A family at war – for 100 years or more
Last updated 05:36, Friday, 25 July 2008
Martin Daley must be a huge disappointment to his forebears.Ever since the middle of the 18th century, members of his family have served in the armed forces.
For Queen and Country by Martin Daley. Hayloft. £15
He and his generation are the first in over two centuries not to have entered military service.
At first such continuity of service would appear to be a splendid record, something unusual and very special and something of which the family should be very proud.
In fact, the whole pattern of service throughout the centuries is not uncommon and applies in many families.
Martin has selected three of his normal and not-so-illustrious forebears, and through their lives he offers a glimpse of what life was like for nearly everyone.
Jacob Reed was born in desperate poverty in Caldewgate, Carlisle, in the year 1817, just after the Battle of Waterloo and the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
His father was a handloom weaver, earning a pittance in a dwindling trade under dire threat from the burgeoning textile manufacturers.
Like many, he was brought up in abject poverty, living in circumstances of unspeakable squalor next to the open sewer of “la’al Cawda”, the river Caldew.
In 1842 Jacob joined the Rifle Brigade and for the first time in his life he ate meat on a regular basis.
He travelled with his regiment to Canada and returned for the Duke of Wellington’s funeral.
Even though still a private, he had come a long way from those squalid streets of Caldewgate.
“Resplendent in his immaculate green uniform, he marched with his colleagues at the head of the Duke’s funeral procession, through the thronged London streets from Horse Guards to St Paul’s.”
However, all was to change.
January 1854 found Private Jacob Reed boarding the Golden Fleece at Portsmouth en route for the Crimean War.
Cholera was rampant on the Black Sea shores, but Reed survived to march and sing and join battle at the River Alma.
A fellow soldier wrote of the conditions: “I have just returned from the trenches, tired and almost worn out by incessant fatigues, and shocked at the awful spectacles of mutilated human flesh for there had been three or four fellows literally blown to atoms this day.”
Within a year of returning from the Crimea, Reed and his regiment were off to India, newly equipped with their state-of-the art Enfield rifles.
It was the Enfields that prompted the Indian mutiny as it was rumoured that devout Hindus would come into contact with grease based on cows’ fat.
Reed and his regiment were involved in the notorious siege of Cawnpore.
This was war at its most savage: “The scene was dreadful. Sepoys lay in rooms slowly burning in their own clothing, with their skin cracking and their flesh roasting, literally in their own fat.”
It was enough. After more than two decades in the army Jacob Reed laid out his kit for the last time on March 30, 1860, and returned to Carlisle to the only profession he knew, that of a handloom weaver.
Isaac Scott belonged to the next generation.
He had earned a comfortable living as a tailor in Penrith, but left to join the army and lead a very different life in the cholera-ridden heat of India.
And a generation after Isaac, Dan Daley, purely by chance, found himself fighting the Boers in South Africa.
Martin Daley has followed a personal thread through the history of the 19th century.
Inevitably, since they left little in the way of personal accounts, he has had to draw on the wider history of the time, but that makes Martin’s history far more vivid.
Here is a picture of 19th-century Cumbria and the vastly different arenas of imperial wars, painted with the enthusiasm that comes from personal involvement.
This is local history as you might hear it from your ancestors.
His great, great, great grand-father may yet be proud of him.
For Queen and Country is available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and from www.bookscumbria.com_
