From Christine Bate’s document titled Sadie Steel-Porter (no extension)

Mother’s Family

It’s time to write about mother’s family. Where shall I start? With her mother’s family , I think, because  several unrelated stray thoughts have recently crossed my mind, probably precipitated by the book about Beatrix Potter that Nicholas and Gayle brought for me two weeks ago. I looked at the map of the northern Lake District on the tray I used for my dinner last week and saw Caldbeck on it. That is where my great grandparents lived and I thought my grandmother was born there but later recollected that she was born at Heskett New Market. Great grandfather Joseph Wilson was the headmaster at the village school and I have a photograph of him and his scholars from the Cumberland News. Later, he had problems with his health, some kind of respiratory difficulties. At this point, Auntie Bessie, his oldest daughter, came home from Manchester where she was working as a teacher, and joined her father at the school. After he died, his wife, always referred to by my mother as Grannie Wilson, bought a cottage at Blitterlees on the coast between Silloth and Skinburness and lived there for the rest of her life. She is reputed to have always walked down the middle of the road and when warned about cars coming she replied,  “I was here before they were”.

 Grandma Steel came from the usual large family of those days. Auntie Bessie was the oldest. She married John Davidson. Other sisters were, Minnie, Grandma’s twin sister who married Jonathan Stalker, Mary who married ……Auntie Fannie died fairly young  for reasons unknown to me. I believe there was a Francis who died in infancy and then there was Tom.

Auntie Bessie married John Davidson who was the headmaster of the school at Crosby, near Maryport. His first wife had died in childbirth and he and Auntie Bessie had no children. They lived in Moor Lea House, a fairly large house that had a row of smaller houses attached to it. He owned some or all of the smaller houses and his two spinster sisters lived in one of them. When he married Auntie Bessie, they constantly compared her to Uncle John’s first wife to the point where she nearly had a nervous breakdown. When the reason became known, her life improved and they lived happily together for many years. 

Say much more about these families. Auntie Mary was Mary Rayson.

Mother was born in a little village called Black Ford. She was named Sarah Annie but was always called Sadie. Aunt Sarah who kept the Fox and Hounds in Moorend, Thursby, came to visit the new child. She apparently said, “Name the bairn for me and I’ll see that she’s a’ reet,” and so the name Sarah was given. However, a woman in the family died soon after leaving young children so Aunt Sarah looked after them instead. Aunt Sarah was my grandfather’s aunt, the daughter of Fergus Steel, married to a Joseph Cartner in 1876, but not the Joseph Cartner mentioned in the family history elsewhere. She was widowed by 1891 and had no children. 

Mother lived in many different houses, mainly in Carlisle, until the family moved to Cardewlees at the beginning of WW I. They couldn’t move after that because of the housing shortage and my mother was married from there. The house at Cardewlees was very big. In fact it used to be a public house until the state moved in and took over the running of pubs in Cumberland because there were so many and were apparently so riotous that they became state controlled. There was a small cottage built on to the side of the house and I visited there in about 1936 or 1937. Polly Bleesdale who had never married, was still living there, but her brother had died. By then she was very old, but mother told stories about her when she made bread and baked it in an old oven, the kind you made a fire of sticks in and then swept out the ashes to bake the bread. She then put the bread in a basket and sold it in the neighbourhood using her pony and cart to travel around. She apparently was confused when summer time was introduced during WWI and when asked the time replied, “Well it’s quarter past ten old time, so that makes it quarter past nine new time and my clock’s ten minutes fast.”  Mother told me that she made the bread for her when Polly broke her arm. Of course there were no recipes and quantities were all judged by the look of the mixture.  When cars began to appear on the roads, they were not welcome, especially when someone ran over her cockerel and Polly appeared at the door holding it by the neck and complaining, “they kil’t me cock”. 

Granda Steel enjoyed living at Cardewlees. It was like a small holding for him as an escape after his hours in the office at Hudson Scott. Mother complained that she was the one who did most of the work, looking after the hens and goats. They kept the goats because Edgar didn’t “do well” on cows milk and Doctor Flamant recommended goat’s milk. Granda always liked being out of doors and was a pioneer “rambler” in the Carlisle area. He kept bees and was active in the local beekeeper’s association. I remember going to the inside market at Carlisle to see his display of bees and honey during the flower show. Even when it was just a regular market day, the large hall with wrought iron rafters smelled wonderfully of country produce; flowers, vegetables, fruit, poultry and eggs, all displayed by growers or farmers’ wives who came into town for the day. The floors were cobbles and the stalls were wooden planks on trestles but each vendor treated the stall in different ways. Some laid out their produce neatly and some just sat on a bench at the stall with a large basket beside them from which they made their sales. 

