ANOTHER BRIEF LIFE
Introduction
Although I am now 79, and rather immobile, it may still not be too late to tell the story of my life. My friend Ken, who died a few days ago, wrote his life when he was in his seventies. Our friend Ben wrote and published his life when over 80. With characteristic efficiency, to which I could never aspire, he did it in a matter of months. It is a very good 'life'; but it may have disappointed those of his family who had suggested it to him as a project to keep him employed in his latter years.
My own great-grandfather, George Jäger, began to write his life story when he was over seventy, and then wrote it, with minor variations, at least two more times. He did it, as I hope to do this, so that his children and later descendants could see what had influenced him and could share some of his many experiences of God's mercy. My life has not been as dramatic and successful as was his. He was born in London of German parents in 1814, and, after an early boyhood in Somersdorf, a village now in the German Democratic Republic, he had to return to London, under the old Poor Law, when his father died. After near-starvation in Chelsea, he and his mother and sister were admitted to Chelsea Workhouse, which he found to be "like a palace". There he learned English (partly through following the Chapel lessons in his German Bible) and a little rough tailoring. However, he did not want to remain a 'workhouse boy', and so, after a season of tramping through England in the hope of 'a place' on a ship, he returned to the Workhouse and set out again in the Spring. This time he did not have to return and, after nearly forty years of painful failure to make his fortune, eventually, with the help of his son, George Jäger Junior, they became rich men and owned two Sugar Refineries, while he continued loyally to follow, as he saw them, the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount.
Ever since, after my father's death, I became possessor of the manuscripts of his Memoirs, his life has been an inspiration to me. It was the desire, still unfulfilled, to have his Memoirs published that helped to persuade me to resign my last parochial charge at the early age of 65.
The life of George Jäger Junior, who died when in his fifties, is much less well known to me. As an infant he nearly died of convulsions. His father earnestly prayed for him to live, and then suffered agonies of conscience because he feared that, after his life had been saved by prayer, young George might grow up to be wicked! Then, as a young boy he nearly starved because, after a near-penniless move from Liverpool to Preston the family was frost-bound in a tragically long cold spell. They survived this, and in a few years were back in Liverpool, and eventually became less grievously poor. Then George worked for his father in the humblest kind of sugar trade, and, with many a set-back, they began at last to prosper, and eventually made their fortune. He wrote a lively account of his Cook's tour of the Holy Land which he made after the death of his first wife, Drusilla, and I have some of the rather illegible but very affectionate letters that he wrote to my grandmother, Georgina, her younger sister. He also wrote a pamphlet commending 'Tariff Reform' which, according to my father, converted Joseph Chamberlain to the cause of 'Protection for Britain', and thereby made history. To his father, and to those who had known him best, he was a hero and a paragon.
I wish I had known him.
My father, George Harold, went to Birkenhead School and then to Rugby. He struggled there on the 'Science side', as he was at first expected to take over George Jager & Son. However, when his father saw that, after the Germans had decided to subsidise Sugar Beet, there were no more fortunes to be made from Cane Sugar, he was encouraged to go on to Balliol and then to become a Barrister. The only condition made was that he should negotiate his own entry to Oxford. That was very unusual in those days. After "eating dinners" at the Middle Temple, he was called to the Bar. After a time "in Chambers" with his Birkenhead friend, F.E.Smith (who became Lord Birkenhead and Lord Chancellor) he became "Junior" on the Northern Circuit, and sent from Assize to Assize with the Judge and his court. This was a very agreeable way of life; but after he had married and they began our family, he decided that the necessary long absences and small income was not fair on my mother, so he went into business. Later he wrote about his life at the Bar and his friendship with Lord Birkenhead in a book, "Brief Life", which he had published at his own expense. He claimed later that this had been an exceptionally expensive book, as the shares which he had to sell to pay the publisher were Steel shares which then rocketted in price when Hitler's war was seen to be inevitable. The first sentence of "Brief Life" was: "I was expelled from school and received my first lessons in law from a murderer". This was quite true; but it made the rest of the book seem to be an anticlimax.
Later, when he had become a widower with six children, he kept a Diary. This, enlivened by occasional digressions, and reminiscences of his earlier, opulent, life, weighs nearly two stone! He also wrote pamphlets and letters to further the cause of 'Protection for Britain' advocated by his father.
This was a life-time interest: but, particularly when we had come to live at Hoylake, he was a keen member of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club. He bought our house, 'The Old Garden', at a Liverpool Auction before he had even seen it. It was sufficient to know that it was 4 minutes from the Station, and abutted on to the golf links (albeit with only a ten foot frontage!)
He had great pleasure in cruising, mainly off the West coast of Scotland, with my mother's cousin Ian MacIver (who wrote a book "Amateurs afloat?"). (After I had retired, one of the bonuses was an annual cruise on the Solent with my brother-in-law Stephen Lowe; but, unlike my father I did not paint.) He loved motoring, particularly in the large yellow 'Hupmobile', which his mother had bought to save my Aunt May the agony of gear-changing on the steep hill leading up from Bowness to 'The Hermitage'. He also loved 'Poker', and similar gambling games; but he knew when to stop! Just as his parents had loved going down to "good old Cannes" mainly for the golf, though they did like staying at the best hotels, (my grandfather could boast that on one occasion he had been greeted by the Prince of Wales (Edward VII) while standing beside him in the 'Gents'), so my father loved to go to Monte Carlo!
