barges and narrow steam-tugs on the Leem.
Thus the brothers Atkinson would ensure that steam would compete with steam, and that when the railway came it would still be cheaper to freight bulk goods to and from Gildsey by river. And thus the Norwich, Gildsey and Peterborough Railway was mainly a passenger service; just as it was still when, as part of the Great Eastern Railway, its varnished teak carriages were the scenes of daily assignations between a boy in a black uniform and a girl in a rust-red one.
Sarah’s work perhaps. But let us keep to the facts. In 1834 Catherine Anne gives birth to a strapping son, Arthur George. In 1836 Eliza Harriet bears a daughter, Louisa Jane. In 1836, likewise, but after the birth of Louisa Jane, Catherine Anne is delivered also of a daughter, Dora Emily. In 1838— But in 1838, for once, Alfred does not observe the two-year principle and does not complete the square by fathering a son of his own. And there, indeed, in
1838, with a round total of three – and only one male child, what’s more, on whom to place the hopes of the future – the Atkinson progeny reaches its limit. No unusual thing in our own times, but unusual in 1838 when successful men of business were given to make children as they made money, and were further spurred by the knowledge – George and Alfred had but to think of their own short-lived brother and sister – that to be certain of one heir it is well to beget several.
If they had not so revered the two brothers, if the brothers’ fortunes were not so inseparable from their own and if the brothers had not built such a fine tomb for their unhappy father, the people of Gildsey might have reflected on this state of affairs. They might have reflected upon the four-year period after marriage before, in the case of both couples, conception was achieved. They might have connected the brothers’ habitual air of stern and implacable purpose with a certain frosty forlornness about both their otherwise charming wives; and connected this in turn with a certain fulsome affection they were wont to display, even in public, to their ribboned and crinolined daughters. They might have concluded that the nuptial squeaks and squeals that once old Tom and Sarah had raised at Kessling did not find an echo in the pious atmosphere of Cable House; and that this was how the Guardian Angel wrought her magic. In short, the brothers were inhibited by that woman up there in that upper room. In short, the townsfolk might have diagnosed, had they been acquainted with a form of magic not then invented, the classic symptoms of the Mother Fixation, not to say the Oedipal Syndrome. And was it not possible that the tireless industry of George and Alfred was nothing other than Sexual Energy which, like Fenland water, cannot be subdued but can be pumped into new channels?
But, facts, facts. In 1833 the new wharves, known collectively as Gildsey Dock, with their warehouses, derricks, pony-pulled railway trucks and their sister
installation across the Ouse at Newhithe, are officially opened. Simultaneously, the Atkinson Water Transport Company, with its soon-to-be extended fleet of three steam-tugs, four steam-barges, six sail-barges and forty-six lighters – not to mention the craft already at work on the Leem – is inaugurated. Within a few years, malt and barrels of ale are no longer the prime, though they are still the most honoured, cargo of the Atkinson vessels. Nor is the Leem the chief artery of their trade. The Atkinson barges go as far afield as Huntingdon, Bedford, Peterborough and Northampton. They ship grain to King’s Lynn, and Tyne coal and continental produce back again. They carry iron, timber, agricultural machinery, bricks, stone, hemp, oil, tallow, flour.
When work begins, in 1839, on the Norwich and Gildsey, and the Ipswich, Bury and Gildsey Railways, it is the Atkinson Transport Company which brings supplies and even Atkinson expertise which advises on such matters as drainage and embanking. The townsfolk are dismayed. Will we not lose our trade, they demand, to the railways? And the brothers reply: And would you lose your markets to some other town served by steam-trains? For the brothers foresee (Sarah’s work?) that what the railway may take in long-haul trade, they regain in short-haul traffic in goods brought by the railway itself. Can trains deliver coal to every pumping-station in the region? Can trains bring goods to every village in this land where people are naturally settled beside water? And, pray, compare our rates of carriage with those of the Railway Company.
Besides, the brothers hold substantial shares in the railways. In these times of change, it is best to be sure.
And not the least of those many materials ferried into the new Dock (and in this case not ferried out again) were the materials used between 1846 and 1849 in the construction of the New Atkinson Brewery. For let us not forget that the name of Atkinson is first and foremost the name of
a beer. Even as the dock is completed, space has been set aside for the grand building which must one day replace the enlarged but soon-to-be inadequate old brewery. And, little by little, in those mid-century years, the edifice rises.
