The Youthful Muse-1839

"We ought not to omit a passing notice of some poetical effusions in praise of steam, written by three pupils in St. Peter's School, Masters James Motley, Thomas Dewse, and T. C. Smyth, which were printed in the form of a small pamphlet, and distributed to the company at the breakfast. As these efforts of the youthful muse possess considerable merit, and much playful humour, we willingly transcribe such portions of each as our limits will admit, which will be found in another part of the paper."

The above extract from the Yorkshire Gazette of 1st June, 1839, establishes a St. Peter's link, albeit slender, with an event which was to prove momentous in the history of York. The paragraph is culled from the Gazette's account of the ceremony which marked the opening, on the 29th May, 1839, of the first railway out of York—the York and North Midland Railway. Only the first part of the projected line had then been completed, from York to South Milford. A further year had to elapse before the whole line was in operation, from York to the hamlet of Altofts, near Normanton, where it was to link up with the North Midland, planned from Derby to Leeds. But it was a historic occasion, of more import perhaps than could have been appreciated by the little group of York worthies who first mooted the idea on the 30th December, 1833, at a meeting in Mrs. Thomlinson's hotel in Petergate ; and York celebrated it in no halfhearted fashion.

The proceedings began with a breakfast at the Guildhall at 11 a.m. Thence there was a magnificent procession of the notables of the City to the temporary railway station, where 400 passengers embarked on the train and rode "with the speed of a race-horse" to South Milford, 14 miles away. All York was on holiday, flags were flying, the Minster bells ringing, cannon booming from the ships on the river, when thousands of citizens, crowded on the city walls, watched the iron horse start on its way at 1 p.m. At South Milford there was a wait of an hour or so, and the travellers were entertained by a band conveyed for this purpose in a special coach. The return journey was taken in more leisurely fashion to enable the passengers to view the moving countryside. After this hazardous adventure—the engine driver, appropriately named Nelson, touched 30 miles an hour— further sustenance was called for, and at 4-30 200 guests sat down to a grand banquet at the Guildhall, a gargantuan feast, which continued until 10 p.m. Similar entertainment was provided for the clerks, engineers, and lesser fry at the Windmill Inn. It says much for the stamina of our ancestors that even after the banquet with its endless speeches the festivities were not regarded as complete. A grand ball in the state room of the Mansion House was the next item on the programme, and the rejoicings finally ended at 4 a.m. the next day.

From this small beginning sprang York's eminence in the railway world, and it is interesting to find St. Peter's indirectly associated with 20

the ceremony which marked the occasion. Apart from the "poetical effusions" of the three Peterites which were circulated at the breakfast, we notice that a notable headmaster, the Rev. Stephen Creyke, was seated at the high table at the banquet in the company of George

Stephenson, who had surveyed the land and supplied the locomotives from his works at Darlington, and of the Lord Mayor, George Hudson, later to become famous, or infamous, as the Railway King, who was

Chairman of the new company and had been the driving force behind the enterprise. Creyke was not actually the headmaster of St. Peter's at the time. He had retired the previous year, and the School, then housed in Minster Yard, was in the hands of the less-successful Hewson.

On his resignation, Creyke had been appointed Rector of Wigginton and Archbishop's Chaplain, and in this capacity replied, in the absence of the Archbishop, to George Hudson's toast of "The Archbishop and

Clergy of the Diocese". We read, too, in the Gazette, which devoted three closely-printed pages of its weekly issue to this epoch-making event in York's history, that some of the ladies were conveyed from the breakfast to the station in Tanner Row in the magnificent new omnibus of the Collegiate School in Clifton, a school which, of course,

St. Peter's was destined to take over a year or two later. There may, indeed, be some connection between the importance of

Stephen Creyke in the civic affairs of York and the circulation of those "efforts of the youthful muse", for it was during his regime as headmaster that the first School magazine made its appearance. The

St. Peter's Journal, presumably the earliest forerunner of The Peterite, made its appearance on 3rd March, 1834, and continued for at least seven numbers, though the full duration of its life is not known.

Perhaps it is not fanciful to connect the outburst of poetry with which

St. Peter's heralded the new railway with the stimulus given to original composition by this first School magazine. Unlike the Yorkshire Gazette, we cannot find space to transcribe extensive portions of the effusions of Masters Motley, Dewse, and

Smyth. The Gazette afforded them a whole column. But it must be confessed that modern taste might question the "considerable merit", and the "playful humour" is singularly hard to detect. And, curiously enough, the poems have remarkably little to say about railways. Thus James Motley having got his "iron monster" started in a dozen or so lines, then gets down to something with which he is less unfamiliar for a further forty or fifty. Thus- . . . But caught at last he feels the chain The ponderous cars his speed restrain, And now full slow he moves, as if 1 He felt his iron sinews stiff; He puffs, he pants, then with a roar Sets off as slow, as fast before; At last moves quicker, with a cough Puts forth his strength, and now he's off 21