Mineral water maker of Boston, Lincolnshire.

By Jerry Kemp. Parts of this article were first published in BBR magazine.

Arthur was born in 1872 in Boston, Lincolnshire, and was the father of my maternal grandmother, Ruby. From a very young age I used to listen to Ruby telling stories about her Edwardian childhood in Boston. Many of the stories were about her father, usually tales of his shop and mineral water business on Blue Street, or of the two years he spent on the Western Front during the Great War.

Arthur started his mineral water business some time between 1901 and about 1910, as a sideline to a grocers, bakers, and provision merchants business he already owned at 70 Blue Street in Boston. By going into the grocery business Arthur was following in the footsteps of his father William, who had a grocers shop on London Road in Boston for several decades up to about 1920 (William was also the landlord of the Black Bull pub, next door to his shop, but I don't have any dates for his tenancy there).

Above: Arthur Morton outside the Blue Street shop, probably about 1909 or 1910, with his delivery cart pulled by his pony ‘Topsy’. Various enamel advertisements can be seen on the walls including Fry's Cocoa, Rowntrees Chocolates, and Colmans Starch. Crates of codd bottles are visible just inside the door of the shop, stored on their side for easy access.

Arthurs drinks business was entirely for fizzy pop. He used Penny Monsters bottles, stone flagons and 10oz codds (possibly also 6oz, but that is unknown). The codds, and possibly the flagons, had his own name on them, but the Monsters bottles were the standard ‘franchised’ type of one pint screw stoppered bottle, embossed ‘Monsters’ but without any proprietors name.

Above: Arthur (on the right) in the yard of his mineral water business, also in Blue Street, some time in 1913.

Ruby could remember several of the ‘1d Monsters’ enamel advertisements stacked, unused, against a wall in the Blue Street mineral water works, mixed up with other adverts for products like Cherry Blossom Boot Polish (apparently the shop received more enamel adverts than Arthur wanted, so he just stored most of them). She also remembered crates of codd bottles stored on their sides for easy access under the counter in the shop, with a wooden codd bottle opener chained to the counter for customers to use. These crates can just be seen on the floor, on the left of the door inside the shop in the first photograph.

The Great War intervenes.

Arthur was in the pre – 1914 equivalent of the Territorial Army, having joined while he was still a teenager in the 1890s. He was called up for active service abroad on the 10th September 1914, a month after the war started and by October 1914 (within a year or two of the photograph above being taken) he was on the Western Front with the 7th Division. He was a driver for 105 Battery of XXII Brigade Royal Field Artillery, and between October 1914 and September 1916 he was involved in most of the major British battles of 1914, 1915 and 1916 including 1st Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, Aubers Ridge, and the Somme.

Above: Are we downhearted? 'No'. F Subsection, 105 Battery. Arthur with his unit at Lyndhurst Camp in southern England, late September or very early October 1914.

The 7th Division included a number of units returned from overseas. XXII Brigade RFA had been stationed in South Africa, which is why some of the soldiers in the photograph are wearing pith helmets. Arthur, who was posted to the unit in mid September to make up its strength, is the rather Victorian looking gent (perhaps still feeling a bit of an outsider in the group) third from the right in the back row. At the time of this photograph he was already 42 years old. Not a young age to go to war for the first time, especially to the conditions of the Western Front. In a letter home only a few months later in early 1915, Arthur said that 105 Battery "have not an officer left who came out with us, and only one sergeant, and very few of the original gunners and drivers". I have not yet managed to identify any of the other soldiers in this photograph (any help would be much appreciated!), but I often wonder what became of the people in this group in the four years after it was taken. The 7th Division suffered almost 500% casualties during the war (one of whom was Arthur) so the odds were, to put it mildly, not good, even for artillerymen.

