GILCRUX 1750-1950: BROOKWELL AND NEIGHBOURS

I was talking to my neighbour, who has lived in Gilcrux most of his life, when he asked about a couple who live in the village – didn’t know their names, didn’t know exactly where they lived. We got to talking, as we are wont to do, about the changing village. About a family who’d once lived across the road when my neighbour was a youngster.
“I remember John’s mother,” he said.
“Sarah Ann.”
“Yes. That’s right. Lovely woman.”
We talked about Sarah’s family history. Sarah died in the 1950s. I remember her son John (who I knew just a little in the 1980s when he was an elderly man). John’s memoir A Cumbrian Boyhood had sent me into his family’s history.
“Aye,” my neighbour said. “If you don’t talk about these folk, they disappear.”

Later, I came across a probate record. “George Percy Story of Brookwell House …. died 17th March 1977.”(1) George was one of John’s brothers; they’d lived next door to Brookwell House for a time, in what was Rose Cottage. Had George bought Brookwell? Rented it? I asked my neighbour but he didn’t know. And I still don’t.

Brookwell is a handsome Georgian farmhouse rendered and painted, symmetrical façade, sash windows with so-called banding, a low stone boundary wall. It holds its ground without making a fuss. Inside, a couple relatively new to the village have taken a great deal of care making the house their home. Inside, you could be in a city townhouse: two front parlours with exposed fireplaces, antiques and vintage finds alongside modern art and comfortable, squashy furniture. A Labrador pads down the hallway and into the kitchen.

M and I live nearby, in a two-up-two-down cottage that was once a cow byre. A grand building facing us was once the Wesleyan chapel. Its centenary publication records the building as one of great workmanship: every piece of sandstone manhandled from the West Croft Field and carted by John Clark, the ironwork and railings given free by the village blacksmith, Mr Williamson Clark. (2)

Gilcrux ran on church, chapel and coal. Small quarries dotted the fields, and miners first drew coal nearby almost three hundred years ago. Miss Dykes, Lady of the Manor, co-owned two pits in the area. By 1862, Joseph – born here, a man who would one day become Sarah Ann’s uncle – had joined the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers and received his First Class Certificate as a manager of mines under the Coal Mines Regulation Act. (3) Joseph’s story takes a darker turn. He entered the city asylum in 1890, claiming he’d been half-poisoned, that folk in the west end of the village had electrified him.
“Even if I got inside an iron boiler,” he told the doctors, “they’ve means of seeing what I’m writing about.” (4)
The doctors wrote up their notes and Joseph spent the rest of his life at Garlands, dying there in 1915, aged eighty.

The 1890s brought economic strain to go with everything else. In April 1895, the Maryport Advertiser reported very gloomy prospects for the coal trade in West Cumberland – Scottish competitors undercutting local operators for the Irish market. (5) Something was shifting. You could feel it in your water, as people said then. But you didn’t have to look far for a cheery story in the papers. Here’s the hale and hearty Widow Brown, binding sheaves in the harvest field of her son-in-law William at Flagstaff Farm, ten miles from Gilcrux. The year is 1896 and Widow Brown is ninety-four. (6) Remember William because his story loops back to ours, in time.

An arts curator in another life, I treat each document as an artefact in a mind’s eye gallery. Every crumb leads somewhere. I gather names, trace them on gravestones, let my eyes travel over two-hundred-year-old deeds and the newspapers of the day. Joseph Smith, farming High Green, sold the chapel land to the Reverend Joshua Fielden, superintendent of the Methodist circuit, at the end of March 1875. I’d been looking for that nugget for years, and found it when I wasn’t looking at all.

There’s a pub opposite Brookwell. On Easter Tuesday 1905, Bella, the only daughter of the pub landlady Polly, marries Tom, the youngest son of Elizabeth from Rose Cottage – next door to Brookwell. Elizabeth, who lost her husband in 1899, lives at Rose Cottage with her daughter Sarah Ann, son-in-law George, and baby grandson Joseph William. The collieries are slowing, a depression in the cotton trade, and too much Lancashire coal on the market. In early September 1905, four doors down from Brookwell, Mrs Pirt is as pleased as punch. Her son Joseph has received a first-class certificate in higher grade electricity and magnetism, and a second-class in machine construction from Workington Technical School.
“Workington Technical School,” Mrs Pirt says, then pauses. “In connection with South Kensington.”

