If you attended St Joseph’s, you’ll remember Layton Mount aka ‘the House’. When the Brothers arrived in Blackpool just over a century ago, the House was almost the extent of the school buildings. Outside, it was a faintly sinister-looking villa built of Yorkshire stone at the top of a steep wooded drive, with a copper-topped oriel turret at its south-east corner. Inside, it was fitted with high coffered ceilings; etched and bevelled glass; elaborate marble fireplaces; heavy mahogany doors; and - although this must have accumulated when Layton Mount was no longer privately owned - furniture of dark, elaborately-carved oak and shiny black horsehair upholstery.

It was built with money made in West Yorkshire. Joe Lumb senior (1811-1879) was a worsted yarn spinner who founded Joseph Lumb & Sons of Huddersfield and moved his business into the town’s Folly Hall Mill in 1853. From 1870 onwards, Lumbs imported high-quality Merino wool from Australia and South Africa and established an early international reputation for the silk-like quality of their yarn. The business survived until the 1980s, but the family name lives on in the Bulmer and Lumb Group, whose 'Lumb's Golden Bale Cloth' is made from the highest-quality wool.

Between 1839 and 1857, Joe Lumb and his wife Elizabeth produced four sons - William (1844-1918), Jesse (1847-1929), Joe junior (1851-1932) and Edward (1852-1891) - and four daughters. All four boys worked in the family business though Edward (1852-1891) also had a distinguished career in the amateur game with Yorkshire County Cricket Club, before dying of pleurisy in a London hotel at the age of 38. As the eldest son, William led the company after his father died but seems to have retired from its active management when it became a private limited company in 1891. Jesse became chairman of the company on brother William’s retirement, developing a Huddersfield reputation in the best ‘’trouble at t’mill’’ tradition. For the Lumbs had the brass that sustains brass necks: when they died, William, Jesse and Joe left fortunes that equated collectively to over £50M at today’s values.

In retirement, William formed a partnership with John Worthington - Blackpool born and bred - to invest in Fylde property. They bought the Layton Hall estate which seems to have comprised land east of Devonshire Square. Its boundaries are unclear, but a Fleetwood Chronicle article of 10 February 1893 explains that it covered an area equivalent to the distance between North and South Piers and between the Promenade and Whitegate Drive. The business case for its purchase undoubtedly rested on a development of quality mixed-housing. Initially, 150 acres were set aside for building 379 houses. Plots sold for three shillings per yard, or five shillings for plots on Whitegate Drive where a convenient tram route was planned. Worthington also established a successful brickworks on the estate.

Down the centuries, Layton Hall had been owned by fabled Fylde families - Butlers, Fleetwoods, Rigbys, Cliftons - but their picturesque Elizabethan manor had been replaced around 1760 by a nondescript late-Georgian farmhouse located in what today is Hollywood Avenue near its junction with Collingwood Avenue. This house was demolished around 1927 after the estate was sold when Lumb died. Its rusticated gate piers now stand sentry at an entrance to Stanley Park at the confluence of East and West Park Drives.

It is thought that a Blackpool architect and surveyor, John Ashworth Nuttall, may have developed the street plan as well as designing some villas commissioned for the estate by Lumb and Worthington. Nuttall’s brother was a local surveyor, and his uncle, Henry Winder, was another Blackpool architect. The Nuttall brothers were Freemasons, and John designed their local Lodge building.

The Crescent between the front drive of Layton Mount and what is now Beech Avenue was probably a statement of intent by Lumb and Worthington, but other detached and semi-detached houses of the period are scattered along the south side of Newton Drive (then known as Dickinson Road), east of Layton Mount. St Clements Avenue was developed, presumably as a cul de sac, well before Stanley Park and North Park Drive were laid out in the early 1920s.

William Lumb was able to select the highest and choicest point on the estate for his own home. In terms of its situation and opulence, Josh is said to have declared Layton Mount to be the finest house in Blackpool. But that has never been a very competitive field, and the design of the House was light years behind the Arts and Crafts domestic architecture being pioneered in Lancashire during the 1890s by Voysey and Baillie Scott around Windermere, or by Edgar Wood in Manchester.

