At the coast Whitehaven and Maryport grew from a humble fishing hamlets to a major ports for the export of iron, steel and coal, often to Northern Ireland. Numerous pits were opened on the coast from 1675 and through the 1700s, all sourced from the rich seams that outcropped at land and sea. The ship-building industry in Whitehaven mushroomed after Daniel Brocklebank established his yard in 1788. Twenty-seven ships were built there before he died in 1801 and his sons founded a shipping company that used Whitehaven ships to trade with the World. Today large scale naval shipbuilding remains at Barrow-in-Furness.
And tourism and the Lake Poets arrived. Celia Fiennes wrote about her horseback journey through the area in 1698, Daniel Defoe eulogised about Westmoreland in 1724, Thomas Gray included it in his Journal of his Grand Tour in 1769 and Thomas West produced “A Guide to the Lakes” in 1778. William Wordsworth did the same in 1810, reaching its 5th edition in 1835 – Wordsworth spent 60 years amongst the region’s lakes and mountains inviting other poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Southey to his homes in Grasmere and Rydal Mount. The Kendal and Windermere Railway opened in 1847, the line to Coniston in 1848, and from Penrith Through Keswick to Cockermouth in 1865.
The history of English Gardening is a long one, and is a story of England. The Romans grew vegetables and fruit here, and probably surrounded their villas with topiary and flowering shrubs. Early medieval gardens in private houses and above all monasteries concentrated on the growing of herbs, both culinary and medicinal as well as vegetables for the table. By the 15th Century however there were flower gardens – though some part of their content would have been medicinal. Wars, both public and private, were a feature of life in England until the end of the 15th Century and it was not until the coming of the Tudors and relative internal peace that gardening for beauty and pleasure as we know it today started to grow from the roots precariously established in earlier times. Explorations abroad widened the varieties of available plants and travelers returned from the Orient, India, Africa and the Americas with new and exotic plants and seeds to be nurtured in the gardens of Royal palaces and great houses by careful gardeners.
The earliest professional or learned amateur botanists worked mainly in Holland and in France in the late 16th Century but England produced John Gerard whose catalogue of over 1000 plants which he grew for Lord Burleigh at Theobalds in Hertfordshire and at his own gardens in London was published in 1596. His famous “Herbal” followed in 1597. John Tradescant who worked for Burleigh’s eldest son Robert – Earl of Salisbury – became Gardener to Charles I travelling abroad in search of plants, and with his son, another John, established a famous garden and plant collection at Lambeth. It is these men and others like them who were collectors and propagators of plants and to whom we owe the enormous proliferation of all kinds of flowers and vegetables grown in English Gardens. Enthusiastic owners would encourage their Gardeners to exchange specimens with other gardeners to increase the variety. But it does not seem to have been until after the interruption of the Civil War and the subsequent Restoration of Charles II that the professional Nurseryman breeding plants for sale appeared in England. With the increasing popularity of gardens came the rise in the numbers of gardeners and florists and by the end of the 17th Century came the professional Growers or Seedsmen.
By the 1660s Nurserymen were appearing in London in some numbers, notably North of the River in Hoxton, and in Fulham and Brompton where two of the most famous – George London and Harry Wise – had a Nursery of over 100 acres established in the 1680s. Throughout the 1700s the best seeds came from London, sent out to Country House gardens by post and by coach. Very little is heard of provincial Nurserymen except as those based in great houses, but Kendal in Cumberland had an early professional Gardener in Thomas Watson of Highgate, now part of Kendal (d.1756) who had a garden on Fellside up the hill from the River Kent. The eventual establishment of a professional Nursery Garden in Ambleside must have owed something to the growing popularity of the Lake District as a place to which tourists came, first to admire, then to walk but increasingly often also subsequently to live.
The appreciation of the landscape fostered in the Lake District by men such as William Gilpin and the poet Thomas Gray from the 1770s was reflected in English gardens by the works of William Kent and Lancelot (Capability) Brown who “created landscape” rather than more formal gardens for their patrons.
In Westmoreland there was no need to “create“ landscape – it was all around, to be exclaimed over, painted, loved and ultimately exploited for the benefit of visitors. Thomas English, who built the round house on Belle Isle in Windemere in 1776 is the first recorded gentleman to settle in the Lake District because of its scenery, and he was followed by a host of others. New patrons at new houses needed gardens, and gardens needed Gardeners to tend them and Seedsmen to supply them.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an English Romantic Poet and Poet Laureate from 1843 to his death but is also known for his love of nature, and for the care he took of his garden. When young he travelled widely (including living in Revolutionary France) until around 1800 when he moved back to the Lake District living in Dove Cottage until 1813 then moving to Rydal Mount in Ambleside for the rest of his life.
Along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (Poet Laureate before Wordsworth) they became known as The Lakeland Poets. Coleridge’s nephew John wrote of Wordsworth:
“He combined beyond any man with whom I ever met, the most unsophisticated poetic delight in the joys of Nature with a somewhat artistic skill in developing the sources and condition of them. In examining the parts of a landscape he would be minute and he dealt with shrubs, flower beds and lawns with the readiness of a practiced landscape-gardener. His own little grounds afforded a beautiful example of his skill in this latter respect, and it was curious to see how he had imparted this same faculty in some measure to his Gardener, James Dixon”. Wordsworth himself mused “I often as myself what will become of Rydal Mount after our day? Will the old walls and steps remain in front of the house and about the grounds or will they be swept away with all the mosses, ferns and wild geraniums and other flowers which their rude construction suffered and encouraged to grow among them?”
It was Joseph Hayes, born in Grasmere in 1825 who in the 1841 Census at the tender 16 is recorded as a Manservant to the local Clergyman Herbert Hill in Rydal Lodge. This must have been quite a house in which to be a Butler at such a young age. The World swirled around that house in a manner that must have affected his views on life, perhaps presenting a World outside of the knowledge and experience of a Cumberland gardening family, and maybe the spirit of his Mariner ancestors told him that must explore. And then there were the familial relationships. Herbert Hill’s father (who died in 1828) had been 25 years older than his bride and was 61 at Herbert’s birth after which he eventually fathered five more. Herbert’s Mother was a friend of Jane Austen. Hill’s Paternal Aunt Margaret was the Mother of the aforementioned poet Robert Southey, and in addition in 1839 Herbert married Southey’s daughter Bertha (1st cousin, once removed).
The Lakeland Poets had all been fervent supporters of the French Revolution in their youth but after ‘the Great Terror’ in France that followed the revolution, they all mellowed with time. That said, they mingled with the great thinkers of the age, counting many members of the Lunar Society amongst their friends and contacts. Southey and Coleridge both joined in the experiments of Humphrey Davy in Bristol with Nitrous Oxide and dabbled in recreational drugs. The circle of friends mixed with bankers, botanists and antiquarians, industrialists, engineers and politicians. Southey knew and corresponded with Thomas Telford and Mary Wollstonecraft who married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Southey had even got involved with Joanna Southcott the Prophetess who died in Blockley in 1814 (see notes on the Bearcroft and Minors families) and in 1837 Charlotte Bronte asked for his thoughts and advice on her poetry. In 1826 without his knowledge (and before the Great Reform Bill of 1832) Southey had been elected to Parliament as a Tory MP but he refused to sit. Even so, Robert Peel granted him a pension of £300 year.
But Came They All to Birmingham 