Jump to content

T. Walter Hall


RichardB

Recommended Posts

Thomas Walter Hall, Hon M. A.; F.S.A.; F.R.Hist.S

Better known as T. Walter Hall, anyone know his lifespan please ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Gramps

TWH....briefly.

Born 21 Jan 1862, died 11 Nov 1953.

Retired from practice as a solicitor in 1910 to pursue his interest in local history and palaeography.

Translated, transcribed and published many ancient deeds, wills and manorial records relating to the Sheffield area.

Was a founding member and first chairman of the Hunter Archaeological Society and was for many years the chairman of the book selection committee for the Reference Department of Sheffield City Libraries.

Awarded honorary MA by Sheffield University in 1922.

Full obituary in THAS Vol 7 page 162.(See post below)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This obituary first appeared in the Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society , and is reproduced by kind permission of the Society.

T..WALTER HALL, Hon. M.A., F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S., F.S.G.

MR. T. WALTER HALL, to whom Sheffield is deeply indebted in more than one cultural sphere, died on 11th November, 1953, at the age of 91. In his last years he had withdrawn from public affairs and lived very quietly. He was unmarried.

He was born on 21st January, 1862, the son of John Hall of Sheffield, surgeon, and his cousin Elizabeth, the daughter of John Hall of East Bank. The pedigree of his family which he published in 1909 shows how deep were his roots in South Yorkshire, the area to which the major part of his researches were devoted.

He began to practise as a solicitor in 1884, after being articled to F. P. Smith. In the years of his practice his main private interest was in music. He was one of the earliest to recognize the genius of Wagner, journeying to Bayreuth to hear his music and becoming a friend of his family; and he was among the most zealous of the group of enthusiasts who, in 1896, promoted the first Sheffield Triennial Musical Festival. Until 1914 he was Chairman of the Executive Committee of these Festivals, and continued to play an active part in their organization until the latest in 1936.

In 1910 he was able to retire from the firm of Sorby, Hall and Richardson, and devote his leisure to the study of palaeography and the other auxiliaries of history. In the same year he became a citizen member the Public Libraries Committee.

From this time began those labours in the field of document discovery and transcription which have so greatly advanced the cause of historical research in Sheffield. To his unwearying missionary work among the solicitors and landowners of his acquaintance the City Libraries owe their finest gifts of accumulations of documents, on which the present resources and prestige of the Department of Local History have been built.

The simple catalogue of the miscellaneous manuscripts then in the Reference Library, which he produced in 1912, was the first of a series of over twenty books of abstracts of documents which he continued to bring out, at considerable expense to himself, until 1946, when he found his eyesight no longer good enough for the study of old papers.

These books have provided much of the raw material of Sheffield history. Mr. Hall's aims were to provide facts, and to help the reader without much knowledge of Latin; he confined most of his work to the calendaring of documents in that language.

Occasionally he allowed his interest in a particular problem to have full rein, and built an article round a fact found in a document.

In these too rare examples of historical detective work he made some valuable contributions to local, and particularly to manorial, history. Members of this Society will readily think of Thundercliffe, Owlerton Manor, a note The Brocco as one of the common fields of Sheffield, and an interesting contribution to the discussions about the site of Waltheof's hall.

He was a founder-member of the Hunter Archaeological Society, and its first Chairman. His membership of the Public Libraries Committee continued until 1926; for the preceding six years he had been Chairman of the Books Selection Committee, and gave much thought to the building up of the Reference Library stock.

He also took a helpful interest, at a time when the University of Sheffield was still young, in its Department of History. The University showed its appreciation of this interest by conferring upon him an Honorary M.A. degree in 1922.

In 1930 Mr. Hall, sharing the anxious interest then being taken in the effect on Sheffield of its rapid growth, presented to the City a strip of the south bank of the Porter, ensuring the continuity of the "Round Walk" in the Green Belt from the Forge Dam to Carr Bridge at the source of the river. The gratitude of all who appreciate the beauty of Sheffield's valleys, and the history of the community which was cradled in them, is due to him.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A great man; one of the finest Contributors to our history.

Thank you (again) to you and HAS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

T. W Hall was given the task of selecting many of the street names for the new Manor Estate. He was working on the court rolls of Eckington Manor at the time, so a lot of the names came from that. In fact some of the street names there are the same as the ones on the Manor. One name was however rejected - that of Strangeways - due to the prision lol

Link to comment
Share on other sites

He was an amazing man. I am constantly blessing him for cataloguing all those charters as my research would be so much harder without that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

He was an amazing man. I am constantly blessing him for cataloguing all those charters as my research would be so much harder without that.

Just as a reminder we have

Sheffield 1297 to 1554

A

Catalogue

of the

Ancient Charters

Belonging to the

Twelve Capital Burgesses & Commonality

of the Town and Parish of Sheffield

With Abstracts of all

Sheffield Wills

Proved at York Prior to 1554

link to topic

Link to comment
Share on other sites

T. W Hall was given the task of selecting many of the street names for the new Manor Estate. He was working on the court rolls of Eckington Manor at the time, so a lot of the names came from that. In fact some of the street names there are the same as the ones on the Manor. One name was however rejected - that of Strangeways - due to the prision lol

Thanks for that. There has been discussion on here over quite a while about the names on the Manor estate. We knew they were linked to Eckington, but couldn't fathom why!

