Saint Modwen’s is probably Burton’s most significant church since it occupies part of what used to be the original abbey and hence has a history that dates back to that time.
Much of this section, photographs and text, is extracted from a booklet covering the history of Saint Modwen’s Church by kind permission of Dr Robin Trotter who produced it. The booklet is still available at the church.
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Passing through the doors into the depths of Burton Town Hall really is like taking a step back in time to the elegance of the Victorian era.
Up the stairs past the pictures of the most recently serving mayors with the current major at the top until his time comes to join the others; some re-shuffling will be necessary in 2010 when the current mayor takes the last available slot!
Approaching the top of the stairs, the imposing picture of Michael Thomas Bass, the father of Lord Burton who famously donated the building to be used as a much needed new Town Hall.
The landing shows the mayor’s private parlour half way along on the right with the beckoning doors of the main Council Chamber at the end.
The Mayor’s Parlour continues in victorian style with the walls covered with every mayor starting from W.H.Worthington, the first mayor serving in 1878-79, to the most recent.
The Council Chamber itself is no disappointment and has the marvellous feel of a small version of the house of Commons. Several imposing pictures oversee the proceedings, the most conspicuous one guarding the door being W.H.Worthington.
The front bench must make local councillors sometimes feel that they are up in front of the local magistate.
The impressive chamber ceiling.
Finally, although a later addition, the foyer memorial board.
The last years of the nineteenth century were to see radical changes in every aspect of the Infirmary’s development. That these changes all occurred about the same time was probably quite fortuitous, but coming as they did in the dying years of the Victorian era it seemed as though all concerned were determined that the Infirmary and all its work would advance into the new Edwardian age in perfect order.
The original Duke Street building was over twenty years old and although additions had been made from time to time, they had been more of a patchwork than a redevelopment. In 1893, the surgeons reported that the floors in the large surgical ward and the operating room were in an unsanitary condition. New floors were laid at a cost of £104. It was reported: “The new floors are of the best English oak and care has been taken to make the joints so tight that no germs can be harboured therein”. The committee’s views on bacteriology may have been rather naïve, but it was certainly a compliment to the hospital carpenter. By 1894 it became obvious that something more radical was required and an extension fund was opened which eventually reached the sum of over £20,000 which was a considerable sum.
Duke Street
It was probably Lord Burton who was responsible for the choice of architect. Living in Burton as he did (he had a town house in the High Street as well as the Rangemore estate) his enormous wealth and social standing gave him almost autocratic powers quite beyond anything conceivable today and it would not seem in the slightest degree incongruous to him to call in one of the leading architects in the country to pull down and rebuild the small Infirmary in Burton upon Trent. Nor would it occur to Aston Webb, later to be knighted for his services to architecture, and at the time occupied with designing the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington and later the University of Birmingham, to refer Lord Burton to a local builder. Aston Webb came to Burton, assessed the situation, and produced his plan.
Any architect concerned with hospital building in the late nineteenth century had to tread very warily indeed. There was one person of very considerable power who knew more about the design and building of a hospital than the surgeons and architects put together. Long before her time in the Crimea, and even more so after it, Florence Nightingale had been collecting volumes of data on every aspect of hospital work, from the structure of the building itself down to the most minute details of plumbing and kitchen equipment. Her experience in the unworkable hospitals in the Crimea had not enamoured her towards those responsible for building them and on her return to England she was fully determined that things would change. At first involved with the Army Medical Service her association with civil hospitals followed almost automatically. She was just too late to stop the rather panic building by the War Department of the New Military Hospital at Netley. Some £70,000 had been spent on this rather magnificent piece of architecture before she saw the plan and deemed it unworkable; but not even her personal friendship with Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, could make the Government scrap £70,000 with the considerable loss of face such an act would entail. The finished hospital confirmed her worst forebodings. A magnificent sight from across Southampton Water, within its walls it reduced the nurse’s working capacity by half as she engaged in a perpetual marathon walk along its miles of corridor. It was to be a hundred years before her advice was taken and Netley eventually pulled down.
She had better fortune with the new St. Thomas’ hospital on the south bank of the Thames which was to open in 1870. The woman who opened her ‘Notes on Nursing’ with the words, ‘it may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a hospital that it should do the sick no harm’, would have been the first to acknowledge with everyone else that a hospital’s purpose was the welfare of the patient. What she altered were the priorities. Her view that the well-being of the patient depended mainly on nursing care, which was certainly true at that time, made the first priority in hospital design not the patient but the nurse. Only by making her working conditions the primary consideration could the hospital succeed. Work study is by no means a modern conception. So detailed was her knowledge of every facet of hospital life that she would have a water tap moved two yards to save the nurse that number of steps. For the first time residential accommodation for the nurse was properly designed and made available for the Nurse Training School in the new St. Thomas’s hospital.
Her second concept, quite radical in its time, but no more than common-sense would dictate, was the building of any large hospital on the pavilion system. With sepsis the great bug-bear of the time it seemed reasonable to design a hospital as a series of self-contained but completely separate units which enabled spreading infection to be at least contained and not run rampant throughout the whole hospital. The system at St. Thomas’s was to have another value in another war which she could scarcely have foreseen. The bombs which were to fall on London seventy years later destroyed two of the units, leaving the rest to carry on undisturbed.
The architects had to conform if for no other reason that her standing in the country and with the Government itself was such that no committee concerned with building a hospital of any size in any part of the country would have a stone laid without her opinions on the plans and her opinions could be vitriolic.
Although Florence Nightingale played no part in the new Burton Infirmary there can be little doubt that Aston Webb knew all about Netley and St. Thomas’s, and although Burton was a small unit it was built on the Nightingale lines. The days of special departments were a long way ahead. Wards were medical or surgical and the design of a ward in any hospital built between 1870 and 1900, whether in a teaching hospital in London or a small Infirmary at Burton, was exactly the same.
New Street
The new hospital was completed in 1899 with a complement of seventy-two beds which was a much larger increase in capacity than the figures imply since Typhoid Fever and Diphtheria, formerly such a problem to the staff, were now admitted to the new Isolation hospital and the Infirmary ceased to admit fevers of any kind. Inevitably within a few years the hospital was too small for the increasing number of patients and over the years became a kind of architectural hotch-potch, with so many additions, subtractions and divisions that by 1930 Aston Webb’s original design had become almost unrecognisable.
When opened in 1899, however, it was a small compact hospital of no great architectural merit, but not unpleasing to the eye (Aston Webb would never have built anything shoddy) and within its compass contained every modern development of the time. It was built in three separate units. A two storey block with a central doorway was laid out on the Duke Street front. On the ground floor the Matron’s quarters and Board Room were on the left of the entrance, with a fairly commodious flat for the still single House Surgeon on the right. Above these quarters was the single Ratcliff ward named after the Misses Ratcliff of the brewing family who had offered to defray the cost of one complete ward as their contribution to the new hospital and eventually paid for the whole block.
From the entrance a corridor ran the whole length of the property from Duke Street to New Street. The main unit of four wards was set back from the entrance block in parallel with it, while a new Casualty, Out-Patient Department and Dispensary were built on the New Street front where the main entrance to the hospital was sited, with nurses’ and domestic servants’ accommodation above.
Apart from some variations in size each ward was of identical construction. Rectangular in shape with long windows down either side and beds between, the ceilings were high, allowing the requisite cubic feet of air space per patient while keeping the floor area to a workable size. Piped water, which had been an innovation in the eighteen-sixties when even the largest private houses had no more than a single tap laid on to the ground floor, was now available throughout the hospital, but only to the ward kitchens and sluice rooms. In the ward itself the huge flat-topped cabinet in the centre always held in pride of place a basin and ewer with a small hand towel neatly folded. Filled with warm water by a junior probationer, for the surgeon on completing his ward round, it became a kind of ritual procedure for sister to fill the basin and stand ready to hand the chief his towel.
