On the 21st May 2025 Ian Grainger gave a talk on Thomas Haswell - The Musical Maister. The text of the talk is reproduced in full below. 

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Thomas Haswell, The Musical Maister (for the Northumbria Club, 21.5.25)

My first talk as Chairman, was entitled “George Macaulay Trevelyan, a passion for walking in Northumberland and Italy”.  Trevelyan was a great historian and writer, a public figure, not just in the North East but nationally, and indeed to some extent abroad, particularly in Italy.  By way of contrast, my subject tonight, Thomas Haswell, while much respected and much loved for his talents as a teacher and a musician, operated on a decidedly more local scale.  The Trevelyans of Wallington were wealthy, and socially and intellectually extremely well-connected but Haswell was firmly a man of the people, of humble Tyneside origins and a man who spent most of his years teaching the children of the poor.  So you are getting a complete contrast.  

Our sources of information and some basic facts

For the most part, the little I know about Thomas Haswell (SLIDE 2) has been gleaned from the book entitled “The Maister, A Century of Tyneside Life” written by one of his sons, George H. Haswell.  (Revealingly, the H in the author’s name stands for Handel so his full name was George Handel Haswell.  But we’ll get to the father’s obsession with music later on!)  The son’s book was published in 1895, six years after the old man had died and its full title is The Maister- A Century of Tyneside Life.  Being some account of the life and work and times of THOMAS HASWELL - who for close on fifty years was Master of the Royal Jubilee Schools at North Shields – and of a notable essay in the education of the people.  That means, I think, an account of a notable experiment in the education of the people.  My copy was bought, by post, from Steedmans of Grey Street in 1980 and I paid the princely sum of £15 for it, it being as Mr Steedman observes in his letter “a scarce and wanted book”.  I have put the book out along with Mr Steedman’s letter.  By all means, have a quick peep but please be careful with both: the book is a first edition.  I’ve read the book twice, once back in 1980 and once in preparation for tonight.  It is a very easy and spirited read, largely I think – and this is important - because it deals not just with the facts of his father’s life but also, as vital background, with the changing social conditions of Tyneside in general and of North Shields in particular through the various stages of that life.  As one reads it, one is constantly struck by just how different life was, by how much one takes for granted in modern life: although many things had improved by the time Haswell died, much of his life was spent in an age before gas or electric light, when decent food and clothing were something many people simply had to do without much of the time and when death or serious injury were commonplace companions of work.  The Borough of Tynemouth was not founded until 1849, at which point Haswell was 42.  Here is its coat of arms.  (SLIDE 3)  Its motto was Messis ab Altis, commonly translated as We reap the harvest of the deep, the deep referring to the sea and to the mines.  The shield of the three kings buried at Tynemouth Priory was there on the borough’s crest but it was flanked by a sailor and a miner.  In both those trades, Death sadly but constantly reaped very fruitful harvests.  

Another thing that one should not forget is that at the start of the nineteenth century Shields was still in essence the long narrow street winding along the river margin.  Here is an old map.  (SLIDE 4)

And that part of Shields at any rate was pretty tough.  This is how the editor of the Shields Gazette wrote of it:

 

Farewell to Shields, the filthiest place

On old Northumbria’s dirty face,

The coal-hole of the British nation

The fag-end of the whole creation.

…

A mass of houses - not a toon –

On heaps of cinders squatted doon

Close to the river’s oozy edge.  (William Brockie)

 

Apart from the parish church, Christ Church, most of the more handsome buildings up on the higher parts of the banks were only to come later.  Christ Church (SLIDE 5) was built in the 1660’s to replace Tynemouth Priory as the parish church but it was restored and rebuilt in the 1790’s.  One other building that came fairly soon after that, early in the nineteenth century, was The Royal Jubilee School, just opposite the church.  (SLIDE 6) The Jubilee in question was the golden jubilee of George III in 1810.  There was much debate locally as to how to this event should be marked, some calling for an illumination (for fireworks essentially as in “Blackpool Illuminations”) but others were for an educational project.  Some opposed the educational idea altogether (one well-heeled lament was “Education for the Poor – we’ll soon have no servants”).  But the debate was apparently much swayed when it was announced that in a moment of lucidity, His Majesty had expressed the desire or at least was reported to have expressed the desire that “every poor child in the kingdom should be able to read his Bible”.  I think that wish was inscribed on the school building itself, though I’m not certain.  In any event, in 1810, a committee of subscribers was set up and in June the foundation stone was laid at a public ceremony.  It was opposite Christ Church, just near where the “Keel Row” bookshop was until recently.  It was a religious school as one can tell from the firmly biblical flavour of its book purchases but it was not an Anglican church school.  A boy attending the school had also to attend some place of Christian worship on a Sunday (there were monitors sent round to make sure that you did) but it did not have to be Christ Church.

