Tag: York minster

Rallying support for Heartbeat jamboree

It’ll be emotional when I am reunited with my dad’s old Jaguar at the Heartbeat Vehicle Rally in June. I’ve not seen it since 2017. If you’d like to help me by sponsoring the event in some way, please get in touch with this paper or through my web page.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for information about a needlework sampler that featured York Minster, as well as information about a group of girls creating samplers around the village of Lastingham. I’d been contacted by Sarah Duce whose great aunt Hannah Stonehouse completed a different sampler in 1808 and which was one of four about which Sarah was trying to find out more. “I believe one might have been by a Mary Wilson who was born around 1791 in Hartoft, and wondered if there might have been some sort of connection…I believe my Great Grandma x5, Sarah Harding (nee Smith), may have been the teacher of these girls…She was schoolmistress of Lastingham following the death of her schoolmaster husband from consumption at the young age of 30.”

The Minster sampler was sewn by a girl called Ann Raw and I wondered if she had actually been sitting in front of the building to create it. Reader Gillian Hunt contacted me to say: “The York Minster sampler – same motif on another sampler, which suggests the girls were following a design by someone else – maybe by their needlework teacher?” It means they probably did it in a classroom setting.

Gillian specialises in researching samplers like this, and two years ago was very helpful in relation to helping me understand the significance of the needlework motifs on one that hung in my mum’s kitchen by a young girl called Hannah Raw. Is she related to Ann Raw? We don’t yet know.

Gillan informed me in 2023: “Hannah’s sampler has two sets of initials after the date – MR and what looks like ER…If ER is in dark thread, they are most likely to have died before Hannah completed her sampler.”

Gillian discovered that the initials represented Hannah’s parents Matthew and Ellis Raw. Ellis’s initials were in a dark thread and further research confirmed she had indeed passed away. Matthew Raw died a few years after the sampler was created, when Hannah was still a teenager.

Gillian’s help, among others, led us to being able to fill out much of Hannah’s life story. Best of all, we found a living relative, a direct descendant of Hannah’s brother John Raw. My ultimate goal is to find a living relative of Hannah herself.

On another note, I took a trip up to Goathland last weekend to meet the posse who are responsible for organising the annual Heartbeat Vehicle Rally. This year’s event is scheduled for the weekend of 27th and 28th June.

The rally has boomed over the years, and last time attracted around 6,000 visitors over the two days. They flocked to the village to meet star guests and to study the collection of wonderful vintage vehicles, some of which appeared in the TV show. The local businesses do a roaring trade, with hotels, B&Bs and holiday homes fully booked many months in advance. The local cafes and shops are overflowing, and with the car parks bursting at the seams, some prefer to arrive by steam on the North York Moors Railway. It brings a huge financial boost into the area, and yet those who organise it don’t make a penny from it (And, for the record, neither does my family!).

It’s a truly wonderful, family occasion, and those involved in its planning put in hours of hard work, as well as their own money, all for the love of Heartbeat. Any profits raised are donated to Goathland Primary School.

As the event grows in size, the work and challenges, both financial and practical, increase. This year we are looking for sponsorship to help with the mounting costs involved. Please contact me via this paper or my web page if you are willing to help. I will also be knocking on a few business doors over the coming weeks as the event looms.

This year there is one particular vehicle that I cannot wait to see. It is my dad’s very own vintage Mark II Jaguar. That car had been part of our family since I was a child, but sadly we had to sell it in the wake of his death in 2017. I thought I’d never see it again. But now it’s been found and is coming to the rally.

It’s going to be one heck of an emotional reunion!

Do you have opinions, memories or ideas to share with me? Get in touch with me using the ‘Contact’ button on the top right.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 27th  and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 25th March 2026

Snippets from the past all sewn up

 

A needlework sampler showing a view of York Minster created in 1841 by 16-year-old Ann Raw. She included a depiction of a stained glass window and grazing sheep and cattle next to the building. Picture by Witney Antiques.

Another family mystery has landed in my inbox after a reader came across a series of columns I wrote in late 2022/early 2023 about a set of three needlework samplers that had been hanging in my family kitchen for years.

 

Two were done by ancestors on my mum’s side of the family while the third was by a little girl called Hannah Raw, who was only nine when she created it in 1835, but about whom we knew nothing.

 

Following some expert internet sleuthing by my wonderful readers, over the following weeks and months we managed to flesh out much of Hannah’s story, discovering that by the age of 13 she was an orphan, but later married a John Hall, had two children, and even later became a grandmother. She died in 1890 aged 64 and was buried at St Thomas’ Church, Glaisdale. I was ultimately able to find her grave and go and pay my respects.

 

Sarah Duce, who is based in Limerick, Ireland, got in touch: “I am interested in a school of samplers based around Lastingham. My great aunt Hannah Stonehouse…in 1808 completed a sampler which is quite rare apparently and recently sold to the States for a tidy sum because it depicted the Napoleonic Wars.”

 

Sarah’s family came originally from Lastingham, but moved first to Hartlepool then to Scunthorpe. Sarah moved to Ireland 30 years ago and is trying to piece together her North Yorkshire roots.

 

She goes on to explain that Hannah Stonehouse’s sampler was one of four about which she is trying to find out more. “I believe one might have been by a Mary Wilson who was born around 1791 in Hartoft, and wondered if there might have been some sort of connection…I believe my Great Grandma x5, Sarah Harding (nee Smith), may have been the teacher of these girls…She was schoolmistress of Lastingham following the death of her schoolmaster husband from consumption at the young age of 30.”

