Frank Daniell, Blue Coat Schoolboy and Blue Coat Schoolgirl Hollytrees Museum ,Colchester
Bluecoat schools were founded as charities to educate poor children. In the past the colour blue was associated with charity. The first was opened in 1552 by King Edward VI.
Halifax’s Bluecoat School was set up in 1642 by a bequest. Its charter was granted by King Charles I. Ten boys and ten girls received a home and an education that prepared them for life in the expanding textile town. Work they produced was to be sold to help finance their keep. It was also apparent that children who did not produce work of a suitable standard were to be whipped.
The Bluecoat School in Durham was started at the beginning of the eighteenth century by traders and operated from Ye Bull’s Head pub. It opened at a similar time to the Bluecoat School in Nottingham which began in 1706 in the porch of St Mary’s Church in the Lace Market. By 1855 it had moved to a purpose built building on the Mansfield Road. It is perhaps not surprising to discover that a similar school opened in York in 1705. Girls were educated at the Greatcoat School. Colchester’s Bluecoat School opened in 1710. For most of the schools the aim was to prepare boys for an apprenticeship and girls for a life in service as well as providing children with a grounding in religious education. Some of the schools also functioned as orphanages.
Children who were deemed as deserving were often chosen from within a parish based on their lack of income and their good character. The aim of the school benefactors who funded the schools was to help reduce poverty and to reinforce discipline and social hierarchy. As well as instilling discipline and teaching religion, sponsorship of these schools also reflected the religious responsibilities of the wealthy.
Education was divided between the sexes. Boys received a basic education and training for trades while girls learned to spin, sew and in the case of the girl in the picture above – to knit. The curriculum was limited and did not encourage upward social mobility. What they did offer was stability and the opportunity for adult employment.
William Blake’s poem Holy Thursday describes the annual ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral associated with London’s Christ’s Hospital. He felt that their poverty contrasted with the idea of a just society and used the image to draw attention to social hypocrisy in his Songs of Experience.
Wickham, from Cottingley near Bradford in Yorkshire (these days more usually associated with the Cottingley fairies) began his career as a barrister having studied for his degree at Geneva. In 1793 he was appointed as a stipendary magistrate and it was at that point that he began to work on clandestine operations at the behest of Lord Grenville under the power given to magistrates as a consequence of the Aliens Act.
It was thanks to Wickham that the London Corresponding Society, whose members agitated for democratic reform, demanding annual parliaments and universal suffrage for all men found themselves subject to arrest and treason trials. Wickham actually uncovered nothing treasonous and failed to entrap any of its organisers into ill judged sedition. Even so it was bruted abroad that members of the society planned to assassinate the king.
In 1794 Wickham was made ‘superintendent of aliens’ – a snappy job title if ever there was one- and then sent off to Switzerland where he eventually became the English ambassador. It was his task to liaise with enemies of the revolution, set up a spy network of his own and encourage the French to revolt against the new regime. Ultimately the French persuaded the Swiss to expel him. He returned to England in 1801, after some not entirely pleasant adventures.
While not all of his ventures were a rip roaring success – the uprising in the Vendée (1793-1796) was something of a disaster it was thanks to Wickham that the English began to approach the collection, analysis and dissemination of information in a more wholistic fashion rather than the fragmentary approach to spy work that was evident in previous years.
Wickham returned his attention to the London Corresponding Society and in 1798, Father James Coingly was executed for treasonable correspondence with the French. Edward Despard (who was Irish despite the surname) was executed in 1802. Both men were active in the Irish republican movement. Somewhat ironically Coingly had been in Paris at the start of the French Revolution and narrowly avoided being hanged from a lamppost as a royalist sympathiser because of his clerical garb. The story recounted at his trial did nothing to sway the sympathies of the judge or jury.
Not that all went well for Wickham. In 1800 he was accused of misuse of public funds during his time in Europe and it has been suggested that Jane Austen’s choice of the name Wickham in Pride and Prejudice was as a direct consequence of William Wickham’s portrayal in the press at that time.
In 1802 Wickham was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland but reigned two years later following the execution of Robert Emmet for treason (who’d have thought there were so many treason cases during the ‘Regency Period’?) While Wickham believed in the importance of surveillance and the use of informers he also believed that such spying should only be carried out in the interests of national security.
Durey, Michael (2009). William Wickham, Master Spy: The Secret War Against the French Revolution. Pickering & Chatto.
