Chapter 24. Epilogue

Three years after Mr Barlow's death, the Revd George Sanger's ministry came to an abrupt and unexpected end.

The new church at Carlton was opened by the Archdeacon in March 1879.  George Sanger had done much of the work himself – it was a magnificent undertaking.  Unfortunately, his relations with his parishioners were growing increasingly difficult. 

At three o'clock in the morning on 19 October 1881, the new church was destroyed by fire.

Soon it became apparent that some of his parishioners fervently believed that their vicar had destroyed his own church.  A long history of petty grievances and village gossip had apparently combined to produce a combustible mixture.

Mr Sanger was arrested in London on a charge of arson soon after his marriage to his young and allegedly pregnant housekeeper (who seems to have been the niece of James Stanger's wife).  The case was dismissed by the Stokesley magistrates in January 1882, but the public opinion in Carlton remained unrelenting. 

Nevertheless Mr Sanger entreated his parishioners to build a new church:

Money is not wanting in the parish, where one parishioner can boast of being able to command £70,000, and the united income of the wealthy landowners is not much less than £1m a year. 

Perhaps the distinct lack of tact may explain some of his past difficulties in dealing with his parishioners.

He was inhibited by the church authorities from taking services for five years on an ecclesiastical offence, but for many years afterwards much of the parish continued to ostracise the poor man.  While parishioners attended services at Faceby, Mr Sanger lived on in the vicarage, spending his time walking on the moors.  A reconciliation took place as he came to his deathbed in 1894.  According to Major Fairfax-Blakeborough,

some of those who have had time to hear all the evidence, and every insinuation, are confirmed in the certain opinion that the Rev Geo. Sangar had no part in the burning of his Church.  The mystery will probably never now be solved, though it is said the late Vicar himself could have explained it and that spleen was the motive. 

The case inspired the Middlesbrough-born writer, E W Hornung, creator of Raffles, the gentleman thief, to write a fictionalised version in his novel Peccavi  [1]. 

Chapter 23. "The old vicar of Rudby has gone to his well-earned rest"

Life in the vicarage must have grown more lonely for Mr Barlow in the years following Nanny's death. 

His sister Mary Sophia was suffering from dementia and died aged 78 of "Senile Decay" on 17 September 1873.  She was followed six months later on 7 March 1874 by her sister Isabella, whose cause of death was registered as "General Debility" at the age of 74. 

As before, it was not Mr Barlow who registered their deaths.  Mary's was registered by Christopher Garbutt, the joiner and publican of the King's Head, and Isabella's by the joiner Alvey Kay – they had presumably supplied the coffins and were acting as undertakers. 

The sisters were buried in the family vault and a memorial tablet was placed on the church wall near the door.  Hector Vaughan possibly contributed to the cost of this, which gives full details of his father – it can be seen that Mr Barlow employed the Latin version of the degree of Master of Arts.  The lettering was apparently in gold, although no trace of this remains: 

IN A VAULT NEAR THIS LIE THE REMAINS OF NANNY VAUGHAN
WIDOW OF THE LATE REVD HECTOR FRANCIS VAUGHAN A.M.
RECTOR OF MYSHALL WHO DIED OCTOBER THE 26TH 1867
AGED 66 YEARS
ALSO OF MARY SOPHIA BARLOW WHO DIED SEPTR 7TH 1873
AGED 78 YEARS
ALSO OF ISABELLA CATHERINE BARLOW WHO DIED MARCH 7TH 1874
AGED 74 YEARS
THE NAMES OF THESE THREE DESERVEDLY BELOVED SISTERS
ARE HERE RECORDED BY THEIR AFFECTIONATE BROTHER
IN CHARACTERS OF GOLD AS A TESTIMONY OF THEIR WORTH

Now Robert was alone in the vicarage.  He had his friends and regular consultations with his curate George Sanger, and he was still active, as his notebook shows. 

