Many thanks to Jon Nichol for this research
Introduction 10th
September, 1884, Starcross. The flag on the jetty flew at
half mast, blinds were drawn, shutters half closed and shops shut to pay deep respect
to Sir John Duntze of Exeleigh House, a pillar of Starcross society for forty
years. Sir John’s funeral procession
left Exeleigh House in mid afternoon, a ‘great gathering of rich and
poor’ and wended its way towards Starcross parish church. Heading the cortege
were ‘tenants and other residents in the vicinity; 60 members of a boot
club in Starcross – of which the deceased baronet was the promoter and a strong
supporter.’(1).
Sir John had been a highly active president of the
Starcross yachting and boat club (2). So was boot a misprint of boat? Apparently
not, for, a digital search of 100 years of some 300 British newspapers from
1850-1950 produced a random scattering of about 10 mentions of boot clubs,
including Starcross’s and one in Exeter. In Hull there was a house ‘where the
goose club, and the coal club, the clothes club, flourish – nay, even the boot
club.’(3) Clearly boot clubs could have played a social role alongside other
clubs that might supply coal, drink, clothes and even geese. Already we have a
clue, an inkling, of what Starcross Boot Club might have been like.
A boot club – what, where, why,
how? A London law case provides further illumination as to what membership of
Starcross Boot Club might have involved.
‘A portly , middle-aged woman informed Mr. Lane
of the North London Police-court yesterday, that she had joined a boot club,
run by a boot dealer of Hackney. She had 2s. 1d on her card and the shopkeeper
refused to repair her boots.
Mr. Lane (examining the card}
“What is a boot club?“
Applicant: “You pays in what
you like and you has out what your like.”
Mr. Lane: “That sound very
nice.” (Laughter) “What do you complain of?”
Applicant: “I sent my boots
to be half-soled and heeled, and now her refused to return the boots unless I
pay 1s. 6d. Now her’s got my boots as
well as my money.”’(4)
Running a boot club Other newspaper evidence suggests individuals
like the Hackney boot dealer founded and ran boot clubs like Starcross’s (5)(6).
Each club had an owner or manager, and might even have a secretary and a
treasurer (7). Boot clubs probably had a set of rules including the entering of
members’ subscriptions on their boot club cards to pay for their boots and
shoes. The owner or manager could profit from supplying the boots bought from a
boot maker for boot club members, as in the case of a Mrs Pitt, who received a commission
of ‘1s 6d in the £’ [7.5p in a 100p]. (8)
Charitable boot clubs. Boot clubs could also be charitable with donors’
payments contributing towards boots and shoes for the poor. One such was the
last recorded English boot club, ‘the Coventry
Children’s Boot fund, founded in 1893, when the backstreets of Coventry, like
many other industrial cities, were packed with youngsters wearing rudimentary
footwear or no shoes at all. The CBF is still providing free shoes for between
400 and 500 low-income families every year.’
(9) It is not clear whether Starcross Boot Club was a charitable body with
Sir John Duntze as its benefactor.
Conclusion Starcross Boot Club seems to have played a
major part in shoeing the people of Starcross.
So, as the 60 members of the Starcross Boot Club walked behind Sir
John’s coffin as it processed through Starcross to the parish church, Sir John
could rest happy knowing that they wore well polished boots and shoes, see picture
A, a fitting tribute to him as Starcross Boot Club’s ‘promoter and a
strong supporter.’(1).
The Well Shod People Of Starcross
In Late Victorian / Edwardian England
A booted ragged child, probably a
Victorian or Edwardian photograph
SOLVING THE STARCROSS BOOT CLUB
MYSTERY: ‘DOING HISTORY’
Step 1: Starting point - A topic/subject
that interests, intrigues you….
I was researching the life
of Sir John Duntze, owner of Exeleigh House where we live. The mention of a boot
club in the newspaper account of his funeral fascinated me. Fascination turned
into solving a history mystery when I could find no one who knew what a boot
club was! A perfect mini topic to illuminate what ‘Doing History’ involves.
Step 2: Questions: Asking
questions: without these there is no history!
A number of questions flooded
into my mind, starting with: what was a
boot club? and what was the Starcross
boot club? who belonged to it? who owned it? how was it run? Throughout it
was important to highlight the key question, the first two.
Step 3: Finding historical
sources that might help answer the questions and trigger off new ones
An Internet search came up
with one source, number 9 in the references below, a great help, but there was nothing
else. Also, I consulted textbooks and monographs on Victorian
England and its social history and local history books and pamphlets about
Devon and Starcross. No mentions of boot clubs. These background secondary
sources proved to be a dead end. But, they provided the Victorian
historical context.
So, having joined the
on-line British Newspaper Archive [BNA] that has digitised every page of
over 300 newspapers, original primary sources, on the Victorian period. First
I searched our local newspaper, the Exeter
Flying Post from 1850-1900, unearthing a statement that there was also an
Exeter boot club, but nothing else. So,
Starcross Boot club was not alone. Next,
a blanket search of the BNA’s 300 newspapers from 1850-1950 threw up about fifteen
mentions of boot clubs that I printed off.
Step 4 – Searching for clues
containing evidence in the sources
Bearing my questions in mind,
the next step was to work on the sources to extract clues buried in them,
possible evidence, to help solve the mystery. I collated, analysed and
organised the evidence, while speculating, hypothesising, deducing, imagining
and seeing connections, patterns to answer the questions about the Starcross
Boot Club.
Step 5: Writing about Starcross Boot Club in the context of
Sir John’s funeral
The final stage was to think
about the nature of Starcross Boot Club in the context of Sir John’s funeral.
Here the creative, informed imagination came into play, enabling me to draft
and redraft the essay on the first page, weaving into it what I had discovered
in general about boot clubs and so solve The Starcross Boot Club Mystery.
References
(1) Exeter Flying Post: 17
September 1884, BNA BL/0000103/18840917/026/0006
(2) BNA Exeter Flying Post:: 2 September 1863
(3) BNA Hull Packet: 26 December
1856
(4) BNA The Nottingham
Evening Post: 5 August1894
(5) BNA Dundee People’s
Journal: 15 May 1858
(6) BNA Hartlepool Northern
Daily Mail: 7 August 1885
(7) BNA The Croydon
Advertiser and East Surrey Reporter`; 24 April 1875
(8) BNA The Nottingham
Evening Post: 5 August 1894
(9) Chris Arnot, (2007) The
Guardian, ‘Charity Boot Fund Is Still Good For The Sole’
