Cliff Terrace and the Hartlepool Bombardment 1914

For the last few weeks I've been working on my mariner ancestors (see my Family History Stories page), most especially the Huttons.  Robert Elstob Hutton (b.1804) was the elder brother of my 3x great grandfather Frederick Elstob Hutton.  I can be fairly precise about when Robert moved to Hartlepool as the change is bracketed by the baptism of a son in September 1840, he was still in Sunderland, and the census in June 1841, by which time he was in Hartlepool. 

In 1841 he was living in Moor House, which is on Friar Terrace on the headland. The house is listed and information about it can be found on the British Listed Buildings website. I am more interested today in the street he had moved to by 1851, Cliff Terrace.

I recently wrote to Hartlepool Museum, who have some records about ships owned (or part owned) by Robert Elstob Hutton.  I mentioned that Robert had lived at 7 Cliff Terrace, and that when the OH and myself were passing through last September we went and took a photo of the house.  The Museums Manager noted in his response that the houses in that area had been renumbered and thus the one we had photo'd might not be the right one.  A couple of days ago I thought I'd try to work out what had happened for myself. 

As an OU student I can access a site called Digimap, which contains historic maps, similar to the Old Maps site, but with added functionality.  One thing it lets you do is look at two map sections side by side (I've had to put them one on top of the other for this blog).



Cliff Terrace, Hartlepool in the 1850s and 1950s (from Digimap)

In the 1850s map the leftmost end of the street which is now Cliff Terrace is labelled Marine Terrace.  I went back to the 1851 census and looked at the pages before and after the listing for Robert Elstob Hutton and his family. 

Before the first entry for Cliff Terrace are ten clearly numbered entries for Marine Terrace.  Robert quite clearly lives at No 7 Cliff Terrace, but there are other entries for Cliff Terrace without house numbers.  Nos 5 and 4 are clear, but there are four unnumbered entries.  This does add up to seven, but the order is wrong - it goes:

No number	Joseph Parkin - Ship Owner
No 4	George Moore - Ship Owner
No 5	John Denton - Magistrate
No number	Otto Teichmann - Merchant Ship Broker
No number	Henry Taylor - Coal and Coke Exporter
No 7	Robert Elstob Hutton - Ship Owner
No number	Agnes Hanson - Widow (son is a Ship Broker)

Then comes the Bath House and then the Light House and "3 houses building in Cliff Terrace unfinished".

Of course the enumerator may have entered the schedules in his book out of order, but the order and neatness of the entries for Marine Terrace seems to suggest he was a tidy worker. 

In the 1861 census there are no house numbers on Cliff Terrace and the order of occupants is reversed and different:

Agnes Hanson	(Widow)
Catherine Hutton	House Proprietor (Robert's widow)
Fitz Herskind	Coal Merchant
Pagger Hale	Clerk Customs
Gideon Smales	Timber Merchant and Ship owner
Christian Nielson	Coal Merchant
John Denton	Ship builder, Ship owner, Magistrate
William Grey	Master Wool & Line Draper, Ship Owner
Thomas Charlton	A groom
William Marshall	Coal Agent
Otto Trechman	Cement manufacturer

Then it continues onto Marine Terrace.

In 1871 Marine Terrace has vanished and all the houses appear to be listed as Cliff Terrace. Numbers reappear in 1881, when the street goes up to number 19.

Looking at the map from the 1850s if we discount the first house on the left hand end of Marine Terrace, as probably being part of Queen Street, we can count 19 houses to the end of the row.  I therefore suggest that nos 1-10 Marine Terrace became nos 1-10 Cliff Terrace and nos 1-9 Cliff Terrace became nos 11-19 Cliff Terrace at some point between 1861 and 1871.  Note that the numbers only go up to 18 on the 1950s map - we'll come back to that.

That means that my relative lived at the house which is now No 17 Cliff Terrace (probably!)

Cliff Terrace (from Google Maps)

The reason that there are only 18 houses in the street nowadays is that in the First World War Hartlepool (together with Whitby and Scarborough) was bombarded from the sea by German ships on 16 December 1914 causing immense damage to the town and over a hundred fatalities.  More information can found here and here.

Postcard of Cliff Terrace pre 1914 (from Durham Council website)

If you compare from this postcard from before the war to the Google maps image above you will see that the rightmost house on the postcard has two dormer windows, that house is missing in the modern photo.

No 19 Cliff Terrace after the bombardment  (from thisishartlepool.co.uk)

The picture shows the damage to No 19 from the German bombardment.  Two people were killed here, sisters Annie (aged 34) and Florence (aged 32) Kay.  The Kay family, father a solicitor, were living in No 19 in 1901 and 1911.  We can only assume that the house was so badly damaged it had to be demolished for safety.  Several houses on Moor Terrace, backing onto Cliff Terrace, also disappear, very probably for the same reason.  Go back to the map snips and compare the way Bath Terrace runs up the right hand end of Cliff Terrace in the two maps.  Its direction has swung several degrees anticlockwise. The park in front of Cliff Terrace in the modern photo contains memorials to the dead of the bombardment and both First and Second World Wars.

Hopefully the information from Hartlepool Museum will confirm my guess about which house my relatives lived in.