On the trail of
Captain Kettle and C .J. Cutcliffe Hyne.
On
the trail of Captain Kettle and C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne
I was sitting quietly
indexing the pages of
Boy’s Own Paper
one day when I first stumbled across the remarkable
character known as Captain Owen Kettle. It’s on page
474 of the 1906 annual that we had our first encounter.
The subject was three Yorkshire writers and this is what
I found -
“The three greatest
writers - as many think - of adventure stories of the
modern school, curiously enough, all come from the West
Riding of Yorkshire, and from one part of that riding.
And Cutcliffe Hyne, Walter Wood, and Halliwell Sutcliffe
have, indeed, won the hearts of many older folk in the
world, as well as holding enchained the British schoolboy
who dearly loves a thrilling story. What romances and
adventures these three writers have given boys of today !
What more celebrated hero in his queer way than that
ever- popular spitfire, the dashing Methodist skipper,
Captain Owen Kettle ?”
I copied a part of the
article for Steve Holland who busily stores all
information about children’s writers of the past and
thought no more about it for a while. However, I soon
discovered that the idea of Yorkshire writers for boys
had started nagging away at the back of my mind. I had
recently completed my study of the children’s
stories of Newcastle, Northumberland and North Tyneside
and the book was out. However, my area of interest really
extended to the whole of the north-east of England and
thus a partial study of north Yorkshire. However, the
thought that the three authors in question lived in
Bradford area of the West Riding comforted me with the
notion that I wouldn’t have to read their work.
Two weeks after reading
the article I returned the copy of B.O.P. to the kindly
shop-keeper who let me borrow it. As I shoved it back on
to the shelf a small red book tumbled to the floor from
the pile above. (I secretly call this part of the shop
“Tottering Towers” because of the skewed ranks
of volumes that frequently create an avalanche on to
unwary customers.) I stooped to pick it up and discovered
that the title was “The Adventures of Captain
Kettle” by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne.
An
Alarming Discovery
By now you will realise
that I began to read it and, standing there knee deep in
musty volumes, breathing in more than eighty years grey
dust, my heart began to sink. Things were much worse than
I had anticipated. Within a couple of pages I had
established that Captain Kettle didn’t just confine
himself to Yorkshire – he was actually a character
who lived in South Shields at the mouth of the River
Tyne. A few pages further on it got worse for he crossed
the river to supervise his ship being “coaled”
in Newcastle. It was inevitable (but still not pleasing)
to discover that my guide to the children’s books of
Newcastle was incomplete. I bought the book (£3.00) and
took it home to read from start to finish.
As I got deeper into the
story my first feelings were of relief that the
north-east section was no more than a trivial preface to
the big adventure involving a revolution and gun-running
to a Caribbean Island. I hadn’t missed so much after
all. I pressed on to finish the book and gradually began
to detect some of the reasons why the B.O.P, article I
quoted was so fulsome in its praise. Captain Kettle was
an absolute tartar of a character, the very prototype of
the modern anti-hero, a mess of contradictions and larger
than life in every way but his physical stature. The
world he inhabited was peopled by rogues, villains,
fraudsters, cowards, brutes, sloppy sentimentalists,
religious hypocrites, scheming revolutionaries, and far
from noble savages. Captain Kettle meets all the
challenges with a dogged determination, a ruthless way
with his fists and an unscrupulous eye for the main
chance. His only articles of faith appear to be love of
his family and unswerving loyalty to his employers. Many
times he finds himself outside the law but comforts
himself by declaring that is his owner’s business.
A
new “Kettle” of fish
I finished “The
Adventures” with a feeling of relief. His time in
South Shields and Newcastle were no more than footnotes
in the larger story. I hadn’t missed much after all.
Out of idle curiosity I ran “Captain Kettle” in
the subject slot on Abebooks.
Consternation – there
were at least another 6 books out there – some of
them priced at exorbitant levels. It was no good – I
would have to check them out to see if more north-east
references turned up. I did what I always do in these
cases – I went to the library with a list. The
British Inter-Library Loan Service is a marvellous
institution. You fill in a card with the details you know
and they send it off on a journey until the books end up
back at your local branch. On the negative side it is
like playing roulette, for certain books have totally
vanished from the world unless you happen to live in
London and have time to read them in the British Library.
At the moment I can play roulette without losing my stake
for items classified as Junior Fiction do not come with a
fee. I calculate that I win 50% of the time. My best gain
was when I collected the last two Monica Edwards
(unavailable anywhere) and read them at my leisure whilst
others bankrupted themselves in competition on E-bay.
