Appreciating the Medway Cottage Homes

Although there is no record of the actual level of interest in education my paternal grandparents might have had, in the long run it mattered little because my father was fortunate enough to have been received into the Chatham Workhouse at a tender age along with his baby sister. This wasn’t nearly as bad as it might sound and in fact it was not by any means his first experience of the place. Strictly speaking the term Workhouse had for several years been replaced by Poor Law Institution and although those entering had previously been known as Paupers they were now referred to by the more up to date and cutting edge term Poor Persons. None of this of course was of much interest to my four year old father.

His mother Kate displayed an enduring level of neglect that totally eclipsed the worst excesses of Old Nan Constant, her mothering being liberally peppered with police charges, prison sentences and accusations of prostitution. Her husband Charles had abandoned her because the two youngest of their eight children having been conceived whilst he was away at sea were unlikely to be his. The rest of his family, all living in the Medway area were supportive of this stance. By the time Kate came before the Stipendiary Magistrate at Chatham Police Court in November 1913 her mistreatment of the two children remaining in her care was described as the worst case of neglect the NSPCC had seen in a very long time. So shocking were the details they were widely reported in local newspapers and the children swiftly removed to the safety of what all the locals still called The Workhouse. Their mother was sentenced to six months hard labour. This turned out to be a very good outcome for Bernard Joseph who ended up in the long term care of the Medway Cottage Homes and was not to see his mother again for more than thirty years. Unfortunately all contact with his baby sister, Elizabeth Mary was also severed and it is not known what became of her although she may well have been adopted. Although when she learned of his history my mother was appalled by the fact that he had ended up in institutional care my father always considered it had been a stabilising influence in his life and very quickly came to believe that from an educational viewpoint Nellie and her sisters had been dealt a much worse hand overall.

The Cottage Homes in Pattens Lane, Chatham had been purpose built in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a small self-contained village in which seriously disadvantaged children lived in groups of ten to twenty each with a house mother, boys separately from girls. They had their own school on site together with a chapel, sports facilities and training workshops for metalwork and carpentry. All pupils learned to swim, there was opportunity to learn to play musical instruments and from time to time there were outings to Broadstairs and Southend funded by local church groups. It is unlikely that any of these opportunities would have ever been forthcoming under the chaotic maternal care of Kate Hendy.

Warm clothing and sturdy boots were provided along with an adequate supply of food which was generally plain except at Christmas. As they grew older obliging and hungry lads like Bernard Joseph Hendy volunteered as scullery assistants which meant that from time to time an extra bread and jam or pudding ration might be purloined. Any kitchen related duties would invariably afford the young worker such perks as sole charge of stale bread discarded from the Friday bread pudding making. This task came with instructions to break it into suitably sized pieces to be managed by the four, five and six year olds who were to distribute it to the evening gathering of squabbling pigeons. Not all of the bread reached the birds of course and the untidy assembly grew more raucous and clamorous by the minute as it disappeared into the mouths of the youngest boys. Bernard Joseph enjoyed the shiver of munificence as walked among them ensuring that each child had a portion of stale bread for dissemination. This was his quasi-family, these small children pseudo-siblings. He enjoyed his role as a virtual big brother and he quite liked his house mother.

Discipline at the Cottage Homes was definitely firm but if you kept your head down, as all sensible lads resolved to do, its worst excesses could be avoided. It was not wise to allow yourself to become a bed wetter or to draw undue attention with smart remarks that made other boys laugh because then you surely would find life could be unpleasant. It was also a good idea to pay attention to school work and offer to tidy classrooms. A helpful attitude meant you were invariably one of those allowed first choice of reading books and might even result in your name coming to the top of the list for visits to museums or to the Pantomime. Quite apart from that good behaviour earned you much coveted proper swimming lessons and meant that the small but regular fortnightly pocket money allowance was never reduced by fines that so plagued the miscreants. Life was by no means unpleasant for a boy who kept his wits about him and had learned to get by without a surfeit of parental love and affection in his life.

