Pictures of an (old exhibition)

Following our exhibition in the Wilmslow Library on the Bowers we have received a number of requests, if it would be possible to publish the posters we produced originally for our first exhibition in Wilmslow Parish Church in 2011 as part of the Heritage Open Days.

The posters have been reused a number of times since (and may appear again, when appropriate), but in the meantime, we hope that they will be of use to you.

Thanks for getting in touch.

How the Bowers obtained Hawthorne Hall

"Hawthorn" is a very common name element in the centre of Wilmslow with at least half a dozen streets and numerous houses and businesses including it in its name. The origin of this naming practice dates back to Hawthorn Hall and its estate, which seems to have been in existence since the late Middle Ages.

In the late 18th century the Hawthorn estate consisted of 44 Cheshire acres (which seems to have been a bit of a moveable feast in terms of size), much of which was held in tenancy by a number of local farmers, including Samuel Roylance, Thomas Clarke and William Lawton with most of the land lying around the old Hawthorne Hall. Today this hall still exists and is now back in use as a private residence after a long and varied history of a school and later as offices. It lies now in the middle of the Pownall part of Wilmslow, but by the early 19th century, it was considered to be part of Morley, a term used to describe the entire Western part of the town from Kennersley's Lane to the parish boundaries to the West and to Knoll's Green in the South. For the most part, the area consisted of the moor and heathland of the Lindow Common with a few well-established farms around modern-day Morley and Pownall Hall - and of course Hawthorn Hall.

In addition to the main hall and the farm land, Hawthorn Hall had its own private chapel as part of St. Bartholomew's, documenting the pre-reformation origins of the Hall and its importance to the parish life. Unlike the main nave, it was private property and could (and was) sold and rented out at the will of the owners of the Hawthorn estate, who had the right to be buried in perpetuity inside the chapel and later inside the nave, when the majority of parishioners saw their remains moved from temporary graves in the outside cemetery to a communal ossuary after 20 years (this practice only changed with the extension of the cemetery in the 1860s).

By the late 1700s the estate had long since passed out of the original ownership of the younger branches of the Booths of Dunham Massey (and via the Lathom family) into the hands of the Leighs, some of which served as Sheriffs of the County of Cheshire. In the 1770s the Hall was owned by Thomas Leigh Page and his wife Susan, two of whose children were born in the Hall (and christened in St.Bartholomew's) in 1772 and 1774. However, by 1799 the family decided to move to Devon, where Thomas Leigh Page's will was proved in 1810.

The estate and all its furniture and equipment were put up for sale from the 28th May onwards and the sale advertised in the Cheshire Courant, the Chester Chronicle and the Manchester Mercury.
The Pages clearly decided to make a fresh start in Devon and the sales notice most of the house inventory, including a mahogany dining set, four-poster and "tent" beds (we would call them canopy beds) and dressing glasses (large dressing mirrors) as well as several draft horses and 'brewing equipment' (Chester Chronicle 31/5/1799).

Despite this far-reaching advertising, no buyer could be found for the Hall on the first sales day on August 26th and the sale (which took place in the Swan Inn (now Anthology) in Swan Street) had to be rescheduled for the 23rd of September 1799 (Manchester Mercury 3 September 1799), when Ralph Bower decided to buy the entire estate.

This slow sale of a large house is by no means unusual during the Napoleonic era. It is thought that the period 1795-1820 saw the biggest upheaval in land ownership until the 1920s. The British economy was very much under stress, with the Continental Blockade cutting Britain off from some of its export markets and also to a lesser extent from its possessions and trade partners in the Caribbean and elsewhere. On the other hand, the blockade also stopped the import of a lot of Italian, but especially French luxury goods and opened large business opportunities for businessmen willing to run high risks. With these large changes, it is hardly surprising, to see that large estates unable to adapt might run into financial difficulties or decide to restructure, while a lot of the entrepreneurs especially in the North of England were able to take advantage of offers and invest heavily in land, and the opportunity it offered in providing amongst others beef to the British forces for the duration of the Napoleonic Wars.

By 1799, the Bower family had already invested heavily in a diverse portfolio of businesses, from cotton spinning and weaving to ownership of mills (including for grain) and different farms as well as investment into Turnpike Trusts. We don't know, what attracted Ralph Bower specifically to buy the Hawthorn Estate, but it is possible, that beyond the economic opportunities he saw the chance to obtain a prestigious seat for the family and the chance to document for the rest of Wilmslow that the Bowers had arrived.

