Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Sound effects

Leave a Reply
Sound mirror, Kilnsea, East Yorkshire

Sound mirror, Kilnsea, East Yorkshire

Holderness is a fascinating part of Yorkshire, full of oddities that belong to its remoteness, and are consequently little known.

Among the First World War fortifications that protected eastern England from the German threat is a curious lump of concrete in a field north-west of the Godwin Battery on the coast at Kilnsea on the way to Spurn Point.  This enigmatic piece of concrete is an acoustic mirror, a rare survival of an aircraft-detection system that was used between 1916 and the 1930s to warn of approaching enemy airships and aircraft.

Based on an experimental sixteen-foot reflector cut into a chalk cliff near Maidstone in July 1915, the concrete acoustic mirror was a concave segment of a sphere with a trumpet-shaped sound-collector pivoted at the focal point.  Listeners used rubber tubes, like a stethoscope, to pick up the noise of approaching engines across the sea, and panned the collector across the mirror to locate the direction.  A range of up to twenty miles was claimed for this system, giving several minutes’ advantage over optical or aural observations.  The system became less effective as aircraft speeds increased during the 1920s and was superseded by the development of radar from 1932 onwards.

The best-known of these acoustic installations is the extensive 1928 group of two concave mirrors, 20 and 30 feet in diameter, and a 200-foot concave wall at Denge near Dungeness on the south coast of Kent.

Two places where you can experience this principle practically are at the Jodrell Bank Telescope, in Cheshire [http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/visitorcentre/] and the Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral, London [http://www.stpaulscathedral.org.uk/ and http://www.explore-stpauls.net/oct03/textMM/WhisperingGalleryN.htm]. Something similar is experienced in the Oyster Bar of Grand Central Terminal, New York City – a fact that was a trade secret of New York journalists for many years.

Details of the Denge installation can be found at the very useful website http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/soundmirrors/locations/denge/ along with details of other similar locations, indicating whether there are any remains and whether they are accessible to the public.  Other relevant websites include http://www.doramusic.com/soundmirrors.htm and http://www.culture24.org.uk/science+%26+nature/technology/art17649.

The detailed history of the sound mirrors and their operation is Richard N Scarth, Echoes from the Sky (Hythe Civic Society nd).

Alexandra Vaughan featured the sound mirror in her blog:  https://spurnpointresidency2018.org/2017/10/06/sound-mirror.

The Denge site is only accessible on public guided tours by the Romney Marsh Countryside Project:  http://www.rmcp.co.uk/NoticeBoard.php.

The Kilnsea acoustic mirror stands on private land:  when visiting, please respect this by keeping to the nearest public footpath from the Kilnsea Wetlands car park:  http://www.ywt.org.uk/reserves/kilnsea-wetlands-nature-reserve.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber Heritage’ 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.

Why Jeffie?

Leave a Reply
Jeffie Bainbridge Children's Centre inscription, Norfolk Street, Sheffield

Jeffie Bainbridge Children’s Centre inscription, Norfolk Street, Sheffield

For years I wondered, when I walked along Norfolk Street in Sheffield’s city-centre, about the carved stone on the corner of the Halifax Bank, which says “JEFFIE BAINBRIDGE CHILDREN’S SHELTER”.  Why, in particular, does the lettering say “Jeffie” rather than “Jessie”?

The building which now contains the bank was built in 1893-4 by Emerson Muschamp Bainbridge (1845-1911), a towering figure in nineteenth-century industry in the north of England.  He was the son of the founder of Bainbridge’s department store in Newcastle-on-Tyne, trained as a mining engineer, and became manager of the Sheffield, Tinsley and Nunnery Collieries in Sheffield.  His industrial directorships extended to other collieries in Yorkshire, and he was effectively the founder of the colliery and village of New Bolsover in Derbyshire.  He was also a director of the Yorkshire Engine Company, and an instigator of the huge Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway (which ultimately only extended from Chesterfield to Lincoln), intended to connect Warrington on the Mersey with a major coal-exporting port to be built at Sutton-on-Sea (and which was eventually built at Immingham).

He was MP for Gainsborough from 1895 to 1900, built a villa near Monte Carlo and purchased a 40,000 acre deer-forest in Ross-shire.  He died worth a quarter of a million pounds (worth according to http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php nearly £19 million now).

