The Expose of Thomas Greene

The grandfather of Thomas Wanless had been a small Warwickshire yeoman, whom the troublous times towards the latter end of the last century, family misfortunes, and the pressure of the large landowners, had combined to reduce in circumstances. His son Jacob had, therefore, found himself in the position of a day labourer on the farms around Ashbrook, raised above his fellow labourers only by the fact that he could sign his name, and that, through his wife, he owned a small freehold cottage with about a quarter of an acre of garden in the village.

His unusual literary accomplishments, and his small possession did little to relieve him from the common miseries which pressed more or less on all, but most, of course, on the lowest class, during the years that succeeded the "glorious" Napoleonic wars. The winter of 1819, therefore, found him wrestling with the bitter energy of a hungry despair to get bread for a family of six children. The task proved too much for him, and he was reluctantly driven to let his oldest boy Thomas go to work on the Whitbury farm for a shilling a week. Thomas had been trying to pick up some inkling of the art of reading at a dame's school in the village, but had not made much progress-could, when thus launched on the world, do no more than spell out the Sermon on the Mount, or the first verses of the 1st chapter in John's Gospel, and ere a year was well over he had forgotten even that. There were no demagogues in those days disturbing peaceful villages with clamours for education; no laws prohibiting the labour of little children at tasks beyond their strength.

The squires, the parsons, and the larger farmers had the law in their own hands, and combined to keep the lower orders in ignorance, giving God thanks that they had the power so to do. The sporting parson of Ashbrook of that day even thought it superfluous to teach those d--d labourers' brats the Catechism. He appeared to think his duty done when he had stumbled through the prayers once a week in church. That, at least, was the range of his spiritual duties. For the rest, he considered it of the highest moment that his tithes should be promptly paid; that all poaching should be summarily punished, and that the hunting appointments of the shire should always be graced by his presence. It was also a point of duty with him always to vote true blue, and never to miss a good dinner at any aristocratic table within his reach. He would say grace with fervour, and drink the good wines till his face grew purple and his eyes bloodshot. If he had another mission in life, it was to do his best to divert in sublime disregard of merit or human wants, the charity which some reluctantly contrite sinner of former days had left for the poor of the parish, to the use of creatures who had excited his good feeling by their obsequiousness.

So it came to pass that little Thomas Wanless was launched on the world at the early age of eight, at the age when the well-to-do begin to think of sending their children to school. Clad in a sort of blue smock and heavy clog boots; patched, not over-warm breeches and stockings, Thomas had to face the wintry blasts in the early morning, for it was a good mile walk to Whitbury Farm. There, all day long, he either trudged wearily by the sides of the horses at plough, often nearly frozen with cold, or did rough jobs about the cattle or pigs in the muck-littered farmyard. Weary, heavy hearted, and hungry, the lad came home at night to his meagre supper of thin oatmeal porridge, or of black bread flavoured with coarse bacon, washed down sometimes with a little thin ale or cider. Often he had for dinner only dry bread and a little watery cheese, and rarely or never any meat or milk. Supper over the boy crept straight to bed. For two years this was the life the boy led, and at the end of these two years his wage was but eighteenpence a week. No food was given him save, perhaps, an occasional hunch of bread surreptitiously conveyed to him beneath the apron of a dairymaid endowed with fellow feeling. What need to fill up the picture of these years-who does not know it now? The long autumn days spent watching the corn, often, weary with watching, and hungry, falling asleep by the hedge side. The dreary winters, the hard pallet, and still harder fare, the scant clothing and chilled blood, the crowded sleeping rooms and wan stunted figures; find you not all the history of lives like this set forth in Parliamentary Blue Books for legislators to ponder over and mend, if they can or care. Thomas Wanless suffered no more hardships than millions that have gone before him, or that follow after to this day, bearing on their weary, patient shoulders the burden of our magnificent civilization. He and the others suspected not that this was their allotted mission in our immaculate order of society; but the concrete sufferings of his lot he could feel. For him the harsh words and cruel blows of the farmer were real enough, and, in the misery of his present sufferings, his young life lost its joy and hope. For him the birds that sang in the sweet spring time brought no melody of heaven, the autumn with its golden grain no joy. He knew only of labour, and men's hardness, and was familiar mostly with hunger and cold and pain. The divine order of the British Constitution had ordained it-why should he complain? If my lord and my lady lived in wasteful luxury, if proud squires and their henchmen trod crops under foot in their pursuit of sport, totally regardless of a people's necessities; if vermin, strictly preserved, ate the bread of the poor in order that the lordly few might indulge the wild brute passion for slaughter, deemed by them a mark of high-breeding, what was that to Thomas and his kind? Had not those people a right to their pleasure? Was not the land theirs, by theft or fraud it might be, but still theirs by a power none dared gainsay? All that was as clear as day, and religion itself was distinctly on the side of the upper classes. The Church through its tithes shared in their exclusive privileges, and the parson of the parish was a diligent guardian of property. On the rare occasions when he preached a sermon his theme was the duty of the poor to be contented and obedient. Men who dared to think, he classed as rioters, who, like poachers and rick-burners, were an abomination to the Lord. Who so dared to question the divine order of British society, deserved, in the parson's view, everlasting death. Wealth, in short, according to this beautiful gospel, was for them that had it or could steal it within the lines of the constitution, and for the poor there was degradation, hunger, rags, and, by way of hope, a chance of the pauper's heaven.

