On Monday my sister Linda and cousin Kathleen joined Barbara and I on a short tour of some of our Bell family history locations north of Retford around Sutton-cum-Lound, North Nottinghamshire.
Blaco Hill Cottages, between Lound and Mattersey, was the home of our great grandfather John Bell, a gardener, born 1842, and his wife, our great grandmother, Helena, nee Whitehead, born 1845.
It was the birthplace of my grandfather, Robert Bell, and several of his siblings.
Our thanks to Victoria of Blaco Hill Farm for giving us a guided tour.
The Grade II listed farm house is currently being renovated. During re-roofing they found straw, a form of insulation, stuffed beneath the slates.
Victoria sent me a photograph of an oil-on-canvas painting of the farm.
The Blaco Hill Veg Garden
To judge by the vehicle parked under the archway, this could have been painted in the 1920s or 1930s.
If my Great Grandad John’s gardening job included working at Blaco Hill Farm itself, this might have been the garden he tended.
There are five rows of cabbages on the left and what looks like an onion bed in the background
To the right I’m guessing those are two varieties of lettuce:
- a row of Cos or Romaine, described as ‘the old-fashioned Mr McGregor-style lettuce.’ by Riverford, ‘Sweet and crunchy – the classic Caesar salad leaf.’
- three rows of a leafy lettuce, such as Webb’s Wonderful
There might be a row of rhubarb growing at the base of the hedge. I’ve never read a suggestion that the bottom of a hedge is a good place to grow rhubarb but we had a small patch by our hawthorn hedge in our back garden when we moved here and 40 years later it’s still thriving.
John Bell, Gardener
Blaco Hill Farm has sandy soil which is popular with rabbits so I imagine that my Great Grandad John was like Mr McGregor in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, constantly attempting to keep the rabbits out of his plot.
John also bears a striking resemblance to Cyril Cowell’s Adam the Gardener in the Sunday Express who dispensed advice such as recommending dusting your roses with derris powder:
‘The advantage of using Derris lies in the fact that, besides being a contact insecticide, it is also a stomach poison . . .’
It’s now banned in the UK and the EU, so don’t try this on your roses!
Elsie Ward, Clerk, Bookeeper . . . Artist?
The signature on the painting looks like ‘E. WARD’, so my guess is that this might be Elsie M. Ward, aged 24 on the 1921 census and working as a ‘Clerk Book keeper’ for S. C. Goodwin of Mattersey Hall.
Her father William was a ‘Farm Labourer’ at Church View Farm, Mattersey but it’s the occupation of her younger brother, John W. Ward, aged 21, that particularly interests me . . .
The Cultivator
I’ve always liked using this unusual cross between a fork and a rake, which my dad called a cultivator. It was passed on to us by my grandad, Robert Bell, in the 1960s, along with a blunt-tined potato fork. This would be about the time that he gave up his allotment, which was just across the road from Robert and Jane’s home, Vine Cottage, in Sutton-cum-Lound.
I’ve never seen another one like it. Could it have been passed down to Robert by my great grandfather John Bell the gardener?
This is where the occupation of Elsie Ward’s brother John W. Ward intrigues me: in the 1921 census his occupation is listed as ‘Steam Hammerer, Fork and Shovel Making’ at Messrs Skinner and Johnston, Ranskill.
In a 1921 map of Blaco Hill Farm, what might have been a shed in the north-east corner of the garden in the 1885 map has disappeared and a ‘Windpump’ has been installed.
In the painting, there appears to be a hedge in the corner of the formal garden where the ‘shed’ is marked on the 1885 map. Perhaps the line of the wall had been incorporated into this outbuilding?
That island bed in the lawn was a popular Victorian feature. Here my grandad Robert Bell admires my dad’s handiwork restoring the front garden of Smeath House, Horbury, West Yorkshire, in 1957.
In a watercolour from 1933 there are flowers borders and climbers on trellises on the south corner of the farm.
Victoria tells me that in A Prospect of Nottinghamshire by Christopher Weir mentions Blaco being built in 1763 for Jonathan Acklam of Wieston.
St Bartholomew’s, Sutton-cum-Lound
John and Helena lie next to each other to the north side of St Bartholomew’s Church, Sutton-cum-Lound.
Helena’s headstone records that she ‘DIED AUG 22 1934, AGED 89 YEARS’.
She outlived her husband by 19 years. John died in 1915, on the 23rd but the month doesn’t appear to have been recorded on the headstone.