Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Chatelaine of Chatsworth

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

There was a time when Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire could claim to be non-literary.  When her friend Evelyn Waugh sent her a copy of his biography of the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox, he inscribed it “For Darling Debo, with love from Evelyn.  You will not find a word in this to offend your Protestant sympathies”, and she noticed that every page was blank – “the perfect present,” as she described it, “for a non-reader”.

Her two masterly descriptions of her home, The House:  a portrait of Chatsworth (Macmillan 1982) and The Estate:  a view from Chatsworth (Macmillan 1990), showed her to be a charming, lucid and informative writer, with an unerring facility for the apt anecdote.

Since that time she has written extensively and has published an autobiography, Wait for me!  Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister (John Murray 2010), which is characterised by the candour that contemporary memoirs allow, discussing her miscarriages and her husband’s alcoholism, with the comment, “Sixty years ago none of this would have been discussed:  it would have been swept under the carpet…in the pretence that it was not happening”.

(Andrew Devonshire, shortly before his death, wrote his own memoir, Accidents of Fortune [Michael Russell 2004], honest and modest, as befits a man who declared he won his Military Cross “for being cheerful”.)

In everything the Duchess writes, and in the interviews she gives, there is a characteristic astute common-sense, tipped with asperity – wondering, in a Sunday Times interview with Rosie Millard [September 7th 2008], if the media reporters who hounded her nephew Max Mosley had dull private lives, and vastly preferring Attlee to Blair among Labour prime ministers.

The survival of Chatsworth as a great house and a functioning landed estate is entirely attributable to the courage of Andrew, 11th Duke and to the business acumen of his duchess, Deborah.  When Edward, 10th Duke, died in 1950 four months too soon to escape death duties, it would have been an easy option for his son to sell up, pay the 80% duty and live the life of a prosperous publisher.

Instead, Andrew Devonshire took the view that he and his wife were “life custodians of what has been at Chatsworth for centuries”:  he sold outlying land, handed over Hardwick Hall to the National Trust and gave items from the Chatsworth collection worth four-fifths of the duty owed.  The debt on the actual death duty was settled by 1967;  paying off the accrued interest took until 1974.  Then, with a further sale of a single Poussin and a collection of 69 Old Master drawings, he set up a £21 million trust to maintain Chatsworth.  Visitor entry pays about one-third of the running costs;  the rest is met by the Chatsworth House Trust.

His Grace was always the first to give credit for the way his Duchess turned the estate into an extremely effective cash generator.  She took great pride in the fact that “there are no merry-go-rounds”;  her personal interest has always been in making the house and the estate popular and good value:  “I love shopkeeping better than anything.”

It’s Her Grace’s flair that created the Chatsworth Farm Shop [http://www.chatsworth.org/shop-eat/the-farm-shop], the Cavendish Hotel and Restaurant in Baslow [http://www.cavendish-hotel.net] and the Devonshire Arms Hotel, Bolton Abbey [http://www.thedevonshirearms.co.uk].

When the 11th Duke died in 2004 the title and the Devonshire estate passed to his son, Peregrine, and his wife Amanda.  They are now making their own mark on the house and the estate:  details of the Chatsworth Masterplan can be found at http://www.chatsworth.org/the-chatsworth-masterplan.

Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire died on September 24th 2014 at the age of 94, and is buried with her husband at Edensor on the Chatsworth estate.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

History’s foot-soldiers

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Princess' Theatre, Melbourne, Australia

Princess’ Theatre, Melbourne, Australia

I’m glad I came across the Jason Donovan edition of Who do you think you are? [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tndyd] because it explored parts of Australia I visited a few months ago.

Jason Donovan was born in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern in 1968, the son of an English father and an Australian mother.  The programme set out to explore his Australian roots, and I was interested to recognise location shots of Melbourne and Sydney, as well as footage of Tasmania and the Blue Mountains which I hope to explore on a future visit.

One of the locations I’d visited was the Princess’ Theatre, Melbourne, the one surviving auditorium where Jason’s great-grandmother, Eileen Lyons, had performed.  She was a singer who entered show-business at the age of sixteen (a year younger than Jason when he joined the soap-opera Neighbours).  Here in the auditorium-gallery, he was shown contracts, bill matter and an Australian Broadcasting Corporation audition-review dug out of the archives by a local historian.

