One type of thing we have in our special collection – the Horsfall Turner Room – is scrapbooks. People over the years have saved items, clippings, other ephemera that they find interesting. Have you ever pressed flowers in a diary or saved ticket stubs from concerts? It’s less uncommon than you might think. One section in HT, in the 070 number range, is scrapbooks filled with newspaper cuttings. Two items caught my eye the other day while looking for information about a small tramway built in the grounds of a stately home. Rather than the range which is ordered by year, these simply had an author code on the spine, ASH. So what were they? The items are catalogued as “Newspaper Cuttings” volumes one and two, and the author is Herbert Ashling. Idle curiosity led to three days of research in between day-to-day duties, and this blog post has been written partly to summarise what I found, partly to show how useful our online reference resources can be in such searches, but also to remind the reader that keeping scrapbooks aren’t purely hobbyist or self-indulgent activities. We can learn a lot about a person and a place during a particular time through resources that seem at first glance to be purely concerned with the compiler rather than any wider view. And Ashling’s cases are certainly…unusual, to say the very least. Read on for tales of milk theft and melees.
In the early 1900s Herbert Ashling was first an “assistant solicitor for the Corporation” – in other words, a prosecutor who brought civil and criminal cases against individuals who had broken various regulations within Halifax. He later held the role of deputy town clerk and then town clerk itself, being promoted directly on his predecessor’s retirement without any other advertising of the vacancy. He kept two scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings that detailed cases he had worked on, both wins and losses. The headlines and contents of the articles are fantastically interesting. Who says that “clickbait” is a modern internet phenomenon when we have articles from the early 1900’s titled “‘The Comical Pig’ – Alleged Obscene Prosecution at Halifax”, or “Stealing Milk – Singular Halifax Case – ‘A Nasty, Mean, Contemptible Theft’”, or “New Bank Rowdyism”? A quick look through our usual source of information about people of note, Calderdale Companion, doesn’t reveal anything about him; a little surprising given that he clearly played an important role in Halifax for such a large number of court cases. I had to turn to our various local studies resources to try and flesh out some detail about this man.
Herbert Ashling was born at the beginning of 1873 in Eye. Eye is just north of Peterborough, and both are now in Cambridgeshire, but at this point Eye was still located within Northamptonshire. By 1901, at age 28, he was a solicitor but boarding in High Wycombe. In October 1903 he married his wife Catherine at her (or perhaps their?) parish church, St. Mary’s in Peterborough, although his home address is given as King Cross. Interestingly their first two daughters were baptised at St. Mary’s as well– clearly their connection to their childhood home and church was strong enough that they took the additional step of doing this. His first appearance in Halifax on the census is in 1911, where he is listed as a “town clerk and solicitor” and is living at 46 Heath Crescent with Catherine, his mother, his two daughters, his brother, and a domestic servant and nurse (possibly for the children, as she is listed as a “domestic nurse”). He was also a Freemason, having a membership of Halifax’s Probity Lodge from 1910 to 1916. By 1939 he was retired and lived with his wife, two daughters, and a servant in Bournemouth. Daughter Catherine is listed as a “teacher of French language”, and wife Catherine and their third daughter, Beryl (Ashling) Handley, are listed as “unpaid domestic labour”.Herbert eventually died in 1965, aged 92, in Poole.
Going back to the cases within the scrapbooks, they represent serious and minor breaches of the law, showing that Ashling was responsible for taking on a wide variety of cases that nowadays would usually be handled by solicitors who specialised in civil or criminal cases. He was appointed as assistant solicitor and deputy town clerk in 1902. The first scrapbook includes some newspaper stories from his employment in High Wycombe prior to moving to Halifax as well as the details of his appointment from local papers and the retirement of his predecessor. They then launch into cases ranging from some of the above topics – obscene toys being sold on the borough market, watering down milk prior to sale, selling ale in an unsealed container to a child – to more serious issues like child abuse, murder and rioting. Ashling’s personality shows through in some of the articles. Much mention is made of his sense of humour and entertaining ways of presenting evidence, which he clearly had a reputation for. Sadly Ashling’s careful expertise did not extend to dating the cuttings he kept in his scrapbook, as we have had to resort to the British Newspaper Archive to date some of them and to work out when he was appointed and when he left.
