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Thomas Norton Postlethwaite (1857-1926)

Thomas Norton Postlethwaite

Written by Tim Cockerill

Occupation: Priest

Family Background

Thomas Norton Postlethwaite was born at Offley Hole Farm, Charlton, near Hitchin, Hertfordshires in 1857, the eldest son of Thomas Postlethwaite (1827-1895), who married in 1854 at Derby, Mary Jane Hackett, the daughter of Thomas Hackett of Derby, a draper. His only surviving brother Frank (1863-1943) was a GP in Devon who married and left two sons and two daughters. His sister Mary Emily (1855-1933) was an artist and suffragette and latterly lived in Devon with her younger sister Elinor (1866-1941), also an artist, who exhibited at the Royal Academy. Both sisters were unmarried. Their father, who was born in Bloomsbury, Middlesex, was the tenant farmer of 530 acres at Offley Hole Farm in 1861, but by 1871 had moved his family to Cumberland, where they lived at Hazel Mount, Thwaites, Millom and he became a slate merchant employing eight men. Hazel Mount was a Regency villa overlooking the Duddon estuary and had been built by the Lewthwaites of nearby Broadgate in 1815 and retained by them into the 20th Century, so he must have been their tenant. By the 1890s Thomas senior had moved to Willesden in Middlesex, describing himself as a retired farmer, and died there in 1895, followed by his wife in 1902.

Ancestry

However, the Postlethwaite family are deeply rooted in the Lake District and are of yeoman stock. They can be traced back to John Postlethwaite of Yeat House, Woodland, Kirkby Ireleth, Lancashire in the 17th century. It is difficult to trace the family any further back as the local parish registers that survive are patchy and have numerous Postlethwaite entries. Samuel his son, of Bowthwaite Nook, Broughton-in-Furness was a wheelwright who married Ann Perry of Buckmanhall, Millom in 1700, and was buried at Broughton in 1729.

Their son John (1708-1789) married in 1738 Eleanor Casson and seems to have been the founder of the family firm of mercers in Broughton, which was to be the basis of their prosperity and social ascent in the 19th century. As he was also described as a yeoman, he was presumably also a small landowner and in the years to come the family gradually increased their land-holding to over 1,000 acres. They appear in the 1871 edition of Burke's Landed Gentry for the first time.

These 18th century Postlethwaites, sons of the above-mentioned John (d.1789) were not only local tradesmen. The eldest son Samuel (b.1739) and his brother Robert (b.1745) were merchants in Boston, but both died without issue. Their brother Thomas (b.1749) became a banker in Lombard Street, London, in partnership with his brother-in-law Isaac Hutchinson, whom his sister Ann (b.1752) had married at Broughton in 1781. In his will, dated 15 March 1818, Thomas left legacies totalling £7,500 to his relatives but he also died without issue in 1829. However their brother John (1744-1802) never moved away from Broughton and, like his father, married a girl from the Millom district. In 1786 he married Margaret Hodgson, daughter and eventual heir of Robert Hodgson of The Oaks, The Green, Millom, whose wife had been a Kirkbank of Whicham, another upwardly mobile yeoman family. He was a second generation mercer in Broughton and lived at Broughton House, a substantial dwelling in the main street, still standing today.

John and Margaret Postlethwaite had three sons (no daughters are mentioned), of whom the eldest was Robert (1788-1859), who succeeded both his father at Broughton House and his uncle William Hodgson JP at The Oaks. He was a JP and a DL and married Agnes Lewthwaite of Broadgate. In the early 1840s, whilst still at Broughton, he employed Branwell Bronte as tutor to his young sons, but Branwell was soon dismissed for drunkenness. This branch of the family left issue, but their descendants died out in the male line in Cumbria in 1992.

Robert's youngest brother was William Postlethwaite (1793-1876), a merchant and partner in Petty and Postlethwaite's Bank in Ulverston from about 1820. He married in 1825, Mary Lewthwaite, the sister of his brother Robert's wife Agnes. She died in 1853 and in 1858 he married his late wife's first cousin, Agnes, daughter of the Revd. Richard Armitstead (qv) of Whitehaven. There were no children of either marriage.

