“ The Mathamatical Charlady” Or “The Ressurrection of Bugsville” By Martha Hannah Mills ( 1893-1978)
Introduction:
Something about my great Aunt. She was a rough contemporary of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton. She did not spend her adolescent years reading Montaigne in French in her father’ s library in Bloomsbury . She spent it working in the mill from age 12, like everybody else she knew. In her case it was Kelsall and Kemp’s Hamer Mill, near her home in Halifax Road; Smallbridge, Rochdale, which she calls ’Bugsville’ in her book, because she does not want to be sued for defamation, by the victims of her Wrath. When I first read these tattered, dog-eared pages. I expected a vivid, socialist perspective on working life in early 20th. Century Rochdale; a sort of female ‘ Ragged Trousered Philanthropist’, but she was from the other side of the family.
Absolutely.
So, shifting my gaze, I thought; this is 'feminist' she was influenced by the emergent Suffragist movement the working class precursors of the suffragettes, before those middle- class ladies took all the headlines; not a bit of it, her wrath: her anger is of a different class altogether. I try to get a picture of her. I put to one side, the austere lady with the hat and fixed features who , with her massive friend from Vantona ,visited my grandfather at our house in the early 1970’s.I think of her writing her book as a young woman who had spent WW1 working long hours for little money making uniforms and blankets and underwear for men, who were off fighting the war. In 1918 there would have been men returning, but not so many and not the best men. She was of a generation of women who worked through that war, who bore the brunt of the food shortages and the flu epidemic of 1917/18 who witnessed at first hand the profiteering of the factory owners; who learnt how to borrow long and sell short, who learned how to make do on farthings and make farthings into pennies. That side of my family would call themselves careful and thrifty, I am the same,as a youngster I would would get off a bus two stops early to save myself a half-penny. I can remember my grandad, regularly giving me sixpence, a silver sixpence. He put the coin in the palm of my hand and carefully folded my little fingers over it. “ Keep it safe, don’t spend it all at once”. He would very slowly walk with me down Falinge Road to the post office by Hallows Chapel and watch me carefully in the shop to make sure I didn’t spend it. He would buy himself some pipe tobacco, and when we were back at his house he would fold a little ship out of the silver-paper wrapping the tobacco and give it to me, “ Tell your mum I’ve given you that sixpence.” He would say. I knew I would spend it on bus fares and bubbly gum for football cards or marbles, or maggots. It was mine. That side of the family, mum's side, Thrifty, careful people who had known poverty., but dragged themselves out of it, and fought in wars.
I don’t think women like her were influenced by suffragism: they were apolitical, but they talked, gossiped and out of them suffragism grew. It is all there in her book !
Beginnings: the title is notable for the misspelling of ‘ The Mathamatical Charlady or The Ressurrection of Bugsville.’ The text is full of mathematical puzzles, but the word is misspelled in the title. She misspells resurrection also. I taught English for twenty years so I corrected it automatically only now looking back do I notice the error. It was a beginning, she realised her mistake, could not correct, writing with a steel-nibbed pen, no ‘auto-correct’. The text is always straining for the ‘better word’ and as she writes I think she has a dictionary by her side. It is a world I can imagine, Halifax Road in the Early thirties, or earlier,: back to back houses, outside privies, front rooms and kitchens lit by paraffin or gas light , horses and carts, dark winters, long working hours, coal-fired ranges and cups of tea.. She was the seventh of thirteen children my gran was her big sister who managed the household for her mum. I see them as an aspirational family always inheriting and passing on bits of property opening clog shops. In the story one of the very few descriptions she gives is of a young woman, 'a pretty lady, refined and kindly, nicely built and a sensible woman indeed.