Ashling was not always popular. A series of cuttings are also included that show that on one occasion Ashling challenged the magistrates bench on the manner in which they ruled on a particular case, causing them to issue a resolution calling his remarks and conduct “unwarrantable”. The Town Council’s Watch Committee swiftly countered with their own resolution of full confidence and “appreciation” in and of Ashling’s service to the town. The dispute had arisen over a case in June 1906 regarding a raid on a betting operation and the majority-by-one decision by magistrates not to prosecute the landlord of the hotel where the betting was taking place. The inference seems to have been that some magistrates attended who were not scheduled to attend that day and who had vested interests in the outcome, which is not spelled out in the included cuttings but is directly asserted (as a an allegation that the bench had been “packed”) in an article found on the BNA from the Leeds Mercury referring to it. Ashling escaped with his job intact but any hardening of attitudes from members of the bench towards him that might have happened as a result of this would have made his job rather difficult in the future.
The cutting mentioning the possibility of a “stipendary magistrate” – a salaried, full-time magistrate who would oversee the court and more serious cases – could be seen as a victory for Ashling and vindication of his public stance on the gambling case. One wonders though whether this incident was the beginning of the bloom coming off the Yorkshire rose for him. Despite continuing to progress in his career over the next few years, in January 1911 the Halifax Evening Courier related that he was being considered for the town clerk role in Swansea which offered a total salary package of £1000 per year, as opposed to the £650 per year he received in Halifax, and the paper says that councillors were keen to make an effort to keep Ashling as his services had been so valuable over the years. The following week the paper reports that Ashling had been asked to forward his references and testimonials to the board at Swansea but declined to on the advice of his colleagues in Halifax. A change of heart? Perhaps not; in February, he was appointed to the town clerk role in Bournemouth. He clearly had been keen to move on.
So what date and paper are these articles from? They must begin from 1902 at the earliest, but tracking them down proved difficult using the BNA. Not all our local newspapers are on there, and many of the gaps are where the particular cuttings he saved came from. It would have taken hours to look for each item and the latest we could find during our limited research time was 1906. Looking on microfilm reels has its ups and downs, and the downs are that unless you know roughly what to look for and when, it can be a daunting task. To add to the mystery, the second volume has four missing pages at the end of the cutting section which have been cut out. It’s impossible to know what might have been included on them. More background for why he left? There appearing to be no cuttings from much longer after the 1906 incident with the magistrates could imply that he became fed up with the whole thing. However, another explanation is that he is still the assistant or deputy town clerk all the way to the end of the two books, and we know that he was promoted to town clerk proper in 1909. Maybe he simply didn’t have the time or inclination to continue his scrapbooking.
We don’t know. All we have at the very end of the second book is a loose cutting, pasted to thicker cardboard, from a newspaper on the south coast; the only real clue we have as to why he left Halifax, and to why he might have been specifically interested in moving to Swansea and Bournemouth.
Herbert Ashling turned out to have been, on top of everything else, a keen angler.
The resources that I used to write this blog were the British Newspaper Archive, Ancestry, and FindMyPast – all online resources that you can access from home or in the library to conduct your own snooping (sorry, research) about someone from the past who you’ve come across and want to know more about. These resources include scans of parish records, census returns, the GRO, the 1939 Register, and newspaper articles from some, but not all, local newspapers from the relevant time. Now a researcher with more time on their hands (and less prone to getting motion sickness from using the microfilm readers at length) could have trawled all our reels of all the available Halifax newspapers for this time period to search for more articles to find out even more about him, and to make more suppositions about these books. Were these only cases that Ashling was proud of, or were there others he neglected or chose not to save? Many more internal pages are missing than just those final few. The record is now also silent about how the books came into our possession, another question whose answer might reveal more about his connection to this area. The inclusion of newspaper cuttings from before he came to Halifax indicates that it was indeed his own personal scrapbook, or that of his wife perhaps. And were they always intended to be donated to us by him, or was it a decision made by one of his daughters? The donation stamp reads May 1966, a year after Ashling died. A search of various library, archive and local history societies linked to Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset do not show any holdings related to Ashling, so we do not know whether he continued to keep scrapbooks of his cases after he moved there. He may have and they have since disappeared, or they may not have been taken into the archives. Or perhaps he was too busy angling in his free time?
Local history resources can help us find answers, of course! But as you can see answers can often lead to different questions. If you keep a scrapbook of local events, think of those who might follow and want to learn more about your special interests or about you yourself. And please think of your local library’s archive and local history resources as time goes on and don’t assume that we (and those who follow us) wouldn’t care about or be interested in what you’re interested in. Your scrapbook might tell someone 100 years from now a great deal about how things were in your time, not only the historical facts but the attitudes and culture of those around you. You might even end up the subject of a blog post…
