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Paul Routledge, Diary of Robert Sharp - Slightly Foxed Issue 25

Sharp Observations

Deep in the archives of the municipal Treasure House in Beverley lies a cloth-bound volume of handwritten diaries, the work of Robert Sharp, schoolmaster, village constable, shopkeeper and tax-collector, who chronicled the daily round and common tasks about him in the east Yorkshire village of South Cave from 1812 to 1837.

Academics knew of the manuscript’s existence, and occasionally quoted from it in books or lectures. But this unique document, infinitely more entertaining and informative than many more literary accounts of rural life, seemed destined to gather dust rather than readers until a local history lecturer, Janice Crowther, and her librarian husband Peter set themselves the Herculean task of transcribing its 4 million words.

Modesty being their besetting sin (or virtue), they asked only for an opportunity to bring the diaries to a wider public. After months of painstaking work, transferring the text on to an ancient Amstrad, writing footnotes, compiling an index, excising around 7 per cent of the content (including, wisely, the poems) and preparing filmed copy, they hawked the finished product round commercial publishers. There was not the slightest interest, which turned out to be a godsend.

Through her former Ph. D. external examiner, the redoubtable academic Joan Thirsk, Janice Crowther sparked interest in the British Academy. The result is a beautifully bound 726-page book published for the Academy by Oxford University Press: a case, if there ever was one, of love’s labours realized. Unusually, the first printing of 500 copies of this volume in the Academy’s series of social and economic history sold out within months.

Another printing was put in hand but happily the second impression did not fly off the shelves quite so quickly. I say happily, because had it done so I would never have found it in the Postscript catalogue of remaindered books, reduced to £9.99 from £40. Like most Yorkshiremen, I had never heard of my fellow

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Deep in the archives of the municipal Treasure House in Beverley lies a cloth-bound volume of handwritten diaries, the work of Robert Sharp, schoolmaster, village constable, shopkeeper and tax-collector, who chronicled the daily round and common tasks about him in the east Yorkshire village of South Cave from 1812 to 1837.

