Hull History Centre: Papers of the Baines Family of Bell Hall, Naburn U DDBH Papers of the Baines Family 1421-1918 of Bell Hall, Naburn Biographical Background: The estate papers in this collection relate to two families - Hewley and Baines - who had resided in Wistow from about the fourteenth century. From the 1660s John Hewley (born in Wistow in 1619), lawyer of Gray's Inn and whig MP for Pontefract and also York, began buying land at Naburn. Nonconformist in religion, he may have done this to get around the law that prevented nonconformist ministers from residing within five miles of York. The property had been in the York families of Bell and North and their earlier mansion house was demolished by John Hewley in 1679 to erect a new Bell Hall, just 500 yards from the River Ouse ('Bell Hall', Country Life, p.820; Wilberforce-Bell & Alec-Smith, 'Bell Hall', pp.22-3; Allison, History of the county of York, iii, p.77). John Hewley was married to Sarah Woolryche (b.1627), who was an active presbyterian sympathiser and wood panelling in Bell Hall is reputed to hide cavities in the walls where she hid presbyterian ministers. John and Sarah Hewley had two sons but they both died young and when John Hewley died in 1695 he left a large bequest to his sister's grandson. She was Margaret Hewley (1620-1659) and she had married John Baines (b.1623) from their home village of Wistow. Sarah Hewley was the heiress of her father, Robert Woolryche, and when she died in 1710 she left bequests to the nonconformist church and the rest of the Bell Hall estate to the grandson of Margaret Hewley and John Baines as well (Baines, Old Naburn, pedigree; Arnold, 'Bell Hall'; Wilberforce-Bell & Alec-Smith, 'Bell Hall', pp.23-4). By this means, Bell Hall changed hands from the Hewley to the Baines family, who have owned the house since 1710 and it is unusual in being a house that has never changed hands by purchase. Hewley Baines was born in 1693 and therefore was just 17 when he inherited. He married Lucy Masterman, probably around 1720, and they had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood. Their eldest son, Hewley Baines (b.1721), succeeded to the Bell Hall estates when his father died in the same year as his mother in 1760. He married Mary Ellis (1733-1778) in 1754 and they had nine children. He died in 1800 and was succeeded by Hewley John Baines (b.1762), who is the first member of the family for whom there is any correspondence some of which relates to his activities as colonel of the York Volunteers (Baines, Old Naburn, pedigree; Wilberforce-Bell & Alec-Smith, 'Bell Hall', p.24). Hewley John Baines married Mary Mortimer (1762-1826) in 1786 and they had one son, Hewley Mortimer Baines (b.1788) and three daughters, one of whom died at the age of two and a half and the other two at the relatively young ages of twenty five and thirty nine years. Mary Baines began a family tradition of keeping samples of hair, all of which survive in the collection, the earliest samples being that of her eldest daughter, Mary Ann (b.1789) taken when she was not quite two, in 1791, and then when she died later in the same year (Baines, Old Naburn, pedigree; U DX/196/2). Hewley John Baines died in 1830 and was succeeded to the Bell Hall estates by Hewley Mortimer Baines who was married to Mary Harrison (b.1798). They had four children and were destined to outlive all but one of them. Their eldest child, Mary Catherine (b.1821), married John James Harrison in 1845, from a successful banking family at Harrogate, and they had nine children before she died in 1871. The second child, Hewley John Baines (b.1823), was a captain of the 95th regiment of foot and served in Ireland. In 1844 he secretly married Clara Maria Wade and she died within the year. When he remarried, Esther Mary Shannon, in 1846, his father, angered at his conduct, cut him out of his will. Letters of Hewley John Baines and his second wife are in the collection. They had no children and he died in 1855. Their third child, Henry Baines (b.1824), was a captain in the East Yorkshire militia and there is correspondence of his in the collection as well, page 1 of 308 Hull History Centre: Papers of the Baines Family of Bell Hall, Naburn including letters home from a trip to America. He married Emily Jane Pease, but died without issue in 1868, so never succeeding to the estates; his father was, by this time, the oldest inhabitant in the region (Baines, Old Naburn, pedigree; U DX/196/1). The fourth child of this generation, William Mortimer Baines, was born in 1830 and has left a very considerable