ERO @ 75: The Open Day

Posted on September 17, 2013 by admin

Well, colour me exhausted!

After a thoroughly enjoyable Heritage Open Day on Saturday, I am sure you will forgive us a brief hiatus in the social media sphere. We all had a great time and we hope you did too. It was great to see so many people, roughly more than 500 came through the door by our closest estimates and every tour was packed. In fact, in the the end we had to lay on a few additional tours to ensure as many people could enjoy a guided tour of our searchroom or a visit to our conservation studio (from which one of my friends returned green with envy, saying “Some of the kit in there…fantastic!” He may have had too much blue icing though.

Our thanks must also go out to all our lovely volunteers without whom the day would not have been possible.

I thought I should share with you a few of the photos from the day, there are many more to follow.

Lord Petre, Lord Lieutenant of Essex, Councillor Kay Twitchen, Chairman of Essex County Council and Stephen Dixon, Archive Services Manager, cutting our 75th Anniversary cake.

Favourite ERO documents: Walker map of Chelmsford, 1591

Posted on August 19, 2013 by admin

As well as asking our users about their favourite documents from our collections, we have also been asking ourselves. Here Public Service Team Manager Neil Wiffen tells us about his favourite document, John Walker’s 1591 map of Chelmsford.

My favourite document at the ERO has to be one of the best known and most widely reproduced – the 1591 Walker map of Chelmsford. This might be an obvious choice (and could it be said boring?) but for me it works on so many levels.

Extract from the Walker map of Chelmsford, 1591 (D/DM P1)

First of all it is a map and I think everyone likes a map because we can all get something from a map so very easily. We don’t need to read Latin or funnily written handwriting to be able to enjoy an historic map. As maps go it is a sumptuous and artistic map. The colours are still so very vivid even after 422 years and the wonderful portrayal of the buildings by John Walker is exquisite.

Being Chelmsford born and bred it works for me on a local level, a source of civic pride. I can’t help when I walk down the High Street but try and imagine what it would have been like when Walker surveyed the town. Indeed walking down the High Street is to walk in our predecessors footsteps so little has the basic layout of the town changed over the centuries. In a way the map is the nearest we can ever get to late Tudor Chelmsford, so it allows us to travel in time. It is a map that continues to keep me thinking about town development. If ever you’ve been shopping on a Friday or Saturday when they have the market stalls in the High Street you can just imagine what it was like when the Middle Row was developed over centuries. Stall holders didn’t bother to take down their stalls overnight but slept under the counter or added another level and before you knew there was a row of permanent shops which Walker depicts.

It can also be a dangerous map as well. Looking at the layout of Chelmsford in 1591 we can be lulled in to thinking how much nicer it would be to live in a small Chelmsford. Urban development and awful planning decisions of the 1950s-70s have deprived the town of much interest which is there in the Walker map. However, we must not forget the appalling inequality, insanitary conditions and harsh punishments of those earlier centuries.

Last of all it is a map of wonder. How did John Walker survey the town and produce the map? Whenever I look at the map I always think – ‘John Walker, what a clever bloke!’

If you would like to nominate your own favourite ERO document, we would love to hear from you. Simply download this form, and return it to the Searchroom desk or by e-mail to hannahjane.salisbury[at]essex.gov.uk. There are also paper copies available at the Searchroom desk. Nominated documents may be featured on this blog or in displays at our open day on Saturday 14 September 2013.

Essex’s Industrial Archaeology: Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd

Posted on May 24, 2013 by admin

On Saturday 6 July 2013 we are hosting a special one-day conference on Essex’s Industrial Archaeology.

Essex is perhaps not thought of as a typically industrial county, but industry is a fascinating part of our county’s past, and shaped the lives of the people who lived here. We have six speakers who will be covering a range of topics and roving around the county:

David Alderton: Why Industrial Archaeology?

Prof. Roy Simons OBE: Marconi, the Father of Wireless

Paul Gilman: title TBC

David Morgans: Beeleigh Steam Mill

George Courtauld: The history of Courtaulds Ltd. InEssex– the first 100 years

Tony Crosby: Industrial housing inEssex

You can find out more about some of our speakers and their talks here. Tickets are just £15 which includes refreshments and a buffet lunch.

In the run up to the conference, we will be bringing you some industrial treasures from our collections to show you some aspects of Essex’s (sometimes surprising) industrial past, beginning with a sample of photographs from our collection of Marconi’s famous New Street factory, taken by Fred Spalding soon after its opening in 1912.

Professor Roy Simons OBE will be discussing the history of this famous company at the conference. Professor Simons is a Marconi veteran himself – he began working on radar systems for the company in 1943 – and since his retirement he has researched the early history of Marconi’s. We will also be showing archive footage of Marconi’s factory shot in 1934, where you can see some of the photographs below brought to life.

Guglielmo Marconi – the ‘father of wireless’ – was an extraordinary man, and Chelmsford owes much to him and the companies he established. Marconi established the world’s first wireless factory in Hall Street in Chelmsford in 1898, but by 1912 demand for the equipment manufactured there had grown so much that the company moved to new purpose-built premises in New Street. Marconi wireless equipment was used to broadcast distress signals from the Titanic, and the first publicised entertainment radio broadcast came from the New Street factory in 1920, when the famous Dame Nellie Melba sang. The company continued to improve on voice transmissions, and later became involved in the development of television. Marconi’s also played a crucial role in developing radar, which was critical to Allied victory in the Second World War. The New Street site has now been unused for a number of years, and after much discussion is currently being redeveloped.

Marconi’s factory in New Street, Chelmsford, built over just 17 weeks by a workforce of over 500 people (D/F 269/1/3676)

Men working in the machine shop at Marconi’s New Street factory (D/F 269/1/3683)

Women working in Condenser and Mounting shop at Marconi’s New Street factory (D/F 269/1/3678)

The Power Test Room at Marconi’s New Street factory (D/F 269/1/3680)

The Carpenters Shop at Marconi’s New Street Factory (D/F 269/1/3681)

Essex’s Industrial Archaeology

Saturday 6 July 2013, 9.30am-4.30pm

Tickets £15 – please book in advance by telephoning 01245 244614

Click here for more information

John Lewis’s medieval roots in Chelmsford – part 2

Posted on May 7, 2013 by admin

First of all, apologies for the break in transmission. We have been having some technical problems which our IT department is working on solving, and hopefully all will be back to normal soon.

On 1 April this year we published news of a recent ‘discovery’ in our archives that showed that medieval Chelmsford had its own John Lewis department store. The document in question said that a man named John Lewis had bought some land in Chelmsford fronting the High Street to build ‘a big shop’.

The text for the fake deed was constructed by Archivist Katharine Schofield, who specialises in medieval documents. She used her expertise to mimic the way in which medieval deeds were written, constructing it in both Latin and in English translation. The finished text was sent to our Conservation Studio, where Conservator Diane Taylor used her calligraphy skills to recreate the style in which a deed of this type would have been written.

Here we reveal what was right and what not quite so right about our April Fools forgery…

Ageing our forged deed

A question of language

Medieval legal documents were written in Latin, unless there was no Latin equivalent for an English word, when the scribe would have to resort to the vernacular to make the meaning clear. (See, for example, our post on ‘Names not to call the bailiff’, when the Maldon court had to break away from Latin to record the insults in question in the vernacular English.)

By the date of our forged deed (1405), however, English would have been much more commonly used and expressing something in Latin would have consequently been much more difficult.

Location location location

Field names do occur in deeds of this date (and earlier) and they are often obviously of a pre-Conquest origin. The land mentioned in this deed, ‘Le Backsydes’, is taken from the description of land on the Walker map of 1591.

Purpose

Our forgery tells the reader the purpose the land was being given for, i.e. the building of a ‘big shop’. Real deeds of this date, however, do not mention the purpose for which the land is being conveyed. (Moreover the idea of department stores was still some way off!)

Money matters

In our deed, the annual rent that John Lewis paid for his land was one chilli pepper on All Fools Day.

Token rents were quite common in deeds of this date and applied to land that had been bought and sold as well as to land that was leased. Rents could be flowers, items of clothing such as gloves, pepper and wax. Some of these would be of a monetary value, others would not. Chilli peppers, however, are native to the America sand were not introduced to Europe until the end of the 15^th century.

Payment of rents was usually done on feast days, the most common in medieval deeds being Easter, Midsummer, Michaelmas and Christmas. Occasionally there were payments on feast days. However, All Fools Day is not a feast day.

Witnesses

The witnesses in our deed were chosen from the names of founders of stores which now all trade as John Lewis round the country. A number had to be discarded as the Christian names were 19^th century and would not work in Latin. There was, for example, a third Cole brother but his first name was Skelton.

The land in question in our deed was being granted by the Bishop of London, who would have had his own men who would have been witnesses to his deeds and would not have necessarily had to call on men from outside his own diocese.

