Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Haden’s House Cathedral Quarter, Derby
If you were to walk towards the city centre in Derby along Queen Street, you would eventually reach St. Michael’s, an unassuming Victorian church designed by Henry Isaac Stevens of Derby and built in 1857-59 of ridged ashlar blacks to replace its Medieval predecessor, the chancel of which collapsed, rather dramatically, on a summer Sunday, 17th August 1856, mercifully, just after the congregation had left. The church is now solicitors’ offices, having been converted from ecclesiastical use by Derek Latham as his own offices in 1979. Then there is a gap there before one reaches St. Michael’s House, a red brick building which used to be HQ of the Cathedral until about 20 years ago. This gap bears the name St. Michael’s Church Yard, which it once was but, before 1959, the view through the gap would have been terminated by a fine white painted Georgian house, Nos. 3-4 St. Michael’s Church Yard, which once looked across the church yard to Queen Street and had a garden which ran down to the Derwent. The plain façade of this house – two and a half storeys and five bays wide with an extra lower ground floor on the east side facing the river – had, as so often in Derby, a house of considerably greater antiquity, being said by one Derby author to date from ‘at least the seventeenth century’. A person familiar with the house in its declining years also made mention of unusually thick walls, roughly squared stone plinth work appearing in what was largely a brick house, blocked mullioned windows visible from within (but not evident on the exterior) and a staircase which, if correctly described, must have dated from the later seventeenth century, of oak with turned balusters ‘slightly bulbous in shape running continuously up the gradient of the stair’. There was also a bolection moulded chimney piece, two others ‘of Jacobean appearance’ and a ceiling centered by ‘an oval of realistic fruit.’ The pleasure grounds ran down to the mill-race and, prior to the building of the Derby Silk Mill 1717-1721, no doubt reached the river bank and had a summerhouse there, as did so many other Derby gentry town houses. It is by no means clear who built this house, although there is some circumstantial evidence to suppose that by the time it had receive its Restoration period makeover, it was the town house of the Poles of Radburne Hall. In the 1741 election German Pole stood as the Tory candidate in the first general election of that year, being defeated by skulduggery on the part of the Whig-dominated corporation. They, knowing that the majority of Pole’s supporters would be coming in from the country and that Pole had put money behind the bar of a number of inns for their refreshment, closed the polls at lunch-time, handily disenfranchising any who had not finished their refreshments. Pole, despite having lost, gained much credit from restraining his supporters from rioting. The Poles seem to have relinquished the house after the death of German Pole (who had built the new (present) Radburne Hall, and it was sold to John Balguy of Alfreton (pronounced ‘Bawgie’), a member of an ancient family from Hope which had gone into coal ownership in a big way, making enough money to live in Swanwick Hall by 1770. People of his ilk needed a residence in Derby, not only to stay in whilst attending the assemblies and the race-meetings (which invariably coincided) but also to be on the spot to oversee their business interests. The Balguys made some improvement to the house, adding the plain Georgian brick façade, and parapet (barely hiding an older, uneven roofline) and installing panelling in the dining room. Balguy bought Duffield Park in 1791, shortly after he had been appointed recorder of Derby, but, in the early 1800s, the house was let to Thomas Haden (1760-1804), later an Alderman and Mayor of Derby in 1811 and 1819. He was partner to Joseph Wright’s brother, Richard, a doctor who had inherited Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s medical practice and lived and worked in St. Alkmund’s Church Yard. Haden needed to be close to Wright’s practice, so rented the Balguy’s house in St. Michael’s church yard. The Hadens, at the centre of Derby’s social life being friends with most of those Enlightenment period figures of the time, especially the king-pin, William Strutt who, from 1807 lived very close by at St. Helen’s House, added a ballroom embellished with neo-Classical plasterwork, lit by a large canted bay overlooking the garden. Thomas Haden had several sons, of whom the third, Henry, a surgeon, was the only fatal casualty of the Derby Reform riot of 10-12th November 1831, when he was mugged in Queen Street, left for dead and subsequently succumbed to his injuries (he wasn’t even a Tory, but was in the wrong place at the wrong time, poor chap). In 1818 his sister Ann had married a young American-born army officer, Kirk Boott (1790-1837) who went on to become one of the founding fathers of the cotton-spinning city of Lowell, Massachusetts; the father, also Kirk, a friend of Joseph Wright’s other brother, John, a banker, had migrated to Boston in the 1770s. One of Haden’s grandsons was the surgeon Sir Francis Seymour Haden, FRCS (1818-1910) who, although knighted for the advances he brought to obstetrical surgery and for his role as a co-founder of the Royal Hospital for the Incurables (now the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability), is nowadays more famous as an extremely talented artist who excelled as an etcher. As an artist, Haden was well known as having enjoyed a close relationship to the US born impressionist James Abbot MacNeil Whistler (a descendant of Ann Haden and the Boots) marrying Whistler’s half-sister Dasha Delanoy. Needless to say, like most people who befriended Whistler, they eventually fell out rather drastically. In his younger days, he had joined his grandfather’s medical practice, in direct succession to Dr. Darwin himself. Nor did the Hadens
The Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Netherthorpe Old Hall
Netherthorpe Old Hall was a stone built Elizabethan small manor house situated in Netherton, one of the group of modest hamlets which surround Staveley – Barrowhill, Mastin Moor, Norbriggs, Poolsbrook and Woodthorpe. Built of coarse ashlar of thin coal measures sandstone, there were hefty quoins and at one time dressings to the doorcases, windows and gables. The roof must once have been of stone slate too, but was latterly of Welsh slate, brought in by rail of the back of the rapid industrialisation of Staveley itself. When new, the house no doubt had a great hall set to one side of the central section, for the bold innovation of a through hall, being introduced by Robert Smythson at Wollaton, Worksop and Hardwick, were still in the future, and without doubt the house will have had all the accoutrements of that of a well-to-do minor gentleman: linenfold wainscotting, ribbed plaster Sheffield School ceilings, and a grand oak staircase. The hearth tax, however, tells us that it was taxed on a modest five hearths in 1670, probably because, with a great hall being the focus of domestic life, there were only four other heated rooms, one of which would have been the kitchen. In the only surviving view of the house, the chimney to the right probably served the great hall and that to the