A Year's weather: 1895 by John Megginson

1895 – the year when Oscar Wilde was sent to gaol, when Middlesbrough Football Club won the FA Amateur Cup, Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island, the future George VI was born and, in Bavaria, Adolf Hitler had his sixth birthday.

The year had begun, according to the pages of the Whitby Gazette, with the usual entertainments and concerts held by churches, chapels and societies.  In the months that followed, golf clubs opened at Whitby, Robin Hood's Bay and Goathland.  Ships were wrecked, lives were lost at sea and in the local mines.  Two men died in a thunderstorm at the Royal Show at Darlington, a father and son in a lightning strike at Kirkbymoorside.  The people of Helmsley were horrified to discover that the attentive young father, on holiday with his wife and baby, had murdered them both with a large carving knife and buried them a few miles outside town. 

And the year's weather on the North York Moors was recorded by John Megginson in verse.  He was a 52 year old farmer, woodman and local preacher who lived at Fryup Head with his wife Ann Frank and their large family.  Snowdrifts, floods and storms – here they are in lively verse: 

Original Poetry on the Year of Our Lord, 1895

John Megginson, Great Fryup, Lealholm, Grosmont

As long as we are all alive

We shall remember January of '95;

When it came in it was so coarse, 

It snew and blew with mighty force!

So those that had to go to preach

They had a task the place to reach;

And when they had to travel back

They were beat sometimes to find a track;

For down below, and on the moor,

The wind it made the snow to stoor;

And people round about the place

Could not get to the means of grace.

Mourning in Eston: 1877

A small sheaf of receipted bills, which had survived by chance in the offices of Meek, Stubbs & Barnley, has given me the material for this sad story.

It was on the afternoon of Tuesday 23 January 1877 that a jury met at the Talbot Hotel in the High Street of South Eston.  They had been called by deputy coroner James Dent to inquire into a death.

Some 25 years earlier, ironstone had been discovered in the Eston Hills.  Before the ironmaster John Vaughan and his mining engineer John Marley found that first thick seam on 8 June 1850, Eston was just a little village.  With the opening of the Eston Ironstone Mine, men began to pour in from across the country, and soon terraces of housing were thrown up and the little enclaves of South Eston, California and Eston Junction came into being.

The inquest on that January afternoon in 1877 had been called because of the death of James Scaife.  He had come to Eston from Nidderdale.  Born to linen weaver Thomas Scaife and Esther Metcalfe on 11 November 1831, he was baptised at the Pateley Bridge Wesleyan chapel.  By the time he came to Eston in the early 1860s, he had been at work for more than 20 years.  

When he was 9 years old, living with his family at the Little Kiln Hill Milestone near Glasshouses, he and his 12 year old sister Ann were working in one of the Nidderdale textile mills.  When he was 19, the family was living at Crags, near the Blazefield quarries, and he was working with his father as a gardener.  Mining was a local industry, but he hadn't chosen to work with his brother-in-law Henry Calvert, Ann's husband, who was a miner in one of the Nidderdale coal mines.  

In the 1861 census, James was 30 years old, living on his own in Pateley Bridge and driving a carrier's cart.  By the late summer of 1863 he was in Eston and had married a young widow with 3 small boys.

Elizabeth Fielding was born in 1828 to John and Jane Fielding in Skirbeck, a village on the east coast of Lincolnshire near Boston.  In the summer of 1848 she married Richard Earley, who was a few years her elder, born in 1820 to Charles and Mary Earley at Kirton in Holland, a few miles to the south of Boston.  

In the late 1850s, Richard moved to Eston to work in the ironstone mines, bringing Elizabeth and their little boy Richard.  It seems that Elizabeth had already known a good deal of grief in childbearing – after more than 10 years of marriage, Richard was her only surviving child.   

South Eston c1913:  CC-BY National Library of Scotland

There will have been familiar accents around them in their new home because a good many Lincolnshire men came to work in the Eston mines.  William Pett, a 41 year old platelayer from the same village as Richard Earley, was lodging with them in 1861.  He was probably an old friend or relation of Richard's, and they had called their new baby after him – little William Pett Earley was only a month old at the time of the census.  By then, the family was living at 71 William Street, South Eston.  It was one of the streets that led off the High Street towards the moors.