During the last quarter of the 18th century and into the 1830s Fleet Mills on the border of Oulton and Methley were mainly in the hands of a single family and their relatives. During this period there were momentous events including the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic wars and rapid industrialisation which led to a rise in poverty and crime. As a key location on the Aire and Calder Navigation waterway between the West Riding and the coast the mills grew in size and prospered. Many people worked there as millers or labourers and some brought up families in the small cluster of houses nearby. Two young men who witnessed the power of the mills’ water wheels, shafts and grinding stones, would go on to create an engineering company known worldwide.
In the mid-1770s Fleet Mills were let by John Silvester Smith of Newland Hall near Normanton to the partnership of Richard Hutchinson and William Evers. Both came from the Swillington side of the River Aire. Hutchinson lived at Astley and was from a long established and what appears to have been a well off farming family based in or near Little Preston for several generations. Evers was described as a wire worker with a workshop at Swillington Bridge on the Woodlesford side of the river.
At the time there were two corn mills and one fulling mill. There was a dam across the River Aire and a pound lock, with gates at each end, had been built in 1700 by the Navigation just to the south of the mills so that boats could bypass the mill dam or weir. From the start the partners appear to have had a reasonable, though not completely frictionless, working relationship with the Navigation. The main point of contention was over the amount of water taken from the river to drive the water wheels. If too much flowed through the mill races the level in the river went down and boats were in danger of running aground.
The partners were first mentioned in the Navigation’s minutes in January 1779 when they were granted a yearly allowance of £65 “for their assistance in passing the vessels at Fleet Lock.” It was backdated to May 1776 so presumably that was when they took over the running of the mills.
A lease dated 1781 was for eleven years with a rent of £300 a year. It included the mill at Rothwell which had “lately fallen down.” The partners also took a lease on Water Haigh farm at £25 a year. As well as an income from the mills documents seen by the Wakefield historian John Goodchild led him to suggest the partners also benefitted from tolls collected from cargo carrying boats passing by on the Navigation.
After protracted negotiations started in 1777 the Smith family finally agreed to sell the mills to the Navigation for £10,250 in 1786, although it took another three years before this came fully into effect. This was because Edward, the eldest surviving son, was only 18 and they had to wait until he “came of age” and was legally able to sign the paperwork.
The main reason the Navigation were keen to own the mills was that they could then fully control the weir and regulate the amount of water used by the mills’ wheels. Previously there’d been disputes about damage caused by Navigation construction work, and by boats using the cut and lock that ran next to the mill. As a result compensation had to be paid. Now the balance of power was held by the Navigation with the priority being a year round water level high enough for boats to pass at all times.
One of the leases referred to the legal duty, or soke, that local farmers were supposed to have their corn milled at either Rothwell or Fleet. From the lease’s use of the word “should” Goodchild assumed that by 1786 soke had been abandoned because too many farmers were avoiding it by going to alternative mills in Hunslet and elsewhere. There was also a small corn mill on the beck in Oulton off what became Farrer Lane but it’s not known when it was built or if it played any role in the soke rules.
The youngest of the two partners was Richard Hutchinson, born in 1754. His father had the same name and it may well have been him who provided the initial capital to acquire the Fleet Mills lease. He died in 1789. The Hutchinsons had six parcels of land in Little Preston which stayed in the family until at least 1840 although they had been mortgaged at some stage. More land was farmed at Great Preston. A map of the Navigation from 1774 shows fields on the opposite side of the river near Fleet Mills owned by a Mr. Hutchinson but that may have been one of the Hutchinsons who lived in Oulton. It’s not been possible to establish if the two families were closely related.
William Evers was born in 1746. His father, also William, was about 40 years old by then and had a house and land at Leventhorpe. He probably served an apprenticeship as a blacksmith after which he established a wire and metal working business at Swillington Bridge, on the Woodlesford side of the River Aire, specialising in farming machinery. Coal from the Lowther estate pits just across the river was readily available to fuel the forges. Entries in the estate account book for 1745 show one of his staple products was a riddle for sorting coal. Dozens were sold that year to the “fire engine colliery” between Astley and the river.
Other evidence points to Evers senior being an ingenious inventor at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution whose work was known countrywide. A letter from him about wire work for library book cases dated 1754 is in the archive of the wealthy Lascelles family of Harewood House. Similarly the Winn family at Nostell Priory had an engraving of a grinding or mincing device made by him. In 1761 he patented a winnowing machine that combined a rotary fan with sieves.
Evers senior’s most celebrated invention was described as “a very curious machine for the thrashing and grinding of corn, both of which it will do at the same time, or separately.” According to the Leeds Intelligencer the first machine was erected in 1765 on a farm at Santingley to the south east of Wakefield. Powered by a conventional windmill it could thrash as much corn as twelve men.
Spurred on by gentlemen and landowners Evers was encouraged to make a working model of his invention to be presented to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. He’d just finished it in October 1767 but in failing health he died from an “asthmatical disorder.” The model was sent off by his son to the Yorkshire M.P. Sir George Savile who lived at Rufford in Nottinghamshire. Under his patronage it was then exhibited at the society in London.
The Intelligencer was fulsome in praise of Evers senior: “His friends will greatly regret the loss of him as an individual, and the public a genius in his way, yet we have the satisfaction to hope that none of his useful inventions will be lost, as he took care thoroughly to instruct his son in the practical part of them,” it said.
William Evers junior set about informing the public through newspaper advertisements that he would indeed carry on the business. In March 1768 he announced that the Society for the Encouragement of Arts had given him a premium, or prize, of 50 guineas (worth approximately £4,300 today) for the design of the machine that had been exhibited. With a lack of modesty he claimed that the machine was his own invention rather than his father’s although he may have played a significant part in its design.
Two other inventions were advertised. One for dressing corn, rape and line seed “which winnows, riddles, and screens all in one operation.” The other was for dressing flour for “private families, which is so expeditious that a woman will dress a bushel into three different sorts in twelve minutes.”
Underneath Evers’ advertisement was another from John Johnson, a Leeds millwright which made it clear that it was him who actually constructed the original windmill-like machine and the model. This suggests that whilst the Evers, father and son, may have been the inventors they needed the help of a skilled mechanic to cast the parts and build it.
The Fleet Mills partnership came about after William Evers married Richard Hutchinson’s older sister, Jane, in 1772 at St. Mary’s church in Swillington. A brief annoucement in the Intelligencer described him as an “ingenious wire maker’ and her “a young lady of great accomplishments with a genteel fortune.” This suggests the Hutchinsons possibly had significant investments and enough land to live off the rents. Whether the marriage was arranged as part of a business deal between the two families is unknown.
It was probably Jane’s father, along with Thomas Smith, one of the lessees of coal pits on the Lowther estate, who acquired part ownership of a copperas works at Siddal near Halifax in 1777. Copperas was an acid made from iron pyrites, a by-product of coal mines, and was used as a dye in the textile industry. A debt was owed to Hutchinson and Smith by Halifax businessman Thomas Lister and a part share of the works was acquired so Lister could get out of the debtors’ gaol where he’d been languishing for five months. A few years later they sold the share and there’s no evidence they had a part in running the works.
William Evers and Jane had two sons and a daughter: William born 1773, Richard 1775, and Ann 1777, but Jane died in “childbed” at Fleet Mills in 1779. William then married a woman called Mary but so far it’s been impossible to identify her surname. With her he had three more children: Mary 1784, Jane 1780, and Robert 1792.
Another advertisement from the Intelligencer in March 1774 reveals that William junior had been running a shop on the south end of Leeds Bridge which he had put up for sale. The shop probably sold small items made at the works at Swillington Bridge.
