Brick makers at Walkern by Anthony Camp

[From the June/July 2005 issue of the Walkern Journal]
The first brickmaker that I have found mentioned in Walkern was John Baker who leased two cottages in Frog Hall Lane in 1695 and mortgaged them for £25 in 1700 and again in 1701. He sold them to Anthony Warner in 1703 for £37. Anthony (the ancestor of the present Warner families in Walkern) was also a brickmaker and, as his mother was born Grace Baker, he was perhaps a nephew of John Baker. He died in 1754 and his son, Francis Warner, who followed the same trade, continued to live in one of the cottages until 1753 but died in the workhouse in 1785.

It looks as though George Andrews took over the brick field from Francis Warner. He appears in the lists of those eligible to serve in the Militia as a bricklayer in 1758, and then as a brickmaker, 1759-62. He was described as infirm in 1762 and was buried at Walkern in February 1766. George Andrews the Younger, also a brickmaker, perhaps his son, was buried in November that same year.

A few years later, in 1779, the Rector of Walkern, Elias Thackeray, compiled details of the tithes which he expected to collect in the parish. These show that Thomas Ives, of Walkern, paid a tithe of seven shillings a year on the ‘Brick Yard’, a payment equivalent to that on about two acres of land. Thomas Ives, who died in 1780, was not himself a brickmaker but a baker.

Throughout this period the Spriggins family acted as bricklayers. John Spriggins the elder, the first of the name, married Ann Wawby at Walkern in 1675. He died in 1720, describing himself in his will as a bricklayer, and leaving his son John, another bricklayer, his cottage in the High Street with its barn and outhouses, his feather bed and a pair of sheets, and ‘all my workeing tools haire and tile pins’. He left his grandson, also called John, his ‘best great coat’.

Several of his descendants were bricklayers or, as was typical of the period, shared bricklaying with another occupation. By the time of the 1841 census, however, only Thomas Spriggins, who also kept a beer shop, and his nephew John Spriggins were working bricklayers. John continued as a bricklayer into the 1870s when there were five bricklayers in the parish. In the 1850s and 1860s these included Henry Elliott who was also the landlord at the Yew Tree. The Aylotts were nearly all carpenters and I have not found any of them described as bricklayers.

Quite who was making the bricks at Walkern in the first half of the 19th century is not clear and it is possible that brick making was not actively carried on then. However, it had revived by the late 1860s when the young Thomas Estwick, who was born at Cardington in Bedfordshire about 1832, came to Walkern. To start with he and his wife kept a shop in the High Street but by 1871 he was an established brickmaker, employing two young men, William Warner and Arthur Hancock, and a boy, the 12 year old David Clements. By 1874 his rented house and the brick and lime kiln on Travis Hill together had a rateable value of more than £12 which gave him the right to vote. He lived latterly at Montague House and died in 1919 aged 83. This William Warner is the grandfather mentioned in the interview with Fred Warner.

Thomas Estwick’s son Amos, who was born in 1868, assisted his father, but had retired by 1939 when he was living at Maybank. He died in 1957 aged 89. By the time that the Birdsall children came as evacuees to Walkern in the War, the brick fields were already overgrown and had just been planted with fir trees, but the deep pond was a favourite haunt, as James Birdsall described so lovingly in his book, The Boys and the Butterflies, about his childhood at Walkern.