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In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx
Harry F. Ward and the Struggle for Social Justice
By David Nelson Duke The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5369-8
CHAPTER 1
An English Methodist Shopkeeper's World 1873–1891
I am not ungrateful to my peasant forefathers, nor to the tradition of duty and self-discipline, for the little blue imp who is most of the time on my shoulder, whispering: "Get on with the job." — Harry F. Ward, "Why I Have Found Life Worth Living"
Harry Frederick Ward entered this world 15 October 1873, the firstborn of Harry and Fanny Jeffrey Ward of Chiswick, England. In 1873 Chiswick was a suburb of greater London, a quiet village on the Thames known for its orchards and stately homes, but the town was changing. Ambitious merchants like the Wards were quickly transforming it into a middle-class suburb of shopkeepers. Their Queen's Row shop opened onto the High Road, an ancient thoroughfare to London dating back to the Roman era and, in Harry's day, an increasingly busy road, part of greater London's burgeoning transit system.
The Ward family was part of the influx of merchants who were building commerce along the High Road in a Chiswick hamlet called Turnham Green. The 1870s saw the population of Chiswick almost double in size. In 1891, the year when young Harry Ward immigrated to the United States, an observer of Chiswick noted that though there was "a flavour of aristocracy about Chiswick; Turnham Green, on the contrary, sounds distinctly plebeian." Without question Fanny and Harry Ward were part of this "plebeian" tide lamented by the Chiswick aristocracy and middle class.
Harry's father, probably as a teenager, had immigrated to London from southern England's New Forest area, where for decades, perhaps centuries, his ancestors worked the land as "agricultural laborers," as the census labeled them. Once in the London area it is likely that this young man apprenticed himself to a trade. By the time of his son Harry's birth he was listed as a cheesemonger in Turnham Green.
Only a handful of pictures survive of the elder Harry Ward, all but one taken when he was quite aged. Typically he sits uncomfortably in his coat and tie, the way working men often look. In two of the photographs one notices in particular his very large, swollen, and gnarled hands. As a young adult, Harry described his father as "an upright and godly man and the kindest of parents," the latter a rather striking comment in light of the impersonal authoritarianism often associated with Victorian fathers.
As with most women of ordinary standing, Fanny Jeffrey Ward's life is difficult to reconstruct. Ward family tradition remembers her as the daughter of a French lady's maid. She was born in nearby Hammersmith, a suburb immediately adjacent to Chiswick on the east. She and Harry Ward must have met after he moved to the London area, probably in the early 1870s. Ward family tradition retains the memory of her alienation from her own family because she abandoned her religious tradition (Anglican or Catholic) to join her husband's Methodist chapel.
Her life was not easy in several respects. She was blind in one eye due to an accident with scissors. Subsequent to Harry's birth, she lost an infant daughter, Nall. In the late 1870s she bore three other children, apparently no more than a year apart: Hugh, Elizabeth, and Beatrice. She would live only long enough to see one of her children leave home — Harry, just months before her death. Her son Harry would remember fondly going to midweek prayer services with her at the Methodist chapel. One of her few surviving portraits shows a slightly built woman and gives the impression of gentleness. Her face is very plain, with her hair pulled straight back, revealing rather large ears. Her partial blindness is not immediately evident, though her left eye strikes the viewer as off-center and unfocused. With her receding chin and thin lips, she is not a beauty, but her countenance expresses a pleasant softness. The earrings and lace handkerchief high on her neck do not seem natural to her appearance; one can more easily picture her in an apron, holding her children or tending customers in the shop.
Like her life's story, only a fraction of her tombstone remains: "In loving memory, Fanny, wife of Harry Ward, [pa]ssed away Dec. 29th 1891, aged 42 years." A father-to-son letter on the day of her death painfully reports that during her final hours only one member of her biological family was in attendance to offer her "a word of spiritual comfort." Fanny Jeffrey Ward's bulldog persistence in the face of adversity would be a prominent characteristic of her son Harry. And he, too, would struggle with poor health.
We know little of the Ward family dynamics. As an adult Harry described himself as growing up in a family that rarely expressed deep feelings: "I come of a breed that is stark in speech and used to stand[ing] mute when greatly moved." Certainly there is something very English here, though reticence may also stem from the limited family interaction allowed by long hours maintaining a shop. Harry remembered his mother as "one of the best mothers God ever gave a man; the influence of her life still lingers with a benediction." While Harry would always find heartfelt expressiveness difficult, it is obvious that he was raised by parents who nurtured sensitivity.
Appropriate to his hometown's original name, Cheesewick, Harry's parents had their commercial beginnings as cheesemongers. Hard workers, they shared Chiswick's growing prosperity, eventually becoming the proprietors of a butcher shop. Young Harry's education reflected this prosperity, for at seven years of age he was sent to a boarding school catering to "the landed gentry, lower aristocracy, and successful business men," according to Ward family oral tradition. It might have been one of a number of schools newly created for the rising middle class.
We do not know how long Harry remained at this school, but we do know that it was a difficult experience for him. According to family tradition, young Harry, slightly built like his mother, was victimized by the class bully. As the story goes, Harry took boxing lessons — readily available in Chiswick, a town famous for the sport — and he ultimately defeated his antagonist. But Harry was not strong enough to overcome the effects of the poor diet offered by the school, and he fell victim to rheumatic fever. Two photographs from his childhood starkly reveal the serious impact of this illness. As a six-year-old, before starting school, Harry stands straight and confident, with the full face of a healthy youngster. As a thirteen-year-old he looks thin and sad, with dark circles under his eyes. As a result of his illness, Harry was withdrawn from the school and sent to live with relatives for two years in Lyndhurst, at the center of southern England's beautiful New Forest.
In this land of his Ward ancestors he found not only health but a love for the outdoors which he would maintain throughout his long life. The area is charming, with villages like Lyndhurst nestled among the heath and forest. Ponies, once wild, graze on the heath. The forests abound with a large variety of vegetation. One sees broadleaf as well as evergreen, saplings and scrub brush along with venerable, thick-trunked oaks. In some places the green canopy is so thick that even at midday the forest is like twilight, with the occasional white-striped birch standing out like a signpost. Here young Harry Ward could hike miles and miles of forest paths over heath, through dense forests, and past thick patches of fern, shiny holly bushes, and bright green moss on ancient logs. Within minutes of Lyndhurst there were places where each bird's voice could be heard distinctly, as if one were hundreds of miles from the nearest human outpost. Harry had not lived in London's squalor but in a suburb, where he could gaze out on orchards and large gardens, some directly across the High Road from his father's shop; yet by comparison with Chiswick, Lyndhurst's beauty was extraordinary. More importantly, the New Forest became a healing paradise for the boy's sick body and a solace for the worries that attended his illness.
Here also Harry heard stories about his ancestors, how for centuries commoners such as they were forbidden to hunt in the New Forest — a domain specially reserved for nobility since the time of William the Conqueror, who in 1079 made this area his own private deer preserve. The penalty for encroachment was severe, including mutilation, blinding, and, for frequent offenders, death. The law also prohibited commoners' ownership of hunting dogs, and in the Lyndhurst Verderers' Hall Harry could see the Rufus Stirrup, a device used to discourage illegal hunting. A dog whose feet were too large to fit through the stirrup would have its paws maimed so as to destroy its hunting prowess.
Perhaps even more compelling were the stories of smuggling. Apparently smuggling was so common among the inhabitants of the south coast villages and countryside that one nineteenth-century historian claimed "every labourer was either a poacher or a smuggler." It seems that the economic benefits were not the only aspect of smuggling that appealed to New Forest inhabitants; there was also the thrill of adventure as the commoners tried to outwit the authorities. As an adult, Harry remembered with admiration the exploits of these New Forest folk, who, in a kind of class war, "smuggled the king's brandy and measured their wits and their strength with those of the king's officers." He recalled the story of the "buxom dame" who sat in a pony-drawn cart, covering a keg with her skirts, while coyly chatting with a representative of the Crown.
Another story about smuggling featured a Ward ancestor who emigrated from Ireland to the New Forest "one jump ahead of the sheriff," as Ward later recalled with a smile. Riding a steed named Satan, this outlaw habitually smuggled rum and poached the king's deer in the New Forest, but all that changed after he heard the preaching of John Wesley, who sometimes evangelized in the area.
This story of an ancestor's Methodist conversion is crucial for understanding Harry Ward and his family. For the children — Harry, Hugh, Elizabeth, and Beatrice — this tale, together with reminders of their mother's alienation from her own relatives, reinforced a certain kind of evangelical Methodist subculture in suburban London that provided their family identity. The Wards' social and economic status corresponded to that of many Methodists of the time. Indeed, one historian of Victorian England referred to Methodists as a "sect of shopkeepers and small businessmen."
Following the death of John Wesley in 1791, Methodism experienced what new religious groups often undergo after the death of the founder: a certain amount of fragmentation as religious tradition faces new challenges and struggles to interpret the founder's legacy for subsequent generations in different cultural contexts. Whereas splinter groups such as Primitive Methodism each claimed to be the true representative of Wesley's heritage and found niches in England's religious and social spectra, the mainstream expression came to be known as Wesleyan Methodism. Even within Wesleyan Methodism, however, there was often a good deal of dissension, though usually this stopped short of a formal breach in the ranks. The Ward family represents one such case.