To my surprise six books
turned up during the course of one week. This was about a
month after I had filled in my request. I studied the
reprint dust-jackets with interest. The rear of “The
Little Red Captain” declared,
“This pugnacious,
red-bearded little Welsh sea-captain, created by a lively
imagination, effortless humour, and a breezy vigorous
style, was at one time as popular a fictional character,
both here and in America, as Sherlock Holmes.”
What an extraordinary
claim !
However, it is time to lay
out all the “Kettle” saga before you so far as
I can establish it at the moment. Here is a list of the
“Kettle” books that I can trace:
Adventures of
Captain Kettle 1898
Further Adventures of Captain Kettle 1899
Scan of reprint to the
right.>>>
The Little Red Captain : an early adventure of
Captain Kettle 1902
Captain Kettle K.C.B. 1903
Captain Kettle on the Warpath 1915
The Marriage of Captain Kettle 1916
Captain Kettle’s Bit 1918
The Reverend Captain Kettle 1925
President Kettle 1929
Mr. Kettle, Third Mate 1931
Captain Kettle Ambassador 1932
Ivory Valley – A Captain Kettle Adventure
1938 |
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You can already tell from
a study of the titles and dates that the chronology of
the Captain’s career is not going to be that easy to
work out. By the way, there may be other volumes out
there for currently at Abebooks there is a reference to a
letter about “The Boyhood of Captain Kettle”.
The best way to regard
these books is to compare him with that entirely
different sea-going hero Captain Horatio Hornblower. Like
C.S. Forester C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne started his hero in
mid-career and then leapt about forwards and backwards
from that point. From my studies of a mere seven books
“Captain Kettle K.C.B.” marks the end of his
maritime adventures and finds him retired on a farm near
Skipton in Upper Wharfedale. Perhaps the character was
resurrected for World War I for the 1915 “Captain
Kettle on the Warpath” and the 1918 “Captain
Kettle’s Bit” seem to suggest such a course was
taken. This is merely my surmise and I am happy to be
corrected by those who have actually read these stories.
Here are brief outlines of
seven of the above stories as I raced through them during
the early days of October, 2004.
The
Adventures of Captain Kettle.
Kettle is hired by an unscrupulous gun-runner to
take weapons to the rebels in Cuba. At this point in his
career he is already married with two children. Mrs.
Kettle lives in South Shields whilst her husband is away
at sea. They both attend a church run by a particular
branch of the Methodist tradition. This is partly the
inspiration for Kettle’s own desire to found a
church (of which he is to be the chief minister) in Upper
Wharfedale. The gun running expedition goes disastrously
wrong. Kettle escapes, of course, and finds himself
caught up in a potential South American revolution where
the would-be president is called Donna Clotilde La
Touche. Later escapades in the book include carrying
mutinous Islamic pilgrims across the Red Sea on their way
to Mecca, poaching pearls in Japanese waters, breaking a
man out of a prison on the French island of Cayenne,
refloating a stranded vessel in the Azores and, perhaps
most remarkably of all, being in command of an ocean
liner that collides with an ice-berg in the North
Atlantic. Readers should note that these stories were
published in 1899 and the Titanic did not go down until
1912. Throughout the stories Kettle is dogged by constant
bad luck. In the end everything goes against him no
matter what endeavour he undertakes. He finds solace in
writing dreadful poetry about the countryside. With a
subtle piece of self-mockery C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne makes
his hero sneer at those who create books or write stories
for boys’ magazines about life on the sea or (even
worse) who create detective stories. In spite of
temptation from young women Kettle always remains
faithful to his wife waiting back in South Shields.
Further
Adventures of Captain Kettle.
The cover of this volume in the Lythway Press
reprint carries a picture of an idyllic looking
farm-house with neat stone walls and gentle hills in the
background. This is surely the farm at Kettlewell near
Skipton on which Owen Kettle is destined to settle at the
end of his career. The house in South Shields is just a
temporary accommodation for his family whilst he wrestles
with a malignant fate in order to bring home enough money
to live comfortably and respectably. Nowadays this book
would be identified as a savage attack on the evils of
the European colonisation of Africa. In particular the
conduct of those responsible for the atrocities in the
Belgian Congo is drawn to our
attention. Cruelty and hypocrisy walk hand in hand
through the land as Kettle, once more desperate to earn a
living, accepts a commission in the Belgian Colonial
service. The introduction echoes the B.O.P. article by
saying,
“The author went to
great trouble to get his material right, travelling
nearly half a million miles to ensure verisimilitude and
realism in his stories.”
Human life is cheap and
brutality is never far below the surface. Kettle
contributes his share to the death and destruction
wrought by the white man on the dark continent. Later
adventures in the book show that even the unscrupulous
Kettle is sometimes prepared to draw the line in spite of
his dire need for money. He is easily suborned to
interfere with the working of the International Telegraph
system in order to help with a Stock Market swindle.
