Anson Engine Musuem
The village of Poynton stands just over the western border of the Peak District. Today it is a popular residential part of the Manchester commuter belt, but at one time it was a busy mining village, exploiting the profitable reserves beneath its green fields. Apart from converted miners’ cottages dotted in groups along the village roads, little remains of that industry. One of the last pits which helped swell the 245,000 tons of local coal mined annually was the Anson Colliery. The pit is long gone, but the site now houses the award winning Anson Engine Museum, a collection of historic gas and oil engines, many of them made in the Manchester area. Brian Spencer went along there recently to enjoy the sight of these still operating power providers. The side turning off one of the back roads between Poynton proper and Middlewood, gave little or no hint of the collection of ‘boy’s toys’ that lay ahead. The steady thump, thump coming from one of the cluster of sheds showed that at least one (more as it turned out) of the engines was running. These were just part of the collection of over 250 gas and oil engines mostly made by Manchester based companies like Crossley Brothers of Openshaw, Mirlees Bickerton & Day of nearby Hazel Grove, or L. Gardner and Sons Ltd of Patricroft to the west; There are even Ruston and Hornsby engines made by the Lincoln based company who turned from making agricultural equipment in the first World War, to designing the first tanks to take part in modern warfare. Each of these companies specialised in high quality engines that are often still driving machinery all over the world. Their engines drove everything from ships to agricultural plant, or provided power for factories and also electricity generating. Of the twenty or so engine manufacturers in the North West, Mirlees concentrated on light and heavy oil diesel engines – their first engine is displayed in the museum, together with Crossley’s first, a very rare Griffin six stroke. A 63 ton Ruston and Hornsby was used by Ealing Studios to power dramatic special effects. There cannot be many places like this unusual museum, known at one time as one of the best kept secrets in the industrial North West. What has become one of the U.K’s leading specialist museums was the brain-child of two dedicated enthusiasts, Les Cawley and Geoff Challinor, who started collecting engines purely as a hobby. Gradually their hobby became an almost full-time industry, so the only thing to do was to convert their hobby into a professionally run museum. These 2 men together with a gradually swelling band of like-minded helpers whose idea of enjoyment was to spend their spare time covered in grease, spent years collecting and restoring vintage engines. Those years of effort and hard graft have borne fruit in a working collection of engines that holds interest and fascination for anyone, male, female, old or young. Unlike the current controversy over the movement of the photographic collection from the National Media Museum in Bradford to London, such is the importance of the Anson Museum that it is able to display engines donated from top Science Museums up and down the country. The collection tells the story of engines from the cannon to sophisticated, electronically controlled engines of the future. There is even more than just passing reference to the work done by the German engineer Nikolaus Otto and his partner Eugen Langen who in 1876 made the first successful internal combustion engine. At first the ‘Otto’ engine as it was called, was used as a stationary producer of power, and it took another far sighted engineer, Gottlieb Daimler, to adapt Otto’s ideas into his design for an engine to drive his automobiles. Steam is not forgotten at the Anson. The museum has a steam section with two Robey engines in regular operation; an ‘A’ frame and a beam engine. Pride of place goes to the Stott engine that used to drive a cotton wadding mill just down the road in Hazel Grove. It was rescued by the museum and lovingly restored to working condition by the team of volunteers and ran in 2011 for the first time in 50 years. In honour of Poynton’s mining heritage, a giant scale model shows the village as it looked around 1900. All the multitude of pits dotting the area are shown and give a clear indication of how this one-time colliery village has changed into a dormitory for twenty-first century commuters. Made by 5,000 hours of voluntary work, the model was first put on display in 2011 alongside a display of old maps, photographs, mementoes and keepsakes from the colliery owners, the Vernons from nearby Lyme Hall, together with records of the Anson Colliery on which the museum stands. Sated by the fascination of all the lovingly restored machinery, we wandered outside to the Craft Centre. Here skilled volunteers working in open-fronted workshops were, as the skill dictated, using foot-operated lathes to turn lumps of wood into things like chair-back spindles (the man carrying out this skill told me he was a bodger), or hollowing-out larger pieces into wooden bowls. To their side a blacksmith hammering lumps of red hot iron into fireside implements turned out to be my cousin. In retirement he has gone back to his first job-related activity gained from working at the Bayer Peacock factory in Openshaw, where in times gone by they made the giant locomotives, capable of heroic activities like climbing the Andes or running for hours across the African arid deserts without stopping for water. The Anson Engine Museum is open on advertised days throughout the summer when a programme of events including demonstrations of running engines is held. To find when it is open check www.enginemuseum.org Telephone 01625 874426 The museum is situated in woodland off Anson Road between Poynton village centre and Middlewood (follow the brown tourist signs). It is close to the Macclesfield Canal
Lost Houses – Castlefields
With heavy machinery at work and much building going up in the tract of land between the Railway Station and Traffic Street in Derby, the site of the most ambitious country house close to Derby will be developed for the second time since its demolition nearly 180 years ago. The area is now called Castleward – the name of the voting district, of course – but derives from Castlefields, the ancient name of the area and of the later house. That in itself derives from the shadowy castle at Derby, of which no trace remains, nor has since the Civil War, when a bank and ditch were reported, roughly where Albion Street is now. Castles, even totally vanished ones, usually leave a documentary trace, if only because if the Crown did not build them, one of the great magnates will have done so and not without Royal approval either. Yet no documents survive concerning a castle at Derby, although place name evidence is early enough to be convincing as proof that one did exist. In many of these undocumented cases, the missing fortification turns out to have been a prehistoric (often Iron Age) fort, but this is exceedingly unlikely at Derby, the topography being all against it. The discovery of a previously undocumented motte and bailey castle at Repton by Professor Martin Biddle in the Headmaster’s garden in 1989 (at first thought to have been a Viking dock!) gave the key. It was established as part of a chain of fortifications set up by Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester around 1141, during the anarchy of King Stephen’s reign. He hoped to use the chaos to secure a separate Northern sovereign principality for himself, and these unauthorized or adulterine castles to defend his southern border, roughly along the Trent Valley, were the result. That at Castle Gresley is another example, and it rapidly became clear that the one at Derby fitted the distribution pattern perfectly. After the war, when Henry II managed to establish order again, they were mainly destroyed, Derby and Repton amongst them. Only the toponym lingered on, in the SE corner of the town. The Castle Fields lay south of Cockpit Hill (possibly the site of the castle’s motte), west of the Derwent and east of Osmaston Road, there being no London Road as we know it then. Before the early 18th century, one went to London following the Roman/Prehistoric route along Osmaston Road to Swarkestone Bridge and thence to Leicester. London Road was only formalised in the age of the turnpike. In order to raise funds, the Corporation, the rather paltry income of which derived from stall rents at fairs and tolls, from time to time sold some of the generous quantities of land it controlled around the edge of the town, the original common fields, of which Castle Fields was one. Others included Parkfield, Whitecross Field, Newlands and so on. At the end of the first decade of the 18th century money was required to build a new Guildhall to replace the 15th century one camped out in the middle of the Market Place. Castle Field was therefore sold to Isaac Borrow of Hulland Hall (1673-1745), whose father John had migrated from Gotham, Notts., and was descended from a family living at Thrumpton in the 16th century. The historian William Woolley wrote of ‘…Castlefields, where Mr. Boroughs [sic] builds a very good house (with a curious garden and paddock for deer)’. Woolley’s MS is undated but internal evidence suggests that he wrote the Derby portion in 1713, which fixes the date for a house that one would on architectural grounds describe as ‘Queen Anne’ fairly firmly. Castlefields was a provincial Baroque house in brick of three storeys oriented east – west. The two main fronts were astylar, seven bays wide, the central three recessed on the east side and breaking forward by a brick’s width on the west. The two entrance aedicules have segmental pediments, and the angles are marked by stone quoins. It is difficult to tell whether the fenestration is set in stone surrounds, but if it is, they were clearly fairly skimpy. There were also recessed blind brick panels above the windows on the second floor forming the parapet, which had no cornice only copings, as at Clifton Campville (Staffs., 1708 by William Dickinson) and the Wardwick Tavern, Derby (also 1708). There are no sill or plat bands and no visible string courses. The north & south sides appear to have been of two bays if the painting is to be trusted, but south and north Bucks’ 1728 view suggests a much more credible deeper, double pile house, probably giving five bays on the returns. Both pictures suggest that the south front at least projected by a further bay, recessed from the main facade, like the central section on the east. From Woolley’s description the park was intended for deer, and the curious garden may have been the rather dated looking parterre seen in the picture. There were two slightly detached service wings to the north and south, too with stables beside the former. The whole ensemble was really quite grand. I am coming to the opinion that its similarities to the square, three storey houses without an order of columns or pilasters (astylar) like Wingerworth (1725), Umberslade (1700, Warw.), Newbold Revel (Warw. 1715), Longnor (Staffs. 1726) link it firmly to the oeuvre of Francis Smith of Warwick. He designed all the foregoing (or is firmly linked to them) and whilst building All Saints’, Derby for James Gibbs seems to have acquired seven other Derbyshire commissions from amongst the subscribers to the new church (now the Cathedral). Nor was Smith unknown locally before that, having designed and built Kedleston (1700-1721) and rebuilt Etwall Halls. Indeed, the very year Castlefields was ‘building’, 1713, he was providing a design for a new Guildhall for the Corporation of Derby. As Isaac Borrow was a member of the Corporation then, this may be the link between
Lost Houses – Oldcotes
On the vast, exuberant and lavishly decorated monument in Derby Cathedral to Bess of Hardwick is an inscription, lauding the late Derbyshire grande dame, which includes the lines: ‘This most illustrious Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, built the houses of Chatsworth, Hardwick and Oldcotes, highly distinguished by their magnificence.’ In fact, this is only some of what she was instrumental in building or rebuilding, for it makes no reference to her hunting lodge at Blackwall-in-the-Peak, nor of her impressive town house in Derby Market Place, nor of various other family enterprises in which she was in one way or another involved. Chatsworth, of course, and the two houses she built at Hardwick are well known, but what of Oldcotes, today rendered as Owlcotes? Oldcotes was part of the estate of the very grand family of Savage of Stainsby, and was held under them by the Hardwicks of Hardwick, and thus became the property of Bess of Hardwick on the death of her brother James, whose father also bought out the Savage interest. It was when her son by Sir William Cavendish came of age, that she resolved to build a new house there for him, he being her favourite son. Bess made William Cavendish payments between 1593 and 1597 for the construction of this house, which was going up concurrently with new Hardwick just a couple of miles away. It is thought that the architect for the house was without doubt Robert Smythson, then working on Hardwick and who also designed Wollaton for the Willoughbys and Worksop Manor (another lost house, but in Nottinghamshire) for Bess’s fourth husband, the much put upon George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury. Smythson also designed Bess’s monument in Derby Cathedral, all made and paid for nine years before it was required!. The contract for the stonework at Oldcotes is dated March 1593, and involved six men already working under Smythson at Hardwick. The new house also appears to have included part of its predecessor, as at Hardwick Old Hall, was two rooms deep, had two turrets with a 20 foot high great hall. As no ashlar work was involved, it was clearly to be constructed of coursed rubble, and it was to be finished in eight months – that is, by January 1594. As Bess was still giving further subsidies to William of £100 five years later, we may be sure that, like all builders, they fell behind on the job, and furthermore, that Bess having a reputation for changing her mind in mid-contract (witness the chaotically planned old hall at Hardwick) delays were also thus incurred . Clearly the house was considerably smaller and simpler than Hardwick, but that notwithstanding, the Pierrponts (its owners in 1670 when the assessment was made) still had to pay tax on 48 hearths there, the same total as Haddon, and exceeded in Derbyshire only by Bretby, Chatsworth and Hardwick. A drawing for an unknown house in the RIBA Smythson Collection is generally thought to represent Oldcotes as built, and shows a two storey house on a high plinth, with a three storey two bay centrepiece supported on a three bay loggia and topped with shaped strapwork, with a raised portion behind supporting a group of chimney stacks. The house then – most unusually, even for Smythson – receded back in three stages, as the drawing clearly implies with its return cornices appearing to overlap the following bays, implying recession. Most of Smythson’s houses receded from the edges to the middle and allowed the centre section to advance. An exception is Chastleton, Oxfordshire. There was a cornice over each floor at lintel height and a balustrade on top. A three storey tower was added at each end in the middle of the return elevation (as at Hardwick). Like Hardwick, the windows were all tall, multi-section, mullioned and transomed ones, the largest one of fifteen lights each. It may be, of course, that inside, there were more than two storeys, as at Hardwick and Bolsover, where the changes in level frequently bear little resemblance to the external regularity of the fenestration. We can also be sure that the 20 ft high hall would have run through the house from front to back, as at Hardwick, then a new and innovative feature in great houses, with an elaborate carved stone or timber screen with a gallery upon it. A map of 1609 by William Senior also appears to show the house as two storeys, although the representation is rather formulaic and uninformative, rendering it impossible to be certain whether what we are seeing is the same as the RIBA drawing or not. Nevertheless, a further map, of 1659, now in the Manvers archive at Nottingham University Library, certainly does show the house as it then was. This image, however, comes as something of a surprise as it shows the house with three storeys. This suggests that the house was raised by a storey (except the centrepiece) some time between 1609 and 1659. As it was sold, with its estate to Robert Pierrepont of Holme Pierrepont and Thoresby, 1st Earl of Kingston, in 1641, one might expect that this was done subsequent to that date, but the fact that the Civil War was then raging, followed by the uneasy calm of the Commonwealth, throughout the time between the Pierrepont’s purchase and the 1659 map, the suggestion might seem hard to countenance. More likely it was done by the future 2nd Earl of Devonshire, who lived there before his father’s death in 1626 and was a fairly extravagant young man, who lived in great state. If this suggestion is tenable, then the architect for the enlarging of the house would almost certainly have been John Smythson, Robert’s son, then building for Devonshire’s cousin, Lord Newcastle at Bolsover. It is a shame we have no better image of the place. It is thought that the gabled house in front of the main façade of Oldcotes on the 1659 map is the rebuilt previous
