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

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.

Festivities in Stokesley become respectable

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.

Frederick Cator's trunk goes missing, Stokesley 1841

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 presence of fishermen in this story is fascinating and must show the continuing importance of the coast in Cleveland life) 

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.

John Jackson & Captain Thomas King

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

Rev Robert Joseph Barlow invents a carriage spring, 1836

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.

Accidents at the Stokesley Gas Works, 1846 & 1866

I have found two instances of accidents with the Stokesley Gas Works; one is dramatic and potentially tragic while the other must have caused fury amongst fishermen. 

The first gasometer in Stokesley is said to have been erected near the New Mill of Messrs Mease & Blacket on Levenside (now the premises of Millbry Hill); I think a later gas works was built elsewhere in the town.  Until the 1970s gas was made from coal, so advertisements like this can be found:

Durham Chronicle, 18 September 1863 

TO COAL-OWNERS

THE STOKESLEY GAS COMPANY are desirous of receiving TENDERS for the Supply of good GAS COAL, to be delivered at the STOKESLEY STATION.  Tenders to be sent on or before the 30th day of SEPTEMBER, 1863, to the SECRETARY, at Stokesley.

In September 1846 the Agricultural Show at Stokesley was going well.  It had celebrated its 13th birthday with a "brilliant meeting of its members and friends and by a most excellent exhibition of horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry, on Friday, the 11th inst." and beautiful weather promised another successful day:

Yorkshire Gazette, 19 September 1846 

The Cleveland District Agricultural Show 

We understand that the entries for the present show were, on the whole, more numerous than those of the preceding year.  

We believe that the cattle and sheep did not occupy so great a space of ground in the show field, which, as in 1844, was kindly lent for the use of the society, by Col. Hildyard; but in the horses – the beautiful Cleveland bays – so celebrated in our own country and so great favourites with the foreigners who attend our fairs, – there was a manifest improvement, both as regards quality and quantity.  

The same remark applies to the pigs, to the implements, and the poultry.  The latter class combined great beauty and variety, and attracted the especial attention of a large and fashionable assembly of ladies.  We noticed that the show of pigeons was much greater than in former years, and it will be seen that premiums have this year been awarded to the exhibitors of rabbits.  We heard that encouragement to the breeding of rabbits had been objected to by some, principally on the ground that it would lead to trespassing in the turnip and clover fields, and perhaps there may be something in this suggestion; nevertheless we think it may be fairly urged that the interest which will be excited among the rising generation in these exhibitions will sufficiently counterbalance if not outweigh any small inconvenience that may arise in this respect ... 

The day throughout was beautifully fine, and the harvest being all but at an end in this district, the concourse of visitors to the town of Stokesley was immense.  We suppose that at one part of the day there could not be less than from two to three thousand persons in the show field.

"The only drawbacks to the complete success of the meeting" were the unavoidable absence of the year's president Lord Feversham and "the occurrence of an accident, the consequences of which might have been most frightful."

The committee had decided that the dining hall should be lighted with gas – but 

about noon the town was alarmed by two most tremendous reports, resembling those of the discharge of heavy cannon

There had been an explosion at the Stokesley gas works.

It appears that Mr Simpson, the manager, and his son, two persons of the name of Carter, from Sunderland, who had been engaged in fixing the gasometer, which has recently been removed, two labourers named Gray and Caldwell, and some other persons who had been brought to the spot through feelings of curiosity, were mounted upon the top of the gasometer.  The object of those who had business there was either to try the amount of pressure, or to discover if there was any foul air in the tank.  We were told both, but whichever was the object matters not to our purpose, for the result would not have been different.  

In order to ascertain one or both of these facts, a lighted match was applied to a hole in the top of the gasometer, and a jet of light was, of course, immediately produced.  When the necessary observation had been made, one of the men, instead of blowing the flame out, suddenly placed his finger over the hole, and thus forced the flame within the gasometer.  

An instantaneous explosion was the consequence, the gasometer being forced completely out of its place, and the parties being thrown from the top in all directions.  They were all more or less injured, and Caldwell so much so that when we left Stokesley on Saturday, we were told that his recovery was very doubtful.  He was much hurt about the head and back.

I don't know what happened in the end to poor Mr Caldwell, but I haven't found an entry in the deaths registers for anyone of that name in Stokesley for the period from the accident to the end of 1847.

The second incident spared human life but caused enormous damage to fish:

Teesdale Mercury, 23 May 1866 

Wholesale Destruction of Fish 

The river Leven has long been noted as an excellent trout water, but we regret to learn that from Stokesley to where the Leven falls into the Tees, below Yarm, the fish have been totally destroyed.  The water in the gasometer at Stokesley being pumped, the tank having to be emptied, the water through which the gas was purified for years past, about 350 tons, was allowed to flow into the river.  The consequence has been that all the fish are killed from Stokesley to the end of the Leven.  Large quantities of trout and other fish were taken out of the water dead, and dying, on Tuesday last.

This page from the website of the National Gas Museum explains how gas was made from coal in the days before gas from the North Sea, and this one explains how gas was stored in 'gasometers'.

The Mease sisters of Stokesley

A footnote to the story of the linen mills of Stokesley & Hutton Rudby: 1823-1908 and the Mease brothers.

Thomas and John Mease had three sisters: Isabella, Rachel and Mary.  

Rachel and Mary were the youngest children of the family, born in 1807 and 1810.  They spent their lives together in Stokesley, where Mary was the town's postmistress and Rachel her assistant.  Rachael died in 1882; Mary outlived her by ten years.

Isabella was the second child of the family, born in 1794 a couple of years after Thomas.  She was the only daughter to marry.