However, when he learns that the fraudsters intend making
their money by dragging England into a war in the
Transvaal, he goes apoplectic with rage.
“Run England in for a
bloody war, would you, just for some filthy money !”
He scuppers the
villains’ plans but ends up destitute once more. His
cantankerous nature also makes him put a spoke in the
wheel of a man who intends to marry an heiress for money,
and frustrate the efforts of a trickster who wants to
murder a man for the insurance that he has taken out on
him. Once more the author contrives to end the book with
a cunning ironic twist. All Kettle’s efforts at
building up a profitable cargo business for his latest
employers are rendered invalid by his need to rescue the
passengers from a German liner. To find space for the
huge number of survivors he has to open his hatches and
jettison the cargo. However humane his actions may be
considered by the world at large he knows that the owners
will contrive a way to give him the sack for committing
commercial suicide. This turns out to be true but fate
has another roll of the dice to make before the last page
is reached.
The
Little Red Captain
This, unlike the previous two books we have
described, is a full-length novel and, at times, Captain
Kettle appears merely as a peripheral character. This is
hardly surprising as it is a reissue of “Honour of
Thieves”, a novel written before the Kettle
character had come into his own. In a way it is
irresistibly reminiscent of the work of Charles Dickens.
It starts off by being about a swindle and ends up in
giving a very detailed picture of the life of a man who
is a crooked financier and apparent pillar of society.
Such was Mr. Merdle in Dickens’ “Little
Dorrit” and so we find Mr. Theodore Shelf. On the
other hand it is also the story of Patrick Onslow, a man
who takes to crime after being rejected by one woman, and
who fights his way back to respectability because of the
love of another. In between there lies the swindle.
Captain Kettle, fallen on hard times once more, takes a
ship loaded with gold to New Orleans or does he ?
Captain
Kettle K.C.B.
Once again the author cannot resist making fun
of British institutions and British behaviour. The
promotion of this dastardly little rogue to the rank of
K.C.B. provides the final kick in the teeth to those who
believe in the system. C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne inserted the
words “The Last Adventures” under his title
heading and called Chapter 12 of the book “The Last
Adventure of Captain Kettle”. However, as you can
see from the list above this did not preclude him from
making his antihero up-anchor again or from revealing
episodes in his early life that had only recently come to
life. Indeed the author made use of the device of
pretending that his fictional character lived on a farm
near to him and that he was constantly trying to pry
information out of a reluctant narrator. This time Kettle
has adventures in Somaliland, Tunisia, the Canary
Islands, and Spain. He gets Shanghaied and, at the lowest
ebb of his fortunes, gets his leg cut off.
The
Marriage of Captain Kettle
This full-length novel takes us back to the
early days of the firebrand of a hero. C.J. Cutcliffe
Hyne supplies the missing details of how young Owen comes
to meet and marry the redoubtable woman who became his
wife and mother of his daughters. The Mersey and
Liverpool rather than the Tyne and Newcastle prove to be
the scenes of his early home-life. In spite of his nature
it turns out that Kettle had a very loving juvenile life
with the family of Captain Farnish in Birkenhead on the
Wirral Peninsula. Whilst serving with Captain Farnish
Kettle has a terrific adventure in the Sargasso Sea and
meets for the first time Miss Chesterman, an aristocratic
lady, to whom he is drawn. Later he comes across the path
of Miss Dubbs, the daughter of a clergyman, who later had
to earn her living by serving behind a bar in a public
house. The two women are to cause him a lot of trouble
before he finally decides to settle with one.
The
Reverend Captain Kettle
Captain Kettle attempts salvage once more in this new set
of loosely-linked adventures. The books starts of in
Spitzbergen and northern waters but eventually finds its
way once more to the Canary Islands and West Africa. In
the end Captain Kettle manages to acquire the degree
which he considers will allow his sermons to have more
weight with his congregation in Upper Wharfedale.
Mr.
Kettle Third Mate
The author obviously enjoyed writing about the
early days of his hero when he was still somewhat young
and innocent. His essential pugnacious nature, however,
is already well set in place. He starts off in prison in
Vera Cruz and soon finds himself deeply entangled in
looking for an ancient treasure. The attentions of two
young women, one aristocratic and haughty and the other
voluptuous and affectionate, for a while distract himself
from the fact that he is determined to set his foot on
the ladder of promotion that will lead to his
master’s ticket and a command. Another visit to West
Africa finds the author straying into outright fantasy as
the air is filled with flying turtles that would give a
determined man the handle on ultimate world power.
Having plunged with
enjoyment into the lively early stories and waded with
tenacity through the later turgid adventures it was time
to find out more about the man behind them. I returned to
the original article in B.O.P., looked up anything I
could find on-line and set out to build a full list of
his books. The result is not wholly satisfactory and I
would be glad to learn more.