James Gillray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons- “Leaving Off Powder, or A Frugal Family Saving the Guinea”, March 10th 1795
When Charles II was restored to his throne in 1660 he brought with him a French fashion for wigs. Apparently the Merry Monarch’s uncle, Louis XIII, favoured them to hide his baldness and the rest is history. Wigs were rather expensive so an alternative was hair powder. By the eighteenth century if you aspired to be properly turned out you, or your wig, needed to be doused in hair lotion and then scented hair powder which stuck to the pomade.
In 1786, William Pitt the Younger introduced a tax on hair powder, perfumes and other preparations for beautification and fashion. It proved so effective that he introduced a second tax on hair powder in 1795 (The Duty of Hair Powder Act) to help fund Britain’s campaign in Europe against the French. From 5 May 1795, if you wanted to look like an accident in a BeRo factory (other flour brands are available etc) you would have to pay a guinea (21 shillings) at a stamp office for which you would receive a licence to powder your hair. In theory sellers of such cosmetics would not hand over the goods until they clapped eyes on the licence.
Obviously Pitt wasn’t completely unreasonable. A father with two unmarried daughters at home could get a discount on the amount he had to pay and you didn’t have to pay a guinea for each servant – good news for parents with teenagers everywhere as well as for people with footmen! You did not have to pay the fee if you were in service to the Crown, a member of the royal family, a vicar or in the armed services below a certain rank. And clearly if you had the time to wander around with a ton of flour/starch in your hair then you were part of the social elite in any event. If you couldn’t afford the guinea then, quite frankly, in the eyes of some, you shouldn’t be rocking the look anyway.
Unfortunately for Pitt’s calculations, rather than coughing up for their certificate, Britain’s wealthy and fashion conscious opted to stop using hair powder. Those who were caught wearing hair powder without a certificate faced a fine of £20 with an award of half the fine going to snitches who informed on the unlicensed dedicated followers of fashion. Those who did pay up were rather mockingly called ‘guinea pigs’ while proud male refusers of the new tax, ironically often members of the Whig party, had their hair cut short. Although it was sometimes hard to tell whether they objected to the tax or felt some sympathy for the revolutionary French. In either event short hair had arrived to stay. The law was eventually repealed during the nineteenth century.
Of course, if you’re smiling at this particular post, you may want to consider that today we pay VAT on most things and of course, it had its origins in Pitt’s hated stamp duties on every day items including hair powder.
And no, you really don’t want to know why I’ve suddenly and somewhat randomly started posting about a period in history which up until now I have largely avoided.
The two terms evolved towards the end of Charles II’s reign. The Cavalier Parliament which was dissolved in 1679 contained a loose grouping of MPs known as the Country party who were opposed to the king’s influence over parliament and the court’s attempt to secure the decisions it wanted through bribery and patronage. They weren’t very happy about religious policy either – in particular the way in which the Church persecuted Non-Conformists. Oh yes, and they didn’t want the Duke of York, who was known to be Catholic, to inherit his brother’s throne. In time this group became known as the Whigs – a somewhat derogatory term from the Gaelic meaning a horse thief.
The Tories, by contrast, believed that James should inherit the throne by right of his birth. They believed that the only way for society to be stable was to follow an order based on inheritance and birth. It should be added that they weren’t overjoyed that the Duke of York was Catholic. To start off with the Tories were more inclined to accept the concept of divine right – based on the premise of birthright.
However, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 both parties accepted the concept of a constitutional monarch with limited rights but the Tories still weren’t happy about religious toleration – they became aligned with the idea of Anglicanism. In the eighteenth century the Tories became associated with the Jacobite cause – which didn’t ultimately do them any favours at all.
It should also be added that even by the reign of George III there were two parties as such, there were connected groups linked by family, social class, and sympathy. They could perhaps be better described as factions. As the Eighteenth Century progressed, the Tories grew to be associated with the landowning classes while the Whigs tended to represent religious dissent, industrialists and those who sought electoral reform. However, it was increasingly apparent that the monarch could not rule without the support of a Whig or Tory leader who could raise sufficient votes from within their faction to pass laws or approve taxation. In time this leader would be known as the prime minister.
The French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century muddied the waters still further until the term Conservative, to which the term Tory still applies, and Liberal became the norm. The word ‘Whig’ ceased to have current political meaning. But that is an entirely different journey to the one I am making at the moment!
I’m still wandering around Colchester – which was a borough. The mayor was the returning officer who also controlled the creation of free burgesses or ‘freemen’, who had the right to vote…From the Glorious Revolution of 1688 up until 1728 there were Whig mayors and this meant that the members of parliament returned by the borough were also Whigs. The most important of Colchester’s political figures was Sir Isaac Rebow who served as the town’s mayor and MP. It was he, in pursuit of continued office, who began the practice of effectively selling free burgess status to political supporters from outside the town.
Inevitably things got nasty. There were court cases and contested elections which did nothing for Colchester’s finances at a time when its cloth trade was in decline. In 1712 the Whigs had to mortgage Kingswood Heath, or the Severalls Estate as it was called by then, to meet their costs. And it just so happened that the man who took out the 99 year lease on behalf of his daughter was none other than Daniel Defoe. For those of you who recall these things Moll Flanders had an eventful childhood until the age of 7 before being taken in by the Mayor of Colchester who raises her as though she was part of his family. Not that the writings of Defoe were any help to the mayor and corporation who continued to struggle with the borough’s finances.
From 1728 until 1740 the mayor was a Tory sympathiser. Colchester’s trade was still in decline and the Exercise Bill was not popular – five tories were elected by the disgruntled freemen as aldermen. Four of them starting with John Blatch in 1728, would become Colchester’s mayor. In order to ensure that in future Tories would represent the borough in parliament the mayor created new freemen in 1728 and more again the following year. In 1735 there was a by-election and a Tory was returned to Parliament.
The year I’m really interested in is 1741. Meet Jeremiah Daniel – Gent. He was the Whig mayor of Colchester and thus the borough’s returning officer. His appointment as mayor was not without its difficulties. In March 1741, an assembly was called to elect a mayor. Two of the town’s aldermen were dead, four were subject to legal proceedings, and one stayed away (and quite frankly who could blame him). The remaining five aldermen, all Whigs, refused to accept nominations of two Tories and chose Jeremiah Daniel as mayor.
The result was that one of the Tory candidates took Jeremiah Daniel to court along with Colchester’s aldermen. He argued that they had ‘been chosen into their respective offices in a manner not exactly consonant to the directions in the … charters’. This prevented the confirmation of Daniel to his office . The result was that the court dissolved the corporation saying that none of them were properly elected. This meant that the town’s charter of 1693 ceased to function -there was no mayor and no town council until 1763 when Colchester regained its charter.
And just in case – the 1693 charter provided for 12 aldermen, 18 assistants, and 18 common councilmen, who together formed the assembly. One of the aldermen was nominated mayor. So far so good. The mayor was elected annually by the aldermen from two of their number, who had been nominated by the freemen of the borough.
Time is marching on! The execution of Charles I changed the relationship between monarchy and parliament. The challenge to authority had lasting consequences. By the eighteenth century there were 13 colonies in America that were subject to British rule. In 1763 expansion west was prohibited which irritated the colonists. They also stated that they would not pay taxes unless they received parliamentary representation in London. Essentially they objected to decisions being made 3,000 miles away that impacted on their prosperity. In London, Parliament required taxation to conduct its European wars (1756-63 the Seven Years War). They also wanted to take advantage of the American markets – they had to buy British goods which had heavy levies imposed upon them. In addition many people had gone to America because they wanted political and religious freedom.
The European war crossed the Atlantic to the Americas – British soldiers went to the colonies, there was war with the French in Canada and in Britain the colonists were required to pay for the soldiers sent to ‘protect’ them.
IN Britain no one paid attention to the increasing unrest and instead imposed the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Navigation Acts. The first meant there was a tax on official government paper (seriously) and the later meant that the colonists couldn’t trade with any other country than Britain. Colonial opposition hardened against the British – there was a Continental Congress which create new constitutions, men such as Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine’s booklet entitled Common Sense which advocated independence collected political and moral arguments to encourage ordinary people to join in the fight. At the time the population was 2.5 million and Paine’s book was an immediate best seller. Paine connected his ideas with Protestantism – which was of course why the Puritan Pilgrim Father’s left England- and gave it an American political identity. The people who wanted to do what Britain said had no answering response or anything that stirred similar passion.
The response in 1775 was the Boston Tea Party which saw British tea imports dumped into the harbour. Note in the image that the protesters dressed up with feather headdresses when they carried out their destruction. The British closed the harbour until compensation was paid but in March 1766 Britain repealed the Stamp Act. However, it was too late, tension turned to conflict. In 1783, America became independent – the resistance to Crown authority split British politics – there was a fear that the loss of America would reflect on British power in the world. And radicals started to exert the same demands in Britain as America that there should be no taxation without representation.
