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Blog 5 - Monday 25th March 2024
Where they sat: Cutler James William Harrison and his fellow metal manufacturers

Harrison Brothers & Howson, Sheffield marks entered c. 1849

The spire of St John’s can be seen across the Porter Valley and beyond. The two men who caused it to be built may have lived in mansions on the grandest of Sheffield’s arterial roads and altered the landscape of Ranmoor, but neither seems to have had much swagger about him. 

Next month, on Saturday April 13th,  Loveday Herridge will share her findings about the man who funded the church itself: the brewer John Newton Mappin. This week I would like to introduce the rather self-effacing but hugely enterprising cutler who gave the land on which the church was to be built: James William Harrison.

Harrison built his Ranmoor mansion, Tapton Grange, in 1867. Demolished in 1970, it stood on the hill behind the church, between the church and Moordale, now the Florentine Inn. Harrison was not only the donor of the church site, he was also one of many metal manufacturers whose money ensured the survival of the church community in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  

Both Mappin and Harrison were childless. It is possible their huge generosity, both to the church and more widely, throughout the city, may have been influenced by this. Unlike Mappin, Harrison seems professionally, and possibly socially, to have been an insider. The houses around him belonged to cutlers and metal manufacturers like himself. Indeed, William Howson, the founder of the firm Harrison and Howson, built Tapton Park on the other side of Ranmoor Park Road from Tapton Grange. Both Harrison and William Howson’s son, George, were stalwarts of St John’s. 

Thanks to a list of ‘Pew Rents 1889/91’ in the Ranmoor Society Archives it is clear that Ranmoor’s first vicars would not have been able to survive from day to day without the annual giving of local industrialists who had made their fortunes from the metal industries.

Covering church or chapel expenses by levying pew rents was a source of controversy throughout the nineteenth century. Once the creation of different church denominations had picked up pace in the eighteenth century, the imposition of church rates on local communities was understandably resisted by those who were not Anglicans. Another way had to be found to pay the stipend of a priest or minister. For many Anglicans, and some non-conformists, the way forward seemed to be to ‘rent’ pews to those who could afford to pay. 

In 1879 one ‘sitting’ in the first church of St John’s cost £1 10s (a week’s wages for a skilled stonemason). 400 of this church’s 563 sittings were let, raising an annual £600 - an enormous sum. 

The second church of 1888 attracted 118 parishioners who paid pew rents. These payments ensured that subscribers had a numbered pew for a designated number of family members and dependents. These numbers can still be found on our pew ends, including the one, halfway down the nave aisle for the church warden (there is also a handsome brass retainer for the warden’s staff).

 

The names of many of these pew subscribers are still well known: for example the Edgar Allens of Clevedon House, the Binghams of West Lea, the Colvers (until 1882 of Rockmount in Fulwood Road), the Firths of Oakbrook, the Flathers of Endcliffe Vale Road, the Hadfields of Fairfield in Fulwood Road, and the Laycocks of Ranmoor Grange in Fulwood Road. Next year when I explore the social composition of Ranmoor Parish I will try to understand more about the ways these families’ social and church connections shaped the life of the church, the community of Ranmoor and had bearing on the interests of these industrialists and the wider community. The coming together on a Sunday (if indeed these families turned up to occupy the pews they rented) must have helped shape the social networks which in every age impinge on wealth creation and political influence. 

The practice of erecting private pews which was in fact illegal dated from before the Reformation but gathered pace in the nineteenth century. Pews could be sublet or bequeathed. E R Wickham, in his superb history Church and People in an Industrial City demonstrates how much damage this system did to the way the Church of England was regarded in an industrial city like Sheffield where there was a strong egalitarian tradition.  

Throughout the nineteenth century it was persuasively argued from within the Church of England that the system of pew rentals was deeply divisive and at odds with Christ’s teaching, for example that ‘The last shall be first and the first last’ (Matthew 19. 30). Whereas the wealthy in the parish were gathered at the front of the church, those who could not afford the sizeable cost of a sitting, let alone a pewful of sittings, were directed to the unnumbered pews to the rear and to the side of the main body of the nave. As the Archdeacon of Liverpool put it, in 1857, ‘the free sittings are put in the most uncomfortable positions, where the people feel degraded.’

It is difficult to imagine that our land donor used his status to impose. James William Harrison did not claim a place in the sun, paying for nine sittings in pew number 41 - the total number of pews being 68. By 1889, John Newton Mappin had died so we don’t know where he had been placed in the earlier church. His even wealthier and better-known nephew, Sir Frederick Thorpe Mappin Bart., had two sets of rentals, five sittings in pew 6 and nine in pew 37. 

