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Lewis Carroll & the Savile Clarke letters
At the top of my pile of new books waiting to be read is Lewis Carroll and 'Alice': the Savile Clarke Letters edited by Clare Imholtz and published this year by the Lewis Carroll Society of North...
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John Wrightson, the Wise Man of Stokesley
In the days when people were nervous of witches, and called on the wake-wailer to come each evening before a funeral to sing the lyke wake that would keep their loved one's body safe from demons, they...
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Thomas Wayne (1727-1806) and the "Mystery of Angrove Hall"
In the 1990s Peter Meadows was working on an article on the subject of a lost Cleveland house called Angrove (also Anngrove or Ann-grove) Hall, which once stood between Great Ayton and Stokesley. The...
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The Story of the Letters: Kay Hill & Michael Joseph
Katharine Hill (1905-2005) was very much of her time. A young woman who grew up in a professional middle-class family and among the Teesside ironmasters and gentry, after the First World War she loved...
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The Bathurst Charity School in Hutton Rudby
The connection between Hutton Rudby and the Bathursts began in the first half of the 17th century with the founder of the family fortunes, Dr John Bathurst. Dr John Bathurst (d 1659)By the time he...
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HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy
I've only just caught up (two years late) with reading this excellent book on the sinking of HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy on 22 September 1914 by a single German U-boat.Stuart Heaver's 'The Coal Black...
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Charles Dickens' elder sister Fanny
This is an article from my blog The Engineering Hopkinsons. It is set in Manchester and it's called 'Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel'The unaccompanied hymns at the Chapel...
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Introducing John Hopkinson & Alice Dewhurst
Last year I began a new blog called 'The Engineering Hopkinsons'. Alice Dewhurst of Skipton was the daughter of John Dewhurst of the Bellevue Mill. (Readers may remember buying the familiar Dewhurst...
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"That Tiresome Lady Architect": Mrs Annabel Dott
Five years ago, on Thursday 21 February 2019, I published here the first of my pieces on the redoubtable and remarkable Mrs Annabel Dott, woman architect and builder. I first came across her when I...
View Article19th century solicitors in Middlesbrough, Stockton and Darlington
In the second half of the 19th century when Middlesbrough – Gladstone's "Infant Hercules"– boomed from a farmhouse to an important industrial town in the space of decades, solicitors played a...
View ArticleLetters home from a travelling salesman: 1817-42
Anyone researching the life of a commercial traveller in the early 19th century may be interested in letters now deposited at North Yorkshire County Record Office. Among the papers of John Leslie...
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Carrying coal by donkey
"There are those yet in Cleveland who can remember coals being conveyed into the country across the backs of donkeys."wrote John F Blakeborough in his newspaper column on 14 May 1904. Two Hutton Rudby...
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New & Good Things: Alfred Hopkinson, 1930
Alfred Hopkinson (1851-1939)When Alfred Hopkinson, barrister, academic, MP and keen alpinist, wrote his memoirs in 1930, he ended one chapter with three lists. He was 80 years old and looking back...
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Cockfighting in Hutton Rudby & Stokesley
In 1903 Richard Blakeborough (1850-1918), celebrated collector of North Riding folklore, wrote an article for a cheery weekly family newspaper called the Northern Weekly Gazette about cockfighting in...
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Christmas recipes from Hutton Rudby, 1896
The Northern Weekly Gazette was a cheery weekly newspaper with editions published in Middlesbrough, Guisborough, South Bank, Stockton, Darlington and West Hartlepool. Advertisements declared that"The...
View ArticleDark nights in Great Ayton: 1889
This sad little story is a reminder of village life before street lighting. We are so conscious of light pollution nowadays, we can forget the hazards of the past.That admirable woman Mrs Annabel Dott...
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Defective bottles at Seaton Sluice: 1835
A chance find which has turned up among my family's papers – a furious letter about defective bottles. No idea how it ended up in a solicitor's offices in Middlesbrough …On Thursday 23 July 1835, a...
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A Year's weather: 1895 by John Megginson
1895 – the year when Oscar Wilde was sent to gaol, when Middlesbrough Football Club won the FA Amateur Cup, Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island, the future George VI was born and, in Bavaria,...
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Mourning in Eston: 1877
A small sheaf of receipted bills, which had survived by chance in the offices of Meek, Stubbs & Barnley, has given me the material for this sad story.It was on the afternoon of Tuesday 23 January...
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Lord Falkland fights a duel: 1809
This is the story behind this tablet in the chancel of Hutton Rudby church:Tablet to Charles John Cary, 9th Viscount Falkland, his wife & daughterHutton Rudby ChurchCaptain Charles Cary RN, 9th...
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