left the kitchen, with the other three sharing one or the other. Generally speaking, it probably looked like an expanded version of Staveley’s Furnace House, a building of similar vintage which ended up in the middle of the giant Staveley Works, surrounded by railway lines and which seems to have literally fallen to pieces around 1906. Yet over the centuries, Netherthorpe Old Hall managed to get modernised, losing its mullioned windows in favour of sashes and later casement openings. There had probably originally been stone copings to the gables with finials, and the great hall was later divided both horizontally and vertically from the seventeenth century to down-grade the accommodation quality in favour of extra space. The history of the place is a trifle complex, but readers of this element of Country Images will evince no surprise at that, one imagines. At Domesday, Staveley was held in chief by a Breton ‘baron’ called Hascoit or Acuit Musard, whose descendants held on there until 1294 when the dynasty ended somewhat chaotically. Ralph Musard who died in 1265 held two knight’s fees in Staveley, and his house was most likely on or near the site of the hall. His grandson John died without issue in 1294, leaving as heir an uncle, Nicholas, who was then rector of Staveley, who had children. At that time, parish priests were still allowed to marry, but that state was one that managed to pass Nicholas by, leaving his children illegitimate, although they were left in his will modest pieces of land locally and one sired the line of de Steynesbys from having acquired land at Stainsby. Therefore, when Nicholas died in 1301, his three sisters inherited the extensive estate in three portions. The eldest, Amicia married Anker de Frecheville, another man of Norman descent, whilst her sister Margaret married John de Hibernia (‘of Ireland’) and the youngest, Isabel, married William de Chellaston. The Frechevilles’ portion included the Musard seat. This three-way split soon reduced to two, though, for the Chellaston marriage left no issue and the Ireland portion, which included Netherthorpe, soon became forfeited to the Crown. In November 1308 as a sort of coronation present, Edward II granted this two thirds of Staveley to Robert de Clifford, 1st Lord Clifford, who was in attendance on the occasion. He immediately settled it, for life only, on the husband of his aunt, Idoine de Vipont, who was John, 1st Lord Cromwell, an old comrade-in-arms of Clifford’s from a campaign in France some years before. The quid pro quo was that Clifford in exchange took a portion of the manor of Appleby, Westmorland, giving him control over the whole Hundred of Appleby. Cromwell probably did not visit his two thirds of Staveley, and it is doubtful if there was at this time any house on it, as all the Musards’ successors had perfectly good houses elsewhere – the Cliffords at Skipton Castle and the Cromwells at Tattershall. On Cromwell’s death in 1335, however, the property reverted to the Cliffords, which family held on to it (presumably granting the manor house to a tenant or bailiff) until John, 9th Lord Clifford was killed in action during the Wars of the Roses fighting on the Lancastrian side in 1461. He was posthumously attainted and his lands once again reverted to the Crown and the estate was again tenanted under the Crown a situation which pertained until 1544. During this time, the Crown’s tenants at Netherthorpe in the later fifteenth century at least, appear to have been called Carter. Indeed, the Christian name of Anker Carter, who surrendered his lease in 1543, suggests that his father John, of Netherthorpe, must have been married to a daughter of one of the Frechevilles, for that family had enthusiastically adopted that distinctive name from their Musard ancestors. Thus in 1543, the new tenant was Robert Sitwell, from nearby Eckington. In 1544, Henry VIII granted the Crown’s two-thirds portion of Staveley to Francis Leake of Sutton Scarsdale, who within a year had sold his unexpected windfall to Sir Peter Frecheville of Staveley Hall, who was keen to re-unite the manorial estate. Needless to say, he also inherited Robert Sitwell, whose lease was almost certainly for ‘three lives’ a medieval system whereby a property could be held until the death of the third person to inherit it from the original grantee, when they could either pay to renew, extend, or merely surrender it. Sitwell was the descendant of a family much more famous now than then, although he was the founder of the family’s fortunes. The family’s origins are obscure. One Walter de Boys, or de Bosco (from French, bois = wood
Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Chesshyre’s House, Derby
The Chesshyre family has been amongst the elite tradesmen of Derby since the beginning of the seventeenth century, when brothers Robert and John Cheshire, sons of a Breadsall farmer, set up in business in the town. John (1613-1689) was Mayor in 1680 and left descendants in the town, as did Robert (1602-1673) who was a lawyer. He married Isabella Blood and had four sons and a daughter, of whom Samuel was Mayor of Derby as well, taking the post only a decade after his uncle. The third son was Gilbert Chesshyre mercer and gentleman, who in 1696 married an heiress of considerable fortune, Catherine, daughter of Revd. Thomas Meynell of Langley, of which place he was both rector and lord. With the death of his grandson in 1758, his estate was split nine ways, two parts coming to the descendants of the marriage. The family were well established in the parish of St. Werburgh, but Gilbert and Catherine, determined to have a new house, chose a plot – possibly close to the family’s previous residence – on the corner of Friar Gate and Ford Street. The house was probably begun at the time of their marriage, although to subsequent generations of Derby residents it was known as The Queen Anne House. Its first known appearance on record, however is in a document of 1702. This new house, no. 25, Friar Gate, was exceedingly handsome and well proportioned, and represented the finest quality money could buy in late seventeenth century Derby. Had it survived it would probably have been listed Grade II*. It was of brick, three storeys, and five bays wide under a hipped roof. It was a building of some architectural pretension with stone dressings: quoins, bolection moulded architrave surrounds to the windows, punctuated with keyblocks. The central entrance was embellished by grooved rusticated sweeps, Doric columns and a modillion frieze. The roof was also supported on modillions and was crowned by impressive cruciform-plan stacks. Indeed, the style resembled a mature development of Franceys’ House in Market Place and may well have been by the same (unknown) hand. Nor do we know anything of the interior, bar the fact that there was a timber staircase with turned balusters on a string, fielded panelling (which extended to the main rooms) and chimneypieces carved from local polished limestones. Franceys’s house boasted a frescoed ceiling by Francis Bassano, so it would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that this house boasted something along the same lines. There was also a garden extending down to the Markeaton Brook by Willow row (then still so embowered) and a fine wrought iron railing protected the street front from the vicissitudes of Derby Football. The couple’s only son was another Gilbert who, with his two sisters, inherited a portion of Langley in 1758. Born in 1694, he managed to acquire a small landed estate west of Radbourne and thus described himself as ‘of Dalbury Lees, Esq.’