Four Generations (Photo of Elizabeth, Hubert, Hugh and John, taken August 1932)

When, during the second Disraeli premiership, publican William Dubbins died at Coolham in Sussex, he left his wife Esther to look after two children and a public house, which continues to flourish, known as the Selsey Arms (internet photograph). There is still an old picture of the pub on the wall of the lounge which shows faintly, on the sign outside, the word "Batchelor". This is due to her subsequent marriage to William Batchelor, a man six years younger than she was, who was at that time employed as a farm bailiff. He probably preferred his new job as publican, for the increased use of machinery and artificial fertilisers presaged the disappearance of traditional customs and festivals, making farm life monotonous and dull. The compulsory slaughter of cattle during the terrible rinderpest outbreak of 1865-77 coincided with greatly increased mechanisation on the American prairies. This caused the virtual collapse of English agriculture, the loss of farming jobs all over the country and stagnation in the already low agricultural wages structure. Even a bailiff would not have earned much more than an ordinary labourer's weekly wage of ten shillings.

Yet when Esther Mabel Batchelor (always known as Mabel) was born, the first child of her mother's second marriage, at Coolham on September 26th 1879, she arrived at a time of high national morale. England had undergone a tremendous expansion since the Industrial Revolution. Despite the poverty of agricultural workers, the nation as a whole was wealthy, and Britain had enormous international influence, while science and medicine were continually pushing back the frontiers. Mabel grew up among people who felt that what each one of them did was of real importance, and made a worthwhile contribution to the well-being of the next generation.

Esther and William Batchelor were to have one more child, a son also named William. Not for them the huge families of previous generations; as infant mortality declined rapidly with the improvement in medical knowledge and care, fewer children became the norm, and their upbringing assumed greater signifance. Working class parents had demanded schools and the Liberals of Gladstone's first Government was determined to implement their wishes. The Conservative party agreed. "We," said the leader of the Opposition in a famous speech, "must educate our masters(1)”.

Nevertheless, despite the passing of Forster's Bill in 1870 and the consequent doubling of grants to Church schools, it was a full two decades before England's school capacity could be increased sufficiently to justify the new Act's title of Universal Primary Education. Although many nonconformists had opposed the Bill, fearing it would extend the influence of the Established Church, the Quakers took advantage of its provisions. When Mabel Batchelor began her schooling she and the other children of Coolham had to walk to Shipley or Billingshurst each day. In 1890, however, the Friends began a school in the old turnpike cottage at the crossroads (the Round House), where Mabel learned under the care of Quaker headmistress Harriett Moss. Although her parents were not members of the Society, she attended Friends' meetings at the Blue Idol (internet photograph). This is a half-timbered building originally called "Little Slattern” dating from 1520. It was acquired by the Quakers in 1691, only two years after the passing of the Act of Dissent which allowed them to meet legally. It underwent alterations and was then used by them as their Thakeham meeting house with William Penn as its first leader. Two hundred years afterwards, shortly after reopening in 1870, the Friends were again holding meetings there. The children usually met half an hour before the adult session began, and sometimes stayed to that as well. Well over one hundred years later, meetings are still held at the Blue Idol, eleven o'clock every Sunday morning, with a children's class.

Mabel continued to attend meetings when she moved to Horsham and lived at no.13 Carfax. The name "Carfax" is derived from the French "Quatre Voies"("Four Ways"), but by 1890 the original crossroads had become a tangle of narrow streets and alleys, down one of which lived Mabel's stepsister Mrs Agnes (Queenie) Quested, now a publican like Mabel's mother. Mabel assisted at Horsham's first Quaker Day School where she was "an earnest, helpful worker."(2) When she was seventeen she applied to become a Quaker by convincement. In her letter of application she wrote: "Having been attending Friends meetings for about 6 years, 3 of which I have lived in Horsham, the remainder at Coolham, & believing myself to be in thorough sympathy with Friends’ views, I am desirous of becoming a member. My conversion dates from Nov.25th.1893, when I was led to accept Jesus as my Saviour, under the ministry of Mr.Young.(3)" At the time of her conversion she was fourteen years old.

