Wells or bells?

Last year I was most disappointed to not be able to attend the very first Bell Festival that was held across town. It was September 2023, and I always seem to have a lot on in September, but luckily, I had someone who attended on my behalf, and took some wonderful photographs which I shared on a blog post.   

This year, the event was held in the latter half of October, and I was able to turn up at the events taking place, mostly in the older part of Loughborough, near the parish church and the old Rectory. True, the Bellfoundry was open, but I was unable to make it to the factory.

The whole event opened in the early evening. You may be familiar with well-dressing – an occasion in many Derbyshire and Peak District villages when the wells that supplied water are adorned with handcrafted artworks, often created from natural materials like petals and seeds, or possibly with clay decorations. The events seem to run between May and September, but there seem to be several different theories as to the origin of well-dressing. Perhaps it started as a pagan celebration to thank the gods for the supply of water; or perhaps it originated around the time of the Black Death (c.1348), when people were very thankful for a clean water supply; or perhaps people were celebrating their constant water supply following a long period of drought (c.1615). Whatever the reason, well-dressing is now well-established, and draws many visitors to the area. 

So, imagine my surprise when I turned up at the opening of our second Bell Festival to be greeted by a “bell-dressing” event! I'm supposing that this originated as a way of celebrating Loughborough's industrial heritage of bellfounding (and, of course, our current bellfounders) and our cultural, artistic and crafting heritage. 

For the bell-dressing, lengths of cloth had been prepared and cut into long strips, and people were invited to ‘dress’ the willow bell that currently sits in the grounds of the Old Rectory. The bell was created for last year’s festival by local artist Nita Rao, and some of her other work can be seen permanently (in as much as untreated willow sculptures can be permanent!) in the Rectory Wildlife Garden, and during the summer period at various local woodlands, like The Outwoods, or Beacon Hill Park. The ‘dressing’ of the bell entailed weaving the strips of cloth through the stems of the willow, which, by the time it had been completed, looked rather effective!

The dressed bell in the grounds of the Old Rectory

The following morning I popped along to the Old Rectory, where they were giving a tour of the building and grounds to visitors, before moving over to the parish church where Taylors Bellfounders had set up a mobile ringing tour outside the church. This was really popular, and lots of people were keen to have a go at bellringing!! Meanwhile, inside the church a group of bellringers performed some music on handbells – quite fascinating to watch, and a lovely sound to hear!

There were a few other things going on in the Charnwood Arts building, but unfortunately I was rather limited for time, so only managed to get in and briefly see the bell-related exhibitions. I couldn’t miss the decorated railings along Rectory Place though!

Here’s hoping I can make it to next year’s Bell Festival!

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2024). Wells or bells?. Available from:  https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/10/wells-or-bells.html  [Accessed 29 October 2024]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

External Links:

By including links to external sources I am not endorsing the websites, the authors, nor the information contained therein, and will not check back to update out-of-date links. Using these links to access external information is entirely the responsibility of the reader of the blog.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

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You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

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Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

So Who Was A.E. King Part 2

So Who Was A.E. King Part 2

Last week we had a look into the life and career of A.E. King, i.e. Albert Edward King. Today we’re going to consider another A.E. King with a Loughborough connection, and indeed another architect and surveyor.

Arthur Ernest King was born on 15th May 1871, just three years before Albert Edward King, but of no relation. Arthur Ernest was born in Loughborough to parents William Henry Whatton King, a railway clerk, and his wife, Fanny, nee Perkins. Both Arthur Ernest’s parents were born in Loughborough, William Henry Whatton King to parents William Henry King and Harriett Susanna (nee Whatton), and Fanny Perkins to parents George a hosiery factory warehouseman, and his wife Selina (nee Barson).

William and Fanny were married in 1868 in Loughborough, and their first child, Willam Henry was born in 1869, making Arthur Ernest the couple’s second child, born whilst the family were living at 19 Chapman Street, and while William Henry was a 23-year-old railway clerk. Bearing in mind that although Chapman Street lies fairly close to the Great Central Railway, this was not opened until 1899, and the Charnwood Forest Railway, off Derby Road, didn't open until around 1883, so Henry was most likely to be working at the Midland station. 