Leeds Mercury, 9 December 1815

On the 22d ult. at Stokesley, the Rev Robert Pilter, of Pontefract, Methodist minister, to Miss Mease, of the former place

The Rev Robert Pilter was a widower and a highly respected figure in Wesleyan Methodism.  Isabella and Robert had a large family together, and the birthplaces of the children show how frequently they moved about following Robert's calling – Pontefract, Darlington, Rochdale, Stockport, Rotherham, Doncaster, Macclesfield. 

Their eldest child Thomas was the tenant of his uncle John Mease's flax-spinning mill and had an interesting encounter with the men who had come to repossess it following his uncle's failure to pay off his debt to the Darlington Bank (see Hutton Rudby 1834-1849: the Flax-Spinning Mill by the bridge)  He moved to France, where he had a successful business career.

It was in France that his father Robert Pilter died.  According to A Dictionary of Methodism he went to Lisieux for the sake of his health but died there on 27 February 1847.

Isabella and her four unmarried daughters were left in the necessity of earning their own living. 

Four years later, the 1851 Census for the east side of Howard Street, North Shields, shows that the eldest daughter, Mary Isabella Pilter (aged 28) had set up a school in which her mother and sister Margaret (26) worked as school mistresses.  Their brothers William (aged 20, a shipping master's clerk) and Richard (aged 17) were also in the household, together with the youngest sisters Elizabeth and Isabella (15 & 13), who were still at school.

Miss Mary Pilter's notices in the Newcastle papers show that she used her father's name in her advertising.  His reputation must have been of considerable advantage to her in establishing her respectability and in attracting pupils:

Newcastle Guardian & Tyne Mercury, 15 January 1853

Misses Pilter (daughters of the late Rev. R Pilter), gratefully acknowledge the continued liberal support of their friends, and respectfully announce that the duties of their Establishment will be Resumed on Tuesday, January 18th.

Howard Street, North Shields

Three years later she moved the school to a mill-owner's mansion house in an area ideal for middle-class parents in the growing manufacturing towns of Lancashire and the West Riding.  Her advertisement is confident and reassuring:

Leeds Mercury, 18 November 1854

WILLOW LODGE, NEAR SOWERBY BRIDGE

THE MISSES PILTER (daughters of the late Rev R Pilter), beg to announce that they intend to open the above Establishment for a limited number of Pupils immediately after the Christmas vacation.

Willow Lodge (lately the seat of J F Sutcliffe, Esq.) is a most commodious mansion, in a beautiful and salubrious situation, and surrounded by extensive pleasure grounds.  Its proximity to the Leeds and Manchester Railway renders it easy of access from all parts of the kingdom.

The constant aim of the Misses Pilter will be to ensure the health, happiness, and intellectual improvement of their pupils, by granting them every indulgence consistent with a well ordered household, and by imparting sound instruction in English and Continental literature.

For terms, apply to Misses Pilter, Howard-street, North Shields

It seems the proper name of the house was Lower Willow Hall as it was named as such in a notice in the Leeds Mercury of 16 June 1821 ("the Mansion-House of Mr John Sutcliffe, called Lower Willow Hall"). 

The following July, the advertisement in the Leeds Mercury that announced the new term ("the Duties of their Establishment will be Resumed") continued the reassuring theme, so encouraging for nervous prospective parents:

Every attention is paid by the Misses Pilter to the Health and happiness as well as the moral and intellectual improvement, of their pupils ... Mrs Pilter superintends the domestic arrangements ... Terms and highly respectable references on application.

The school flourished – Mary Isabella was evidently an extremely capable woman – and by the 1861 census the four sisters and their mother had 17 boarding pupils from across Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and Co. Durham – with the addition of one Mary Pilter, born in France and evidently the daughter of their brother Thomas.

Their advertisement in the Yorkshire Post of 27 January 1868 showed that they kept up with the latest developments in education:

Yorkshire Post, 27 January 1868

WILLOW HALL, SKIRCOAT, Near Sowerby Bridge – The Misses Pilter (Daughters of the late Rev R Pilter) have availed themselves of the Cambridge University Local Examinations as a test of the efficiency of their School, and have great pleasure in referring to the success of their pupils.  All the candidates from Willow Hall passed in every subject in which they were examined.  The NEXT TERM will commence on THURSDAY the 30th instant.

The Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate had been established by the University in 1858 to administer local examinations so that students who weren't members of the University could sit exams at centres near to home.  The aim of the Syndicate was to raise standards in education.  Girls had only been officially allowed to enter for the exams on the same basis as boys in 1863.  With pride, the Misses Pilter announced the following year in the Leeds Mercury of 10 July 1869 that

In each of the last three years a fifth of the whole number of pupils at Willow Hall

had passed and 

Honours have been taken in English, religious knowledge, French, music, and drawing

The 1871 census for Lower Willow Hall Boarding School, Skircoat showed that Isabella and her daughters now had 32 pupils, including Mary Sykes from Stokesley.  Their 18 year old niece Margaret Pilter from France was with them, perhaps as a visitor.

The school was clearly flourishing.  Then, only a few months after the census, tragedy struck the eldest and the youngest sisters.  On 20 April 1871, Mary died aged 48 and a couple of months later

Elizabeth died aged 35.

For a short while the survivors carried on with the school.  But Mary had evidently been the driving force behind the enterprise and it must have been very hard to have the heart to keep going.  Isabella and her daughters Margaret and Isabella sold the school and retired to live on their savings with their brother John Mease Pilter, who had followed his father into the Wesleyan ministry.  By July 1873, a new headmistress was advertising the school: "Principal, Miss Wilson, (late Misses Pilter)". 

Isabella Mease died in 1888 in Wales.  She had outlived all her siblings except the youngest, Mary, who was her junior by 16 years