A Sparkle In His Eyes

Thomas Thorpe (c.1807–1888)

In the autumn of 1852, two Methodist ministers walked back into an old barn near the River Leen, on the northern edge of Nottingham.

The barn stood by the path leading up to Bulwell’s parish church, and the congregation had been meeting there for years — cramped, provisional, making do. That afternoon the ministers had been at Bulwell Hall, negotiating with the Reverend Alfred Padley, Lord of the Manor and rector of the parish, for a piece of land on which to build a proper chapel. Nobody expected much. Padley was Church of England, protective of his parish, and the elder of the two ministers had said on the way there that he had little faith in the interview. What happened instead surprised everyone. Padley not only agreed but told them to take more land than they had asked for, and his steward, acting on instructions, doubled the quantity they had ventured to mark out.

When the ministers returned to the barn with the news, a cobbler named Thomas Gent stamped his wooden leg on the floor and exclaimed “Glory be to God!” Across the room, a tall, straight-backed man in his mid-forties said nothing at all. He didn’t need to. The Reverend H.B. Kendall, writing sixty years later from the memory of people who had been in that barn, recorded simply that “the sparkle in the eyes of Mr. Thorpe spoke volumes.”

The River Leen at Bulwell. The stone bridge, built in 1833, still stands

Halam to Bulwell

Thomas Thorpe was baptised on 5 April 1807 at St Michael’s Church in Halam, a small village near Southwell in the Nottinghamshire countryside — quiet country, fieldwork and farmsteads, the soft roll of the Trent valley to the south, the great minster at Southwell visible on clear days from the higher ground. His parents William and Elizabeth had married in Nottingham in 1797 and moved through several villages in the years that followed, baptising their children at Bulwell, then Oxton, then Halam. Thomas’s sisters had converged on Bulwell in the early 1820s, marrying there within months of one another. When Thomas followed them south, probably around the same time, he was joining a family already putting down roots in the hosiery districts — not striking out alone, but arriving as part of a broader family movement toward the trade.

Framework knitting had been woven into the fabric of the county for two centuries. It produced stockings, gloves, and lace on hand-operated frames, and by Thomas’s childhood it employed tens of thousands of people across Nottingham and its surrounding villages, most of them working not in factories but in their own cottages or small frame-shops, renting their machines from hosiers who also bought back the finished goods at prices largely of their own setting. The smell of oil and sizing — the starchy paste used to dress the yarn — was part of the air in any street where the trade was concentrated, and the rhythmic clatter of the frames was the sound of whole neighbourhoods at work, audible through walls and open windows in all but the depths of winter.

A man works at a stocking frame, c1880

By the time Thomas was four or five, that dependency had curdled into open revolt. In the winter of 1811, framework knitters across Nottinghamshire began smashing the wide-framed machines they blamed for destroying their livelihoods — working under cover of darkness, organised and disciplined, calling themselves the followers of the mythical Ned Ludd. The army was deployed to effect a brutal crackdown. The Frame Breaking Act of 1812 made the offence capital. Trials were held in Nottingham, and Luddite men were hanged and transported. Among those convicted of framebreaking was a Bulwell man named Joseph Falconbridge, sentenced to seven years.

The movement was suppressed within two years, but the conditions that produced it were not. The frameworks kept turning, the grievances remained, and the communities that had organised one kind of resistance began quietly building another. It was into this world that Thomas Thorpe came to Bulwell.

The Barn by the Leen

Primitive Methodism had also come to Bulwell, carried by a travelling woman preacher named Sarah Kirkland in 1816. She had been riding south after attending a Camp Meeting on Nottingham Forest — an extraordinary gathering estimated at twelve thousand people — when an urgent message turned her back toward Bulwell. That same night she preached from a cart fixed in the middle of a field to hundreds of people gathered in the dark. Services were held first in the house of a dyer named Gent, one of the town’s first converts, and later in the old barn by the River Leen, its benches filling on Sunday evenings with framework knitters and their families.

Thomas is not recorded among this founding generation – he was still a child when Kirkland came to Bulwell. But by 6 February 1826, when he married Sarah West at the parish Church, he was settled enough to have built a social world there. Sarah’s father was a shoemaker, her family embedded in the same trades and streets as the congregation gathering by the Leen. Her brother John had connections to the international lace trade and would spend several years working near Caen in Normandy before returning to Bulwell in the early 1830s — part of the web of Nottinghamshire textile workers whose skills crossed the Channel as readily as the goods they made.

Bulwell Old Church, where Thomas and Sarah married and baptised most of their 9 children. It was demolished and replaced in 1850

The 1830s brought children in steady succession, the household growing around a trade that the records of those years confirm Thomas was now working at directly — a framework knitter living on Royal Forest Street, one of a community of men doing the same work in the same conditions. Almost every household on the street had someone at the frames. The clatter of the machines carried through the walls of the terraced cottages, the smell of sizing drifting through open doors in summer. It was the sound and smell of the whole neighbourhood’s livelihood, and it was precarious.

Nos. 1-27, The Old Buildings, Forest Side. The street where Thomas was living in 1841. Image taken in 1917. © picturenottingham.co.uk

The 1830s brought political ferment to the hosiery districts alongside the daily struggle with discontent channelled through petitions and mass meetings rather than the hammers of the previous generation. Bulwell men played their part in the Chartist riots — a fact still remembered in the town long afterwards. The movement drew from the same communities as the chapels, the same habits of collective organisation, the same conviction that ordinary men had a right to be heard. Thomas left no discernible trace in any of it. His energy went elsewhere.

Chartist Riots. Engraving by Alfred Pearse from an 1886 book

A Growing Presence

By 1851 Thomas was a framesmith and glovemaker, his household on Hutchinson’s Lane a working unit: his son-in-law Samuel Jennison also a framesmith, son Lot following him into the trade, daughter Mary working as a dressmaker, the younger children still at school. He was in his mid-forties, the trajectory of his working life beginning to diverge from those of his neighbours who remained at the frame.

He was also, by this point, one of the senior figures in the Primitive Methodist congregation. That year he completed the Religious Census return for the chapel in his own hand, signing it as “Elder” — the document recording 146 sittings and 140 people filling them on a typical Sunday evening. It was a congregation that had outgrown its provisional home, and the following year came the announcement that would change that.

The 1851 census return for the original Bulwell Primitive Methodist Chapel, erected before 1826. Completed by ‘Elder’ Thomas Thorpe

The path to a permanent building had not been straightforward. The man whose permission was needed — Padley, simultaneously Lord of the Manor and parish rector — was not an obvious ally. The two ministers sent to negotiate had armed themselves with a copy of Horace Mann’s report on the 1851 Religious Census, in which Mann had described Nonconformist congregations as preparation for the more refined worship of the Church of England. The Superintendent showed this passage to Padley — who said he had been unaware of it. When the answer came back, it was better than anyone had dared hope — land freely given, and doubled in quantity on Padley’s own instruction.

The return to the barn, Thomas Gent’s wooden leg on the floor, the eyes that needed no words — all of it passed into the memory of the congregation and was still being told eighty years later. Padley died in May 1856, four years after the chapel opened, having given more than anyone had asked. The community he had unexpectedly aided continued without him, its lay leadership now organised and confident.

In the summer of 1857 the Primitive Methodists of Bulwell staged a public procession through the village — flags and banners, the Bulwell Brass Band, more than two hundred scholars sitting down to tea in the chapel. Thomas Thorpe walked at the head of the procession alongside Joseph Wilson and Thomas Faulconbridge, the lame shoemaker and earnest local preacher whom Robert Mellors, writing from living memory in 1914, would name among the small group of men who had made the Bulwell cause what it was. At the Forest, Faulconbridge gave an address to a large congregation before the procession turned back through the streets to the chapel and the waiting tea. That Thomas’s name appeared first in the newspaper’s account of the day, ahead of Wilson and Faulconbridge, reflected what everyone in Bulwell already knew.

