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| The cliffside village of Runswick Bay [Photograph by mattbuck, reproduced under Creative Commons licence] |
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 1682Morning 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 1866The 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.
