BLOG - Scissors Paper Stone (SPS) 

Blog 14 - Artistry in Stone, Wood and Bronze: the carvings of architectural sculptor, Frank Tory, and his two sons, with particular reference to St John’s, Ranmoor

11th December 2024
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As part of the Scissors Paper Stone project, Sylvia Dunkley recently gave a talk on Frank Tory and his sons who were responsible for the carving in St John’s. The article below is a summary of it.

Those readers who know the inside of St John’s Church may have at some point admired the very fine stone carving. Much of this is the work of architectural sculptor, Frank Tory (1848-1938), who was responsible for carving the capitals (head feature of a column), the corbels (projecting block supporting something above) and the magnificent reredos (screen behind the altar). It is said that if stone carvers from other parts of the country were in Sheffield they would always ask to see Tory’s work at St John’s.

Frank and Harriott Tory

Frank Tory’s ancestors were Huguenots from France. He grew up in Kent and studied at the Lambeth School of Art. He came to Sheffield as one of the team of stone carvers who worked on the Corn Exchange which was being built for the Duke of Norfolk at the end of the 1870s. It seems Tory was asked to stay in Sheffield because the architect for the Corn Exchange was so impressed with his work. Tory brought his family to the city and had his first workshop in a small, crowded court known as Sans Paviour roughly where the City Hall is today.

Examples of Tory’s carving can be seen all over the city on ecclesiastical, commercial and public buildings. Some of his first commissions were for prominent office buildings in the city centre. Two of these are on High Street: Parade Chambers (1884) for a firm of local stationers with its portraits of Chaucer and Caxton, its gargoyles and its mythical beasts, and the sadly neglected Cairns Chambers (1896) with its fine statue of the 1st Earl Cairns, Lord Chancellor during Disraeli’s ministries and its portrait heads of Edward, Prince of Wales, and Princess Alexandra. Another building Tory worked on was Carmel House (1892) at the corner of Fargate and Norfolk Row which was built for the Young Men’s Christian Association. It is covered with religious carvings: the symbols of the four evangelists, a sequence of ten arched panels, six depicting the six days of creation and the other four the progress of Divine law. There are also shields bearing the arms or signs of the twelve Apostles.


Carving on the south side of the chancel arch.


Tory was particularly in demand for his ecclesiastical carvings, both in stone and in wood. In St Matthew’s in Carver Street, the oak font and pulpit are both his work as is the very striking gilded altar surround with its angels at the top and its niched figures on either side. There are newspaper reports of Tory being commissioned to work in churches across South Yorkshire and further afield in towns like Preston. He also undertook commissions for external carving such as the majestic stone pillars that were designed to hold the gates to the churchyard of the Parish Church of St Peter and St Paul (now Sheffield Cathedral) which are still there today. 

The architect designs for the new St John’s church after the original building was mainly destroyed in a disastrous fire in January 1887 can still be seen in Sheffield Archives. They show that Frank Tory was closely involved in the designs for the work he was responsible for carrying out, whilst the very comprehensive 1990 account by the NADFAS Recording Group of the internal fixtures and fittings in the Church gives us detailed descriptions of Tory’s work. The capitals on the columns in the nave, each one different, are densely carved with foliage as are many of the corbels. The corbels in the Chancery arch are particularly fine. The corbel to the north side of the chancel arch has an elaborately carved base surmounted by the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) with the banner of victory and two praying angels either side. The corbel to the south side has an equally elaborate carved base and above this are three angels. The one to the left has folded arms, the one in the centre is playing the mandolin and the one to the right holds pan pipes. The stone and marble reredos, depicting the Last Supper which is carved in alabaster, has a canopy with crocketed gables above it and the figures of St Peter and St Paul on either side. The coloured marble shafts are particularly striking. Frank Tory was also responsible for the carving of the original choir stalls in dark oak.

The intricately carved reredos.

He and his wife had twin sons, Alfred Herbert and William Frank (always known as Frank) who were born in 1881. Both sons attended the Sheffield School of Art whilst apprenticed to their father and together the three of them formed the firm of Frank Tory & Sons which was located on Ecclesall Road where the Porterbrook public house now stands. Alfred and Frank jnr. were commissioned to carve the Chancel and Lady Chapel screens for St John’s, both of which have now been removed. Like their father, their work can be seen all over Sheffield and they undertook commissions in many towns and cities such as Leeds where they briefly had an office, Hull, Birmingham and even Brighton. The firm closed down about 1960.



Tory’s carving in St John’s is of an exceptionally high quality. As the 2004 Pevsner Architectural Guide to Sheffield records, “His decorative sculpture throughout the church is one of his finest achievements, matching the depth and finish of the medieval work that inspired it and displaying artistry and craftsmanship in every leaf, flower and figure.” The story of Frank Tory and his two sons is an important part of the history of Sheffield’s built heritage from the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

Sylvia Dunkley
November 2024

 

Blog 13 - The Stonemasons who Built St John’s

14th October 2024
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As part of the Scissors Paper Stone project, Val Hewson and Sue Row recently gave a talk on the stonemasons who may have built St John’s church. It was inspired by the masons’ marks discovered in the triforium by Mark Gregory, one of the church wardens. Here Sue gives a summary of it.

Tracking down the individuals who made these marks was not easy; very often we had only the initials, sometimes with a date. The census records were an obvious source of information but were not always as helpful as we had hoped. Not only was the information scarce, it was often unreliable. 

One mark was W. Thornton, not too difficult, one would have thought. I discovered a Watson Thornton in the 1861 census. He was born in 1842 so was the right age for working on the church in the 1880s. According to the transcript of the census, Watson, his father and brother were all stone masons, but unfortunately, when I checked the original census document, all three were recorded as steel melters!

There was one mark, WBP, which was more promising, having three initials to work with.

We are confident he was William Baildon Palmer, a stone mason who is recorded as living in Brightside in the 1891 census. Though a long journey with his tools, he could have found temporary lodgings nearer his work as many itinerant masons did. We discovered quite a lot about Palmer. He was born in Nottingham in around 1862. His father was a coachman at Knowle Manor, a Grade II* listed manor house in the West Midlands. He died in Brightside on 3 July 1904 of phthisis at the age of 42. According to the Operative Stonemasons Union, his family was entitled to £12 in benefit.

We don’t know for certain who FT was. My personal favourite is Farewell Taylor who was from Dore, which was a long walk from St John’s. At some stage he was made sexton of Dore church and there is evidence of his work as a monumental mason in the church yard. 

He died in 1932 and is buried in Dore church yard in the same grave as Sarah Keeton who died in 1927. This was a mystery as I knew he had never married. However, after further investigation the problem was solved: a widow, she was his housekeeper.

One possibility for IW is Isaac Wardley. He lived in Woodseats which seems a fair distance from St John’s but workers often walked what seem to us long distances to and from work. Also, by the 1890s there were horse drawn trams so he could have used them. His son, Isaac, was also a mason. The mark was made in chalk, not incised, so could well have been done by the younger Isaac who was only 14 in 1892.

We also investigated the stone masons who lived near to the church who, though not indicated by the marks, may well have worked there. One such family was the Hancocks. Samuel Hancock senior, born in 1835, lived in Fulwood and was a sexton at Fulwood Church. Samuel Hancock junior, born 1860, was also a mason and became a builder and monumental mason. 

In 1901 Pendeen Rd at Nethergreen was a hotbed of masons: 7 in total including Samuel Hancock, builder and marble mason, at number one, is brother Arthur, also a mason and master builder, at number two.

Newspapers were another valuable source of information. Master builders and monumental masons took out advertisements and court cases were reported. According to a report in the Evening Telegraph of February 1895, Samuel Hancock junior was sued by Frank Cuthbert for £6.10s when his pony was killed falling into the quarry off Armthorpe Road worked by Hancock.

Although the information with which we were working was fragmentary and not as conclusive as we had hoped, it was fascinating to try to recover the stories of the masons who may have worked on the church, the type of working men who rarely make it into the history books.

Susan Roe
11 October 2024

 

Blog 12 - The Stones of St John’s - A geological assessment

28th August 2024
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The geologist Scott Engering gave a fascinating talk as part of the Scissors Paper Stone project setting out what we know about the geology of the stones used to make St John’s. Here is a summary of it.

The City of Sheffield is not best known for its historic architecture but, when exploring the Porter Valley, I have seen St. John’s church from many viewpoints and I think that it is one Sheffield’s most distinctive landmarks, particularly with its very tall spire.
As a geologist with expertise in building stones, looking at it closely for the first time, I was very surprised to discover that the dressings to the exterior and the stone for the interior are made of Ancaster limestone from Lincolnshire – which has a very good reputation as a building stone – but the walling of the exterior is built with an inferior quality sandstone.

     
When the original church was built in 1879 by E. M. Gibbs and then rebuilt in 1888, high quality medium grained sandstones from Derbyshire and West Yorkshire had been widely used in very many of Sheffield’s prestigious buildings.Unlike West Yorkshire, which still produces top quality sandstone that is widely exported to the rest of the UK, Sheffield has only quarried sandstone for local use; however, the fabric of the many buildings that are contemporaneous with St. John’s church are generally still in very good condition.

According to newspaper cuttings, the sandstone is from Oughtibridge, where most of the quarries have been sited on the Loxley Edge Rock, a sandstone formation that tends to be very coarse grained in this part of Sheffield. At the time when the church was first built, the Haggs Stones quarry was by far the largest quarry working this formation and samples previously collected from the quarry are a reasonable match, but this is far from conclusive.

