Victorian Brackley E-Book

John Clarke

• Herausgeber: Phillimore & Co Ltd
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 393

Beschreibung

Victorian Brackley was sometimes called Sleepy Hollow. Compared to many other places, growth in numbers was modest, but beneath the surface, there were extraordinary scandals and power struggles, some of which reached the national press. Above all, there was a great physical transformation involving the construction of a new Vicarage, Church Schools and Manor House, together with the restorations of St Peter's Church and the College Chapel. This book investigates great Brackley characters such as Francis Thicknesse and Tommy Judge and the power struggle between Church and Chapel, Liberal and Tory. Finally it tells the story of the arrival of the Great Central Railway and the appearance of new forces in the decade before the First World War. Written by a leading authority on the history of the area, this richly illustrated volume recounts the remarkable transformation of this Northamptonshire town during the Victorian age.

Leseprobe

First published 2018 by Phillimore & Co. Ltd

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

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© John Clarke, 2018

The right of John Clarke to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8866 7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

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VICTORIAN BRACKLEY

Brackley Top Station, Great Central Railway, 1899

s

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Brackley Town Council

Chapter One

Dear Old Brackley

Chapter Two

It Don’t Hurt ’Em

Chapter Three

A Death at the Workhouse

Chapter Four

Fast Asleep?

Chapter Five

Awake

Chapter Six

The Thicknesse Revolution

Chapter Seven

Votes for Kisses?

Chapter Eight

A New Course?

Chapter Nine

Forward with the Great Central?

Chapter Ten

The Image of War

Bibliography

Subscribers

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Brackley and District History Society acknowledges the support of the following sponsors, without whom publication of this volume would not have been possible:

Brackley Town Council

South Northamptonshire Council

Faccenda Foods

Borras Construction Limited

Macintyers Estate Agents

The Old Hall Bookshop

J.C. Clarke

Tesco plc

Illustrations have been included with the permission of Northamptonshire Record Office (NRO) and Brackley Library (A.A. Green Collection). All others from Professor John Clarke’s own collection.

This, the final volume of the trilogy dedicated to the history of Brackley, provides a unique and interesting record of the town’s history.

From the Iron Age, the Saxon ‘Bracca’, through to jousting, the wool trade and now into the Victorian era, bringing Brackley right into the twentieth century and thus providing an insight into the people and events that moulded the town you see today.

The town’s deep and wonderful history is, at long last, exposed through the meticulous and dedicated work of one team … Professor John Clarke.

Having worked in publishing myself for many years, I know the amount of work required to produce such a publication and cannot leave this foreword without mention of the members of the Committee of the Brackley and District History Society, who have worked so hard to get this historical record published.

Councillor Don Thompson

Brackley Town Mayor

September 2017

Chapter One

DEAR OLD BRACKLEY

Even today, I still meet people who talk of ‘dear old Brackley’. The same expression was used, rather more frequently, in my childhood in the 1950s. Somehow, it cheers me up and I always love to hear it. ‘Dear old Brackley’ strikes a chord in me and has been a crucial motif in my life and career. Yet, what does it mean? Curiously, I have never received a satisfactory answer. The normal response goes something like this: ‘You know John, real Brackley; you’re Brackley too; you must understand.’

In part, this book represents a voyage of self-discovery. I want to work out what I mean by ‘dear old Brackley’. But I know that ‘dear old Brackley’ is part of a heritage I share with others. With this book, I hope that I can help some of my readers to ‘bring back’ the half-forgotten stories they heard as children. In short, I shall consider myself well rewarded if my thoughts assist others to develop their own personal visions of ‘dear old Brackley’.

I offer two suggestions to guide my readers. The first is that, behind the idea of ‘dear old Brackley’ there lies a mixture of buildings, loyalties and values – above all, that sense of place and intimacy which comes from knowing everyone in a small community. It may add up to a kind of ‘Spirit of Place’. Yet, as readers of my earlier works will appreciate,1 Brackley has changed a good deal over the centuries; to get a ‘fix’ on ‘dear old Brackley’ we need an element of time as well. This leads on to my second and more important suggestion – that, to all intents and purposes, ‘dear old Brackley’ should be identified with Victorian Brackley, which in the narrowly academic sense is the subject of this book.

But why should ‘dear old Brackley’ and ‘Victorian Brackley’ be treated as identical? Let us consider the words ‘dear’ and ‘old’ more carefully. ‘Dear’ obviously implies affection, but ‘old’ is more difficult. Brackley has existed in some form or other since Roman times, so nineteenth-century Brackley is hardly ‘old’ in the overall context of the history of the town. But it is ‘old’ in the personal context; it refers to the Brackley of our parents, grandparents and great grandparents. When we express our affection for ‘dear old Brackley’, many of us are expressing our love, not only for the town, but also for members of our own families. In part, when we say ‘dear old Brackley’, we are being nostalgic for our childhoods, even if these were not themselves actually Victorian.

Furthermore, Victorian Brackley is the earliest Brackley to which most of us can make significant visual reference. When we see ‘dear old Brackley’ in our mind’s eye, we are probably thinking of Victorian photographs. Of course, there are many pre-Victorian buildings in Brackley – such as the Church or the College Chapel – but we tend to visualise them in their Victorian form. ‘Our’ College Chapel is not that of the Middle Ages, or the tumbledown ruin of the eighteenth century; rather, it is the Chapel as restored by Buckeridge and furnished with elegant gasoliers by Clarke the ironmonger. ‘Our’ Church is the Church as restored by Thicknesse and Egerton.

