John Walkington - another piece of Hull's history

 Every older Hull native remembers the Humber ferries and the pier; and most of us have explained that the railway station by the pier never had trains.  Many have enjoyed the hospitality of the Minerva Hotel.  I was interested to discover that a past resident of the Charterhouse was a part of that history.

John Walkington was born in Malton, Yorkshire, in 1786.  He married Sarah Skelton there in 1811.  He was making his living as a currier, the branch of the leather trade which took the tanned leather and treated it for use.  But he and his partner went bankrupt in 1814.  So John seems to have come to Hull soon after and tried a different career,  He disappears from the public record until September 1840,

when an advertisement appeared in the Hull Advertiser.  John Walkington is running what we might now call a boutique hotel at 7, Nelson St, down by the "new" pier, and has apparently been doing so for more than 20 years.  It is ideally placed for the Hull & Selby railway terminus on Railway St, as well as for steam packets crossing the Humber.  Very similar adverts appeared in 1841 and 1843.  The 1841 census confirms John's address at 7, Nelson St but, since that census rarely records occupations, he is described only as "Ind." - of independent means.

This later map (around 1892) shows how well-positioned Walkington's guest house was.

This photo (undated) shows Nelson St with the early Minerva hotel on the left.

In 1848 Sarah Walkington died.  Perhaps it was this which prompted John to sell up - or perhaps the owners of the building knew what was coming and wanted him out.  Certainly John's son, also John, was not in a position to take it over.  He opened another guest house elsewhere in 1849.

And in 1849 John auctioned off the entire contents of the establishment, and the notice of the auction gives us a fascinating insight into the furnishings of a mid-19th century hotel.  It doesn't seem to have made John rich.  Or perhaps the proceeds went to his son to enable him to start his own venture.  Whatever the reason, John Walkington was admitted to the Charterhouse a year later, on 1 August 1850.

The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway had begun a new ferry service; and their first offices in Hull were opened in 1853 at 7, Nelson St, Walkington's premises.  The building also accommodated a flat for the clerk in charge.

When the 1851 census was taken of Charterhouse residents John gave his former occupation as "currier"; and he did so again in 1861.  Was that old job more important to him than the two decades as a hotel manager?  He died on 29 November 1865.

Thanks to Bill Longbone and members of the Hull: The Good Old Days Facebook group for their help with this research.

The powers and duties of the Master

  "... thirteen poor men and thirteen poor women, of whom one should preside over the others and be named the Master... "  So says the license in mortmain granted by the King to Michael de la Pole in 1383.  The foundation deed of the following year goes into a lot more detail.  The Master had to be a priest over the age of 30.  He would have his own house and be responsible for the management of the hospital, the brethren and sisters (including paying their allowances), and the administration of the estates.  He also had to lead daily prayers and say mass two or three times a week.  He would be answerable to the representatives of the de la Pole family, to the Prior of the neighbouring Carthusian priory and to the Mayor of the town.

Little changed until 1525 when the last of the de la Poles, Edmund Duke of Suffolk, died.  Fourteen years later another layer of oversight was removed when the priory was "dissolved" under Henry VIII.  In 1552 King Edward gave the patronage of the hospital to the Corporation of the town.  That consolidated the power of the Mayor and the "Bench" of Aldermen.  But they showed little interest at first, and that meant the Master was left to his own devices.  The temptation was obvious; run down the number of inmates, do as little maintenance as possible, collect all the rents and pocket the surplus money. In 1558 Thomas Turner was appointed Master, and also had to assist at Holy Trinity Church, saying mass at least once a week. This dual role was to become the norm for centuries, but for the first time we see the view that the Mastership of the hospital was not a full-time job.

