Off to the Gillows

When it comes to manufacturers of quality furniture there are few names to rival that of Gillow and Co. of Lancaster, and, no doubt, our reader will have heard of them already -- especially if they watch the Antiques’ Roadshow, because various examples of Gillows’ work crop up from time to time on it, usually at extremely high prices.
“What’s this got to do with the Fylde and Wyre Antiquarian?” you might be asking. “After all, you said it yourself – Gillows of Lancaster, the clue’s in the name there. Lancaster might be just up the road from the Wyre, admittedly, but, strictly speaking, it’s still not part of it.”
All right, keep your hair on baldy! I’m just getting to that. You see, what a lot of people don’t realise is that Robert Gillow (born 1704, died 1772, founder of Gillow and Co. of Lancaster) was actually a Singleton lad.
He didn’t hang around for long, ‘emigrating’ to Lancaster in 1720 to begin his apprenticeship as a joiner. Nonetheless, he was Singleton born, and that’s good enough for me. So stop being pedantic and grow up.
Let’s have a look at one of his pieces, shall we? This is a mahogany bookcase (or, at any rate, a drawing of mahogany bookcase, because we weren’t sure how the copyright stood) originally belonging to Mrs Hutton Rawlinson who purchased it from Gillows of Lancaster on the eighteenth of June 1772.


So, what do we know about Robert Gillow’s early years, as a fully-fledged Fylde-born-un? Well, his father, allegedly, played a part in the Jacobite rebellion and was, by way of consequence, locked up in Lancaster Castle, where Robert joined him so as to be close at hand if necessity called. (He didn’t join him in the castle, obviously, just in Lancaster in general.)
Right, I’m quoting from some website or other here – possibly Wikipedia, I’m not sure, I should have taken better notes: “…Robert Gillow's education in carpentry began during his time as a ship's carpenter. He is also credited with having travelled to the West Indies and brought back one of the first recorded shipments of mahogany into England.”
Fancy a drawing of some chairs, the finely carved details of which, like the bookcase, have been lost due to the fact that I couldn’t be bothered spending time drawing them up properly?


Gillow’s first venture into business was in 1727, when he went into partnership with a fellow apprentice called George Haresnape. The business didn’t last long. Three years after it had been set up, it was closed again, Haresnape finding more suitable employment in Liverpool as a slave trader.
Undaunted, Gillow opened his own cabinet making firm close to the Judges’ Lodgings on Castle Hill. The building’s still there, as the illustration of the entrance below sort of testifies:


In brief then, otherwise we’ll be here all day, when Robert Gillow died in 1772, his sons Richard and Robert (he might have been good with mahogany, but he was lousy at inventive names) continued the business, the latter running Gillows’ London branch on Oxford Street.
By this point Richard had also apparently trained up an architect, who designed several notable Lancastrian building, including the Customs House on St George's Quay. In turn, when Richard shuffled off this mortal coil in 1811, his son, also Richard (still not terribly inventive with those names there) took over the business.
Gillows continued to grow, specializing in outfitting liners such as the Lusitania. Good old Queen Vicky also commissioned a few bespoke pieces and during World War I, they made munitions boxes from aeroplane wings and propellers.
Gillow and Co are credited with inventing the Davenport (for Captain Davenport no less), the billiard table (not, as far as we can tell, for Captain Billiard) and the expandable dining table.
Early pieces of work are stamped with the words: ‘Gillows Lancaster’ or ‘Gillow Lancaster’, and later pieces are stamped with ‘Gillow and Co’ or just the plain old, vanilla-flavoured ‘Gillows’
In 1903 the business was finally merged with S.J. Waring, and eventually taken over and closed in 1961.
During its time, however, Gillow and Co. was famous enough to appear in works by Thackery, one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas, and some novel or other by Jane Austin.
There’s even a pub named after the original Robert, so we’ll end with an illustration of said building and a pint of Speckled Hen raised in his honour:

The Mystery of Norbreck Mill

It’s reasonably safe to assume that our reader (singular) never realised that Norbreck had a windmill.
Well it did. After all, Norbreck is a part of the Fylde and therefore, it stands to reason, that it has its own mill.
Or rather, ‘had’ its own mill -- past tense.
It doesn’t nowadays, of course, but reference to it can be found in Alan Stott’s excellent ‘History of Norbreck and Little Bispham’, which informs us that: “John Allen in 1538 took a seventy year lease on more abbey lands, which included the windmill at Norbreck.”
Unfortunately that’s the mill’s only mention in legal documents for more than a century afterwards.
When it finally does reappear in an exchequer deposition of 1657 relating to the Fleetwood family, it was claimed to have been built only sixteen years previously, which raises the question as to whether or not it was the same mill. Let’s assume that it was for now, and that Edmund Fleetwood (mentioned as the previous owner in the deposition) ‘rebuilt’ it circa 1641.
By the time of the deposition itself (1657 in case you’d forgotten) Edmund Fleetwood was long since dead and the mill had passed into the ownership of his widow, Everill Heber.
Why do we mention all this when we’re usually the sort of people to steer as clear of genealogical lists as we would of Channel Five American made-for-television-movies? Because we’re trying to work out where the mill was located, that’s why, and, unfortunately, we’ll need this sort of information to accomplish the task.
Bear with us.
Suggestion has been made that the mill originally stood at the southern end of Norbreck Road, which back in those days probably ran a few hundreds yards further to the west than it does today (i.e. out over the beach where, four hundred years ago, the cliff tops would have reached.)
Let’s have a photograph of said location (albeit off the edge of the cliffs in the foreground, and suspended in mid-air as the temporal crow flies):