All the stock in trade was to be sold consisting a large quantity of all sorts of hardware which were “chiefly new and saleable goods.” There were all the tools for carrying on a whitesmith business making items like cups, plates and kettles from tin or pewter. The shop and a house were to be let “to the person that purchases the stock in trade.” Potential buyers had to meet William in Swillington or at the shop which he visited every Tuesday. With money from the sale William was then able to enter into the Fleet Mills partnership.
By the 1770s trade on the Aire & Calder Navigation had grown considerably with coal, limestone, sandstone and corn cargoes joining raw wool and finished cloth. However little had been done to make the rivers deeper so heavier boats could ply between Leeds and Wakefield and the coast. A practice had been evolved by the boatmen whereby “flashes” of water were released using flash locks built into mill dams so they could use it to float their boats over the shallow parts of the rivers. This dropped the level of water in the mill ponds and conflicted with the needs of the millers who needed to keep the level high. Downstream when the flash reached the next mill dam it tended to go over the top of it and waste water which that miller needed.
Recognising the problem, and with a threat that there were proposals for new canals independent of the rivers, in 1771 the civil engineer John Smeaton was asked by the Navigation to make a survey and suggest improvements. He was born at Austhorpe Lodge in Whitkirk and educated at the grammar school in Leeds so knew the area well and must have visited Fleet Mills to compile his report.
Smeaton called for most of the existing cuts and locks to be rebuilt and new longer cuts to be made at various places. At Woodlesford it involved extending a mile and a half long canal called the Cryer Cut. It had been built in the early 1700s so boats could avoid the shallowest and most meandering section of the river in the valley between Temple Newsam and Woodlesford. Extending it by about a mile towards Methley would divert boats from another shallow section near Swillington Bridge. As a consequence Fleet Mills would have been bypassed completely.
Approval was given by an act of parliament in 1774 and, as with the other Smeaton improvements, the Navigation quickly set about drawing up detailed plans and buying the land required for the extended cut. In the end, following the agreement with Hutchinson and Evers, and the long term plans for the Smith family to sell the freehold, the Woodlesford cut wasn’t made. It took another 60 years for a canal along a slightly different line to be built.
Despite the £65 annual payment to the Fleet Mills partners, and the intention of the Smith family to sell the freehold, the conflict over the control over water levels continued. The undertakers’ minute books contain several threats made by them. For instance in May 1779 Hutchinson and Evers were requested to attend the next meeting to settle for the future “the supplying the Navigation with a proper depth of water at Fleet lock.” A couple of months later after a formal deed had been drawn up they ordered their clerk to inform the partners ”that if they refuse to execute the agreement made between them and the undertakers on or before the 2nd day of August next they will proceed in making the Woodlesford cut.”
The minutes of the next meeting reveal that William Evers and Richard Hutchinson must have been clever businessmen and shrewd negotiators. As well as profiting from the milling they’d developed a lucrative sideline supplying horses for hauling boats along the river between Leeds and Castleford. Also, under the 1774 act, new regulations limited the amount of water that millers could draw from their ponds and as compensation they were allowed to collect tolls from boats. At Fleet Mills these were 1 shilling per loaded boat going upwards towards Leeds and sixpence for one going downstream.
If the undertakers had carried out their threat to build a new cut then both these sources of income would have been reduced or lost altogether. So, no doubt with a bit of sweet talking, in return for making sure there was a good flow of water through the Fleet lock they requested that as well as being able to haul privately owned boats, they should be given an exclusive contract for vessels directly owned by the Navigation. The undertakers readily fell for this ploy and ordered their manager, William Martin,”be directed to use his interest with said masters of vessels to comply therewith.”
At the same meeting Martin’s salary was increased to £400 a year, an apparent result for everybody all round, the undertakers especially as they saved over £10,000 by not building the new cut.
From the available evidence it appears that William Evers was the more active of the Fleet Mills partners. In April 1777 he was advertising the sale of tartarian oats “of his own raising produced from the original sample.” The oats were dark in colour and gave a high yield. They were unappealing to humans but grown as animal fodder so it’s likely Evers had started to culivate them to feed the forty or so boat hauling horses in the Fleet Mills stables. Given that this was long before the days of steam or petrol engines for transport there would have been a ready market for producing feed for the tens of thousands horses in the area. Probably initially carried by boat the oats were delivered via public houses in nearby towns: “at Mr Samuel Vincent’s, the Golden-Lion, Leeds; at Mr Lodge’s, the Red-Lion, in Pontefract, and at Mr Bleasby’s, the Talbot, in Wakefield, at seven shillings and six-pence per bushel.”
On the subject of pubs, or rather alehouses, Fleet Mills had one nearby. In fact there was one about every mile or so along the Navigation to provide beer for the boatmen as fresh clean water was in short supply. The alehouse towards Leeds, near the lock in Woodlesford, became known as the Boot and Shoe whilst at Methley the Caroline Inn was eventually established. The alehouses were not much more than large rooms in private houses with the beer brewed on the spot and sold by the housewife. The one at Fleet Mills may have been larger and purpose built with both the boatmen and mill labourers to serve. Licences had to be obtained from the West Riding authorities and in 1777 Evers paid £10 for a licence with a surety of the same amount stood by a James North. In 1781 he stood surety for a licence for a Matthew Jackson.
The original wire working business, established by Evers’ father, continued after William entered into the Fleet Mills partnership. For this he found another partner, a cousin, William Burland from Barwick-in-Elmet who’d been born in 1741. Most of Burland’s children were baptised at Swillington from about 1775.
For a few years Burland probably occupied the premises at Swillington Bridge as it was still known as William Evers’ house when the manor or lordship of Woodlesford was put up for sale in 1782. As well as the house there was a foldstead, a barn, a stable and workshops with a wharf for loading and unloading vessels on the River Aire. It appears the workshop then moved to premises across the river in Leventhorpe where it continued with Burland in charge of the hands on work. A notice, printed in the London Gazette in 1800, stated the firm had traded under the name of Evers & Burland. From Leventhorpe it moved to Methley but the partnership had been disolved in January 1796 “by mutual consent.” Any debts incurred afterwards were solely down to William Burland. He died in 1824 but his son, Richard, continued in the trade and after moving to Allerton Bywater he died in 1847. Some of William Burland’s grandsons were listed in the census returns as wire workers living in Leeds many years later.
Cloth weaving was still being carried on in homes in the Rothwell area during the 1780s in what was known as the domestic system before large mechanised mills came to dominate production. Weavers, who usually also had a small farm, made the cloth at home and used Fleet Mills which still had fulling stocks to process the cloth. Evidence for this comes in an advertisement in November 1788 placed by the Wakefield solicitor John Waugh who lived in Oulton. It was for a “large and commodious dwelling house, with barns, stables, and a good granary along with two acres of land. It was in “a very suitable and convenient situation for a cloth or stuffmaker on account of the good spinning in the neighbourhood, also within a mile of Fleet Mills, where there are several pairs of stocks for milling cloth.” There was “a most excellent spring of soft water within twenty yards of the house and what was described as “a rivulet” running along the bottom of the field.” This description suggests this must have been in Oulton village close to the beck.
In October 1790 the Navigation undertakers asked their engineer, John Gott, to look at Fleet Mills “and report on what is necessary to be done.” A month later the minutes show that Hutchinson and Evers wished to continue with their lease of the mills, plus Rothwell mill and Water Haigh farm, on a year by year basis at £300 per annum. They also wanted a £500 investment from the Navigation in “new works” which presumably meant increasing the size of the mills. Any money laid out directly by them was to be repaid if they were dispossessed or if they died within seven years. In return they had to keep the mills in “tentantable repair” and pay local taxes. The £65 annual payment was to cease but crucially they agreed to supply the Navigation “with water as before.” The committee of undertakers meeting at the White Hart in Wakefield readily agreed and the partners quickly set about making the improvements. A minute from July 1791 records they had already laid out more than £600.
By this time the up and coming Leeds alderman and banker John Calverley had joined the undertakers’ committee. Later, when he inherited the Oulton estate and changed his name to John Blayds, he would come to own most of the land adjacent to the mills on the south side of the River Aire.
The major landowner on the north bank was Sir William Lowther and he too had an interest in Fleet Mills, not least because he was also an undertaker of the Navigation. As heir to his father, also Sir William, in 1788 he took over the family’s considerable estate in Swillington, Little and Great Preston and Rothwell. Unlike his father, who had lived there permanently, this Sir William, born in 1757, lived most of the time in Rutland, was an officer in the militia and a member of parliament. Nevertheless for about fifteen years, until he handed the management of the Swillington estate to his younger brother John, he was assiduous in dealing with its affairs.
In September 1793 Sir William was at one of the monthly Navigation meetings in Wakefield to complain personally about the way in which the operation of the Fleet Mills dam was causing floods on his estate which had four miles of river frontage. It was an issue that had been highlighted by his father at least twenty years earlier and nothing much seems to have been done about it. The problem was caused by the large boards, known as deals, which had been built across the weir to increase the level of water in the mill pond. When the river was in flood they were supposed to be taken down but William Evers was failing to make sure this happened. As a result the water held back by the deals went over the top of a shoal of sand and gravel in the river and flooded the land.
Now, as the outright owners of Fleet Mills, the undertakers had much more power and they ordered Evers “be directed to take care to let down the deals in time of floods.” The surveyor, or engineer, was requested to remove the shoal from the river. Also at this meeting Sir William agreed to sell to the Navigation for £150 what had become an island of land just to the east of the mills between the river and the mill races. It was let to Evers at £4 per annum with a reservation that the Lowther estate take gravel from the shallow part of the river, known as a steander, to repair the Swillington roads.
There were no local newspapers in the Rothwell, Methley or Swillington areas in the 18th and early 19th centuries so little of the day to day social and community life has been recorded. The papers in Leeds and York did occasionally cover significant incidents but most mentions came in advertisements for the sale of land or property. Some glimpses though come from Joseph Wood, a clothier and minister in the Society of Friends, who lived near Denby Dale. He was known as the “Samuel Pepys of Quakers” for the meticulous journals he kept of his travels which often included a few drinks at alehouses and inns. Quite a few Quakers are known to have lived in the Rothwell area, the most significant evidence being a burial ground they established not far from the Nookin in Oulton. Wood records visiting several of them.
For instance in September 1792 he passed through Woodlesford where he stopped “for a little spirit and water at the White Hart, paid 10d.” After that he went across Swillington Bridge to Little Preston. There he met a Quaker he’d known as a young woman in Pontefract. Elizabeth Walker had married farmer Charles Smith.
“She was very glad to see me and I understood that both her and the children attended Friends’ meetings,” he wrote. In September 1796 Wood stopped off in Royds Green to see Ann Thorp who was at her brother James Jowett’s house. A couple of months later, on New Year’s Eve, after passing through Kippax and Swillington, he stopped at the Carpenter’s Arms in Oulton.
In late September 1797 Wood was on his way home after he’d been to York for a Quaker meeting. He was travelling with John Robinson, a fellow Friend, who’d lived in the city before moving to Wakefield. It’s not clear from the diary whether they were walking or riding horses but after breakfast they set off for Tadcaster where they stopped “about one hour at the Golden Lion and got some refreshment and paid 6d each.” There was another break at the Old George in Garforth where they “got three pints of ale and paid 2d each.” After passing through Swillington they crossed the River Aire by boat and arrived at Fleet Mills to stop for a while with William Evers and his wife.
It turns out the call was for John Robinson to renew his acquaintance with his former boss. He’d previously been the foreman at the Swillington Bridge workshop with William and possibly his father. “They are not Friends but received us courteously and entertained us kindly,” wrote Wood of Mr. and Mrs. Evers. “We stopped two hours and drank tea and and then came by Oulton and Stanley to Wakefield where we got about 8 o’clock in the evening.”
Life and business at Fleet Mills was not immune to national and international events and one of the topics of conversation with Wood and Robinson may have been the ongoing war with France which had led to an increase in the price of corn and flour. Poor harvests also cut yields. There are no surviving account books so it’s not clear how this affected the Fleet Mills partnership.
The war started in 1793 following the French Revolution with prime minister William Pitt The Younger having to borrow heavily to finance the army and navy. A domestic crisis came in early 1797 when rumours of a French invasion caused a run on the banks with many customers taking out their money in gold. Business owners and merchants in the West Riding rallied round to keep lines of credit open and to express their support for the paper notes issued by local or “country” banks and those circulating from the Bank of England.
Large meetings were held in early March and William Evers was present at the gatherings in Pontefract and Wakefield. He put his name to a list of over 120 merchants and traders published in the papers after both meetings. “We will not refuse to receive bank notes in payment for any sum of money to be paid to us, and we will use our utmost endeavours to make all our payments in the same manner,” said one resolution printed after the Pontefract meeting.
For Evers things went from bad to worse because just a few weeks later a fire broke out in the shilling, or shelling, mill at Fleet Mills. It happened on Sunday 16 April 1797 and probably took hold when most of the workers and their families were at church or chapel. It was serious enough to be reported in the Leeds Intelligencer. Luckily it was “happily extinguished” though not before “doing damage to the amount of several hundred pounds.”
The shelling mill was for oats and barley. Unlike wheat, which sheds its chaff easily during threshing, the shelling process was used on the other crops to remove the rough inedible outer husks from the grain. Lightweight millstones were set further apart than normal grinding stones. After the shelling action, internal fans and sieves separated the light chaff from the edible grain which was moved to a second set of stones to be ground into flour or oatmeal.
The fire was discussed by the Navigation undertakers the following September where they were told that since 1790 the partners had laid out a much larger sum of money than expected. They had started to rebuild the shelling mill “upon an informed plan at a very considerable expense” and wanted a further loan or to be paid back when they gave up the lease. The undertakers didn’t seem to be in a rush to make a decision. It took until the next October for them to agree that the £1,000 spent by Evers could be covered by forgiving the annual £300 rent for several years as long they paid interest every half year. It was probably as a result of this rebuilding work that the mills took on the shape and size as seen in later maps, sketches and photographs.
William Evers two eldest sons, William and Richard, joined the partnership when they came of age during the 1790s. Throughout Richard Hutchinson appears to have remained a sleeping partner living off his investment in the mills and income from other land. In 1803, at the age of 49, he married Harriet Craggs from Rothwell parish. A few weeks later he left the partnership by mutual consent. By then it was known as Hutchinson, Evers and Sons. The decision was announced in the London Gazette with all debts guaranteed by the remaining partners.
Harriet Hutchinson was much younger than Richard and from provisions in his will it looks as though they were hoping to have children. In about 1811 they moved to Hicklam House near Aberford “fitted up for a genteel family” with a dining room, drawing room, sitting room, three bedrooms, a coach house, stables and two gardens along with 18 acres of land. He died in 1827 but if any children had been born none had survived. He was “much regretted by numerous relatives and universally respected.” His widow was wealthy enough to move to a house in the affluent Georgian streets of the St. John’s area of Wakefield where she died in 1847. `
William Evers must have been a relatively wealthy man too, sufficiently so to buy the rectorial tithes of corn and grain for the whole of Rothwell parish. These were an ancient form of taxation whereby landowners were required to give ten percent of their produce to support the parish church. They evolved into a form of private property that could be bought and sold with the tithe paid in cash. Wealthy investors bought them to generate income in the same way as people buy modern government bonds or shares today.
The Rothwell tithes, covering 5,217 acres, were put up for sale in February 1806 by Charles John Brandling, the Northumbrian owner of the collieries at Middleton. His father had acquired them and the ability to appoint the vicar of Rothwell in 1786 and had a map drawn up of all the parish townships to show the landowners and acreage.
Within a few days William Evers had bought and sold the tithes for Oulton and Woodlesford. His advertisement in the Leeds Intelligencer said the buyer was a Mrs. Blayds. This is odd and something of a mystery. It could have been a typesetting mistake with the reference supposed to be to Mr. John Blayds, the wealthy Leeds cloth merchant and Oulton estate owner. However he was a widower and had died in 1804. It could possibly mean one of his two unmarried sisters who both died later in 1806 but not John Calverley who inherited the Blayds’ Oulton estate as he didn’t change his name to Blayds until 1809.
The advertisement for the sale of the tithes for the rest of the townships – Rothwell, Royds Green, Lofthouse and Carlton – made it clear that any individual owner of land could buy their own tithes “upon moderate terms.” This would then free them for having to pay the annual tax. If the landowners didn’t want, or couldn’t afford, to buy the tithes for their land then he would sell them to somebody else. David Colvard, a solicitor in Wakefield, was appointed to deal with the sales. One of the buyers was farmer Joseph Stocks from a long established Carlton family. Others were Josiah Smithson and Thomas Hardaker of Rothwell.
Colvard must have been the lawyer for most of William Evers’ financial and legal transactions as his name was again attached to a notice in the papers in November 1808. It was aimed at the creditors of Joseph Marsland from East Ardsley. He was a badger, a licensed middleman who bought food in one location and transported it to sell elsewhere. As such he would have had dealings at Fleet Mills and must have built up a significant debt. As payment he signed over his personal estate and effects in trust to William Evers. David Colvard was appointed to reach agreements with Marsland’s creditors and attempt to collect from his debtors.
Some of the Evers money went into the breeding of merino sheep. In 1792 King George III acquired a flock from the King of Spain and their descendants were spread round the country. Previously the breed, famous for its fine wool, had been jealously guarded and the Spanish had banned their export. In 1809 William was again using the pages of the Intelligencer to advertise the sale of five cross-bred merino ewes which had been made pregnant by a merino ram. The lowest price he would accept was 50 guineas.
A detailed examination of Fleet Mills was undertaken in 1813 by the Navigation’s resident engineer and surveyor Elias Wright. He lived at Walton near Wakefield, was in his late sixties and had fifty years experience with canals and mills. Tasked with re-assessing how much rent should be paid by William Evers & Sons for the mills and associated land his lengthy report was presented to the undertakers at their meeting in Leeds on 5 July. Industrialist Walter Spencer Stanhope was in the chair and the committee included Sir William Mordaunt Sturt Milner of Nun Appleton and John Blayds – the former John Calverley, now firmly established on the Oulton estate.
It was obvious Wright was impressed with William Evers and how he conducted his business. The report started with a reminder that in the beginning he had been very helpful to the Navigation and reminded them he had saved them £10,000 from making a new cut. When the property had been acquired from the Smith family the mills were apparently in “a ruinous state,” and Evers had spent £7,000 “at his own expense” on rebuilding work.
Referring to the £1,000 lent for the rebuilding of the shelling mill after it burnt down it transpired that an oil mill had also been built. The rent with interest on the loan had been £400 until 1807. A further loan was made in 1812 for new stables and 17 acres of land had been conveyed to the Navigation.
Since the soke had been abandoned Evers had to lay out thousands of pounds each year to buy corn. “Very few men are to be found who would embark so large a capital in a concern of this sort, indeed the only one would be the man who is already in the business and has obtained this capital by his industry therein,” stated Wright. Comparing Fleet to the mills upstream at Thwaite and downstream at Castleford Wright concluded that the rent shouldn’t be increased “nor for many years to come.”
William Evers age was given as 76 in the Swillington parish register when he died and was buried in early April 1820. If the records for his birth and older brother who died as an infant are to be believed then he was actually 74. Another small mystery. What is clear is that he was a relatively wealthy man. He first made a will in 1814, probably during a health scare. After confirming that his unmarried eldest sons William and Richard would keep their shares in the Fleet Mills partnership he stipulated that his personal estate should be invested in “government funds, securities, or otherwise.” He nominated two trustess to wind up his affairs. One was William Sheppard, a yeoman farmer who lived at Barlow Lane End in the parish of Heminborough near Selby. The other was John Wilton of Methley, the Fleet Mills bookkeeper and alehouse landlord.
Within two years William’s wife Mary was to receive a legacy of £1,000 whilst his youngest son, Robert who had become an attorney in Wakefield, was to get £1,500. After the trustees had sold off all his land and other property, and invested the proceeds the income was to be divided equally between Mary, Robert and his two youngest daughters. Both had married farmers and had children, Mary to John Parkinson from Swillington, and Jane to Thomas Dear from Reasby in Lincolnshire who later moved to Dunford House in Methley. The eldest daughter Ann appears to have been given nothing although by then she was married to William Wilks junior of Woodlesford, son of the owner of local potteries and a considerable land owner. This first will was witnessed by farmer William Swain of Huddleston near Sherburn in Elmet and the Fleet Mills miller John Goodall along with the millwright Jonathan Craven. In the event Robert Evers died in July 1819 and William added a codicil making a £700 provision for Robert’s only son William who had been born the previous year. The remainder of the £1,500, originally intended for Robert, was then to be split between the rest of the family. Miller Benjamin Braham added his name to the list of witnesses.
For the next decade Fleet Mills continued under the existing name of William Evers & Sons with the younger William and his brother Richard in charge. The extent of the land holdings their father had built up becomes clear from an entry in “The Annals of Leeds, York and The Surrounding Districts” from September 1823. The land was ‘“on the low side” of Outwood near Wakefield. Whether it was for farming or some other purpose wasn’t stated but as a man and boy working for the Evers were putting up a fence the boy hit his mattock, or pickaxe, on what he thought was a large stone. It turned out to be a piece of Roman pottery filled with copper coins “of various emperors.” The coins weighed 62 lbs and were encrusted together but when they were broken apart and cleaned up many of them were “in a state as perfect as when fresh from the mint.” (Later research has suggested the find may have been of counterfeit coins.)
On a more mundane level a drowned horse was found in the Fleet Mills pond in October 1824. It had been carried down the river all the way from Leeds, a distance of about seven miles. It was one of a team used to haul the Amity, a fast “light post” stage coach which had just started running between the White Horse on Boar Lane in Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham. It ran six days a week in both directions, took only thirteen hours and carried just four inside passengers. The arrival in Leeds was at half past eight in the evening and two horses had been taken to water at the Waterloo ford near the centre of the town. The horseman had underestimated the depth of the river which was higher than usual. He was thrown into the water, the horses lost their footing and were carried away. The other animal was discovered near Thorp Hall four miles downstream.
Human bodies were also found in the river near Fleet Mills. Back in 1807 William Walker, a 63 year old “mill servant,” had fallen in and drowned a few days after Christmas. An inquest was held at the mills by William Carrett, the coroner for the Honour of Pontefract and keeper of the gaol in Rothwell. He found it to be an accident, probably because of the cold weather, and Walker was buried on New Year’s Eve at Rothwell.
The weather can’t have been as bad in July 1825 but waterman William Greaves managed to fall in and drown whilst walking to his house in Woodlesford. It seems he’d moored his boat near the mills and may have been unsteady on his feet after stopping for a few beers in the nearby alehouse. He was only 36 years old.
The following year’s discovery was more gruesome. In September 1826 a woman, named as Ann Furnish, was reported to have committed suicide by “throwing” herself into the Fleet Mills weir. She was said to be about sixty years old. For about twenty years she’d been the pinder for the township of Oulton with Woodlesford rounding up stray animals and keeping them in a pinfold until the owners paid a fine to release them.
It was said that in order for the suicide attempt to succeed Furnish had tied her feet firmly together before she jumped in. Foul play doesn’t appear to have been suspected as an inquest, led by the new coroner and gaoler Christopher Jewison, heard that for some time she’d exhibited “symptoms of derangement.” He found she’d drowned herself in a fit of insanity. No burial records for an Ann Furnish can be found in any of the nearby church registers. She may have been buried in an unmarked grave in unconsecrated ground with no religious ceremony as had been the tradition for what was deemed a crime of self-murder. The law had been changed in 1823 to allow a church burial if the coroner ruled the person was of “unsound mind” as he appears to have done in Furnish’s case. However her absence from the registers would suggest the new law had yet to take effect locally.
Nearly ten years after William Evers’ death a dispute between the stepfather of his grandson William and the rest of the surviving children and grandchildren came to a head. The stepfather was James Stephenson who’d married young William’s widowed mother Maria, nee Walker, in Wakefield in 1821.
Stephenson was a solicitor who also acted as a clerk in the West Riding Registry of Deeds office which held certified copies of conveyances, wills and other documents. As well as having children with Maria he’d taken on the responsibilty for young William’s upkeep and to send him for an education at a boarding school. The fees were partly paid for by the interest from a legacy of £613 left by his father. Stephenson claimed that wasn’t enough and that over the years he’d been left out of pocket by £120. He wanted Richard Evers to give him the interest from the £700 left in trust to young William by his grandfather in 1819 but Richard had refused.
A complicating factor was that the £700 had been invested in the Wakefield branch of a prominent Yorkshire bank and not in government funds or securities. Unfortunately in 1825 the bank, Wentworth, Chaloner, and Rishworth dramatically collapsed during a recession. The subsequent financial crisis triggered widespread economic distress across the whole country and the failure of numerous other banks. Godfrey Wentworth Wentworth and his partners had to sell off their estates and assets. Eventually a dividend of 10 shillings in the pound was declared, in other words investors only got half their money back.
All this prompted James Stephenson to present a case to the High Court of Chancery in London in 1829. By then he’d moved with Maria and their children to Islington leaving young William behind in Yorkshire to be looked after by a John Stephenson, most likely James’ father, who lived at Brotherton. James had an office on Chancery Lane and mainly seems to have done conveyancing work. Perhaps with a sense of bravado to impress his new metropolitan friends he was probably encouraged to pursue the case. As well as naming all the surviving children and grandchildren of William Evers it also named Wakefield spirit merchant Luke Race, the second trustee of William’s 1819 codicil. Race had died in 1827 so his executor, merchant and insurance broker Robert Whitworth, found himself named as a defendant too. Stephenson maintained that the £700 legacy should have been invested in goverment securities but seems not to have noticed the word “otherwise” in the original will.
The documents for this case survive in the National Archives although a defence by Robert Whitworth is faded and difficult to understand. There doesn’t appear to have been any written response from Richard Evers and the other defendants and there was no published judgement so it’s unclear as to what happened. Reading between the lines it’s clear that Richard Evers didn’t have much time for James Stephenson, or his claims.
Obviously a man on the make Stephenson over extended himself and was declared insolvent in 1840. A year later the census records him as a barrister still with his family at Trinity Square in Islington. Probably short of money in November 1842 he applied to be the Registrar of Deeds for the West Riding, an elected position with three candidates standing. The contest was won by Arthur Lascelles, son of the Earl of Harewood. Stephenson’s reputation must have preceeded him. He came third with zero votes. In 1847 it appears that he’d been sent to prison for five weeks as a bankrupt owing £3,492 11 shillings and 2 pence. Applying to a court to be released it transpired there‘d been some dodgy dealings in shares for the Denby Dale turnpike trust and a failed plan to build a rival railway between Leeds and York. On hearing this the judge sent him back to gaol for a further seven weeks. He was living in Camberwell when died about a year later.
In Yorkshire, in June 1830, Richard Evers “of Swillington” was listed as a new subscriber to the Leeds General Infirmary paying £2 2 shillings along with the Oulton brewery owner Henry Bentley. This was common amongst large and small employers. Their charity meant that they were given “recommendation tickets” to place their sick or injured workers into the hospital ahead of others. With a larger workforce Bentley gave a benefaction of £10.
Industrialisation led to a rapid rise in the population of Leeds and other places in the West Riding. Many lived in poverty and it brought with it an increase in crime. Situated out in the countryside it might be thought that Fleet Mills was isolated from its effects but that wasn’t the case. One incident came in October 1831 when two young men appeared at the Leeds Borough Sessions where the magistrates included John Blayds’ brother, Thomas, a partner in Beckett, Blayds & Company, the town’s main bank.
A long list of cases were dealt with, mainly involving theft and burglary as violent crimes and murder were tried at that time at a higher court in York. Those in positions of authority with property to defend handed down tough sentences in an attempt to control persistent offenders and deter crime. William Martin and Cook Jackson were charged with stealing “a quantity of wearing apparel” from William Evers and his brother. One record for Jackson gave his occupation as carter so he and Martin must have travelled to Fleet to deliver or pick up goods. The pair were also charged with stealing a pair of trousers, a worker’s heavy woollen “shag” waistcoat and two handkerchefs from another man.
Both were sentenced to two months in prison and to be “twice whipped.” In a way they were lucky as other offenders for similar crimes at the same court were given seven year sentences and transported to Australia. They included a 14 year old boy who’d stolen three sacks and 20 yards of rope. It’s not clear what happened to Martin as there are quite a few penal records with the same name. Jackson, with his slighlty unusual forename is easier identify. His spell in the West Riding House of Correction at Wakefield wasn’t enough to mend his ways and a year later he was again before the magistrates for housebreaking, stealing an iron chain and clothing. This time they didn’t hesitate to send him for transportation. He left Sheerness with more than 300 other convicts on board the Lord Lyndoch in June 1833 and arrived in Sydney after a four month voyage.
More details of Cook Jackson emerge from Australian records. He was born at Newburn to the east of Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1812. Before he turned to crime he’d been a soldier, had a scar on his face and was heavily tattooed on both arms including the name of his father Robert. After his arrival in New South Wales he was transferred up the coast to Newcastle, a far different place to his native town. From there he was sent inland and assigned to work for a farmer at Paterson. He was eventually given his certificate of freedom in 1841 and a year later married Mary Purcell who had recently arrived with her parents and brother on an assisted passage from Tipperary in Ireland. Cook and Mary had at least seven children who survived into adulthood and have many descendants. He was again listed in a newspaper in connection with a crime in Australia in 1873. This time though he was the victim, after a horse’s saddle and bridle he owned were stolen. He died in 1884.
Half a world away and back in time in Yorkshire not long after Cook Jackson was first sent to prison in 1831 a couple of months later Richard Evers died and was buried at Swillington on Christmas Day. He was 56 years old and his death marked the beginning of the end of his family’s connection to Fleet Mills. As the Leeds Patriot newspaper put it: “His life was one of unimpeachable integrity and benevolence, which had long endured him to a large circle of friends and acquaintances.” The Patriot was a radical weekly paper and campaigned for the vote to be given to all adult men instead of the limited franchise of property owners. Another cause was for shorter working hours in mills and factories. Their praise for Richard Evers strongly suggests he too was a radical and as a result would have been liked and admired amongst the Fleet Mills workforce and others in the locality though not necessarily by the established landowners.
Richard Evers had never married and had no children. His will was witnessed by the innkeeper at Fleet Mills, Abraham Kay, miller John Dyson, and Lepton Dobson the clerk to Smith and Hutchinson, a firm of Leeds solicitors. Two trusteess were appointed, Thomas Farrer, from the Oulton farming family and solicitor Richard Hutchinson. Born in 1804 he was Evers’ nephew, the son of his mother’s brother, Matthew, who worked the family farm at Astley. His partner was Edwin Smith, an older man who he’d probably served an apprenticeship with. He had a number of official positions including clerk to the West Riding magistrates and clerk to the trustees of two turnpike roads. Together they acted in the Leeds borough for the association for the prosecution of felons. Edwin was married to Emma Ridsdale from a well off Leeds family and later moved to Acomb near York where he was listed as a banker in the 1851 census.
Richard Evers’ will declared that the mill partnership should be wound up and that his brother should receive his half share. It still included a considerable amount of property and land in Methley, Whitwood, Woodlesford, and “elsewhere.” After everything had been sold off, and debts paid, the money remaining was to be invested in parliamentary stocks or government funds which paid a guaranteed rate of interest. The will is complicated but the gist was that the annual interest from the invested funds was to be split into eighteen parts. Eight eighteenths were to paid half yearly to his sister Ann Wilks and then to her children when they reached the age of 21. Similarly five eighteenths went to the children of his sister Mary Parkinson who had died in 1825, and four eighteenths was for sister Jane Dear and her children. Whilst they were under age the money was to be used to provide for the childrens’ education. Finally there was a sting in the tail. One eighteenth was to go to young William Evers when he reached the age of 21. This had a clause which clearly showed Richard Evers’ displeasure and annoyance at the Chancery case against him and rest of the family in 1829. It had a proviso that £400 should be deducted from William’s share “for the expenses and loss occasioned” and it was to be divided amongst his cousins.
It took until the end of August 1832 for Richard’s will to be granted probate and about then his trustees and brother informed the Aire & Calder Navigation they wished to give up the lease on Fleet Mills. A detailed advertisement was drawn up at the Navigation’s offices in Wakefield dated 30th October and printed in the Leeds and Newcastle newspapers a couple of days later.
The advertisement gave a detailed breakdown of what by then were four mills on the Fleet Mills site and represents all the effort and investment the Hutchinson and Evers partnerships had put in to rebuild and develop them. Top of the list was the flour mill. It had “four pair of French stones, two pair of grey stones, four dressing machines, a corn screen, and two sets of sack tackle, one outside and the other inside of the building, and one pair of malt rollers.” It was worked by two water wheels, each three feet wide, one of 18 feet diameter, the other 16 feet.
Second came the shelling mill. It had a single pair of “good shelling stones, one pair grey stones, two sets of sack tackle, and a drying kiln, with two fires, 26 feet long and 16 feet wide.” It was worked by a single water wheel 18 feet in diameter and two feet six inches wide.
Then there was the oil mill for crushing oil bearing seeds and nuts, such as linseed and rape seed to extract vegetable oils which were used for lighting, paints, and making “oilcake” for farm animals. This mill had a pair of oil stones or crushers, two presses, two kettles, stampers and seed rollers. There were two large tanks or cisterns and it was worked by an 18 feet water wheel which was four feet wide.
Finally there was a flint and whiting mill for crushing and grinding flint and chalk into powders used in the pottery, paint, and construction industries. It had seven stampers to break the stone and flint and two tubs for grinding the powder. This mill had a water wheel 18 feet in diameter and 4 feet wide. No detailed floor plan of the mills exist so it’s difficult to identify the relative locations of the four mills on plans, a later drawing and photographs.
Also to be let was “a good house and suitable conveniences, within thirty yards of the mills, together with farm buildings and stabling for 50 horses.” There were 40 acres of “excellent land, divided into convenient sized fields” in the centre of which was a barn, a stable, and two cottages. This was probably Water Haigh farm. The advertisement went on: “Altogether this is one of the most extensive concerns in the West Riding, now in the occupation of Messrs. William Evers and Sons, who have been residents on the premises above half a century, and is now given by the only surviving partner, who retires from the concern.”
The mill in the centre of Rothwell was advertised too. It had a pair of blue stones, a pair of grey stones, a pair of shelling stones and a flour machine. It was worked by a “breast” water wheel 20 feet in diameter, and 4 feet 4 Inches wide. There was a drying kiln and a house adjoining the mill with about two acres of land “in the occupation of Joseph Steel.” Rothwell mill and the mills at Fleet could be let separately or together.’
Joseph Priestley (not the famous scientist who discovered oxygen) was the Navigation’s manager based at Wakefield and he informed the undertakers’ committee at the beginning of December 1831 that Evers & Sons had offered to leave everything at the mills for a new tenant, apart from their household furniture and personal items. As a neighbour, the chairman Sir John Lowther, who had taken over the management of the Swillington estates from his brother, would have been well aware of the situation, as would be commitee member John Blayds of Oulton Hall who had succeeded his father in 1827.
Evers & Sons claimed the Navigation owed them £2,000 for all the work that had been done but they agreed to an assessment which was carried out by a Mr. Colley, probably Sheffield based Benjamin Colley. He was already in the area surveying and valuing land to be taken for major improvements in the Woodlesford area including a new wider and deeper canal all the way from Hunslet to to just before Allerton Bywater where boats re-entered the river via a new lock.
The renowned civil engineer Thomas Telford had surveyed the route in 1827 but his proposals for the Leeds to Castleford section were rejected in favour of plans by the Navigation’s own engineer George Leather. Sanctioned by an act of parliamenrt in 1828 a short spur and a lock into the river adjacent to Fleet Mills were part of the works with the new cut bypassing the mills entirely. The hauling station with its 40 horses would remain but tolls would no longer be taken from boats passing the mills. With huge disruption during the new cut’s imminent construction William Evers probably concluded this was the best time to leave.
Mr. Colley came up with a value of £1,503 owed to the Evers partnership and after further to and fro this seems to be the figure the trustees and William Evers accepted. At the end of January 1833 Priestley told the undertakers that “not one person” had offered to become tenant of Fleet Mills. He suggested they be examined by “a competent person” with a view to divide them. They were then were re-advertised during March.
At the beginning of April 1833 a “great sale” by auction was announced in the press. All the machinery and mill stock at Fleet Mills was to be sold along with farming stock and “implements of husbandry” on nearby land at Water Haigh and in Methley parish. It was to take place over four days later in the month under the auspices of the Leeds based auctioneer John Holmes and comprised a long list of items. They including 50 ewes and their lambs, horses, pigs, poultry, wagons and ploughs. There were also stacks of wheat, beans and straw, brewing vessels, and all the contents of the shops used by blacksmiths, wheelwrights and coopers. The offer to leave everything behind for the new tenants seems to have been forgotten probably because Messrs. Evers & Sons hadn’t received the £2,000 they had asked for. The sale probably attracted a large crowd of potential buyers from miles around many of whom would have lodged in local inns and public houses.