Our witnesses from Watford and Chelsea may well have been called upon as they were part of the Diocese of London, but our witnesses from Reading and Windsor(part of the Diocese of Salisbury) and Cambridge and Norwich(Diocese of Ely) would not have been.

We also gave our witnesses both first names and surnames and places of origin, but at this date witnesses were more often described by their first names only, e.g. Robert of Cambridge, or by a family relationship, e.g. Robert son of John. Since they would have been regular witnesses and known to the Bishop and his household no more accuracy was required. It is for this reason that medieval deeds usually conclude the list of witnesses with ‘et multis aliis’ (and many others). The deed was describing an act which had taken place, the transfer of land (hence it was written in the past tense) and the witnesses were people who would if called upon be prepared to bear witness to the transaction. It was unnecessary to list them in lengthy detail, it was sufficient to know that witnesses existed.

What’s in a date?

The date of 1^st April in 1263 was Easter Day. It is very unlikely that any deed would be dated on Easter Day. Both Sunday and Easter Day were too holy for business to be transacted on those days. Deeds are often dated before or after Easter and are often dated by the number of days from Easter. It is also rare for deeds of the 13^th century to be precisely dated. Dates can often be deduced from other evidence and sometimes if the witnesses are well known.

Shire Hall: Past, present and future

Posted on February 7, 2013 by admin

Shire Hall is one of Chelmsford’s most significant landmarks, and features heavily in our collections of images of the historic city centre. From its opening in 1791 until 2012, Shire Hall served as the County Court. As the County Council asks residents to submit ideas for the building’s future, we took a look back through the archives to see what they reveal about the Hall’s past.

Shire Hall replaced two earlier buildings which served as the county’s court rooms. The Tudor Market Cross, or Great Cross, had been built in 1569, replacing an earlier Medieval building, and it served as both market place and court house. The ground floor was open-sided, with enclosed galleries above, as depicted in John Walker’s map below. Despite the fact that it was open to the street and dusty, draughty, and noisy, the county Assizes and Quarter Sessions courts were conducted in the open piazza on the ground floor, and corn merchants conducted their trade there on Friday market days.

At some point between 1569 and 1660 a second, smaller court building was built, apparently on the west side of the Great Cross, known as the Little Cross. While the Great Cross continued to host the Crown Court, the Little Cross hosted the Nisi Prius (civil) Court.

Extract from John Walker’s 1591 map ofChelmsford, showing the north end of the High Street, with the Tudor Market Cross building in the centre of the market place (D/DM P1)

In October 1788, the Tudor court houses were condemned by the Quarter Sessions as ‘not in a fit condition for transacting the publick [sic] business of the County’, and the County Surveyor John Johnson was commissioned to build a new ‘Shire House’.

The authorities quickly settled on a site for the new building at the north end of the High Street, between the market place and the churchyard, which was then occupied by the existing court houses and several private properties. The new building was to be set further back from the market place, offering some relief to the traffic bottleneck at the top of the High Street.

We are fortunate to have John Johnson’s original plans for the building, including elevations of the south, west and north sides of the buildings, and plans of each of the four storeys, with the plan for the ground floor including internal layouts for the Nisi Prius and Crown Courts. In 1789, a county rate was levied to raise £14,000 to buy the site and construct the new building.

Plans and elevations for the ‘County Hall of Essex’, 1788 (Q/AS 1/1)

The builders of Shire Hall encountered some of the problems experienced today when working on enclosed sites in built-up areas; the old courts were not demolished straight away as they had to carry on functioning, and the churchyard could not be turned into a builder’s yard, so a field was leased in Duke Street to assemble and store materials and carry out preparative carpentry and masonry work. Contractors complained bitterly about the extra time, effort and monetary cost of transferring materials, and also the interruptions to their work caused by the running of the court, and by the annual fairs in May and November.

Despite these challenges, the new building was completed in 1791, and the old courts demolished, revealing the impressive Portland Stone façade of the new Shire Hall.

Shire Hall soon after its opening. Engraving by J. Walker after an original picture by Reinagle, 1795 (I/Mb 74/1/59)

The three central arches of the new building led into a large hall, which replaced the old Market Cross and functioned as market space and corn exchange. Beyond the market hall at the back of the ground floor Nisi Prius and Crown Courts, and a retiring room for judges. A grand staircase lit by a glazed dome led out of the market hall up to the grand jury room and the ‘county room’ or ballroom, which took up the whole of the front of the first floor. There was also a small waiting room for witnesses and an office for the Clerk of the Peace and his records. The building’s façade included three emblematic figures by John Bacon, representing mercy, wisdom and justice.

