Thunderstruck

In the late 19^th century, Nelson Place, a small undistinguished back street in the Wellington estate to the east of Hanley town centre, was home to a flint mill owned by a Mr George Edwards. It was a small establishment that ground flint for the pottery industry and was just one of many similar works that were dotted around the Potteries, all part of a larger infrastructure that fed into the manufacture of ceramics. There was the mill itself and its out-buildings, plus some stables where several horses belonging to a carter named George Flower were housed at the time, Mr Flower himself living further down the street at number 40 Nelson Place. The mill’s main feature, though, was a fine chimney that had been erected half a century earlier, which in size and dimensions was said to be a copy of Pompey’s Pillar, a Roman triumphal column in Alexandria, Egypt. Whether it was a true copy of the famous column - complete with square base and Corinthian capital - or was simply an 88 feet tall tubular shaft is not made clear, but it was a notable landmark in the surrounding streets, at least that is, until the night of Wednesday 8 November 1882.

It had rained heavily in Hanley all afternoon and into the evening, the rain driven in hard by a heavy gale that had caused serious damage elsewhere in the Potteries. In Stoke, the roof of the parish church had been partially torn up by the wind and dashed down onto the north side of the church. This in turn had knocked down some of the decorative masonry on the roof, which was smashed to pieces when it hit the floor, destroying a gravestone as it did so. In Burslem, it was the culmination of a couple of days of variable weather, a frost on Tuesday had given way to a fall of snow on Wednesday morning, then a hail storm in the early afternoon which transformed into a full-blown thunderstorm in the evening, with an incredible play of lightning in the sky.

This seems to have been the same storm that rolled in over Hanley late on Wednesday evening. The Staffordshire Sentinel reported, ‘Such a disturbance of the elements has not been known in the town for very many years, the nearest approach to it, perhaps, being during a heavy storm which took place about forty years ago, when the Old Wind-mill was struck.’

The lightning was unusually vivid throughout the storm, particularly one flash which occurred shortly after 10 p.m., the thunderclap that came with it being likened to a short, sharp volley of artillery. People who were out of doors, were staggered by the flash, the noise and the rush of air that hit them. Police Sergeant Jones of the Hanley Borough police, on duty at the lower end of Charles Street, was bowled over by the shock, but not physically hurt.

The cause was a massive lightning strike that hit the chimney of the flint mill and blew it apart as if a bomb had exploded. A mass of bricks fell straight down onto the nearby stables, killing and burying two of the three unlucky horses housed there and seriously injuring the third. Debris was scattered over a wide area, the houses nearest to the mill taking the brunt of the damage, with every window broken, while a finger of the lightning had entered a house at the top of the street, struck a cupboard and destroyed its contents, consisting of crockery, which was scattered around the room. On other homes, chimney pots were gone, rain spouts and gutters were missing, and tiles were blown off the roofs. Indeed, scarcely a house in Nelson Place escaped damage. Telephone lines were brought down in the street and pieces of brick from the collapse chimney were hurled great distances. Some smashed back windows in Hassall Street, while the cross was knocked off the west end of St Luke’s Church and holes were made in the roof. The lightning blast also seems to have done some damage to J. and R. Hammersley’s pot bank at the bottom of Hassall Road, but to what extent is unknown.

Today, such an event would garner intense press attention, but for papers in the late 19^th century where news tended to be presented in a digest form, the reportage was restrained to a relatively small account the day after and a repeat of the story at the weekend. As a result it is impossible to go into any more detail on what the overall effect was on the area. The destruction to the Nelson Place mill was considerable, the once admired chimney was now just a mass of broken rubble. Estimates placed the damage at about £300 (nearly £32,000 in 2026), a massive sum for a small business to shoulder. Thankfully, no one was killed or injured save for the horses and only on that subject was there anything further in the paper. The death of the two horses and the injuries to the third had robbed George Flower of his only source of income and a couple of days after the storm, a letter written by one Edwin J. Hammersley appeared in the Sentinel, making an appeal on Mr Flower’s behalf. Describing the carter as ‘one of the most industrious and persevering working-men in the borough’ he proposed a subscription fund to help Mr Flower in his distress. Headed by the Mayor Mr John Emery, who acted as treasurer, this soon gained legs and numerous manufacturers, neighbours and most of the workforce of Hammersley’s factory chipped in. So successful was the appeal, that by 20 November an additional letter to the paper announced that so much had been collected that George Flower was now nearly fully compensated for his losses. Certainly, nine years later in the 1891 census, he was still listed as a carter at 40 Nelson Place.

That was all that was written about the lightning strike that demolished Nelson Place’s most distinctive landmark, but what of the flint mill itself? Well, that too seems to have literally ridden out the storm, trade directories indicating that George Edwards continued to do business as a flint grinder in Nelson Place, certainly up until 1912. At some point between then and the 1940s, though, the mill ceased working and was finally demolished and the land cleared, much to the delight of the local kids, who adopted it as a playground, known simply as ‘The Mill’. One of those children was my own father, who told me many tales of life in the street, of it’s people and it’s buildings, but he seems to have been completely unaware of that dramatic night six decades before he was born when the sky fell in on Nelson Place.

Reference: The Staffordshire Sentinel, Thursday, 9 November 1882, p.3; Friday, 10 November 1882, p.3; Monday, 20 November 1882, p.3.

