Howden education, Howdendyke and Hook Road

 Since my last post a lot has happened in the world. Covid seems to be something we are all learning to live with and instead we are all now watching the awful events in Ukraine. Not only is it a tragedy for all those being bombed and displaced but it is having a dramatic effect already here at home. I am gathering fallen branches ready for the woodburner as domestic heating oil prices have tripled and we don't have any gas out here in what The Times in an article called 'a remote community'.

More mundanely the garlic is doing well and we have put an upturned black dustbin over the rhubarb although not much is happening in there yet.

I have been preparing a presentation on education in Howden  beginning with the Grammar school in the church and coming up to the present schools. The Howden senior school badge incorporates the original grammar school badge which in turn was the coat of arms of Walter Skirlaw, as well as referencing the horse fair, the market cross and Howden's connections with the bishop of Durham. It was designed by teacher and organist Ted Stockdale.

Earlier this week a friend and I walked around Howdendyke in preparation for a talk about the village at our small Skelton history group. So much of the village was demolished in order to make way for the fertiliser works to expand and it is difficult to work out where many of the old pictures we have were taken.

Meanwhile the other group I attend in Goole has spent several weeks moving slowly along Hook Road looking at the houses in a sort of version of a 'house through time'. Using newspaper and census records as well as pictures [ thanks to Gilbert Tawn who has photographed them all] we have looked at the dates and names of the houses and tried where we can to trace where their names were from and who lived in them.

We have also talked of Christ Church and its ministers, possibly also  the  site of an early Goole Grammar school, of Richard Cooper's original Phoenix iron foundry, a Palace of Varieties and Herons' mill.

This week we looked at Nunraw, so called as in 1923 it became the home of the Milner family. The family of course still has the florists' shop  in Boothferry Road. An early Mrs Milner came from Nunraw in Scotland.

Let us hope that by the time  I write my next blog post  there will be peace in the Ukraine.

 A very rural view of Goole's Hook Road