He was a strong supporter of the YMCA, and his building on the corner of Norfolk Street and Surrey Street was partly intended to house the YMCA headquarters.  He also provided a children’s shelter, the Jeffie Bainbridge Home for Waifs & Strays, which included a dining room and dormitories for homeless children and was opened by the Duke and Duchess of Portland.  The interior was swept away behind the façade in 1977-8.

Why Jeffie?  Emerson Bainbridge’s first wife was born Eliza Jefferson Armstrong (died 1892);  their daughter was Eva Jeffie Bainbridge.  Jeffie is simply short for Jefferson.

Rails and quarries in the Derbyshire Peak

1 Reply
Middleton Top Engine, Cromford & High Peak Railway, Derbyshire

Middleton Top Engine, Cromford & High Peak Railway, Derbyshire

The Ecclesbourne Valley Railway runs an excellent ‘Rails and Quarries‘ tour from their Wirksworth station, using their diesel railcar to run up the steepest section of line in use in the UK – 1 in 27 – to Ravenstor, the foot of a slightly mysterious incline that connected with the Cromford & High Peak Railway at Middleton Bottom.

The day I visited, the guide was Vince Morris – informative, professional and endlessly patient with people who struggle with stiles.  His itinerary involved a steep climb through the National Stone Centre [http://www.nationalstonecentre.org.uk] to the High Peak Trail [http://www.derbyshire-peakdistrict.co.uk/thehighpeaktrail.htm], which follows the trackbed of the Cromford & High Peak Railway, up the 1 in 8½ incline to Middleton Top Engine House and then over the fields and through the derelict moonscape of Middle Peak Quarry and back through the centre of Wirksworth.

Middleton Top Winding Engine [http://www.middleton-leawood.org.uk] is an interesting survival, the only remaining example of eight built by the Butterley Company to haul trains up and down the inclines which in 1825 were judged the most effective and economical method of running a railway over the Peak massif.  William Jessop II was a director of both the Butterley Company and the C&HPR:  his younger brother, Josias, had engineered the railway though he died during the construction period.  The total cost of the railway, when it was completed in 1831, was £149,206 16s 8d.  Of this the eight winding engines cost £20,000.

More significantly, the largest single item of expenditure was for cast-iron rails, provided by the Butterley Company for £61,950.  The Butterley Ironworks was incapable at that time of manufacturing wrought-iron rails, so that when the railway wanted to replace horses with locomotives (as Josias Jessop had suggested in his initial specification), the track couldn’t stand the weight and had to be re-laid in wrought iron from end to end.

As the Americans say, do the math.

This unique railway, which was technologically sound when it was promoted in 1825 and an anachronism almost as soon as it opened in 1831, continued to work with periodic modifications on the principle that if it works, don’t fix it.  Middleton Top stopped winding in 1963, but at the Sheep Pasture Incline further down the line a steam engine built in 1883 was replaced with an electric winder in 1965.  The entire line finally closed in 1967.

As the French say, C’est la vie.

Events on the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway can be found at Events 2021 – Ecclesbourne Valley Railway (e-v-r.com).

The branch line that thinks it’s a main line

2 Replies
Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, Derbyshire

Ecclesbourne Valley Railway, Derbyshire

There’s a sleepy little branch line up the Ecclesbourne valley in Derbyshire, from the former Midland main line at Duffield to the market town of Wirksworth.  Since 2002 a group of volunteers have been reviving it for tourist traffic.  Its survival is unusual, but nothing like as unusual as its origin.

For complicated reasons of Victorian railway politics, there was a possibility in the 1860s that the Midland Railway’s line from Derby to Manchester might be blocked by its competitor, the London & North Western Railway, when the joint lease on the section between Ambergate and Rowsley ran out in 1871.

In case this happened, or perhaps to prevent the L&NWR making trouble, the Midland built the branch up the Ecclesbourne valley as far as Wirksworth, which is as far as any reasonable railway line would go.  Beyond that, they secured the right to tunnel under the hills, crossing the Via Gellia road on a 280-yard-long viaduct, emerging into daylight above Matlock and dropping down the Derwent Valley to their newly-built line from Rowsley westwards.

If it had been built it would have been even more heavy-duty than the “flute” line through Monsal Dale, Miller’s Dale and Chee Dale.  It would have been a stiff challenge to drive expresses and – even more – coal trains up the grade, through a series of lengthy tunnels and round tight curves under the Heights of Abraham.

