Dere Diary . . .

In October 1881 a 14-year-old London schoolboy called Ernest Baker started keeping a diary. ‘In this little book I intend to give a full and faithful account of the remarkable events of my life,’ he announced, ‘although of course my life is no more remarkable than anyone else’s life but however I hope it may interest some one.’

What I want from a diary is not necessarily remarkable events, but a vivid sense of the author’s character and of the times in which he or she lived. Though it covers a mere four months, Ernest Baker’s diary more than satisfies this requirement, providing a marvellous picture of everyday life in Shoreditch in the early 1880s filtered through the consciousness of a lively and irreverent adolescent. Ernest had been given the diary by ‘his dear Papa’, the Reverend Henry Baker, who as Chaplain to the Ironmonger’s Company had charge of the Geffrye Almshouses in London’s East End. The almshouses were home to some fifty or so women pensioners with connections to the Ironmonger’s Company – or, as Ernest characteristically put it, ‘old biddies, who are resting the remains of their shattered lives in these grounds’. The Chaplain lived with his large family on the premises, took services in the chapel, supervised the staff and attended to both the spiritual and physical welfare of the pensioners. The almshouses are now the home of the Geffrye Museum, to which the diary was left by one of Ernest’s nieces in 1988 and by which it was published the following year as A Victorian Schoolboy in London. Ernest Edward Baker was born on 9 November 1866, the sixth of the Reverend Baker’s nine children. At the time he was writing his diary, he was attending a crammer in Cannon Street run by a Dr Julius Klein. ‘I having a strong desire to go into the army am sent there to be prepared for the Sandhurst military college examination,’ Ernest explains in the first entry in his diary, dated 10 October 1881. Also enrolled at Klein’s was his brother Septimus (Seppy), who was 13 and Ernest’s closest companion. The regime at Klein’s seems to have been fairly relaxed – pupils arrived at 11 a.m., had an hour off for lunch, and usually set off home again at 4 p.m. – and Ernest’s family recall that he was far more interested in mucking about than in attending to his studies. He was apparently the favourite among his siblings because he was so funny, quick-witted and easygoing, and these qualities come across in the diary, which he illustrated with his scratchy and highly amusing little drawings. It seems probable that Ernest had been given the diary with the idea that writing in it would be a good daily discipline. It may also have been hoped that this exercise would improve his spelling and punctuation, which at times give Nigel Molesworth a run for his orthographical money (and have sensibly been left uncorrected in the published edition). ‘These last few days dear reader I must acknowledge with many apoligies that I have been writing very thick and sluvenly,’ he confesses at one point, adding that ‘bad spelling . . . is a defect I try to overcome, strange to say but true, that the Bakerians naturally spell very well, I am afraid I must add with many a bitter but false tear that I am an exception.’ This gives a good flavour both of Ernest’s style and his irresistible bumptiousness. The diary’s earlier entries tend to be quite short, as if Ernest were indeed fulfilling a daily duty; but after taking a month off, he returns to the task at Christmas 1881 with new energy, writing at greater length and in more detail. He even acknowledges where entries have fallen short: ‘This day’s diary has been hurried over a little on account of violent headache caused by tumpling down stairs,’ he apologizes on 11 January 1882. Although he writes a good deal about his recreations – keeping hens, constructing a highly dangerous swing-cum-battering-ram from scaffolding poles, brandishing real swords while playing with Seppy – Ernest is also very informative about food, furniture, shopping and family celebrations. We discover what a middle-class Victorian paterfamilias might expect from his children on his birthday (pens, blotters, ink, a box of rubber bands, a corkscrew, a ‘transparent shaving stick’ and, from Ernest, ‘a little candle-stick’); that although the family ate goose on Christmas Day, stockings and presents were opened, and plum pudding consumed, on Boxing Day; and how much time everyone spent going to a wide variety of shops, both locally and further afield, in search of such useful items as sou’westers and a sausage-making machine. The children regularly attend daunting-sounding lectures: ‘The routes of trade and commerce in