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Coastal View & Moor News Issue 29 November - December 2012


Hollie Bush Writes A whimsical look at our area


o there we have it. The US Election result has given us four more years of Obama, and for the good I think.


S He may not have set the world alight, but


that too may be for the best, given that this is a power which US presidents can wield both metaphorically and literally (and as someone aged 13 in the late Autumn of the Cuba Missile Crisis year of 1962, I can still remember whether I would ever see another week). For what it is worth I guess his handling of the ‘Superstorm Sandy’ disaster clinched it - and he richly deserved that fi nal victory. This makes me think; just what links does


our part of the world have with the USA? In truth, there seems little. I did, in a previous article, talk about the troubled city of East Cleveland in Ohio, but after that, we have a comparative vacuum But, in the Cleveland context, as well as Cleveland and East Cleveland in Ohio, we also have Cleveland County, North Carolina. This is made up of a collection of townships, the largest on which is Shelby, a town with a classic courthouse ideal for Marty McFly and the prof to rig up to a lightening conductor so as to get him and the DeLorean back to his future. More to the point it has a rival to our


Cleveland’s cuisine star, the Parmo. This is Livermush. Livermush is made up of pig liver, head parts, and cornmeal spiced with pepper and sage, all fried in grease. They are very proud of this odd mixture. Shelby hosts an annual Livermush Exposition, which began in 1987 to celebrate the unique delicacy. In that year the Cleveland County Commissioners and the Shelby City Council passed resolutions proclaiming that “Livermush is the most delicious, most economical and most versatile of meats”. But what was of most interest to me was not


Livermush, but our own living East Cleveland link to the White House and the Oval Offi ce. For living quietly and anonymously at Kirkleatham Old Hall (now the Museum) from about 1920 to the late 1960’s was Esther Cleveland. Esther was the daughter of the 22nd and 24th President of the USA, a man called Grover Cleveland, a guy who still holds the distinction of being the only man to have won the presidency twice on different years. Esther herself held another record - that of being the only baby to have been born in the White House. Her dad’s family, with a name that may have been a bit of a giveaway, also


probably came from hereabouts, although the direct line of the family upped sticks to what were then the North American colonies in the 1600’s. It is said that they were a ‘North Country’


family and one ancestor, a vicar was down as coming from York. Dad became President at a time when US power was on the up and up and it was clear to anyone with half an eye for the future that the USA was to be the country of the coming century. He was, like Obama, a democrat, although not in a form we would recognise today, espousing a pro- business agenda, opposition to infl ation and any subsidies of state help for business, farmers or veterans. Esther was a frail child, although living in


the lap of luxury as a child of the fi rst family. She nearly died twice in infancy, succumbing both to virulent measles and diphtheria - a killer disease of that day. Nursed constantly in the White House in infancy she witnessed the glittering presence of the rich and the famous as part of her daily life. But all this was to change when at the age


of 20, she took herself off on a long European tour. In Switzerland she met a young wealthy Englishman fresh from Eton and Oxford - a lad called William Sidney Bousanquet. It was love at fi rst sight, but a love that was to be torn asunder when a year later war broke out in Europe and William enlisted in the Coldstream Guards He, with his comrades in arms, saw active service in some of the hot spots of the war - Ypres, (where their 1st battalion was virtually annihilated) and Mons, Loos and the Somme. Sidney Bosanquet was also from high society.


His father was a senior law offi cer at the Old Bailey, and, as said, he had a classic upper class education. His love for Esther Cleveland was not drowned by war, and, given his family background, the subsequent wedding was held at Westminster Abbey So this should have been the start of a glittering partnership amid the bright lights of London and New York. But it wasn’t. Instead Sidney Bosanquet became, of all things, the general manager of the Skinningrove steelworks here in East Cleveland. That, to me, is a mystery. It seems totally a career move at odds with his background and breeding. It was not a sinecure. The ‘Grove’ was a demanding plant. And to be the plant general manager, he was not there merely to preside over a oak tabled board room - it was a nuts and bolts


Esther Cleveland and Sydney’s memorial, Kirkleatham (pic from Chris Twigg of Hidden Teesside)


job, possibly dealing with customers at one moment and then trying to tackle a fractured roll and a jammed ingot section the next. True, the job was, in local terms, high status. And, refl ecting this, he and Esther lived in some style at Kirkleatham Old Hall. So how did a US


president’s daughter cope with life in East Cleveland? There is no doubt she lived well, but it was a life spent in ‘comparative obscurity’ as a US syndicated column in the 1950’s put it. ‘A tall handsome women with graying hair, but bright blue eyes’ she ‘was somewhat of a local celebrity in this olde-world village in the rolling dales of Northern England’. Sidney spent the rest of his working life at Skinningrove, fi nally retiring in the late 1950’s after which he and Esther devoted their time to running the land at the eastern end of the Kirkleatham estate as a market garden and selling on the fruit and vegetables to local retailers. Esther also tended a magnifi cent garden, and Peter Sotheran, long associated with Kirkleatham, remembers that she regularly bedecked St Cuthbert’s Church with fl owers picked from that garden. The social enigma of their life was illustrated


for me by Mrs Sheila Simpson of Kirkleatham - a lady who has lived and worked there all her life and whose grandmother and mother knew the Bosanquet family and corresponded with them over many years. She remembers


Esther Cleveland (taken allegedly on her wedding day)


that from Sidney’s side of the family the minor aristocratic links they enjoyed reached widely - even to people on the fringe of the Royal Family such as Major Ronald Ferguson, the Duchess of York’s father and Fulke Walwyn, the racehorse trainer to the Queen Mother. That Sidney forsook such links in favour of looking after a small steelworks makes the mystery even more stranger. They had two daughters, Phillipa and Marion. Marion, the youngest, became a leading psychiatric social worker at a London teaching


hospital, whilst Phillipa became, under her later married name of Phillipa Foot, one of the world’s leading academic philosophers, with an impressive career which began at Oxford where she had been a student, and up to her retirement, at the University of Los Angeles, where she was lauded as “not only one of the world’s greatest moral philosophers but the granddaughter of President Cleveland”. Philippa was educated at Kirkleatham by


governesses hired by her parents and, refl ecting their status, rode to hounds with the Zetland hunt. When, during their fi rst riding lessons, Marion held on to the saddle, she thought it not at all the thing and was “very shocked”. To the question, of whether she had asked the name and address of a little boy at her dancing class, who had asked for hers, she replied, “Of course not – you don’t ask for names and addresses if you are a girl.” Decades later, she was described as the “grande dame of philosophy”. Despite this, she remained down to earth in her beliefs as a lifelong socialist and Labour supporter, and was one of only four academics to vote to prevent President Harry S Truman (seen by them as the architect of Hiroshima) from having an honorary Oxford degree. So, there we have a little bit of the Oval


Offi ce right here in East Cleveland. It was an enigmatic presence and indeed it has been a struggle to fi nd out more about her and Sydney beyond these brief, prosaic, facts. I suspect and hope that out there, among the great Coastal View readership, there may be other people who remember Esther in her garden at Kirkleatham or Sydney getting down to the job at Skinningrove. If there are I would love to hear from you. Hollie Bush


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