In fact the austere and disciplined learning environment with its over-abundance of books by Charles Dickens and classroom walls covered with maps of the world suited my father admirably. He never tired of examining those fortunate areas of the known world operating within the confines of the Great British Empire and he vowed that in the mysterious future he would travel widely. Over the years within the relative comfort of these predictable environs he learned rapidly and with ease, was always top in Mental Arithmetic, rarely made spelling mistakes and usually had his socks pulled up to his knees and his boots polished to perfection. For just over a decade he did not rub shoulders much with outside children, those described as Ordinary with mothers and fathers and real siblings neither did he appear to have any memory whatsoever of any of his birth family. For him they were good years.

He had got on as a Cottage Homes boy very well overall but nonetheless something happened to rupture this equanimity when he was thirteen or fourteen years old because it was then he damaged his unblemished record of excellent behaviour and ran away vowing never to return. Unfortunately he chose not to share the details of this most exciting story with me and if he did so with my mother she chose likewise. He set off apparently after lights out with a bread roll wrapped in a handkerchief and two shillings of laboriously saved pocket money. This was revealed to me by my brother after a great deal of genealogical research in more recent years and may or may not have been completely accurate. His aim had been to reach London and find a job, preferably as a motor cycle mechanic which was something he knew little about but was exceedingly keen to learn. How he made his way to the outer reaches of North London to a modest mock Tudor estate is not known but somehow or other he did. An over excited ten year old boy called Stephen Woodman, the only child and son of a ledger clerk, hid him in the garden shed at 29 Methuan Road, Edgware just beyond the neat rows of climbing beans for almost a week. He supplied him with food stolen from his unknowingly generous mother’s pantry and desperately wanted to join him on the next part of the adventure, promising to steal him a map of the area with perhaps clear indication of the way to Wales. It was whilst searching through his father’s possessions in near darkness late at night for such a map that he was discovered and unable to control his excitement any longer blurted out to his startled parents that there was a runaway boy in the shed.

And so it was that my father was returned to Chatham quite quickly to the disappointment of both boys. Young Stephen, greatly impressed by Bernard Joseph’s resolution and mettle stayed in touch with him for years afterwards, sending regular letters to the Cottage Homes and was eventually to be known to me and my brother as Uncle Steve. It wasn’t until after the death of my father that he revealed the story of how their relationship began.

When Bernard Joseph reached the obligatory age for leaving the care of the Homes a job was found for him at the cement works in Northfleet together with a relative to lodge with, traced apparently without undue problem. The first two weeks of his Board was to be financed by one of the funds established for the purpose. His older brother Walter Francis Hendy now married and living at 119 Waterdales was deemed a suitable landlord and my father moved in without delay sharing a room with several teenage nephews. It was then that he began to save for a motorbike and reclaim his heritage by embracing Catholicism.
The details of his progress through life over the next thirteen or fourteen years are unknown but on a Saturday evening in early 1939 he was taken by a group of motor cycle enthusiasts to The Jolly Farmers in Crayford where he met my mother and two of her sisters. By that time he was the proud owner of an Ariel Red Hunter cycle that boasted only one previous very careful owner. He was also a regular Sunday Mass attendee at St John the Evangelist Church in Gravesend. He was undeniably anxious at the age of twenty nine to settle down and create a family of his own. Nellie Constant, unmarried, demure and associated with the Right Church seemed ideal and in any case it was about time he was getting on with it.

Urged on by her sisters who all agreed marriage would be good for her and she was lucky to be asked at the great age of thirty-one my mother did not hesitate for long although she did have doubts. The main obstacle as far as she was concerned was that he wasn’t a patch on her Fred but Mag said she was bound to think that but she shouldn’t let it stand in the way of good sense. Her Fred would have wanted her to find somebody else after all these years and it could even be that he was looking down and had directed Bern her way. Nellie didn’t entirely agree with this considering it a fanciful notion but she didn’t argue too much either because when all was said and done he did seem a nice enough chap and nobody could accuse him of being a drinker for instance. A single pint once a week or perhaps two if really pushed was quite enough for him, nothing like Mag’s Harold or Maud’s George who both drank like fish. He didn’t use bad language either and if you only heard the language used by some that she didn’t care to name it would make your hair curl, it really would. So to be fair she could do a lot worse.

So her brother Edgar booked an available space with the priest at St Mary of the Crays for Monday 7th August at 11am, he and two Constant sisters agreeing to be witnesses. The fourth witness was a cousin from the Hendy side called Arthur May. My mother wore a cream satin dress and carried a spray of orange blossom and everybody said she looked a picture. Four of her sisters were bridesmaids in pale blue satin, Rose, Phyllis, Violet and Freda. She hadn’t really wanted to have Freda if the truth be known but Old Nan was adamant and Mag said don’t upset the apple cart, it never pays. Mag’s little Margaret was the flower girl and Maud’s Desmond was the page boy, both in cream with blue sashes and looking as if butter wouldn’t melt. To be fair little Margaret was always a well behaved child but Maud spoilt her kids rotten and Desmond could be a real tartar at times and if he was hers he would get what he deserved and that was a fact. That day, however, he was as good as gold. She had to admit it, she’d definitely enjoyed the ceremony and the fuss involved in the taking of photos and the wedding breakfast in the hall had been a real treat, everybody said so. It had been a most agreeable day though not the happiest in her life because that had been the day she and Poor Fred got engaged but nevertheless a good day. Everything had gone well all things considered and it was only the future that really concerned her.

At some stage in those early days of marriage she took courage and discussed with her new husband topics that perhaps she should have raised earlier. The most significant by far were her grave reservations regarding some aspects of Catholicism and she took pains to emphasise that she thought the teaching nuns to be particularly cruel and that she would be reluctant to release any future children into their care. A Roman Catholic wedding was one thing and was over and done with before you could say Jack Robinson and as Mag quite rightly pointed out, upsetting the apple cart would be foolish. On the other hand year after year in a religious school was quite a different matter. If that could be avoided by setting the cat among the pigeons then that was the way it had to be, apple cart or no apple cart.

How much heed my father actually paid to the revelations is completely lost but what is evident is that a great many altercations took place over the following years with regard to the Holy Catholic Church and exactly how my brother and I should be taking part in it. There would have undoubtedly been a great many more disagreements had the Second World War not intervened and deftly removed him from our lives for a number of years.

Our baptisms were problematical and the precise details of my own are a total mystery. The only aspect recalled by those present and now still living such as my cousin Margaret is that there was a last minute complete change of name announced by Nellie in unusually firm tones that brooked no argument, startling whoever was officiating and greatly embarrassing my father. My brother inexplicably was baptised at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Rosherville in an obvious act of complete defiance and again there was a name change, though this time less significant. As far as the schools we were to attend were concerned there of course eventuated even more disharmony. I was deftly enrolled in St Botolph’s before my father was demobbed from the army. Naturally enough he was later to retaliate and my brother was registered into St Joseph’s in Springhead Road when he was still only four years old. My mother, enraged and aghast was heard to complain to the aunts that he had done so Behind Her Back whilst she was gossiping with Grace Bennett one Friday afternoon. The only good thing about it was that it was on our doorstep and she was able to view what was going on in the playground from the garden gate. The moment one of those nuns laid a finger on her son she would be over there like greased lightning to clean them rotten.

Regular Church attendance heralded even more problems and once he returned to us my father bought me a Missal for Roman Catholic children and took me to Sunday Mass himself each week which I did not altogether enjoy. My mother sent me to the Methodist Chapel Sunday School in the afternoons which I quite liked because there were stories and orange juice and ginger biscuits and sometimes transfers to adorn hands and arms with. It would be fair to say I grew up under a surfeit of differing beliefs and learned always to be wary when discussing them. Those childhood Sundays of memory were never completely agreeable days. Even now Sunday is my least liked day of the week, the day where unpleasant pieces of the past live. Some of us have most liked days on the other hand, days that are far easier to pick from recall and examine. For my father they were probably those when he walked as a kind of older brother among his pseudo siblings supervising the casting of stale bread to gatherings of pigeons. They were good days and when in future years his new in-laws spoke in whispers about his mother, pitying him and saying he must have been a Poor Little Soul he could only wonder at their ignorance.