A Sunday School procession in Bulwell of the type led by Thomas. This image from c1900. © picturenottingham.co.uk

Hempshill Lane

By 1861 the occupational shift was complete. Thomas was a hosier and framesmith on Hempshill Lane, his younger children working as framesmiths and stocking framework knitters alongside him. He was organising the trade now rather than working inside it in the old way — dealing in what other men’s frames produced, employing and advancing credit, his name appearing in White’s Directory under two separate headings, as framesmith and as glove manufacturer. He had come from the bottom of that system and worked his way to its middle, at a time when the trade itself was beginning its long decline under pressure from steam-powered machinery and the shifting economics of the mid-Victorian textile industry.

The family had consolidated into a small cluster on and around Hempshill Lane — Thomas in his house with the frame-shop, his son Thomas junior nearby, Lot keeping a public house a short distance away. Three generations of Thorpes within a few hundred yards of one another, their working lives intertwined with the properties they occupied.

In 1869 Thomas appeared before the magistrates at Nottingham as a character witness for one of his workers, James Mellors, accused of stealing matches from a barber. Thomas told the court he had trusted Mellors with hundreds of pounds and would trust him with a thousand. The magistrates discharged the prisoner, citing his good character. It was a small episode, but it caught something about how Thomas operated in the world — direct, confident in his own judgement, willing to put his name behind a man he believed in.

The prosperity of the decade was real but it carried losses. In the spring of 1870, Lot fell ill at the Green in Bulwell. Heart disease and dropsy, the illness running for nearly three weeks before he died on 8 April, aged thirty-seven. A few weeks earlier his daughter Clara had died, aged thirteen. Father and child, within the same season. Lot left behind his wife Mary Ann and three surviving children. Thomas was sixty-two.

By 1871 the house on Hempshill Lane was quieter. Only Sarah remained at home, working as a glove stitcher alongside Thomas — described in the census that year as a glove manufacturer employing six men and a Primitive Methodist Vocal Preacher, both facts recorded side by side as though they were simply two aspects of the same life, which by then they were.

1871 census return showing Thomas, 64, glove manufacturer employing 6 men and Primitive Methodist Vocal Preacher

Owner of Land

In February 1872 Thomas voted in the North Nottinghamshire Election — Liberal, in the Basford Polling District — the first such election in twenty-five years. His candidate, Thomas Laycock, lost to the Conservative, but the vote placed Thomas within the broad tradition of working-class Nonconformist Liberalism that had grown from the same soil as Primitive Methodism, the political expression of communities that had spent decades organising themselves outside the established church and the established order. The man who had marched with flags and banners in 1857 and the man who voted Liberal in 1872 were making the same statement in different languages.

The following year he appeared on the Return of Owners of Land, recorded as holding just under three acres in Bulwell. The framework knitter of the 1830s had become a landowner.

By 1875 he appeared on the Primitive Methodist Preachers’ Plan for the Nottingham Second Circuit as preacher, circuit committee member, and Society Steward for both the Bulwell chapel and the Bulwell Mission Buildings — a second site suggesting the congregation had grown beyond what the 1852 building could hold.

1875 Preachers’ Plan for the Nottingham Second Circuit, showing Mr T. Thorpe as both a Society Steward at Bulwell and a preacher on the circuit

In October 1876 he made his will. Eleven freehold dwellinghouses — Victoria Cottages on Byron Street near the Forest — together with two more houses on Hempshill Lane, workshops, a stable, and land enough to build four more. The rents were left in trust for Sarah during her lifetime, and after her death to be divided equally among his surviving children, with one share set aside for Lot’s three children, held until they came of age. How Thomas had assembled this portfolio from a single rented house in the 1830s is not fully documented, but the properties along Hempshill Lane and Byron Street represented the accumulated choices of forty years in a trade and a town he had made his own.

Two months after the will was signed, Sarah died. It was 7 December 1876, three days after the onset of heart failure. They had been married fifty years. The gravestone at St John’s where she was buried, and where Thomas would eventually join her, records that they were “for many years consistent members of the Primitive Methodist Society” — the description, above all others, that those who knew them chose to mark their lives.