Prehistoric Europe’, ‘The cause and phenomina [sic] of dreams’, ‘The essay in the nineteenth century’. This last left Ernest with the impression that ‘Montaine’ was ‘the first essayist . . . and must have lived about 400 years ago, perhaps at the time of “Euclid”’ – which makes one wonder about the quality of education offered at Dr Klein’s establishment. David Rogers, who has done an excellent job of introducing and annotating the diary for publication, finds Ernest immature by today’s standards, but also rightly says that modern sensibilities should not be brought to bear on the antics of a Victorian schoolboy. Ernest and Seppy regularly consume wine and wander round London with a freedom and self-sufficiency unimaginable today for boys of their age. Ernest also writes casually about spending time with ‘an idiot boy’, who cannot join in cricket and football ‘on account of his legs bending in at the ankles’; conducts a rather drastic experiment to ascertain whether or not a tortoise is still alive; and goes to inspect the corpse of one of the pensioners: ‘I uncovered it as far as its head, I pinched its cheek and found it cold, I lifted its head up and found it was heavy, I turned its head round, and found it wouldn’t go; I went out.’ This dispassionate account, as much as his fondness for excruciating puns and terrible jokes (think The Diary of a Nobody), reminds us that Ernest was very much of his time. He was also no respecter of persons, and freely criticizes his elders and betters: incompetent teachers, squalling concert musicians, ‘that unimaginable little beast Klein’, and a ‘muffin faced young man’ who drops in on the family unannounced. Reprimanded by a librarian for his bad behaviour during a lecture, he writes airily: ‘I only laughed that a mere “bookduster” was trying to have authority.’ Like many boys of his age, Ernest is conscious of his appearance, often returning clothes to retailers for a better fit. He records one terrible occasion when a game of charades at the home of some family friends becomes an ordeal ‘on account of a tare I had at the back of my trousers’, which his Eton ‘bum freezer’ jacket fails to conceal. He explains that he hadn’t changed into smarter clothes because he thought he was merely dropping in to bring his sisters home; asked to stay, he’d been obliged to remove his overcoat, which had ‘covered everything’. In spite of his generally anarchic behaviour, Ernest is capable of standing on his dignity – often with unintentionally comic results. On one occasion he unsuccessfully attempts to persuade a policeman to arrest a drunken woman who has ‘insulted’ him in the fogbound streets. (The woman, perhaps not entirely without provocation, had given him a smart clip round the ear.) The last page of the diary announces: ‘A second but thinner DIARY will be commenced in a weeks time, and will go by the name of Vol: II being a supplement to this DIARY.’ This promise, alas, remained unfulfilled, and the rest of the story is told by Ernest’s youngest sister Lena in a short unpublished family memoir also donated to the Geffrye Museum, who kindly provided me with a copy. Readers will not be wholly surprised to learn that Ernest failed his Sandhurst entrance exams. To his parents’ dismay, he instead enlisted as a ranker in the 15th Hussars. They bought him out and found him a job as a commercial clerk, but after a short time he arrived home to say that he had once again enlisted as a private and would be sailing with his regiment to India in a couple of days’ time. He would die there in 1892 after being thrown against a wall by his bolting horse. He was just 25 and is buried in Muttra in West Bengal. Lena writes that Seppy had followed his oldest brother Hal into the Merchant Navy and was lost at sea on his second voyage. A bit of research led me to discover that in 1884 he had signed a four-year apprenticeship aboard the Berwick Law, which on 19 March 1886 set sail from what was then Akyab in Burma and was never heard of again. He was 18. It is a heart-breaking end for the two carefree boys we left in February 1882 playing at ‘cutting oranges with swords’; but there is a further coda. Quite by chance I discovered that Seppy had also kept a diary, in which he recorded his first year at sea. It is now in the library of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, and provides a detailed account of life aboard a Victorian merchant vessel. No one seems to have spotted the family connection between these two juvenile diaries, but it would be nice to see them published together, perhaps with Lena’s memoir to make the story complete.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 57 © Peter Parker 2018