Category Archives: Humber Heritage

Nellie’s

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White Horse, Beverley, East Yorkshire

White Horse, Beverley, East Yorkshire

When I was an undergraduate at Hull University in the late 1960s, what passed for debauchery was a trip on the train to Nellie’s at Beverley.

Once I’d ascertained that Nellie’s was in fact a pub – I was mindful of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), which tells of men who went to the Bear Flag Restaurant for a sandwich – it became, and remains, a favourite.

This famous and memorable hostelry has medieval timbering but has been radically altered in and since the eighteenth century.  It belonged to St Mary’s Church (which stands at the opposite end of the street) probably from 1585, and had become an inn by 1666.

It seems to have changed little since the tenancy was taken on by a sadler, Francis Collinson, in 1887.  Mr Collinson bought the inn in 1927, and after his death it was run by his son, William, and after his death by three of William’s sisters, Nellie (after whom it is now popularly known), Ada and Dorothy, who maintained the ancient tradition of opening their private kitchen to drinkers during the evening, serving from a table beside the hand pumps and washing up with hot water from the coal-fired range.

After the three sisters died in rapid succession during 1975-6 the White Horse was sold to Samuel Smiths of Tadcaster:  under this new ownership the nineteenth-century fittings and gas lighting are lovingly preserved, but not the brick wall that served as the original gents’ lavatory.

There is a grandiose website at http://www.nellies.co.uk/abt.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

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

The Elwells of Beverley

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45 North Bar Without, Beverley, East Yorkshire (detail)

45 North Bar Without, Beverley, East Yorkshire (detail)

Just outside Beverley’s North Bar stands a riotously decorated black-and-white revival house 4-6 North Bar Without, loaded with dormers and turrets, statues, mottoes and coats of arms, and two endearing carved caricatures of Gladstone and Disraeli, dating c1890.

This is the work of the Beverley carver James Edward Elwell, whose fine carvings can be found in churches, public buildings and houses across the East Riding.

In Beverley he executed, among much else, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s Gothic organ screen in the Minster (1878-80) and John Oldrid Scott’s reredos at St Mary’s Parish Church (1880-1).

He also provided carvings at his own house at 43 North Bar Without (Oak House) (Smith & Brodrick 1880) and the house next door, 45 North Bar Without, which he designed himself (1894).

He died in 1926 aged  ninety:  his work, much of it for the architects Temple Moore and F S Brodrick, dates from the 1880s to around 1910.

His son was Frederick William Elwell (1870-1958), a painter with a national reputation who chose to live most of his life in Beverley with his artist wife Mary Dawson, née Bishop, (1874-1952).

His portrait-subjects included King George V, whose lying-in-state he also painted, and the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, and he painted numerous civic leaders in Hull and the East Riding.  He is now most celebrated for his genre-paintings of local life, including several of the kitchen-staff at the Beverley Arms Hotel, such as ‘Preparations’ and ‘Three Maids’ (both c1940-45), which are displayed on weather-proof panels around the streets of Beverley.

By this means Beverley is embellished by the talents of both father and son.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

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

Beverley’s medieval carvings

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St Mary's Church, Beverley, East Yorkshire

St Mary’s Church, Beverley, East Yorkshire

Though Beverley is famous first for its magnificent minster its parish church of St Mary is well worth visiting, not least for its carvings.

After the tower collapsed into the nave during Divine Service on April 29th 1520, killing many of the inhabitants, the generous donations that paid for its rebuilding were commemorated in the north arcade of the nave:  the merchant John Crossley and his wife gave “two pillars and a half” and the “good Wyffes of Beverley…gave two pillars – God reward them”.

Most enjoyable of all, the “Maynstrells” gave the easternmost pier, on which five of them, including their robed and badged president, appear.

Indeed, St Mary’s church and Beverley Minster between them contain a quite unparalleled collection of medieval carvings of musicians and their instruments – pipes and tabors, viols, rebecs, bombardes, shawms, citterns, hautboys, bagpipes, twin horns and nakers – no doubt because the town was the headquarters of the Northern Guild of Minstrels.

