When I read the letter in more detail, it turned out to be a reference for Robert Standen, which he will have taken with him to interviews for other jobs. I located him in records, and discovered he had quite the career. He had grown up in Goosnargh, where he worked as a labourer on his grandparents’ farm well into his twenties.
Robert then obtained a role as a farm manager and industrial trainer at the Industrial Schools at Swinton, where he spent at least four or five years. Swinton Schools provided an education for pauper children in an environment away from the warehouse, where the elder boys were taught skills such as farming, shoemaking, painting and plastering. It also had a museum for the children who lived there, where Robert assisted collecting and displaying specimens.
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| Swinton, Industrial Schools 1894. Copyright Francis Frith. Link |
Robert’s true passion was conchology – the study of shells. He
had been meeting regularly with others in the area with whom he had formed the
Manchester Conchological Society. After almost five years at Swinton Schools in
1888, he was keen to pursue a more scientific career, and was clearly applying
for other roles, given the glowing reference written for him.
Robert spent a period of time working in the zoology
department at Owens College (now University of Manchester), before transferring
to the Manchester Museum, becoming assistant keeper for conchology. He also
assisted in the unwrapping of Khnum-Nakht in 1908, a recently discovered
Egyptian mummy.
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| Margaret Murray, Robert Standen and others unwrapping Khnum-Nakht, 1908. Manchester Museum Central Archive Link |
Robert was said to be well known in zoological circles all
over the globe, and became president of the Conchological Society of Great
Britain and Ireland. He was the inventor of the method of selectioning, and his
obituary in 1925 described his ethnographic collection at Manchester Museum as
the most perfect of its kind in Britain.
As for the letter found in a hedge – Robert had one daughter
from whom he had two grandchildren. One died in 1977; the other as recently as
2010 aged in her 100s. While Robert himself had Lancashire and Manchester connections,
his children and grandchildren lived and died in Derbyshire and Sussex.
The only plausible theory I have for the letter in the
hedge, is that it had been kept safe by his granddaughter until her death in 2010;
after which her belongings had been sorted out and whatever this letter had
been inside for safekeeping (perhaps a book or a piece of furniture) ended up
in Adlington in February 2022. The letter has now been sent to the archives at Manchester Museum for safekeeping.
- http://www.manchester-family-history-research.co.uk/new_page_39.htm
- https://www.workhouses.org.uk/Manchester/
- https://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/william-chance/children-under-the-poor-law--their-education-training-and-after-care-together-hci/page-16-children-under-the-poor-law--their-education-training-and-after-care-together-hci.shtml
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273885997_Molluscs_mummies_and_moon_rock_the_Manchester_Museum_and_Manchester_science