The Gentleman

Thomas Thorpe, A. & G. Taylor, Nottingham, c.1870s–80s

A photograph taken at the A. & G. Taylor studio in Nottingham, probably in the 1870s or early 1880s, shows Thomas Thorpe in later life. He sits solidly in a wooden chair, one hand resting by a book, possibly a Bible – a symbol of intellect and perhaps moral virtue. He wears the dress of a prosperous tradesman, respectable without ostentation. He carries a watchful, self-possessed expression and sits easily — a man accustomed to occupying space. Robert Mellors, writing from memory in 1914, described him as “tall and straight as a dart”. Seated, the length of the legs and the breadth of the shoulders bear it out. It is recognisably the same man Mellors remembered.

Thomas lived on for another twelve years after Sarah’s death, the household at Hempshill Lane reorganising itself around him. His widowed daughter Sarah moved in with her three children. His son William was living at 1 Victoria Cottages, one of the eleven properties his father had built — the choices of one generation becoming the literal shelter of the next.

In 1879 Lot’s widow Mary Ann married William Falconbridge — Joseph the framebreaker’s son. The two families had been part of the same streets for nearly sixty years before they became kin.

The children Thomas and Sarah raised had scattered in almost every direction by the time of his death — into engineering, licensed trade, coal, carpentry, and dressmaking. Only one or two stayed close to the hosiery trade at all. Job had gone north to Lancashire as an engine driver; young Thomas had become a prize-winning machine builder and employer in his own right, following his father’s trajectory but in a different industrial world entirely. The children of a framework knitter who had arrived in Bulwell with almost nothing had moved, collectively, well beyond the frames.

In June 1885, adding a codicil to his will, Thomas described himself for the first time as a Gentleman rather than a glove maker. The practical additions were modest — his daughter Sarah could remain in the house and choose her furniture against her share of the estate. But the change in designation was not nothing. It marked an arrival that the framework knitter of Royal Forest Street could not have anticipated.

Thomas refers to himself as a Gentleman in his 1876 Codicil

Foundation stones for a new and larger Primitive Methodist chapel were laid in August 1887, the old 1852 building to be replaced by something the congregation had earned. It opened for worship in 1888. Thomas had been part of the society it served for sixty years, from the house meetings at the Gents’ through the barn by the Leen, through the building Padley had helped them find, and now this. He lived to see it open.

He died on 20 June 1888 at 24 Hempshill Lane, of senile debility, eighty years old. The informant at his death was his grandson Lot Caunt of Chalham Street — Hannah’s son, carrying in his name the memory of the uncle dead eighteen years before. Thomas was buried at St John’s three days later, beside Sarah. He had been a framework knitter, a framesmith, a manufacturer, a landlord, and finally a Gentleman.

His will was proved in July. Personal estate of twenty-three pounds and change, reflecting liquid assets only, the property excluded under the law as it then stood. Six years later, when the estate was finally wound up and the properties put up for sale, the rental value was one hundred and fifty-seven pounds a year. Victoria Cottages, 1 to 21 Byron Street. The houses on Hempshill Lane with their workshops and stable. The estate of a man who had come to Bulwell as one of a family following the trade, and spent sixty years building something that was entirely his own.

1882 map of Forest Side showing Victoria Cottages on Byron Street facing the Midland Railway, only a short distance from “The Buildings” where Thomas began

What Remained

Robert Mellors, writing in 1914 from the living memory of a town that still knew the names, placed Thomas among the small group of men who had made Primitive Methodism in Bulwell — alongside Thomas Faulconbridge the lame shoemaker, George Gent with his wooden leg, and Joseph Wilson. Thomas Thorpe, Mellors wrote, was a bag hosier — a middleman who collected finished goods from the framework knitters and sold them on. By 1914 Thomas had been dead for twenty-six years, and the man Mellors’ sources remembered was not the manufacturer and landowner of his final decades but the figure they had known at the height of his public life: someone who worked the trade, walked the roads, and organised the chapel. He was tall and straight as a dart. The photograph from the Taylor studio confirms it.

By 1914 the community those men had built was three generations deep. The Thorpe, Falconbridge and Gent families — neighbours and chapel colleagues across the middle decades of the century — were connected by marriage as well as faith, the personal threads of the town’s history pulled tight across the generations. Alexander Caunt, Hannah’s son and Thomas’s grandson, was a trustee of the Bulwell Methodist Church in 1937, still maintaining the institution his grandfather had helped found eighty-five years before. When the chapel published its jubilee history that year, a footnote identified the Mr Thorpe whose eyes had spoken volumes in 1852 as Alexander’s grandfather. He was almost certainly in the room when it was written.

Main Street, Bulwell, ca. early 1900s. The new Primitive Methodist Chapel marked with an X

The trade Thomas had spent his life in was by then a ghost of itself. His son William, who had grown up at 1 Victoria Cottages and worked as a framework knitter for most of his adult life, had made the transition sometime in the 1880s to labouring above ground at one of the collieries spreading across the Nottinghamshire coalfield — the northward expansion of the mining industry drawing workers away from the dying frames and into a different kind of industrial life altogether. William lived until 1913, long enough to see his granddaughter Nelly, who had worked as a lace mender, give birth to her first child Gladys in 1905. They would eventually leave Bulwell and settle in Farnsfield — a village in the Nottinghamshire countryside, only a few miles from Halam, where Thomas had been baptised more than a century before. Gladys became a skilled dressmaker, her hands working the same textile tradition that had run through the family since Thomas first started out in Bulwell in the early 1820s.

The frames were silent by then. The chapel was still standing.