Who was the architect of Layton Mount? The Lumb brothers had homes in the Huddersfield suburb of Edgerton. This area now boasts almost one hundred Listed Buildings based on the prosperous homes that successful woollen manufacturers, and leaders of allied industries and professions, commissioned there in the third quarter of the 19th century. Layton Mount, differs from many houses in Edgerton, however, in a symmetry and avoidance of Gothic that argues for JA Nuttall. On the other hand, its stone construction argues the opposite because Blackpool is a town largely built of hard red Accrington brick because of the destructive sea air.

The Lumbs’ move into Layton Mount can be pinpointed to a date in 1897 between April (when their elder daughter Mary was married from the then family home at Brooklands in Middle Lane) and December (when her mother died at Layton Mount). Middle Lane is now St Anne’s Road and Brooklands was probably located near its junction with Watson Road.

How was Layton Mount decorated and furnished in its heyday? Some clues are given in an extraordinary feature article, worthy of a modern ‘celebrity life-style’ magazine, published in the Blackpool Gazette & Herald on Friday 16 June 1893. In part, this describes the interior of Brooklands. After referencing the Lumbs’ extensive trips around the Mediterranean and the USA, the anonymous author gushes that one result of their travel is seen in the many curious and valuable articles brought from foreign lands which decorate their luxuriously furnished and charmingly arranged home. Bric-a-brac from all parts of the globe, costly works of art… and magnificent silver plate, with beautiful palms, ferns, and flowers adorn the different rooms…. This conjures the sort of villa, overstuffed with expensive tat, in which Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, might have installed Mrs Langtry.

When Layton Mount was offered for sale on William’s death, an advertisement refers to its extensive flower gardens, orchard and glasshouses. In the early 1960s, I remember aged Brothers pottering around a large, square conservatory perched precipitously above Newton Drive to the north of the House. The Gazette & Herald article reports that an air of luxuriance characterises the well-laid-out kitchen and flower gardens [at Brooklands]… The air was with the sweet perfume of pinks and geraniums and rhododendrons, and beautiful flowers which responded in profusion to the warm rays of the sun… In the kitchen garden were… heavily-laden fruit trees, and last, but by no means least, a heavy drop of strawberries… The visitors were regaled with the luscious fruit, and right well did they enjoy it…’

Despite the early death of Mrs Lumb, an interest in gardening was maintained at Layton Mount. William Lumb’s obituary records that a substantial portion of the grounds was made over to horticulture, and that when he was at home, he devoted a large part of his time to gardening and the culture of orchids in his conservatories. No trace of these gardens remained in my time. It would be interesting to know their extent and location.

There was a garage, probably in the single-storey building to the north of the House that later served in bizarre sequence as science laboratory, latrines, prep department and library. Both William Lumb and his son Joe were enthusiastic motorists. William’s obituary mentions that he had been passionately fond of motoring. He regularly toured on the Continent and had driven over a considerable portion of the British Isle. A newspaper report of 1908 referred to his purchase of a 50 hp, six cylinder Darracq through Mr Geo Nearing, the northern representative of the firm. Wiilliam generally seems to have adopted a lofty approach to motoring law: when his car clipped a pedestrian’s leg at a blind corner in Bolton in 1910, the elderly man in the back (almost certainly Lumb) left his chauffeur (John Jackson of 8 Layton Avenue) to sort things out.

Two years later, William and the long-suffering Jackson were up before the magistrates. William had allowed a motor car identity to be used fraudulently by transferring the registration plate to his Darracq without formally completing registration, which he had assumed the company had made. By doing so, Jackson had unwittingly driven an unlicenced vehicle.

William’s son Joe was an equally avid motorist. A newspaper report of June 1905 when he was 22 described Joe’s appearance before the Milnthorpe magistrates for driving a car at 36mph (sic) at Heversham. Joe subsequently took up flying and used the grounds of Layton Mount to trial his newly-constructed metal-framed aircraft for the Blackpool Flying Week of October 1909. In the event, poor weather and some technical mishaps confined it to its South Shore hangar, but he entered again the following year using facilities lent by Councillor Albert (later Sir Lindsay) Parkinson.
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To return to the Gazette & Herald article of June 1893. In prose as lush as the decor it describes, the article records how a representative of the Herald visited the Lumbs at Brooklands. This merchant prince’ s… amiable wife… greatly entertained us by recounting interesting reminiscences of the travels which she and her husband have made in different parts of the world. They have explored almost the whole coast of the Mediterranean and are as conversant with the greater portion of America as with the counties of the Red and White Rose… It would not be at all a bad thing for the town if [their host] could be induced to come out as a public man, to take some little part in the administration of its affairs, and to give the community the benefit of the shrewd foresight and judgment which he has shown to such marked advantage… in the management of the large and important firm with which he is connected… William’s subsequent obituary describes him as a staunch Conservative but that was possibly a change of heart as most West Riding woollen manufacturers of the late 19th century supported the Free Trade policy of the Liberal Party. Or perhaps a local newspaper felt obliged to plug the Conservative Party because Blackpool was a stolidly Tory town for reasons that included the influence of successive Earls of Derby as Fylde landowners.

Although William didn’t enter the lists as a local politician, a few months after Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, he made what was at first sight a public-spirited proposal. He offered to give 35 acres between Newton Drive, Whitegate Drive and Whinney Heys, valued at £10,000, for development as a public park in memory of the late Queen-Empress. But there was a catch. As a local paper reports: The gift is made under certain conditions, chiefly relating to the making of roads…[though] these are by no means onerous. Well maybe. But it’s difficult not to suspect that Lumb had hit upon a way of saving on the infrastructure costs of his housing development. In any event, and for whatever reasons - which may have included a traditional reluctance on the Town Council to develop any attraction that lured the punters inland - the idea came to nothing. The acres concerned were later acquired to form a small part of Stanley Park when it was opened in 1926.

Lumb may have had two motives for giving, perhaps even soliciting, the interview for this article. The first was to promote his development of the Layton estate. The second was to lend respectability to the happy couple as they planned to enhance their social prestige by building one of the grandest local properties. For at the time this article was published, the Lumbs were not in fact married at all. More than that - and unmentioned in the article - ‘Mrs Lumb’ had six children bearing her maiden surname.

William Lumb does not figure in the 1891 Census (he was possibly overseas on business), but his future wife, Susannah Priestley, was listed as Single. She had been born in Huddersfield in 1845, the daughter of Abraham Priestley, a cloth finisher. By the 1871 Census, she was living near Manchester in Barton Upon Irwell with her mother (described as Head of the household), her two brothers, and a grandson and gran’daughter. In the days before computers facilitated cross-checks, it was relatively easy to bamboozle the peripatetic enumerators who moved between households to collect Census data, and the two grandchildren were actually Susannah’s offspring, born out of wedlock. She was still at Barton for the 1881 Census, but by 1890 had moved to Middle Lane with five children: Mary (born 1871), William (1876), Joe (1883), Annie (1885) and Edward (1886).

There is no evident record of a registered marriage in the United Kingdom between a William Lumb and a Susannah Priestley born around Huddersfield in 1844. There is such a record however between a bachelor and a spinster of their names and ages at the parish church of St Brelade on Jersey in October 1894, when marriages conducted in the Channel Islands were not recorded elsewhere. It is of course possible that William Lumb had not fathered all or any of Susannah’s children, but if so why had both partners conveyed the impression to the local journalist that they were already married when they were not, and why subsequently choose to solemnise their marriage on Jersey?

Moreover, both Lumb and his new wife had other out-of-wedlock form. It seems that William already had at least one illegitimate son - another William - born in 1870 to Liza Ann Holden. When Lumb (by Ms Holden’s account) failed to stump up the cash promised for the boy’s upkeep, she began to stalk him - at first in Huddersfield, later in Blackpool. Lumb eventually complained to the Huddersfield constabulary in 1888, and Susannah followed suit with the Blackpool police in October 1890. Court proceedings in both instances led to press publicity, though the Gazette & Herald tactfully avoided any mention of the son. Before she began her long premarital relationship with William, Susannah also appears to have given birth to a child in 1868 by one Squire Jackson (at the time, ‘Squire’ was a common Yorkshire forename, with no implication of landed gentility). This was Albert, whose connection to the Lumbs is confused. Before his marriage in 1891, he seems to have lived with his half-siblings in his mother’s household at Brooklands; indeed, he went on to marry the daughter of a Middle Lane farmer. She subsequently died, and when he remarried in 1906, Albert names William Lumb as his father on the marriage certificate. Yet Albert seems to have received no material advantages from his tenuous Lumb connection and was an indentured butcher before going to work on the railways. Neither his mother nor Lumb left him anything in their wills. Albert died in 1939, and his own son, Albert Edward, died the following year at the age of 45. (Old Josephians may recall another Albert Priestley who taught elocution at the College for many years but who, as far as I can establish, was not related to the Layton Mount family.)

By the moral standards of the time, overt illegitimacy was a grave social handicap among the respectable classes. It is likely that the Lumbs recognised that their children were all growing up - Mary, the oldest, was 23 in 1894 - and action was needed to give the girls a chance in the marriage stakes and the boys a future in their chosen careers (all three duly entered the family business as Lumbs). There are documented cases of 19th century gentlemen who maintained a long-term mistress and her children in a separate establishment as their effective wife and family but did not succumb to marriage because their partner hailed from a much lower social class. What is striking about Lumb is that his own family had only recently left the same class as the Priestleys’. Perhaps then, as now, some men just couldn’t Commit, and Lumb was one of them.

Susannah Lumb did not live to enjoy Layton Mount for long. She died in December 1897 and was buried in Layton Cemetery - according to local legend, in a grave visible from the upper floors of Layton Mount. Her estate was proved at £3,172-17-10 nett, left in trust for her husband, and to her five Lumb children on his death. William survived his wife by over twenty years. In December 1917, he was taken ill aboard the train in which he was returning to Blackpool from a break in Llandudno. Treated at Layton Mount for bronchitis and pneumonia by his GP (the Glaswegian John Young of South Shore) and Manchester specialists, in time he recovered sufficiently to be driven out each day.

Nonetheless, his recovery cannot have been helped by a family scandal that erupted around this time. On 7 February 1918, while William was still convalescent, his son Joe entered a petition for divorce from his wife Lucie on grounds of her adultery with Lieutenant Eric Bailey on ‘divers occasions’ in 1917 and at various addresses on the south coast. The case was set down for 18 May 1918, and a decree nisi was issued ten days after the Armistice later that year. But on 29 May 1919 the King’s Proctor intervened to forestall a decree absolute. This arose from disclosure that at the November hearing Joe had falsely denied Lucie’s cross-charges of his own adultery. These were now exposed in lurid detail: with Clarissa Mary Burton at the Imperial Hotel, Blackpool and at home in Huddersfield, in July 1912; with an unknown woman in Paris in February 1914; and with Gladys Mabel Batson in August 1917 at the Midland Hotel, Manchester. The following December, he had allegedly succumbed again to Ms Batson at Brantwood in St Clement’s Avenue, almost within sight of his father’s sickroom. Brantwood had been William’s wedding present in 1911 to his daughter Annie, Joe’s sister, and was still her home - adding a further frisson to the scandal. This was in addition to encounters at Fleetwood’s Mount Hotel (sic); and on one memorable date both there and at Brantwood. The claims and counter-claims included some where husband and wife each stood accused of adultery on the same date.

William Lumb died on 20 April 1918 and was buried in the same grave as his long-dead wife. The gross value of his estate was £99,103-5-1. He left his shares in Joseph Lumb and Sons equally between his sons Joe and Edward, and his residuary estate in trust to both sons plus his third son William. He left nothing to either daughter. It is possible that he had gifted a fully-furnished house to Mary - as he subsequently did to Annie - at the time of her marriage to Robert Parkinson, a Blackpool solicitor, in 1897. The fact that the Parkinsons’ home Marsden Lea was in Newton Drive on Lumb’s estate suggests that he did. Or he may have made marriage settlements on one or both daughters.

The Lumb boys lost no time in realising their inheritance. The will was proved on 20 April 1918, and on 25 October the first tranche of William’s considerable Blackpool holdings, including Layton Mount, was advertised for sale by auction. A further sale took place the following year. That auction included the still unsold Layton Mount and its seven acres of grounds, for which offers began at £4,000. The property was withdrawn when bidding petered out at £5,000.

William Lumb’s sons spent their working lives in Huddersfield in the family business. Fifty years after his death, one of his great-grandsons, Miles Jessop, cashed in his shares in the business and bought the Scafell Hotel at Rosthwaite in Borrowdale. For many years, he presided over what became a well-known Lake District hostelry. At time of writing, the hotel has been closed following an unsuccessful attempt to sell it. But I would guess that over the decades some alumni or staff of St Joseph’s have patronised the bar at the Scafell without knowing that the portrait they’d passed in the hotel entrance was that of William Lumb, creator of Layton Mount.


Jerry Park attended the prep department and senior school at St Joseph’s from 1959 to 1969. He has published books about the Miller family of Singleton Park; the Crewe family of Crewe Hall; and the Victorian rebuilding of Crewe Hall.