The River Trent was the making of Gainsborough. For centuries it had carried the town’s commerce south to the Humber and out to the North Sea, bringing coal and groceries upriver and taking grain, wool and manufactured goods down. By the time Adam Stark began keeping his newsbooks in May 1821, the river was entering its most dynamic era yet, the age of steam. Over the next twenty-one years, Stark’s careful records of ship launchings, packet arrivals, drowning accidents and coroner’s inquests trace a story that is both exhilarating and sobering, the Trent as a highway of extraordinary opportunity, and as a boundary that claimed lives with remorseless regularity.
The Coming of Steam
Before the steam packet, a voyage between Gainsborough and Hull, a distance of fifty-two miles downstream, was an uncertain affair. Stark noted that ‘previously to the establishment of Steam Packets it was no uncommon thing to be four to seven days in performing a voyage between Gainsbro’ and Hull.’ By 1823 that journey was measured not in days but in hours, and by 1826 in something approaching the miraculous.
People may take an early breakfast at Gainsburgh, be in Hull in good time for business, and return the same day, going over a distance of 158 miles in the course of about 13 hours and travelling at the rate of about 13 miles an hour; a celerity of travelling altogether unparalleled.
Source: Adam Stark Newsbooks, April 1823, on the Albion Steam Packet
Three years later, in March 1826, Stark recorded the Mercury Steam Packet completing the fifty-two miles from Hull to Gainsborough in just two hours and fifty-five minutes, ‘delivering at nine ferries upon the Trent,’ a feat he considered ‘perhaps never equalled.’ By the summer of 1833 the Dart steam packet was making the return journey, 104 miles in a single day, stopping at ten different ferries each way, spending half an hour in Gainsborough, and still arriving back in Hull by two in the afternoon. Gainsborough was suddenly, measurably, connected to the wider world.
This was not simply a matter of convenience. The steam packets transformed the economic geography of the region. Goods that had required days of uncertain sail and variable wind could now be scheduled by the hour. The packets brought passengers, newspapers, parcels and commerce, and they enabled Gainsborough merchants, the Sandars family foremost among them, to operate at a scale and speed that would have been impossible a generation before.
Furley’s Yard and the Shipbuilders
Gainsborough was not merely a consumer of the new maritime age; it was one of its manufacturers. Stark’s newsbooks record a remarkable sequence of ship launchings from the yards of Messrs. Furley and Mr. Henry Smith, two of the town’s principal shipbuilders, throughout the 1820s and into the 1830s. In February 1823, a fine ship of 363 tons slid from Smith’s yard ‘in fine style and much to the gratification of a great number of people.’ Two years later, Furley’s yard launched the Newark, ‘a fine brig intended for a regular trade between Gainsbro and Raye’s Wharf London,’ followed within the same year by the schooner Flora, intended for the coasting trade.
The pace of production was remarkable. Between 1824 and 1826 alone, Stark recorded the launch of the steam packet Trent (100 tons, intended for goods to Hull), the Newark, the Flora, the steam vessel Bradford (‘allowed to be one of the best Packets that have been built in this kingdom’), the Hero (‘the handsomest packet in this part of the kingdom’) and the Dart. In February 1834 came the Dauntless, a fine new ship of 430 tons intended for the East India Trade. These were not cottage-industry productions; they were substantial commercial vessels carrying Gainsborough’s name and craftsmanship to distant waters.
Not every voyage ended in triumph. In March 1824, Stark noted the grim intelligence that the Esther Audus, belonging to Gainsborough, had ‘been picked up at sea off Harwich keel upwards and brought into that port.’ His note is brief and bleak: ‘It is much to be feared the crew are entirely lost.’ In August 1838, the Riby Grove whale ship was lost ‘between two floes of ice’ in the far north at latitude 78, its crew scattered across other vessels. The river gave Gainsborough its prosperity, but the sea beyond extracted its price.
The River’s Dark Toll
For every triumphant launch and record-breaking passage, Stark’s newsbooks record a counter-narrative, thirty-six drowning deaths in twenty-one years, each one named, dated and noted with the careful sorrow of a man who knew his town well. They range from the occupational to the tragic, from the foreseeable to the heartbreaking.
The first drowning in the record is that of George Bucknell of Castle Donnington, aged twenty-four, drowned in the Trent at Gainsborough in June 1821 after overreaching himself pushing off a boat. A month later, John Frud, joiner, fell overboard from the new Steam Packet Nottingham on the Humber. By August 1823, the ledger had grown darker still: on a single Tuesday afternoon, the master of the sloop James Martin, a man named McIntosh, and a sailor broke an oar while staying the vessel, were ‘both precipitated into the river and drowned,’ and buried together at Ferry. Three further drowning incidents were recorded in that same month of August 1823 alone.
Children appear with awful frequency. Thomas Bell, just six years old, fell from Etherington’s Wharf into the Trent in August 1823. Stark added a detail that makes the entry doubly wrenching: ‘Only about six years ago his brother was also accidentally drowned.’ A four-year-old girl named Wilson, who ‘regularly went to see’ her father at the bone mill at Stockwith each day on leaving school, went missing in September 1825; her body was found floating in the Trent two days later. In June 1833, Charlotte Hill, aged six, ‘while playing about on the deck of a keel called The Four Sisters at Gainsburgh, unfortunately missed her footing, fell overboard and was drowned.’
A boy named Wheate aged 13, whilst bathing in the river Trent at Gainsbro, was unfortunately drowned. The long continued wet weather has scoured the river so much as to render it exceedingly dangerous, in many places where formerly there was hardly 5 foot of water there is now from 15 to 18 feet.