In 1571 the Bench at last showed an interest in what was happening. They came up with a long list of corrupt practices and petitioned the Archbishop of York to act against Turner. Turner pointed out that the Mayor and Aldermen had the power to deal with him themselves; so they did. The Master was made to swear adherence to a long list of rules, mainly financial (including an annual audit of the accounts), which would put the hospital back on track. In the process the Bench assumed powers it did not legitimately possess. But the next Master, Griffith Briskin, failed to comply and had to resign, owing £50 to the hospital. The problem of how to get rid of a Master was to recur for many years. The Bench could sack him; but what happened when he would not leave? In 1644 they thought that William Stiles had resigned and appointed a replacement. Stiles insisted he was going nowhere. There was a long legal wrangle and Stiles stayed put. It was Cromwell’s Council of State which solved the problem in 1651 by removing him for his politics, and at last John Shaw, who had been waiting impatiently for 7 years, replaced him. That didn’t end well either. Shaw was an extreme Puritan who was eventually sacked by Holy Trinity but refused to leave the hospital. He used it as his base for preaching his inflammatory sermons to his large following before agreeing to move elsewhere.

One power which seems to have been taken out of the hands of the Master for good in the 18th century was that of deciding who was to be admitted to the hospital. The Master received the applications but the Corporation selected the “winners”. This lead to a suspiciously high number of inmates who had connections to the Corporation. A practice grew up of the Aldermen taking it in turn to nominate someone to fill a vacancy, and, unsurprisingly, they rewarded people they knew personally. It was a scandal which was no secret but was only publicised in the 1830s. The newly-constituted Corporation acted to make the process more transparent. In 1847 a committee of Advisers to the Charterhouse was formed – a kind of sub-committee of Aldermen – to deal with admissions and other matters, such as the maintenance of the buildings.

One power, or responsibility, which seems to have been left with the Master for longer was that of collecting rents and organising leases on the lands which gave the Charterhouse its income. By the 1860s the Advisers thought they had control, but John Healey Bromby was not one to leave matters to others. He proposed that, in order to pay for new rooms, part of the land at Hessle be developed as “villa residences”, leased out at £20 per acre per annum. Bromby already had the lessees signed up and the plans drawn. The Committee members were not best pleased at his presumption but were obliged to go ahead. They would not allow this to happen in the future.

By this stage the City Council was becoming determined to diminish the powers of the Master drastically. The role, they argued, was not a full-time job. The Master should become a part-time chaplain, on half his current salary, and he should find and pay for his own lodgings. The matron (a role created in the early 19^th century) would run the place on a day-to-day basis. But the Council did not now have the final word. That lay with the recently formed Charity Commissioners, and they refused to countenance the plan. In 1872 they produced a set of rules based on the foundation document. The Council tried to ignore this and go ahead with their own plan but they lost the battle. In 1901 the Charity Commission’s scheme was imposed. There were to be 9 trustees, 5 of them to be nominated by the Council. The duties of the trustees were spelled out, as were those of the Master. He had to take services on Sundays and three other days; visit inmates and enforce discipline among them and the staff; pay the inmates their allowances; arrange for the special needs of infirm inmates and the removal of the insane; and “to appoint and remove the doctor, matron, nurse and porter of the Hospital”. There were few actual powers there, and one wonders whether he could, in reality, appoint staff without the approval of the trustees.

In the wake of World War 2 the question of downgrading the Master's role re-emerged. His house had been badly damaged by a bomb in 1941 and fell into ruin. The hospital itself was closed, and the Master, Arthur Kent Chignell, lived in temporary accommodation and had little to do. The Charterhouse was reopened in 1948 but the Master's House was a bone of contention for several years after. Some people reverted to the idea of the Master as chaplain, with the House being demolished or rebuilt as rooms for inmates. Chignell was naturally alarmed. He wanted a pay rise, not a cut. He asked for an assistant because he couldn’t afford to retire (there was no pension) but was too old to do the work. The Charity Commission was adamant; no assistant. In a letter which is startlingly blunt in its language it insisted that there was no provision or money for an assistant and if the Master was too old for the job he should retire. It seems that an assistant was appointed. Chignell died in 1951 and his assistant, Ronald Helm, succeeded to the Master’s job. In 1956 the House, rebuilt as closely as possible to the original, was reopened.

What few powers remained to the Master were weakened by the holder of the post of Clerk to the Trustees. He was also the Town Clerk, and he tightened the grip of the Council on the Charterhouse. One long-serving clerk took to pre-empting or ignoring any decisions by the trustees. At one stage he told the Master of the time that he should not be handling money. The Master responded that he couldn’t not handle money and he pleaded for a written job description. It is not clear if he got one. (The clerk to the Trustees is no longer a Council officer.)