In January, 1897 the two Friends appointed to visit Mabel, Margaret Ashby and Lucy Linney, reported that they had a satisfactory interview with her and that she appeared "to understand the reasons for our differing from other Christians on the subjects of Warship, Baptism, The Sacrament and War"(2). She had wanted to apply for membership for a year. After a second visit the February meeting were told that "there does not appear to be anything to prevent her application being received favourably. We hope she will be admitted into membership, & that it will prove a strength and encouragement to her in her Christian course, & that she will prove to be an earnest and useful member of the church"(4).
The Meeting accepted this recommendation and received Mabel Batchelor into membership. Earnest and useful she certainly proved to be, playing the harmonium at weekly meetings and remaining faithful to the Friends for the remainder of her life.

Mabel's mother, born Esther Holland, is not known to have had any connection with the public house business before her marriage. Her maternal grandmother, Martha Charman, although able to write her name, was a descendant of farming families who for generations had tilled the Sussex soil. Her maternal grandfather, William Holland, had moved to Horsham from the family home of Shipley, where his parents were agricultural labourers.

Mabel's faith would have provided her with a sharp contrast to the home life she knew. For "... the pubs were the centres of social life, and of considerable drunkeness. They opened early in the morning and stayed open until late at night, often until next morning"(5). As a young person of the late Victorian era she would not have seen ladies' power and influence as necessarily limited to the home. Since Florence Nightingale's impact on the previously male bastion of War nineteenth century woman had regarded herself as able to be active, useful, influential and effective outside the family in the proud Victorian tradition of using your strength in the cause of right.

Mabel's great courage enabled her, despite her parents' dependence on an income gained from the sale of alcohol, to join a sect whose members entered public houses in order to sing hymns, preach and turn customers away. That courage helped her to make the momentous decision to marry the crippled Hubert Henley Collins. Hubert was the third surviving child of miller and nonconformist lay preacher William Collins (photographs) at Ockham, Surrey on March 9th 1881. His mother Elizabeth (photograph) had suffered a series of tragedies. The first three childen she bore, Bertha, Rhoda and Lily all died in infancy, and the small headstones of the first two can still be seen in Ockham churchyard. The next child, Maurice was strong and healthy and Elizabeth gave him as his second forename her own maiden name, Oliver. The death of her next baby Norman was followed by the crippling of Hubert. When he fell from his high chair she was unable to prevent him breaking his back on the fender. He was to grow up with long legs surmounted by a body so hunched that his chin would be but a few inches above his waist. His mother continued to bear child after child, several more dying in infancy, until she too became a cripple, recovering full use of her legs only in later years, after the death of her husband.

As a child Hubert lived in his father's mill at Ockham, wandering the surrounding countryside and fishing the mill stream. With other young boys on the green at Ripley he watched the pennyfarthing riders stop at the Hautboy Inn. They turned in to the archway of the coach entrance, where they would steer close to the wall in order to dismount. The problem of mounting and dismounting the pennyfarthing bicycle seemed to preclude its use for house delivery services. So a few years earlier, in about 1881, a Sussex architect named Henry Burstow had invented the "cycle centre", which had one large wheel and four small ones around it. A number of these were bought by the Horsham Post Office and were used by their postmen. Mabel Batchelor as a young girl would have been familiar with them. During her teens Burstow's invention was outdated by the new "safety bicycle" which even ladies could ride around the country lanes of Sussex with, as yet, no danger of meeting a motor car.

Yet the trains had already been running for several decades. Not only did they serve countryfolk wishing to travel into the big cities, but also towndwellers seeking recreation away from them. Even before the railways came, holidays at Brighton and at other resorts on the south Coast were becoming popular, but tbe trains brought such pleasures within the reach of the working class. Competition between rail companies was fierce. In 1848 the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Company, seeking to compete with the London and South West Railway Company's direct line to Portsmouth, began their Mid-Sussex line by joining Horsham to Three Bridges and London. Thus began a proliferation of rail links with Horsham. It had been connected to Petworth in 1859, to Shoreham in 1861, to Guildford via Cranleigh in 1865, and to Dorking, Leatherhead and Epsom in 1867. By the time Mabel Batchelor was born the townsfolk were well used to the trains, and were busily taking advantage of the opportunities for prosperity which the railways had brought them.

