Q&A Bonus Episode (Season 5, + Janie's story returning soon)

Season 5, bonus episode. Ingrid answers listeners' questions, talks about the future of My Love Letter Time Machine, and introduces her Grandfather Owen's memoirs, (who was a nurse in the Royal Navy during WW2). Ingrid will come back with Janie’s story in the Spring in a new season of the podcast, and then lead into story of her family getting through the first world war, the depression, the second world war and out the other side, as well as taking a look at history through the eyes of a very ordinary working class family in Sheffield. 

Transcript

[Intro]
Welcome back to My Love Letter Time Machine, Hi, I’m Ingrid Birchell Hughes, and I’ve been serialising the love letters of my great great Grandparents, Fred Shepherd and Janie Warburton. Travel 140 years back in time with me now where we take a look at Victorian history through their eyes and today I have a bonus episode for you were I answer your questions and we also take a little look at my grandad’s memoirs.

[Q&A bonus episode and what happens next…]
Hi there, today we are doing a Q&A and then I’m going to talk to you about the future of My Love Letter Time Machine, as I think I have worked out how to carry the stories on for a little while longer. While I’m at it thank you to everyone who has left a review, it’s a great way to support the podcast and it doesn’t cost any money, so can I ask, if you haven’t already, would you leave a review and click the ratings for me? Thank you so much!

Now, first, I feel I must apologise on some level for breaking everyone’s hearts for the last episode where we ended up having to say good bye to our Fred. It’s so strange, I know Fred died 129 years ago, but in a weird way, he also died last week, after such an intense time in his company. I want to thank you not only for your lovely questions but also your kind messages asking how I was. Including this one from Chris in Ontario:

“Just listened to the recent episode. Am sobbing while I make toast. Such lovely letters people sent to Janie (none of those "what to say to a bereaved person" lessons required) and I am in awe of how she went on without her love, with 6 small children as well. You did a wonderful job […] despite what was surely so painful and sad. Made me think of my own spousal loss, …everyone who has lost a beloved--including you and all the people you've come to know and love through these letters. You're right that Fred was a bright spark, like my spouse, Aren’t we so lucky to have known and loved them--and the rest of us are so lucky to have shared Fred and Janie's love story through your amazing talent and hard work."

Thank you so much Chris, I really appreciated getting that message, it’s been something of a roller-coaster these season and I was unprepared for it. I also got this message from Lee:
“It’s been emotional recently, with the low point being the passing of Fred. My question is, how are you? You have lived and breathed it, and these remarkable individuals are your past relatives. How have you been these last couple of weeks and have you been able to reflect on your own journey?”

Thank you Lee, I’m ok, I had a couple of rough days during the recording process of the last episode, but I’ve bounced back a bit. I knew we were always headed here, I always knew that poor Janie and Fred only had 12 years of married life together, but to see them realise their dream of bettering their lives after relatively poor beginnings only to have that all fall over, and in such a horrible, painful way — Well that coming after reading all their hopeful letters week in week out was just so sad. I think when I started this journey I was unprepared that it was going to take bits of my very soul with it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not resentful of that, but it’s been more of a labour of love than I was expecting. But then I think all the best journeys are like that aren’t they? 

pearlcardigan57 
"I am thinking about those photos you posted [on instagram], and how different they'd seem without the letters...how rare it is that you have been able to get to know your ancestors this way. I am struck most by their sense of community & family, and for improving themselves. From Fred's New Years resolutions and churchgoing, to their constant discussions of how to be better, and how to give back to their friends, neighbours and family. There is no silly gossip or discussion of TV shows, celebrities, royalty - it's all about themselves and their circle - the world hadn't gone global yet, no cars, cinemas [...] It was all just lovely, thank-you so much for sharing

I can see that this has really touched you - thank you so much for this comment. For those of you not following on instagram (which is mylovelettertimemachine all one word by the way) I’ve been putting up some pictures of Janie and Fred’s family and this last week a couple of picture of Janie and Fred out with their friends. 

I started writing this podcast perhaps 4 months after the last lockdown was over, and I was really stuck by how much community interaction everyone had with each other in the letters. I felt my first true envy when Fred wrote in his diary of the New Year’s Eve of 

“Tuesday, December 31 1878. Went to the children’s tea at Attercliffe, afterwards there was a “Magic Lantern”, after that Betsy Panton and myself, Will Meays and Miss Hopkinson, went on the top of our church steeple. Splendid view! could see all around. Coming down we had “Days and moments”, and “Now the day is over” in the bell chamber. Enjoyed ourselves immensely.” (Fred’s New Year’s eve sounds rather lovely rounding it off with a bit of a sing with his friends.) 