It is not vast, by modern standards; but as its foundation stones give way to its part brick and part stone-faced walls, and as its brick and stone-faced walls give way to elaborately embellished cornices and friezes (a chain of barley sheaves and beer casks) and a roof part gabled and part widely arched in the manner of railway termini, and as this roof leads on, in turn, to a four-sided chimney, sixty-six feet high, the sides tapering upwards and faced with brickwork fluting, and the whole crowned beneath the vent, by more ornate moulding and friezing (of indeterminate style but said by the architect to suggest an Italian campanile) and, for good measure, a clock, by which all Gildsey, and half the Fens if they possess a spyglass, can tell the time – as all this rises up and draws with it the gaze of the gaping inhabitants, a joke originates: that the New Brewery must surely cause a new flooding of the Fens, but not a flooding of water – a flooding of beer.
Sarah hears, in her room, the sounds of work in progress. There comes a time when above the crooked house-tops on the northern side of Water Street appear scaffolding, the tops of cranes and hoists, then the iron skeleton of the roof itself, over which workmen crawl and strut, as if on some giant flying-machine. Then the chimney, phallically rising to abash the Fenland sky. Does she notice? Does she care? Is she pleased, is she proud? No record notes that she is present among the guests of honour on that day in June, 1849, outdoing for splendour even that former day of triumph in 1815, when a band played once more, when no less than two Lords were in attendance, when speeches rang out first from a flag-bedecked rostrum and again at the Grand Reception in the Town Hall; when the Atkinson bargees raised their caps and sounded the horns of their steam-barges, when the
crowd hurrahed and the first ceremonial shovelfuls of malt-grist were loaded into the mashing tuns. But was she there in spirit – cheering with the rest of them? Or was she still, in her upper room, keeping her watch over Nothing?
When can we fix the zenith of the Atkinsons? When can we date the high summer of their success? Was it on that June day in 1849? Or was it later, in 1851, when among the products privileged to be represented at the Great Exhibition was a bottled ale from the Fens, known appropriately as Grand ’51, which, in the face of strong competition, won a silver medal for excellence, outdoing even the noble brewers of Burton-on-Trent? Was it before that, in 1846, when having served his six years as alderman of the town, George Atkinson was unanimously elected mayor? Or was it in 1848 (two years later) when his brother Alfred succeeded to the same office, and the tacit principle became established that whoever, thereafter, would be nominal and official mayor, the true mayoralty of the town would belong always to its brewers?
Was it in 1862? When George and Alfred, stout men now with greying whiskers, as old as the ageing century, decided that their labours had earned them the right to stylish seclusion, to a rural retreat to complement the bustle of the town; and so had built at Kessling, though not near the maltings and their father’s former residence but a good mile or more to the south, an opulently ugly country mansion, Kessling Hall, complete with gargoyles and turrets, happily concealed by thick woods, where at weekends or for longer sojourns George and Catherine would occupy one wing and Alfred and Eliza another, but would meet together in the Long Room or the Dining Room to entertain visiting men of rank and their families; and where the cousins, Dora and Louisa, young ladies in their mid-twenties – but not so young that they did not give cause for recurrent concern – would suffer and deter, on the Terrace, or the Croquet Lawn, suitor after suitor.
For they preferred, above all suitors, their darling Papas, and to the company of young men that of each other, and perhaps a volume of moody verse.
Or was the pinnacle not yet reached, even in the luxury of Kessling Hall? Was it not, indeed, to be reached during the ascendancy of George and Alfred but during that of Arthur, who, as his father and uncle puffed their proud cigars at Kessling, was already assuming command at Gildsey, and who, in 1872 – as Atkinson Ale was in demand over all the eastern counties, and as a special pale brew known as Atkinson India Ale was being regularly shipped thousands of miles to Bombay – added yet another province (in well-tried manner) to the Atkinson dominions, by marrying Maud Briggs, daughter of Robert Briggs, owner of the Great Ouse Flour Mills?
Is there no end to the advance of commerce? But should we speak only of the advance of commerce, and not of the advance of Ideas – those Ideas which the Atkinsons cannot help conceiving? For these present Atkinsons, brothers and son, though they would be the first, if need be, to point with rigid fingers to facts – to figures of profit and sale, to sacks of malt, barrels of ale, chaldrons of coal – are apt also, when the mood takes them, which it does more and more, to make light of these material burdens, and to assert in almost self-renouncing tones that what moves them is indeed none other than that noble and impersonal Idea of Progress.
Have they not brought improvement to a whole region, and do they not continue to bring it? Do they not travail long and indefatigably in the council chamber as well as in the boardroom, for the welfare of the populace? Have they not established, out of their own munificence, an orphanage, a town newspaper, a public meeting-hall, a boys’ school (black uniform), a bath-house – a fire station? And are not all these works, and others, proof of that great Idea that sways them; proof that all private interest is subsumed by the National Interest and all
private empires do but pay tribute to the Empire of Great Britain?
What is happening to our little Fenland outpost, once but a mud hump with a wattle chapel, once so removed from the wide world?