It must be all right, of course; but somehow, gradually, to little Thomas it did not appear so. Very young and ignorant as he was, strange thoughts began to stir within him. At home he saw his father sinking more and more into the hopeless state of a man whose only earthly hope was the parish workhouse; he saw his mother beaten to the earth with the weary work of rearing a family of six children, without the means of giving them enough to eat. One by one these went out, like himself, from their little three-roomed cottage to try and earn the bread they needed. The girls worked in the fields like the rest. All were, like himself, uneducated, and, in spite of all, the wolf could hardly be kept from the door when bread was dear, as it often was in those days. His father's wages never averaged more than 8s. a-week the year round. But what did that matter? Had not the parish provided a poorhouse, and did it not give bread of a kind to every miserable groundling whom it could not drive beyond its bounds? They ought surely to have been contented. Yet Thomas, who saw and often felt their hunger, and contrasted it with the coarse profusion at the farm, and the pampered condition of the squire's menials at the Grange-he doubted many things.

The sight of a meeting of fox-hunters, and of the rush of their horses across the cultivated land, filled him with wrath even then. The life he saw around him had no unity in it. Thus it happened that, by the time he was 13, though still stunted in body, he had begun to assert some amount of dogged independence, and was driven away from Whitbury farm because he flew at his drunken master for striking him with the waggoner's whip.

With some difficulty he got work after this, at 2s. a week and his dinner, on a small dairy farm called the Brooks, which lay a mile further from the village, on the Stratford Road. There he got better treatment. His master was a quiet hard-working man, who had himself a hard struggle to meet his rent, maintain his stock of nine cows, and get a living. His own troubles had tended rather to soften than harden his nature. Thomas, though having to work early and late, at least always got his warm dinner, and often received a draught of milk from the motherly housewife. Here, therefore, he began to grow; his stunted limbs straightened out; his chest expanded, and, by the time he was seventeen he gave the promise of becoming a more than usually stalwart labourer.

While Thomas was still new at this dairy farm, and while the remembrance of his defiance was still fresh in the minds of farmer Pemberton, of Whitbury, and his family, he was subjected to an outrage which almost killed him, and left a mark on his mind which was fresh and vivid to the day of his death. Farmer Pemberton's sons resolved to have a lark with the "impudent young devil." Their first idea was to catch Thomas as he came home at night, and, after trouncing him soundly, duck him in the stinking pond formed by the farm sewage. On consulting their friend, the eldest son of Lawyer Turner, of Warwick, he, however, said that it would be better to frighten the little beggar into doing something they might get him clapped into jail for. Led by this young knave, the farmer's three sons disguised themselves by blackening their faces and donning old clothes. Then, armed with bludgeons and knives, they lay in wait for Thomas as he came home from work in the gloom of an October evening. Their intention was to seize him, and amid great demonstrations of knives and fearful imprecations, order him to take them to Farmer Pemberton's rickyard. Once there they intended to force him to set fire to some straw in the yard, and then seize him for fire-raising. As young Turner said, they might easily in this way swear him into jail for a twelvemonth.

This diabolical plot was actually and literally carried out upon this poor, ignorant, peasant lad by four young men, supposed to be educated and civilised; and it might have had all the disastrous consequences they could have wished but for an accident. A labourer on the farm overheard part of the conversation of the plotters as they marshalled themselves on the night of the expedition, and, as soon as the coast was clear, stole off to warn the boy's father. Jacob Wanless and he at once roused the neighbours; and, after a delay of perhaps twenty minutes, half a dozen men started for Whitbury Farm, while as many took the Stratford Road to try to save the boy from capture.

The latter party was too late; Thomas was caught near a cross-road about a quarter of a mile from the farm. Two disguised men rushed upon him from opposite sides of the road with savage growls, their blackened faces half hid in mufflers. Brandishing clubs and knives, they demanded his name. Thomas gave one piercing yell of terror and dashed forward, but was seized and held fast. Gripping him by the collar of his smock till he was nearly choked, young Turner again demanded his name, and, on Thomas gasping it out, roared in his ear, "then you are the villain we want. You must take us to farmer Pemberton's rickyard and stables. We are rick-burners, and will kill you unless you obey." Whereat he flourished a knife, and drew the back of it across his own throat, with a significant gurgle. Thomas trembled in every limb, tried to speak, but his tongue failing him, burst into a wail of crying instead, and sank to the ground. The scoundrels laughed hoarsely, and, amid a volley of oaths, hauled him to his feet. Then forcing him on his knees, Turner ordered him to swear to lead them to the place, and keep faith with them. As the boy hesitated, they stood over him crying, "Swear, swear, you obstinate pig, or you die," and Turner held the knife to his heart. Thoroughly cowed and terror stricken, Thomas gasped out, "I swear." A man on each side then laid hold of him, hauled him to his feet and led him towards the farm, the other two ruffians acting guards, muttering foul oaths, and brandishing their cudgels within an inch of his face in a way that froze his very heart's blood with terror.