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What delighted us all was the discovery that Stokesley and Great Ayton are still delightful towns with sufficient landmarks to enable us to appreciate how things looked in the 1770s and 80s. Although both are probably a lot smarter and cleaner now, they have been spared significant Victorian and 20th century development, which might have changed them entirely. The eastern approach to the town from College Square is dominated by the mid-Victorian Town Hall set on the western side of a spacious piazza known as The Plain and extending to the 18th century Manor House on the east side. Flanked by three or four storey Georgian shops and inns, Stokesley offers a welcoming aspect.

Behind the rectangular Town Hall block is a smaller, cobbled space, which was the ancient Market Place. A pattern in the ground and a blue plaque on a nearby wall, reminds us that here stood the old market cross. It was badly damaged in an anti-papist riot around 1747 but not finally destroyed until it became the centre of a huge bonfire set up to celebrate Admiral Rodney’s 1779 naval victory at Gibraltar.

Facing the Market Place and with its back to the spot where the Town Hall now stands was the former Toll Booth and Butter Market. A sketch made from an old painting shows arched doorways to the Butter Market on the ground floor and a ladder to the upstairs Toll Booth, where every person leaving Stokesley carrying a basket or parcel had to pay a toll of one penny. Also kept here was the steelyard, a steel rod one yard in length used to standardise the traders’ measuring sticks and other weights and measures.

In his memoirs, Joseph Potter records that his parents kept a common bakehouse, where the family lived, “our house stood fully a quarter of a mile from the entrance of the town, and it stood alone, separate from any other house, only adjoined the Toll Booth in the market place nearly in the centre of the town.” The old painting shows a shop (in the nineteenth century a hatters) built onto the south end of the Toll Booth, whilst behind this – on the south-east side there is another small shop still extant. The whole block has undergone many structural changes and it is not known what stood to the back (east side) of the Toll Booth, where the Town Hall now stands, but it seems highly probable that one of these was the Potter family’s common bakehouse.

It was here that Joseph was born in 1769 and passed his first decade until his mother died and he went to live with his aunt at Great Ayton. He would have grown up in the heart of this flourishing market town, where he would have witnessed all the comings and goings as well as the sufferings of the petty malefactors who would have been placed in the stocks or whipping post, which also stood in front of the Toll Booth; although the damaged Market Cross still had a few more months left after Joseph moved from Stokesley.

A brief biography on four generations who shared the same significant first name. Click here to view the article.

This historic photograph taken on Boxing Day 1910, shows four generations of Newman, each bearing the name Hugh whose lives span a period of a century and a half. The first Newman of our family to be given this name was Hugh Newman (1689-1746), a bricklayer and builder of Epsom. The name passed to several cousins and nephews, who took pride in his success, and provides a link between the family before and after its move to London.

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Joseph Potter recalls an uncle who made his fortune in eighteenth century London as a diamond cutter as well as two of Joseph’s half-brothers who inherited his wealth.

In his Memoirs, recalling the year 1792, Joseph Potter writes:

“We arrived safe in the River Thames and moor’d her abreast of the Tower of London. It came into my mind concerning a rich uncle I had in London which I had never seen, likewise two of my father’s oldest sons of his first wife’s children, Thomas and Ralph Potter …… He died possessed of about one hundred thousand pounds besides all Bell Alley, Coleman Street, belonged to him. He died when I was an infant and my mother alive, but Thomas and Ralph never once wrote to acquaint my mother with his death as the two shared the effects between them….”

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Hugh Newman, was Court Crier of the Rolls Court, but met his end at his own hands.

Hugh Newman (1778-1827) was the fourth son of John & Margaret Newman. He was six when the family moved to London. In 1805 he married a young widow, Ann Mathews, who bore him one son before her own early death. Hugh was employed as Porter and Court Keeper (Crier) of the Rolls Court in Chancery Lane, Westminster but lived with his infant son, George, in the same house as his brother-in-law, William Leedle, in Gibraltar Row, St. George’s Fields, Southwark.

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Between 1850-1900 the population of Australia rose from 405,000 to 3.7 million, the majority of whom came from emigrants from the British Isles.

Between 1850-1900 the population of Australia rose from 405,000 to 3.7 million, the majority of whom came from emigrants from the British Isles. One of these was Mary Jane Newman (1851-1905), eldest surviving daughter of Samuel John Newman (1826-1886) and Mary Jane Pollard. At the age of 17 she undertook the fourteen week voyage, probably disembarking at Melbourne in March 1868.

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Thomas George Newman (1840-1933) was the fourth and youngest son of Samuel Hugh Newman and Elizabeth Myres Potter. As a grandson of Joseph Potter, doubtless he had been told many tales by his grandfather. Bored with school, from which he frequently truanted, and unhappy with living with an aunt who seemed to favour her dogs more than him, he began to think of running away to sea. Twice he set off for Chatham Dockyard but at that time was not tall enough to serve, so was brought back until, finally, having grown to 5 foot 6 inches tall, he was accepted on HMS Waterloo as a Boy 2 Class on 9 August 1857 for ten year’s service.

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Between 1843-1857 Samuel Hugh Newman and his family, lived at various addresses in Ship Yard, Strand. Ship Yard took its name from the Ship Tavern, which stood at the south corner, just at the east end of Butcher’s Row (which fronted the Strand to the rear of St. Clement Dane’s Church). To the left, marking the junction of Strand and Fleet Street, stood the historic Temple Bar. From the Strand, Ship Yard was barely visible as it was entered through a narrow archway beneath 246 Strand, the double-fronted Temple House, then occupied by Griffiths, Linen Draper. Ship Yard’s narrow entry gave on to a tiny court on the right before turning sharply to the left and opening out into a street almost as wide as Butcher’s Row itself. Its importance was increased, however, by the fact that it wasn’t a cul-de-sac but debouched into Little Shear or Shire Lane (a thoroughfare joining Boswell Court on the west with Shire Lane on the east).

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