On 3 June 1791 the Chelmsford Chronicle gave its verdict the transformation to the town centre. The new building ‘…exhibits a splendid object to all persons coming up the town; this elegant building when completely finished will not only do credit to the taste and spirit of the magistrates of this opulent county, and honour to the architect, but will be of the greatest service and accommodation to every person frequenting the public meetings.’

Hundreds of thousands of cases have since been heard in the court rooms of Shire Hall since that time, including witchcraft trials in which women were sentenced to be burned alive, and trials which sentenced people to transportation for what would now be considered minor offences.

Shire Hall has also been the focal point of many grand occasions inChelmsford. Not least of these were the judges’ processions which opened the Assizes each year (where the most serious cases were heard). This was a tradition that continued until the late nineteenth century; prolific photographer and Mayor of Chelmsford Fred Spalding, reminisced in the 1930s:

‘Even the coming of the Judge to open the Assize has altered. It was a great event in my young days – the High Sheriff with his carriage and four horses, trumpeters, marshals, footmen with powdered wigs. I can remember the late Mr. John Joliffe Tufnell ofLangleys, Gt Waltham was Sheriff. A procession of tradesmen, farmers and others from the town and surrounding villages of nearly a mile long, went out to Broomfield to meet him and accompany him to Church with the Judge.’ (D/Z 206/1/93)

Engraving by J. Ryland showing the judges’ procession through Chelmsford High Street before the opening of the Assizes, attended by the High Sheriff and his officers. Pre-1788 (I/Mb 74/1/109)

Shire Hall has also been the iconic backdrop to the many large gatherings of Chelmsford residents in Tindal Square which have accompanied momentous occasions such as pronouncements of new monarchs and election campaigns, as well as social gatherings.

George V is proclaimed King from the steps of Shire Hall by the High Sheriff of Essex, Ralph Bury, 1910. Photograph by Fred Spalding (SCN 1445)

Election of 29 October 1924, candidates addressing the public in front of Shire Hall. Photograph by Fred Spalding (SCN 3396)

Dance in the ballroom, c. 1924. Photograph by Fred Spalding (SCN 4476)

The exterior of the building is little changed today; the west side was extended in 1851, and the east side remodelled in 1903-06.

Shire Hall in 1895, with addition on the west side, and the clock added to the pediment (I/LS/CFD/00011)

The interior, however, underwent more radical changes in 1935-6, when the lobby, courts, picture room and stairwell were substantially reconstructed by the County Architect J. Stuart, bringing in Art Deco aspects. These features are today considered to be an essential part of the building’s architectural character, but they were not universally accepted at the time. Fred Spalding, who took a particular interest in Shire Hall, was dismayed by the changes:

‘…alas!, what of the interior? During 1936, the architects of the present day, have altered it to such an extent that those who knew it, now fail to recognise it. The vestibule has had all its stately columns removed and now looks more like the entrance of a modern cinema. The Crown Court and Nisi Prius Court have been strip[p]ed of all their old solemnity…The whole atmosphere is changed.’ (D/Z 206/1/93)

Photograph of the Crown Court room in Shire Hall, taken by Fred Spalding before the alterations in 1936 (D/Z 206/1/89)

Court room after the 1930s alterations (SCN 4191)

The vestibule before 1936 alterations. Photograph by Fred Spalding (D/Z 206/1/89)

The vestibule after the 1930s alterations (SCN 4211)

Shire Hall is an important focal point in Chelmsford’s history, and in the present cityscape. Listed at Grade II*, it is recognised as a building of great significance.

If you would like to find out more about this Chelmsfordian icon, you can search for Shire Hall on Seax, or see Hilda Grieve’s magnificent history of Chelmsford The Sleepers and the Shadows, available in the ERO Searchroom and libraries across the county. To find out more about Shire Hall’s architect, see John Johnson, 1732-1814: Georgian Architect and County Surveyor of Essex, by Nancy Briggs, again available in libraries around the county and the ERO Searchroom (in the ERO library and also for sale).

To take part in the future use of Shire Hall consultation visit www.theshirehall.com or email shire.hallconsultation@essex.gov.uk.

The closing date for comments and expressions of interest is Friday 15 February 2013.

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Tag Archives: Chelmsford

ERO @ 75: The Open Day

Favourite ERO documents: Walker map of Chelmsford, 1591

Essex’s Industrial Archaeology: Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. Ltd

John Lewis’s medieval roots in Chelmsford – part 2

Shire Hall: Past, present and future