A Visit From The Police

... who told my parents I went in pubs

New Month Old Post: first posted 19th April, 2019.

My generation was not as open with our parents as our children are with us, at least not in my part of the North of England, or maybe it was just me. I never told my parents I went in pubs. Not even when old enough. The police told them. It was Easter Sunday, 11th April, 1971.

It was the day after I had been with three friends to The Green Bottle in the curiously named Spawd Bone Lane, Knottingley. The pub was packed with noisy, holiday-weekend drinkers, and we took little notice of a short-haired man in a suit sitting alone at a table in the middle of the room until he asked us one by one to go over to have a few words with him. He was a detective investigating a vicious attack on an elderly lady the previous afternoon*, although we did not know that until later. 

I can still remember some of what he asked – name, age, address, where I been between 4.30 and 6.30 the previous afternoon, and where I worked. I told him I was an accountants’ clerk with Goodwill and Ledger in Leeds, to which he said, “Oh! Do you know Mr. Black?” I said no, there was no Mr. Black where I worked, to which he replied that he worked at the Huddersfield office. It so happened that we did have an office in Huddersfield, and being naïve and trusting, thinking it a genuine question, I said I wasn’t sure but thought I might have seen that name on the letterheads, and that Mr. Black might be a partner at the Huddersfield office. It seemed to arouse the detective’s interest. I had never been grilled by the police before, and found it unsettling, although I tried hard not to show it.

The detective moved on to my friends, one of whom was in the middle of a Fine Art degree, with a contrary “art student” attitude, full of the deep and mysterious philosophies to which such beings are prone. He was going through a phase of answering questions with enigmatic answers, that’s if he could be bothered to answer at all. When approached on a train in the Midlands by a woman carrying out a travel survey, he told her he was on his way to Johannesburg. No matter who was asking, or how serious the situation, he took the same line. It was also the case, coincidentally, that he had the same surname as me, which drew the obvious follow-up from the detective.

“Oh! Are you related?”

“I suppose we must be.” 

“What does that mean?”

“Are we not all related in some way?”

The detective was suspicious. Did he think I had given him a false name, that of my art student friend? We had a bit of a laugh about it afterwards.

When you consider the gravity of the situation, it was not really funny at all, but we were still at that stage of youthful innocence which takes little seriously. Without really being part of it, we liked to imagine we followed the trendy, counterculture of underground bands and magazines such as Oz which was about to face an obscenity trial. You don’t realise now when you see old clips of bands such as Black Sabbath, just how excitingly anti-establishment they seemed, even in name. The police were joked about: you would see “Screw the Pigs” scrawled in four-foot letters on garage doors. This pushing of the limits, I would now say, was only possible because England, on the whole, was a much safer and law-abiding place than it is today, which makes the attack on the old lady all the more shocking.  And of course, we did not yet know the awful details of the incident. 

The following day, being Easter Sunday, I was at home, going through the pointless motions of revising for my accountancy exams. Dad called me down to the front room where two more short-haired men in suits wanted to see me. 

“These two gentlemen are police officers, and would like to ask you some questions.”

Being the sort of person who feels guilty even if not (you know, when the teacher asks who made that silly noise and you go red, terrified she thinks it was you, even though it was someone else), it really scared me. I had to explain about the pub in Knottingley and about being questioned, and the two detectives went off satisfied, but it felt very awkward.

And that’s how my parents found out I went in pubs, although, they probably knew already.

There is now no sign The Green Bottle ever existed. It closed for good and was boarded up by 2009, burnt out in 2010, demolished, and is now the site of a care home. 

*From newspaper archives, I can see that the elderly lady was 88 year-old Mrs. Dorothy Leeman. She had been beaten around the head, bound, gagged and robbed of £80 on Good Friday in her roadside shop at Hilltop, Knottingley, Yorkshire. She never properly recovered and died less than six months later. It was an appalling attack and I don’t believe anyone was ever caught.

A Family History Mystery

The mystery of John Price, and our part in its solution.  

Neil Price: Dickens’s Favourite
Blacking Factory (The Conrad Press, 2023)  

 

I have mentioned before that my wife is descended from Henry Francis Lockwood, the architect of Bradford Town Hall and the mill and town of Saltaire. Much of her family history was pieced together by her father trawling through archives in the 1950s and 1960s, then a painstaking and laborious task demanding patience and perseverance.  

After retirement I filled in more details. It was much more interesting than my own family history, and I spent months on it like a full-time job, placing a lot of information on genealogy web sites.

One of Henry Francis Lockwood’s uncles was Charles Day, the boot blacking manufacturer, who made the kind of fortune that would easily place him alongside today’s richest rock stars. When he died in 1836, one estimate valued him at £450,000, the RPI equivalent of £40-£50 million today. But in terms of property price inflation, the value of his holdings in London and elsewhere would now be astronomical.

