An unplanned detour with this post, thanks to a serendipitous find in a box of books from an auction. “Chance found me at Hedon”, indeed! My friend Greg has an incurable addiction to buying cheap job lots, and I get to rake through them for the good stuff. By which I mean not the expensive stuff (in the unlikely event there is any), but the obscure little gems that fit the Holderness Historian’s remit. Greg’s latest purchase was a musty-smelling cardboard box filled with scrapbooks of newspaper clippings dating from the early 1900s. The pages are covered with annotations and corrections by the author: Mr Hiram P Bailey, or “American Citizen” as he dubbed himself for the British press.
Bailey wrote the laboriously-titled Shanghaied Out of ‘Frisco in the ‘Nineties (Lauriat, Boston, 1920), a tale of maritime rogues that purports to be a memoir of his time on the high seas, although I suspect it’s more fiction than fact. He did, however, get about a bit in Britain, sending off his travelogues to newspapers as he went: Cornwall, Scotland, the Lakes, Shakespeare Country… and Holderness. One of the scrapbooks has his address on the cover; somehow, Bailey ended up living in Hull, which explains his forays into the flatlands of East Yorkshire.
Bailey wrote a lot about his love of history. It’s clear he had a deep yearning for the ability to see into the past, to open his eyes and find himself in landscapes a long time out of mind. Hidden in the haul of clippings, amid much purple prose discussing “Is There a Hell?” and “Psychology: the Danger of Bestowing Too Much Attention”, is a piece entitled “A Few American Thoughts on The Medieval at Hedon” in which our hero sets out to explore the site of St Sepulchre’s leper hospital.
The Hospital of St. Sepulchre, a place for the housing and care of lepers, and later the infirm and elderly, was built in the late 12th century on a rare patch of high ground to the north of Hedon, near the ancient Sepulchre boundary cross. Until its closure during Henry VIII’s Reformation, it was run by an Abbess and a Prior overseeing nuns and an order of Carthusian monks. Although Carthusian philosophy hinged on a total withdrawal from the world, it’s said that St Sepulchre’s Brother John Coomber couldn’t resist Sister Alice, and together they betrayed their Holy Orders in more ways than one…
This tale of lust, jealousy, murder and suicide is in the pantheon of Hedon’s ghost stories. The site of the hospital is alleged to be walked by the spectre of a white-clad Sister Alice, while Brother John haunts the spot where the boundary cross used to be. The historical and cultural context of this legend, particularly when seen through a folkloric lens, is fascinating — you’ll have to wait for my next post for that!
The hospital’s location was well-known in the area, due its terrifying reputation and medieval significance (but mainly its terrifying reputation), and is shown on most Victorian maps. In the early 20th century, it formed part of the land belonging to James Soutter’s house The Chestnuts (named Pomona House when built in 1874) and in a 1908 letter to the Hull and East Yorkshire Times2 Soutter says that all traces of St Sepulchre’s — which he confirms was situated in his garden — have “now vanished off the face of the earth”.
Here, Hiram P Bailey enters the chat. Bailey spends a happy hour in Hedon one October afternoon, “wandering over cobbled streets and byways shaded with quaint little dwellings, ruddily roofed with pantiles” before setting off to find “the ruins” of St Sepulchre’s, which he’s been told (by an unnamed party) lay in the grounds of a house somewhere to the left of the road leading to Preston.
“Could it be that this ‘desirable residence’ sacrilegiously encumbered the site of the ancient monastery? To eliminate doubt, I turned up an adjacent lane, and discovered that it did. Suddenly, without the least preliminary, my eye alighted greedily upon the ruins — or rather the remains of the ruins. Little there to be seen — just two Gothic windows — but, oh, their beauty in the evening light!… A poem in stone! Their halo was one of boughs, their footstool was one of flowers.”
The American then falls into a reverie of fanciful musings on late 12th century architecture, the hospitality of medieval monks, and his (rather less fanciful) hatred for Thomas Cromwell, arch nemesis of St Sepulchre’s.
