John Wrightson, the Wise Man of Stokesley

In the days when people were nervous of witches, and called on the wake-wailer to come each evening before a funeral to sing the lyke wake that would keep their loved one's body safe from demons, they also had another resource – the Wise Man.  The wise man could be consulted for many problems – illnesses, lost and stolen goods, help in time of need, and to turn away witches' charms.

The most famous in Cleveland is undoubtedly John Wrightson, the Wise Man of Stokesley.  He was at the height of his fame at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, at the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.  This was a time when nobody was left unaffected by the huge demands of the war.  The wartime economy, the press gang, the militia and the army, the disruption of trade and manufacturing and the effect on people's livelihoods gave rise to uncertainty and many great hardships [1].  

So it is hardly surprising that John Wrightson should have a fertile field in which to work.  As to what he actually did and how he did it – writers over the years had various opinions on this, while there has always been an audience for the stories of his amazing feats.

Opinions on John Wrightson

Richard Blakeborough

Richard Blakeborough (1850-1918) was a writer, publisher, actor, playwright, recitalist and entertainer, in great demand at concerts and at house parties, where he was a favourite of fashionable audiences.  Born in Ripon, his passion was for the folklore and dialect of his native Yorkshire.  He began collecting during the time he worked in Bedale as a jeweller and watchmaker between the early 1870s and 1882 when he recorded many stories and dialect words which would otherwise be lost to us [2].   Born a couple of years after the railways reached Ripon, in the year that ironstone was discovered in the Eston Hills, he lived in the age of empire, of Disraeli and Gladstone and the might of industrial Britain.  He wrote with affection and enthusiasm of the world before industrialisation and compulsory education and he had a love of the mysterious and magical.  For him John Wrightson was "undoubtedly a man endowed with marvellous psychic power, and with the smallest amount of charlatanry possible" [3].

He relates in Wit, Character, Folklore & Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire a couple of the stories that he was told.  

The first was a tale told him by William Scorer, who came from Baysdale and was landlord of the Fleece in Bedale during Blakeborough's time there.  The buyer of some cattle at Northallerton fair had engaged an old drover to drive them to Stokesley with the beasts he was taking for another buyer.  In the morning two of his cows were missing from the field near Stokesley in which the drover declared they had been gated the night before.  The buyers decided to consult the Wise Man, but also to test him by saying that it was a horse that was missing.  As they entered Wrightson's house, before a word had been said, Wrightson called from the scullery where he was washing himself

Noo then, if you chaps is sharp eneaaf, an' ez that mich off [ie. know that much] 'at ya can manish ti to'n tweea coos intiv a hoss, it's neea ewse cumin' ti me, foor Ah can't to'n a hoss back inti tweea coos, an' seea ya'd better mak yersens scarce.  Ah've nowt ti saay ti ya.

In the end he was persuaded to answer, and he told them that the cows were in the beck – where, indeed, they found them.  The cows had missed the bridge as they were driven over the Leven late at night and fallen into the swollen river. 

Thomas Wayne (1727-1806) and the "Mystery of Angrove Hall"

In the 1990s Peter Meadows was working on an article on the subject of a lost Cleveland house called Angrove (also Anngrove or Ann-grove) Hall, which once stood between Great Ayton and Stokesley.  The results of his work were keenly anticipated but, as far as I can tell, it was never completed.  His draft article was the basis of Dan O'Sullivan's piece on Angrove Hall on the Great Ayton History Society pages on wikidot and I was given sight of the draft article many years ago by Dr Geoffrey Stout, but I have not been able to discover whether the draft article itself survives.  Finally I decided to investigate Angrove Hall myself and the account that follows is the result [1]. 

(The Great Ayton History Society's wikidot pages are no longer active, as the Society is in the process of creating its own website.  I will alter my references to link to the new website when it is operational.  In the meantime, my apologies.)

Richard Blakeborough's ghost story

On 11 August 1900 the Northern Weekly Gazette proudly announced that Mr Richard Blakeborough, "the well-known author of 'Yorkshire Wit, Character, Folklore, and Customs' and 'T'Hunt of Yatton Brigg'" would be contributing to the newspaper 

a series of unique complete stories, into which he has woven in his own inimitable way a variety of remarkable

Old Legends, Folk Tales,

and

Ghost Stories of North Yorkshire

under the title "Tales our Grandfathers Told"

On 25 August 1900, Richard Blakeborough's column began with a story of some 3,500 words entitled 'The Mystery of Ann Grove Hall' with the subtitle in brackets '(The Manor House, Stokesley)'.