The scheme of governance has been updated several times in the last 120 years, but the clauses on the duties of the Master remain almost the same, except that he (or she) no longer appoints staff without reference to the trustees and, of course, no longer pays allowances to residents. The emphasis is on duties rather than powers. No doubt the situation will continue to evolve, but the position of Master of the Charterhouse survives after 637 years.

  

The life and death of Robert Brock

 I wrote about Robert Brock's death in an earlier post.  He was the first person in our database of Charterhouse residents whose death was worth investigating.  Now I have researched more about his life; and it's a fascinating story.

Robert was born in Stainforth near Doncaster in 1813 and baptised in nearby Hatfield.  His parents were George and Elizabeth.  Stainforth was (and still is) a canal town, on the Stainforth and Keadby Canal which connects the River Don Navigation at Bramwith to the River Trent at Keadby, by way of Stainforth, Thorne and Ealand, near Crowle.  The waterways in this part of the country are part of a system which dates back to Roman times, connecting the Humber Estuary with the rivers to the west and south.  For centuries sailing vessels called Humber keels plied these waters, and the Brocks may well have come from generations of keelmen.  Whole families spent their lives on board, transporting goods to and from the Humber ports to the towns of Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire.  Many birth certificates showed the place of birth as "on water".  

Stainforth

On 30 October 1839 Robert Brock married Mary Richardson in Hull.  Mary came from Beverley.  In August 1840 Robert's name appears briefly in  the Hull Packet when two boys were charged with stealing a rope from his boat.  Evidently the Brocks were based in Hull from now on.  They are not to be found on the 1841 census but their son George Thomas was born in that year.   The 1851 census misses them, but Robert's older brother Thomas is there, with his family at 100 High St, Hull, and describing himself as a shipowner.  Perhaps he owned a keel which was crewed by someone else.

Robert and his family were moored in Hull's Old Harbour on census day 1861.

The "keel of river trade" called the Carrier had Robert as its Master, son George as mate and Mary as Master's wife.

Four months later Robert got his name in the papers again.  On 3 August the Hull Advertiser and Exchange Gazette reported:  

The incident didn't put Robert off a life on the canals.  Such mishaps were not unusual.  In 1871 he was on the Stainforth canal with Mary and a 14-year-old boy as "servant".  But Robert was perhaps finding the work increasingly hard as he got older.  By 1881 he and Mary had settled at 20, High St, Hull.  Robert described himself as a general labourer.  He was 68 and probably just picking up whatever work he could find.

On 3 May 1887 Robert and Mary Brock were admitted to the Charterhouse.  Five years later Mary died.  

Our register records that Robert Brock, aged 81, died on 7 January 1895.  But a note adds: "Presumably; body having been found in the Queen's Dock".  This prompted me to send for his death certificate, and I then found a letter in the archives.  Together they tell us more of the sad story.  7 January was the date he went missing from the Charterhouse.  Presumably there was a search; if there was, it was unsuccessful.  On 26 January, and again on 30 January, it seems that the Master assumed he was dead and was writing to the the council's Charterhouse Applicants Committee asking them to fill Brock's vacant room.  A letter survives from the Town Clerk in reply on 31 January saying that they were deferring a decision "in the hope that some news may be heard of Brock".  His body was not found for more than two months; it was recovered from the dock on 15 March.  There was an inquest, and the verdict was that he had drowned.  It leaves so many questions unanswered.  How did he come to fall in the dock?  Why did the body not surface for two months?

Can one say that it was an appropriate death for someone who had spent so much of his life on the water?

Thomas and Mary Ann Giles

 Like many Charterhouse residents, Thomas Giles was not born in Hull.  He was baptised in Camblesforth near Drax on 28 May 1820.  His father died when he was 9 and his mother remarried; by 1841 the family were living in Drax, where Thomas was described as a journeyman joiner.  That same year Thomas married his first wife, Anne Dean, on 27 Sept in Holy Trinity, Hull.  He was to spend the rest of his life in the city.  At around this time he started a business of "joiners, carpenters and builders" called Giles & Brown with a partner called James Brown.  The partnership didn't last long.  It was dissolved on 16 February 1855, and Thomas took on all its debts and assets.  In his hands the business prospered.  

