When my partner Rony Robinson and I met we discovered a shared interest in Carpenter. As a child, Rony’s mother had been taken by her Independent Labour Party father to meet Carpenter. Rony had a signed picture. He had given a paper on him while a history undergraduate at Oxford in the 1960’s. He had even written two plays about him for the early Crucible Theatre. And he too had met Sheila Rowbotham, that WEA lecturer (now a Professor at Manchester University), who had taught me in the 1970’s - and who is now the author of a prizewinning biography – Edward Carpenter – A Life of Liberty and Love. Soon, Rony and I met Sheila again, renewing our friendship and our shared curiosity about Carpenter.

Later, having moved to Totley and stimulated by the publication of the biography, I started to research Carpenter’s connections with our local
area – Bradway, Totley and Holmesfield. I found houses and places that were part of his story, houses other than the well known mecca at Millthorpe. This article is my story of that search.

When this Brighton born, Cambridge educated, ex-curate first came to Sheffield as a young man, he was already looking for ways to mix with ordinary working people and was a travelling lecturer for the University Extension Movement – the WEA of its day. He travelled around northern cities teaching astronomy and mathematics and living in lodgings. I learned from Sheila Rowbotham that, while in Sheffield, he was invited by a student of his, Albert Fearnehough, a scythemaker, to visit him and his family in his Bradway cottage on the farm of another student - a freethinking farmer called Charles Fox. In 1879, Carpenter decided to lodge with the Fearnehoughs and to write there - drawn by their humble rural life – a remarkable thing for a man of his background at this time. Sheila didn’t know the whereabouts of the farm and we all took to prowling around Bradway looking for it. Then, while idly looking through the Sheffield Telegraph Property Section, I saw a cottage at Fox Hall on Fox Lane for sale. I’d found it! We discovered that a Mr Fox still lived at Fox Hall – a descendent of the original Charles Fox – who knew of Carpenter and who kindly showed Sheila and me his family tree. The house is now almost hidden by the Low Edges Council Estate, but was then surrounded by open country.

I learned too from Sheila, that Carpenter had moved briefly with the Fearnehough family to Totley until a larger cottage could be found to accommodate them all at the Bradway farm. The address was Woodland Villas. One Sunday, taking our dog, I set out to find it. I knew of Woodland Place at the top of Queen Victoria Road. Maybe “Villa” signified a Victorian house? Nothing there - but coming down the hill into Queen Victoria Road, a pair of stone semis with, chiselled above the ground floor, the name Woodland Villas and a date in the 1870’s. Which of the pair Carpenter and the Fearnehough family lived in I don’t know. They were originally small two up, two down houses of the common Sheffield terrace design, but with substantial outhouses – perhaps a convenient writing place for Carpenter. I asked Sheila to look up the original correspondence with the poet Walt Whitman from which she had found the address. This was dated 1^st July 1880 and the letter confirmed that this was indeed the house:

I am living with a man – the best friend I ever had or could think to have – an iron worker, scythe maker and his little family. He often says I wish Walt Whitman would come over here. Below my window here is a little wooded bank running down to some water and beyond about two miles off the hilly undulating line of the Derbyshire moors from which there comes a broad fresh breeze – like being near the sea.

Whitman is revered as the man who freed up American poetry, who celebrated the new democratic spirit of a young country and its people and who also famously celebrated the body and his own ambiguous sexuality. Carpenter had travelled to America in 1877 to meet Whitman and was inspired by him and other American writers, like Emerson and Thoreau, to turn his life around, to live – as we might say now – lightly upon the earth. While with the Fearnehoughs at Totley and Bradway he wrote Towards Democracy – a long book of somewhat dubious poetry modelled on Whitman, but which was a touchstone for many an early socialist some of whom even carried pocket editions to the front in the First World War. We therefore catch Carpenter in Totley and Bradway at a turning point in his life – when he throws in his lot with working people, begins to be involved with the infant socialist movement and just before he builds his rural house at Millthorpe in 1883, which was to be a model of a new way of life for many “progressives” of the time.

From our bedroom window in Lemont Road in Totley, we look south across a track up to Woodthorpe and Holmesfield – locally known as the White Lane. This was probably the very track Carpenter, Shaw, Forster and all those writers, theorists, gays, anarcho-socialists, food reformers, feminists, simple lifers, nude sunbathers, pagans and sandal wearers must have taken on their way from Dore and Totley Station to Millthorpe - and which we walk almost daily with our dog. It was probably also the track where George Merrill, eventually Carpenter’s life partner, first followed him home from Dore and Totley Station.

Beyond this track we look over to the Holmesfield ridge and church. On one of our walks, we discovered another George – George Hukin, the kind
socialist razor grinder and really the great love and life-long friend of Carpenter, buried there in the church yard under a hedge. The other side of the ridge lies Millthorpe, Carpenter’s house which drew so many keen to
witness and learn from the strange life style of this man.