Elsewhere, he followed his blood-lines to a Tasmanian convict-settlement and, most intriguing of all, to a connection with Dorset-born William Cox (1764-1837) who reached Australia commanding a contingent of transported convicts and went on to engineer the first road from Sydney across the Blue Mountains in 1814-5.

Jason Donovan is therefore descended both from a transported convict, and from a British army officer in charge of transporting convicts.  He’s a living example of the Australian claim to be a classless society.

Each step of the way, as in each of these programmes, the subject is assisted by archivists and local historians who have undertaken the spadework of detailed research that threads the story together.

Just as volunteer enthusiasts make possible the living-history museums, historical re-enactments, preserved railways and steam and motor-vehicle rallies that offer the general public weekend entertainment, so the nuts and bolts of local- and family-history research depends on individuals quietly beavering away in their specialist patch, building up a body of knowledge that the rest of us can tap into.

Jason Donovan’s realisation of a stronger sense of his Australian identity was made possible because he gained access to detailed information in libraries, archives and the files of people who investigate history for their own interest.

Those of us who explore our local or family history without the benefit of a BBC research team have even more reason to be grateful to the foot-soldiers who catalogue, index and retrieve the minutiae of past lives.

 

Tried and tested

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Sheffield Assay Office

Sheffield Assay Office

When my mate retired as a dentist, he surprised me by trotting off to the Sheffield Assay Office [http://www.assayoffice.co.uk] with a jamjar.  It turned out that he’d been collecting scrap gold fillings for thirty-odd years to cash in on his retirement.  Melted down into a dull-looking ingot (the colour, I’m assured, caused by the presence of other precious metals), this produced a healthy little nest-egg.  The Assay Office provides a certificate of the metallic content which is immediately acceptable to precious-metals dealers and offers virtually instant conversion to a satisfying cheque.

It’s an indication of Sheffield’s status as a manufacturing city of fine metalwork that, like Birmingham, it supports an assay office alongside the capital cities of London, Edinburgh and Dublin.  Eighteenth-century manufacturers of cutlery and silver ornaments in Sheffield collaborated with the metal workers of Birmingham to obtain the right to test the quality of local precious-metal products in 1773.  The meetings to campaign for the necessary Act of Parliament took place at the Crown & Anchor pub on London’s Strand:  as a result of the toss of a coin, it is said, Birmingham took as its place-mark the anchor and Sheffield the crown.  (The crown symbol was changed in 1975, and now Sheffield ware is identified by a Tudor rose.)

I had an opportunity to tour the Sheffield Assay Office earlier this year with the Art Fund South Yorkshire Group [http://www.artfund.org].  Emma Paragreen, the Assay Office’s Librarian/Curator, gave an introductory talk, and there was a tour of the analytical and marking areas of the new Guardians’ Hall, opened in 2008.

The interiors of the new premises in Hillsborough are decorated with oak panelling from the previous building, carved with the complete sequence of Sheffield date marks from 1773 onwards.  A selection from the Assay Office collection of silver is displayed, including new items which are commissioned from local craftsmen and women annually.

The culture of the Sheffield metal trades combines practicality with elegance.  The clothes brushes in the splendid gents’ lavatory are hand-made.  We do things properly in Sheffield.

Cosy curry

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Brunswick Inn, Railway Village, Derby

Brunswick Inn, Railway Village, Derby

The other rite-of-passage at the age of sixty, after the bus pass, is the Senior Railcard.  It has to be after the bus pass because there is a cost and it’s not worth having until the first time you use it:  if you buy it the first day you need it, you have more days to use it at the other end (assuming you live that long).

We chose to launch my mate Richard’s railcard by taking the train from Sheffield to Derby, a mere forty minutes, to visit the Brunswick Inn in the Railway Village, three minutes’ walk from the station:  http://www.brunswickderby.co.uk.

Take a close look at the Railway Village houses and it’s obvious that this is polite architecture, not speculative artisan housing – actually by Francis Thompson, company architect of the North Midland Railway – built very early in the railway age, 1840-2.

The pub, occupying the apex of the triangular street-pattern, is distinctly elegant:  apparently it was originally the Brunswick Railway & Commercial Inn – catering for commercial travellers by offering storage for sample-cases, telegram facilities and generous opening hours.

The houses and the pub were scheduled for demolition in 1970, and were rescued by the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust.  The Brunswick reopened in 1987, and a microbrewery was added in 1991:  the place collects awards, including UK Beer Pub of the Year, 2001.

