John Buckingham Pope (b. 14 February 1807, d. 20 March 1878)
John Buckingham Pope (son of Samuel Pope and Ann Titt)
was born 14 February 1807 in Newton Bushel, England., and died 20 March
1878 in Rocklands, Isle of Wight, Southampton, England.109. He married Maria Law on 17 March 1829 in St Giles, Camberwell, London, England..
Notes for John Buckingham Pope: The
West Riding coal trade received a considerable boost from 1850 when the
completion of the Great Northern Railway opened for the first time on
any large scale the great and increasing coal-hungry markets of London
and the South of England to West Riding coals. Already, during the 1840s
the construction of railways within the North and East Ridings of
Yorkshire, with rail links into the coal-producing West Riding, had
given collieries lying within easy access to the new local steam
railways an advantage in competing with the older canal or
navigation-linked pits for the supply of the regional coal markets. It
was against this background of changing and expanding markets occasioned
by the opening of the new railways that the collieries worked by the
Popes at Crigglestone and later by Pope and partners at Altofts arose.
The first members of the Pope family to appear on the West Riding
scene were Richard and John Buckingham Pope, coal factors and
co-partners of Lower Thames Street in the City of London. Richard Pope
had had dealings in property in London from at least as early as 1827.
In November 1841 the partners are referred to as agents in London for
the sale of coal from the Cliffe Colliery at Crigglestone, near
Wakefield, where pits were being sunk in 1838-41. The owners of the
Cliffe Colliery had some difficulty with the availability of liquid
capital and by 1842 they owed 2,300 Pounds to the Popes on a balancing
of the accounts so that the Popes took over the new colliery, sinking
number one shaft deeper and completing number two to the Winter seam.
The colliery had four shafts in 1841 and in 1846. The Popes continued
their London coal business, maintaining their Lower Thames Street
offices and trading in coal from Abbey Wharf, Westminster. Richard Pope
lived at Camberwell and J. B. Pope, who had been born at Newton Bushall
in Devon and was thirty-five years old in 1842, lived at Mornington
Crescent, Hampstead Road. The Popes continued to develop their Cliffe
Colliery which supplied coals to London by water, and a railway was
built (largely a self- acting incline and in part in tunnel) down to the
Calder and Hebble Navigation under wayleaves granted between 1843 and
1846. Coke ovens, a fireclay works, a stoneware manufactory, brick and
tile kilns and drying sheds and a chemical works were all run along with
and close to the railway. The firm had a fleet of twenty-seven keels,
the Yorkshire river barges, to carry their products. A series of
highly complex legal and financial manoeuvres were ultimately
unsuccessful in assisting the Popes in a difficult period of trade
depression in the coal industry in the middle and later 1840s and a fiat
in bankruptcy was issued against them at the very end of 1 847.
Ultimately, in June 1849, the colliery was put up for sale by auction
and was purchased by J. V. Broughton for 23,050 Pounds. The
financial difficulties of the colliery had brought J. B. Pope to the
West Riding and some four months after the sale of the Cliffe Colliery a
draft partnership deed was prepared under the provisions of which J.
B. Pope, by now of Castleford and described as a coal merchant and
earthenware manufacturer, was to join Joshua Skidmore, commission
agent, and William Shaw, railway building contractor, both of Wakefield,
in the operation of a colliery at Whitwood and of a pottery and clay
works at Castleford, late lsaac Fletcher's. Pope was to devote his
whole attention to the new business and was to receive a salary of 250
Pounds a year. A new partnership deed was entered into in 1850, Pope
being joined by George Pearson and John Woodhouse, railway contractors
residing in Pontefract. (Pearson could only sign the deed with a mark
and Woodhouse had very poor handwriting!) A first lease of coal was
agreed in 1850, the lease being taken from an absentee landowner, the
Rev. Sir T. G. Cullum, Bart., M.A., J.P., D.l., of Suffolk (1777-1855)
Richard Pope, J. B. Pope's eldest son, cut the first sod of one shaft of
the new colliery on his twenty-first birthday in February 1851.
