This week, let’s go up to the top of Jepp Hill and the end of King Street and look at the evidence there. You have often heard me say that Barlick as we know it as a town is a fairly recent invention, it didn’t start taking its present layout until the early 19th century. Before that it was more a collection of small hamlets and folds. King Street is a good example. There are some very old properties next to what is now the Legion Club. My pic this week shows how old and altered the stonework is. As they stand I’d date parts of them possibly as early as the 17th century and even then they could have been rebuilds of earlier houses. They would have had uninterrupted views out over fields to the North and would have been desirable homes. In the early days they would have stood alone.
Opposite them there used to be two small cottages and they always went by the name of ‘The Nook’ (corner). One of them used to be a tinsmith’s home and shop, they were demolished in 1979. Where the Legion is now there were some more old cottage properties and one of them was a clogger's. I told you I couldn’t get away from them! Harold Duxbury once told me that when he lived at Paythorne they used to walk to Barlick to a clogger on Jepp Hill to get their clogs ‘wrung’, re-ironed. He named the clogger as Greenwood Hartley. In 1932 the Craven Herald carried an obituary that helps us. This reported the death of Bob Hartley at 80 years old. He was a clogger until he was 78 and was Greenwood Hartley’s son. Bob started his career in the forge attached to his father’s shop on the site of what was to become the Legion. He started his own clogging business in Brook Street in a building that later became the Ivory Hall Club but later moved into his father’s shop for nine years. He then moved back to his old shop in Bank Street and carried on there for almost 50 years. Notice that one of my questions about cloggers and where they got their irons has been answered. Some made their own.
Bob was proud of the fact that he did all the operations necessary to make clogs except tan the leather. He sold clogs by post all over Britain and even sent some abroad. Many of these were light clogs for athletes, the 19th century equivalent of trainers! His youngest son Robert followed him in clogging and another, Greenwood became a grocer down Long Ing.
Jepp Hill is getting to be quite a busy place. It had shops, a tinsmith, a clogger and of course the Cross Keys pub at the bottom. There was one more building, and yes, at last I am getting to the Mechanic’s Institute but not yet, the other building was a Wesleyan Chapel and school. Sorry, but I shall have to leave that until next week!
SCG/14/10/22
The oldest surviving buildings on King Street.
