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William Adams
At a time of the year when we are reminded of “No room at the Inn”, the
following is a salutary tale. William Adams was probably sorry that he
found room in Chorley!
William Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom
William Adams was born in 1832, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. He was
apprenticed to the proprietor of the Cheltenham Journal at the age of
fourteen, and while an apprentice was drawn into radical politics. In
1854, by now a journeyman printer, he spent a year at "Brantwood", on
Coniston Water in the Lake District, and later the home of John Ruskin,
assisting with the publication of the English Republic — and it is here
that our excerpt from his autobiography begins, tracing his walk to
London after this radical journal collapsed. In London during the 1850s
he authored a series of radical pamphlets. In 1862 he started working
for the Newcastle Chronicle, becoming its editor for 36 years until
1900. He died in 1906.
TRAMP LIFE
THE lodging-houses of Preston were too filthy to be trusted; but they
could scarcely have been filthier than that which I had the misfortune
to sample at Chorley. This place—described in my diary as "a small neat
town, supported by its manufactories"—was only nine miles from Preston.
I was, however, weary and footsore when I reached it at six o'clock in
the evening, for I had been walking about Preston for many hours before
resuming my tramp at three o'clock in the afternoon. "When in doubt, ask
a policeman." Could he tell me where I could get a bed for the night? My
appearance, I dare say, didn't suggest that I wanted one of the best
hotels in the town. Anyhow, he directed me to a lodging-house. The
Chorley constable was more helpful than a member of the same order whom
I encountered when in much the same difficulty some years later on a
tour through the Scottish Highlands. The encounter took place in
Callander. Would the policeman be kind enough to give me the name of a
good hotel in the place? The reply was not a bad example of Scottish
discretion. He didna ken, he said, as it behoved people in autho-rity to
be cotious! But the Chorley policeman could hardly be suspected of
recommending one fourpenny lodging-house more than another. All the
same, I ungratefully wished afterwards that he had sent me somewhere
else.
The common room of the common lodging-house at Chorley—a dingy, dirty,
squalid apartment—was full of people when I entered it. Most of them
were of the tramp type; but one or two girls—probably daughters of the
proprietor—were apparently factory operatives. I had not been much
edified by the conversation I had heard in similar places. Even that in
the thieves' kitchen at Lancaster, though the place was clean and its
occupants considerate, was of a coarse and vulgar character. Here,
however, I could not qualify the conversation, for the reason that I had
not then made the acquaintance of the Lancashire dialect, which, as I
listened to it at Chorley, was as much like a foreign language to me as
anything I had heard before. Only a word dropped here and there, such as
"bobbin" and "mill," led me to infer that the people, for part of the
time, were talking about work at the factories. It was my practice while
on tramp to go to bed early—always, however, in fear and trembling least
I should have to put up with a bedfellow. I had a couch to myself at
Chorley, but I had more bedfellows than I quite knew about at the time.
The other three beds in the apartment were occupied by a weaver, a
tailor, two labourers, and a bookbinder turned labourer. These five
gentlemen combined to produce such a concert in their sleep that night
was made hideous. If by accident the performers in the three beds took a
short rest, my own bedfellows made the most of the interval. Real repose
was quite out of the question, so that I fled from the abode of horrors
as soon as daylight enabled me to see that I was putting on my own
clothes, and not somebody else's. But my torments were not over when I
had escaped from that registered inferno; for, after all, though I was
careful as to the garments I donned, I carried off more than belonged to
me. That day was the most miserable I passed in the whole of my tramp.
My ankles ached; my feet were blistered; all the other unexposed parts
of my unfortunate anatomy were in a state of intolerable irritation.
Overtaking a waggon, I gave the waggoner twopence to let me ride into
Bolton.
John Harrison
Dec 2009
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