‘That maid in a calico dress is probably how she wanted to be thought of; that is good enough for me She probably had a pale, round face and brown, intelligent eyes like my granny. But what shines out of her ‘book’ is an attitude. It is full of ideas for self-help, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I hear their voices. She writes of a world of Pawn Shops of buying things on the 'Never-never', of mills next door to farms of abattoirs and chickens: of football pools syndicates for people who who couldn’t read, but could afford a penny line, who couldn’t afford the postage or a newspaper to see the results. The victims of her book are ‘The get rich quick brigade’, who made money during the first world war and left the town afterwards, she goes into the local conflict between the woollen, worsted mills of her end of town and the cotton spinners and dyers of Whitworth and Spotland and Oldham Road. I am reminded of the Rochdale I knew as a child, where I could tell what part of town people were from, by their accents, Healey and Whitworth rolled there ‘r’s as you headed toward Burnley and Chorley and serious Lancashire. Halifax Road was broad vowels and very Yorkshire. Norden was split syllables as you headed toward Bolton,’ Nor-den’ , the other side of town towards Oldham and Castleton was of course, much more Manchester. Rochdale has always been a very mixed community, but what is noticeably absent from Martha’s book, is racism, there is massive and quite bitter local rivalry, but not based on religion or ethnicity. She writes of a world of teasing and practical jokes and scheming. I think of another of her contemporaries L.S Lowry and his painting ‘The fight’ where a bloke is pulling another fellow’s hat down over his ears, while women and children pass by. In Martha's book, though there is teasing, there is no sex or violence; well only a bit. Religion is a consistent sub-text. There is quotation of ‘Chapter and Verse’, literally; and some finger wagging. The chief protagonist is a very worthy mill owner, who is proper Dickensian in his desire to do right by people.He is a Church-going worthy, who wants to understand the changing world around him, the world of of the means test and the work house. He embarks on a journey of discovery,, No spoilers, but an awful lot happens, most of it crazy and unpredictable. The means test creates the world of the welfare scrounger, but that is not an insult, more a way of life.
Opening section: Martha may never have set foot in a ‘Gentleman’s Club’, she does not attempt to describe the scene; she notes that there are armchairs and, describes Mr. Bouncer; , but she has no qualms about what they would talk about. Mr. Kamm has progressive ideas. and is in woollens Mr. Bouncer is less progressive, but in cotton!
We do not know much about Martha’s employment history. How much of this ‘gentleman’s conversation' was general gossip from the pubs or from the street. Some of it might come from local small-scale publications. It reads to me like the articles that used to turn up in 1960’s copies of ‘The Dalesman, some may well have come from the local press;We need to scour old Rochdale Observers for evidence. In the 1921 Census, Martha was 28 years old, she was at home with her two brothers Charlie and Percy and her sister Eva, who was 25. Martha was working as a weaver 3 ( is this a high or low-skill job?) at Kelsall and Kemp, Flannel Manufacturer at Hamer Mill; Eva was a winder at Oswald and Duncan cotton at Mayfield Mill, Percy was 24 and worked as a clogger and boot repairer on his own account in Yorkshire Street Charlie was 19 and working as a grocer’s assistant at Rochdale Pioneers ( the Co-op) on Halifax Road. It is not hard to see where lively discussion about the relative merits of woollen and cotton manufacturing might have come from. I can picture the four of them, holding big mugs of tea and talking, both parents were at home too! It must have been ‘Gossip Central’ at tea-time..
For me this is what her book is about, Goings on in Smallbridge in the mid-1920’s but remembered later in her life: remembered not romanticised. I think of Martha sitting in the front room in the terraced-house on Halifax Road, furnished with a piano; her mum had insisted on a piano, a big status symbol before WW1, it was delivered on the milkman’s cart; with a piano and a table with one chair, she has a pile of faintly-lined paper a bottle of ink and a steel-nibbed pen. On the wall behind the piano she can see at the sampler that her Grandmother made years earlier “ In Memory of Dash” it reads “ He that is down shall fear no fall, He that is lowly no pride. He that is humble ever shall, have God to be his guide!” : “ Bugger that!” she thinks;, “I’m going to write a book!”