The Atkinsons of Scaling Dam in the 17th & 18th centuries

This is the sort of thing that one always hopes for – in 2013 I posted the Whaling Journal 1774 of Thomas Atkinson of Kirkleatham and articles about the Atkinson family of Scaling Dam.  And recently I was contacted by Stella Richmond Sterry, a descendant of Thomas's sister Jane Galilee (as I am myself) – but she has the family Bible!

And so, armed with all that lovely information, I've been able to do more research on the family.  I hope it's (a) of interest and (b) of use to people who are trying to disentangle their own Cleveland Atkinsons.  

An extra bonus for me is that I get to go back again to the Civil Wars, which I left reluctantly after finishing work on Alice Wandesford in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms 

………

The young Thomas Atkinson who took the whaling voyage in 1774 (you can find it here) was the eldest son of Thomas Atkinson (1722-92), Master of Sir William Turner's Hospital at Kirkleatham.

In 1788, towards the end of his life, Thomas Atkinson senior repaired his father's family Bible, which had been damaged after his father's death in 1755.  And in it, very wisely, he left a written record which he entitled "From Oral Tradition".  He began with the story of his great-grandfather Atkinson, who was a soldier in the Parliamentarian Army during the Civil Wars – the Wars of the Three Kingdoms – and who lived afterwards at Scaling Dam.

Scaling Dam was (and is) a hamlet more or less half way along the moors road between Guisborough and Whitby.  Then, the North Riding of Yorkshire was thinly populated and the moors were wide and empty.  The antiquarian Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., (1658-1725) took the moors road in November 1682 and didn't like it at all, recording in his diary that he travelled "over the rotten Moors for many miles without anything observable."

O.S. map 1888-1913

CC-BY-NC-SA National Library of Scotland

The hamlet's name doesn't come from the reservoir which was built there in the 1950s – it appears, for example, as Skallingdam in the 1675 map of John Ogilby.  I suspect the hamlet was given its name to show it was a sort of outpost of the village of Scaling but near the dam – the Dam Bridge can be seen on the map above.  It was, of course, a very practical place for a settlement, being on the moors road at the junction with the road to Staithes.  It isn't surprising to see that the 1888-1913 map shows both a pub and a smithy, both of which must have been there for very many years.  Both Scaling and Scaling Dam were in the parish of Easington in Cleveland.

Atkinson the Parliamentarian Soldier

The family didn't remember the Soldier's Christian name, but knew that he had been at the battles of Marston Moor (1644), Naseby (1645), Preston (1648) and Dunbar (1650).  The fact that Marston Moor seems to be his first major battle suggests the Soldier was a Northerner, and the fact that he spent the rest of his life in Scaling Dam seems to me to show that he was almost certainly an East Cleveland man.  It's hard to think an outsider would find his way to Scaling Dam in the middle of the 17th century.

The Soldier used to talk of the battle of Dunbar, Oliver Cromwell's miracle victory.  The histories say that when the right wing of Scottish cavalry broke under the English attack, Oliver Cromwell and General Lambert didn't allow the English troopers to go in pursuit and, as the troopers regrouped, they sang the 117th Psalm

O praise the Lord, all ye nations:
praise him, all ye people.
For his merciful kindness is great toward us:
and the truth of the Lord endureth for ever.

When the Soldier looked back on the battle, Thomas wrote, he used to say of the singing

their Notes were more pleasing to Him who is the Giver of all Victory than the Clashing of Swords and roaring of Canon.  

The Soldier was very probably a member of one of Cleveland’s Trained Bands, the local militias made up of householders and their sons, who were obliged to turn out when summoned for training and action.  The ability to read and write was spreading fast among the common people at this time, but the sort of family that was liable for Trained Band service would certainly produce a literate man like the Soldier, whose constant reading of Scripture led him to have, as Thomas wrote, "the Bible and Testament almost by Heart".

Soldier Atkinson was in the minority in the North Riding of Yorkshire, which was almost entirely Royalist in sympathy – though many, if not most, people didn't want to choose a side at all and simply wanted to be left in peace.  The North Riding gentlemen who supported Parliament had a difficult time raising troops and the troops, when assembled, weren't keen.  Sir Henry Foulis reported that a Cleveland foot regiment that had mustered 500 men at Yarm had rapidly dwindled to 80 at the approach of the enemy.  (see War in Yorkshire: 1642-1643)

Parliamentarian gentry included the Foulis brothers, whose father Sir David Foulis had been put in the Fleet Prison for several years because he opposed the King’s man, Sir Thomas Wentworth (the story can be found here) but their family estates were at Ingleby on the western escarpment of the moors.