It’s a reasonable theory under the circumstances, but we’d like put forward an alternative. (Well, we have to be different just for the sake of it.)
Unfortunately Norbreck Mill wasn’t the only thing that passed into Everill Herber’s hands. Six hundred quid’s worth of debt was passed along with it, so, along with other sections of the Rossall Estate, the mill was sold off (in true Fylde coast nepotistic fashion) and ended up in the ownership of Reginald Heber.
None of which, worse luck, brings us any closer to discovering the mill’s whereabouts. However, one helpful clue appears in Norman Cunliffe’s ‘A journey through Bispham, Norbreck and Little Bispham’: “The Norbreck Mill has been described as being situated on a mound whilst elsewhere there is another reference to Norbreck Mill Hill.”
'Situated on a mound’ suggests a peg mill.
For those not fully conversant with ancient windmills, peg mills were generally wooden affairs based on an early mediaeval Dutch design, the entire building being pivoted on a central post, or ‘peg’, around which it could revolve in order to face the wind. These mounds, circular embankments around the base of the mill, generally housed the mill’s machinery.
Norbreck Mill Hill, of course, suggests a hilltop.
Right, back to our history lesson.
Reginald Heber, as mentioned above, put his manservant (watch it), Robert Gaulter (a sixty year old Norbreckonian husbandman) in charge of said mill. Robert Gaulter died in 1672, leaving the mill in the capable hands of his son Richard who, unfortunately, also shuffled off this mortal coil one year later in 1673. Another year later still and Norbreck Mill found its way into the possession of Robert Brodbelt, or rather was in the process of finding its way out of Robert Brodbelt’s possession, because that was the year he kicked the bucket. The mill now, along with ‘Haybers Tenements’, was bequeathed to Robert Brodbelt’s son-in-law Richard Smithson.
Pay close attention to the ‘Haybers Tenements’ bit. Haybers Tenements were obviously named after the previously mentioned Everill Herber/Reginald Heber etc. In the Victorian period, the area of the cliffs between Bispham tram station and Norbreck Castle was known as ‘Eagburg’ (as mentioned by William Thornber, the Victorian antiquarian). The same stretch was also mentioned in the Blackburn Mail of 1795 as ‘the cliffs of Egbert’.
Was this a corruption of the Haybers Tenements?
It might have been.
It’s a bit tenuous, perhaps, but who can say?
Regardless of this, somewhere around the same time the mill finally seems to have run out of wind and given up the ghost. Of the two known millers in the Norbreck area in the 17th century (John Anyon of Great Bispham who died in 1681 and William Brodbelt) neither appeared to be connected to Norbreck Mill (or were even working as millers) in 1676, the time of the census, suggesting that the mill was well and truly out of business by this point.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, Alexander Singleton (somewhat confusingly of Poulton) inherited most of the former Brodbelt estate, which included the windmill site, from his brother Edmund Singleton. Haybers Fields were described in deeds pertaining to the Brodbelt estate as being situated in the southwest of Norbreck.
Right, that’s the important bit. You almost missed it, didn’t you? (I can’t say as I blame you. Even I’m having difficulty staying awake.)
The southwest of Norbreck! That’s the end of Norbreck Road, next to the castle, right?
Well, no…that’s wrong actually. That’s the extent of Norbreck nowadays, but originally the southwest corner of Norbreck was designated as Hesketh Avenue, a boundary that, despite being well and truly planted in Bispham today, was agreed upon by the Ordnance Survey back in Victorian times.
Let’s have a Victorian photograph of Hesketh Avenue then, just to get our bearings. (I know Hesketh Avenue well, having lived there many years ago, although I probably knew the Highlands pub better.)

Just to add to the confirmation of Norbreck’s extent back in those days, Alexander’s son Edmund inherited the estate in 1768 and bought up the rest of the Brodbelt lands, including Cradley Slack Farm (now opposite Sainsbury’s on the other side of Red Bank Road) and a field called Whinny at the end of Beaufort Avenue, all described as being at the southern end of Norbreck.

A quick photograph of Beaufort Avenue for you, and then we’ll move on:

So, now that we’ve established that the southern extremity of the Brodbelt Estate was Redbank Road, this suggests that Norbreck Mill originally stood on the cliffs, where the Haybers Tenements had originally stood, somewhere close to where the Bispham Tram shelter now stands. As far as we know Bispham never actually had its own mill, probably because this particular location was ideally situated to serve both communities.
Mystery solved (in our opinion at least).
Of course, if anybody out there believes they know different...