| Notes |
From Mitch Owen, a trustee at Hyde Hall (Springfield, New York), which was built by GHC’s son George.
GHC, had a mistress Sophia Astley (daughter of John “Beau” Astley who later married a Frenchman, Foncier), and he abandoned his wife, Katherine, in Jamaica at some point, in Falmouth, when he left the island with his sons and his mistress and their eldest son, Hyde John. The leers we have about Katherine are deeply moving, her being stranded in Jamaica and unable to return to England, because her husband had refused to send any money for her passage. He really was appalling.
Owned: "Swanswick" and 297 slaves
Called "an execrable villain," his uncle referred to him as "my profligate nephew". Having run up gambling debts he fled to Europe to escape his creditors. He abandoned his first wife in favor of another with whom he ran off with to Jamaica. When he got bored of her, he paid a Frenchman to marry her, taking her off his hands. Returning to England, he kept a mistress before his death in London
To the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth I (b. 1533 - d.1603, reigned 1558 - 1603), Protestant Huguenot tradesmen and artisans fled their Flemish homelands, escaping Catholic persecution in Flanders, - seeking sanctuary refuge in Protestant England. [1] It would be the Protestant Robert Hyde of Hyde Hall Manor, who would invite a number of the Flemish refugee families to take up residence in a plot of land within Dan Wood, Haughton. [2] Almost opposite to the Hyde Hall, on the other side of the River Tame the Huguenot ‘Glassblowers’ (glass makers) established their hamlet and glassworks that was given the name Glass House Fold. To this day there is a cul-de-sac street, ending close to where the fold once stood, that is named after the glassblower refugees - Flemish Road.
As the glassmakers’ furnaces, had an insatiable appetite for the consumption of charcoal, that was derived from the pyrolysis of wood in internally heated smouldering charcoal mounds, and that the villagers forested and foraged from not only the surrounding Dan Wood, but the woods along the River Tame valley bottom as well. The glassmakers might have also opened a drift mine close too their village to extract coal to help compliment the charcoal makers. The Hydes of Hyde Hall had built a lane that passed over the River Tame on a wooden bridge that went up to Haughton Green, and hence forth via various other thoroughfares (possibly Two Trees Lane) would connect the manor hall in Hyde with the Hydes other family estate, Hyde Hall in Denton.
In the eighteenth century, a George Clarke, Governor of New York, after marrying the daughter of Edward Hyde, Governor of North Carolina, Anne Hyde in 1714, took possession of the estates of Hyde Hall Manor. Having adopted the surname Hyde-Clarke by deed poll, one of George Clarke’s descendants, George Hyde-Clarke (b. 1768 - d. 1824) would inherited the estates in Hyde, England, after his father’s death. As Middleton does not make clear which of the Hyde-Clarkes built the new Hyde Hall, might I suggest that it was George Hyde-Clarke who set out to improve his estates in Hyde, Cheshire, and had built not only a the new Hyde Hall next too the old manor house, that became the hall’s stables, but he also had erected a water-wheel corn mill (both practical and picturesque) on the banks of the Tame river as well. (I’ll continue to carry out research on this to confirm it or not, and include anything I subsequently discover into the Post.) Furthermore, although George Hyde-Clarke lived mostly at Hyde Hall, Otsego, New York State, USA, he was not an infrequent visitor to his estates in Hyde, and especially vigilant on the construction and maintenance of the new Hyde Hall. By 1841, Edward Hyde-Clarke (b. 1770 - d. 1873), son to George Hyde-Clarke, was the absentee lord and owner of Hyde Hall, while his half-brother Captain Hyde John Clarke, R.N., J.P., who died at the age of eighty in 1857, was its tenant and manager. I would hazard a guess, and as Middleton does not actually say, that it was Edward Hyde-Clarke who Middleton refers to as Squire Clarke in the following quote.
On Glass House Fold Thomas Middleton writes ….
❝In the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century, Glass House Fold became a busy mining centre, a coalpit being sunk remained in use for over fifty years. A bridge was built over the river at the bottom of Mill Lane by Squire Clarke, and the coal was conveyed in waggons running on a line of rails across the bridge, and up the field behind Hyde Hall, to the canal at Hyde, where it was loaded in barges. The water supply for the inhabitants of Glass House Ford was drawn from three old wells in Dark Lane, on the left-hand side about 100 yards nearer Haughton Green than the by-lane which leads to the fold. These will continue to be used until their site was added to the road when Dark Lane was widened in the year 1922.❞ [3]
To clarify what Middleton is saying in his indistinct, round about way: The bridge built by Squire Clarke was named Clarke’s Bridge, and that replaced the earlier wooden bridge of the Hydes of Hyde Hall, and was erected circa 1795. The canal, Middleton refers, to is the Peak Forest Canal, opened 1800. [4] The by-lane that ran from the Glass House Fold coalpits, running through the hamlet of Glass House Fold all the while, passing Hyde Hall, and ending at a Coal Works (see Map 1 in Photograph Album attached) the Coal Works, that would eventually become Hyde Lane Colliery, Middleton calls ‘Dark Lane’. However, it was named as such, because of the blackened, acrid smoke that constantly hung above Dan Wood and lingered in the lane itself, that from the furnaces of the glassworks and the coal pit, the by-lane was given the colloquial pejorative cognomen of ‘Dark Lane’. In the meantime the lane that ran from Haughton Green to Hyde Hall, and which had part of its length followed by Dark Lane over Clarke’s Bridge, would eventually be officially named after the corn mill on the banks of the Tame river, Mill Lane. There would also be an extension to Mill Lane that led to join Hyde Lane (today’s Manchester Road/Market Street/Stockport Road), also named after the Hydes of Hyde Hall, and that ran from a ford close by to where Broomstair Bridge is now, to Hyde Chapel, Gee Cross. Whilst the palatial hall was demolished, after not a century of life, in 1857, its stables continued until the 1920s as Hyde Hall Farm. Whereas, the short lived glassworks of Glass House Fold ceased operations approximately to the middle of the eighteenth century, the drift mine continued until its closure circa 1830s. Whereas the coal mine had been the main source of employment for the denizens of Glass House Fold, and both that part of Haughton, as well as Kingston, the colliers would find employment in the pits of Broomstair (Haughton) and Hyde Lane Colliery, after its closure. The hamlet, itself, continued well into the twentieth century, and does anyone know when it was actually demolished? There was a partial archeological excavation of the site, mainly over the glassworks area, conducted under the auspices of Tameside Archeological Department through the years 1969 and 1973.
~ Near Tragedy at Glass House Fold ~
Whereas the villagers of Glass House Fold lived their lives without much of a to do, only experiencing the everyday tribulations that any villager would suffer as they carried on there normal working day, in the fields, in the glassworks, or indeed coal mine, one week in February 1910 saw their lives turned upside down. Thomas Middleton writes ….
❝Glass House Fold was the scene of an extraordinary adventure which befell two children in 1910. The children were Sarah Leech, age eight years, and Jack Bowker, aged five. At three o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, February 27th, 1910, they were playing together in a field a few yards distance from their homes, when suddenly they disappeared - the ground beneath them had given way, and the earth had engulfed them. Nothing was seen or heard of them again until half-past eight next morning. For sixteen and a half hours they were at the bottom of an old and long forgotten pitshaft.❞ [5]
Middleton continues ….
❝The police were informed, and a closer search at the neighbourhood commenced. When daylight broke next morning, and the search had proved fruitless, it was feared the children must have fallen in the river and be drowned. Then suddenly two men, still searching, met near a wall, and called to each other to ask if the children had been found. The next moment there came a cry from behind the wall, and on looking over the men saw a hole. They shouted down, and in answer the girl called back that she and the boy were both safe. Rapidly a number of men gathered about the pit mouth. They could not see down the hole, and they dared not approach the edge for fear the earth would give way, so a plank was obtained, and laid across the top of the shaft; a basket and a rope were procured; the basket was lowered, and the man shouted to the youngsters to get in the basket the basket one at a time, and stick tight to the rope. In this way both were safely brought to the surface.❞ [6]
Middleton draws a conclusion to his tale ….
❝The story the children told was simple and touching. When they found themselves at the bottom of the shaft, they began to cry. Some time later they felt sleepy. The girl took her pinafore off, and laid it on the floor in the darkness, put her hands together as she had been taught to do at home, and prayed that God will take her and little Jack back to their fathers and mothers. “Then,” said the girl, “We cuddled up together in the ‘pinny’, and Jack put his jacket over us to keep us warm. We stretched our arms round each other’s neck and went to sleep.” The children slept all through the night, and they had not been awake long when they heard the noises of the man outside. What had happened was that the children had fallen down a long disused pumping shaft of the old Glass House Fold coal pit. When the colliery ceased working the shaft have never been filled up; it did not even appear to have been covered over; but in process of time grass, and herbage growing over it, had gathered dust, and soil, and covered it with a thin layer of earth, which looked just like the rest of the field - and the presence of the shaft had been forgotten.❞ [7]
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Reader's Contributions:
My thanks to Christine Walsh who writes, "My Dad lived at 8 Glasshouse Fold and has written about living there. He said he was the last person to be born there in 1930 and this is an excerpt from what he wrote: 'In 1938 Glass House Fold cottages were condemned and we received the notice to quit from Denton Corporation. We then had to say goodbye to our little cottage and move to the council house at number 34 Greswell Street Denton. We and some six other families were then moved to brand new council houses on Greswell Street/ Tame Street / Quebec Street, Denton where we all had all the modern facilities of the time. We had electric lights, cold piped water, we had a bathroom and a flush toilet. Having a bath was a pleasure in the seclusion of the bathroom. However, my mother said she would have preferred to stay in Glass House Fold if the modern facilities had been available to her.'
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References:
1. Thomas Middleton - The History of Hyde and its Neighbourhood - 1932 pp. 239 - 243
2. Ibid P. 240
3. Ibid P. 241
4. Peak Forest Canal - The Hydonian Chronicles ~ https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheHydonianChronicles/posts/747781785629334
5. Thomas Middleton - The History of Hyde and its Neighbourhood - 1932 P. 241
6. Ibid P. 241
7. Ibid pp. 241 - 242
Additional information and photographs:
1. Glass House Fold - PittDixon Blog Site ~ http://www.pittdixon.go-plus.net/glass-house-fold/glass-house-fold.htm
2. Glass House Fold - Hyde Cheshire Blog Site ~ https://hydonian.blogspot.com/2012/07/glass-house-fold.html
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1742 - 1824 (82 years)