Mother had four brothers, Joe who was older, and Fergus, Donald and Edgar who were born quite close together, beginning when mother was eight or nine years old. Grandma had help in the house, a charlady, a washerwoman and a housekeeper when the three boys were born. However, Mother had to help at home from an early age and continued to do so until she married. Mother left school when she was only ten years old. Of course, this was illegal, in those days education to age thirteen was compulsory, but around 1914, the family moved to Cardewlees and Mother was just not sent to school. Nobody noticed. I believe she had scarlet fever at some point in her childhood and maybe she was not going to school just before the family moved. Mother had been a star pupil at St. Cuthbert’s school according to the headmistress and it is no wonder because she was very intelligent and overcame the limitations that were imposed on her.  She was a knowledgeable and interesting person. She was self-educated and began by reading all of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that were still on the shelves at Broad Street when we visited. 

Father was called Will by Mother, Willie by his family and Bill at work,  and lived in Dalston, the next village to Cardewlees. He was a friend of Joe, Mother’s older brother and knew her from being at their house.  Father courted her mainly by going for walks since neither of them had any money and they lived out in the country, Mother had no allowance from her parents and Father was discharged from the army and unable to find work for a long time. They were married on September, 16th 1926. By that time, Father had managed to get a job with the London Midland and Scottish Railway through having a recommendation from someone.  He began in the office as a clerk ( he always had beautiful copperplate hand writing) but did not like being cooped up in the office. He transferred to work on the footplate; that is working on the steam engines. He started at the bottom as a cleaner. Besides cleaning the engines, his job was to rake the cinders and ashes out of the engine fireboxes and start the fires so that the engine was ready with a full head of steam when the driver, or engineer in American parlance, came to the engine. The system of promotion was very simple: the day you joined the company set your position on the roster regardless of how well or poorly you performed. 

[I have written about Father’s family in a separate section.]

Granda was chief clerk at Hudson Scott’s, a factory that made metal boxes and indeed his company was taken over by the Metal Box Company. In Granda’s day, all the records and ledgers were written by hand.and when the company acquired one typewriter, he was the one who used it. However, before long, typing became the domain of women employees. The head of the company was Mr. Scott Nicholson and Mother was always proud to say that Grandma and Mrs. Scott Nicholson were on visiting terms and talked about Christopher Scott Nicholson being brought to tea in a large pram, or perambulator as my Great Uncle John called them. 

When Granda retired in August of 1939, they left Broad Street in Carlisle and rented a house in Gilsland. It was a small house, only one room wide so that you entered the front door into a dark room that was never used and I believe had the staircase in it. I do remember that the family tall clock or grandfather clock was in there. A door led into the living room with a fireplace and a lovely view down into the valley where the railway line ran, and then across up onto the fells.  In Cumberland, fells describes upland moors.  There were two bedrooms upstairs but no bathroom. From the living room, a door led into the kitchen which was an addition to the house. The oddest thing was that there was a bathtub there that was permanently covered by a large board and served as a kitchen counter. All personal washing was done at the kitchen sink. Outside was a small paved yard with a wash-house and a coal-house and then there was a garden and Granda’s beehives. 

As you stepped out of the front door of the house in Gilsland, there right across thenarrow lane, over the other side of a stone wall was the Roman Wall.

I was looking for a magic marker this morning so that I could erase my name from the books I was going to donate. However I was side-tracked and ended up tidying my desk drawers. In one of them I found a list of names for the Sundays in Lent that Mother told me some years ago. They are: Kid, Mid, Misere, Carling, Palm and Pace Egg Day. She said that carling referred to peas “parched for eating” or dried peas. Pace eggs were hard-boiled eggs dyed with vegetable dyes such as onions. When we made them at home, we first took scraps of fabric left over from making our cotton frocks and wrapped them around the egg over leaves and flower petals, then tied the parcel up with cotton thread. Sometimes we dipped a matchstick in lard and wrote initials on the eggs so the the dye wouldn’t take there. When the eggs were cooked and cooled we polished them with lard on a piece of cloth. Mother told us that in Cumberland the children rolled their eggs down grassy slopes to see who’s egg won but we admired and then ate ours. The word pace comes from the French “pacques” for Easter. It was not unusual to hear French words in the Border Country  because of the French influence in Scotland which ended after the rebellions. Mother used to call a big serving platter an “ashette”, a word coming from the French word for plate “assiette”.