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Rev Robert Joseph Barlow invents a carriage spring, 1836

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I came across this fascinating report quite by accident.  It turns out that the Rev Robert Joseph Barlow of Hutton Rudby (c1804-78) invented a safety spring to make travelling by carriage (and this seems to mean, above all, railway carriages) safer and more comfortable.

His invention was presented to the Whitby Lit & Phil by Dr George Merryweather of Whitby, who owned Linden Grove (now Linden Grange), the house in which Mr Barlow lived.  He was the inventor himself of the celebrated Tempest Prognosticator, a leech-powered barometer.  A model of it may be seen in Whitby Museum.

The Rev George Young referred to is the celebrated historian (a short biography can be found here here on the Whitby Museum website).

The surprising story of Robert Barlow's brother, James Barlow Hoy, and his rise to unexpected good fortune and a seat in the House of Commons can be found in my book Remarkable, but still True: the story of the Revd R J Barlow and Hutton Rudby in the time of the cholera.  His life history begins here at Chapter 7 and the account of his sudden death in an accident while shooting in the Pyrenees is here in Chapter 16.

The Whitby & Pickering Railway was one of the first railways in Yorkshire and George Stephenson was the engineer.  When it opened in 1836 – when it tried out Mr Barlow's spring – it was a single-track horse-worked railway.  Now it is the North Yorkshire Moors Railway and is not to be missed by any visitor to the moors who values heritage steam locomotives and diesel engines, beautiful scenery, nostalgic tearooms, etc, etc.
Hampshire Advertiser, 1 October 1836 
Newly Invented Safety Spring for Carriages 
We take from the Yorkshire Gazette, the following notice of a new Spring for Carriages, the invention of the Rev R J Barlow, brother of our town member, J Barlow Hoy, esq.:- 
A general meeting of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society was held at the Whitby Museum, on Monday, September 12, for the purpose of receiving a communication from the Rev R J Barlow, of Linden Grove near Stokesley, on his newly invented patent safety springs for carriages.   
A respectable company of ladies and gentlemen having assembled, John Frankland, esq. was called to the chair, and the object of the meeting was stated by the Rev George Young, A.M. one of the secretaries.  Dr Merryweather, through whom the communication was received, then addressed the company as follows:- 
Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I have the pleasure this day of bringing before your notice an original paper by the Rev Mr Barlow, communicating an invention which, when properly understood and duly appreciated, will, in my humble opinion, rank among the most beneficial and ingenious of modern times.  When I say ingenious, I particularly allude to the simplicity and beauty of the contrivance, and when I say beneficial, I mean not only to express my sense of the increased convenience and comfort of carriages, but also with the great comparative security of life and property, by which travelling will be accomplished when these springs shall have become universal ...
After an introduction full of praise for the invention and its usefulness for the future, Dr Merryweather read Mr Barlow's paper.  The company then examined the "ingenious models" he had provided and they "admired the simplicity and excellence of the invention."

The Revd Young concluded by praising the Spring, which would promote ease and convenience in travelling and "prevent accidents and preserve life"
The speed with which locomotive carriages are sometimes propelled on railroads is truly astonishing, and every practicable plan for rendering these and other carriages safe, as well as commodious, must be of incalculable value
The Spring had been tested by Mr Barlow himself and by the Directors of the Whitby and Pickering Railway, 
who have a coach constructed on the new principle, fully answering the expectations that were formed.  It must have cost the Rev Gentleman much study and many trials to bring his invention to this state of maturity
Mr Young concluded his speech of thanks by suggesting that Mr Barlow be elected an honorary member of the Society, and this was done.


John Jackson & Captain Thomas King

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If you've come to this blog from reading Chris Lloyd's article in the Darlington & Stockton Times, and you'd like to read in full my blogpost about John Jackson and his uncle Captain Thomas King (1748-1824) - very active in the transatlantic slave trade - it can be found here

Frederick Cator's trunk goes missing, Stokesley 1841

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The story that follows was reported in the Yorkshire Gazette and the York Herald on 10 April 1841 – two rather confusing and sometimes conflicting versions, which I have melded into one, with additional research into the people concerned.  

On Thursday 11 February 1841 a young man called Frederick Sawbridge Wright Cator was on his way from the University of Durham to Stokesley, where his father Charles Cator had been Rector for the past six years.  Frederick must have been coming back to a sad household because his mother Philadelphia Osbaldeston had died at the Rectory nearly six months earlier on 29 August – anyone who encountered him on the way would have realised he was in mourning because of the crape band on his hat.

The story starts when Frederick reaches the Cleveland Tontine Inn.  The Inn was nearly forty years old at this point.  It takes its name from the way the money was raised to build it.  Gentlemen of Cleveland decided that a coaching inn at the spot where the Stokesley road met the new turnpike road from Yarm would be desirable for the neighbourhood and very convenient for travellers.  They raised a subscription of some £2,500 using a financial instrument called a tontine.  This was rather like an annuity fund crossed with a wager as to who would live the longest.  Each man received a dividend from the fund and whenever a man died his share fell back into the common fund.  This meant that the survivors received ever bigger dividends, profiting in effect from the deaths of their friends and neighbours.  

Mr Scarth of Castle Eden must have designed the new coaching inn to impress, as the Revd John Graves in his History of Cleveland (1808) says it was built "on an extensive and elegant plan".  A couple of years later (according to Pevsner's The North Riding) stabling was added for the mail-coaches which now ran from Sunderland to The Crown at Boroughbridge, a celebrated coaching inn with its own library for the amusement of travellers.  There the Sunderland mail-coach would link up with the London coaches.  

The Tontine's foundations were laid on 13 July 1804 and on the same day a letter was sent from the principal inhabitants of Cleveland to the Postmaster General asking for an improved postal service – they were clearly intent on improvements for the neighbourhood.  They wanted a daily service between Thirsk and Guisborough and their request was granted.


The newspaper accounts say that Frederick Cator reached the Tontine Inn from Durham in a gig, but they don't say how he travelled the eight miles from the Tontine to Stokesley.  I wonder if he journeyed from Durham in the mailcoach and was met by somebody from the Rectory in a gig – a light, two-wheeled sprung cart, like the one shown here.


There was no room for his luggage, so he left his trunk at the Tontine.  His father was a well-to-do man in a rich living and was remembered by his descendants, according to this fascinating account of the Cator family, as "a very extravagant man"– which is presumably why, at the 1851 census, the household included two lady's maids, a cook/housekeeper, a housemaid, a kitchen-maid, an under-housemaid and a butler.  Frederick's trunk, however, was not new.  It had previously belonged to his now married elder brother George Albemarle Cator and the initials "G.C." were picked out on it in brass nails.

Inside it were packed: 6 shirts, 8 handkerchiefs, 3 night shirts, 3 pairs of stockings, 4 pairs of lamb's wool stockings, 1 satin waistcoat, several other waistcoats, 5 pairs of trowsers, and "a great many other articles of wearing apparel".

It was left to be picked up by the carrier Thomas Tate, who took goods twice a week between Stokesley and Thirsk, where you would find his waggon at the Red Bear on the north side of the market place.  Tate's driver John Dale was due to arrive at the Tontine that evening.

John Dale was a married man aged 37, born in Helmsley.  He lived with his wife Hannah, who was born in Wass, in Silver Street, Stokesley, with their three young children, Sarah aged 9, John aged 7 and Mary aged 5.  He duly arrived at the Tontine at about six or seven o'clock on that dark February night.  He was given two items to load onto his waggon for Stokesley.  There was a box to be delivered to the boots at the Black Swan Inn – that is, to the lad employed to clean guests' boots and other lowly tasks – and also the trunk which he was told was to go to young Mr Cator.  

The boots got his box – but Frederick was not to see his trunk again for nearly three weeks.  One hopes there was someone at the Rectory whose clothes fitted him.  

When the trunk hadn't turned up after a week, the people at the Rectory took all the steps one would expect.  They sent a manservant to speak to John Dale, who said he'd never had the trunk.  Then they asked the Stokesley police to make enquiries with John Dale's employer, Thomas Tate.  Lastly they had handbills printed and distributed around the area, asking for information about the trunk.

Constable Edmund Charles Gernon went to call on Thomas Tate.  He was a man of about 44, born in Bagby, and he lived in Back Lane, Stokesley with his wife Mary and young daughters Margaret and Ann.

Gernon found John Dale there.  As he questioned the man, Dale grew more and more uneasy and distressed.  Observing his alarm, Gernon asked, 

"Why are you so agitated?" 

Dale replied, 

"I feel as if a fellow would knock me down."  

Finally he said he had actually lost the trunk.  His shaky position was made much worse by the discovery that, though Mr Tate had given him a book in which he was to record the items he was picking up and dropping off, there was no record of Mr Cator's trunk in it.  This looked worryingly like deliberate theft.  

Either in response to the handbills or because of the rumour and gossip in Stokesley and the neighbourhood, someone came forward who had seen John Dale on his way from the Tontine.  The Yorkshire Gazette described the witness as "a boy called Foxton" who was with his father, "a fisherman at Staithes".  The York Herald writes of a man called Foxton and his son, both fishermen at Staithes.  I can't identify them – unless the reporter has misheard and it was William Foxton, a fishmonger living in Hinderwell, with one of his sons, Joseph or George.

The Foxtons were travelling that evening in the opposite direction to John Dale, going from Stokesley to the Tontine, and had seen Dale but said that they hadn't noticed any trunk in the road.  The boy had a longer story to tell.  At the top of Wilkinson's Bank (I don't know where this is), he had loosed one of the horses from his father's cart and gone back to Stokesley (we don't know why) leaving his father to carry on alone to the Tontine.  On his way he met with Simpson Adamson, a 31 year old fisherman, who was walking beside his own cart.  

"Hello, have you only got here?" shouted the boy, to which Adamson made no reply.  The boy went on towards Stokesley.  A little further along the road, he came up with John Dale's waggon and went past him – he could see that Dale had a lamp lit at the front of the waggon, so he must have seen Adamson as he went along even though it was such a dark night. 

So Constable Gernon asked John Dale if he had met with Adamson on the road, and he said that he hadn't.  Which can only have added to the police's suspicions.  

On Thursday 25 February, another of the Stokesley police officers, named as Bartram or Bertram in the newspapers – I think it was James Barthram – had been sent to Thirsk to summons Simpson Adamson to appear before the magistrates on some petty offence under the Highway Act.  Two days later, Adamson came to Stokesley and at ten o'clock in the morning met Constable Barthram "at the house of a Mrs Reddington".   I can find nobody of this name, but I think it probably means they met at the George & Dragon, the pub in the Market Place kept by Mrs Elizabeth Pennington.  

Adamson had heard about the handbills and the lost trunk, and that John Dale had been arrested the day before.  He asked Constable Barthram, "What are you going to do with Dale?" and was told that he was to be brought up before the magistrates.  A couple of hours later Constable Gernon saw Adamson, who complained, 

"What a shame it is to bring me so far on such a frivolous charge as this."  

Gernon made no reply and Simpson Adamson then said, 

"I have got something else."  

"What is it?"  

"They are going to prove that Dale was drunk the other night, but I met him and am going to prove differently."  

Perhaps drunkenness was thought in Stokesley to be the reason that Dale hadn't noticed Adamson on the road – and had lost the trunk.

But when Dale was brought before the magistrates, Adamson was seen to be whispering to him and after a few moments he called out, "I found the trunk."  His story was that he found it at the top of Wilkinson's Bank.  This would mean that the Foxtons had missed it in the dark as they went past in their cart – perhaps Adamson had seen it because he was walking.  

The constables immediately obtained a search warrant and took it to Thirsk where they enlisted the help of Constable John Little and went to search Adamson's house.  There they found his wife Sarah – and the trunk.  The brass nails with George Cator's initials had been pulled out but letters addressed to Frederick Cator in Durham, undeniably identifying the trunk as his, were still inside.  Some of the clothes were not and one of the night shirts, which had been marked as Frederick's, was found to have had the name washed out.  The initials G.A.C., which had been embroidered on a handkerchief which had evidently once belonged to his brother George, had been picked out.

John Dale, Simpson Adamson and Sarah Adamson were sent to be tried at the North Riding Quarter Sessions at Northallerton on Wednesday 7 April 1841.  The charge against Dale and Simpson Adamson was larceny.  This was a serious matter and they would see the people who came up before them for larceny sentenced to some months in prison, often with hard labour and frequently with a whipping, while those who had previously been convicted of a felony were sentenced to terms of transportation.  

The prosecution case was that Dale and Adamson were in it together.  If Dale, when he put the trunk onto his waggon, intended to steal it – that was larceny.  Anyway, the Adamsons must have known, from the letters and the name marked in the clothes, to whom the trunk belonged and so they must have had a "felonious intention" when they kept it all the same.

Sarah Adamson was charged with receiving stolen goods and had elected not to be tried with her husband.  Only the trial of Simpson and John Dale seems to have been reported – the press interest lay in the fact that it was a carrier who charged with stealing, a thought that would send a shudder down the spines of every reader who entrusted their goods to one of the many carriers plying their way between towns and villages.

A "great number" of witnesses were examined and they gave Dale a previous good character.  Mr Bliss had been instructed for John Dale and he kindly agreed to act for Adamson as well.  He did a good job for them – he addressed the jury 
in an eloquent speech, arguing that the trunk had been lost from the hinder part of Dale's cart, the night being extremely dark, and also that it was possible Adamson had found the trunk, and had detained it, expecting a reward would be offered for its being given up. 
As to the names on the linen, Adamson could not read them.
The jury found both these hapless men Not Guilty.  And Sarah Adamson, too, was later found Not Guilty.

And so Frederick Cator got his trunk back and recovered his shirts and silk waistcoat.  

We don't know how modishly the young gentleman liked to dress – perhaps he was quite dapper, like the man depicted here (from an illustration on Victoriana.com).  More examples of the clothes of the period can be found on the wikipedia page on fashions in the 1840s.  

But anyone choosing to make a shirt like one of Frederick's can do no better than to consult page 142 of The Workwoman's Guide by A Lady (1840).  They will find the illustrative plates which they will need for cutting out their fine linen or lawn at the back of the book.

And what happened next to the people we have met in this story?

Looking in the 1841 Census, taken two months later on 6 June, I can see that John Dale had, unsurprisingly, lost his job.  He was working as an agricultural labourer.  Simpson Adamson, still a fisherman, had left Thirsk for Middlesbrough, where he – but not his wife Sarah – was in the household of William and Jane Adamson, who were in their early twenties.  William was a seaman and may have been Simpson's younger brother.  Thomas Tate prospered – by the time he died in 1871 he was not only a carrier but a farmer of some 40 acres.  

Constable Edmund Charles Gernon was only at the beginning of his career – he was a young man in his twenties.  He was to have an eventful year because that June he would find himself at the beginning of the story of the skeleton thought to be the remains of the missing William Huntley of Hutton Rudby.  I think Gernon was probably from Ireland.  His wife Rachael is buried in Stokesley.  She had died in July 1838, two months after giving birth to a boy whom they named after his father.  Constable Gernon left Stokesley a few years after these events to join the police in London.  

The Revd Charles Cator remarried in 1849 and brought his bride, Miss Amelia Langford of Hyde Park Gardens, home to the Rectory.  They were both 63 years old.  I rather think her money must at least partly explain the comfortable living recorded in the 1851 Census.  They both died in Stokesley in 1872.

Young Frederick Cator, who was twenty at the time his trunk went missing, was shortly to leave Durham University and go to Haileybury College for three years.  This was where young gentlemen destined to serve the Hon. East India Company were trained.  His record there shows that during his fourth term he was awarded the third prize for the Telugu language.  In 1843 he was sent out to India to be a Writer (one of the junior clerks).  His record of service shows that he was progressed to Assistant and was posted to Tirunelveli (then called Tinnevelly) in Tamil Nadu; and in 1852 to Madurai (then known as Madura) and to Guntur (then called Guntoor) in Andhra Pradesh.  

Was he coming home on leave, or going back out to India, when he left the ship at the Cape of Good Hope, to die in Cape Town on 11 February 1854?  We don't know.
York Herald, 20 May 1854
At Cape Town, Cape of Good Hope, February 11th, Frederick Tawbridge [ie Sawbridge] Wright Cator, H.E.I. Company's civil service, Madras Presidency, and fourth son of the Rev. Charles Cator, M.A., Stokesley, Yorkshire
He was 33 years old.  His possessions in India were duly inventoried for auction.  The inventory, in the British India Office Wills & Probate Records, captures the life he left behind.  

The first page lists his china and tableware, beginning "One handsome Dinner Service Blue and Gold".  The word "handsome" is either underlined or deleted, it's hard to tell which.  He had "One Common set (crockery)" and nothing of this is omitted, even the extra cover for his white curry dish.  On the next page, his furniture is listed  there's a "Large Easy Chair" and a "Grasshopper Couch" , the equipment such as a "Camp Table (3 pieces) and "3 Camp chairs (mahogany)", that he needed for his journeys around the country, and his "Double barrel fowling piece".  A page full of pans and cooks' knives and "2 Spits" also lists 3 garden rakes, 2 bird cages, a Dove Cot and 16 Pigeons, ending with "1 Lot of antelope skins".

His books take 4 pages to list and include The Family Shakespeare, poetry (Byron, Cowper, Pope), classics such as Plutarch's Lives, dictionaries and grammars (Latin, German, Hindustani, Tamil...).  He followed developments in science, owning Lyell's Geology (1830-3), books on natural history, botany, Herschel's Astronomy.  He kept up with affairs in the UK and in India, taking Fraser's Magazine, Blackwood's Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly and Calcutta Reviews.  He had a copy of his father's published sermons

The inventory ends with 5,500 Bricks (good) and 1,590 Tiles, so he evidently intended some building work.  I wonder if he was going home to marry.

There were also "6 Poodle Dogs".  These will have been the Standard Poodle, used as a gundog.

His goods were sold and the prices recorded.  Captain Allan bought a lot of the household china.  The Revd W Snyder paid £1-4s for Cator's Sermons, which will have saved him some work preparing his own, perhaps.  Captain Farewell paid £3-8s for a Map of Hindustan and Rahim Sahib paid £1-5s for a map of England & Wales and a map of Durham.  The proceeds came to £703-0s-3d.

Mr Bance paid £2 for one of the poodles.  No mention is made of what happened to the other five.



Festivities in Stokesley become respectable

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In the Cleveland market town of Stokesley at the beginning of the 19th century, festivities were lively and raucous.  As the decades went by, organised and decorous Victorian celebrations took their place.  This is a story about Stokesley – but it will have been true of so many towns and villages!

As I explain in Radicalism in Stokesley in the 1820s, during the Napoleonic Wars the town was particularly outward looking and full of activity.  There were nearly twenty inns and the Stokesley markets were the trading hub of a wide area.  Handloom weaving was at its height and weavers were known for their independence of thought.  The town was very much part of the coastal economy of Cleveland and was the home in the winter months of East India Company captains, merchant seamen, whalers and men of the Royal Navy – and there were plenty of places for them to drink and spend their wages.  

When the Wars ended in 1815, a severe economic depression followed – but all the same, during the 1820s when George IV was on the throne, Stokesley was a Georgian town riven by fractious debate and with a raucous sense of humour.

A lasting reminder of one of the acrimonious debates is the collection of pamphlets produced in the Stokesley Paper Wars (1822-4).  This was a war of the printed word between the radical watchmaker Robert Armstrong and the Methodist tradesman Thomas Mease (much more about his ventures here).  It was a bitter and noisy debate between the supporters of radicalism, Freethought and atheism on the one hand and the supporters of religion and orthodoxy on the other.   

That wasn't the only division – there was also ill-feeling between the various forms of Christianity.  The injustice of the system of tithes lay behind this because it meant that the Methodists, Calvinists and other Nonconformists, who were already financing their own chapels, had to support the Church of England as well in the person of its local representative, Stokesley's very well-to-do rector.  Thomas Mease was an active opponent of tithes and, according to his enemy Robert Armstrong, used to go to the parish church with his friend Robert Kneeshaw "for the purpose of laughing at the Parson". 

The town's bawdy sense of humour can be seen in the newspaper report of an event that took place in the spring of 1825.  The people gave themselves over to hours of fun to celebrate the moment when a 16 year old youth married a 55 year old woman.  The church and factory bells rang, the town-crier made his announcement, the barber shaved the groom with a 30-inch razor, everyone followed the town band to the church and after the ceremony the band led the married pair, carried on chairs and followed by a crowd of people, around the town.  "Rustic festivities followed", said the newspaper report, which can be found here in the account of the flax-spinning mill behind the High Street, where the bride and groom both worked.

By 1828 things were changing and Clarke's Topographical Dictionary described Stokesley as having rather an "air of retirement than business".  But it was still a lively place – in the winter of 1832/1833, there was something like a riot when the Tory candidate Hon William Duncombe visited the town electioneering.  Thomas Mease, who opposed Duncombe's politics, was said to have instigated it.


By the time of the young Queen Victoria's coronation on 28 June 1838, the respectable classes of the town had taken a grip.  There would be no more unseemly processions, no more chaotic scenes of revelry.  They formed a committee a fortnight ahead of time and the Revd Charles Cator was asked to chair it.  They raised money – Lord Falkland and Sir William Foulis sent £5 each – and the considerable sum of £63 was raised.  The Yorkshire Gazette on 7 July published a flowery account of the celebrations, written no doubt by one of the gentlemen of the town: 
The Cleveland Hills have been roused from their still repose, and have uttered responsive echoes, to the loud plaudits poured from the enthusiastic lips of the whole assembled population of this little town.
They wanted to feed everyone but couldn't work out how to provide a public feast for 1,100 people.  Instead, the committee sent 1½ lbs of meat and 1lb of bread to each individual so they could "enjoy themselves without restraint" in the bosom of their families.  This must also have ensured that unseemly celebrations happened in and around the houses and not in the middle of the High Street.  

At half past two in the afternnon, the "respectable inhabitants" and the various clubs and societies met at the school house and processed to church to hear Mr Cator preach.  When they emerged, the men (not the women) formed an organised procession.  

At the front were two men carrying flags.  Behind them came the management committee, walking two by two, carrying white wands and wearing white rosettes and Victoria medals.  (Quite a variety of medals were struck for Victoria's accession and coronation at a good range of prices to suit customers' pockets – tradesmen were told to be on their guard against people trying to pass off the gold-coloured ones as genuine sovereigns.  This medal is particularly fine.)

After the management committee came a brass band, followed by the clergy in their robes, also with rosettes and medals.  Then the churchwardens and parish overseers (more medals and rosettes) – then the parish clerk in his robes – then another flag – then the Odd Fellows society, two by two and "attired in their proper costume and bearing the various insignia of their orders".  Next came another flag, and then the society of Ancient Foresters, two by two and dressed as archers with bows and arrows – then a flag – then the Benevolent Society of Flax Dressers, two by two.  Then came the general committee, four by four, in "appropriate costumes".  

The town's schools followed next, first the masters of the Preston school followed by the scholars, four by four.  Then the Langbaurgh West school, with the mistress and the girls, four by four, in front and then came the master of the school.  (The mistress and master of the National Schools in the 1840 Directory are Miss Price and John Thompson).  A police officer followed, and then the boys, four by four.  Another police officer came after them (to keep an eye on the boys?).

At the rear of the procession came "the rest of the inhabitants"– the report doesn't say whether these were only the "respectable" inhabitants who had been inside the church, or whether they had been joined by less respectable ones.

They processed to West Green and sang God save the Queen – then to East Green, and did the same – and then to the various lodges of the societies where they sang once more.  As each society reached its lodge, it dispersed.

At 4 o'clock some 40 gentlemen (not women) sat down to an "excellent dinner" at the Swan, with Mr Cator as chairman.  He gave a speech into which he managed to drag a reference to "the pernicious error of transubstantiation" (though he assured his readers he did not speak in hostility to "our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects") and finally after drinking many toasts they got up from the table after four hours of conviviality and went to prepare for the ball in the schoolroom.  This went on until midnight when they had an "elegant supper".

Those who didn't qualify as gentlemen were not left out because there were "festivities at various places in the town, all of which were conducted with the greatest decorum".

(This orderly and decorous way of celebrating the days seems very much to have been the state of affairs generally.  In Whitby, their celebrations were enlivened by the firing of cannon from Barricks' shipyards and the procession was a third of a mile long and included nearly 1,250 Sunday School children of all the denominations.  Their Ancient Foresters performed an archery display on the Abbey plain and the fishwomen had a grand tea-drinking in the fish-house and a dance afterwards.)  

Even when the Chartist agitator Mr Bussey came to Stokesley in March 1839, the welcome from the workpeople was orderly.  They met him with a procession and a banner and took him to the Black Bull Inn in the Market Place so he could speak to the crowd from one of the front windows.  They voted on resolutions, adopted the Chartist petition and pledged themselves to support the Chartist Convention.

Processions were obviously very much enjoyed by all classes.  A few months before Frederick Cator's trunk was lost between the Tontine and Stokesley, the Yorkshire Gazette reported a swiftly organised and well-managed reception in Stokesley.  

On 1 September 1840, the gentlemen and tradespeople decided to welcome the return to Ingleby Manor the next day of Sir William Foulis after an absence of six months.  It seems likely that Sir William had been away for some sort of cataract operation because the article explains that his sight, after "sufferings", had been restored.  Perhaps the operation was the ancient one known as "couching" or perhaps he was a very early patient for the more radical operation undergone by the Revd Patrick Brontë in 1846.  See the Anne Brontë blog for the details – no anaesthetic, leeches, lying in a dark room for a month to recover.

Sir William, the gentlemen and tradespeople felt, was "one of the old baronets, and a good landlord ... with a kind heart and generous disposition" so he should be welcomed into Stokesley with a reception.  On 2 September they formed a procession and made their way a short distance outside the town to Bense Bridge, which is where the road from the Tontine Inn (the Thirsk Road B1365) crosses the Eller Beck.  There they waited to meet Sir William and his family on their way north.  

