Webmaster, Derbyshire VCH Trust

If you are interested in supporting our work, you are very welcome to join us here at the Derbyshire Victoria County History Trust.

We are currently concentrating our efforts on the Chesterfield area, having undertaken research which has been published on Bolsover and adjoining parishes.

You can find out more information on our activities at our website and by contacting us.

In normal times we run a weekly term-time research group in Chesterfield, which brings together a small friendly group of interested people under our County Editor Philip Riden. We also hold summer guided walks and usually hold an AGM, with a speaker on some topic of interest to those interested in the county’s history. Members of VCH also receive a free copy of our publications (but not back copies) and a periodic newsletter.

Our blogs and Facebook posts give some indication about the sources we use and the research we have undertaken. Membership of VCH is available from £5 a month, which automatically enters you into our monthly prize-draw. We are a registered charity.

The Victoria County History makes use of a wide range of sources in our attempt at a new history of local communities. One of the forgotten aspects of Chesterfield’s claim to be the ‘Centre of Industrial England’ was the amount of in-house magazines produced by locally based companies for their employees. They can make an excellent source for both local, company and family history. Many are available in local studies libraries.

We feature just a few examples on this page. Our first is the front cover of January 1962’s Staveley News. Produced by the Staveley Iron & Chemical Company, the cover shows ‘…one of Staveley’s stockyards has as a background the neat block which houses Foundries laboratories and offices and the research department. Just behind are the roofs of foundry buildings…’

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The second is Trebor Sharps’ Working Together, from Winter 1973. The front cover features Chesterfield’s ‘Maeve McGoaty at the hopper that feeds the wrap machine wrapping Trebor mints.’ In addition to the Chesterfield facility, at this time the Trebor group had factories at Woodford, Forest Gate, Maidstone and Stratford, their own printers (who printed the magazine) and overseas distributers. Their magazine covered all these locations.

Broad Oaks was the magazine of the Markham & Co. Ltd., named after their engineering works at the bottom of Hady Hill. Like most other company magazines, it not only featured latest corporate news, but also such things like social events, sports and employee news. Our third extract is from the magazine of spring 1967. It’s a page showing the children’s Christmas party – an annual event at many companies during the period. We wouldn’t use this type of information in VCH, but it does seek to outline the ‘other things’ lost that the closure of large employers in the Chesterfield area and elsewhere has resulted in. Also lost were numerous sports-grounds and welfare facilities. The Staveley company and GKN were particularly noteworthy examples in the Chesterfield area of facilities that are no more.

In-house employee magazines can be an excellent source for tracing the development of local companies. For the family historian, many also contain photographs and other information on long-serving employees, even marriages and deaths. Take our final scan from the same January 1962 Staveley News. It features the retirement of three employees. One wonders if this photograph or the information in the article has survived or is available anywhere else?

We are still at Bolsover for this blog – and is anyone up for a swim? Unfortunately, if you are – you’re too late, for these baths were closed, controversially, in the late 1980s and demolished.

They were opened in 1925 on land given to the miner’s welfare committee fund by the duke of Portland, at the bottom of Castle Lane. Not only were there public baths, but the scheme also included public slipper baths (where, for those who had no bathroom, you could go and get one) and showers. The baths (there was one pool) could be boarded over for dances, concerts and meetings.

Our first photograph shows the baths, including the superintendent’s house, under construction. Our second the completed baths, both are courtesy of Bernard Haigh and featured in his ‘Around Bolsover’ book. The baths were certainly impressive.  As recorded in our book ‘Bolsover: castle, town and colliery’ the town’s urban district council took a 25-year lease on the baths in 1925, at a nominal sum.

They were used by local people and those from further afield – particularly schools, who would be transported by the town’s Castle Coaches to and from the baths. (The writer of this post remembers being ferried from a Chesterfield area junior school to Bolsover and back in the late 1960s by Bolsover’s own Castle Coaches).

The interwar period was one of progress by Bolsover’s urban district council. They constructed council homes, provided improved parks, purchased the formerly private water undertaking (1923) and began to supply electricity (from 1927). A library was also established in the council offices, jointly with the county council, in 1925, before moving to a former Co-op branch in 1932, on Cotton Street.

We’ve dipped in to our own archives for this blog, with pictures of when our part of the England’s Past for Everyone (EPE) project was launched in Bolsover Library on 18 March 2006.

We were able to welcome Dennis Skinner, then Bolsover MP, who cut our rather tasty birthday cake. Professor David Hey (who sadly died in 2016) and Professor John Beckett from the University of Nottingham and one-time Victoria County History (VCH) national director were also present along with civic and local history organisations in the Derbyshire project areas (which were Bolsover and Hardwick). Professor Hey was a chairman of the Derbyshire Victoria County History Trust.

