We Three - Act 1

CHAPTER 1 - GOING AWAY PARTY FOR CHARLES

ACT I (1850-1860), Scene 1. 1850

INVITATION:

We are having a farewell party for Charles Walker, who takes up his position as bookkeeper in Worcester next Monday. We would be pleased if you could join us.

Maria and Edward Cox, Mary, Caroline and Charley

9 Park Road, Toxteth Park, Liverpool

Date: August 31, 1851

Place: Cox house, 9 Park Lane, Toxteth

Time: 8 p.m.

Those invited:

Lindsay Hall, aged 20 (clerk to merchant)

Robert Hall, aged 25 (clerk to merchant)

Alison Hall, aged 30

Mr. William Hall, aged 60, (retired cotton broker) from The Elms, 6 Princes Terrace, Toxteth

Harry Lomax, aged 15 (apprentice to cotton broker)

Eliza Lomax, aged 18 (visitor) currently staying at the Cox house

Mr. William Holt, aged 42 (attorney)

Mary Holt, 42

Mary Holt, aged 15

William Holt, aged 16, iron merchant apprentice

Everyone is sitting or standing around in the large drawing room, apparently having a great time. Charades is the game being played as the curtain rises, and Lindsay, Charles Walker and Charles Cox are miming, their actions being to walk around an imaginary pot in the middle of the
floor, apparently stirring something. They stop and shake hands and look pensive, and then each goes in a different direction.

Alison: I know! You’re cooking something.

Charles: Perhaps you are close.

Mary Holt: Why are you all cooking together? Is it for a party?

Lindsay: No, afraid not.

Mr. Hall: I think you are indicating that each of you is going off on a journey in your own
direction.

Charley: You nearly have it.

Eliza: Perhaps you are the witches in Macbeth, stirring your potion - and then saying, “When
shall we three meet again?”

Lindsay: Well done Eliza. That’s the third one you’ve guessed. You’re really good at this game.

Mr. Cox: Well, I suggest that we older members of the group go off to the dining room and have a game of  cards. Anyone fancy whist?

Mrs. Cox: You four play and I will see how Jane is getting on with the refreshments.

The five adults go off stage, and the others, now that the regulated game is over, come closer together. All of the boys are eying Eliza, whose is by far the prettiest girl there. Alison, being somewhat older than the others, goes to the bookcase and seems to be separating herself
from the younger ones.

Alison: It really was appropriate - that charade you did. You three have been as thick as thieves these last five years - growing up together, and now you will each have to take your place in the real world. Have you been to Worcester before, Charles?

Charles: Oh, yes. I have aunts and uncles on both sides there. It’s like a second home to me.

Eliza: Will you be living with your relatives?

Charles: No, I have two rooms in a boarding house - very close to the station, and only a short
distance from our offices by the canal. But my Aunt Elizabeth will do my laundry - and no doubt she and my other uncle and aunt will provide me with meals on weekends, and a chance to get away from the howling brats that belong to my landlady.

Charley: I sort of wish that I was leaving home too - but father has set up this job for me -
clerking in his cotton broker’s office. But hopefully it won’t be long before I become a partner with him. He already has the sign - Edward Cox and Sons - so that means there have to be at least two of us working with him.

Alison: And what about your brother Edward marrying Eliza’s sister, Marianne. I expect they're
still on their honeymoon.

Charley: Yes, they are. He’s just a year older than me, so I think it won’t be long before we
all will be going down that route. Even though our mime was a bit of a joke - it made me think - when will we meet again? All of us, of course, from around here will see each other often enough - but I
wonder when we will have our Gleesome Threesome again?

Lindsay: Maybe we can go to the Great Exhibition together next summer.

Charles: I certainly intend to go. I know several people who are doing exhibits for it. It really
will be the experience of a lifetime.

Mary: Maybe it will be for a wedding. Which of us do you think will get married first?

(Lots of giggling and looking at one another.)

Caroline: You’re the oldest, Alison. It would only be fair for you to be first.

Alison: I have no intention of getting married. Taking care of the household and Father is my full time commitment.

Mary Cox: But don’t you long to get away and have a life of your own? I know I would. How unlucky for your mother to have died all those years ago, leaving you to cope with two brothers and a father who is a bit on the elderly side, not to put too fine a point on it.

Alison: Maybe, one day, I will travel abroad again. I was born in the United States, you know, in Charleston, South Carolina.

William: I didn’t know that. Does that make you an American?

Alison: Well, yes, I suppose it does. And my mother was American born too. It is quite an interesting family we come from. My grandfather, William Hall, was a merchant, and it is said that he drove his carriage from there to New York and back.

Mary: How far is that?

Alison: Three hundred miles, at least. And our mother's people were called the Jakes and the next generation back they were called the Shakletons, and they had a big cotton plantation. And my father, although he was born in Scotland, was making his fortune there in the cotton industry.

Charles: Through the slave trade, I expect. 

Alison: No, of course not. We never had slaves.

Charles: But your grandparents, I expect they did. Who picked their cotton?

Alison (clearly upset now): I really don’t wish to discus the subject with you. You don’t
understand how things are in the States.