 

It was not unusual for widows to take on the work of their late husbands to earn a living to support themselves and their children. Sarah had three little ones, the youngest just two weeks old, and was still the schoolmistress at the age 80, as revealed in her entry on the 1841 census.

 

Sarah wondered if Hannah Raw was one of the girls sent to the Lastingham sewing school. She explains that her 5x great grandmother Sarah would have had no formal education and was likely illiterate at the time of her marriage  “…so must have brushed up her skills quickly, but maybe sewing was the backbone of her teachings…I also saw during my research…a newspaper of 1997 illustrating a 1841 sampler by Ann Raw, age 16, entitled the ‘South View of the Minster’…I wonder if there might be a connection there?”

 

I cannot answer that question, and Lastingham is a good 15 miles away from where Hannah Raw lived in the Lealholm area. But perhaps a family history sleuth reading this might be able to help, as they did before when finding out such useful information about Hannah. Raw is a common name, and I would imagine that to produce an image of that view of York Minster in 1841, Ann would have had to have sat in front of it to know what it looked like. That would possibly mean she would have been living in York, which in the 19th century was a long journey from the North York Moors. She was a similar age to Hannah Raw, so perhaps they were cousins?

 

I found an image of the sampler in question on a Facebook page run by Witney Antiques, an Oxfordshire-based specialist in embroidery and samplers. They describe it as follows:

 

‘This sampler, which shows a view of York Minster, was completed by 16-year-old Ann Raw on 14th February 1841. Her handling of the cathedral’s stained glass window is incredibly charming, as is the depiction of grazing sheep and cattle in the grass next to the building.’

 

Sarah ended her message by saying: “You never know where little snippets of info can come from, so you have to keep asking!”

 

You do indeed, Sarah, and I am hoping that someone reading this might just have the key to the little snippets we are looking for.

Do you have opinions, memories or ideas to share with me? Get in touch with me using the ‘Contact’ button on the top right.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 13th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 11th March 2026

Oh man, the tales we tell!

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York Minster, which an American visitor described as ‘That wee little church’

 

The theme of word confusion has prompted a few readers to get in touch with their own funny stories and I thought that sharing a few might brighten your day.

A rich source of mirth are the things that children say, be they malapropisms, mispronunciations or valiant attempts at the right word. Alastair Smith said his daughter would call her brother ‘Ditchead’ instead of ‘Richard’ and swans were ‘Fonz’. When Lynn Catena’s son was little, she wasn’t sure what he meant when he asked her if he could listen to the ‘old fashioned CDs’. It took her a moment to work out that he was referring to her vinyl LPs. And Teresa Watkin’s son invented his very own word whenever his parents would try to tickle him. “Legoffme!” he would shout, instead of ‘Let go of me’ (I think that word deserves its own entry in the English dictionary). One of Lynnette Brammah’s funniest came courtesy of a friend’s daughter, whose favourite film was the one with Dorothy and the ruby slippers. She referred to it as ‘The Buzzard of Was’.

Lynnette also provides us with an excellent example of when our friends from overseas unwittingly entertain us with their attempts at our very complicated language. She was asked by an American if she knew the way to ‘Can-arse-bow-roo’. Any ideas where that is? I couldn’t work it out! Turns out it’s that pretty town that lies on the River Nidd, otherwise known as Knaresborough. And Lynn Catena was asked by a French visitor if she knew where he could buy ‘shoe’ cream for his wife. He rubbed his face to help Lynn decipher what he meant. “I figured it out,” she says. “He wanted Boots the Chemist. He was close…it was footwear!”

I don’t know about you, but it seems that everything in the USA is bigger than here. Their food portions, for example, are huge, and if you ask for a large carton of cockporn – I mean popcorn – at the cinema, you get enough to feed a small country. The same goes for the width of the roads, the size of the cars, and even the buildings. Dad once told me a story about some visiting Americans who were very proud of their country’s reputation for all things jumbo. He was driving them around York, pointing out the significant sights and landmarks, and they passed a particular one for a second time, at which point one of the guests exclaimed: “Oh gee, look! There’s that wee little church again!” The wee little church? Only York Minster!

And I was walking with a German friend in the Dales a couple of years back, and as we passed by a farm he declared, “Look at all those midgets!”. I looked towards the farm buildings, but not one midget could I see. When he began to flap his arms about his head, I realised he actually meant ‘midges’.  

But it’s not just those from abroad that sometimes get it wrong. It seems our southern neighbours have trouble with understanding the way us northerners might say things. Lucien Smith says: “I had a great Northumberland place name that was Southernised recently. Slayley Hall, pronounced Slay-ley, was poshified to ‘Slarley’. It took me a moment to know where she meant!”

And that brought to mind another memory of mine which always makes me giggle. In the 1990s I used to work in East Grinstead, West Sussex, and as I was handing some paperwork over to a colleague, she said, “It’s Maggie outside.”

“Pardon?” I replied.

“Maggie, outside.”

“Oh, is she? Who’s Maggie?”

“No!’ she laughed, “I mean the weather! It’s warm and maggy!” The penny finally dropped. What she was trying to tell me was that it was a muggy day outside.

On the subject of getting words wrong in church, a reader revealed: “One of my brothers, when he was a kid, used to start the Lord’s Prayer like this: ‘Our father who art in heaven, Alan be thy name…” And one of my friends reported that her daughter used to think that everyone was saying ‘Oh man!’ rather than ‘Amen’. So it turns out that Peter God whom, as I mentioned last time, some of us would thank every week during Mass, now has a mysterious colleague called Alan.

Oh man!

Contact me, and read more, at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 1st October and the Gazette & Herald on 29th September 2021