Perhaps because of his experience, Thomas Giles got involved with the Hull Guardian Society.  These societies were taking over from the earlier Trade Protection Societies which were formed by local business owners to deal with creditors who failed to pay their debts.  We have seen many times in the stories of Charterhouse residents who had been in and out of bankruptcy that businesses failed with great regularity.  An auction of stock and assets would be arranged to pay off the debts, and the business owner might be imprisoned for a while until he could raise enough money.  Not long after, he would start up the business again.  Some of this was due to a banking system that wasn't geared to overdrafts and loans for a business with temporary problems.  Some of it was down to bad debts and not being able to afford to pursue the debtor through the courts.  The Guardian Societies enabled business people to club together to pursue the debts and perhaps to blacklist persistent bad payers.  On 28 Feb 1857 Thomas was nominated and elected along with many others to be a member of the Hull Guardian Society – to protect trade in the city. The event was held at George’s Inn, 66 Whitefriargate, with the society based on Trinity House Lane.  

Thomas Giles' wife Anne died in October 1859, leaving him with 6 children.  A little over 7 months later he married Mary Ann Gibson at All Saints, Sculcoates.  The family lived at 11 Grimston St, a building which still exists and is now listed.  (left).  Thomas ran his business from 12 Worship St.  

It wasn't all plain sailing.   In 1862 Thomas appeared at Hull Police Court charged with breaching the Builders Act.  One charge was that he had built a property on Park St with walls only 4.5 inches thick, when the law said they had to be 9".  He was given 14 days to rectify this, with increasing financial penalties after that.  It didn't do him any harm.  In 1873 and 1876  he was the President of the Hull Subscription Mill Society.  This had its origins in co-operatives attempting to bring down the high cost of good quality flour.  The Hull society was founded in 1800 and continued until late in the century.  

Giles was also Honorary Secretary of the Hull Mechanics' Institute, founded in 1825.  These institutes brought education, largely in evening classes, to working men and were a valuable part of the movement towards giving greater opportunities to the working-class and broadening their horizons.  They had their less earnest side; in Thomas Giles' time there were also theatrical performances.

With all this success, and no evidence of bankruptcy, it seems odd that Thomas and Mary Ann should seek to end their days in one room at the Charterhouse.  But they were admitted on 30 October 1884.  Our register is, as so often, confusing.  Mary Ann is not registered until July 1889.  Thomas had died in March 1886.  It was at that point that we would expect a widow either to be evicted (so we would have no trace of her) or to be awarded the room, or another vacant room, in her own right.  The more than 3 year gap seems excessive.  Yet it is unlikely that Mary Ann was evicted in 1886 and given a room 3 years later.

Mary Ann had her own moment of fame to come.  In 1899 she was the subject of a lengthy article in the Hull Daily Mail when the story emerged that she stood to inherit a fortune from a long-lost uncle, William Gibson, who had died many years before in Calcutta.  Years had been spent looking for his heirs, and it seemed that Mary Ann was one of them.  She and four other heirs, one of them Thomas and Mary Ann's son John, stood to inherit over a million pounds.  We hear no more about it; there is no follow-up in the press.  It seems improbable that she and her son actually got any money, and she died 4 years later.  Our register has her date of death, correctly, as 26 April 1903, but the death notice in the paper says she died at 62 Prince's Rd, her son's address.  Perhaps she had been moved there in her last days to be cared for.

Thomas and Mary Ann Giles were in some ways not a typical Charterhouse couple, but they show how diverse and interesting are the people behind the names in the register.

(Thanks to Joanne Bone, a descendant of the Giles, for much of the research into the couple.)

The sculptor and his widow

 

Everyone in Hull is familiar with the work of William Day Keyworth junior, whether they know it or not.  He was a sculptor who followed in the footsteps of his father and created many works which are landmarks in the city.  

Keyworth was born in Hull in 1843 and spent some of his early years in Chelsea, London, developing his craft.  In 1875 he married Elizabeth Pybus in Hull and they settled at 2, Osborne Villas, Spring Bank.  By 1891 they had moved to a larger house at 244 Spring Bank; William had a workshop / studio at the rear of the house.  There he sculpted statues of Hull's best-known figures, among them Andrew Marvell, William Wilberforce and William de la Pole.  He was patronised by the Wilson shipping line family and his marble busts of members of the family were exhibited at the Royal Academy.  He made a figure of Britannia for the front of the Exchange Buildings in Lowgate; and, branching out of Hull, he made the colossal lions for the front of Leeds Town Hall.  On a much smaller scale, he made the memorial to W T Dibb which was affixed to the wall of the chapel of the Charterhouse in 1888.

It seemed to be a success story.  William and Elizabeth had two daughters and, at least in 1892, two homes, the second at the seaside in Withernsea.  But on Saturday 9 August 1902 William took a service revolver into his workshop and shot himself in the head.  That was the assumption, and it seems the obvious one.  But he left no suicide note, and no one was quite sure why he'd done it.  The burial register says "Suicide - no evidence as to state of mind".  The likeliest reason was money troubles.  The demand for his style of work had diminished, and perhaps he was in debt.  Elizabeth did not attend the funeral on 12 August, but we cannot read too much into that.

Elizabeth Keyworth was living in Hornsea in 1911, at 2 Marine Drive with her two daughters, neither of whom were married.  On 1 August 1914 she was admitted to the Charterhouse  She didn't stay.  She is not on the 1920 electoral register as a resident, or on subsequent ones, but she didn't die until 1929.  Her burial record mentions Hornsea so perhaps she returned to Marine Drive.  

Contrasting lives: Sarah Herdsman and Henry Jollands

 Sarah Herdsman died in the Charterhouse on 14 February 1914 of "senile decay" at the age of 82 and was buried in the Western Cemetery.  There would seem to be little remarkable about her; a single lady who had lived the last 19 years of her life in room 103 of the Charterhouse.  Yet Sarah would have had some interesting stories to tell.

She was born in 1832 in Beverley, the daughter of farm workers.  By 1851 she was a housemaid in the household of Edmund Smith at 11, High St, North Ferriby.  Smith was a retired officer in the Indian civil service and a director of Payne & Smith's bank.  He, his wife, 2 daughters and 8 servants formed a prosperous household.  

High St, North Ferriby

Ten years later Sarah had become a cook in the somewhat more modest household of Thomas Firbank, a JP and retired merchant at 8 Charlotte St, Hull.

It's hugely frustrating that we have only these ten-yearly snapshots from Sarah's life, so we don't know what took her from Hull to London.  All we know is that in 1871 she was the cook in the Mayfair of the small household of the great Florence Nightingale.

Florence, aged 50, is Director Nightingale - and then a scribbled additional word which may be Nurses.  She has a personal maid, a cook (Sarah) and two housemaids.  She had set up the Nightingale Training School At St Thomas's Hospital in 1860.  It is now part of King's College, London.  

How long Sarah worked there we don't know.  She doesn't appear on the 1881 census, and has been replaced as Florence's cook.  We don't catch up with her until 1891 when she was living (or at least staying) "on own means" with her nephew in Scarborough.  When, and why, did she return to Hull, a place where she did not have deep roots?  On 10 January 1895 she was awarded a room in the Charterhouse, so she apparently did not have enough money to maintain a household of her own.  Did she regale her neighbours with tales of her famous former employer?

Henry Jollands led a very different life.  We first find him in the Spilsby workhouse in Lincolnshire, aged 11, in 1861.  (Confusingly, he shared a name and year of birth with another boy in the same county.)  Our Henry was born to a mother, Sophia, described by the workhouse authorities as an "imbecile" i.e. having severe learning difficulties and had been there all his young life.  Sophia then disappeared from the records, to turn up again in 1901 in the Lincoln Union workhouse.  

1881 census

Henry married Ellen Simpson in 1877. He next appears on 19 November 1880 in the Stamford Mercury: “I, Henry Jollands of Boston, will not be answerable for any debts collected by my wife Ellen Jollands after this date 19 November 1880. Henry Jollands.” On census day, 3 April 1881 Henry is in the lock-up on Victoria St, Grimsby, in the custody of Police Superintendent Geoge Jarvis and his wife. Oddly, he is described as “Head prisoner [illegible] one in lock-up”. What he was doing there becomes clear 5 days later in the Lincolnshire Chronicle: Henry Jollands of Clee, brought up on remand, charged with using threats to his wife, was ordered to find sureties, himself in £20, and one in £20, in default one calendar month.” 