While piped water throughout the hospital was standard, central heating was a completely new innovation but, with some doubts as to its efficiency, the open coal fire was still a standard feature of every hospital ward. Built in the form of a cube about five feet high and faced with green tiles these were sited in the centre of each ward with an open coal fire on two sides. Unlike the American stove with its central chimney the flues were carried under the floor, in itself a form of central heating as old as the Romans, to emerge in a buttress-like chimney stack on the outside wall. No doubt they were somewhat dirty and repeated filling of the scuttles an unwelcome chore for the porters, but they gave a feeling of warmth and welcome to the visitor which no later form of heating has ever replaced, and never again will the patient have the comfort of dozing off with the firelight flickering on the walls and the night nurse in her chair before the fire, able at the turn of her head to see all that was going on.
At the far end of the ward the sluices and toilets were built out in a three-sided annexe which by its three windows gave maximum ventilation where it was most needed at a time when ventilation depended entirely on windows and flues. At the ward entrance the kitchen, serving also as sister’s room was fitted with the kitchen range, complete with open fire and side oven, where for many years breakfast and tea for the patient were prepared by the nursing staff. A small window opening from the kitchen to the ward still enabled sister, having a quiet cup of tea, to command a view of all her patients, and what was sometimes more important, keep an eye on her junior staff.
The building of the new Infirmary was not without its prohlems. Once the decision was taken at a meeting in the board room of Bass’s office under the chairmanship of Lord Burton, and Aston Webb called in for preliminary talks, a building Committee consisting of four members of the main committee and Philip Mason the surgeon had been elected in May, 189fi, to look after the hospital’s interests. It was a matter the members took very seriously. They were prepared to pay for the best materials and equipment and while the building contract had been given to the local firm of Lowe’s, on Aston Webb’s advice leading firms from London were called in to deal with their various specialities. Any flaw or defect detected by the Building Committee had to be put right and the members kept a very careful check through every stage of the new development. For over three years until final completion in 1899 the committee met almost monthly and more often than not Aston Webb was in attendance, brought down from London to deal with every problem as it arose, He had probably sensed something of the situation and assessed the type of committee with which he was dealing, when in his original agreement with Lord Burton and the main committee he had accepted a fee of live per cent on the building costs but wisely inserted a clause that the committee would be responsible for his railway journeys to and from London; over the years they were not a few.
The innovation of installing ‘the electric light’ had been taken with some trepidation, and a few gas jets had been left at strategic points throughout the building in case of emergencies. For a few months there were problems. Bulbs grew dim and flickered out; fuses blew and left the ward in darkness; newly-plastered walls had to be re-guttered for new wires; and Verity & Company of London, who had installed the equipment, had to pay a few extra visits at their own expense. The central heating brought its own problems. The pipe from the boiler was too small and the number of radiators required to heat the high ceiling wards had been under-estimated. But while the patients at the far end of the ward had to have extra blankets and hot water bottles, at the near end where the ward wall adjoined the kitchen they were perspiring from another cause. The kitchen ranges with open coal fires had been fixed against the adjoining wall and with coal at eleven shillings a ton causing little need for economy, the fire roaring day and night made the wall almost too hot to touch. All the ranges had to be brought out four-and-a-half inches and an extra layer of brick work put in to absorb the heat.
The operating unit had been fitted out by Aston Webb but the new operating table had been the personal responsibility of Walter Lowe and Philip Mason who had purchased it in London, and on its breaking down were duly asked by the committee to have it repaired and ‘find out how the accident had happened’. Some of the expressions used in connection with this unit sound rather strange today. The word ‘theatre’ did not come into use for some years. It was still just the operating room and what is now the anaesthetic room was referred to as the preparation room. It takes a moment or two’s reflection to appreciate that the ‘lavatory basins’ installed in the operating room were in fact the surgeons’ wash basins, the word still being used in the true meaning of its Latin derivation; and the modern anaesthetist might be interested to know that the ‘vomiting sink’ in the preparation room was no longer considered necessary. One somewhat startling expression occurs during the discussion on the size of the doors opening into the preparation and operation rooms ‘in reference to the facility for getting the ambulances in and out of these rooms’. Why a word originally meaning to walk should have come to mean to carry is a problem for the etymologists, but the expression, with only one connotation at the present day, was used by the Victorian surgeons to denote any conveyance on which a patient could be carried in this case the trolley on which he was brought to and from the ward.
Another advance in development was the first installation of a lift to avoid carrying patients up and down the stairs on canvas stretchers but it proved to be no quicker. Matron timed it to take three minutes to rise from the ground to the first door and Aston Webb’s enquiries of the makers brought the explanation that it was manually operated by one man winding it up and down and that it was impossible to do it any faster. Electric power had not yet been extended to lifts.
Some of the complaints were rather puerile in the true sense of the word. Matron complained that small boys were climbing on to the window ledge of her new sitting-room which faced directly on to Duke Street and upsetting her privacy. After some discussion it was gravely decided ‘to take no action at the moment thinking that when the novelty wore off the annoyance would cease. Small boys appear to have been the source of some concern in the committee on various occasions. A new boundary wall in Duke Street had to be topped by iron spikes to prevent their walking along it; and it was not long before attention was drawn to the habit of boys slipping into the new Out-Patient Department in New Street to utilise the toilets provided there for the patients. The cure of this problem by increased staff supervision merely produced a worse one. The little boys used the entrance porch Instead. By the end of 1899 most of the teething problems had been overcome.
New furniture (from Maples of London) had been installed, the board room lilted out at a cost of over £100. This even included a piano for the wards. It had taken some four years to complete, but the committee could fairly congratulate themselves in having produced a hospital which though small in size could compare with the best in standards and equipment. Aston Webb had done litem well, but was no doubt happy to see the end of the Buildings Committee as the new century began.
Over the years the nursing staff had increased in size and Miss Ransford, who had been Matron since 1888, resigned in 1900. She had dealt with the Typhoid epidemic of 1892 and had been mainly responsible for the eventual cessation of the admission of infectious fevers to the hospital altogether. In spite of all the troubles and turmoil of the rebuilding programme she had increased her staff and continued the training school.
When it had been decided in 1885 to discontinue the association with Derby and train its own staff in Burton, the committee had asked Miss Ransford’s predecessor, Miss Browne, the last of the Lady Superintendents, to draw up a report on the nursing situation. It was her opinion that the Infirmary, with some sixty beds, dealing with just over three hundred In-Patients and nearly six hundred Out-Patients, could be adequately nursed by herself at £80, three nurses at £18 to £25, and three probationers at £8 a year. It was little enough to start a training school, but there was nothing to stop any hospital doing so; no Nursing Council, no State Registration, nothing but the arbitrary rules laid down by Florence Nightingale Thomas’s Hospital in 1860, and more or less copied by Miss Browne at Burton.
Uniforms to be provided :
One heavy dress – £0 14s 6d
Three linen dresses – £1 0s 0d
Six aprons – £0 8s 0d
‘One heavy dress every year and the linen dresses and aprons every two years.’
The acceptance of unpaid probationers and more particularly of those who actually paid for their training was a dangerous step which no doubt Florence Nightingale had taken with her eyes open. It was crucial to the success of the nursing service she was trying to develop that it must attract women of some education which at that time could only mean women of a higher social class – a class to which she herself belonged and of whose foibles she was well aware. For this type of woman to accept a salary in the eighteen-eighties was to put her on a par with a paid governess, to reduce her social status, and almost ostracise her from her own kind. The Lady Probationer was an initial necessity to attract the educated woman to the new service; she was unpaid and was giving a charitable service, and if she paid for her tuition it was no different from paying the music master to teach her the pianoforte. Florence Nightingale knew how to deal with the snobbery of her time and also the inevitable effect of her decision. It split the nursing service right down the middle. The Infirmary rules might say there would be no difference in any way in the treatment or training, but the salaried probationer knew better. Quarrels and jealousies arose. The paid probationer felt the Lady Probationers were better treated and more favoured for promotion; and the latter suggestion at least was not without reason.
Lady Probationers received quicker promotion, not because they were ladies but because being ladies they were more highly educated. Necessary as the Lady Probationer was in the early years, as the service developed the situation became as untenable as the position of the Lady Superintendent, and Miss Ransford, the first of the new Matrons, had stopped it altogether. From the nineties onwards all probationers were paid their salary of £8 a year, and shortly afterwards the legal agreement signed by the nurse binding her to a year’s service, was also cancelled.
The Matron held supreme pride of place in an institution run on almost convent lines. The surgeons no doubt appeared daily and although received with some deference were visitors from an outside world. The Secretary was a member of committee and acted in a purely honorary capacity and when he or the chairman paid their calls they were received by Matron in her sitting room where the problems of the day were discussed and Matron’s views given very serious consideration. Within the hospital walls it was a female society. Even when departments developed outside the province of pure nursing Matron still remained in control. The cooks in the kitchens came under the charge not of the chef but the kitchen sister. The living-in domestic staff, and of course the nurses, came under Home sister’s rule; even when the X-ray Department came into being some years later the radiographers were trained nurses and all directly responsible to Matron. This closed community of unmarried women was made closer still by the fact that few of them were local girls with families or relatives in the town. It was considered wrong, and probably rightly so, for a nurse trained in the hospital to be promoted to Sister without widening her experience for a year or two in another hospital and many in fact did not return. Most of the Sisters, therefore, came from other hospitals and other towns. It was even considered unwise to admit local girls for training and every attempt was made to recruit them from elsewhere, even as far away as Ireland, on the grounds that local girls might be too ready by accident or design to gossip at home about the hospital or its patients. The privacy of the patient was sacrosanct, not only to the surgeon but to the nurse. For many years the age of a private patient was not allowed to be recorded on his notes or temperature chart. The appointment of a Matron was a matter of great importance. She could make or mar the whole hospital. She had autocratic powers but had to use them with tact and discretion. Burton was fortunate.
Christmas 1906
By 1900 the Infirmary had achieved a position of some standing, mainly through the reputation of Walter Lowe among other Midland surgeons and their hospitals, and when Miss Butler was appointed Matron to the new hospital she was selected from a list of no fewer than ninety-four applicants for the post. The above photo taken at Christmas 1906 provides a good feel for a typical ward when the hospital was new.
The stained glass windows were added in 1865. They were given by the Marquis of Anglessey, Michael Thomas Bass and Henry Allsop.
(Photos awaiting sunshine!)
You would be forgiven for thinking that the two above pictures are the opposite sides of Saint Modwen’s church. In fact, whilst the top one is St Modwen’s but the bottom one is actually St Alkmund’s curch in Whitchurch, Shropshire.
They are almost identical, bar a few differences to suit their respective locations and a few additions over the years. Both were designed and built under the supervision of architect and builder William Smith, and his brother Richard. Saint Alkmund’s was completed first but William died before Saint Modwen’s was fully completed.
I had always imagined that churches were all unique so this was quite a revelation. In was strangely disappointing to find that Saint Modwen’s of all of Burton’s churches was a duplicate of an existing church being the mosty historically important church in Burton, and maybe even Staffordshire, occupying the site of Burton Abbey.
Burton from the East – 1800 (One of the most useful sources of the old bridge)
Trent Bridge at Burton – a scene from the early 1800s
Burton Abbey – 1812, View of Manor House (Formerly the private residence of the Abbot.)