Bibliography:
T.Cadell and W.Davies (1810), The county Palatinate of Chester. Vol. 2,2.

Ann Bower's Lifeboat

During the 1870s and 1880s the most influential member of the Bowers was Ann Bower, the unmarried cousin of William Bower, who used her considerable wealth generated by rental income from land and houses particularly along Gravel Lane and the Knutsford road to support numerous projects associated with St. Bartholomew's. 

Ann’s wealth was the result of a series of inheritances, first from her father William Bower, who in 1827 split his estate of the Grove (roughly both sides of Grove Street from Hawthorne Lane to Water Lane, and to Old Street (now Green Lane) to the East and to Grove Way in the West. 

His only son, George, became a successful lawyer in London, while the two daughters Ann and Isabella remained in Wilmslow (both the 1861 and 1871 Census shows them living in Grove Street). 

After George’s death in 1865, both sisters inherited his wealth and with it his executors as wealth managers. While at first, they appear to have continued in Wilmslow, by 1877 they had moved to their brother’s estate in Kent, where on the 27th May Isabella died, aged 69, leaving her property of slightly less than 7000GBP to her sister as well. 

In the years following Isabella’s death, Ann continued to administer her wealth with the help of her brother’s friends, whose help is expressly acknowledged in her 1884 will. Her support for charitable causes must have been very important to her as she actually mentions a special fund set up to maintain her charitable giving. Thanks to various local sources (and not least her own epitaph in St.Bartholomew’s) we know that she supported a large number of causes in and around Wilmslow, but occasionally her activities stretched much further afield.

According to her epitaph, she also donated a lifeboat named in memory of her brother and sister the “George and Isabella”. Now East Cheshire, and even more so Wilmslow is not generally known for its coastal sites and thus the support for a lifeboat is slightly unusual. Her support becomes even more noteworthy when it is realised that the “George and Isabella” was a lifeboat that was stationed in Ackergill bay, just north of Wick at the very northern tip of Caithness, as far as possible in Britain from Ann’s other sphere of interest in London and Cheshire. 

So what could possibly have led Ann to support this cause? First of all, this may have been a matter of timing. The lifeboat was very much a memorial, and her sister Isabella died on 27th May 1877 (Wilmslow Advertiser 4 June 1877). We know the names of many of the other lifeboats donated at the time and they were frequently named after people close to the donors so this may have seen to have socially acceptable precedent as a form of memorial to an unmarried sister. 

At this time, furthermore, Britain was facing a number of inquiries into the performance of lifeboats in the hands of various organisation throughout the British Isles and the newspapers carried every month stories about the efforts to save lives by the lifeboat crews around the coast. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) had been founded in 1824, but had been given a Royal Charter only in 1860 and was at this point a cause celebre, rapidly replacing other providers of these services such as the Fisheries Board with a reputation of efficiency and devotion to the cause.

In the spring of 1877 a board of enquiries into the wreck of the Emilie with heavy loss of Life in Wick had called for the establishment for a new lifeboat at Ackergill bay and much advertised fundraising in support of the boat, boathouse and maintenance of the crew was well underway, although short of the GBP1000, with initial donations at first coming to GBP158. We do not know when or how Ann heard of this appeal, but it must have been before she returned to Wilmslow, as in 1878 she is described as still living in Kent. The newspaper articles at the time describe her as paying for the entire boat, GBP 278 in total. To put this in proportion, Trollope describes GBP 800 a year sufficient for a Gentleman and his family to live on, while a railway porter was earning about GBP40 a year and a senior manager would make about GBP300.

By the middle of March 1878, the “George and Isabella” was ready to launch in Wick. National newspapers as far south as the South London Gazette (23 May 1878) carried notices about the opening ceremony, which was attended by the head of the (then) Royal Lifeboat Institute as well as all local dignitaries and about 4000 visitors. (In 1881 the towns of Wick and Pulteney had just 6820 inhabitants (F.H.Groome 1882-5, Wick)). The lifeboat is described as self-righting and thus the latest and best design available at the time. Ann Bower, while named as the donor of the lifeboat appears not to have been in Wick for the occasion (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 15 March 1878). This may not be too much of a surprise, however: officially she was still in mourning for her sister and would not be expected to take part in public meetings. But even more so, Ann Bower was by now 75 years old and the Railway line from Inverness, opened in 1874 would take about 7,5 hours to get to Wick, making this probably too arduous a journey for the lady, who would have had to travel from Kent, where she still seems to have resided at the time. 

The George and Isabella lifeboat remained in use in Ackergill bay until 1888, when it was replaced with a more modern design. Ann Bower died four years earlier and her epitaph in St. Bartholomew's in Wilmslow is the last reminder of this lifeboat. 

Research by Howard Barlow and Birgitta Hoffmann 

Bibliography:

Andrew D. Anderson, Ackergill Lifeboat (1877 ‑ 1932). Caithness Field Club Bulletin 2002. (Now available at http://www.caithness.org/caithnessfieldclub/bulletins/2002/ackergill_lifeboat.htm (accessed 8/10/2017)

Francis H. Groome (1882-1885), Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland: A Survey of Scottish Topography, Statistical, Biographical and Historical, Thomas C. Jack,  Grange Publishing Works, Edinburgh. (Accessed via http://www.scottish-people.info/parishes/parhistory116.html (accessed 8/10/2017).

The Highland Council (2014) Population change in Caithness and Sutherland 2001 to 2011.  Planning and Development Service. Policy and Information Briefing Note 57. Inverness: The Highland Council.

New exhibition opened in Wilmslow Library: The Bowers. The family that shaped Wilmslow

Some of you must have thought that this blog is now officially defunct and my apologies for making you think that.

But over the last six months, several volunteers of the Wilmslow Community Archaeology and me have been very much working behind the scenes putting together a new exhibition in Wilmslow Library. At times it felt as if we would never manage to get all the research done and then it turned  suddenly into, how much of this will we have to cut, to fit it still all on the boards?

Yesterday evening we finally managed to set it all up and the first visitors made some very nice comments - Thank you, to those who came to the early viewing.

The title of the exhibition is "The Bowers. The family that shaped Wilmslow".

During our years of research in and around Wilmslow, the name of the Bower family kept appearing in the records again and again - usually as one of the people who were able to move events along and change the history of what was when they started a village of about 4000 very dispersed souls.

By the time Ralph Bower the councillor died in 1900, the place had become a very prosperous suburban town at the fringes of Manchester, with a very international outlook on life and business.

The exhibition traces the history of the Bower family over four generations from the first Ralph Bower, who moved from the family farm at Great Warford to Wilmslow and started a spinning mill in a property next to the Parish church, via his sons who developed the family business to a considerable size and that made them into one of the wealthiest families on North Cheshire and Wilmslow into one of the first town in the Northwest to have Gaslighting, to the change of direction in the 1850-1880s away from the manufacturing into property development and the creation of the high-quality houses and neighbourhoods that they built for other businessmen, who were moving into the suburbs.
The family was very much engaged with the local churches and the creation of the schools at St.Bartholomew's and the church and school of St.Anne's in Fulshaw and in the last generation as members and eventually chairman of the newly created Urban District Council.

Tracing the history of the Bower family through the original records of the 18th and 19th century revealed a family that emerged from the local area and remained true to their roots over 150 years and saw a lot of change in Wilmslow parish, a lot of which they had helped to create. The amazing fact is that with this huge importance for the area, they have attracted very little attention in the past, possibly because they were neither titled aristocracy nor did they leave impression industrial structure, but instead an infrastructure framework, without which this town would look very different, whether it is through their generous gifts to local schools and churches, their far-sighted investment in the A34 turnpike or the creation of Grove Street as Wilmslow's shopping and business centre.

The exhibition will be open at Wilmslow Library until Friday 20th October during normal Library opening hours (http://www.cheshireeast.gov.uk/libraries/nearest_library/wilmslow_library/wilmslow_library.aspx) and we hope to use this blog in the coming weeks to add a bit more background information on the family to the story of the exhibition.

Thank you

To Cheshire Libraries and Archives, Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast, the National Archives, The British Library, St.Bartholomew's Parish, Wilmslow Historical Society and a number of residents in Wilmslow who share their documents and records with us, while we have been researching this exhibition. 

We are very grateful to Mailboxes etc Wilmslow and the Waitrose Community Fund for supporting this project.