One of TWH's pet subjects was the naming of one particular road near his home in the Porter Valley. The road now called Quiet Lane was formerly called Carr Lane. As the suburbs expanded, the Council, as was and is its policy, changed the name because of there being several 'Carr Lanes' in the city . Rather than the choice of Quiet Lane, TWH wanted it to revert to an even earlier name of Jewett Hill (There are various spelling in documents, Jewett, Jowett et al.) Unfortunately he lost the argument so we're stuck with Quiet Lane, which it might have been in the past but isn't any more, having become part of the SW Sheffield rat-run. (Quiet Lane runs roughly parallel to the section of the Round Walk he presented to the city)

As for the name Jewett/Jowett, it now only exists as the name of a house at the top of the hill, and could be lost to posterity at the whim of the owner.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for that. There has been discussion on here over quite a while about the names on the Manor estate. We knew they were linked to Eckington, but couldn't fathom why!

One of TWH's pet subjects was the naming of one particular road near his home in the Porter Valley. The road now called Quiet Lane was formerly called Carr Lane. As the suburbs expanded, the Council, as was and is its policy, changed the name because of there being several 'Carr Lanes' in the city . Rather than the choice of Quiet Lane, TWH wanted it to revert to an even earlier name of Jewett Hill (There are various spelling in documents, Jewett, Jowett et al.) Unfortunately he lost the argument so we're stuck with Quiet Lane, which it might have been in the past but isn't any more, having become part of the SW Sheffield rat-run. (Quiet Lane runs roughly parallel to the section of the Round Walk he presented to the city)

As for the name Jewett/Jowett, it now only exists as the name of a house at the top of the hill, and could be lost to posterity at the whim of the owner.

Yes I found the reference in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph for the 12 May 1924, probably in one of those newspaper cuttings vol. in Local Studies. Hall submitted 30 names to the Highway Committe.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 02/05/2011 at 12:07, Bayleaf said:

As for the name Jewett/Jowett, it now only exists as the name of a house at the top of the hill, and could be lost to posterity at the whim of the owner.

T.Walter Hall’s note from his “Descriptive Catalogue of Sheffield Manorial Records” published in 1926:

‘The messuage on Jewetthill is now known as Jowett House; it has been for many years in the occupation of the family of Fox long resident in Upper Hallam. The house faces south, across the Porter Brook, below Carr Bridge; it stands at the west end of Chapel Lane. Jowett House, with the adjoining crofts, is shown on the ordnance map of 1851; and one croft is still known as Hobroyd. 

In Liber Finium William de Hanley surrendered, in 1441, a messuage, half an Oxgang of hastlerland, half an oxgang of assart and an acre of land called Jowet Acre in Fulwood; in 1508 Richard Shemeild surrendered a messuage, lying above Jewet Hill, with a meadow called Bocon Inge and a cottage called Alyshouse, with certain plots of land lying in Okenfeild and a croft called Reynold Lee, in Fulwood, to the use of his son John Shemeild and his heirs for ever; in 1543-4 Richard Shemeild gave a fine on admittance to a messuage, lying above Jewett Hill, with a plot of meadow called Betering and a cottage called Alehouse, with a plot of land lying in Okenhold and the croft called Reynold Lees, in Fulwood; in 1560 John Shemeild gave a fine, for leave to hold the messuage standing upon Jewth Hill, a meadow called Betton Ingg, the cottage called Alice House, the land in Okenhold and the croft called Reynold Lees in Fulwood, after the death of his father.

If we can rely on the accuracy of the compiler of Liber Finium, the earliest spelling was Jowett, as to-day, though the intermediate entries give ]ewett and Jewth; from the records, we get no clue to the origin or meaning of Jowett.  Harrison in his ‘Surnames of the United Kingdom’ 1912, under Jowett, says: ‘In 14th century English records, we find both ]ouet and Jowet’; which he derives from Old French jou, French jeu, Latin jocus, meaning a game or sport; so that Jowet Acre may have been the playing field of five hundred years ago, where the May Games were held and the youth of Hallam trained to the use of the bow. There is a bridge over Porter Brook, above Fulwood Mill, not half a mile from Jowett Acre, which is now known as Butter Brigg, without any apparent reason, and I have seen it written ‘Butts brigg’ ; a few yards away stands an old building, now used as a cowhouse, which thirty years ago was used and known as Mayfield Chapel; and Liber Finium, at 18 Richard II (1394), records a surrender of an oxgang called Mayland and a meadow called Maying in Fulwood. For May Games, see Transactions of The Hunter Society volume i, page 17.

The flowing tide of suburban villas has now reached the gates of Jowett House and if it is doomed to give place to modern houses, there is no reason why the old name Jowett Hill, which has clung to the hillside for five centuries, should not be preserved. I would urge, that to prevent the loss of a time honoured place-name, the old Carr Lane now known as Quiet Lane should be re-christened Jowett Hill; this lane runs along the south slope of the hill and, in the days before town-planning became a science, the civic authority changed the old name of Carr Lane to Quiet Lane, with little regard for either tradition or the prospective development of Sheffield’s most attractive suburb. Quiet Lane was from the first doomed to become a misnomer. Let Quiet Lane of to-day be given the entirely appropriate and time honoured name of Jowett Hill ; preserving to Hallamshire one of its many ancient place-names.

PictureSheffield link

1851 map:

jewett.png.0d82b91392a4463a40fbeda085a73ed8.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...