The visual power of Victorian Brackley is so strong partly because it had no successor until the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, the physical appearance of Brackley had changed little since 1914. Despite some modern housing and the survival of buildings from the eighteenth century and earlier, the overall ‘tone’ was Victorian. The two railway stations were Victorian, as were the interior of St Peter’s Church, many of the buildings of Magdalen College School, the Congregational and Methodist Chapels, the enormous Manor House, the flamboyant Church School, the ‘black and white’ Vicarage, the Cottage Hospital, ‘hunting boxes’ like the Red House in the High Street, the middle-class villas in the Banbury Road, the ‘artisans’ dwellings’ erected by William Judd, the police station, the gasworks and the brewery all dated from this period.

The image was even more compelling because every building had associations with figures of major local importance. There were the ‘classic’ Vicars (Thicknesse and Egerton), the local boy made good and brilliant Headmaster (Isaac Wodhams), the local boy who married money and bought a brewery (Walter Norris), the complete gentleman (the Earl of Ellesmere), the Station Master (Mr Taylor), the medical men (Dr Parkhurst and ‘old’ Dr Stathers), the Squire (John Locke Stratton) and – for those with a taste for such things – the Radical (Thomas Judge). The list goes on and on.

The ‘characters’ seemed larger than life and, in some quarters, they still provide a standard against which their successors can be measured and found wanting. Of course, it was not perfect. It could be petty and intolerably snobbish; even the wives of successful traders expected to be curtsied to. There was much poverty and most people prefer to forget the awful Workhouse. Yet at least those in authority knew how to behave and most of those beneath them knew how to be properly thankful.

To misquote Matthew Arnold, this was the Brackley that was still ‘whispering the last enchantments of the Victorian Ages’ to me in my childhood. It was not so much history but more of a living presence. It seemed a Golden Age, the culmination of earlier epochs of greatness and romance. No doubt, I viewed the stories about Mr Thicknesse and the Earl of Ellesmere like those of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

But are golden ages ever more than illusions, the product of childish imagination? Many years later, I had a shock. In 1982, when I opened Barrie Trinder’s otherwise excellent Victorian Banbury, I was horrified to read:

Some market towns remained ‘sleepy hollows’, small agglomerations of shops, visited by a mere handful of carriers, with infrequent and declining markets, only one or two weak dissenting causes, and a few voluntary societies. Many such towns lost their parliamentary representation, if they ever enjoyed it, in the 1832 Reform Act. They were places which had declined, relative to larger centres in the 18th century, and, except in special circumstances, this decline continued in the 19th. Such towns, the Brackleys, the Bishop’s Castles and the Beaminsters, may be defined as ‘immature’ market towns.2

My first reaction was one of incredulity; how could a town which achieved so much be called a ‘sleepy hollow’, or a place whose first Charter had been issued in 1260 be described as ‘immature’? I was not deceived by the references to Bishop’s Castle and Beaminster. I suspected they had been included to lull readers into accepting Victorian Banbury as a work of dispassionate and fashionable ‘urban history’. It seemed to me that, in reality, Trinder’s book was nothing less than an attack by a Banbury man on Brackley and the version of Brackley history I had revelled in as a child. I saw it as a challenge, almost a declaration of war.

But calmer reflection soon prevailed. Trinder is a good historian and I remembered that others – Brackley people themselves – once called the town ‘Sleepy Hollow’. I realised that Victorian Brackley must be set in a wider context, which may not be to its advantage. In other words, this book has to be something more than a votive offering to the cult of ‘dear old Brackley’. I must try to untangle the reality from romantic nostalgia. But I refuse to go ‘the whole hog’ with Trinder. I remain convinced that, as with the Kingdom of Heaven, there is much to be said for approaching history ‘like a little child’.

It is perhaps too easy to talk of ‘Victorian Brackley’; should we regard it as a whole or as no more than a succession of several very different periods? Here, I confess a debt to a ‘national’ historian, GM Young, whose Portrait of an Age: Victorian England (first published in 1936) remains the best overall study of the period. Young asked himself whether there had ever been such a thing as ‘Victorian England’? Young thought not; the period had been too varied and changing to be viewed as a coherent whole. That encouraged me to ask the same question about Victorian Brackley and I found my answer was similar to Young’s.

Of course, there were a few constant features. One was that Brackley was overshadowed by its larger neighbour – Banbury. Of course, Brackley remained in Northamptonshire. Administratively, it continued to look to Northampton; ecclesiastically it looked to Peterborough; educationally it looked to Oxford. But for most economic purposes, the best way to describe Brackley is as part of an area unofficially known as ‘Banburyshire’. ‘Banburyshire’ was made up of those parts of Oxfordshire, Northants, Bucks, Warwickshire and even Gloucestershire which were nearer to Banbury than to their own county towns.3 By the 1840s, Banbury was one of the most flourishing market towns in England. Brackley is only 9 miles from Banbury and, as the Banbury Guardian of 6 July 1843 put it, ‘To the 140 places within a circuit of ten miles, it [Banbury] may be said to be a metropolis’. The opening of the Buckinghamshire Railway (later London & North Western, LNWR) from Bletchley to Banbury, via Buckingham and Brackley, in May 1850 only served to strengthen Brackley’s orientation towards its powerful neighbour. Significantly, Brackley never had a direct rail link to Northampton – inconvenient for anyone who was engaged on official business or who wanted to visit relations in the County Lunatic Asylum at Berrywood.