Blakeborough's story was an exciting tale featuring in swift succession: a master of Angrove Hall who was enraged by the suspicion that his daughter planned to elope with the undercoachman; his allegation that the man had stolen valuables that he was entrusted to take to Stokesley; the disappearance of the coachman and his reappearance as a ghost; the hunt by the man's tenacious sister for the truth of her brother's fate with the aid of the witch Hannah Waugh and the Great Broughton blacksmith; and the exposure by means of magic charms of the master as a murderer.  The man's body is at last discovered and the Hall decays, falling 

into such ill-repute that no one could be prevailed upon to live in it, so it was closed, and never inhabited again, thus fulfilling the prophecy, which Hannah Waugh is reported to have made to the master of Anngrove, one day when she met him in Stokesley town, he being in company with several others at the time.  Said she, brandishing her staff in his face 

Thoo'll a'e thi day,

Bud lambs 'll plaay,

An' loup on t'grund where Anngrov' stan's.

Neea lahm (lime) s'll ho'd

S'all hap up t'deed o'thi tweea han's

Indeed, Blakeborough wrote, Hannah Waugh's prediction had come true and "not a stone" was left of "the ill-fated Manor House, Anngrove Hall".

By the time he repeated the story in his column in the Whitby Gazette on 1 December 1905, he had made the tale still more exciting and lively with the addition of a great deal of the dialect speech for which he was famous.  He also made a small change in the name he had given one of his characters.  In his original version he had given the name Thomas Mease to a groom at the Hall.  Possibly it had been pointed out to him that Thomas Mease (1792-1862) had been a well-known Stokesley business man as he has altered the name to Thomas Moses.

Three farms (Angrove East, Angrove West and Angrove North) preserve the name of Angrove today.  Its gate pillars can still be seen, as they were moved to the entrance to Stokesley Manor House when Angrove Hall was demolished 2.  (The date of the demolition is generally accepted to have been 1832, as given by Peter Meadows and as stated in Dan O'Sullivan's article.)  Richard Blakeborough's ghost story is still retold, and versions can be found online.

So what was the history of Angrove Hall?  And what relation does the ghost story bear to that history? 

Richard Blakeborough informed his readers that details of the murder and Angrove Hall itself were hard to establish.  Some old people believed that the murder happened in about 1840; some said it took place "quite a hundred years (say 1725) before the place was allowed to fall into ruin".  Some said the body was soon discovered; in the version he favours, the action plays out over generations.  Certainly Blakeborough knew little about the house, believing that it was an old manor house and referring to it as the Manor House of Stokesley.

In fact, Angrove Hall was only built in about 1760 and had a lifespan of barely 70 years.  Its owner and builder was called Thomas Wayne.  

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 racing about the countryside in her friends' fast cars, astonishing the locals when they appeared at village hops and danced the Charleston.  She was married all in lace at St George's, Hanover Square to a kind and gentle, and also wealthy, friend of her brother.  And then she became the classic character of the time – a "Bolter".  

In 1937 she ran away (literally) from her husband and child to join a local racehorse trainer.  She left behind the world of racing cars, parties and going to London to have her hair done, and took up life near Thirsk at a racing stable and farm, breeding poultry and Siamese cats.  

Of an intensely romantic nature, she had a deep love of history and a great facility for writing.  Her stories and anecdotes of the past are vivid and fluent – though they can't quite be relied upon for accuracy.  

She never expected monogamy from herself or the racehorse trainer, and indeed they parted in the end and she lived in a caravan on his farm until her mother's death left her enough money to buy a cottage.  Her last years were spent contentedly at Omega Barns Retirement Home where the many dogs and horses made her very happy until her death at the age of 100, outliving her contemporaries in spite of smoking heavily for some 80 years.

During the Second World War, Katharine began a love affair with the publisher Michael Joseph (1897-1958) and at some point, writing in the third person, she wrote an account of their time together.  The photocopy which I found among her papers is apparently still unfinished and the whereabouts of the original are unknown, but all the same the draft story has such charm and is so redolent of its time that I thought it deserved a place here.  

Katharine, who was my great-aunt, on her death left Michael Joseph's letters to a novelist friend.  "Many letters are lost.  Some fell to bits with being carried about," she wrote.  She wanted her friend to use the letters in some way and for the story to be known, but the copyright in the letters remains with Michael Joseph's family until 70 years after his death and that time has not yet come.  In the meantime, and in case the letters are never made public, here is Kay's story. 