So that was the town and the school.  Let us turn to the man.  At the time of its formal opening, in October 1811, Haswell was only a toddler, not quite 4.  He was born on 8.12.07.  His father, George, was a mariner, sailing all over the world.  His mother came from the Isle of Man and his parents actually met and married in Liverpool.  They were then parted by George’s voyaging and it was not until 3 years after their marriage that they settled down at a pub, called “The Three Legs of Man”, on the lower street of Shields.  They went on to have 9 children, only 4 of whom lived to be adults, our hero being one.  That fact – less than half of your children surviving – is of course another terrible way in which this was a very different world.  

George Haswell found running a pub tedious – he had briefly been involved in foying, that is towing ships in and out of harbour, at this stage around Tynemouth Bar, and later he owned two keels bringing coals down from Wallsend.  There is a detailed account of one occasion when a gale blew him and a mate on his keel out to sea, where they had to spend a couple of terrifying nights before managing to land at Druridge Bay.

Anyhow, in 1815, the year of Waterloo, at the age of 8, their son Thomas was admitted as a pupil to the Royal Jubilee.  To begin with, it was mostly reading scripture and other religious material, though later on writing and arithmetic were adventured upon.  As he himself later described it:

The renowned three R’s were driven forward at a pretty rapid rate, followed closely by, not a Manx cat, but one with the more orthodox nine tails, which seemed to have discovered the long-sought perpetual motion.  For it never ceased during school-hours, but indeed made itself evident to all our five senses; and we could see, feel, hear, taste, and even smell it from morning till night. (p.95)

So, very basic learning and very strict discipline from the age of 8 to 11.  Then, as was usual, he left, initially to help his father on the river; then at 12 to grind lenses for a maker of watch crystals; at 13 he became an errand boy; and at 15 he was bound apprentice for 6 years to a Master Painter.  Being a master painter meant upmarket painting and decorating, not easel painting, though it perhaps included inn and shop signs and the like and certainly the decorating of some fairly grand properties, not just in the NE.  It may partly have been through a shared work-history in painting that Haswell came to develop his life-long devotion to music.  At 16 he joined the choir of Christ Church and as his son put it, acquired a complete knowledge of vocal music.  Let me read you a couple of passages which hopefully give a hint of the magic which can surround the musical parts of this book.  And as I read them, bear in mind that this was a pre-technological age: no tapes, no records, no mobile phones.  No music at all unless you made it for yourself, either with friends and family, or in the pub or in church.  

The choir-master, Thomas Oxley, a fine old worthy with an unquenchable passion for music, took an immediate interest in the young recruit, and gave him every opportunity for pursuing his studies that a scanty leisure afforded.  Oxley, himself a quondam journeyman painter, combined the duties of parish clerk with those of choir-master.  ‘He possessed the most charming voice I ever heard – a baritone of unusual compass, its quality of surpassing sweetness, power, and expression.  It was, at that time, the custom at funerals for the clerk to sing two or three verses of a psalm, and music being a sacred matter with the old teacher, it was a delightful thing to hear his beautiful voice swelling out in devotional fervour as he sang ’The Old Hundred’ or ‘Rockingham’, or some other of the lovely old ‘tunes’ that the modern hymn has disfigured or displaced; and wayfarers, seeing him, left their present purpose to follow on into the quiet and empty church, where in rapt silence, and not seldom with tears in their eyes, they listened to the echoing strains of his lonely requiem.’  (p.98)

[It was only after reading this that I remembered that on another corner of the crossroads where school and church stood, there was (and I think still is a pub called “The Old Hundred”.]  There is also a revealing description of how Oxley trained people and of how he got hold of his music:

“Oxley’s standard of excellence was an exacting one – his training rigorous and stern.  In summer-time the choir practice was held in the church at six o’clock in the morning, and as the organist could not be induced to attend at such an unheard-of hour, the singers had a hard and wholesome drill at the hands of the testy old master.  The whole of the music was manuscript, for at that time the heavy cost of printed anthems and oratorios placed them entirely out of the reach of all but cathedral and other leading choirs.  Pilgrimages therefore were made – piously and laboriously – to Durham, or York or Beverley, where the privilege was craved of being allowed to copy out some treasure in the way of a new anthem, or service, or kyrie, or chant, by some noted contemporary composer; and the veneration in which such copies were held may be estimated from the perfect state of preservation in which they came down to later years, notwithstanding their continual use at the numerous choir practices and services of the church.  (p.100)

So much musical do it yourself.  Oxley’s own tastes seem to have been fairly old-fashioned, Handel, Corelli and the like. But, somehow or other, Haswell learnt how to sing and how to read and to play music.  At 16, he began playing the bugle in a military or brass band.  The band would march down to Tynemouth where at Easter there were races on the sands and what is described as a “hoppin” in the village.  On the sands, they encountered a wandering clarionet player who opined that Haswell’s ear was so good that he should be the leader of the band and should learn the clarionet.  A few weeks on, Haswell was indeed made bandmaster.  