The horses were taken from the carriage and it was drawn into the town behind the procession, a band and banners and amid a "vast concourse of people".  They all stopped at the Black Swan Hotel – today's Methodist Church, opened in 1887, stands on the site now.  There a deputation of gentlemen presented Sir William with an address of congratulation, which was read aloud by the Revd R K Pearson.  The address explained that the procession would go no further as their "demonstrations of joy" were constrained out of respect for the rector and his family – Mrs Philadelphia Cator had died only a couple of days earlier.  But they hoped that Sir William was convinced that they were glad to see him again.  Sir William was indeed quite overcome by the enthusiasm of the crowd.  He made a suitable and affectionate reply and gave £15 to be distributed among the populace – so the "vast concourse of people" must have felt that their efforts were well rewarded.

Nine years later, the Revd Charles Cator remarried.  He was now 64 years old and his new wife was Miss Amelia Langford of Hyde Park Gardens, aged 63.  They married on 1 March at St James's Church, Paddington.  

Great celebrations for their arrival in Stokesley were planned by his congregation – the Yorkshire Gazette of 31 March 1849 has a lavishly flowery account entitled "Public Demonstration of Regard".
Tuesday last being fixed for the arrival of the Rev Charles Cator and his bride, at the Rectory, early in the morning at the east and west ends of the town, as well as in the market-place, were observed (as though they had sprung up like mushrooms during the night) large and splendid triumphal arches, formed of evergreens, flowers, and fruits, with appropriate mottoes over the central part of each, significant of the welcome reception their revered pastor and his lady would receive on their arrival.  A large "Union Jack" silk flag waved on the steeple of the parish church, and by the hour of ten the bells range merrily.
It goes on to describe how flags with appropriate mottoes and an "instrumental band of music from an adjacent village" processed through the streets, while crowds poured in "from the villages and hamlets" and all was "hilarity and joy".  At 2:30 pm there were "great numbers of individuals of all grades and sexes" on the south road looking for the approach of "their revered rector and his amiable partner".  At last
A carriage, drawn by four horses, was seen at a distance passing rapidly through this lovely and wooded vale.
The horses were unharnessed and the "delighted parishioners" drew the carriage in themselves.  Behind came a procession of "the gentlemen, tradesmen, and the children of the public schools, headed by several mottoed flags and the band".  Under each triumphal arch of greenery, the procession stopped so that everyone could cheer while ladies waved "their white kerchiefs" from the windows and balconies.  In "an orderly manner" it processed "through the avenue and coach road" to Levenside to the rectory (now The Old Rectory).

There, Mr Cator – "his fine manly forehead fanned by the breezes"– stood on the steps of the rectory, "overarched by magnificent patriarchal trees" and, with uplifted hands, thanked the crowd that had flocked into the courtyard and shrubbery and bestowed a blessing on them all.  

No wonder they were cheering – "the poor people of the parish of every sect and party were plentifully supplied with beef, flour, tea, sugar, &c. at their own cottages".

And no wonder the newspaper account italicised the words "of every sect and party", when we think of past enmities in the town.  The 1851 Ecclesiastical Census details of the local returns are here.  They show that, besides the parish church of St Peter's, Stokesley had the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel on Back Lane (now North Road) at the end of what is now Brewery Yard; the Primitive Methodist Chapel, also on Back Lane; and the Bethel Chapel near the Packhorse Bridge.  (Today's Methodist Church dates from 1887 and the Primitive Methodists built a new chapel in College Square in 1903)

Bonfires were lit in the evening to illuminate the river near the rectory and at 8 o'clock Mr Cator and about 50 of his friends and tradesmen sat down to a "sumptuous repast" provided by the Golden Lion Hotel (now Chapters) followed by many toasts to the Cator family and to every man of note in the area.  "The utmost order prevailed throughout the day".  Meanwhile, the new Mrs Cator must have been unpacking.  We don't know if she had visited the Rectory before – perhaps she was meeting the servants and finding her way around – and perhaps getting to know her new stepdaughter better.  Perhaps the ladies of the town joined the gentlemen to hear the speeches.

Charles and Amelia Cator were to enjoy fourteen years of married life.  Amelia died at the age of 76 on 2 November 1863.  Both of them were generous to the charities and poor.  

The brief note of her death in the Yorkshire Gazette recorded that Amelia "was a liberal contributor to all the charities of the town" and when Charles died at the Rectory on 17 December 1872 at the age of 86, after 37 years at Stokesley, the York Herald reported
The lamented rector was extremely liberal to the poor of the parish; a tale of poverty and distress would ever readily loose his purse string, even to the last coin.  He also took great interest in forwarding the education of any school boy or young person who showed any talent for learning or had a desire to improve himself, and was ever ready both with advice and with pecuniary aid.  Many a poor family will miss his seasonable charities.
In her fourteen years in Stokesley, Amelia had brought a touch of vicarious celebrity to the town.  The Yorkshire Gazette ends its notice with the words "She was aunt to General Cannon, the renowned of Silistria".  

Postscript: General Cannon (Behram Pasha)

Robert Cannon (Behram Pasha)
In fact, Amelia was the aunt of General Cannon's first wife, Isabella Langford.

General Cannon was one of those figures beloved by the Victorian press and public – the sort of man that George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman would probably have sought to avoid.

Robert Cannon (1812 or 1813-1882) was from near Dundee, the son of the Revd David Cannon.  He joined the Madras Army of the Hon East India Company as a very young man and in 1834 had served in a short but bloody campaign against the Raja of Coorg, known as the Coorg War.

While he was in India, civil war had broken out in Spain in 1833 where the three-year-old Queen Isabella and her mother the Queen Regent (constitutional monarchists) were challenged by another claimant to the throne, Isabella's uncle Carlos (arch-conservative).  The British government wouldn't send troops to support the two Queens, but in 1835 did send a volunteer corps of militia, the British Auxiliary Legion  its costs were paid by the Spanish government.

Robert Cannon, aged 23, raised 500 men in Devon for the legion.  He began as a Major of the 6th Scotch Regiment and rose to Colonel of the 9th and 10th Royal Irish regiments, seeing a great deal of service and being at the forefront of the action several times.  He was awarded the 1st, and the Cross of the 2nd, class of the National and Military Order of St Ferdinand and was made a knight of the number extraordinary of the Royal and Distinguished Order of Charles III for his services.

He went back to India and was appointed one of the commissioners for the government of the territories of Mysore, but after some years returned to Britain either on leave or because of ill-health, it isn't clear from the sources.  So when the young Isabella Langford met him, he must have appeared to her as an exotically decorated hero who had seen the world.   They married on 28 July 1846 at St John's, Paddington. 

In 1853, when the Crimean War broke out, he was lieutenant-colonel commandant of the West Middlesex Militia and he and Isabella had three little children.

The Turkish government asked him to take a command in their army.  It seems that he must have intended to take Isabella and the children with him to Constantinople but his plans were interrupted by tragedy when Isabella died at home at 10 Kensington Gardens Terrace on 13 January 1854.  She was buried at St Michael's, Highgate, a fortnight later on 27 January – the day after what should have been her 27th birthday.  The clergyman who took the service was Charles Cator, Rector of Stokesley.  Perhaps he and Amelia were in London to see her niece and the children before they started on their voyage into the Mediterranean.

With the nursemaids already assembled for the trip and everything ready, Colonel Cannon must have decided to take the children with him when he sailed, because it was in Constantinople in the middle of March 1854 that his middle child, little Amy Josette, died at the age of 3 years and 2 months.  The burials register of St Michael's Highgate records that on 3 August 1855 her remains were interred there, "removed from Constantinople to the Family Vault in Old Chapel Yard" to be buried with her mother.  Perhaps the other two children, Robert and Mary, were already back in Britain by then.

The bereaved Robert Cannon stuck to his original plan of serving with the Turks though, as E H Nolan's History of the War against Russia (1855) records, the officers who went out with him to Constantinople changed their minds.

Before he went to his posting, Cannon visited the HQ of Omar Pasha, the extremely able and effective Serbian military leader who had begun life as an Orthodox Christian and had converted to Islam after quitting Austrian lands hurriedly, fleeing from charges of embezzlement.  Omar Pasha saw that Cannon could be of service to him, gave him the name Behram Pasha and appointed him to a brigade of his Army of the Danube.  Cannon saw a good deal of action and was always remembered in the British press until the end of his days as Behram Pasha and for his part at the siege of Silistria  (Silistra, on the Danube in Bulgaria).

He ended the war as a ferik or lieutenant-general in the Turkish Army and the Sultan awarded him the 2nd Class of the Order of the Medjidie .  A couple of years later Queen Victoria gave him the honorary rank of Lieutenant-General in the British Army.  He married again and he and his wife Emma Beevor Ronald had a son and two daughters.  He died in Folkestone in 1882, having spent his later years there.  With him in the Cheriton Road Cemetery are commemorated his wife Emma and their son Ronald – and also Isabella and little Amy Josette, whose remains were moved there from Highgate.

Isabella and Robert's daughter Mary Isabella Georgiana Cannon married Louis-Virgile-Raoul du Saussay, a French politician.  Their daughter Marguerite married Baron Henri de Saint-Geniès; they are both buried in Cambridge where they lived from the 1930s.  Their son Marie Joseph Gonzague de Saint-Geniès (1917-44) must have had a good deal of his great-grandfather Robert Cannon in him.  

Twenty-two years old when war broke out, he was an interpreter with the British Expeditionary Force and was taken prisoner on 28 May 1940.  He managed after many difficulties to make his way back to Britain in June 1943 and used family connections to get recruited to the Special Operations Executive, the SOE.  He was parachuted into France in March 1944 with Yvonne Baseden.  Their group was caught in June and, because his identity was known to the Nazis, he killed himself by taking poison.

Gonzague de Saint-Geniès is commemorated in several places: at the Valençay SOE Memorial; on a plaque at the site of his death; and on the Mémorial de Lapeyrade to SOE Wheelwright, the réseau Hilaire-Buckmaster.  He is buried in the British War Cemetery at Choloy near Nancy.

Bishop William Stubbs (1825-1901): a devout Yorkshireman

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This is something I meant to write before, but it got lost in other work.  I'm afraid the alignment of text in this is a little haphazard - Google Blogger was not co-operating!  


William Stubbs by Hubert von Herkomer
William Stubbs, scholar, clergyman, Regius Professor of History at Oxford and finally Bishop of Oxford, was much loved.   A contributor to the Bucks Herald on 18 January 1802 in a column looking back over the year in the diocese of Oxford wrote 
The one death which marks and makes a loss to diocese, Church, country, and literature is that of good Bishop Stubbs, kind Bishop Stubbs, grand Bishop Stubbs, of the winning face, fatherly heart, humorous fancy, fine nature, wide and magnanimous tolerance, keen sympathies.  
William Stubbs was born in Knaresborough in 1825 and his roots in Yorkshire were of importance to him to the end of his days.  "So long as I last, I continue a devout Yorkshireman," he wrote not long before his death.

He grew up in a place rich in historical associations with important national events.  All around him were places where his forebears had lived for generations – in the written records the Stubbs family can be found, farmers and yeomen, in the Forest of Knaresborough from the mid 14th century.  In Bishop William Stubbs & Knaresborough, an article by Robert M Koch in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal (Vol 82, 2010), you can find an evocative account of how the layers of history with which he was surrounded laid the foundation for William's career as a pioneering mediaeval historian.

He was drawn to the study of history very early on in his life and he recommended local and personal history to others as a way of connecting with the social and political history of the country.

His biographer W H Hutton (the biography can be read here) wrote that in 1886 William gave a talk in Crewe in which he took himself as an example.  Hutton doesn't give his source for his quotation and there are errors which William would not have made – perhaps it was an early draft or a newspaper report.

I wonder if the talk was at the Crewe Mechanics' Institute.  He presented prizes there on at least one occasion when he was Bishop of Chester and you will see that at the end of this quotation he encourages them with his own example of success, saying "please to remember that I am just as much a working man as any of you":
You do not mind my taking myself for an illustration.  
Where was I born? Under the shadow of the great castle where the murderers of Thomas Becket took refuge in 1170, and where Richard II was imprisoned in 1399.  My grandfather's house stood on the site where Earl Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner in 1322.  My first visits were paid as a child to the scene where Stephen defeated the Scots and where Cromwell defeated Prince Rupert; my great-grandfather had a farm in the township where King Harold of England defeated Harald Hardrada;  and one of my remoter forefathers had a gift of land from John of Gaunt in the very same neighbourhood where I was born.   
As you can see, William is referring to some famous battles fought in the North and West Ridings.  His forefather John Stubbs had a grant of newly cleared land at Birstwith in the Forest of Knaresborough from the prince and soldier John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, on 27 February 1387.  I think it wasn't his great-grandfather who farmed at Stamford Bridge, but his 3xgreat-grandfather, John Wright.  Further on, it was his great-grandfather who was out in the Gordon riots.

Now he turns – he was a precociously clever little boy – to events that happened when he was four and five: the arson at York Minster in 1829; the death of the King on 26 June 1830; the July Revolution  of 1830 in France when Louis Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, overthrew Charles X; and the election of the statesman Henry Brougham in 1830.  Brougham was a major force in the passing of the 1832 Reform Act and the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.  
What do I remember first?  Well, perhaps the first thing I do remember was the burning of York Minster – then the death of George IV, then the second French Revolution, then the election of Lord Brougham for Yorkshire, then the Reform Bill and the Emancipation of the West India Slaves. What sort of connection had I with soldiers and churchwardens, and such like?  Oh, my grandfather was out in Lord George Gordon's Riots; and all of my ancestors, so far as I can trace, served the office of churchwarden in their time.    
You may smile at this – perhaps I was lucky in the circumstances of birth and associations – but mind you, on every one of the points that I have mentioned hangs a lot of history to which my mind was drawn by the circumstances that I have jotted down, and from which the studies began which, not to speak of smaller successes, have landed me in the dignified position to-night of having to advocate the study of history before an audience of the most intelligent people in England!  
You like, I dare say, to be told so.  As I am flattering myself as you see, I may give you a little of the overflow of my self-complacency; and please to remember that I am just as much a working man as any of you, every step of the life which is now drawing to an end having had, under God's blessing, to be worked out by my own exertions, so that to some extent I may put myself forward as a precedent for you.
He had indeed worked his way through life by his own exertions.


William Stubbs' family background

William and his family lived in a network of friendship and close-knit kinship.   It can be seen in the diaries of William's cousin John and the account of his life I give in A Boroughbridge Boyhood in the 1850s: the diaries of John Richard Stubbs.  The family's roots were deep in the farms, villages and towns from which they came but they kept in regular contact with relations across the country – in the 1870s, John's family letters show they were close friends with descendants of his great-grandfather's brother who was a grocer and vintner in London by the 1780s.

William was the first child of William Morley Stubbs (1800-42) and Mary Ann Henlock (1803-84). 

He was born in Knaresborough
in a small house in the High Street, which is still standing, next but one to the Bank.  The house is built over an archway through which there is access to the back and to a garden stretching some way behind the houses. 
William's birthplace
His father was the second son of Thomas Stubbs (1761-1838) and Jane Morley (1776-1833).  Thomas had left Ripley, where he was born, for the thriving town of Boroughbridge where he set up as a grocer, tea dealer and wine & spirit merchant.  He was following the example of his own father (Thomas Stubbs 1735-1805) who had left Nidderdale, where the family had lived and farmed for many generations, to be a grocer in Ripley. 

Thomas had chosen well.  Boroughbridge was prosperous and bustling, an important staging post on the Great North Road and a major inland port on the River Ure, which had been made navigable up to Ripon in 1770.  Before the railways bypassed Boroughbridge and took away the road and river traffic, the mail coaches alone brought a huge amount of business to the town – by the beginning of the 19th century there were at least 150 horses in constant requisition for the coaches in Boroughbridge alone.  It was on the route for the Scottish drovers and it is said that nearly 2,000 head of cattle might pass through the town in a day.  

Thomas's home and premises were in the Bridge Foot, which is now a care home, but which then was ideally placed beside the road and the river.  Close by was the famous coaching inn, The Crown Inn.  Its owner, Hugh Stott (1780-1851), was one of Thomas's partners in the Boroughbridge Bank.  (Details of the Bank and a photograph of a 5 guinea note can be found here).  When William said in 1886 that his grandfather's house "stood on the site where Earl Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner in 1322", he was speaking of the Bridge Foot.  

(Business ledgers from the Bridge Foot dating from 1794 are now held by NYCRO – you can find an account of them here

Thomas Stubbs married Jane Morley in Aldborough in 1794.  Her mother was Elizabeth Barroby of Dishforth and her father was William Morley, a Boroughbridge merchant who had a share in a lead mine in the Forest of Knaresborough.  

Thomas and Jane's eldest son, yet another Thomas (1796-1867) went into the family business.  Their younger son William became a solicitor.  We often see this development at this time, as prosperous yeomen and businessmen in country towns articled their sons to attorneys, a burgeoning profession.  

William Morley Stubbs set up his practice seven miles away in the market town of Knaresborough – described charmingly in the 1822 White's Directory as "delightfully situated on the north eastern bank of the river Nidd, which runs here amongst precipitous banks, and through a romantic valley"– and by the time of the 1829 Pigot's Directory he was one of the nine attorneys practising in the town.  Knaresborough offered him much better scope for his talents  much bigger and busier than Boroughbridge, with more bankers, more schools and more inhabitants to be listed in the directories as Nobility, Gentry & Clergy, it was also a centre of linen manufacturing.

On 23 September 1824 he married Mary Ann Henlock (1803-84).  She was the daughter of William Henlock (1771-1808), a wine merchant in Knaresborough.

When he was 33 years old, William Henlock had been involved in a riot on polling day in the town.  Knaresborough was a "pocket borough"– the Duke of Devonshire had it in his pocket and the town's two MPs were always men chosen by him – and on Monday 30 July 1804 the Duke's agents had been frustrated in their attempts to get his candidates elected.  The History of Parliament online puts the riot down to the Duke of Devonshire's new agent cutting the amount of money he was willing to spend on the "treating" (wining, dining & bribing) of the electorate.  Bishop Stubbs described it differently [see p4] – as a "riotous attempt" to stop the Duke's candidates from being elected by his tenants, men who didn't live in the town and who could only produce the property qualification to vote because the Duke's agents used to put a title deed into their hands as they went into the polling-booth – and took it off them again as they came out.

William Henlock and five other men were prosecuted for the riot and preventing the election.  The report of the case and details of the riot can be found here.  It ended with the solicitor Joseph Mosey Allen being sentenced to six months in Newgate Prison and Richard Dewse (or Dowse), linen manufacturer, and Thomas Abbott, weaver, to three months each in King's Bench Prison.  William Henlock, the auctioneer William Allison and tailor William Whitehead were acquitted, which must have been a great relief to their families.  But William Henlock died only a few years later in 1808, leaving three little girls – Mary Ann was only 4½ years old – to the care of their mother, 29 year old Eliza Bowes.

On her mother's side, Mary Ann's great-grandfather Thomas Bowes came from clothiers of Hunslet near Leeds but he himself was an apothecary in York where he was twice Lord Mayor, dying in office in 1777 aged 61 "after a long indisposition"[Leeds Intelligencer, 28 Oct 1777].  Her grandfather, another Thomas Bowes, was a lieutenant in the 9th Dragoons as a young man and out in the Gordon Riots; he died in York in 1793 aged 47.  

The family circle into which William Morley Stubbs and Mary Ann Henlock's children were born was made all the closer by the fact that his elder brother Thomas had married her second cousin, Mary Henlock.  

Mary, like Mary Ann, was a great-granddaughter of yeoman farmer John Henlock of Branton Green (died 1745), but while Mary Ann's father and grandfather had become merchants, Mary's family were still farming in the Great Ouseburn area – her brother William, who died in 1866, was the last of a line that began in the written records with the John Henlock of Nether Dunsforth who died in 1540.

William's early years

William was born on 21 June 1825 in his parents' house on Knaresborough High Street.

He learned his first Bible lessons with Mrs Maria Stevens in a little room off Kirkgate, whom he greatly revered for her piety and kindness [see p9].  He went to Mr Cartwright's school in Gracious Street, a school so highly thought of that the sons of tradesmen and professional people from as far afield as Harrogate were sent as pupils.  One of the older boys was the future artist William Powell Frith (as in The Railway Station and Derby Day).  Mr Cartwright was a master of the "old school"– he caned boys freely – but he was a man of wide general knowledge and loved to teach boys subjects far out of the usual curriculum of schools.  
William Stubbs as a schoolboy
By the time William was 12, he had three sisters and a younger brother (Eliza born 1827, Isabella 1832, Thomas 1834 and Frances 1836) and soon his mother was expecting a sixth.  William's biographer wrote about how devoted he was to his mother and grandmother Eliza Henlock but very little about his father, simply a mention in a quotation from a lecture that "the first drive that my father ever took me led us across Marston Moor", so we have little idea of William Morley Stubbs' life and character.  But we do know that while Mary Ann was pregnant in 1837 something was going disastrously wrong for her husband.  

Just before Christmas, on 23 December 1837, William Morley Stubbs went bankrupt.  I don't know the cause.  Possibly he had been investing or engaging in a venture that failed.  Possibly he had backed somebody he had trusted whose crash then brought him down as well.  The story of Thomas Mease in Stokesley shows how one man's bankruptcy could bring others down with him – you can see there how William Stephenson of Stokesley was ruined because he had accepted bills of exchange from Mease.

Family disaster: bankruptcy and death

It must have been a dreadful time for the family.  The stigma was such that in 1906 Bishop Stubbs' biographer never mentioned the bankruptcy at all.  In 1884, William wrote to a friend, 
Any note from your family or from Knaresborough mean so much to me.  I never forget the kindness of your aunt, Mrs Atkinson, to me as a boy when I was in sore need of kindness in many ways  
By late February William Morley Stubbs' creditors were satisfied they had received as much as they would get and he received his discharge (for the curious, an explanation of the law on bankruptcy at the time can be found here).

Mary Ann gave birth to their fourth daughter, Mary Anne, shortly afterwards on 6 March 1838.  They must at this point have been very dependent on family and friends for financial help.  I don't know the effect this had on William Morley Stubbs and what he did to re-establish himself, but in fact he had very little time left to him.  

The following year, 14 year old William left Mr Cartwright's school to go to the Grammar School in Ripon.  It was no longer a boarding school, simply a town school "in a small building below the cathedral churchyard at the south, where now the choir school is" [Hutton, p10].  At the Grammar School, the boys only studied the Classics and William wrote in later life "the discipline depended largely on the cane and the rule of fasting".

Perhaps the family had already moved to Ripon by 1839 – if not, they did so then and by 1841 were living in North Street.  William's father described himself in the census as an Attorney at Law and Mary Ann had a 20 year old servant girl to help with the house and the six children, who were aged between 3 and 15.  

Then, on 23 August 1842, William Morley Stubbs died at the age of 42 and was buried at Ripon Cathedral.  (The ancient minster church had become a cathedral a few years earlier when a new diocese was formed in 1836.)  

This must have left the family devastated.  Not only did they have to contend with their grief, but Mary Ann was now in very difficult financial circumstances.  Young William's future was now even more important  sons in his position knew only too well that their mother and sisters might very well look to them for support in the future.  In William's case, he would feel it all the more acutely as his younger brother Thomas was a delicate boy.  

However, they were fortunate in their friends and especially in the vicar the Revd R Poole and his family because it was through him that the Bishop of Ripon, Dr C T Longley, took an interest in William.  Within two months of his father's death, the Bishop had obtained for him a servitorship at Christ Church, Oxford, for 1844.  This was the only way that the son of poor parents could attend Oxford (the Revd Patrick Brontë was a sizar, the equivalent at Cambridge) because the universities were the preserve of the very well-to-do.  This is William's biographer's description of the position of servitors – 
Servitors were at this time men who came up to the University in forma pauperis, and they formed a class in a college as distinct as that of the noblemen.  The servitorships were bestowed on persons who were unable to support themselves, with a view of smoothing their way into the ranks of some profession; and candidates for them would have to satisfy the authorities that they were poor and deserving, but not necessarily that they were capable of high honours.  Thus there was no presumption in those days of exceptional intellectual distinction in a servitor.
William recorded that when he went to see the Bishop to thank him, he said it was 
certainly speaking a very good thing for me, and worldlily speaking the best thing that could happen to me, that I should have the same advantages as the first men in the kingdom, and with the Lord's blessing he hoped I should succeed.
The Bishop went on to guide William's studies over the next couple of years.

William goes to Oxford – his mother & sisters go to Settle

William entered Christ Church in April 1844 and Mary Ann and the other children continued at Ripon, where they were now living in Bondgate.  In early January 1846 they must have been visiting Mark Barroby of Dishforth – a prosperous and kindly bachelor farmer who lived with his spinster sister, he was William Morley Stubbs' first cousin once removed.  There was an accident and young Thomas, aged 11, died.  The copy of W H Hutton's biography in my possession is annotated in pencil "Killed by falling from a pony at Dishforth" (the handwriting may be that of Miss Alice Stubbs, who is described in A spinster lady in 19th century Boroughbridge) and indeed in the burials register of Ripon Cathedral the clerk has noted that the boy was "buried under the Coroner's Warrant" on 15 January 1846.  

A few months later, Mary Ann's younger sister took a decisive step.  While Mary Ann had married only to meet with tragedy and her elder sister Frances Eliza (1801-81) was settled in Knaresborough with her husband, the Scottish surgeon John Lees Hunter, the youngest sister Isabella (1805-60) had remained unmarried.  She must have been earning her living as a governess.  In the summer of 1846  she took the step that so many governesses hoped one day to make – she announced her intention of opening a school.  She had found a house in Settle which would be suitable – one of three large stuccoed houses built in a terrace not very many years earlier.  The address, then and now, is The Terrace.

Settle was a much smaller town than Knaresborough but the new railway would within months connect it to the wider world.  I think the ability to attract girls from the growing manufacturing towns of the West Riding was a great asset to any school, as can be seen in the story of The Mease sisters of Stokesley, and in Settle extra income could be made by lodging boys attending Giggleswick Grammar School.  The 1851 Census lists 17 year old Mary Jane Hardacre from Long Preston, who must have been a parlour boarder and treated as part of the family, plus six Grammar School boys.  One was Isabella's nephew Henry Hunter from Knaresborough; the birthplaces of the others were given as Leeds, Colne and Wetherby, while the two youngest, aged 10 and 12, were born in Jamaica
Leeds Intelligencer, 29 August 1846 
The Terrace, Settle
Miss Henlock purposes to Open an Establishment for the Board and Education of Young Ladies, in Settle, upon the commencement of the next Year.  Miss Henlock begs to say it will be her earnest endeavour to unite sound Religious Principles with a useful and elegant Education, and as far as possible combine the comforts of home with the duties and discipline of School. 
Most unexceptionable references can be given if required.  Terms may be had on application to Thomas Redmayne, Esq., Taitlands, Settle
Mary Ann Henlock joined with Isabella in this venture – she would be needed to act as housekeeper and supervise the boarders while Isabella devoted her time to teaching.  Her own girls would be pupils in the school and in due course would be able to help in the school.  

Isabella was drawing on the support of a significant local figure in Thomas Redmayne of Taitlands.  He was married to her second cousin Jane Henlock of Great Ouseburn.

Jane was the sister of Mary Ann's sister-in-law Mary Henlock, wife of Thomas Stubbs of Boroughbridge.  Mary was one of eight – there were four brothers and four sisters including, confusingly, another Miss Isabella Henlock – and they had a great many connections in the Settle area.  (You can meet Mary and her family in A Steadfast Friend: the life of Mrs Mary Stubbs).  Their mother was Jane Redmayne, daughter of Richard Redmayne yeoman of Austwick.  Their father John Henlock's sister Mary had married Giles Redmayne of Settle.  And a few years after Isabella Henlock set up her school,  Mary and Jane's brother William Henlock of Great Ouseburn married Ellen Thornber of Settle.
Leeds Intelligencer, 9 January 1847 
The Terrace, Settle
Miss Henlock would be happy to receive into her Family after the Christmas Vacation, a limited Number of Young Ladies to be Educated along with Three of her own Nieces who reside with her, and thus to combine the care and comforts of Home with the duties and discipline of School. 
Miss H. would desire to impart to her Pupils a sound and liberal Education, based on the highest Religious Principles. 
Terms and further Particulars may be had on Application, and the most unexceptionable References given if required. 
Miss H. would be happy to receive a Young Lady as Parlour Boarder.  School will commence on the 20th of January.
In this advertisement in the New Year of 1847, Isabella stresses the comforts of home and the family atmosphere that her pupils would enjoy.  The three nieces must be Isabella, aged nearly 15, and Frances and Mary Ann, who would soon be 11 and 9.  Eliza was soon to be 20 so she was either teaching in the school or was working as a governess.  William's biographer W H Hutton never mentions the school, only going so far as saying that "one of [Mary Ann's] daughters had gone out as a governess, partly to help in her brother's education".  This must have been Eliza, who was two years younger than William.  Isabella was a governess at the age of nineteen when William was an ordained clergyman.  I suspect all the sisters will have taught and I don't think this was something that an Edwardian biographer would want to dwell on overmuch.

On the night of the 1851 census, only Frances, aged 15, was with her mother and her aunt at the Terrace.  Eliza, now 24, and 13 year old Mary Ann were with William at the vicarage in Navestock in Essex, where he had been vicar only a few months.  Isabella was governess to the four daughters, aged between 6 and 15, of the banker Henry Alcock and his wife Belle in Skipton.  

Isabella wasn't there long.  On 1 June 1852, she died aged 20 and was buried in Settle churchyard.

William & his family in John Richard Stubbs' papers

John Richard Stubbs was the son of Mary Ann and Isabella's second cousin, Mrs Mary Stubbs of Boroughbridge.  His diaries begin in 1853, six months after Isabella's death, when he was a pupil at Giggleswick Grammar School and boarding with his aunt and her sister.  A diary entry shows he was under his aunt's supervision – and was escaping it to visit his Redmayne cousins at Taitlands near Stainforth
30 Sep 1853:  School   In the evening walked with T Bramley to Taitlands on the sly   Mrs Stubbs & Co knew not
There was quite a family party in Settle in August 1856.  John, his cousin Sophy Hirst and his Aunt Bell (Miss Isabella Henlock) were over from Boroughbridge, and William was there visiting his mother.  John was not quite eighteen but he was evidently trusted with his uncle Thomas Redmayne's phaeton as he took three of his cousins, including William's sister Fanny (Frances), out for a drive.  On 18 August he 
drove the ladies to the Terrace to tea.  After tea we all walked to Castleberg  Fanny told me of her smash with George Robinson and she also told me of Mary Anne’s Engagemt with Walter Alfred Hill [actually Hills] Esq
Fanny’s "smash" with George Robinson was perhaps the end of an attachment or engagement.  George was a young banker and nephew of a prominent banker and JP in Settle.  He was the same age as Fanny, only 21 at the time of the "smash".  

On 12 January 1857 John records that William's sister Eliza dined at the Bridge Foot with their cousin Dora Hirst – Eliza must have been staying with the Hirsts – before going back to Settle for her wedding on 20 January to the Revd Thomas Gwynn, a Christ Church graduate whom she must have met through William.  John’s father went over for the wedding, staying with the Redmaynes at Taitlands, and John sent Eliza a copy of the classic household handbook Enquire Within Upon Everything for a wedding present.  

In 1858, both John and William were groomsmen for their friend Dr Leonard Sedgwick when he married John’s cousin Jane Redmayne of Taitlands at Stainforth, near Settle.  It was a fine wedding.

William himself married the 20 year old Catherine (Kate) Dellar, the daughter of John Dellar, gamekeeper in Navestock, and his wife Martha, at Navestock on 20 June 1859.  

A couple of William's letters to John survive.  His remarks and Kate's messages have a pleasant air of playfulness and affection.  When John's engagement to Ellis was announced – they were engaged within ten days of meeting in late November 1870 and married four months later – William wrote to John's sister Alice
I hope you and Aunt like John’s engagement.  Do you know the young lady?  Where will they live?  Were you surprised?  
In February 1872 when the birth of their first baby was imminent, John's mother wrote to Ellis that Kate Stubbs had enquired after her – 
if the baby has yet arrived that would be so well trained   she hoped you would not forget she would like to be at Redcar again but dreads the journey with three children
The children were Katharine, William and Launcelot, as little Francis had died not many weeks before, aged only two months.  Poor Kate and William had already lost baby William in Navestock and little Helena and Edward at Oxford – details, and a photograph of Helena, Edward and Francis's gravestone at St Sepulchre's can be seen here,  

And when John's first child Thomas Duncan Henlock Stubbs was born, William wrote
I congratulate you very sincerely on your little boy and hope he will live to be a blessing and comfort to you and his mother.  I suppose you have already found out how mistaken your previous views of wives and children were.  I shall be very happy to be godfather, and will put him down in the pedigree as soon as he is baptized.  
That summer William and Kate and the children did come up to Redcar.  In August 1872 John's mother Mary wrote from Boroughbridge
I hope you and the Professors are good neighbours  give my love to them all
William had been made Regius Professor of History at Oxford and the family evidently – and proudly – referred to him as the Professor.  On 10 August he preached at John and Ellis's parish church – Christ Church, Coatham – on the anniversary of its consecration.  
I fear the Professors will now be dull only they will have Canon Haines as neighbors 
wrote Mary on the same day, as Ellis and the baby had gone to visit her family in Scotland and John was off for a few days' shooting.  

By 31 August the Professors were staying in Harrogate, where John's sister Jane Capes and her lively family lived.  (see A large family in 19th century Harrogate).  Mary Stubbs wrote
Aunt Bell went to tea at the Professors on Wednesday  they are much enjoying Harrogate and stay another week  they may come to us for a day next week  they were going last Thursday with a party of eighty to Hackfall given by Mr Gill  his return wedding party.  Jane and [her husband] Henry were going too
On 10 October 1872, Mary wrote to John and Ellis
The Professor is going to Harlow this week to preach at the reopening of Knaresbro Church.  I had a letter from Kate this morng.  She enquired if you are at home again and begs her love to you all    poor little Lancey was very ill at Harrogate but is better again
The 1870s did not continue well for William's family.  It seems that only he and his mother had robust health ...

William's sister Fanny never married, but continued to live with her mother and to be the useful unmarried sister.  She and her mother are described in a letter of 6 October 1873 from John's Aunt Bell – they were "both as cheerful as ever and look very well".  Fanny died at the age of 41 in 1877, and was buried at Ramsgate where her sister Mary Anne and her family lived. 

Mary Anne's wedding to Walter Alfred Hills took place nearly two years after Fanny had told John about the engagement.  They were married by William at Navestock church on 14 December 1858.  She probably met Walter, who was a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, through her brother.  The son of a barrister, he studied law himself and was the author of published poetry.  The Hills lived in Ramsgate and had five children – Laura, Florence, Lilla, Henry and Margaret – but Mary Anne was only 40 and her children aged between 12 and 19 when she died in 1878.  Walter died the following year.

Eliza's husband the Revd Thomas Gwynn was an assistant master at Marlborough College.  In 1869 he and Eliza began their own preparatory school at Marlow Place, a fine country house outside Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire.  A notice in the Reading Mercury of 21 August 1869 advertises that Thomas would receive "twenty-six pupils to prepare for Marlborough College and other Public Schools", with William as one of the references for interested parents.   Letters surviving in John's family reveal that in 1873 they were hit by misfortune.  In October Eliza fell ill with "rheumatic gout in the knee" and wrote to Boroughbridge where her mother and sister Fanny were staying, because she "wished for Fanny’s help".  A week later she was better but both knees were affected.  She continued unwell through November, but then her husband was taken very seriously ill.  On 6 December Mary wrote to John that 
we have rather better accounts of Mr Gwynn but he will be obliged to give up work entirely and the School must be disposed of poor things   they had hoped to go on a few years longer and then take a Curacy but now I do not suppose he can even do that.  
On 13 December she wrote
Poor Mr Gwynn is better they have disposed of the school for one thousand pounds and had saved nearly five thousand so they may live quietly poor things but he is never to attempt taking duty or work at all
In February 1874 they came north to visit the family:
Poor Mr Gwynn is much the same   they stay at Harlow till next month then go to Wem they have got the one thousand for the school
Thomas Gwynn died at Great Marlow in the house of Mr Ransom of West Street at the age of 47 on 3 April 1874, Good Friday.  Mary Stubbs heard the news a couple of days later.  On 11 July she told her son John
we must be at home the last week in August as Eliza Gwynn will come to us then
Eliza died four years later on 6 April 1878, very near the anniversary of her husband’s death, and was buried at Wem.

The years 1877 and 1878 were terrible for the Bishop’s family.  Fanny died on 16 June 1877.  On 5 March 1878 Mary Anne died leaving five teenage children.  A month later Eliza died on 6 April, her husband having died three years earlier, leaving an 18 year old daughter.  On 21 October 1879 Mary Anne's widower Walter Alfred Hills died.  Mary Ann Stubbs had lost one son, all her daughters and both her sons-in-law.  She died on 8 June 1884 – in time to see William become Bishop of Chester.

William's career

In June 1848, William took his B.A. degree with a first in Classics and a third in Mathematics.  According to Hutton, it was not the custom of Christ Church for a servitor to become a Fellow; instead William became a Fellow of Trinity College, where he stayed for two years.  He felt called more to ministry in the church than to work as a college tutor and he was priested in May 1850 and presented to the College living of Navestock in Essex.  

William was at Navestock for 17 years.  He was a diligent and well-loved parish priest – 'I suppose,' he said in later years, ’I knew every toe on every baby in the parish' [p259 of Letters of William Stubbs]

It was during those years that he began his prodigious body of historical work.  He had first begun to find his way about mediaeval documents when he spent holidays in the archives held in the old Courthouse (now the Museum) in Knaresborough, amongst manorial records dating from the reign of Edward III (1327-77).  By the time he was settled in Essex, he had gained an unrivalled knowledge of many original mediaeval sources.  He also took the occasional pupil – Algernon Swinburne was one.  

Swinburne came to William Stubbs at the end of 1859 and given that he's considered one of the Decadent school of poetry and many of his subjects were distinctly shocking (dealing with lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism as the wikipedia entry says), it's rather touching to read his tribute to his old tutor in 1903
It would be impossible for me to say with what cordial and grateful regard I shall always remember him.  His kindness was as exceptional as his other qualities.  I am sure no young man who ever had the honour to be his pupil – however little credit the pupil may have done him – can remember his name without affection as well as admiration
In 1866, William became Regius Professor of History at Oxford.  Robert M Koch writes in his article [p355]
Stubbs was the ideal choice to hold the office, the first Regius Professor to be trained in the discipline of history.  When he rose to give his Inaugural Lecture on 7 February 1867, a lecture delivered with traces of a Yorkshire accent and a mind trained in the German methods of scholarship, Stubbs began a revolution in the study of history in the English speaking world
His career included: being librarian to Archbishop Longley at Lambeth; diocesan inspector of schools in diocese of Rochester; Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford; curator of the Bodleian Library; delegate of the Clarendon Press; Rector of Cholderton, Wilts; Canon Residentiary of St Paul's; Bishop of Chester; and Bishop of Oxford.  The bishopric he really wanted was that of Ripon.

For a true appreciation of William's significance as a pioneering historian and editor, in the preservation and publication of mediaeval chronicles and texts in England, and in his views of what university teaching should be ('the historical teaching of history has been practically left out in favour of the class-getting system of training'), the reader should turn to Robert M Koch's article and to the rather drier, but very detailed, entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.  The text of the DNB entry can be read here.

It concludes with a list of his public honours:
Among the public honours Stubbs received may be mentioned membership of the Berlin, Munich, and Copenhagen academies, corresponding membership of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques of the French Institut, honorary doctorates of Heidelberg, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Dublin, and Oxford, and the rarely conferred Prussian order pour le mérite (1897). Perhaps no recognition pleased Stubbs better than that of his old Oxford contemporaries and brother historians, the friendship of such German scholars as Pauli, Maurer, Waitz, and Liebermann, and his honorary studentship of Christ Church.
William was very ill when he gave the sermon at Queen Victoria's funeral in St George's Chapel, Windsor, in the presence of King Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II.  He died not long afterwards on 22 April 1901 and was buried in the village churchyard of Cuddesdon.  Kate survived him by many years.  She died on 19 August 1942 at the age of 103 and was buried in the vault with William.  She was survived by her daughter Katharine and her sons William, Launcelot, Lawrence, Wilfred and Reginald.

I notice that the obituaries in the newspapers after William's death often commented that he was no orator.  I wonder – given the open, accessible language of the extracts that Hutton gives from the lecture to the working men in Crewe and from a lecture in Reading, and given that the Pall Mall Gazette wrote of the "good, plain sense" of the content of his sermons – how much of this was a matter of style, and whether we nowadays would very much prefer to hear William Stubbs preach rather than any of his famous contemporaries.

Humorous anecdotes about Bishop Stubbs

After William's death, vicars in his diocese paid tribute to him in their Sunday sermons.  These phrases can be found in the reports in the Oxford press:  his freedom from worldly or even intellectual ambitions ... his gentle, retiring character ... a single eye for truth, for righteousness ... his simplicity of character ... with his great learning the Bishop was above all a humble man ... singularly forbearing, and patient of other people's follies ... he did not care to ridicule or chide ... his playful moods ... his perpetual activity was simply marvellous, as well as his sound wisdom and critical acumen.  

Serious obituaries were published in the newspapers – but they couldn't resist humorous stories about him either because, as the Sheffield Independent remarked "this cold seeker after historic truth had a pretty wit".  This is from the Bradford Daily Telegraph
On one occasion, when he was presiding over a meeting of the Diocesan Board whose proceedings were, as he thought, being unnecessarily protracted by a sequence of prosy speakers, he scribbled the following on a piece of paper and passed it to his neighbour.  It plays on the remark of Louis XIV, "L'état, c'est moi" and that he was the diocesan, the bishop:
"I am the state," said Louis the Great,
A parallel case I afford,
For now don't you see, it's the same thing with me,
For I'm the Diocesan bored.
On one occasion the Bishop had presided at the presentation of a pastoral staff  a crozier  to his suffragan, Dr Randall.  When making the presentation he delighted his hearers with an eloquent speech on the uses of the staff and all that it symbolised.  And then wound up by saying, "For my own part I prefer an umbrella."  Some dismay and a lot of laughter followed.  One of the Oxford clergy, preaching after his death, earnestly explained this
the truth of the matter being that to him the useful and the ornamental occupied very much the same place, and both seemed insignificant when measured with the eternal claims of truth and righteousness.
While officiating in a Buckinghamshire church he hesitated before coming down the steps from the altar.  After the service, one of the other clergymen told him he was on the point of coming forward to help as he thought perhaps the hesitation was due to failing eyesight.  "Not that at all, not that at all, thank you,"  replied the Bishop, "merely a matter of sex, you know.  Though I have been a bishop twenty years, I have not yet learnt to manage my skirts properly."

Some of the stories showing his playful, down-to-earth humour may have been embroidered over the years!


A favourite story, which appears in variants, finds the Bishop at a school prize giving – he was apparently excellent on these occasions.  He told his audience of his regret that pressure of work as a bishop meant that he no longer had time for literature.  Indeed, there was only one book he now found time to dip into at all.  (Some variants have him asking if the audience can guess its name – which began with B):
"I need hardly say that the book to which I refer" (a stillness fell on the audience) "is – the Bradshaw [Railway Guide]"
These are from the Yorkshire Evening Post:
An importunate lady, knowing Dr Stubbs's experience of the Holy Land, kept on asking him what place she ought to go to, as she was starting on a trip to Palestine.  "To Jericho, madam." said the Bishop sweetly 
On another occasion his tall hat was damaged as he passed through a somewhat hilarious crowd.  Someone proposed that it should be put on the table for general view.  "I propose," said the Bishop, "that it be passed round." 
Once going to a service at Oxford St Mary's, Dr Stubbs and his chaplain espied a Master of Arts in the procession wearing the hood of a Bachelor of Divinity.  "I call that acting a lie," said the chaplain.  "I should only call it a false hood," said the Bishop. 
An aristocratic don insisted on having his name pronounced in an eccentric manner.  Dr Stubbs talked of great houses – "But I seldom find recognised," he added, "the distinction of the great family of St. Ubbs"



Hard labour & transportation to Tasmania: Northallerton, April 1841

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Each one of these cases brings us a little glimpse of the past.  I think the information might also prove useful to family historians.

These are the details of people brought before the North Riding Sessions in Northallerton in April 1841 at the same time as John Dale, Simpson Adamson and Sarah Adamson.  The story of Dale and the Adamsons can be found in Frederick Cator's trunk goes missing.

You can see that prisoners were still convicted even when they abandoned the item they were trying to steal.  In young Henry Richardson's case, he threw back on the hedge the stockings that he had planned to steal, but when that charge was put together with a previous conviction for felony, it earned him 7 years' transportation.  And of course the felonies are all crimes against property, while the grandfather who tried to rape his little granddaughter was tried for a misdemeanour.

And what was "hard labour"?  The treadmill.  For a description of Northallerton Prison – the "Northallerton Hell" as the Chartists called it – see The Treadmills of Northallerton and the wikipedia description of the Penal treadmill.

From the Yorkshire Gazette, 10 April 1841

Misdemeanant

William Best (71) – charged with assaulting on 7 March at Thirsk Mary Ann Storey "a child only 8 years of age" with intent to commit a rape.  The prisoner is grandfather to the child.  2 years' hard labour

Felonies

Jacob Granger (18) of Dalton – charged with having stolen a sovereign from G Robinson of Dalton, labourer.  1 month's hard labour.

Thomas Adamson (22) and George Stockton (39) – charged with having on 20 January stolen 2 pigs' heads, 8 pigs' feet, 7 hens and 1 cock, from a barn belonging to George Fawcit of Hawsker-cum-Stainsacre, farmer.  Adamson pleaded Guilty, Stockton Not Guilty.  Both 6 months in the House of Correction

John Carrol (24) of Middlesbrough – charged with having on 13 January stolen a shovel from a cart of manure belonging to Robert Barron of Middlesbro', cartman.  Carrol was seen working with the shovel on which was branded "R Barron".  Some time afterwards it was seen that the name was cut off the shovel, which Carrol still kept.  6 weeks' hard labour

Stephen Moody (15) – charged with stealing a sixpence and seven pennies from James Stewart, keeper of a beer-house in Middlesbrough.  Prisoner was caught by Stewart with the money in his hand.  The jury found him guilty but recommended mercy because "We think it is his first offence".  Chairman said he was afraid it was not.  Prisoner had been convicted of rioting in Middlesbrough the year before.  6 months' hard labour and to be once severely whipped.

Harriet Newill Horsley (18) – charged with stealing 9½ yards of printed cotton from Mary Easterby of Whitby.  Mary Easterby had bought some cotton of a travelling man and took it to Margaret Burton's house, who put it in a basket.  Harriet Horsley was there.  A few days afterwards Mary Easterby went to Mrs Burton's house but the cotton was gone.  Horsley told the constable that she had pawned it with James Appleby, where it was indeed found.  In her defence, and to the amusement of the court, she said repeatedly that there were nearly 10 yards, not 9½.  She said Mrs Burton had sent her to do it and had drunk some ale bought with the money.  1 month's hard labour

John Bennison (24) of Fryup – charged with having on 15 March stolen oats belonging to Mr W Keld Agar, farmer of Fryup, for whom he had worked.  Mr Agar had suspected thieving was going on, had kept watch and seen Bennison taking oats from the stable.  2 months' hard labour

Joseph Barker (22) of Great Smeaton – charged with stealing hay from Daniel Hossick Alderson of Linthorpe, gentleman on 24 February.  Alderson was a gentleman farmer living at Marsh House near Linthorpe (Marsh House Farm was demolished in about 1937).  Mr Alderson also occupied a farm at Great Smeaton.  The prisoner had a stable near Mr Alderson's cow-house, one of whose hinds (labourers) had suspected theft and had therefore marked a quantity of his master's hay with a stick. The hay was missed and found in the prisoner's stable, with the stick, and there were bits of hay strewn between the cow-house and the stable.  Prisoner said he'd bought it from a man from Osmotherley.  2 months' hard labour


John Hewison, out on bail – pleaded guilty to having stolen wheat from Mr Gordison, a respectable farmer living near Thirsk.  Mr Gordison had winnowed a quantity of wheat from the barn beside his house and on 8 January he took some wheat to Thirsk market.  One of his servants saw someone hiding a sack among some chaff which was in a stackyard.  The servant found the sack in which was some wheat.  In the evening they saw Hewison take the sack and begin to make off with it.  When challenged by Mr Gordison, he threw it down and ran off.  He was taken into custody a few days later.  1 month's imprisonment.

George Theasby, out on bail – pleaded guilty to stealing £3 19s 9d from Ann Sotheran of Newton-upon-Ouse near Easingwold.  Also charged with stealing £2 15s from her.  He was clerk and confidential servant to Mrs Sotheran, lime merchant at Newton, and the money had been paid to him on her account.  Sentence delayed.

Sarah Wilcox (40) of Rowton – pleaded guilty to stealing 1 iron chain, back band and other articles from William Fawcitt.  6 months' hard labour

John Batty (17) of Leeds – pleaded guilty to stealing 1 pair of boots belonging to Thomas Green of Mansfield, labourer, from a stable at Mansfield.  Batty was a chimney-sweep and had been called in by Green to sweep his chimney.  While the family weren't looking he took the boots from the stable where they were hung up.  1 month's hard labour

William Bradley (19) of Stokesley – charged with stealing a quantity of iron from the mill of James Blacket of Stokesley.  1 month's hard labour

Daniel Barker (52) and Daniel Barker the younger, of Appleton Wiske – charged with stealing 1 great coat, 1 horse's head brush and 1 pair of gloves from Robert Atkinson of Swainby, carrier.  Not Guilty.

Sarah Garth (41) and Jane Garth (13) both of Guisborough – charged with stealing lambs' wool yarn from John Smith of Guisborough, druggist.  Each to serve 1 month's hard labour

Henry Temple (57) of Borrowby – charged with stealing 8 bushels of barley and 2 sacks from Mr Thomas Rose, farmer of Boltby, who had put in his barn on 13 March 6 sacks, each containing 4 bushels of barley, slightly mixed with oats.  Next day 2 of them were gone.  In the road near Temple's house were the marks of a horse's feet matching the shoes of a horse in Temple's stable.  When Constable Little of Thirsk searched the house, he found the barley and also 2 sacks from which the marks had been cut out.  Also charged with having been convicted of a felony in Co Durham.  7 years' transportation
I haven't been able to find a record of Henry Temple arriving in Australia, so I wonder if he died on the voyage out.
Henry Richardson (16), late of Hutton Rudby – charged with stealing a pair of cotton stockings belonging to Thomas Sterling and a cotton shirt belonging to Joseph Coates of Thirsk.  The stockings had been washed and hung on a hedge to dry on 11 February.  A carrier saw Richardson take them off the hedge, roll them up and put them in his pocket but, seeing he was watched, throw them back on the hedge and run away.  Guilty.  Further charged with having been convicted of a felony at the last Sessions.  The prosecution then said that the charge of theft of the shirt would be dropped.  7 years' transportation.
This record in convictrecords.com.au shows that Henry Richardson was taken from the hulks to the convict ship John Brewer, which set sail from Sheerness in December 1841 to Tasmania. We can see from the record in the Digitalpanopticon.org that Henry said he was born in "Stously" workhouse (the old dialectal  pronunciation of Stokesley, often spelt Stowsla) and the details on Foundersandsurvivors.org show that he said he had no relations.   
His conduct record shows that he was 5 feet 5½ inches tall, with a fresh complexion, an oval face, brown hair and hazel eyes.  He could neither read nor write.  He had been convicted for vagrancy and theft, his character was "very bad" and the record shows he was in constant trouble in Tasmania.  It is a sad catalogue of solitary confinement and hard labour.  His record (see Image 164) shows he was again convicted of stealing and was sent to the harsh conditions of the penal settlement on Norfolk Island, where he was found dead on 30 October 1850.
Yorkshire Gazette 5 June 1841
Convicts
On Wednesday morning, the following convicts were removed from York Castle in pursuance of their sentences, to be delivered on board the Fortitude hulk, Chatham.  For life, John Mitchell, and Wm Kenworthy.  For fourteen years, Wm Bean, George Sayers, and Joseph Day.  For ten years, Edwin Pinder, John Moore, John Scofield, and James Naylor.  For seven years, Henry Temple, Henry Richardson, Nathan Hart, Samuel Fletcher and George Taylor
This paper by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Rebecca Kippen is a fascinating study of Sickness and Death on Male and Female Convict Voyages to Australia 


About the picture of Guisborough Priory in an earlier post

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 In a post from 2012 entitled Changing Guisborough market day: 1813, there is a picture of the priory and this is a message to Ben G, who asked in a comment if I had any information on that picture.  

I can't reply direct because messages that come to me from a comment don't have the writer's email!  I need a message to my email via the Contact Me section for that.

The answer, hoping that Ben finds this, is that it's a photograph of an old picture that I inherited and so I'm afraid I don't have any information.  Check one of the 19th century local histories and see if it's there?  Perhaps the Rev Graves' history?

George Bewick in Hutton Rudby

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 If anybody has any information on the origins of the George Bewick who settled in Hutton Rudby in the mid-18th century, do let me know.  

I've been contacted by someone who'd very much like to have more information on the family.

The Bewicks first appear in the Hutton Rudby parish registers in 1760 with the baptism of Susannah, daughter of George, on 16 October 1760.  Then there is the burial of George Bewick on 20 March 1761.  

The relationships of these early Bewicks can't easily be disentangled, as can be seen from my original notes on the family which can be found here.  Women of the Bewick family appear in the baptismal registers of St Mary's Roman Catholic in Crathorne (see The Roman Catholic population of Hutton Rudby, c1780 to 1830)

A later George Bewick plays a major role in the story of the disappearance of William Huntley.  This George was a Wesleyan Methodist linen manufacturer in North End who was at the time Constable of Hutton township.  The newspaper account of the testimony at the trial of the accused murderer of Huntley reports what George Bewick actually said at the time – it is like overhearing a voice from the past.  The story can be found here in Chapter 6. 1830: Suspicions of Murder of my book Remarkable, but still True.

Do contact me using the Contact Me page on the blog if you would like to be contacted yourself – using Comments doesn't give me your email address.

Cholera: glimpses of the pandemics of the 19th century

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In the 19th century, the usual yearly epidemics of frequently fatal infectious diseases in Britain were eclipsed by successive waves of a frightening newcomer: Asiatic Cholera.

It first arrived in 1831.  You can read about it in 'The year of the Cholera', Chapter 11 of Remarkable, but still True: the story of the Revd R J Barlow and Hutton Rudby in the time of the cholera .

There I describe how, in York, Dr Thomas Simpson and the surgeon J P Needham not only treated patients but also investigated the spread of cases.  They both believed cholera was contagious and Needham wrote a monograph on the subject in 1833, after the pandemic had subsided.  Dr Simpson, who thought it was an air-borne disease, published his Observations on the Asiatic Cholera: and Facts regarding the mode of its diffusion after the next pandemic, which happened seventeen years later in 1848.

In 1848, as in 1831, cholera was firmly associated with "nuisances"– sewage and filth – and it was still thought that it was the "unwholesome exhalations" and poisonous vapours from nuisances and decaying vegetable matter that spread the disease.  The theory may have been erroneous but the practice was helpful, because cholera is spread through water contaminated by faeces; this was the beginning of improvements in better drainage and public health.  

Cholera isn't easy to catch but without the correct treatment it is fatal in half the cases.  Nowadays it is treated by rehydration – which has to be begun without delay – and sometimes with antibiotics.  In the 19th century, careful nursing might pull a patient through but unfortunately doctors very often used purges and emetics on their patients, which would only have dehydrated them further.  

Meanwhile, there were plenty of advertisements for patent medicines.

William Hardcastle advertised his "Cure for Asiatic Cholera" and "Grand Preventive of Cholera" extensively in the Northern press.  Born in Sunderland, he had learned his trade as a chemist in Stockton-on-Tees and now had his own shop in Finkle Street – and I'm glad to say the interior of Hardcastle's is preserved at Beamish Open Air Museum (photographs here).  He was a man in his late thirties and evidently very enterprising.

At this time anxiety was all the greater because diarrhoea was thought often to precede cholera – of course there was a good deal of diarrhoea around – and it was believed that stopping diarrhoea would stop cholera developing.  William Hardcastle's advertisements proudly proclaimed that 

having witnessed the great mortality by Cholera which took place in Stockton, 17 years ago, when about 130 persons died in a very short time, Mr H. directed his earnest attention to discover some more efficient Preventive and Cure than were at that time employed, and has succeeded in compounding the "Diarrhoea Powders" and "Cholera Drops", which has rescued many from premature graves.  Their great efficacy has caused them to be so much esteemed in Stockton and the Neighbourhood, that the Proprietor has now made arrangements for extending their sale to other places.

The Drops could be sent by Post to any part of the UK on forwarding 12 Postage Stamps, and they cost a shilling and a penny halfpenny or two shillings per bottle.  I expect the chief ingredient was laudanum.

More useful in preventing cholera were products such as Sir William Burnett's Patent Disinfecting Fluid, which was advertised as "a deodorizing and purifying agent" and was a chloride disinfectant.  

When nothing seemed to help, the only answer was prayer:

York Herald, 22 September 1849

Cholera – The authorities of Middlesbro' have issued a notice to the inhabitants to set apart Friday, the 21st inst., as a day of humiliation and prayer to God to remove that desolating pestilence, the cholera, which has lately been so fatal in that place.

Then a third wave of cholera reached Britain in 1853.  It was at this point that Dr John Snow of London  (1813-58) demonstrated that cholera was a water-borne disease by removing the handle of the Broad Street pump.  He published his findings in his work of 1855, which drew upon the careful observations of Dr Thomas Simpson.  But it took many years for public health authorities to act to ensure a clean water supply and Snow had been long dead when the Chief Medical Officer for Health acknowledged the significance of his work.

We can see that keeping the streets clear of nuisances and encouraging better cleanliness was well established as a priority for the authorities:

York Herald, 15 October 1853

Cholera – On the 24th of Sept last, this devastating disease broke out in one of the low parts of Stockton, and since that period to the present time, 13 deaths have occurred, but all in that particular locality, which is said to be in a very indifferent state of drainage, and where many of the inhabitants are not of the most cleanly description.

In Darlington, the local board of health and the board of guardians held a joint meeting.  They decided to carry out the recommendations of the medical superintending inspector of the General Board of Health to set up a system of house to house visiting as the only effectual safeguard against the spread of the epidemic.  (This might remind us of recent events described in this story on the BBC News website in which Professor John Wright, Head of Bradford Institute for Health Research describes the work of the local test and trace teams, sending testers door to door in neighbourhoods with high rates of infection).  They resolved to employ more scavengers to clear away the nuisances, to set up a more general distribution of disintectants such as chloride of lime, and to supply water for free to the poorer districts, "in order that greater facilities for cleanliness might be afforded".   

And, then as now, there were plenty of conspiracy theories.  In some countries, the swiftness with which the disease spread led the people to think their water supply had been poisoned:

Huddersfield Chronicle, 2 September 1854

News has arrived in Palermo of the appearance of cholera in that city.  The Sicilians, it seems, are under the impression that the cholera is a poison which has been communicated by human means.  The people have surrounded the Governor's palace, and shouted "We will not have the cholera here!"  The Lord Lieutenant immediately issued orders prohibiting the people to speak of poison.  The city is in a very excited state.

In 1865 the cholera returned yet again to Britain.  

It reached Yarm on 8 October 1866 and when doctors Robert and Christopher Young, the town's medical officers, made their report on 13 November, they hoped they had seen the back of it.  There had been 23 cases of cholera, 12 of which were fatal, and 5 cases "approaching cholera", of which 2 were fatal. In the same period they had seen 87 cases of diarrhoea.  

A few days before cholera came to Yarm, it had already reached Hutton Rudby and Potto – but luckily not with the virulence of the 1832 outbreak, when there were 45 cases and 23 deaths at the east end of the village green:

York Herald, 6 October 1866

The Cholera – We regret to state that a fatal case of Asiatic cholera has just occurred at the small rustic hamlet of Potto, in the parish of Whorlton, near Stokesley.  Elizabeth Mary Cawthorn, the wife of a brickmaker, was attacked on Saturday afternoon last, and was visited the same night by Mr A A Boyle, assistant to Mr J H Handyside, surgeon, Stokesley, and he at once perceived that she was prostrated by a malignant attack of cholera.  Mr Handyside attended on the following morning, and Mr Boyle was present when she died on Sunday night, medical skill being of no avail.

Richmond & Ripon Chronicle, 13 October 1866

Thompson - On the 6th inst., at Hutton Rudby, Cleveland, of Asiatic cholera, aged 60 years, Mr George Thompson, brickmaker

Nearly twenty years and many cholera deaths later, people across the world were electrified to hear that the German scientist Dr Robert Koch and his team had discovered the "cholera germ".  

Dr Koch had carried out his researches in India.  This fact spurred Professor Edwin Ray Lankester (1847-1929) to write a trenchant criticism of the British government's approach to scientific research that appeared in, among other papers, the Pall Mall Gazette of 2 November 1883.  He was the son of Edwin Lankester (1814-74), surgeon, naturalist, the first public analyst in Britain, the first medically qualified coroner for Central Middlesex, a man who made a major contribution to the control of cholera in London.  So his son had, in a way, a family interest in the fight against the disease.  

He deplored the fact that
when a dire disease broke out in a country occupied by British troops, and, for the time being, controlled by the English Government, no steps were taken by that Government to initiate a thorough study of the disease in the light of modern science, but that, on the other hand, independent Commissions were sent to the plague-stricken country by the Governments of France and Germany for the express purpose of making the investigations which the English Government had omitted to set on foot.
The French and German scientists were from 
the State-supported laboratory of M Pasteur; they were his assistants and pupils.  The German Commissioners came from the Imperial Sanitary Institute of Berlin, the workers in which are drawn from the twenty-two State-supported laboratories of pathology which are scattered throughout the German Empire
Britain should be following the examples of France and Germany in training scientists and funding research bodies and laboratories like those in France and Germany.

By July 1884 the "discoverer of the cholera germ" Dr Robert Koch was known to everyone and admired by all.  The Pall Mall Gazette of 11 July 1884 noted that "in the last five years he has succeeded in identifying the germs of cattle disease, of consumption, and of cholera"– he was the benefactor of humanity.

Two years later, the Sanitary Congress – the annual meeting of the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain, founded in 1876 – was held in the Museum in York (now the Yorkshire Museum).  

The Leeds Mercury of 25 September 1886 carried a report of the proceedings.  The president, Mr William Whitaker, read a paper about water-supply in which he said two of the chief problems in sanitary matters were getting good water and getting rid of bad water.  Percy F Frankland, associate of the Royal School of Mines, spoke on the filtration of water.  They had known for many years that the real danger in sewage-contaminated water lay not in the organic matter to be found by analysis but in "the presence of minute living organisms, capable of producing zymotic disease".  Largely thanks to the genius of Robert Koch they now had "beautiful methods of bacteriological investigation" and this had enabled the great advance made in water purification.  Surgeon-Major Pringle described his system of collecting and storing rain and drinking water. Another debate clearly centred on the role of government.  Enforcement or education?  The West Riding County Surveyor, J Vickers Edwards, took what might now be called the libertarian approach to achieving "a healthy house", arguing that sanitary science would not progress through the actions of local authorities nor by legislation, but by educating people to act for themselves.  

Over the next fifty years the Sanitary Institute was to become the leading public health organisation in the UK, with a world-wide reputation.  It is now the Royal Society for Public Health.

Public health reform was truly on its way.

Runswick: a tale of landslips – and the cholera of 1866

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The cliffside village of Runswick Bay 
[Photograph by mattbuck, reproduced under Creative Commons licence]
 
Runswick (the 'w' in the name is silent) lies on the coast a few miles north of Whitby.  Much loved for holidays and days at the seaside, to our sight it offers a charming view of red-roofed cottages nestling under the cliffs of a sandy bay.  But it was only after public taste changed with the Romantic Movement that it began to be considered pretty – and its existence, and the lives of its inhabitants, were for centuries very precarious, not just because of the dangers of the sea but also from the unstable shale cliffs ...  


Here we have the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., (1658-1725) on a northern journey in the last years of the reign of Charles II – the sight of moorland in November is not one to cheer his heart, and his account reminds us that Roseberry Topping had a long while to go before it would acquire its famous profile:

Mon 13 November 1682

Morning up pretty early; ferried over the river at Stockton, thence to Acklam, where Sir William Hustler has a pretty seat, thence through a blind cross-road, to Marton, a church-town, and thence over the bad moors to Gisborough, famous for a stately abbey ... 

thence over the rotten Moors for many miles without anything observable; the sea at a small distance upon the left; and upon the right hand, hills, whereof a round one, called Roseberry Topping, is a mark for sailors; within a few miles of Whitby, we passed not far from Runswick, the place where, near by the sea-side, stood a little village of six or ten houses the last spring, of which I find from credible persons, the report we had of its being swallowed up of the earth, too true, though blessed be God, all the inhabitants were saved, they happening to be at a kind of wake (as the old manner is) at the house of a person immediately deceased, where observing the earth to crack and gape, made all their escape; shortly after which, the chinks grew suddenly wide, and the houses fell into the gulf. 

On the right hand we left Moulgrave [Mulgrave] Castle, that ancient fabric, and passed through Lith [Lythe], a pretty country town; thence over the Sands to Whitby. [1]

I think the original little village of Runswick stood a little to the north of the village today, which is described here by the Revd John Graves in his History of Cleveland (1808), who quotes from the 18th century naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant [2]

Runswick ... is situated near the sea, and consists of a few scattered huts, inhabited by fishermen, and grouped irregularly together on the declivity of a steep and rugged rock; the projecting top of which juts forward in an awful manner and threatens at some future period to overwhelm the inhabitants.  The situation of the place is singular and must excite the curiosity of strangers; when in winding along the narrow paths between the houses,  they may on one side enter the door of one dwelling, and from thence look down the chimney of another in front.  Pennant observes that, 

"the houses here make a grotesque appearance, scattered over the face of a steep cliff in a very strange manner, and fill every projecting ledge one above another, in the same manner as those of the peasants in the rocky parts of China."  

The houses are sheltered on the north and north-west, and command a pleasing prospect into the bay, which is upwards of a mile in extent, – with Kettleness alum-works about a mile to the north-east.  The lower part of the town is almost choaked with sand, which fills up every passage; and in wet weather is dirty and unpleasant.

The Revd Graves was rather behind the times – for sensibilities formed by the Romantic Movement, Runswick could only be described as picturesque.  By the 1830s the village was becoming beloved of artists and tourists.  Some enterprising person, seeing commercial possibilities, decided to build a hotel at the Bank Top, equipped with all mod. cons. including a Water Closet.  

I wonder if it was completed on the generous scale originally intended and if it was initially as successful as predicted in the advertisement below; in the early years it changed hands with some frequency.  In the early 1860s it was run by a Mr Ivison, but in 1865 Mrs Wardale took it over.  It evidently looked an attractive prospect to people coming from outside because by the time of the 1871 census, George Marshall from Nottingham had taken it on.  He and his family had been in Felixkirk near Thirsk three years earlier – that was where his little daughter had been born.  By 1877 the Marshalls had gone and William Brown from Loftus had the hotel; he was still there in 1891.  

In the spring of 1860 the still unfinished hotel was up for sale:

Yorkshire Gazette, 21 April 1860 
All that New, Commodious, and Delightfully-situated Inn, known as the Albert Hotel, situate at Runswick Bank Top, in the Parish of Hinderwell, in the County of York, lately occupied by Jonathan Ramshaw.  This Property comprises a good Front Kitchen, Back Kitchen, Wash-House, Roomy Bar, Smoke Room, Commercial Room, Private Rooms, an excellent suite of Bed Rooms, Water Closet, Attics, Coach-house, Stabling, and all other suitable Out-Offices. 

Although the Premises are not entirely completed, they are in such an advanced stage that, with the bright prospect of an increasing Business, a Purchaser may confidently rely on his Purchase-Money with any small additional outlay being amply secured.

This is one of Mrs Wardale's advertisements:

Whitby Gazette 3 November 1866

The Sheffield (late Albert) Hotel, Runswick Bank Top 

Is delightfully situated, amidst the most romantic scenery of the Yorkshire Coast, and is fitted up with every comfort for the reception of Tourists and Visitors.  It is modern and very commodious, and the utmost attention and quiet may be relied upon.  Mrs Wardale, Proprietress.

The hotel was highly praised by one J.G., in an account in the Yorkshire Gazette of 14 July 1866 of the walking holiday he had taken along the coast:

as the accommodation is good and the charges moderate, it is desirable to remind the future tourists that there did not appear to be a house on the coast at which to stay where cleanliness, and civility, and comfort, and cheapness were to be had in combination so well as in this house.  Mrs Wardell is a widow, a middle-aged person, and has, so she said, lived in her early days with some of the aristocratic families in the west end of London.  The house was taken by her last year.  Persons desirous of enjoying the sea and the beautiful and romantic scenery in and around this locality cannot do better than secure accommodation here.

On the cliffside below the new hotel lay the thatched roofs of the village – the "town of Runswick" as the census enumerator described it in 1861 when he listed its inhabitants.  In 97 cottages, 430 people were living and there were four cottages standing empty.  The little low cottages would have blended into the cliff face, as they were all thatched (ling was used for thatching in moorland districts).  One thatched house has survived, the one that used to be occupied by the coastguard.

Roughly half of the population was aged 23 years and younger, which isn't surprising because it's only in recent years that the UK median age has risen to 40½.  (In 1911, it was 25 and it was 34 in 1975).  So Runswick was a place with many children.  Of the 430 people there, just 46 were aged 60 and over – and they included a 90 year old, who was the blind uncle of one of the fishermen.  

Like Staithes, further up the coast, Runswick was a self-contained and inter-related community with its own customs, superstitions and habits.  The name Calvert was by far the most the common surname in the village in 1861, followed by Patton, Taylor, Hutton, Beswick and Clark.  Its needs were served by a grocer & draper, four dressmakers and a tailor, two innkeepers, two joiners, three blacksmiths, and a painter who had been born in Chester.  

The vast majority of the population had been born in Runswick and the hundred or so people born outside the village were mostly from further along the coast or a little way inland, and some of those may have had family ties to the place.  The coastguards were appointed from outside the area – how could a local be trusted to deal with smugglers? – and in 1861 he was from Sheffield.  Of the Runswick-born who had left their birthplace, most had not gone many miles or had left for the towns of Stockton, Middlesbrough or Hartlepool.  And of course there were the Runswick-born men who were at sea.

The people of Runswick knew all too well the dangers of the sea.  In 1866, 650 lives were lost on average from shipwreck on the shores of the United Kingdom.  The likelihood of raising the funds for a lifeboat station at Runswick had looked remote – but then came an amazing offer from the people of Sheffield, who raised the money to donate a boat to the village.  It only remained to raise the money locally for its upkeep and for a boat house.  And so, in May 1866, 'The Sheffield' arrived in Whitby by train (carried for free by the railway companies) and was towed by the steamboat 'Rover' to its new home.  Mrs Wardale must have renamed her hotel in its honour.

The people of Runswick were tough and resilient.  For generations the men had been fishermen – at Runswick it was mainly the inshore fishery – and the women played a crucial role alongside them.  They had a hard life.  They got the bait, cleaned and baited the long lines, mended the nets, filleted the fish and packed it in salt.  They launched and hauled the cobles ashore and some of them carried heavy baskets of the catch to sell in outlying villages rather than to a dealer.  They fetched water from the beck and bread from the communal bakehouse, looked after the house and children and knitted for the family.  The children lent a hand alongside them.  

In 1861 there were 50 fishermen in the village and 5 men who described themselves as mariners, and they were all born in Runswick.  But alongside the fishing, mining – another dangerous occupation – was growing in importance and the men working in the mines were mostly from outside. 

There were ironstone mines a little way up the coast at Port Mulgrave.  At Kettleness, at the southern end of the bay, there were alum works which were still operating in the first part of 1866 but would close before long [3].  The jet works at Kettleness were certainly in operation only a few years before the 1861 census, because it was there in 1854 that a labourer at the jet works, Dalton Taylor, accidentally fell from the top of the cliff on to a piece of broken rock and was killed on the spot.  In 1861, 16 men worked in the ironstone mines and only one of them was born in Runswick.  Of the 18 men who worked as labourers, either at Port Mulgrave or Kettleness, 10 were Runswick-born men.

The sea, the mines, the precarious nature of Runswick's hold on the cliff edge – it isn't surprising to find that spiritual needs were not ignored.  As in Staithes, the villagers' independence of mind (and the Church of England's history of ignoring them) can be seen in their strong Nonconformism.  A Congregational Chapel was built in 1829, which had a Sunday School and a Day School – perhaps the 40 year old schoolmistress Miss Mary Agar from Danby, who lodged in the village in 1861, was the teacher there [4].  In 1854, a Primitive Methodist chapel was built.  The sand and lime together with 140 loads of stone had been carried to the site on the heads of the women of the village – which was how they carried heavy baskets of fish, mussels and baited lines, their heads protected by their distinctive bonnets – while the men had carted the heavier stone in handbarrows.  It was too steep for any horse and cart [5].  It became known as the High Chapel while the Congregational Chapel was the Low Chapel.

And it was among these strong and determined people that, in November 1866, an outbreak of cholera led to deaths – and then to a damning report on the state of the village.

So what is cholera and how can it have come to Runswick?  

It's a bacterial disease that causes vomiting and diarrhoea.  It doesn't transmit easily but the violent diarrhoea causes rapid dehydration and it's fatal, when untreated, in half the cases.  

It is transmitted in the faeces of an infected person and the usual way of catching it is in contaminated water.  Unfortunately, the massive diarrhoea – up to a fifth of the body weight might be lost in one day – ends in the classic diagnostic sign of the grey liquid known as "rice water stools".  The stools are colourless and odourless and so the patient's bedlinen – and the hands of the carers – can be soiled without anyone noticing.  And as the bacterium can survive on food – up to five days in meat, milk and cheese and up to sixteen days in apples – the disease can spread without anyone realising it.  (For graphic descriptions of the progress of the disease in patients by 19th century doctors and an account of how it was spread in Hutton Rudby in 1832, see here in Chapter 11. 1832: The Year of the Cholera.

As in Hutton Rudby, the cholera must have been brought to Runswick by someone who was infectious – they must have been away at sea, for work or on a visit.  And, again as in Hutton Rudby, it must have spread from that first patient into the community through the water or on food.

Such was the fame of Runswick that the outbreak was described at length in the Yorkshire Gazette on Saturday 10 November:

Outbreak of Asiatic Cholera at Runswick – 
We regret to record four very virulent cases of Asiatic cholera at the village of Runswick, all of which terminated fatally in a few hours.  Runswick is a picturesque fishing village on the North Yorkshire Coast, about one mile from Staithes, and nine from Whitby.  
Its situation is both curious and delightful, and open as it is to the refreshing sea breezes, one might have thought it was exempt from those unwholesome influences which so often produce disease.  The houses are built on the side of the over-hanging cliff, and although the situation is open, exposed, and breezy, yet the place has no system of drainage.  It is in a most dirty condition, and as there is not a scavenger the accumulation of filth and other offensive matter must be highly injurious to health.  

Hitherto, no cases of cholera have occurred nearer than Stockton and Hartlepool, which are about 20 miles from Runswick by sea.  The first case occurred on Friday, when Mrs Clark, wife of Mr Andrew Clark, jun., fisherman, was attacked with such severity that although the best medical attendance was promptly summoned from Hinderwell, she died at the end of 15 hours from the commencement of the attack.  Miss Mary Steward, attacked on the same day, also succumbed to the disease in a few hours, and both were interred in the Hinderwell church yard on Saturday. 

(They were 47-year-old wife and mother Mrs Sarah Ann Clark and 46-year-old Miss Mary Stewart.  They were buried on Saturday 3 November.  Mary Stewart's mother did not long survive her; she was buried eighteen days later aged 73)

On Saturday, other two fatal cases occurred, the first being that of George Calvert, an aged fisherman, and the other a young man named John Patton, a miner, who was first attacked about five o'clock on Saturday afternoon, and expired at nine the same evening.  The last two persons were also interred together at Hinderwell on Sunday afternoon. 

(George Calvert was a 64 year old widower.  John Patton was the 20 year old son of Cuthbert Patton, fisherman, and his wife Mary Ann, who was from Essex.)

This melancholy visitation has produced a feeling of sadness and anxiety in the district.  We hear that another two persons have been attacked, but we hope that the pestilence will soon be arrested; and with this end in view, the poor law guardians are taking prompt measures.  On Monday afternoon two deaths occurred, Robt. Taylor, an old fisherman of 70, and his sister, Mary Bell, aged 75.  

Several cases are still under medical treatment, but there has not been a death since Monday.  The guardians have appointed Drs Taylorson and Yeoman to inspect Runswick.  Poor Patten, whose death is recorded above, died under very affecting circumstances.  Hinderwell church yard, in which the bodies were interred, is a mile from Runswick, and Patten helped to carry the bodies of the first two victims to the epidemic to their last resting place.  He returned to his house about five o'clock on Saturday afternoon, and at nine the same evening he was a corpse, and the following day his remains were laid with those he had helped to carry on the previous day.

In a matter of four days, the villagers will have walked, following the ancient tradition, behind six coffins to Hinderwell churchyard.  Nor was the outbreak over.  On Saturday 17 November, the Whitby Gazette reported that there had been no fresh cases but that Mrs Taylor, the 31 year old wife of D. Taylor, fisherman, "of whose recovery hopes were last week entertained", had died.  She was buried on 13 November.

This was Elizabeth, wife of Dalton Taylor.  She was the mother of two children, Robinson and Ann Elizabeth, by her first marriage to Joseph Patton and with Dalton Taylor she had Dalton, Dinah and Elizabeth.  When their mother died, her eldest child was 11 and the youngest was just 2.  The Whitby Gazette reported that two children – it doesn't say if they were Elizabeth's – had, however, recovered.

The same day, the newspaper carried the report of the weekly meeting of the Poor Law Guardians, which had taken place on the previous Saturday.  Dr Taylerson read out a report of the inspection that he and Dr Clarkson had made, Dr Yeoman being unable to go.  

The medical men had clearly been completely shocked by what they found.  They give a vivid description of the village – its thatched roofs, the dilapidated cottages, the number of pigs, the human excrement in the paths and passageways.

We can see from their report that they had not caught up with the work of Dr John Snow in the last cholera pandemic, in which he showed the link with contaminated water, and that they believed that the infection came from the noxious gases produced by the rotting vegetation and animal waste to be found in this insanitary village.  They tested the water supply but Dr Robert Koch had not yet identified the cholera bacterium and so the test would tell them nothing useful ...  Here is their report from the Whitby Gazette:

We visited Runswick on Thursday last, with the double object of ascertaining the cause of the late outbreak of cholera there and of devising the means necessary for avoiding future invasions. 
We found the place in a most deplorable condition – beggaring description – a monster group of midden steads.  It was impossible to make a selection of any part for favourable remark.  Our astonishment was not at the outbreak of cholera, but rather at its limited range, and the comparative exemption of the villagers from continual sickness. 
Were fevers of every kind things to be desired, no better means could have been devised for securing a never-ending succession of them than is now practised by the natives. 
Every cottage seems to have its pig, and every pig its own midden.  The house where the last fatal case occurred had two – one in front and one at the end, – and the thatch of the roof on the sea side was on a level with the soil behind it. 
Scarcely a house in the place was spouted, and the waterfall went as it would or could. 
The only scavenger is the rain, and this in consequence of the numberless inequalities of the spot tends to make confusion worse confounded with the midden steads and the make-shift drains which are all choked up. 
There are even no dogs in the place to supplement the labours of the scavenger – at least none were to be seen. 
Many houses are going to decay without any attempt being made either to arrest or expedite the process, and these being mostly thatched materially augment the amount of decaying vegetable matter going on on all sides. 
The people generally seem to have no idea of the value of sanitary precautions. 
The quantity of human excrement of children and adults, everywhere interrupting the passage of visitors, too truly attested the scantiness of privy accommodation. 
The inspector states that there are three privies in the place.  We saw none, and our belief is that were they provided they would not be used.  As the mode of speech and manner of life, so the traditions of the Runswick people are immutable. 
The numberless causes of offence everywhere to be found are not of yesterday.  The place is saturated with the neglects of generations. 
The water supply, as far as we were able to make out on the spot, is unexceptionable. A specimen from each source was brought to Whitby for further examination.  The sources are so circumstanced as to be beyond the possibility of contamination or pollution. 
The cause of the outbreak appears to have been a strong easterly wind acting on the general insanitary condition of the place.  The wind carrying up in two lines converging to a point all the noxious gases emanating from a long succession of midden steads.  On the change of the wind the disorder was arrested, and no new cases are reported. 
Should the wind return in the same direction, and the other conditions remain, a fresh outbreak is not unlikely. 
It is only proper to state that the ages of the last three sufferers averaged 73 years, and that one had been ill for at least a week before his death, the cause of which, but for this outbreak, would doubtless have been assigned to diarrhoea. 
As regards the means to be adopted to prevent similar outbreaks:- 
First may be mentioned a thorough cleansing of the whole village, by the removal of all decaying and decomposed material and the after saturation of the cleansed depots with suitable disinfectants. 
The doing away with the innumerable middensteads, and tolerating one or two in suitable situations, under responsible and strict control. 
The appointment of a paid scavenger, and seeing that he does his duty. 
House to house visitation by the local medical men, the ministers of religion, and other influential persons. 
Lime-washing the interior of the cottages, insisting on efficient ventilation, and generally advising and instructing the people on sanitary conditions. 
The pulling down of ruinous cottages, and levelling the surface. 
A regular system of drainage (mostly open) under professional advice. 
Some settled arrangement with the farmers for the periodical removal of all the offal of the place.

And last, but not least, for the time being a more liberal mode of dealing with the aged and sick poor, notwithstanding their being either the real or the imaginary owners of the ricketty tenements they may occupy.

I wonder how the inhabitants took to all of this and whether they accepted the criticism, cleaning and demolition with grumbling rather than obstruction and defiance.  

Runswick Bay, North Yorkshire by Frederick William Jackson.  
Photo credit: Gallery Oldham, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
  


The great landslip of early 1873 & the threatened collapse of 1900

Seven years after the cholera outbreak, excessive rainfall in the winter of 1872 to 1873 caused a major landslip.  We find the details in the report of a fatal accident and accounts of events at the two chapels:

Bradford Observer, 1 February 1873 
The Late Landslip near Whitby – Two men killed – 

A number of men were engaged on Friday in repairing a bakehouse, which had been damaged by the recent landslip at Runswick, near Whitby, and while engaged in taking the soil out of the oven the arch fell in, killing two men named John George Bell and James Calvert.  William Jowsey, the owner of the bakehouse, was injured, but not very seriously, as was also another man named Zebedee Patten

Northern Echo, 8 February 1873 
Primitive Methodist Chapel at Runswick

The trustees of the Primitive Methodist Chapel, Runswick, acknowledge the receipt of £10 from Mr H Pease, and of £5 from Mr A Pease, toward the repair of the chapel injured by the late landslip.  These generous gifts will enable the trustees to put in a stone also.

Whitby Gazette, 14 June 1873 
Congregational Chapel - 
... Our readers will have seen from our columns that during the late excessively wet season, Runswick has seriously suffered.  In consequence of a great landslip many houses were totally destroyed, and both the chapels were very much damaged, and it was feared by many that the whole village would slide into the sea.  

These fears have abated, the village has stayed its downward course, and the fishermen hope to spend many years still in their curious dwellings, being very loth to leave the bower of their ancestors ...

In 1900, a little more than 25 years later, another major landslip looked very likely.  

In the 1880s an artists' colony [6] had become an established feature of Runswick, with some artists coming for the summer – many stayed in the Sheffield Hotel – while others lived there all year round.  By this time, industrialisation had made huge changes to life in towns and cities, to people's expectations and outlook.  It was the fisherfolk themselves who drew the artists to Runswick and Staithes, not simply the picturesque.  There was an intense desire to capture a disappearing way of life, one that was threatened by steam trawlers and overfishing, and that seemed, as we might say now, more authentic than the new ways of the late 19th century.  

Consequently, when the village was threatened again in early 1900, the artists – who were doing very nicely exhibiting and selling their work in London and the cities, and who had become very much a part of Runswick life – were particularly asked for financial help.  On 19 March 1900, the Shields Daily Gazette picked up the story from the North-Eastern Gazette and ran it under an eye-catching headline

The Village Doomed

The old-fashioned and romantic village of Runswick, near Whitby, situate on the steep sides of a cliff facing the sea at the bay of that name, is (says the North-Eastern Gazette) doomed to destruction unless something can be done to relieve it.   
For more than a fortnight past a landslip has been developing which threatens to let down the whole of the north side of the village, including the Fishermen's Institute.  Large and ominous fissures, reaching in two cases to the doors of the houses, have shown themselves, and the cart road to the beach has already become impassable.  

It is apparent that if the village is to be saved from wreck and ruin a strong sea-wall must be built, and it is estimated that it will cost £500.  The villagers have collected £68 amongst themselves, but this is the extent of their resources, and an appeal has been issued to the artists and others to whom Runswick Bay has formed a happy hunting ground, for subscriptions to prevent its complete demolition.

And the latest news?  In 2018 an award-winning coastal defence scheme was carried out to give 100 years of improved protection and to protect and enhance the ecological habitat – read here about the creation of more than 100 rock pools and look here for eye-catching photos of the construction of the new defences.

Notes

[1]  Ralph ThoresbyThe Diary of Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S.; Author of the Topography of Leeds (1677-1724) Now first published from the original manuscript by the Rev Joseph Hunter, F.S.A. (1830) can be found here, on the website of the Thoresby Society

[2] Thomas Pennant (1726-98), naturalist and antiquarian 

[3]  There is a really good piece on alum mining here on the website of East Cleveland's Industrial Heartland.  I have seen conflicting dates for the closure of the Kettleness alum mine.  Some sources say 1866 but The Archaeology Data Service website gives the date as 1871.

[4]  The Congregational Chapel (now a private house)

This is the full article in the Whitby Gazette giving the history of the Congregational Chapel from its founding by members of the Silver Street Church in Whitby, and including the account of the landslip of 1873

Whitby Gazette, 14 June 1873 
Congregational Chapel -  
For nearly fifty years past, the Congregationalists have had a church in this village, and during that period besides the ordinary preaching of the gospel, a Sunday and Day School has been carried on by them.  The work was originally commenced by members of the Silver Street Church, Whitby.  Many of those who founded the church, however, have long since entered into their rest, but the few who survive feel a warm attachment to the place.  For many years preachers were regularly sent out from the church at Whitby, and it is very gratifying to know, that among the old fishermen and their wives the survivors of those men are still held in the highest esteem.  The church afterwards became a branch station in connection with Staithes, and for a lengthened period the venerable and much respected pastor, Rev W Mitchell, ministered unto them in Divine things.  In the Spring of the present year the church at Staithes voluntarily sought to cease its connection with Runswick in order to open a new mission nearer home, and arrangements having been completed Runswick has become a branch of Mickleby. 
Our readers will have seen from our columns that during the late excessively wet season, Runswick has seriously suffered.  In consequence of a great landslip many houses were totally destroyed, and both the chapels were very much damaged, and it was feared by many that the whole village would slide into the sea.   
These fears have abated, the village has stayed its downward course, and the fishermen hope to spend many years still in their curious dwellings, being very loth to leave the bower of their ancestors.    

During the last weeks the chapel has undergone thorough repair, and on Tuesday, the 3rd inst., special services were held when the Rev R Balgarnie, of Scarborough, preached afternoon and evening.  The Rev J Holroyd, led the devotions of the congregation, and Mr Balgarnie preached in his usually earnest and impressive manner.  The attendance was large, the chapel being crowded.  The collections and proceeds of public tea were such as to enable the committee to defray the expenses they have incurred.

[5]  the Primitive Methodist chapel (now a holiday rental)

Runswick, like Staithes, wasn't visited in the 1820s by the Primitive Methodist preacher William Clowes and it was only some 30 years later that the lively worship of the Primitive Methodists arrived and won enthusiastic allegiance, with the women of Runswick carrying sand, lime and stone on their heads for the building of the new chapel.

See the My Primitive Methodists website for details of the article in the Primitive Methodist magazine of June 1854 reporting the opening of Runswick Primitive Methodist chapel in the Whitby circuit.  It was described as a "plain but comfortable and substantial" building with a Welsh slate roof and measuring 30 feet by 24 feet and could hold 72 worshippers.  "The opening services started on Friday April 7th 1854 and preachers included Mr Southron, Mr Elstob, Daniel Gates, and Mr Venis of Fryup.  On the following Monday a tea meeting for 150 persons was held."

Primitive, Wesleyan and United Methodism merged in 1932.

[6]  The artists' colony at Runswick is fully described in Artists' Colonies in Staithes and Runswick Bay c1880-1914 by Robert Slater, March 2010.  It is packed with fascinating details, not just of the artists involved, but also of the lives of the local people – their work, superstitions, the effects of change on the villages from the increasing use of steam-powered trawlers, the reduction in fish stocks, the railways, the rise of tourism ... Tourism and visitors became increasingly important to the local economy – visitors were buying houses in Runswick by 1907.  

Examples of the artists' work can be found by looking for paintings by eg. Frederick William Jackson or by Ralph Hedley.  (There is more on Hedley in this post Allan Bowes Wilson of Hutton Rudby & the artist Ralph Hedley).  The Art UK website is a good place to start.

[I normally justify the text, but it won't let me!]

The Vassal Singers in Nunthorpe before the First World War

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This was written many years ago by Kay Hill (1905-2005).  I think it must have appeared in some publication but I don't know which.  She lived with her parents and two elder brothers at Red Croft (now 113 Guisborough Road) in the little hamlet called Nunthorpe Station.

Katharine Stubbs c1914

The Vassal Singers

They were known throughout the North Riding as the Vassal Singers, although they chanted rather than sang, and learned writers spelled the word "wassail".

They came every November, a group of boys and girls, aged between five and fifteen years old, carrying a deep, oblong, cardboard box containing a doll tucked up in bed.

I saw them first when I was six years old and never forgot the doll.  She had a china face and blue staring eyes that never closed.  Her head was on a pillow and her body covered with a counterpane of white cotton sprinkled with faded flowers, probably a scrap of material from a well-washed summer frock.

They chanted, rather than sang, on one note in our broad, delightful North Riding dialect that so clearly reflects a Scandinavian origin.  The verse, as my mother taught it to me afterwards, went, as I remember, something like this:

God bless the Maister of this hoose
And the Mistress alsaw.
And all the pretty childer
As round your table gaw.
And all your kith and kindred
As dwells both far and near.
We wish you a Merry Kissimuss
And a Happy New Year.

We gave them pennies and biscuits, cakes and apples.  My mother told me I must always keep up the custom, as she had heard that townspeople coming into the village were turning them away unkindly, believing them to be carol singers arriving far too early, just a nuisance.

They never came again after the First World War and I am told that the name of the leader, a shy, gangling boy, is alongside that of my brother on the village War Memorial.

I was enchanted by the word "Kissimuss" and taught it to my brothers when they came home from school for Christmas, until it became a family word that I am quite capable of using to this day.

I wish you a Merry Kissimuss and a Happy New Year.

.............


Walk the Cleveland Way – in 1866

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An ideal trip back in time for anyone planning to walk the Cleveland Way when lockdown is over, or for people who know it well.  Actually, this isn't actually the whole Cleveland Way but only a section of it.  It's an account written in 1866 of a two day walking holiday along the coast from the newly-built and select resort of Saltburn by the Sea to the ancient town of Whitby.  The writer, who styles himself J.G. (in those days, newspaper articles were anonymous), is drawn by the prospect of a hearty walk and the scenery, but it's the industry and geology that really capture his attention:

Yorkshire Gazette, 14 July 1866

A visit to the Sea Cliffs of Cleveland

The Yorkshire sea coast is upwards of 100 miles in extent, and is, more or less, interesting to the tourist.  The coast of the East Riding begins at Spurn Head, and ends near Filey, and that of the North Riding from near Filey to the Tees mouth, near Redcar.  Desirous of spending a couple of days on the sea coast, and of seeing some of the ironstone districts of Cleveland, about which much has been said, we happened to look into a little book styled North Yorkshire by John Gilbert Baker, lately published, and at page 148 it is stated 

Now that the railway runs to Saltburn on the one side, and to Whitby on the other, this grand sweep of craggy coast is brought within the range of easy access to tourists, and it is to be expected that it will be more visited, and become better known than it has been.

The tide is often inconvenient for paying a visit to the crags from below, and to skirt their upper edge necessitates 

a good deal of rough scrambling, but to those who are able to make it, and who care for either magnificent scenery or geology, the walk between Saltburn and Whitby will richly repay the exertion.

Here is the very tract of country mapped out for a two days' trip, embracing in its range everything that is requisite for healthy exertion and for a general knowledge of the ironstone strata of the Cleveland hills.

The train which left York at 6 a.m. arrived at Saltburn at 9.30 on Tuesday, the 26th of June.  The Zetland Hotel, not far from the station, was built by the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company at a cost of £30,000, and on each side, with a southern front, are built rows of handsome lodging houses and shops and detached villas.  On the sands were ten bathing machines, and besides the usual comforts of a popular sea-bathing town, there is the two mile romantic walk of Skelton Glen, the entrance to which is opposite the beautiful range of lodging houses.

Zetland Hotel today
by Donnylad, licensed by CC BY-SA 2.0

Enchanting as everything appeared we had no time to linger, so we began our trip from the beach and walked onward to Huntcliff, on the way to Whitby.  This cliff rises to an elevation of 360 feet, upon which the men at the ironworks of Mr Morrison are engaged in removing the earth which overlie the ironstone, and filling trucks with the ironstone and taking it away on iron rails by an engine to a depot, from whence it is taken by rails to Middlesbro' to the blasting furnaces.  Whilst some part of the mining had been done by gunpowder explosion, we saw some of the men working at the extreme edge of the cliff removing the earth and rubbish from the surface of the ironstone and throwing it over the cliff; and others with mattocks removing the ironstone and filling the trucks, – a more simple and inexpensive method cannot be conceived.  The seam crops out near the surface, and the wealth in iron ore to be extracted from these hills must be incalculable.  We took a few specimens of the mineral, and walked onward through a gorge where gorse and ferns and shrubs in their native beauty luxuriate, and entered Skinningrove Bay.  

Cleveland Way footpath, Cattersty Sands
and Skinningrove jetty (built in the 1880s)

Here all was solitude.  The beach appeared to be rarely trod, except by the foot of the occasional tourist, or the miner at the Lofthouse [Loftus] works.  The glen and stream of Lofthouse, with their native beauties, had to be passed by, when we scrambled up the rock cliff and on to Boulby; this elevation is 660 feet above the sea.  Care must be taken all along these cliffs that the edge is not approached too nearly, for otherwise the danger is imminent; here and there the pathway of even recent time has fallen away into the sea, and the margin left between the stone boundary of the adjoining fields and the edge of the cliff is so narrow that the pathway is dangerous to walk upon.  Wherever this happens it is always better to get over the stone fence and walk in the adjoining fields until the pathway becomes less near the edge of the cliff, or is otherwise safe.  In several places the stone fence of some of the fields will be soon undermined and fall into the sea.
Staithes from the south

We passed through Boulby and down Colborn Nab to Staithes.  Entering this fishing town from Boulby the incline is steep, and the houses and buildings hang beside the ravine and overlook the beck or stream which runs through the town into the sea.  We crossed a wooden foot bridge and got into vile nooks and strange lanes, and passed numerous half-naked children and oddly draped women and lazy looking men.  We entered the Royal George Inn, hastily got some refreshment, and as speedily as we could left the place, for the stench from fish curing was beyond endurance after we had been inhaling the sweets of mountain breezes.  The people here are much to be sympathised with; they are often afloat in the storms and perils of the deep; their fare is hard; their clothing coarse; and their household is cheerless.  

A cold looking building had "National School" upon its wall, and we heard from a medical gentleman of Hinderwell, in which parish is situated the town of Staithes, that the church service is performed in this room.  These things ought not so to be.  There is here living a large number of people and a very large number of young children without a church in which to meet together for public worship.  The ladies and gentlemen of Hinderwell might soon remedy the evil by forming themselves into separate working committees and extending their solicitations amongst the local and wealthy county families.  The Christian work would begin and get forward until the church was erected, and divine worship celebrated for the spiritual good of this out-of-the-world and hitherto uncared-for people.  

Port Mulgrave: O.S. map 1888-1913
Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland website

Soon after we departed from Staithes we visited the ironworks and pier at Port Mulgrave, belonging to "Palmer's Shipbuilding and Iron Company Limited."  These works are to the north of and near to Runswick Bay, and they appear to be well adapted for the purposes required for getting the ironstone and shipping it off by sea in boats of 40 tons each and towing them by steam tugs to the blasting furnaces of the company.  There are about 300 men employed here.  

The pleasant and respectable village of Hinderwell is about a mile from the sea, and as the cattle plague has not visited this part of the country the cows in the fields and in the village added a charm to the beauty of the surrounding scenery.

A new built inn, not far from Runswick Bay, called "Albert Hotel," and kept by Mrs Wardell, was the house at which we stayed for the night.  As this house is about halfway between Saltburn and Whitby, and the accommodation is good and the charges moderate, it is desirable to remind the future tourists that there did not appear to be a house on the coast at which to stay where cleanliness, and civility, and comfort, and cheapness were to be had in combination so well as in this house.  Mrs Wardell is a widow, a middle-aged person, and has, so she said, lived in her early days with some of the aristocratic families in the west end of London.  The house was taken by her last year.  Persons desirous of enjoying the sea and the beautiful and romantic scenery in and around this locality cannot do better than secure accommodation here.

Shoreline north of Runswick Bay, O.S. map 1888-1913
Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland website

Although the ironworks are found to be so profitable by the proprietors, yet there are evidences in this locality that if the managers are not competent or well-looked after, the owners will soon be ruined.  A little to the north of Runswick bay there are in a state of utter decay ironworks which have cost about £30,000.  They are built at the foot of a cliff, and consisted of a pier, a blasting furnace, engine house, and the usual erections for getting the iron manufactured and shipped.  The works are about to pass into fresh hands, but a large sum will be required to re-construct these works and put them again into working order.  

The bay of Runswick is extensive; the cottages forming the village are on the south side of the cliff, and are here and there nestled among shrubs and flowers, and are approached by circuitous paths or trackways.  

Kettleness Point

We walked on the beach and over the rocks which lie scattered by the waves in wild confusion as we neared the alum works of Kettleness, which we passed by, and then through Goldsbrough to Lyth.  The perils attendant upon cliff mining and working appeared to be great, but the men and boys when we thus spoke to them seemed indifferent to our caution.  The first head-stone in the churchyard of Lyth told of the danger as we read of a young man, aged 31, who had been recently killed whilst jet mining.  Near this church are the woods and domain of Mulgrave Castle, and a fine view of Whitby.  From Sandsend we walked on the beach to Whitby, which we left at 6.5p.m.  

During the summer months it is found to be difficult to know where best to spend a few days.

In the coast district there is in the entire extent from Saltburn to Whitby a fine agricultural country, diversified by hills and glens, amongst which delightful and romantic drives can be taken.  The botanist will here find an intelligent director in Mr Baker's book.  The geologist will be practically assisted by Professor Phillips' work on the Geology of Yorkshire.  The fossil and mineral collectors can fill their baskets with stores for the enrichment of their private museums.  The draughtsman as he sits on the cliff, the beach, or in the glens and bays, will speedily fill his portfolio with sketches, which never fail to charm the lovers of English coast scenery.  The man of business in his town life vocation requires to know where he can enjoy the mountain and the sea air in the balmy hours of a summer's day in a part of the country which is detached from his artificial existence.  To such persons, and they are multiplying every years, take the paths we have taken, and make your stay there as long as your time will allow.  The infirm can be driven from Whitby to the glens and villages near the sea coast, and enjoy the diversified scenery from which so many at this time of year derive substantial benefit.  J.G.

Notes

North Yorkshire: Studies Of Its Botany, Geology, Climate And Physical Geography (1863) by John Gilbert Baker (author) is still in print

Saltburn
The Victorian resort of Saltburn by the Sea was still very new and the Zetland Hotel only three years old when J.G. arrived.  It was the brainchild of Henry Pease, who set up the Saltburn Improvement Company in 1859, and a history of its development can be found here on the Saltburn by the Sea website.  The Pier and the Cliff Lift would be built within a few years of this article's appearance.

Huntcliff Ironstone Mine
This was the Cliff Mine, owned by Henry William Thomas from 1857-1865 and by Bell Brothers from 1865 until it was abandoned in 1887.  I don't know why J.G. says it's Mr Morrison's mine – perhaps he was the manager.  Hardly any trace of the mine remains.  You can see details of it here on the East Cleveland's Industrial Heartland website.  The remains that can be seen are from the later mine owned by Bell Brothers.

Loftus Ironstone Mine 
This mine was in operation until 1958 (see the East Cleveland's Industrial Heartland website for details).  The Cleveland Ironstone Museum opened on the site in 1983.

Boulby Cliff is the highest cliff in England.  Nearby is Boulby Potash Mine, the second deepest mine of any kind in Europe, where the Underground Laboratory operates and experiments such as the search for Dark Matter in the Universe are carried out.

Colburn Nab = Cowbar Nab

Staithes  
J.G. does not like Staithes!  It was only from about 1880 that it became a magnet for artists and became the home of the celebrated Staithes Group (1894-1909).  But his depiction of it as a God-less place is inaccurate and far from fair.  He is writing only of the Church of England.  Staithes was a Nonconformist village.  The Wesleyan Methodists had a chapel – Robert Slater in Artists' Colonies in Staithes and Runswick Bay c1880-1914 (March 2010) writes that "an adapted Wesleyan Chapel at Staithes appeared on the Guisborough Circuit list" in 1821 and that in the year that J.G. passed through a purpose-built Wesleyan Chapel was opened.  A Congregational Chapel was opened in 1823 (the Whitby Gazette, 25 November 1865, reports that the Earl of Zetland gave £5 to the Congregational Church to reduce its debt).  The Primitive Methodists came rather later to Staithes but found an enthusiastic welcome and a chapel had been opened in 1858 (see the website of My Primitive Methodists).