Right – feeling brave? G.C.S.E students should be able to explain how the American Revolution and the Peasants Revolt are similar. And the American Revolution might also fit into the question Has Government been the main factor in improving people’s rights in Britain.
Essentially there is always a question asking students to compare to events to look for similarities and consider their impact on government and authority. By now most of you will have decided that there is some one doing GCSE this year! You are quite right but time is running out – so tomorrow is going to be something of a timeline to get us from revolutionary Americans to modern day – eek!
If you’d like to know more about the American Revolution but need somewhere to start the very short histories have a book on the subject which provides an excellent summary before delving further in.
Amazon Associate – every purchase following a click on the link, whether it’s this book or another help pays to pay the blog fees. Many thanks to anyone who has supported the History Jar in this way.
Samuel and Nathantial Buck’s engraving of Derby shows the town dominated by the tower of All Saints Church which was constructed at the turn of the sixteenth century and in the middle by Exeter House, owned by the Earl and Countess of Exeter. Exeter was not at home when Bonnie Prince Charlie arrived on 4 December 1745.
But who was the Earl of Exeter and why did he have a house in Derby? Brownlow Cecil, Lord Burghley had only recently succeeded his father, similarly named, as the 9th Earl of Exeter. It turns out that Brownlow’s mother, Hannah Chambers, was from Derby. Her father Thomas Chambers who ran his business from London was a merchant in copper and lead – which immediately provides the Derbyshire connection as well as a reason for the marriage of the younger son of an earl with the younger daughter of a ‘gent’. In short they were very wealthy. The 8th Earl’s elder brother died within two years of Hannah’s marriage and she became a countess.
Hannah’s grandfather is buried in All Saints. By then the family extended their home in Derby with the pleasure grounds depicted on the near side of the river to the viewer but it doesn’t seem that the earl and his countess spent much time in their Derby residence.
Having provided accommodation for the Jacobites it was sold in 1758 to the then Mayor of Derby.
Incidentally, the long narrow plots of land are the footprints of the Anglo-Saxon burgage plots – what’s not to love? A burgage consists of a long narrow plot with a house fronting on to the street – usually burgage plots were rented for cash rather than service although the latter was possible. Tenantry of a burgage plot also often accrued voting rights. Obviously Exeter House involved the purchase and amalgamation of two burgage plots because of the width of the house when the area became fashionable.
In 1772 it was forbidden that any descendent of King George II aged under 25 years should marry without the express consent of the monarch. Any one over that age was required to provide a year’s notice of their intentions to the Privy Council in writing- then they had to keep their fingers cross that the Houses of Lords and Commons had no objection. Failure to comply made any marriage null and void. The 1772 Act was replaced in 2011 with the Perth Agreement which means that only the first six people in line to the throne need to get the monarch’s permission for a marriage.
The reasons behind the act were very straight forward – the royal family was being brought into disrepute George III’s brother married beneath him. Henry Duke of Cumberland married Anne Horton née Lutterall on 2 October 1771. She was the daughter of an MP and more importantly a commoner. Henry told his brother in November that he was married and was banished as a direct consequence.
It wasn’t the first time that Henry had managed to get himself tangled up with a woman – in 1769 there were rumours that he married Olivia Wilmot and fathered a daughter named after her mother. Olivia junior later married John Thomas Serres and took to styling herself Princess Olive of Cumberland- although that was nothing compared to the scandal of a court case that took place a hundred years after the event. Cumberland was also sued by Lord Grosvenor for adultery and had to pay £10, 000 damages.
Maria Duchess of Gloucester, Joshua Reynolds, Royal Collection
As though that wasn’t bad enough once George, who was a devoted husband and father of 15 children, made his act law, another of his brothers, William the Duke of Gloucester had to own up that he had been clandestinely married for six years to Maria, the dowager Countess of Waldegrave. She was the illegitimate daughter of Sir Edward Walpole. George had already heard rumours of the liaison but didn’t know that the pair had been married in secret by Maria’s chaplain. He’d sent William on a series of diplomatic missions to try and break up the romance. What forced William to tell his brother was the fact that Maria became pregnant. Their daughter Sophia was born at the end of May 1773 just a short while after the Privy Council held up the validity of the secret marriage. The couple had two more children including a second daughter who died during infancy. I’d like to tell you that despite all the angst that the couple lived happily ever after – sadly William, a true Hanoverian, began an affair with one of his wife’s ladies in waiting and had an illegitimate daughter – Maria was not amused but found herself living in a household alongside with her husband’s mistress.
