Rosemont, West Villas, Stockton-on-Tees

Chapter 10: Joseph and Elizabeth Ann Wilson

I am not absolutely certain how and when my grandparents, Joseph Wilson and Elizabeth Ann Pearson, first met. But as my grandmother was employed as a governess to the children of Anthony Rudd, who also employed both my grandfather and his father before him, it seems very likely that it was in this way that they first got to know each other, before Miles Pearson II moved to Linthorpe. Joseph and Elizabeth Ann were married on 7 April 1887 at the Wesleyan Chapel in Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough - a building which I believe no longer exists. The marriage certificate shows Joseph as a commercial traveller, aged 23, living in Moat Street, Stockton. Elizabeth Ann was also shown as aged 23, living at Linthorpe; but, as I have already, she was in fact nearly 25 when she was married. The marriage was witnessed by "Mary Pearson", who could have been either my grandmother's mother or her younger sister; by Joseph's younger brother Albert; and by a Henry Atkinson whom I have not been able to identify.

My grandparents' first home was at 26 Percy Street, in an area of south Stockton known as Parkfield from its association with the ancient castle. This area of small back-to-back terrace houses has been cleared and re-developed within the last twenty years or so. My mother, the eldest child, was born at Percy Street on 2 March 1888 and baptised at home by the Wesleyan Methodist minister on the 9 April following. She took her first name, Maud, from the wife of Anthony Rudd, the employer of both my grandfather and my great-grandfather (Thomas Wilson IV), and the second, Mary, from my great-grandmother Mary Pearson ("Blind Mary").

Joseph and his family lived at Percy Street for no more than a couple of years and then moved to a house in Vyner Terrace, where my uncle Walter was born in 1890. Vyner Terrace ceased to exist long ago. It was a single row of 14 houses on the south side of Oxbridge Lane and stretched from the corner of Yarm Lane to a level crossing at the railway line. This level crossing became a considerable obstacle to traffic as more houses were built to the west of the railway and it was replaced by the present underpass. Vyner Terrace was demolished to provide the necessary land. The family's next move was to Spring Street, leading off Yarm Road about half a mile south of Vyner Terrace, and it was there that my aunt Edith and uncle Joseph were born in 1892 and 1894. I know little about their life at these first three addresses; but as my grandfather was said to have started work on ten shillings a week and married on not much more I assume that it was not easy. It was from Spring Street that my mother and Walter used to visit their grandfather Thomas Wilson (IV) at his house in Moat Street (see Chapter 7), and I recall my grandmother telling me that it was also at Spring Street that my grandfather had some form of skin infection which required the rather painful remedy of having his moustache pulled out hair by hair with tweezers!

Anthony Rudd, my grandfather's employer, was a rich corn merchant who had his warehouses on the riverside at the foot of Castlegate. At that time he lived at Ivy Croft in Richmond Road but later moved to Lower Middleton Hall on the way to Darlington. From all accounts he was a bit of a "slave-driver", but he had a high opinion of my grandfather (whom he had known since Joseph had been a small boy) and constantly pressed him to move from Spring Street to a more impressive house - mainly, one assumes, for appearance's sake as my grandfather was making good progress in the company. Eventually, in 1894, my grandfather took on the lease of Prospect House, Fairfield, for the princely sum of £15 a year. In those days Fairfield was a small isolated hamlet situated in farm lands some two miles out of Stockton, with no access to the town save by foot or horse and trap along Bishopton Road or Oxbridge Lane. In Kelly's Directory for 1887 Fairfield is included with the outlying village of East Hartburn, and only six private residents and five farmers and agricultural workers are identified as living there. Prospect House itself was not mentioned in the directory and presumably had been built only a short time before my grandparents moved into it. It stood at the junction of Bishopton Road and The Avenue, in those days a narrow and very dirty private road between Bishopton Road and Fairfield Road. The house still exists, and although it is now known as The Lindens and has been divided into two separate dwellings, it has changed very little from the outside. The brick coach-house, stables and other outhouses are still there facing Bishopton Road, but are now used as garages. Fairfield, however, has ceased to be a remote outlier of Stockton, and continuous housing now stretches away into the countryside well beyond The Avenue.