By the 1840s, there was an increasing tendency to read Banbury papers, a development likely to encourage Nonconformist and Radical ideas. Only the ‘county-orientated’ gentry continued to take the Northampton Mercury or the Northampton Herald.

The arrival of the Great Central Railway (GCR) at the end of the century may have diminished the ‘pull’ of Banbury. The GCR gave Brackley a direct link to London as well as to other towns like Leicester and Aylesbury. The new line led to a late-Victorian version of the old distinction between Brackley St James and Brackley St Peter: ‘Bottom End’ and ‘Top End’. The two stations were over a mile apart; those living closer to the new ‘Top Station’ now tended to do their shopping in Aylesbury, while those nearer to the old ‘Bottom Station’ continued to go to Banbury. But Banbury’s loss of influence was only temporary. Neither station was very convenient, involving a long walk for most people. The position was transformed in the 1920s and 1930s with the appearance of motor buses. The buses, which stopped at the Greyhound and the Market Square, were more convenient and cheaper than the trains. Most of the services went to Banbury and thus Brackley’s westward orientation was reinforced once more.

Another constant was the survival of the traditional Brackley dialect. Despite Banbury’s economic dominance, its influence made little headway in patterns of speech. Perhaps this was due to the lack of significant numbers of ‘immigrants’. Someone from Banbury would immediately announce themselves as ‘I be Bambry’, but I doubt if anyone ever said, ‘I be Brackley’. ‘Bambry’, with its rising note at the end of sentences, carried the first hints of the speech patterns of Birmingham and the West Midlands. ‘Buckingham’, on the other hand, with its slight glottal stop, belongs to a family of dialects culminating in Cockney. But ‘Brackley’ and ‘South Northants’ is unlike either.

Of course, ‘Brackley’ had its enemies. Especially during the Mastership of Rev Robert Ashwin (1910–29), one of the prime missions of Magdalen College School was to produce pupils who ‘spoke nicely’. The campaign had some success, but only with a minority. The rest continued to say ‘yourn’ for ‘yours’, ‘hisn’ for ‘his’, ‘unkhed’ for ‘unhappy’ and ‘chimbley’ for ‘chimney’. It is notoriously difficult to reproduce dialect sounds using ordinary letters. In this area, the man who did it best was Rev Jack Linnell, author of Old Oak. Linnell wrote mostly about Syresham and Silverstone. Even there the dialect is not quite the same as in Brackley, but it is very close. Linnell gives a marvellous account of a sermon given by a Methodist lay preacher in the Chapel at Silverstone:

Well, here I be, but I thought o’one time as us’d never get here. Afoore us set out the missus wur as akhud as could be, an’ comin down Gulliver’s Hill, the britchin’ bruk, an’ us settled down as nice as could be on the grass by the side o’ the rooad. ‘Bwoy’, sez I ‘Old Sca-aper [the Devil] dooan’t mean us shall goo to Silson to-day, but us’ll see if us keeunt dish the old chap!’ and so here us be, but for all the good I’m a-gooin’ to do you, I might just as well a’stopped up in Bucknell’s ‘ood an’ hollered ‘Cookoo’; for you Silson folk never did know nothin, and never ‘ull, and I reckon nuthen’ll ever be required an ye!4

Yet the search for constants does not get us very far – as Young found in his investigation of Victorian England. This may come as a surprise and points to an important difference between popular impressions and historical reality. The Victorian period is often seen as a time of stability, certainty and lack of change – perhaps not in the great towns and cities but at any rate in the countryside. This is quite untrue as far as Brackley is concerned. Although it remained a small community throughout, it experienced tremendous changes between the Reform Bill of 1832 and the outbreak of World War I. I would go so far as to claim that these changes were actually greater than those that have occurred since 1914. Some of the features of Victorian Brackley, which people imagine lasted for centuries, were actually very short-lived. One of the supposed characteristics of a traditional society is the presence of a resident Lord of the Manor. In reality, Brackley only acquired such a figure in 1878 and it ‘lost’ him in 1915. Thus a ‘traditional’ arrangement lasted for less than forty years.

In order to make sense of Victorian Brackley, there is no alternative but to break it up into shorter periods. GM Young believed there had been three Victorian Englands and I believe there were three Victorian Brackleys. I do not adopt Young’s chronology. His early-Victorian England ended in 1847 and his mid-Victorian England in 1868, but Young was looking at things from a London perspective and it would hardly be surprising if Brackley lagged behind somewhat. From the way I look at things, early-Victorian Brackley lasted from the 1830s to the late 1860s. Then there was mid-Victorian Brackley which lasted from the late 1860s until the mid-1880s and, finally, there was late-Victorian Brackley which lasted until World War I – although its ‘ghost’ survived until the 1950s.

Each of these Brackleys has a distinct aura or zeitgeist. There is little to admire about early-Victorian Brackley and its story must be told in largely negative terms. But mid- and late-Victorian Brackley were very different places compared to the town between 1832 and 1868; together they make up the real ‘dear old Brackley’ beloved of our grandparents. In some ways it was a ‘sleepy hollow’, yet in other respects it showed great energy and dynamism; it certainly possessed considerable charm and style.

But how to explain the turning points of Victorian Brackley – the Wendepunkten as it were? I am not normally an enthusiast for the ‘great man’ theory of history, but here it is inescapable. The great change from early- to mid-Victorian Brackley came with the arrival of Rev Francis Thicknesse in 1868. This year began the ‘High Noon’ of Victorian Brackley and here the tone must be overwhelmingly positive.

