Heatherfield Estate

         The Heatherfield Estate, in the 1940s or possibly earlier

Having recently had access to the deeds for a house on The Grove, I thought it may be of interest to the newer residents to have a summary of the developments that have taken place.

At the beginning of the century the area now covered by The Grove comprised the Heatherfield Estate which was owned by Ebenezer Hall of Abbeydale Park. He died on 28th June 1911 and on 1st November 1912 his executors sold this Estate together with Cannon Hall Farm at the top of Penny Lane to James Frederick Johnston of Pitsmoor for £2,500. They were bought with the help of a mortgage of £1,800 from Samuel Osborn - the steel magnate. The total area was 35 acres 2 roods and 8 perches.

On February 7th 1923 the Heatherfield Estate, comprising 28 acres of land was sold to Jessie Green for £4,000. At this time The Crescent, Terrey Road and The Quadrant had been laid out and separated into building plots. The line of The Grove is shown on the plan, which also shows Quarry Road originally planned to meet The Grove about where No 8 is now built.

The Heatherfield Estate - the 28 acres



The following year on 3rd June 1924, 10½ acres of this land was sold to Herbert Melling for £4,000. This must have been an astute sale on the part of Mrs Green who had got her money back and still retained 17½ acres of the land! The area sold was the lower end of The Grove from No. 4 to just beyond the junction with the Green. The sale was subject to the building of a suitable roadway not less than 12' wide (The Grove). The sale was subject to a covenant that Mr Melling would build detached houses costing at least £600 or pairs of semi-detached costing at least £1,000 per pair. Provision was made however for these prices to be decreased if the cost of building materials was considerably reduced! Mr Melling gained the ground rents from the 999 year leases that had already been granted to 5 plots.

One of these was for No 4 The Grove, where we live. The house was originally called 'The Crag' and was built for Charles Wesley Street whose son Les still lives in a bungalow across the road. On 23rd May 1928 Mr Melling cleared the outstanding mortgages on the land to become the Freeholder. The Freehold was subsequently sold to a Mr Cocking of Sutton Coldfield and after his death his widow sold it to the Sheffield Equalised Independent Druids Friendly Society for £11,590 3s. 0d. who still own it. The total ground rent from the 999 year leases granted to all the houses amounted to £526 16s. 6d. per year. Although this was a substantial income at the time, there was no allowance made for inflation and with some ground rents as low as £3-4-0 it is now not such an attractive investment. Several residents have purchased the Freehold of their plots over the years and this trend will no doubt continue.

I hope that I have interpreted the documents correctly and would welcome any comments on the accuracy of this account from our more competent local historians.

Colin Wells

February 1989

Wigmore, Heatherfield

We have had an unusual and interesting enquiry from Nick Kuhn about an attractive poster that he bought some time ago from the well-known Sheffield department store John Walsh Ltd. It was one of a number that the store commissioned in the 1920s to advertise its fashions. The poster has an owner's impressed, blind stamp in the corner and Nick was curious to find out more. 

Blind stamp: WIGMORE, HEATHERFIELD, TOTLEY, NR. SHEFFIELD

There is no one in any of our records with the name Wigmore although we did come across a newspaper reference in 1904 to a George Wigmore of Totley. However, the stamp almost certainly refers to a house named Wigmore on the Heatherfield Estate which was built on former pasture land from around 1926. Even in 1931 Totley Rise Post Office simply referred to each house on the estate by its name and "Heatherfield" although the various road names - The Crescent, The Green, The Grove, The Quadrant, Grove Avenue, Quarry Road and Terrey Road - did exist from the outset. House numbers did not come into general use in our area until after Totley had been absorbed into Sheffield and by 1936 the house was known simply as 12 The Quadrant. The blind stamp must therefore have belonged to the people who lived in the house before this time.

We cannot be certain who the first occupants were but it is a fair bet that they were the family of John Howarth Caine. He was born in Hulme, Manchester on 27 March 1870, the first of eight children of Henry Caine, a railway station manager, and his wife Ellen Lord who married at St. John's Church, Manchester on 28 October 1869. John became a railway worker like his father joining the Newton department of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway on 24 October 1883. 

He was transferred to Lincoln department and, presumably whilst there, he met and later married Florence Jane Prince at St. Mark's Church, Lincoln on 24 November 1897. Florence was born in 1870 in Lincoln, the sixth of seven children of Peter Prince, a gardener, and his wife Mary Richardson who had married in the spring of 1858. John and Florence Caine had one daughter, Doris Mary, who was born on 11 March 1900 in Normanton on the Wolds, Nottinghamshire after John had been appointed to the post of district mineral agent for the Great Central Railway at Nottingham. It would be quite an important role and John would have been in charge of all the stations and depots where the main traffic was "minerals" - mainly coal and coke in this part of the country.

        The poster from John Walsh Ltd. Photographed through glass.

We can trace the Caine family living at Holme Lea, Rose Grove, Normanton in the 1911 census, electoral rolls and Kelly's directories, right through until the electoral roll of 1927 even though John had been appointed the district mineral agent for Sheffield in January 1920. The following year the Great Central was merged with five other northern railway companies to form the London and North Eastern Railway.

John would have attained the age of 65 on 27 March 1935 and the Sheffield Independent of 3 April carried a report of his retirement. Later the same year Doris Caine married Harold Sage Tunbridge, a commercial traveller, at Totley All Saints Church on 24 November. The names of John and Florence Caine appear in the electoral roll for 12 The Quadrant in 1936 but they had left by the following year. Sadly, Florence died at The Cottage, Plumtree, Nottinghamshire on 18 March 1937 aged about 67. When the National Register was compiled on 29 September 1939, John was living with his daughter and son-in-law at Normanton Lane, Normanton on the Wolds. Around 1948 he moved to Llandudno where he lived at 17 St. Mary's Road. John Caine died on 6 November 1951 at the age of 82.

January 2021