Though there is no evidence that the family shifted their allegiance from Wesleyan Methodism to the more revivalistic Primitive Methodism, apparently there were times when the Wards' Wesleyan identity was sorely tested. In particular, Harry's father was put off by his congregation's increasingly formal liturgy.
The Wards were not alone in their dissatisfaction. In the late 1870s, for example, when Harry was just a young child, Methodism's Second London District wrestled with proposed revisions in the Methodist liturgy. It is probably no accident that in 1879 the district minutes describe "serious losses occasioned by the large number of members who have removed or ceased to meet." A real crisis seems to have developed ten years later, for Methodist periodicals of the time feature letters and articles from concerned lay folk and lay preachers about the coldness of formal liturgy.
Lay preachers, commonly known as "local preachers," were scandalized by and frequently suspicious of educated clergy, partly because of their unhappiness with read prayers and learned, passionless sermons, and partly because of the derision — real and perceived — they suffered at the hands of their "betters." Though criticism by the professional Methodist clergy was painful, it did not alter the conviction of these stouthearted lay preachers. As one of them said: "If zeal and fire — deep piety and bold aggression — are but the marks of vital life in Methodism — then it will need that every man a flame of fire shall be, fitted by heaven for mighty deeds, and noble conquests win o'er Satan's kingdom."
The elder Harry Ward, himself a lay preacher, was cut from this same bolt of Methodist cloth. Together with his family, he found ways to withdraw without leaving the Wesleyan fold. The Wards joined a mission band, a group devoted to revivalistic, open-air meetings attended by members of London's working classes. Mission band participants like the Wards could remain Wesleyan Methodists even as they engaged in a style of religious practice more in keeping with their beliefs. Through their membership in the mission band and the elder Ward's itinerant preaching, the Wards could avoid the formal mode of worship that prevailed in their Chiswick congregation and still retain their adherence to Wesleyan Methodism. The legacy of this dissident membership style would last throughout son Harry's long life.
Many lay people such as the senior Ward preached regularly, filling pulpits as they were assigned in their circuit. If the 1891 quarterly circuit plan is typical, Harry's father, a local preacher in the Ealing and Acton Circuit, had ample opportunities. He is listed there as preaching among four different chapels at least three times each month, including Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and mid-week services.
These religious gatherings played a key role in defining young Harry's sense of place and commitment in Victorian society. Church life among Wesleyan Methodists was the principal feature of his social life and, most likely, the primary context within which he made friends and learned customs of social interaction. Indeed, a significant portion of each week was lived in the company of his fellow Wesleyans. There were Sunday services and midweek prayer meetings to be attended with his mother, in addition to preaching forays with the mission band into working-class districts of London.
Reports and advertisements for the mission bands reveal their revivalist ethos. For example, in Harry's sixteenth year, mission bands associated with the London Wesleyan Mission Band Union made a day of it on a Bank Holiday. The observance began with a prayer meeting at 10 A.M., followed by a "Consecration Meeting," a time of inspiration and challenge — or, as a Methodist reporter saw it, "a time of heart-searching and holy resolve with very many [people]. ... [P]rayers were offered by workers full of fire and faith, and the meeting closed, every heart aglow." Early afternoon provided an opportunity for "Prayer and Praise." As to music, "The singing went with a swing, the old-time hymns and tunes firing the hearts of all." Testimonies followed. "Hearts throbbed, pulses beat quicker and quicker still, tears of gladness mingled with shouts of praise." This was followed at 3:15 by an open-air procession of mission band workers led by two of their brass bands (instruments and singing comprised a principal strategy for drawing a crowd to hear the forthcoming sermon). One picks up the flavor of this religious subculture: "Thank God the devil is not having his own way on Bank Holidays. The singing and speaking were of the right stamp, and the good results of our meetings will presently appear." The size of the crowd is evident by the report that 500 persons stayed for tea (supper). The day ended with an "Evangelistic Meeting" at 6:30 P.M. A "sea of bright faces" nearly filled chapel, and people listened attentively to the preaching and sang vigorously as "the chorus was taken up again and again." Both ordained and lay preachers addressed the audience, "pleading with the sinners [and] inspiring the saints. ... It was far from a silent gathering. The shouts of 'Glory' and 'Hallelujah' will not be readily forgotten." The meeting ended with another prayer and a call to the altar. Some eleven hours after the day's first session had begun, the crowd left for home, "but the workers were jubilant still."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx by David Nelson Duke. Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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