In February 1796, my six-times-great-grandmother Margaret Mattison, along with five other people, stopped two horse-drawn carts taking wheat and wool through their village in the Yorkshire dales and duffed up one of the hauliers. This was “riotous assembly” and Margaret was tried at the Easter quarter sessions not long afterwards. She and the others were cleared of the charge of riot, but found guilty of assault.
This was at the height of the bread riots, when England was undergoing a painful transition to the free market, and producers of goods such as wheat and wool were growing wise to ways of increasing their profit, including taking them to be sold in bigger markets – in this case Kettlewell in the West Riding. Margaret was one of many “social bandits” (Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase) who tried to intervene physically to stop the economic changes that were depriving them of affordable bread. It was to little avail, but she is a heroine to me. She also had a criminal record.
When I first started researching my family, I had no idea of the crimes we had committed, collectively, or the travails we had withstood over the past 200 years and more. I focused on my mother’s side of the family, as it was only on her side that we conceived of ourselves as a clan – the Mattisons. But as far as family legend went, the patriarch and matriarch of the clan were my great-grandparents. In the 1920s, John and Julia ran Mattison’s Bazaar, a small department store, in the marketplace in Richmond, Yorkshire. Great-grandfather John Mattison, a tinsmith who made stock for the shop, had one of the first cars in the town, a De Dion Bouton, until he backed it over a steep drop below Richmond castle in 1922, writing it off. He almost severed his foot when the windscreen sliced into it, sending my great-granny, who had just given birth, into shock.
This misadventure, I discovered, was only one in a long chain of knockbacks that might have overwhelmed a less resilient family. Over two centuries, various members of my family have excelled in murderous or suicidal cock-ups. They seem to have been, by turns, either baddies or blunderers – mostly the latter. Take another John Mattison, born in 1816. In November 1839, he was riding home from Richmond to Redmire in Wensleydale with another man when they came up behind four young people. John’s horse trod on their heels and a scuffle broke out. In the fight, the only young woman in the party, Edith Horn, tried to get in between the men to break it up and got a blow on the head from an umbrella and one in her side. Having struggled home, she lay in bed vomiting blood and died 10 days later. She was 29. Incredibly, Mattison’s companion was not charged with anything because he was drunk (and so not considered responsible for his actions), while my first cousin six times removed was sentenced to just 21 days in prison for manslaughter. Years later, one of John’s farmhands died from being impaled on a pitchfork and, although this was declared an accidental death, I can’t help wondering if my cousin still had a murderously nasty temper.
With other Mattison misdemeanours, it is hard to say whether the perpetrators were actual criminals or just criminally stupid. Several caused fatal explosions.
Aged 12, my four-times-great-uncle William Mattison was in Mr Beetham’s gun shop in Richmond marketplace with his friend Wilson who was an apprentice there. It was October 1836. Mr Beetham was out and the two boys were messing about with a pistol, which sparked and ignited a barrel of gunpowder. In the massive explosion, Wilson was killed and the shop destroyed along with a flat above it. Three people from the flat also died within a month. William’s father, Jonas, my four-times-great-grandfather, found him lying in the wreckage and carried him home (they lived down at the gasworks). William recovered and went on to become a successful manufacturer of iron machinery.
The steamer Aberdeen had just left Gravesend, bound for Australia, in March 1884 when the captain, Charles Mattison, a distant relation, noticed smoke coming from the ship’s powder magazine (which held flares as well as gunpowder). He shouted to the second mate, “You are on fire, throw it overboard!” but it was too late. Charles, the mate and a harbour pilot sustained fatal injuries in the ensuing explosion. At the inquest, the coroner suggested the practice of storing flares in the same box as gunpowder should end.
Only two years later, three people were killed and 17 injured when a boiler at a mattress factory in Stepney, east London exploded. The factory owner was George Mattison, another distant relative; he had bought the third-hand boiler for next to nothing, patching it up to keep it running. The casing had become “as thin as a knife blade” and the girls employed to make the mattresses had run screaming into the street on several occasions when the boiler ran dry and they thought it would blow up. When it finally went, one of the victims was the maintenance man, who had warned his boss of the danger on previous occasions.
This George weighed down the culpable side of the balance, but more Mattisons were victims than perpetrators. There was Ann, a servant, who fell off her master’s carriage in 1818: one of the wheels ran over her neck and killed her. Jennie was going to Richmond parish church to be married when her carriage “came into violent contact with a house”. She and her party were “alarmed” but the bride walked the rest of the way to church. That was in 1885. This was really the “decade horribilis” for Mattisons: the following year, William’s horse was dragged into the river Swale at Richmond as he was dumping a cartload of rubbish in the water (normal practice for the time); in 1892, eight-year-old Alfred fell through the ice when the Swale froze over – both he and the horse were rescued but Alfred’s father, a builder, was not so lucky. Two years earlier he had fallen to his death from scaffolding. Actually, Alfred wasn’t lucky either: he was killed at Ypres on 22 October 1914.
Apart from a distant Mattison relative who fell down a well, the most poignant calamity is perhaps that of yet another John Mattison, who in 1956 had just climbed to the top of Snowdon with his wife, Mary (they were from Leeds). Mary said later that they could see for miles. They were enjoying the view when John was struck by lightning and killed instantly. The terrible irony is that he had taken excessive safety precautions (perhaps knowing the family risk of being snuffed out by disaster) and was wearing a crash helmet and goggles. The lightning entered his body through the goggles.
My great-grandfather who backed his car over the drop in 1922 was the last of our branch of the family to bear the Mattison name – he had four daughters so it was lost when they married. We all, nonetheless, still refer to ourselves as Mattisons and like to hark back to our roots. Yet we are only Mattisons at all because of another bad boy in the family.
In November 1794, my five-times-great-grandmother Elizabeth Mattison, daughter of Margaret the bread rioter, married a William Battersby, and that should have been that. Battersbys for ever after. But William turned out to be a thief who stole a tablecloth and a linen shirt and was indicted for felony in 1800. After that, he disappears from the record but Elizabeth spurned the Battersby name, reverting to Mattison, ensuring that it would continue to be associated with death and disaster for another century or more. In truth, I think you would probably find such stories in any family if you looked hard enough – the danger is perhaps in becoming over-aware of the ill fortune and starting to expect more of the same. That’s how curses are born. I prefer to think that, in spite of everything, we’re still here.
• The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane: The Story of the Carr’s Hill Murder by Jane Housham is published by riverrun, £20, available from the Guardian Bookshop.