I mean when was the last time you got to have a spontaneous sing with friends? It’s a rare occurrence outside singing groups and choirs. Perhaps at a bbq if someone has brought their guitar? 

But that’s not to say that Fred and Janie and their friends didn’t also have their own media, while they didn’t have tv shows, they certainly had books, and theatre and opera, musical hall, and concerts, and even magic lantern shows. They swapped books with their friends, and followed serial stories in the newspaper supplements - imagine being able to read the Sherlock Holmes stories for the very first time? Arthur Conan Doyle first published A Study in Scarlet in magazines in 1887, and his ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ was serialised in 1891. I know can’t ever know, but I reckon our Janie would have bloody loved those!

I received this lovely email from Joy and Roger,
“It's amazing the amount of historical content in the podcast.  It must have taken ages.  It's all so local and relevant to the area, it brings it alive. Like the first electricity lighting up a football match, and vinegar valentines.

When you were growing up were Janie and Fred talked about often? Was there anything that you discovered about their relationship that surprised or shocked you when doing the research?"

Well firstly thank you for your email, and I’m glad my little bits of history helped bring Janie and Fred’s lives alive for you.

The letters were always in the background, and they did come up in conversation periodically, we knew their letters were a real treasure. Apart from the incredible circumstances of Emma’s divorce, I think the most surprising thing for me was that Fred monitored Janie’s periods in his diary so diligently. I know these two were frank about their physical relationship, but I guess I assumed that Victorian women wouldn’t talk about their periods to their men-folk. And here you have a man, who is in many ways showing more interest and genuine concern for Janie’s well-being regarding her periods than sadly many male partners do today. I know some of it is him wanting to check in with Janie on his visits back to Sheffield to see if they might be in with a chance of a private moment, or to work out if she might be pregnant, but Fred also hates the idea of Janie being in pain, and states on several occasions that he’s going to get her medical care when they start living together. This was all coming from a place of consideration.

Joy and Roger also asked:
"Do you have other artifacts from them - personal belongings and such? Have you visited their burial sites? Or the buildings mentioned in the podcast where they lived, etc? "

We don’t have any clothes or household objects that we know about. I have a suspicion that the battered bone handled dinner knives my Grandad still had when we were visiting him in Sheffield, could well have been from the set that Fred Johnson bought Janie and Fred as a wedding present, however they disappeared when he went into sheltered housing. As well as the letters, Fred’s diary, and Janie’s paperwork, the only significant object is the Family bible which was given to her from her fellow Sunday School teachers, and is now in the possession of my nephew, Fred and Janie’s 3 x great grandson. 

I would love to visit their burial sites. I was going to this Summer just gone, but our family bereavement put that on hold. I hope to reattempt it in the Spring. I’ve visited Fred’s family home and the Cross Keys, a lot of the houses that they lived in in Middlesbrough have been demolished, but the one they lived in on Redcar High street still exists, and I’d like to see that, and walk along the esplanade by the sea, perhaps try and walk along the sands towards Saltburn. But not get cut off by the tide like Fred almost did. 

And continuing on this theme, thank you to Helen for these questions: 
"Have you visited the Cross Keys Pub, and what is it like? How do the current owners feel about the podcast? Have you spoken to them about your family connections with the place. How do you know how to pronounce all the old names, or are you making a best guess? And when is the BBC going to make this in to a TV series?"d

Oh I would love this to be dramatised SO much - wouldn’t that be amazing! The names I try and ask around, but the one I got no consensus on was how to pronounce John Meay’s name. Which is spelled m e a y s. I guess we’ll probably never know how he pronounced it himself.

As I said before, I have visited the Cross Keys in Handsworth, a couple of times, the last in 2017 before it was taken over by the new proprietors. I have a few shots of the interior from then, a lot of dark wood panelling. But I didn’t get to go upstairs into the family part. It’s now called the Chantry Inn, in recognition that the building used to be the chantry for the church back in the C13th. It’s been beautifully refurbished, the current landlady and landlord have worked on it really hard to make it all lovely, and get this their surname is Warburton! It’s very possible that they are distant relations but we’ve not tried to find out. I’m totally made up that Warburton’s are running the pub again. I have been in touch with them, they know about the podcast, and they are kind enough to occasionally share my pictures on instagram.

Carrying on with the history research theme Manda asked:
"[I wanted to ask about that] additional layer of exploring everything else that was going on at the same time? …it means that I begin to connect with my own family and my granddad who was an engineer, and I begin to connect with railway history for example. and everything then becomes more real because I have this connection with the late 1800s. [Which has been] facilitated by your podcast.My question really is could you talk a bit about how you approach that, and that being distinct from your family history, and more about the history of the time?"

Hi Manda, thank you so much, I’m really touched to know that my noodling around in history has been opening your connections to your own family - that’s lovely. 

My approach has been to try and dig out as much local colour as I can find, but it usually starts with a throw away comment with a detail I don’t understand. Such as discovering that Aunt Staniforth hosted an inquest in the Wellington Inn and then finding out that it was used to be fairly common to do that before the advent of official Coroners.  Or finding out that Fred’s office was connected to the telephone system. I was completely surprised to realise that the telephone had been adopted so quickly in the UK after its invention. The hardest part is to know what to leave out really rather than what to include. There have been a fair few occassions where I’ve wanted to include so much more of something I’ve found interesting but what I’ve done up to now it to be really strict with myself - does this information further Janie and Freds story? Does this help build a clearer picture of their day to day world or is it going off on a tangent? I could have included many many more news stories of the time, that I found interesting but I’ve had to be very focused and only really mentioned the ones that would have effected them somehow. Like the xyx murders in Dublin or the eruption of Krakatoa which would have been akin to that generations nine eleven. 

By the way, Manda, Janie and Fred’s son Arthur worked on the railways so you’ll be pleased to know, there will be more railway history on the way in future episodes.

Thank you to Kevin for this question:
“I was wondering about class and where Fred and Jannie fit in. We know Jannie was a publican’s daughter which I think raises her a few levels up within the working class, but what did that mean for her and opportunities. What did Fred’s father do? […]Was Fred considered a few steps up from those who worked the physical jobs in the steelworks? I suppose we have nothing on where Fred’s loyalties lay in relation to strikes.”

Hmmn Kevin, well as far as the strikes were concerned, while our Fred was a fair minded chap, he was very attached to Arthur Cooper — the boss of the North Eastern Steel Company. Fred was Cooper’s prodigy really and his whole fortune and life had turned around because of him. He even named his third child Arthur. So I suspect that Fred could well have been a company man in this situation but really there is no way of knowing. 

On the class situation, I know I speculated on this in the first season of the podcast and I now feel I have a better understanding of the class situation for both of them. Fred’s dad, Alfred Shepherd, was a roll turner, a hot and physical job in the mill producing rail tracks, but it was skilled labour and would have been better paid than men going down the mines or working in the docks. Somehow Alfred owned the family home in Darnall. Did that come via Anne his wife or had he earned and saved enough over his life to buy it himself. So Fred’s family were not the poorest of the poor but still very much ‘blue collar’. By landing a desk job, via doing well in his education, Fred would very much have been seen as above that, especially once he moved to Middlesbrough.  I’ve speculated that Janie being a publican’s daughter, and their connection to the Staniforths meant that she would have been seen as occupying that liminal area between upper working class and lower middle class. By the time the pair of them had moved to Redcar they would certainly have been perceived as middle class. It’s very sad that had Fred lived, his boys would have been sent for better education and may have been able to archive even more for themselves and the family. As we’ll see in future episodes, Janie had a struggle on her hands, and it’s a little shocking to me now, to realise that the poverty my family had to deal with when my mother was a tiny child, was in no insignificant part to do with the loss of Fred, and the protection and financial support he would have given his family.

I was really flattered to get this comment from Paula:
“No questions just thoroughly enjoy listening and your voice is so calming to listen. Thank you for sharing your beautiful letters.”

Thank you Paula - I’m so glad you are enjoying the podcast, that’s such a lovely thing to say. I have had quite a few messages about my voice, that it’s soothing or mesmerising or compelling. I’m truly flattered and to begin with I wasn’t sure what to do with this information, but I think what these messages have done, is made me believe in myself as a vocal storyteller and because of that, I can tell that I have become much more confident in the later seasons of the podcast than I was at the beginning. So thank you all of you who have sent these messages over the course of the show - they have made me a little bit more brave, to be more expressive and to take the occasional risk. Not enough, ‘owever, to try doing a Yorkshire accent full time, I mean I can code-switch to it, but I’m not sure I could sustain it through all’t letters. 