It was widely believed that Charles Day had just one daughter, Caroline, with his wife, Rebecca Peake. However, at the very end of his life, he added a codicil to his will:

    “I Charles Day of Edgware and Harley House being of sound mind so desire that the three Post Obit Bonds for £5000 cash which will be presented at my decease may be doubled that is made £10000 cash and that the same may be invested for the benefit of my three natural sons ...”

That was quite a revelation. Wills are public documents and the existence of three, secret, illegitimate sons would have been a real scandal. He left them each the equivalent of around £1 million today, producing incomes of perhaps £45,000 per year.

I tried hard to identify who these three natural sons might be, without success, but left a summary of the will and other details in various places online. This turned out to be crucial.

Around the same time as my father-in-law was busy with his research, a certain Hugh Price was struggling with his own family history. One could fancy them together in Somerset House (then the genealogical archives), two gentlemen, strangers, each unaware of the other’s connection, brief nods of acknowledgement, departing their separate ways, never again their paths to cross.

Hugh had long been troubled by his great-grandfather, John Price. He knew that John had had three boys with Sarah Peake, and that their names had been Henry, Alfred and Edmund Price; Alfred being his grandfather. But otherwise John remained a mystery. Indeed, some records named him as Charles Price rather than John. 

Hugh died in 1986 and the quest was taken up by Hugh’s son, Neil, who had been intrigued by the problem since boyhood. Like me, he soon had the immense power of the internet at his disposal, but this only added further questions. It revealed that the three brothers had lived quietly but very comfortably at the best addresses in London and Edinburgh, without ever having worked or followed any profession other than “fundholder”. Where had these funds come from? And John/Charles Price remained elusive as ever.

Very late one night in 2015, Neil was following up links to his great-great grandmother’s Peake family. You may have noted that the surname of Charles Day’s wife was also Peake. Neil had been tipped off that a family member had been extremely wealthy, and wondered whether this could be the source of the brothers’ funds. He came across my summary of Charles Day’s will:

    “After about 20 further minutes of scratching about and fumbling for more information as to how John Price fitted into all this (if at all), the penny suddenly dropped. It was about 1am and my shriek of recognition certainly woke [my wife] and probably some of the neighbours! The “Three natural sons” – it was too much of a coincidence – they had to be Henry, Alfred and Edmund Price! But how?”

Indeed they were. John/Charles Price and Charles Day were one and the same. The reason for the deception was that Day’s wife knew nothing of the boys’ existence, and even more explosive, their mother was her cousin, Sarah Peake. Furthermore, Day’s assistant and confidente in all of this was none other than his wife’s sister. The boys may later have known their father’s identity, and that they were illegitimate, but they maintained the secrecy and kept it from their own children. Illegitimacy was seen as a shameful stain on the character until very recent times.  

Their identities emerged only because the will was subject to lengthy litigation, in which Henry, Alfred and Edmund Price of Regent’s Park are sometimes named among the many respondents. Along with several other possibilities, I had even wondered whether they might be the three natural sons, but they were almost impossible to trace. Price is a very common name, and where I did seem to find them they appeared to be associated with Peakes rather than Days. You would have to be an unusually obsessive genealogist to delve into an ancestor’s brother’s wife’s cousins.

When Neil contacted me, I said he needed to look at the court papers at the National Archives. I had only seen newspaper reports. The initial case concerned an unscrupulous attorney who had attempted to write himself into the will as co-Executor on highly favourable terms, but this was ruled invalid. He contested the ruling, resulting in the boys being named, but their mother’s identity was never revealed. The ramifications went on for decades and the case became celebrated for its length and complexity. Dickens used it as the model for the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce in ‘Bleak House’, in which he pokes fun at the Court of Chancery, its lawyers and the enormous costs involved.  

The Court papers provide a window into the lives of Day and his family, and how the three boys were hidden from Day’s wife, the rest of the family, the prying public, and the shame of illegitimacy. This, and how the firm of Day and Martin built up their business and became so successful, is a tale of Regency London, ruthless competition, inspired marketing, shameless counterfeiting, an eligible heiress and a vacuous playboy, and no end of other fascinating and entertaining detail.  

One uncanny coincidence was this. For his last two decades, Charles Day was blind. You can see this in the portrait on the cover of Neil’s book. One of Day’s many acts as a benefactor was to found a charity called The Blind Man’s Friend. Eventually, the charity and the portrait passed to the Clothworkers’ Company. Neil Price, during his working life, sat through many meetings in the Clothworkers’ Hall, never aware that, there, all the time, on the wall above, the portrait of his mysterious great-great grandfather, John Price, i.e. Charles Day, had been watching over him.  

If anyone is interested in Neil's book I can pass on his contact details if you email me via my profile page.