Source: Adam Stark Newsbooks, July 1830
Among the most haunting entries is that from December 1822, when an inquest was held ‘upon the body of an unknown female person found floating in the river Trent.’ No evidence could be established as to how she had died. She appeared to be about nineteen years of age, dressed in ‘a darkish blue and white printed gown, green stuff petticoat and black stockings.’ In her pocket was a single fine white cotton stocking, marked with the letter S. Her name was never established. She remains unknown.
George Foster and the Coroner’s Court
Running through the drowning records like a thread is the name of George Foster, one of the coroners for Lincolnshire, who presided over inquest after inquest throughout the period. His name appears in Stark’s newsbooks dozens of times, always attached to sudden, violent or suspicious deaths. He was the coroner for the body of Henry Lloyd found below the bridge in August 1823 (verdict: found drowned); for Catherine Hill, servant at the Black Head Inn, who threw herself from Furley’s Wharf in October 1823 (verdict: insanity); for the unknown woman in the river in December 1822; for Joseph Hickingbotham, killed when a vessel’s tiller was driven across his body by a sudden grounding in 1826.
Foster’s inquest verdicts tell their own social history. ‘Died by the visitation of God’ was the routine verdict for sudden natural death. ‘Accidental death’ covered the full range of industrial and domestic catastrophe. ‘Insanity’ was the standard finding for suicide, reflecting both the legal position and the era’s limited vocabulary for mental suffering. Between 1821 and 1841, the inquests recorded in the newsbooks include deaths from burns, falls, drowning, falls from horses, an eight-year-old boy crushed by the town’s water-engine wheel, and a tollgate keeper who, woken suddenly in the night to open his gate, took the wrong door and ‘falling down a flight of steps that lead to a lower room was killed upon the spot.’
The Plea for a Receiving House
What makes the drowning records particularly striking is not just their frequency but the repeated, frustrated call for something to be done about it. As early as July 1825, Stark noted that the inquest on a drowned boy named Lobly ‘imperatively demands that some active measures should be taken either to prevent boys bathing in dangerous places or to afford more immediate assistance in case of need.’
In July 1826, following the drowning of John Allen, an eighteen-year-old apprentice saddler who had ‘unfortunately ventured beyond his depth while bathing in the Trent,’ the same plea was made more forcefully. Stark recorded that ‘the want of a proper receiving house and the necessary apparatus for restoring suspended animation was much felt’ and that considering the number of accidents occurring near the town, the authorities ought to remedy this. Allen’s life, the report insisted, would otherwise have been saved.
Eight years later in 1834, and again in 1837, almost identical observations were made. After the drowning of Thomas Chapman, a twenty-year-old sailor who fell from a bowsprit into the Trent, Stark wrote: ‘It is much to be lamented that notwithstanding the numerous accidents which occur at Gainsborough no public provision is made for the restoration of suspended animation and it is much to be feared that in consequence many lives have been lost.’
In the neighbourhood so dangerous a river as the Trent and when accidents are so frequently occurring, it would very often be a means of saving life if boards were put up containing the simplest directions for the recovery of drowned persons, run for the nearest surgeon; carry the body to the nearest Public House; strip off the wet clothes and lay the body on a blanket on the warm floor before the kitchen fire; and rub the stomach freely with a piece of flannel.
Source: Adam Stark Newsbooks, May 1837, following the drowning of John Ridley
The pragmatic, humane specificity of these instructions, ‘the nearest public house,’ ‘a piece of flannel’, speaks to a genuine public health problem that Gainsborough’s authorities repeatedly declined to address. The appeal was made no fewer than four times in the newsbooks across twelve years, and there is no record of a receiving house ever being established.
Five Lives Saved: James Brocklehurst
Against the weight of tragedy, one name stands out for a different reason. In July 1841, in one of the final entries of the newsbooks, Stark recorded that a boy named Wilson had fallen into the river at the Crow Garth riverside while amusing himself, rising inside the paddle wheel of a steam packet. He was saved by the intervention of James Brocklehurst, warehouseman to Messrs. Smith and Son, Wharfingers, who ‘hearing the cry, although at some distance from the spot, immediately ran towards the place and plunging into the river fortunately succeeded in catching hold of the boys hair just as he was sinking for the third time.’
What makes this entry remarkable is Stark’s quiet additional observation: ‘this is no less than five persons whom the same individual has by his courage and humanity rescued from a watery grave.’ Brocklehurst does not appear to have received any official recognition. He was a warehouseman. He simply ran towards the water when others did not, five times over twenty-one years, and pulled people out. In a record full of bureaucratic verdicts and frustrated public health advocacy, he stands as evidence that individual courage could sometimes succeed where institutions failed.
Conclusion: The River That Made and Took
Adam Stark’s twenty-one years of newsbooks give us the River Trent in full, not as a picturesque backdrop but as the active, dangerous, productive centre of Gainsborough’s life. The same river that carried the Dart on its record-breaking runs and floated the Bradford off Smith’s yard ‘in fine style’ also claimed Thomas Bell aged six, the unnamed woman in the blue gown, the boy Winks whose body was never recovered from beneath the ice near Chapel Staithe in February 1838, and thirty-three others whose names Stark faithfully recorded.
The newsbooks do not sentimentalise this duality. They present it as fact: here is the launch, here is the packet’s record time, here is the inquest verdict. But read together, across all twenty-one years, the picture that emerges is of a community that understood its river was simultaneously its greatest asset and its most persistent danger, and that struggled, sometimes fruitlessly, to find the balance between the two.
Sources
This article draws on the Adam Stark Newsbooks 1821–1841, transcribed by Paul Kemp and Andrew Birkitt, 2009, held by Gainsborough Heritage Centre. All quoted entries are taken directly from the original transcription. The 35 Ships & River entries, 36 Accident-Drowning entries and 69 Inquest entries referenced in this article are fully searchable in the Adam Stark Newsbooks Database.
