The Wrong Register - A Wilkie Collins Mystery

The Parish Chest, A Study of the Records of Parochial Administration in England (1946) by W E Tate was, when I chanced upon it recently on the ‘Vintage’ shelf of a charity bookshop, just the sort of title to appeal to me.

I have already written on the subject of extra-parochial districts, odd pieces of territory that were for many years independent of the parish system, and exempt from most civil duties: these sometimes have a mysterious history (‘Beyond the Boundaries: Extra-Parochial Districts’, in Northern Earth 146, 2016, collected in A Country Still All Mystery, 2016). I also used one such place in my story ‘An Incomplete Apocalypse’ (Seventeen Stories, 2013).

The book proved to be just as fascinating as I hoped, and to have a curious literary interest too. Mr Tate is a deep and often droll scholar who explains that parish records have always been kept in a somewhat haphazard manner. They are often lost, and have sometimes been burnt as being of no value or interest, or thrown away on account of damp. Even those said to have been transferred to the custody of county records offices cannot always be traced. Yet they are a vital part of social history, recording births, baptisms, marriages and deaths, often with interesting incidental remarks.

In pursuing his research, he advises that even when incumbents tell you, in all good faith, that there are no parish records, it is advisable nevertheless to rummage in the vestry and the belfry where, beneath 'piles of antique hymn books, disused vestments, and harvest festival leaflets' they will may well still be found. The tone of the book, with its mingling of serious antiquarianism and dry humour, is decidedly Jamesian.

This description of the vagueness and neglect of parish records will strike a chord with readers of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859), where the marriage register crucial to the plot (involving inheritance) is kept in a scene of similar disorder:

' "We might be tidier, mightn't we, sir?" said the cheerful clerk; "but when you're in a lost corner of a place like this, what are you to do?” . . . My anxiety to examine the register did not dispose me to offer much encouragement to the old man's talkativeness. I agreed with him that nobody could help the untidiness of the vestry, and then suggested that we should proceed to our business without more delay.

"Ay, ay, the marriage-register, to be sure," said the clerk, taking a little bunch of keys from his pocket. "How far do you want to look back, sir?" '

The reply is: "Backwards from eighteen hundred and four." Then the clerk:

“opened the door of one of the presses—the press from the side of which the surplices were hanging—and produced a large volume bound in greasy brown leather. I was struck by the insecurity of the place in which the register was kept. The door of the press was warped and cracked with age, and the lock was of the smallest and commonest kind. I could have forced it easily with the walking-stick I carried in my hand”

“The register-book,” we are told, “was of the old-fashioned kind, the entries being all made on blank pages in manuscript, and the divisions which separated them being indicated by ink lines drawn across the page at the close of each entry”.

The apparent marriage entry is found in September 1803: “It was at the bottom of a page, and was for want of room compressed into a smaller space than that occupied by the marriages above”. And here is the key to the mystery, the turning-point of the plot. The entry is a forgery.

Except, as Tate points out (p.49), some years before the date given, the Marriage Act 1755, introduced by Lord Hardwicke, had reformed record-keeping. Parishes were now required to keep “proper books of vellum or good and durable paper”. “The entries,” Tate says, “were to be signed by the parties and to follow a prescribed form, and the registers were to be ‘carefully kept and preserved for public use’”. These Hardwicke Registers, he explains, often found in parish chests, were “the first registers consisting of bound volumes of printed forms”.

In short, Collins has made what Tate mildly calls “An interesting mistake . . . The forged marriage entry in the registers of Old Welmingham upon which the whole plot hangs is so described that it is clear that Wilkie Collins had never seen a Hardwicke Register—composed of printed forms, four to the page”.

The bogus marriage entry could not, 48 years after the Marriage Act, have been “compressed” in manuscript onto the bottom of a page, because by then a duly completed form, in a set template, was required.

Well, well, we might say, in Collins’ favour, this part of his story is set in a very out-of-the-way place, as his garrulous clerk several times remarks. Perhaps, we may suppose, the Hardwicke reform had been overlooked, simply not introduced: the "old-fashioned kind" of register was still in use.

Unfortunately, that won’t quite do, because (as Tate describes) in 1783, 20 years before the bogus entry depicted in the novel, the Stamp Act introduced a charge of threepence on every register entry, to be collected by the officiating minister. The tax was linked to the registers: and taxes are apt to be pursued. The use of the Hardwicke Register could hardly be evaded.