Port Mulgrave & the disused ironstone mine just north of Runswick, as described by J.G:  
Charles Mark Palmer (1822-1907) and his brother were the founders of Palmers, the famous shipbuilding company in Jarrow.  Cleveland ironstone could be mined all along the Cleveland coastline and Palmer bought land around Staithes to mine ironstone for his Jarrow works.  Palmer's mine was in the area known as Rosedale at Rosedale Wyke; it became known as Rosedale on Coast to distinguish it from the ironstone mines in the moors at Rosedale.  He constructed a harbour there in 1856-7 and named it Port Mulgrave.  As to the disused mine – I haven't got a copy of Peter Tuffs' book on Cleveland Ironstone which may hold the answer, but I notice that the Northern Mine Research Society website distinguishes between the two mines near Hinderwell: Port Mulgrave Mine, which operated between 1856 and 1893, and the Rosedale on Coast Mine, which was in operation between 1854 and 1876.  The map (above) shows Old Ironworks and Old Shaft.
Photographs of the remains of the Port Mulgrave mine can be seen here on the website Hidden Teesside.

Cattle plague
There was a largescale outbreak of rinderpest in the British Isles between 1865 and 1868

Alum and jet mining at Kettleness 
The alum works at Kettleness would close in 1871 according to the website of the Archaeology Data Service.  The jet mines at Kettleness had been in operation in the 1850s.  There is a newspaper report in 1854 of the accidental death of a labourer there, Dalton Taylor, who fell from the top of the cliff on to a piece of broken rock and was killed on the spot.  
 
There is a really good history of alum mining in North East Yorkshire here on the website of East Cleveland's Industrial Heartland


On the Sea Cliffs of Cleveland: 1864

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A more appreciative and detailed account of the walk taken by J.G. in 1866 (see last blogpost) is that described by William Stott Banks in On the Sea Cliffs of Cleveland, which appeared on 1 October 1864 in the Wakefield Free Press and West Riding Advertiser [1] .  In his voice we hear someone with an acute eye for the landscape, someone deeply interested in places and people, their language and their lives.

William Stott Banks (1820-72) was a self-taught, self-made man.  He only had a few years of formal education and that was in the Wakefield Lancasterian School – in the Lancasterian system, the teacher taught the top pupils and they taught the younger or weaker pupils, so saving the cost of paying more teachers and ensuring that in large classes a child got at least some personal attention.  He started work at the age of 11 as office boy for a local solicitor and when he was 18 he kept his family with his wages.  So it was by self-education and by hard work that he became a solicitor, clerk to the Wakefield Borough Magistrates, and mainstay of the Mechanics' Institute.  Never forgetting his own past, he was impelled by a strong desire to help the education and well-being of others.

He was also the author of the acclaimed Walks in Yorkshire, which began in 1864 as a series in the Wakefield Free Press and in 1866 appeared in book form – I have listed the articles in the Notes below under [2].  

He had a deep interest in dialect and wrote one of the earliest glossaries of a Yorkshire dialect in his List of Provincial Words in use in Wakefield, so he is always attentive to how placenames are pronounced and the variety – though he found it had lessened with more widespread education – of local accents.  And so he noted in his articles on Cleveland that Cringley [Cringle] Moor and Cold Moor End were pronounced "Creenay and Caudmer End", that Chop Gate was Chop Yat and Slaethorn Park in Baysdale was Slaytron.

He had an appreciative eye for distinctive features of the landscape, describing Roseberry Topping as "that sweet green cone" and Freeborough Hill as "peculiar, round topt Freeburg".  And he liked facts and figures, so in this article he includes, for example, details of the number of cobles at Staithes.

In On the Sea Cliffs of Cleveland, Banks begins by outlining the extent of Cleveland, which was the name given to the ancient wapentake of Langbaurgh.  (I've relegated my explanation of 'wapentake', local government and how the names Cleveland and Langbaurgh have been used over the years to footnote [3]).  

The litany of names in his opening paragraph has a lyrical quality:

Cleveland is bounded by the Tees and Sea Coast from near Newstead Hall, two and a half miles above Yarm, to East Row Beck the same distance N.W. of Whitby; then by this beck for a mile inland, whence the boundary, turning south, crosses Swarth Howe to the Esk opposite Sleights; follows the Esk and the Murk Esk and the beck below Hazle Head to Wheeldale Howe; runs westward along the high tops of the moors, Shunner Howe, Loose Howe, White Cross, Ralph Cross and Flat Howe, and by Stoney Ridge, over Burton Head; continues by Hasty Bank, Coldmoor End and Cringley Moor; bends south at Carlton Bank for above two miles and then again goes west over Arncliff, north of Mount Grace, and down the Wisk, and turns round Appleton up to the Tees again – thus taking in a good deal of moorland and sea coast, beside the broad level of the Cleveland vale.

This is a picturesque and valuable tract of country, has lands good for farming, fine woods, much ironstone and alum shale – the former fast altering the aspect of many parts – numerous country mansions, villages and towns and enterprising fishing population, places for sea side visitors, a large centre of iron smelting (Middlesborough), two or three alum works, passenger and mineral railways completed and in progress.  It is now more interesting to holiday tourists than it probably will be after further development of its mineral wealth, when others of the hitherto quiet dales shall be busy with furnaces and black with their smoke.

He and his friends began this stretch of their Yorkshire walks by making for the coast:

Travelling after dark towards Redcar, the glare of successive furnaces accompanied by clouds of smoke, alternating with the gloomy breaks that come in between, give a striking appearance to the iron-smelting country.

The works were within 4 miles of Redcar but the locals assured him that the smoke didn't reach them.  He calculated that at the end of August 1864 there were 250 lodging houses and inns in Redcar and Coatham, catering for above 1,000 visitors, and as for fishing, there were only 8 or 10 cobles, carrying 3 men a piece.

From Saltburn by the Sea, 

a new place so called to distinguish it from the little old village of two or three houses, lying just below in a hole near the level of the seashore
they climbed Huntcliff and went on through fields.  A farmer had advised them

"gang doon t'gress an you'll get t'liberty o' cuttin off a vast o' gains" and so [we] came to Skinningrove by tortuous footways over the wasting sea cliffs, some cut down to mere gables of soft soil and destined soon to fall under the influence of sea and wind.  Timid people would find the narrow tracks difficult in a strong breeze with the rough sea beneath.

Harvesters were busy with "machine as well as scythe and sickle" cutting the wheat.  They followed the path along the cliff edge to Boulby Cliffs

In many parts we find no more space between the boundary wall of the fields and the edge of the upright cliff than is needed for the feet, and some of us were led for assurance of safety to hold by the wall ... 
These cliffs, partly from their perishable nature and partly from alum workings – extensive at Boulby – are continually falling; but for folk with steady heads this is one of the finest walks in the county

They walked down to Staithes, passing the Boulby alum house "half way down the long steep bank which ends at the Staithes hollow".  He writes appreciatively of Staithes, of its situation and its people: 

The ordinary tides come almost up to the houses and the sea is continually making breaches.  On ground now covered by shingle, houses and shops and a sea wall stood fifty years back.  There was the drapery and grocery shop kept by Saunderson whom Captain Cook served for eighteen months in his youth, but about 1812 the sea broke in and Mr Saunderson's successor removed stock and furniture and took the stones of the building and rebuilt the shop in Church street where it may still be seen.  

The fishermen of Staithes are strong, brave men ... and the women are helpful and as handy as they ...

Sixteen yawls belong to Staithes each carrying ten men and boys, and in the same months when these are employed twenty cobles manned by three men each are used.

He discusses how much they might earn – the large boats at least £20 a week an the cobles £6 a week – and he describes how, having stayed the night at the Black Lion

One of the party went in the morning to see what herrings were in but the wind was blowing strongly from the north-east and only the large boats could go out and catches were down.  A fish buyer said

"Neen at t'other 'ed neen; bud ah 'eerd somebody saying as ah coom doon t'street Mark ed six or seven thoosan – oo monny es eh?"  "About five unerd ah 'eerd!"  "Shotten uns?"  "Ahs seer ah deen't knaw"

(Shotten herring were fish that had spawned)

He describes the fish – which "comes to several West Riding towns"– "salted and drying in the air, long white rows of it stretcht on rods upon the cliffs".  There being no safe anchorage for the yawls, from Saturday morning to Sunday evening and when unemployed, they were taken into the Port Mulgrave harbour.  As they walked over to Rosedale Wyke, they saw 15 yawls sailing round to Staithes.

He was struck by Runswick – 

a fine bay ... the sloping banks, furrowed by streams, are large enough to hold a town of 5,000 people; but the village is stuck on ledges in a nook not unlike (in relation to available space) a corner cupboard in a room ... They say there is no horse and cart in the place and only ten fishing cobles and the population is about 410

... In the shale across the bay are the caves called hob-holes; and at the corner of a deep furrow which has a little beck through it the footpath goes up the steep and slippery Claymoor Bank and thence through fields to Goldsboro' and Lyth.  Climbing Claymer bank was found a serious business by some of us.  We were told by a farmer it was a road that did not please anybody, but we all got up and I hope those who likt it least may live long to remember it.  
We had pleasant views on our way of the broad blue sea with numerous ships, for the wind had changed and was now off the land, and we passed several tumuli, one remarkable for its size and position, on which stood a quiet horse patiently enjoying the splendid outlook over land and sea

Towards evening we strolled into Mulgrave Park by the Lyth gate and walkt through the grounds to the ruins of the old castle, a mile or so from the present house; saw the fine prospects down the slopes to the sea and to Whitby, with its abbey and lighthouses, and lookt into the deep and woody glens that cross the Park ... We stayed that night at the Ship Inn at Lyth and were very comfortable

Lythe, he wrote

stands on a hill which ends in the alum shale rocks of Sandsend Ness where are alum works.  The alum house is at Sandsend, the last sea side village of Cleveland, a tidy place contrasted with Staiths and Runswick, most of the residents of which are employed in alum making.  A little further on is East Row Beck, the Cleveland boundary, and stepping across that we entered the liberty of Whitby Strand opposite Dunsley Bay, and from there followed the new highway to Upgang and thence the cliffs into Whitby.

Do those examples of William Stott Banks' attractive, easy evocation of familiar scenes invites you to read more of his work?  You can find the volume Walks in Yorkshire: the North East, comprising Redcar, Saltburn, Whitby, Scarborough and Filey, with intervening places; and the Moors and Dales between the Tees, the Derwent, the Vale of York, and the Sea by W.S.Banks (Pub. London and Wakefield 1866) for free in Google Books [4].  Or you can buy a modern reprint.  The companion volume for the North West of Yorkshire evidently hasn't been scanned but secondhand copies of the original 1866 edition of Walks in Yorkshire: In the North West & In the North East can be found via online booksellers.

Notes

[1]    The Wakefield Free Press was a newspaper of eight pages, published every Saturday and costing one penny.  It ran from 1860 to 1902 and was owned by William Rowlandson Hall, a master printer aged 30.

[2]    The articles that appeared in the Wakefield Free Press:
27 Feb 1864  Walks in Yorkshire I. [an account of a walking tour with friends] Malham II 
5 March 1864  Ingleburg Cave, Chapel - Dent - and King's Dales III
12 March 1864  Wensleydale - Chapeldale - and Ingleburgh IV.
26 March 1864  Up Swaledale and across Wensleydale into Ribblesdale V
16 April 1864  Nidder - Langster - and Litton Dales.  Penyghent. VI
14 May 1864  Sedberg - Through Garsdale to Cotterfoss and Hawes - by Greenside, Dod and Cam Fells to Selside.  Past Moughton into Clapdale VII
25 June 1864  Upper Teesdale - Greta Dale and intervening Dales VIII., concluded on 
2 July 1864     do.-
16 July 1864  Cleveland - Upper Eskdale - over moors to Lewisham Station IX
20 Aug 1864  Bilsdale - Ryedale - Hambleton Hills X
10 Sept 1864  Western Slopes of the Cleveland and Hambleton Hills XI
1 Oct 1864  On the sea cliffs of Cleveland XII
12 Nov 1864  Ilkley to Simon Seat - Burnsal and Rilston to Cold Coniston XIII
17 Dec 1864  At and about Pomfret XIV
31 Dec 1864  The Howgill Fells XV

In February 1866 the walks were published in book form
1 The North-West: Among the Mountains and Dales, from the Wharfe, Aire, and Ribble, to the Western and Northern limits of the County
II The North East: On the Moors and in the Dales between the Tees, the Derwent, and the Sea

In 1871 he published Walks in Yorkshire: Wakefield and its neighbourhood

[3]    Short(ish) and slightly tedious explanation of wapentakes etc:

A wapentake was a sub-division of the North Riding of Yorkshire; both wapentake and Riding are names that date back to the Danelaw – Yorkshire was divided into three Ridings (= thirds).  

For centuries, the wapentakes were a unit of civil administration (including justice) but the rapid and radical social change of the 19th century meant reform was needed and so in 1889 the administrative county of the North Riding came into being, governed by a County Council with Middlesbrough being a Borough Council.  

Then in 1967, local government in the area around the River Tees was reorganised and the short-lived unitary County Borough of Teesside was created.  It lasted until 1974 when a reorganisation of local government in England created another short-lived authority, the two tier Non-Metropolitan County of Cleveland (which lasted from 1974 to 1996).  At the same time, it was decided that Langbaurgh would be the name of one of the four districts of the new Cleveland authority and that it would be pronounced Langbar.  I can't remember why they came to that decision; perhaps someone will tell me.  Previously, the name was pronounced Langbarf, as can be seen from the Victoria County History (published 1923), which can be found on British History online here

Cleveland was replaced by unitary authorities in 1996: Redcar and Cleveland, Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool.  Now, together with Darlington, these authorities are members of the Tees Valley city region (that is, a combined authority with a directly-elected mayor) administered by the Tees Valley Combined Authority.  The current Mayor is Ben Houchen.

Cleveland was also the name of the Parliamentary constituency created in 1885; it was replaced by the Redcar constituency and the Cleveland & Whitby constituency in 1974.

[4]    Blogger won't let me edit the hyperlink for Walks in Yorkshire: the North East, comprising Redcar, Saltburn, Whitby, Scarborough and Filey, with intervening places; and the Moors and Dales between the Tees, the Derwent, the Vale of York, and the Sea, so here it is in full

Biographical notes on William Stott Banks

There is a wikipedia entry for him and he appears in the Dictionary of National Biography, which notes of his books, "Both works are remarkable for their completeness and happy research".  He was a good friend of the parents of the novelist George Gissing (1857-1903). 

He married Susanna Hick of Wakefield, daughter of Matthew Hick, watch maker, on 5 January 1850.  They lost four children as babies or in early infancy: William Henry; Oliver; Godfrey (died aged 3); and Alexander.  

William Stott Banks died at home in Northgate, Wakefield, at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon of Christmas Day 1872.  He was 52 years old.  His health had begun to fail some time earlier and in August he left for a tour of the Continent in the hope of recovery; he had been home a few weeks when he died.  He left his widow Susannah and two children, Dorothy aged 7 and Roland Campion aged 4.  Susannah died little more than a year later on 18 February 1874, and on 21 February 1880 Roland died.  Only Dorothy survived and she married in 1888 and had a family.  Her husband was the Revd Thomas Alexander Lacey, M.A, later Canon of Worcester Cathedral.  I think she may have been living with her mother's sister Arabella, who had married Joseph King.  They lived in Clifton, near York, and it was there that Dorothy's wedding took place.

The Sheffield Independent of 28 December 1872 recorded William's death:

Death of Mr W S Banks, of Wakefield

Mr W S Banks, of the firm of Iansons, Banks, and Hick, solicitors, Wakefield, died at his residence in Northgate, about three o'clock on the afternoon of Christmas Day.  Mr Banks, who was a self-made man, was well known amongst the legal profession.  He was the author of 'Walks in Yorkshire' and some other similar works.  His health gave way some time ago, and in August he started for a tour on the Continent.  He returned home a few weeks ago, and gradually sank.

And the Wakefield Express of 4 January 1873 described how the funeral procession started from his home in Northgate at 11 o'clock.  There were members of the Borough Police Force, headed by the officers, marching in double file, and six feet apart and then followed between forty and fifty gentlemen (councillors etc).  Behind came the mourning coaches carrying his widow and members of her family, including her sister Mrs King.  There were magistrates, the mayor and aldermen were there.

It was observable that several of the principal tradesmen along the line of route to the Cemetery had caused two or three shutters to be put up as a token of respect, and a great number of persons were to be seen as the funeral cortege passed along, notwithstanding the gloomy weather, witnessing the last of one so highly esteemed.

He was interred in the vault where his four infant children lay.

The Wakefield Express of 18 January 1873 carried a report of the Borough Magistrates' meeting.  They appointed a new clerk in Mr Banks' place and one of the magistrates, Dr Holdsworth, paid this tribute:

... Mr Banks was a self-made man – he was one of those gentlemen who had to work his way up in the world almost from obscurity.  

He was brought up in the Lancasterian School, and the only education he received in early life was in that institution, which he appears never to have forgotten.  He had devoted an amazing amount of time in past years to the cause of education, the value of which he could well appreciate; and after personally struggling very hardly with those difficulties which will ever beset the path of self-educated men, his great anxiety was to promote the intellectual and social well-being of others.  

By assiduous application to business and study, at the early age of eighteen he attained such a position that he became the support of his family; and, like a truly worthy young man, he maintained the, saving them from the bitter experience of poverty, and rendering happy an otherwise perchance needy home.  

As a public man, we know that for the past twenty years he has been connected with the Mechanics' Institution, which, in a great measure, owed its origin to his exertions, and to which he rendered invaluable assistance in the capacities of librarian, treasurer, and secretary; whilst he assisted other institutions in a variety of ways.  Nor must we omit to express our regret at the loss of a public official of this court – who both in his capacity as a lawyer and as clerk to the magistrates has performed his duties most efficiently.  

Having seen a very great deal of Mr Banks in his capacity as the clerk to the magistrates, I personally acknowledge the good advice and counsel I have always received from him.  So far back as 1862 and 1863 – upon the occasion of the marriage of the Prince of Wales, when there were many regulations necessary to be made – when his services were especially called into requistion – I personally received great kindness and assistance from Mr Banks.  His legal knowledge then proved, as in other cases of emergency, to be very extensive; indeed, he could be looked up to for sound advice upon all occasions of difficulty.



North Yorkshire dialect – & the White Horse of Kilburn

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As I said in On the Sea Cliffs of Cleveland, my last blogpost, one of William Stott Banks' great interests was Yorkshire dialect.  

He began his walks in Cleveland rather disappointed:

16 July 1864  Wakefield Free Press
Walks in Yorkshire X:  Cleveland - Upper Eskdale - over moors to Lewisham Station
A first journey anywhere is always open to doubt; but it is necessary to begin somewhere, and so we decide upon starting off with Roseberry Topping in Cleveland, that sweet green cone, from childhood believed to belong to Margery Moorpoot and associated in one's head to a broad north Yorkshire dialect supposed to be spoken by men and women with laughing mouths opening from ear to ear across great red cheeks; but, sad to say, our little-boy's dream will not come true, for these things will seem to have quite gone out if they ever were in; nobody will as a matter of course call Ayton "Canny Yatton," though many still think Roseberry "b'biggest hill i' all Yorkshur, aboon a mahle an a hawf heegh an as cawd as ice at t' top on't i' t'yattist day i' summer," which it is not; nor will any peculiarity of face be seen, nor the farmers be found in any sense to come under the denomination bumpkins.
Margery Moorpoot was a character from farce who, when asked where she came from, declared 
Ah was bred and boorn at Canny Yatton aside Roseberry Topping
and when asked where that was, replied
Ah thowght onny feeal hed knawn Roseberry. – It's biggest hill in all Yorkshire. It's aboon a mahle and a hawf heegh an' as cawd as ice t' top on't i' t' yattest day i' summer; that it is. 
And that is why William Stott Banks writes of a "little-boy's dream" and "great red cheeks".  He must have been remembering going to a theatre to see a farce played, complete with heavy stage makeup and comic country 'bumpkins'.  

Margery Moorpoot was the creation of a Stockton man, the playwright and poet Joseph Reed (1727-83).  

There is a wikipedia entry for Reed, drawing on the Dictionary of National Biography entry, and there is an account of Reed, with his own comic description of his early life, on page 85 of The Local Records of Stockton and the Neighbourhood by Thomas Richmond (1868), which can be read online here

Joseph Reed succeeded to his father's business as a ropemaker, but was always devoted to literature and in 1757 he moved his business and family to London.  In 1761 he made a great hit with 'The Register Office: a Farce' in which Margery Moorpoot, a Yorkshire servant looking for work at a register office in London, featured and which was popular for years.  In one revival, the part of a female author called Mrs Doggerell was played by the celebrated comic actor Mrs Jordan – mistress of William IV and mother of Amelia Fitzclarence, wife of 10th Viscount Falkland, whose memorial can be found in Hutton Rudby church, (see The People behind the Plaques)

The text of dialogue between Gulwell of the register office and Margery Moorpoot can be found transcribed here on Genuki.  It's from Specimens of the Yorkshire Dialect (1808) *.  
Roseberry Topping – from this angle it still looks like a cone

William Stott Banks deplored the loss in Yorkshire of the old ways of speech and dialectal words.  He might not have come across anybody referring to Canny Yatton, but he did find that Snick Gate was pronounced Snek Yat, Stokesley was Stowsleh and Raindale was Raindil, and on the next walk he was reassured:

20 August 1864 Wakefield Free Press 
Walks in Yorkshire X: Bilsdale - Ryedale - Hambleton Hills 
To answer a doubt which lately arose and moreover not to overstate things, we have been under obligation of inquiring whether the striking peculiarities of dialect, not heard on our last walk, but put down in books as characterising Cleveland 30 or 40 years ago, have ceased to the extent supposed; and it may be said, so far, that while what was noticed before is generally true, there are here as all over persons whose manners and speech have not yet undergone the changes that schooling, quick travelling and more extended intercourse with other places and people are everywhere bringing about.
And in that walk he included pronunciations such as Wainstones (pronounced wean or wearn) and he reported the speech of people he met.  

At the end of the walk he reaches Gormire and the White Horse of Kilburn.  As the wikipedia article on the White Horse explains, while some say that the horse was made by the schoolmaster, his pupils and some volunteers, a tablet near the carpark gives the credit to one Thomas Taylor.  

The tablet was put in place after a restoration following a public appeal in 1925.  The Horse had been renovated after a public appeal a generation earlier:  

29 June 1896 Bradford Daily Telegraph 
The notable Yorkshire landmark, the White Horse of Kilburn ... was originally completed on the 4th of November, 1857, by the projector, Mr Thomas Taylor, a native of Kilburn and for many years a resident in London ... The projector dying something like a quarter of a century ago, the figure was neglected and got from bad to worse, and at the commencement of the year was so overgrown with weeds that it was found necessary to ask for outside aid for its renovation, or otherwise to allow it to become obliterated altogether.
In 1925 it was the Yorkshire Evening Post that raised the funds and on 15 August 1931 the newspaper proudly reported – along with an account of the money spent on the 'grooming' of the horse that year – that it was in "fine fettle" and that 
The history of the White Horse is set forth in the following inscription on the tablet which is let into the ground near the back of the statue:- 
The Kilburn 'White Horse'
This figure was cut in 1857,
on the initiative of 
Thomas Taylor,
a native of Kilburn.  In 1925
a restoration fund was subscribed
by readers of 
The Yorkshire Evening Post,
and the residue of £100 was
invested to provide for the 
Triennial 'Grooming' of the figure.
The wikipedia article quotes Morris Marples in his book White Horses and Other Hill Figures (1949 and still available secondhand from a 1980s reprint) as giving the credit to Taylor, a native of Kilburn, who was a buyer for a London provision merchant.  "He seems to have attended celebrations at Uffington White Horse in 1857, and he was inspired to give his home village a similar example."

A report in the Northern Echo of 2 July 2004 reveals that both schools of thought are right – the horse was the idea of Thomas Taylor and it was carried out by his friend, the village schoolmaster John Hodgson with the schoolchildren.  The newspaper's source was one of the Hodgson family – and he held a copy of the original drawing, with all the measurements, that Thomas Taylor sent to John Hodgson.  It had been passed down in the family over the generations and the only other copy is in the Yorkshire Museum in York.  There is a photograph of the drawing on this website.

When William Stott Banks and his walking companions came to the White Horse it was less than 10 years since it had been cut.  He begins by describing the scene.  The white mare he refers to can only mean White Mare Crag.
Just below Whitstone cliff is the lake Gormire covering about sixteen acres, and here, as in Berkshire, we have a white horse newly chalk't every year, and a white mare too.
There they encountered a Kilburn woman who lived between Whitstone Cliff and Roulston Scar, and what she told them is interesting, not only for the dialect, but also for the details she gave them of the creator of the White Horse.  
T'wite mare is under Wissuncliff an' t'wite 'orse is just a back at'bank facin t'toon o' Kilb'n.  T'wite 'orse wodn't shew itself aboon as it wod below.  It's clean'd a' brack'ns ivery year and chalk't oot.  Tommy Taylor at's gone tuv Australia 'ed it pick't oot for a memorandum not so very monny years sin; may be ten years mebbe.  Taylor wur born at Kilb'n an 'e got a taumst'n put up for all t'family livin an' deead an' put their names on, a particular sort of a man.  Ther's none on 'em left noo.  Ther's 'unerds an' thoosans comes to Gormire.  I's gawin that rawd in a minit.
I think that Thomas Taylor must be the cheesefactor (that is, he would be buying cheese from the makers to be sold in the London markets) who is to be found in the 1851 census living with his wife Ann and their six children at Kilburn Cottage, Central Hill, Lambeth.  He was born in Kilburn in about 1808 and we can see his attachment to his birthplace in the choice of a name for his house.  As to whether they all went to Australia at some point, I don't know!  In the 1861 census Thomas and Ann and two of the children were in Central Hill, Lambeth, but I know no more than that.  As to the tombstone that Thomas Taylor had made, I have no idea!

