The Mansion House in Calderstones Park – image by Raymond Knapman, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Looking through my notes on the various talks I have attended in the last few months, I found that I had not written about the very interesting one that took place at Calderstones Mansion House last October, as part of the 2022 Gravity Festival organised by The Reader Organisation, so today’s blog post aims to put that right.
This walk (led by volunteer Jan) cleverly combined a history tour with various stops to read related poems, which helped convey what the Mansion House may have been like almost 200 years ago when it was first built – especially on a lovely autumnal Sunday when families and dogs crowded through the buildings and green spaces, enjoying the mild weather.
Calderstones Park in the October sunshine
The House was commissioned in 1828, by the landowner, Joseph Need Walker, 28 years old and married with one young child. His grandfather was a farmer and nail-maker in Naseborough; his father owned an iron foundry in Rotherham and moved into the lead industry in Chester. There was no obvious connection with Liverpool but it would seem that Joseph moved here to keep an eye on the family’s export trade run via the docks as the family had warehouses at Mann Island – then called Nova Scotia due to the links with Canada.
We walked through the main entrance, past the café, which was once the drawing room, and the original curving staircase, to the ‘history’ room where the house’s journey is traced around the walls and a portrait of Joseph hangs above the mantelpiece. It names him as from Eastwood (in Nottinghamshire) and Calderstones (Lancashire). His sense of pride is apparent, and he and men like him thought of themselves as ‘merchant princes’ and modelled themselves on the aristocracy, with arranged marriages, etc. However, it seems he had abolitionist sympathies, entertaining William Wilberforce more than once, and it is conjectured that this is why he does not feature greatly in contemporary writing, Liverpool in the main being opposed to abolition.
The history of the Mansion House
We marvelled at the huge stainless steel key that does actually fit a keyhole in a cupboard in the house, and considered the weight it would have added to the housekeeper’s belt. (Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take a photo of this impressive artefact…)
Two censuses, from 1851 and 1861, list 14 servants as well as Joseph, his wife and three other family members, including a governess, dairy maid, coachman, groom, and two footmen. We read an extract from a long poem by Robert Dodsley, A Muse in Livery, or the Footman’s Miscellany, written in 1729 by a man who actually was a footman (before becoming a publisher – a change of career that seems odd for that time). It paints a detailed picture of the running around that the footman was expected to do, from dawn until well after dusk.
After the Walkers, the house passed into the ownership of the MacIver family, who owned the Cunard Line, and then into the council’s hands, in 1902. The council bought it for the grounds, with the intention of creating a network of parks throughout Liverpool, and so didn’t really utilise the house to its best potential. Luckily, in 2014 the Reader Organisation took it over, and went about the lengthy process of tearing out the hardboard room dividers, restoring what they could of the original features and sympathetically developing the rest.
We moved outside, to find the horses’ gravestone, and read a very sad poem, Last Horse, by Alison Brackenbury, and then, fittingly, carried on into the stable yard, which now houses the Storybarn and ice-cream parlour. It was hard to imagine horses, carriages, grooms, hay, oats, manure, etc., here now – the hustle and bustle of daily stable life – but Jan had included a poem by Robert Wrigley, which conveyed the scents of stable life.
We ended our walk by the Calder Stones, six stones which Joseph Need Walker found elsewhere – probably on Menlove Avenue, as it is conjectured that they could be the stone circle from Druid’s Cross Road – and had moved to the entrance to his house. Animal and human bones were found at the original site, together with Bronze Age funeral urns, and it is a shame that the site was desecrated by people who had no respect for these ancient things. We noted the spiral carvings that are still visible on the stones’ surface and that these designs are found along the western seaboard – Anglesey to here to the Orkneys. On another visit, a different volunteer (Stephen) had pointed out the bird carved into the bottom of one of the stones – it’s quite tricky to find but is a beautiful and poignant reminder of our ability to wonder at and revere the natural world.
The Calder Stones
For old photos and other details about the Mansion House, see: https://www.thereader.org.uk/calderstones-archives/calderstones-mansion-house-early-1900s/