Horse-drawn transport continued to be popular, however, and Hubert told his children years later how he had polished the boots of gentlemen disembarking from the coach at Horsham, more than thirty years after the advent of the railways. Hubert's first job, before he came to Horsham, was as a carrier's boy. His hunched back prevented him from working at his father's mill, and he had given up his watchmaker's apprenticeship after only twelve months. So he became assistant to a cobbler and shoemaker, yet worked so hard that by the time of his marriage to Mabel Batchelor he had his own business in London Road. One neighbour, and possibly the owner of the freehold of the cobbler's shop, was Mr Jackson the garage proprietor. On the other side, at the actual point of the junction, was a sweetshop.

Hubert and Mabel's first child Hubert William (Hugh) was born on March 20th 1908, and his sister Mabel in 1912. By this time the cobbler's shop had two assistants and the family were living in a fine four-bedroomed house in Victory Road. They were directly opposite Mrs Esther Batchelor's terraced house, where she lived with her first son Fred Dubbins. He, following the fashion brought back to England half a century earlier by the heroes of Sebastopol, constantly puffed at a pipe filled with strong smelling plug tobacco. Mabel's brother Bill lived around the corner in Rushams Road.

This was a good time to be self-employed. Although railway clerks earned 30s. a week, trades unions battled, often vainly, to overcome appalling injustices in industrial rates of pay. The long hours and monastic living conditions of domestics were rewarded by salaries of from £10 to £25 a year for servants up to the rank of underfootman. When Chancellor Lloyd George gave the first state pension of 5s. per week funded by a rise in income tax on higher salaries from 1s to 1s 2d, he met great opposition. Hubert Collins, dependent on no employer, prospered. He moved his family into a larger residence, also in Rushams Road, consisting of two houses and a florist's shop joined together. Although his son Hugh does not recall the incident himself, Hugh's mother was fond of telling how, dressed in his sailor's suit, the boy was stood up on a wall at the end of Rushams Road to watch the Duke of York marching past in front of a column of troops. She said that when her little son saluted the Duke smiled and returned the salute. Hugh's own first memory is possibly earlier. He can recall blowing bubbles on the stage while a piano played "The Oak and the Ash". He was dressed in the velvet suit and lace collar of the soap advertisement, and his mother was one of an audience of parents at the Victory Road Elementary School.

Like most Edwardian parents, Hugh's father could also entertain. He played an E flat euphonium, until it was sold to a teacher named Mr Isles. Hugh's mother's talent on the harmonium was put to good use at the Friend's Meeting House near the mill. Her enthusiasm was not always shared by her husband, whom Hugh remembers taking out his silver half hunter watch and opening it to check the time, when the service seemed to him to be going on for longer than usual. Sometimes they visited Hubert's family at Ockham Mill, taking the train which ran on the single-track line from Horsham to Guildford. Once baby Mabel was old enough to sit in a pushchair, her father, who was an unexpectedly strong man, carried Hugh for a good part of the four miles between Ripley and Guildford. Hubert's family lived in the millhouse next to the mill run by Hubert's father. But on 27th October 1913 William Collins, the miller, died at Ockham. Although the old man had been a lay preacher with non-conformist views, he was buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Ockham under a large headstone which reads:

In memory of William the beloved husband of Elizabeth Collins who died October 27th 1913 aged 69 years "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace."

On August 4th 1914 war was declared. On August 7th the new pound and ten-shilling notes replaced the sovereign and half-sovereign. Hubert's younger brother Stanley was called up and sent to France, where he served with the King's Royal Rifle Corps. During the war rail travel was forbidden for all but essential purposes(6), and the visits to Ripley stopped. At Rushams Road two soldiers were billeted with the family during the early part of the war. Jackson's garage was turned into a munitions factory making parts for artillery shells. Women were employed there, which caused much comment, as did their uniform overalls and large berets.