Another sign of another age – the band was once shipped off (quite literally) to Alnmouth to play for one of the candidates at the hustings in the 1826 election in Alnwick.  The band was playing for a Mr Lidell, one of the Tory candidates.  One shudders to think of the row if the other 3 candidates also had bands!  And finally, towards the end of his apprenticeship, Haswell began secret attempts to play on the organ in Christ Church, at 6 in the morning.  He feared discovery but simply could not resist the temptation:

“At length, the question as to how the organ was to be locked up again without my being detected came upon my mind, and with it the conviction that condign punishment must certainly be meted out to the miscreant guilty of so sacrilegious an act as mine.  However, I discovered that I could lock the door as easily as open it, and so I escaped.  This method of learning was by no means to my taste, but I could not help myself.  I knew of no other way in which to secure the chance of touching the grand instrument, and my desire to learn was so great that I could not overcome it.”  (p. 107)

He asked the existing organist to give him lessons.  This gent came down from Newcastle to spend Saturday and Sunday nights in Shields on either side of Sunday’s services: he also seems to have liked the bottle.  For that or some other reason, the organist was once taken ill during a service and Haswell was asked to take over, which temporarily he did, though he was not actually to become organist and choir master in charge of all the music at Christ Church until 1851.  

As well as the business of self-education in music, self-education in many other areas was going on apace.  He seems to have been a voracious reader with a pronounced taste for the practical and the scientific.  Nor was he based exclusively on Tyneside at this stage: in the summer, the painting work took him away, for example (by coach!) down to Maidstone in Kent, there was work in London and also in rural Northumberland, for example at Bamburgh (church and castle) and at Belford.  At Bamburgh, he got to know the musical vicar and the sister of Grace Darling and he also managed a musical jaunt to Edinburgh.  [This short passage, though I do not completely understand it, is for the viola lovers among us:

“I well remember that during our Bamburgh campaign in 1829 we went down to Edinburgh for two or three days, and that one night in the Theatre Royal, between the acts, the orchestra played a slow, soft piece, in which I detected a peculiar and novel effect for which I could in no way account.  Creeping round the gallery, which was but thinly filled, until I could see the whole of the band, I soon perceived that the sounds referred to were produced by two fiddles larger than the ordinary violin – tenors, in fact.  This was my first introduction to the viola, an instrument which never fails to delight me when I hear it.” (p.110)]

Of course, books as well as music were available in all these places that he visited.  And Haswell had very wide tastes and interests.  He was one of those establishing the Tynemouth Amateur Musical Society which gave monthly subscription concerts in the winter but he was also involved in the group which revived the local Mechanics’ Institute with, in due course, its large library.  

Finally, he decided to become a teacher.  In early 1839, by now 32, he got a post at the Westoe Lane Schools in South Shields: he had already begun arranging various bits of Handel and Haydn for the Glass Makers Band in South Shields, which they used to perform in the market place.  That musical connection seems to have continued for some years but Haswell’s teaching south of the river was short lived: only a few months later, the Mastership of the Royal Jubilee School in North Shields became available, he applied and was selected.  The job came with a house beside the school and in his second year there, he married Matilda Preston Armstrong.  They went on to have 7 children there, including the George Handel who wrote the book.         

Now, I have taken so long to get to this stage, dwelling on the Maister’s personal background and early musical enthusiasms that I shall have to be more concise hereafter.  That is not difficult.  A general explanation of Haswell’s methods as a teacher is not only possible but sufficient: that he was extremely good at teaching is quite obvious from the way in which he came to be loved and from the very considerable length of his service at the school.  The other side of his life, the music, is not easy to expand upon much further, because while he seems to have written a lot both for the church and for more secular purposes, I have found it quite impossible to find any examples to play to you.  Further, I am myself musically far too ignorant to be able to judge, without hearing it, how good anything that he produced actually was.  However, here goes: a few words on Haswell’s methods at the Royal Jubilee and on his career there and then a few words on his own music.

The School and Haswell’s teaching there

He came back 21 years after he left as a schoolboy.  In most respects, things had not changed at all.  There were at first only about 40 boys, all taught in one big barn-like room, though this was done with the help of monitors, that is by teaching through other boys.  The walls were whitewashed and there were large windows.  There was a fire at each end.  However, aids to the art of teaching were few.  At one end, painted on the wall were all the letters of the alphabet, both capitals and lower case.  At the other end, was painted a list of benefactors, with His Grace (inevitably) at the top.  In between were the boys, many of whom were very poor and some still barefoot.  From the word go, Haswell went at innovation and at tools of the art with a vengeance.  In the first year, unsurprisingly, he started singing lessons which despite being viewed by many locals as totally unorthodox were extremely successful and popular with the boys.  Haswell erected a huge music board to display the staves and the notes.  On one long side of the room, after a year or so, he drew and painted two “terrestrial hemispheres”, as an aid to teaching geography, a subject obviously of huge use in a sailing community.  Each hemisphere was 8 feet in diameter but his previous work as a painter allowed Haswell to do all the work himself.  Later again, feeling the need for something more tactile and readily comprehensible, he bought two large globes, at his own expense, one terrestrial and one celestial.  This purchase allowed lessons however rudimentary in astronomy, again something of great utility to those lads likely to spend years navigating at sea, often in the pitch dark.  

