The house was built by Richard Cooke in about 1784, although he died before he could occupy it. He was from a wealthy clothier family that had for many years owned Lodgemore Mill. There was a Richard Cooke of Lodgemore in 1758 and another in 1825 who was one of the Feoffees of Stroud, a select group administering the historic property of the parish church. There had been Cookes of Paganhill as early as 1641 and even in 1601 the Cooke family had occupied a mill in the vicinity of Lodgemore.

Cooke had bought the manor of Paganhill at the same time. He represents one of the clothiers who succeeded as establishing themselves as extensive landowners. In 1842 his son Richard owned an estate of 330 acres, based on Farmhill House and extending as far as Ruscombe Farm and Stokenhill Farm.

The house called Farmhill Park represented an improvement on the historic building on the other side of the road. The latter was built about 1700 and was originally much smaller, there being large additions in the C19th. Cooke's house was a fine example of a small Georgian mansion such as befitted a successful clothier. It was a rectangular stone building of three storeys. It had quite ornate classical details, such as a pediment at the front and urns decorating the corners. There was an adjoining, low wing containing the offices, and this has the appearance of being later.

The house and a farm of 60 acres was sold to Henry Wyatt in 1833 and his family's connection continued to around 1870. Henry Wyatt was celebrating the return of his family to at least part of their inheritance as Richard Cooke had bought the Farmhill estate from the Wyatts. They were people of some standing and Henry fulfilled many roles, being a banker and later a feoffee. The name appears frequently and therefore it would require further study to discover whether he was the same Henry Wyatt that was caught up in the Weavers' Riots of 1825 when Vatch Mills, worked by Henry and his brothers, was the focus of a riotous assembly of up to 3000 weavers. Whatever the relationships he was already the tenant of Farmhill in 1817.

Given its size it is not surprising that Farmhill was occupied by a number of people of local eminence. Josiah Greathead Strachan, who had helped to build the fortunes of Ebley Mill in partnership with S.S.Marling, lived there from 1870 to his death in 1892. C.P.Allen, M.P. for Stroud from 1900 to around 1916, leased the house for a time.

However the great days were by then definitely over. A tenant coming in in 1916 referred to the heavy expense he faced as "at present the rain pours through the kitchen, the scullery and all the domestic offices." Through most of the 1920s the absentee owners were trying to sell the house for an increasingly depressed price. Since it lacked electric light and mains water and needed repairs buyers who were attracted by the charms of the house were put off by the costs involved.

A list of the rooms show that whereas the generous C19th arrangements for servants remained unchanged little had been done to adapt the house to the needs of the C20th, . On the top floor there was a bathroom, a w.c. and 4 bedrooms. The first floor contained 2 bedrooms with dressing rooms and another bedroom as well as a landing. Along in the wing were 2 servants' bedrooms. Down the main staircase, on the ground floor, were the hall, study, morning room, drawing room and dining room. The domestic offices consisted of a pantry, boot room, larder, kitchen, scullery, servants' hall, butler's pantry, a lavatory and w.c., back corridor and cellars. Outside was another w.c., a woodshed, a game larder, wash house and a large coal house.

There was a gardener, Mr Burt, who had plenty to occupy him on his wage of 35/- a week as there was a peach and nectarine house, a tomato house, a cucumber house and a vinery as well as a forcing frame, a potting shed, furnace house and gates and fences to maintain. Meanwhile his wife could write confidently that "he was able to do repair and painting and carpentering or house duties if required."

The Burts occupied the gardener's cottage, the Lodge, containing a bedroom, a box room and a kitchen. Yet she was prepared to board and lodge one of the men working on the estate. Alternatively she "would assist with kitchen work up at the large house for two hours daily, or ...assist the Lady up at the house, doing light household duties, shopping etc.."

If Mrs Burt seems a little frantic in the generosity of her offers we should remember the contrast between her position at the gate, or archway, and the large house with its 12 chimneys. Mention might still be made of the stabling, consisting of stalls and loose box, as well as the washing house, harness room, front room used as a tool room and the summer house; but there is no reference to a garage!

For all this the tenant in 1916 had agreed to pay £250 a year in 1916; by 1923 the owners would accept £150 a year. But really they wanted to sell it. In 1926 two of the prospective purchasers reflected the revolution in female expectations that was under way. The Girl Guides considered it for a training centre and it nearly became a Women's Training Centre. However nothing came of these ideas. In 1927 the house and its 7 acre garden was finally sold for £3150. Although the asking price was £4000 the estate agent had suggested in 1925 that it would not fetch more than £3500 and that £3000 should be accepted.

