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January 2005 Newsletter

Programme
Exhibition
Donations
Appeals for Information
Review of Past Activities

A Happy New Year to all members and we look forward to seeing a good turn out at meetings and events during 2005. Following the plea in the last Newsletter, we are delighted that Cathy Kearns has joined the Committee and will be adding her skills and input to the Society’s activities. We should still like some further support so please think again and see if you could offer some assistance, if not full commitment, to the committee. We still need people to distribute publicity posters to the notice boards all around the town and if you don’t feel you can do all, perhaps the task could be shared between several who could each do some boards in their locality.

Programme

The next two meetings feature places in Dronfield which have recently been transformed. No one can fail to be impressed with the change from Butler’s Foundry to The Forge and the January meeting on Thursday 27 January is about both the actual buildings, particularly the newly discovered medieval building, and its history. The two speakers – Ann Brown, Chair of the Society, who has researched the history, and Stanley Jones, an expert in historic buildings and advisor to English Heritage, will each concentrate on their area.

On 17 March a speaker from North East Derbyshire Industrial Archaeology Society will talk about the work they undertook on the Damstead Site at Mill Lane prior to the County Council project to create a pleasant riverside walk accessible to all.

The Annual General Meeting will be held on Thursday 28 April.

The May meeting is about a well known Chesterfield company. Barry Knight will speak about Joseph Clayton & Sons, Tanners and Curriers.

All these meetings take place in the Edward Lucas Hall of the Peel Centre at 7.30 p.m. Although the stair lift has been installed for some months it has unfortunately suffered some teething problems. However, we now understand that it is operational and anyone wanting to use it should either ring a member of the Committee beforehand or inform somebody on the night.

Exhibition

The Society is holding another exhibition in the Peel Centre over the weekend of 11/12 June. The theme will be the Second World War, as 2005 is the sixtieth anniversary of its ending. If you have any memorabilia of any kind – military or connected with civil defence or civilian life which you would be prepared to lend or have copied, please contact a member of the committee. Items do not have to be solely Dronfield- related.

Donations

A Gosforth Youth Centre cricket scorebook recording matches played by Dronfield Cricket Club between 1970 and 1975 has been very kindly given to the Society by Denise Holmes, District Youth Worker, Dronfield, Derbyshire Youth Service.

Appeal for Information

The following e-mail has been received via the Society web site.

‘I’m trying to trace my family tree and have come across a great uncle whose name was ELI FIELDING. He and his wife Alice (formerly Tudge from Worcester) had a grocer’s shop and lived at Christopher Road No. 72. Eli had at least three children, Edith, Ellen and Hannah and another daughter called Winifred Evelyn who sadly died aged 4 months.

They were resident in Dronfield on the 1901 census. Eli came originally from Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire and this is the first of our relatives I have managed to trace who lived outside of that area. Eli would have been around 52 at the time of the 1901 census. His daughters were aged 16, 14 and 12 respectively.

Any information regarding these names would be really useful.’

If anyone can help with this enquiry please contact Judith Vernier at ods@thateden.co.uk.

Review of Past Activities

A popular subject, Bess of Hardwick, drew a large audience on 23 September to hear Tony Davis, volunteer lecturer and steward at Hardwick Hall. He recounted Bess’s fascinating life from her birth in 1527, the fourth daughter of John Hardwick who died the following year. By the time Bess herself died in her eighties in 1608 she had risen from being the daughter of a Derbyshire squire with a modest manor house to a member of the Queen’s court with a reputation as a ‘formidable woman of masculine understanding’. Her first three marriages, all of which led to widowhood, would seem to have been love matches and that with William Cavendish produced six surviving children in ten years. More importantly perhaps, each marriage left her better off and it was at the Queen’s court that she met and married George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, an entrepreneur of his time, who was regarded as loyal and trustworthy by the Queen as well as rich and so was entrusted with the guardianship of Mary, Queen of Scots. However the relationship between Bess and George deteriorated and he having harried her out of Chatsworth, she returned to her place of origin, buying the Hardwick estate and eventually undertaking the construction of one of the finest Elizabethan houses still in existence today.

Local author Peter Machen’s talk and very up to date accompanying visual presentation on 25 November covered more than his advertised subject of Norfolk Park and its Lords. It was really a review of Sheffield’s history from its Anglo Saxon origins (revealed by the discovery of a cross now in the British Museum on the site of the cathedral) and concentrated on the area of Park Hill and the Manor. Dominated by just four families from the Norman conquest onwards, the last of these was the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury, (so linking with the previous speaker) whose line died out in the early 1600s and who were succeeded through the female line by the Dukes of Norfolk whose family names and land connections remain alive in street names today. In the 18th century Sheffield was still quite small and Park Hill open fields but this changed dramatically with the onset of the industrial revolution when streets of squalid housing were erected – and subsequently demolished in post war re-development. However, the city still benefits from these former landed families – the Shrewsbury hospital founded by the last Gilbert of that name and the open spaces of Norfolk Park given to the city fathers by the 11th Duke of Norfolk who persuaded Queen Victoria to open the new town hall in 1897. For a resume of the history of Sheffield Peter Machen recommended a visit to the chapter house of Sheffield cathedral to see a series of twelve windows.

The Christmas meeting on 9 December was an ‘in-house’ affair. An interesting compilation of readings of poetry and prose mainly about Christmas customs in Derbyshire together with some appropriate music had been put together by Margaret Mace and Jean Kendal. Read by Society members suitably adorned in seasonal headgear, the audience appreciated the combination of sad and humorous, undoubtedly the pièce de resistance being Margaret’s rendering of one of Joyce Grenfell’s masterpieces. A glass of wine and a mince pie made it an informal and sociable occasion.