More basic arts were not neglected but broadened and made more inviting.  The Bible was still read of course but in place of the other old religious texts, the boys were now introduced to literature.  As well as Robinson Crusoe and Scott’s Waverley, they got Don Quixote, “Humboldt, Mungo Park, the inestimable voyages and travels of Pinkerton, and all the Arctic exploration books”.  Note that as well as the obvious “greats”, he also taught them natural science – Humboldt – and histories of voyages and travel which were likely to go down well with the children of seafaring folk.  The very youngest children were helped on the road towards these delights with their spelling and definitions by a strange machine called an alphabet mill.  There were also talks to the boys by local personalities and occasional trips out, for example to see land surveying in operation.  And in the school yard, Haswell erected an enormous mast covered with ropes so that hands on nautical tasks could be practised as well as giving the lads some physical exercise.  

In short, the numbers of boys attending the school boomed and Haswell came, over the years, to be a much loved and respected figure.  He was there for 47 years, retiring at the age of 80, in 1886.  He can, quite simply, never have stopped.  After his 12th year, he was also the organist and in charge of all the music at Christ Church.  There is perhaps a slight temptation to over-simplify and over-romanticise Haswell’s story but the hard background to it was all too simple and absolutely not romantic.  Some of the lads who turned up for his lessons every day came not from Shields itself but from some distance away in what were then the surrounding rural and mining districts.  They were not fed at school and they brought their own food, such as it was or wasn’t.  The worst cases of under-nourishment seem to have been discreetly sent round the back for Mrs Haswell to provide some sort of helping hand in her already over-stretched kitchen.  But the hard background to the following beautiful passage is all too real.

“Sometimes on a drear afternoon in late November the darkness settled down prematurely.  The vane on the old church when last looked at was swirling wildly, the dripping rain-drops blowing out from the eaves almost horizontally before the wild blast that has been working up wrathfully since morning.  The roar in the chimney and the whistle through the key-holes and crannies rise now and again to a shriek, and the storm cloud blackens every hour.  It is, as yet, not nearly the time for dispersal, but the boys must bend over the desks with faces close to their slates to see their work. 

With a strange look on his face the Maister takes his place at his desk and slowly reaches out for the bell with which he is accustomed to summon attention.  Glancing up, for a moment, at the thundering windows as a heavier squall strikes them and carries past a hurling burden of seaweed, foam and sand, and then looking down with grave face at the long line of heads (now almost invisible) busied with no thought of peril, and full of the heedless things of youth – he pauses again.

For he knows that Death is busy this afternoon with some of their homes, and that – certain as Death itself – at roll-call next morning Dixon, or Boyce, or little Thomson will be returned absent, and that some shrill voice will utter the quite familiar explanation –

“Pleese, sir, his father’s droondid.”

Somewhat more solemnly, then, than usual, or possibly only apparently so because of oppressive feelings, the bell is rung.

“Attention! Slates - away!

Then, in the darkness, amid the wild noise of the storm outside, comes from the Maister in deep tones, followed by the higher response of the lads, the evening prayer –

“Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy, defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of Thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ.” (p.235)

Haswell’s legacy and music    

Like many of us, as he grew older, Haswell had little patience with the business of regulation, all too necessary no doubt in many cases but not, one would think, in his.  After the 1870 Education Act, he had to go down to Durham for a week and sit various papers in order to gain a certificate allowing him to teach, even though by then he’d been doing it with very considerable success for 31 years.  He said “I had to travel, early on a damp, cold, foggy December morning to Durham, where there was no place but a public-house to wait in until the college opened.  We were received by a fussy official, and after seeing H.M. Inspector, commenced our week’s work.  I remember the last paper was on music – one for which two hours were allotted, but not needing as many minutes.”  (p.266)

When he retired, Haswell was the oldest schoolmaster in the country in active service.  He was given a pension of £30 a year but he and his wife had to move out of the house that had been their home for so long – I’m not sure where they went in Shields.  There were various celebrations to mark his retirement and sometime shortly after, his portrait was painted by local artist James Shotton.  After his death on 8.12.1889, that portrait was presented to the Public Library.  He was buried in Preston Cemetery.  (SLIDE 7)  His wife had predeceased him.  After his death, a fund for a prize was set up – the Thomas Haswell Memorial Medal which was to be presented to the boy in the school who had shown the greatest proficiency in scholarship that year, conduct also being taken into account.  The medal was presented on 8thDecember, the date of Haswell’s death.  Finally, a tablet was set up on the school itself, in red Penrith stone.  I have no picture of it but the inscription, written by one of his oldest musical friends and correspondents, Wesley W.B. Woolhouse, read as follows: 

Tablet placed 1891

In memory of

Thomas Haswell

Who was for forty-eight years the able, worthy and esteemed 

Master of this School, and much honoured and respected.