Burton Abbey Gates – 1830 (now Abbey Arcade, High Street)
Peel Mill – 1830s (Still evident as apartments, Newton Road, Winshill)
Old Trent Bridge – 1840, although anonymous, this picture provides terrific insight of the time
Old Trent Bridge – 1844 by John Harden (Winshill end of old bridge)
Old Trent Bridge – 1857 by William Wilde (North side, note footbridge and lock gate)
View from Stapenhill- c1870
The Triangle, Stapenhill – by John Harden (Saint Peter’s Street)
Stapenhill Village – by John Harden (Junction of Hill Street and Main Street)
Stapenhill Green – by John Harden (Tree felling on what is now Saint Peter’s Island)
Burton Washlands – 1881 (View from top of the new Saint Peter’s Church tower)
River Trent – 1890s (View from Stapenhill Road)
The name Byrkley, which has changed a few times over the centuries, is derived from the family De Berkeley of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. In the 13th century there was a hunting lodge on the site which was in the heart of the ancient Forest of Needwood. Thomas de Berkeley was keeper of the Tutbury ward and occasionally stayed there.
Needwood Chase, as it was then known, had become the hunting preserve of the powerful Norman family de Ferrers, Earls of Derby, whose collective estates were known as the Honour of Tutbury. In 1267 the daughter of William de Ferrers married Thomas de Berkeley.
Because the Ferrers allied themselves with Simon de Montford in his rebellion against Henry 111 they were forced to forfeit their extensive estates to the crown. These subsequently became part of the Duchy of Lancaster which passed to the crown again in 1399.
Those were bloody times but Byrkley Lodge saw the coming and going of generations of monarchs, of charters and changing laws, was controlled by numerous keepers and saw the births, marriages and deaths of numerous tenants.
The hunting lodge was usually the residence of the keeper who was appointed by the King. It was also used on occasions by the monarch on hunting expeditions. Edward IV, who was a particularly keen huntsman, spent lavishly on extensions and repairs. Byrkley Lodge alternated with Tutbury Castle at one time as a venue for the wood mote or forest court. At such times miscreants would be brought before officials who would levy fines for trespass, poaching and other forest offences.
King James I often visited his much loved lodge at Byrkley. The ‘Woodmote Court’ was the only local judicial body. On 19 May 1337 the Chief Forester (Judge) dealt with the following cases:
– A person of Tatenhill fined 2 shillings for stealing three tops of fallen oak trees near Byrkley fishpond.
– Robert Clerk fined 12 pennies for taking one oak tree top from Dunstall Hill.
– Robert Dicon fined 6 pennies for cutting down lime trees.
– Richard Merriot fined 6 pennies for trespassing two colts in the lord’s fenced Byrkley Park.
– The Rector of Tatenhill Church fined 12 pennies for trespassing 140 sheep in Byrkley Park.
– Henry Brown fined 3 pennies for breaking down park palings in Highlands Park half a mile from Byrkley.
All offenders were held in the mercy of the court under surety of the Chief Forester.These courts were no longer necessary once the disafforestation of Needwood was affected after the enclosure in 1801. By this time the forest had changed. Once the home of the wolf, wild boar and wild fallow deer, it was now exploited for timber and pasture. On the lush meadows and grassland grazed the stock and dairy herds and the horses of the Earls and manorial lords. Plentiful oaks supplied acorns for pigs, and where oaks and timber trees were felled underwood and thorn were planted to provide cover for game. Venison, fish from the ponds, and honey from Needwood supplied the Lancastrian households and provided rewards for their supporters and officials.
In 1754 Lord Townshend, whose wife Lady Charlotte Compton had inherited Tamworth Castle and succeeded to the Ferrers barony, acquired the leasehold of Byrkley Lodge as his hunting seat. Here he built a house more extensive and somewhat more elegant than the earlier lodge, where they could retire in peace for a few months of the year.
It had become fashionable in the early 18th century to seek quiet, for some even solitude, in a country retreat, and Byrkley Lodge was ideally situated. Needwood Forest became the haunt of poets, philosophers and painters in search of the picturesque, as well as those in pursuit of the regular sporting pleasures of the forest.