The new pit was named California, after the then-recent California Gold
Rush. One shaft was sunk close to Altofts railway junction, giving
access to all parts of the country. Another (probably for pumping) was
sunk near to the present Wheatsheaf Inn in Whitwood township.
Coal had been mined at Altofts in earlier times - the writer has a deed
of the 1330s which refers to pits of sea coal in Altofts, and there are
references of about 1600 - but no modern coal shafts existed in 1851 in
the tawnship. In any case, Pope and his partners were preparing to work
in the much deeper and hitherto unexploited Stanley Main seam. The
potential of the deeper seams had, it is interesting to note, been first
exploited by Henry Briggs and Charles Morton who had taken a lease
of coal in Whitwood in 1841 from the Earl of Mexborough. The colliery at
Altofts was early given the name of West Riding from its principal
shafts' situation within the angle formed by the railway junction,
already known as the West Riding junction. One of Pope and Pearson's
letterheads with an engraved illustration and used in 1860 shows a busy
scene at the coiliery. Richard Pope senior died in January 1853 and a
few months later Woodhouse left the colliery partnership. The firm now
became Pope and Pearson, the name under which it traded until
Nationalisation - and under which it does still trade (1977). By
1855 Richard Pope, the son of J. B. Pope and the young man who had cut
the first sod in 1851, had joined the partnerships and it was his energy
which both established and developed the colliery and its trade. The
only early account book which survives begins in 1850, presumably during
the period when coal was being merchanted but not mined too: much coal
was sold in the northern parts of Yorkshire via the York and North
Midland Railway (one end of which is at Altofts Junction) and there were
smaller local sales to potteries (at Leeds and Castleford), to
limeworks, to Carter's Knottingley Brewery and so forth. Other local
markets included a windmill, a flintmill, a bank and a workhouse. Small
and distant sales were made to Chatham and even to Newton Abbot, to
which place there was an established water connection for the transport
of china clay. New coal leases were negotiated in 1851, when a lease
was taken from Hugo C. M. Ingram, Lord of the Manor and a large
landowner in Altofts, and coal was sub-leased from Henry Briggs. Sidings
were put in to the York and North Midland Railway in 1853, the year
before it became part of the new North Eastern Railway, and
communication was made with the conveniently close and accessible
Fairies Hill Cut of the Aire and Calder Navigation. John Buckingham Pope
remained managing partner of the concern until his death in April 1878
but his son took a very active part in its affairs and in the coal
industry in a wider context. In 1885 he and his partners were
negotiating for a lease of coal at Rawrnarsh near Rotherham. In 1858 he
and his partners established the modern Sharlston Calliery. He and his
partners sank the great Denaby Main Colliery from 1863 (he, his father
and Pearson were all members of the partnership there), and from 1889
Cadeby Main developed as an adjunct to Denaby. George Pearson, who lived
in the Pontefract suburb of Tanshelf, was the senior partner in a group
of pontefract men who sank Darfield Main Colliery near Barnsley, in
1856-60. The partners kept the West Riding Colliery's pits up-to-date
technologically. In 1858 they agreed with the patentees to make use of a
coal washing machine, which necessarily resulted in the unusually early
development of colliery pitheaps at Altofts and the neighbouring
part of the Whitwood township. In 1860 William Wood of the nearby
Foxholes Colliery, Methley, recorded in his diary that he went to
Balaciava Colliery, West Ardsley, vvith Mr Pope, Mr Locke and Mr
Warrington (of Kippax Colliery) to see a coal-cutting machine there. In
August 1869 Pope and Pearson agreed to continue the use of an
experirnintal coal-cutting machine in their colliery which was worked by
compressed air. The firm was constantly a leader in the field in regard
to mechanical coal-getting. William Garforth, then only recently
appointed manager, introduced two undercutting machines in the Haigh
Moor seam but these, and all other early machines only undercut to
about half the depth which was possible with hand holing. In about 1888
an electric-powered bar machine was introduced, although Garforth was
concerned at the possible effects of the flashes which it made. About
1892 Garforth's own Diamond deep undercutting machine was brought into
regular use at the colliery and from that time the machines became of
increasing significance: mechanical failures decreased and the new
machines were able to contribute towards a shift output per man of six
tons as against a manually-got output of some three and a quarter tons.
Garforth set up his own firm to manufacture coal cutters: he built
twenty-one in 1899 and fifty-six in 1901 and the firm still
flourishes(1977). As with many of the new rail-orientated collieries of
the 1840s and, (particularly) the 1850s, the West Riding Colliery was
sunk in what had been hitherto a predominantly agricultural area. Men
had to be recruited to work in the new colliery - often from far afield -
and houses had to be built for them and their families. The population
of Altofts increased to a small extent as a result of the immigration
of railway workers but largely as a result of that of colliery workers
and their families, and especially of those employed by Pope and
Pearson. Some colliery families did, however, live just outside
Altofts, where other colliery and industrial developments make any
assessment of the influence of Pope and Pearson's employment impossible
of determination. The 1871 census returns indicate places of birth, and
the colliers who were heads of households in the largely-completed
colliery village of The Buildings at lower Altofts, where the entire
village was the property of the colliery partnership. Pope and Pearson's
cottage building accounts begin in September 1852, but deeper sinkings
and increased outputs demanded more and more workers and more and more
houses for them,. in the mid 1860s the three collieries in which the
Popes had interests all began the development of specific colliery
villages, two of which (those at New Sharlston and at Lower Altofts)
still survive in 1977. The Silkstone seam of coal, lying at some 414
yards below the surface and 4ft. 7in. in thickness, was leased by Pope
and Pearson in July 1863, and the new sinking was paralleled by the
building of the new and model colliery village. The exact date of the
erection of The Buildings at lower Altofts is uncertain, but the site
for the houses was bought by the partners at an auction sale at the
Horse and Jockey Inn in Attofts in April 1864 at the price of 460
Pounds for some 5.5 acres.:" A letter of July 1864 refers to a proposal
of the firm's concerning their "commencing to build". The sinking to
the Silkstone seam apparently occurred in 1864-65, and the newly-opened
seam gave its name to the new village, Silkstone Buildings. The dating
of the village is further elucidated by a reference in the 1871 census
returns to a boy born in Silkstone Row who was then aged six, and by
the stablishment of the colliery community's own Altofts and Normanton
Co-operative Society in about September 1866. By 1871 the streets in
existence were: Silkstone Row, North Street, South Street, East Street
and Prospect Place. In both 1889 and 1899 Henry Briggs, Son and Co. were
the largest producers of coal among the members of the West Yorkshire
Coal Ovvners' Association, with Pope and Pearson coming second in both
years. The question of early labour relations and troubles at Pope and
Pearson's collieries is a difficult subject to deal with, largely on
account of the lack of adequate documentation. Machin's book The
Yorkshire Miners details some of the disputes which affected the
collieries from as early as 1853, but gives the men's views only.
Certainly some disputes led to severe conflict and even ejection of
colliers from their houses," although relations never deteriorated to
the extent of those at the sister colliery Denaby Main, which was
constantly and bitterly riven by industrial disputes. The recollection
of old employees of Pope and Pearson is definitely at the present of a
sympathetic relationship between masters and men within the last fifty
years of the private ownership of the concern . As was so frequently
the case in regard to major colliery owners in the West Riding, the
Popes were nonconformists, a situation which to some degree cernented
the interests of capital and labour as many of the colliery workmen
were nonconformists by conviction and even before their coming to work
at the new collieries in Yorkshire. J. B. Pope was a member of the
Plymouth Brethren and, not surprisingly, two of the meeting houses of
that denomination arose in Altofts: one was dated 1891 and the other
was built in 1906. There is no reference to the existence of this
denomination in the 1878 trade directory, but in the February of the
following year the Brethren were using the colliery company's Pope
Street School for a tea, and by May 1882 they had a Sunday School.
Religious provision did not, of course, emanate entirely or even largely
from the Plymouth Brethren. The Wesleyan Methodists had established a
preaching place in Altofts in 1809, and the Primitive Methodists opened a
chapel in Lock Lane, halfway between Lower and Upper Altofts, in 1871.
Curiously, it was the more staid and respectable Westeyans, as against
the Prims, who built a wooden chapel at Silkstone Buildings in 1877 at
a cost of 25 Pounds, replacing the denomination's use of a room in
Silkstone Row itself. A new Wesleyan Chapel was erected in 1891,
costing a further 701.18.1 Pounds. and is still in active use (1977).
The Church of England, as was again common, was late on the industrial
scene, W. E. Garforth being behind its interests at the Buildings: the
Mission of the Good Shepherd at Lower Altofts, housed in a corrugated
iron structure to seat two hundred, was opened in February 1903, and
for some years it had its own minister, operating under the umbrella of
the Vicar of Altofts. An early Scout Troop was formed at Lower Altofts
in 1908. Educational facilties were provided by the colliery owners: in
1867 or 1868 a school was built at the end of Silkstone Row by Pope
and Pearson"and the building was used as an infants'school from February
1872 when log books were first kept as a result of the first obtaining
of a Government grant in aid. The log books refer to visits made by
the school managers and by the owners - Mrs Pope visited, for example,
on several occasions in 1873 - as well as referring to the frequent
outbreak of infectious epidemics. On the outbreak of an infectious
disease, the company put out posters advising precautions which could be
taken by the tenants against its spread, while the houses infected
were fenced off. This school was enlarged in 1895 and its gallery was
only removed in 1924. It was not until as late as July 1942 that the
management of the school was transferred to trie West Riding County
Council, all although the building had been leased to the County at a
peppercorn rent in 1903. A school house was also part of the model
village. The school celebrated its centenary in 1972 - apparently quite
wrongly. A school was in fact run by the colliery partners from about
1856, and this became the Aftofts Colliery School in Pope Street, the
log book of which dates from November 1872. A new school was built here
in 1875 and old J. B. Pope visited the new buildings on the occasion of
the re-opening in September 1875. The H.M.I. did not think much of the
natural abilities of the children: in December 1875 he wrote that "The
general intelligence of the scholars is low and they are very irregular
attenders". This school's management was also transferred to the County
in 1942, and the school was closed in 1946. There is an interesting
reference in the log book in May 1888, when the headmaster refers to his
scholars' parents setting-off to see their relatives near Bristol and
Gloucester and in Shropshire and Staffordshire - the areas from which
they had originally come. Further social facilities were provided in
the form of a recreation ground; the date of its establishment is
uncertain, but is possibly in the 1880s. The printed rules of the
recreation ground survive, headed "Silkstone Row Recreation Ground" -
its location being at the north end of the Row. The Ground was for the
benefit of the tenants of Pope and Pearson, their families and persons
living with them (it will be recollected that there were many lodgers).
A huge committee of sixty persons was to be elected from the
inhabitants, and the Ground, which lay between Silkstone Buildings
School and the canal, was to be open from 6 a.m. to 9.30 p.m. from 1
May to 31 August, and during the winter from 8 to 6. No games were to
be played on Sundays, and fines on adults and exclusion for children for
various periods were provided for misbehaviour. A new recreation
ground or sports ground was opened in September 1924 in a different
location. Many colliers had - and still have - a delight in gardening
and (incidentally) in supplementing their wages by growing vegetables.
In 1896 Pope and Pearson supplied some seventeen acres of land for the
use of their workmen at a reduced rental of 25 shillings an acre and
the Altofts Allotments Association was formed for its management: In
1915 the Co-op committee was asked to allow the use of a room for the
Allotment Association's meetings. Another typical model colliery
village development, backed by the colliery company, was the
establishment of the Altofts Co-operative Society. The minute books of
the Society which have survived date from June 1877, but by that time
the Society had been established for some ten years. It was originally
The Altofts and Normanton Co-operative Society, Ltd., and was formed at
the height of interest in the development of co-operative retail
outlets by individual societies in the new colliery villages of the
West Riding. No store was opened in Normanton itself, and a
co-opqrative store was built there in 1872 by an independent Normanton
Society, but it was not until 1894 that the Altofts Society dropped the
name of Normanton from its title. There was another neighbouring
society in the form of the Hopetown and Whitwood Industrial Society.