From the Brunswick, we walked round to London Road, where there is a superlative Indian restaurant called Anoki [Derby | Anoki].  Anoki’s chief claims to fame are its superb food – £35 buys a multi-course banquet that leaves you full but not bursting – and its assiduously attentive staff.  The male waiters, who are in a majority, wear the sort of elaborate uniforms I associate with Indian border guards – hats with fans and shoes with curly toes.  The place is high camp:  the immaculate gents is liberally provided with fluffy white towels, the floor scattered with rose-petals.

Its historical claim to fame is that the building is the former Cosy Cinema, built in 1913, and later renamed the Forum (1939) and finally the Cameo (1950).  As the Cameo it featured an adventurous and unsuccessful line in French avant garde films;  better business was done by placing an advertisement at the exit to Derby Midland Station to attract long-distance passing trade.  Occasionally, when the house-lights went up, patrons would be found wearing dressing-gowns and pyjamas, refugees from the Infirmary across the road.

After the cinema closed in 1959 it became a furniture showroom:  installing display windows wrecked the ornate baroque façade.  The restaurant occupies the balcony level, built across to the former proscenium.  The barrel ceiling and caryatides are beautifully decorated and, where the original screen would have been, an endless loop of Bollywood clips is projected.

The place has impeccable style.

Breakfast with the Pudding Ladies

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Sheffield: Bole Hills and Rivelin Valley

Sheffield: Bole Hills and Rivelin Valley

One of the great privileges of reaching the age of sixty is having a bus pass.

When my mate Richard reached his sixtieth birthday we made a point of meeting for breakfast in order to celebrate both his birthday and his new-found freedom.

At some expense (because before 9.30 am you have to pay bus fare even if you’re sixty) we met in the Sheffield suburb of Hillsborough in order to catch the once-every-two-hours bus to Rivelin Post Office.  We travelled in state, because no-one else got on or got off, and from the terminus walked down the picturesque Rivelin Valley, past ponds and waterfalls that in the era of water-powered industry had been dams and mills.

Sheffield has a much better known route, the Round Walk, which follows the River Porter through the elegant Victorian western suburbs.  Rivelin, on the north of the city, is much less frequented, but just as attractive.  All it lacks is more thorough interpretation:  we knew we were looking at historically interesting scenery, but only one notice-board told us anything about it.

There are other priorities, however.  Our goal was the Pudding Ladies’ Café [http://www.rivelinparkcafe.co.uk] which offers smoked-salmon and creamed-cheese bagels for breakfast.  (Richard had bacon and creamed cheese, which seemed to me a little eccentric.)  When his wife Janet appeared, she had kippers and scrambled egg.

Janet looked a little surprised when Richard declined a lift back so he could ride home on Supertram for free.

The guy has style.

Gateway to a vanished abbey

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Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire: gatehouse

Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire: gatehouse

It’s natural to assume that our best historic buildings always were the best – that Chatsworth and Blenheim are among the finest English country houses, that Fountains, Rievaulx, Lindisfarne and Tintern are among the finest medieval abbeys.

That may be so, but not necessarily, because it’s hard to credit other great buildings that have vanished long ago and can now be judged only from contemporary illustrations or archaeological remains.

Thornton Abbey, in the very far north of Lincolnshire, is one such.  Its fourteenth-century gatehouse is huge – the biggest of all surviving monastic gatehouses in England – and particularly splendid, built of brick at an unusually early date.  It’s approached by a long barbican and was clearly designed to keep out unwelcome visitors.  Above the vaulted gateway are two substantial chambers, one above the other, and a warren of corridors and chambers, some of which would have been lavatories.  The roofline is shorn of its battlements, but the front still contains a number of lifesized statues.

This was the frontispiece of a powerful and influential institution.  When Thornton Abbey was dissolved in 1539 it was worth £591 0s 2¾d.

Yet when you walk through the gateway, there is little but fields to see.  The abbey church, of which only the foundations now remain, was 282 feet long.  All that remains is a section of the cloister and domestic range, with two splendid bays of the octagonal chapter house.  That tells us that this place was as impressive as the greatest surviving abbey ruins in England.

The church and most of the other structures had gone by the early seventeenth century, demolished by Sir Vincent Skinner, who “built a most stately house out of the same, on the west side of the abbey plot within the moat, which hall, when it was finished, fell quite down to the bare ground without any visible cause”.