“The occupation dearest to his heart

Was to encourage goodness.”

“Learning grew

Beneath his care, a thriving, vigorous plant.”

 Both the quotes are from William Cowper’s poem The Task.  The tablet was sculpted by William Johnston of North Shields, himself a Jubilee boy and a former scholar of Haswell’s.  On its right, as a tribute to his years of labour in the school, was sculpted a laurel branch.  On its left, was a representation of seaweed, emblematical of the first line of the song ‘Tynemouth Abbey’, Where the sable seaweed’s growing, Tynemouth, on thy rocky shore, a popular song to which Haswell wrote the music.  Each side panel was enclosed by a rope, with pulleys at the corners, emblematical of another song to which Haswell wrote the music, ‘The Life Brigade’ for the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade.

So, on his death, the public memorials to him were not just to the teacher but also, very firmly, to the musician.  But the emphasis has altered with the years.  The school expanded, took in girls as well as boys but was then closed in 1933, effectively being replaced by Ralph Gardner Senior School.  The building was used as a British restaurant for a while, suffered bomb damage during WWII and then carried on a tenuous existence (of which more anon) until it was finally demolished in 1971.  A slightly inferior monument to Haswell was put on the corner site and here it is.  (SLIDES 8/9)  As you can see, one of the quotes from Cowper has survived but there is now no mention at all of Haswell as a musician.  The curious fading of his music is, at least to my mind, the most tantalising aspect of this man’s story.  Music was clearly his greatest personal passion and something at which he was certainly more than competent.  Whatever its quality, there must somewhere be a heap of music worth re-examining if not resurrecting.  Tynemouth Abbey and The Life Brigadewere far from being alone – he also set to music some stirring verses on the Hungarian exiles who were touring the North and for whom a concert was held.  He produced something nearer the romantic heart called Love Lore and there was his Inaugural Hymn for the opening of the Mechanics’ Institute.  If you remain doubtful of the probable quality of such Victorian concert fodder, there is also his work at Christ Church to consider: of that, his son writes Some beautiful church music written by him shortly after becoming organist at Christ Church, and at intervals later, is still heard in some of the churches of Tyneside.  What was that? and where is it?  The undiscovered music of Thomas Haswell seems to me a curious mystery for somebody to look into and report upon.            

As a postscript, I said that the school building had a last leg of life before demolition in 1971.  That life, rather unbelievably, was as a swimming bath.  It was not the public baths – they, in those days, were in Hawkey’s Lane and down at Tynemouth Pool.  But it was a makeshift construction raised inside Haswell’s own huge teaching room and emitting an overpowering stench of chlorine.  Schoolkids were sent there from the various modern schools which had replaced the Jubilee to learn how to swim.  And here is the proof (SLIDE 12/13), a certificate earned, as the reverse shows, for 20 yards breast stroke.  Our member, Judith Rutherford, sadly not here tonight, also learnt to swim there. In that rather odd way, she and I were among the last products of the Royal Jubilee School though sadly neither of us were scholars, musically or in any other way, of the amazing Thomas Haswell.         

Ian Grainger gave a talk at the meeting of the Club on the 25th October 2023 entitled  G.M.Trevelyan – A passion for walking in Northumberland and Italy - the text of which is reproduced below. 

Even forgetting his many other achievements, George Macaulay (invariably “G.M.”) Trevelyan was one of the most learned but also most popular historians in early 20th century Britain.  He was undoubtedly a great man (and a great Northumbrian), not just as a historian but in many other ways.  He was born in 1876, so even though he died in 1962 - and was therefore a contemporary of The Beatles! - he was in essence a Victorian: he was 25 when the great Queen died.  That Victorian youth is not to be forgotten because in some ways, much of the rest of his life, especially the period after WW1, involved (as he saw it) a gradual erosion of much of what he regarded as best in British life.  You can see the Victorian in photos of him.  Here he is: tall, craggy, slightly unkempt.  Though humane and in many ways modest and friendly, he does not seem to have been easily intimate with others: many, especially those less accomplished than him, found him remote and a tad intimidating.  He did not always suffer fools gladly.  His family background, may well explain why he was as he was, both in terms of its social quality and its intellectual punch.    

