sootallures

May 16, 20215 min read

Rodborough and Jamaica 1840

Rodborough and Jamaica, 1840:

Reimagining Peter Hawker

There are several strands and a good few facts

In this tale of Peter Hawker and Caroline Stephenson

Of this parish of Rodborough near Stroud.

But how did this tale come about?

Well, I thought I had compiled an accurate list

Of Stroud area residents who gained

So much ‘cankered coin’ from the abolition

Of slavery in the colonies;

I had carefully examined my alma mater

UCL database and thought I had bagged the lot.

But a few years later I came across:

AWARDEE Peter Hawker

Jamaica St Andrew 111 (Liberty Hall Pen) £699 17s 8d [26 enslaved]]

Absentee slave-owner by virtue

of his marriage to Caroline Stephenson

In Rodborough, Gloucestershire, 26/05/1823.

She was heiress of George Stephenson

of Liberty Hall, St Andrew, Jamaica.

I wonder what life was like for George Stephenson?

Well, in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald

And his ‘documentary fiction’,

I let the past speak for itself,

Courtesy of the pages of Jack P. Greene’s erudite tome,

Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism

in Eighteenth-Century Britain …

One 18th century critic asserted that Georges

‘know no Medium in Things; a Man with you must either be either absolutely a Slave, or licentiously free, free from all Restraints of Law.’

Another opponent of enslavement wrote thus:

‘The negroes in our colonies endure a slavery more compleat, and attended with far worse circumstances, than what any people in their condition suffer in any other part of the world, or have suffered in any other period of time.’

And another wrote of Georges:

‘Cruel Task-masters … petty tyrants over human freedom … sincere Worshippers of Mammon … civilized violators of humanity …’

And to conclude:

Their days are full ‘of Idleness and Extravagance … habituated by Precept and Example, to Sensuality, Selfishness, and Despotism … at the Expence of the poor Negroes who cultivate their lands.’

But enough of ‘documentary fiction’,

I contacted Stroud Local History Society,

With an email in February 2020:

Hello there,

I've just discovered another local recipient of slaver compensation - does anyone know where Peter Hawker might have lived in Rodborough in 1834?

And then, life being what it is,

I forgot all about Mr Peter Hawker,

Until I received an email in May 2021:

‘

Hello Stuart

Did you get anywhere with finding out about Peter Hawker?

I have been looking at the Hawker family

Peter Hawker 1797-1840 was a lawyer. He married in 1823 Caroline Stephenson. She died 1830.’

Before I show anymore of the content of the email,

I have to say at a first quick reading

Of these deceptively beguiling lines,

I felt something of a suggestion

Of the Gothic horror genre and novel:

Death, decay, family curse, madness etc.;

Perhaps a curse for ill-gotten gains,

Arising from enslavement compensation;

Perhaps a curse for marrying into such money …

Shades of Jane Eyre after some sort of fashion,

Or Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea,

Or some sort of conjoining of two cultures:

Obeah and the ghost stories of M.R. James …

Or even George Orwell’s Decline of the English Murder:

Domesticity, bourgeois respectability,

Bankruptcy, money … poison …

But I know I shouldn’t think or speak

Or conjure or write ill of the dead;

And so, we banish all these wild flights of fancy,

Engendered by too much midnight reading,

And return to the plain, unvarnished facts

About these eminently respectable people:

Back to the email:

There followed an extract from the

Cheltenham Journal and Gloucestershire Fashionable Weekly Gazette. 22 February 1830:

‘Same day, at Stroud, aged 35, universally esteemed whilst living, and lamented in death, Caroline, the beloved wife of Mr. Peter Hawker, of that place.’

An entry for Trade Directories followed:

Peter Hawker was an attorney

In the High Street in Stroud in 1820/22;

Mr. Hawker had come up in the world by 1830:

‘Hawker & Fryer, Rowcroft, attorneys; clerks to the magistrates and commissioners of taxes for the hundred of Whitstone’;

And even higher nine years later:

‘Hawker & Fryer, King St, attorneys; clerks to the magistrates and commissioners of taxes for the hundred of Whitstone; clerks to Wheetinghurst Union’;

The Gloucestershire Chronicle 26 September 1835

Advertises their services and acumen

In a straightforward manner,

As does the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard

29 September 1838,

About ‘Mr. Friar, of Stroud’;

But then description becomes more tantalising:

‘and his partner, the modern Roscius,

Mr. Peter Hawker’;

Roscius? I had to look that up.

Turns out he was a Roman actor,

And in the early nineteenth century,

It was a popular classical synonym…

But what might the description connote?

Theatricality? Dissimulation? Pretence?

Whatever.

Just over a year later, we find this:

Gloucestershire Chronicle 11 January 1840:

‘SUDDEN DEATH of Mr. PETER HAWKER. – On Saturday evening, the 4th instant, an inquest was held at the George Hotel, Stroud, before J. G. Ball Esq., coroner, on view of the body of the above gentleman, who was found dead in his bed early that morning, at the home of his father, George Hawker, Esq., of Wallbridge, in this town. It is well known that the deceased had been in a state of mental and bodily debility for many months past. The evidence of a servant who had constantly attended him was to that effect, and also proved that on Friday evening he retired to bed without any apparent alteration to his health, and was found in the morning quite dead in his bed. Mr. Uthwatt, his medical attendant, corroborated the statement with regard to his health, and added that the event was expected by him, knowing that the nature of his complaint was such as to render it extremely probable that his death would occur in the manner it did. Verdict – “Died of apoplexy.”’

The email gave me more facts:

‘His father’s house’ was the ‘Canal HQ Wallbridge’;

‘His father was George Hawker b 1762’,

‘he was a clothier at Fromehall Mill in 1805’,

‘and at Lodgemore Mill 1808,

As tenant in both but was bankrupt in 1808’;

So, ‘George became Clerk (= manager)

Of the Stroudwater Canal and lived

At the headquarters at Walbridge’.

Stroudwater Canal archives: Minutes Tue 21 Jun 1814

Mr George Hawker elected as new Chief Clerk with a salary of £120 per annum free of taxes

‘He died in 1843.’

‘George's father was Rev Peter Hawker

of Woodchester died 1730.’

I conclude this piece of ‘documentary fiction’,

In the manner of W. G. Sebald,

With a final reference to Mr. Peter Hawker, aka ‘Roscius’,

As we finish our slip down wormholes of time,

With a bit of the Bard:

‘All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts …’

So, as I said earlier, on a first quick reading

Of the email’s deceptively beguiling lines,