Place:Radcliffe, Lancashire, England

Watchers
NameRadcliffe
Alt namesRadcliffe-Bridgesource: Family History Library Catalog
Radecliuesource: Domesday Book (1985) p 156
Stand Lanesource: Family History Library Catalog
TypeAncient parish, Borough (municipal)
Coordinates53.55°N 2.333°W
Located inLancashire, England     ( - 1974)
See alsoSalford Hundred, Lancashire, Englandhundred in which it was located
Bury (metropolitan borough), Greater Manchester, Englandmetropolitan borough of which it has been a part since 1974


the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Radcliffe has been, since 1974, a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Bury in Greater Manchester, England. Until 1974 it was a part of the county of Lancashire. It lies in the Irwell Valley 2.5 miles (4 km) southwest of Bury and 6.5 miles (10 km) north-northwest of Manchester and is contiguous with Whitefield to the south. The disused Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal bisects the town.

Evidence of both Roman and Norman activity has been found in Radcliffe and its surroundings. A Roman road passes through the area, along the border between Radcliffe and Bury. Radcliffe appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Radeclive". In the High Middle Ages it formed a small parish and township centred on the Church of St Mary and the manorial Radcliffe Tower, both of which are Grade I listed buildings.

Plentiful coal in the area facilitated the Industrial Revolution, providing fuel for the cotton spinning and papermaking industries. By the mid-19th century, Radcliffe was an important mill town with cotton mills and bleachworks as well as a road, canal and railway network.

At the UK census of 2011, Radcliffe had a population of 29,950. Radcliffe is now predominantly a residential area whose few remaining cotton mill buildings are now occupied by small businesses.

Image:Bury_rev2.png

History

the text in this section is a condensation of an article in Wikipedia

Early history

Following the 11th century Norman conquest of England, Radcliffe became a ancient parish and township in the Salford Hundred, of Lancashire. One of only four parishes from the hundred mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and held by Edward the Confessor as a Royal Manor, it initially consisted of two hamlets: Radcliffe, near to the border with Bury and centred on the medieval Church of St Mary and the manorial Radcliffe Tower and, further to the west, Radcliffe Bridge, at a crossing of the Irwell.

In the 15th century the Pilkington family, who during the Wars of the Roses supported the House of York, owned much of the land around the parish. Thomas Pilkington was at this time lord of many estates in Lancashire. In 1485 Richard III was killed in the Battle of Bosworth and the Duke of Richmond, representing the House of Lancaster, was crowned Henry VII. Sir William Stanley may have placed the crown upon his head. As a reward for the support of his family, on 27 October 1485 Henry made Thomas Stanley the Earl of Derby. Thomas Pilkington was attainted, and in February 1489 Earl Thomas was given many confiscated estates including those of Pilkington, which included the township of Pilkington, and Bury. During the English Civil War Radcliffe, along with nearby Bolton, fought on the side of the Parliamentarians against the Royalist town of Bury.

In 1561, after about 400 years rule by the Radclyffes, Robert Assheton (Lord of the Manor of Middleton) bought the manor of Radcliffe for 2,000 Marks. From 1765 the Assheton estates were divided between the two daughters of the late Ralph Assheton, one of whom married Thomas Egerton, 1st Earl of Wilton. The manor of Radcliffe appears to have been included in her share, and thereafter was included in the Wilton estates.

Textiles and the Industrial Revolution

The first documented reference to industry in Radcliffe is after 1680, in the Radcliffe parish registers, which make increasing mention of occupations such as woollen webster (weaving), linen webster, and whitster (bleacher). These were cottage industries which worked alongside local agriculture. In 1780 Robert Peel built the first factory in the town, several hundred yards upstream from Radcliffe Bridge (at the end of Peel Street). With a weir and goit providing motive power for a water wheel, the factory was built for throstle spinning and the weaving of cotton-—a relatively new introduction to Britain. The water wheel proved to be insufficient, and so around 1804 the goit was extended. The weir (known as Rectory Weir) was made from timber. Conditions were poor; the mill employed child labour bought from workhouses in Birmingham and London. Children were boarded on an upper floor of the building, and obliged to work at the mill until they reached the age of 21. They were unpaid, and were kept locked up each night. Shifts were typically 10–10.5 hours in length, and children returning from a day shift would sleep in the same bed as children leaving for a night shift. Peel himself admitted that conditions at the mill were "very bad". In 1784 an outbreak of typhoid prompted Lord Grey de Wilton to inform the magistrates of the Salford Hundred; keen to prevent the spread of the disease to neighbouring towns and villages, they sent doctors to assess the situation. Their recommendations included leaving the windows of the mill open at night, fumigation of rooms with tobacco (as this was thought to discourage disease), regular cleaning of rooms and toilets and occasional bathing of children. The report forced the magistrates, led by Thomas Butterworth Bayley, to abandon the practice of binding parish apprentices to any mill not adhering to these conditions. The report also prompted Peel to introduce an Act of Parliament to improve factory hygiene, which later became the Factory Act of 1802. Over time, conditions at the mill improved; in the mid-1790s the physician John Aikin, a critic of the factory system, praised working conditions at the mill, and in 1823 inspections by local magistrates of conditions in mills across the county revealed that unlike many others, the factory at Radcliffe was adhering to all requirements of the Factory Acts.

