TO READ THE CHARLES WATERTON STORY IN ORDER (RECOMMENDED) CLICK THE APPROPRATE LINK: PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE.
Spring guns, marriage and money worries...
A story I found in Henry Clarkson's book 'Memories of Merrie Wakefield', first published in 1887, illustrates Waterton's less attractive side. If Clarkson has any of the following details wrong, blame him not me. He's been dead since 1896, so will be less upset by any criticism.
It was legal until 1827 to set spring gun traps on land that you owned, even if it was open. If a wire was activated by a trespasser or even an innocent hiker who had misread his map, a shotgun would go off and fell the offender. We know that Waterton sent very few Christmas cards to local poachers and he was apparently an enthusiastic adopter of the spring gun practice.
In response to many fatal accidents across the country at the hands of spring guns, an Act of Parliament was passed banning them on open ground. However, it was still legal to set these lethal traps on your land if it was enclosed by a high wall.
Can you see where this tale may be heading? Yes, Clarkson suggests that it was this Act that provided the impetus for Waterton to build the wall around his estate - he never even mentions the creation of a nature reserve. Soon after its construction, though, some poachers scaled the wall only for one of them to be shot and killed by such a trap. His companions managed to get his lifeless body back home, but they were traced by the trail of blood.
A trial ensued but due to some technicality they got off and Waterton was apparently given something of a dressing down in the dock. The folly of setting such traps, even behind a high wall, was probably pointed out to him by the prosecution.
He was obviously raging at the perceived injustice of it all because immediately after the trial he ordered his gamekeepers to kill every bit of game in the park, presumably to deter poachers in a different way. Clarkson doesn't make it clear as to whether this ever happened, only saying that spring guns were never heard of again on the estate.
This is not the behaviour of an animal lover but, if true, it shows the other side of Waterton, namely his short temper. Let's hope that the letter to his gamekeepers only arrived after Waterton had made it home, in a calmer state and in a position to reverse his instruction. Birds and rabbits everywhere would have rejoiced that the invention of the telegraph was still decades away.
Of course, there is a problem with Clarkson's anecdote, in that Waterton started the construction of his wall a number of years before the Act banning spring guns on open land came into being. Maybe Clarkson is misunderstanding Waterton's primary motivations, or certainly missing much of the story.
What is clear is that poaching was a perennial problem on the estate. It is perhaps a reminder that while landed gentry like Waterton had the luxury of preserving animals - both alive and dead - other folk were facing a daily struggle to feed their families.
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Clarkson has a second story about Waterton in his book that again shows his argumentative side. It's not as dramatic, but hints that the Squire had a fondness for theatre.
In 1831, hustings had been erected near the courthouse on Wood Street, in order to offer Lord Morpeth as a candidate. After his speech, a voice from the edge of the crowd asked whether Morpeth would support the notion of separating church and state. Everyone turned in the direction of the voice and saw Charles Waterton standing on a wall opposite the hustings, some 12 to 14 feet above ground.
When Morpeth refuted the idea, Waterton tore up the card showing support for the prospective MP. He then melted away into the crowd.
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By the 1820s, when the wall around Waterton's estate was constructed, he began to travel much less. He spent his time looking after his estate and indulging his other passions of taxidermy and writing books.
He also got married, in 1829, to Anne Edmonstone in Bruges, Belgium. He was 47 and she was only 17. This doesn't sound any less, shall we say, out of the ordinary to the modern ear when one knows that Anne was Waterton's goddaughter.
She was the daughter of his great friend, Charles Edmonstone, who lived in Guyana for many years. Edmonstone, a Scot, had married an Arawak Indian and so had contact with the Arawak tribes that lived in the rainforest. I wish I could say he used this connection for good, but it seems he used the tribes' knowledge of the jungle to help him track down runaway slaves.
How Waterton squared this friendship with Edmonstone's part-time career as a slave catcher, when Waterton was supposedly so opposed to slavery, I'm not sure. All I know for certain is that applying 21st century morals to situations from long ago can be a risky business. Anyway, back to Waterton marrying a schoolgirl when he was nearly 50...
