THIS INSCRIPTION ON a gravestone outside All Saints’ Church, Bloxwich, near Walsall in the West Midlands, gives us a snapshot of the state of our subject's life at the age of five, one of the three children left to ‘deplore’ the early loss of both parents.

Compared to most orphans at the time, his situation was not terrible. He had relatives prepared to take care of him and his father had been wealthy – self-made, as he would be. In the official biography, Lane-Poole describes Harry senior as a man of ‘energetic and self-reliant character … full of life and spirit, bright of eye and short of stature’. This would have been a good description of Harry junior, who seems to have taken after the father he had barely known. That said, Harry senior was also ‘a social favourite, appreciated for recitation and song’, which were not really attributes of his son (he could be social when he wanted to be but usually was not, and he had no musical talent). More relevant to our story was Harry senior's wealth, which could be understood by looking at his fine house: Birchills Hall.

The area around Birchills was very deprived. In 1886, it was described as ‘the poorest part of the poorest parish in Wallsall’. It was an industrial area, surrounded by pits and ironworks. The hall must have looked like an island of affluence in a sea of poverty, and the Parkes family surely stood out there, a world away from the ‘shoals of little ones at the entrance of court after court, making mud pies in the gutters or prying down the gullies of the common sewers in the streets’, as the vicar of St. Peter’s, Stafford Street, described the area's children in 1879. Birchills Hall, built on what turned out to be coalfields, gradually fell into disrepair.