The Woman in White is of course a novel with many other qualities, and in an exciting and twisting plot minor inaccuracies of detail might be indulged. Yet, as Tate says, this detail is somewhat more important than that. Collins' hard-pressed characters might have been saved a lot of trouble (and we might have lost a classic thriller) if only their author had not used the wrong register.

(Mark Valentine)

 

Ancient Origins of English Inn Signs

The origins of English inn signs remain obscure, and the usual explanations, where there are any, have rarely, if ever, been tested. And yet here is a remarkable form of popular heraldry, full of strange beasts, legendary figures and quaint old lore. As the poet Edward Thomas put it, when he was describing a walk through the outskirts of nocturnal London, ‘the names of the inns were as rich as the titles of books in an old library’ (The Heart of England, 1906).

What Inn-Signs Tell! by Whittoney Block is listed in the bibliography to The Spotted Dog (1948), an enjoyably urbane book on the same subject by Reginald Turnor, which has attractive engravings by John Farleigh. The Block book was published by Imprimerie Mentonnaise in their Editions France Riviera. The British Library catalogue says it was published in 1929 and that Block was a pseudonym for Lady Caroline Ella Eve: no details of her appear. There is no other book listed under either name.

It is an enjoyably eccentric study of the subject. The opening chapter, ‘The Green Snake’, recounts how the author met an American tourist at an inn who wanted to know what the signs meant, and so she decided to investigate, in an open-top Panhard car, the Green Snake of the title. Inn names ‘were jotted down whilst passing through town after town and village after village’.

The book begins, however, by tracing the prehistoric origin of all signs (not just those for inns), first as pictures, then as pictographs, then as alphabetical letters. Then it discusses which are the oldest symbols, and argues these are the Ship (or Ark), Bull, Star, Half Moon, and then, radiating from these, the Bell, Peacock and Magpie: the argument for their precedence and succession is sometimes rather arcane.

The essence of the book is given in a single sentence early on: ‘The Inn-signs of England are the symbols adopted by an Eastern priesthood to teach the people their own particular faith.’ How did these images come to Britain? Well, says the book, rather breezily, ‘it may be strongly suspected that these hieroglyphics were conveyed to The Isles of the Setting Sun by the maritime people who first lived on the Bahrein Islands in the Persian Gulf’ (p.79).

This is an interesting variation on a quite frequent esoteric idea that Phoenicians came to Britain trading in tin, though here applied to an even more ancient people. The derivation of inn signs from ancient symbols is also advanced in a later book, The Rising Sun: A Study of Inn Signs (1937) by H T Sherlock, though there the derivation is more specifically from the Egyptian mysteries: the Rising Sun sign is seen as a symbol of Osiris, and others are shown, often ingeniously, to be of a similar nature. The idea is that inns developed as stopping places for pilgrims (this much is conventional history), but in this case those on the mystical journey to the west (this is rather less conventional).

The reason that the origin of inn signs can be attributed to either Mesopotamian or Egyptian mystery cults, neither on the face if it exactly probable, is that they have been so little studied. The explanations given for many of the most popular signs, which have often continued unchallenged since an early Victorian study, are unconvincing. Amateur researchers are therefore free to go their own way, and they certainly do!  

I have been studying them on and off since my teens when, like the author of What Inn-Signs Tell!, I wrote down the name of every inn we saw on family car journeys. They are not always what they seem. I discuss the Saracen’s Head sign in Sphinxes and Obelisks (2021), and the Red Lion in Echtrai, Edition One (2022). I have been unable to resist them in fiction either, as in ‘Red Lion Rising’ (Supernatural Tales 40, 2019).

And indeed I do think there could be more to tell of, among other signs, the Black Lion, the White Hart, the Raven, and the Green Man. It sometimes seems as though inn signs are the symbols and the focus of some great alchemical experiment in the landscape of England. If only these majestic figures could be invoked at the right time and in the right order, then . . .

(Mark Valentine)

Greenidge Dream Time

Philip and the Dictator: A Romantic Story (1938) by Terence Greenidge is another in the sub-genre of fantasies involving imaginary North Atlantic islands, such as The King of Lamrock by V Y Hewson, The Dark Island by Vita Sackville-West and Hy Brasil by Margaret Elphinstone. Others, such as The Master by T H White and the Princes of Sandastre fantasies of Antony Swithin are set on the real, but greatly elaborated, island of Rockall.  