number of personal papers starting with early letters to his father while at Bishopton Close School and Rugby. As a young man he travelled out to New Zealand, meeting and marrying there Mary Ann Verdon in 1855. In the early 1850s he bought land in Auckland and the Waikato, engaging in saw milling and gold prospecting. He and his wife lived at Remuera and Mount Eden where they had no less than seven children in the first dozen years they were married. These were: Mary Frances Mortimer Baines (b.1856), Katherine Baines (b.1858), Rosa Augustin Baines (1861), Emily Edith and Annie Baines, twins (b.1863), Hewley Mortimer Baines (1865) and Henry Verdon Baines (b.1868). This last child was born just three days before the death of William Mortimer Baines' brother Henry and his father wrote immediately saying that as the heir to Bell Hall he should return home. Within a few months he boarded the 'Kate Waters' with his eldest daughter who had never seen England or her English grandparents. Mary Ann Baines remained in New Zealand with their six youngest children and arranged for their Mount Eden estate to be let, following her husband at the end of the next year (Baines, Old Naburn, pedigree; U DX/196/1). In 1870 William Mortimer and Mary Ann Baines rented Hemingborough Hall, buying the furniture in it, and on 30 August their eighth child, Ethel Mary Baines, was born in England. She was followed by Hilda Jane Maud Baines in 1872 and Mary Ann Baines was pregnant again when her husband finally succeeded to Bell Hall on the deaths of Hewley Mortimer Baines and his wife Mary within a month of one another in early 1874. The growing family moved into Bell Hall in time for William Philip to be born in May 1874. He was followed over the next ten years by five more children: Lucy Masterman Baines (1876), Leonard Mortimer Baines (1878), Winifred Esther Nona Baines (1879), Dorothy Sybella Baines (1881) and Walter Francis Woolryche Baines (1884). William Mortimer Baines and his wife, Mary Ann, were extremely unusual: despite having a very large family and emigrating right around the world not one of their children was lost in infancy or to childhood illness. All of their children except one lived into the twentieth century, nearly all of them living to old age. Only William Philip Baines, the first to be born in England, died as a young adult in the ship wreck of the 'Port Yarrock' off the coast of Ireland in 1894. Three of their children went to live overseas: Rosa Augusta Baines became a nurse in India and the eldest son, Hewley Mortimer Baines, was an engineer in the public works department in India. Letters from them in India are a useful source for Indian colonial history. Hilda Jane Maud Baines married a doctor and went to live in South Australia (Baines, Old Naburn, pedigree; U DX/196/2). This generation inherited its long-livedness from both parents. William Mortimer Baines died in 1912, at the age of eighty-two. His wife, despite fourteen pregnancies, outlived him, dying at the age of ninety-three years, in 1932. William Mortimer Baines published two books during his life, the first soon after his return from New Zealand, about his experiences there: The Narrative of Edward Crewe (1874). The second book was published some twenty years later, when he was selling off his New Zealand property and was very settled on his inherited estate at Bell Hall: Old Naburn (1895). Mary Ann Baines went on living at Bell Hall after the death of her husband and the property was then held in trust by their two eldest sons, Hewley Mortimer Baines (d.1945) and Henry Verdon Baines (d.1954), before passing to the eldest son of Hewley Mortimer Baines, John Hewley Baines, solicitor (b.1935). Bell Hall, a brick house, with stone dressings, five bays wide and three tall (with basement and attic also), is a beautiful, symmetrical, Wren-style house that pre-figures the best Georgian architecture while still containing much of its richly-carved, seventeenth-century wood pannelling. It also contains many page 2 of 308 Hull History Centre: Papers of the Baines Family of Bell Hall, Naburn portraits of this lively and interesting East Yorkshire family (Wilberforce-Bell & Alec-Smith, 'Bell Hall', p.24; Allison, History of the county of York, iii, pp.77-8). Custodial history: Deposited in the East Riding Record Office by J H Baines in 1963 and transferred to Hull University Archives in 1974. Hull University Archives purchased the collection from the executors of J H Baines in June 2021 with the aid of grants from Friends of the National Libraries and a private donor.