Bill Williams was not a Quaker, nor was he a notably amiable person – in fact, what little we know about his life was characterized by uncertainty, angst and possibly depression. As the partially-educated bastard son of a clergyman, he was caught between social classes in the world of the 1870s, during which time he worked as a clerk at a coal mine in Yorkshire. The ‘Amiable [or Amicable] Quaker’ was, rather, his euphemism for sex, preserved in his diaries, which themselves were discovered in a derelict building over a century after he wrote them. It is a delightfully evocative term, and it seems a great shame that, of all the slang terms and figures of speech that have existed, this one failed to survive. In my opinion, it must be revived!
But back to Bill Williams himself. His diaries, which cover a period of less than a year, are fascinating because they show the struggle of a man who wants to live up to the values and imperatives of his society, yet is constantly held up by his human flaws. So many of the things that we (rightly or wrongly) tend to associate with Victorian English people – strict sexual morality, work discipline, obsession with being on time, self-improvement, protestant religiosity – played important parts in his life. Yet he is constantly failing to be on time, to work hard, to fulfill his promises to himself to pray and read improving books, or to be faithful to his girlfriend.
In one diary entry, after weeks of having to run from the room where he lodged to the coal mine because he overslept, and still arriving late, he went into town and bought an alarm clock (he recorded his income and the price of all he purchased). A few days later, he overslept, and in anger broke the alarm clock. Another week, and he was heading back to town to get the clock fixed. Yet oversleeping remained a problem, and the mocking chalk messages on his office door from the mine manager continued, while the queues of miners waiting for their equipment grew.
Then there was his constant womanizing. In spite of his regularly stated determination to stay faithful to his charming, demure girlfriend Beck, who lived with her respectable parents in a town some distance away, he inevitably strayed. He contemplated seducing the daughter of his landlady (and may even have done so), he entertained various other young local women, as well as enjoying the company of some not-so-young. At one point, he recorded a bizarre sexual dream about his landlady, which ended in violence when her husband came into the room. He described these episodes of flirting and more-than-flirting in a detached tone that could not conceal his underlying guilt, constantly reassuring his diary that, whatever he did, the women concerned ‘seemed not to mind’.
Towards the end of his surviving diaries this burden of guilt, always lurking behind his words, seemed to overwhelm the competing pressures of lust and ego, and the tone of the entries became both more religious and more distressed. The death of a friend and financial insecurity brought on by his mine moving to part-time hours added to his problems.
In the end, his discipline broke down to the extent that even his semi-regular diary ended, or was lost. It is unclear what happened to him – perhaps he emigrated to New Zealand, as he was constantly proposing to do? Did he move somewhere else in the country, to escape angry fathers and pregnant lovers? The editors of his diaries were unable to trace him, finding no sign of emigration or marriage. When I first came across them, I wondered whether they were some sort of fake concocted by a mischievous twentieth-century wag (presumably not the earnest local historians who edited the volume). They seemed too perfect, too racy, somehow. But if they are, then they are an extremely good fake, and even if Bill Williams was an invention, he should have been real, as should his delightful euphemism.
Source: William Williams, The Diary of a Working Man: 1872-1873, Bill Williams in the Forest of Dean (Far Thrupp, England: A. Sutton, 1994)