In 1875 Arthur Ernest’s sister, Alice was born, but unlike her older siblings, her birth was registered in Cambridgeshire, while that of her younger brother, Walter born in 1879, and Herbert born in 1880 was Mansfield. This location is confirmed by the 1881 census return which lists that family as living at 12 Queen Street, Mansfield. William is a railway station master and goods agent, now aged 32.

In 1891, when Arthur Ernest was 19 years old, he was an assistant architect and surveyor. He was still living with his father William and mother, Fanny, and siblings on Queen Street Mansfield, although the census records the property number as 11 rather than 12. Father, William was still a railway station master and goods agent, and brother, William Henry was now a railway ticket collector. The younger children, Alice (16), Walter (12), and Herbert (10), now joined by Ethel (6) and Frederick (3) were all listed on the census as scholars.

Eight years later, on 18 October 1899, Arthur Ernest married Isabel Hughes, at St Margaret’s church in Toxteth. At the time, Arthur Ernest was living at 102 Derby Road in Loughborough, and he was aged 29, and working as a civil engineer. His father, William was a stationmaster at Mansfield. Isabel was the 25-year-old daughter of stockbroker, Edward Gerard Hughes, and at the time of the marriage she was living at 43 Mulgrave Street, Liverpool. She had originally been called Isabella, and was baptised on 16 February 1874 in St James Church, Whitehaven, Cumberland. I wonder how they met?

'Stamford Villas' built 1884, no.102 Derby Road to the left, pictured in 2016

Arthur Ernest’s parents, William and Fanny were still living at 11 Queen Street in Mansfield in 1901, along with daughters (Alice) Maud (25), Ethel (15), and son Frederick (13) who don’t seem to be employed, and sons Walter G. (aged 22) who is a railway clerk, and son Herbert (20) who is a lithographic artist. Meanwhile, back in Loughborough, Arthur Ernest and wife Isabel were living at 126 Park Road. Arthur Ernest was aged 29, and was an assistant civil engineer. They had been blessed with a new baby, Dorothy, who at the time of the census return was 9 months old.

126 Park Road (black front door) pictured in 2017

In 1905, Fanny, Arthur Ernest’s mother died in Mansfield, and it was shortly after this, in April 1906 that Arthur Ernest’s older brother, William Henry, married Blanche Elizabeth Chambers. William Henry was a railway station inspector, living at Clough Villas, Clough Road, Masbrough, near Rotherham, and his father, William Henry Whatton King, was still a railway goods agent in Mansfield. In July 1909, Arthur Ernest’s younger brother, Walter George, married Florence Louise Savage at Mansfield parish church. He was a 28-year-old clerk, living at Watson Avenue, Mansfield, and his father, William Henry King, was now listed as a gentleman.

By 1911, Arthur Ernest, Isabel, and Dorothy had moved back to Mansfield where they were living at Stanton Place, and Arthur Ernest was now an architect and surveyor, and certainly by 1913 his office was established at West Gate, Mansfield. His offices were also the place where details of land and property could be picked up. Naturally, things didn’t always run smoothly, and there was a time in 1914 when Arthur Ernest took someone to court for not paying him for the plans he had drawn up in relation to alterations to a property in Pelham Street, for which a dance and music licence was to be requested.

Sometime after 1914, and before 1921, Arthur Ernest, Isabel, and Dorothy moved to Richmond in Surrey. On the 1921 census returns they were living at 36 Montague Road, and Arthur Ernest was an architect and surveyor to H.M. Office of Works. The family remained living at number 36 until at least 1924, and it was on 31 December that year that Dorothy married Henry Theodore Andrew at St Matthias Church in Surrey. Henry, who lived a few doors away at 22 Montague Road, was a lieutenant in the navy, and his father was Thomas Andrew, a gentleman.

In 1925 Arthur Ernest was elected as a licentiate of RIBA, and five years later, his father, William Henry Whatton King, who had been a station master for over 40 years, had received a gold watch for his long service to mark his 25 years’ service, and who was a keen bowler, died.

