X42   MAN c.1865 PLA

Size: 9” * 15”               Material: Paper

Scale: 20 yards to 1”    Condition: good

This plan is entitled ‘Sagar’s property at Manningham’. It is undated and shows two small plots, near Carlisle Road and Church Street. Clearly the existence of Church Street made no sense until the erection of Manningham church in 1848, which gives us a terminus post quem for the plan. In fact it cannot be of so early a date as that since the street names were not in use at the time of the first ordnance survey (published 1852). One plot is labelled as the Bradford Co-operative Society, and this was not founded until 1860, after which it would have needed some time to establish itself in Manningham.

Of the landowners mentioned on the plan Mr Rushforth Rhodes would seem to have the most easily identifiable name. Using probate records (reasonable for a landowner) the most plausible individual was a cotton warp sizer of that name who died in 1875. The warps were the long threads in a piece of cloth, through which the weft was woven in a loom. Warps were ‘sized’, or given a protective coating, to make them stronger and smoother. I’ve selected this man because his executors in1875, William Waddington Rhodes (his son) and John Rhodes, both have Manningham addresses. Rushforth Rhodes (1803-1875) was married to Sarah Waddington and the 1851 census places him in Victoria Street , Manningham. Oddly Rushforth is only a labourer but William is already a silk and cotton warp sizer, perhaps working for the nearby Manningham Silk Mill.

So, using all the available evidence, the plan is likely to have a date between 1865-75. But who was Sagar, the property owner, and why is he not afforded the dignity of a first name, or even a title? There is nothing positive to indicate that he is dead. Was the sale, of what looks like terraced housing property, an ordinary commercial transaction, or could it have resulted from a slightly disreputable cause such as the owner’s bankruptcy?

Using the 1861 census of Manningham and filtering out all the results except those who are male, householders, and over 21, there are only three candidates for ‘Sagar’. There were two local butchers who might have owned land – Samuel Sagar 44 (of White Abbey) who had a son called Egremont, and Stephen Sagar 49 (of Lumb Lane). I have rejected those two in favour of the more likely third candidate, a John Tetley Sagar (1828-1891), a joiner and builder living nearby in Salt Street.

Naturally, as a builder, John Tetley Sagar would be a plausible developer of terraced property. In the 1871 census he is living in Prospect Place, Manningham, and actually describes himself as a ‘landowner, and owner of houses’. Later he moves to Anvil Street, Manningham. He may have had other interests since in 1874 a man of this unusual name is trying to get an alehouse licence in Liversedge. What makes him unique, for a landowner in this series of maps, is that I know that he was lucky enough to have all his own teeth. This is a fact which clearly merits explanation.

John Tetley Sagar had married Sarah Bolton in 1851 but she died 1880. Subsequent to this he appears twice in the records of HMP Wakefield. In 1884 (at the stated aged of 58) an order of bastardy was made against him, and he was sentenced to 1 month in jail or a fine of £2 16 4. Then again in 1888 HMP Wakefield records that a man of this name, a joiner of Bradford, was given 28 days or a fine of £3 3 6, again for bastardy. He was described as having brown hair, a prominent nose, a deformed back, but all his own teeth. At this period the fathering of children out of wedlock was evidently a criminal offence. Be that as it may the fact of his being unable to keep it in his trousers had proved very helpful to a local history drudge who is trying to find ‘corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative’.