A History of Manningtree,
the 1800's - Continued...
On the River
To many people Mistley is inseparable from the sailing barge and the name Horlock is synonymous with the Mistley waterside. There was a Richard Horlock among the local ship-owners in 1848, though the family had come to Mistley not many years before from the Rettenden area of south Essex. In the course of the 19th century the Horlock family thrived, and the Mistley economy thrived with them.
Although a serious barge transportation business racing was a key interest. Richard Horlock entered Excelsior, built at Ipswich by William Bayley, in the new class for barges introduced into the Thames match in 1868. It is said that Richard’s two sons had time to tar only one side of the barge in preparation for the race, the other side being still dirty when she sailed home first in class. It was the beginning of a long run of racing successes for the family. But more on the river and the Horlock name into the 1900’s
The Railway - a faster pace…
When the railways passed close to Manningtree on its journey from Colchester to Ipswich in 1846 a station was opened a mile from the town. It is generally thought that the railways brought prosperity, but writing nine years after the railway came Joseph Glass paints a different picture. He talks of how many people had made an ‘ample living’ chiefly from the coasting trade, with freights of coal and corn being carried by many ships and with good wages for the sailors, mates and captains, and the families of the Longs and Howards of the ‘fishing trade’. Little wonder then that at the time Manningtree, Lawford and Mistley could support almost 50 public houses and private beer houses – most since gone as drinking establishments but many of the buildings survive to this day some with still in their original role.
Iron Foundry
1833 saw the formation of the Iron Foundry in Colchester Road. The ironworks, which was in Lawford before the boundary changes, was run, in later years, by Robert Maxwell Fitch, who termed himself engineer, iron and brass founder. Besides being general engineers and manufacturers or agricultural machinery and all kinds of metal work, the firm also specialised in deck machinery for sailing barges. The leeboard winches on some barges can still be seen with the name Fitch, Manningtree, picked out in white paint.
Before Mr Fitch took over, the foundry was run by successive generations of the Bendall family, with a history going back to at least the 1830’s. The area still hints to its past with names such as Bendalls Court and Ironside Walk.
Plastic – ground-breaking industry
The word ‘celluloid’ has become synonymous with cinema films, but it is much less well known that a plastics material of similar composition has been manufactured in England ever since 1869 under the name of ‘Xylonite’ at first in London and then after 1887 at the village of Brantham, Suffolk, just over the river from Manningtree.
Xylonite in England and celluloid in the U.S.A. were developed almost simultaneously, but independently, and were without question the first of the now very large group of materials known as plastics and preceded Bakelite by some 40 years. It’s hard to imagine the Stour Valley as the launch pad for plastic manufacturing.
Gasworks
If you walk down York Street you will come to the site of the old gasworks of the Manningtree and Mistley Gas Company. Every town once had its own gasworks, making gas from coal and producing as by-products of the gas-making process coke and bitumen. C. Stone & Son, the coal merchants in Norman Road, had a licence to deliver coke from the gasworks to customers in the area. Locals used to queue up to get rough coke, which burned easily, to take away in any kind of cart or receptacle they could muster.
Manningtree gasworks was built in 1840 at a cost of £1,700, and the gas was available as far away as Manningtree Station. In 1890 gas lamps were put along The Walls, the road running along the riverside between Manningtree and Mistley, and in the streets of Mistley. The gas street lamps were not lit for two days before and two days after full moon, people being expected to see their way around by moonlight.
If you look on the north side of York Street you will see an old wall constructed of gasworks clinker. And ahead is a path whose name, Gasfield, seems to bring a whiff of that long-gone gasworks.
This much later photo depicts the Maltings and Mistley Place owned by Edward Norman
and at the bottom the gasworks.
The Maltings – Norman and Brooks
One of the major purchasers of the Rigby estate was Edward Norman, who had been a tenant of the family for a good many years. A member of a local family, he was a maltster and coal and corn merchant and head of a business that in the course of the early 19th century attained pre-eminence in the Mistley area. He was about 30 when he built a malting on land belonging to the Rigby family at the west end of the Walls, close to the Manningtree boundary. Many of these buildings can still be seen but are now converted into residential properties.
In 1819 Norman had a large house, Mistley Place, built for him just to the east of his maltings complex, and there he brought up his family. And by the late 1800’s descendents owned much of the Rigby estate. In the 1860’s Canon Norman – a nephew, had become a canon of St Alban’s by then – gave a piece of land for the building of a new parish church to take the place of the Rigby church, which was suffering badly from dry rot that it had to be demolished, leaving only the two towers that still stand to this day.
In his will Edward Norman made a generous bequest to his ‘loyal clerk’ William Brooks, who also received all the farm and malting utensils. William had clearly begun business on his own before Norman’s death, for by 1859 William had acquired granaries on Mistley Quay, where there were mills and a private rail siding, and in 1863 he set up the company of W. Brooks and Sons. The company, which was in the business of buying and selling grain and agricultural produce and also farming, expanded in the early 1900’s, but more on that in the next section.
Why not find out more and continue into the 1900's....
Next page or travel back in time to the early 1800's.
For even more information we recommend the book
Manningtree and Mistley - The people, the trades and the industries by local author David Cleveland or a trip to the Museum in the Library found in Manningtree High Street.
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