The second and lesser change, from mid- to late-Victorian Brackley is linked with the arrival of ‘democracy’ in local and national government. Much was achieved between the late 1880s and 1914, but there are worrying trends, sometimes reminiscent of the ‘bad’ early period, so that positive and negative features are more or less equal. For those inclined to Hegelian dialectic – I confess I know not how many Hegelians there are in today’s Brackley – we may postulate early-Victorian Brackley as the Thesis, mid-Victorian Brackley as the Antithesis, and late-Victorian Brackley as the Synthesis.

The ‘bad’ early period, the ‘good’ middle and the ‘mixed’ late are reflected in changes in population patterns. It may be premature to condemn early-Victorian Brackley. At least the town was growing. When the first National Census was taken in 1801, Brackley’s two parishes were found to have a total population of 1,495. Numbers grew rapidly in the next thirty years, reaching 2,107 by 1831 – an increase of 41 per cent. But population growth does not necessarily indicate prosperity or harmony. It can be more of a curse than a blessing – more poor loudly demanding charity and relief, more social tensions, bad and insanitary housing, more potential criminals.

It is true that from the 1830s the rate of increase began to abate. The 2,383 inhabitants recorded in 1861 represent an increase of only just over 13.1 per cent since 1831. Between 1861 and 1891 numbers grew to 2,614, or by 9.7 per cent. After 1891, apart from a short period of growth between 1901 and 1911, Brackley experienced forty years of contraction.

Some people had always taken off elsewhere but, at the end of the nineteenth century, the trickle became a flood. As early as the 1851 Census, there were thirty-five people in Banbury who claimed to have been born in Brackley; by 1871 there were sixty. Later emigrants went further afield. Some went abroad, others to London or to an industrial city. Around the turn of the century, there seems to have been something like a concerted emigration movement to Coventry, seen by many as a place of wealth and opportunity. The gains of earlier years were wiped out and, with 2,373 people in 1921, Brackley was back to its 1861 size. The decline accelerated in the 1920s and, with the 2,097 recorded in the 1931 Census, numbers were lower than a century earlier. If the downward trend had continued, Brackley’s future would have been bleak indeed.

There was no census in 1941 – due to World War II – but an upward trend was visible once more in 1951. At 2,531 Brackley’s population was higher than at any time between the wars. Thereafter the rate of expansion was rapid, faster even than during the ‘population boom’ of 1801–31.

The 1961 Census showed that Brackley had passed the 3,000 mark for the first time in its history. Only twenty years later, in 1981, numbers had more than doubled to 6,535.

Brackley’s Population 1801–1981

1801

1,495

1811

1,580

(+5.7%)

1821

1,851

(+17.2%)

1831

2,107

(+13.8%)

1841

2,121

(+0.7%)

1851

2,277

(+7.4%)

1861

2,383

(+4.7%)

1871

2,351

(-1.3%)

1881

2,504

(+6.5%)

1891

2,614

(+4.4%)

1901

2,487

(-4.9%)

1911

2,633

(+5.9%)

1921

2,373

(-9.9%)

1931

2,097

(-11.6%)

1941

No Census

1951

2,531

(+20.7%)

1961

3,208

(+26.7%)

1971

4,612

(+43.8%)

1981

6,535

(+41.7%)

The pattern at Towcester – 2,031 in 1801 – is similar to Brackley’s; Towcester’s 2,775 in 1891 fell to 2,252 in 1931. But things were different in larger communities like Banbury. In 1801, with a population of 4,070, Banbury was already more than two and a half times bigger than Brackley. By 1901, however, Banbury’s population had reached 13,026, or more than five times the size of Brackley’s. Banbury grew most rapidly between 1841 and 1871, when Brackley’s growth was already slowing. But even Banbury grew only slowly between the 1870s and the 1930s, its period of relative stagnation coinciding with Brackley’s absolute decline.5

In the late nineteenth century, the major growth points were the big cities. Norman Stone’s idea of ‘Metropolis’ sums up the process well.6 The other side of the coin was that the smaller the place the more likely it was to lose population. Thus, the decline in numbers in the villages around Brackley and Banbury started earlier and was proportionately greater than in Brackley itself. The population of the rural parishes in the Banbury Poor Law Union fell from 21,231 in 1841 to 15,527 in 1901.

I do not claim that my version of Victorian Brackley is the only way to approach the subject. At any given moment the population is made up of the young, the middle aged and the elderly; hence there is always a diversity of outlooks and values. All I suggest is that my scheme of things may help to achieve an understanding of what was really a very complex historical process. It is up to my readers to decide if it works.

____________

1 Clarke, John, The Book of Brackley (Buckingham, Barracuda Books, 1987) and Yesterday’s Brackley: From Restoration to Reform (Buckingham, Barracuda Books, 1990).

2 Trinder, Barrie, Victorian Banbury (Chichester: Phillimore & Co., 1982) p.2.

3 Ibid., pp.16–17.

4 Linnell, JE, Old Oak (Northampton: The Burlington Press, 1984) p.72.

5 Stacey, Margaret, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1960) pp.5–7.

6 Stone, Norman, Europe Transformed, 1879–1919 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1983) pp.13–15.

Town Hall from the High Street. Note the building in the middle of the road. (NRO)

People’s General Supply Stores. Note the thatched roof.

Westbury carrier, outside the Master’s Lodgings on the corner of Buckingham Road.

