Personal Record
This Hugh Hole was perhaps the most notable of the family ancestors: he never knew his father, had no siblings, but became the patriarch of a large farming family and a respected member of Victorian society.
Hugh’s parents, Hugh Hole (aged 49), a widower, and Ann White (aged 31), were married in September 1792 and lived in Wensley.
Hugh was born on the 7th January 1793 but his father died a few days later. He was christened at St Helens Church, Darley on the 10th January and his father was buried there on the 7th February.
Ann married Isaac Flint, also a widower, in July 1793 and the family moved down the hill from Wensley in to Isaac's house at Bridgetown (now called Darley Bridge), which is where young Hugh grew up.
Shortly after reaching the age of 21 in 1814, Hugh proposed marriage to Elizabeth Rains who was then aged 20. At that time he was living at Winster, a village about a mile west of Wensley, and was employed as an agricultural labourer. Elizabeth came from a large farming family and lived at Grange Mill, near Ivonbrook Grange, a small hamlet on the road between Winster and Wirksworth. It is possible that Hugh met Elizabeth when working on her father Isaac Rains’s farm.
In those days the groom had to apply to the church for a marriage licence which was granted following the signing of a Marriage Affidavit and a Marriage Bond. The Affidavit was a sworn oath that there were no legal impediments to the parties being married and the Bond was an undertaking to pay a substantial sum of money to the church if the Affidavit was later found to be untrue.
Hugh applied for a marriage licence accompanied by John Rains, Elizabeth’s brother, who presented a note from their father, Isaac Rains, giving his consent as Elizabeth was under 21. The Affidavit and Bond for Hugh and Elizabeth's marriage licence dated 3rd May 1814 are reproduced below. The Bond for the sum of £500 (a huge amount in those days) has Hugh’s and John’s signatures and thumb prints.
Hugh married Elizabeth Rains on the 9th May 1814 at the Church of Saint Mary The Virgin in Wirksworth. John Rains and Hannah Woods were witnesses; they themselves married two years later and went on to have twelve children.
After they were married Hugh and Elizabeth moved to Bridgetown, where Hugh worked firstly as an agricultural labourer and then as a tenant farmer. Their first child, Ann, was born in August 1815 but she only lived for four weeks.
In October 1816 Isaac Flint died and left the family home to his step-son Hugh.
Hugh and Elizabeth had nine more children: John, Hugh Mary, Isaac, Ellen, Lydia, Henry, Elizabeth and Rebecca. Apart from Rebecca, they were all born at Bridgetown and christened at St Helen's Church, Darley.
In November 1822 Elizabeths's father, Isaac Rains lost a horse. He had a notice placed in the Derby Mercury on 13th November 1822, which is reproduced below with a map of the Ivonbrook Grange area.
In 1832 the Poll Book for the Wirksworth Polling District of the Derbyshire Southern Division Constituency recorded that Hugh Hole, residing at Darley, qualified to be an elector because he owned a freehold at Wensley. We can therefore conclude that his mother Ann had previously assigned at least one of the properties at Wensley to him. The General Election in early 1833 immediately followed the passing of the Reform Act of 1832, which had redefined the parliamentary constituencies and extended the franchise to male freeholders and long-term leaseholders of property valued at more than £10 in county constituencies. The Derbyshire Southern Division Constituency had two MPs and the Poll Book showed that Hugh had voted for a Tory candidate but the two Whig candidates where elected. Secret ballots were not introduced until 1872.
In March 1836 the Derby Mercury published notice of an auction of the live and dead farming stock at Dairy Wood Farm, Alderwasley near Wirksworth and Belper, following the death of the tenant. (See the notice reproduced below.) We don’t know if Hugh attended the auction but we do know that by 1838 the family had moved 10 miles down the River Derwent to Alderwasley, most likely to Dairy Wood Farm.
Hugh's mother Ann died in 1838 aged 77 so he inherited the remaining land and properties in Wensley and Bridgetown that had passed to her following the deaths of her husbands Hugh and Isaac.
The first census taken in 1841 just recorded the parishes where people lived and so we only know that the family was then living in Alderwasley and that Rebecca was 3 years old.
