Bygone Burnley: St Peter's Church, Part Two

Burnley Express

Bygone Burnley: St Peter's Church, Part Two, with historian Roger Frost MBE

Transcript

00:00We're in St Peter's Church now and it really is worth coming in to see because it's beautifully

00:07maintained and the history of the town can be told by looking at the memorials in the

00:13church. We are standing where the 19th century galleries were built. Rather than extend the

00:22church because the site was small, what we decided to do with the increased population

00:28of Burnley was to put galleries on either side of the church, above where we are now,

00:34and over on the other side of the church and that increased the number of people who could

00:40attend services enormously from about 1830 to 1840. But the pillars themselves, this is one,

00:51are Norman pillars tooled down to made to look as if they were constructed in the late 15th and

01:03early 16th century. You can see on the pillars where the original pillar was, the lower part,

01:10and the extensions, upper part of the pillar. And of course the church is famous for its

01:19magnificent window behind the altar. That's the master window and it is named after Robert Mosley

01:27Master who was the incumbent, the Parson of Burnley from 1825 to 1855. Okay, this is a memorial to

01:41General Scarlet who is the most famous of Burnley soldiers. Although he wasn't a Burnley man by

01:47birth, he was born near Guildford in the south of England. But as a young soldier he came to Burnley

01:54with his regiment because Burnley was a barracks town and he was very fortunate to meet the heiress

02:05to the Hargreaves Colliery Company. Now when he married Charlotte Hargreaves, incidentally Charlotte

02:13became Charlotte Scarlet because of that, which I always think is slightly amusing. But he inherited

02:17a vast estate, became very wealthy and lived here in Burnley for the rest of his life from about the

02:27age of 40 until he was in his 70s when he died in 1872. The other thing about him that made him

02:36famous is that he was the leader, the commander of the most successful military incident of the

02:45Crimean War. Just because he led the most successful military campaign in the Crimean War.

02:54The most famous is the Charge of the Light Brigade which Tennyson wrote about and that was an utter

03:01disaster. General Scarlet led the Charge of the Heavy Brigade which was a complete and utter

03:08success and he became very famous in his own lifetime. He was a personal friend of Queen

03:15Victoria. She insisted on giving him a baronetcy and he was a very well respected person in Burnley

03:29until his death in 1872. And he's buried at Clivager I believe. Yeah he's buried at Clivager,

03:36right in front of the main entrance to the church because the family, the Thursbys and the

03:44Scarlets, their main house was Omrod Hall which was in Clivager. General Scarlet lived at Bank

03:52Hall which is almost in Burnley Centre. We're in the Stansfield or Scarlet Chapel at the moment

04:00and behind me is the oldest grave memorial in Burnley. At one time there would have been quite

04:07a lot of old memorials, perhaps even effigies in here. None of those appear to have survived. But

04:16this is the gravestone or the grave marker of Oliver de Stansfield who was the Lord of the

04:25Manor of Worsthorne. His house was at Rewley, or one of his houses was at Rewley, but he lived

04:33in Heshamford Hall or Heshamford House which is still standing in Heshamford in Burnley. It's a

04:42grave marker, probably on top of the grave, and it shows a cross, obviously the religious symbol,

04:50and if you look at the cross there is a sword. He was a knight, he was the constable of the

04:57D'Lacey castles in Yorkshire and the main castle in Yorkshire they had was at Pontefract and he

05:06was constable of Pontefract under the D'Lacey family which did a lot to keep this church in

05:15good condition in the early Middle Ages. This is Caroline Augusta Parker, Townley Parker was her

05:25full name, and she was the wife of one of the big landowners in this area. The Parker family

05:31originally owned Monk Hall in Braggcliffe, then they built Exterus Hall in the Elizabethan times,

05:38they inherited the estate of the Townleys of Royal in the late 18th century, and then by

05:48additional marriages they had estates in the Preston and Chorley area. They were a very wealthy

05:55family. However, when Caroline died, her husband, who was by then based in Preston, insisted that

06:04the burial should be here, and the two of them look across time as it were, facing each other

06:11in the church, because ahead of me is the magnificent memorial of Robert Parker, Robert

06:21Townley Parker, and they, as I say, they face each other for a time in memorial with the whole

06:27length of the church between them.

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