The residents of Byrkley Lodge, like those at Yoxall Lodge lying little more than a mile south on Linbrook, found the natural brook, the valleys and plains, the fertile soils and the picturesque gnarled oaks all lent themselves well to the designs of landscape gardeners. Before he sold Yoxall Lodge to John Gisborne in the mid 18th century Sir Nathaniel Curzon had Ernes, a landscape gardener following the tradition of ‘Capability’ Brown, design improvements for the grounds there. Brown himself was planning the complete rebuilding and landscaping of Fisherwick for the Marquis of Donegal. The Marquis purchased Byrkley Lodge from Lord Townshend and the watercolours of the house and grounds in 1786 show clearly the influence of these gardeners who blended their cultivated art with nature.
On a 1775 map to the nobility Byrkley Lodge is the only building in the wooded area of the Needwood Forest Plateau except for Yoxall Lodge. Its only neighbour at this time was Hanbury Park Farm some 3 miles north.
The inhabitants of many of the great houses in the vicinity were closely associated by ties of friendship and marriage. They shared enthusiasm for hunting and fishing, archery and battledore, books and poetry, music and painting, and exchanged ideas on gardening developments. Many interesting figures of this period found pleasure in this company: William Wilberforce, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Wright, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (2 of whose 4 wives were sisters of Edward Sneyd) and the novalist Maria Edgeworth.
Richard Edgeworth had 22 children. Edward Sneyd had only one and Mary Emma Sneyd did not marry. But one of her close friends, one of the 6 sons of Thomas Gisborne of Yoxall Lodge, married the daughter of Michael Bass of Burton-on-Trent. Mary (Bass) Gisborne’s brother, another Michael Bass, eventually rented Byrkley Lodge from Emma Sneyd in 1850.
The deeds of this lease are interesting in the detail of care for the property stipulated by Miss Sneyd. Of particular interest are the gardens and greenhouses mentioned, hothouses, shrubberies and pleasure grounds. Michael Bass had to spend £350 for improvements and reparations and ‘keep the gardens and garden grounds belonging to the Mansion House cropped and manured and managed the same according to the most approved methods of gardening’.
Sir Oswald Mosley wrote in his 1863 ‘Natural History of Tutbury’ that: “At Byrkley Lodge, for some years, families of pure white rabbits have been produced in the park where they make a very striking appearance”.
Before the Bass family rebuilt the Lodge, previous occupants had tried to make Byrkley different. Albino rabbits were bred and released in large numbers into the grounds. Byrkley Park was the only country estate in existence to have true white rabbits running wild. When the Bass family lived at the Lodge, workers were not allowed to shoot any of these white rabbits.
Brykley Lodge was completely re-built between 1887 and 1891 for Hamar Bass. The above photo shows the impressive stairway.
The stables at Byrkley Lodge, which survived for some time after the main house eventually demolished, enjoyed some fame and success. The Byrkley Stud produced ‘Love Wisely’ which won the Ascot Gold Cup in 1896. Hamar Bass was also the master of the Meynell (Fox) Hunt for 12 years so the hunt started at the front of the lodge.
Hamar’s son, William, succeeded in his uncle’s baronetcy according to special remainder and inherited Byrkley Lodge. The great mansion left by Sir William Bass and sold in 1952 was demolished.
The Trent Bridge is one of Burton’s most destinguishing features. It has a history almost as old as Burton itself.
The current Trent Bridge was only built in 1864, replacing an earlier one which was a little further downstream. If, like me, you marvel at the foresight of it being built large enough to accommodate today’s traffic, you will be similarly surprised to learn that in fact, up until 1926 it was only half its current width when it was widened to cope.
The tramway that used to traverse it only had a single track to handle both directions of Stapenhill and Winshill as well as the Burton and Ashby Light Railway trams requiring careful timetabling!
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The origin of the old bridge on the north side of Burton is not known, but it is certain that for a long time it ranked amongst the wonders of the land. In the early records of the Abbey there is reference made to a sum of money being set apart for the bridge, but this is thought to be for the repairing of it, not for the building.
There seems to have been a bridge of sorts on the site before the Abbey was established in 1004 AD. For many years after the Abbey was built, High Street, then called Old Street and later Long Street, consisting of very little beside two sloping banks and a ditch between them. There was little else to Burton aside from the Abbey. Some antiquarians even claim that the bridge is over two thousand years old, and that the Icknield Road, stretching from Derby to Ashby, must have crossed it. If that be true, it gives much credit to Roman building skill and materials.
There was certainly a substancial bridge on the site by the early 12th century. A bridge keeper was recorded as holding land on the Winshill side. It is not certain whether it fully spanned the river at this time but it certainly did by the end of the 12th century by which time, burgage plots were established in Horninglow Street, ‘west of the great bridge’. It was probably built of stone, or at least had stone footings, although the first surviving mention of a stone bridge is from 1322. The exact form of the structure is unknown but providing that it was not later substantially altered it would have been as described in the 18th century: running north from Winshill before turning west across the river and the west arm, the bridge was then 515 yards long and 15 feet wide and had 36 arches. By the 1590s water no longer passed through two of the arches where land had silted up at the south end of Burton meadow, creating Umpler green. The east end of the bridge was widened in 1831, and in 1839 the first two arches on that side were filled in.
The west end of the bridge originally terminated with a causeway on the south side of which cottages had been built by 1550. In 1835 there were three houses there and four on the north side. The causeway was raised in the later 1750s, after the road had been turnpiked, and two low arches were inserted as culverts.
Grants of land and bequests of money for the upkeep of the bridge are recorded occasionally in the Middle Ages, and in 1546 the endowment comprised three houses and a small amount of land and meadow, worth 21s 4d a year. The abbey seems to have taken no formal responsibility for maintaining the bridge and much of the money needed for repairs came from alms, presumably collected by a chaplain who maintained a bridge chapel. When part of the bridge was swept away by flood in 1284 John of Norfolk, who was acting as keeper of the works of the bridge, was given royal protection to beg for alms to repair it, as was the keeper in 1324. A grant of pontage made in 1383 was to a body of trustees, including a chaplain who may have been the bridge keeper. John of Norfolk, described as a ‘monk’ in the royal grant of 1284, and a ‘bridge monk’ recorded in 1396 are unlikely to have been monks of Burton abbey, and were almost certainly lay hermits, possibly following the rule of St. Paul: a house called the Hermitage in 1546 stood at the west end of the bridge on its north side, opposite the chapel.
In 1441 the abbot and leading townsmen appointed a layman as keeper and proctor of the bridge for a 30 year term, and a layman was appointed for life in 1493. In 1527 an appeal for funds was launched by the abbot, the prior of Tutbury, George, Lord Hastings, and local gentry.
Some of the £20 a year that Burton college was obliged, probably from its establishment in 1541, to spend on making and repairing roads may have been applied to the upkeep of the bridge. At its dissolution in 1545 the college was paying 33s. 4d. a year to a bridge master named William Mason (or Edge), who seems to have been a stone mason retained originally by the abbey; he was still paid a fee by the Paget family in the later 1560s. The annual cost to the manor of maintaining the bridge was estimated at £16 13s. 4d. in 1585. The Pagets evidently assumed responsibility for the bridge, and the obligation was specifically included in the Crown’s grant to William Paget of his father’s forfeited estates in 1597. The cost of repairs was a constant drain on the manor in the 17th and 18th centuries, and when the road over the bridge was turnpiked in 1753 the earl of Uxbridge was awarded £20 a year from the tolls for bridge repair. It remained the lord’s responsibility until 1864.
Bridge Chapel
There was a bridge chapel by the 1260s, and its dedication to St. James was recorded in 1332. On the eve of the Reformation services were being celebrated there by the town’s guild priests. The chapel stood at the south-west end of the bridge and had a south door onto Burton hay. There was also a cross at the east (now Winshill) end of the bridge in 1598. The chapel, having fallen into disrepair, was demolished in 1777.