Sources

Baptism of Thomas Thorpe, 5 April 1807: England, Parish Register, St Michael’s Church, Halam, Nottinghamshire; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), “Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1812,” accessed 2026; citing Nottinghamshire Archives.
Marriage of Thomas Thorpe and Sarah West, 6 February 1826: England, Parish Register, St Mary the Virgin, Bulwell, Nottinghamshire; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), “Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754–1937,” accessed 2026; citing Nottinghamshire Archives.
1841 England and Wales Census, Nottinghamshire, Bulwell Civil Parish, Enumeration District 1, folio 5, page 3, household of Thomas Thorpe; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), accessed 2026; citing The National Archives, HO107/856, book 8.
1851 England and Wales Census, Nottinghamshire, Bulwell Civil Parish, folio 553, page 32, household of Thomas Thorpe; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), accessed 2026; citing The National Archives, HO107/2127.
1861 England and Wales Census, Nottinghamshire, Bulwell Civil Parish, folio 20, page 33, household of Thomas Thorpe; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), accessed 2026; citing The National Archives, RG9/2441.
1871 England and Wales Census, Nottinghamshire, Bulwell Civil Parish, folio 7, page 6, household of Thomas Thorpe; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), accessed 2026; citing The National Archives, RG10/3490.
1881 England and Wales Census, Nottinghamshire, Bulwell Civil Parish, folio 56, page 41, household of Thomas Thorpe; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), accessed 2026; citing The National Archives, RG11/3332.
Religious Census, 1851, return for Primitive Methodist Chapel, Bulwell, completed and signed by Thomas Thorpe as Elder; The National Archives, HO 129/438; digital image, source unrecorded.
“Nottingham Assizes,” Nottingham Gazette, 19 March 1813, p. 2, and 11 June 1813, p. 3; digital images, Find My Past (findmypast.co.uk), accessed 2026. Cited for conviction of Joseph Falconbridge for framebreaking.
“Local Intelligence,” Nottinghamshire Guardian, 23 July 1857, p. 5; digital image, British Newspaper Archive (britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), accessed 2026. Cited for account of the Primitive Methodist procession and scholars’ tea, Bulwell.
White’s Directory of Nottinghamshire, 1864, entries for Thomas Thorpe under “Framesmiths” and “Hosiery Agents and Glove Manufacturers,” Bulwell; digital image, Google Books (books.google.com), accessed 2026.
“Singular Charge of Felony,” Nottingham Journal, 28 June 1869, p. 5; digital image, Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk), accessed 2026. Cited for testimony of Thomas Thorpe in the case of James Mellors.
Death of Lot Thorpe, 8 April 1870: England and Wales, Register of Deaths, Basford Registration District, 1870, second quarter, vol. 7b, p. 91; digital image of full register entry, General Register Office (GRO), accessed 2026.
Poll Book, North Nottinghamshire Election, 23 February 1872, Basford Polling District, entry for Thomas Thorpe; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), “UK, Poll Books and Electoral Registers, 1538–1893,” accessed 2026.
Return of Owners of Land, 1873, Nottinghamshire, entry for Thomas Thorpe, Bulwell, 2 acres 3 roods 39 perches; digital image, Google Books (books.google.com), accessed 2026; originally published as Parliamentary Paper, House of Commons, 1874.
Primitive Methodist Preachers’ Plan, Nottingham Second Circuit, 1875, printed by J. & H. Clarke, Chamber Street, Nottingham; digital image, My Primitive Methodists (myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/chapels/nottinghamshire/i-p/bulwell_pm_church_nottingham), accessed 2026.
Commercial Road Methodist Church, Calendar Blotter and Handbook 1937–1938, including extract from H.B. Kendall, The Origin and History of the Primitive Methodist Church (1906); digital image, My Primitive Methodists (myprimitivemethodists.org.uk/content/chapels/nottinghamshire/i-p/bulwell_pm_church_nottingham), accessed 2026.
Death of Sarah Thorpe (née West), 7 December 1876: England and Wales, Register of Deaths, Basford Registration District, 1876, fourth quarter, vol. 7b, p. 103; digital image of full register entry, General Register Office (GRO), accessed 2026.
Will of Thomas Thorpe, dated 21 October 1876, codicil dated 29 June 1885, proved Nottingham, 20 July 1888: England and Wales, Principal Probate Registry; digital file obtained from His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, Probate Search (probatesearch.service.gov.uk), accessed 2026.
Gravestone of Thomas Thorpe and Sarah Thorpe (née West), St Mary the Virgin, Bulwell, Nottinghamshire; photograph and transcription by Heather_Whelan, shared via Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), accessed 2026.
Death of Thomas Thorpe, 20 June 1888: England and Wales, Register of Deaths, Basford Registration District, 1888, second quarter, vol. 7b, p. 113; digital image of full register entry, General Register Office (GRO), accessed 2026.
“Sales by Auction,” Nottinghamshire Guardian, 10 March 1894, p. 1; digital image, Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk), accessed 2026. Cited for auction particulars of the estate of Thomas Thorpe, including Victoria Cottages and properties on Hempshill Lane, Bulwell.
Robert Mellors, In and About Nottinghamshire (Nottingham, 1914), Bulwell extract; digital transcription, Nottinghamshire History (nottshistory.org.uk/articles/mellorsarticles/bulwell1.htm), accessed 2026.
Photograph of Thomas Thorpe, carte-de-visite, A. & G. Taylor, photographers, Nottingham, c.1870s–1880s; digital image shared by Heather_Whelan via Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), accessed 2026; provenance of original unknown.
Baptism of John Falconbridge, 16 December 1821: England, Parish Register, St Mary the Virgin, Bulwell, Nottinghamshire; digital image, Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk), “Nottinghamshire Baptisms” (Nottinghamshire FHS transcription), accessed 2026. Cited as evidence of Joseph Falconbridge’s return to Bulwell by 1821.
Marriage of William Falconbridge and Mary Ann Thorpe, 7 October 1879: England, Parish Register, St Mark’s Church, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire; digital image, Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), “Nottinghamshire, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754–1937,” accessed 2026; citing Nottinghamshire Archives.
“Bulwell’s History,” Nottingham Journal, 21 May 1925, p. 7; digital image, Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk), accessed 2026. Cited for recollections of David Cottingham regarding Bulwell men’s involvement in the Chartist riots.
F. Hind, Duncan Gray, Walter Murby and Kenneth V. Bailey, Bulwell: Four Essays Towards a History of the Manor and Township (1946); digital transcription, Nottinghamshire History (nottshistory.org.uk/books/bulwell1946/bullwell1.htm), accessed 2026. Cited for general history of Bulwell.