Details about Arthur Ernest that he provided to RIBA in 1933-7 showed that he had moved from 36 Montague Road, Richmond, to a street very close by, number 5 Kings Road, also in Richmond. However, by 1939, Arthur Ernest and Isabel had moved to Hodgson Howe, Newlands, Bridge, Cockermouth, Cumbria, presumably as Arthur Ernest had now retired from his position as architect and surveyor. Cockermouth was only about 13 miles from where Isabel had been baptised in Whitehaven, which might be another reason they moved there.

Unfortunately, this is where the trail runs dry, and as yet I have been unable to establish any later information about the family. 

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2024). So Who Was A.E. King Part 2. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/10/so-who-was-ae-king-part-2.html 

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

External Links:

By including links to external sources I am not endorsing the websites, the authors, nor the information contained therein, and will not check back to update out-of-date links. Using these links to access external information is entirely the responsibility of the reader of the blog.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

So Who Was A.E. King Part 1

So Who Was A.E. King?

Way back in 2016 I began to try and find out who A.E. King was. My interest had come about because I had found reference to him as an architect in Loughborough, and I wanted to know more about him, his life, and his work. Well, as you can imagine, researching was a very long process, which threw up lots of questions, but it is only now that I have been reminded I did this research, and so I now present this to you. Naturally, it is incomplete, but this is what I have learned so far!

So, which A.E. King are we concerned with? In truth, I have found numerous A.E. Kings, at least two with connections to Loughborough, and two with those connections who were architects and surveyors! All very tricky to disentangle!

Let’s begin with A.E. King – that’s Albert Edward King …

Albert Edward was born to parents Joshua King and Sarah (nee Holmes) in Arksey, Yorkshire, in 1874. He was baptised on 3rd August 1874. His father, Joshua, was the son of John, a labourer, and his wife, Elizabeth, and had been baptised on 29th December 1831, in Haddlesey, Yorkshire. Albert Edward’s mother, Sarah Holmes was born in 1837 in Rossington, Yorkshire, to parents James and Hannah.

Albert Edward’s father, Joshua, had two younger siblings, Mary and William, and by the age of 19, Joshua was apprentice to shoemaker James Brown, with whom he was lodging in Kippax, Pontefract in 1851. I have no idea how Joshua met Sarah Holmes, but the couple were married in Doncaster in January 1857.

The birth of Albert Edward’s older brother, John William, took place in 1860, when his father was now a cordwainer (a qualified maker of shoes in leather), and the family were living in Adwick le Street, a village close to Doncaster. By 1871, Joshua had now gone into farming and cattle dealing, and he and Sarah, living at Arksey, now had two boys, John William aged 10, and Fred aged 5.

On 16th May 1878, when Albert Edward was aged only 4, his father, shoemaker turned farmer, Joshua, died and probate was granted to his widow, Sarah. Sarah then married Henry Smith, a retired milker, some 16 years older than she. In the 1881 census returns, Sarah and Henry were living in Kirk Bramwith, Arksey, Yorkshire, with Sarah’s 83-year-old mother, Hannah, and Sarah’s son, 15-year-old Frederick. But what of Albert Edward, aged only 7? Turns out, he was living next door to his mother, with his uncle and aunt, John a 44-year-old farmer and his wife, Harriott Singer.

At the age of 17, in 1891, Albert Edward was boarding with William Glossop, who was in the shipping business (although I can’t quite make out from the census return exactly what his occupation was), and his wife Anne. Albert Edward was a teacher to a pupil, which was probably William and Anne’s own children, Gertrude aged 10, and Harry aged 5. Along with Albert Edward another boarder, Stephen Salmon, who was a police officer, was also living in the house, at 11 Argyle Street, Hook, near Goole, in Yorkshire.

Between 1891 and 1899 Albert Edward seems to have changed occupation, just like his father, Joshua had done, and in March of 1899 it is clear that Albert Edward had set himself up as an architect in Loughborough, on Baxter Gate. The directors of a group calling themselves the ‘Loughborough Temperance Hall and Café Company’ were inviting tenders to build a New Temperance Hall Café in Cattle Market, and such applications were to be sent to Albert E. King whose architectural practice had designed the building.