Dialects constantly change and language adapts over time and place.  There has been noticeable 'levelling' of dialects across Europe and in North Yorkshire I expect we have all noticed the slow disappearance in some areas of the old ways of speaking.  So William Stott Banks' transliteration of the people he heard as he walked in North Yorkshire in 1864 is to be treasured, and it is always a joy to listen to the old lilting speech to be heard in the voice of the late Maurice Atkinson in the videos on the Hutton Rudby and District Facebook page.

And, with words dating from long before Banks' time, the Yorkshire Historical Dictionary of historic terms from early documents (1100 to c1750) is great!


William Weldon Carter & Eden Lodge, Hutton Rudby

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In Spring 1880, this advertisement appeared repeatedly in the Yorkshire newspapers:

The Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 15 April 1880 
Desirable Country Residence 
To be sold, and may be entered upon immediately, EDEN VILLA, within eight miles of Stockton, near Hutton Rudby, and one mile from the Potto Station on the Whitby Railway.  The House is most favourably situated, commanding magnificent views of the Cleveland Hills, and in the midst of a fertile country. 
The House contains Drawing and Dining Rooms, Front and Back Kitchen, Scullery, Larder, Wash-house, Cellar, &c., and five good Bedrooms and W.C.  The Outbuildings consist of two Coach-houses, 2-Stall Stable, Cow-byre, etc. 
There is Hard and Soft Water on the premises. 
The premises are well and substantially built, and are in first-class order; they stand upon one-and-a-half acres of Land, well stocked with Shrubs, Ornamental and Fruit Trees.  There is also eight-and-a-half acres of rich Pasture Land adjoining the House, making in all ten acres of splendid Land. 
Applications to be sent in to the owner, William W. Carter, Eden Villa, Hutton Rudby, Yarm.  Further particulars may be obtained from 
EUGENE E. CLEPHAN,
Architect and Surveyor,
Stockton-on-Tees.
March 16th, 1880.
Eden Villa was the house built by William Surtees when he came back from Australia in 1868 with his son, the only survivor of his first marriage, and his Australian wife and their little girls.  He built them a house in the fields beyond the edge of the village and he called it Eden Cottage after his grandmother Eden Dodds.  

He was a stone mason by trade and now he established himself as a builder and contractor.  But he had more adventurous plans.  First he set up the Albion Steam Crushing and Cutting Mills in Middlesbrough and then he bought land at the corner of Doctors Lane and began work on his new project – the Albion Sailcloth Works, equipped with a horizontal steam engine driving six looms.  And then, before the Works had really begun, he died in 1877 aged 53.  His widow sold up and took her children back home to her family in New South Wales.  (The whole story is to be found in Hutton Rudby 1876 to 1877: the Albion Sailcloth Mill)

I always wondered when Eden Lodge, as it is now called, took on its present appearance.  It seems to me that William Surtees' Eden Cottage must have been a modest building because he needed his money for his business ventures.  

The advertisement from the spring of 1880 reveals the answer.  William Surtees very probably had outbuildings for his tools and equipment but I suspect he was far too busy a man to have time to stock an orchard and put in shrubs.  The hard and cold water may well have been his work – a well drawing hard water from an aquifer and a rainwater collection system for the soft, ideal for washing.  

It was William Carter who must have enlarged the house, perhaps converting the outbuildings into coach-houses and stables.  He bought more land and, with the assistance (I would guess) of the architect Eugene E Clephan, he created an idyllic miniature country estate.  In fact, in his brief ownership he had gentrified Eden Cottage.

The story of William Weldon Carter, to give him his full name, is one of steady success and sudden failure in the retail trade and of the parting of the ways between brothers.  It's also the story of a long-running Stockton drapery firm, which must have been very frequently visited by people from Hutton Rudby; there were close ties between town and village.

In 1841, two brothers called William Weldon and George Richardson Weldon from Beverley were doing well as drapers in Stockton-on-Tees.  Living with them on the shop premises, as was usual at the time, were two assistant drapers and three apprentices.  Business may have been getting on well, but William and George evidently were not – in the spring of 1842 they ended their partnership and each struck out on his own.  William's business was now William Weldon & Co at 32 High Street [1]

By 1850 William had shops in both Stockton and Middlesbrough and had taken his sister's son William Weldon Carter into partnership with him.  William Weldon Carter was still a very young man, born in Hull in 1827 to Margaret Weldon and Richard Carter, a commercial traveller.  His younger brother Thomas Vincent Carter had joined him by the spring of 1851 and they lived with their uncle, three shopmen, an apprentice and three servants at Todds Buildings, which seems to have been on Yarm Lane.  It was a thriving concern.

Meanwhile, George Richardson Weldon was in a much quieter way of trade at 62 High Street.  Eventually he retired from business to farm 40 acres on Oxbridge Lane.  

But William Weldon's partnership with his nephew William was not long lasting – it ended in July 1852.  It looks as though young William, on his travels for his uncle's business, had fallen for a girl and on 7 August 1852 he and Elizabeth Whistler were married in London.  She was the daughter of a draper, which was perhaps how he had met her.  (In the marriage register, he described his own father as a gentleman).  It seems he had ended the partnership with his uncle in order to emigrate.

The young couple went to Australia – as did William Surtees and his wife half a dozen years later – but, just as for William Surtees, their voyage ended in tragedy.  Elizabeth died in Collingwood, Victoria on 10 March 1853 after only seven months of married life.  

By 1861 William Weldon was doing very well.  William Weldon & Co had expanded into the four buildings of numbers 30 to 33 High Street and William had pulled them down and replaced them with a single four-storey building.  He no longer lived at the shop but in great style in West End House on Yarm Lane, in the fields outside Stockton [2].  The house was set well back from the road in its own grounds and the entrance to the drive was flanked by two gate lodges.  His pleasant and quiet nephew Tom [3] was still living with him and working alongside him.  His nephew William, who had returned from Australia a few years earlier and had been married since 1858 to Mary Ellen Ellison, was running the Middlesbrough branch in East Street.  (Middlesbrough began as a town on the north side of the railway line and that was where the middle classes then lived.)  William and his wife lived on the premises with seven staff, both male and female, aged between 14 and 40.

At around this time William Weldon took both his nephews into partnership with him and the firm became William Weldon, Carter & Co.

And then William Weldon Carter's luck took a downturn again when he fell ill.  In February 1863 William Weldon instructed a Manchester accountant to dispose of the "stock-in-trade, fixtures and goodwill of his branch drapery concern".  Such a sale in the booming new town of Middlesbrough was expected to have a broad appeal and this advertisement appeared in the Liverpool press: 
Liverpool Mail, 28 February 1863 
... The shop is large, modern and well lighted, having been built expressly for the business, and occupies the first situation in the town.  The trade is a first class and profitable one, and the returns average £10,000 per annum.  Present amount of Stock £3,000 or thereabouts.  A clever business man, or two active young men, who know how to buy and sell, may make a fortune in a few years.  The business at Middlesbro has hitherto been managed by the proprietor's nephew, who is unable from ill health to conduct it any longer, and hence the reason of its disposal.
It isn't clear to me whether William Weldon actually sold the business.  At any rate, William Weldon Carter and his wife and baby son returned to Stockton.  It was a busy few years for the family.  William and Tom's widowed mother Margaret died aged 59 at her brother's house and the following year it was from there that her daughters were married, Agnes Sarah to the shipbuilder George Craggs and Margaret Ann to the Bishop Auckland metal merchant Henry Kilburn.  Perhaps William Weldon found he missed the female company because at the end of 1865, he married.  He was 59 years old and his new wife Elizabeth Ann Benson was 30.

Five years later, on 24 July 1870, William Weldon retired from business to live out his retirement in comfort and dignity at West End House and William and Tom Carter became Carter Bros.  They branched out, buying an interest in Robert Gray & Co, a big drapery concern in Blyth. 

So in 1871 the younger generation was in charge.  Tom had just married and he and his new wife Jane Robinson Dickin lived at 4 Barrington Crescent.  William had bought a house at 2 West End Terrace for his family of three young children.  

Everything was looking promising.  The brothers sold their share of Robert Gray & Co back to Robert Gray, had their shop at numbers 34 to 37 High Street demolished and new premises built on the site.  In early June 1874 they celebrated with a ball for their employees.  The Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough reported on 13 June that over 500 people were present and that
The dances took place on the ground floor, and the show room was metamorphosed into a supper-room.  Dancing was kept up with great spirit till an early hour in the morning
The new buildings were heralded by an enormous advertisement in the Gazette on 3 July 1874 ("Great Extension of Business Area") and we can see the extent of the goods they sold in an advertisement in early December that year.  
Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 2 December 1874 
Carter Bros.,
Wholesale & Retail Drapers
Stockton-on-Tees
Desire careful and special attention to the undernoted Departments, which certainly contain by far the Largest, most varied and fashionable, together with the Cheapest Stock in the District of Cleveland.

They listed Costumes ("Fifty Homespun, at 29s 6d, ticketed in the town at 39s 6d"), Skirts, Jackets, Shawls, Flannels and Furnishing, which included carpets, matting, hearthrugs and paperhangings.

In the winter of 1875 they led the area in Early Closing for the winter months.  The Daily Gazette thought all the town's tradesmen could "advantageously and profitably" follow their example.  It doesn't mention the shop assistants.  These were the days of punishingly long working hours.  It wasn't until 1886 that the number of hours were restricted to 74 just for the under-18s and, with staff living on site, unpaid overtime was common.  The reduced opening hours meant that Carter Bros would close on Saturdays evenings at nine and on other weekdays at 6 o'clock.  (One early polemic against the system, Death and Disease behind the Counter, was written by the barrister Thomas Sutherst in 1884 and can be read here.  The cause of the shopworkers was later taken up by The Lancet).

And then in 1879 William and Tom's partnership came to an end.

By this time, Mrs Surtees and her little daughters had left Eden Cottage and William Weldon Carter had bought it.  Was it intended as an investment or did he intend to live comfortably in the country?  We don't know.  He still owned 2 West End Terrace and he must have spent a good deal of money on Eden Cottage to turn it into Eden Villa.  And he had plans for his future ...

Meanwhile in Stockton, it was the end of an era.  William Weldon died at home on 5 June 1880 aged 74.  The Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough reported on 8 June that
There was a large following at the funeral, most of the leading tradesmen and inhabitants of the town being present to show their respect for the memory of the deceased gentleman.  Mr Weldon was the founder of the old established firm of Weldon and Carter, drapers, now known as Carter and Co, and was generally esteemed for his strict business integrity and general uprightness. 
Over the road from the Oxbridge Lane cemetery where William was buried, his brother George now lived in one of the recently-built large houses called The Ferns.  Five years later, he too would be buried in the cemetery.

William Weldon Carter must have had high hopes for the future at the beginning of 1880.  He was living at Eden Villa, his little country paradise.  In March his son William Weldon Carter junior passed the preliminary examination of the Law Society and his proud parents had announced the fact in a notice in the Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough.  And then something began to go wrong with the finances.  

Eden Villa was repeatedly advertised for sale but there were no buyers.  The mortgagee lost patience and both properties were ordered to be auctioned on 30 September 1880 at the Vane Arms in Stockton.  This must have been a very unwelcome moment for William's brother Tom who was at that point renting 2 West End Terrace from his brother.  The auction notice described the house as 
a very comfortable and commodious House, and conveniently situated
while the description of Eden Villa ("a very desirable country Residence") now included a Croquet Ground.  

(The mortgagee's solicitors were Hirst & Capes in Harrogate, and if that sounds familiar to keen readers, it's because it features here in A Large family in 19th century Harrogate and in the story of John Richard Stubbs, which begins on this blog in July 2014)

This advertisement at the beginning of December shows that William's new plans were maturing: 
Sunderland Daily Echo, 3 December 1880 
New Drapery Store
212, High-Street, Sunderland
(Two minutes' walk from the Station on the right)
William Weldon Carter
Wishes the General Public to know,
without giving a Long List to read,
they will find all their requirements 
at Prices undoubtedly the Best
Value in the North
He and his family now lived comfortably at Oaks West in Sunderland, where William Weldon Carter junior, in spite of his Law Society examination success, was an apprentice draper and the two daughters had the benefit of a governess living in the household.  Eden Villa was empty; before long it would be the home of the Thorman family.

A few months later, William Weldon Carter announced the opening of a new shop selling "General Drapery Goods & Paper-Hanging" at 50 & 51 Church Street, West Hartlepool.  He advertised heavily.  It would be a cash only business, he explained in a long notice in the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 2 August 1881.  The goods would be marked at 
fixed and unalterable prices, and will be sold strictly for cash across the counter, thus saving bad debts, and deferred interest, so that cash buyers will be supplied with goods at such prices as would prove utterly ruinous to credit-giving houses.
Was this a public-spirited policy or did he need immediate payment for his cash flow?  He was hoping to "meet many of his old Stockton connection and friends" and he had an offer to make that might help poach customers who would otherwise go to his brother's business in Stockton:
Buyers from the country travelling by rail or carrier will be allowed their fare one way on purchases of one pound, and return fare on two pounds
No wonder relations between him and his brother Tom were strained.  A notice had appeared in the Hartlepool Northern Evening Mail, 22 July & Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 23 July 1881
Messrs Carter & Company, Drapers etc, Stockton-on-Tees, 
Beg to inform their Customers and the Public that they have no connection with the Carter from Sunderland who is opening Sutton's old shop at West Hartlepool.  
and directly below it was another notice
Note this – William Weldon Carter wishes the public in general to know that he has NO CONNECTION whatever with Carters' of Stockton nor has he any desire to be connected with them in any way whatever
On 20 August another advertisement appeared in the Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail– William Weldon Carter would be delaying the opening of the Hartlepool shop until 27 August 
In consequence of the enormous pressure of Business in connection with his SUMMER CLEARANCE SALE now going on at Sunderland
But financial disaster was looming and it arrived all too soon:
Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 22 September 1881 
LOCAL FAILURE – William Weldon Carter, hosier, draper, and milliner, late of Hutton Rudby, North Riding, but now of 50 and 51, Church-street, West Hartlepool, and of 212, High-street West, and of The Oaks, Sunderland.  Debts, £5,000; assets not ascertained.  The solicitors are Messrs Dodds and Co., Finkle-street, Stockton.  Mr F H Colison, public accountant, Cheapside, London, has been appointed receiver
An end to all his dreams.  

In Stockton, Tom was quietly prospering.  This advertisement from c1893 shows the extent of his business, which had become Carter & Co when Carter Bros was no more


And after that ... 

William Weldon's widow Elizabeth married Dr Thomas William Fagg the year after her first husband's death.  She continued to live on at West End House while the town steadily built up around it.  She certainly lived in comfort, as can be seen from an advertisement in the Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough 20 October 1891 for "2 Vine Houses of Black English Grapes."  She died, again a widow, in 1914.

William Weldon Carter makes a brief reappearance in the newspaper advertisements in the first three months of 1891.  He was the manager of the Darlington Mills shop in Dovecot Street, Stockton – this was the large and well-known woollens and worsted company of the Pease family in Darlington – and so he was once more in direct competition with his brother.  After that he disappears from the record.  He died in late 1904 at the age of 79 and was buried in the Oxbridge Lane Cemetery.  His son William died in 1912 aged 49 and was also buried there.  

Tom Carter died at home at 8 West End Terrace in December 1896, leaving a widow and seven children.  In his obituary, William's role in the early years of the business is quite forgotten:
Northern Echo, 28 December 1896 
Death of a Stockton tradesman
The death took place on Saturday morning, at his residence, West End-terrace, Stockton, of Mr Thomas Vincent Carter, the founder and chief partner of the firm of Messrs Carter & Co., drapers, High-street.  The deceased gentleman took an active part in the management of the business until about three and a half years ago, when he was seized with a stroke, and since then he has been in a helpless condition and under the medical care of Dr Hind.  
Mr Carter was a native of Beverley, Yorkshire, and was about sixty-three years of age.  In 1874 he built the present extensive premises, after having carried on a smaller business adjoining for some time, having succeeded to it on the death of his uncle, Mr Weldon, and about ten years later three other gentlemen joined him in partnership.  He leaves a widow and a family of seven.  The elder of his two sons is in a large drapery establishment in London, and the younger Vincent, is in the Stockton business, which has been under the direction of Mr H G Robson, the managing partner since Mr Carter's illness.  The deceased gentleman was of a genial but quiet nature, and was highly esteemed amongst a large circle of business and private friends.
Carter & Co became D. Hill, Carter & Co Ltd after his death.  They were a presence on Stockton High Street until just before the Second World War.  Nowadays, the new buildings that the Carter brothers opened with such a fanfare in 1874 are occupied by the Enterprise Arcade:

The Enterprise Arcade is on the far left

[1]    I have drawn a great deal of information, above all on the buildings themselves, from this ECM Heritage report and this Heritage Stockton article.  Other sources: London Gazette entries relating to the partnerships; digitised newspapers.

[2]      For West End House, see photograph and comments on the the Stockton picture archive

[3]      Thomas Vincent Carter is referred to as Tom in the notice placed in the press by Robert Gray on the occasion of the Carter brothers buying a share on Gray's drapery business.  Tom's obituary in the Northern Echo, 28 Dec 1896, given at the end of this piece, describes him as "quiet".


Alice Wandesford in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms

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The next series of posts are set in the 17th century.  It is my retelling of the life of Alice Wandesford during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms – the much more accurate name now given to the English Civil War of the 1640s.  

Alice was a girl of the Yorkshire gentry, thirteen years old when the Wars began and thirty-four at the end of the republic and the restoration of the monarchy.  It was a time of tumultuous upheaval in which Britain was permanently changed and during those years the North Riding witnessed skirmishes, small battles, sieges, large armies, and military occupation.

Alice Wandesford (1626-1707) began to write about her life when she was 47 years old, to defend herself against slander following a disastrous rupture with a woman she had looked on as a friend.  Her work is known – and studied – as The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton.

She rewrote it and added to it and in all, she wrote four books.  In 1875, the Surtees Society published a composite version edited by Charles Jackson and this is available online for free on Google Books.  

The second of her books, thought for the last hundred years to be lost, was found in the Durham Cathedral Archives in 2019 by Dr Cordelia Beattie, a Senior Lecturer in Mediaeval History, University of Edinburgh.  Dr Beattie also found the fourth book among papers in private hands.  With luck, before long all four will be available in print and online.

I have used the Surtees edition and Raymond A Anselment's 2014 edition of My First Booke of My Life, available as an ebook.

I hope I've written an account which brings the times to life.  I decided not to use footnotes for that reason.  But I've used so many sources – these are the invaluable ones:

The Story of the Family of Wandesforde of Kirklington & Castlecomer ed. by Hardy Bertram McCall 1904.  It can be found here 

The BCW Project  
This is an endless source of information – Timelines, Biography, Military, and Church and State.  And there is plenty on Wikipedia.

For the Parliamentarians of Yorkshire: 
The Extent of support for Parliament in the Yorkshire during the early stages of the First Civil War by Andrew James Hopper (1999) here 

A guide not to be missed:
The First Great Civil War in the Tees Valley 1642-1646: A Guide by Robin Daniels and Phil Philo here

For Ireland:
This interview with Dr. Micheal Ó Siochrú by Cathal Brennan gives a very useful overview: here  

The personal and professional relationships between Thomas Wentworth, Earl of
Strafford and his closest advisors
by Charlotte Kate Brownhill 2004: here 

The King's Peace and The King's War by C V Wedgewood

Perhaps before long the re-enactment socities will be able to hold events again – until then, and for a taste of the 17th century, why not watch the 2016 promotional video made by the Sealed Knot?  It's on youtube here 

A note about Richmondshire and the North Riding

Yorkshire was divided into three Ridings (thirdings): North, East and West.

For a map of the pre-1832 parishes of the North Riding, see here

The North Riding covered a smaller area than today's administrative area called North Yorkshire, which has a population of about 1.16 million.  (The population of England is nearly 67.9 million).

Richmondshire was the name given to the western part of the North Riding.  It contained the Borough of Richmond and the wapentakes of Gilling West; Gilling East; Hang West; Hang East; and Hallikeld.  See here.  Nowadays, Richmondshire is the name of a district council within the county council of North Yorkshire.  
(I've explained the part of the North Riding called Cleveland here)

Next post: 1.  The Wandesfords of Kirklington


1. The Wandesfords of Kirklington

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When Alice Wandesford was born, she was put in the care of a wet nurse – pregnancy and labour always left her mother far from well.  It was 13 February 1626 and at the time the family was living at the Hall at Kirklington on her father's estates in Richmondshire in the North Riding of Yorkshire.  

At her baptism by the Rector of Kirklington, it must have seemed to everybody that the future – if, with God's grace, she survived all the childhood perils of illness and accident – looked promising for her and for the country.

Young King Charles

Queen Elizabeth had died childless in 1603 when Alice's parents were small children, and the Stuart king James VI of Scotland had become the ruler of the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland – Wales had been conquered by England 350 years earlier.  With one king ruling both England and Scotland, there was at last not even a lingering fear of war between the two countries.  No more need, after many centuries, for either country to keep troops on the border, no more low level warring and sudden incursions, and the violent outlawry of the Border Reivers had finally come to an end.  

And the new King James VI & I was a Protestant king – the Wandesfords, and those of their opinion and allegiance, could feel that the Church of England was secure.  A little more than fifty years earlier, a longing among many for the return of Catholicism had brought about the Rising of the North in 1569.  Alice Wandesford's great-grandfather Christopher Wandesford had ridden aged twenty to reinforce Sir George Bowes' garrison holding Barnard Castle for the Queen against the besieging rebel forces.  In Kirklington itself, twenty-two men who held to the old faith had joined the Rising, including the village constable.  When the Queen exacted her terrible retribution against the ordinary people – far more terrible than anything her father King Henry or her sister Queen Mary had done – three of them were appointed by the Queen's commander to be hanged in the village.  And as a dreadful warning for the future, the bodies of the hanged men were to be left "till they fall to pieces at the hanging place".  But those days were over.  The Church of England now looked secure.

And now King James had been dead for less than a year and his son Charles was monarch of the three kingdoms – in fact, his coronation in England had only just taken place.  

The new King Charles was a shy, sheltered young man of twenty-five.  He would soon prove to be a man of fixed ideas and little experience.  And not a little slippery.  There were worries.  Many of his English subjects were already wishing heartily that he had broken with his father's example and come to respect the ancient, hard-won limits on his power over the people of England.  If only, people thought, he wasn't so completely dependent on the Duke of Buckingham, his late father's handsome favourite.  

Charles I by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1628

And if only, many of his English and Scottish subjects began to fear, the King's religious policies did not look so suspiciously hostile to their own dearly-held Puritan and Presbyterian beliefs.  This was a serious matter.  Religious toleration was not a virtue in those days – the future of the immortal soul was at stake, and how could a nation be secure and peaceful if people incurred God's wrath by heresy and irreligion?  What if, some people began to wonder, the King was actually planning to draw the country back to Catholicism, the religion of his own French Queen?  Catholicism was reviled and dreaded by all Protestants, however much they might live peaceably alongside their Catholic relations and neighbours.  They feared the reimposition of the Pope's authority and tended to greatly overestimate the number of Catholics.

But how peaceful and hopeful the future was for the three Kingdoms of the British Isles, especially compared to Europe, which was mired in conflict and suffering from the appalling toll of the terrible Thirty Years War.

Kirklington & Yorkshire

Alice's birthplace Kirklington lies in a sheltered basin in the pleasant, undulating country between Bedale and Ripon.  Fifteen miles to the north lay another of her father's properties, and Alice was to come to know it well.  This was Hipswell Hall in the parish of Catterick on the southern bank of the River Swale.  The North Riding stretched from the northern dales of Swaledale and Wensleydale, the high fells at the Westmorland border and the source of the Tees eastward to the important ports of Whitby and Scarborough.  It was a vast and thinly populated agricultural area, home to perhaps some 120,000 of England's five million people – and about 2,800 of them lived in Scarborough.  

Kirklington Hall by David Rogers CC BY_SA 2.0

At the centre of Yorkshire lay the Ainsty and City of York, the second capital of England, the centre of the King's government in the North, and quite as good – its inhabitants were sure – as London.  The East Riding, like the North Riding, was agricultural.  It bordered on the independent borough of Hull, Yorkshire's most important port.  The West Riding – where most of Yorkshire's population could be found – was increasingly industrial.  Its inhabitants made their livelihoods through the woollen industry, mining and metalworking, many of them living in large villages and thriving cloth towns like Leeds.  The West Riding's independent and self-sufficient workers were strongly Nonconformist and Calvinist – not for them a respect of church hierarchy and ritual observance.  

Mr & Mrs Wandesford of Kirklington Hall

Alice's father, Mr Christopher Wandesford, had inherited his estates fourteen years before she was born, when he was only twenty.  Auburn-haired and ruddy-cheeked, he was a good, serious and devout young man.  He had just decided to become a clergyman when his father died, leaving him with his younger siblings to provide for out of an inheritance burdened with debts – the late Sir George had been both careless and extravagant.  To be fair to Sir George, it was not only his extravagance that had left his son with impoverished and reduced estates.  Misfortune played a part.  For a hundred years, each heir had been under age and that meant that most of the rents had been taken by the monarch, who also had the right to marry the heir off as they pleased.  Christopher was the fifth under-age heir in succession and it cost his grandfather Ralph Hansby £900 to buy off King James so that Christopher could choose his own bride.

Christopher Wandesford (1592-1640)

After his father's death, Christopher left his studies at Cambridge for Kirklington, where he set about restoring the family fortunes, diligently studying law and providing for his siblings.  Within two years he was able to look about for a wife and his choice fell on Alice Osborne, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in London.  Carefully brought up by her mother in all that a good education and the Court could provide, she was proficient in writing, singing, dancing, and playing the harpsichord and the lute.  And she was as serious and devout as Christopher himself.  They married in 1614 and settled at Kirklington Hall.  

Mr Wandesford took in hand some of his land and, by farming it himself, provided for his own household while giving a weekly allowance of corn to the poor of the townships and villages on his estates.  He provided his cottagers with wool so that they might add to their income by weaving and Mrs Wandesford encouraged spinning for the linen industry by growing hemp and flax.  The Hall had been rebuilt by Mr Wandesford's grandfather Sir Christopher in about 1571.  Mr and Mrs Wandesford's additions were practical:  new stables, a large walled orchard and a new dairy, its water supplied by lead pipes running from a cistern near St Michael's Well, close by the mill race.

Their daughter Catherine was born the year after they married, and Christopher and Joyce soon followed.  And perhaps the Wandesfords might have remained always on their Yorkshire estates, improving their land and developing new industries, if it had not been for a strong and lasting friendship that was to determine the direction of Mr Wandesford's life.

Next post:  2. Mr Wandesford enters politics


2. Mr Wandesford enters politics: 1620-1630

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From schooldays at Well near Kirklington – or perhaps only from university days at Cambridge, nobody is sure – Mr Wandesford was the friend of Sir Thomas Wentworth of Wentworth-Woodhouse in the West Riding.  Mr Wandesford had a talent for friendship; Sir Thomas Wentworth had a talent for making enemies.  But Sir Thomas was much loved by his small circle of close friends and perhaps they loved him the more because his enemies hated him so much.  However it was, the friendship between Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth was real and deep.  

Sir Thomas Wentworth

So when in November 1620 King James found himself obliged to call the third Parliament of his reign – needing it to vote funds for military operations he planned in Europe – and Sir Thomas was engaged in a contested election to be one of Yorkshire's two MPs, he was able to persuade his friend and supporter Mr Wandesford to join him.  Mr Wandesford became one of the two MPs for the little borough of Aldborough in the West Riding and moved with his family to London.  

It was a sadly reduced family – little Joyce had died in 1620 at the age of two.  They remained in the South for a while after the King had brought the Parliament to a close in a fury, swearing never to call a Parliament again.  They set up housekeeping together with Mrs Wandesford's brother Sir Edward Osborne and his wife at Stratford Langton in Essex and it was there that a second son, George, was born to them in 1623.  

Then the King, needing funds, found himself obliged to call Parliament once more and Mr Wandesford once more joined Sir Thomas Wentworth in the House of Commons.  But only briefly – Parliament sat for a couple of months before the King prorogued it, not just once but repeatedly.  And then, on 27 March 1625, King James died and the Wandesfords returned to the peace of Kirklington.  

But Sir Thomas Wentworth was fully committed to a life in politics and Mr Wandesford followed him.  From early 1621 to the spring of 1629, he was in the House of Commons.  All in all, he was there for the last two Parliaments of King James and the first three Parliaments of King Charles, and each time the division between King and Parliament grew deeper and more bitter.  

So from the beginning Alice knew her father as a man who was sometimes immersed in the care of his estates and sometimes embroiled in fierce politics.  Family life was divided between Kirklington and London.  When she was born in Kirklington in February 1626, he was in London in the thick of the business of King Charles' acrimonious second Parliament.  So he will have met his new daughter for the first time when he went home in the summer.  She was by then a few months old, a strong and thriving child.  He could take up family life and the management of his estates once more – for a couple of years.   

Alice's early childhood

Mr and Mrs Wandesford were tenderly attentive to their children's upbringing.  Family life was filled with the practice of their Anglican religion.  There were household prayers three times a day and, every morning before breakfast, the children would gather round their mother who would hear them pray, repeat Psalms and chapters of the Bible and kneel for her blessing.  

A Royalist family in 1640: Arthur, Lord Capel, wife & children

Many years later when Alice looked back, she was filled with love and admiration for her parents, "through whose care and precepts," she wrote, "I had the principles of grace and religion instilled into me with my milk."  And so she recorded, in vivid detail, the accidents and illnesses of her childhood and praised God for her deliverance from them.  Children's lives were precarious – her eldest brother Christopher died from an accident when Alice was a year old and he was ten.  He had broken a rib in a fall, apparently from a child's coach, and it injured his lung.  When Mrs Wandesford bore her sixth child the following year, she and her husband named him Christopher after the boy they had lost, as was often done.

Among the earliest memories that Alice recorded were a horrid accident, a frightening illness and an escape from fire.  

She had been well looked after by her wet nurse and Mr and Mrs Wandesford engaged the same woman to nurse the new baby Christopher – she had milk because she had had a child herself in the meantime.  Alice had passed into the care of her dry nurse Sarah Tomlinson once she was weaned, and it was when she was following Sarah, who had Christopher in her arms, that her first bad accident happened.  Alice, a toddler of three, was clutching Sarah's coat and trying to keep up, when she stumbled and fell on the cornerstone of the hearth in the passage chamber which led to her mother's bedchamber.  She was like to have bled to death from the grievous cut on her forehead and the skin of the brain was seen, she said – but her mother's careful nursing and a kind Providence left her only with a great scar as a reminder of God's goodness in preserving her.

Then a year or so later, while her parents went to London, Alice was left to stay at St Nicholas, the house just outside Richmond which was the home of her beloved aunt Anne, who was her father's sister and the wife of Maulger Norton.  And there she fell so ill, so low and weak, that Mrs Norton and Sarah Tomlinson almost despaired of her life.  The little girl had eaten some beef that was not well boiled – or perhaps not well digested – and this brought on vomiting, which had driven her into a fever and then into the measles.

St Nicholas in 1824

When Alice was about five, the family went to London and took a house in St Martin's Lane.  One evening, while Mr and Mrs Wandesford were attending Court – the Court of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria was renowned for its splendour, ceremonial and elegance – a fire broke out in the house next door and began to spread to their own.  While the servants fought the blaze, Sarah Tomlinson carried the terrified children to Lady Livingston's and safety.

During this time, the future of Alice's sister Catherine was decided.  In 1630 she was married to Mr Wandesford's eighteen year old ward, Thomas Danby of Thorp Perrow.  Catherine was fifteen.  Marriages were arranged to be advantageous for the family and in this case her father could be sure of the state of the young man's affairs because he himself had put the Danby estates upon a sound footing.  As Catherine and her husband were too young to set up house together, they lived for some years at Kirklington – but of course Catherine was not too young to be pregnant and she was soon expecting her first child.  

And in these same years, Alice's father's career and the future of the country both reached a turning point.

Next post: 3. Dublin & war

3. Dublin & War: 1629-1639

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Until the Duke of Buckingham – who was all-powerful as King James' favourite and then as King Charles' adviser – was assassinated in 1628 by an army officer with a grievance, Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth had opposed him and the King.  

Duke of Buckingham: 1625

They had stood against King Charles when he tried to get round the need to have taxation voted for in Parliament by raising Forced Loans – imprisonment without trial was the penalty for those who, like Sir Thomas, refused to obliged the King with a loan – and by using martial law to force ordinary householders to lodge his soldiers and sailors in their own homes and keep them in food and clothes.  Mr Wandesford played an active part in the opposition to the King.  But by 1629 the rift between the King and Parliament widened to a gulf and positions were hardening on both sides.  The King was already viewed with great distrust and now it was feared by some that the bishops he had appointed were working to undermine the Church of England and move it towards the Church of Rome.  

If common ground couldn't be found between King and Parliament – and it was clear that it could not – then the time had come for men to make decisions.  Which side should have the upper hand?  The increasingly Puritan House of Commons or the intransigent King?  For many it was an agonising choice – a man might be as repelled by the aims and the religious position of the Puritan faction as he was by the King's past political manoeuvres and his slippery tactics.  But a choice had to be made.  Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth chose the King.

Now began the period known as Charles I's Personal Rule, when he governed without a Parliament from the spring of 1629 to the spring of 1640.  But it was not the end of the two friends' public life.  With the Duke of Buckingham assassinated in 1628, the King needed a new adviser and it would soon be Sir Thomas Wentworth.  He was made Viscount Wentworth and President of the Council of the North.  So he was able to help his friend to office and Mr Wandesford became the Deputy Bailiff of Richmondshire, Deputy Constable of Richmond and Middleham Castles and Master of the King's forests.  

Wentworth was by now a formidable public figure, much in the King's favour, but his gift for making enemies only grew.  It was particularly on display as President of the Council of the North.  Among the enemies were two Cleveland landowners – Sir David Foulis of Ingleby Greenhow, an old Scottish courtier of King James, and Sir Thomas Layton of Sexhow.  They clashed with Wentworth over a cynical ploy by the King to raise money by fining gentlemen who could have attended his coronation and been knighted, but who had not done so.  Sir Thomas Layton found himself in 1633 in the frightening position of being brought before the King's Court of Star Chamber.  He escaped lightly, but Sir David Foulis ended up in the Fleet Prison for seven years.  His sons would be no friends of Wentworth or of the King.  

To Dublin

And now Alice's life took a very different course.  When she was eight, the family moved to Dublin.  Her father had become one of the great men in the viceregal court, one of the small group of close advisers around Wentworth, now the Lord Deputy of Ireland.  

Some of Wentworth's friends had been against him going to Ireland.  They thought the post was a poisoned chalice and one he should refuse.  It was a job in which it was almost impossible to succeed and being away from Court left his enemies free to plot against him.  Perhaps Mr Wandesford thought it was a bad idea himself – he was always cautious and moderate where Wentworth was bold and dictatorial.  However, Wentworth accepted and the King agreed that he could take Mr Wandesford with him, to fill the legal and administrative post of Master of the Rolls.  

In July 1633, Wentworth, his family and advisers left for Ireland.  Mr Wandesford took with him his ten-year-old son George and his young son-in-law Thomas Danby.  Mrs Wandesford stayed behind with the younger children Alice and Christopher and they all travelled to Dublin some months later, together with baby John who had been born in London in the meantime.  The family settled into their new home in Damas Street – a very elegant house, according to a descendant, in a very wholesome Air, with a good Orchard and Garden leading down to the Water Side.  

Speed's map of Dublin in 1610

The small walled city of Dublin was a fraction of the size of London, though it had grown in size and prosperity since this map was drawn by Speed in 1610.  It had its own university, Trinity College, founded in 1592 under the encouragement of Queen Elizabeth to bring Ireland into the world of European learning and to strengthen Protestantism on the island.  It soon had a theatre – Wentworth dearly loved going to a play and he encouraged his children's tutor John Ogilby to set up Ireland's first custom-built theatre in Werburgh Street.  He had great plans for Ireland.

Life in Ireland

Six happy years followed for Alice.  She had the company of Wentworth's daughters as she learned her lessons – Anne was younger than she was by eighteen months and Arabella by four and half years – and her education was of the best.  On her father's orders she learned to speak and write French, to sing, dance, and play on the lute and theorboe, a 14-string lute with a long neck.  She was taught the arts of huswifery that her mother thought suitable for a young lady of her birth – such skills as silk embroidery, making sweetmeats, and making decorative leaves and flowers by gumming together layers of silk and cutting them into shapes.  

Wentworth's daughters, Anne & Arabella

Genteel indoor physical exercise was included, on a swing – she and the Wentworth girls used to "swing by the arms" as the ladies did for recreation and exercise, and Alice found it did her good.  Until, that is, one day at the house of Sir Robert Meredyth, when the girls wearied of the game and a page boy was instructed to push Alice.  Alice did not like this idea but could not get off the swing in time before he came over and gave it a violent shove – which resulted in her losing her grip and falling forward onto the floor onto her chin and being knocked quite silly for a while.  Sir Robert Meredyth was a member of the Privy Council; Alice's life – and that of her mother and brothers – was spent in government circles among the Protestant English rulers of a Catholic island.  

Beyond those circles lay people that Alice hardly knew or never encountered.  There were the Old English, descendants of the Norman lords who had conquered the island centuries earlier – they were still mostly Catholic.  And there were the Irish that they had defeated, also Catholic, excluded from their ancient lands and from civic life.  And there were Protestant incomers.  King James, to subjugate Ireland, had begun the Plantation of the province of Ulster, importing Protestant, English-speaking colonists from England and especially Scotland to settle there.  Wentworth, Mr Wandesford and the other close advisers believed that planting Protestants in other areas of Ireland – on land claimed by quibbles and legal loopholes to be the King's – was the way forward to a productive, modern country.  It would civilise the Irish.  Discontent simmered.

Wentworth's aim was to ensure the King had absolute power over Ireland, to bring order and prosperity to the country, to bring its Calvinist Protestant church in line with the King's High Church Anglicanism, and for Catholicism to dwindle away.  His goal was for Ireland was to be as like England as possible – but dependent on England.  He was ruthlessly efficient – everyone was glad when he put an end to piracy – but he and his policies were far from popular.  He was high-handed and his short temper was made much worse whenever he was in pain with that excruciating complaint, the gout. 

Alice's time was not only passed in the city.  In 1635 Mr Wandesford bought the manor and castle of Kildare, some twenty miles from Dublin, and for a couple of years it was the family's country house.  Perhaps it was here that Alice learned to ride.  It was while living here in 1636 that Mr Wandesford wrote a book of advice for his son and heir George, for the "regulating of his whole life", with instructions on such vital points as what to study and how to choose a wife, clearly setting out the universal understanding that marriage for the gentry was a very practical matter.  The greater a wife's fortune, the greater would be George's own comfort and the gratitude of his descendants.

On one terrifying occasion which Alice remembered vividly – it was on 6 October 1636 – they had driven out of Dublin to go to Kildare.  Mrs Wandesford, Alice and the three boys were inside the coach and Mr Wandesford and his men rode alongside.  They came to a narrow place where the riders had to fall back.  On one side of their road was a deep river – the Liffey? – and on the other a dry bank.  Was there no space for the coach?  Did the ground begin to give way?  The riders watched with horror as the coach began to slip – but the coachman, with great presence of mind, forced it to overturn against the bank.  Some of the family inside were hurt, but they escaped plunging into the river.  

The following year, Mr Wandesford gave up the estate to his great friend Wentworth, who had taken a liking to it.  Splendour and ceremonial were part of his plans for imposing royal authority on Ireland and he began to build a viceregal residence there, at Jigginstown near Naas.  Mr Wandesford had already begun to plan his own plantation – a new town in County Kilkenny, nearly sixty miles from Dublin.  He bought the estate of Castlecomer on which he began, with his usual efficiency and energy, to build a model market town with a new church, manufacturies and collieries, using the labour and expertise of artisans who came over from Yorkshire with their families.  For his own family he built a house and enclosed a deer park.  Besides all this work and his other financial plans in Ireland, he was busy in Parliament and as Master of the Rolls, and he deputised when Wentworth went to England.  His family can't have seen much of him.

1639:  shipwreck & war

The year 1639, when Alice was thirteen, was marked for her forever by escape from shipwreck and drowning.  She had travelled to England with her mother, who was suffering from the stone – bladder or kidney stones – and had decided to take the waters at St Vincent's Well, just outside Bristol.  In late August they set off back to Ireland, bringing with them Alice's nephews from Yorkshire, eight-year-old Thomas and seven-year-old Christopher.  They were the eldest sons of Alice's sister Catherine, now Lady Danby – during Thomas Danby's short stay in Dublin in 1633 he had been knighted by the Lord Deputy – and the boys were coming to Ireland for their education.  When the party reached the quay at Neston on the River Dee estuary, ten miles from Chester, they found they were kept ashore for a week by contrary winds and a great storm during which five ships were cast upon the shore.  One ship was so close to the house in which they were staying that its mainmast nearly touched the window.  

At last, on 22 August, they were able to go aboard one of the King's new ships, only to find that, within an hour of sailing, they were driven by a storm miles beyond Dublin to Skerries.  The anchor was lowered but for ten hours they were in peril until a Mr Hubert sent out a fishing boat to help.  And now Alice was nearly drowned.  She was somehow caught by the cable stretched between the boat and the ship and was half overboard when a seaman, coming up onto deck, saw her and pulled her back just in time.  At last, at eight o'clock in the evening, they were all brought safely ashore to Skerries where Mr Hubert and his family made them most comfortable until the next day when Mr Wandesford and some friends came out by coach from Dublin to bring them home.

Charles I by Van Dyck: 1635 or 1636

Mrs Wandesford's illness and the shipwreck were just a part of Mr Wandesford's troubles.  In 1638, King Charles' attempts to force his own brand of religion upon Scotland had ended in crisis.  The Scots created a National Covenant, an agreement signed by the people across the country, opposing the King's new prayer book and the existence of bishops.  So the King had begun the year 1639 by announcing his intention of raising an army against his Scottish kingdom.  

At this time, there was no standing army – just the Trained Bands, local militias made up of householders and their sons, who were obliged to turn out when summoned for training and action.  Their effectiveness was improved by the many men who had served in the religious wars in Europe.  The cavalry were the shock troops.  The foot – the infantry – was made up of pikemen, each with his ash pole, which could be up to 18 feet long and was tipped with a 2 foot long iron spear, and musketeers.  Dragoons rode light ponies and dismounted to fight on foot.  The ordnance – artillery – was of a range of sizes, from the large siege guns to the lighter and more easily transportable field guns.  

Battle was a fearsome, bloody business of hand-to-hand fighting.  The musketeers would stand doggedly firing at each other at point blank range.  The pikemen would advance, their weapons at shoulder height, until the opposing sides were jabbing at each other.  Then they would lock in the Push of Pike, two solidly massed bodies of men each attempting to force the other to give way.  The cavalry would come in with their pistols, short muskets and swords, firing, hacking, slashing.

Pikemen by John Beardsworth

By the end of March 1639, Charles and his troops had reached York.  On 30 May he was at Berwick with an army mostly made up of raw conscripts and the Trained Bands of the northern border counties.  When it became clear that he wouldn't be able to defeat the Covenanter army, he decided to negotiate.  But he was still determined to succeed by force and he summoned Wentworth to England.  

Notes:
The story of Sir Thomas Layton's clash with Sir Thomas Wentworth is told at Sir Thomas Layton finds himself before the Star Chamber 1633    

Damas Street is now Dame Street – it also appears as Damask Street and Dames Street [Wikipedia entry] 

Next: 4. War in the Three Kingdoms 


4. War in the Three Kingdoms: 1640

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With Wentworth now the King's closest adviser and soon in virtual command of his armies, Mr Wandesford became Lord Deputy of Ireland on 1 April 1640.  

He was left with an increasingly impossible task, as developments in Scotland and England interacted with the grievances of Ireland.  To add to his worries and forebodings, Wentworth had just made another bitter enemy.  On being made Earl of Strafford, he had chosen for his secondary title to be Baron Raby.  Why cause so needlessly such deep offence to Sir Henry Vane of Raby Castle?  Mr Wandesford himself would never accept a title or honours – he felt it was unsuitable in those unsettled times that threatened the King's own future.

Scots musketeers, from website of The Earl of Manchester's Regiment of Foote 

In early September Mr Wandesford will have heard with utter dismay that the King's attempt at another campaign against the Covenanting Scots had only produced the invasion of England and the Covenanters' victory over the Royalist forces at the Battle of Newburn on the River Tyne.  The border between Scotland and England was now at the River Tees.  So Scottish troops were only a few miles from the Wandesford estates.  To add insult to injury, a fortnight after the battle, the King signed the Treaty of Ripon agreeing to pay £850 a day to the Scottish soldiers' upkeep.  

Musket ball: found about 5
miles south of Sedgefield

The Irish Parliament grew ever more difficult to manage and was now trying to  impeach Strafford.  It would be no use Strafford advising his old friend to subdue them by holding firm, saying his "old rule of moderate counsels will not serve his turn in cases of this extremity".  Strafford was always supremely confident that his own bold and dictatorial methods would succeed.  Alice often heard Mr Wandesford speak to his wife of his forebodings for the future of the kingdoms.  

In the middle of November, Mr Wandesford learned that his colleague Sir George Radcliffe was about to be accused of High Treason and that the English Parliament had started impeachment proceedings against his great friend Wentworth, now Strafford.  On hearing this, Mr Wandesford sat in a sort of trance.  

Not long afterwards he was taken ill with a fever and kept at home for some days.  Feeling well again, he attended church but realised on coming home that he had not fully recovered.  He took to his bed again and soon the fever grew on him.  He did not expect to get better and he prepared for death.   

On the Tuesday he called for his Will, which he had executed the month before, to be read over to him in the presence of witnesses.  He spoke at length to his son George, urging him to fear and love God, to do his duty, to love and honour his mother and always to consult his uncle Sir Edward Osborne.  He had no doubt that the three kingdoms were heading for disaster.  He would call Alice, now nearly fifteen, to his bedside and, looking at her steadily, say, "Ah poor child, what must thou see and thine eyes behold," and, praying for her, turn away with a great groan.  

On the Wednesday night, the doctors laid live pigeons, cut in half, to the soles of his feet – a sure way to bring down even the most malignant fever.  "Are you come to the last remedy?" he asked them, smiling.  He knew that his illness would outwit their skill.  He died on Thursday 3 December 1640 at home in Damas Street, after declaring his faith and hope in God to Bishop Bramhall of Derry, a Yorkshireman he had known for many years, who gave him absolution.  He was forty-eight.

When they embalmed his body, they found that his heart was decayed on one side and this was felt to be because of the burden of work and care that he had carried.  They buried him with state in Christ Church under a marble slab before the Lord Deputy's seat.  

Mr Wandesford had faced many problems but he believed in conciliation and moderation and he didn't make enemies.  At his funeral, the Irish paid him the high tribute of keening for him – singing a lament.  It was never known to be have done for an Englishman before, Alice remembered, and when the unearthly, mournful cry of 'Och – Ochone' was raised, it so terrified her grieving twelve-year-old brother Christopher that from that time, she said, he fell into a fit of the spleen – a serious depression.

Cannon ball: found about 5 
miles south of Sedgefield
Notes

The King's campaigns against his Scottish kingdoms in 1639 and 1640 are known as The Bishops' Wars.

Keening, which in time became a profession for women, was strongly discouraged by Protestant clergymen in later years.  A BBC World Service Documentary called Songs for the Dead, including audio recorded in the 1950s of one of the last professional keeners, Brigid Mullin, can be heard here 

And a hint of how it must have sounded at Christ Church in 1640 when it so frightened young Christopher Wandesford can be gleaned from this video of Professor Ó Madagáin giving a verse of the Caoineadh Art Ó Laoghaire (Keen for Art O’Leary) followed by the Cry or Gol, the "Och ochón", which is the "hone" that Alice mentions.  Imagine this being unexpectedly sung full-throated by a great gathering of people

War comes to Ireland: 1641

The shocked and grieving family stayed on in the house at Damas Street.  Mrs Wandesford was a woman of great strength of character.  She was preparing to leave, but she kept up the great household as befitted the Lord Deputy's widow while she paid off the debts and discharged the servants.  The expense was a worry because she couldn't get at her own money in England, but the King had promised that the funeral would be paid for out of the Treasury and that the estate wouldn't have the cost of George's wardship – he was yet another underage Wandesford heir.  George was now seventeen and she sent him out of Ireland to finish his education. 

So Mrs Wandesford, the three younger children and her two little grandsons were still in Dublin when they heard that their family friend the Earl of Strafford had been condemned to death by an act of attainder when legal proceedings by Parliament against him had failed.  He was executed before a large crowd on Tower Hill on 12 May – murdered, as far as Alice and her family were concerned.  His many enemies, including Sir Henry Vane of Raby Castle and Sir Thomas Layton of Sexhow, had finally succeeded and his King's slipperiness and political mistakes had been fatal to him.  

And the Wandesfords were still in Dublin when the Irish Rebellion broke out on 23 October 1641.

Long-term grievances and the short-term hardships of poor harvests and economic difficulties had come to a head.  The descendants of the Norman French lords and the descendants of the Irish whom they had conquered had drawn together in the face of hostility from their Protestant rulers.  Ulster landowners had planned a preemptive strike so they could, like the Scots, take over their kingdom and force concessions from the King.  They succeeded in Ulster but they were betrayed in Dublin and they failed to take the city.  Their bloodless coup had failed.  Massacres of Ulster Protestants and bloody war were the result.  The extreme violence of the uprising was followed by the extreme violence of the retaliation.

When the plot was discovered, wild rumours spread through Dublin.  That night Mrs Wandesford and her household, with everything they could take, fled into the safety of the Castle.  

The next fortnight was spent in the city, packing up to leave in a nightmare time of fear and constant alarms.  Terrified, short of sleep, food and rest, fifteen-year-old Alice fell ill of a desperate flux, a dysentery which they called the Irish Disease.  But Mrs Wandesford found a ship that would take them all and they had a safe and quiet passage across the Irish Sea.  

Safely ashore, they stayed several weeks in the beerhouse at Neston Quay because Alice was so ill.  Sickness and grief had taken a heavy toll on this tender, loving, sensitive girl, who was prone all her life to ominous dreams foretelling family deaths.  A doctor came out from Chester to see her and she was cared for lovingly by her mother until at last she gained enough strength to make the journey by coach to Chester, or Weschester as it was still often called.

Note

The Irish rebellion and the war that followed is known as the Confederate War, from the Confederation of Kilkenny formed by the rebels in May 1642.

Next: 5. War in Yorkshire: 1642-1643 


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