A Parliamentarian gentleman from the close neighbourhood of Scaling Dam was Nicholas Conyers.  In fact he came from the parish of Easington itself, being the son of Nicholas Conyers of Boulby, and, like Soldier Atkinson, he was at Marston Moor.  Two of his brothers died fighting for the King.

Nicholas Conyers was in the Scarborough garrison under Sir Hugh Cholmley of Whitby when Cholmley changed sides and took the town over to the Royalists in 1643.

Cholmley first made sure that anybody wanting to leave Scarborough before it became Royalist had left the town.  Many did, including Nicholas Conyers.  If Soldier Atkinson was there with Sir Hugh's forces, he too will have left for the Parliamentarian garrison at Hull.

Atkinson the Soldier was clearly one of the Godly – a Puritan – and committed to Parliament's cause.  This makes him an interesting figure in the overwhelmingly Royalist North Riding.  Perhaps there were many more like him among the ordinary men of Cleveland, but we only know about the gentry and we don't know how many of the Soldier's neighbours and relatives shared his views.  And we don't know what his views were – how ardent a Puritan he was, how radical a Parliamentarian.

Thomas describes the Soldier as a subaltern.  I've checked with Phil Philo (do not miss his new blog Of Things Trent-North) and this was not a term used at the time.  I think all we can say for definite is that his family remembered that he had men under him.  So he could have been a junior officer, or a sergeant or a corporal.  Nor do we know if he fought in the foot or the cavalry.

Pikemen.  Photo by John Beardsworth

In the same way, Thomas thought that he lived to a very great age "being near a hundred before he died".  This isn't any help in identifying him, as the Easington parish registers for the time are fragmentary and don't record the age anyway.  But we can certainly say that he was notable in the area, with his past history of bloody and brutal warfare, his command of the Bible and his great age.  

After the fighting stopped, everyone must have had to learn to live together and mend the divisions within families and neighbourhoods.  It can't have been easy after so many deaths and so much destruction. 

We don't know how the Soldier made his living before and after the wars, but we can guess that if his father was a farmer then he wasn't the eldest son, because then he would have been needed on the land.  So he would have had a trade.  At some point the Soldier married and had at least one son, whose name was John, who was "brought up to the business of a Tanner", so perhaps the Soldier was a tanner himself.  

Tanning was a vital industry at this time, with leather necessary for so many things, from boots, shoes and gloves to horse collars, and Scaling Dam was a good place for the tanning process, with water from the Dam Beck nearby.  Tanning was done in pits lined with timber.  The bark of young coppiced oaks was used, or lime, and the process took time, hard manual labour and skill.  Most villages had a leather worker and they were to be found in much larger numbers in towns.  Tanners often farmed on the side.

Walk the Cleveland Way – in 1866

An ideal trip back in time for anyone planning to walk the Cleveland Way when lockdown is over, or for people who know it well.  Actually, this isn't actually the whole Cleveland Way but only a section of it.  It's an account written in 1866 of a two day walking holiday along the coast from the newly-built and select resort of Saltburn by the Sea to the ancient town of Whitby.  The writer, who styles himself J.G. (in those days, newspaper articles were anonymous), is drawn by the prospect of a hearty walk and the scenery, but it's the industry and geology that really capture his attention:

Yorkshire Gazette, 14 July 1866

A visit to the Sea Cliffs of Cleveland

The Yorkshire sea coast is upwards of 100 miles in extent, and is, more or less, interesting to the tourist.  The coast of the East Riding begins at Spurn Head, and ends near Filey, and that of the North Riding from near Filey to the Tees mouth, near Redcar.  Desirous of spending a couple of days on the sea coast, and of seeing some of the ironstone districts of Cleveland, about which much has been said, we happened to look into a little book styled North Yorkshire by John Gilbert Baker, lately published, and at page 148 it is stated 

Now that the railway runs to Saltburn on the one side, and to Whitby on the other, this grand sweep of craggy coast is brought within the range of easy access to tourists, and it is to be expected that it will be more visited, and become better known than it has been.

The tide is often inconvenient for paying a visit to the crags from below, and to skirt their upper edge necessitates 

a good deal of rough scrambling, but to those who are able to make it, and who care for either magnificent scenery or geology, the walk between Saltburn and Whitby will richly repay the exertion.

Here is the very tract of country mapped out for a two days' trip, embracing in its range everything that is requisite for healthy exertion and for a general knowledge of the ironstone strata of the Cleveland hills.

The train which left York at 6 a.m. arrived at Saltburn at 9.30 on Tuesday, the 26th of June.  The Zetland Hotel, not far from the station, was built by the Stockton and Darlington Railway Company at a cost of £30,000, and on each side, with a southern front, are built rows of handsome lodging houses and shops and detached villas.  On the sands were ten bathing machines, and besides the usual comforts of a popular sea-bathing town, there is the two mile romantic walk of Skelton Glen, the entrance to which is opposite the beautiful range of lodging houses.