Apart from my Granny Maclver, whose all too brief "Recollections of a happy life" are a delight as well as an education, few of her family wrote diaries. However my great-grandfather Charles Maclver was the hero of a recklessly imaginative film "Atlantic Ferry" about the beginnings of the Cunard Line (of which he was one of the three co-founders). Moreover the DODO, our family Annual, published (almost) every year since 1940, now gives up-to-date news sent in by its subscribers. These, in 1989, number about 120, of whom most are householders and direct descendants of Edith E Maciver (or "Buffy" as she was known to her family).
Edith was born in 1852, and, when she was about a month old, her parents moved to Lower Bebington, near Birkenhead. Her father, Andrew Squarey, came from Salisbury; but his father had come from Teignmouth where his had been an owner-captain in "the Triangular Trade". Their little sailing boats were built and based on the Teign estuary, and their trade was based on the following annual pattern:- First, they went to Cornwall to load up with China Clay. This they took round Land's End and up the Mersey and the Weaver to Northwich, where the clay was sold for use in the Potteries, and they bought a cargo of salt. This they sold to the fishermen who fished the Newfoundland Bank; but they kept enough salt to use themselves when they fished the Banks on their return across the Atlantic. They salted their catch and took it over to Spain or Italy, and bought fruit with the proceeds. This they took home to sell in England.
It was certainly a hard and dangerous life, and we cannot blame Andrew's father for migrating to Salisbury and setting up as a Chemist. Andrew himself migrated to Liverpool, where he became a clerk in a solicitor's office. When his first wife died he went home to Salisbury. Soon he was called back to Liverpool, as his firm found that they could not manage without him.
So they made him a partner. One of his clients was Charles MacIver, the ship-owner, and, later, his son David. David, a young widower, fell in love with Edith, who was then only 20, and, having got permission from her father to court her, soon married her. Thus this girl, who had character enough to argue with her Vicar about the Athanasian Creed, took on a rich husband, three step-children, of whom the eldest was a very delicate girl of 15, and consequently spoiled, and a houseful of spoiled servants who had taken advantage of the fact that their master was a busy young widower. Very soon, Edith had to dismiss and replace the butler, and to insist that the cook, who had been making a good income from her tradespeople should in future let her do the ordering. In due course she had eleven children of her own.
My grandfather, David MacIver, went into his father's office of D & C MacIver in Liverpool. As well as dealing with the Liverpool end of the regular service between Liverpool and Glasgow, they were also managing agents for what later became the Cunard Line. As his father had soon retired, for the sake of his health, to Malta, and continued to order his business from there, we must conclude that David was very soon in day-to-day charge of the affairs of D & C MacIver. In these circumstances it is not surprising that father and son should quarrel: and there is, in the Cunard papers at Liverpool University, a notable letter from Andrew Squarey to his son-in-law, urging him to make allowances for his father and to be reconciled to him.
But young David had inherited his uncle David's share of the MacIver fortune, and was able to resign from D & C MacIver, and set up his own shipping line and become a Member of Parliament. The MacIver Line traded, at first, to India and other places, and, later, concentrated on the service between Liverpool and the River Plate, on which lie Buenos Aires in the Argentine and Montevideo in Uruguay. (The Maclver fortune, by the way, was not founded, like that of the Gladstone family, on the slave trade, but on the profitable, and legal, activities of the Liverpool Privateers. These were licensed by the King, not only to undertake normal sea journeys, but also to attack and capture any French, or other, enemy vessels which they might encounter).
As the wife of an M.P., Edith had to cope not only with a large staff of ten indoor servants, horses and a carriage, but with three houses. "Woodslea", in Birkenhead, was 'very large and Victorian', and very cold in winter. Wanlass Howe, at the head of Lake Windermere, was their summer home. It had been bought (having been seen only from the Lake) as a present for David's first wife, and re-furnished and re-decorated for Edith to come home to.
Wanlass was her home, and, apart from an interval of a few years when it had to be let, it remained her home until she died some 66 years later. From 1919, when she gave up her Birkenhead house, it was her only home. And, when David was an M.P. and Parliament was in session, they migrated to a rented house in London.
My mother, Dorothy, was Edith Maclver's eighth child. In 1906 the Maclvers lived at 6 Manor Hill, Birkenhead, and the Jägers lived at 'Lingdale', a rather grander house, further down the road. Dorothy's older sister, Ruth (No.7) was married, that year, to my father's younger brother, Bertram (Tram). Harold would like then to become engaged to Dorothy; but she was considered to be too young. However they were married, next year, in 1908, and went to live at 6 Vyner Road, a little house on Bidston hill. They were happy there (that was why our Gerrards Cross house was also called 'No.6', to the confusion of the road numbering in Marsham Lane); but it was, sadly, more than easy walking distance from Manor Hill!
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