The youngest child of Joseph and Elizabeth Ann - my uncle Thomas Alfred - was born at Fairfield in 1895. All the children attended school in Stockton, going there and returning - usually with my grandfather - in a horse-drawn trap for which the family had a resident coachman-cum-gardener. The few houses and farms in the vicinity of The Avenue formed a fairly compact little community and my grandparents were friendly with their next door neighbours the Tossells; with the Funnells who lived at the other end of The Avenue facing on to Fairfield Road; and with the Guys who lived at Elm Tree Farm about a quarter of a mile away on the north side of Bishopton Road. The Tossells had been living in The Avenue even before my grandparents' time, and it is only within the last ten years or so that William Tossell - then a schoolboy and the last of his family - died in the house that his family had occupied for nearly 80 years. My grandparents were particularly friendly with the Funnells, both at Fairfield and for many years afterwards. Mr Funnell was the first headmaster at the Oxbridge Lane Schools and frequently walked along to Prospect House to talk to my grandfather and play draughts and chess with him during the long winter evenings. From all accounts he had a rather dry sense of humour, of which my grandfather - who was inclined to be credulous - was on more than one occasion the victim. For example, late one night my grandfather went out into the garden in his nightshirt thinking he heard a fox around the henhouses. He happened to be seen by a neighbour, who mentioned the incident to Mr Funnell on the following day. The outcome was a widespread story that a ghost had been seen in the vicinity of Prospect House; and it lasted until he and my grandfather concluded that, after all, it must have had a more natural explanation!

Joseph and Elizabeth Ann lived at Fairfield for seven years before deciding to move nearer in to Stockton. It is possible that this coincided with the expiry of the lease of Prospect House, but my grandmother told me that their main concern had been the isolation and the problems they had encountered as the children grew older. She said that very often in the winter-time the only sign of life she could see was the oil-lamp in the distant window of Elm Tree Farm, And on two occasions when Walter and Joseph had accidents in my grandfather's absence (both suffered concussion, one from falling off the back of the trap and the other from being struck on the head by a heavy football) she had to run across the fields to seek help from Mr Guy and his wife. Finally, in the severe winter of 1899-1900 my mother was lost in a heavy snow storm when trying to make her way home on foot along the Fairfield Road, and had to be rescued by my grandfather and Mr Tossell, who had gone out in search of her. The move from Fairfield took place early in 1902. The family's new home was a large stucco-faced house in West Villas named "Rosemont". In those days West Villas were virtually the last houses out of Stockton along Oxbridge Lane, before one came to the ancient Ox Bridge and open farming country. They faced the new cemetery and backed on to Stockton Park, their long sloping gardens giving on to a narrow lane which led to the rear park entrance. Rosemont was the end house in a group of four, with a wide side entrance leading into the house and back garden. It stood - as indeed it still stands - immediately opposite the main cemetery gates. And although I believe 'Rosemont' ceased to be its name many years ago, the house has changed very little since the early years of this century.

During the period up to the First World War my grandfather prospered very considerably and eventually took over the business of Anthony Rudd and Company after his old employer had retired. He had extensive interests in the importation of corn and feeding-stuffs through the north-eastern ports, much of it for the many thousands of pit-ponies working in the mines of Durham and Northumberland at that time. In a material sense life at Rosemont was comfortable, although in retrospect my mother had one or two reservations. After leaving her primary school she went on a scholarship to the girls' side of the Higher Grade School (later known as the Secondary School) which my father also attended. One of her recollections of her schooldays at the turn of the century was of having to meet her father for a midday meal whenever he was "standing" at the Corn Exchange in Stockton. The meal was taken in a first-floor cafe at the corner of Dovecot Street and invariably included boiled cabbage which my grandfather liked but my mother hated - perhaps one of the reasons why we saw relatively little of it at my parents' home in later years! My mother had thoughts of becoming a teacher when she left school, but nothing came of this, I believe she and her sister Edith were kept fairly hard at work in the large family home, where my grandmother refused to have any outside help at least until after her two daughters had married. But at least this enabled them to develop their skills in other directions. Both my mother and my aunt were accomplished painters in oils and examples of the work they did at Rosemont adorned their walls and local art exhibitions for many years afterwards. Before she married my aunt also established a local reputation as an amateur singer and I recall reading newspaper accounts my grandmother had kept which described her successes at concerts in the Teesside area. Unfortunately on one occasion she was suddenly attacked by stage fright, dried up, and obstinately refused to sing another note thereafter.

As the children of Joseph and Elizabeth Ann grew up they started to go their own ways. My mother and Edith were married at a double wedding on 8 July 1915, the photograph of the many guests which I still have in my possession providing an interesting guide to the members of the family - old and young - on my father's side as well as my mother's. Walter followed his father into the corn trade, and Joseph took articles as an accountant in return for a fee of 100 guineas, which my grandfather much begrudged! Thomas Alfred, the youngest son, became a bookkeeper at the Moor Ironworks which stood near the railway north of Mill Lane end (literally, on the old Stockton Moor) until well into my own lifetime.

But the last years at Rosemont were clouded by unhappiness for my grandparents, more especially for my grandmother. Fairly early in the First World War Thomas Alfred contracted tuberculosis of the spine. In an effort to restore his health my grandmother took him first to Danby and then to Glaisdale in the North Yorkshire Moors, but to no avail. He then went to Rueberry Nursing Home at Osmotherley, also in the moorlands, but became progressively worse and eventually died at home in August 1915. I have one or two photographs of him sitting in the garden at Rosemont with my grandparents during the early summer of that year. He insisted upon attending my mother's wedding in July, although the wedding photograph in which he appears preceded his death by no more than a month or so. Thomas Alfred was a fine pianist and was studying for his licentiate at the time he was taken ill. To his death were added the temporary loss of Walter and Joseph in the following year, when they went into the Army. Thankfully both survived active service in France, although not entirely unscathed. The final blow occurred in September 1918 when my grandfather, who had by then retired from business, died of heart failure at the age of only 54. He and Thomas Alfred, and my grandmother many years later, were buried near the main entrance to Oxbridge cemetery, within sight of the house where the family had lived for about 16 years. In three years, therefore, Elizabeth Ann had lost her husband and her youngest son; her two daughters had married and left home; and there was no certainty that her other two sons would return from France. Although financially well off, she could not contemplate living on her own at Rosemont, with its many family associations, and after my grandfather's death she decided to move away. The house was eventually sold in January 1919.

Rosemont figures in my earliest memories. From over 60 years ago I dimly remember my grandfather at the head of the dining-room table (perhaps at a Sunday lunch-time) although I can recollect little more of him than the gold watch-chain he was wearing across his waistcoat. More clearly I can remember playing in the garden and on the tiled floor of the large kitchen (which I have never seen since) and, at a later date, I sat with a neighbour's son on the front porch steps watching the furniture being moved out.

After her family had grown up and my grandfather had died, my grandmother - like her parents before her found it hard to settle down in any one place. Her first move was to a three-storey house in Varo Terrace, Yarm Lane, almost directly opposite the old Vyner Terrace house in which Walter had been born in 1890, I can remember very little of the inside of the Varo Terrace house (which is now used as a branch of Lloyds Bank), apart from the fact that it had a front door with lots of blue and red glass in the Victorian style and that the door into the small back garden was hung with small blue glass lanterns which were lit by candles at Christmas. My clearest memory of this house is that it stood three or four doors away from a confectioner's and a chemist's shop to which I accompanied my grandmother and was occasionally charged with the task of bringing back a loaf of bread. After about three years in Varo Terrace Elizabeth Ann left Stockton and moved to a large three-storey semi-detached house, named 'Corderry', in Cambridge Road, Linthorpe: she was not very pleased by the fact that the previous owner had been a public-house keeper. I visited Corderry with my mother shortly afterwards but because of its distance from my own home this was, I think, the only time I saw it during my grandmother's stay there. I can see a large silver tea-urn which stood on the sideboard in the dining room, and the silver tea service that was used on that occasion. But my only other recollection is that Corderry, unlike the Varo Terrace house, had a large conservatory by the side entrance. My grandmother stayed at Linthorpe for no more than a year or two because by January 1927 at the latest she had moved to 'Dunholme', a double-fronted three-storey house in Norton Road, on the southern outskirts of Norton about a mile north of her father's old grocer's shop in Crosby Terrace. I have very clear memories of this house, which my brother and I used to visit by tram from Stockton High Street and where I stayed on occasion with my grandmother. It was a very substantial and roomy house with a small garden back and front, a glass porch at the rear in which Walter kept his early motorcycles and Flanders car, and beyond that what seemed to be an interminable series of outhouses. The house is now used as a private hotel. It was from Dunholme that Walter was married; and as his younger brother Joseph had already married two or three years earlier my grandmother was then left on her own.

From Dunholme Elizabeth Ann moved to 'Alverthorpe', a new semi-detached house of modest size in Appleton Road (now part of Reeth Road) at Linthorpe, immediately facing the Linthorpe Tennis Club. I stayed at Alverthorpe with her for the greater part of two years in the late 1920s, going to school in Stockton by the Redwing or Safeway bus services that went past the end of the road; and it was during this time that I first heard from her the stories of the Pearsons of Borrowby and her own family in years gone by. By this time, however, my grandmother was nearly 70, and al though she remained in good health she eventually decided to move back to Stockton to be nearer her daughters and Walter. This final move, which took place about 1931, was to a house at 25 Richmond Road, in the same group of houses as my aunt Edith and almost opposite Anthony Rudd's old house where she had been a governess before her marriage. She remained there for 20 years, the longest time she had spent at one address in the whole of her life. After the move to Richmond Road my grandmother's sight began to fail - rather ominously in view of what had happened to her mother during the later years of her life - and during my last schooldays and early workdays I often used to read the newspapers to her and show her where to sign her name on business papers. Fortunately she managed to recover her sight as the result of operations at Newcastle Infirmary, and at least in one eye this remained good to the end. Although she was visited frequently by Edith and in later years agreed to have some daily help in the house, she continued to live on her own and do much of her housework and shopping: the only 'living-in' company she would accept was her budgerigar. But on 5 February 1952 she had an accidental fall down her stairs, and this proved fatal. She was in her 90th year when she died. During the last year or two of her life she had met (the eldest two of) my own children (names removed) during our holiday visits to north Yorkshire and Stockton, so providing a "verbal contact" with great-grandchildren which at the time of writing has extended over more than 116 years.

