My novel The Spyders of Burslem features the last of the ‘cunning’ men, Jimmy Tunnicliffe, at the end of the 1860s. I’m pleased to discover that there was a real if rather more upmarket equivalent to Jimmy Tunnicliffe in Burslem and, by the looks of it, at more or less about the right time. Evidently there was a ‘Botanic Institute’ herbalist on The Sytch (which also appears in the novel), by the name of Ree Dar or Reedar.

If he could get out to country patients (see the bottom of the flyer) evidently he kept a horse and gig. Which would make sense, since he would also need to have a means of getting out of Stoke to gather herbs in their season. Though such people also had ‘gatherers’ I seem to recall.

A new article on Darwin & Shropshire’s Geology. Unmentioned in the article is his strong connection with Maer Hall, just over the border in Staffordshire. One can imagine him whipping out his magnifying-glass to scrutinise the micro-ferns and beetles of this magnificent wall at the end of the driveway there, for instance…

This post is now superseded by my The Man in the Moon 3.0

A couple of Jack Simcock pictures are currently on eBay, albeit at ridiculous prices. But there are very nice photos of the pictures, which allow you to see the fine surface details.

Phil Bell’s ‘The Disc of Cad Goddeu’, fashioned from Rowan wood during the famous ‘Battle of the Trees’, allegedly.

More Facebook changes today. Shortly after the move to the new UI they had it perfect, apart from the annoying and utterly pointless “See more…” click-iness. They had saved themselves, after the Great Exodus.

But now they’re slowing starting to ruin it again, with more changes. They’re also soon to push more work on Group admins through regrettable back-end changes.

The latest change today is to huge ‘blaring’ images. These now overpower the text and links, and make it difficult to concentrate on these. The new ultra-wide central column now also makes it more difficult to read across the text. With this and the very unwelcome Group changes coming, I’m definitely considering taking all my Groups over to an amalgamated WordPress blog. Most likely with a newspaper-like template. By which I mean an old-school news newspaper, not one of the modern hives of clickbait and pop-ups. Though perhaps not quite this old-school.

It’s surprisingly difficult to use search to cut through the ocean of robo-made shovelware templates, but Gabfire’s old $60 WP Newspaper (aka Advanced Newspaper, or Advanced WordPress Newspaper) theme is still a classic and now in v3.6. Here blurred and inverted so you can see the basic structure and how it might look with a Dark Mode on it…

Twelve ‘lost things’ from Stoke:

1. Aurochs. Giant prehistoric wild cattle which survived to the Roman period, a skull of which was discovered in diggings at Etruria and is in the Potteries Museum.

2. The old Roman Road, through Wolstanton to where the current Stoke train station is. Though some of Rykeneld Street is likely still there, underground.

3. ‘The Lost Painting of Longton’. Robert Bateman’s large major oil painting “Saul and the Witch of Endor” was given to the city and was last heard of in Longton Town Hall in the early 1950s.

4. The vanished railway line from Stoke railway station to Newcastle-under-Lyme, which went through over 700 yards of tunnels to get there and went on the town of Market Drayton. Also the Potteries Loop Line around the city, though much of that now survives as off-road bicycle paths.

5. The old-style ‘very broad’ Potteries Dialect, now almost extinct.

6. The Etruria Woods, of which only remnants and re-growths now remain. One might also include the vast 55-mile long Lyme barrier-forest from the Norman era, which gave its name to Burslem.

7. The vast network of modern deep-mining tunnels. Now flooded, they run mostly from around Forest Park across the valley to Wolstanton.

8. Trentham Hall, offered to the Council as a miners’ hospital but unwanted and thus largely demolished. But the Gardens and Estate are now thriving.

9. Wedgwood’s secret glazes, for making pottery. When H.G. Wells was living in the Potteries, he roomed with a school-fellow who had the job of trying to reconstruct these secrets from the old dried-out glaze-pots in the cellars of Etruria Hall.

10. Folklore and old local tales, of which only fragments remain. Also related customs, such as the annual Hanley Venison Feast.

11. The North Staffordshire Field Club. Once one of the largest and well-patronised in the nation, with amateurs researching everything from local history and geology to local insects and birds. Like a burst seed-pod, it eventually withered away after giving life to a great many individual specialist groups.

12. The Trubshaw Cross at Longport. In the 1620s said to be the terminus of “a great passage out of the north parts unto diverse market towns”, serving the packhorse teams that bore the industries of the Peak (sheep-fleeces, metals etc) to Newcastle-under-Lyme and thence to the good roads that ran north and south. By the 1840s only the stone base of the cross, likely of “Saxon origin”, remained.

Thomas Pape (1872-1970) was a key historian of North Staffordshire. He produced several local history books from 1928-40, and a number of articles can also be found. Sadly the books are not on Archive.org and the publisher — Manchester University Press — has not yet scanned the extensive series of which they are a part and put them online.