Charley: It wasn’t only the States that had slaves you know, Alison. Liverpool people were in the thick of it. I could tell you the names of 20 famous Liverpudlians, with the mansions and streets named after them, who were involved in the slave trade.

William: You sound like you've looked into this. Give us some names. Are there any of our current politicians that were involved? It seems like a long time since the Emancipation Act - what was it 1811? Surely that should be more or less all over and done with by now.

Charles: Slavery played such a large part in Liverpool’s wealth, both before and after 1807, and how the leaders of the city were tied in to this should be brought out in full. The justification for slavery was a racism that went deep into British society and has lasted to the present day.

Charley: We have had endless discussion on this - as it is a bit of a hot topic for Charles, so I can add something to this conversation too.  In 1814 a petition was sent to Parliament registering Liverpool’s opposition to slave trading. But Napoleon had just been defeated and France was being allowed to resume its own slave trade. Liverpool traders must have been outraged that French ships could carry slaves when theirs couldn’t.

Anyway, contrast this one petition with the 64 petitions Liverpool Council sent against the abolition of the slave trade during the Parliamentary debates of 1787-1807, and the fact that Liverpool
Corporation paid for a delegation to remain in London to put their case to Parliament throughout this time!

Lindsay: A leading slave merchant, George Case, chaired the Council Finance Committee for
thirty-eight years from 1775 and all the ‘grand old Liverpool families’ were ‘more or less steeped’ in slavery, either trading or owning or both.

Take the Gladstones for instance. John Gladstone was an MP from 1818 to 1827. He owned more
than 1000 slaves in Demerara, now British Guiana which weren’t freed until 1834. In 1823 a revolt of slaves in the colony was put down by the governor, with 250 slaves slaughtered. Gladstone went on
to help procure the West Indies planters a grant of £20 million in 1833 by way of compensation for the loss of their slaves but the slaves got nothing!

His son, William Ewart Gladstone, who later became Prime Minister, devoted his first substantial speech in the Commons in 1832 to a defence of slavery.

Charles: And the Liverpool Corporation even commissioned a Reverend Raymond Harris to produce a pamphlet in which he stressed slavery’s “conformity with the principles of natural and revealed religion delineated in the sacred writings of the word of God.” Not surprising when the Church of
England was the largest single owner of slaves in the West Indies!

Mary: I’m sure there were some people in Liverpool who were against it, weren’t there?

Lindsay: Cotton from America was first imported into Britain at Liverpool by William Rathbone in 1784. Cotton was a product of slave labour so it is odd that an abolitionist like Rathbone should trade in it. Earlier in his life William Rathbone IV had persuaded his own father, William Rathbone
III, not to take a share in a slave trading voyage to Africa.

Charles: I think it was Rev. James Martineau at Church who said something about how the cotton
that we are even now dealing and making fortunes out of still depends on the American slaves. If weren’t there to pick the cotton for nothing, there would be nothing for us to buy and sell on. I think those of us here, who will be the dealers in cotton in the next two decades, should take a policy decision and not buy our cotton from the United States. There are sources in Egypt and India.

Caroline: Our father deals all sorts of products - tea is probably the biggest, and guano is
starting to be really important.

Mary: How unpleasant, guano. Where do they get that from then?

Robert: I know the answer to that one. Come over here and I’ll show you on the map, where the
guano comes from.

(He has carefully engineered it so that he has separated one of the girls to a corner of the room, where they sit close together looking through a huge atlas, his arm surreptitiously going around her back, and almost but not quite touching her.)

Eliza: Why do they import guano anyway? Don’t our local birds produce enough or the right kind?

Charles: I think that places where certain birds roost on mountain sides, it can be shoveled off by the ton - places where hardly anyone lives, and it is a free resource.

(He has an idea that he might like to get Eliza off in a corner too.)

I expect my employer will be dealing with guano as well. We will be buying and selling all sorts of goods, but mainly coal, I think, coming along the canals from Yorkshire. Shall I show you on the map where I will be living?

Just then Mrs. Cox comes in with the servants, Jane and Mary, bringing trays with food on. A huge tea service is uncovered in the corner of the table, and the adults came back into the room.

Maria: Help yourselves. There is eel pie and stuffed mushrooms, especially for the vegetarians,
amongst us, Charles, and goofer wafers, macaroons and queen cakes.

Mr. Cox comes back into the room bringing with him a bottle of champagne, and Mr. Hall carries a tray with the appropriate number of glasses, already filled. They are passed around until everyone has one.

Mr. Cox: Let’s all raise our glasses to Charles - to wish him all the best in his new position, in his new city of Worcester - which he will never find as good as this one. To Charles.

Everyone: (laughing and raising their glasses: To Charles.

Lindsay: And to when we three shall meet again, shall not be after too many months - and not involve all that much toil, trouble with lots of thunder lightning and rain. When the hurly burley’s done.

Charles: When the battle’s lost or won.

Charley: That will be ere set of sun.

Lindsay: Fair is foul and foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air.

Eliza: (laughing) Enough of that! Here is my toast. To Weddings, Christenings and
Funerals.

Everyone: (again laughing): To Weddings, Christenings and Funerals.