First, the family’s social quality.  His father was Sir George Otto Trevelyan, MP for Tynemouth, and his mother was Caroline Phillips, from a leading Manchester political family.  GMT was actually born near Stratford upon Avon but spent much of his youth and large parts of his later years at Wallington, his father’s estate near Cambo.  He was the youngest of 3 sons (often referred to collectively as “the Trevs”).  The oldest was Charles, who in due course inherited the estate and became an MP; and the second, Robert, was a poet and scholar.  As their name suggests, the Trevelyans were originally a Cornish family but they had inherited their vast Northumberland estate from Sir Walter Blackett, a Newcastle merchant.  As you will know, Wallington is now National Trust property.  In 1928, Charles took over as owner of the estate but at a later stage, while retaining a personal life interest, he gave Wallington to the National Trust, of which GMT was a major pillar.  GMT himself had a smaller house at Hallington, towards Hexham.

Next, the family’s intellectual punch.  Sir George Otto and his sons were not the first generation of intellectuals in this family or this place.  Wallington’s central hall, created in part by John Dobson, contained the famous series of pre-Raphaelite paintings of Northumbrian history and legend. They are by William Bell Scott but were commissioned by Pauline Trevelyan.  GMT grew up with those inspirational images all around him, just as he grew up with another monumental brooding presence.  His great uncle (his father’s uncle by marriage) was none other than Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay.  Macaulay was initially a great civil servant in India but later came to be viewed by the Victorians as one of the greatest of all English historians.  Indeed, the very name GMT was itself a tribute to Lord M.  So the monumental achievements of Macaulay were always in the air that the young boy breathed.  And bear in mind that we are speaking not only of M’s historical achievements but also of his literary ones, especially his Lays of Ancient Rome – Horatius keeping the bridge and all the rest of it.  To remind you of the flavour of this verse, let’s see if I can manage the first two verses of Horatius:

Lars Porsena of Clusium,                                                East and west and south and north

By the nine gods he swore                                             The messengers ride fast,

That the great house of Tarquin                                     And tower and town and cottage

Should suffer wrong no more.                                       Have heard the trumpet’s blast.

By the nine gods he swore it,                                         Shame on the false Etruscan      

And named a trysting day,                                             Who lingers in his home,

And bade his messengers ride forth,                              When Porsena of Clusium

East and west and south and north,                               Is on the march for Rome.

To summon his array.

 

Phew, I did it.  But GM could do even better.  In his Autobiography, speaking of his very early years, he said “I knew the ‘Lays’ by heart (and have never forgotten them, turn me on where you like)”.     

The danger with a major public figure like T is that there are innumerable fields in which he involved himself and in which his changing views were significant.  I shall try to avoid being distracted from my main focus (walking) by covering his major achievements in as short a compass as I can.  The main part of his education was at Harrow.  Then (like Macaulay and his father and his two brothers before him), he was at Trinity College Cambridge, studying in the fairly new school of history.  He got a first and then wrote a dissertation which won him a fellowship.  However, in 1903, at 27, he deliberately left Cambridge in order to create time and space to write.  He did not go back there for a quarter of a century.  

By this stage, he had already begun visiting Italy, both with his parents and walking there with friends, and he developed a deep passion for the country and its people.  In 1904, he married Janet Penrose, who was herself extremely knowledgeable about medieval Italy, and the Italian travels continued with her, sometimes cycling.  In 1907, he published the first volume of his Garibaldi trilogy – Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic, followed by Garibaldi and the Thousand in 1909 and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy in 1911.  These books, especially the first two volumes, were hugely successful, partly due to the epic and rather “Boy’s Own” quality of Garibaldi’s life story but also due to T’s ability to produce narrative passages which were at once learned and literate but also hugely readable.  The books have their faults, not least a strongly expressed aversion to Papal power.  [Trevelyan was in fact an agnostic – he was never confirmed – but he was, if you like, a good Protestant agnostic!]  But he knew how to tell a dramatic story and to tell it well.  These books sold.

Moving on, the First World War was a vast watershed in GMT’s life.  He was 38 and unfit for service due to poor eyesight but despite that he volunteered for work in Italy with the British Red Cross, as the Commandant of the first British ambulance unit there.  He did that for 3 and a half years and God alone knows how he escaped unscathed.  Initially, he was on the Isonzo front, near Gorizia, working of course only with the Italian army; and then after the mega-disaster of Caporetto in 1917, he worked on the Piave front, where large numbers of British troops were brought in to stem the Austrian advance towards Venice.  He produced a book about this service called Scenes from Italy’s War.  In later years, he viewed the awful experiences of this time as having given his writing an air of reality which it might previously have lacked as coming from a scholar based simply in libraries.  Quite apart from the awful medical realities which he must have witnessed, the book certainly contains scenes for which his privileged background cannot have prepared him.  I remember an episode during a cholera outbreak when he berated two southern soldiers for ignoring an Aqua non potabile notice - i.e. Not Drinking Water – when they were drinking from the spring beside it.  When he angrily said “Can’t you read?”, they replied to his shame (not theirs) “No signore, we can’t”.  At that stage, unlike what he was used to at home, a huge proportion of Italians remained wholly illiterate.  