The Great Storm of 1872

Being situated in such a hilly region, widespread flooding is a rarity in Stoke-on-Trent, but occasionally chance extremes of weather have briefly put parts of the area under water. One startling weather event occurred on the afternoon of Sunday, 7 July 1872, when what the Staffordshire Advertiser described as 'a thunderstorm of great severity', struck the Potteries. Though it only lasted an hour and a half, it was so fierce that it left in its wake many dozens of flooded or damaged properties and a somewhat shell-shocked populace. Considering the violence of the storm and the damage it caused, remarkably few people were injured, though it seems there were many close calls.

It had been cloudy all day, but in the afternoon the sky began to grow much darker presaging a storm, the light becoming so dim that newspapers could only be read near to windows or by candle or gas light. The dark clouds then gave way to ones with a strange yellow tint to them and it was then that it started to rain, not in drops, but as a veritable deluge driven in by a fierce wind and accompanied by loud claps of thunder and multiple bolts of lightning. In Hanley there was one very alarming event when a bolt of lightning passed through the Primitive Methodist school room in Frederick Street (now Gitana Street), entering by one window and out through another. The only damage was a scorched paint board on the front of the building, but the room had been full of children when the lightning shot through and these now fled the room in panic. They had to descend a flight of stairs to get out of the building and while none had been injured by the lightning, several now fell and were trampled underfoot and bruised in the crush, though none of them seriously. 

During a service at Shelton Church, it rained so heavily that water forced its way through the roof and poured down into the building in streams. Buckets had to be brought to catch the water and the noise produced during the saying of the litany is said to have made for a very curious sound. Elsewhere in town, the lobbies of Bethesda Chapel in Old Hall Street were flooded, so too were numerous houses in town, notably in Nelson Place where part of the road nearby carrying a tramway was washed away. In Hanover Street, the downpour lifted stones up out of the road and deposited them at the bottom of Hope Street, where a heap big enough to fill two barrows was collected. The bottom end of Hope Street itself flooded, filling the cellars with up to a foot of water, floating heavy beer barrels in a brewery and boxes of live chickens in one house. The damage done to yards and gardens was tremendous. Nor were the local pot banks immune. The Cauldon Place works were flooded, though no serious damage was caused. Hanley's satellite villages were likewise hard hit. At Basford a lightning bolt shot down a chimney and blew away a portion of a mantle shelf in one of the rooms; Etruria saw dozens of properties flooded, as too did Bucknall, where the water rushing down the roads and through the houses quickly threw the Trent into spate, causing it to overflow. This caused enormous damage on the low-lying ground of the neighbouring Finney Gardens where Bucknall Park now stands, some of the walks, plants and flowers being washed away by the sudden inundation. 

Probably in no other part of the Potteries were the effects the storm so severe than in Burslem. Reporters on the scene shortly afterwards noted that even the oldest inhabitants had never before witnessed such a tempest, one stating that the rain 'came down in bucketfuls'. The rain here was particularly heavy and for more than an hour the thunder and lightning was incessant and at one point the wind rose to a terrible pitch causing major damage in several places. On the Recreation Ground (where the old Queens Theatre now stands), Snape's Theatre, a temporary structure of wood and canvas which had been constructed for the town's wakes week, was in a matter of minutes blasted to smithereens. A number of the thickest supports were splintered like matchwood and many of the rafters and seats were destroyed, while the canvas roof was torn to shreds as the wind hit it. Mr Snape was a veteran travelling showman, well liked in the district and there was a great deal of local sympathy for him over his losses. In the aftermath of the storm a fund was set up, subscriptions to which would hopefully help him in repairing the serious losses he had sustained. 

The Big House, Burslem.

Just down the road from where Snape's Theatre was taking a battering, part of an eight-foot tall wall between a timber Yard and the Big House was knocked down by the wind and rain, the accumulated flood water then rushed through the ground floor of the Big House with great force, blowing the front door open and then pouring in a stream down the turnpike road. 

At the Roebuck Inn in Wedgwood Place, the violence of the rainstorm split some of the roof tiles, causing a mass of water to cascade into the upper rooms, then down the stairs and out through the front doors. The Town Hall too received a soaking, the basement of which was flooded to a depth of three feet, which caused no end of problems for the hall keeper and his wife who had the job of clearing it all out. Likewise the row of houses in Martin's Hole – literally a hole or hollow near the Newcastle Road, where the roofs of the houses were on a level with the road – 'presented a truly pitiable appearance', the buildings being flooded to a depth of four and a half feet, ruining food stores and furniture and forcing the luckless inhabitants to seek shelter on the upper floor. 

Almost everywhere else it was the same story with only slight variations. Longport received a severe visitation with most of the houses flooded to several feet. At Middleport the canal overflowed adding to the chaos. At Tunstall, water poured into the police station and several houses doing much damage. In Smallthorne numerous houses were flooded and smaller items of furniture were flushed out of the doors and sent floating down the street. At Dresden as well as the numerous flooded properties, the road at the lower end of the village was split apart by the storm, leaving it looking for all the world as if it had been heavily ploughed, which made it impassable to traffic and men had to be brought in to make repairs. In Stoke, Fenton and Dresden as in Burslem, many householders were forced briefly to live upstairs as their ground floors filled up, sometimes as high as the ceiling. Longton too suffered torrential rain and likewise had some flooding, but saw much less material damage, though at one pot bank the downpour extinguished the fires in their kilns. 

Then the storm passed, leaving the Potteries in a battered state that it would take several days to recover from. That evening another storm broke overhead, but this turned out to be a much less severe event and caused no more serious problems.

Reference: Birmingham Daily Post, Tuesday 9 July 1872, p.5; Staffordshire Advertiser, Saturday 13 July 1872, p.5.