Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

11 Tracing Clarke’s Early Life from 12 shillings a week to a starvation eight shillings, a situation which led to the infamous Luddite Riots beginning in 1811/12, when handloom weavers smashed up the more advanced and productive knitting machines. Nottingham was definitely not a happy place in which to be growing up. Like the rest of Britain the increasing price of wheat made a difficult situation even more fraught. William Clarke, according to his own account, left school to work with his father in the building industry, principally as a bricklayer; there appears to be no record of which school he attended though his subsequent life clearly indicates he was literate. Bricklaying itself is, of course, a skill requiring arithmetical capabilities. As a young adult he was 5ft 9in, so quite tall for his generation, and relatively slim, though by 1850 he had filled out to become 13st 11lb. He was married on 15 February 1818 in St Nicholas Church, Nottingham to Jane Wigley – Clarke was described as from the parish of St Mary, whilst Jane was of St Nicholas. The two witnesses were John Lister Sharp and Catherine Wigley. On 29 December 1819 Clarke, having just reached the age of 21, was admitted as a burgess of Nottingham, when he is described as an innkeeper. The first child (a daughter, Frances) of William and Jane Clarke was baptised on 3 August 1820 at St Nicholas’s Church, Clarke now being described as a victualler of Angel Row. Angel Row is a range of buildings leading out of Nottingham Market Square. The only inn contained there is The Bell, presently reputed to be the oldest in Nottingham, though two other inns dispute this claim. On the wall of the main bar of the inn is a time-line listing the landlords going back to the mid-eighteenth century. William Clarke is given as landlord from 1820. Immediately prior to him, and beginning in 1812 is Katharine Wigley. As a witness to Clarke’s marriage was Catherine Wigley, it would be not too rash to assume that Catherine/Katharine Wigley was the mother of Jane Wigley. If the age at death of Jane Wigley, as given in the Nottingham newspaper in her obituary notice is correct, Jane was, like William, aged 19 at the time of her marriage. A search through late eighteenth-century Nottinghamshire records The baptism certificate of William Clarke’s oldest daughter, Mary. In 1818, state registration of births was still almost twenty years away.