Anne was still studying at a convent in Bruges when she sneaked out of her dormitory to marry Charles. They then had a second ceremony at St Helens Church in Sandal (the one on Barnsley Road near the junction with Walton Lane), which is where some of the Watertons are buried.
The ceremony in Belgium was a Catholic one (Charles got Anne to convert - I imagine this was a deal breaker, given his commitment to the faith), but the one in England was Anglican. Charles was quite possibly worried that the marriage would not be seen as legal unless he had an Anglican wedding too. Having swallowed that amount of pride for the Sandal ceremony, I imagine he was scowling in all the wedding sketches.
Since writing the above paragraph, I've since discovered that the Watertons had their own chapel within St Helens that had been in the family since before the Reformation (the Chapel is still there, with Watertons buried beneath the carpeted floor). It was probably easy, therefore, for Charles to see Waterton Chapel as a Catholic island within the now Anglican church.
Charles took his new bride to live at Walton Hall. It must have been hard for this granddaughter of an Arawak Indian, who had spent her childhood in South America, to suddenly find herself living in a big house near Wakefield with a man much older than her.
Walton Hall may have looked something like this when Anne's carriage arrived there.Sadly, she didn't have long to get used to it because, in April 1830, she died. Shortly after giving birth to a son at Walton Hall when she was just 18, she went the way of so many women before her.
Her death seems to have hit Charles hard. He took to sleeping on the floor with just a blanket over him and a wooden block for a pillow, as some kind of penance. Several sources suggest that he continued to do this for the rest of his life, which maybe goes some way to explaining his general irritability.
At least he had Anne's two sisters to lean on. He was by all accounts extremely close to them and they took to raising his son, Edmund, who had survived the birth that tragically killed his mother. They were, incidentally, present at dinner when Darwin was a guest at Walton Hall. He described these two half-Arawak women as 'mulattresses' in his letter to Charles Lyell.
Waterton lived out the rest of his days with Anne's sisters in Walton. Aged 82, he had a fall while crossing a bridge on the estate when a bramble caught around his foot. He fell heavily on a log and broke some ribs and severely injured his liver.
He knew he was badly hurt, possibly fatally, but made it back to the house. He asked for a window to be opened so he could hear his beloved birds chirping outside. Perhaps this sustained him, as he survived the night and all the next day. However, he succumbed to his injuries early the following morning. His son was, unfortunately, still rushing back from a trip to Italy when his father died.
Charles wanted to be buried near where the accident happened, as it was a favourite spot of his (his favourite tree for climbing was nearby). On what would have been his 83rd birthday, the coffin was taken by barge from the hall to the far end of the lake. His cortege was headed by the Bishop of Beverley and a great many people were ferried across the lake for the funeral.
A simple cross marked the spot where he was laid to rest. The following year, his sisters-in-law persuaded his son to erect some railings around it. This was contrary to Charles' wishes, as part of the reason he choose the spot was, it seems, so he could be swallowed up by the trees and vegetation and be reclaimed by nature.
The originally cross was vandalised, or maybe even stolen. Consequently, it was replaced in the 1950s by a concrete one. It is, however, in an area of woodland one could describe as overgrown, so the Squire came close to getting his wish.
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As part of my research, I also visited the Waterton Discovery Centre near Wintersett Reservoir. Having visited Wakefield Museum, Waterton Park and scoured several websites and books I wasn't expecting to be told anything I didn't already know, but I was very wrong. If you're interested in Waterton - and if you've made it this far, I'm guessing you are - I'd recommend a visit. It was as informative as Wakefield Museum and the display boards were full of interesting photos.
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With Charles gone, it was left to his son Edmund to run the estate. He was his own man, but one unfortunate aspect of this was that he had no interest whatsoever in the natural world. Having an owner who has no interest in nature is a bit of a hindrance to the running of a nature reserve.
His father had banned any kind of shooting in the park but Edmund held shooting parties to pay off some of his debts. He was by all accounts profligate when it came to money. For example, he was rather too fond of collecting expensive rings and relics of the Catholic Church (some of these were on display in Walton Hall into the late 20th century).
Painting Edmund as someone who ruined his father's careful management of the estate appears a little unfair, though. Charles may have been terrified of being in debt by even the slightest amount for the shortest time, but it seems like he had a fear of money full stop.
He didn't like paper money, such as cheques, no matter who they were from or for what amount, preferring what he delighted in calling 'solid tin'. Neither was he very good at generating money from rents, yet still funded costly trips abroad. The long legal case he had fought with the soap works and the subsequent financial burden this had placed on the estate also did not help.
The more I read on this aspect of the Waterton story, the more it sounded like Edmund had been forced to pick up the pieces of his father's financial mismanagement after he had died. Alas, he was ill equipped to do this and only five years after Charles had been buried on the estate, Edmund was filing for bankruptcy.
After 14 generations of Waterton had lived there, Walton Hall was sold in 1877. To add insult to this sorry state, the house was bought by the son of the soap works owner with whom Charles had fought his long expensive battle - a battle without which the Watertons may have been able to keep their heads above water.
When one of the Simpsons showed up (he was called Edward, just like his dad) I imagine Edmund didn't say, 'Howdy diddly, good neighbour'. At least none of the Simpson family could move in immediately, as there was a sitting tenant called Edward Hailstone. He took out a lease in 1871 when Edmund scurried off to Belgium. Hailstone, who was an interesting and notable figure himself, continued to live at Walton Hall till 1890.
The hall sold for £114,000 which was a huge sum of money and the equivalent of several million today. The price was partly a reflection, however, of the coal reserves beneath the park. It's clear that the Simpson family could not have cared less about the environment and after poisoning the water of Walton, they planned to turn the village into a massive coal mine.
Fortunately for Waterton Park, the coal turned out to be of poor quality and plans to start mining in the area came to nought, in the same way as plans to run HS2 directly through the estate also never came to pass. One way or another, Squire Waterton's estate continues to survive.
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What of Walton Hall in the 20th century? The Simpson family continued to keep Charles spinning in his grave till the 1940s when it was requisitioned as a military hospital, as so many large houses were during World War Two.
It then became a maternity hospital and remained so on and off till the early 60s (by which time it was seen as an annexe of Manygates, Wakefield's primary maternity hospital). Many Wakefield residents between the ages of 55 and 75 (as I write this in 2019) were born in Walton Hall.
The hall then entered a sad period when it was boarded up, empty and neglected. From the mid 60s to the late 1970s, the grounds remained wild at least, as befitting a nature reserve.
The hall was finally renovated in 1978 when it became a country club. From what I can gather, the place still struggled for money, though. Plans were mooted for years to turn the estate into a golf course, so the place could be financially viable. These finally came into fruition in the 1990s when the current hotel came into being.
The legacy of Waterton is still very prevalent, however. The hall has been saved, as has the medieval Watergate and the wrought iron bridge; his perimeter wall is still mostly intact, as is one of his hides. Also, the lake in Waterton Park and the nearby heronry is always teeming with wildfowl - just as the Squire would have wanted it.
'He was a man who did no harm to the world he lived in but enhanced it by his presence and his care of it. Would that we could all have a similar epitaph.' - Gerald Durrell, May 1988
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I David Thompson was born in Walton hall maternity house in January of 1945 when I was aged 10 the roof of the hall was damaged upon inspection of the in textile I found and stop had sparge marble mortor used to grind corn my sister has a cannon ball my farther ploughed up on arable land adjacent to the hall
ReplyDeleteI fear that much of the information in here about the Edmonstone women, and Anne in particular is incorrect. She most certainly did not 'sneak out of her dormitory' to marry Charles. Her letter and her sister, Eliza's letters back to their other sister, Helen, in Cardross Park, Scotland, tell us she was almost certainly hijacked into marrying Waterton the minute he stepped off the boat. It was a Catholic marriage and therefore not recognised by the English courts which is why they married in St Helen's church on Barnsley road. Anne's body is interred there in an unmarked grave.
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