The Arch and its Origins

In 1833 these depressing circumstances were far from the thoughts of the new owner of Farmhill Park. That year was part of a period of tumultuous local politics. In 1832 Stroud had been created an electoral division with the right to send one M.P. to Parliament. This new status inspired the desire to decorate Stroud with appropriate architecture . This led in 1833 to the erection of the Subscription Rooms, financed by donations from the public.

The local clothiers, holding strong Whig loyalties, were happy to attack the neighbouring Tory landowners on an issue about which many undoubtedly felt strongly. The issue of slavery was one which could divide the parties locally as the Codrington family, of Dodington, owned a West Indian island . But to many the issue was as much a moral one. It was at Ebley Chapel that the Stroud Anti Slavery Association was established. The strong religious influence is reflected in the fact that five clergymen, including Benjamin Parsons of Ebley Chapel, joined Quakers and millowners such as John Figgins Marling, the tenant of Ebley mill, in signing a torrent of resolutions. The example of Ebley was followed by others in the Stroud area. The Bell Inn in Painswick overflowed with anti-slavers who passed strong resolutions.

In reply the West India planters were believed to have hired a Peter Borthwick who held disputations in a public room at the White Hart Inn, near the Cross at Stroud. Whether he actually encouraged debate at these two meetings is unclear. He certainly prompted a series of pamphlets seeking to answer his arguments.

One of these, perhaps with some hyperbole, suggested that Stroud had been "agitated by strifes and questions to a degree almost unparalleled in its history". Certainly when the election of December 1832 was held the issue of slavery played a significant part in the final speeches by the candidates. About 5000 crammed the space in front of the Royal George Inn. Scaffolding of a neighbouring unfinished building served as the hustings. The successful candidate, W.H.Hyett, of Painswick House, promised to vote for the abolition of slavery but feared the anarchy that might occur if emancipation was immediate and unconditional. After the speeches the Anti- Slavery Society used the opportunity to question the candidates.

The Society kept up the pressure on Hyett by sending him, as M.P., a petition urging immediate and entire abolition of slavery without compensation. This proposal was too radical for the new Whig government; in 1834 the Emancipation Act paid the slave owners £20 million. However Henry Wyatt was sufficiently delighted to erect the arch at the entrance to his carriage drive. Inscribed "Erected to commemorate the abolition of slavery in the British Colonies the first of August AD MDCCCXXXIV" it is unique as the only monument of this size in Britain to this great event that had taken so many years to achieve. There is no record of the architect.

In 1961/2 Stroud U.D.C. spent over £1000 renovating it. Much of the money was donated and the work was done by J.Hopkins & Son of Gloucester. Even now, as we approach the 21st century, the spirit of Wyatt and the other "warm friends" in Stroud to the abolition of Negro slavery deserves to be honoured and appreciated.

Sources:-

House:- V.C.H. Vol. xi; G.R.O. D2299 3744, plus photographs; Fisher, Notes and Recollections.
Slavery:- Manuscript, P.K.Griffin, 1983. Photo:- J.Tucker, Stroud, 1991.

Ian Mackintosh 1993

This issue came to a head just as Stroud became a Parliamentary borough and its newly enfranchised citizens began to flex their political muscles. However, there had been agitation and discussion in the district for some years previously, notably in Nailsworth where the prominent Quaker, Anthony Fewster was a leading member of the Friends’ Committee of Sufferings which collected at least £75 in 1825 on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Movement.

Local Whig landowners toyed with the idea of adding their voices to the chorus. Early in 1826 Colonels Robert Kingscote and William Fitzharding Berkeley both favoured calling a County meeting on the subject to organise a petition to parliament but were dissuaded by Lords Ducie and Sherbourne. They clearly believed that the signatures of the gentry carried more weight than those of the millowners and shopkeepers of Stroud and Nailsworth. “If we have not a great many respectable names, we shall only be laughed at, and do no good.” Ducie and Sherbourne further argued that their signatures were unnecessary because as members of the House of Lords they would be petitioning themselves.

Thus the local campaigners continued without the overt support of their political and social leaders. In the wake of the triumph of Reform in June 1832 the Stroud Anti-Slavery Association met at Ebley Chapel on July 16th under the chairmanship of John Partridge and adopted 5 resolutions which were printed in the next edition of a sympathetic Gloucester Journal. These verbose and repetitive resolutions provided an opportunity for eleven of the leading campaigners to associate their names with the cause as proposers, seconders and supporters. The strong religious element in the movement is illustrated by the way in which 5 reverends, including Benjamin Parsons of Ebley, joined the Quakers Anthony Fewster and Samuel Bowly and millowners like John Figgins Marling in this spate of resolution making.