Olivia Wilmot -Princess Olive of Cumberland’s daughter married John Serres, a marine painter to George III – the marriage not successful: she took many lovers, he kept her short of cash and they got themselves into debt. Eventually the pair divorced. Olive wrote to the Prince Regent (who had his own brush with the 1772 Marriage Act when he married the Catholic widow Maria Fitzherbert in a secret and illegal ceremony rendering the marriage null and void under the terms of the 1772 act.) Olive initially claimed that she was the natural daughter of the Duke of Cumberland. The story underwent a revision three years later in 1820 when she became the daughter of a Polish princess who was legally married to the duke despite the fact that she never came to England! By 1844 Olive’s daughter Lavinia Ryves was trying to extract cash from George III’s will and in 1866 the case went to court. She presented three sets of documents which were confiscated at the end of the case and which can now be viewed in the National Archives at Kew having been deemed forgeries.
Lavinia’s barrister also made the claim that George IV ought not to have been king and that Queen Victoria should not be queen because George III was actually married to Hannah Lightfoot rather than Queen Caroline. The story had been brewing for a very long time. Which was pretty impressive given that there was only one whisper of scandal in a private letter during George III’s life – Walpole described the monarch as ‘chaste’ unlike his grandfather and great grandfather or even his sons.
Ashdown-Hill, John, Royal Marriage Secrets: Consorts and Concubines, Bigamists and Bastards
Calke Abbey near Melbourne in Derbyshire is one of my favourite National Trust properties ever! On Friday we took the opportunity to visit it before the summer holiday. We still have no desire to join the crowds but have missed our adventures to stately stacks during the last two and a half years.
We began by exploring the house which from the outside isn’t much to shout about unless you like eighteenth century symmetrical stately stacks with columns and big windows. The house has become slightly tidier across the years we’ve been visiting but its delight is the sensation of walking into a house that hasn’t been touched – the wall paper is peeling, there’re piles of chairs in various states of disrepair, trunks and collections of seashells, seals, Victorian birds if you’re into that sort of thing and old papers – the Harpurs were once one of the richest families in Derbyshire but the Harpur-Crewes were clearly amongst the most eccentric. Not only did they wish to provide for the education of their tenants, they seem to have loved their wives, were passionate about their natural history and never threw anything away. Whilst the house isn’t as dark, dirty or as dusty as it used to be but it’s still pleasingly ramshackle and demonstrates what happened to the aristocracy when they could no longer afford a platoon of staff to maintain order and could no longer afford the lifestyle or the house.
On this occasion we discovered that the double thickness walls in the eighteenth century hall were not only to permit servants to move unseen but also to ensure that there was a symmetry to the grand residence – though you’d have thought they’d have considered a staircase to the rather elegant new rooms when they planned their mansion and not had to add one on later. There’s even a panel that opens to reveal a secret entrance – makes you wonder what might be lurking undiscovered in the skeleton of the house – and of course, there was a skeleton unearthed in the courtyard several years ago.
Then there’s the glorious silk bed – amidst the layers of history were two wooden chests, and inside, rolled not folded, was Lady Caroline Manners wedding present from Princess Anne, the daughter of King George II. The bed hangings were made for George I in about 1715 and as beautiful as the day they were carefully wrapped up and placed in the boxes where they lay forgotten for so many years. Obviously Caroline didn’t appreciate the gift or had no need for fancy bed hanging. Apparently there are coiled peacock feathers in the embroidered butterfly wings. For those of you who want technical terms rather than me describing beautiful embroidery – its a Palladian state bed which was apparently an essential household item…I’m sure we’ve all got one somewhere ….
Which leads us to the monastic element of the equation – Calke was never an abbey – priory is pushing it as well. It would perhaps best be described as a cell attached to Repton. When the monks of Repton realised what Cromwell was up to prior to the dissolution of the monasteries they let Calke to a certain John Prest – on a 99 year lease. It wasn’t straight forward and Thomas was not best pleased. Suffice it to say that it was only thanks to Cromwell’s demise that matters didn’t get out of hand and Calke ended up as a Tudor manor with a courtyard and a gateway. Everything you can see today was wrapped round the Elizabethan mansion which is why the stairs are slightly odd, there’s secret passages between the rooms and a blocked up entrance for a coach to drive through. The tour of the house finishes with a climb through the brick lined tunnels that the servants used so that they didn’t blight the landscape with their presence before you emerge in the brew house and back out into the sunlight.