In August 1905, the Osborns, from Mawbray, took the contract to chip plaster from the chapel walls and rework them in cement. I shout at the page: that won’t work, Mr Osborn – you’ll just trap the damp! Robert Simpson from the village painted the walls in a beautiful French grey distemper, the dado peacock blue with white stencilling. (7) The pulpit gleamed. Robert varnished the pews, Jane Watson recovered the cushions. The village blacksmith, Mr Huddart, gifted four copper lamps hung from twisted iron scrolls.
One Sunday that August, the Reverend Dowthwaite from Coniston preached, the congregation singing Ora pro Nobis. Miss Johnston played the organ. Miss Johnston. She was the great-aunt of Graham H, who today lives a couple of villages away with his wife Jackie. A name in a newspaper from 1905, a living family connection in 2025. It is a small thing. And it is not a small thing.
The next evening, Mark Sanderson took the chair. His address was pithy and, having followed Mark’s story for years, knowing all he was dealing with (at this time on his farm in nearby Crosby) I read that word pithy as the choice of a man shorter on time than usual. Miss Brown and the Misses Johnston served supper, helped by Miss Grave, Miss Allison and Mrs Gray. They raised upwards of £7.

Robert Simpson’s brother, Richard, one of three Wesley ministers in the family, had been the first to marry in this chapel. Richard had married Isobel, Mark Sanderson’s daughter, in 1894, with the wedding breakfast at Retreat Farm next door to the chapel, when Mark and his sons still farmed there. (8)

October 1905. Harvest festival, a last colour-wash before winter. The Wesleyan chapel still hums with the morning’s service, fruits and flowers and handfuls of wheat laid out like offerings. After the service, a capital supper: Mrs Johnson of Brookwell provides, alongside Mrs Watson, Mrs Brown, the Misses Johnstons, Mrs Huddart. The men speak of reform. The women pass the bread. That night, Brookwell holds warmth and presence. Beeswax, cake, and coal. Outside, the ash trees are turning.

At some point, a colliery company took on the lease for Brookwell while it remained in the hands of the Dykes estate. The house became a manager’s residence – a perk of the job. Harold lived at Brookwell for a time. He was a young colliery manager, trained as a mining engineer, born in South Shields, son of a shipbuilder’s accountant. The membership records of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers show him residing at Brookwell by 1902, elected to the organisation on August 2 that year.(9) On the rise, and not in Gilcrux long. On July 1 the same year, George took possession. Another man responsible for keeping the pit profitable, the men in order. Another set of maps of the coal seams spread across Brookwell’s table.
I walk past the house now and think how it watched these men come and go. I imagine their boots on the step, their wives adjusting to the parlour windows, the sound of the church bell. The socialist van arrived in June 1908, parking on the school green. A man from Liverpool gave a speech, asked for questions, any interest. The village turned away. No hecklers. No coins pressed into palms.
“No matter what the papers say,” the man told his comrade afterwards. “The village proved to be very fair considering the political colour of the place. A few more meetings and Socialism wins.”(10)
Next door to Brookwell, at Rose Cottage, Elizabeth is selling a small field of meadow hay in July 1909.(11) Life carries on, one season into the next.

In September 1910, the local colliery closed after nearly fifty years of operation.(11.5) Coal remained in the Yard and Ten Quarter Seams, but the pit came down all the same. Mr Penn of nearby Crosby had worked that mine for forty-two years.¹⁴ Foy, the last colliery manager to live at Brookwell, left the same year – sailing for Canada with his son.(12)
Four years later, a cablegram reached John Martin in Aspatria from his niece in British Columbia:
“Manager Foy, two Fearons, Tackle Irving, and husband Tom drowned in mine yesterday. Victims not recovered.”
Twenty-two men drowned when the South Wellington coal mine flooded. Foy among them. Five Cumbrians, all from the Aspatria district. All gone in a day. The seams of West Cumberland had followed them across an ocean.
I think of Brookwell, wondering who lived there then. I imagine Brookwell empty, and waiting.

Before Ann came to Brookwell, she lived at Highlaws Farm, twelve miles east of Gilcrux, with her parents and her seven-year-old daughter Esther. Also on the farm in 1901: Ann’s brother Richard, and her recently widowed sister Sarah.
Ann thought often about the turns in Sarah’s life. Just ten years before, Sarah had been a domestic servant in ninety-year-old Isaac Fisher’s household. Isaac’s son Joseph, (12.5) an accountant nearly thirty years Sarah’s senior, had become her suitor. Their marriage in 1893 raised eyebrows across the parish, but Sarah gained the authority that came with being a professional man’s wife. Now a widow after four years of marriage,⁶ she’d returned to Highlaws, bringing whatever her late husband left her to invest in the family farm.
Ann and Sarah farmed in all but name – their labour appearing in no wage book, on no title deed. Dairy cows, pigs, chickens, a draught horse. Small plots for oats, barley, root vegetables. Their mother Fanny had slowed those days. Headaches. Her words sometimes coming out wrong. On June 4, 1901, Sarah was with Fanny when she died: cerebral tumour and exhaustion, according to the death certificate Dr George Hill signed thirteen days later.(13) Fanny was sixty-one. Ann worked longer hours after that, physical exhaustion blunting the sharp edges of loss. I imagine Sarah had read her late husband’s newspapers, sat at his table when professional men discussed trade and politics. Women’s suffrage was a live argument in those papers by 1901. I picture her saying something to Esther about the vote, about what might yet be possible. And I picture Ann, who taught her daughter to pluck a chicken, to keep animals alive, to keep herself to herself… giving her sister a sharp look. She couldn’t say Sarah was wrong.