Chapter 22. 'Remarkable, but still True'

The 1871 census found a diminished household at the vicarage – Robert, his sister Mary (here called Maria), whose age is now given as 75, and his sister Isabella (here for some reason called Jane), whose age is given as 72.  They had one maid of all work living in the house – 20-year-old Mary Chipchase, born in Appleton Wiske. 

New industries had come – there were now jet miners living in the village and working in Scugdale and a busy timber mill stood at the top of Sexhow Lane.  George Wilson's Sailcloth Mill employed 24 men and 9 women and was being converted from water to steam power, while over on the Rudby side of the river, the bleach house employed three men.

Mr Barlow was occupied with a new project.

Not for him the usual topics of the clergyman scholar – he was engaged in a lively volume of disguised autobiography and colourful anecdote, under the pen-name Walter Fitzallen.  It is interesting to note that nearly all the names he gives his characters were used by Sir Walter Scott – Graham, Clutterbuck, Barnard, Seymour and the name Fitzallen itself.  Perhaps, although he does not mention reading Scott, he was so fond of his works that he had absorbed the names without noticing.

The novel was printed for Mr Barlow in 1872 by Wyman & Sons of Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields – again, he had evidently no desire to use the local printers – and appeared as a small octavo volume (19cm tall) of 406 pages divided into 34 chapters.

Chapter 21. "My intense exertions"

In Mr Barlow's notebooks we can catch a glimpse of his interests and activities in the latter part of his life. 

In the Middleton Book in his early years in the village he had written out a "Catalogue of Books", which appears to be a record of his library.

It naturally included the classical authors and a range of religious works, such as Hebrew grammars, a Hebrew Psalter, sermons, commentaries, and Waldo on Liturgy [1], but also poetry and French authors such as Pascal, Racine and Mme de Sévigné, together with dictionaries.  There were also works by the Evangelical philanthropist Hannah More, who had sought to counter the arguments of Tom Paine (the author so admired by the radicals of Stokesley) with her Cheap Repository Tracts urging the poor to work hard, respect the gentry and trust in God – views echoed in Barlow's sermon of 1833.

However Mr Barlow, though classically educated, was not interested in the usual pursuits of the scholarly Victorian cleric.

He had little interest in theological debate, and the great questions of his day that had tormented so many – from the Tracts for the Times to Essays and Reviews – seem to have made little impression upon him.

Practical matters and technology fascinated him above all, and, as can be seen in the draft of a letter [2] entitled "Suggestions upon the construction and armour of ships of war", his preoccupations were not those normally expected of Victorian clergy.  The letter must date from the mid-1860s, as the Armstrong gun itself was only introduced in 1859:

My Lord Duke.  Having carefully studied the experiments lately made at Shoeburyness upon the Hercules target which resisted a 300lbs shot propelled by a 60lb charge target coated with 9in armour backed by wood and iron the bolt having merely penetrated the 9in plate … and finding that such target resisted a 300lb Armstrong gun with a charge of 60lbs of powder …
… bearing all this fully in mind I am of opinion that the plan I now submit to your Grace will in several respects be found superior to the Hercules target.  On the other side I give the sketch of a ships side from which it will be seen that my plan is to reduce the vital part of a ship to a minimum and to surround that portion with an impregnable belt …

Chapter 20. "A very queer chap"

While Robert Barlow contemplated the success of his pamphlet, the nation was horrified to hear of the uprising in India.

In late July 1857 Lieutenant Hector Vaughan sailed with his regiment from Portsmouth on the Champion of the Seas.  She was a clipper charted by the government as a troop transport, and she made the journey in only 101 days.  Lieutenant Vaughan's regiment was to be present at the capture of Lucknow in 1858, and he would later receive the Indian Mutiny Medal.  It was the beginning of Empire.  Meanwhile, the old way of life in Cleveland was rapidly changing. 

Middlesbrough, which had been a farm and a few cottages when Mr Barlow arrived in the area, was made a municipal borough in 1853; ironstone had been found in the Eston Hills.