Above: Arthur (on the right) in a studio portrait taken in France or Flanders, probably in 1915 or early 1916, along with his best friend of the time ‘Nobby’ Clark (or Clarke). Arthur looks very different from the man he was in the previous photograph. Clark did not survive the war, dying from shrapnel wounds within yards of Arthur while they and their horses were sheltering from a bombardment while trying to resupply the guns, probably during 1916. Of the eight horses and two men sheltering together apparently only Arthur survived. From the stories Ruby told me it seems that Clark must have been in the same unit as Arthur, but I have been unable to find records that indicate who he may have been, even though I obtained a full casuality list for XXII Bde RFA from the Commonwealth War Graves Comission. If anybody recognises the man on the left in this photograph, I'd be very pleased to hear from them. His uniform indicates he was a driver in the Royal Field Artillery, and his unit was probably 105 Battery, but may have been 104 or 106 (both of which were also in XXII Brigade).

Arthur was invalided back to England in September or October 1916 after being incapacitated during the Battle of the Somme. He had shell shock (and possibly a head wound), and never fully recovered. Both his mineral water company and his grocers shop were already out of business before he returned to England. In 1917 his wife and children moved from Boston to Grimsby, where Arthur joined them after several months of convalescence at the Lord Derby War Hospital in Warrington, and then at the smaller hospital at Poulton-le-Fylde.

The mention of a head wound is from slightly contradictory family stories. It is not backed up by any documentary evidence (Arthur's full service record was destroyed when the records store in London was damaged by bombs during the blitz of 1940), but probably occurred as a separate incident several months before that which resulted in his being invalided home. One version of the story is that his head wound (a depressed fracture of the skull) was not severe enough for him to be sent home. He was apparently treated in France and afterwards went back to active duty without returning home. In contrast his shell shock is briefly documented in his discharge papers, which give the reason for his discharge as "Neurasthenia (head trouble)". He was discharged from the Army in 1919 at York barracks, only a mile from where I live now.

Arthur suffered badly from the effects of shell shock for the rest of his life. For several years he could only cope with quiet and low-intensity work. After spending several months in hospital he returned to his family in Lincolnshire. He managed to find a job as caretaker of the smallpox hospital in the rural setting of Laceby, near Grimsby. Eventually he moved on to other work, but he never again ran his own business. He died in 1937 at the age of 65, two weeks before he was due to retire.

Above: a photograph of Arthur (bottom, second from left) in a Society of Friends hospital train, probably in France, in late 1916. I have no idea how common such photographs are, but it does seem amazing that this photograph was taken at all, let alone that it includes indentifiable individuals. It's interesting to see that there are no bandages visible on any of the patients. Given the fact that Arthur suffered badly from the effects of shell-shock (nowadays called combat stress, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) it suggests that this may be a carriage of shell shock victims.

The Great War had one other huge impact on the people in the photograph of the mineral water factory yard. The teenage boy on the left, leaning on the hand cart, was William (Billy) Berry. He was apprenticed to Arthur at the time the war started. When the mineral water business closed in 1914 or early 1915 Billy went to work for another business in Boston. He was eventually called up, and ultimately became one of those killed on the western front who have no known grave.

Morton Bottles.

Darren and I have dug several Penny Monsters bottles over the past few years (we found two on the Market Rasen site), but I have never managed to track down any of either Arthur Morton’s or William Morton’s own marked bottles (William also used bottles with his own name on them : I heard that a ‘Wm. Morton, Boston’ slab sealed flagon was sold in a local auction in Boston about 10 or 15 years ago, but I didn’t manage to track it down). A number of Morton codds and other bottles were found in Blue Street when some buildings there were demolished to make way for some development in the 1970s or 1980s, but again I have never managed to get hold of any, or even find out where they might have got to.

I’d very much like to hear from anyone who has, or knows about, any bottles, or anything else, from either of the Boston Mortons, Arthur or William! Even if they don’t want to part with any Morton items, I’d be grateful to get hold of photographs or descriptions.

William Morton's shop on London Road, Skirbeck Quarter, Boston, about 1918 - 1920. The taller building immediately to the left is the Black Bull pub, of which William was the landlord for many years. William died in 1920, and his shop was taken over by two of his daughters (Arthurs sisters).

© J. M. Kemp. 2007 (all images © of Arthur's family!)

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