The underlying coal measures throughout the parish were a valuable source of fuel. Radcliffe already had an established textile industry before the arrival of steam power. The first recorded instance of obtaining coal in the northwest of England was in 1246, when Adam de Radeclyve was fined for digging de minera on common land in the Radcliffe area. Coal outcroppings were not uncommon; as recently as 1936 members of the public were seen carrying away large pieces of coal from a seam revealed by the landslip caused when the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal breached at Ladyshore. Mining was initially limited to bell pits until the arrival of steam engines, which along with improved ventilation, made possible much deeper pits. The earliest known local use of such an engine was in 1792 at Black Cat Colliery. The parish of Radcliffe was once home to as many as 50 pits, but with the exceptions of Outwood Colliery and Ladyshore Colliery, all were either exhausted or closed by the end of the 19th century. During the 1926 General Strike many striking miners illegally took coal from exposed seams around the Coney Green area of the town, to sell to local housewives. In the 1950s to the north of the town the National Coal Board did some open cast mining near Radcliffe Moor Road, but the last legal instance of coal mining in Radcliffe was between 1931 and 1949, close to Bury and Bolton Road.

The transformation of the area from an industry based upon water power, to one based upon steam power, may not have been without problems. A story in W. Nicholl's History and Traditions of Radcliffe (1900) tells of a "great crowd" of protesters from Bury who marched on Bealey's Works, demanding that work be halted. James Booth ordered the gates closed, gave the ringleaders £5, and promised to halt work the next day. The crowd then marched on other businesses within the town before heading along the canal to Bolton, at which point they were apparently turned back by news of approaching soldiers.

There were many smaller textile concerns in the parish. Thomas Howarth owned a cottage in Stand Lane from where he sent yarn to be dyed and sized. He made his own warps which were weaved in the town. He would then travel to Preston and Kendal where drapers would purchase his products. His nephews founded A. & J. Hoyle's Mill in Irwell Street, which employed power weaving to produce their specialities in Ginghams and shirting. The mill closed in 1968. Messrs Stott & Pickstone's Top Shop on Stand Lane was the first company to employ powered looms and spinning around 1844. Many of their employees would eventually leave to start their own businesses, such as Spider Mill, built by Robert and William Fletcher, and John Pickstone. This mill closed around 1930.

Radcliffe was at one time home to around 60 textile mills and 15 spinning mills, along with 18 bleachworks of which the Bealey family were prominent owners. However, the textile industry was not the town's major employer; other industries such as mining and paper making were also important sources of employment.

Mount Sion Mill along Sion Street was founded in the early 19th century and during the First World War manufactured guncotton. A weir was constructed along with a goit, used to turn a water wheel which powered a beam engine to pump water to the reservoirs above.

Radcliffe became well known for its paper industry; its mills included the East Lancashire Paper Mill and Radcliffe Paper Mill. The former was founded by the Seddon family on 29 March 1860, along the banks of the Irwell. Its construction provided much-needed employment: in the 1860s living standards within the town were poor, and local mills often operated on "short time". A reduction in the demand for coal had placed many colliers out of work, and the Lancashire Cotton Famine was starving Lancashire of raw materials, especially cotton. Soup kitchens were opened by local benefactors, and many local residents were on poor relief.[1] The mill began producing low grade paper and newsprint, moving on to other products including high quality printing and writing papers. Radcliffe Paper Mill was formed during the First World War, when it took over from a paper mill and a pipe plant. It originally produced paper suitable for roofing felt, to cater for a national shortage. After World War II the mill employed over 600 people and produced 70,000 tons of paper annually. British Plaster Board Industries (BPB) took over the company in 1961.

Other industries in the town included brick making and chimney pot manufacture. Raw materials were sourced from local collieries. In Mill Street carts, waggons, and bicycles were manufactured from 1855, and elsewhere motor vehicles were also produced until the late 1950s. John Cockerill moved to the town from Haslingden before leaving for continental Europe to become the founder of Cockerill-Sambre. James Cockerill, employed Radcliffe man William Yates as his manager. Several foundries and machine manufacturers were located around the town, including Dobson and Barlow at Bradley Fold, and Wolstenholme's along Bridgewater Street. Munitions, aircraft and tank components were manufactured during the Second World War. Chemicals were manufactured by companies such as Bealey's and J. & W. Whewell.

Post-industrial history

From the 1950s Radcliffe's textile industry went into terminal decline, and although its paper industry survived to the end of the 20th century, both the town's largest paper mills have now been closed and demolished.[2] One of the larger mills in Radcliffe was the Pioneer Mill, built between 1905 and 1906, and which ceased weaving in July 1980—the last mill in Radcliffe to use cotton. The building is now occupied by several different businesses.

Although the town retains much of its existing Victorian and Edwardian housing stock, new estates have been built on former brownfield land including that of the Radcliffe Paper Mill Company.[2] Since deindustrialisation the local population has continued to grow. Radcliffe's housing stock of 23,790 properties is a mixture of mainly semi-detached and terraced housing, with smaller percentages of detached housing and flats. In 1974 the town became a part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, and as a result has been described as losing its independence, and to some extent its identity.[2]

Research Tips

  • See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes were ecclesiastical (described as ancient parishes), under the jurisdiction of the local priest. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
  • An urban district was a type of municipality in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish and were used for urban areas usually with populations of under 30,000. Inspecting the archives of a urban district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
  • Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
  • The terms municipal borough and county borough were adopted in 1835 replacing the historic "boroughs". Municipal boroughs generally had populations between 30,000 and 50,000; while county boroughs usually had populations of over 50,000. County boroughs had local governments independent of the county in which they were located, but municipal boroughs worked in tandem with the county administration. Wikipedia explains these terms in much greater detail.
  • Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
  • FamilySearch Lancashire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
  • Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
  • A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
  • A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
  • GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
  • The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.
  • A description of the parish of Radcliffe from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Radcliffe, Greater Manchester. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.