The Story of the Letters: Kay and Michael

A few days before Xmas 1943, Kay's Siamese cat died.  She had nursed it day and night and went down, exhausted, with influenza.  

On Xmas day, in bed with a temperature, she unwrapped a Xmas parcel which revealed a book Charles by Michael Joseph [1].  The sight of it was unbearable.  Seizing a pen & with temperature soaring, she wrote in her grief and rage to Michael Joseph.  "I did not know whether to read your book or throw it unread into a furnace."

He replied and when, in calmer mood, she wrote to thank him he sent her a parcel of books including Eleanor Farjeon's Golden Coney [2].

She returned the books and to her amazement got another letter.  So it started & so it went on.

They found themselves falling in love by letter and before they ever met were writing ardent love letters.  The war came to an end and with it the terrible fact emerged that they could meet and so bring about either the destruction of something rare and sweet or its fulfilment.

He was living in Richard Llewellyn's[3] flat in Upper Brook St when in London.  His secretary managed to find the impossible, a room in a London hotel nearby.  (No guests allowed to stay for more than 3 days, such was the scarcity of accommodation among the bombed houses.)

All the way to King's Cross at every stop Kay's impulse was to leap from the train and go back.  She had deliberately described herself as less attractive than most men had found her.  She was to be wearing a slate blue suit and to be carrying a rawhide suitcase.

In fact she had bought some clothing coupons and was wearing a tawny Donegal suit and carrying a brown suitcase.

They were to meet "at the bookstall" at King's Cross.

Michael Joseph by Howard Coster,
1938, NPG x1943

Kay stood there and saw him.  She was petrified, unable to move.  He did not recognize her and went round and round the bookstall searching.  She then went to the taxi queue, as instructed to do if he did not turn up) and there he saw her and pounced.

They went to Upper Brook St for lunch, then to her hotel where she changed and bathed.  From there they dined at the Café Anglais and that night she never returned to her hotel to sleep.  She managed to get her room booked for a further 3 days although she used it only for changing and resting in.

They wrote to each other until they met again and after they had met for the last time, before his last marriage, up to the day of his death.

They met in all for 15 days out of their lives.  "You always call it fifteen nights," he said.

They decided that marriage was not for them even when both were free.  Kay thought herself "unmarriageable" without maternal instinct, especially for step children, and loathed the housewife role.  He needed all these things in a wife – but not a mistress.  He was incapable of fidelity.  So, on the whole, was she.  He had a feminine, cruel streak, in spite of war service and a fondness for sport including amateur boxing, and considerable toughness of character and appearance.  She had a masculine streak with not a vestige of maternal instinct or domesticity.  They met on both levels.

Before he married again he wrote and asked her up to London.  She refused, without knowing, but sensing, what was to happen; considering it to be a typical instance of his "feminine" side.  To betray his future wife and cause his mistress to suffer 

Soon after he wrote a tender and loving letter telling her he was to marry.

She was seriously glad for his sake, glad too that their love affair had never tailed off into indifference, glad for a clean break.  She told him so, and parted.

A fortnight after his marriage he wrote, to her staggered surprise, and said that the honeymoon had been much less boring than he'd feared and he looked forward to happiness.  They went on writing but never met again.

Kay woke up one morning dreaming happily, half asleep, of the absurd meeting at King's Cross, which she had not thought of for years.  Still smiling, and with eyes, half closed, she leaned out of bed and switched on the BBC news.  A voice announced "the sudden death of Michael Joseph".  His last letter still unanswered.

Kay Hill at harvest time
c1950s

Notes

[1] Michael Joseph (1897-1958) was a few years older than Kay.  Charles was about the life and death of his Siamese cat and is now only available second hand.  It is described on this Pet Histories blog  here 

  

[2] Michael Joseph published Golden Coney – a novel by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965) about a cat – in 1943

[3]  The best known work by Richard Llewellyn (1906-83) is his novel How Green was my Valley (1939), which was made in 1941 into a Hollywood movie directed by John Ford

 

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 died in 1659, the eminent physician Dr John Bathurst [left] was a very wealthy man, whose estates were said to have been worth £2,000 a year.  The date of his birth is unclear [1].  According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he was born in Sussex and came of a Kentish family.  A reviewer of a history of Richmond and Swaledale in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal [2] in 1979 described him as "one of the most famous of the Old Boys of Richmond Grammar School".

