Can You Hear the Sea? Read online

  To understand my grandmother I need to go back to her beginnings, and to the Liverpool family to whom she was still emotionally bound after more than sixty years in Australia. Unlike many women of her generation, she had firm, though sometimes contradictory, political views. About twenty years after her death there was a sharp exchange between her two oldest grandsons. One said: ‘Of course, Granny was a radical.’ The other said: ‘Nothing of the kind, All her values were conservative.’ He put pen to paper and sent his views to other family members. The fact that, in old age, these two men were interested enough in their grandmother’s ideas to have a heated argument about her politics says something about her influence on them both. My mother joined in. She thought ‘radical wasn’t quite the word’, but was sure that Aggie voted Labor. One reason she gave was that Menzies always won in her electorate, the blue-ribbon Kooyong seat, and it was bad for him to get too big a majority. The other: ‘A bit of socialism wouldn’t hurt.’ Aggie admired James Scullin, prime minister of the depression years, a plain-living man who, in tough times, said that ‘justice and humanity demand interference whenever the weak are being crushed by the strong’. Aggie’s instinctive alignment with strugglers and have-nots was unusual in her time and place. It goes back to a Liverpool upbringing that she never forgot.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Sea Burial

  Liverpool, the Irish impulse to perform, the Welsh need to sing, the sailors’ shanties, the movement of the mighty river, the roar of the sea, the rhythm of the wind, the beat of the factory. Liverpool the slope by the creek, Liverpool on the threshold of the invisible, Liverpool, pulling itself up by its bootlaces.

  Paul Morley, The North

  It was a mistake to call Agnes Maguire an Englishwoman. She was quite firm about that. Nor did she think of herself as Irish, although both her parents were Irish-born. She came from Liverpool. The seaport city that she chose to leave was always home. Although she hadn’t been a slum dweller, as her parents had, I don’t think that Aggie saw much of England’s green and pleasant land. She saw extremes of poverty and riches, shockingly close together. Gin palaces and pawn shops were just a step away from elegant shops and grand hotels. Unitarian minister Richard Acland Armstrong described 1880s Liverpool, a city that was second only to London in its importance within the British Empire:

  The contiguity of immense wealth and abysmal poverty forced itself upon my notice. The hordes of the ragged and the wretched surged up from their native quarters and covered the noblest streets like a flood. Men and women in the cruellest grip of poverty, little children with shoeless feet…swarmed on the very pavements that fronted the most brilliant shops…I had seen wealth. I had seen poverty. But never before had I seen the two so jammed together.

  There was nothing safe or sheltered in the experience of Aggie’s Irish family, forced into exile in Liverpool in the years of the Great Hunger. The Merseyside city was awash with destitute Irish men, women and children from the mid to late 1840s. Three hundred thousand crossed the Irish Sea in 1847, and they kept coming. They were as unwelcome as most refugees. Plausible-sounding crooks took their last shillings with promises of cheap tickets to New York. Those who had the fare and the strength for the voyage to the New World left Liverpool as soon as they could. Those that stayed were resented because they were a burden on the parish. Not that the parish did much for them. In the winter of 1847, an observer wrote of ‘thousands of hungry and half-naked wretches wandering about, not knowing how to obtain a sufficiency of the commonest food, nor shelter from the piercing cold’. Many died.

  Where in this dismal scene was my Maguire great-grandfather? In the gentrified version of the story that I heard, little was made of his early struggles, and perhaps not much was known. A recent search of public records revealed the family context. John Maguire, a labourer’s son from County Fermanagh, was ten years old in the Famine year 1847. It’s not known when he came to Liverpool, but he was working in a match factory at fourteen and probably earlier. His father is listed as a gardener and his older brother Patrick as a dock labourer. He had two sisters: Ann, a servant, and Alice who filled boxes in a match factory. All, including their mother Catherine and younger brother James, were born in Ireland. The family lived in Toxteth, one of the worst slums in Liverpool.

