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Thurlby
The nave of St Firmin's Church
The village of Thurlby straddles the A15 two miles south of Bourne.
One thousand years of history are reflected in the village church and 1,000 more
in the Car Dyke which runs nearby, a reminder of the Roman occupation of
Britain. The name is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Turolvebi
but by 1207 it had become Thurleby, meaning
Thorulf's farmstead or village.
A substantial private house built in the High Street during the 19th century was bequeathed by the owner to the Youth Hostels Association which runs a chain of similar hostels throughout England and Wales and was eventually used for that purpose, accommodating visitors from all over the world arriving to see the sights of Lincolnshire. The house called Capstone was opened as a hostel on the May Day Bank Holiday, Monday 4th May 1981, by Mr Hedley Alcock, national treasurer of the YHA, and provided accommodation for 30 overnight visitors in three dormitories. There was also a kitchen for them to cook their meals, a comfortable common room, a small shop, drying room, shower and other facilities and spacious grounds.
The property, predominantly Georgian and Victorian in style, was built on the site of a 15th century blacksmith's forge. It was left to the association in the will of Mr Harry Garwood Sneath, a prominent farmer and businessman who died in February 1979 and whose family had lived there since 1862. He also left £4,000 towards the cost of converting the house for its new role, work that was carried out by local building contractors although the decorating, equipping and fitting out was appropriately completed by youngsters employed under the government's Youth Opportunities Programme.
The grounds originally covered 1½ acres but a large area was later sold off by the YHA for residential development and in March 2002, it was announced that the house itself was to close as a hostel at the end of the summer season and sold as part of a cost-cutting exercise in the wake of the recent foot and mouth crisis which caused a dramatic drop in tourism and countryside activities the previous year and resulted in a £5 million shortfall in their business nationwide.
The decision provoked an outcry in the village and elsewhere because the closure was not in keeping with the wishes of Mr Sneath who bequeathed the house and would also affect travellers seeking overnight accommodation and businesses in the village and services in the area. After protracted negotiations, a rescue deal was worked out in conjunction with South Kesteven District Council and Lincolnshire County Council and refurbishment work began in the summer of 2005 at a cost of £250,000 with an expected completion by the spring of 2006. When finished, the new look hostel will have 30 bedrooms with additional facilities for the disabled and extra car parking space. County council project manager David Woods explained: "We are turning the building from a basic hostel into something that offers accommodation in smaller, more private rooms and which will carry at least a three-star rating. The facility will then be leased back to the YHA."
The church can be found on the other side of the A15 and is tucked away in a lane alongside the Car Dyke, well maintained and surrounded by a spacious churchyard with the west windows overlooking the fens. The tower may well have Saxon origins and could have been built as a fortress as well as a sanctuary and the patron saint is St. Firmin, first bishop of Amiens who was martyred early in the 4th century, and Thurlby is one of the few churches with his name. A restoration programme for the church windows began in 1992 and the east window has just been completed at a cost of almost £5,000. This window with its intricate decoration of Victorian stained glass was originally installed in 1860 by Thomas Cook Hubbard of Thurlby Grange in memory of his ancestors and his two wives Sarah and Mary.
In 2005, major improvements were made to the church at a cost of £110,000 provided by local fund-raising and financial assistance from the Historic Churches Preservation Trust. The building was closed for three months from September while the work proceeded. It included the restoration of woodwork, including the replacement of the Victorian pews, which had been affected by dry rot, with chairs, the installation of an under floor heating system and the replacement of the wooden floor by traditional flagstones. The church re-opened in December with a service of blessing and re-dedication by the Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Rev John Saxbee.
See also Pews in our parish churches
Thurlby Manor is situated to the south west of the church and is now divided into two dwellings separated by a hedge. The lower central section dates back to the early 17th century and the east wing is early Georgian with moulded and keystoned windows and a comfortable looking Restoration type of roof. On the front of this wing is a tall, arched stairlight and on the east front a protruding chimneybreast. The north front is symmetrical: two bays, two storeys and quoins. The entrance in the centre wing suggests a normal 17th century plan. The west wing was rebuilt after a fire in 1878. In the garden there is a pleasant vernacular barn with steps leading up to the loft. During the 1970s, the house was the home of the brothers Arthur and Noel Ward whose grandfather bought it 60 years before from the Earl of Ancaster. Mr Arthur Ward was a keen collector of everything connected with horses having a room entirely devoted to harness, amulets and figures of horses.
