Bygone Burnley: Hapton with historian Roger Frost MBE

Burnley Express

Bygone Burnley: Hapton with historian Roger Frost MBE, 4-4-25

Transcript

00:00We're in Hapton today, and Hapton is a very interesting community.

00:06It's got a long history.

00:09It's most famous these days because, much to its credit,

00:15and the credit of one company in Hapton,

00:18the village was the first village in England to have electric street lighting.

00:25And on the parish council's coat of arms, or badge of office, as it really is,

00:31there is a lamp, an early electric street lamp, or part of it on the lamp.

00:38So Hapton's very proud of this because of the company,

00:42and you can see a name behind the Simpsons.

00:45The company was called Simpsons.

00:47They were in these buildings which were mostly cotton mills,

00:51and they had a section of the mill in that direction over there,

00:56and they were very early electrical engineers.

01:00They had connections with the early electrical engineers

01:04who made things like electric kettles,

01:08and the company Swan had a connection with Hapton.

01:14But not the only one. Edison, the American inventor,

01:17also had connections with Hapton through the Simpsons brothers,

01:23who owned the company that actually erected the first electric street lamps in a village.

01:32We're standing in front of one of the oldest buildings in Hapton,

01:35which is Shuttleworth Hall.

01:38It's the building that the Shuttleworth family of Gawthorpe owned

01:43before they took possession of Gawthorpe in the late 17th century.

01:49But the building itself, as you can see,

01:51is late Tudor, probably Elizabeth I reign,

01:58and if not, early in King James I reign.

02:03It's just about the only really old building that we could use as a background

02:09to talk about Hapton's early history.

02:13And Hapton has got a medieval history.

02:16There was a castle here.

02:18The castle may have been built in the 12th century,

02:23but other historians have disagreed and said it was a bit later than that.

02:28Now, if it was built in the 12th century,

02:31it's likeliest to have been built in the reign of King Stephen.

02:35He reigned from 1134 to 1159 or something,

02:46but it's in that period anyway.

02:48That was the period of the Civil War,

02:51the War of the 19 Long Winters.

02:53Stephen was one of the claimants to the throne,

02:57but he had a rival in the Empress Maud,

03:00who was the daughter of Henry I.

03:03But being a woman,

03:05people at the time thought that she had no right to be the ruler of the country,

03:14but she had her supporters,

03:17and the war was between the Empress Matilda,

03:21who was the widow of the Holy Roman Emperor,

03:24and Stephen fought it out.

03:28In the end, it was decided that Stephen should continue his reign,

03:33but Matilda's son, Henry Plantagenet,

03:37should become king.

03:39And when Stephen died,

03:42I think it's 1159,

03:45Henry became king,

03:47he became Henry II,

03:49and founded the Plantagenet dynasty,

03:52which lasted right the way through

03:54to the death of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.

04:00So, for 300 years or thereabouts,

04:04the Plantagenets ruled.

04:07So, there was a castle.

04:09There's nothing much left of it.

04:11Manchester University once had permission to dig there,

04:15but then it was withdrawn,

04:17and nothing has been done.

04:19But it wasn't the only early building.

04:21The Tynley family of Tynley owned another building in Hapton.

04:28At the Tower.

04:30This is Hapton Tower,

04:32which is on the southern side of the township.

04:36And it was a popular house among some of the Tynleys.

04:41One of them preferred the tower to the hall,

04:46and lived there.

04:47And another Tynley connected with the Hapton property.

04:53He was the man who saved the altar vestments from Wally Abbey,

05:00which can now be seen in Tynley Hall.

05:03So, the remains of Hapton Tower can be seen,

05:07but they're ruined.

05:10The building is not lived in any longer.

05:14It hasn't been lived in for a long time.

05:16But it's right in the southernmost part of the parish.

05:20So, that was another aspect of Hapton's history.

05:26One of the older facts about Hapton,

05:32is that in the late medieval privilege,

05:36part of the area was known as Bertussell.

05:41And in the direction in which I'm looking,

05:44there was a village called Bertussell.

05:49It's probably more accurate to call it a hamlet, really.

05:52There were several houses.

05:54Because they were involved in farming, pastoral farming.

05:58I don't think they grew a great deal.

06:01But the hamlet became virtually deserted.

06:07So, in Burnley, we have got a deserted village.

06:11There's another one in Thursdon, in Dry Cliff,

06:17and a third near Barnalswick.

06:19But this is actually within the borough of Burnley,

06:22and is something which many evil historians are very fond of,

06:27is tracing the history of these deserted villagers,

06:32or handles, as I say.

06:35Anybody called Bertussell gets their name

06:38from this part of the township of Hapton,

06:42where we are now,

06:43which originally was called Bertussell.

06:46We're in Hapton,

06:48on the lane that leads to Castle Clough,

06:51because it was there,

06:53in the early Industrial Revolution,

06:56that one of Burnley's earliest cotton mills was constructed.

07:01It was built on the banks of the Clough,

07:04and it was a cotton spinning mill.

07:08A group of local men got together and subscribed some money,

07:12and part of the mill was originally water-powered,

07:17but very early on they installed a steam engine.

07:20But unfortunately, the company didn't survive very long.

07:25However, the mill itself continued to work as a mill,

07:30and it was, as I say,

07:31one of the first in the Burnley area.

07:33Ultimately, in the 20th century,

07:37it was converted into a calico printing works,

07:40and it did some very important calico printing in these premises,

07:46right the way through until the 1950s.

07:50So it had over 30 years as a calico printing works as well.

07:55Hapton wasn't only a cotton area,

07:59there were all sorts of industries in Hapton.

08:03There was a chemical works not far from where we are,

08:06but most significantly there was a coal industry.

08:12Several large coal mines exist in the Hapton area.

08:17The most famous of them was the Hapton Valley Coilery,

08:22which in the 1960s was an area where there was a big mining disaster.

08:28I remember it because I was at school at St Mary's on York Street,

08:34where one of the miners who was killed had been to school a year or two before me.

08:40So it was very significant to me.

08:44It always has been.

Category

Transcript

Recommended