The Wirksworth-Rowsley extension was never built, and instead trains pottered up and down the Wirksworth branch, carrying limestone, milk and passengers.  The milk and passengers went over to road transport before and during the Second World War, but the huge Middle Peak Quarry kept the railway running until 1989.

Then, when the quarry was mothballed, the railway was left intact but utterly neglected, so that by the time the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway crews had the go-ahead to bring it back to life it was an 8½-mile-long jungle.  Whereas most railway-preservation groups have to lay fresh track, as did the EVR’s neighbours at Peak Rail, here the heavy work has been clearing out blocked culverts and replacing rotten sleepers.

The line is  open from the existing main line at Duffield so that passengers can connect with East Midlands trains’ hourly Derby-Matlock service. 

The main-line connection has been severed and, so I’m told, there’s only a minimal chance of it being reinstalled.  The EVR can provide a worthwhile passenger service with steam locomotives and diesel railcars, and Wirksworth is a pleasant market town with a fascinating history.  The future looks promising for this once derelict survivor of a time when railway companies would build their lines almost anywhere.

Details of the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway services are at http://www.e-v-r.com.

Break of journey: Cromford Station

3 Replies

Cromford Station, Derbyshire

Cromford Station, Derbyshire

The little railway with the long name – the Manchester, Buxton, Matlock & Midland Junction Railway – only reached Rowsley, just short of the Chatsworth estate, before the money ran out and railway politics cut it short.  The original Rowsley station still stands, isolated in the middle of a retail park more depressing (in my view) than the contractor’s yard it replaced.  When the line to Manchester was resumed in the 1860s, it turned left and headed up the Wye valley, rather than following the original route.

One of the directors of the MBM&MJR was Joseph Paxton, the protégé of the Bachelor Duke of Devonshire.  He sketched the first design for his Great Exhibition building, the Crystal Palace, on a sheet of MBM&MJR blotting paper during a directors’ meeting.

Paxton designed the company’s stations at Rowsley and Matlock, and his son-in-law, George Henry Stokes, did the particularly attractive station at Cromford in what is generally described as “French château” style.  The existing main, down-side building is later, but the tiny up-side waiting room and the elaborate stationmaster’s house are Stokes’.

Ever since main-line services ceased in the late 1960s, the Cromford station buildings have been neglected, until in recent years the Arkwright Society has renovated the down-side building as a suite of two offices and Ryan Phelps has converted the waiting room opposite into a compact, high-quality holiday let [The Waiting Room Holiday Cottage – Cromford – Railway Station Cottages] which sleeps two very comfortably, and four at a pinch.

Here you can live in great comfort, with an hourly train-service up and down the Derwent valley between Derby and Matlock.  The first train north comes through at 0605, and the last one south passes at 2249.  Sleep would have been more of a problem when the great coal trains lumbered through twenty-four hours a day.

In a spare twenty minutes I took the guests on the 2010 Waterways & Railways of the Derbyshire Peak tour to take a look at Cromford Station.  One lady, curious to know if a train was due, pressed the “enquiries” button, expecting a recorded announcement, and was fascinated to be put in touch with a man who not only gave her the time, but checked that the driver was ready to leave Matlock on time.  And so fifteen very mature people stood fascinated, waiting for the headlight to appear in the tunnel, and to photograph a very brightly painted diesel railcar.  We’re all anoraks really.

Cromford Station House is private, and the Waiting Room is of course let regularly:  if you visit Cromford Station please keep to the public platform.

The Duke of Newcastle’s dormitory

Leave a Reply

Markham Clinton Mausoleum, Nottinghamshire

Markham Clinton Mausoleum, Nottinghamshire

Authoritarians have a way of undermining themselves.

The 4th Duke of Newcastle (1785-1851) was a clumsy politician.  Queen Victoria sacked him from the post of Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire because he wouldn’t appoint magistrates he disapproved of:  “for though his integrity could never be suspected, his discretion was by no means remarkable”.

When his Duchess died giving birth to twins in 1822, he built the stern and chilly Milton Mausoleum at West Markham, Nottinghamshire designed by Sir Robert Smirke.  This project, which took eleven years to complete, became a lugubrious farce.  Known in the family as the “Dormitory”, it was intended to supersede the cramped family vault at Bothamsall Church, and was designed to accommodate 72 coffins.  It was also to serve as a replacement for the tiny medieval parish church of All Saints’, West Markham.