His key works are:

1. Medieval Newcastle-under-Lyme, Manchester University Press, 1928. No TOCs online, but his second book for the Press gives a summary of the first…

Ten years ago the Manchester University Press published the first volume, Medieval Newcastle-under-Lyme, a history of the Castle from its foundation in Stephen’s reign until its decay in the late fifteenth century, also a history of the borough from its formation in Henry II’s reign and a history of the Manor — all to the end of the reign of Henry VII. The two most important appendices were the extended Latin transcripts of the minute books of the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme from 1369 to 1510.

1a. “The Ancient Corporation of Cheadle” in the North Staffordshire Field Club Transactions for 1930. This actually turns out to be mostly relevant to the “Mock Mayor” tradition of Newcastle-under-Lyme. He also notes, in passing, the annual Hanley Venison Feast which he found could be traced to the 1780s.

1b. “Medieval Glassworkers in North Staffordshire“, in the North Staffordshire Field Club Transactions for 1934.

2. Newcastle-under-Lyme in Tudor and early Stuart Times, Manchester University Press, 1938. Substantial, at 350+ pages. It is partly on Google Books, including TOCs. In an appendix are to be found useful castle-location maps that took account of the latest excavations (undertaken by himself and a group of his boys, 1934-1935).

3. The Restoration Government and the Corporation of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Manchester University Press, 1940. At 63 pages this third and final work for Manchester University Press was more of a booklet, perhaps due to wartime paper shortages at a guess. Google Books appears to have no preview, but on one of the versions it offers a simple TOC, and when you click the links for that you do get preview pages…

THE INFLUENCE OF THE EARL OF ESSEX
THE CORPORATION ACT
COUNCILLORS DEPOSED
THE CHARTER GRANTED BY CHARLES II
THE LOCAL TRUSTEES
FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES
A ROYAL MANDATE
THE OLD ORDER AT WORK

It might be useful to get all of the above republished as a single volume, with a new introduction correcting any errors of fact and updating the reader.

He also produce a history of the town’s parish church, St. Giles, seemingly published (re-published?) in 1967.

His papers and photographs are in a special collection archive at Keele University, though a list is only available on request rather than being online in public. The page does however have a basic biography…

Thomas Pape (1872-1970) was a schoolmaster, holding posts at Newcastle-under-Lyme Middle School, the Orme Boys School and Wolstanton Grammar School. Pape devoted a great deal of his time to historical and archaeological research of Newcastle-under-Lyme and surrounding areas, authoring several books and numerous articles. He was elected a member of the North Staffordshire Field Club in 1917 and served as President in 1931.

Elsewhere I also found a picture of him…

Thomas Pape photographed in old age.

He taught History at Orme (called the ‘Middle School’ before 1914) and in his second book he states that he retired from teaching in 1933. This picture might have been made on that occasion, yet he looks older than 59 and the camera lens and picture-shape looks to be from a later era. My guess is he returned to teaching circa 1942 at age 70, due to the needs of the war, and this might date from that time? He lived to 98 years old, though, so it may even be later. Judging by his hands I’d say he could be in his late 80s here.

Evidently he also published articles in the local newspaper, and one observer remarks on… “Notes by medieval historian Thomas Pape, published in The Evening Sentinel newspaper in 1935″, re: a local pottery excavation.

He and his lads also excavated: The Roman Villa at Hales, Staffordshire; Chesterton Roman Fort; and from memory I’m fairly sure he was the one who did the excavations to find the bed of the Roman Road in the vicinity of Wolstanton (Chesterton fort to Stoke station).

Update: My thanks to David Pitt for a small correction. I had been led to believe, by Staffordshire Past Track, that Pape was serving as headmaster at Orme in 1927 when the Hales Roman Villa was excavated. I am informed that he was a History teacher throughout his career. This fact has been updated.

Since when did Amazon UK become the nation’s pills-and-booze pusher? After the first few results it now show this, and many more like it…

I get the same results on a “clean” alternative Web browser with no addons or scripts, so it’s not my browser. Book searchers had become used to getting junk results, as pages filled with blank “notebooks” and the like. Now it seems Amazon has gone from ‘junk’ to ‘junkie’.

Yet another local novel of the Potteries, found. Where do they hide? The Spoilt Kill is a ‘police procedural’ crime mystery novel published in 1961 and set in what’s said to be a vividly evoked Potteries of the late 1950s. The obscure title refers to the name for the failed firing of a ceramics kiln.

The novel has recently been republished. By the British Library’s shovelware division, which has nice covers but doesn’t have a very high reputation for textual care. Yet at least the book is available again.

Formerly a mass-market crime mystery in the Penguin Crime paperbacks series. One can currently be had on eBay and the text there will be free of OCR errors.

There’s also an audiobook version.

Here is a new edition of my free booklet The Folk-lore of North Staffordshire, an annotated bibliography. There are a number of newly discovered additions, some quite substantial, and a significant expansion of one item. All told, around seven extra pages are added and one new picture. Several of the new additions relate strongly to the wintry Sir Gawain landscape of the Moorlands, especially as I’ve now finally been able to see Sleigh’s book on Leek. As such the booklet now also forms a shelf-companion to my recent book on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Download.

Please update any local copies you may be keeping. The previous revision was December 2020, when it was 24 pages. It’s now 32 pages and is again feasible to print as a booklet and slip between card covers.