Serves him right.

Thornton Abbey is an English Heritage property and is regularly open:  http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/thornton-abbey-and-gatehouse.  Unusually, it has its own railway station with a regular two-hourly service from Cleethorpes:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thornton_Abbey_railway_station.

 

Risk of grounding

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Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, Derbyshire

Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, Derbyshire

One of the peculiar attributes of the Cromford & High Peak Railway was that it provided water-supply, not only for its own engines but also for adjacent farms and quarries on the high limestone hills that it traversed.

The water was carried along the line in trains of reused locomotive tenders which were filled from a spring at High Peak Wharf.  One of these tenders was rescued when the line closed in 1967 and ultimately ended up in the reserve collection of the National Railway Museum.

This fascinating but unspectacular piece of railway archaeology would hardly attract attention in the main museum at York, and has been loaned to the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway [http://www.e-v-r.com] in Derbyshire, where it’s locally relevant.  There it stands, in a siding, labelled “Cromford” as you’d expect.

Apparently, this is incorrect.  Someone at the Middleton Top Visitor Centre [http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/countryside/countryside_sites/visitor_centres/middleton_top/default.asp], which is beside the actual trackbed of the C&HPR, has interviewed the last surviving engine-driver, who is adamant the tender at Wirksworth couldn’t possibly have got up the cable-hauled Middleton Incline.

It has six wheels.  All the tenders based at Cromford had four wheels:  indeed, the six-wheeled versions had their middle wheels removed precisely so they could breast the top of the inclines.

The tender now at Wirksworth must have come from the other end of the line.  Perhaps it should say “Parsley Hay” on the side.

Does this matter?  Certainly not to 99.9% of the EVR’s visitors.  But it shows that to make historical and archaeological facts as accurate as possible, it’s important to listen to living witnesses.  Oral history matters, even if it’s as prone to misinterpretation as written or moving-image evidence.

Shunter hunters

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Peak Rail, Rowsley, Derbyshire: British Railways D2284

Peak Rail, Rowsley, Derbyshire: British Railways D2284

Wandering round the Peak Rail site at Rowsley South in Derbyshire, I came across a gentleman in a shed surrounded by more 1960s and 1970s heavy diesel shunting locomotives than you could shake a stick at.

Peak Rail provides a home and facilities for a number of specialist rail-preservation societies, and I was intrigued by the work of the Heritage Shunters Trust [http://www.heritageshunters.co.uk], who conserve and commemorate an extraordinary episode in the non-development of British Railways.

When the Attlee government nationalised the railways in 1948, the initial policy was to run the railways on steam and coal-fired electricity to make best use of the British coal industry.  Only later did the cheapness of imported oil become economically irresistible.

After British Railways decided in 1955 to phase out steam (having built over 3,500 locomotives since 1948, 999 of them to brand-new designs) there was a rush to obtain sufficient diesel locomotives on a one-for-one replacement basis.  In particular, small, heavy-duty steam shunters were replaced by a great variety of diesel equivalents, some to designs which had not been fully tried and tested.

This policy ignored the fact that single-wagon loads of freight were diminishing, as road transport became more efficient and cost-effective.  By the mid-1960s increasing amounts of rail freight were moving in train-loads not wagon-loads and there was less and less need for shunting locomotives.

This huge, diverse fleet proved to have been a waste of money, and not all of them were capable of doing the job they were intended for.  As pieces of engineering history, however, the different designs are fascinating.

There are over twenty of these engines at Rowsley, some fully restored, others awaiting attention.  I asked my guide what the display policy was – is it an art gallery of locomotive design, or do the workable engines have a practical function?  There is, after all, not much more shunting to do at Rowsley than there was on British Railways after the 1960s.

The major annual jamboree when the working shunters get an outing used to be the Shunter Hunter weekend when the Trust took over the Peak Rail line and worked all the passenger services.  This put up to ten shunting locomotives on the line.

As a means of raising funds to help volunteers preserve the engineering heritage it was a worthwhile enterprise.  And it was entertaining into the bargain.

The Shunter Hunter weekend has now become part of Peak Rail’s Diesel Weekend:  http://www.peakrail.co.uk/dieselweekend. 