Chapter Two

IT DON’T HURT ’EM

We must now turn to early-Victorian Brackley, in many ways a troubled and divided community. The loss of the Parliamentary seats in 1832 removed the chief reason why the Bridgewater Trustees, preoccupied with canals and coal mines, had previously taken some interest in the town – at least at election times. Now the age-old problem of absentee Lords of the Manor threatened to become worse than ever. On 1 July 1837, James Lock, Chief Agent to the Bridgewater Trustees, wrote to Lord Francis Egerton (later Earl of Ellesmere) to remind him that no head of ‘the most noble family’ had even visited Brackley ‘since the Duke of Bridgewater [died 1805] drove there in his coach and four when a young man’. Fifty years had elapsed since an Estate Manager had given the Halse farms a proper inspection. Most of the farm buildings were inconveniently placed and run down.

The old Church of St Andrew at Halse had not been used since the seventeenth century and was now a total ruin. A leading Trustee, Mr Hains, visited the Church and proposed its demolition. The proposal caused much distress to at least one of the tenants. In an undated letter – probably written in 1837 – Mr Thomas Bannard asked for reconsideration. He wanted the Church to be restored, pointing out that the long walk – 2½ miles – to Brackley St Peter’s deterred many of the sixty inhabitants of Halse. As a result, many developed ‘a carelessness for divine duties’ or attended ‘Conventicles held at neighbouring Hamlets to the prejudice of the Established Church’. If restoration was impossible, at least the Church should be made secure. Bannard was appalled at the thought that soon ‘swine and cattle’ might be grubbing among the bones of the illustrious dead buried there. Failing that, Bannard appealed to ‘the prevailing taste for antiquity’. Hains’s proposal was particularly shocking because another Trustee was none other than the Archbishop of York. Bannard concluded:

Think, oh think for a moment and let it not be said that Lord E[gerton] and Mr L[ock] have no interest in the spiritual wellfare for their Vessells while it is so amply in the power of both to provide for them. Mr Hains, I have no doubt, is fully qualified as a Projector in modern improvements, but as an admirer of Antiquity he has proved that it is not his element or he could not have sat under the well turned Arch and meditated its destruction.1

The demolition went ahead and Lock seemed eager to extend the same policy into Brackley itself. One of the Bridgewater houses in the town, ‘occupied by a person of the name of Lathbury’, was in a ruinous condition and ‘I would say that the best thing would be to pull it down and not to rebuild it’.2

Francis Egerton had authorised some repair work to the chancel of St Peter’s but the work was not yet complete and the overall condition of the church was disgraceful. Lock reported:

One of the windows is in so rotten a condition that I am afraid it will require new stone mullions which will cost about £10. I hope your Lordship [Egerton] won’t think this wrong; it is the only thing of the sort which has been done since the Duke of Bridgewater’s death.3

The Trustees certainly did nothing to save St James’s Church, demolished in 1836. When Baker saw it in the 1820s, it had already been in ‘a very dilapidated state’.4

It was not all gloom, and Whellan’s Directory for 1849 mentions no fewer than 110 traders, shopkeepers and innkeepers. Some had several occupations; perhaps they were very enterprising or – more likely – none of their various jobs provided sufficient business on its own. Thomas Bannard, landlord of the Cross Keys was also a carpenter. Charles Thomas Rudkin of the George was also an auctioneer and appraiser. John Hatwell of the Horse and Jockey was also a cooper. Edward Bowerman of the Reindeer was a plasterer and slater and Joseph James of the Wagon and Horses was a butcher.

Representative Brackley Traders, 1849

Joseph Barrett

Bookseller & Binder; Printer & Stationer; Newsagent and Circulating Library; Agent to the Norwich Union Fire & Office

Edward Bartlett

Linen & Woollen Draper

James Bartlett

Currier & Leather Cutter

John Blackwell

Blacksmith

Timothy Blencowe

Brazier & Tinman

William Blencowe

Brewer & Maltster

Frederick Cave

Ironmonger & Seedman

William Cave

Maltster

John Chatwell

Boot & Shoe Maker

Elizabeth Dix

Ironmonger, Brazier, Gunsmith and Whitesmith

Thomas Course

Baker

Robert East

Grocer and China & Glass Dealer

John French

Miller

Alfred Hayward

Agent to County Fire and Provident Life Offices

Robert Howard

Basket Maker

James Jelleyman

Rope & Twine Maker

Benjamin Judge

Grocer

Elizabeth Judge

Butcher

Richard Judge

Butcher

Thomas Judge

Butcher

Richard Kendal

Baker

William Knibbs

Saddler and Harness Maker

George Lathbury

Butcher

Francis Layton

Cabinet Maker

William Mee

Perfumer, Stationer, Jeweller & Toy Dealer

John Nichols

Coach Maker

William Norris

Painter, Gravestone Cutter and Bird Preserver

Frederick William Rudkin

Grocer & Tea Dealer

Robert Russel

Auctioneer, Land Surveyor and Agent to the Atlas Fire & Office

Henry Sirrett

Chymist and Druggist

Smith & Blackwell

Fishmonger and Orange Dealers

William Walford

Watch & Clockmaker

Samuel Walters

Linen and Woollen Draper

James Wootton

Stonemason

Henry Wright

Slop Seller and Shoe Dealer

But the compilers of the Directory had not kept their information up to date – perhaps a sign that they did not regard Brackley as a place of any importance. Thus, Elizabeth Dix had ceased trading as an ironmonger in 1841. In January of that year, Mrs Dix had issued a handbill thanking her customers for their patronage since the death of her husband (1837) and announcing that she had disposed of her business to Mr Joseph Clarke – who had actually managed the concern for the previous twenty years. Thus began the firm of Clarke’s the Ironmongers, which was to remain an important feature of the commercial life of Brackley until 1948.