St Mary’s has other notable carvings including the Beverley Imp (arguably more frightening than the one at Lincoln) and a so-called Pilgrim Rabbit which is supposed to be the inspiration for the White Rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

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

Beverley Friary

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Old Friary, Beverley, East Yorkshire

Old Friary, Beverley, East Yorkshire

It’s a pity that the George and Dragon pub on Highgate in Beverley was renamed the “Monks’ Walk” because while medieval Beverley may have been black with vicars, crawling with canons and full of friars, the monks remained firmly in their monasteries.

The Dominican friars, who came to Beverley by 1210, were based at what is now called the Old Friary.  The site of its church was intersected by the railway line in 1846, but the surviving building contains religious wall-paintings which date from shortly before or soon after the Reformation.

When the factory buildings surrounding it were cleared in the 1980s, the Old Friary was converted into a Youth Hostel:  http://www.yha.org.uk/hostel/beverley-friary.

The result is a beautifully tactful extension, which is clearly modern and entirely appropriate.

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

Cleethorpes

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Central Promenade & Pier, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire

Central Promenade & Pier, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire

Some time ago I wrote a Facebook entry about my local butcher’s disappointment when he visited Cleethorpes for the first time in decades.  The place wasn’t what it used to be, he said, fifty years ago.

Shortly afterwards, my friend Marion remarked how much the children at her grandson’s primary school had enjoyed a day in Cleethorpes.

Apparently the school is in a fairly deprived area, and some of the kids had never actually been to the seaside.  It proved impossible to get them off the beach:  the sand and the sea were all they wanted.

That’s the magic of the seaside, yet Cleethorpes is entirely a commercial creation, the unlikely joint enterprise of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, who had built the line out to Grimsby to exploit the fish docks, and the dons of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who owned 56% of the land enclosed by an Act of 1842 that specifically allocated to them 2½ acres of coastline.

The railway to Cleethorpes was opened in 1863:  in August that year 40,000 Primitive Methodists attended a tea meeting, three-quarters of them arriving by train.

By 1892 the railway company owned the entire foreshore between Grimsby and Cleethorpes.  George Dow, the railway historian, declared that Cleethorpes was one of the best investments the MS&L possessed.

Like most British seaside resorts, Cleethorpes is indeed a shadow of its former self, though you can by a quirk of railway geography get a train there direct from Manchester Airport.

Cleethorpes’ most successful sons are the actor, Patrick Wymark (1926-1970), and Rod Temperton (born 1947), member of the band Heatwave and writer of – among much else – the title track of Michael Jackson’s album, Thriller (1984).

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

Ghost trains

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New Holland Pier Station, Lincolnshire (1981)

New Holland Pier Station, Lincolnshire (1981)

When I was an undergraduate at Hull University in the late 1960s, one of our innocent pleasures was to catch the Humber ferry from Hull Corporation Pier to ride across to New Holland and back.  The boats in those days were still, literally, paddle-steamers, Wingfield Castle and Tattershall Castle (both 1934) and Lincoln Castle (1940).  The bar was customarily open once the vessel had left dry land.

The only time I ever set foot on New Holland Pier was a week before the ferry-service ended in 1981.  Here there was a rail service south to Grimsby to join the main railway network.  The New Holland ferry started out in the early nineteenth century as a legally dubious operation, named after Holland’s Gin.  Its latter-day function was as an extension of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway (later the Great Central Railway and latterly the LNER and, of course, British Railways).  It was eventually superseded by the opening of the Humber Bridge.

The informative and well-illustrated Disused Stations website [http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/n/new_holland_pier/index.shtml] tells me that the New Holland Pier and its rail-connection still survive as a grain and animal-feed terminal.  Passenger rail services continue between Cleethorpes and Barton-on-Humber.

There is also an intriguing parliamentary service that runs three times a week between Cleethorpes and Sheffield via Gainsborough Central.  Parliamentary trains were originally a bottom-of-the-range penny-a-mile compulsory service intended by the so-called “Gladstone Act” of 1844 to guarantee cheap travel and encourage mobility of labour.  They were satirised by W S Gilbert in The Mikado:

The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window-panes
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
On Parliamentary trains.

Nowadays they are a device which allows railway operators to pretend to provide a service over lines that they no longer wish to operate without going through the cumbersome procedure of legal abandonment.

