Michael D.Heath-Caldwell M.Arch.

1795

Margaret Skerrett (ne Caldwell) - 45/46

Anne Caldwell of Nantwich  -  36/37 

Elizabeth Caldwell (Bessy) of Nantwich - 28/29 - sisters of James Caldwell

Hannah Stamford of Linley Wood - 41/42 - Elizabeth Caldwell's sister 

James Caldwell of Linley Wood – aged 35 going on 36. 

Elizabeth Caldwell of Linley Wood – aged 41

Hannah Caldwell (later Roscoe) – aged 10 

Stamford Caldwell – aged 8

Mary Caldwell – aged 5/6 

Anne Marsh-Caldwell – aged 3/4 

Margaret Emma Caldwell (later Holland) – aged 2/3 

Catherine L. Caldwell – 6 months 

Part printed form with handwritten infills.

Five Per Cent Annuities

Received 10 day of April 1795 of Mr Thomas Jackson the sum of Three Hundred and eighty one pounds 10/ being the consideration for Four Hundred pounds Interest or Share in the Capital or Joint Stock of Five Cent Annuities, (erected by an Act of Parliament of the 24^th Year of the Reign of His Majesty King George III, intitled, An Act for granting Annuities to satisfy certain Navy, Victualling and Transport Bills, and Ordnance Debentures, and by other subsequent Acts) transferable at the Bank of England, together with the Proportional Annuity attending the same, by me this day transferred to the said Thomas Jackson Witness my Hand, J Paycroft.

Memoirs of Anne Marsh-Caldwell

Spring 1795

The next thing I remember must be the following Spring – there was a flat terrace walk of turf ran round the house to the wood and a slope from it to the field, at that time covered with long grass.

I remember being there with Emma – on a fine dewy morning gathering the golden buttercups, the red clover and the blue speedwell – with an excess of delicious pleasure that nothing I know now approaches. The butterflies floating about and the bees.

I think it must be this Spring that I read Mrs Barbould’s (see Warrington Academy, J.C.s’ background) lessons, where she gives little short descriptions of the months; March and its wind and the rooks going Caw! Caw!, and the little yellow ranunculus peeping out – and the July – under the rose bush, etc. the pleasure I received from these representations of the nature I saw about me were greater than anything the finest poetry could give me now.

I slept in a little railed bed in the nursery then, and being a middle child was under the care of the housemaid Nanny Tayte (?). Oh how I hated her! She used to twitch me out of bed by both arms as if she would pull them off. She had a harsh face and voice. Betty Burrows the nurse, I loved.

August 1795.

The next event that marks chronology is the birth of Fanny, my mother’s youngest child. I remember the night well. I had left my railed crib and now slept in what was called the press-bed – How rough servants were and coarse with children – I wonder whether they are so now? I used to sleep so sound that I remember speculating with myself whether there really was such a thing as night at all, and whether I did not merely shut my eyes, open them again – and it was morning.

A great rough maid used to come and waken the little sleeper with a good bang on its poor little behind – when the sun shone and it was fast asleep – not exactly as Montagne advised that a child should be awakened – but whatever my nerves have since become, they were good enough then, so that when Nanny Tayte did not twitch my arms off I cared little for these things… Then what odd feelings we had about being washed – we considered it the greatest hardship in the world; to be sure, they used to seize us and scrub our faces with a lather of brown soap till our eyes smarted and our mouths were full, and on Saturday nights our feet were washed in a basin, and there was such crying, screaming and kicking as if they were killing us.

I remember one winter under the reign of my good Nantwich Aunts, who used to come and take care of use when Mamma was away anywhere – which was very seldom – they enforced a more general washing, which we resented as the most barbarous tyranny. I remember running up to the nursery with them, hearing Emma screaming and crying. She was in her shift, little fat white square creature, and they were washing her back and shoulders. I believe her delicacy was hurt – very unnatural for a child. Our present way of strip and slosh is much more natural and better.

Memoirs of Anne Marsh-Caldwell

I was giving an account of the coming to Nantwich – Joshua Rigby brought in his cart cribs and beds; I know by this date of this visit, it must have been 1795, because Fanny the baby’s crib came and this crib was only used by a young infant. I cannot recollect anything of this Christmas whatsoever; I cannot remember being with Fanny when she was what my own little girls used to call “a long baby.”

1795 presents nothing very remarkable to my imagination – some things belonging to this year are dated by those trifling little circumstances that stick so unaccountably in the memory – a great fir tree was upon a little grassy rocky bank, the last one of a row that came down from the firwood to the place where now the stable stands – then it was all wild broken ground. Under that tree Emma and I used to sit and play - our play consisted in pretending we had a house there.

Two tufts of that thin wirey grass that is one of the few things that will grow under the fir tree were our cushions on which we sat – contented doing nothing as it seems to me – my imagination to me was a perpetual feast; is it so with all little children? We had an old broken iron coal scuttle for a piece of furniture – just as good as the most splendid toy to that creative fancy of childhood which turns into gold all that it touches… I know the date of this love of the fir tree by, as I said, a trifling circumstance – shewing how capricious memory is – a little cloth doll which my beloved Mother had made for her baby – it had no face, which teased me beyond measure. Some wicked wight threw this doll in its old age into the fir tree and I remember it as if it was yesterday…

I remember, too, sitting at the foot of the best stairs playing with Fanny – who was then a little thing of a year old. I was extremely fond of this little round fat being and thought it excessively pretty and charming. As this child grew older she became the passion of my heart – its first passion. I doted upon her with a vehemence I think I have never felt since.

When she was a little older she used to occupy the little bed railed round with green striped curtains from which Nanny Tayte used so ruthlessly to haul me – but the rail at the foot of the bed was now taken away. It stood by one of the nursery windows. The nursery was on the third storey over my Mother’s room.

That dear Mother – I have heard her describe the pleasure she used to take in a morning in hearing as each child was finished off in dressing, its little feet pad across the floor – these windows looked over the garden and the terrace to the fir wood – now here I laid in my bed watching the dark feathers of that wood, those plumes like the plumes of some giant’s helmet waving in the wind on a lowering morning – or covered with snow and then fling myself on Fanny’s bed and kiss the sleeping child with a passionate ecstasy that I am no more capable of feeling now than any other of the exquisite sense of things I then possessed. (Fanny Caldwell died in 1801, aged five. J.M.W. owns a mourning pendant containing a lock of her golden hair.)