The fourth Duke himself was eventually buried there with his wife, but only fourteen members of the family lie in the vault, and the parishioners of West Markham abandoned its dismal isolation to return to their more homely church in the heart of their village.

Sir Richard Westmacott’s superb monument to the Duchess was carried off to Clumber Chapel, and later returned to its original resting-place where it remains.

The Milton Mausoleum is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust and can be visited:
http://www.visitchurches.org.uk/findachurch/milton-mausoleum-newark.  There is a description at http://www.mmtrust.org.uk/mausolea/view/134/Newcastle_Mausoleum.

Visitor-information for Clumber Park, including the Chapel, is at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/clumber-park/.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

Castle that’s not a castle

Leave a Reply

Nottingham Castle

Nottingham Castle

When is a castle not a castle?  For many visitors, Nottingham Castle comes as a surprise, because it doesn’t have battlements or a drawbridge.  It did, of course, at one time, but the medieval fortress that guarded the crossing of the River Trent that is now a famous cricket ground disappeared after the English Civil War.

Nottingham was the place where King Charles I first raised his standard, signalling his military opposition to the forces of Parliament and triggering the conflict that led to his execution.  The old castle was “slighted”, that is, rendered indefensible, by order of Parliament in 1651, and its ruins and the park around it were bought after the Restoration by William Cavendish, a prominent Royalist and the first Duke of Newcastle.

He swept away the remains of the old castle and – well into his eighties – began a completely new, extremely modern classical palace that was completed, three years after his death, in 1679.  It cost £14,000.  (Curiously, the 8th Earl of Rutland, a Roundhead, had built a similarly splendid baroque palace in place of his slighted castle, beginning in 1654.  All that remains of this is a model, now displayed in the nineteenth-century replacement Belvoir Castle [http://www.belvoircastle.com].)

The seventeenth-century Nottingham Castle was little used in the decades that followed, and was virtually empty when in 1832 it was set alight by Reform Bill rioters.  Its then owner, the 4th Duke of Newcastle, was anything but popular:  in an election in 1830 he had evicted tenants who wouldn’t vote as he wished, saying, “Is it not lawful for me to do what I please with my own?”

Eventually, in 1876, Nottingham Corporation bought the Castle from the 6th Duke and commissioned the local architect Thomas Chambers Hine to rebuild the interior as the first municipal museum of art in England.

Now it is the Castle Museum [http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1036], centrepiece of a cultural quarter that also includes a fascinating series of caves, including Mortimer’s Hole, and, at the foot of the cliff on which the Castle stands, the Museum of Nottingham Life at Brewhouse Yard.

It may not look like a castle, but you can spend an entire day in and under it without getting bored.

 

Apocalyptic visions

Leave a Reply

York Minster: west front

York Minster: west front

John St John Long, the quack doctor who is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery, could have had an alternative, much less dangerous career.

One of his oil paintings, ‘The temptation in the wilderness’ (1824), belongs to the Tate Britain collection [http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=13062&searchid=25174].  Apparently, he spent the early 1820s as a painter of biblical subjects before turning to medicine.

His tutor was the apocalyptic painter, John Martin (1789-1854), a fascinating character who took time out of a commercially successful artistic career to support his eldest brother William’s career as an inventor, to join in the controversy over how to solve London’s sewage problem, and to care for his demented elder brother, Jonathan (1782-1838).

Jonathan Martin witnessed the murder of his sister, a trauma which he never overcame. At his confirmation he was “astonished at the wonderful size of the bishop”, and took to an abusive correspondence with clergymen, who tended to exclude him from their churches because of his antics.  He was for a time a Wesleyan minister, and was locked up for threatening to assassinate the Bishop of Oxford.

One missive began, “Blind Hypocrits, You serpents and vipers of Hell, you wine-bibbers and beef-eaters, whose eyes stand out with fatness…” and another made the more sinister prophecy, “You whitent sea pulkirs…your Gret Charchis and Minstairs will cume rattling down upon your Gilty Heads.”)

Perhaps someone should have kept a closer eye on Jonathan Martin.  On February 1st 1829 during evensong at York Minster he was apparently distressed by a buzzing in the organ, and concealed himself inside the building.  He started a fire, before escaping through a window, and succeeded in burning down the entire east end.  One of the bystanders remarked that the spectacle reminded him of one of John Martin’s canvases, not realising that the sight was the result of the artist’s brother’s work as an arsonist.