One day Hugh was unwell, so stayed home from school. As he lay on the mat in front of the fire his mother leant over him, opened the oven door, and partially withdrew a rice pudding to test it with her knife. She lost her balance and the tin tipped over his bare calf and ankle, scarring him for life. He vividly remembers her weeping while the nurse attended to his leg.

He hated cats, so that one night when two of them were quarrelling on the wall behind the house, his father came into the bedroom. "Don't worry, son, I'll deal with them." Hubert clambered up onto a chair by the window, his thin legs protuding beneath his hunched nightshirt, and expertly fired a catapult through the lowered sash window. Hugh remembers no more, but years later his mother told how, unable to sleep, Hubert eventually left his bed a second time, worried about the discovery of the animal's body. He took a spade into the garden to dig a grave, but when he searched the alley behind the houses, he could find no corpse to bury. Yet at heart Hubert was a conservationist. In the park on the south side of Rushams Road he and Hugh found an abandonned bird's nest containing three babies, two dead and one still living. The survivor was taken home and fed for weeks from the end of a matchstick.

At Ripley, the eldest brother Maurice's bakery was thriving, and Hubert's elder brother Harvey had taken over the mill. Harvey was a tall, very stooped man, and lived in the millhouse with his mother and his wife Elizabeth (Bessie) (photographs). In Millwater, the big house, dwelt (Frederick) Wilfred Scott Stokes. a civil engineer who had once been president of the British Engineers' Association, and was chairman of Ransome and Rapier. He had already invented rotary kilns for cement making and sluices for dams and canals. By now the war in France had reached a terrifying stalemate, with both sides firmly dug in on a five hundred mile front. Wilfrid Stokes therefore turned his inventive brain to the problem of killing and wounding soldiers in a trench too near to be shelled safely, yet too distant to be reached by a hand-thrown grenade. He patented the Stokes gun, the predecessor of the modern mortar, which could be heard at intervals being tested in his grounds.

During the appalling carnage of the Somme, R/1480 Private Stanley Collins, whose normal duties were those of a sniper, was killed after returning from a spell on the line by a bullet apparently fired from the rifle of a German sniper. He died in front of his colleagues. His effects were sent home to his distressed mother at the mill, and she had the second part of her husband’s gravestone inscribed:

also of Stanley, youngest son of the above who fell in action in France August 18th 1916 aged 22 years "Faithful unto death."

A few months later the K.B.E. was awarded to Sir Wilfred Stokes for his contribution to the effectiveness of the war.

The cramped position of Hubert's chest caused him problems of health which were so severe that his doctor advised him to move nearer to the sea. It was decided to live in Worthing, so the business was sold to one of his apprentices named Barrett, who had been crippled following a fall with a pencil in his trouser pocket.

Hubert moved his family (photo of the family, probably in 1919) to 31 Broadwater Street East and began working for Mr Wheatland, a cycle and boot repairer, whose shop lay between the house and Broadwater Green. After a while he began work on his own account, in the tiny workshop he built in the back garden against the south-facing wall to take advantage of the sun. A fig tree along the same wall flourished in its sheltered surroundings.

After the war large numbers of returning disabled men were retrained as cobblers, and competition became fierce. As the price of leather was high, Hubert's stubborn refusal to resort to the shoddy materials used by some of his competitors lost him custom. The growth of the new multiple stares, which offered surgical shoes at the price of the mass produced article as a loss leader, made matters even worse. One customer a with huge, grossly deformed foot, on finding that he could buy his shoes as cheaply as anyone else at Freeman Hardy and Willis, cancelled his order after the leather had been cut and the shoe partly completed. There was so little profit to be made in cobbling that at times money could not be found to buy a bend of leather.

Nutritional food was expensive, and the family which now included Harvey, born in 1920, had to make do on a diet of bread and cheap vegetables when these could be obtained. While he was still at school, Hugh already had a job as an errand boy for 6d a week. When he left in 1921, he took a shop assistant's position at ten shillings a week. This was a help to the strained family finances, and things began to improve a little.