In Greenidge’s novel, a young man, Philip, working in the newsreel industry, cutting and splicing footage, steps out of his Wardour Street workplace for a smoke and is transported through a drain cover to a different plane. He finds himself on a train in St Michael’s Isle, which lies in the mid-Atlantic between Britain and America. It is a former British colony that has achieved independence but retained its own king: the reigning monarch was a schoolfriend of Philip, in England.

Greenidge’s hero (modelled on the author) soon finds himself embroiled in the politics of the island, and a romance with the English-born queen: an influence is clearly Antony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), though with a less swashbuckling panache. The Dictator of the title is a General who leads the dominant party on the island and has autocratic tendencies: a poker-faced note at the start of the book assures us he is not based on Franco.

The idea of the mid-Atlantic island is well-realised, with a plausible sense of how such a territory might develop, and the switches from Philip’s London life to this fantasy realm (he goes to and fro several times) are achieved briskly and without tiresome explanation. The novel has a languid charm, not taking itself too seriously, and the satire on contemporary times is also fairly lightly-worn.

In asides, the author takes the opportunity to praise other books he likes, including Moonfleet by J. Meade Falkner and A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys.

Terence Lucy Greenidge (1902-70) was the author of several satirical fantasies, and also of poems, plays and essays. Some titles appear to be self-published from a correspondence address, BM Hegel, and others were with the Fortune Press, often a subsidy publisher, who had an interesting reputation: Timothy d’Arch Smith portrays the Press in an entertaining chapter in his The Books of the Beast (1987).

Greenidge’s first publication, Degenerate Oxord? (1930), a defence of contemporary varsity youth, was, however, with a major publisher, Chapman & Hall, probably through the influence of Evelyn Waugh, who had published Decline and Fall (1928) with them. Greenidge had made an amateur film featuring Waugh and Elsa Lanchester, The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama (1924), a Firbankian satire about a Roman Catholic conspiracy to convert the Royal Family (it is free to view at the BFI).

Greenidge was part of Evelyn Waugh’s aesthetical, camp and louche circle of Oxford friends, somewhat in the Brideshead mode. Waugh recalled in ‘A Little Learning’: ‘He was the orphan son of a don & the ward of the Bursar of Hertford College. An ex Rugbeian, an enthusiastic Greats man, given to declaiming Greek choruses loudly, late at night, in the quad’. 

Another novel, Tinpot Country: A Story of England in the Dark Ages (1937) is described on the dustwrapper as ‘a remarkable account of life in an English film studio. But the film industry is treated merely as a typical institution of post-war England, which—far from being a land fit for heroes—with its false values and its speeding-up of everything threatens to destroy those who have learnt true values and felt the slow march of real progress, perhaps even at an ancient seat of learning. The New Morality certainly enters into the hero’s managing of love affairs, but he was with the ages when he concentrated on Beauty and forgot everything else . . .’

A later publication was Girls and Stations (1952), a book of poems introduced by his friend John Betjeman, who applauds the strong railway interest: there is a sonnet sequence based on the little-known Bletchley-Oxford line. Greenidge ran an informal society of fellow high-spirited young men, the Railway Club, whose purpose was fine dining on obscure trains

A Checklist of Publications by Terence Greenidge

Degenerate Oxford? A critical study of modern university life (Chapman & Hall, 1930)

The Magnificent. A story without a moral (Fortune Press, 1933)

Brass and Paint: A Patriotic Story (Chapman & Hall, 1934)

Tinpot Country: A story of England in the Dark Ages (Fortune Press, 1937)       

Philip and the Dictator. A romantic story (Fortune Press, [1938])

Sonnet sequence on the Oxford and Bletchley branch. By a Master of Arts [i.e. Terence Greenidge] (BM/Hegel, [1947])

Ten poems, mostly amorous. By a Master of Arts (BM/Hegel, [1948])

Girls and Stations, etc. [Poems.] (Fortune Press, [1952])

Four Plays for Pacifists, etc (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1955)

My Philosophy. By a Master of Arts (BM/Hegel, [1955])

(Mark Valentine)

Image: BFI

Dunwich

To Call is a mimeographed journal edited by artist and printer Petra Schulze-Wollgast. The latest issue, no 16, with the theme of crisis, includes my typographical poem ‘Dunwich’, as well as works by other artists and poets.

The magazine is printed on Gestetner 320 and Gestetner 160 duplicators on old typewriter paper, and hand-collated, in an edition of 130 copies.

It will appeal to that possibly elusive or even illusory coterie of connoisseurs interested in any or all of vanished cities, experimental poetry, semi-obsolete printing and the complete works of M Valentine.

(Mark Valentine)