Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

to as a framework knitter, given the customary abbreviation ‘fwk’. Richard’s elder surviving siblings were Thomas, born 1817; John Henry, born 1823; and Charles Frederick, born 1830. North Street, Richard’s first home, ran westward from Milton Street, along the south side of what is now Trinity Square. There was one way in which the area was privileged – it was right on the northern edge of town, with open space on the far side of North Street which is difficult to imagine now. The home of an ageing framework knitter could hardly be a prosperous one: most of the ground floor was taken up with the frame, where John Daft knitted stockings and other woollen garments. The knitter or one of the older children collected the woollen yarn from the warehouse. As Giles Worsley wrote about Victorian working-class homes, what cannot be replicated in our times is ‘the dirt and damp, the smell of urine, and the oppressive sense of overcrowding that must have come from so many people living in such proximity.’ By 1841, young Richard was living with his family at Knotted Alley, which lay just north of the Nottingham Canal and the Midland Railway. Long ago destroyed by redevelopment, it cannot have been the most salubrious part of town, being highly susceptible to flooding, but may have been closer to the warehouses from which the wool awaited collection. The 1841 census records that John, whose age was given as 55, though he may have been rather older, and Sarah, 45, were living with three of their sons, John, aged 18, Charles, 11, and Richard, five. Ten years later, the family had split up following the death of Richard’s mother. His father was then living with a sister and her family in Sneinton, Nottingham, but Richard had left the town and was apprenticed to H.H.Greenwood at 9 Lowgate in the parish of St Mary’s, Kingston-upon-Hull. The period of training, learning the characteristics of many different types of materials, running errands and living in, would have been a lengthy one. H.G.Wells, too was apprenticed in the trade and he acquired many of the attributes of a gentleman. This period of Richard’s life must have had some considerable influence on his manner and personality. Though he did not care to mention it later, it contributed towards his becoming a man of some education, deemed suitable at the age of 26 to marry his boss’s daughter and capable of running two businesses in tandem for many years. Very early in his career, he was invited, as a young amateur, to play in country-house cricket for teams raised by the Earl of Stamford Nottingham, Queen of the Midlands 11