Help in regard to a problem Hubert had become used to came from an unexpected quarter. Hugh recalls a visit to the retail premises of one of the hated chain stores, whose mass production methods had contributed so much to the family's poverty. Because of his hunched back his father had to have his suit made for him, and as it cost £10 to have this done he possessed only one. Hugh recalls the conversation with an assistant at the Worthing branch of the Fifty Shilling Tailors. At first, Hubert's query about the possibility of purchasing a suit for his teenage son was misunderstood.
"Yes sir, we can make a suit for you for fifty shillings."
"Not for me."
"Yes sir, for you. In your case we would probably ask you to attend for a fitting before the suit was completed, but it will still cost you only two pounds ten."
Young Hugh got the suit that they had come for, but later when they had more money his father returned to take advantage of the offer himself.

Hugh's cousin Donald, whose father Maurice's bakery suffered little from the increased competition of peacetime, owned a wireless set. It was tuned by moving' a pointed bolt to the spot on the coil where reception was best, then screwing it tight at that position. His father possessed a Rover automobile. It had wooden wheels with six wooden spokes. The spare, known as a Stepney, was fastened to the punctured wheel by three clamps gripping alternate spokes. Donald went to a college in London to learn about confectionery, but did not complete the course.

When her husband died in February 1927, Lady Stokes, now the owner of the estate, was forced, through death duties, to vacate Millwater and live in the millhouse. Harvey and his wife moved into a cottage by the village green, and he became its groundsman. His mother's health improved so much that whilst in her eighties she would gather and chop her own firewood in the depth of winter, even crossing to the island in the pond at the bottom of the garden when the ice was thick enough. She died in 1941 and was buried in Ockham churchyard. As the second half of her husband's headstone had been used to record Stanley's untimely death, she was laid to rest a few yards away under the marble inscription:

Elizabeth beloved wife of William Collins who passed away November 6th 1941 aged 90 years.

Mabel Batchelor did not long survive her mother-in-law. She died on the night of the Dieppe raid in 1942, with only one of her three children at her bedside. Harvey was in the R.A.F., and although Hugh took the first train down from Lewes he arrived too late. When he reached the hospital his sister was waiting for him in the foyer.

There was no Church service. Neither was there a tombstone. Bill Batchelor had made a simple wooden cross for his sister's grave, but her sorrowing widower insisted that she would not have wanted it used. Had not the Friends (7) condemned “...the vain custom of erecting monuments..." For Mabel Batchelor, no monument was needed, nor was liturgy required. The sanctity of her life was her memorial, and her faith the assurance of her eternal reward.

Hubert was to outlive her by almost ten years, seeing the war through and the establishment of the Welfare State by Attlee's post-war Government before his death in 1951. There is no gravestone for him either, but his courage and his tenacity in the face of his appalling handicap will always be remembered by those who knew him.

Hubert and Mabel Collins lived their lives through a period of enormous social change from Queen Victoria to George VI, from Gladstone to Churchill. They saw the arrival of the electric light bulb, the motor car, the radio and the aeroplane. They saw prosperity and adversity. They knew times of happiness and times of great grief. During the whole of their lives they stood firm for what they considered to be right, and died faithful to their beliefs.

Four Generations (Photo of Elizabeth, Hubert, Hugh and John, taken August 1932)

                           References 
1.	Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli) during the debate on the Universal Primary Education Act, 1870.
2.	Report to the Dorking, Horsham and Guildford monthly meeting :1st month, 1897.
3.	Recorded in the minutes of the Dorking, Horsham and Guildford monthly meeting	: 12th month, 1896.
4.	Minutes of the Dorking, Horsham and Guildford monthly meeting :	2nd month,	1897.
5.	Montgomery, p.141
6.	The Guildford-Cranleigh-Horsham line re-opened for civilian travel after the First World War and continued 
in use until it was permanently closed in June 1965.
7.	Rules of Discipline, 1834, p.70 quoted by Phillimore (p.677). In 1850 the use of headstones was permitted 
provided they did not distinguish between rich and poor, but not all Friends agreed with the relaxation, and many 
continued to observe the old rule.