Grave matters : ‘The happiest man on earth’

Ninety-six years ago today, the self-proclaimed ‘happiest man on earth’ died in the Victorian seaside town of Penarth, in south Wales. I was intrigued when I read George Lewis Norris’s headstone in the graveyard of Penarth’s St Augustine Church and just had to find out more about him. The headstone reads:

Here lie the remains of
GEORGE LEWIS NORRIS
Overthorpe, 24 Plymouth Road, Penarth
Born 18th March 1852,
Died 10th December 1923
who lived and died the happiest man on earth, who was always busy doing good and trying to do good advising and helping those in trouble.

The first headlines that appeared when I searched the Welsh Newspapers website read ‘NORRIS CHEERED’ and ‘NORRIS UNSEATED’. I read on, dug deeper, and found a fascinating series of local events. Norris was both a champion of the poor and downtrodden, and a thorn in the side of the local authorities. I’ve summarised below the events of just two years, 1908-1910, taken from snippets in the local papers.

Evening Express, 1 February 1908, ‘”MOST INSOLENT LETTERS”’:

At the meeting of the Cardiff Board of Guardians [responsible for overseeing the functioning of the workhouse and local poor relief] to-day, the Clerk (Mr. Harris) reported that Mr. G. L. Norris had sent further correspondence concerning the price of bread and other necessities to the scattered homes at Penarth. Mr. Norris, it will be remembered, complained that the guardians paid more than they ought to, in the interests of ratepayers, for certain articles.

Norris waited outside the meeting room for four hours but the Board refused to see him.

Evening Express, 3 February 1908, Norris wrote to the newspaper:

Sir,—My Saturday's letter was addressed to the chairman and the 85 Cardiff guardians, and every guardian had a right to see the letter or hear it read. Ninety-nine per cent of the guardians had no chance of one or the other. The chairman read it himself, and because he could not answer a single line of the four foolscap pages said it was insolent, a very easy thing to say when you are beaten in argument. Fifty per cent of the guardians know absolutely nothing whatever of the business transacted in the board-room. That's what they tell me.
... If the order of things were reversed the ratepayers' pockets would be eased, and the poor, wretched persons whom I saw hanging round the door crying would have their stomachs filled.

There followed a series of letters and articles about the relative prices of bread of different loaf weights, in different towns, both contesting and supporting Norris’s claims of overpayment and the waste of ratepayers money, and Norris subsequently produced a circular outlining his concerns and claims.

Presumably it was the lack of response from the Board of Guardians and other persons in authority, combined with Norris’s desire to improve the plight of the local poor that prompted him, in April 1908, to stand for election in not one but all four of Penarth’s district council wards. Norris won two of those elections and chose to sit in the west ward, but the incumbent didn’t take his loss to Norris sitting down – he instituted legal action.

Evening Express, 14 June 1908

Evening Express, 16 June 1908:

Penarth was all agog this morning in expectation of pyrotechnics at the sitting of the Commission appointed to consider the petition to unseat Mr. George Lewis Norris, as member for the West Ward of the Penarth Urban District Council. Mr. Norris, the man of questions and motions, who has made things at Penarth very lively during the two short months he has held a seat on the council, delights to describe himself and his doings in the phraseology of the cricket world. He is, he avers, "100 (resolutions) not out," and he has frequently challenged the whole of the council and others to put him out.
To-day one of "the others," to wit, the man whom he defeated in the West Ward (Mr. W. L. Morris, who had held a seat on the local authority for twenty years), took a turn at trundling, backed by an array of legal talent, whilst Batter Norris stood up at the wickets alone and unaided.
It will be remembered that Mr. Norris contested the four wards of Penarth at the district council election in April, and was returned for two – the North and West. He decided to sit as the representative of the West Ward. Thereupon, the defeated candidate, Mr. W. L. Morris, petitioned against Mr. Norris's election, alleging bribery and treating. It was affirmed that, prior to the nomination of candidates for the election, Mr. Norris issued handbills stating that he was going to give away so many threepenny bits, so many pennies, and so many lIb. of cake to the people of Penarth.

Weekly Mail, 20 June 1908

Evening Express, 18 June 1908, ‘NORRIS UNSEATED’, an article relaying, word for word, the judgement of electoral commissioner Mr Morton Smith K.C., in which he found George Norris guilty of bribery at the recent local body elections and therefore declared Norris’s election void.

Evening Express, 4 July 1908, ‘MORE CAKE AT PENARTH’:

Keeping his promise that whether he lost his seat or held it he would make a free distribution of cake, Mr. G. L. Norris made many children happy at Penarth this afternoon by presenting a quarter of a lb. of the luxury to about 400 or 500 boys and girls.
At the conclusion of the "ceremony," Mr. Morris called for cheers for various persons, and, of course, the children responded with a will.
Mr. Norris says he intends holding a public meeting at the Park-hall, Cardiff, or Andrews-hall, Penarth, "as soon as the weather permits.” He also intends giving a similar quantity of cake to the children of the West Ward, and he stated that his action was against the chamber of trade, whilst he reiterated his defence to the election petition—that he never had any idea of becoming a candidate when he bestowed the gifts.