. He was a colonel in the militia raised by the 3rd Duke of Devonshire to oppose the southward progress of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the autumn of 1745. His reward was the high shrievalty in 1759, shortly after he inherited his share of the Langley estate. However, in 1761 he disinherited his surviving son (who died unmarried in 1764) and died eighteen months later. He had married in 1720 Dorothy Beighton of Crich, and in 1744 clearly decided to improve the roof, installing fresh rainwater goods including a lead hopper clearly monogrammed: At the same time, a Robert Bakewell side gate was installed to allow access past the west side of the house into the garden. It is close in design to that at Tissington Hall, datable to the same period. In 1938, this ended up in the museum, but presents a problem, for the coat-of-arms on it read oddly. The cast crest of an unicorn’s head erased collared and chained is fine, and may relate to the unofficial arms used by the Chesshyres, but the original shield has been at some stage removed and replaced by a thin iron confection looking like an incandescent light bulb, bearing the device vert on a chevron between three stags statant or as many trefoils slipped gules. Since I have known it, this has been tinctured to conform with the arms of Robinson of Yorkshire, but these may not have been the original colours. Presumably the shield was changed after the Chesshyres and Cheneys left. At Gilbert’s death his three parts of the Langley estate was re-divided between his daughters Dorothy and Catherine. The latter died unmarried in 1764, leaving her entire estate, including the Dalbury Lees land and a single part of Langley, to a close friend – how close in not clear, but she was only 22 when she inherited from her father – Dr. Philip Gell, who was her tenant at Kirk Langley. His son, by Honor Borough of Castlefields, was another Philip who, in 1789, on the death of a relative, inherited thereby another half of a third of Langley. Meanwhile Catherine’s elder sister Dorothy inherited the Derby house and in 1753 married a neighbour, Henry Peach of Full Street, who died in 1758. By Peach she had six children, one born posthumously and including a pair of twins. Three years later, by now the inheritor of her portion of Langley she married Robert Cheney, by whom she had a son, Robert, born 1766. She lived in the family’s house in Derby with Peach, but two years into her second marriage she inherited her portion of Langley, which happened to include the hall, into which they moved, and where Cheney lived until his own death in 1809. At this stage the impressive Derby house descended to Cheney’s eldest son, Maj. Gen. Robert Cheney (1766-1820), whilst Langley Hall was inherited by Dorothy’s eldest son by Henry Peach, also Henry (1754-1833), a clergyman who had married the niece and co-heiress of Derby’s eminent Lunar Society co-founder, John Whitehurst, FRS.
Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Green Hall, Belper
The story of the Strutt family and that of modern Belper, which they more or less created, are intertwined. They built the mills and the workers’ housing (to a very high standard for the period) and over several generations endowed the town with numerous benisons, leaving the built environment the better for it; today it is a settlement with, for its size, an extraordinary number of listed buildings. Some, however, failed to survive to be listed, or at least to benefit from the 1968 planning act. This obliged listed buildings to be put through a series of evaluations, resulting in consent or otherwise to demolish or alter them. Prior to 1st January 1969 one had merely to notify the local authority and the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments (so they could record the building) before doing anything drastic. One Belper building to fall to the wrecking ball was Green Hall, situated at the top of King Street on the north side. It was one of a group of three local country houses built in the period 1790-1810 for various members of the Strutt family: Milford House, Makeney House and Bridge Hill House being the others, of which the latter appeared in these pages in November 2012. Three of these houses were designed by Jedediah Strutt’s eldest son, William Strutt, FRS, an amateur architect who worked in a Neo-Classical style and who was usually sensible enough to employ what we would today call an executant architect, for instance Samuel Brown when he designed the Derbyshire General Infirmary at Derby, 1806-1810. The latter year is that in which the sources agree the house was built at Green Hall. The idea was to provide a house for Jedediah Strutt the younger, second son of George Benson Strutt, younger son of the first Jedediah, and founder of the Belper branch of the family. G. B. Strutt lived at Bridge Hill House, and in 1810, his son married on 12th April, Susannah, daughter of Rotherham steel maker Joshua Walker. Green Hall was to be their home until such time as Jedediah’s father died and they could move to Bridge Hill. The house was nothing like as grand as Bridge Hill, and once extended lacked the latter’s symmetry and elegance, although the hand of uncle William can still be discerned in it. Yet it is a bit of a hotch-potch when viewed from the small garden on its west, nor was the short, south (entrance front) particularly architectonic either. The North side was blank and the east side was aggressively plain and stood flush to the west edge of Green Lane. The west front had five bays and although the entire house was of two storeys, the range to the North was higher, under a hipped roof and dwarf parapet; This contained the high-ceilinged dining room. To the right was a conservatory fronted room beyond which was the only symmetrical portion, three bays with a central pediment under which were superimposed tripartite windows, where were the drawing room with master bedroom above. This part had a slightly higher hipped slate roof, and was the original William Strutt-designed house. On the east side the extension created a recessed court yard which acquired a glazed roof. From the asymmetrical extensions it becomes clear that as Jedediah and Susannah’s family increased, so the house was extended accordingly, hence the taller block at the NW angle and the linking range. The need to entertain may have increased too, after the death of Jedediah’s elder brother George in 1821, unmarried. Jedediah was henceforth the heir and thereafter the manager of the mills. The house was filled with gadgetry of the type pioneered by John Whitehurst and Erasmus Darwin (the latter a mentor of William Strutt) designed to improve what was then called the domestic economy and included improved kitchen ranges with back boilers to heat water for bathing, flushing lavatories and clever ventilation systems, all of which William Strutt had tried out in St. Helen’s House, Derby. There was only a low stone wall in front of the main range and a patch of lawn with a near-circular path, the remainder of the pleasure grounds lay on the other side of King Street, which in 1830 was cut through the grounds between stone retaining