The mixture of limestone and sandstone has been considered to be the cause of the advanced state of decay of the sandstone masonry in the spire, which is usually associated with very high levels of atmospheric pollution. In industrial areas, acid rain reacts with limestone to form calcium sulphate, a highly soluble salt that dissolves, runs down the masonry and recrystallises within the pores of the sandstone.
For the interior of the church, which is in the Early English Gothic style and has the dimensions and features of a small cathedral, Ancaster limestone has been used throughout and, looking closely, a pink tinge to the stone is often seen. The exquisite carved stonework is by the eminent architectural sculptor Frank Tory, who had already demonstrated that he was very capable of producing very intricate carving in gritstone, as seen at the old gates to Sheffield Cathedral and the adjoining Parade Chambers.
      
Various decorative stones have been used for flooring in the chancel, choir and south chapel. The white marble is from Carrara in Italy, used together with what looks like Cork Red Marble, an iron stained Carboniferous limestone from Co. Cork in the Republic of Ireland. During the reordering of 1991, the chancel was extended and a different red marble was used for this and for restoration of the south chapel floor.
In many later Victorian churches, polished black Carboniferous limestone was widely used, along with Carrara marble, for chequerboard pattern flooring, with Co. Galway and Co. Kilkenny in the Republic of Ireland and Belgium being major suppliers. These are not easy to distinguish, but one of these has been used as edging and inlays in the chancel floor.

The reredos was also carved by Frank Tory and is made with English alabaster and Caen stone from Normandy in France, which is rarely used in the north of England and was first used after the Norman Conquest in 1066 – with Canterbury Cathedral and the White Tower at the Tower of London being notable examples of its use.

For the columns to the reredos, red marble has also been used along with a green to grey marble, possibly a variety of Connemara Marble from Co. Galway, which was often used in conjunction with Cork Red Marble and Kilkenny limestone by Victorian architects.
The pulpit is made of Caen stone and Ancaster limestone, with columns of red marble similar to that used for the chancel and a polished black limestone, which contain fossils like those found in the Kilkenny limestone, has been used for the moulded band, plinth and steps.
Finally, the font in the baptistery is also made of Caen stone, with columns made from green and reddened varieties of the metamorphic rock serpentinite, which look like those that have long been quarried in the area around Genoa in Italy.
It is fascinating to see how many different areas of the country, and indeed of Europe, have contributed to the beauty of St John’s.

Scott Engering
26 August 2024

Blog 11- ‘Just be careful’: Following the footsteps of the stone masons

23rd July 2024
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‘Just be careful not to step on the grills’, says Mark Gregory with the confidence of a man who knows what he is doing. Mark is a Church Warden at St John's and part of his job is to look after what you might call the 'back church', the parts that parishioners don't see or even know much about. On Sunday 14 July the part in question is the triforium, a narrow passage high above the nave, and Mark is giving us a tour. The grills he warns us about are metal, square, punched with a pattern of crosses and circles, set every few feet in the floorboards and letting in light from the nave. 

Why are we in the triforium? The answer is that we are researching our talk on Job Stone and the other stone masons who perhaps built St John’s (see below for details). Our usual beat is the Sheffield archives and local studies library. We also spend hours online, scrutinising Ancestry, the British Newspaper Archive and the like. We meet up in cafes a lot, to share our latest discoveries and discuss difficult enquiries. But we are always up for a challenge - in this case, literally up. Mark discovered the initials and symbols left by the stone masons in the triforium and has shared his photographs with us. We want to see the marks for ourselves. We want to examine them for details photographs just don’t show – for example, how deeply the marks are incised into the stone. We want to get a sense of how and where the stone masons worked.  

The triforium, we learn, is a passage between the lower and upper nave of a church and bounded by windows overlooking the lower nave. It is built over the side aisles, helping to support the structure of the church. The nave includes the central area where the congregation assembles, and just under the roof, the clerestory with its set of windows. The triforium is sometimes wide - a gallery from where people may view services; or it may be narrow – a walkway used by workmen for access and construction. In St John’s the triforium is narrow, built over the left and right aisles, with a connecting passage above the vestibule and font at the back of the church. It was never meant to be a public space. To reach it, Mark unlocks a small door in the vestibule, revealing a spiral stone staircase. Up and up we go. The triforium is narrow, cramped, low, dusty, with sharp corners. There are lights at intervals, and as we scramble along, we are conscious of the bright nave on the one side, and on the other, a dim crawlspace beyond the triforium, where we glimpse huge beams and stones. It is disorientating. ‘Just be careful not to step on the grills.’ 

With Mark’s help, we inspect the marks, which are found all along the triforium. Some are clearly modern, like ‘P Leslie’, an electrician who left a neat note of name and job in 1991. Did P Leslie perhaps see the other marks and decide to leave a permanent reminder? Most of the marks are clearly much older. The carvings are black with the ingrained dust of the years. For the most part they are serif capitals, skilfully and deeply incised into the stone. They look solidly Victorian. Some are less skilfully (or more hurriedly?) rendered, but still clear. The symbols – a jug, a flower and two crosses – are delicate and attractive. For all the differences in skill and style, all the marks suggest purpose and determination. The triforium is not a comfortable place. When the church was under construction, it must have been dark and confined, dusty, busy and even dangerous. This is not casual vandalism. For W Thornton, WBP and the others to invest time and effort in leaving their mark, it must have been important to them. 
     
Like most historians, we relish the hunt for answers and are pleased with our progress in identifying the stone masons of St John’s. But in a different sense we now feel we know who these men were. Walking the triforium – scrambling over obstacles, bumping our heads and stumbling more than once - has given us a strong sense of the Victorian stone masons, their craftsmanship, their strength, their will and endurance. These men deserve our admiration. 
  

Sue Roe and Val Hewson
22 July 2024

Many thanks to Mark Gregory for his patience and support. The images above were taken by Mark, Sue Roe and Val Hewson. 

Val and Sue’s talk, ‘The life of Job Stone and other stone masons of Ranmoor’, will take place in St John’s on Saturday 7 September, at 5.30pm. It is free and part of St John’s contribution to the Heritage Open Days festival. 
 

Blog 10 - The masons in action

This week’s blog will lead you directly to the video of the masons’ marks which Mark Gregory found in the triforium above the south aisle earlier this year. He didn’t stumble on them by accident but suspected that they might be there. 

I didn’t expect him to find them because our Church is Victorian. I knew that in Tudor times each ‘banker’ stonemason involved in carving or preparing stone before it was ‘fixed’ would have had his own individual mark. In 1598 the Master of Works for James VI of Scotland decreed that a mason would only to be admitted into the masons’ guild if he had registered his own individual mark. The banker masons would be paid by measure. The individual marks would be tallied with those incised on the stones and determine how much the mason would be paid.

I don’t believe this system of determining pay existed in the nineteenth century so the initials, symbols and names found by Mark were carved for another purpose. Thanks to our choirmen, Brendan Sloan and James Stone the marks found have been filmed and gathered together in a two minute video. 

I would very much like your thoughts on the reasons why these masons (most of them in 1888 on the building of the second church) wanted to make their marks in this far away and usually hidden part of the church. If you could help us track down their identities we would welcome your contributions.

I hugely appreciate the help of Mark, Brendan and James in creating this video and look forward to seeing you at the talk about what our researchers, Sue Roe and Val Hewson, have discovered about these unsung and highly skilled craftsmen. Their talk ‘The Life of Job Stone and other stone masons of Ranmoor’ will be given at 5.30 on Saturday 7 September as part of the Heritage Open days. Admission is free.

To see the video please click here.  

Blog 9 - Our Spire

Saturday 8th June
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One of the mysteries of our church is that if you are running past it for the 120 bus or striding towards Attilio’s for a mid-day sandwich, it is easy to miss the imposing building altogether. It can seem tucked away from everyday life on a little hillock and surrounded on three sides by trees. Yet, from the hills and valleys on the west of Sheffield, miles or half a mile from the church, it is clearly visible. It rises above the Victorian and Edwardian suburbs and the treelined streets and is, even for those who have nothing to do with the church, a defining component of a landscape which seems unchanging and much-loved. 

It is the spire that makes its mark on the city of Sheffield, not the rest of the building. Yet, as we now know, it is the spire that is the building’s greatest weakness.

The only part of the first church to survive the fire of 1888, its survival seems to suggest the spire’s permanence but where fire failed, chemistry succeeded. The fatal combination of limestone and sandstone in the spire meant that over the last 150 years the materials that it is made of have caused it to disintegrate. 

Limestone should never be placed above sandstone on the outside of a building. When wet, limestone gradually leaches calcium carbonate. When this seeps into sandstone it gradually crystallises causing the sandstone to burst apart. 

So why did our architect, Edward Mitchel Gibbs, use this combination? It is possible he was following the lead of that great founder of Victorian Early Gothic, George Gilbert Scott. Thirty years earlier , in the 1850s, Gilbert Scott designed what is said to have been his favourite creation: All Souls, Haley Hill in Halifax. Gibbs worked in Leeds and Sheffield and Flockton, who took him into his Sheffield architectural practice, had trained under Gilbert Scott. Was it this chain of influence that inspired many of our church’s early Gothic features: the slender columns, the relatively simply tracery and, above all, the delight in what is sometimes called structural polychromy. This is the use of different coloured stones to emphasise certain structural features in a building. Our spire looks like a copy of Scott’s creation in Halifax which suffered even more disastrously from the mix of limestone and sandstone. The problems faced by the guardians of All Souls were so great that it is no longer a functioning church but preserved, for its beauty, by the Churches Conservation Trust. 

Yet, when we look up at our spire we can see why the architects of both All Souls and St John’s were seduced by the interlacing of different coloured stone. Limestone is less crumbly than sandstone – more Cheddar than Lancashire. This means that the shapes cut from it can be sharply defined. Looking up at our spire we can see that the whiter blocks of limestone etch the spire’s shape against the sky. In between the network of limestone lies the yellowy infilling of sandstone which lightens the whole effect and gives the construction that sense of lift-off - one of the great thrills of looking upwards at it from close by.

I found a visitor one day, doing just that – standing outside the church, craning his neck to look at the spire beyond the inverted umbrella of scaffolding that now prevents church goers from being struck by lumps of sandstone. He introduced himself as Roderick Hughes. He had himself been a chorister at St John’s in the mid twentieth century. He revealed that he had a close family connection with the spire. His great grandfather had put the cockerel and the weathervane at its topmost point. Roderick, both a musician and an engineer, had come from a family of builders. His ancestor had come from Harrogate to seek work in Sheffield just as the building boom on the west side of Sheffield was gathering pace. It was a source of family pride that his nerve and his skills had contributed to this well-known local landmark. 

 I shared Roderick’s family history with a group of children who were waiting patiently while their parents were rehearsing for a concert. The music being sung was in celebration of the man who paid for the spire and first church to be built: John Newton Mappin. While their parents were singing, Sally Booker and I took Sam, Arthur, Iris, Toby and Polly out on to the green in front of church. It was one of the few nearly sunny afternoons this spring. Sally had provided binoculars for us to look at the spire to see if we could find the golden cockerel that should be spinning around in the wind and that Roderick’s relative had placed there. 

Though there was a light breeze there were no flashes of gold as the cockerel spun round – we hope that in the church’s restoration we will be able to restore his plumage. But we could see the weather vane change position and Gibbs’ creation of white limestone and golden sandstone shone. Against the fast-moving little clouds the whole spire seemed to spin upwards.

I am grateful to Iris for capturing that afternoon when the spire seemed invincible and to Polly for helping us all to look carefully at patterns of white and gold that define and destroy it. 

These first six months of the Scissors Paper Stone project have caused many of us to look more carefully at the building in which we worship. It is my hope that all this looking will help increase our understanding of the way our church was built and can be preserved. The geologist Scott Engering will be talking to us on Saturday July 6th about the nature of the many kinds of stone that Gibbs used to create St John’s. Only such understanding will help us save our church from collapse or from being conserved simply as an empty monument to times past.

Mary Grover
6 June 2024

Blog 8 - Who Was John Newton Mappin?
Part 3
Tuesday 21st May
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In my final blog I want to show how John Newton Mappin’s generosity in life - towards the church and in civic philanthropy - continued after his death, and permanently altered the cultural landscape of Sheffield.  But first, how did Mappin accrue the wealth to fund his benevolence?  We know that by 1837, when he was 34, Mappin described himself as a ‘common brewer’.  After his death in 1883 his Rotherham and Doncaster breweries were said to be producing around 100 quarters of malt.  Dave Pickersgill of Sheffield CAMRA has kindly clarified what this implies - he says that according to this figure Mappin was producing around 115,200 pints a week.  This supplied the 30-odd pubs he owned and leased, and perhaps others too.  It was evidently a thriving concern.

Endlcliffe Grange - With permission of Picture Sheffield 

As well as amassing a probably substantial income from his brewery Mappin was a huge promoter of the railways, from north to south, east to west, from early in his working life.  He was, for example, Director of the Manchester Sheffield and Midland Railway company, and others, was active on the committees for the Direct Western Railway, and many others, and had lucrative shares in many other booming railway enterprises.  Presumably, he saw that the railways were necessary for moving the goods, livestock and people that were essential for his and other businesses, and invested in them.  He also had at some points in his career stocks and shares in the Sheffield United Gas Light Company, the Sheffield and Hallamshire Bank, Sheffield General Cemetery, Crystal Palace Company, Joseph Rodgers and Son Ltd, one of the most eminent Sheffield cutlery companies, Newton, Chambers and Co Ltd, iron founders, and Tickhill Gas Light Coal and Coke Co. Ltd. The fruits of canny investment must have made up a substantial proportion of his wealth.

I will now look at Mappin’s will, which is revealing - of his lifestyle, his priorities, even his affections. As a document which details the possessions of a man of his class it is telling - here are his musical instruments and his Erard pianoforte, from the London workshop of the piano maker to her Majesty Queen Victoria.  You can see an advertisement for an Erard piano in the 11 October 1873 edition of the ‘Sheffield Daily Telegraph’ on sale at Stacey's Pianoforte shop in the High Street.  Also, his books and bookcases, his horse, his landau, his silverware, his wines, his armour, sculptures, bronzes, statues and objets de vertu, watercolours, drawings and engravings, hot house plants, jewels and trinkets etc. and much else are mentioned and disposed of. 

Most people towards the end of the nineteenth century died leaving nothing, or debt; Mappin was one of the minority who amassed a fortune and left a will.  Compared with his neighbours, most of whom were connected with steel and metal manufacturing, his fortune was relatively modest - only about £10 million at today’s values.  Edward Vickers, for example, who built Tapton Hall left about £22 million in today’s values, and Thomas Jessop of Endcliffe Grange left about £88 million in today’s values.

Unlike most such families Mappin had no children.  But his affections and loyalties are evident behind the dry words of the will.  He left his wealth to a cutler friend, his nephews and their families, nieces, his Lady Housekeeper (so long as she did not marry), trusted servants and faithful employees, and the vicar at St John’s (so long as he performed his duties to the satisfaction of the will’s trustees).   He left £1000 each (about £120,000 in today’s values) to Sheffield General Infirmary, the Sheffield Public Hospital and Dispensary, the Boys Charity School (or Bluecoat School) in Sheffield, the Orphanage (or Cherrytree) at Totley near Sheffield, the Rotherham Public Hospital and Dispensary, and the Scripture Readers Society in Sheffield. 

But then comes the extraordinary bequest of Mappin’s collection of 153 paintings to the city of Sheffield and of £15,000 (around £1,750,000) to build a gallery to house them, ‘in perpetuity and without any charge’. 

Why did Mappin collect art?  Within the highly status conscious Victorian society collecting art was an activity which allowed wealthy business men, such as Mappin, to establish themselves as a middle class elite.  Mappin’s art collection was well known before he died and he loaned pictures to the Sheffield School of Art’s annual Conversazione, and to galleries elsewhere.  He bought many paintings from the Royal Academy summer shows and from artists’ studios to make his collection. Collecting and showing pictures were markers of a particular social identity in Sheffield, just as in London. 

However, there are also more personal reasons why Mappin might have collected paintings. A press report about the opening of the Mappin Art Gallery in July 1887 comments that he liked to get up between 4 and 5 a.m. as a younger man to paint in his leisure time.  The same report suggests that his work as an engraver with his father taught him his appreciation for art.  He certainly lived close to his collection - at his home Birchlands there were 42 pictures in the drawing room, 51 in the picture gallery, 18 in the dining room, and 23 in the breakfast room, with a few more unaccounted for. 

The speech givers at the opening of the Mappin Art Gallery in July 1887 suggest a further motive for his art collecting and his magnanimous gesture of a gallery to house his pictures for the town of Sheffield.  

Their view was that the collection was a thing of beauty, that the gallery was an engine of social good, and its donation to the town was to improve the lives of Sheffield’s working people.   Also, that following Mappin, other public spirited entrepreneurs who made their money through the activities of the populace, should plough it back into the city they helped to build.

John Newton Mappin’s name is no longer much remembered, but his generous legacy can be traced in the ongoing spiritual and cultural life of the city.


Loveday Herridge
20 May 2024

Blog 7 - Who Was John Newton Mappin?
Part 2

Tuesday 8th May
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First, the few personal details we know about Mappin.  He was the youngest of 5 children of Joseph Mappin and his wife Hannah Newton. Joseph’s father had been a plater and cup maker, and Joseph continued in the family business, becoming a Freeman of Sheffield’s Company of Cutlers in 1787.  By 1800 Joseph was an engraver and copper plate printer, and also made pearl buttons, spoons, and dessert knife handles using lustrous mother of pearl. He died of consumption in 1841, and at his funeral was said to have been ‘a man of strict integrity of conduct and kind and gentle manners’. 

John Newton Mappin’s life is something of an enigma.  Even his birth date is often mistaken - perhaps because throughout the nineteenth century there is a proliferation of Mappin brothers and nephews in changing business partnerships with similar names and close birthdates and a tendency to feud.  But also perhaps the variations occur because he himself suppressed knowledge of it. The censuses from 1841 to his death, which give his age, imply a bewildering array of birthdates. 

But the birth and baptism registers of the Howard Street Independent Church give his birthdate as 13 February 1803. He was educated at Sheffield’s prestigious and progressive Milk Street Academy, where its Quaker principal, J H Abraham, advertised a curriculum which included English Language, penmanship, arithmetic, merchants’ accounts, geography with the use of globes, French and drawing. A member of the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, Abraham was among the first teachers in England to integrate modern science instruction into the curriculum. Luckily for his students, in his introduction to a book of boys’ and girls’ prize winning essays from the school, published in 1805, Abraham advocated offering pupils kindness and encouragement as a means to successful learning.  The family names of the published students are those of Sheffield’s leading manufacturing and professional families, and their younger siblings would have been Mappin’s contemporaries at the school - for example, Thomas Jessop, later a great steel maker and philanthropist.

There is evidence that John Newton Mappin initially worked with his father and older brother as a pearl button maker at J Mappin and Son, up to at least 1838. However, by this time it also appears he had decided to take a different path from the rest of his metal working family.  By 1837, as a ‘common brewer’ and with his business partner William Bradley, a ‘coach proprietor’, he was lessee of the Old Three Pigeons beerhouse, in Carver Street, Sheffield. Together they built the Soho Brewery on Ecclesall Road.  By 1846 Mappin had dissolved his partnership with William Bradley, and was ready to take the step that would propel him into wealth and gentlemanly gravitas. He took the lease of the Masboro Old Brewery, Rotherham, and, through business acumen and energy, developed a successful brewery.  As the 19th century progressed, developments in brewing encouraged, and were encouraged by, the application of science. Maybe Mappin’s early exposure to science lessons at school encouraged his interest in the complex process of beer making. 

In a society where wealth was highly valued, brewing was one of the most lucrative of all the trades, but there was some ambivalence in Sheffield about the morality of the consumption of alcohol, which may have had an impact on Mappin. Around 1832 when he was 29 and not yet married (at 45 he married Mary Briddon, of Manchester), he seems to have adopted his infant nephews John Yeomans Cowlishaw and Joseph Cowlishaw whose parents had died (their mother was Mappin’s sister). Later, after Mappin had become an established brewer, it seems that the boys may have been placed in the custody of their aunt, Elizabeth Mappin, Mappin’s second sister.  She, it is said, believed the boys were ill served being associated with the brewing industry.  

As well as raising the question of whether the relationship between Mappin and his sister was harmonious, her belief implies that the brewing trade might have been denigrated in parts of Sheffield society.  Did Mappin feel he needed to compensate - perhaps through charitable giving - for his association with brewing?  The Temperance Movement’s campaign against the evils of alcohol began in earnest in Sheffield in the 1830s.  In fact, Mappin took no part in Sheffield’s temperance struggles, though he was Vice-Chairman of the Licensed Victuallers Protection and Benevolent Society, which aimed to provide a home in Sheffield for ‘decayed licensed Victualers, their widows and orphans’.  At the 1846 victuallers’ annual Festival a speech-giver remarked that ‘time was when a licensed victualler was shut out from society as a man who dealt in poison and lived by drunkenness and debauchery’, but that this was not the case now.  Was Mappin (who did not speak at the Festival) tainted by this reputation?  Perhaps in some quarters, but it is difficult to believe he was not a generous man. 


Cherrytree Orphanage - with permission Picture Sheffield
I described in my previous blog how Mappin was a benefactor to the church.  But he was generous in many ways, and his status must have risen accordingly.  For example, he was a subscriber to the ‘Sheffield Central Relief Committee for the general distress of the town’ which was formed to alleviate poverty.  He also subscribed to the Sheffield Fund for the Relief of the Lancashire Distress, for those suffering during the depression in the textile industry in the north west in the 1860s. In 1866 he joined a committee to collect subscriptions - giving £100 himself (about £11,000 at today’s values) - for the bereaved families of Oaks Colliery in Barnsley, after explosions there killed 361 miners and rescuers.  He gave an annuity to the Deakin Institute of £20 (about £2,200) for the relief of the poor.  In a reminder of his generosity to his infant Cowlishaw nephews, he supported the Cherrytree Orphanage in Totley.  He gave to the Public Dispensary and the General Infirmary, and was President and Vice-President of the Sheffield Public Hospital and Dispensary in 1861-71.  

As a loyal wealthy Sheffield business man, keen to make Sheffield a memorable destination for the 1875 visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales, he contributed £250 (about £28,000) for the expenses associated with it.  ARCHES He was chair of a reception committee, which erected triumphal arches on the route of the royal procession along Fulwood Road, quite close to the entrance to his house ‘Birchlands’ (demolished to make way for the Hallam Towers Hotel).

In a rare foray into public affairs he stood in 1856 as a Guardian for Ecclesall Bierlow, part of the arrangements for welfare under the Poor Law, but was not elected.  He was a member of the Sheffield Club, one of the social institutions to which Sheffield gentlemen of influence and standing belonged.  Here they could ‘meet on common ground for an exchange of opinion on subjects of common interest’, in its club house in the centre of town, which was said to mirror the comforts of the London Athenaeum or Reform Club.  There were good opportunities for networking at the Club - in 1868 there were 8 substantial brewers among a total of around 200 members, who were ‘merchants and manufacturers’ and also professional men, such as solicitors.  From the Club’s records we know that Mappin voted for the Liberal Party in 1841 and Tory thereafter. 

For my final blog I can report a little more about this shadowy character. Perhaps more than any other details, the choices and preferences of his Will tell us something about his personality.  Next time, I’ll look at this, how he came by his wealth, and his remarkable generosity in disposing of his art collection.


Loveday Herridge
6 May 2024

Blog 6:  Who Was John Newton Mappin?

Monday 29th April
Download blog as a PDF

Who was John Newton Mappin, who donated £14,000 for the building of St John’s?  A Google search for the Mappin name lists various Sheffield University buildings and Mappin Street in the centre of the town. These places are named to honour the philanthropy of Frederick Thorpe Mappin, John Newton’s nephew, who was a steelworks owner, local politician and later MP for Hallamshire.  Mappin & Webb, the luxury silverware company, is also listed, an internationally known success story of Sheffield and London.  This enterprise is the culmination of the complex business activities of various members of the Mappin family - but not of John Newton Mappin, who did begin his working life in the metalworking trade of his father, but later became a brewer. There is also a Google Tripadvisor entry for the Mappin Art Gallery, which dismally, and misleadingly, states that the location is permanently closed. 

John Newton Mappin has slipped from modern view, but in his time he was described as one of Sheffield’s  ‘best known’ men.  As previous blogs have made clear, highly skilled craftsmen in the building trades created St John’s, and the cutler James William Harrison provided the land on which to build it. In this and two later blogs I’ll investigate the shadowy benefactor, John Newton Mappin, who gave around £14,000 or £1.5 million (in today’s values) so that the church could be built.   

The building project was part of the Vicar of Sheffield’s Scheme of Church Extension of around 1877 to build an additional nine churches in Sheffield in five years.  At a meeting reported in the Sheffield Independent of January 1877 the Archbishop of York said of Mappin that (he) ‘is a very practical person and almost as soon as I heard he was going to build this church he made his appearance with a roll of plans under his arm’.  Whether or not Mappin intervened graciously in the work of E. M. Gibbs, St John’s architect, the building work progressed quickly.  By May 1878 Mappin had held a ‘rearing dinner’ for the 100-strong workforce to celebrate the completion of the outer walls and roof (as reported in Mary Grover’s blog of 15 January 2024).  

At the opening of St John’s in April 1879 at which Mappin was present, it was said that,  ‘Much thought and care and anxiety have gone along with the gift ... every power of the giver was employed in it.  His liberal hand, his thinking head, his daily watchful mind, have altogether brought this house to its completeness’.  And after Mappin had died, at the laying of the foundation stone in 1887 for the new St John’s after the old one had been destroyed by fire, Archdeacon Blakeney said that his ‘great desire was to glorify god and do what was right in his day and generation’.  Blakeney said he believed ‘that Mappin never did anything that gave him greater satisfaction than the building of the church’.  

Mappin’s reputation as a good churchman is frequently mentioned in newspaper reports, and one of them says that he ‘wanted an evangelical not a ritualistic clergyman’ for St John’s.  His interest in the evangelical may have come from early experiences at the Howard Street Independent Congregationalist Church, where his birthdate of 13 February 1803 is recorded, and where he was baptised, and from Mount Zion Chapel, where his nephew Frederick Thorpe Mappin maintained he 'had an association’ in his early years.

John Newton Mappin was a generous church benefactor in other ways.  He was Churchwarden at the Parish Church 1854-58, now the Cathedral, a role which required both religious commitment and responsibility in practical matters and for keeping accounts.  In 1857 he paid for the large stained glass window behind the high altar there, the first in coloured glass in the church.  Alterations to the chancel required the old one, which was not coloured, and which he had also paid for, to be replaced.  This was dedicated to James Montgomery who was much mourned at his death in 1854 as Sheffield’s renowned hymn writer and social reformer.  It’s possible that Mappin knew Montgomery through mutual philanthropic interests.  The window shows, as well as St Matthew, Moses, David, and St John, Mappin’s coat of arms, and the crest and motto of the Mappin family, together with the words ‘The gift of John Newton Mappin, churchwarden, 1857’.  It was reported that Mappin, as ever a hands-on benefactor,  ‘being anxious to secure first-rate talent, invited several artists in stained glass, six of whom sent in designs.  Mr Mappin consulted some friends and selected Thomas Baillie and Co. of Wardour Street, London', a prominent company which had exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Mappin was also involved with the building of St Luke’s Church, more often called the Sale Memorial Church, in memory of Dr Sale, Vicar of Sheffield, who died in 1873.  A meeting to organise this was held at the Cutlers Hall with many eminent gentlemen and churchmen attending.  Mappin is mentioned in a newspaper report as a member of this committee, and as is so often the case in press accounts of his philanthropy, at the end of the report is a list of wealthy subscribers, a roll call of Sheffield’s eminent family names, with his name at the top of it, contributing £500 (about £52,500 at present values). 

League tables of charitable giving like these appeared frequently in the press. They made it possible for readers to assess the relative wealth, piety and respectability of the subscribers who were listed in such detail.  These characteristics were cherished by the Victorians, and helped secure the giver’s social status, ensuring that they were ‘well known’.

In my next two posts I’ll look at Mappin’s other acts of civic generosity and his work as a brewer, and make the case that he should be remembered for his role in the development of Sheffield’s cultural life.


Loveday Herridge
22 April 
2024
 

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