Now, I’ve traced the original publication of Bailey’s article to the Hull Times, November 30th, 1912 — four years after James Soutter categorically stated that there was nothing left of the hospital. Yet Hiram P Bailey sees otherwise! Hmmm… perhaps Bailey had visited Hedon before the last of the ruins had collapsed, and was writing this much later? Or perhaps Soutter didn’t publicise the fact that there was still something there in case he got hordes of American writers hanging around his garden? Bailey’s view is indeed blocked by “a tall, unfriendly hedge”, but even this doesn’t dampen his excitement, given that “the distance robbed the spot of its harsher details, and accentuated its sweeter ones.” Or has Bailey unwittingly fulfilled his ambition of being able to gaze into the past? Is this a “timeslip”?3. All something of a mystery…
Live detective work alert!
In true Scooby Doo style, my dog and I went for a walk to try and solve the puzzle by retracing Bailey’s route and vantage point. The Chestnuts has also disappeared, replaced by several relatively modern houses. I realised that the “adjacent lane” Bailey turned down is now a private road leading to these houses, one of which is guarded by a large Rottweiler, so I thought it prudent not to follow Bailey’s footsteps that far.
Chance pampered me once again, though, as the lovely ladies who live in the Lodge at the top of the lane stopped to chat. Not only did they give Mac a chunk of sausage pasty, they gave me some very useful pointers as to the location of various houses over the years and confirmed that the hospital site was definitely in a paddock behind one of the gardens. The only way to catch a public glimpse of it today is to walk down the railway line (now a bridlepath — I wasn’t about to become the heroine of a silent melodrama) and climb into a bramble thicket4. So that’s what I did.
Definitely no Gothic windows in sight.
Back home, in search of further clues, I turned to an old faithful: Dr Martin Craven’s A New and Complete History of the Borough of Hedon (The Ridings, 1972). And lo, the medieval mists cleared and I solved the conundrum of Hiram P Bailey’s ghostly ruins.
Bailey was peering through the wrong hedge. Instead of looking left into the garden of The Chestnuts, where the hospital had been, he looked right, into the grounds of the house opposite: Birkholme, built by the Todd family in 1888. And at this point, chance didn’t so much pamper him as punch him in the face. For Mr Todd had erected in his garden two Gothic windows, taken from Hull Minster during its restoration in 1859, as a decorative feature.
Private road be damned. I marched back down Souttergate to see how far I could get to where Bailey had stood without someone performing a citizen’s arrest. Luckily, the homeowners I came across were benign; special mention must go to Peter Crombie, who provided some cracking new information that requires a post of its own5. I carried on up the lane and there, only just visible behind a tall, unfriendly hedge, was part of the “poem in stone”6.
Bailey was not seeing the remains of St Sepulchre’s leper hospital, but a Victorian gentleman’s folly.
This realisation, while being one of those moments that make a historian laugh out loud, was a poignant one. I imagined our American friend with his head in the evergreens, lost in his dream of lepers and monks and Thomas Cromwell, blissfully unaware that he was looking the wrong way. But Hiram P Bailey died, aged 65, in 1949 so he will never read this, never know that a 21st century woman followed in his footsteps one hot August afternoon and blew his dream to bits. We shall leave him be on that lonely lane in 1912, staring at the stones:
“A last, long, lingering look of thanks I cast to them. Then they faded amidst the trees, and I beat my steps back towards the town.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks must go to Gregory Butterworth, Esq., for spending a whole £16 on the box of books that inspired this post. Dr Martin Craven has my eternal gratitude for his lifelong dedication to Hedon’s history. And huge thanks to Mr Peter Crombie for his kindness and knowledge — I will be pestering him again! Mac and I also very much appreciated the help and snacks from the Lodge ladies (Mac might be pestering them again).
A note on the title of this piece, “A Medieval Timeslip at Hedon?” — The answer to any title posed as a question is, almost invariably, “no.” See also: “Is There a Hell?”
- Boyle, J.R., The Early History of the Town and Port of Hedon, Brown & Sons, 1895 ↩︎
- Hull and East Yorkshire Times, 26th December, 1908 ↩︎
- For a good overview of the recent timeslip reports from Bold Street, Liverpool, see 46:19 of https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001rckl/uncanny-series-1-1-case-1-miss-howard ↩︎
- St Sepulchre’s Hill is part of the Scheduled Ancient Monument, Hedon Medieval Town, so metal detecting or disturbing the site in any way is illegal https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1003779?section=official-list-entry ↩︎
- There will be a Part II for this case, and it’s going to be a banger! ↩︎
- Mr Todd installed this structure and an 18ft high Gothic window that I couldn’t see from the lane — no wonder Bailey was smitten! The stones are Grade II Listed https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1346597 ↩︎