On 27 January 1636 (recorded as 1635 at the time, when the calendar was still in the Old Style) he married Elizabeth Willance at Marske in Swaledale.  Elizabeth and her sisters were the heiresses of their father Brian Willance of Clints Hall and shared his estates between them.  As a result, by his marriage Dr John Bathurst became the owner of Clints, a few miles from Richmond.  

Little is known of Elizabeth's father but her great-uncle, the draper Robert Willance, is one of Richmond's celebrities.  He was nearly killed when his young horse spooked and sprang down the cliff at Whitcliffe Scar, killing itself and breaking its rider's leg.  Famously, Willance saved his own life by cutting open the dead horse's belly and putting his broken leg into the carcass to keep himself warm and alive until help finally came.  His leg had to be amputated, and is said to have been buried in Richmond churchyard where its owner joined it years later.  Willance marked the spot on Whitcliffe Scar – Willance's Leap, as it is known – with a stone in thanksgiving for his preservation from death.  

In 1644, in the early days of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Dr John Bathurst was in practice at York where he successfully treated young Christopher Wandesford from Kirklington near Bedale who had been left in a pitiable state from the trauma of his father's death and funeral in Dublin.  Christopher was from a Royalist family;  Dr Bathurst's most celebrated patient was Oliver Cromwell himself.  

In 1656 Dr John Bathurst represented Richmond in the parliament reluctantly called by Cromwell (the Second Protectorate Parliament) and in 1659 when Oliver's son Richard Cromwell called the Third Protectorate Parliament, Dr Bathurst again represented Richmond.

He made his Will on 23 April 1659, the day after that parliament was dissolved and he died three days later.  

His family would benefit for the next hundred years from the fortune he had accumulated and the investments he had made.  Above all, they drew their wealth from the Arkengarthdale lead mines, where the well-known CB Inn is named after his descendant Charles Bathurst.  He had taken a lease on the mines in about 1650 and by 1656 he had bought the whole of the dale and the mining rights from the Crown.  

At his death he owned property in Swaledale, Richmond, London and Cleveland, including the manors and estates of Skutterskelfe and the nearby hamlets of Thoraldby and Braworth.  In his Will he established a charity in Richmond to maintain two poor scholars at Cambridge and to put out every year a poor boy as an apprentice, and among his charitable legacies he left a rent charge of twenty shillings on his manors to be paid by the churchwardens of Hutton Rudby to the poor on 20 December every year [3].

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 Sea' is a vivid account of the disaster, with plenty of naval detail (the author was a navy officer himself) to engross those interested in the sea, and a full account of Winston Churchill's role and the political spin that followed the losses. 

Not to be missed by anybody interested in the First World War.

Klaudie Bartelink's poignant film about the cruisers, with amazingly beautiful footage of the wrecks, can be seen at

https://www.dutchmaritimeproductions.com/portfolio-item/live-bait-squadron/

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 (see The Rusholme Road Chapel & the Rev James Griffin) had always been plain and hearty, led by a rudimentary choir.  But at the beginning of the 1840s two musicians, fresh from London and the stage, had joined the congregation and, as their contribution to church life, formed a new and inspiring small choir to lead the singing.

They were Henry and Fanny Burnett, the two young people mentioned in the chapter 'Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel'.  Theirs was a world beyond John Hopkinson's imaginings.  He was 59 when he first went to the theatre in 1883 and seemed to his son and daughter-in-law to be fairly baffled by it, while his wife dared not tell his sister Elizabeth, "she would have been so shocked."  

Henry and Fanny Burnett came to Manchester after the baptism of their second son in London in the middle of May 1841.  Three or four weeks after settling in, they were walking along the Rusholme Road one Sunday evening when they saw the lights of the Chapel and the people going in.  They followed and were shown to seats.  Something – they could never say exactly what it was – impressed them deeply with the earnest wish to come again.  At the end of the service, Fanny had turned to Henry and said, "Henry, do let us come here again: if you will come, I will always come with you."  He was quite taken aback because she had never said anything like this before.  