The format was soon repeated elsewhere. On 9th August the large room at the Bell Inn at Painswick was crowded to overflowing by anti-slavers in animated mood. “Strong resolutions were unanimously carried,” reported the Gloucester Journal, “expressive of the incompatibility of negro slavery with the spirit of Christianity, the genius of the Constitution, and happiness of man…….”

Meanwhile the same newspaper featured another, more subtle, tactic. On 28th July 1832 a letter purporting to be from ‘Tory Lumpkin’ of Stroud to C. W. Codrington strayed into the correspondence columns. Baiting of the slave-owning Tory Codrington family by various forms of unfavourable publicity in the Whig Gloucester Journal was commonplace at this time. Tory Lumpkin was supposed to be a lone voice among the Gothamites in favour of the Corn laws and slavery who told Codrington, “I am sorry to say, that I can’t do much for you in this radical District – people here declare that Slavery ought not to exist!” Much was made of the dependence of country gentry on their unjust or immoral sources of wealth.

Support in Stroud for the maintenance of Slavery was not entirely fictitious, however. In the autumn of 1832 Mr. Peter Borthwick delivered at least two orations on slavery in “Stroudwater”. Paul Hawkins Fisher recollected that these meetings were held in favour of slave emancipation and took the form of disputations, Borthwick being “a paid advocate of negro slavery, hired by the West India planters to give lectures on their side of the question”. He locates them at a public room on the west side of the yard of the White Hart Inn near the Cross. It is not clear, however, whether Borthwick was engaged in formal debate at the time of his addresses. A series of pamphlets, the first of which appeared a few days after his orations on the 5th and 7th of November, sought to answer him in print.

The Anonymous pamphleteer suggested, perhaps with a measure of exaggeration, that within the last few days Stroud had been “agitated by strifes and questions to a degree almost unparalleled in its history”. He was disturbed by some evidence of sympathy for slavery in “these enlightened vales”, though this may have been the rancour of Anglican Tories against Nonconformist radicals rather than a firm commitment to the cause of West Indian planters. The blameless lives of the anti-Slavery campaigners were poetically compared with the silent stream that wandered through the Stroud vales, doing a little good without courting observation and praise. From here the argument plunged into Scriptural and historical matters, ending with routine propaganda about unpleasant aspects of slavery and prospects for emancipation.

Within a month the General Election campaign of December 1832 brought more unparalleled agitation to Stroud. About 5,000 people crammed the space in front of the scaffolding of an unfinished building adjoining the George Inn which served as a hustings. All the candidates referred to the slavery question in their main speeches. W.H.Hyett viewed the continuance of slavery with detestation and declared himself unwilling to temporise of procrastinate but could not reconcile it with his conscience to vote for violent, unconditional, immediate emancipation which would incur the risk of anarchy and bloodshed. Both David Ricardo and Poulett Scrope spoke in much the same terms with strong language on the principle of slavery and cautious qualifications on the practicalities of emancipation.

At the conclusion of the main speeches the Anti-Slavery Society predictably used the opportunity of questioning the candidates for their own purposes. The indefatigable Anthony Fewster read a prepared question designed to elicit a specific pledge but delivered himself of a long speech before the candidates could reply, while J.G. Ball, who had seconded a resolution at the Ebley Chapel meeting, followed with a mercifully short speech. Scrope was prepared to give the pledge required, but the successful candidates Hyett and Ricardo reserved their decision until the Parliamentary debate whilst making further encouraging noises.

During the subsequent Parliamentary session, as the Emancipation Bill which ultimately succeeded in the summer of 1833 was being drafted, the Stroud Anti-Slavers felt that further prompting was required. Among the papers of the new M.P., W.H. Hyett, is a petition, whose signatories constitute a roll call of the mainly Nonconformist tradesmen and manufacturers of the Stroud area, which urged immediate and entire abolition without compensation. Hyett, and Ricardo who had apparently received a similar communication, were encouraged to resist any “inferior” Government measure.

As it transpired, the zealous campaigners may not have been entirely satisfied with the eventual legislation, but Henry Wyatt, the new owner of Farm Hill, was sufficiently impressed with the historical importance of the coming into effect of emancipation to commemorate the occasion with a triumphal arch at the end of his carriage drive. By the mid 20th Century this functional purpose for the arch had ceased with the construction of a housing estate and a new secondary school in Mr. Wyatt’s former grounds. However the symbolic importance of the structure was sufficient for the school to be named after it and for suggestions about removal to be firmly rejected. In 1961/2 the U.D.C spent over £1.000 (much of it donated by individuals) on a renovation by J. Hopkins & Son of Gloucester which preserves to the present day the memory of Henry Wyatt and those other “warm friends” in the Stroud District to the abolition of negro slavery.

P.K. Griffin
June, 1983

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