Bygone Burnley: Hapton with historian Roger Frost MBE, 4-4-25
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00:00We're in Hapton today, and Hapton is a very interesting community.
00:06It's got a long history.
00:09It's most famous these days because, much to its credit,
00:15and the credit of one company in Hapton,
00:18the village was the first village in England to have electric street lighting.
00:25And on the parish council's coat of arms, or badge of office, as it really is,
00:31there is a lamp, an early electric street lamp, or part of it on the lamp.
00:38So Hapton's very proud of this because of the company,
00:42and you can see a name behind the Simpsons.
00:45The company was called Simpsons.
00:47They were in these buildings which were mostly cotton mills,
00:51and they had a section of the mill in that direction over there,
00:56and they were very early electrical engineers.
01:00They had connections with the early electrical engineers
01:04who made things like electric kettles,
01:08and the company Swan had a connection with Hapton.
01:14But not the only one. Edison, the American inventor,
01:17also had connections with Hapton through the Simpsons brothers,
01:23who owned the company that actually erected the first electric street lamps in a village.
01:32We're standing in front of one of the oldest buildings in Hapton,
01:35which is Shuttleworth Hall.
01:38It's the building that the Shuttleworth family of Gawthorpe owned
01:43before they took possession of Gawthorpe in the late 17th century.
01:49But the building itself, as you can see,
01:51is late Tudor, probably Elizabeth I reign,
01:58and if not, early in King James I reign.
02:03It's just about the only really old building that we could use as a background
02:09to talk about Hapton's early history.
02:13And Hapton has got a medieval history.
02:16There was a castle here.
02:18The castle may have been built in the 12th century,
02:23but other historians have disagreed and said it was a bit later than that.
02:28Now, if it was built in the 12th century,
02:31it's likeliest to have been built in the reign of King Stephen.
02:35He reigned from 1134 to 1159 or something,
02:46but it's in that period anyway.
02:48That was the period of the Civil War,
02:51the War of the 19 Long Winters.
02:53Stephen was one of the claimants to the throne,
02:57but he had a rival in the Empress Maud,
03:00who was the daughter of Henry I.
03:03But being a woman,
03:05people at the time thought that she had no right to be the ruler of the country,
03:14but she had her supporters,
03:17and the war was between the Empress Matilda,
03:21who was the widow of the Holy Roman Emperor,
03:24and Stephen fought it out.
03:28In the end, it was decided that Stephen should continue his reign,
03:33but Matilda's son, Henry Plantagenet,
03:37should become king.
03:39And when Stephen died,
03:42I think it's 1159,
03:45Henry became king,
03:47he became Henry II,
03:49and founded the Plantagenet dynasty,
03:52which lasted right the way through
03:54to the death of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.
04:00So, for 300 years or thereabouts,
04:04the Plantagenets ruled.
04:07So, there was a castle.
04:09There's nothing much left of it.
04:11Manchester University once had permission to dig there,
04:15but then it was withdrawn,
04:17and nothing has been done.
04:19But it wasn't the only early building.
04:21The Tynley family of Tynley owned another building in Hapton.
04:28At the Tower.
04:30This is Hapton Tower,
04:32which is on the southern side of the township.
04:36And it was a popular house among some of the Tynleys.
04:41One of them preferred the tower to the hall,
04:46and lived there.
04:47And another Tynley connected with the Hapton property.
04:53He was the man who saved the altar vestments from Wally Abbey,
05:00which can now be seen in Tynley Hall.
05:03So, the remains of Hapton Tower can be seen,
05:07but they're ruined.
05:10The building is not lived in any longer.
05:14It hasn't been lived in for a long time.
05:16But it's right in the southernmost part of the parish.
05:20So, that was another aspect of Hapton's history.
05:26One of the older facts about Hapton,
05:32is that in the late medieval privilege,
05:36part of the area was known as Bertussell.
05:41And in the direction in which I'm looking,
05:44there was a village called Bertussell.
05:49It's probably more accurate to call it a hamlet, really.
05:52There were several houses.
05:54Because they were involved in farming, pastoral farming.
05:58I don't think they grew a great deal.
06:01But the hamlet became virtually deserted.
06:07So, in Burnley, we have got a deserted village.
06:11There's another one in Thursdon, in Dry Cliff,
06:17and a third near Barnalswick.
06:19But this is actually within the borough of Burnley,
06:22and is something which many evil historians are very fond of,
06:27is tracing the history of these deserted villagers,
06:32or handles, as I say.
06:35Anybody called Bertussell gets their name
06:38from this part of the township of Hapton,
06:42where we are now,
06:43which originally was called Bertussell.
06:46We're in Hapton,
06:48on the lane that leads to Castle Clough,
06:51because it was there,
06:53in the early Industrial Revolution,
06:56that one of Burnley's earliest cotton mills was constructed.
07:01It was built on the banks of the Clough,
07:04and it was a cotton spinning mill.
07:08A group of local men got together and subscribed some money,
07:12and part of the mill was originally water-powered,
07:17but very early on they installed a steam engine.
07:20But unfortunately, the company didn't survive very long.
07:25However, the mill itself continued to work as a mill,
07:30and it was, as I say,
07:31one of the first in the Burnley area.
07:33Ultimately, in the 20th century,
07:37it was converted into a calico printing works,
07:40and it did some very important calico printing in these premises,
07:46right the way through until the 1950s.
07:50So it had over 30 years as a calico printing works as well.
07:55Hapton wasn't only a cotton area,
07:59there were all sorts of industries in Hapton.
08:03There was a chemical works not far from where we are,
08:06but most significantly there was a coal industry.
08:12Several large coal mines exist in the Hapton area.
08:17The most famous of them was the Hapton Valley Coilery,
08:22which in the 1960s was an area where there was a big mining disaster.
08:28I remember it because I was at school at St Mary's on York Street,
08:34where one of the miners who was killed had been to school a year or two before me.
08:40So it was very significant to me.
08:44It always has been.