  John was twenty-five in 1862 when he married Irish-born Jane Thomas. John was a Catholic. Jane, a farmer’s daughter, was a Protestant. They were married in St Peter’s Catholic Church in Liverpool, which was known as the Church of the Runaways because you didn’t need to give public notice of intention to marry by having the banns read. That suggests trouble with one or both families.

  I wondered if Jane might have been pregnant, but the date of their first child’s birth makes this unlikely. Disapproval from both sets of parents is the most likely reason for keeping the marriage quiet. Sectarian divisions in County Fermanagh, in the north of Ireland, where John was born, and in Jane’s birthplace, Ballintra, in County Donegal, were facts of life. Yet, if there was trouble, it was overcome. Although the Maguire children were brought up in their father’s faith there is plenty of evidence of good relations with Jane’s Protestant brother and cousins.

  Passenger lists meticulously record the human cargo to Australia and the United States. There’s no such record of the flotsam and jetsam of the brief crossing from Dublin to Liverpool. No use then to look for John Maguire or Jane Thomas to see just when they arrived in Liverpool. Their parentage, age and places of birth were recorded when they married. After that, they can be tracked by census every ten years.

  The size and whereabouts of the household, the ages of its members, the occupations of the adults, and the presence or absence of servants, give useful clues to the way they were living. They don’t, however, show how the Maguires made their rapid rise from expendable Irish to solid citizens, or how they managed to educate eleven children, even at primary level. All that I ever heard about Jane Maguire was that she was an admirable woman who kept her promise to raise her children as Catholics.

  One personal object represents Jane for her Australian descendants. This is her sampler, an exquisite piece of stitching in coloured silks on calico. In large letters, centred, are the words: FEAR GOD J. T., and at the bottom a signature in cross-stitch JANE THOMAS aged 11 YEARS. In between, in smaller stitches, are the words of a devotional poem. An alphabet and a set of numbers complete the sampler. For girls of Jane’s age, a sampler was a way of practising the skills needed for household tasks or finding a job as a needlewoman. It was a kind of resumé. At eleven Jane was old enough to be in the workforce. We don’t know if she had been to school; there was no compulsory education in Britain before 1867, and by that time she was married and the mother of four. The moral on the sampler was an essential part of the exercise, and ‘Fear God’ was often chosen. Two of Jane’s sisters were milliners, and it’s likely that at some time before her marriage Jane was earning a living with her needle.

  John Maguire has a work record. It looks as if he married up in choosing Jane. As a labourer’s son, he was a notch below the farmer’s daughter, and as a Catholic he would have had less access to education than Jane’s Protestant family. He was sometimes described by his Australian descendants as an industrial chemist. That stretches the term way too far. He came into the match industry as cheap child labour; he became a warehouseman, foreman, and finally an owner and employer. Not a single great leap but a steady climb to the top.

  Maguire worked for Martindale’s of Liverpool, which wasn’t just a match factory: it was also a blacking factory. His early workplace evokes one of the most famous accounts of child labour in literary history: the story of David Copperfield, a stand-in for his creator, Charles Dickens. The working conditions that humiliated the young Dickens in the London blacking factory would have been no better for John Maguire, but as a child of the Irish famine, Maguire wouldn’t have had Dickens’ expectations of education and gentility. Dickens escaped; Maguire stayed to fight his way up from the f
actory floor.

  Liverpool in John Maguire’s boyhood was a wretched place. One-third of the inhabitants of the old town, where the workers were penned—you couldn’t called it housed—lived without sunlight, in airless courts or in damp cellars. They had no choice but to live close to the docks; that was where work was to be found. Wind, tide and fog meant irregular work, being on call, lucky to be chosen from the crowd of casually employed dockers. A good day meant a short spell of feverish, exhausting activity followed by long spells of waiting, often in the cold and wet, for the next job.

  Jobs in the match factories were in some ways better than those of the docks, and in some ways much worse. Most of the work was light. Very young children could do it, and many did. It wasn’t hard to set up a match factory: according to evidence given to the Children’s Employment Commission in 1862, and tabled in Parliament, it needed only ‘a little wood, a few drugs [chemicals], and the simplest implements’ in a rented shed. A witness commented that because there was a quick return for this minimal outlay, match factories were often operated by ‘persons of slender means, character or intelligence, who are little able, if they cared, to regard the welfare of their people.’ They employed any hands they could get; and these were generally ‘ragged, half-starved untaught children’.

  Workers in the match factories of Britain, some as young as seven, were at risk of phosphorus necrosis, known as phossy jaw. If they had decayed or missing teeth, as many did, the phosphorus they were exposed to would make its way in. Without treatment, the jaw would be destroyed and a painful death would follow. The only treatment was surgical removal of the jaw bone. Child workers also suffered lung damage from inhaling the fumes. Red phosphorous, which was relatively safe, wasn’t used, because it cost almost twice as much as the toxic white or yellow phosphorous. The convenient ‘strike anywhere’ match, which needed only a hard surface like the sole of a boot, was cheaply made with white phosphorous.

  In the 1860s, consciences were stirring on the question of child labour in Britain. The match industry, among many others, was being investigated. Martindale’s in Liverpool, where John Maguire worked, was said to be better than most in having a certain amount of space and fresh air which safeguarded the workers to some extent from the white phosphorous. The 1862 enquiry by the Children’s Employment Commission reported that Martindale’s was ‘happily situated, not far from the sea shore’. Even so, one factory owner testified it was unsafe:

  The greater part of the work, including the filling, dipping, drying and boxing is done in a very long building (in which sometimes towards 300 people work) of one storey, with a number of windows on each side, one side looking over the sea. So long as the windows are kept open, little harm probably results. In winter, however, and in bad weather, the case must be somewhat different.

  The factory owner describes the child workers as ‘mostly poor Irish…very ragged and dirty, very few with shoes or socks’. There are some heartrending testimonies from children as young as nine or ten who had been employed from the age of seven. They worked a twelve-hour day, for two or three shillings a week. Most were illiterate.

  I don’t know when John Maguire entered this appalling workforce. If he came from Ireland in the first famine year of 1847 he’d have been more fitted for the match trade than for anything requiring muscular strength. One of my aunts told me that he came from Ireland with all his belongings tied up in a pocket handkerchief. She made it sound like a lighthearted Dick Whittington story. Public records reveal a family migration. It seems probable that the older sons and daughters came in 1847 to get work and were followed by their parents and youngest brother. From match factory to wharf labourer, and back to the match factory as a warehouseman, John became factory foreman, manager, part-owner and then owner. He was an owner when the campaign to outlaw white phosphorus began to make progress.

  How did John Maguire escape the hell of the factory floor? Was he a reformer in his own factory, or was it his son Bert who deserves credit for the campaign to put an end to phossy jaw? Matches were such a commonplace item that I never thought of them as a blessing or a curse. Boxes of them, bought by the dozen, were cheap and unremarkable but essential for lighting a fire, a gas jet or a cigarette. Yet they began as a startling discovery. Before them, the tinder box, cumbersome and hard to operate, a burden on servant girls, was in household use. Historian of the industry Roger Fresco-Corbu describes the process in Vesta Boxes:

  In the morning early, before dawn, the first sounds heard in a small house were the click, click, click of the kitchen maid, striking flint and steel over the tinder in the box. When the tinder was ignited, the maid blew upon it until it glowed sufficiently to enable her to kindle a match made of a bit of stick dipped in brimstone…it was not pleasant to keep blowing into the tinderbox, and on pausing a moment to take breath, to inhale sulphuric acid gas and a peculiar odour which the tinder box always exhaled.

  Replacing the tinder box with the matchbox made life easier for most people, but it came at a high cost for matchmakers. The dangers of phossy jaw, which were known by the mid-nineteenth century, could be minimised by careful dental checks. Workers used to dodge these checks because the fear of being jobless was stronger than the fear of disease. Even quite young children, girls as well as boys, could do the tipping, which was the process of dipping the end of the matchstick into the combustible mixture. They could also fill matchboxes, as John Maguire’s sister, Alice, did. It seems that John became strong enough to do heavier work. After a time as a dock labourer he returned to Martindale’s and was promoted to foreman and then manager. How well did he then take care of the children who did the tipping and filling? That uncomfortable question hangs around, unanswerable. The 1862 Children’s Employment Commission questioned many young workers. Evidence taken from Patrick Lavan’s interview, includes a reference to John Maguire. Patrick is ten years old.

  [Patrick]comes at 6, sometimes 5. Has come at 5 and 4. Has done that in winter. There are lads filling all night then. John [Maguire] would not let him because he is so little…never has tea till he goes home. Is very hungry then.

  Of course I want my great-grandfather to be a hero. It looks like a welcome protectiveness on his part that the ten-year-old child labourer, who calls him John instead of a respectful Mr Maguire, is kept from the all-night shift. It’s on public record that John Maguire’s sons worked for factory reform, and there is reason to believe that John’s early experience in the match industry, allied with an enquiring mind, prompted him to understand, deplore and work against the use of white phosphorus. That story is embedded in the Maguire success narrative. His sons gave him the credit for starting the war against phossy jaw.

  John Maguire’s Australian descendants grew up with vague and unreliable stories about him. Big claims were made. ‘Our great-grandfather invented matches.’ ‘No, he didn’t.’ ‘He invented the safety match.’ ‘No, that was Uncle Bert.’ ‘No, he couldn’t have. A Swedish man did that. It’s in the Encyclopaedia.’ No one looked into the story to find the element of truth in the legend. Rags to riches, a match fortune was made and enjoyed for a brief span but then somehow melted away. The match industry brought Jane and John Maguire together and was central to the lives of their six sons, all of whom were brought up to the trade.

  Jane Maguire first appears on the public record in 1861 as Jane Thomas, spinster, aged twenty-two, living with her aunt Isabella Wilson at an address in Liverpool that sounds decidedly slummy. Isabella, who is a ‘matchmaker’, has a fourteen-year-old son. No husband is listed. The intriguing term ‘matchmaker’ is literally true: she makes matches. It doesn’t seem that Jane is employed. A year later, her marriage to John Thomas Maguire, warehouseman, is recorded. The birthplaces of their first five children show how quickly the young couple found better times; they moved from inner-city Liverpool, notoriously fetid, to healthier parts as far as possible from the slums. Litherland, where Agnes Jane was born in 1869, was a midpoint in their journey to the suburb
of Waterloo and middle-class respectability.

  By 1871 John Maguire was part-owner of a match factory but, mysteriously, he is listed in the 1871 Census as a grocer and provision merchant. It is possible that he was both and that the family at that time lived over a grocery. He may have lost his job at Martindale’s; it seems that the owner gave up matchmaking to concentrate on his blacking factory. Whatever the reason for the hiatus, a new enterprise, with Maguire as co-owner, appears and flourishes from the 1870s on.

  Eleven Maguire children, born between 1862 and 1882, were fed, clothed and educated at an unexpectedly high level. A letter written by nine-year-old Minnie, dated 1873, is unremarkable in itself—a few lines in which she tells her parents to admire her ‘much improved penmanship’—but it comes from a school in France. A French schooling for Minnie Maguire? Minnie spoke fluent French, taught English and studied painting in Paris before coming to Australia. But at nine years old, with the family fortune yet to be made, why would she be sent to any boarding school? A school prospectus, found among Minnie’s papers, supports her letter but doesn’t explain the mystery. Asked why her sister was chosen for schooling in France, Aggie replied enigmatically: ‘Minnie got all the plums.’

  The most likely explanation is that Minnie was chosen for this plum of an education by French nuns working in Liverpool schools. There are two orders whose nuns might have been responsible: the Sisters of Notre Dame and the Faithful Companions of Jesus, a French order, known as the FCJs, that taught working-class children in a Liverpool parish school. The FCJ nuns also taught young ladies in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Australia. It wouldn’t be much trouble to send this gifted child to one of their schools in France. With luck, she might become a nun, and at the least she could teach English to French children.