Mrs Lydia Metcalfe of Yarm, in 1784

Yarm Town Hall, built 1710

A Deed donated to the Hutton Rudby History Society may be of interest to people looking for ancestors in Yarm and to members of the Metcalfe family.

The Deed, dated 10 July 1784, records the repayment of mortgages by Mrs Lydia Metcalfe of Yarm.


The main points are as follows:

In 1745 Lydia Smith owned property in Yarm.  On 7 December 1745, shortly before her marriage to Henry Loughhead, she settled her property on trustees to hold it on her behalf, free from the control of her husband.  (It was not until the Married Women's Property Act 1882 that married women could hold property in their own right.)

Her trustees were Jonathan Hedley and Benjamin Flounders.

Tom Brown of Kirkleatham & Yarm, hero of Dettingen

William Hutton, in his A Trip to Coatham, gives a wonderfully vivid account of the story of Tom Brown, the hero of the battle of Dettingen 1743. 

While he was at Kirkleatham in 1809, Hutton went to find the site of Tom Brown’s birthplace and to visit the hero’s nephew (see p 166 of the scanned book):

It never occurred to my thoughts, when Tom’s exploit blazed over the world, that, sixty-six years after, I should see his portrait, handle his sword and record the fact.

Tom Brown was born in Kirkleatham, apprenticed to a shoemaker at Yarm, and enlisted in the Inniskillen Dragoons. 

He was five feet eleven, and well made, rather bony.  At the battle he was twenty-eight years old.

He served with outstanding valour at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 in the War of the Austrian Succession - the last battle when British forces were led into action by their King.

Tom was terribly wounded – as can be seen from his portrait (to be found in this full account of the battle)

As William Hutton observed, the portrait

exhibits two wounds in the face; one is a cut, seemingly with the point of a sword from the top of the forehead to the corner of the left eye.  The other, across the upper part of the nose, which obliged him to wear a plate of silver; now lost.

He retired to Yarm with a pension of £30 a year from the King, and died there in 1746.

His grave is marked by a memorial erected by the Queen's Own Hussars in 1968. 

Do see Bob Scotney’s account, with details of the painted sign that used to be attached to Tom Brown’s house in Yarm – and a transciption of the Song of the Silver Nose.

Kirkleatham in 1809

Kirkleatham, as described by William Hutton in his A Trip to Coatham 1809:

Three thousand five hundred acres, the property of Sir Charles Turner.  I am now in the centre of this most delightful valley.  Sir Charles, it is said, wishes to part with this estate, which proves that even beauty itself cannot always please; were it mine, it would cost a tear at parting.  The eye dwells upon the view, but cannot be satisfied.

The village is a groupe of Palaces, fit for the reception of Royalty.  The church is neat, and what a church ought always to be, not tawdry.  The organ is rather too strong for so small a place. 

There is an hospital which brought to mind an expression of King William’s, when he saw Greenwich, “There are, in England, Cottages for Princes, and Palaces for Peasants.”

This superb building was erected and endowed by the Turner family, with lands, said to be worth £1500 a year, for the support of ten old men, ten old women, ten boys and ten girls, with proper officers.  In the centre is a most elegant chapel, in which is a transparent painting, of great value, representing the first founder, who was Lord Mayor of London ...

Hutton continues his account (on p165 of the scanned book), marvelling at the “collection of rarities” in the “shew-room” and the library:

I cannot think its value less than seven or eight thousand pounds.  I saw many books worth twenty or thirty guineas each …

More about Thomas Atkinson, surgeon, of Kirkleatham

This was revised and rewritten 30 January 2022 with many thanks to Stella Sterry for her information

Thomas Atkinson, the writer of the Whaling Journal of Thomas Atkinson of Kirkleatham, 1774, was a young man of 21 when he made the voyage to Davis Straits.

He was born in the spring of 1753 in Kirkleatham, a North Yorkshire village a couple of miles from the mouth of the River Tees. 

His father Thomas was Master at the Hospital founded in Kirkleatham in 1676 by Sir William Turner for the relief of ten "poor aged" men and women and the relief and upbringing of "ten poor boys and ten poor girls". 