Academics knew of the manuscript’s existence, and occasionally quoted from it in books or lectures. But this unique document, infinitely more entertaining and informative than many more literary accounts of rural life, seemed destined to gather dust rather than readers until a local history lecturer, Janice Crowther, and her librarian husband Peter set themselves the Herculean task of transcribing its 4 million words. Modesty being their besetting sin (or virtue), they asked only for an opportunity to bring the diaries to a wider public. After months of painstaking work, transferring the text on to an ancient Amstrad, writing footnotes, compiling an index, excising around 7 per cent of the content (including, wisely, the poems) and preparing filmed copy, they hawked the finished product round commercial publishers. There was not the slightest interest, which turned out to be a godsend. Through her former Ph. D. external examiner, the redoubtable academic Joan Thirsk, Janice Crowther sparked interest in the British Academy. The result is a beautifully bound 726-page book published for the Academy by Oxford University Press: a case, if there ever was one, of love’s labours realized. Unusually, the first printing of 500 copies of this volume in the Academy’s series of social and economic history sold out within months. Another printing was put in hand but happily the second impression did not fly off the shelves quite so quickly. I say happily, because had it done so I would never have found it in the Postscript catalogue of remaindered books, reduced to £9.99 from £40. Like most Yorkshiremen, I had never heard of my fellow tyke Robert Sharp, but it seemed a good punt. Rarely was a tenner so well spent. I have laughed and nodded and sucked my teeth through most of this extraordinary book, an almost Joycean pageant of quotidian life in the years immediately preceding Victoria’s ascension to the throne, from the Napoleonic Wars to the passing of the Reform Act. It’s all there, from the price of sheep to Catholic emancipation, from the drunkenness of villagers to the coming of the railways, the advent of paper money (much reviled), the loss of church music to the newfangled organ, the death of Mr Sykes from an infection of his big toe and the mechanization of farming. There is something novel and stimulating on practically every page. Who was this unusual journalist, in the original sense of the word? Robert Sharp was born in 1773, in the East Riding village of Barmston, the eldest child of a shepherd. He was educated by the local schoolmaster, his maternal uncle Robert Harrison, and was probably apprenticed to a shoemaker at the age of 13; at any rate, his nickname in later life was ‘Cobbler Dick’. But books, not boots, were his first love. Introduced to two Quaker sisters in Bridlington who had many good books, he rejoiced at being invited to ‘ransack among them as much as I liked, where I could get amongst Books was always a treat to me’. In 1804, he became the village schoolmaster in South Cave, where he remained until his death in 1843. The school, and his family home (for he was now married to Ann Read), were above the Market Cross hall in the centre of this agricultural settlement, in the westward lee of the Wolds, hard by a Roman road running north from the river Humber. As one of the few educated men in the village, he took on a variety of other jobs: tax-collecting; writing wills and lists of voters, jurors and militiamen; selling stamps; measuring fields for farmers; and book-keeping. He acted as deputy village constable and clerk to the friendly society. He also ran a shop, but he was plainly a better diarist than shopkeeper, for the enterprise failed. He saw and heard everything, and seems to have written most of it down. Sharp was unusually free of cant, drawn more to dissenting Christianity than to the Anglican church, whose services he was perforce obliged to attend in several of his official capacities. He was a follower of the radical Cobbett, a Whig sympathizer and an opponent of the Corn Laws, rarely missing an opportunity to point up the self-serving nature of farmers and landowners who dominated local society. While rejecting Catholicism, he opposed his neighbours’ bitter hostility to Catholic emancipation, observing in February 1829: ‘Whether it be a natural Sympathy that causes me to wish well to the oppressed or a spirit of Contradiction in Argument that urges me to oppose the domineering Spirit at present abroad I cannot say, perhaps it is a bit of both.’ That captures the spirit of the man pretty accurately. The journal begins in 1812, with letters to his son William, who was employed by a bookseller and binder in Hull, before moving to London in 1821 where he worked for the rest of his life at Longmans the publisher. The diary proper begins on 19 May 1826. On 24 May – I choose at random – he records ‘with great satisfaction’ reading in The Times of a revolt against land enclosure in Wales, adding:
How I wish an end could be put to the Monopoly of Land, and that farms were not allowed to be so large as they generally are, where one great Farmer lives in wealth while all his neighbours are in comparative poverty . . . Prodigality and Penury rule the land, while misery everywhere attends. Old Mrs Ayre died this day in the 83rd year of her Age.
It is this charming conjunction of the philosophic and the humdrum that I find so attractive. The next day, he and his wife hear a cuckoo for the first time that season, ‘and fortunately, as luck would have it, she had three halfpence in her pocket, for it is very unlucky to hear Cuckoo for the first time without money, and indeed it is unfortunate at any time not to have money’. For whom, I wonder, was Robert Sharp writing? Himself? Posterity? Very early on, little more than a month after he began, he writes:
This sort of Journalizing suits very well for any who cannot continue a narrative; as the writer is tied [to] no subject he may be concise as he pleases one day on a subject, then he may spin out another amazingly for his amusement another day; I had often wondered why Diaries were written, but it seems the person wanted to appear as something and did not know how to proceed: of course I disclaim all this.
The disclaimer is not very convincing, though the evidence strongly suggests that his son William, rather than Sharp himself, was responsible for the binding of the work. The more one reads the diary, the greater is the sense that he is writing not merely for his own amusement but for an audience – unseen, unknowable, a phantom gathering of like-minded souls. It is possible to examine the original, held in the air-conditioned, state-of-the-art (as it should be, having cost £6 million) Treasure House in Beverley. Robert’s diary is intact, but scruffy. The cheap hessian binding has come away, the cardboard covers are scuffed and the pages, of varying lengths and widths, have been faded by dust and daylight. The schoolmaster’s copper-plate handwriting is perfectly legible, however. Reading the manuscript is like looking over the shoulder of a contemplative man committing his thoughts to paper as they occur. The early entries are the best, and most discursive. He waxes indignant against ‘prattling parsons’ and praises the Quakers on the grounds that they have books – he laments that nobody in South Cave has books (‘as important as furniture’) except himself. He follows political events in The Times and periodicals of the day, warming and then cooling towards the radical Cobbett and offering sharp criticism of Whig and Tory governments. But he is never so engrossed by the court circular that he omits to tell the stories of the thrice-stolen pig, the Ass races at Spring fair and the oyster-eating competition between the Dutchman and the priest. As he grows older (he stopped writing more than five years before his death at the age of 69), the entries become shorter, and the tone more querulous. He complains about his health, though he kept no horse and regularly walked the ten miles over the Wolds into Beverley well into his sixties. His enjoyment of the company of friends diminishes, and he is less charitable towards the world, even condemning his brother-in-law for being ‘exceeding foolish’ for marrying late and having so many children. He dismisses political speeches as ‘not worth reading’: to which I might add, not worth listening to, after a lifetime of so doing. The long, harsh winter of 1836–7, which continued well into May, finds his pen faltering. Sometimes, he even mixes up his days, and it seems the world has few attractions for him. He doesn’t say, other than obliquely, that his school is also going the way of his failed shop. As national schools began to spread across the country, establishments like his fell into desuetude and South Cave’s once-flourishing one-man enterprise shared their fate, it seems. The school building is still there, and a blue plaque lately fixed on its honey-coloured brick walls pays tribute to the village’s most famous – albeit adopted – son. If you take the 155 bus from Hull’s gleaming new transport interchange (Sharp would not have approved – he had no faith in the Rail Way), you trundle round the villages that figure so prominently in his diary: Ellerker, Elloughton, Welton and Brantingham, whose old red-brick houses, some with Dutch gables, still just recall his era. And you can drink a pint of Black Sheep bitter in the Bear pub, scene of so many drunken scenes that attracted Sharp’s pedagogical censure, across the road from the Town Hall where he lived and taught the village youngsters. That is, when they were not gleaning and harvesting, as they were wont in season. Naturally, much else has changed. What he would make of the nail beauty salon is anybody’s guess, but I am confident he would have disapproved of the gun shop. He was contemptuous of ‘men in scarlet’ and his entries for 1 September when the shooting season began refer to ‘murderers’ whose ‘sport, as it is called’ was mere ‘death and destruction’. Not only are his attitudes surprisingly modern, so occasionally is his ‘plain Yorkshire, East Riding language’: on 31 August 1833, he describes ‘a perfect Storm’ that brought down trees and an abundance of apples and plums. Robert’s last entry, on 5 June 1837, relates how he saw a nephew of Mr Beaumont’s at the market, who comes from London and is with Twinings at Temple Bar in the banking line, by whom he proposes to send a parcel to his son William ‘with this; and not begin another Sheet’. And there it ends abruptly. The pageant is over. We hear no more of the antics of the villagers, of the Russian invasion of Poland, the avarice of farmers, the indiscretions of politicians, or the routine visits of the Grim Reaper. And they would all have been forgotten, but for the literary detective work of Janice and Peter Crowther, who rescued this lost masterpiece from Depository 1 of the East Riding Treasure House. ‘I am glad that Wm. likes the Journal, as praise to a writer is animating,’ wrote Robert on 24 January 1827, ‘and Censure is the next agreeable sensation: the worst situation an Author can be placed in is not to be noticed at all.’ Sharp’s gravestone was destroyed in a housing development less than thirty years ago, but his true memorial lives on.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 25 © Paul Routledge 2010


About the contributor

Paul Routledge, formerly of The Times, Observer and Independent on Sunday, is the author of eight political biographies, a columnist for the Daily Mirror and Tribune and contributes to sundry other magazines from his eyrie by the Pennine Way in North Yorkshire.

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