This side of the ridge sits St George’s Farm, bang in the middle of our window view. This was the site of a slightly earlier utopian experiment
involving the Victorian cultural thinker and writer, John Ruskin. Ruskin financed the purchase of the farm for some “communist” Sheffield working men and their families to collectively grow fruit. After they had all fallen out and the experiment failed, Carpenter suggested a socialist farmer, George Pearson, to Ruskin as someone who might take on the farm. There are still Pearsons farming and working in the area today.

No wonder Rony jokes that we live on a socialist ley line!

I learned more about George Hukin, the razor grinder, from Sheila’s biography. George married a woman called Fanny in 1887 – and though he was generous to them, giving them a bed and being a witness at their wedding, Carpenter appears to have sunk into a deep depression due to his great love for him. However, Hukin remained a life long friend and a wise and loyal diplomat when relationships between Carpenter and other friends sometimes became strained. Hukin, I learned from Sheila, lived for a while in Totley - again whereabouts unknown. In the 1901 census I found him living with Fanny in Brook Terrace, just around the corner from us on Mickley Lane - near where Laverdene Avenue meets it now. This terrace was demolished in the 1950’s. I knew that Harry Brearley, the inventor of stainless steel, had also lived as a newly married man in this terrace - he was on the census too as a neighbour of the Hukins. Through a local resident interested in Brearley, I discovered that Brearley learned how to mend all the family’s shoes from yet another George. This was George Adams, a working class man and would be artist who lived with his family at Carpenter’s Millthorpe house, taking on the smallholding and Carpenter’s sandalmaking venture. I surmise that Harry Brearley, the inventor of stainless steel must therefore have met George Adams and Edward Carpenter, the men who introduced the sandal as the mark of radicalism in Victorian times, through his neighbour in Brook Terrace, George Hukin.

We learn from Sheila’s biography that George Adams and Carpenter later fell out very badly, Adams and his family moving from Millthorpe where
they had kept house (as well as making sandals), to a house called Adamfield on Fox Lane near Millthorpe. On a walk, I discovered this lovely old house, lying conveniently next to a public footpath.

However, quite unexpectedly, when reading Chantrey Land, the book by Harold Armitage about the Norton area of Sheffield (then in Derbyshire), I discovered that George Adams was a friend of the author and had lived for a while at another wonderful old property – then a rather dilapidated farm – Fanshawe Gate Hall. The Hall and the family connected to it – the Fanshawes - has a long history as many of you will know. Lady Ann Fanshawe was married to a famous Royalist in the Civil War and wrote her memoirs about him. These memoirs were republished in the early 1900’s and Armitage in Chantrey Land, says that George Adams drew the house to be included in this publication.

I contacted Cynthia and John Ramsden, the present owners of the house but they had not heard of Adams or his tenancy there. But John said “Wait
a minute” and brought out of the house a copy of the 1906 reprint of Lady Anne’s memoirs – and when we looked, there was Adam’s drawing with a tiny signature in the corner dated 1904. I found George Adams and his family indeed living at Fanshawe Gate in the 1901 census. In the dovecot at Fanshawegate the Ramsdens have old photos of the farm and these give an idea of it at the time that the Adams were there. In fact, they must only have lived there for a while before moving to the new Letchworth Garden City (designed by Raymond Unwin, a Chesterfield socialist and another friend of Carpenter’s) where George became sandal maker in chief to an assortment of Victorian socialists and new agers.

Recently Judith Vernier wrote in Dronfield Local History Miscellany about the Victorian novelist Robert Murray Gilchrist and the mystery of his photograph. Gilchrist lived at Cartledge Hall – his family being tenants there. It may interest readers to know that Carpenter was friendly with him too and not averse to nipping over from Millthorpe for a whisky when George Adam’s children were getting too noisy!

I know from residents in the Cordwell Valley that despite his lifestyle and beliefs, Carpenter was by and large well respected by local people.
Everyone remarked on his generosity, his charisma, the eyes which tended to draw people to him. I think he appears to have had gravitas – for although he may have been unconventional, he still exuded something of the upper middle class curate. George Merrill, his eventual life partner was evidently a bit more of a rough diamond, not averse to having a few too many down at the Royal Oak!

Sources:

Sheila Rowbotham: Edward Carpenter, a Life of Liberty and Love, Verso 2008

Edward Carpenter Collection: Sheffield City Archives

Edward Carpenter: Towards Democracy (Manchester and London: The Labour Press 1883. Reprint of complete edition, George Allen and Unwin, 1921)

Edward Carpenter: My Days and Dreams (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1918)

Edward Carpenter: The Intermediate Sex (London:, 1908. Reprint, George Allen And Unwin 1918)

Edward Carpenter (ed): Chants of Labour (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888)

Harry Brierley: Knotted String, Autobiography of a Steel-maker, 1941

Harold Armitage: Chantry Land(Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. 1910)Fanshaw

Ann Fanshawe: The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, Wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Bart., 1600-72 (reprinted 1906)