This leaves us with the middle son Thomas Postlethwaite (1792-1827), a tea merchant in London and the grandfather of the Revd Thomas Norton Postlethwaite, the subject of this biography. Born in Broughton he lived in Bloomsbury, Middlesex and in 1824 married at Lincoln, Sarah Urry Norton (1805-1882 ), the daughter of Thomas Norton of Lincoln, a silk merchant. On her husband's death three years later she reverted to her maiden name of Norton and in 1842 married William Whiston, a Derby solicitor. There were children of both marriages.

By her first marriage to Thomas Postlethwaite she had a son Thomas and a daughter Mary, who married in 1854, the Essex born Lt. Colonel Benjamin Channing Rouse Gardiner of the Army Veterinary Department. In the Army List 1878 he was listed as the second most senior Veterinary Surgeon in the British Army but by 1890 he had retired on half-pay.

Her brother Thomas (1825-1895), was born at Bloomsbury, their father died two years later, and in 1854 he married at Derby, Mary Jane Hackett, daughter of Thomas Hackett of Derby a draper.  By 1861 Thomas was the tenant farmer of 530 acres at Offley Hole Farm, Charlton, near Hitchin , Herts, but by 1871 had moved, with his family, to the Millom district of South Cumberland and become a slate merchant, as shown in the first paragraph of this article.

Education

His son Thomas Norton Postlethwaite had a somewhat unsettled childhood, first in rural Hertfordshire and, by the time he was about fifteen, moving to the north.  According to his entry in Venn he was educated at a private school in Lincolnshire, probably via his maternal grandmother's family of Norton of Lincoln.  Thomas was admitted pensioner at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1875 and graduated BA in 1879.

Career

The 1881 census reveals that Thomas began his career as a schoolmaster. First as an assistant master at Heatherley House, Sandhurst, Berkshire, employed by the Revd J.W. Spurling, but by 1891 he was a schoolmaster at St John's Park, Greenwich, looking after several young boarders whose parents were probably colonials serving overseas.

However, at the age of thirty-seven, he was ordained deacon at Carlisle in 1894 and priested in 1895. He became a curate of St John the Evangelist, Barrow-in-Furness from 1894-1897, curate of Ulverston from 1897-1902 and then vicar of Urswick from 1902 until his death in 1926. The net stipend of the living was £200 p.a. (now about £6,000 p.a.), in addition to the use of the vicarage; the village population was 898.

Literary Output

The Revd. Thomas Norton Postlethwaite was a prolific author of historical and antiquarian articles both in the Transactions of the CWAAS and in the local newspapers. In addition, his papers at Cumbria Archives Centre, Barrow-in-Furness reveal several short stories, including An Awkward Predicament and Captain Tapscott's Courtship, which were probably unpublished. He wrote a history of Urswick church and published A Legend of Urswick Tarn. Although never a member of the CWAAS, among his articles in their Transactions, was one in the 1926 Transactions on the ancestry of the artist George Romney, to whom he was distantly connected via the Lewthwaites of Broadgate although he was unable to find the link. In 1990, the late C. Roy Hudleston (qv) and the author made a pilgrimage to the home area of the artist's maternal ancestors, near Millom. This was followed by Hudleston's further article on George Romney's Ancestry in Transactions XCI (1991) which acknowledges Postlethwaite's earlier article and builds on it to a material extent, including, for the first time, discovering the Romney-Lewthwaite link via the Parke family of Whitbeck Hall.

Character

Thomas Postlethwaite is not an easy character to pin down. He never married and seems to have been a rather solitary and eccentric individual. He lived alone at Urswick vicarage and his notebooks reveal a somewhat edgy character who was often in dispute with his parishioners. These disputes frequently revolved around his wish to alter or add to the furnishings in the church, of which he was clearly passionately fond; or to try and prevent his parishioners from changing things themselves. When in 1916 he was convicted in the local magistrates’ court of causing unnecessary suffering to a ram and fined 40 shillings, he was publically humiliated. It seems surprising that with his zeal for the past and his obvious practical support for the CWAAS he never became a member, which may indicate that he was always a loner, who liked to plough his own furrow.

