CHAPTER 1

Victorian Childhood

Godley by name and ungodly by nature!1

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO, the world was a very different place. The Industrial Revolution had made Great Britain the richest and most powerful trading and industrial empire on the planet. The imperial government in London ruled over a fifth of the world‘s population, and there were profitable British colonies on every habitable continent. Britain’s new prosperity was very unevenly distributed amongst the nation’s population of thirty million people. An ‘upper class’.f nobles and landed gentry, and increasing numbers of nouveau riche industrialists, made most of the money. Beneath this privileged elite was a ‘middle class’.f self-employed tradesmen and shopkeepers, salaried civil servants, doctors, lawyers and managers. At the bottom of the heap was the ‘working class’, most of whose members lived in overcrowded urban slums and eked out a precarious existence working in grimy and unsafe textile, steel and engineering factories. One in twenty working-class women died in childbirth, one in six children didn’t survive infancy, and life expectancy was, at best, half what it is today.

This was the world into which Alexander John Godley was born on 4 February 1867, in the Kentish village of Gillingham (see map onpage 13).2 Alick (as his family knew him) was the first-born child of William Godley, an Irish-born captain in the British Army who managed the gymnasium at the nearby Chatham Royal Dockyard, and Laura Bird, an English clergyman’s daughter. Alick eventually had four siblings: Mabel, Godfrey (known as Archie), Richard (Dick) and Denis.3

The earliest known reference to the Godley family name occurs during the thirteenth-century reign of King Edward the First, in an English town of the same name near Manchester. Little more is known until the seventeenth century, when some merchants named Godley moved to Ireland. King Charles the First granted land in the Irish county of Leitrim to a Scottish knight in 1640, but the Scot was killed a year later and his bankrupt family was eventually forced to sell the land to a Dublin textile merchant named Richard Morgan. The Godleys entered the picture when Morgan’s daughter Mary married a ‘landless clergyman’.amed William Godley (Alick’s great-great-grandfather) in 1730. The Morgan family line died out in 1784, and Mary and William’s grandson John Godley (Alick’s grandfather) inherited the land in County Leitrim in 1810 (see family tree onpage 71). John built a house on it at Killegar that became the Godley family seat.