Anyway, after the war, honours and achievements poured in thick and fast.  He wrote only one more book on Italy – Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848 – but many more home-focussed works for which he grew famous, among them a one-volume History of England (1926), his 3 volume magnum opus on England under Queen Anne (1930-34) and two books with Northumbrian roots, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920) and Grey of Fallodon (1937).  His most successful book, which is perhaps the one still most often read and which one used to see in second hand bookshops everywhere, English Social History, came out in 1944.  In 1927, he had gone back to Cambridge as Regius Professor and in 1940, partly due to the influence of the new PM, Churchill, he was made Master of Trinity.  But honours flowed in – Order of Merit, Companion of Literature, Chancellor of the University of Durham.  Nor should one forget his influence in one particular wider sphere.  The First War had imperilled the privileged life of the landowning gentry in which he had grown up and he viewed the modern city-based life of the 20’s and 30’s as rather imperilling civilisation altogether.  He tried to protect what he had always known by playing a massive role in promoting the new National Trust, not only at points giving them land himself but also for many years chairing their estates committee.  Many of the NT’s vast landholdings were down to his influence.  And appropriately for a manic walker, he was also the first president of the Youth Hostels Association.

As I say, there was only one Italian book after WW1 and that reflected something of a general retreat on that front.  He loved Italy and travelled all over it as a preparation for his books but that changed after Fascism.  There were far fewer trips to Italy.  He was involved in Italian cultural activities in London but even they were problematic because of the growing influence of Fascism.  In 1941, when we were at war with Italy, he joined (and indeed was Vice-President of) a new organisation called The Friends of Free Italy, a society which, after the war, changed its name to The British-Italian Society, under which name it happily continues to thrive.  I have been one of its Vice-Chairmen in my time and there is at least one other member here tonight.             

So much for his career and background.  For the second part, I want to consider, largely using T’s own words, his passionate if not slightly obsessive need to walk. He described himself as having two doctors, his right leg and his left leg: if you used them well and often, there would be no need for other types of doctor.  This passion started very early.  He described himself as a boy “who soon came to think that poetry, history and solitary walking across country were the three best things in life”.  And this passion for walking never diminished until old age prevented it.  

And don’t forget that we are speaking of a late Victorian, educated by even earlier Victorians.  So the distances and methods involved were far more robust than now.

For example, in his Autobiography, describing his time at Harrow, there is this revealing passage about his house-master, Edward Bowen:  (p.11)  [Bowen] was a great walker and battlefield hunter, and I owed my love of walking and of battlefields, partly at least, to emulation of him. I remember his saying to me ‘O boy, you can never walk less than 25 miles on an off day!’   [You may well ask what you do on an on day and T’s next words give the answer.]  [Bowen] was the first of the very few who have walked the 80 miles from Cambridge to Oxford in 24 hours.  He was a bachelor of somewhat ascetic habits: he once said to me, some years after I had left the school, ‘O boy, you ought not to have a hot bath twice a week: you’ll get like the later Romans, boy’.   

So, lots of effort it seems - but minimal soap and water!  Moving on to Cambridge, T speaks of Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the poet and climber who he described as his greatest friend through life.  The two of them served together in Italy, where sadly Young lost a leg. Before the war, Young had run a mountaineering group in the English Lakes and T says this of their activities there: (p.15)  I was never a climber.  Sometimes they dragged me up places but left to myself I was only a walker and runner on the hills.  Geoffrey and I invented and initiated the Man-Hunt in the Lake District, a game which enabled me to exploit my only athletic accomplishment of running and leaping downhill over very broken ground: my ankles are untwistable.  Geoffrey and I also walked to London together, from Trinity to the Marble Arch, in twelve and three quarter hours, a little better than four miles an hour.

In a footnote in his essay on Walking, T gives succinct advice on how to pull off this Marble Arch feat: Start at 5am from Cambridge and have a second breakfast ordered beforehand at Royston to be ready at 8.  

For the most part, his accounts of walking are not detailed narratives of particular walks.  Rather, they are recollections, often very literary and passionate recollections, of past experience – emotion recollected in tranquillity, if you like!  Here is a description of walking in the Borders.  Note how the account is dense with historical and literary allusions, in this case to Thomas Carlyle and to Sir Walter Scott.  As you will hear, he can get very specific in his references! 