Right enough of that

It was delightful to get this question from Julieanne, she writes: 
“The way you wrote the episode of Fred & Janie's wedding (S 5, episode 8) was magical, you brought […] the event [to life] and as a listener, it felt like yes, it happened just like that. I felt like was there. What processes, practical & creative, did you use to put the episode together?"

What a lovely thing to say - I am thrilled to hear that the wedding episode was so evocative for you! Those 10 minutes took the longest to work on I think in the whole of the 70+ episodes. And it was like flying blind for the first time - because of course the letters terminated just before the wedding. 

I actually first sketched out the episode I think about a year ago now. I had just finished doing the wedding episode for Janie’s brother and sister in law Frederick and Polly - you know the one where Tom Wortley was so drunk in charge of a horse and trap, he caused a carriage crash. After doing that script, it was late and I was about to go to bed when I had a sudden compulsion to start writing Janie and Fred’s wedding. I realised that their wedding in terms of structure and cost, being the second wedding that the Warburton’s had been involved in that year, would have been very similar, and it was such a gift to have that information. 

I think I structured and wrote 80% of that episode into the hours of the early morning, it just kinda unfolded so easily, and I was genuinely moved by the end of it. When I came back to it, I just had to add in some of the things that had come to light in the later letters. 

Doing the wedding without their voices was so hard but it was nice to do a call back to Janie describing her brother’s wedding, and to bring in a bit of John Meay’s letter again to represent his best man’s speech. 

I was little unsure about including the vows from the Book of Common Prayer but we know those are words they would have spoken, so I gave a go, and then kept it in. 

When I was editing it, with the exception of deliberately paying for a license to have a church organ version of the wedding march, I drew on all the music I had used before that we’ve been used to hearing at different points during Janie and Fred’s story, to try and keep the familar feel of them carrying through. There’s one particular track I only ever use for when Janie or Fred are talking about their feelings for each other, you can hear it paying now and I knew I had to save that for the very last part of their wedding day.

I also knew that we had to finish with the ‘moon shining splendidly’ and it being ‘just one of their nights’ given that this has been a phase the pair of them had repeated so so many times in their letters. We can’t really know if it was cloudy in Middlesbrough when they got to their lodgings, but frustratingly, according to moon phase calendars, on October the 12th 1882, it was actually a New moon, so the moonlight will have to exist in our imaginations. If this ever gets made into a drama, I’m keeping it in.

So I got this very important question now from Kate:
“Hundreds of us can't believe we've come to the end of this story! What story or stories are you going to tell next?”

Well Kate, I can’t quite believe we've come to the end of this story either , and in truth we haven’t. Thank you for this question because it gives me the perfect opportunity to talk about the future of the podcast. I’ve mentioned before that my grandad, Owen, wrote his memoirs. Actually harking back to an earlier question about the letters, I wonder if they in part inspired Owen to leave behind a record of his life? He’s left behind the details of his life from 1919 to the two thousands. He died when he was 98 and I knew him for most of my life. He grew up in Sheffield during the depression and he was a nurse in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. I have listened to many of his war stories first hand and they do not disappoint! Owen married the girl next door, her name was Mary and she was Janie and Fred’s grand daughter. So I want to read you a couple of extracts from his memoirs to give you a feel, but you need to imagine I’m a man speaking in a distinct Sheffield accent. (No I’m not doing the accent) Where’s Sean Bean when you need him? This first one, Owen would have been 8 years old:

"1927 My [Childhood] sledge 

Pitsmore nestles on the side of Clydebank, one of the seven hills of Sheffield, and Marshall Street where we lived with my grandparents, and presented a fairly steep slope which was ideal for sledging – when it was covered by the winter snows!

Few kids in the Pitsmoor [slums] enjoyed the luxury of a ‘proper’ or manufactured sledge – most were home-made, including mine.

My sledge was a very large Yorkshire pudding tin in which I could sit comfortably with my feet hunched up to my bottom. 

The tin, once burnished by the ice, made a swift efficient square boat but was, unfortunately, very difficult to steer.