The gardens are some distance from the house and to be honest I usually see them in the autumn so it was rather wonderful to find the walled gardens filled with flowers and a rather surprising mandrake nestling amongst the feverfew. Then there was time to see the deer lounging beneath various trees and inspect the grotto -again every one should have one, though the one at Calke isn’t going to win an RHS medal any time soon. Rather like the house it’s seen better days but has its charm for all of that and is rather more fun than some of the spotless but rather cold eighteenth century properties that can be found elsewhere.
Oil painting on canvas, Called Hannah Lightfoot, Mrs Axford (1730-c.1759), ‘The Fair Quakeress’, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (Plympton 1723 – London 1792), circa 1756. A painted oval half-length portrait of a young woman, turned to the right, gazing to the right, brown hair dressed back with a pink ribbon, in white satin dress edged with lace and decorated with pink bows, with a pink ribbon frill around her neck.
Hannah Lightfoot, if you believe these things, was the mistress of George, Prince of Wales. She was born in 1730, the daughter of a shoemaker in Wapping. Three or so years later her father died and she was adopted by her uncle Henry Wheeler, a linen draper. So far so good. Hannah, a quaker, married clandestinely outside the Friends. it wasn’t long before she discovered her error and fled her husband, a man named Isaac Axford. This was 1755. There was nothing more heard of Hannah and in 1759 Isaac remarried. he either thought she was dead or since Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act was passed in 1753 he believed that the union was invalid – clandestine marriages being banned at that time.
And then we start moving into the realms of gossip and conspiracy. Wheeler’s merchandise was sold at St James’ Market and it just so happens that the Young Prince of Wales noticed her there…or at a ball…take your pick. The Public Advertiser of 7 September 1770 calls her the ‘Fair Quaker’ and it suggests that she and the Prince of Wales were having an affair. In some versions of the story George persuaded her to marry Axford and in other versions she just marries George and moves to Peckham. In 1866 Mrs Lavinia Ryves went to court claiming that her mother was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Cumberland – the brother of George III. Her mother Olive, claimed that George III left her £15,000 as his niece. The claim was thrown out. More documents appeared including a marriage between George and Hannah in 1759 – in two different places! The first at Kew Chapel and the following month, May, in Peckham. The officiant on both occasions was James Wilmot.
There were two sons and a daughter.
And now for the conspiracy theories! in 1845 the parish records of St Anne’s Chapel Kew were stolen and later found in the Thames…without the records. And in Carmarthen the grave of Charlotte Dalton, the grand daughter of Hannah perhaps explains the presence of the George III pipe organ – made for the king in a church with no known royal connections. There was a television programme about it in the 1990s but in truth the genuine family history of the family purporting to be that of George III is a long way distant from royalty.
Tendered, Mary L., The Fair Quaker Hannah Lightfoot and Her Relations with George III (London: 1910)
Not sure how festive it is – but we have Cumberland rum Nicky at Christmas! Essentially it’s a tray bake with a pastry bottom and a lattice top. The middle is made from butter, ginger, brown sugar, rum and dates. I think it should probably be a tart but I’ve always made it as a tray bake for ease of cutting. Having now done a little digging it is clear that the origins of the name have been obscured although there is a theory that the top layer pastry was “nicked” to create the lattice.
The ingredients originate from the 18th Century when the Cumbrian port of Whitehaven was part of the ‘triangular trade’ – shipping sugar, rum and ginger in from the Caribbean, taking English cloth to West Africa and slaves from there to North America. Maryport and Workington were also thriving ports at this time.
Whitehaven rum was apparently very popular and it was in the 18th century that rum butter made it’s appearance – butter, sugar and rum. There seems to have been a fair amount of tax avoidance in Cumbria in the eighteenth century as well – rum smuggling was part of the local scene.
“He who is occasionally obeyed” remembers being sent, as a child, by his nana at Christmas to fetch a quarter bottle of rum from a shop close to her house for the treat to be made. He also remembers the butter and sugar being placed on the hearth to melt.
It should be added that I’m not wildly keen on rum butter and much prefer a good helping of vanilla ice cream. It’s not the least calorific or most healthy pudding I’ve ever served but having said that it’s definitely a once a year treat.