Zetland Hotel today
by Donnylad, licensed by CC BY-SA 2.0

Runswick: a tale of landslips – and the cholera of 1866

The cliffside village of Runswick Bay 
[Photograph by mattbuck, reproduced under Creative Commons licence]

 

Runswick (the 'w' in the name is silent) lies on the coast a few miles north of Whitby.  Much loved for holidays and days at the seaside, to our sight it offers a charming view of red-roofed cottages nestling under the cliffs of a sandy bay.  But it was only after public taste changed with the Romantic Movement that it began to be considered pretty – and its existence, and the lives of its inhabitants, were for centuries very precarious, not just because of the dangers of the sea but also from the unstable shale cliffs ...  

Here we have the antiquarian Ralph Thoresby, F.R.S., (1658-1725) on a northern journey in the last years of the reign of Charles II – the sight of moorland in November is not one to cheer his heart, and his account reminds us that Roseberry Topping had a long while to go before it would acquire its famous profile:

Mon 13 November 1682

Morning up pretty early; ferried over the river at Stockton, thence to Acklam, where Sir William Hustler has a pretty seat, thence through a blind cross-road, to Marton, a church-town, and thence over the bad moors to Gisborough, famous for a stately abbey ... 

thence over the rotten Moors for many miles without anything observable; the sea at a small distance upon the left; and upon the right hand, hills, whereof a round one, called Roseberry Topping, is a mark for sailors; within a few miles of Whitby, we passed not far from Runswick, the place where, near by the sea-side, stood a little village of six or ten houses the last spring, of which I find from credible persons, the report we had of its being swallowed up of the earth, too true, though blessed be God, all the inhabitants were saved, they happening to be at a kind of wake (as the old manner is) at the house of a person immediately deceased, where observing the earth to crack and gape, made all their escape; shortly after which, the chinks grew suddenly wide, and the houses fell into the gulf. 

On the right hand we left Moulgrave [Mulgrave] Castle, that ancient fabric, and passed through Lith [Lythe], a pretty country town; thence over the Sands to Whitby. [1]

I think the original little village of Runswick stood a little to the north of the village today, which is described here by the Revd John Graves in his History of Cleveland (1808), who quotes from the 18th century naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant [2]

Runswick ... is situated near the sea, and consists of a few scattered huts, inhabited by fishermen, and grouped irregularly together on the declivity of a steep and rugged rock; the projecting top of which juts forward in an awful manner and threatens at some future period to overwhelm the inhabitants.  The situation of the place is singular and must excite the curiosity of strangers; when in winding along the narrow paths between the houses,  they may on one side enter the door of one dwelling, and from thence look down the chimney of another in front.  Pennant observes that, 

"the houses here make a grotesque appearance, scattered over the face of a steep cliff in a very strange manner, and fill every projecting ledge one above another, in the same manner as those of the peasants in the rocky parts of China."  

The houses are sheltered on the north and north-west, and command a pleasing prospect into the bay, which is upwards of a mile in extent, – with Kettleness alum-works about a mile to the north-east.  The lower part of the town is almost choaked with sand, which fills up every passage; and in wet weather is dirty and unpleasant.

The Revd Graves was rather behind the times – for sensibilities formed by the Romantic Movement, Runswick could only be described as picturesque.  By the 1830s the village was becoming beloved of artists and tourists.  Some enterprising person, seeing commercial possibilities, decided to build a hotel at the Bank Top, equipped with all mod. cons. including a Water Closet.  

I wonder if it was completed on the generous scale originally intended and if it was initially as successful as predicted in the advertisement below; in the early years it changed hands with some frequency.  In the early 1860s it was run by a Mr Ivison, but in 1865 Mrs Wardale took it over.  It evidently looked an attractive prospect to people coming from outside because by the time of the 1871 census, George Marshall from Nottingham had taken it on.  He and his family had been in Felixkirk near Thirsk three years earlier – that was where his little daughter had been born.  By 1877 the Marshalls had gone and William Brown from Loftus had the hotel; he was still there in 1891.  

In the spring of 1860 the still unfinished hotel was up for sale:

Yorkshire Gazette, 21 April 1860 

All that New, Commodious, and Delightfully-situated Inn, known as the Albert Hotel, situate at Runswick Bank Top, in the Parish of Hinderwell, in the County of York, lately occupied by Jonathan Ramshaw.  This Property comprises a good Front Kitchen, Back Kitchen, Wash-House, Roomy Bar, Smoke Room, Commercial Room, Private Rooms, an excellent suite of Bed Rooms, Water Closet, Attics, Coach-house, Stabling, and all other suitable Out-Offices. 