Birkenhead Tramway

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Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society: Birkenhead Corporation Tramways 20 at Woodside Ferry

Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society: Birkenhead Corporation Tramways 20 at Woodside Ferry

Photo:  Janet Miles

The first time I visited the Birkenhead Tramway, which preserves a representative collection of trams from both sides of the River Mersey along with numerous buses and cars, I fell into a conversation that highlighted why individuals give up so much time literally to make such museums work.

I asked one of the museum workers about the Birkenhead tram we were standing next to.  This splendid vehicle had spent the years 1937-1983 as a potting shed, and the Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society rescued it by providing the owner with a brand-new potting shed.  I asked how much of the original tram still survived.

The short answer is – the middle bit downstairs.  The ends, the top deck and the running gear are all second-hand or fabricated – necessarily, because who needs a double-deck potting-shed with wheels and a trolley pole?  My guide showed me the high-quality original interior woodwork, including the finely carved borough coats-of-arms, that had remained untouched and had polished up marvellously.

I asked a question that had fascinated me:  he was nowhere near thirty years of age, so why did he spend time preserving a mode of transport that virtually died out long before he was born?  I’m the last generation that can recall traditional street tramways in such cities as Liverpool;  for him, they’re out of the history books.

He told me he was a graduate engineer.  In his daily work he sits at a computer screen.  Occasionally he clicks his mouse and eventually a lathe or cutting-machine miles away springs into action which he never sees.

As he put it, by coming down to Taylor Street once or twice a week, he sees a potting shed gradually resurrected.  Metal, wood, glass and paint come together and eventually, after two or three years, the pole is lifted to the overhead wire, the thing lights up and trundles away.  That’s real engineering.

And that’s why we should all be grateful to “anoraks” – and “overalls”.

Details of the Merseyside Tramway Preservation Society’s activities are at http://www.mtps.co.uk.

London Transport Museum Acton Open Day

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London Transport Museum Acton Open Day, March 14th 2010

London Transport Museum Acton Open Day, March 14th 2010

In some circles, the term “anorak” is pejorative, indicating greasy outdoor clothing, a camera and an unhealthy predilection for standing on railway bridges and the ends of station platforms with a notebook.

In a particularly fine evocation of the attraction of watching steel wheels on steel rails, the journalist Mike Carter, [‘Shunted on a branch line to nowhere’, The Observer, June 25th 2000], tells of the reaction when he asked the assistant at W H Smith, Birmingham New Street, if they still sold trainspotting books:  “‘I don’t think we sell that type of thing any more’, she said, looking at this 35-year-old man as if I’d just asked for the latest copy of Nuns in Rubber.”

I argue that the general public and its posterity owe a great debt to those who spend their weekends scraping rusty metal, polishing brass, learning to drive locomotives, trams, buses and cantankerous vintage cars – or making models of long-gone vehicles. If they also spend their evenings arguing over which defunct railway company had the smartest engines, or how many electric dustcarts operated in Birmingham after the last war, there are far worse ways of passing the time.

And without the “anoraks”, where would we now hear the beat of a steam train approaching, admire the sheer craftsmanship of coach-built cars, buses and trams, sail in a paddle-steamer, see in flight the aircraft that fought the Battle of Britain?

I spent an entertaining Sunday in March at the London Transport Museum Acton Depot, where they keep the trams, buses and Underground trains that won’t fit into the Covent Garden museum, along with piles of memorabilia ranging from posters to railway signals.

I was astonished at the range and variety of volunteer-built models on show – highly convincing representations of trams and Underground rolling-stock ranging in size from miniatures you could hold in your hand to models you could ride on.

You can, of course, buy kits or ready-made models if you want a train, bus or tram to put on your mantelpiece.  You can even buy the kits of my fifties childhood – Bayko and Hornby Dublo. But I most admire the craftsmen (mainly, so far as I could see, men) who spend countless hours getting the detail right and making the whole thing work.

They recreate scenes and customs that vanished a couple of generations ago.  One shows, for instance, how the four-track tramway layout at Dog Kennel Hill in East Dulwich operated, and why it was necessary [see http://londonmodeltramways.webs.com/dogkennelhillmodel.htm and http://www.londontramways.net/articles/dog_kennel_hill.php].  Another provides the only opportunity so far to compare the size of first-generation London trams with the vehicles of Croydon Tramlink, because there was a layout running models of both.

It’s essentially a species of entertainment, and well worth a tenner and a few hours’ time.

Future London Transport Museum Acton Depot Open Day arrangements are at http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/museum-depot/events.