The moors were a few miles away to the north [of Wallington], where we used to shoot grouse and blackcock, more plentiful then than now.  But I was not a good shot, and I soon developed a stronger passion for walking across country, alone, at something over four miles an hour, often doing forty miles a day.  In that fashion I traversed again and again the Cheviot country on both sides of the Border, a land of solitude and old romance that captivated my soul and enhanced my historical interests and imaginings.  I also got to know in this fashion the South West of Scotland, the land of Dirk Hatterick and Redgauntlet, of Carlyle’s Ecclefechan, and the more distant fastnesses of Loch Trool; I more than once found solitary moorland graves of the martyrs of the Covenant, that Old Mortality had helped to preserve, and heard tales of the ‘dragoons’, handed down by word of mouth in remote cottages.  One day at the close of the century, Geoffrey Young and I took part in a farmer’s fox hunt on the top of the Great Cheviot, carried out on foot with guns and dogs of all kinds and sizes, in the manner described in the 25th chapter of ‘Guy Mannering’.  I often stayed the night with the Shiells of Sourhope, at the head of Bowmont Water, a family of Scottish Cheviot farmers of the true breed.  But the Lake District, both the outer and inner part, was my favourite ground of all. (Aut. pp.25-26)

He certainly loved the Lakes but perhaps the most rhapsodic passages of all are about Italy.  T seems actually to have walked into Italy, through the Alps, but here, for certain, is his description of their first encounter:

It was in 1895 that I first visited Italy, coming down out of Tirol with Charlie Buxton, my Harrow and Trinity friend. We emerged at Verona. There it all was – the streets and walls of the Capulets and Montagues, the bell-towers and war-towers, the church-porches with the pillars resting on the Lombard griffins praised by Ruskin, and all the smells and sounds of Italy, then smelt and heard by me for the first time! I fell in love with Italy then and there, though I did not foresee that I should ever write books about her liberation, and live to witness her great misfortunes. (Aut. P.27)

Italy’s liberation was, of course, the Risorgimento. Italy’s misfortunes were two World Wars and the blight of Fascism between them.  There are many other moving passages one could cite, including the occasion when his father first took him up the Janiculine Hill “to see all the roofs of Rome shining below in the winter sun” and then told him the story of Garibaldi’s defence of Rome, on that very spot, in 1849.  But for pure literary overload, mingled with heartache at what was to happen to Italy, listen to this short account of a remembered walk in western Tuscany with a university friend.  

Usually I was alone, but I remember toiling up, with Robin Mayor of King’s, late one night to the old Etruscan acropolis of ‘lordly Volaterrae’, [Macaulay] and the revelation next morning whither and how high we had come in the darkness, when at dawn the trumpet of the Bersaglieri (it might have been of Lars Porsena) [Macaulay] roused us from sleep, and flinging open the shutters (‘magic casements’ indeed) [Keats] we saw the vast expanse of distant sea, and Elba and Corsica beyond.

But, fond as I was of the olive-sandalled Apennines of Tuscany [Shelley], I preferred as a walking ground the wilder mountains and steeper gorges of Umbria, amid the head-waters of Tiber and Metaurus and Rubicon. / On these tours I got to love the unadulterated Italian people of all time, a lovable folk whom that wretch [i.e. Mussolini] tried to drill and bully into second-rate Germans – and failed. (Aut. p.28)    

I hope that gives a flavour of the man, both his work and his walking.  I fear I have probably overloaded the poetry.  These extracts are, of course, his personal accounts of his passion for walking but many critics would complain that he overdid the literary angle generally, even in his history books, and some even went so far as to suggest that history is simply not literature at all.  T vigorously disagreed with that view but over the years, his essentially narrative kind of history came to be much attacked (unjustly attacked in my view) as being supposedly unscientific.

I add a short postscript.  There are 2 great but awful journeys of which I have not spoken at any length.  Both these journeys were retreats and real-life retreats.  One was the withdrawal after Caporetto, from the Isonzo to the Piave, which T had to join in like everybody else.  Some parts of that considerable distance he simply had to walk, due to bridges being totally blocked by retreating soldiers and their impedimenta.  He mentions the experience only fleetingly in his book on the war.  The other and greater journey, which I have not talked about at all but which T did, is the real-life epic retreat of Garibaldi from Rome towards Venice in 1849, dealt with at length in the second half of Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic.   T had already walked much of that area before he had the idea of writing that book but then, before actually writing it, he himself walked the route of G’s retreat across Italy.  The route is over what is mostly very mountainous terrain before it arrives, as Garibaldi did, at San Marino, then and now not part of Italy.  G and his wife were trying to get across the Adriatic to Venice to join the revolt there against the Austrians.  In the meantime, the Austrians were assiduously hunting for Garibaldi.  The final part of Garibaldi’s journey was over marshy terrain north-east of Ravenna and Ferrara.  There, near Comacchio, is where his whole expedition finally came to grief, with his wife Anita dying and with G himself having to give up all hope of getting to Venice.  Unbelievably, after a brief time in hiding, he then had to turn around and make his own way back again, right across the Italian peninsula a second time, in order to escape from the Tuscan coast into Liguria.  But anyone who is sufficiently interested (or crazy) can still visit the room in a fenland farm near Comacchio where Anita died, the nearby site where she was first secretly buried and indeed the humble hut in the marshes (now something of a national shrine) where Garibaldi himself then hid.  Or, more easily, you can buy a good map of central Italy and follow on the map Trevelyan’s own passionately restless account of the whole thing in his marvellous book.       


Ian Grainger

For the Northumbria Club, at the Army & Navy, 25.10.23