Life and death ... and life (Part 2)

And the ever-present now

Mar 31, 2025

Allow me to take you briefly back into the world of my friend Paul Bagshawe who died nearly five months ago and last featured in this post.

He and I discussed my own Substack efforts and, eventually, he announced that it had prompted him to want to compile some stories from his own life and write about his own family history.

Here is one of Paul’s anecdotes:

Boys of fourteen
At fourteen I went into my father’s study:
“Dad, I have been thinking about my pocket money.
My friends at school get around 50p a week, and with prices going up like they are would you be able to give me a raise on my 35p?”
“Son, I’ve been thinking about it too.
I’m going to scrap it completely.”
This hit me like a punch in the face.
Maybe three or four years later my dad did punch me in the face.
It was for the first and last time.
I literally cajoled him into doing it.
I have no idea why.
What an idiot.
He punched me in the face.
I went upstairs.
It was never discussed again.
Back in the study.
“But what am I going to do for money?”
“Get a job like everyone else.”
Weeks or months later he came into my bedroom one morning.
“There’s a job going at the Texaco garage.”
“But I’m not old enough.”
“You look old enough.”
I didn’t get the job. Because I was at school, I couldn’t do the hours and they didn’t need anybody on Saturdays.
Shops and off licences weren’t open on Sundays.
Surely petrol stations were, but I can’t remember?
Pubs closed at 10 on Sundays.
I did end up getting a job at the petrol station near my school.
5-10pm every Thursday and an hour at lunchtime on Fridays.
85 pence an hour.
I was minted.

I’ve set it out exactly as he emailed it to me because it’s not just what he says and how he says it, but also how he visualizes it in written form. That’s Paul.

A focal area in Paul’s reminiscences is in the English Derbyshire Dales, around the village of Chelmorton. It’s where generations of the Bagshawe family lived out their lives and Paul wanted to explore what had gone on.

Sadly, this task will not now be completed but Paul had already unearthed some fascinating details. These, for example:

Shortly after my father’s death in 1992, amongst multiple reams of family paperwork crammed into his spare leather briefcase, I came across two innocuous, heavily-inked photocopy sheets filed under Chelmorton.
The sheets were incredibly compact copies of pages from a book. I knew these papers were somehow related to my family history, but being half my current age and busy with other things – I just thought all this can be looked at another day.
The another day arrived in early-April 2024.
What caught my eye within the dense typesetting were the slightly larger words within the heading: perpetual motion.
As I read this tiny script, my first thought was of the wonder I felt as a boy when I started to discover the forces at work when toppling dominoes over on a wooden table, the serenity of releasing a paper aeroplane that would fly through more than one room in the house, and of course in the late-1960s becoming completely transfixed watching the Saturn V space rockets slowly clear the launch pad before roaring out of the atmosphere, hang silent over the earth for a little while and then disappear off to the moon.
Alexander Ollerenshaw of Chelmorton and the perpetual motion felt like it could be worth a read.

The cartoon at the top of this post titled Discovering Perpetual Motion and included in Paul’s emails to me, is by English painter and engraver, Theodore Lane. Born in 1800, his life was cut short in 1828 in an accident at a horse repository in London’s Gray’s Inn Road.

I soon realised that these three photocopied pages I had found were reproductions from a 19th century journal. The three pages forming one of numerous pieces within this rather highbrow quarterly publication:
The Reliquary:
Quarterly Archaeological Journal and Review
July 1863 – October 1894
London Vol. 11 (July 1870): pages 30–32
The piece was written by Thomas Brushfield J.P. and commented on by the Editor of the journal, Llewellyn Jewitt, of Winter Hall, Derbyshire – a prominent illustrator, engraver, natural scientist and author who’s output was prodigious and covered a large range of interests.
The photocopies were of quite poor quality, the reproduced type size tiny (around seven point with no line spacing) so I decided to recreate the pages line-for-line, in a larger format – to aid reading (a little) and make the story more presentable.
As is evident, Thomas Brushfield’s account in this journal is of the rather notorious character Alexander Ollerenshaw, a resident of Chelmorton, a hamlet a few miles south east of Buxton in Derbyshire. Ollerenshaw lived from 1753 to 1841.
The piece outlines Brushfield’s father’s encounters with Ollerenshaw in some detail, with occasional corroborations from Brushfield himself. Whilst not delving into the precise machinations of Ollerenshaw’s perpetual motion endeavours, which would have been terrifically interesting, he does paint a very considered portrait of Ollerenshaw as a man.
Ollerenshaw ran his blacksmith’s business from a public house opposite to the local (and only) church in Chelmorton, St. John the Baptist – the highest-steepled church in England, where as well as his blacksmith’s business, he also served as the pub’s licensee for many years.
Within the Blacksmiths’ Arms (now The Church Inn), was one secret room where Ollerenshaw spent decades working on his perpetual motion machine. Apparently very few people were ever allowed in there to see his work, but he talked of little else – always being just a couple of adjustments away from perfecting his invention.
On his death, at age 88 in 1841, Ollerenshaw’s machine was broken up, and parts given to the villagers as momentos of this unique character, and the village commemorates his life on the chelmorton.org website.
Chelmorton is the birthplace of many of my ancestors, including my father and grandfather Fred – the eldest of the five eccentric Bagshawe Brothers – of whom I am yet to determine exactly which four of his six brothers can be classified as such.
The Bagshawe brothers (and sisters) were all born and raised in Chelmorton, and although I figured Alexander Ollerenshaw would certainly have known, and worked with the Bagshawes, it turns out he was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Aargh! by David Pinder

Discussion about this post