Although the Premises are not entirely completed, they are in such an advanced stage that, with the bright prospect of an increasing Business, a Purchaser may confidently rely on his Purchase-Money with any small additional outlay being amply secured.

This is one of Mrs Wardale's advertisements:

Whitby Gazette 3 November 1866

The Sheffield (late Albert) Hotel, Runswick Bank Top 

Is delightfully situated, amidst the most romantic scenery of the Yorkshire Coast, and is fitted up with every comfort for the reception of Tourists and Visitors.  It is modern and very commodious, and the utmost attention and quiet may be relied upon.  Mrs Wardale, Proprietress.

The hotel was highly praised by one J.G., in an account in the Yorkshire Gazette of 14 July 1866 of the walking holiday he had taken along the coast:

as the accommodation is good and the charges moderate, it is desirable to remind the future tourists that there did not appear to be a house on the coast at which to stay where cleanliness, and civility, and comfort, and cheapness were to be had in combination so well as in this house.  Mrs Wardell is a widow, a middle-aged person, and has, so she said, lived in her early days with some of the aristocratic families in the west end of London.  The house was taken by her last year.  Persons desirous of enjoying the sea and the beautiful and romantic scenery in and around this locality cannot do better than secure accommodation here.

On the cliffside below the new hotel lay the thatched roofs of the village – the "town of Runswick" as the census enumerator described it in 1861 when he listed its inhabitants.  In 97 cottages, 430 people were living and there were four cottages standing empty.  The little low cottages would have blended into the cliff face, as they were all thatched (ling was used for thatching in moorland districts).  One thatched house has survived, the one that used to be occupied by the coastguard.

Roughly half of the population was aged 23 years and younger, which isn't surprising because it's only in recent years that the UK median age has risen to 40½.  (In 1911, it was 25 and it was 34 in 1975).  So Runswick was a place with many children.  Of the 430 people there, just 46 were aged 60 and over – and they included a 90 year old, who was the blind uncle of one of the fishermen.  

Like Staithes, further up the coast, Runswick was a self-contained and inter-related community with its own customs, superstitions and habits.  The name Calvert was by far the most the common surname in the village in 1861, followed by Patton, Taylor, Hutton, Beswick and Clark.  Its needs were served by a grocer & draper, four dressmakers and a tailor, two innkeepers, two joiners, three blacksmiths, and a painter who had been born in Chester.  

The vast majority of the population had been born in Runswick and the hundred or so people born outside the village were mostly from further along the coast or a little way inland, and some of those may have had family ties to the place.  The coastguards were appointed from outside the area – how could a local be trusted to deal with smugglers? – and in 1861 he was from Sheffield.  Of the Runswick-born who had left their birthplace, most had not gone many miles or had left for the towns of Stockton, Middlesbrough or Hartlepool.  And of course there were the Runswick-born men who were at sea.

The people of Runswick knew all too well the dangers of the sea.  In 1866, 650 lives were lost on average from shipwreck on the shores of the United Kingdom.  The likelihood of raising the funds for a lifeboat station at Runswick had looked remote – but then came an amazing offer from the people of Sheffield, who raised the money to donate a boat to the village.  It only remained to raise the money locally for its upkeep and for a boat house.  And so, in May 1866, 'The Sheffield' arrived in Whitby by train (carried for free by the railway companies) and was towed by the steamboat 'Rover' to its new home.  Mrs Wardale must have renamed her hotel in its honour.

The people of Runswick were tough and resilient.  For generations the men had been fishermen – at Runswick it was mainly the inshore fishery – and the women played a crucial role alongside them.  They had a hard life.  They got the bait, cleaned and baited the long lines, mended the nets, filleted the fish and packed it in salt.  They launched and hauled the cobles ashore and some of them carried heavy baskets of the catch to sell in outlying villages rather than to a dealer.  They fetched water from the beck and bread from the communal bakehouse, looked after the house and children and knitted for the family.  The children lent a hand alongside them.  

In 1861 there were 50 fishermen in the village and 5 men who described themselves as mariners, and they were all born in Runswick.  But alongside the fishing, mining – another dangerous occupation – was growing in importance and the men working in the mines were mostly from outside. 

There were ironstone mines a little way up the coast at Port Mulgrave.  At Kettleness, at the southern end of the bay, there were alum works which were still operating in the first part of 1866 but would close before long [3].  The jet works at Kettleness were certainly in operation only a few years before the 1861 census, because it was there in 1854 that a labourer at the jet works, Dalton Taylor, accidentally fell from the top of the cliff on to a piece of broken rock and was killed on the spot.  In 1861, 16 men worked in the ironstone mines and only one of them was born in Runswick.  Of the 18 men who worked as labourers, either at Port Mulgrave or Kettleness, 10 were Runswick-born men.

The sea, the mines, the precarious nature of Runswick's hold on the cliff edge – it isn't surprising to find that spiritual needs were not ignored.  As in Staithes, the villagers' independence of mind (and the Church of England's history of ignoring them) can be seen in their strong Nonconformism.  A Congregational Chapel was built in 1829, which had a Sunday School and a Day School – perhaps the 40 year old schoolmistress Miss Mary Agar from Danby, who lodged in the village in 1861, was the teacher there [4].  In 1854, a Primitive Methodist chapel was built.  The sand and lime together with 140 loads of stone had been carried to the site on the heads of the women of the village – which was how they carried heavy baskets of fish, mussels and baited lines, their heads protected by their distinctive bonnets – while the men had carted the heavier stone in handbarrows.  It was too steep for any horse and cart [5].  It became known as the High Chapel while the Congregational Chapel was the Low Chapel.

And it was among these strong and determined people that, in November 1866, an outbreak of cholera led to deaths – and then to a damning report on the state of the village.

Cholera: glimpses of the pandemics of the 19th century

In the 19th century, the usual yearly epidemics of frequently fatal infectious diseases in Britain were eclipsed by successive waves of a frightening newcomer: Asiatic Cholera.

It first arrived in 1831.  You can read about it in 'The year of the Cholera', Chapter 11 of Remarkable, but still True: the story of the Revd R J Barlow and Hutton Rudby in the time of the cholera .

There I describe how, in York, Dr Thomas Simpson and the surgeon J P Needham not only treated patients but also investigated the spread of cases.  They both believed cholera was contagious and Needham wrote a monograph on the subject in 1833, after the pandemic had subsided.  Dr Simpson, who thought it was an air-borne disease, published his Observations on the Asiatic Cholera: and Facts regarding the mode of its diffusion after the next pandemic, which happened seventeen years later in 1848.

In 1848, as in 1831, cholera was firmly associated with "nuisances" – sewage and filth – and it was still thought that it was the "unwholesome exhalations" and poisonous vapours from nuisances and decaying vegetable matter that spread the disease.  The theory may have been erroneous but the practice was helpful, because cholera is spread through water contaminated by faeces; this was the beginning of improvements in better drainage and public health.  

Cholera isn't easy to catch but without the correct treatment it is fatal in half the cases.  Nowadays it is treated by rehydration – which has to be begun without delay – and sometimes with antibiotics.  In the 19th century, careful nursing might pull a patient through but unfortunately doctors very often used purges and emetics on their patients, which would only have dehydrated them further.  

Meanwhile, there were plenty of advertisements for patent medicines.

William Hardcastle advertised his "Cure for Asiatic Cholera" and "Grand Preventive of Cholera" extensively in the Northern press.  Born in Sunderland, he had learned his trade as a chemist in Stockton-on-Tees and now had his own shop in Finkle Street – and I'm glad to say the interior of Hardcastle's is preserved at Beamish Open Air Museum (photographs here).  He was a man in his late thirties and evidently very enterprising.

At this time anxiety was all the greater because diarrhoea was thought often to precede cholera – of course there was a good deal of diarrhoea around – and it was believed that stopping diarrhoea would stop cholera developing.  William Hardcastle's advertisements proudly proclaimed that 

having witnessed the great mortality by Cholera which took place in Stockton, 17 years ago, when about 130 persons died in a very short time, Mr H. directed his earnest attention to discover some more efficient Preventive and Cure than were at that time employed, and has succeeded in compounding the "Diarrhoea Powders" and "Cholera Drops", which has rescued many from premature graves.  Their great efficacy has caused them to be so much esteemed in Stockton and the Neighbourhood, that the Proprietor has now made arrangements for extending their sale to other places.

The Drops could be sent by Post to any part of the UK on forwarding 12 Postage Stamps, and they cost a shilling and a penny halfpenny or two shillings per bottle.  I expect the chief ingredient was laudanum.

More useful in preventing cholera were products such as Sir William Burnett's Patent Disinfecting Fluid, which was advertised as "a deodorizing and purifying agent" and was a chloride disinfectant.  

When nothing seemed to help, the only answer was prayer:

York Herald, 22 September 1849

Cholera – The authorities of Middlesbro' have issued a notice to the inhabitants to set apart Friday, the 21st inst., as a day of humiliation and prayer to God to remove that desolating pestilence, the cholera, which has lately been so fatal in that place.

Then a third wave of cholera reached Britain in 1853.  It was at this point that Dr John Snow of London  (1813-58) demonstrated that cholera was a water-borne disease by removing the handle of the Broad Street pump.  He published his findings in his work of 1855, which drew upon the careful observations of Dr Thomas Simpson.  But it took many years for public health authorities to act to ensure a clean water supply and Snow had been long dead when the Chief Medical Officer for Health acknowledged the significance of his work.

We can see that keeping the streets clear of nuisances and encouraging better cleanliness was well established as a priority for the authorities:

York Herald, 15 October 1853

Cholera – On the 24th of Sept last, this devastating disease broke out in one of the low parts of Stockton, and since that period to the present time, 13 deaths have occurred, but all in that particular locality, which is said to be in a very indifferent state of drainage, and where many of the inhabitants are not of the most cleanly description.

In Darlington, the local board of health and the board of guardians held a joint meeting.  They decided to carry out the recommendations of the medical superintending inspector of the General Board of Health to set up a system of house to house visiting as the only effectual safeguard against the spread of the epidemic.  (This might remind us of recent events described in this story on the BBC News website in which Professor John Wright, Head of Bradford Institute for Health Research describes the work of the local test and trace teams, sending testers door to door in neighbourhoods with high rates of infection).  They resolved to employ more scavengers to clear away the nuisances, to set up a more general distribution of disintectants such as chloride of lime, and to supply water for free to the poorer districts, "in order that greater facilities for cleanliness might be afforded".   

And, then as now, there were plenty of conspiracy theories.  In some countries, the swiftness with which the disease spread led the people to think their water supply had been poisoned:

Huddersfield Chronicle, 2 September 1854

News has arrived in Palermo of the appearance of cholera in that city.  The Sicilians, it seems, are under the impression that the cholera is a poison which has been communicated by human means.  The people have surrounded the Governor's palace, and shouted "We will not have the cholera here!"  The Lord Lieutenant immediately issued orders prohibiting the people to speak of poison.  The city is in a very excited state.

In 1865 the cholera returned yet again to Britain.  

It reached Yarm on 8 October 1866 and when doctors Robert and Christopher Young, the town's medical officers, made their report on 13 November, they hoped they had seen the back of it.  There had been 23 cases of cholera, 12 of which were fatal, and 5 cases "approaching cholera", of which 2 were fatal. In the same period they had seen 87 cases of diarrhoea.  

A few days before cholera came to Yarm, it had already reached Hutton Rudby and Potto – but luckily not with the virulence of the 1832 outbreak, when there were 45 cases and 23 deaths at the east end of the village green:

York Herald, 6 October 1866

The Cholera – We regret to state that a fatal case of Asiatic cholera has just occurred at the small rustic hamlet of Potto, in the parish of Whorlton, near Stokesley.  Elizabeth Mary Cawthorn, the wife of a brickmaker, was attacked on Saturday afternoon last, and was visited the same night by Mr A A Boyle, assistant to Mr J H Handyside, surgeon, Stokesley, and he at once perceived that she was prostrated by a malignant attack of cholera.  Mr Handyside attended on the following morning, and Mr Boyle was present when she died on Sunday night, medical skill being of no avail.

Richmond & Ripon Chronicle, 13 October 1866

Thompson - On the 6th inst., at Hutton Rudby, Cleveland, of Asiatic cholera, aged 60 years, Mr George Thompson, brickmaker

Nearly twenty years and many cholera deaths later, people across the world were electrified to hear that the German scientist Dr Robert Koch and his team had discovered the "cholera germ".  

Dr Koch had carried out his researches in India.  This fact spurred Professor Edwin Ray Lankester (1847-1929) to write a trenchant criticism of the British government's approach to scientific research that appeared in, among other papers, the Pall Mall Gazette of 2 November 1883.  He was the son of Edwin Lankester (1814-74), surgeon, naturalist, the first public analyst in Britain, the first medically qualified coroner for Central Middlesex, a man who made a major contribution to the control of cholera in London.  So his son had, in a way, a family interest in the fight against the disease.  

He deplored the fact that

when a dire disease broke out in a country occupied by British troops, and, for the time being, controlled by the English Government, no steps were taken by that Government to initiate a thorough study of the disease in the light of modern science, but that, on the other hand, independent Commissions were sent to the plague-stricken country by the Governments of France and Germany for the express purpose of making the investigations which the English Government had omitted to set on foot.

The French and German scientists were from 

the State-supported laboratory of M Pasteur; they were his assistants and pupils.  The German Commissioners came from the Imperial Sanitary Institute of Berlin, the workers in which are drawn from the twenty-two State-supported laboratories of pathology which are scattered throughout the German Empire

Britain should be following the examples of France and Germany in training scientists and funding research bodies and laboratories like those in France and Germany.

By July 1884 the "discoverer of the cholera germ" Dr Robert Koch was known to everyone and admired by all.  The Pall Mall Gazette of 11 July 1884 noted that "in the last five years he has succeeded in identifying the germs of cattle disease, of consumption, and of cholera" – he was the benefactor of humanity.

Two years later, the Sanitary Congress – the annual meeting of the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain, founded in 1876 – was held in the Museum in York (now the Yorkshire Museum).  

The Leeds Mercury of 25 September 1886 carried a report of the proceedings.  The president, Mr William Whitaker, read a paper about water-supply in which he said two of the chief problems in sanitary matters were getting good water and getting rid of bad water.  Percy F Frankland, associate of the Royal School of Mines, spoke on the filtration of water.  They had known for many years that the real danger in sewage-contaminated water lay not in the organic matter to be found by analysis but in "the presence of minute living organisms, capable of producing zymotic disease".  Largely thanks to the genius of Robert Koch they now had "beautiful methods of bacteriological investigation" and this had enabled the great advance made in water purification.  Surgeon-Major Pringle described his system of collecting and storing rain and drinking water. Another debate clearly centred on the role of government.  Enforcement or education?  The West Riding County Surveyor, J Vickers Edwards, took what might now be called the libertarian approach to achieving "a healthy house", arguing that sanitary science would not progress through the actions of local authorities nor by legislation, but by educating people to act for themselves.  

Over the next fifty years the Sanitary Institute was to become the leading public health organisation in the UK, with a world-wide reputation.  It is now the Royal Society for Public Health.

Public health reform was truly on its way.

A Cleveland link to a Dublin matricide in 1936?

A new story.

I've recently been contacted by researchers working on the fascinating business I outline below.  It seems almost certain that the main protagonists were related to the Weatherills of Hollin Top Farm, near Danby, and the Browns of Staithes and they wondered if I knew anything of the people involved.
I didn't!  Perhaps one of my readers does?  Do let me know!

On 23 May 1936, a 20 year old man called Edward Francis Allen Preston Ball was convicted in Dublin of the brutal murder of his mother.  He was found guilty but insane, and sentenced to an indefinite stay in the Dundrum Lunatic Asylum.

The national press had been entranced by the story and it was covered by every provincial newspaper.

It began with the finding of Mrs Ball's bloodstained car "at the top of a precipice overlooking the sea near Shankhill, Co Dublin" [Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 18 May 1936].  Mrs Ball lived in a fashionable area, was of independent means, and was the wife of Dr Charles Preston Ball, a Dublin nerve specialist, from whom she had been separated for some years.

Her body could not be found, though they searched with aeroplanes, row-boats and grappling apparatus according to a report in the Irish News.  In the meantime, her house was watched by the police and, five days later, her younger son, Edward, was arrested.  The police were satisfied that he had killed his mother with a hatchet before disposing of the body.

He pleaded not guilty at his trial, his rather unlikely defence being that he had come home to find that his mother had committed suicide by cutting her throat with a safety razor blade and that he had decided to hide the suicide by disposing of her body in the sea.

Witnesses told of the poor relations between mother and son and to his failure to settle down to any proper occupation after finishing school.

His father told the court of his late wife's mental illness.  She had begun to show signs of mental instability after Edward's birth and had become terribly neurotic, "She would meet patients at the door and tell them not to come in and see him, and get friends to ring him up and send him on wild goose chases into the country." But at the same time, she had carried on writing him affectionate letters until the time of her death.  [Derby Daily Telegraph, 22 May 1936].  He thought perhaps his son's mental state was inherited from her.

There had been some disagreement the day before between two expert witnesses, pathologists engaged by the opposing sides, over whether or not hair had been chopped or cut off the dead woman's head.  Dr Ball was naturally very anxious that the court took the view that his son was insane - the alternative would, of course, have led to the death penalty.

Mr Justice Hanna spoke in his summing up (widely reported in the press on 23 May) of the "months, even years" that the boy had suffered "under the disposition of his mother towards him."  In the end, he had found it intolerable (it had been suggested that the crisis came when Mrs Ball would not give him £60 to go on tour with the theatrical company for which he was an unpaid extra) and "suddenly something snapped".

"It might be," said the Judge, "that Mrs Ball, outside her own home, was bright, cheery and charming, and that she was not the same inside her home ... The position of the boy was very pathetic.  He was drifting about like flotsam on the sea."  

Pointing out that adolescent insanity was a rare disorder, the judge said that he disliked very much using the word 'insanity'.  The terms 'sane' and 'insane' were relics of the time when people thought that the sane and the insane were like black and white, in two separate compartments.  Modern science had shown that that was not so.

"There is a twilight of the mind, just as there is a twilight between day and night."  

Unsurprisingly, the jury returned the verdict of guilty, but insane.

In normal circumstances, he would not have got anything due to him under his mother's Will, but the press was fascinated to discover that this would not be the case - his insanity prevented him from being debarred.  So when he was released from the asylum 14 years later, he had something to live on.

This was a major news story at the time, but now is really only remembered because it features in A Classical Education, a short and fascinating book by the historian, Richard Cobb. 

For years, Cobb had been making a party piece of his connection with his old schoolfriend, Edward Ball.  He knew the strange boy very well, and had known - and very thoroughly disliked - his mother. Over the years, his anecdotes had become much embellished.  The entrancing power of the prose distracts the reader from this most successfully and there is no easy way of finding out which parts are true.  (For example, Cobb says that Ball insisted at his trial that the murder had been premeditated.  And did the Irish police really suspect Cobb of inciting the murder?  And Mrs Ball try to sue him for libel?).  The title of the book comes from their shared time at Shrewsbury School and from something Cobb quotes Edward as saying when they finally met again after his release.  His classical education had meant that he had no idea that if one wanted to wash blood from an axe, it was important to use cold , not hot, water:

"What a pity that we went to a classical school!"

The question is: Who was Mrs Ball?

Newspapers say little of her family background - beyond the fact that she was of independent means - and don't even appear to be sure of her name.  She is called, variously, Lavena, Vena and Vera.

But it now seems very likely that she was in fact Lavinia Weatherill, and the granddaughter of Edward Theaker Weatherill.  He was born at Hollin Top Farm, near Danby in 1820, married a Staithes girl, Lavinia Brown, and was buried at Hinderwell in 1905.

Edward & Lavinia's son John married Margaret Mackenzie of Dublin.  Richard Weatherill (1844-1923) recorded that John & Margaret's children included Lavinia Brown Weatherill, who married Dr P Ball, and had John Charles Preston (Edward's older brother).

This exactly matches the unfortunate Mrs Ball - described by Richard Cobb as "slothful, unimaginative, uneducated, ignorant, feckless, sloppily dishonest ... changeable, untruthful, untidy ..."

As you can see, he really didn't like her.

Captain Thomas Galilee (1744-97) and his family

Jane Galilee (1783-1856), the second wife of George Langborne (1773-1832), was the daughter of Captain Thomas Galilee of Whitby and Jane Atkinson of Kirkleatham. 

Her father Captain Thomas Galilee and his brother Samuel (also a master mariner) are examples (as in the story of Captain Thomas King, merchant of Wapping of the link between Whitby and the River Thames.

Jane and her five sisters were all born in Rotherhithe,  where Jane was christened at St Mary's, Rotherhithe on 4 April 1784 at the age of one. 

Captain Thomas Galilee (1744-97) was the son of John Galilee and Mary Campion of the parish of Hinderwell, on the coast north of Whitby:


John Galilee married Mary Campion at Hinderwell in 1741.

Their children were
•    Jane Galilee, bap 8 Oct 1742
•    Thomas Galilee, bap 27 Feb 1744
•    John Galilee, bap 29 Sep 1747
•    Robert Galilee, bap 20 Sep 1750
•    Mary Galilee, bap 17 May 1753
•    Samuel Galilee, bap 9 Dec 1755
•    Hannah Galilee, bap 26 Oct 1758
•    Margaret Galilee, bap 23 Jul 1761
•    “female” (?Henrietta) Galilee, bap 2 Sep 1763

A note, written by a much later hand (possibly Capt Galilee’s granddaughter Miss Margaret Langborne 1825-1910) on the inside back cover of Thomas Atkinson's Whaling Journal was very useful in confirming that this was the family of Captain Thomas Galilee.  It states:

"Robert lived at Staithes and Jack at Sunderland both I believe also [drank?] like fishes as was the correct thing in those days for sailors.
Aunts Potter and Chilton were sisters"

[The word in square brackets is fairly illegible, but I’m afraid it does look very like “drank”!]

The Weatherill family tree: compiled by Richard Weatherill (1844-1923)

Excerpt from Richard Weatherill's manuscript

Richard Weatherill (1844-1923) compiled a family tree from the memories of his father, the artist George Weatherill (1810-90). 

He supplemented it with further research, particularly in the Parish Registers of Easington and in the Easington, Whitby, Hinderwell and Guisborough churchyards.  A copy of his manuscript (missing one page) is held by the Whitby Literary & Philosophical Society.

Another copy is owned by descendants of the Guisborough Weatherills; this copy has later amendments by Charles Buchannan (Richard Weatherill's nephew) and others.

The information below is taken from both manuscripts.  Passages marked in quotations are taken directly from Richard Weatherill's manuscript.