With no single lessee coming forward for the four mills at Fleet a few days after the auction on 1 May Joseph Priestley signed off an advertisement for the oil mill to be let separately. Attached to it was an oil cake house and seed chambers and to sweeten the deal the lease included a dwelling house, garden, stables and 18 acres of “excellent grass land.” It seems William Evers had now left the premises completely as immediate possession was offered.
On the same day he and his brother’s trustees, Richard Hutchinson and Thomas Farrer, formally dissolved the William Evers & Sons partnership. A document confirming this was then signed and witnessed on 14 May. A public announcement printed in the Leeds papers at the beginning of June requested that all debts, including from the boat hauling business, should be paid immediately to their agent John Wilton of Methley.
Underneath this one was another from Messrs. Wilks Brothers, a new partnership which had been formed to run the corn, shelling and flint mills. They begged “to inform the friends and customers of the late firm of Messrs. William Evers and Sons, and the public in general,” that they had entered Fleet Mills, and hoped by “proper attention to merit a continuation of their support.” The delay in printing both announcements was probably because the Wilks partnership were finalising their lease arrangements with the Navigation.
The Wilks brothers were in fact Richard and William Evers’ nephews and beneficiaries of Richard’s 1831 will. Quite why they decided to take on Fleet Mills is unknown. It could have been planned within the family all along or perhaps they’d been approached at the last minute as nobody else had come forward.
The story of the Wilks in Woodlesford will be covered separately. Suffice it to say that the two brothers in the new Fleet Mills partnership were the grandsons of William Wilks who had inherited the Woodlesford manor house and a considerable amount of land from an unmarried cousin in 1796. William was the son of an Outwood clothmaker and as a young man had gone off to Cork in southern Ireland to seek his fortune. There, during the height of the slave trade and the plantation economy, he became a victualler supplying ships from England en route to West Africa, the West Indies and the American colonies.
After he inherited the Woodlesford estate William Wilks brought his wife, a daughter of Pierce Fitzgerald, a famous Irish poet, and his children to live at the manor house. There he became involved with the pottery that had grown up on the site near Swillington Bridge once occupied by William Evers and his father. After changing his mind several times about which of his sons would inherit his estate, and selling some land to John Blayds in 1818, William Wilks died in 1820.
The brothers in the new partnership were William (1800 – 1845) and Joseph Robert Wilks (1813 – 1895). A third, Richard (1805 – 1882), appears not have been involved. Confusingly their father was also a William. Just before he married Ann Evers in 1799 he became a farmer living in Barwick in Elmet parish and at some point moved into Scholes Grange. He may have provided some of the financial backing in the form of a surety so his sons could take up the Fleet Mills lease.
On 20 July 1833 Joseph Priestley reported to the undertakers that the water wheel and machinery at the mill in Rothwell had been in a ”ruinous state.” A new wheel and machinery “upon the improved system” had been installed and the mill had been let to Joseph Flockton for £90 a year. He had to pay more if he wanted to occupy a small house on the site.
The minutes of the same meeting make it clear that part of the new line of canal from Hunslet to the Kippax lock had been finished. As a consequence water had been diverted from the river and its surface level had dropped. At Fleet Mills this revealed that some of the walls needed repairing. The undertakers were quick to sanction work to lower the wheel races along with strengthening of the foundations before new machinery was installed.
From the available records the Wilks brothers had much less contact with their landlords than their predecessors as there were no further squabbles about the level of water in the mill pond. The only item of note was in November 1834 when the Navigation’s surveyor and clerk of works, Thomas Hamond Bartholomew, was ordered to reduce the height of the wooden deals on the Fleet Mills dam. At the same time the old locks at Thwaite, Fleet and Methley were abandoned and the dam at Methley was dismantled. After the new canal was completed in 1835 the water level at Fleet Mills was no longer a problem. Instead a great deal of the undertakers attention was taken up with the plans for the North Midland and Manchester to Leeds railways, both of which threatened their interests. After several years of objections and negotiations compromises were agreed and in 1838 work started in earnest on the line which ran through Methley and Woodlesford into Leeds.
Meanwhile the extent of the land and property built up over the years by William Evers and his sons becomes clear from notices for “valuable freehold estates” placed by solicitors Smith & Hutchinson in the papers in March 1835. They appear to have been liquidating and turning into cash as much as possible to comply with the stipulations in Richard Evers’ will. In total there were about 45 acres of land spread across quite a wide area from Whitwood to Methley, Rothwell, Outwood and Wakefield. At Woodlesford there were nine houses and a butcher’s shop with gardens and outbuildings. A small plot occupied by a Thomas Hutchinson was next to Pickpocket Lane. The land at Whitwood and Methley had valuable seams of coal and at Outwood there was a ropery on a plot known as the “Cock Pit.” This was probably where Roman pottery and coins had been discovered in 1823.
After the sale of the estate Richard Evers’ brother William settled down to live as an ordinary farmer in the Wood Row area of Methley. At this stage he too was unmarried. Staying with him and helping on the farm when the 1841 census was taken were two of his nephews, Richard and William Parkinson along with three male and two women servants. He was still there at the age of 77 in 1851 but in the meantime he’d married widow Phoebe Hollings nee Smirthwaite in 1847. Staying with them were her daughter in law Mary, wife of Woodlesford shop keeper William Capes, and their daughter Sarah Elizabeth. Mary was listed as annuitant with an independent income probably from a legacy given by her father.
Back at Fleet Mills a report in the Leeds Times from June 1836 gives a small insight into life there. It involved three young workers, John Ingham, John Firth and Thomas Watson. They slept in the same room and one night Ingham disapperead after stealing a pair of trousers, a cap and a pair of “half boots” belonging to the others. John Firth had a good idea where he’d gone and went to Leeds where he spotted Ingham wearing the same clothes selling crab fish on Kirkgate. A policeman was called, he was arrested and after a trial was sent to prison for a month.
The same week there was a report of the trial of a man and a boy who’d been accused of stealing wool from the Lowther Arms Inn near Swillington Bridge. William Strickland, 26, a rag and bone merchant and Robert Rawlinson, 14, his apprentice, were defended by Mathew Talbot Baines, son of the famous editor of the Leeds Mercury, Edward Baines. The innkeeper, Joseph Ash, had had them arrested by a constable but in front of a jury in Bradford many witnesses, including Joseph Robert Wilks, who’d been drinking at the inn, gave evidence in their favour and they were acquitted. “Many persons could scarcely restrain an audible expression of sympathy with the prisoners, and of belief in their innocence,” reported the Leeds Times.
A few months later the High Court of Chancery in the Old Hall of Lincoln’s Inn in London again entered the lives of the extended Evers and Wilks family as young William Evers laid out another case against them. The court, famously described in the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, was notorious for its cramped and gloomy interior and its suffocating “fog” of slow-moving litigation. Amongst the piles of legal papers, set to acquire dust over the years and end up rolled in bundles in the National Archives, was William’s claim, aided this time by his “next friend” John Stephenson of Brotherton.
Not named this time was his stepfather but the claim bears all the hallmarks of the previous one made in 1829 by James Stephenson. It was against the trustees Richard Hutchinson and Thomas Farrer and William’s aunts, their husbands and his cousins. By this time he was four months past his eighteenth birthday and had been apprenticed as a notary and solicitor. To pay for this he had to borrow £300 from George Knowles, a Wakefield butler and it appears he had received none of the money due to him from Richard Evers. Again it was alleged that the trustees hadn’t properly invested the money and no payments had been made to any members of the family. This may well have been true as it probably took a long time to dispose of all of Richard’s personal estate as well as that due to him from the break up of the Fleet Mills partnership.