For him, a Nonconformist service was a coming home.  He had been an acclaimed and successful operatic tenor, trained in music from an early age – at the age of ten he had stood on a table to sing a solo in the Brighton Pavilion to the Court and seen the old king George IV, gout-ridden and wrapped in bandages.  But though his father had been persuaded by a friend that the boy's voice was too good to be wasted, that he could make an excellent living from it, it was reluctantly because theirs was a Nonconformist family.  Henry had lived until the age of seven with a pious grandmother and aunt and their early teachings left a lasting impression on him.  And so his success in the world of music had become less and less fulfilling.  He was, as Mr Griffin wrote in his memoirs

gradually coming to feel the emptiness of worldly pleasure, and to yearn in his "secret heart" after more substantial satisfaction

In the end, he could no longer bear the contradiction between the life he was leading and what he felt to be right.  He decided to leave the stage and make his living from teaching.  He and his wife were advised that Manchester was the place to go, as music was highly appreciated there.  

Fanny Burnett wrote to Mr Griffin in these early days that 

I was brought up in the Established Church, but I regret to say, without any serious ideas of religion

but of that evening in the Rusholme Road Chapel, she said 

More or less all through the service, I seemed in a state of mind altogether new to me; and during the sermon it was as if I were entering a new world.

Her old world had been very different.  She was the elder sister of Charles Dickens.  In the Rev James Griffin's description of her new life in the chapel we can see the distinctive world of John Hopkinson and his family.

Fanny Dickens, 1836

Fanny (1810-48) and Charles (1812-70) were born in Portsmouth, the first of the large family of John Dickens, a pay-clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth Barrow.  

In 1822 John Dickens was posted to London where Fanny was one of the fortunate children to get a place at the newly established Royal Academy of Music at its opening in March 1823, where she studied piano and singing.  The fees were 38 guineas a year, which wasn't cheap – as is recorded in A History of the Royal Academy of Music (1922), one of the committee members wrote to another, "we find that there are a great many schools where children do not pay so much". 

At this point, her parents' Micawber-like attitude to money, their habit of living beyond their means, caught up with them.  In September 1823, to save school fees and boost the family finances they sent their bright little 11 year old boy Charles to work in Warren's boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, an experience which Michael Allen has shown lasted for one year and which certainly marked him for life.  (His argument is to be found in this article on the National Archives website).  

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 sewing thread)  

In 1848 she married John Hopkinson, millwright and engineer of Manchester, and they had a large family.  Three of their four sons were engineers:

John Hopkinson FRS was a noted physicist, electrical engineer and professor who died untimely with three of his children in a climbing accident in the Alps.

Edward Hopkinson, engineer and MP, designed the first City & South London Railway's electric locomotives

Charles Hopkinson was a consulting engineer.  With his nephew Bertram Hopkinson and Ernest Talbot, they worked on the electrification of the Newcastle upon Tyne and Leeds tramway systems

Sir Alfred Hopkinson, John and Alice's second son, was the only one to follow the arts rather than the sciences.  He was a lawyer, academic and MP

Albert Hopkinson, the youngest son, was a general practitioner and influential teacher of anatomy.

This is the first article on 'The Engineering Hopkinsons' to give readers an idea of the story that follows:

Introduction

On Monday 7 February 1848, four days before his 24th birthday, a young engineer called John Hopkinson wrote his first and only letter of proposal of marriage

My dear Miss Dewhirst,

I wish to ask you one question, one which I have never proposed to any other, soliciting for it a patient consideration, because your answer may possibly affect your own happiness, and is to me an object of deepest concern.  Most respectfully yet most anxiously I ask, Will you be mine?

He had come to know Alice Dewhurst – in his anxiety, he misspells her surname in his carefully written letter – when she came to Manchester on visits to her married sister Ellen.  From the start he had been attracted by her "intelligence, unaffected piety, and genuine worth."  Admiration and esteem had become love, "deep and fervent."  He had never spoken to her about it because, as an apprentice and then an employee of Messrs Wren & Bennett, Millwrights & Engineers, he wasn't in a position to look after a wife.  Now he was a partner in the firm.  Casting aside formality, he wrote

I do love you.  I am yours devotedly.  Dearest let me call you my Alice and the future shall bear witness to the fervency of my gratitude.  

His proposal wasn't made lightly – deep feelings, long thought and prayer lay behind it.  His closing words were 

In tendering to you my warmest affections and in soliciting a return I have taken council of my own heart, but not less have I sought direction from God.  To His guidance I commend you, confident that in His hands the result will be right even though it should blast my most fondly cherished hopes – for He is wiser than men. 

Ever am I 

Yours very sincerely

John Hopkinson

That Friday, on his birthday, he visited her at her parents' home in Skipton and they were engaged.  They were married seven months later in the Zion Chapel in Skipton.  They remained a devoted, loving couple until John's death in 1902.