Remember William at Flagstaff Farm? Widow Brown’s son-in-law, hale and hearty in 1896. His wife died in 1905. In 1908, aged seventy-one, William married Sarah(14) – Ann’s sister, who had returned to Highlaws after her first husband’s death. By 1911, Sarah was running William’s household at Silloth. A horseman, a cowboy, a general maid and William’s son, Robert, all under her direction.(15) Sarah, who’d begun life in service, was now the one giving the orders.

Ann and her daughter Esther moved into Brookwell.(15.5) I don’t know what brought Ann here, but I’m glad she came, partly because this connection feels personal: I knew Ann’s great-granddaughter Carol in the 1980s. Carol’s children, with children and grandchildren of their own, live not far from Gilcrux today.

Ann resists gossip when she moves to Brookwell, but she cannot bear to hear a woman slate another woman. When gossip about her own character finds its way back, she fires an answer.
“I’m the kind shaped by hard grace,” I imagine her saying. “The kind that comes from keeping animals alive and crops upright.”
Essie, whose mother always says keep your head down, keep yourself to yourself. Well, Essie looks up and sees Daniel, who lives across the road at Holly Bank.
There’s also Wilfred: Ann’s son, twenty-three by 1921, a fitter in a Nottingham foundry. Wilfred had lived with Ann’s aunt since he was a baby.

In March 1914, Ann sat at Sarah’s farmhouse table and heard the sorry tale of William’s son – forty-four, intending to book passage to Canada with his wife and child – who had taken his own life in his father’s coal shed at Silloth.

“He was very deaf,” one newspaper reported, “and this was said to have preyed on his mind.”(16)
Sarah’s William died in February 1915.(17) Sarah, approaching seventy, took work as a housekeeper to the elderly J.M. in Abbeytown, twelve miles northwest of Gilcrux – returning to domestic service as if completing some great circle.(18) The woman who’d learned to carry herself differently, who’d shown Esther how to speak with authority, back in someone else’s kitchen.

The war changed everything it touched. Death duties. New land taxes. Rising wages for the farm labourers who came back from France. The grand country estates buckled. Colonel Dykes, DSO, Scots Guard, former High Sheriff of Cumberland, returned from the war with medals and honours – and, like many of his class, found his ancestral position unmaintainable. The 1919 Land Settlement Act encouraged the breaking up of estates. Colonel Dykes sold large chunks of his.
For Ann, this was opportunity. The house she had made her home for a decade could now be hers.(19) At forty-eight, Ann was about to become a property owner – something her mother and grandmother could never have imagined.
“You understand the terms,” the land agent told her. “The mineral rights remain with the estate.”
Ann nodded. She had expected this. The dark wealth running beneath the ground belonged to the landowner. What Ann was buying was everything above. The kitchen where she and Esther took their tea. The garden where Esther and Daniel’s little son, Richard, toddled among the cabbages. The parlour wall where someone might one day hang a painting. She thought of Wilfred, in Nottingham. The aunt’s house, the baby handed over. But here, in this present moment, standing in the land agent’s office with the deed in front of her, Ann signed her name.

I wonder if the mineral rights still belong to the Dykes estate?

______________

1 England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1995. Available through paid subscription to Ancestry.co.uk. Accessed: Saturday April 25, 2026.

2 Gilcrux Methodist Chapel. (1975) Methodist Chapel 1875-1975 Centenary publication. [Facebook post image] Posted by G. Hetherington. Available at: Private Facebook Group. Accessed: Tuesday June 14, 2022.

3 Durham Mining Museum. (no date) Joseph Monkhouse b. 1836. Available at: http://www.dmm.org.uk/whoswho/m613.htm Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

4 Carlisle and Whitehaven Archive Centres. (1898-1915) DWM/485/124, DWM/596/59, DWM/737/7, Papers regarding Joseph Monkhouse, a Lunatic at Garlands Asylum, first admitted Nov 17, 1898 and dying there, aged 80, on Mar 25, 1915. Viewed in-person: Friday March 10, 2023 in Whitehaven, and Wednesday March 27, 2024 in Carlisle.

5 Maryport Advertiser. (1895) ‘A TEN PER CENT REDUCTION ASKED FOR’, Maryport Advertiser, May 4, p.4. The British Library Board Digital Archives. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

6 Wigton Advertiser. (1896) ‘AN ANCIENT HARVESTER’, Wigton Advertiser, September 5, p.5. The British Library Board Digital Archives. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Monday April 14, 2025.