walls. Part of the grounds to the west of the house even oversailed shops built into the retaining walls. To ensure continued access to all the pleasure grounds therefore, an iron bridge with a depressed Tudor arch was built, to connect to the land on its south side, called The Paddock. This was cast, at a cost of £42.10s.9d, at a local foundry, the bill being paid on completion in August 1832. All this was probably done at the behest of Jedediah who, as manager of the Strutt mills in the town, was a keen improver, like his father. The Paddock itself was the scene of public celebrations marking the passage of the Reform Act in the autumn of 1832, when the new bridge no doubt proved handy. When George Benson Strutt died aged eighty in 1841, Jedediah and his second wife moved into Bridge Hill House, leaving his own son, able to move into it when he came of age in 1847. In his turn he succeeded to Bridge Hill House on Jedediah’s death in 1854. It then became home to John Strutt, the youngest brother, who died unmarried in 1858. It remained, largely unoccupied until 1867, by which time it had become clear that no member of the family was likely to want it as a residence, a probable exacerbated by the construction of the railway station immediately to the west in 1840. Nor was any likely candidate found to take a lease on the place and in the end, it was let to a boys’ preparatory school and the garden bridge was removed in late autumn 1867. The Paddock itself was given to the Belper UDC in 1921 and the town’s war memorial,
Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Oak Hurst, Alderwasley
As one travels north on the A6 one of the less uplifting sights in an area of stunning beauty is the wire works, covering the valley floor not many hundreds of yards south of the bridge by the former Derwent Inn, now a tea-room. Should you be caught in slow traffic – fairly likely at any time of the year – and should it also be this time of the year, when the leaves are coming off the trees apace, you might well catch a glimpse of a large, clearly ruinous house on the far side of the works, embowered in trees. This is Oak Hurst, a house of considerable merit, despite its relentless faux timbering, pointy-roofed corner bartizan and tricksy, late Victorian fenestration. As one travels north on the A6 one of the less uplifting sights in an area of stunning beauty is the wire works, covering the valley floor not many hundreds of yards south of the bridge by the former Derwent Inn, now a tea-room. Should you be caught in slow traffic – fairly likely at any time of the year – and should it also be this time of the year, when the leaves are coming off the trees apace, you might well catch a glimpse of a large, clearly ruinous house on the far side of the works, embowered in trees. This is Oak Hurst, a house of considerable merit, despite its relentless faux timbering, pointy-roofed corner bartizan and tricksy, late Victorian fenestration. The site was originally part of the Hurt family’s Alderwasley Hall estate – indeed, that fine house, now a special school, but erected in 1790, is perched on the hill top not very far away. In the 1760s, the family, ever enterprising, started an iron works in the valley bottom; certainly it was up and running by 1775 when Joseph Pickford ordered iron grates for some of the fireplaces at Kedleston Hall and balusters for Robert Adam’s bridge over the lake when he was clerk of works there. One thing that marked Francis out in this enterprise was that he, as a major landowner, was making a considerable investment in the iron industry at a time when most gentry families were content to lease works on their estates to professional ironmasters at a fixed rent. Hurt, on the other hand, was acting as entrepreneur and, as with his family’s lead mining enterprises, taking the profit. The original Ambergate forge did not survive beyond 1794 before being completely rebuilt, but vestiges of the original blast furnace, set up on the earlier site, were visible amidst the sprawl of Johnson’s wire works at Ambergate until they were destroyed in 1964. A substantial stone house was also built for the forge manager, Forge House, across the river in Alderwasley parish at the foot of Shining Cliff woods, but alongside the works, probably designed by George Rawlinson of Matlock Bath, a friend of Pickford’s and who seems to have worked extensively for both Sir Richard Arkwright and the Hurts. It was lived in by Francis Hurt’s manager, Matthew Bacon for some years. In 1848 the works were leased to John and Charles Mould, Forge House included and one of the brothers took up residence. The upwardly mobile Moulds re-named it Oak Hurst and lived in it until 1865, when they became bankrupt, new technology by that time having made their haphazardly up-dated first generation ironworks obsolete. For over twenty years the house reverted to being let, mainly to the Hurts, as a residence for their estate manager, and the works appear to have remained in the doldrums. In around 1880, however, the Midland Railway purchased it (or possibly did so slightly earlier) and in that year extended it, giving it a sturdy Neo-Jacobean cloak. The architect was their “in-house” man, Charles Trubshaw, a talented member of a long established Staffordshire dynasty of builders and architects. His Railway Institute in Derby has outlasted his Station façade by 20 years. It thereupon became the residence of Richard Bird, the superintendent engineer of the railway. However, on his leaving the post, it was in 1887 let (and soon afterwards sold) to John Thewlis Johnson, (1836-1896) a Mancunian who had already bought the old forge site from the Hurts and turned it into a wire works. Johnson, grandson of John Johnson of Pendleton, was the ‘nephew’ in the well-known firm of Johnson & Nephew, started by his uncle Richard Johnson (1809-1881), and of which the Ambergate works was a subsidiary. He lived at Broughton House, Manchester, dominating the Manchester Chamber of Trade for many years and serving as its president in 1892. He was also a director of Nettlefolds, the Birmingham foundry. His father Thomas Fildes Johnson of Pendleton had been a successful cotton spinner. In 1888 Johnson completely rebuilt Oak Hurst and considerably extended it so that he could dwell cheek by jowl with his latest enterprise. A new full height canted entrance boasted a tablet above with his initials and the date. It is not clear who the architect was but John Douglas of Chester has been plausibly suggested, who also built Brocksford Hall near Doveridge at about this time for a fellow industrialist. The house had a thorough Arts-and-Crafts makeover, and the interior fitted up very sumptuously with panelling and all the latest contrivances, including electric light and modern central heating. Furthermore, it was lit by electricity throughout, then something of a novelty. He also landscaped the grounds. By two wives – Aurelia and Anne Higgins, cousins to each other – he had five sons, of whom two lived in Derbyshire, the fourth, James, being at one time tenant of Foston Hall. The eldest, Herbert Alfred (1866-1923), who succeeded his father when he died aged only 59 in 1896, had a glamorous American wife who could not stomach living cheek-by-jowl with a wire works, and they moved, taking a lease of Farnah Hall from Lord Curzon and later were the last private owners of Allestree Hall.
Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Thornhill, Kingsway, Derby
This impressive Regency villa was built on an elevated site in the district of California, Derby, looking south but with an easterly vista across The Rowditch towards the town, but one later spoilt by the erection of two brickworks on the west side of the brook. It is one of three such houses, which Stephen Glover tells us were designed by the amateur architect Alderman Richard Leaper (1759-1838); the other two being now listed grade II. Leaper was also a director of the family bank, receiver of customs for Derby, four times mayor of Derby and a partner in a tanning firm. Subsequent research has identified a group of other local villas firmly attributable to him, all of considerable interest and charm. The client was Major John Trowell JP, DL, who came originally from Long Eaton where his family had been considerable landowners since the Restoration. Born in 1744, son of another John Trowell, he had been appointed to the Bench in 1776 and made a deputy lieutenant of the County six years later. His public service was by no means over, however, for in 1787 he was gazetted Major in the Derbyshire Volunteer Militia. At the time Thornhill was actually commissioned he has living as tenant at Offcote Grove, near Ashbourne, where he was recorded in 1809. Prior to that he had been living in the large house in Friar Gate designed by William Strutt (now no. 65) which Roy Christian used to point out had originally been intended for Strutt’s father Jedediah, who unfortunately died before he could move in. His presence there is accounted for by the fact that he had married at St. Werburgh, Derby, on 27th September 1792, Dorothy Webster, daughter and sole heiress of William Woollatt, Jedediah Strutt’s original partner and brother-in-law, who had occupied the house on its completion. This match, needless to say, further enriched him. His wife died in December 1852 leaving a daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1798, but who died unmarried in November 1876. Unfortunately, like Jedediah Strutt and the Friar Gate house, Trowell had died by 1821 when the house, originally modestly called Trowell Hall, was completed in 1821. It was finished against a bond for £7,000 dated 27th March that year between Mrs. and Miss Trowell and Thomas Cooper (died 1850), a prominent Derby mason and contractor. This refers to the completion of the ‘remainder of the buildings’ at Thornhill. The money appears to have been in the form of a loan from Thomas Cox of 41, Friar Gate, also a banker; this was probably because the Major’s estate was still in probate. The two storey house was built in brick and originally rendered in Brookhouse’s Roman Cement – one of several forms of external stucco, in this instance manufactured locally in The Morledge, Derby – and grooved to resemble ashlar. The main SE front, was originally of five bays set under a wide, low hipped roof. Here the ground floor windows were originally carried down to terrace level. The NE front is of three bays and was originally the entrance front, entry being gained via a Tuscan portico, but unfortunately, that was replaced much later by a much larger brick affair on the SW front when the house became an institution. The two substantial service ranges were originally of three bays and two storeys, neither exactly alike, but lower and built side by side. They were done in a much more vernacular style, originally with unstuccoed brickwork, brick lintelled windows, dog toothed eaves cornices etc., as with other houses by Leaper. The interior was relatively plain, partly following local tradition at such residences and partly, one suspects, because the flamboyant Major Trowell was then but recently dead, his widow probably did not feel it appropriate to finish the interior in as bravura manner as her husband might have done himself. The main staircase, however, latterly reached right from the hall, was top-lit and consisted of a dog-leg, turning in an apse on the north side. The mahogany balustrade was supported on plain locally made cast iron square section balusters with generous spiral terminals, again all much resembling that at Mill Hill House (see Country Images article, July 2015). In 1987 a number of good quality contemporary chimney pieces in various local polished limestones survived, albeit securely boxed in. The gardens were terraced down on the east, where Sainsbury’s car park now is, and were shielded from the brickworks by planting. Parkland, originally nearly 100 acres, stretched south towards Rowditch and east to the Uttoxeter turnpike, then newly pitched and from map evidence was partly wooded. Much of the parkland was preserved when the Borough Lunatic Asylum (later Kingsway hospital) was built to the designs of Benjamin Jacobs of Hull from 1888 being retained with little alteration to provide the unfortunate inmates with a life enhancing environment. . The entrance was reached from the Uttoxeter New Road at The Rowditch via Trowell’s Lane (metalled and built up from 1888), which had a neat contemporary brick lodge about half way along it, which survived until c. 1930. Mrs Trowell swiftly re-named the house Thornhill from the eminence upon which it stood. Her daughter, however, refused to sell some land to the Corporation in 1873 in order to build the Asylum, probably out of what today we would call NIMBY-ism, but on her death it passed to her nearest heir, Edward Strutt, 1st Lord Belper, and he sold the Corporation the house and land they required – about 24 acres – and more to the Trustees of the Derbyshire General Infirmary to build a temporary typhus hospital. The house was subsequently sold to the Mosleys of Burnaston House – descendants of Sir John Parker Mosley, 1st Bt., of Rolleston Hall, Staffs; becoming the home of the eldest daughter of Ashton Nicholas Every Mosley of Burnaston House: Isabella Ashton Mosley, who died there unmarried 27th July 1912. The family trustees, having failed to find a tenant, finally sold it
Lost Houses – South Wingfield Manor
Some lost houses leave no trace behind, some fragments, some a wing or two incorporated into something else, and some, like the Manor at South Wingfield, end up as a stupendous ruin. Wingfield Manor is just such a stupendous ruin, and one that never fails to amaze me once I go through the gate from the road. Its sheer size brings you up short for a moment, for here is a ruined house that once was as big as Haddon, but taller, as tall as Hardwick, but more spread out. Had it survived to the present intact, it would be a wonder of Europe and a serious rival to houses such as Penshurst. The grandest houses in the 15th century, when most of what you see at Wingfield Manor was built, were constructed around two courtyards, as at Haddon and once upon a time at Codnor Castle. Yet it took from the 12th to the 16th century to complete Haddon as you see it today, whereas the importance of Wingfield is that it was conceived as a whole and built – more or less – for one man within just over two decades. Thus it is an architectural unity, one man’s vision. The other architectural landmark at Wingfield is the seventy four foot High Tower. This, of five storeys, is only the second manifestation in Derbyshire of what one might call “high rise living”, a habit that was to