The earliest record of a school at Thurlby is 1585 but a church school was built in 1853 and attended by eighty pupils. A house was also built for the schoolmaster and funded voluntarily with grants from various sources including the Provost and Fellows of Eton College who were patrons of the living of Thurlby (£25) and the Baillie stained glass works in London which had made windows for the church (£5) while other fund raising came from amateur concerts in the schoolroom and by 1862 the debt had been reduced to only £20 which was cleared soon afterwards. The heating conditions at the school were poor and as a result of the Education Act of 1870, a new building was erected, controlled by a board of local parishioners. It was called the Board School and opened in 1878. In these days when it is frowned upon to smack our own children and it may son be made illegal, we can learn a lesson from the conditions that existed here. The standard of punishment for bad behaviour was severe and varied according to the offence and usually consisted of several strokes of the cane by heavy handed schoolteachers exasperated by the wayward conduct of their pupils who would rather have been out in the fields and the fresh air than confined to their slates to learn the three R's. Discipline was strictly enforced in this manner from the opening of the school until World War I when less rigorous methods were introduced.
The 19th century buildings were replaced by the present village school in the late 1980s when the old school premises were sold off by Lincolnshire County Council. The actual school room and playground were demolished and cleared and new houses built on the site but the school house where the headmaster lived, which is pictured above, was turned into a private house, as it is today, and a stone tablet has been preserved on the gable end recording that it was erected during 1877. Both properties were built with the yellow bricks much favoured by the mid-Victorians although the original blue roof slates that were also used for such buildings have recently been replaced on the house by modern tiles. Villagers still remember the old school as a large building with an assembly hall at the front, a corridor running its entire length and classrooms and a kitchen leading off, with the large playground at the rear, and there is much sadness that such a fine Victorian building was allowed to disappear in this way.
Schools today provide facilities and freedoms undreamed of by those generations of children who attended this school at Thurlby and so the building that remains is not only part of the village's heritage but also a reminder of the changing conditions for the education of our children over the years.
Methodism was introduced into the village around 1810 by the Hayes family and for the first twenty years, services were held in cottages and barns. A Sunday School was started in 1830 and the first Wesleyan chapel was built in 1832 to hold 150 people on a site in the High Street given by the Jackson family who worked as blacksmiths and shoemakers. The total cost of the building was £311 12s. 8d. which included £1 5s. 0d. to dig out the foundations. By 1851, there were 60 adults at Sunday afternoon services and 40 in the evenings. The singing was at first accompanied by a small orchestra consisting of string and woodwind instruments, such as oboe, cello and violin, but a pipe organ was installed in 1852 and later a harmonium, succeeded in 1902 by an organ.
The present red brick Methodist Chapel was built in the High Street in 1912 when the old one was deemed to be unsafe and a new site was donated by Sir John Lawrence. The building was designed in the Gothic style by William Hinson of Stamford and had room for 250 people with a schoolroom and two vestries and was built by Mr F Brutnell of Thurlby at a total cost of £853 11s. 1d. A stone laying was held on 12th June 1912 and a jar was placed in the foundations containing copies of Methodist documents and local newspapers. The chapel was opened on 15th November that year by the Rev F Luke Wiseman, president of the Methodist Conference. A new church hall was built in 1977 at a cost of £10,000 and the Thurlby society continues to thrive.
There was however a split in Methodism in the village in the early 1850s when the Reformers, as they became known, broke away from the mainstream congregation and after holding meetings in a barn in Whitechapel Row, built their own chapel in 1861 on a site bought from John Fields for £25. It was constructed at a cost of £280 with the distinctive yellow brick façade, red brick side walls and blue slate roof used in other village chapels in the area, notably that in Dyke village, and became known as the "Top Chapel" because of its situation in the top end of the village. A schoolroom was added at the rear in 1903 and continued in existence until 1970 when the trustees decided that Thurlby was not large enough to support two Methodist chapels and the Top Chapel closed. The building was left standing empty for several years when it was sold for residential development and the new owners have turned it into a home that has been given the name Kirktom House although they have left much of the exterior intact.
The village once had its own railway station on the Essendine and Bourne branch of the Great Northern Railway but it has since closed and is now a council depot and all that remains is the platform. (See box below).
REVISED JANUARY 2006
See also Henry Andrews Sneath John Elwes Noble Marjorie Noble MBE
Sir Malcolm Sargent at the organ of Thurlby church
For details of the 1916 Airship Disaster at Thurlby see Dr John Gilpin
For
details of the Thurlby Total Abstinence Society
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