Victoria St, Grimsby

Clearly it was not a happy marriage.  Ellen disappears from the record - fortunately for Henry, as it turns out.  By 1888 he was in Hull marrying Caroline Clark, almost 20 years his junior, and he seems to have become a family man, with 8 children eventually.  In 1891 they are living with their children in Peel St, Hull, where Henry is some sort of dealer. Ten years later they are managing a lodging house at 56 Salthouse Lane, and in 1911 he is the caretaker of a Catholic school and living at 5 Blundell St.

Peel Street

We don’t know when the couple entered the Charterhouse, but they are there on the 1926 electoral list. Caroline died in 1933, Henry in 1939.

The Garden

 We have a very big garden; so big that it's impossible to get it all in one photograph.

The scale of it is also hard to judge on aerial photographs because trees hid a lot of it, so it's best seen in a clip from this 1928 map.

The garden is marked in red.  It sits to the south of the building which used to be all the Master's house and is now partly his house and, on its western side, residents' flats.  Today only the patch directly to the east of the house is the Master's garden; the rest is open to all of us.  But for most of its existence this whole area was for the exclusive use of the Master and his family, with residents entering only at his invitation.

The brickwork of the wall around the garden shows that it may well have been built in two stages since there appears to be a an extra few feet of height added.  The wall would have been part of the rebuilding of the Charterhouse in the second half of the 17th century after its demolition at the start of the Civil War.  This appears to be when the Master's House was erected and, probably, when our famous mulberry tree was planted.  (There are no records to provide a narrative for this.)  The accommodation for residents was on the northern side of the street, then an unpaved road.  (This range was replaced again in 1780.)  At this stage there were no surrounding buildings, so increasing the height of the wall may have been the response to having neighbours.

The size of the house and garden might have been appropriate when the Master had a large family and servants, but this was seldom the case.  Masters, even if appointed whilst young enough to be family men, stayed until they died, perhaps outlived by a wife.  Visiting grandchildren would have appreciated the garden.  For residents, however, it was the only space, apart from the chapel, where all of them could meet together, and they could only do that if summoned by the Master.  

One such event was held on 29 January 1858 when a tea party was held to celebrate the royal wedding.  Others which may have occurred were not reported until the Mastership of Arthur Chignell from 1919 to 1951.  Rev Chignell supplied the local paper with write-ups of these events.  

1921

This is a snip from a typical piece of self-publicity on 18 August 1921.  The local worthies who attended were, as always, named.  A marquee was erected in case the weather was unco-operative, but there is no mention of chairs for the 120 residents.  

1933

In September 1932 the party was hosted by the Sheriff and his Lady.  Chignell's description of the event is pure propaganda for the joys of living at the Charterhouse.

A similar event in June 1933 is an "annual tea-party", attended by the Lady Mayoress but hosted by Rev Chignell.  This time the weather did not co-operate, but the old folk apparently enjoyed the opportunity to get together.  

The war put paid to these parties, of course.  The Master had his own air-raid shelter in the garden, which survived until the 1980s.  The Charterhouse was closed in 1941 and did not reopen until 1948.  The Master's House and the garden remained closed for another 8 years.  In the debates  about what to do with the ruined house, some wanted to use the space occupied by the house and garden to provide more accommodation for residents, but this didn't happen.  An elderly visitor recalled, a few years ago, that while he and colleagues were laying electricity cables for a nearby building they were frequently "threatened" by hordes of feral pet rabbits in the garden.  While he may have been exaggerating, it seems that pets liberated during the war had bred in the wilds of this space.  A recent drought brought out parch marks on the grass showing that there had been structures on the lawn.  We know that there had been a greenhouse which the Master allowed pupils at the neighbouring school to use for their science studies, and some recall that, lacking a playing field, they were able to use the garden for their sports days.

In the 1970s it was recognised that the rebuilt house was too large for the sole use of the Master and his family.  The western range was converted into flats for residents, and it was probably at this point that the garden ceased to be the "Master's garden" and became an amenity for all residents.  A small patch was retained for the private use of the Master.  We continue to make good use of the garden, at least during the warmer months, for both social gatherings and individual enjoyment.