We can conclude that Hugh took over the tenancy of Dairy Wood Farm, around 1837, at the start of 18 year-old Queen Victoria's reign. The farm had 173 acres of agricultural land on the western slopes of the River Derwent and provided work raising sheep and cattle for three or four agricultural labourers. ‘Hugh Hole Farmer & Sons, Alderwasley’ was listed in Piggot’s 1846 Trade Directory. Hugh and Elizabeth’s four sons all became farmers and two of their daughters married farmers. The family prospered at Dairy Wood Farm and managed the land there for the next 70 years.
The 1878 map below shows the location of Dairy Wood Farm just to the south of Alderwasley and north of Belper. The present day aerial view superimposed on the 1878 map shows that little has changed in the last 150 years.
Hugh joined the Wirksworth Farmers’ Club which had been inaugurated in 1848. At the club's first annual agricultural show in 1853, Hugh exhibited some of his livestock and attended a dinner at the Red Lion Hotel in Wirksworth with his son John. The fulsome account of this event was recorded in the Derby Mercury and is reproduced below. Hugh also exhibited at shows in Belper where his rams were judged best and second best in June 1859.
In July 1852 there was a parliamentary election where Hugh Hole was again one of the Wirksworth electors for the two members of parliament to represent the constituency of Southern Derbyshire. See the interesting newspaper account below of the hustings at Belper.
In May 1854 Hugh was appointed Poor Law Guardian for Alderwasley, one of the parishes in the Belper Poor Law Union. Poor Law Guardians were elected annually by the ratepayers of the parish and were responsible, under the 1834 New Poor Law Act, for ensuring that relief was provided for the poor and the workhouse was properly managed by the Master. The Board of Guardians met at the Belper Workhouse every Saturday afternoon. Hugh continued to represent Alderwasley in the Belper Union for the next 20 years. A history of the Poor Laws and the Belper Union is given below.
Hugh and Elizabeth's Children
Daughter Mary married Thomas White, the boy from the farm next-door, in 1844 and raised five boys and three girls They first lived at Waterford Farm, Alderwasley then took over Thomas’s parents’ 180 acre farm, White Wells, in about 1855.
Son Hugh (great-great-grandfather) married Mary Ride in 1847 and became the tenant of a 120 acre farm at Morton. They had two children: Hugh born in 1851 and Mary Ellen born in 1853. (See separate Personal Record.)
Son John married Elizabeth Hall from Middleton in North Yorkshire in 1849 and took over a farm of 146 acres at Sutton-cum-Duckmanton near Chesterfield. They had eight children: Elizabeth, John Henry, Hugh (who died shortly after birth), Mary Letitia, Isaac William, Leonard, Lydia, and Annie B. John died in 1869, aged 53, and Elizabeth continued to run the farm with the help of John Henry until she remarried in 1875.
Son Isaac married Mary Susanna Lane at Barrow-on-Trent in 1859 and farmed 146 acres at Mugginton, some 10 miles south-west of Dairy Wood. They had two children: John Hugh born in January 1860 and Isaac born in June 1861. Sadly, Isaac, the father, died in December 1861 aged 38 and Isaac, the son, died before his second birthday in April 1863. Mary Susanna continued to run the farm, employing between four and six farm servants until between 1881 and 1891. John Hugh died at Mugginton in 1888 aged only 28.
Daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Dakin, a miller and corn dealer from Tideswell, in 1858. The family moved to Wormhill, Miller’s Dale, near Chapel-en-le-Frith in 1861. They had four sons: Benjamin (born 1858), George (born 1860), Hugh (born in March 1861 but died in November 1861) and William (born 1864). Tragically their mother Elizabeth died in 1865 aged 31. The 1871 Census shows Thomas with son Benjamin at Miller's Dale, William at Dairy Wood Farm and interestingly, George, aged 10, was a boarder at a school in Great Longstone near Bakewell. By 1881 all three sons were back with their father working as corn millers at Wormhill, Miller's Dale.
Daughter Lydia married William Brittin, a farmer of 80 acres at Bolsover near Chesterfield, also in 1858. They had no children and Lydia died in 1870 aged 43.
Son Henry married Susannah Spendlove in 1861 and became the tenant of Wyver Lawn Farm, a small farm half a mile down the lane from Dairy Wood Farm towards Belper two miles away. They had five children: Elizabeth (born 1862), William (born 1865), Isaac (born 1868), Henry (born 1871) and Florence Annie (born 1880).
