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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.

News posted today by Seraphim Newman-Norton that the tour around Yorkshire will begin next Tuesday

Next week, John Townsend (Hereford), Marion Sumpter (Falmouth) and I will be visiting sites in North Yorkshire associated with Joseph Potter. We will be staying just outside Middlesborough but plan to visit Stokesley in Cleveland, where Joseph was born in 1769; Great Ayton, where he lived with his aunt and uncle and attended school; and Whitby, where he first went to sea in 1788. Armed with his own account of these early years, we hope to understand how the local landscape influenced this ancestor’s choices. Although much will have changed in the intervening 240 years, we hope there will be sufficient “footprints” to guide us time travellers. Watch this space, as we shall report back on our potterings in the North !

Keep an eye out for new photos and information when available on our forums, fingers crossed for new discoveries and an insight on Joseph Potters birth place.

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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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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Please check back for more updates and new discoveries posted daily.

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