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.

The Jackson family of Lazenby and Lackenby

In the 18th and 19th centuries, a family called Jackson farmed at Lackenby and Lazenby, two small hamlets in the parish of Wilton, at the northernmost edge of the North Riding of Yorkshire.  This low-lying land, stretching northwards to the mouth of the river Tees – and later mostly covered by ICI Wilton – was once known as the Lowside.

We are so used to the view of the petrochemical complex that inspired the opening scenes of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner that it is hard to imagine how empty and beautiful the place once was.

Here it is – before the Tees became an industrial river – described by the Revd John Graves in his History of Cleveland in 1808:

The village of Wilton is small, and consists of a few houses, seated on the northern declivity of a hill, the summit of which being nearly level, has been brought into cultivation; while the sides, rising abruptly, are ornamented with young and thriving plantations.   

The grounds on the north from the village have an easy and gradual descent, and the prospect is extensive and pleasingly diversified: near at hand upon the right are seen the hospital and mansion, with the richly cultivated grounds of Kirkleatham, beyond which, tracing the circling line of shore to the left, the town of Hartlepool in a prominent position, with the bold figure of its church, affords a striking object; while the serpentine course of the river Tees, which on its approach towards the sea, expands itself into a fine extensive bay, is seen winding through a tract of rich and fertile grounds beneath, adding greatly to the beauty and interest of the general view. 

It was a small agricultural parish and, in 1801, consisted of 67 houses occupied by 74 families – a total of 328 people.

The lands within the parish consist nearly of an equal portion of arable, meadow, and pasture; and the soil in general a fertile clay; which, notwithstanding its northern aspect, and exposure to severe blasts from the sea, produces crops of wheat and other grain in great perfection, and the harvests in general are as early as in any of the more favoured parts of Cleveland.   

The low grounds near the river Tees are principally in grass; as was formerly an extensive tract, which lay in common open fields, stretching from the village in a direction north and south; but, by the late inclosure, has been brought into a more advantageous state of cultivation.

The Jacksons of Wilton were for the most part yeomen, that hardworking, prudent class that lay between the gentlemen and the petty farmers.

In the mid 20th century, a descendant of the Jacksons of Wilton compiled a family tree covering the 17th to 19th centuries, based on a collection of legal documents, information and artefacts that had remained in the family, and supplemented with research. 

It was subsequently examined and extended by the late Miss Grace Dixon, local historian of Guisborough, with assistance from the Kirkleatham Museum, and then Grace Dixon and I worked on some specific areas of the story. 

The early parts of the family tree remain imperfect, but nevertheless useful (perhaps particularly to those trying to disentangle the many Jacksons of Cleveland), and the later developments are very interesting.  Where I can, I indicate sources; it is obviously open to correction, but will at least point to areas of investigation.