Rough justice

Friday, January 5th., Trinity Hall Farm.

My father, in a mood of reminiscence, told us of an incident which, he said, happened when he was about 8. He seemed fairly sure of the date, but I should say that he would be more probably 10 or 12; anyhow he still wore pinafores. At the time, being highly precocious, he taught in a sort of night school, and earned 2d, a night for so doing.

Mow Cop Castle

One day he was fetched out of day school by an older boy who had just begun to work in the office of Sneyd Colliery. This boy had embezzled certain small sums (my father did not know this until later) and was itching to spend. They took train to Stone and there bought a lop-eared rabbit. Returning to Burslem they walked with a third boy (George Wigley) to Mow Cop, and bought there a donkey for 12s. The Sneyd boy drove the donkey home, while father and Wigley carried the lop-eared rabbit in a basket.

Father reached home about midnight. My grandmother had sent the town crier round to 'cry' him. By a lie he managed to escape immediate consequences. But on the third day my grandfather entered his bedroom carrying a pair of braces. In the meantime the whole adventure had revealed itself. My grandfather set himself specially against the lying. First of all he knelt down and prayed, then he thrashed father with the braces until neither of them could very well stand. My father remembers how his mother afterwards, with tears, displayed his bruised back for the commiseration of a neighbour. At that time my father was accustomed daily to strip everything but his trousers and wash in the yard at the rear of the house. The Bennetts then lived in Pitt Street just off the Waterloo Road.