Tag: High Street (Tunstall)

Sir Smith Child: Calver House Tunstall’s First Workingmen’s Club

In 1876, Calver House and its grounds in Roundwell Street, Tunstall, were converted into a non-political and inter-denominational workingmen’s club.

The idea of using the house and its grounds to give Tunstall a workingmen’s club came from Sir Smith Child, who gave £100 towards the cost of conversion.

Inside the clubhouse, there were rooms for conversation, smoking, and playing games, including bagatelle, draughts, and chess. It contained reading rooms where members could read books and newspapers, a lecture theatre and a bar that sold alcoholic drinks.

The management committee intended to open a lending library, enabling members to borrow books and planned to create a recreation ground and build a gymnasium.

Membership of the club costs 2d per week, 6d a month or 1s 3d a quarter.

Smith opened the club on 14 July 1876. The opening ceremony was preceded by a parade led by the Tunstall Volunteer Band from the town hall along High Street to Calver House. During the ceremony, Smith said he was always happy to support any project that benefited Tunstall and its citizens. He believed the club could become the second home for many young working men who had only a bedroom in the house they lived in, that they could call their own.

High Street Tunstall (c.1900)

This postcard shows Tunstall High Street at the end of the 19th century. Notice the tram line and the tram in the middle of the road. In the distance, you can see Lawton’s Tile Works at the Haymarket, where Roundwell Street joins High Street.

Tunstall Market in the 1850s

A 19th Century Meat Market

In his book, Old Times in the Potteries, published in 1906, William Scarratt describes the scene in Tunstall‘s Market Square. These scenes occur on Saturday nights during the 1850s.

Pottery workers worked a six-day week and were paid their wages at five o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

Saturday night was the busiest time in the market.

A score or two of butchers had stalls in the market square. Their tent-like stalls were lit by naphtha lamps. They were chopping up meat and haggling over prices with customers. These fat and smiling butchers seemed content. I do not think they liked covered markets. They were used to trading in the open air.

In the lower part of the square, in front of the town hall, were the hucksters and the poultry dealers. Stalls sold green groceries, fruit, and vegetables. A higgler from Cheshire was nicknamed ‘Cabbage’. His cry ‘Cabbage and cou’d (cold) lard’ was so loud that it was heard by customers at other stalls.

Between the higglers and the High Street were the fishmongers.

On Saturdays and Mondays, a quack doctor had a stall outside the Sneyd Arms. He sold patent medicines and displayed extracted teeth, charts and physic bottles on his stall. A real doctor who frequented the Sneyd Arms enjoyed teasing the quack. He sent notes to him asking difficult medical questions. These questions puzzled the quack, who couldn’t answer them.

Edited by The History Factory (2025)