By modern standards, this parliamentary service is actually quite good:  parliamentary trains in other parts of Britain run once a week, often in one direction only.  Details, some of which may be out of date, can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_train.

An article in the Birmingham Press (February 4th 2011) illustrates the reasons for maintaining – at some expense – stations and routes that have little current practical purpose:  http://www.thebirminghampress.com/2011/02/04/the-train-not-standing.

A recent account is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KiZGRA_yCE.

And an example of a parliamentary bus that thinks it’s a train is at Chiltern Railways’ ‘ghost bus’: Is this Britain’s most bizarre route? – BBC News.

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

Auditorium for sale

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Former Tower Cinema, Anlaby Road, Hull (1999)

Former Tower Cinema, Anlaby Road, Hull (1999)

Earlier articles in this blog have featured auditoria across the north of England that have been neglected to varying degrees by owners who would like to see them flattened – in Bradford, Manchester and Derby.

The November/December 2010 edition of the Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin featured a cinema building with a more optimistic future – the former Tower Cinema, Hull.

The Tower opened on July 1st 1914, designed by the Hull architect, Horace Percival Binks.  Originally it seated 1,200 – 850 in the stalls and 350 in the balcony – and had a café serving “Morning Coffee, Luncheons, and High-Class Teas”.  Latterly, it was reseated to 523 in the stalls and 230 in the circle.

Its history is entirely conventional – sound in 1929, Cinemascope in the 1950s, closed in 1978.  Since then it has functioned as a night club, and is once again up for sale.

Its appeal, however, lies in the ornate exterior, a riot of cream and green faience, with domes (recently reinstated), obelisks, a belvedere with Ionic columns dripping with swags, topped by a bare-breasted female figure that no-one seems able to identify.

Despite Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s dismissive 1972 comment “undeniably debased in the extreme, but the young have begun to like this sort of thing”, it was listed Grade II.  (Pevsner’s comment on the sister cinema across the road, the Regent of 1910, is “built in seven weeks and it shows”.)

Images in the Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin indicate that the decorative interior with its domed ceiling and gilded plasterwork is practically intact.  Indeed, David Salmon’s detailed history of the cinema at http://www.davesden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/tower016new.htm suggests that the plasterwork, woodwork and stained glass were cleaned by a team of volunteers in 1981.

The Cinema Theatre Association Newsletter for September/October 2012 reported that, after a failed attempt to restore it as a cinema, new owners have reopened the Tower as Tokyo nightclub http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/pictures/Tokyo-nightclub-opens-Hull-s-famous-Tower/pictures-16766642-detail/pictures.html with a commitment “to make the most of the beautiful building”.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

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

Gateway to a vanished abbey

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Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire: gatehouse

Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire: gatehouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

Serves him right.

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

 

Sound effects

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Sound mirror, Kilnsea, East Yorkshire

Sound mirror, Kilnsea, East Yorkshire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Royal relief

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Gentlemen's lavatory, King William III statue, Market Place, Old Town, Hull

Gentlemen’s lavatory, King William III statue, Market Place, Old Town, Hull

Queen Mary’s advice to her eldest son was (reputedly) – “Take every opportunity to take the weight off your feet and to relieve yourself.”

It’s widely known in Hull that if you seek relief in the city centre it’s a good idea to head for a royal statue.

There are two, and they’re very fine indeed – one beneath the fine Scheemakers statue of King William III (1734) on the Market Place and the other beneath the H C Fehr’s 1903 monument to Queen Victoria in Queen Victoria Square.

Both are listed Grade II.  The King William III gents was designed by the City Engineer, W H Lucas, at a time when such creations were a matter of pride.  It has fittings by Finch & Co of Lambeth dating from c1900, including marble-and-glass cisterns, faience Ionic columns and original doors with leaded lights.  The Queen Victoria lavatories are later than the statue, dating from c1925 when the Ferens Art Gallery was under construction:  again the gents has its original earthenware fittings.

There’s an account of the local pride in these magnificent facilities, told by the people who care for them, at http://static.hullcc.gov.uk/hullinprint/archive/october2002/a_right_royal.php.

The Hull historian, Paul Gibson, includes in his website a lengthy account of the history of Hull’s public lavatories:  http://www.paul-gibson.com/history/public-toilets.php.

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