19th century solicitors in Middlesbrough, Stockton and Darlington
In the second half of the 19th century when Middlesbrough – Gladstone's "Infant Hercules"– boomed from a farmhouse to an important industrial town in the space of decades, solicitors played a...
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"That Tiresome Lady Architect": Mrs Annabel Dott
Five years ago, on Thursday 21 February 2019, I published here the first of my pieces on the redoubtable and remarkable Mrs Annabel Dott, woman architect and builder. I first came across her when I...
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Introducing John Hopkinson & Alice Dewhurst
Last year I began a new blog called 'The Engineering Hopkinsons'. Alice Dewhurst of Skipton was the daughter of John Dewhurst of the Bellevue Mill. (Readers may remember buying the familiar Dewhurst...
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Charles Dickens' elder sister Fanny
This is an article from my blog The Engineering Hopkinsons. It is set in Manchester and it's called 'Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel'The unaccompanied hymns at the Chapel...
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HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy
I've only just caught up (two years late) with reading this excellent book on the sinking of HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy on 22 September 1914 by a single German U-boat.Stuart Heaver's 'The Coal Black...
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The Bathurst Charity School in Hutton Rudby
The connection between Hutton Rudby and the Bathursts began in the first half of the 17th century with the founder of the family fortunes, Dr John Bathurst. Dr John Bathurst (d 1659)By the time he...
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The Story of the Letters: Kay Hill & Michael Joseph
Katharine Hill (1905-2005) was very much of her time. A young woman who grew up in a professional middle-class family and among the Teesside ironmasters and gentry, after the First World War she loved...
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