Posts - People

This is an expanded version of an article first published in the Society’s newsletter ‘The Twitchell’. All the old pictures are the copyright of Steve Mills. Mills Dockyard is probably the oldest family business in Sawley. Established around 1895 at a yard on the Erewash Canal, about 400 yards upstream from Trent Lock, four generations of the Mills family have been building and servicing inland waterways craft. (Arthur) Amos Mills (1870-1942) started the business in the 1890s.  He’d been born in East Leake and initially followed his father in the basketmaking trade and also been a toll collector at Ratcliffe on Soar, before moving to Sawley.  The business ran two narrow boats and a horse, carrying plaster from Thrumpton to the Sheet Stores for transshipment to railway wagons. This trade ended about 1924. Amos also used the yard for boatbuilding, converting e.g. Trent barges to houseboats, and building (in the loft during the winter months) rowing skiffs. This picture, from before 1900, shows two workmen at the yard. The one on the right holds a smoothing tool called an adze. The corrugated sheets were when the men had to lie down on the ground After the second world war Amos’s […]

Charles ‘Tim’ Tyler (1906-2005) was born in Draycott and visited as a child, but lived in London and then Sussex.  In 2000 (aged 95) he wrote to the Sawley Historical Society with his memories of Draycott around the time of the First World War. Charles Tyler’s Letter At the turn of the 20″ century, Draycott was a small village in east Derbyshire, on the old Roman road (now A6005), between Derby and Nottingham. I was born in the village on August 2″, 1906, but my memories only relate to the period 1914-1919, so this needs explanation. Father and mother started their life together in Brussels, where Father was accountant to a small new company called The Gramophone Company — trademark “His Master’s Voice”. After a miscarriage, Mother, pregnant again, had to decide whether to go with Father who has just been appointed as manager of a new branch of HMV in Alexandria, Egypt. Determined to have her children born in England, she chose to go to her brother John’s house in Draycott. He was manager of a cotton mill in the hamlet of Church Wilne, about a couple of miles away on the banks of the river Derwent, which provided […]

On the evening of 31 Oct 1846, a 28-year-old man called Thomas Mullins was travelling from Derby to Nottingham in a third class carriage.  He worked as a footman for the Reverend Curzon of Aston on Trent.  At some point he realised he’d caught the wrong train, heading for Leicester.  As the train slowed down at the old Sawley Station he jumped out, rolled over and one of his legs was run over by 3 carriages.  He was taken by train to Nottingham Infirmary (now City Hospital) but died a few hours later. Midland Railway, Derby Station c1840 The inquest heard from John Bailey of Sawley who was a Midland Railway gate (level crossing) keeper on the Sawley-Breaston road and about 19 years old.  One of his duties was to deal with trains which stopped there after 7pm.  The evening Leicester train did not routinely stop at Sawley, but Bailey used a red light to signal for it to slow down as he had a parcel to give the guard.  It slowed to about 2½ mph as he handed over the parcel and confirmed to the guard that no passengers needed to get on.  As the train began to accelerate […]

On Monday 10th June 1889 an inquest was held at the Nags Head in Sawley on the death of Henry Cook, who’d been found dead at his aunt’s house two days earlier. The coroner was W.H. Whiston and the inquest jury were W. P. Bennett (chair), Joseph Birkin, Percival Bosworth, William Ward, Edward Kilbourne, Benjamin Allen, George T Lodge, John Bromley, Henry Bonser (landlord of the Nags Head), Albert Robinson, Reuben Bailey and Thomas Ironmonger.  They heard that Henry Cook (25) was separated from his wife.  Lately he’d been lodging with his aunt and grandmother in Hey’s Buildings in Sawley.  He was out of regular work but had been doing odd jobs and gardening. HIs aunt, Emma Smith, identified the body.  She said that there had been some ‘unpleasantness’ in the village which had disgraced the family.  And as Henry couldn’t pay his way, she’d told him on the Wednesday that he’d have to leave the house. He told a friend, John Staples, that he’d got himself in trouble and didn’t know how to get out of it.  He was tired of life, and he’d bought small amounts of laudanum (a tincture of opium and alcohol) at different chemist shops […]

In July 1906 Sawley’s Harrington Bridge was being rebuilt.  Traffic was using a temporary bridge whilst the damaged centre section of the old bridge was being replaced by a new central pillar and a steel deck.   On Tuesday 10th July a 7-year-old boy – Redvers Buller Barton – was fishing for minnows in the Trent.  It was either the school holidays or late afternoon after school and several children were playing in the area.  Redvers decided cross a plank to reach a boat moored under the bridge (probably the temporary bridge) to make better use of his net.  But, leaning over the side, the boat tipped up and he fell in. Another boy, Thomas Noon (aged 9), saw him and called for help.  Horatio Allport (aged 11) of Cross Street ran to the spot, crossed the plank to the boat, grabbed an oar and tried to reach the boy, but he’d drifted too far downstream and soon disappeared.  The police were called and dragged the river, finding the body on Wednesday night.  He was taken to the Harrington Arms and the next afternoon an inquest was chaired by Mr Whiston, the local coroner.  The jury found that he’d accidentally […]

In the 1870s there were many boatmen in Sawley, working on the river and canals, but Daniel Barkham was a qualified master mariner, who’d been brought up as a fisherman on the Isle of Wight.  In 1871 he was still a ship master, but lodging in Ripley with his first wife, Anne (nee Blanchard).  After Anne died in 1873, he moved to Sawley.  In 1875 he married again, to Ellen Comery.  They lived in Narrow Bridge cottages, on the Lock Lane bend, and had 3 children: Parling Barkham (born 1876) Karl Barkham (born 1878) Reginald Barkham (born 1880) They rented the 40-acre ballast hole known as Trent Lake from the Midland Railway.  It’s not clear why a master mariner was renting a lake miles from the sea.  Perhaps he was hiring out boats (it seems there was a boathouse next to Narrow Bridge cottages) and/or teaching people to sail. In the winter they rented the lake out for skating.  Ice skating was quite a big thing locally at the time.  There even seems to have even been an ice rink in Long Eaton (Forbes Hole?).   Trent Lake, c1884 On Thursday 7th Feb 1881, there had been a thaw, but […]

Samuel Hill was born in Somercotes in 1859.  His father William (1832-1903) was a colliery agent, and his mother Eliza was from Shardlow.  By 1871 the family had moved to Station Street, Long Eaton and were living with William’s father, a coal merchant. Samuel was in the lace trade, which was booming at the time, as labour in Long Eaton was cheaper than Nottingham and the canal and railway were conveniently placed for the delivery of coal to run the steam-powered factories.  Samuel had started to raise money for his own factory whilst still in his teens, but he fell out with his creditors, and it took him 3 years to pay them off.  In 1879 he started a partnership with his father.  The same year Samuel married Mary Jane Draper in Radford and moved to Regent Street in Long Eaton. In 1882 Samuel and his father had a factory built on Princess Street, near Lime Grove (where the parking for West Park is now), at a cost of £4,000-£5,000.   It was a 3-storey building, about 12 windows wide.  It was steam powered and had a large chimney. The Hill family had most of the top floor, with half a […]

Having researched a family, we normally include military records on the page about the family, linked from the Families index and (where applicable) from the War Memorial page.  But we haven’t completed the long and complicated history of the Leivars family in Sawley yet.  So, for Armistice Day, some of the wartime records for the family have been extracted and set out below. John Leivars (1844-1926) known as Jack, was a regular solder in the 1860s and 1870s, serving with the 45th Regiment of Foot (which became the Sherwood Foresters).  He took part in the 1868 Abyssinian Campaign.  In 1879, Jack qualified for an Army (Chelsea) pension and returned to Sawley, where he married Ann Catliff.  In 1924, General Smith-Dorien chatted with him at the Sherwood Foresters Old Comrades Annual Dinner.  By 1914 Jack and Ann had 12 children and were living in Chantry Place.  Their eldest son John William Leivars (1882-1916) served with 9th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters during the war.  In late September 1916 they took part in the Battle of Thiepval Ridge, one of the later stages of the Somme campaign.  In mid-November they were at the Battle of the Ancre Heights.  A week later, on 26 November […]

[A longer version of the following story appeared in the Long Eaton Advertiser in January 1947] Many details of the life and change in the ancient township Sawley are revealed by Mr William Smith of Towle-street, who is the oldest inhabitant of the village and who will celebrate his 93rd birthday this month.  In a talk with this hale and hearty veteran farm worker he recalled scenes people and happenings as far as eighty years ago.  Born at Sawley in 1854, Mr Smith retains vivid recollections of his youthful days. In his early days, Sawley consisted of 200 houses and less than 800 inhabitants, then chiefly engaged in farming, boating, stocking making, warp net and lace making and blacksmith work. In Smith’s early days Sawley possessed four small one-storey factories containing about ten warp lace machines, owned by the Smedleys and Cliffords and later by Mr John Thorpe, several of these warp machines being subsequently shipped to America. An Italian named Arnabiliano also made warp lace in Sawley.  A small number of women possessed lace frames and used to sit outside their homes in summer especially on Smithy-row (now demolished) working designs on plain net from paper patterns underneath. During […]