Charles John Cutcliffe
Wright Hyne was born in 1865 and died in 1944. According
to B.O.P. he was born in Gloucestershire where his
clergyman father was in charge of a parish there.
However, Hyne made his home in Yorkshire and lived there
most of his life. He attended Cambridge University and
was known as quite a scholar. B.O.P. declared the
following of his appearance and demeanour.
”He is a regular
giant amongst tall Tykes, with his six feet something. He
reminds you insensibly of the old Norse Vikings, with his
frank face, full of boyish fun and pleasure; his deep
blue eyes, always smiling; his strong-looking limbs and
body. You can tell him at a glance for a sportsman of the
best type, through and through. Like all true
Yorkshiremen, he loves sport of all kinds, but he is at
his best with a gun, with a rod, or sailing the briny
ocean. Where you know Mr. Hyne is present, and you hear a
laugh that seems to shake the room at some funny story or
incident, you do not need to ask who was the man who so
enjoyed the joke. When you learn that a brawny youthful
Englishman has been on a long walking tour and has
penetrated into some part of the globe where no other
white man has been seen before, the traveller may not be
Cutcliffe Hyne, but it will be very probable that it is !
For the creator of "Captain Kettle" makes it a
boast that he travels ten thousand miles a year for
pleasure and profit, and he is a great man at a
walking-tour.”
Cutcliffe-Hyne wrote for
Boy’s Own Paper in its early days and attended its
anniversary dinner. Most of his well-known work first
appeared in Pearson’s Magazine during the late
1890s. As you can see from the list of his books he also
wrote detective stories under the name Chesney Weatherby.
The only other
biographical note I can find refers to the death of
Hyne’s wife in 1938.
The
non-Kettle books of C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne
Beneath
Your Very Boots 1889
Currie, Curtis and Co Crammers 1890
Four Red Nightcaps 1890
A Matrimonial Mixture 1891
The New Eden 1892
Sandy Carmichael 1892
The Captured Cruiser 1893
The Recipe for Diamonds 1893
Honour of Thieves 1895 (later became “The
Little Red Captain”).
The Wild-catters 1895
The “Paradise” Coal Boat 1897
Through Arctic Lapland 1898
Stimson’s Reef 1899
The Filibusters 1900
The Lost Continent 1900
Mr. Horrocks, Purser 1902 (also appears in the
“Kettle” series)
Thompson’s Progress 1902
McTodd 1903 (also appears in the
“Kettle” series)
Atoms of Empire 1904
Kate Meredith Financier 1906
The Trials of Commander McTurk 1906
The Escape Agents 1913
Prince Rupert the Buccaneer 1913
Empire of the World 1914
Firemen Hot 1914
Red Herrings 1918
Admiral Teach 1920
Ben Watson 1926
Abbs – his story through many ages 1929
But Britons Are Slaves 1931
West Highland Spirits 1932
Absent Friends 1933
My Joyful Life 1935
Don’t You Agree 1936
Wishing Smith 1939
Steamboatmen 1943
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Written
as Chesney Weatherby
The
Adventures of a Solicitor 1898
The Adventures of an Engineer 1898
The Dilemma of Commander Brett 1899
Four Red Nightcaps 1900 (already appeared under his real
name ?)
John Topp Pirate 1901
The Foundered Galleon 1902
The Baptist Ring 1903
The Mystery of a Bungalow 1904
The Tragedy of the Great Emerald 1904
The Branded Prince 1905
The Cable-Man 1907
The Claimant 1908
The Romance of a Queen 1908
More
Surprises
I returned to Abebooks and this time I inserted the
author’s name. The result was astonishing. There
were over 100 entries for just one of his books –
“The Lost Continent” published in 1900. Captain
Kettle may have been a famous Victorian and Edwardian
character but “The Lost Continent” was clearly
the story that had gone down on record as his most
popular book. Yet again I resolved to investigate
further. Pretty soon it became clear that “The Lost
Continent” was a tale about Atlantis and that it was
regarded as a cult classic in the “Lost World”
genre. By sheer luck I noted that the book was available
on Project Gutenberg and so I settled down to read it. It
can be found at -
http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/other/ebooks/lostc10.txt
It’s a great story, employing all of Cutcliffe
Hyne’s narrative and descriptive talent, epic in
scale, and suppressing the tendency towards humour that
undermines the conviction of the serious points in the
“Kettle” stories. I won’t spoil your
enjoyment by revealing any of the details. Sufficient to
say that even if Captain Kettle was incapable of
outperforming Sherlock Holmes then I think you might
agree that this tale of Atlantis surpasses anythingthat
Conan Doyle wrote about the adventures of Professor
Challenger.
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