Although his business was settled in Loughborough, Albert Edward, the architect, was only lodging in the town in 1901. He was boarding in the property of Louisa Groves and her children at 94 Leicester Road, along with two other boarders who were both electrical engineers, and a couple of servants.

Albert Edward’s business, A.E. King, Architects, began to grow, and his designs could now be seen in the bank building in Shepshed Bull Ring for the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Banking Company (designed 1903-4); the Theatre Royal on Mill Street (now Market Street), designed in 1904, for the proprietors W. Payne Seddon and George Robertson (who had several other theatres) but now demolished. In 1906 Albert Edward King was looking for builders to erect a new Old Boot Hotel, which replaced an establishment of the same name, which had been demolished. However, the architect’s role was quite varied, and in 1908 Albert Edward produced plans showing gradients, cross sections, and road widths as evidence in relation to a road accident that had taken place near Whitwick.

In 1909, Albert Edward appears to have married divorcee Lily Jane Nicholson (nee Crawforth), although as yet I’ve not found a record of this marriage. Lily Jane had married Frederick Howard Nicholson in November 1904, but they had divorced in January 1909, although this had been rescinded in October 1909. At the time of the 1911 census, Albert Edward and his wife, Jane, were listed at 96 Victoria Street, Westminster, and Albert was an architect, working on his own account. The practice on Baxter Gate in Loughborough was still part of Albert Edward’s empire.

On 26th December 1911, Albert Edward King of 19 Baxter Gate and the Great Central Hotel, died at 96 Victoria Street, Westminster. Death was from ptomaine poisoning, complicated with pneumonia. He was aged 41, and, according to the Architect’s Journal of 1912, he had an extensive practice in the designing of electric theatres and factories.  Probate was granted on 5th February 1912 to Lily Jane Nicholson (otherwise Lily Crawforth, otherwise Lily Crawforth King, wife of Frederick Howard Nicholson) of 96 Victoria Street, Westminster. Effects were £4,178 1s. 6d..

The architectural and surveying practice of Albert E. King continued to operate from Baxter Gate, after the death of A.E. himself. At the time of Albert Edward King’s death, Albert Edward Perkins was articled to him, and upon the death of King, Perkins took over the practice, going into partnership with a Mr Haynes. Sadly, Albert Edward Perkins died in 1918.

In 1913, a pair of semi-detached villas on Leicester Road, part of the Elms Park Estate, one - Elm Cottage - was occupied by Richard Sutton Clifford, the other - Holmwood - was occupied by Miss Clarke, were for sale. Details of the properties were available both from King’s offices in Loughborough and in Westminster, as well as from local estate agents W. and F. Armstrong, and local solicitors Clifford and Clifford.

King’s architectural and surveying practice continued to operate from Baxter Gate. In 1915 the practice was looking for land to purchase in Normanton or Sutton Bonington (although it is unclear whether they were making this purchase for themselves, or acting as agents for other purchasers). The practice was also advertising plots of land available on what is described in a newspaper report of the time as the Elms Park Building Estate, and were looking for land for ‘works’, ‘locality not important’!

In 1939 the old brewery buildings (presumably those on Derby Road) were about to be demolished in August, and the architectural practice of Albert E. King on Baxter Gate were looking for reliable contractors to undertake the work.

In September 1939 Lily Jane Crawforth King, wife of Albert Edward King, died.

The architectural practice continued. A RIBA directory lists Albert E. King and Co. still at 19 Baxter Gate Loughborough, LE11 1TG, telephone 0509 212316, and having a branch office at 19 Milton Street, Nottingham, NG1 3EN. The partners in the practice at the time were E.L. Messom, ARIBA and F.E. Dickinson, RIBA.

So, that's one A.E.King! Check back next week for the story of another A.E.King!!

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2024). So Who Was A.E. King Part 1. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/10/so-who-was-ae-king-part-1.html  [Accessed 6 October 2024]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

External Links:

By including links to external sources I am not endorsing the websites, the authors, nor the information contained therein, and will not check back to update out-of-date links. Using these links to access external information is entirely the responsibility of the reader of the blog.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne