9780718894351 Text Mee.Indd

ONE Beginnings Stapleford Arthur Henry Mee was born in Stapleford, Nottinghamshire, on 21 July 1875. Ten kilometres south-west of Nottingham, Stapleford was in the year of his birth an unremarkable community of 2,000 inhabitants. The village economy once reliant upon agriculture had by 1851 turned towards hosiery and lace manufacture following the growth of a factory-based industry. While agriculture and coal mining remained sources of work, from the 1870s Stapleford owed a substantial growth in population to its emergence as a satellite for the lace industry in Nottingham. In 1881 the population of Stapleford had shown a significant increase, a trend that continued following the opening of a lace factory and a new colliery on the edge of the village.1 The population of over 3,000 in 1881 had by 1891 risen to 4,000. This prompted local historian Cornelius Brown to write, “A visitor to Stapleford after an absence of twenty years would scarcely recognise in the mass of buildings and places of business the small hosiery village thatSAMPLE he once knew.”2 Arthur Mee’s roots lay firmly within the respectable working class. His father Henry Mee was born in the industrial town of Heanor, twelve kilometres south of Stapleford. Henry’s father James Mee had spent his working life as an unskilled agricultural labourer before dying of a heart condition aged fifty. Henry Mee’s mother Sarah earned a living making hosiery items on a pedal-operated machine, which, until the introduction of steam power, was a cottage industry. In 1871, the year of his mother’s death, twenty-year-old Henry Mee, his twenty-six-year-old brother James and James’s wife Emma left Heanor to live in Stapleford. James Mee, who had been a coalminer, found work as a signalman on the railways but later took his family back to Heanor, where he worked as a framework knitter and then a postman. Henry Mee remained in Stapleford, lodging on Nottingham Road with a railway signalman, Alfred Charlton, and his family. He found work as an engine cleaner and was then 1 © 2016 The Lutterworth Press 2 Arthur Mee employed on the Midland Railway as an engine driver. But most of his working life was spent as an engineer operating stationary steam engines inside hosiery and lace factories where they drove the machinery, shafts, pulleys and belts. On 10 June 1872 Henry Mee married nineteen-year-old Mary Fletcher, whose well respected nonconformist family worked in lace manufacturing in Stapleford. Mary’s father John Fletcher was a lace-maker and before marrying Henry, Mary and her eight brothers and sisters worked in the industry. Mary worked as a cotton lace winder, transferring yarn from bobbins into balls ready for weaving. The Mees set up home in Church Street around the corner from James Mee in Church Lane, before moving to 7 Pinfold Lane. Near the heart of the village’s industrial development, they lived in a two-bedroom terraced house like many others built for a growing industrial population. In 1881 Henry Mee’s neighbours in Pinfold Lane were lace-makers, railway workers and unskilled labourers. Mary Mee’s family lived close by; her widowed father John Fletcher lived at 5 Pinfold Lane with four of her brothers and sisters and at 6 Pinfold Lane was her elder brother Charles, his wife Janette and their three children. Once settled into married life, Henry and Mary Mee quickly became caught up in the responsibilities of raising a family. Between 1873 and 1881, Mary gave birth to six children. The first to arrive was a daughter, Annie (b. 1873); she was followed by Arthur, boys Ernest (b. 1878) and Herbert Fletcher (b. 1881) and two more girls in Mabel Laura (b. 1885) and Sarah Lois (b. 1887), who was always called Lois. A Nonconformist Upbringing Arthur Mee grew up in a family whose values and lifestyle were conditioned by the liberal politicsSAMPLE and nonconformist commitments of Henry Mee. Campaigning for the separation of church and state and freedom of religious and civil conscience, nonconformists developed a natural affinity with liberal politics, and Henry Mee was a staunch Baptist and a steadfast liberal. Drawn from the middle and upper working classes, artisans, shopkeepers and wage earners living and working within commercial and industrial centres formed the basis of nonconformist congregations. They prided themselves upon their individualism and reluctance to submit to the power of government agencies. They saw themselves as outsiders and, divorced from the religious and political establishment, a sense of independence shaped their identity. Nonconformists combined within their own communities; not only did they worship together, they lived and worked side by side, did business with each other and married into each other’s families.3 Life was shaped by family responsibility, hard work and a powerful sense of community.4 © 2016 The Lutterworth Press 1. Beginnings 3 Piety lay at the core of nonconformity; a sober and disciplined lifestyle was essential and signs of pretension, ostentation or self-indulgence were considered improper and unacceptable. Nonconformity was more than a commitment to a set of religious beliefs and it went far beyond the chapel door in providing a programme for living an ethical and moral life. Although not exclusively the province of nonconformists, the “nonconformist conscience” matured into a set of principles designed to guide personal and public behaviour. At the heart of nonconformity was a willingness to oppose injustice and behaviour considered morally wrong. Conditioned by a reformist zeal, nonconformist social identity included a sense of historical mission and a commitment to self-improvement, individual freedom and social amelioration. Being a nonconformist meant adopting a robust commitment to public as well as private duty and nonconformists played important roles in civic life. Political action was equated with religiously inspired reform and the pursuit of social welfare and integrity in public life. With the exercise of conscience a pre-requisite, nonconformists campaigned against poverty, unemployment, prostitution, gambling and crime and had a central role in the temperance movement.5 Henry Mee was an earnest, uncompromising and dedicated member of the community at Stapleford Baptist Chapel. A patriarchal and serious figure, he lived his life guided by a fixed framework of religious, political and social beliefs. As well as being a member of the congregation, Henry Mee was a deacon, helping to manage the business of the chapel. Deacons were chosen because of their spiritual piety, their grasp of doctrine and their honesty, reliability and integrity. These were qualities that Henry Mee possessed in abundance and he is said to have carried out his role with “unsmiling gravity and inflexibility of purpose”.6 Along with Mary Mee’s father John and herSAMPLE uncle William Fletcher, Henry was involved in laying a memorial stone at the new Baptist Sunday school before giving an address to a public meeting.7 Henry Mee was politically active and as an act of conscience objected to the 1902 Education Act and refused to pay that portion of the local rates given to education. The Act abolished local school boards and made local authorities responsible for funding schools, including denominational schools. Nationally thousands of nonconformists rejected the idea that they should pay rates towards sectarian religious teaching in denominational schools, leading to a campaign of passive resistance.8 John Clifford was the recognised leader of the passive resistance movement; he was a devout Baptist and an uncompromising believer in the nonconformist conscience. At age ten his poverty stricken upbringing had seen him earning a living in a Nottingham lace factory working fifteen hours a day, six days a week. It was an experience that shaped his faith © 2016 The Lutterworth Press 4 Arthur Mee and his crusades against poverty, inequality and injustice.9 Clifford studied at the Baptist Academy in Leicester before in 1858 becoming pastor at Praed Street Baptist Church, London, and then in 1877 at the newly built Westbourne Park Church, where he stayed until his retirement in 1915. As a member of the Nottingham Local Preachers Association, on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1875, a nervous Clifford preached to Henry Mee’s congregation at Stapleford Baptist Church on the subject of “faith”.10 What Clifford described as the soul of passive resistance was opposition to an abuse of individual rights that saw religion in schools dominated by Anglican and Roman Catholic rites and dogmas.11 Failure to pay the rates usually meant a court appearance, at which point, after registering their protest, some debtors paid up. When payment was withheld, personal goods were confiscated for auction with the money raised paying the debt.12 On such occasions resisters would often arrive in force at auctions and sometimes, with the agreement of the auctioneer, sing hymns and make speeches before the sale began. Henry Mee was secretary of the Nottingham passive resistance committee. On 21 April 1910, along with twenty others, he found himself at an auction of goods; he bid £9 4s 2d, the amount required for the rates plus court costs, and bought all the lots, including his own.13 It was common practice that committee funds be used for purchase and the goods returned to their owners. While other passive resisters fell by the wayside, Henry Mee did not, and on 23 April 1923 he appeared in the Nottingham Summons Court for what he described as the twenty-first or twenty-second time for failing to pay that portion of the rates provided for education.14 This was the context within which a young Arthur Mee grew up. It was a family and community environment in which religious faith, political and social activism sat side by side.

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