The Altofts Society was probably established in February 1867, although
according to the successive numbering of its quarterly meetings it may
date back to 1866. It was intended only for employees of the colliery
partnership, and it provided a not atypical range of social facilties
beyond those of a shop alone: by 1872 an educational fund was in
existence, a library existed by 1877 and a reading room was
maintained,. a subscription was paid to the Leeds Infirmary to enable
members to obtain treatment there, and in the 1870s references also
occur to tea meetings, lectures and excursions. The Buildings at lower
Altofts had no public house, but the workmen's co-op did sell beer for
consumption off the premises, and in 1877 the committee agreed to get a
board painted to caution customers to refrain from drinking beer or
spirits in the streets or in the shop. In 1900 a separate beerman was to
be appointed for the co-op shop - still known as the Top Shop - and
tobacco was also sold. In 1894 it was recommended that non-Pope and
Pearson workmen should be eligible as members of the co-op for the first
time, and in 1917 business was booming to such an extent, despite the
War, that the Society had to ask for the tenancy of the adjoining house,
number one Silkstone Row. As could be expected with a Society so
closely allied to the fortunes of the coal trade, booms and depressions
in that industry and in its wages were felt in the co-op: the coal trade
slumped in 1874 and only recovered slowly, and the sales figures of the
co-op show a similar pattern. Pope and Pearson grew as a large
employer of labour: there were 1662 work- men (1316 below and 356 on the
surface by 1903, and the firm ultimately became of necessity and
design, a major housing owner. By 1928 a list of the firm's property
shows them owning a total of 429 houses, 316 of which were in Altofts,
99 in Normanton and 14 in Whitwood; 388 were freehold and only 41 (all
in Altofts) leasehold. In 1874 one of the first board meetings of the
new company had agreed to buy 38 cottages at Normanton Common which were
the property of Mr Pearson. The greatest concentration of company
property was, of course, at Lower Altofts, where in The Buildings there
were 164 houses; Silkstone Row itself had 52 houses, still in one row
without cross alleys in 1904. An undated list of properties shows that
the dimensions of the Silkstone Row houses slightly differed: One
row, North Street, was of back-to-back houses, the remainder being
through. The two Portland rows are probably early examples of concrete
houses, similar to those being built (by 1877) at The Concrete near
Wombwell, but now demolished. The colliery schoolmaster recalled that
the company had built 80 new houses between 1871 and 1875. The company
early had its own gasworks, but the supply came from the Normanton
Gasworks from about 1898, when the new Silkstone shafts were sunk on the
site of the gasworks in the colliery yard. Water was supplied by
Wakefield Corporation from 1880, and local government facilities were
(slowly) provided for Altofts by an elective local Board, originating in
1872 and providing, for example sewering from 1878-79 and a cemetery in
1878. By 1894 Pope and Pearson were paying some 74% of the rates of
Altofts. The colliery village was somewhat altered in the 1890s, when
the ashpits were much improved, and in 1927 a loan was made by the
Altofts Urban District Council for the conversion of the privies in
Silkstone Row. A further social facility was provided at lower
Altofts in the form of an institute for men and boys opened in a
converted maltkiln in the lower part of the village in 1892; in 1911 a
Grand Bazaar was held in the Church Schools in Altafts to raise 800
Pounds for furnishing a new institute, during the presidency of W. E.
