Ep. 4 The Cheese Affair: bishops, nepotism, and puns (mini-ep)
Hello and welcome all to Victorian Time Travel, the podcast where we get ready to travel back in time. I'm Emi, your time travel researcher, and in these mini episodes we'll take a look at Punch, or the London Charivari, a weekly satirical publication from the period. And in each episode we'll pick an entry from that week's Punch. Of course that week, but sometime in the 1800s, and do a little light research together. This won't be as in-depth as the full length episodes, but being able to chat about entries in a satirical periodical is a great way to prepare for our travels, because they'll give us plenty of topics for gossip and chitchat, for blending in in our time travel.
This week, we'll take a look at the issue from the 9th of March 1861, and again as I mentioned last week I do have a physical copy of this one, I'm really lucky. So I'm just going to flip through the issue from this week in 1861, and I do tend to gravitate towards the full page pictures because of course they are just big and they catch your eye. And also like I imagine they must have been important enough that the editors of Punch thought they deserved a full page. So here it is a couple of pages in, it's a full-page cartoon.
It's titled The Durham Cheese and it features a bishop—I know he's a bishop because of the caption as well—a Bishop with very very big puffy sleeves and a full length robe and he is holding in his hand a bottle that's labelled £1,300. And he's pouring the contents of the bottle, presumably a wine bottle, into a wheel of cheese that's on a plate on a table covered with a white tablecloth and in front of him is a man, his head bowed down, and he's wearing a long coat, and he's holding a top hat in his hands and an umbrella. And the caption reads: “Bishop (to a needy clergyman): I am exceedingly sorry, dear brother in the church. But you see, I have not a drop left for you. I have poured it all into my cheese.” So I think that already sounds quite interesting to look into. There's a Bishop, a religious figure. There's cheese. There's clearly some money concern going on. So let's look into this one. I have absolutely no idea what this could be about, by the way. So I'm going to start with a fairly general search and just to be clear, these episodes that are 10 minutes or so, it's kind of a live search. So I just look up stuff as I find it. So they're not quite as structured as the longer form episodes.
So first of all, I'm going to go to britannica.com and look up Durham cheese, I guess, and see if there is an encyclopaedia entry… and there is not. So I hope you'll forgive me for being a little bit basic in my research, I'm just going to quickly Google the Durham cheese so yes, so the 1st results for the Durham cheese, I put 1861 to narrow down, are actually scans of this very page from Punch.
So I'm just going to read out the description for this picture from gettyimages.co.uk. And the inscription reads: “The Bishop of Durham, finely clad with the most enormous sleeves, pours the last of the bottle into the cheese, leaving nothing for the shabby clergyman standing before him. This relates to the Rev Edward Cheese, the new incumbent of Haughton le Skerne. The Rev Cheese just happened to be the son-in-law of the Bishop of Durham.” OK, so there is some nepotism going on, I guess. And so now we have a name, Reverend Edward Cheese, which this is about. So let's look that up. I'm going to go to Google Scholar just to see if this Edward cheese pops up. And at a glance, there isn't a huge amount about him. You can see there is something about Northern History, “The First Palmerston Bishop: Henry Montagu Villiers, Bishop of Carlisle, 1856–1860 and Bishop of Durham, 1860–1861”. So this should be Bishop of Durham. So the father-in-law of the guy, the Reverend Edward Cheese. But this doesn't seem to have information about “the Durham Cheese”, at a glance, and also I can't read the full article, it’s behind a paywall, so let's go back to our trusty Google. So you have to be careful with Google. Obviously you have to check all the sources of anything you find on Google, but in a cases like this because I can't really immediately find something, it may just be good to get some more information, so at least I know which direction to go.
So if I Google Reverend Edward Cheese 1861, the first result is an article from The Northern Echo from December 2009. All of these are going to be linked or in the transcript, by the way, and it's titled “Mr Cheese spreads the word, but gets into a bit of a pickle”. Let me have a quick glance, and I'll report back in a second. You don't have to listen to me read quietly. So it's already looking quite dramatic. It says “lurking beneath the surface [of Haughton-le-Skerne and its idyllic beauty] is a fine ecclesiastical scandal, the Cheese Affair, that drove a Bishop to his early death.” I'm going to read a little bit of the article here, because it lays it all out quite nicely. It says “by an accident of history, the vicar of Haughton-le-Skerne was an extremely wealthy man. In 1861, his salary was £1,300 a year”, which according to the article is £116,000 in today's money, and today's 2009, so it’d be even more money for today 2024. “By contrast to the west of the Skerne in Darlington, the three vicars were paid only £600 between them £200 each and the vicar of Haughton-le-Skerne £1300 a year! Back to reading the article, sorry for my interjections. “The post was highly prized. Great men were appointed to it, men so great that they rarely deigned to visit the flock they were supposed to be tending. For example, Dr Bulkeley Bandinel was said to have “held it since 1822 without letting it interfere in any way with his more important responsibilities as librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford””. There continues to be a little bit of drama because of the absence of this vicar. And then we get to 1861. So this guy, Dr Bandinel, who spent all his time in the library in Oxford instead of at his post Haughton-le-Skerne, retires officially to spend more time with his books, the article says. And so the Bishop of Durham, the Right Reverend Henry Montagu Villiers, needs to appoint a successor, and here the article says that since the three vicars in Darlington, those poor vicars that were sharing the £600 amongst the three of them, were ministering to more than 15,000 people, golly, and in Haughton there was only 1000 in the congregation. So I guess people expected that this would be a chance to redress the balance. And instead, Bishop Villiers gave the post in February 1861 to the Reverend Edward Cheese, aged only 28. He had only been in the Holy Orders for only three years, the article says, but very importantly was the Bishop's son-in-law and now the 2009 article from The Northern Echo goes into an overview of responses from newspapers at the time the Darlington Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian accusing the Bishop of “gross nepotism”. And then, oh, they mention Punch magazine and they said that they took up the cause and pilloried the Bishop in both cartoon and verse throughout March 1861, as we've just seen. And here to the rather tragic turn, “The Bishop thought about resigning, but his friends urged him to stay on. The strain of the national opprobrium affected his health, and he died at Auckland Castle after a fortnight’s illness on August 9, 1861, aged 48”, and here the 2009 Northern Echo article concludes that the Reverend Edward Cheese actually. Well, for a change, stayed at his post and resided in Haughton until his death. And so I guess he did a better job than his predecessor.
I'm going to go and look at some newspapers now. So looking up “Durham Cheese”. Just these two words for 1861 in this newspaper search from Find My Past, I get 35 hits and they're all from 1861. They're all from that period sort of February to the summer of 1861, I think. So I'm going to take a quick look and I'm going to read out selection perhaps of these newspaper entries. I'm not going to read all 35 out to you because that that'd be a bit boring probably. So let me take a quick scan and I'll read the most interesting ones.
I'm going to start with this one just because it's the earliest one I can find using the words Durham and cheese. Actually, it's not yet combining 2 words, so it's not about “Durham Cheese”, and it's not about the cheese affair. It's just a piece of news about the appointment. It's from the 20th of February 1861 and it's the Teesdale Mercury publication. And here they say actually that the appointment of Mr Cheese, who is characterised as a very young clergyman, active and popular as a preacher. They say that his promotion is regarded with “satisfaction, if not exultation,” by the many people who are fans of his work as a preacher. So here the news is not painted explicitly as controversial, even though they do mention that he is a son-in-law of the Bishop of Durham, who's made the appointment. And they do mention that the “rectory is one of the most desirable in this dioceses”, so they kind of hint at the fact that this is potential nepotism, but they don't explicitly say so.
Now I'm taking a look at the Hampshire Advertiser on 2nd of March 1961 and again they don't use “Durham Cheese” as a phrase yet, but they the entry is titled the Bishop of Durham—"More Cheese”, and cheese is in inverted commas, so it gives me an idea that this was already being talked about in these kind of jokey terms. Making puns on the Cheese surname of the Reverend.
OK, so I'm really trying to contain myself and not read you every single entry. I find this stuff so interesting, I just can't stop. But just so you know, the Punch cartoons, the captions from the Punch cartoons are actually reprinted in a bunch of different publications, just as text. So that's kind of popularising, I guess this terminology. Like “the Durham cheese.” And so on.
And I'm just going to have to read a little extract from this 15th of March 1861 Shrewsbury Chronicle entry. It's titled “the Durham Cheese”, so I guess by this point that's what we're calling it, “The Durham Cheese,” this case. And it says “it is gratifying to know the agricultural improvements which have been made in the rich mineral county of Durham. Its short horns are justly celebrated, and it is with pleasure that we perceive that in the same neighbourhood, the neighbourhood of Darlington, where these famous cattle were, we believe, first brought to perfection, the art of cheese-making on a new principle has been introduced. England is already favourably known for the variety and quality of her cheese, Cheshire and Gloucester, Cheddar and Stilton are “household words”. It is not necessary for us to sing their praises, but who has heard of the Durham cheese? We have heard of Durham mustard, sharp and pungent, of Durham sheep and Durham xattle. Of Durham coal and Cleveland bays. But Durham cheese is somewhat new.” And it goes on and on and on, talking about this case. But it's, I just found it quite funny. And again, here a little later on in the article, it's pretty long, they repeat again the rectory of Haughton-le-Skerne is a comfortable place, the income above £1300 per annum as we know from the cartoon in Punch the population less than 1000 people like that Northern Echo 2009 article said. So here when you talk about the money, the article does turn a little bit more serious. Then it says, there is a large number of “worthy clergymen, poor incumbents, who have been labouring for 10, 15, 20, 30 years with scanty stipends, much work and little pay. These poor fellows thought some strange things, thought that the old and hard-worked might stand a chance of getting this pleasant place. They had, however, forgotten, that Montague Villiers had a son-in-law, one Cheese,” and the article is kind enough to paint Mr Cheese as a good kind of young man, mild and amiable. Their point, mostly is the nepotism. And the fact that he is only 27 years old and so he's not quite as experienced as the post would require. So that's really their main points. They conclude by saying “we do not hesitate to say that this gross violation of decency has done more harm, far more harm to the Church of England than all the Essays and Reviews ever have done or can do.” Essays and Reviews is in italics, and that would could be a whole other episode that we go down and figure out what that “essays and reviews” is in reference to. And it has scathing words at the end. “Montague Villier has fallen: all his preachings and exhortations to renouncing the world, and self denial, and spiritual mindedness, a mere cant. He is not worse than many others: he has preached high and holy precepts he has practised base things.” So the tone has started very jokey, but it ends with a very, very harsh condemnation.
All right, I hope you found this as fascinating as I did. I'm always so blown away by how just picking one little thing you can uncover so much about the period and how people thought about things. So this is a great case to discuss with people as we time travel back to 1861. “What do you think of the Durham cheese? What do you think of the Cheese Affair?” It's of course very serious. There are hard-working people here who are being overlooked for a post they deserve to get. But it's also lending itself to so many puns and so much word play, and it's obviously something that really riled up people’s interests and imagination at the time.
Thank you all for listening to Victorian Time Travel, dress up in period-appropriate warm clothes and have a great trip and stay safe!
Sources
Punch, or the London Charivari, 9 March 1861 https://archive.org/details/punc186100lemouoft/page/n123/mode/2up (page 125 of 562 in this digitisation)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/007817290790175845
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/history/4798018.mr-cheese-spreads-word-gets-bit-pickle/
Teesdale Mercury, 20 February 1861, Page 4
Hampshire Advertiser, 02 March 1861, Page 4
Shrewsbury Chronicle, 15 March 1861, Page 6