7 West Cumberland Times. (1905) ‘[LOCAL] WESLEYAN CHAPEL’, West Cumberland Times, August 5, p.3. The British Library Board Digital Archives. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Friday May 3, 2019.

8 West Cumberland Times. (1894) ‘MARRIAGE AT GILCRUX VILLAGE’, West Cumberland Times, August 11, p.8. The British Library Board Digital Archives. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Tuesday August 11, 2020.

9 North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. (1905) ‘List of Members’, Transactions of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, Vol. 57, p. xlvii. University of Toronto. [Online] Available at: https://archive.org/details/transactions57nort/page/46/mode/2up?q=brookwell/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

10 Carlisle Journal. (1908) ‘GILCRUX VILLAGE – The Socialist van, under the care of Mr. Charles Wilson…’, Carlisle Journal, June 26, p.4. The British Library Board Digital Archives. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

11 West Cumberland Times. (1909) ‘SMALL FIELD of MEADOW HAY for Sale. – Apply, Mrs Barton, Gilcrux’, West Cumberland Times, July 28, p.2. The British Library Board Digital Archives. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

11.5 Bolton Evening News. (1910) ‘After being worked for half a century, the Gilcrux Colliery, Cumberland…’, Bolton Evening News, September 12, p.5. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

12 Carlisle Journal. (1910) ‘Mr. Joseph Foy, of Gilcrux, the late manager of Gilcrux Colliery, accompanied by his son, sailed on Friday for Canada’, Carlisle Journal, September 27, p.5. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025. Also: Penrith Observer. (1915) ‘A FLOODED CANADIAN MINE’, Penrith Observer, February 23, p.6. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Wednesday April 16, 2025.

12.5 General Register Office. (1897) Death register entry for Joseph Fisher, died Thursday December 16, 1897, aged 63 years, at Saint Bridget’s, Beckermet, Cumberland. Cause of death: Cancer of Rectum. Certified by S. Braithwaite M.R.C.S. Registration District: Whitehaven, Cumberland. Paid-for digital image available at: https://www.gov.uk/order-copy-birth-death-marriage-certificate/ Accessed: Saturday April 19, 2025.

13 General Register Office. (1901) Death certificate of Frances “Fanny” Monkhouse, died Saturday June 4, 1901 aged 61 years, at Highlaws, Holme Abbey, Cumberland. Cause of death: Cerebral tumour and exhaustion. Certified by George Hill L.R.C.P. Registration District: Wigton. Volume: 10b, p.358. Paid-for digital image available at: https://www.gov.uk/order-copy-birth-death-marriage-certificate/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

14 General Register Office. (1908) Marriage index entry for William Chicken and Sarah Fisher. December Quarter, Wigton Registration District, Volume 10b, Page 971. Information from paid subscription to ancestry.co.uk private tree. Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

15 The National Archives. (1911) Census Returns of England and Wales, 1911: William Chicken, Silloth Flagstaff Farm, Low Holme, Cumberland, RG14 Piece 31381, Enumeration District 10. [Online]. Information from paid subscription to Ancestry.co.uk. Accessed: Friday April 18, 2025.

15.5 The National Archives. (1911) Census Returns of England and Wales, 1911: Ann Vickers, Brookwell, Gilcrux, Cumberland, RG14 Piece 31455, Enumeration District 01. [Online]. Available through paid subscription to Ancestry.co.uk. Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.
16 Lancashire Evening Post. (1914) ‘INTENDING EMIGRANT HANGS HIMSELF NEAR SILLOTH’, Lancashire Evening Post, April 1, p.3. Available by paid subscription via: https://britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ Accessed: Sunday April 20, 2025.

17 General Register Office. (1915) Death certificate of William Chicken, died Tuesday February 2, 1915 at Holme Law, Holme Cultram, Cumberland. Cause of death: (1) Vesical calculus cystitis (2) Operation uraemia. Certified by C. Crerar M.B. Registration District: Wigton, Sub-district: Abbey Holme, Entry No. 313. Paid-for digital image available at: https://www.gov.uk/order-copy-birth-death-marriage-certificate/ Accessed: Tuesday April 22, 2025.

18 The National Archives. (1921) Census Returns of England and Wales, 1921: Sarah Chicken, Abbey Terrace, Abbey Town, Holme Abbey, Cumberland, RG15 Piece 25841, Schedule 99, Enumeration District 6. [Online]. Available through paid subscription to findmypast.co.uk. Accessed: Saturday April 19, 2025.

19 Cumbria Archive Service. (1921) DWM/660/3, Sale of Brookwell, Gilcrux, by Major F H B Dykes DSO, to Miss Ann Vickers. [Digitised document bundle provided to researcher by email]. Carlisle Archive Centre, Cumbria. From: Friday May 2, 2025.