Railways were spreading across the countryside – the line from Middlesbrough to Guisborough was built in 1853, and on 2 March 1857 the North Yorkshire & Cleveland Railway opened a line from Picton station to Stokesley.

It was an age of technological marvels, which Mr Barlow must surely have enjoyed – the first iron ship built on the Tees was launched at South Stockton in 1854, and in 1858 an iron steamer was built at Middlesbrough. 

Improvements of all kinds were being carried out.

In Osmotherley, the open drain in the middle of the main street was covered over at last in 1852.  By 1856 Yarm's trade as a port had almost entirely disappeared, but they had the railway and gas street lights.  Stokesley had gas lighting, paved streets and a new Town Hall.  The "odious unsightly shambles, situated in the centre of the main street" described by Ord in 1846 had finally been demolished, and neat new buildings erected in their place.  Mr Barlow himself was improving his glebe land, and his notebooks contain records of field drainage undertaken.

Chapter 19. 'The Queen, the Head of the Church'

Mr Barlow had now reached the age of fifty and the full implications of his situation had become unavoidable.

As a boy, he was

ambitious of distinction and learning … content with nothing if anything loftier stood forth for competition. 

As a man, he had an enormous interest in the outside world, and his leisure time was evidently spent in

the profitable perusal of scientific reasoning [1].  

One of his favourite books, referred to in his novel, was Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos, on which he took copious notes:

The limit of perpetual snow depends not on the mean temperature of the year but of the summer which melts the snow … The Chinese had a waggon with a needle to direct them across the deserts 1000 years before Christ …

Humboldt was a traveller, explorer and mountaineer, father of the earth and life sciences we know today, who conceived of projects unimaginable in his time, such as the Panama Canal and a United Nations. 

Not far from Mr Barlow's own parish, men of enterprise were developing new industries.  People of his own acquaintance made epic journeys.

Chapter 18. The early 1850s

In 1851, some months after her marriage, Marian Digby Beste and her new family left the country.  They sailed for the United States in a large party consisting of eleven children (Beste's eldest son remained behind), several canary birds, a lapdog and a dormouse.  They hoped to find a better future for the boys in the new world. 

Back in Yorkshire, some of Mr Barlow's activities at this time can be traced in his notebooks, and particularly in the one that survived amongst the logbooks for the Hutton Rudby school.  In it he recorded
the beginning of what was to be a long-running boundary dispute with his neighbour, the tailor William Jackson, who lived in the cottage where Drumrauch Hall now stands:

The time when the hedge at the foot of Jackson paddock Jacque Barn was cut by my order and in my presence
after harvest    1850    by Ramshaw
after harvest    1851    by Thos Brown

Some jottings show his open-handedness in giving and lending money to his parishioners, as for example:

Teddy has paid towards his boots    0 – 6 – 7   Decr 27th 1851

Other entries include notes of the number of days worked for him by the Meynells, Hebron, "Joe" and Pat Cannon and details of the substantial sum of £309-19s he had made in 1854 on sales of crops grown on his glebe land.

The 1851 census found Robert Barlow and all his family together in the vicarage: his wife, his three sisters and his nephew Hector.

They had a very suitable complement of servants – cook, housemaid and groom – indicating a well-to-do middle-class household.  The cook and maid were two Hutton Rudby girls aged 20 and 17, Catherine and Elizabeth Bainbridge, and the groom was an Irish lad, John McLaughlin, aged 18.

Hector Vaughan was then 18 years old and must soon afterwards have begun his career in the army, entering the 1st Battalion 20th Foot (East Devonshire) Regiment [1].  At this time an army officer was generally expected to have a private income in addition to his pay.  Hector may have inherited money from his father's family, or possibly his mother passed on to him some of the income from his father's Will and her own marriage settlement.

For this census Mr Barlow gave his age as 47 and reduced his wife's age from nearly 70 to 45.  His two eldest sisters are described as aged 30 and 28 years old, while their younger sister Nanny has a mere fourteen years taken off her age, which is given as 36.