In appearance Joseph Wilson, my grandfather, resembled Lloyd George when young, though he was somewhat plumper than the statesman and did not have his plentiful hair. He was a man of great business acumen and drive, and left what was for that time a considerable fortune when he died in 1918. His manner was rather brusque and his attitude towards his family patriarchal: he was inclined to treat his sons and daughters as children for longer than they deserved. Although he was a regular attender at the Wesleyan Methodist chapels in Stockton, I believe this was less out of personal conviction than the result of pressure or persuasion by my grandmother. However, she never succeeded in weaning him away from a glass of whisky which he enjoyed on returning home in the evening, though from all accounts she was inclined to regard this as a form of mortal sin! My grandfather and grandmother, though different in many ways, were devoted to each other and it was a grievous blow to her when he died in early middle age. My grandmother, for her part, was an extremely strong-willed person, as all her children have acknowledged over the years; and although she would never have wished anybody harm, she could harbour prejudices to an extent that was really not justified by the circumstances. She always sat bolt-upright in a chair, which in a way seemed to typify her general attitude. Like her father, Elizabeth Ann was a zealous Wesleyan Methodist and was very active in chapel matters in the Teesside area until advancing years restricted her activities. But although she was very much the "grande dame" in my earlier years- she could be kind and considerate in her rather stiff way; and I personally had much to be grateful to her for during difficult times in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Of Joseph's and Elizabeth Ann's children, Walter the eldest son entered the corn trade in which his father had been so successful, and remained in that line of business in the Teesside and Cleveland areas until he retired. He married Marjorie Arnold of Barnet, and with the exception of a few years before the Second World War when they lived at Seamer near Stokesley, their married life was spent entirely in Stockton. After Marjorie died Walter lived on his own at Fairfield - not far from his boyhood home at Prospect House - until his own death in 1977, in his 87th year. Edith, my mother's younger sister, married Reginald Holmes, a Midland Bank cashier, at the double wedding with my father and mother in July 1915. They lived first at Newbiggin and then at Blyth, in Northumberland. But by 1922, when the younger of my sisters was born, they had moved to a house in Granville Terrace on the sea front at Redcar because then and on a later occasion my brother and I stayed with them for some weeks. Then in about 1927 they moved to Richmond Road in Stockton and. remained there for the rest of their lives. My aunt died in 1961 and Reg in 1972. They had no children of their own, but there was a closer attachment between them and the family at Raby House (see Chapter 11) than there was between us and our other uncles and aunts. In later years they were popular with our own children, whom they never failed to visit when we were spending our summer holidays on the North Yorkshire coast. During their married life Reg and Edith had a succession of new cars and Scotch terriers, and during the 1930s it was a fairly regular practice for one or more of us to take the dog for a walk in Ropner Park on summer Sunday mornings and to be taken out for a ride in the car in the afternoon. My grandparents' other son (apart from Thomas Alfred who died in 1915) was Joseph, who had a very successful accountants' business in Middlesbrough. He married Lillian ("Billie") Pike of Runswick Bay in the early 1920s, and after living for two or three years in Stockton, they spent the remainder of their married life in The Avenue at Linthorpe. After Billie's death Joseph lived on his own in the family home for a few years and then greatly surprised everyone by marrying again at the age of 83. At the time of writing he and his second wife (formerly Miss Wynne Mellanby, an old friend) are living in Yarm Road at Stockton. The next generation of the Wilson family remained in the Teesside area and are still living there with their families. Walter's son Peter is at Potto in Cleveland; Joseph's son Geoffrey is at Busey Hall at Carlton-in-Cleveland, less than a couple of miles away; and Joseph's daughter Shirley (although she has changed her name on marriage) lives at Linthorpe as did three generations of Wilsons and Pearsons before her.

Next: My parents Everett Jones & Maud Mary Wilson