Below is Alan Gregory’s written history of his recollection of living in Egglescliffe. You can follow what he says in his oral history by simply clicking the above and sitting back and enjoying what he says.
Alan Gregory was interviewed by Arlene Ellis on 12th September 2017.
I first came to Egglescliffe as a babe-in-arms in the early 1930’s. There were frequent visits in the 1930’s of which I can recall very little before 1939. My mother, Maude Forster Smith, was born in the Manor House in the parish of Eaglescliffe (as it was known in 1898), and grew up here, but I was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1930. and grew up in Bamburgh.
The village name has changed frequently. My family history notes that “until the latter part of the 20thcentury, the village of Egglescliffe has been a rural community, and the varied pronunciation of the village name has, no doubt, led to the numerous ways it has been spelt over the centuries. This has also led to the derivation of the name being lost. ‘Egga’ was probably a Danish chief who settled hereabouts in the ninth century, whilst ‘Ecclesia’ refers to the ‘church on the cliff’. With the advent of the Stockton to Darlington railway, and the building of houses close to Eaglescliffe Junction station in the second part of the nineteenth century, the name board on the station reflected the current spelling”.
In 1897, it was the Parish of Eaglescliffe that celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The celebrations were an all-day affair and took place on the green on Tuesday June 22nd1897. There was a bell race for girls under 7! The programme allowed ample time for the consumption of ale. The Treasurer for the day was my grand-father, Frederick Walton Smith, a JP and churchwarden.
The green has been reshaped a number of times. The barn which stood on the green (in front of the row of cottages now known as The Green), was shown in a photograph of about 1890 but by 1900 had disappeared. I suspect the green was tidied-up in time for golden and diamond jubilee celebrations and for the Coronation of George V in 1911. Trees were planted in 1911 by the children of the village and I claim that my mother planted the walnut tree.
The pump was at the bottom of the green close to the corner. The pump outside Pump Cottage came from a French flea market, though there was definitely a pump in front of Wells Cottages better known as Pump Row.
Manor House and the farm has definitely been in the family since 1795, when a Richard Paverly acquired the tenancy. Unusually the tenancy has passed down through the female side of the family, firstly to Elizabeth Paverly (who married a Robert Law), and thence to Jane Law who married John Joseph Smith (my great grandfather) in 1852. He had a yard in Middlesbrough, was a ship owner and broker, a coal filler (he bought the coal at the railhead and filled the ships bound for London). After his marriage, he added ‘gentleman farmer’ to the list of occupations in the 1861 census. It was he who had the granite set path laid from the old Yarm Station, up Stony Bank and on to the Manor House as seen in the photographs of Stony Bank. He commuted by train to Middlesbrough and required to find his way home in the dark. He shipped stone back from London which he used to strengthen the river bank on this side of the river.
School holidays during the war often found me staying in the Manor House, helping with milking and working in the dairy. Well I remember sticking cardboard discs in the top of milk bottles. Pint and half pint. Gathering up the sheaves of wheat at harvest time, forming stooks, and the thrashing days in the stack yard are firmly in the memory seventy years on. The year after leaving school saw me working on the farm, and then occasional visits in the next forty years kept me in touch with the family and village until I could retire and move north.
My cousins alerted me to the possibility that Sunnyside was coming onto the market – I ensured that it did not and we, my late wife and I, became custodians in 1988.
Sunnyside is probably the oldest inhabited cottage about the green. Dating back to about 1680 (when bricks became readily available) and presumably built on the site of an existing cottage, the title deeds and the tithe maps don’t give up a more accurate date.
Originally built as two cottages, two rooms, (one up, one down, with an alley between), it became one in about 1870 when the stairs, kitchen and a small bedroom were added. The attics between the two halves, where the looms would have been, had a doorway between them. There is much evidence that the cottage was part of the Hall estate. It became known as Sunnyside in the 1950s; prior to that, in common with most houses and cottages in the village, known by who lived there.
Bertie Bell told me, amongst other snippets, that the Hall’s ice house was in our rear garden. The semi-circular raised patio could well be on top of the remains of the ice house. There was at some time a wash house to the rear of the cottage, which no doubt served the needs of The Hall. The land on which Wayside and Beechcroft now stand was once part of the Sunnyside’s garden. The cottage has the sash windows that came from The Hall, when it was updated in about 1870, and were altered to fit the misshapen front of the cottage.
Horse and carts leaving the Pot and Glass were obviously a problem. With no gardens to the front of the cottages, the front corner of the cottage was in constant danger from well-oiled drivers, so it was rounded to a height of about three feet so that the wheel hubs of the wagons did not take the corner of the cottage away. It is currently hidden behind the bushes. Mark you, that same corner is under threat from modern day delivery vans!
Whilst crawling around the churchyard, to find the graves of my ancestors, I couldn’t but help notice that in two areas the grave-stones are very much younger than the graves surrounding them. Research showed that there had been two cottages in the church-yard. Who lived in them I don’t know. They are visible on old photographs of Stony Bank and are marked on Ordnance Survey maps of 1896 and 1920, but had disappeared by 1939.
What changes have I seen over the years? The vast improvement to the housing about the green, the development of Butts Lane and surrounding areas, and the more than fourfold increase in the number of cars. The character of the village of sixty years ago, that I can recall, with the post office and village store, is so very different to that of now.