take hold both here and in Nottinghamshire in a big way in the century following, reaching its apogee in houses like Hardwick, Worksop Manor and Bolsover Castle. The predecessor of the High Tower at Wingfield is Prior Overton’s Tower at Repton Hall – now part of the Headmaster’s House at Repton School. It would not be unreasonable to assume that this splendid residence was built for someone of great consequence, and it was: Ralph, 3rd Lord Cromwell, Lord Treasurer of England. The Cromwells were a family of no particular wealth, who had held only dear old West Hallam after the Norman Conquest. Ralph’s enrichment came partly through winning a long legal case in 1439 by which he obtained, as joint-heir, Wingfield and its estate, and partly through what we might term the fruits of office. Sleaze was not then considered de trop! Ralph was clearly an enthusiast for tall buildings, for he built another famous one – which also survives – at Tattershall Castle, in Lincolnshire, but this time, like Prior Overton’s, in brick. In 1441 building work began under John Entrepas, Lord Cromwell having first cleared the site of the ancient house of his predecessors, the de Heriz family and thought to have been built a century and a half before by Roger de Paveley on the site of what might have been an adulterine (i.e., unofficial) 12th century castle dating from the war between Stephen and Matilda. Heriz had also laid out hunting parkland around his house, certainly one to the north which a descendant gave to the Abbey of Darley and rented back, the charter concerning which gives us a clear insight into its extent. Indeed, that document set against the present topography, helped save South Wingfield from an opportunist building an estate of 80 odd houses within it at a recent planning appeal. The little park to the east (now mainly built over) and the huge great park to the south, extending to the Ripley Ambergate Road, were either laid out by the de Heriz family or by Ralph Cromwell. The house itself is built of local stone – Ashover Grit from Crich and Ashover Moor for the best ashlar work the masons, could produce, and Wingfield Flags, a type of Coal Measures sandstone, for the coarser work and the roofing. The High Tower was to house guests and was also put in place as an elevated hunting platform from which the ladies could watch the menfolk at the chase. In winter, this was the only viable way to obtain fresh meat. A second tower, now mainly demolished, was provided at the NE angle to aid people watching the hunt in the northern park. The house was not finished when Cromwell died in 1455, and it passed by sale to John Talbot, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury, already a major Derbyshire landowner. He managed to occupy it by 1458, so that the entire magnificent structure was completed within 17 years, which was quite an achievement. There are even surviving records of him hunting the parks, and it may well be that he acquired the house and estate specifically for this purpose. It is well known, and hardly bears repeating here, that the estate later passed to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, the unwilling gaoler of Mary, Queen of Scots – a man who was in the invidious position of being beholden to a jealous Queen: Elizabeth I (and her efficient intelligence network) and a jealous wife: the larger-than-life matriarch, Bess of Hardwick. The Scots queen’s apartments are said to be those one encounters immediately beyond the High Tower. Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl, the heir, died without a son, so the huge Derbyshire estates including South Wingfield, were split three ways between the daughters and their husbands. Thus one of them, the Earl of Arundel (later Duke of Norfolk) got the house and 1000 acres of park. During the Civil War the house was taken for the King in December 1643 by the ‘Loyall’ Duke of Newcastle, and held by a garrison under Col. Dalby – who undertook a great deal of raiding from there – until well into the year following when, after several fruitless attempts to dislodge them, Sir John Gell, the county Parliamentary commander, managed to borrow some seriously superior ordnance, breach the walls and re-take the house. After the war, the Duke of Norfolk sold the house – which, apart from bombardment damage had been partly dismantled on the orders of Parliament in 1646 – to his steward, the Cumbrian Immanuel Halton FRS.
Lost House – Derwent Hall
Architect Joseph Aloysius Hansom undertook the work of creating an Elysium amongst the dark hills above Derwent. Next time you turn on the tap, you might spare a thought for poor old Derwent Hall. This interesting and distinguished house disappeared slowly beneath the waters of Derwent Reservoir between summer 1943 and 1945, when the last vestiges of its half-demolished shell finally disappeared beneath the waters. The culprits were the combined water authorities of Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Sheffield, eager to ensure uninterrupted clean water for their burgeoning populations, and the entire operation was nationalised in 1947. So what was lost? Essentially a typical upland Derbyshire stone built 16th or 17th century gabled country house much enlarged and equipped with all the latest comforts in the late 19th century, but none the less interesting for all that. Although Derwent was part of the extensive upland parish of Hathersage, the unforgiving terrain was not inductive to the accumulation of a landed estate and the site from late medieval time was a farm held by the Barber family. The father of Henry Balguy (pronounced ‘bawgee’), a younger son of the Balguys of Aston-in-Peak, bought some land at Derwent and later acquired more at Rowlee and Henry (1648-1685) combined the two to create a modest estate, acquiring Derwent Hall, then a moderate sized farm house taxed in 1670 on four hearths, in 1672. His son – another Henry – rebuilt the house some two decades later (it bore an entirely convincing date-stone of 1692), leaving an attractive small H-plan manor house of two storeys with gabled attics, built of coarse local Kinderscout grit with ashlar detailing: coped gables, four, six and eight light mullion-and-transomed windows with string courses over, and quoins at the angles, all under a stone slate roof. The central entrance had a round arched top with the date-stone and an armorial set above it, the string course dipping down above for emphasis. The east elevation was five bays, the two closest to the main front being full height and the three towards the north being lower with attics, representing service accommodation. In the early 19th century a pair of ten light matching windows were installed here. There was also a lower wing to the west and a stable block beyond, at right angles to the house, the whole ensemble being set on the lower slopes of the hill behind with parterres and terraces running down to the Derwent. A third Henry Balguy (1700-1770), having acquired by marriage extensive coal mining interests in the Alfreton area, sold up in 1767 and moved there, selling to the Bennet family, a numerous and well-off farming family in the Dark Peak. The purchaser’s son, John Bennet, acquired tapestries rescued from the fire that destroyed Lord Shrewsbury’s epic prodigy house, Worksop Manor and had them altered to fit Derwent’s parlour and dining room. In 1831, however, the estate was sold to John Read (1777-1862) initially as a summer retreat. He re-ordered the gardens as recorded in the lithograph by W L Walton. He sold it on in 1846 to the Newdigates of West Hallam Hall and Arbury (Warwickshire) who tenanted it as a farm. They too sold it on, in 1876, and this time the purchaser was Henry, 15th Duke of Norfolk, who vested it, as a coming-of-age present, to his younger son, Lord Edmund Bernard FitzAlan-Howard. Although the Howards were normally seated at Arundel, it must not be forgotten that they also owned Glossop Hall and the vast, if rather barren, hills that surrounded it; indeed the lad’s politician great uncle Edward, who lived there, was in 1869 created 1st Lord Howard of Glossop. Lord Edmund, as a FitzAlan-Howard, was a strong Catholic, and also a talented and energetic fellow. He immediately set about transforming the very modest old house into a considerable seat, employing the then doyen of Roman Catholic architects, Joseph Aloysius Hansom (of cab fame) to undertake the work of creating an Elysium amongst the dark hills above Derwent. The work began in 1878 and was completed in 1882. Although the original south front was kept, the remainder of the house was almost completely rebuilt, although with considerable tact. The two cross wings were extended back into the hillside, the main range was doubled in depth, and new service wing was added to the west and the stable range was re-ordered to create a courtyard around it. The East front was enlivened with two ground floor square bays and a large projecting bay containing a vast new drawing room with a canted end, beyond which was built a simple gothic domestic chapel, slightly higher than the house itself. Attic dormers were also added, and the interior acquired new oak panelling to match the old, along with a completely new and very fine oak staircase. The interior also gained an overmantel dated 1634 from old Norton Hall (replaced in 1796 and now in Sheffield). The gardens were completely re-arranged and the estate increased to 1,274 acres. The result was a house of some style and ambition, fitted with all modern conveniences, including home-produced gas and, after a decade or so, electric light installed by George Crompton of Stanton Hall, Stanton-by-Dale, a pioneer in this field. In 1921, Lord Edmund was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – the last person to hold that office and the first Catholic to do so since 1686 – and was ennobled as Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent in consequence. By the time he laid down office in 1922, as a result of the declaration of the Irish Free State, he had decided, with advancing years to live at Cumberland Lodge at Windsor, and the family just went to Derwent for part of the summer and the shooting season. Then, in 1920 the various local authorities determined to build a further series of reservoirs to alleviate an impending water shortage, and it soon became clear that the days of Derwent Hall were numbered. In 1920 the Norton Old
Lost House – Parkfields Cedars, Derby
When architects design their own houses, there is always something of interest. Richard Leaper was Derby’s Regency period amateur architect who, according to historian Stephen Glover ‘…has had great taste and much experience in building family mansions…’ Leaper was a municipal grandee, a banker and tannery proprietor, but despite these responsibilities, was indeed a fairly prolific architect, a gentleman of leisure with time on his hands and a wide circle of kinsmen and acquaintances. Leaper’s father had served as Mayor of Derby in 1776-1777 and in 1753 had married Sarah Ward, sister of Archer Ward, a banker colleague of his father. Richard, born in 1759, was educated at Derby School, joined the Corporation 1790, being elected Mayor in 1794-95 and was made an alderman shortly thereafter. He served as Mayor again in 1807, 1815 and 1824, by which time he was also a partner in the bank. His earliest commission was probably the Particular Baptist Chapel in Agard Street (for Ward) built in 1796 with a good Classical facade. Unfortunately, it fell victim to the coming of the Great Northern Railway in 1876. On this page over the last two years we have looked at four of the houses he designed for friends in the Derby area, but of equal interest is the house he himself lived in, for when architects design their own houses, there is always something of interest. At first he lived at 59, Friar Gate, Derby, a house of 1770 upon which he seems to have left no discernible architectural impression, but at some time before 1819 he had decided to leave his modest Georgian house in Friar Gate and move to Kedleston Road ‘about one mile outside Derby’ where he built himself a villa, later called Parkfields Cedars. It was possibly so called from the outset indeed, but house names tend not to be listed in very early directories. The six acres of land in which it stood was part of the Park Field, one of the common fields of the Borough and which was sold off at about this time. On various parts of it were built Parkfields House (now situated off Park Grove), Highfields (off Highfields Road) and Parkfields Villa (Duffield Road, cruelly demolished in the 1990s). Two large cedar trees framing the SW front determined the choice of name. Leaper’s authorship of its design is implicit from its date and the fact that he resided there during the final two decades of his life, but no supporting documents seem to survive. Stylistically though, it had his paw prints all over it. The house was a relatively plain two storey brick and stucco villa of three bays by five, the three on the garden front, being centered by a full height curved bow. There is a typically Leaper cornice and low parapet hiding the low hipped roof. The return, SE, front appeared to have five bays with Doric pilasters framing the central trio, but actually at the right hand end there was an extra bay with mezzanine windows, marking the position of the staircase. The NW side had the entrance, very like Leaper’s nearby villa called The Leylands in that the portico was columned in antis, but Doric rather than Ionic as at The Leylands. This part was also irregular, in a typically Leaperish way in that there were two bays to the left of the portico, but only one to the right and that was a blind bay with only recessed panels, and antae (plain pilasters) at the angles. The analogous house is the extant Limes, Mickleover, which has just this arrangement, with a bowed garden front and an irregular side entrance with a portico and is thus also attributable to Leaper. Inside, the dining room lay to one’s left and the drawing room, looking out over the lawns and cedars, to one’s right. Further along the hall and the breakfast room and study/library were entered on the right with the stairs opposite. This was timber, carved with fruit and flowers and almost Jacobethan in its un-Classical exuberance. It bifurcated on a mezzanine lit by an eight light Gothick window almost exactly like that on the stairs at Leaper’s Barrow Hall, Barrow-on-Trent (see Country Images for April 2014). One of the rooms sported a Corinthian chimneypiece of local crinoidal marble, whilst another was pseudo-15th century with stone hood, very similar to an equally quirky one Leaper installed in The Pastures, Littleover (now the Boys’ Grammar School). There was also a large service wing to the NE. On Leaper’s death in 1838, the house was sold to Alderman John Sandars, a man who had, shortly afterwards, the distinction of being Mayor of Derby. When the new Guildhall burnt down very spectacularly on the night of Trafalgar Day 1841, he had left office for a year. This conflagration might have meant the loss of all the City’s records which were then stored in the building, but for the fact that the good Alderman, a former book dealer and antiquarian turned vintner, had used his Mayorial clout to take many home with him to read, thus ensuring their survival. Sandars died aged 86 in 1867, when the property was sold by his family to the Wilmot-Sitwells of Stainsby House (see Country Images January 2015) as their Derby town house. Later, in the 1850s, it became the roost of some of their maiden aunts, notably Eliza Wilmot-Sitwell, after the tenancy of whom the place was let to solicitor John Moody, founder of Messrs. Moody & Woolley, then and until recently of St. Mary’s Gate. Towards the end of the 19th century it was again sold, this time to the formidable Mrs. E. M. Pike, proprietor of the Derby Telegraph. She was something of an enthusiast for buying property, having also bought 36-38 Corn Market (formerly the Tiger); on her death in December 1905 her trustees decided to dispose of Parkfields Cedars. Thus it was in 1905 that Derby Council bought it with five and a
Lost Houses – Aldercar Hall
It was of brick with quoins and other dressings of coal measures sandstone, undoubtedly from a local quarry (or re-used from Codnor Castle, at this date, rapidly in decline). Aldercar, a portion of the parish of Heanor and in the Middle Ages being one of four parks attached to the Zouche family’s Codnor Castle estate, takes its name from the Old English for an Alder plantation. At some stage in the downward spiral of the fortunes of the Zouches, Aldercar Park was sold off. That the Codnor estate was large enough to split without too much damage to the income (mainly from agriculture and coal rents) will be apparent when it is realised that the total parkland alone ran to 3,000 acres. The purchaser was Heanor merchant Henry Hyde, although we cannot tell precisely the date of his acquisition. Probably he was a freeholding yeoman farmer who had made a fortune by letting the rights to mine for coal under his land. In those days, mining was a family or extended family affair done in bell pits, the land being rented from the freeholder for a share of the take. This indeed, was probably Hyde’s incentive for buying part of the Codnor estate. Henry died in 1610, probably relatively young, for his son and heir, John, who succeeded to the land, was only twelve at the time; a younger son was Henry, only eight. John married a lady called Joyce around 1626 and they had a son, also John, born two years later, and it may well be the death of one of other of them that allowed the estate to be sold. Whether the Hydes actually built a house at Aldercar is not wholly clear, but the elder Hyde is once or twice described as ‘of Aldercar’ which suggests they lived there rather than in Heanor. The purchaser of the estate was extractive entrepreneur Richard Milnes of Dunston Hall, Sheepbridge, near Chesterfield, but all he did was to detach part of the estate which he wished to add to some coal-rich land he already owned nearby, and in around 1667 he sold the remainder on. It was bought by his kinsman Thomas Burton of Holmesfield Hall, near Chesterfield, the scion of a then numerous but very ancient family. He too was a coal owner, but he had at first settled in Derby, building Thorntree House at the bottom of St. Peter’s Street, now the site of the HSBC. The impetus for this was his marriage, during the Commonwealth, to Frances, the daughter of the aristocratic gynaecological pioneer Dr. Percival Willoughby, who lived in the house later known as the Old Mayor’s Parlour, nearby, which I described in these pages two years ago. Frances died in childbirth, and his father died in 1657 so Thomas returned to Holmesfield. He re-married in 1662, his bride being Prudence, a daughter of Francis Lowe of Owlgreaves Hall, very close to Aldercar (now called Aldgrave and replaced). Indeed, it may have been the spur for Thomas buying land near his wife’s father’s estate. What is certain is that he built a house – or perhaps, rebuilt the one that the Hydes had. It was of brick with quoins and other dressings of coal measures sandstone, undoubtedly from a local quarry (or re-used from the castle, at this date, rapidly in decline) It was of two piles deep, plus a northern service wing, with twin gabled end elevations. The gables being straight coped and decorated with finials, with two light mullioned windows on the attic storey and mullion and transom cross windows on the lower floor. The whole being of two tallish storeys with attics. Inside there was a fine oak staircase with turned balusters and much panelling of the period.. It seems to have been taxed on seven hearths in 1670, when it must have been very new; a sundial was dated 1668, which might well mark the completion date of the building. William Woolley, writing in 1713, said of it that it was a ‘good house and a pretty commodious seat’ but by his time, Burton had died (not long after his wife, who died in 1679). He had three sons, of whom the youngest., Capt. Thomas Burton had the single misfortune to have been killed in action fighting under Marlborough at the Battle of Blenheim in 1705.Michael, the eldest, married the co-heiress of Henry Wigley of Wigwell, an opulent lead trader.Moving to Wirksworth he sold Aldercar to Richard Milnes’s grandson (also Richard), from whom it descended in 1787 to Robert Mower and through his daughter’s marriage in 1791 to Thomas Smith of Dunston, ancestor of my esteemed kin the Craven-Smith-Milnes family of Winkburn Hall in Nottinghamshire. Thomas Smith’s brother, John sold the house and estate to George Jessop, youngest son of Butterley Company co-founder William, sometime around 1848, when the latter became involved with the running of the company after his return from setting up an ironworks in India. He moved to Honley Hall in Yorkshire in the 1850s, and sold it to his Butterley co-director, Francis Wright of Osmaston, who installed his 16 year old son Francis Beresford there in 1857. In 1862 the latter married Adeline FitzHerbert (of the Norbury branch of the family), whose family occupied a superb Carolean house in Warwickshire, the hall at Wootton Wawen, which they bought outright in 1882 Aldercar failed to sell, due to the agricultural depression, and was instead let as a school for young gentlemen wishing to make a career in the colonies, run by Francis Hugh Adams and later by Ernest Nicholls. In 1895 the house was described as ‘venerable looking’. However, in 1896, the Wright’s eldest son Arthur came of age, and he re-occupied Aldercar, soon afterwards (certainly before 1908) completely rebuilding it. His architect was John Reginald Naylor of the Derby partnership of Naylor & Sale of Derby, who were then building extensively for other members of the family, enlarging Swanwick Hayes for Francis Wright’s brother FitzHerbert in 1893-96
