The History of Tarleton & Hesketh Bank and their Maritime Past “We Built This Village on Rock’n’Coal” By David Edmondson A version of this book is accessible on-line at http://www.heskethbank.com/history.html It is intended that the on-line version will be amended and updated as further information on the villages’ history emerges The author can be contacted on: [email protected] 1 Index Dedication Preface Introduction Geography & General History of Tarleton and Hesketh Bank Time line Village photographs Tarleton & Hesketh Bank Population – Names and Numbers Population Infant mortality, life expectancy, and Causes of Death Surnames Occupations What did Village People Look Like and Sound Like? Influences on the Maritime Economy Roads Rivers Canals Railways Cargos on the Ribble-Douglas-Canal waterway Sailing Ships Built at Tarleton and Hesketh Bank Historical Background List of Ships Built at Tarleton and Hesketh Bank Boatmen, Sailors and Mariners List of Identified Mariners of Tarleton and Hesketh Bank Ship Owners List of Ships with Owners from Tarleton and Hesketh Bank Summary A Bonus: Oddments Collected along the Way: Crime, Religion, Mayors of Tarleton, Types of Sailing Ships, Reading Old Handwriting, Local Dialect, Chelsea Pensioner, Col. Banastre Tarleton Further Sources to be Explored 2 This book is dedicated to my father: John Henry Edmondson 1914-1999 He was born in Tarleton and died in Tarleton. In between he was postman to the villages of Tarleton and Hesketh Bank for 32 years, and was Clerk to Tarleton Parish Council for 48 years. He knew the villages well and was well known in the villages. 3 Preface I would have liked to have written the definitive history of Tarleton and Hesketh Bank. I am not in a position to do so. To attempt it would risk my becoming a permanent and unfulfilled researcher. I have settled for a history of these villages told with a particular emphasis, namely their maritime history. To document the maritime history of the villages’ detached from its context in the broader history of the villages, would I believe, have limited how informative and satisfying to the reader, and to me, the end product would be. Other people could write a history with a different focus, just as valuable. So it is a history, not the history. Other histories have already been written, for which we should be hugely grateful, each a valuable record, each also revealing the thought processes which dominated the writer. Baines ‘History of the County Palatine’ is dominated by family dynasties, church, and physical attributes; more recently Janet Dandy’s book captures the common knowledge of village folk in her reminiscences before it was lost for ever. My account, besides its maritime focus, has an analytical research bias. This research bias is fed by my formal education which started at Tarleton Church of England School and ended with a degree in Pure Maths and Chemistry with postgraduate studies in Operational Research. This numerical bias in my higher education may become painfully obvious to readers in some sections of this book. The research bias is also assisted by the availability of information provided by the now open-door approach of the previously bureaucratic holders of historical documents, and the analytical capability offered by information technology. 4 Introduction Tarleton, in west Lancashire, to the casual visitor would appear to be an inland village, and so it is. It is a modern village not lightly giving up a sense of its past, likewise the neighbouring village of Hesketh Bank. The agricultural past might well be guessed, and be seen in its modern form all around the outskirts of the urbanisation, but few such visitors, and probably not all of the villages’ current residents, would have much inclination of the maritime history that was such a major part of these villages’ past. True each village still boasts a working boatyard but they are hard to find. When found, whilst both have healthy businesses at their heart meeting today’s demand, the waterside surrounding these businesses looks like the resting place for half pursued pastimes and over-optimistic projects, with a few serious endeavours lurking amongst them. But these boatyards are the key to unlock the maritime history of these two West Lancashire villages, standing as they do on the River Douglas. The Douglas forms the eastern boundary to both villages and runs into the bigger River Ribble which provides the northerly boundary of Hesketh Bank. Significantly these two Rivers are tidal at this point and for some way beyond inland. In a time when our current-day means of transport didn’t exist this made them significant geographic assets and the focus of much maritime activity in the villages. I use the word maritime in an exaggerated sense to mean the commercial involvement with boats: seagoing and inland. In the mid 1800s very roughly a quarter of the adult male workforce was engaged with boats. Many were described as Boatmen principally working on barges. Some in the loading and unloading of cargos to and from landing stages or to and from larger seagoing vessels; others engaged in shipping goods inland by river or canal and bringing return loads. Other men were sea-going, described as Sailors or Mariners. As the century wore on, this later group provided Mariners, and especially Master Mariners, for the expanding ports elsewhere, particularly Barrow-in-Furness, about fifty miles by sea north of Tarleton (eighty miles by road) on the coast of what is now Cumbria. Most of these seafarers worked coasters up and down the English and Welsh coast, but a few of them would sail to Ireland, France and Spain for cargos. Their descendants are settled around the west coast, but especially in the Barrow and Ulverston area. Ship building forms a substantial part of this maritime history. Around sixty sea-going sailing ships built at Tarleton or Hesketh Bank between 1762 and 1886 have been identified. These ranged from 50 to100 feet long, with tonnage in the same range. Most were rigged as Schooners but some are also described as Sloops, Flats and Wherries. These sailing ships have been identified by their registrations in their home port, a requirement which only began in 1786 and only applied to sea-going vessels. Many more which didn’t need to be registered were built: fishing boats (Nobbys) at Hesketh Bank, sailing barges at Tarleton. These have proved more difficult to identify. 5 Despite there being little evidence on the ground of this almost vanished economy, a considerable amount of information is available. Some is in the form of original documentation: the registration book of sailing ships for Preston, crew lists for various ports, both these originals at Lancashire County Records Office; and the Tarleton lock keeper’s log book held privately, etc. Other information is now easily available via the web: census records; births, marriages, and deaths; both giving extensive information on names and occupations. Available it may be, but to make it powerful does require some painstaking work to extract and analyse. Encouragement in this labour of analysis is gained from the fact that what was at the time the mechanical workings of an emerging bureaucracy is now a peep-hole into the history on our doorstep held in large leather bound books writ in flowing ink oozing the aura of the time and showing us how things worked. They also give us occasional insights into personal stories: ‘The Joseph’ built at Tarleton 1816 lost with its Master Lawrence Johnson and all hands, off Whitehaven 1866 (testified by his sister Mary Norris); the disastrous launch in 1879 of ‘The Tarleton Lass’ which cost its captain William Higham the lives of two of his children, and three other young people. It is the aim of this book to present the results of this analysis in a framework which paints a picture of the maritime history of Tarleton and Hesketh Bank particularly over the period from the late 1700s to the end of the 1800s, a period which saw the rise of this economy to its peak and the beginnings of its decline, but also to set this activity in the broader context of the development of the villages over time, and the influential causes. In doing so, some sections of the book will be a narrative whilst others will contain extensive lists and numerical analysis. Consequently the book should be readable to those with an interest in the subject or the locality, whereas others may use the details contained within it to discover references to particular mariners, ships, etc. which will launch them into further research in primary sources. The reader will also quickly identify avenues into adjacent topics worthy of research and analysis. I hope it does prompt a few people to research these areas, it needs ‘anoraks’ to do so – the good news is that technology has made techno-anoraks fashionable. Geography & General History of Tarleton and Hesketh Bank Our story concerns four ‘villages’: Hesketh Bank, Becconsall, Tarleton and Sollom. They run in that sequence from north to south on the westerly bank of the River Douglas. Becconsall is now a sub-district of Hesketh Bank and Sollom a sub-district of Tarleton. Mere Brow and Holmes (sub-districts of Tarleton) and Hundred End (part of Hesketh Bank) though detached from the rivers do receive some references in the text. 6 The geography of the villages’ area, both natural, and man’s manipulation of it, have fashioned their history. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recalls the conquest of North Meols in 923 by the English king and its transfer from Northumbria to Mercia.