The upper 80 yards or so of the hill was extra steep and the sledges sped at an alarming rate but most of the kids managed to steer off to the right into Grove Street and gracefully slow down: My ‘skimming dish’ rarely responded to my frantic efforts to turn off and I would continue at an ever increasing speed on down the hill – more often than not facing the wrong way round, entirely out of control and the only hope of avoiding a crash was to fling myself off and hope that I wouldn't hit a gas lamp-post.

After many such a hair raising–rides I would happily return home, hand back the somewhat battered tin with with my grateful thanks, whereupon my Aunt Marion would endeavour to restore it to its original shape with a hammer, to once again continue its intended role as a Yorkshire pudding tin.”

I’ve always loved this story of my Grandad’s and I think he’s got a lovely way with words. I have many fond memories of crying laughing when he got going. Trying to do his voice justice is something of a challenge. For our purposes with the podcast, this next passage links everything together:

"1930
In the August of 1930 my family moved – after an eleven-year wait on the council housing list – from the slum district of Pitsmoor, to a newly built council estate at Wisewood at the lower end of the very beautiful Loxley Valley on the west side of Sheffield. It was the reputed domain of that illustrious character Robin Hood - Earl of Loxley. That supposed fact fired my boyish dreams of anticipated adventure and added a touch of magic to the event.

The estate was built on fallow fields and most of the houses were semi-detached, spaciously spread and each with a plot of fertile land for a garden. My father was a keen gardener and had kept a well-stocked allotment of vegetables and flowers in Pitsmoor.

He quickly and energetically set about the task of tilling and planting and soon our garden was a delight to behold and from then on kept trim and colourful, supplying us with beautiful flowers and fresh vegetables.

It was like moving to another planet; gone the smoky grime of the asphalted back yards, the air was pure because the prevailing winds were from the west – straight from the wild Bradfield moors, unsullied and often carrying the scent of hay. Now I was to live in the countryside in a green valley, with a view of distant hills and a whole new world to explore. This was one of the major changes in my life.

I was now 11 years old and my sister, Violet, was six

Within a week of moving in, a large family moved into the empty house next door, which again opened up another new chapter of my life. One member of that family was destined to share thirty-seven years with me – twenty-four of them as my wife.”

That family who moved in next door to Owen contained two of Fred and Janie’s grown up children, Edith (my great grandmother), and Arthur. The head of the household was David Holden, who had married Edith and with her started a family, and Arthur, lived with them too - his whole life. Uncle Arthur - or ‘Lunk’ for short. 

So here is my story telling challenge. I have Janie’s story to finish, how she moved from Middlesbrough to the Loxley area in Sheffield, raised her kids, how one of them, Edith, met David, started a family, and with her brother Arthur in tow, wound up next door to Owen and his family. How Mary married Owen the boy next door and how they all survived the second world war. One of Janie and Fred’s grandsons, Mary’s twin brother in fact (who was also called David) was actually a rear-gunner in the RAF, Mary herself joined the Women’s RAF, and Owen became a nurse in the Royal Navy. 

At this point in time, the way I segue through this to get to the rich detail of Owen’s memoirs is not clear to me.  To be able to tell the story of both families getting through the first world war, the depression, the second world war and out the other side would be amazing, and of course, most importantly, we still haven’t finished with Janie - she lived on until 1921. 

So my plan is, to come back with Janie’s story in the Spring in a new season of the podcast, and in the process feel my way through the connecting history of those years that would have been relevant to her, then Edith, David and Arthur, and then Mary & Owen. I hope you’ll want to continue taking a look at history through the eyes of a very ordinary working class family in Sheffield. 

Thank you everyone for all your fabulous comments and questions today, and thank you all so very much for coming on this journey with me so far, the level of support and encouragement I’ve had from listeners has been so special and I feel like there is a truly special group of people out there who love Fred and Janie as much as I do.  I hope you are up for more history adventures with My Love Letter Time Machine and I’ll see you in the Spring. 

[outro]
Thanks again for listening to My Love Letter Time Machine.  As I said at the beginning it would be great if you could leave a review or click the ratings. I’m sharing photos of Fred and Janie and their letters over on instagram my love letter time machine all one word and you can write to me at my love letter time machine at gmail dot com. This podcast was written and produced by me, Ingrid Birchell Hughes, and the theme music is Delicate Waltz by Neil Cross.

Until next time, take care.
© Ingrid Birchell Hughes 2023