Many of the traders mentioned in the 1849 Directory were the direct heirs of men – often with the same name and in the same trade – who figure in the Purefoy Papers, the Court Rolls and the correspondence of John Welchman over a century earlier. Even then, the Lathburys had been butchers, a Timothy Blencowe was trading as a tinman and a James Wootton as a stonemason. While there were a few newcomers, ‘trading Brackley’ had not changed much since the 1730s.

Some of these early-Victorian tradesmen were elected to the Corporation, a body with virtually nothing to do since the changes of the 1830s. The Corporation functioned – if that is not too strong a word – in a bizarre ‘time warp’. Well into Queen Victoria’s reign, new burgesses were required to subscribe to complicated declarations about the political and theological disputes of the seventeenth century now long forgotten by most people. Thus:

I A.B. do declare that I hold that there lies no obligation upon me or any other from the Oath commonly called the Solemn League and Covenant and that the same was in itself an Unlawful Oath and imposed upon the subjects of this Realm against the known laws and liberties of the Kingdom.5

Gradually the traders came to dominate the Corporation, as their forefathers had done before the ‘invention’ of absentee burgesses in the 1760s.

The sole purpose of the absentee burgesses had been to return the Duke of Bridgewater’s nominees as Members of Parliament. The loss of the Parliamentary seats in 1832 rendered the absentees’ role redundant and no more were chosen. But existing absentees retained a life interest and it took a long time for the group to disappear. Augustus Hill Bradshaw (Burgess 1803, Alderman 1803, Mayor 1805, 1808, 1815, 1822 and 1828) died in 1846. Samuel Meacock (Burgess 1805) survived until 1852. The last of the absentee burgesses, Robert Augustus Bradshaw (Burgess 1824) did not die until 1871 – almost forty years after the Reform Bill.

Among the tradesmen who became burgesses, the most prominent were the auctioneer, Robert Russel (Burgess 1834, Alderman 1843, Mayor 1843, 1847, 1852 and 1858; died 1860) and John Cave, landlord of the Red Lion (Burgess 1843, Alderman 1861, Mayor 1865, 1870, 1873 and 1876; died 1880). Other mayors included the Halse farmers, John and Edward Butterfield, and Alfred Hopcraft, son of the Enclosure Commissioner. The tradition of clerical mayors was maintained in the person of Rev Charles Arthur Sage. Born in 1786, Sage was the third son of Joseph Sage, Assay Master at the Royal Mint and Sarah, daughter of John Shakespear, Alderman of the City of London.

Sage was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge (BA 1810) and ordained Deacon (Peterborough) in 1811. The Bridgewater Trustees presented him to the living of Brackley in 1825 – in succession to Rev TB Woodman.6 Sage probably had earlier connections with the Trustees; he became Burgess in 1818, seven years before he was presented to the Living. In 1826, Sage was appointed Rural Dean and Bishop’s Surrogate. He was an active magistrate, a Poor Law Guardian, and, from 1839, Chaplain to the Workhouse – although he later gave up this ‘ungentlemanly’ post to Rev HW Smith. Sage became an Alderman in 1825 and was Mayor in 1826, 1829, 1831, 1832, 1833, 1836, 1839, 1844, 1848, 1850, 1853, 1856 and 1861. He died on 20 December 1867.

The Corporation 1818–817

Name

Burgess

Alderman

Mayor

Died

Rev C A Sage

1818

1825

1826, 1829, 1831, 1832, 1833, 1836, 1839, 1844, 1851, 1853, 1856, 1861

1867

William Cave

1819

–

–

1829

Joseph Nichols

1820

–

–

1855

John Butterfield

1821

1842

1842, 1846, 1850

1850

William Collison

1822

–

–

1834

Robert Bradshaw

1824

–

–

1871

Rev Anselm Jones

1824

1835

1835

1838

Benjamin Lansdale

1825

–

–

1862

William Tripp

1826

–

–

1829

Edward Butterfield

1828

1851

1851, 1859, 1868

1881

James Pendlebury

1829

–

–

1863

Robert Weston

1829

–

–

1841

Edward Taylor

1829

–

–

1849

John Goodman

1830

–

–

1867

John French

1834

–

–

1844

Robert Russel

1834

1843

1843, 1847, 1852, 1858

1860

Edward Bartlett

1835

–

–

1843

Benjamin Wesson

1835

–

–

1858

William Dix

1835

–

–

1837

Frederick Runkin

1836

–

–

1876

Robert East

1837

–

–

1848

James Bartlett

1838

1852

1855

1874

Alfred Hopcraft

1840

1853

1854, 1860, 1864, 1869

1872

Joseph Barrett

1841

–

–

1855

Isaac Bartlett

1842

1868

1874, 1878

Alive

Joseph Clarke

1843

–

–

1851

John Cave

1843

1861

1865, 1870, 1873

1880

William King Malins

1844

–

–

1870

Edward Taylor

1844

1873

1877

Alive

David Hearn

1846

–

–

Alive

John Anstee

1848

–

–

1851

Henry Walsh

1849

–

–

1865

Thomas Stuchbury

1851

–

–

Alive

George Taylor

1851

–

–

1879

Robert Bartlett

1851

–

–

1865

Henry East

1852

–

–

1855

Robert Roper

1852

–

–

1862

William Tibbetts

1852

–

–

1861

Rev HW Smith

1852

1853

1857, 1862, 1866

Alive

Richard Jones

1853

1874

–

1878

John Nichols

1853

–

–

1878

John Collier

1853

1878

1880

Alive

Thomas Pratt

1855

–

–

1864

John Richardson

1855

–

–

Alive

Henry Hawkins

1855

–

–

Alive

Robert Weston

1858

1860

1863, 1867, 1871

1872

Robert Russel

1860

1872

1872, 1875, 1879

Alive

Henry Holton

1861

–

–

Alive

William Blencowe

1861

1880

–

Alive

Thomas Slatter

1862

–

–

Alive

Walter Moore

1862

–

–

Alive

John G. Clarke

1862

–

–

Alive

William Ellis

1863

–

–

Alive

Clement Blencowe

1863

–

–

Alive

John Farmer

1864

–

–

Alive

Robert Anstee

1865

–

–

Alive

William Tucker

1865

–

–

Alive

James Goodman

1867

–

–

Alive

Robert Hawkins

1868

–

–

Alive

John Walsh

1870

–

–

Alive

Edward Bartlett

1871

–

–

Alive

John Hopcraft

1872

–

–

1874

Richard Judge

1873

–

–

Alive

Arthur Nichols

1874

–

–

Alive

Robert Hocter

1876

–

–

Alive

Alfred Hopcraft

1878

–

–

Alive

William Cave

1878

–

–

Alive

Joseph Nichols

1879

–

–

Alive

William King

1880

–

–

Alive

There are clear signs that membership had become virtually hereditary in a few families. In many instances a burgess was elected shortly after the death of his father. Thus, Edward Bartlett died in 1850 and Robert Bartlett became Burgess in 1851. Alfred Hopcraft died in 1872 and John Hopcraft became Burgess the same year.

After the Enclosure Act of 1829, it was logical to proceed to an arrangement on Tithe Commutation. The agreement was drawn up by the Local Surveyor, Robert Russel, on 22 February 1840 and confirmed by the Tithe Commissioners on 19 December of the same year. The former Rectorial Tithes became an annual payment of £167 10s to the Bridgewater Trustees and the Vicarial Tithes an annual payment of £238 6s 10¼d to Rev Sage. The largest payments were due from the Halse farmers, all tenants of the Bridgewater Trustees. Thomas Bannard was to pay £34 to the Vicar on 338 acres, the representatives of the late Robert Bartlett £46 on 335 acres, Mary Butterfield £32 on 247 acres, Alfred Hopcraft £74 on two farms totalling nearly 400 acres. Payments on the Magdalen properties were significantly lower, with the Vicar receiving only £17 10s on just over 200 acres. The measure probably helped to prevent the regular bickering over tithes, once such a feature of local life. Yet both sides were taking a gamble. The agreement was based upon current prices; if they went up the occupiers would benefit and the former tithe owners would suffer; but if prices fell – as they were to in the late nineteenth century – it would be the other way around.

As well as his membership of the Corporation, Sage also presided at Vestry Meetings – which had a more important role in the running of the town. But neither the Vestry nor the Corporation did much for ordinary people. Sage was not a popular figure; he seemed more interested in punishing the poor as a magistrate and a Guardian than in caring for their physical and spiritual welfare as their Vicar. In Sage’s time, the Church in Brackley was at a low ebb and the Methodists were the most vital force in the town. An article in the Methodist Recorder of 4 February 1904 – admittedly hardly an unbiased source – says of these years, ‘But for the Methodists, there would have been neither education or piety in the town. In those days, alas, the Church was deserted, the Grammar School scarcely known.’

In his last years, John Wesley had visited Brackley on several occasions when staying with his friends, the Padbury family of Whittlebury. The Padburys were related to the Burmans of Brackley and Samuel Burman, then ‘a prosperous trader’ (actually a shoemaker), was the first active Methodist in the town. At first, the Methodists were unpopular and Burman’s shoes were boycotted. His business seemed on the brink of collapse, but he saved it by walking to Northampton to secure orders. One morning, when Burman opened his front door, he found a great heap of stones had been piled against it during the night; of course, the stones fell into the house. The Vicar, Thomas Woodman, sent for Burman’s son and urged him to give up his connection with the Methodists; the young man refused. Although the tactics used against the ‘Methodies’ were essentially ‘horse play’, they could be distinctly unpleasant.

About this time, a preacher took his stand in the Market Square, but soon the alarm was given and some of the baser sort brought a heap of straw to the place, set light to it and began to cry, ‘Fire! Fire!’. The engine was brought, water procured and they played pretty freely on the straw, not forgetting the people who were assembled to hear the preacher. They were compelled to retire to a friend’s house, but thither the engine and its friends followed and continued to annoy them.8

Initially, the Methodists met in a small room but then moved to a larger one near to St James’s Church. A Brackley Methodist Circuit was established in 1799. This was amalgamated into the Banbury Circuit in 1804 but was re-established as a separate Circuit in 1809. The new Circuit had thirteen preaching places and 240 members and was headed by Rev John Sydserff and Rev Jarvis Shaw.

A number of prominent Methodists, including Rev Joseph Gostick, visited the community in Brackley. Gostick discovered a prayer meeting for ‘Single Females of the Society’ from which married women were rigorously excluded. Gostick was moved to write a poem, dated 21 April 1816, urging a more liberal attitude:

Reject, then, good sisters, this foolish condition,

And at least grant your sisters, though married, permission,

In that sacred temple with you to appear,

And yet in devotion may join you without fear.

Imitate those assemblies before the bright throne,

Where idle distinctions shall never be known,

Then Angels and Saints your praises shall join,

Who with heart and with voice in your service combine.9

By 1830, the Methodists were strong enough to erect a purpose-built Chapel in Hill Street (formerly Tinkers’ Lane). When the author of the article in the Methodist Recorder came to Brackley, he met an old lady, Dinah Fennimore, who could remember playing on the building site when she had been a little girl. On the day the Chapel was opened, there was flooding in the ‘Bottom End’ and some of the men who attended had to walk through the flood carrying their wives on their backs. Later a gallery was added. The Methodists were so delighted with their new Chapel that they gave the builder more than he had asked for, ‘an act of surprising generosity, of which only a poor and pious people could be capable’.

Arrangements in the services were informal. One elderly shepherd, who normally sat in the gallery, would always stroll down, accompanied by his dog, to sit on the pulpit steps so that he could hear the sermon better. The Trustees eventually widened one of the steps so that shepherd and dog could be more comfortable.10 The Chapel profited directly from the demolition of St James’s Church in 1836. John Tibbetts acquired the Communion table and a chandelier from St James’s and gave them to the Chapel. The table eventually found its way back into Anglican hands and is now in St Peter’s Church.

By the 1840s, the Methodist community contained a number of families who were to be pillars of the Chapel into the twentieth century, although a few, such as the Garretts and the Kendals, returned to the Church in the 1870s. The Methodist Recorder mentions: Thomas and James Gaskins, Robert Buckley, Robert Freeman, Mr Jones of Hethe, old Mrs Archer (the Chapel Keeper), Mrs Whitten, Mrs French, Mrs East of Hinton, Mr and Mrs Sirett, John Osmund of Westbury, Robert Blackwell (the leader of the choir for forty years) and Billy Jakeman. Although the article does not say so, Billy Jakeman was a little ‘simple’, but he used to carry ‘good old Mr Tibbets’’ base viol in its green baize cover up to the gallery at every service, come down to the door to await the minister’s arrival and ‘then take the hymns triumphantly up to the leading singers, Mr Richard Kendal and Mr Richard Garrett, both Masters of song’.

It is unlikely that the author of the article was told what happened to Billy Jakeman. Although admirable in many ways, the Methodist community failed to look after its poor simpleton. The Brackley Observer of 19 November 1873 contains this sad report:

William Jakeman, so long and familiarly known to our readers, died on Sunday last in the Workhouse. The Deceased, on being received into the House was, we are informed, literally in a state of starvation and, although Dr Farmer immediately rendered him all the assistance that could be afforded, he was unable to cope with the effects of previous neglect, want and misery.

In the early days of Methodism, the element of ‘enthusiasm’ was strong and there are accounts of experiences bordering on the ecstatic. In 1832, Rev James Penman died at Brackley after a few days’ illness, ‘unspeakably happy in God’. Even more extraordinary was the deathbed of John Osmund of Westbury:

It was related of this good man that his departure was signalised in a remarkable manner. He had endured great domestic opposition and trouble and in his last hours was attended, in the absence of every member of his family, by two kind neighbours. These persons declared that, as they watched the dying man, they suddenly were aware of strains of music which seemed to come nearer and nearer until they filled the room and at the same time a bright unearthly light shone upon the countenance of the old saint. The music gradually passed away as it had come and he was gone. They declared that they never would forget this scene and the token God had given to the sincerity and fidelity of his Servant as long as they lived.11

All accounts of the Chapel agree that most of the early members were ‘in lowly circumstances’. The cost of the new Chapel proved a heavy burden and the debt was not cleared until 1859. In view of their poverty, the Methodists’ efforts in education – to be discussed later – seem all the more praiseworthy.

The religious census of 1851 shows that, for Northamptonshire as a whole, 56 per cent of regular worshippers went to Church as against 44 per cent who went to some kind of Chapel. But the Nonconformists were not united. The 1851 Census also reveals that no fewer than fifty-one rural communities in Northamptonshire had more than one Chapel. There was least likely to be a Chapel of any description in villages where the living was in the gift of an Oxford College; thus, any Dissenters from Evenley, a Magdalen living, had to worship in Brackley. In places with two Chapels, however, one was likely to be Methodist, the other Baptist or Independent. This was the normal pattern where a town had either lost or was narrowly holding onto its market. In Brackley the ‘second’ Chapel took the form of an Independent or Congregational community. There had been Independents in Brackley in the late seventeenth century, but they seem to have died out well before the rise of Methodism. Thomas Coleman’s Memorials of the Independent Churches in Northamptonshire (1853) suggests that Brackley Congregationalism was a recent development.12

There were many Congregational Chapels in Northamptonshire, but the one in Brackley had closer links with Buckinghamshire. In the early 1830s, the North Bucks Association, which had an academy at Newport Pagnell, obtained a room to hold services but this soon proved inadequate for the large congregation.13 In 1836, however, the present Chapel was erected in the Banbury Road at a cost of £650; unlike the Methodists, the Congregationalists seem to have been able to raise the necessary money with comparative ease. According to Coleman, the Chapel could seat 300 people, but that must have been a very tight fit. By 1838, there were twenty full members with a resident minister – Mr G Smith; it was Smith who ‘first administered the Ordinance of the Lord’s Supper’ on 24 June 1838.14 But Smith did not stay long and the community was left ‘destitute of a pastor’ for extended periods.