Jonathan Martin was committed to an asylum for the second time in his life, and remained there until his death.

York Minster suffered further fires in 1840, when a workman’s lamp set fire to the south-west tower, sending the bells to the ground “with a deep hollow sound” and gutting the nave, and again in 1984 when lightning set alight the roof of the south transept.

The south transept was restored by 1988.  Now there is a major campaign once again to safeguard the east end of the Minster.  See http://www.yorkminster.org.

The 44-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic York tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. 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.

Lapidary description

1 Reply

Tomb of Dr John St John Long, Kensal Green Cemetery, London

Tomb of Dr John St John Long, Kensal Green Cemetery, London

Dr Johnson remarked that “In lapidary descriptions a man is not upon oath”.

But how do you frame an epitaph when the life of the deceased has been marked by scandal?

Dr John St John Long (1793-1834) lies beneath a tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery that is a masterpiece of lending dignity to a remarkable man who is, perhaps, remarkable for unfortunate reasons.

Long is usually described as a quack doctor.  In fact he practised from a Harley Street surgery, though he “had not been regularly educated as a surgeon”.  On at least two occasions the deaths of his patients led to manslaughter charges:  in the first instance he was fined £250;  on the second, though the coroner’s jury returned a manslaughter verdict “on the ground of gross ignorance, and on other considerations”, Long was exonerated at the Old Bailey and “several ladies, elegantly dressed, remained with the prisoner in the dock throughout the day, to whom this verdict appeared to give great satisfaction”.

Nevertheless, he received glowing testimonials from patients who felt they had benefitted from his treatments – among them the Countess of Buckingham and the radical politician, Sir Francis Burdett, who recommended Long to the Marquess of Anglesey for a treatment for tic doloureux.

His tomb at Kensal Green carries a lengthy and delicately poised inscription:

It is the fate of most men to have many enemies, and few friends.  This monumental pile is not intended to mark the career but to shew how much its inhabitant was respected by those who knew his worth and the benefits derived from his remedial discovery.  He is now at rest and far beyond the praises or censures of this world.

Stranger as you respect the receptacle for the dead as one of many who must rest here, hear the name of John St John Long without comment.

Most commentators quote only the final paragraph – which has a more terse effect.

Of the “benefits derived from his remedial discovery” nothing further was heard after Long’s death.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology 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.

Equestrian genii

Leave a Reply

Tomb of Andrew Ducrow, equestrian, Kensal Green Cemetery, London

Tomb of Andrew Ducrow, equestrian, Kensal Green Cemetery, London

Probably the most bombastic monument in Kensal Green Cemetery is that to Andrew Ducrow (1793-1842), the equestrian owner of Astley’s Amphitheatre in Lambeth.

Ducrow’s entry in Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ducrow] likens his stage act to the modern-day Chippendales, because he and his sons dressed in flesh-coloured body stockings and posed on the backs of white stallions.

Even though Astley’s burnt down three times, Ducrow was clearly worth something.  His plot in Kensal Green Cemetery is in a prestigious location near to the Duke of Sussex, and his monument cost £3,000.  Built initially for Mrs Ducrow, its design by George Danson is a ponderous mix of classical and Egyptian motifs, originally coloured and surmounted by a statue of Hygieia, goddess of health, cleanliness and sanitation.

The inscription, which Ducrow clearly wrote, declares that the tomb was “erected by Genius for the reception of its own remains”.  It was described in the contemporary periodical The Builder as “ponderous coxcombry”.

The real genius of Astley’s Amphitheatre was, of course, its founder, Philip Astley (1742-1814).  In many ways he is the originator of the modern circus, because he was the first professional trick-rider to perform in a circle, though he never used the Latin term “circus” or the English “ring”, but called it a “ride”.  He introduced clowns and acrobats into his show to extend and vary the performance.

Most significant of all, he determined that the diameter for the circus ring, as we now call it, should be 42 feet, for that caused a cantering horse to lean at the optimum angle for a man to stand on its bare back.

Now that‘s genius.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Victorian Cemeteries, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Cemeteries and Sewerage:  the Victorian pursuit of cleanliness tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology 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.