In 1861 the census recorded that just daughters Ellen and Rebecca were then living with their parents at Dairy Wood Farm. Hugh employed a farm servant, three shepherds and a dairy maid. The farm servant, Henry Sherlock, came from Wensley and had worked for Hugh for around 40 years from the time the family moved to Dairy Wood Farm.
Rebecca, the youngest daughter, married German Cooper a farm labourer, in 1865. They lived at Belper Dally and had one child, Samuel who was born in 1866. In the 1890’s, German and Rebecca ran a pub in Belper called “Puss in Boots Inn” until Rebecca died in 1894 aged 56.
Hugh’s wife Elizabeth died in November 1865 aged 71 and was buried at St Peter's Church in Belper. The 1871 Census revealed that the following persons were living with Hugh at Dairy Wood Farm: his remaining unmarried daughter Ellen (aged 46), his grandson William Dakin (aged 7), together with Henry Sherlock (aged 58), two other male farm servants (aged 17 and 14) and a female general servant (aged 13).
Hugh lived for four more years dying in 1875 at the age of 82. Five of his ten children had died before him and he had 29 grandchildren of whom three had died in infancy (two were named Hugh). A transcript of Hugh's extensive will can be read below. His estate was valued at £1,500 which would be equivalent to £150,000 today. He gave a sixth part of his estate to each of his surviving children - Hugh, Mary, Ellen, Henry - and left a sixth part in trust to the surviving children of his deceased daughter Elizabeth. The remaining sixth was also left in trust to provide benefits as needed to support Rebecca with any residue to be given to her son, Samuel when he reached the age of 21. He also expressly stipulated that the bequests to his daughters were for their sole use and should be free of interference from their respective husbands. There is no specific record in the will of any land or property owned by Hugh but he asked his trustees, son Hugh and son-in-law Thomas Dakin, to 'call in and convert unto money' his real and personal estate. It should be noted that son Hugh had arranged for the auction in 1873 of property in Wensley, including the Crown Inn, which was no doubt part of Hugh's inheritance.
After Hugh's death his son Henry and family moved from Wyver Lawn Farm and took over Dairy Wood Farm. Ellen moved from Dairy Wood Farm to Wyver Lawn Farm with Henry Sherlock who was recorded as a lodger. Henry Hole was appointed Poor Law Overseer for the parish of Alderwasley in 1876 and 1877. Working closely with the Belper Board of Guardians, he was responsible for the collection of the poor rate and for administering relief to the poor. In February 1878, 11 year-old Samuel Cooper was reported missing on his way to visit his Uncle Henry. He must have been found because he appeared in the 1881 Census. In August 1878, one of Henry's farm labourers was brought before the Belper magistrates charged with ill-treating a cow. See the newspaper reports of these incidents below.
Less than a year later, in June 1879, Henry suddenly died at the age of 48. Then, between March and June 1880, Susannah, at the age of 39, gave birth to a daughter, Florence Annie. It appears that Henry may not have been her father. So Susannah was left to run a large farm of 175 acres with a baby and her four older children: Elizabeth (18), William (15), Isaac (12) and young Henry (8). The 1881 Census shows that her brother-in-law Hugh (great-great grandfather) had moved from Morton and was living at Dairy Wood Farm where he was helping out as a herdsman. Daughter Elizabeth married a William Spendlove in 1889 and moved to her widowed father-in-law's farm which was also in Alderwasley. Son Isaac married in 1891 and established himself as a butcher in Belper. Young Henry also left home around this time leaving Susannah with her eldest son William and daughter Florence Annie to work the farm with the assistance of a 'cowman', a young farm labourer and a 14 year old girl as a domestic servant.
Susannah managed the farm for 30 years until 1909 when she (aged 68) and Florence Annie (aged 29) both died within a few weeks of each other.
William did not take over the farm after his mother's death. In 1913 he emigrated to Australia with his brother Isaac and his sister-in-law, also called Susannah, and their children Alice (19), Susan (16) and John (13). They sailed on the Steamship Demosthenes from the Port of London on 3rd April 1913 bound for Melbourne.