Once again the outcome of this case isn’t known and whether young William Evers ever received the inheritance due to him. What is certain is that, even if he qualified, he didn’t pursue a career in the law. Instead, like his uncles and grandfather before him he became a miller and farmer. In September 1845 he was a bookkeeper in Leeds when he married Hannah Dyson, the daughter of a corn miller and flour seller from Holbeck. They then set up home at Newthorpe near Sherburn in Elmet where they brought up a large family who in their turn, mostly prospered. One of them was, for 46 years, the relieving officer, administering the Poor Law for the Tadcaster union of parishes. He lived in Garforth and was also the registrar of births and deaths there.
In the vicinity of Fleet mills in September 1837 it was the impending start to the construction of the North Midland Railway’s line between Leeds and Derby that probably prompted Methley estate owner, John Savile, 3rd Earl of Mexborough, to order some posts to be put up blocking the eastern end of Fleet Lane near Wood Row. He may have been hoping to extract a fee from the contractors for the use of his private road to bring in navvies and materials. It had already been diverted to accommodate the new canal and the blockage meant that carts to and from Methley and the mills had to take a more circuitous route.
The Wilks brothers complained about “the great inconvienience they sustained” and John Blayds was dispatched by the Navigattion’s undertakers to Methley Hall to have a chat with his neighbour. A few weeks later he reported back that Lord Mexborough had agreed to delay putting up the posts.
With no surviving mill paperwork or family correspondence to throw any light on the subject its hard to say how well the Wilks brothers were doing. The conclusion, however, is not very well, perhaps because of the wider economic picture or their own inexperience. Maybe Joseph was spending too much time in the Lowther Arms! Whatever the reason, on the 1st of May 1837 they mutually agreed to disolve their partnership. Curiously though the notice of this wasn’t published in the papers until after a document was signed by them on 16 August 1839, witnessed by the Rothwell solicitor Baynes Pinder. It’s possible the delay was because one of them, most likely WIlliam, was trying to make a go of the business on his own, or they may have been trying to avoid paying debts they owed. Whatever the case the long association, lasting over sixty years, of the Evers and Wilks families with Fleet Mills had come to an end.
In January 1838, based on the evidence of advertisements, it looks as though a new tenant had, or was just about to, take over. The first advertisement was for a farmer and his wife. The man would work on the land and at the mills whilst the wife would manage a nearby house. There she was to “cook occasionally for a gentleman who is only there during the day,” presumably the new tenant. It was necessary that she should have lived in gentlemen’s families, be a good cook, and be “neat, cleanly, and capable of managing a dairy.” The employment would start in March and applications were via James Walker at 104 Briggate in Leeds.
A few days later an overlooker was wanted for the flint mill. “Civility and honesty” were necessary qualifications and nobody “addicted to liquor” should apply. This time applications were via James Dufton in Leeds which may indicate the flint mill was being let separately to the corn mill.
When the Wilks brothers left Fleet Mills William lived at Astley near Swillington although he still farmed land at Water Haigh partly in Oulton, partly in Woodlesford for which he paid rent of £50 a year. In January 1841 at Swillington church he married Ellen Sharp the daughter of a boatman on the Navigation. William was at Water Haigh wneh he died in January 1845. He was buried at Swillington.
His brother moved in with their parents at Scholes but their mother died in May 1838. Joseph Robert was still there helping his father when the census was taken in 1841, as was his brother Richard and his wife who he had married at Wickenby in Lincolshire. Their father William Wilks remarried in March 1842 to Rothwell spinster Elizabeth Smithson, the daughter of a wool dealer, but just two months later he died. After this Richard moved his family back to Linclonshire where he had a series of farms until he died near Market Rasen in 1881. As for Joseph Robert Wilks he upped sticks, crossed the Atlantic and started a new life as a farmer, first in Nebraska and then Illinois.
Perhaps the most far reaching outcome of the Evers and Wilks era at Fleet Mills was its connection to two men who founded an important engineering company that achieved worldwide recognition. They were William Craven, born in Hunslet in 1805 and Richard Bradley who was born in Wakefield in 1808. William was the son of Jonathan Craven, the millwright who signed William Evers’ will in 1814 and its codicil in 1819. Before moving to Fleet Mills Jonathan was a millwright in Hunslet and about a year before William’s birth had wound up a partnership with a man called Thomas Wood. In some records he is described as a wheelwright. Records from the nonconformist Old Chapel in Morley suggest he was baptised there in 1773 after being born at nearby Churwell. He married Sarah Smith at Rothwell church in 1798.
From the dates it’s possible to deduce that William Craven must have observed his father operating and mending the shafts and cogs at Fleet Mills when he was a boy around the age of ten. With the ambition to become a “real engineer” and to build steam engines and other machinery, a few years later he started an apprenticeship at the works of a recently established engineering firm in Wakefield. There he met fellow apprentice Richard Bradley, they formed a lifelong friendship and vowed to set up their own partnership.
Other evidence from family trees gives firm links to Fleet Mills. William Craven was a regular visitor to Oulton during his apprenticeship and in 1827 he married Jane, the daughter of local farmer William Moore, one of his mother and father’s friends. The Moore family had been in Oulton since at least Tudor times. A newspaper report of the marriage describes William Craven as a millwright “of Hunslet,” although other sources place him living in Wakefield and indeed it was there that he set up home with Jane and where their first child, John, was born in 1829.
On many occasions Richard Bradley is said to have accompanied his friend to Oulton and this led to Richard having an even stronger relationship to Fleet Mills as he became one of the extended Evers family. This was because he met and eventually married, in 1838, Sarah Parkinson. She was the granddaughter of William Evers who died in 1820 and was one of those named in the Court of Chancery litigations. Sarah was born in Swillington in 1814 but the records show her father farmed land on the Oulton side of the river that was part of the Fleet Mills estate.
The firm of Richard Bradley & Company was established at a foundry in Wakefield in 1843 and about ten years later was renamed Bradley & Craven. One of their earliest designs was for a stationary steam engine for winding coal and miners in cages up and down colliery shafts. Over the next 80 years or so they made many of the engines used at pits across Yorkshire. Around the world they were primarily known for their automated brickmaking machinery from when they took out their first patent in 1853. After the deaths of the founders the firm was carried on by William Craven’s sons and in 1914 had 300 employees.
Surprising as it may seem William Craven’s cousin also became a renowned Victorian engineer, although there’s no evidence to link him directly to Fleet Mills apart from the possibility he may have visited Oulton to see his uncles, aunts and cousins. John Chester Craven was also born in Hunslet, in 1813, and served an apprenticeship with the locomotive builders, Fenton, Murray and Jackson. At the age of 19 he was building engines for George Stephenson for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. In London he worked on the engines for Brunel’s Great Western steamship. He became the locomotive foreman of the Manchester and Leeds Railway and must surely have travelled on their trains past Fleet Mills. Later still he moved south again to become the superintendent of the locomotive and carriage departments of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.
Through war and banking panic, fire, flood and legal dispute the Evers and their kin built, rebuilt, and sustained Fleet Mills. But perhaps their true legacy lay not in the flour and flint they ground or the water they channelled, but in the generations who watched, learned, and went on to build engines and machinery that would transform the world beyond the mills. The ingenuity first nurtured beside the Fleet Mills weir was carried forward into the age of steam by men who once stood beside the water wheels and dreamed of something greater.