The EPE project was driven by the internationally respected research standards of VCH. In addition to the two books on Bolsover and Hardwick which were eventually produced, a website was created. This is still accessible at https://www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk/explore/. The project included work with schools. A volunteer research group was started and contributed to the work. Other communities across England were also part of the EPE project.

Find out more about the Derbyshire EPE books on Bolsover and Hardwick (which are unfortunately now out of print) and other VCH publications here.

It’s only fairly recently that we have been managing our own digital media presence. Both our own webpage and Facebook page are newcomers.

We have had a blog published by the British Association for Local History (BALH), about this recent approach to digital media, including Facebook posts. Take a look at https://www.balh.org.uk/blog-opening-up-our-research-to…

The BALH has lots of information on its website (https://www.balh.org.uk/) for anyone interested in local history and runs a popular series of on-line talks and seminars.

Local wine and spirit merchant Thomas Philpot Wood (1840-1911) published an annual almanac from his premises over-looking Chesterfield Market Place. Our first illustration shows the once familiar cover of one the later editions. The second illustration is taken from the rear cover of his edition for 1900, which clearly shows TP Wood’s premises. The almanac was distributed freely to his ‘customers and friends’.

The first edition was published in 1863 with the final one in 1963 (for 1964), though by this time the business had long been part of the Mansfield Brewery Company. There were notable gaps in publication, including just before the First World War and after the Second World War.

In its early years, Wood would introduce each almanac with his personal thoughts about local and national happenings. There were general articles, a local directory and perhaps, most famously of all, a chronicle in which local events were briefly listed. Our third photograph shows the final entries for the 1900 almanac. They generally end in November of each year to allow for typesetting and subsequent publication around Christmas. The almanac for 1900 was therefore published in the period leading up to Christmas 1899. It comprised some 515 pages – quite an undertaking. They were eagerly awaited in many households.

The almanacs might also be illustrated with plates of local features, such as the workhouse on Newbold Road (later Scarsdale Hospital) – our final photo. Wood explains in his introduction that rebuilding or a move out of town was then under discussion. In the event the former was pursued.

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The covers of the almanac changed little in its later years. Our first photograph shows one from 1921, which includes the TP Wood’s punch (in a) bowl trademark. The cover of the last edition for 1964 was basically the same, but with a dark blue paper.

TP Wood himself was a great benefactor to the town and prominent in its politics. Today he is best remembered as the driving force behind Chesterfield’s Queen’s Park and his almanac. You can find out more about him at this short biography by Chesterfield Museum.

There’s an interesting blog from the Derbyshire Record Office about how an engraving of Chapman’s 1837 map appeared in one of TP Wood’s almanacs here.

For us in Derbyshire VCH, we still use TP Wood’s almanacs as a useful research source – particularly its chronicle of local events.

One of the features of older Chesterfield was the large number of long yards in the Market Place area. In this post we look at one of these survivors – Angel Yard which started in the Market Place and ran right up to Saltergate.

When the Crown officials, who had charge of the manor of Chesterfield, decided to move to a new and present market area, at the end of the 12th century, they also laid out burgage plots. On the Low Pavement and Central Pavement side of the market these went right down to the banks of the river Hipper. But, on the opposite side they were constrained by those already on Saltergate. Many had yards to access the properties that were built on them.

You can still see remnants of these plots and yards today. A traceable one is Angel Yard, which ran from the Angel Hotel on the Market Place, right up to Saltergate. Our first photograph shows the one-time Angel – decorated for the turning of the first sod of the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway in 1892. The archway to the right leads up to Angel Yard. Fast forward to the late 1920/1930s for our second photograph – complete with trolley bus. The Angel Hotel was burnt down in 1917, but had closed in 1915. The adjacent post office (which opened in 1886 after being in the Market Hall) took advantage by extending towards its next-door neighbour – the then Westminster Bank. Note the gap between the two – probably remnants of our Angel Yard. This gap is still there – our third photograph.

At Saltergate – our fourth photograph – next to the Barley Mow public house, Angel Yard still exists. You can still see it has a street name plate and it actually looks like a yard. It runs down towards its now isolated end in the Market Place, cut off by the relatively modern Rose Hill.

There are still other fragments of the burgage plots and their yards left – perhaps most notably on Central Pavement with Theatre Yard and Ward’s Yard. But many went when The Pavements shopping centre was developed at the rear of Low Pavement. A stark illustration of the former burgage plots can be seen on our seventh and final illustration – part of the 1883 Ordnance Survey 6 inches to 1 mile map of Chesterfield. Note the long black blocks of property – following the boundaries of the old burgage plots.

You can find out lots more in our Chesterfield Streets and Houses book.