The "poor boys" and "poor girls" usually entered the Hospital at the age of eight and left at sixteen.  At this time most of the boys came from the North Riding, from Scarborough to Askrigg, but some came from much further afield – from Ticknall in Derbyshire, Bristol and Hertfordshire.  They included the sons of a local clergyman, a Darlington bookseller and a Northallerton attorney, which must indicate that, in addition to the poor children, the school was taking paying scholars.  This was usual in schools that began as charitable foundations. 

Thomas Atkinson's mother was Elizabeth Featherstone (c1720-1805).  His parents were married in Westerdale in 1749, so Elizabeth may have been the Elizabeth, daughter of Peter Fetherstone, who was baptised in 1720 at Danby in Cleveland.

It seems very likely that Thomas Atkinson's sons were taught alongside the boys of the Hospital.  Wherever they went to school, he and his brothers clearly received a good education; Thomas's second son William was to become a Doctor of Divinity and Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. 

The career chosen for young Thomas may have been influenced by the surgeon employed at the Hospital (at a salary of £50, compared to the £45 paid to the Master), but the Hospital was also in contact with the York Infirmary whose surgeons pronounced one boy's "scrofulous disorder" as incurable in 1773.  

In his mid-teens Thomas's parents sent him to Ripon to be apprenticed for 6 years to William Chambers of Ripon, described by Thomas's father in the family Bible as "an eminent Surgeon and Apothecary".  

Then on 27 February 1774 at the age of 21, he went to sea as a surgeon on the Hope of Whitby, on a whaling voyage to the Davies Straits.

We don't know why he decided to make the trip.  Perhaps it was a hankering for adventure; perhaps he wanted to find out how he would cope in harsh conditions.  We don't know how he came to choose the Hope, but it's interesting to see that at this time one of the boys at the school was Thomas Peacock, son of the Revd John Peacock, curate of Stainton in Cleveland.  Perhaps they had a family connection to Captain Robert Peacock of the Hope.

It is clear from young Thomas Atkinson's journal that it wasn't the sea that took his interest, but the strange new lands he encountered and, above all, the Inuit. 

So it isn't surprising to find that, the following year, his curiosity and love of adventure led him to work for the Hudson's Bay Company.

At the beginning of June 1775 he took up his post as a surgeon at Moose Fort (now Moose Factory), the Company's oldest settlement in Ontario, established in 1673 about 11 miles from the mouth of the Moose River on the shore of James Bay.

This was the home of the Cree and Anishinaabe peoples, but from the 17th century it was where the British and French fought over the fur trade.  

In 1776 the Company was planning to establish a post on Lake Superior.  So they sent out a party of 5 men – Thomas was one of them – with two Indian families and instructions to "Build a Halfway House".  They set out on 16 October 1776 from Moose Fort and travelled about 200 miles by canoe along the Moose River, and by sledge, until on 11 December they reached "Wapuscogamee" Creek.  

Thomas chose a site for the Company's post – it was half a mile or so from the mouth of the creek, on the west bank of the Missinaibi River, which flows into the Moose River.  On 14 December they began to build a log tent in which they were to spend the rest of the winter.

When the spring came, they laid the foundation for the post and by early August 1777 Wapiscogamy House was ready for occupation.  Thomas was in charge there until 31 May 1778.

I hope he was a good doctor, because he wasn't very good at choosing a place for a trading post, or at planning its building.  

A report to Edward Jarvis, chief at Moose Fort, in 1781 described a site vulnerable to attack with no way of seeing the attackers coming.  There was a large creek within 200 yards of the back of the house and a ridge of high land within 100 yards, and at one end of the small, inconvenient house (it measured 26 feet by 18 feet) there wasn't a window or a port hole.  

The foundations were laid direct on the ground, so it wasn't possible to dig a cellar without undermining either the chimney or the frame of the house.  They  couldn't find anywhere to keep the gunpowder except "directly under the fireplace" and the summer heat spoilt their "Salt Geese".   Edward Jarvis decided it would be better to build a new post somewhere else.

By this time, Thomas Atkinson had been moved on to Henley House, a transit post on the junction of the Albany and Kenogamy Rivers.  He was Master there for 3 months from September to December 1779.  Perhaps he was filling in for the arrival of another man because he dropped down to Assistant for the next few months.  From June 1780 he was Assistant at Albany, the company fort on the James Bay, and then he left for home on the Royal George on 21 September 1781.

On 21 September 1788, when his father repaired the family Bible and recorded the most recent details of his children's lives, he wrote proudly that his eldest son had been "sometime Governor" of one of the Company Forts and was now "Surgeon at the English Settlement in Honduras Bay".  

So Thomas, having experienced the extremes of heat and cold in Northern Ontario, had taken a post in Central America, where the British were cutting logwood and mahogany.  There had been a British settlement in Belize for over a hundred years.  

An undated entry in the family Bible records that it was there that Thomas died. 

The manuscript is a contemporary fair copy of Thomas Atkinson's original journal and may not be in Thomas's own hand.  It is possible that it was transcribed by a relative.  It bears a strong resemblance, particularly in the decoration and flourishes, to his father's graceful hand.

By the end of the 19th century the journal was in the possession of his sister's granddaughter, Miss Margaret Langborne of Whitby, who gave it to one of her great-nieces.

Further posts on Thomas Atkinson and his family:

Jane Atkinson of Kirkleatham, wife of Captain Thomas Galilee (1744-97)

Captain Thomas Galilee (1744-97) and his family

Sources

Parish Registers of Easington and Kirkleatham
Turner Hospital Records (Teesside Archives and NYCRO)
The Will of the Revd William Atkinson, TNA (PROB 11/1771)
The Will of Thomas Galilee, TNA (PROB 11/1296)
'Biographical Register Volume II 1666 – 1905', Christ's College
Venn Alumni cantabrigienses, Cambridge 1940
(with thanks to Suzan Griffiths, Librarian of St Catharine's College, and Ruth Waite, alumni officer of Christ's College, Cambridge)
Hudson's Bay Company Archives online at the Government of Manitoba's Culture, Heritage, Tourism and Sport website: Biographical Sheet for Thomas Atkinson

Tracing the History of Northern Ontario at the British Library by Shaelagh Cull 

Whaling Journal of Thomas Atkinson of Kirkleatham, 1774

In 1774, Thomas Atkinson was a young surgeon of twenty-one when he took ship in the Hope of Whitby, on a whaling voyage to the Davies Straits.  This is a fair copy of his journal, full of accounts of the fish, the wild cold weather, and his first encounter with the Inuit:

Aerial photos of Stokesley in 1929

The new website, Britain from Above has 4 aerial photographs of Stokesley in 1929.  They centre on the church, West Green, the Market Place and Commercial Row.

The site was launched in June 2012 and is part of a programme to conserve, catalogue and digitise the Aerofilms Collection of images.  The team running the programme wants plenty of input from the public: 

The Britain from Above website features a high degree of interactivity and is designed to encourage wide public participation. Users can download images, customise their own themed photo galleries, share personal memories, and add information to enrich the understanding for each of the images. They are also invited to identity the locations of a number of “mystery” images that have left the experts stumped.

The number of images available to view on the website will continue to grow, and by 2014, some 95,000 images taken between 1919 and 1953 will be visible online.

It's very easy to use, especially through the map on the advanced search option.

Stokesley station & a Skutterskelfe farm: 1950

On 31 December 1950, the coldest day of the year, the entire stock of a Skutterskelfe farm was moved by railway from Stokesley station to Hartfield in Sussex - and it was recorded on film.

Farmer Moving South is a beautiful British Transport Films short movie, lasting 16 minutes.  It's now on youtube, but I find (on revisiting this post on 1 March 2013) that the version I originally uploaded is not available.

It's a great pity, because it was the best quality version on youtube - instead, I shall insert another version.  This one is in two halves.

The farm's name is recorded as Skutterskelfe Hall Farm - we now know it as White House Farm, Skutterskelfe.  The farmer was a son of the Ropner family, who owned the Skutterskelfe estate in the first half of the 20th century.