 Jonas and Colver Continental and Novo Steel Works
https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/2022/08/12/jonas-colver/

There are only three double bookings recorded. Mrs Patteson from Storth Lane had two sittings in pew 15 and one sitting in pew 40. Robert Colver’s rentals were more in the same order of magnitude as Thorpe Mappin’s. 

Robert Colver was a senior partner in Jonas and Colver Steel Works in Attercliffe. Colver was an active member of St John’s and donated much to the church. His family history was a tragic one and the loss of two sons in the First World War moved him to donate commemorative windows in the side chapel.

The double booking of separate pews suggests that both the Colvers and Thorpe Mappins placed family grandees at the front whereas other dependents and employees would be in the rear pews. These senior servants therefore had opportunities for creating other, parallel, social networks.

I am grateful to Dan Eaton who pointed out that the sequence of heads above the nave pillars enact a similarly hierarchical view of society as that reflected in the seating of our nineteenth century congregation, with angels at the east end, followed by royal persons, then wealthy commoners as we move west. At the west end itself we find a motley crew of grotesques, a random king and mortals of an apparently lowly sort.  Any suggestions of the organising principle here would be most welcome. 

I would like to end this introduction to the industrialist donors with an extract from the obituary of James William Harrison. His life has many parallels with other contemporaries who became wealthy industrialists: the fact that he started his working life as an apprentice, his rootedness in his native city and his generosity to Sheffield’s charitable institutions. Perhaps the most striking difference is his reluctance to take on the prestigious role as Master Cutler. 

The Obituary of James William Harrison 1816-1897 in the Sheffield Independent 2 March 1897
He was apprenticed when fourteen years of age to Messrs. Stuart and Smith, stove-grate manufacturers, who earned business at Roscoe Place. Before completing his term of apprenticeship he left and took a position at Messrs. Thomas Sanson and Sons, cutlers to Her Majesty, whose place of business was in Norfolk street. The partners in the firm at that time were Mr. George and Mr. Thomas. Mr. Harrison subsequently became a partner, and in the year 1847 the name of the firm was changed to Harrison Brothers and Howson, and it has been carried under the same style ever since. 
The deceased displayed a remarkable business capacity, and his never-ceasing energy and close attention to his duties won for him the success afterwards enjoyed. On one occasion he journeyed to London with Mr. Jobson Smith, and was one of the few men in Sheffield who could say they had travelled to the Metropolis on a stage coach. He retired from the firm in 1875. He was extremely liberal in all charitable and deserving institutions. In recent years he gave the sum of £lOOO towards the building of an additional wing at the Infirmary, and also contributed largely to the erection of Ranmoor Church.
In politics he was Conservative, but he took no active part in the public life of the city. He filled, however, various private offices with dignity, but his quiet, unassuming disposition did not allow him to become a public man in the ordinary acceptation of the term. At one time he was a director of the Water Company, and for a time held a similar position in the firm Messrs. Thomas Jessop and Sons Limited. He was also a member of the Cutlers’ Company for a short period, but when it became his turn to be elected to the honourable office of Master Cutler he preferred to pay the fine, and subsequently left the company. At the time of his death he was director of the Gas Company, one of the Church Burgesses, a trustee of Ranmoor Church, a trustee of the Sheffield Savings Bank, and governor of the Girls’ Chantry School. He never married, and is the last of his family.
 
 
Advertisement from Etsy for a pair of scissors made by Harrison and Howson possibly from the 1900s

Blog 4 - Monday 4th March 2024

 A Study in Stone

                  
'Images collected by Mark Gregory' 


 

Blog 3 - Monday 19th February 2024
‘The Death of a Successful Stone Mason’:
The life and death of Job Stone 1840-1885

An unknown Master Mason and two apprentices in Sheffield 1851-1899:  Picture Sheffield

Though we have, as yet, no evidence that the aptly named Job Stone worked on St John’s, he might well have done. He was, as the newspaper notice of death put it, a ‘successful’ stonemason and he lived only a few hundred yards away from our church – at 43 Tapton Hill, in a terraced house, now demolished, to the right behind the first Tapton Congregational Church, then made of tin. He was from a family in Derbyshire and moved to Sheffield to improve his chances. 
 

My thanks to Cãrólinã HR for this image from the early twentieth century

We have several newspaper references to him. In 1882 he was a building contractor as well as a master mason, advertising for transport to get bricks to a large site he was developing in Sandygate. Then throughout the second half of 1883 he places numerous advertisements seeking a tenant for a large property that he hopes to let in the neighbouring suburb of Broomhill. This was still the period of the Sheffield slump so perhaps his difficulties in letting this house reflect that. As Peter Warr comments, the developers in Ranmoor and the surrounding hills were not particularly successful. Yes, large mansions were built, but the area struggled to accommodate the more middling sort of resident of whom there were fewer than there were in Leeds or Manchester, because of the nature of our dominant industries.  

Possibly discouraged by his hopes of making money as a property developer, Job Stone diversified again, setting up a business in the centre of town selling mortar. He still continued to be active in the building trade and in 1885 is mentioned in a long article in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph as a senior contractor for the building of a small orphanage, financed by the Church of England. The paper notes

‘The cost of the new cottage will be about £1,450. The contractors are Mr Job Stone, mason; Mr J Robertson, joiner; Mr C Chadwick, tiler; Mr J B Corie, plumber; Messrs Hodkin and Jones, plasterers. Mr J B Mitchell-Withers is the architect.’   June 1885

It is unusual to find a report of a building project at this period where the skilled craftsmen are named. But it is not uncommon in the local papers to find the stories of stone masons who have reached prominence in part because of their craft skills. The success stories to be found in the local papers are witness to the wide range of their abilities. 

In 1885 the obituary of Mr Abraham Linacre describes the fortune he made in Australia from government contracts. He returned to Derbyshire to become an important philanthropist in Chesterfield. 

In 1892 the obituary of Mr Glassby from Mexborough describes how he trained as a stone mason at the Norfolk Lace Marble Works, graduated from the Sheffield School of Art in 1857 then went on to create many of the sculptures to be found in Whitehall.

The most colourful of these successful masons was George Myers, 1803-1875, a ‘whitesmith’ from Hull who became the favoured builder of the famous architect Augustus Pugin. According to Pugin, Myers was ‘a rough diamond, but a real diamond’.

Were stone masons such as Job Stone more likely than those from other building trades (such as carpenters or slaters) to achieve success in other related areas? I suspect there were features of their trade that made this likely.

As we know, Sheffield had a wealth of skilled workers: in the metal and mining industries and in its building and brewing trades.  It was, as the economic historian Sidney Pollard says ‘the biggest proletarian city’ in Britain. Metal and mining industries were sited in areas which geographically enclosed manual labourers in specific trades and separated them from other kinds of worker. This limited awareness of the range of different kinds of work. Social mobility was not easy from within these big industries. Setting up an independent business in such enterprises would have needed an unfeasible amount of capital. 

The city’s stone workers on the other hand were scattered throughout the city. They had to move to find work. The itinerant and diverse nature of a stone mason’s work encouraged awareness of the range of social and economic opportunities potentially available. There was a significant amount to be invested in tools and possibly a stone-yard but not a huge outlay of capital. And their work, dangerous as it was, might well have contributed a degree of self-confidence which is necessary for the entrepreneur. The apparent permanence of stone, the discernment needed to differentiate its particular properties, the difficulties of extracting it and skill in shaping it must surely have contributed to a mason’s sense of worth and lent him the confidence to acquire other more lucrative skills. After all, evidence of his worth was enshrined in the buildings which surrounded him. As the mason says at the end of John Ormond’s poem ‘The Cathedral Builders’, ‘I bloody built that’. 

The nature of a mason’s work also brought him into contact with architects and patrons who were people with some wealth. These social contacts must have increased the social confidence to develop a business, as Job Stone of Tapton Hill did. 

Job Stone’s achieved modest success, a master mason employing five men, according to the 1881 Census. Then in August 1885, two months after he had achieved honourable mention as a contractor for the orphanage cottage in June, he died, at the age of just 44 leaving a wife and four children. His wife got a job in the workhouse and his children were housed there. 

Warwick University holds what are called ‘The Obituaries’, lists of all those whose insurance with the Guild enabled their families to receive payment on their death – 25,000 of them between the years of 1832 and 1921. Most of the payments record the cause of death.

 

As you can see from these records, 8 out of the 10 Sheffield masons whose deaths are recorded here died of lung disease. Only one lived beyond the age of 45. Having skimmed the rest of the entries, this is a pattern that persists across the years and localities. Being a stonemason may have been a respected and relatively well-paid trade, offering chances for advancement, but it more or less ensured an early death.  Job’s death certificate records he too died from lung disease caused by his trade: ‘stone masons consumption some years’. 

 

Unlike many beautiful buildings, our church may not have been paid for by the profits of active oppression but it was certainly built by men whose health was destroyed by the work they did on it. I wish we knew more about them and I trust that with your help and further research we will. 

Val Hewson and Susan Roe are at work on finding records of these men’s lives. I believe that our church warden, Mark Gregory, has been exploring the higher reaches of our roof in search of the initials of masons who wished to leave their mark on their creation. I look forward to Mark’s dispatch.

Mary Grover

 


 

Blog 2 - Monday 29th January 2024

‘Undercutting’: Where was our stone shaped?

The size and elegance of St John’s church conceals the fact that it is built close into the bank behind it and on a remarkably small site. So small that we have no churchyard. This caused tensions between us and Fulwood Church who, when the church was built, were instructed by the Diocese of York to bury our dead.

So how was the stone to be worked in such cramped conditions? There would seem to be no space for a covered yard, essential if the stone were to be worked on site. Having a covered yard on site would also have been very expensive. The General Cemetery Company minutes notes on the 12th January 1838 that ‘£67 16s was expended in erection of stone mason’s workshop’.  Fine if the workshop was to be used for centuries to come, but an expense difficult to justify for a relatively short-term project, even if there had been room. Such a sum would have paid the wages of a skilled stone mason for 231 days in 1838.

James Stone, a singer at St John’s and trained stone mason, concludes that most of our stone would have been worked off-site, according to detailed architect’s plans, and imported ready finished. Yet, only sixteen years before the first stone was laid, local stone masons had won a nationally significant victory to work stone on site. 

Sheffield stone masons were nationally known for being strongly unionised and organised. Though, during this period, they never won their campaign for a nine-hour working day, in 1862 the masons did achieve this notable victory. The masons building Sir Mark Firth’s Oakbrook Hall (now Notre Dame School and just over the road from the church) succeeded, after a punishing strike, in ensuring that masons belonging to the Operative Stone Masons Guild would finish stone on site unless they agreed that it could be imported in its finished state from elsewhere. This was to prevent workers from other localities undercutting them and doing the work at a cheaper rate than the one negotiated with the immediate employer. The sandstone used to build much of the exterior of our church comes from Oughtibridge where labour was likely to be cheaper than it was in the newly developing suburbs of Ranmoor. So, it would have been cheaper for employers to bring it in ready finished from the Oughtibridge quarries where it was extracted. 
 

Oakbrook Hall, now Notre Dame School

One of the reasons why the stone masons won this victory when many other trades were starved out of similar disputes was because of the strength of their union in the mid-nineteenth century. Payments to The Operative Stone Masons Guild insured a mason’s tools, paid for his funeral and supported his family after his death. In our quest for the masons who built our church Val Hewson and I have found these insurance records invaluable. Yet the only Sheffield mason who features in the local papers for his achievements rather than his mis-steps, is a master mason whose membership is not recorded by the Guild which was only open to the rank and file. 

My next post will be about this successful master mason, Job Stone, who lived on the hill-side behind the church and whose life and death tells us much about the conditions under which a local mason had to work in the 1870s and ‘80s. 
Mary Grover

 

Blog 1 - Monday 15th January 2024

The ‘Rearing Dinner’

On May 1878, 11 months after starting work on our first church, the 100 workmen on the building team were celebrated. On the point of completing the outer walls and roof, they sat down to what was called ‘a rearing dinner’ at the Yellow Lion in Sheffield’s Haymarket. They were guests of John Newton Mappin, the donor of our church. Luckily an image of this pub has been preserved and on its frontage is blazoned the source of our donor’s wealth: ‘Mappin’s Gold Medal Beers’.

A rearing dinner dated from medieval times when a great hall would have been built around at least two timber arches. A mighty frame was constructed flat on the ground by the carpenters but it took the combined forces of all the workmen who had played a part in the construction of the building to raise or ‘to rear’ the structure from the horizontal to the vertical. No wonder celebrations were in order.  You might enjoy Harrison Ford’s involvement in an Amish barn raising and the feast that followed in the 1980s’ film Witness ( https://youtu.be/dPLb_POsC7M?si=MCfKi7BVf2pZP1p6 ).

Mappin, with characteristic generosity, supplied the 100 masons, plasterers, carpenters, glaziers and labourers with a ‘repast’ so lavish that it was reported in the local papers.

At the end of the meal it was time to toast all those responsible for our building. Understandably, the health was drunk of our benefactor, Newton Mappin. But no toast is recorded to the men he paid to do the job: not even the foreman or master mason. It is this absence that has inspired us to launch the community history project which we call Scissors Paper Stone.

The names of those who created the fabric of a city are rarely recorded. If they make their way on to the pages of the local newspaper it will usually be because they were criminal or victim of an industrial accident. As my colleagues Val Hewson, Sue Roe and I delve through the range of records that might help us write their histories I bear in mind the words of that great historian of the building trades, Raymond Postgate:
 
Carpenters, masons and bricklayers have expressed the ideals and civilisation of their age as much and as well as writers, soldiers and statesmen.

The Builder’s History (The Labour Publishing Company 1923) page 2
 
Over the next six months I will keep you in touch with all that the Scissor Paper Stone project is uncovering about many aspects of our church’s history. On Saturday 6 September, at 5.30 pm, Val Hewson will be giving a talk about what we have discovered about the builders of our church. This Heritage Open Day event will be held in St John’s, at 5.30 on Saturday September.  Do join us and contribute in any way you can to our investigations.
 
Mary Grover 14 January 2024