In his Confessions of a Country Parson, handwritten in an exercise book dated 1917, but never published, he acknowledged that he was unconventional. The love of his Church had become a passion and observed that 'in life I was a humble individual who showed love to people, many of whom were unreceptive of love; they wanted admiration and this could not honestly be bestowed.'

Death and obituaries

Postlethwaite never retired and died on 9 November 1926 aged 70, after 24 years as vicar of Urswick. His lengthy obituary in The Barrow News of 13 November was followed by an anonymous appreciation. His long ministry at Urswick was noted for his faithfulness to his parishioners and the many improvements to the interior of the Church. He also revived the annual rushbearing festival, after a lapse of 80 years. In addition, he was a member of the local education committee, a governor of Urswick Grammar School, a keen member of the North Lonsdale Field Club and a collector of local legends and examples of quaint humour. The appreciation adds that he delighted in the classics and the study of medieval church latin and possessed the pleasing faculty of making the past live in his writings and lectures. Lastly, he had little use for money and was always giving it away to the poor and needy.

His obituary in the CWAAS Transactions for 1927 is much shorter and confirms that he was never a member of the society, although his work for the society included papers on Urswick Church, the muniments of Bardsea Hall and the Hudlestons of Millom. The Society felt much indebted to him and his death was a great loss to Furness History.

He was buried in Urswick churchyard where his rather ornate gravestone can still be seen. His will was proved in London on 5 February 1927 by his solicitor, his effects being sworn at £692-5-5d, now about £38,000.

Sources

  • Ancestry.com
  • Army List, The, p.591, The War Office, 1878 (for Lieut. Col. B.C.R Gardiner)
  • The Barrow News, 13 November 1926 (obituary)
  • Boumphrey, R.S., C. Roy Hudleston and Hughes, J., An Armorial for Westmorland and Lonsdale, p.236, Kendal, 1975
  • Bowes, Peter, ex info
  • Burke, Sir Bernard, Burke's Landed Gentry, vol. 11, p.1114, London, 1871
  • Cornwall Artists Index (re Elinor Postlethwaite)
  • Crockford's Clerical Directory 1921-1922, p. 1208, Oxford, 1921
  • CWAAS Transactions CWAAS, New Series, vol. 26 (1927), pp. 555-556 (obituary)
  • Hart, H.G. and son, editors, The New Annual Army List for 1890, p.742, London, 1890 (for Lieut Col. B.C.R. Gardiner)
  • Honour, Colin R., Ossik Coots and Collared Doves Chapter 9, pp. 111-129, entitled Postlethwaite's Passion, website, ossiccootsandcollareddovespdf
  • Hudleston, C. Roy, and Boumphrey, R.S., Cumberland Families and Heraldry, Kendal, 1978
  • Mannex, P.J., History, Topography, and Directory of Westmorland and Lonsdale North of the Sands, pp. 460-465
  • National Census Returns, various
  • Postlethwaite, Mary, Mapping Women's Suffrage, https:map.mappingwomenssuffrage.org.uk/items/show/305
  • Postlethwaite, Revd. T.N. Collection, Barrow Archive Records, Z/784-Z/798/1-3, and BLC/PH/172/UA/Pos1 and BCL/PH/172/EC/URS1 and Kendal Archive Records WDBLT/1/4/40
  • Simpkin, John, (john@spartacus-educational.com), British History Women's Suffrage, Mary Emily Postlethwaite (1997, updated 2023)
  • Venn, J.A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part 11, vol. V, p.165, Cambridge 1953
  • White, Rod, https://furnessstoriesbehindthesestones.co.uk/stories/postlethwaite-revthomas-norton/ 20.4.2022