Garforth, and a Working Men's Club was in existence in the village by
January 1916. A yet further and highly important, social facility in the
form of a railway station, to serve Altofts and Whitwood, was opened in
Septernber 1870. Meanwhile, what of the management of the colliery? The
members of the Pope family were, as has been indicated, much concerned
in the 1860s with the opening up of collieries at some distance from
Altofts - at Denaby Main and at Sharlston - and George Pearson was a
senior partner in Darfield Main. Capital for the necessary new
developments at Altofts was consequently limited, especially after the
collapse of the coal boom early in 1874, so it was decided to turn the
Altofts collieries into a limited liability company, the Pope and
Pearson families taking a majority of the 'shares - 301,000 Pounds out
of a total capital of 400,000 Pounds. The first meeting of the new
company was held at the firm's solicitors' offices in East Parade in
Leeds on 18th November, 1874, and J. B. Pope was appointed chairman. Old
Mr Pope retired to the Isle of Wight, returning to undertake his duties
as chairman until his death in 1878. His son Richard Pope took over
after his father's death, with the newly-appointed W. E. Garforth as his
strong right hand, Richard was a Congregationalist, unlike his Plymouth
Brethren father, but like his father he had a country estate in the
Isle of Wight, and he died there in 1903. George Pearson died in 1881,
but members of the Pope and Pearson families continued an active
interest in the concern. The management of the colliery was largely in
the hands of a professional manager, directed initially by the partners
and (from 1874) by the directors and with the aid, for a short time, of a
consulting mining engineer: the great Jacob Higson of Manchester was
appointed to this consulting office, on a part-time basis, in 1874. John
Warburton was the colliery manager until about the end of 1872, when he
was replaced by John Hopkinson, who lived at Normanton and who saw the
colliery through its first years as a limited liability concern; he died
suddenly in London on 14th April, 1879, and was replaced by William
Edward Garforth in that same year: Garforth was introduced at a meeting
of the Board held on 3rd July, 1879 and was paid initially the handsome
salary of 500 Pounds a year. No detailed account of the life, activities
and significance of William (later Sir William) Garforth is given here,
on account of the recent publication of John MacKinnon's excellent
biography of that gentleman; the work can be consulted at any local
library. By 1875, when the great European coal export trade from Britain
was well developed, a major coal sales depot had been established by
Pope and Pearson at Calais, and by 1876 the company owned steamships
which took the coal from Hull. The use of coal washing machinery
resulted in the development of pit heaps and also in the availability of
large quantities of coal slack; briquettes from this slack were made at
both Altofts and Calais, and in 1880 the Board ordered the building of
twenty coke ovens at Altofts. In 1881 the Board was considering the
purchase of the unsuccessful Park Hill Colliery near Wakefield, but
decided against the project; a few years later, in 1886, the firm sank
the Fox Pit as an air shaft but close to the canal, a situation which
was considered suitable for the new pit's use as a coal loading place
for the waterway. In the same year of 1886 there occurred an explosion
in the Silkstone pit of Pope and Pearson at Altofts, where normally some
four hundred men and boys were at work: owing to the explosion
occurring between shifts, only twenty-one persons were killed. Naked
candles had been used in the pit until only six months earlier. The
explosion led to the ultimate invention of Garforth's (the WEG) rescue
apparatus and to the establishment of a series of experimental galleries
near the colliery which cost some 13,000 Pounds in experimental
expenses and, according to the files of the Colliery Guardian, "focused
the attention of the whole mining wold on Altafts". The first mines
rescue station in the world is claimed to have been established in
connection with Pope and Pearson's Altofts Colliery in 1901, and an
Ambulance class was formed in 1884. Pope and Pearson had, of course,
their own colliery locomotives, and railway wagons, and by 1893-94 they
were using between 114 and 117 horses in and about their pits. Thus
there developed at Altofts both a major West Riding colliery and a wide
range of social ancillaries; the colliery was to continue to produce
coal well into the period of Nationalisation, the last coal being drawn
(after the cessation of coal drawing from the colliery shafts) from the
Fox Pit drift on Friday, 7th October, 1966, at about 1 p.m.
More About John Buckingham Pope: Christening: 9 April 1807, Newton Abbot, Wolborough Street Salem Chapel Independent, Devon, England. IGI C075651.
More About John Buckingham Pope and Maria Law: Marriage: 17 March 1829, St Giles, Camberwell, London, England..
Children of John Buckingham Pope and Maria Law are:
+Richard Pope, b. 1830, Camberwell, Surrey, England., d. 8 September 1903, "Westfield" Bonchurch, Hampshire, United Kingdom..
John Buckingham Pope (b. 14 February 1807, d. 20 March 1878)
Notes for John Buckingham Pope:
