Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

On my usual Sunday run – along the canal, the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation, to Meadowhall, then up the long steep hill to Kimberworth church and back down, and up again and down, to Rotherham – on a rare cooler day, a cloudy August morning, in the third heatwave of an endless summer, I stop briefly in Masbrough, beside Rotherham’s ring road, to part the head-high branches of a water-deprived London plane, and find the unassuming brick box that is the Walker Mausoleum.

Resembling in its size the Hampton Court ice house in Home Park, it was made of red bricks in the Flemish bond pattern, with quoins of ashlar sandstone, though not of the local soft-pink Rotherham Red variety out of which many of the town’s finest buildings, including its forbidding minster, were built. It contains the remains of 23 members of Samuel Walker’s family, including the man himself who died in 1782, with the last internment dated to 1855. With his customary certainty, Pevsner wrote that Samuel ‘died in 1783 [sic], but the architecture of the austere little building is too Grecian for so early a date’.

The Walker brothers – Jonathan, Samuel and Aaron – were sons of a nail-maker from Grenoside, a village whose curious name means ‘quarried hill’ in Anglo-Saxon, six miles to the west in what is now north-east Sheffield. As they surfed the waves of the Industrial Revolution, they made their fortunes as ironmasters. A schoolmaster who moonlighted as a surveyor and sundial maker, Samuel gave up teaching and threw in his lot with his brothers to manufacture furnaces and other premises and equipment for the iron and steel industry, including, in 1746, a major works, powered by the Don, a little upstream at Holmes.

Hand in glove with their moneymaking enterprise went their Methodism. Samuel and Aaron were early converts to the Great Awakening of the 1730s and ’40s, the Christian revival promoted by, inter alia, the Wesleys and George Whitfield. Whitfield’s more Calvinist branch of Methodism was more to their taste than the Wesleys’ Arminianism: predestination rather than free will. In 1763, they built the now vanished Masborough Independent Chapel in whose grounds the mausoleum stands. Functioning as a place of worship until almost the end of the last millennium, it became a carpet warehouse before fire damage led to its demolition in 2012. It had a close connection with Rotherham Independent Academy, a Congregationalist seminary founded in 1795, which moved in 1876 to the Gothic fort-like building on Moorgate Road that now houses a well-regarded sixth-form and adult education centre, Thomas Rotherham College, named after a late-15^th Century Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England.

At the top of one of the many hills overlooking the town, Samuel’s son Joshua built Clifton House – designed by John Carr, architect of Buxton Crescent, Harewood House, racecourse grandstands, prisons and much else – in the year his father died. Within this modest Georgian pile Rotherham’s excellent museum, gallery and archival study room are accommodated. Pevsner called it the ‘most ambitious’ of several such houses built locally in that period. The grounds which surround the house are a fine example of civic park landscaping, designed by upstanding Victorian aldermen to provide leisure activity for the town’s workers and their families as an alternative to drinking. It still admirably fulfils that function, with a recently upgraded watersplash play area, a magnet for children throughout this drought summer, plus crazy golf, rides, a sandpit and a splendid 1928 bandstand that is criminally underused. In three weeks’ time, the annual Rotherham Show will fill the park for a weekend celebrating the diversity and identity of the town through music, circus, other performance, stalls aplenty and, best of all, the fruit and veg produce display, prizes awarded in categories galore.

The mausoleum has been rendered even less prepossessing than Pevsner’s description, by the covering-up of the windows with boards painted racing-green, which, despite the building’s listed status, lend it an air not so much of abandonment as wilful apathy on the part of its supposèd protectors. What’s left of the adjacent burial ground of the erstwhile chapel is more desperate still: gravestones are overgrown, illegible and, in some cases, smashed. On the pedestal of the last remaining obelisk these words from the King James version of 1 Corinthians 15:52 are written in capitals, ‘for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible and we shall be changed’. Among such waste land, it is the dead who will more likely be changed; turned to despondency, if not justifiable fury, at the rack and ruin into which their graves have fallen.

I take a few photos with my phone and resume my run, the overcast skies as sombre as the plight of the mausoleum and burial ground.

Later, on typing into the search engine, here, of the UCL database of British slavers and investors in slavery the names of the Walker clan, I find, to my pleasant surprise and relief, that none of them are listed there.