Evening Express, 19 August 1908, the ‘NORRIS CHEERED’ article. Not content with removing Norris from his council seat, the police then decided to charge him with four counts of offering voters inducements of three pence or a penny, if they were to vote for him. A crowd of children cheered Norris’s arrival at court – perhaps they were hoping for more cake! The case later broke down at the assizes, the Grand Jury throwing out the case against him.

Evening Express, 7 December 1908

Norris fires off a ‘sheath of telegrams’ to various officials, including this one to Prime Minster Asquith: 

To Prime Minster, London
Five prosecutions in five months, four miscarriages of justice. Norris improperly unseated. Public inquiry demanded. What about my seat? What about my costs? Who is going to refund?—Norris, Penarth

Though he did succeed in having a question about his treatment asked in parliament, George Norris neither regained his council seat nor was he awarded any financial compensation. He did, however, continue to agitate against the actions – or, perhaps, the inactions – of Penarth’s district council, challenging them over various administrative matters, including their unprofitable running of the town’s public baths. And he continued to show compassion towards the local people.

Evening Express, 24 August 1910, ‘Mr Geo. Norris Weeps’:

It was as prosecutor that Mr. G. L. Norris, the well-known Penarthite, appeared at the local juvenile court to-day. The defendants were Albert Howell, George Parkman, Francis Hooper, Bertie Davies, and Albert Saddler, all Penarth lads, who were charged with breaking and entering Mr. Norris's house in Plymouth-road, Penarth, and stealing watches, rings, brooches, and other jewellery.
It was evident that the prosecutor was touched by the sight of so many boys in such a grave position, for he wept profusely. The house was broken into on Friday last, and Police-constable Borston gave evidence of arrest, when each defendant is said to have made a statement admitting his oonnection with the affair, and most of them produced some of the missing articles. Many of the articles, however, had, it was stated, been given away or otherwise disposed of. ... a week's remand was granted.

The Welsh newspapers have not yet been digitised past 1919 so I wasn’t able to check for any obituary following George Norris’s death on 10 December 1923. I did, however, find two items in New Zealand newspapers. His death notice in The Press, of 25 June 1924, states that he was formerly a wine and spirit merchant’s manager and that he left his estate, with a gross value of £14,289 19s 2d, to the town of Penarth. And I particularly enjoyed this article about his will in the Evening Star, 18

June 1924:

HAPPIEST MAN ON EARTH

ODD WILL OF WELSH CELEBRITY.

Evening Express, 29 April 1908

Here lie the remains of G. L. Norris, who lived and died the happiest man on earth, who was always busy doing good and trying to do good, advising and helping those in trouble. G. L. Norris never knew his advice go wrong.
This is the epitaph with which the late Mr G. L. Norris, a Penarth celebrity, concludes his will, a quaint document by which he leaves over £14,000, chiefly for charitable and social purposes.
As it was his opinion that the great amount of deplorable poverty and destitution in the world was due to a want of proper training in the habit of thrift, Mr Norris left money for a “Good Character and Thrift Prize Fund,” the prizes to be savings bank books with deposits of 5s each. There are also swimming and other prizes offered to boys and girls who are to be kept informed of what is going by being able to see copies of the will hanging on the walls of the schoolrooms.
The prizes are to be distributed each year by the chairman or vice-chairman of the Penarth Urban Council on Mr Norris’s birthday, and at the distribution a sum not exceeding £l2 is to be spent on coffee, light refreshments, cigars, and cigarettes. Mr Norris bequeathed two boxes of cigars and two boxes of cigarettes annually “to be kept in the Penarth Council Chamber handy for any member who wants to smoke.”
Five pounds a year is to be given to the young couple about to be married whose joint bank books show the largest amount saved, and £3 a year to any man in the district “who will fat and kill the best and heaviest pig during the year.”
Mr Norris said he gave the latter prize “for the purpose of killing the silly, stupid, and ridiculous restrictions placed on pig killing by illogical and irresponsible cranks who could not, without the help of an experienced veterinary surgeon, possibly tell the difference between a young pig, a yelf, or a seven-year-old hog pig.”
Several prizes are offered for the cultivation of gardens and allotments by children and adults, but the donor placed a ban on people who bought German horse radish or Spanish onions. “I would doubly punish all members of the Government who in future allow these vegetables to come into the country,” added Mr Norris.

It seems to me that George Norris was a good-hearted man who was concerned about the level of poverty he saw about him and tried to do something about it, though perhaps not in the smartest of ways. Even commissioner Morton Smith described him, in the Evening Express, 18 June 1908, as 

a man of very peculiar temperament, and of an imaginative mind – in fact, a man who does not appreciate and regard things in the same way as others would, and does not in the least consider the affect of his language and his acts. In fact, the word “eccentric” describes the views I have formed about the respondent.

Three cheers for eccentricity, I say!