X45   MAN c.1865 ATK

Size: 14” * 22”             Material: Paper

Date: c.1865                Scale: 10 yards to 1”

Condition: Good

The full title of the plan is ‘Plan of property situate in Brick Lane, Manningham belonging to the late William Fairbank’. The plan was surveyed by WC Atkinson, Marlborough Road. Although there is in fact a brick-making connection to the landowner I believe that the name ‘Brick Lane’ long pre-dates this, and may have originally been derived from the word ‘breck’ or broken. By the 1890s it had become known as City Road. A detail from the 25” Ordnance Survey map from this decade locates the position of the plan precisely.

The terraced housing in Saxon Street might well have been developed by William Fairbank himself. He is not an especially famous son of Bradford, but I have come across his name before during my work in the Local Studies Library and West Yorkshire Archives. I think all the references I have located are related to a single family of miners and brickmakers. These start with the 1841 census in which there is a William Fairbank, a farmer of Lower Grange. He is 45 and is married to Sarah. Among his 10 children are two teenaged sons, James and Joseph Fairbank.

William Cudworth (Heaton, Manningham & Allerton) says quite a bit about them: “Messrs. Fairbank, who, from the year 1840 to 1850, had worked pits on the upper and lower estate at Allerton, began to sink for coal near the bottom of Whetley Lane in 1849, and sank to a depth of ninety-six yards. In order to discover the dip of the seam, they also made borings on the site of Alston Mills to a depth of 106 yards. At this depth they came upon the water, which is especially suitable for wool-washing, and is so used by Messrs. Isaac Holden & Sons. In May, 1852, the seam of coal was reached on the site of Messrs. Holden’s works. For about ten years Messrs. Fairbank employed from 150 to 200 men in mining occupations”.

In 1851 George Baron (of the Clockhouse Estate) leased coal under land in Manningham to William Fairbank of Allerton and James Fairbank of Whetley Lane. The seams involved were the Upper or Black Bed (£40 per acre) and Lower or Better Bed (£150 per acre) and it was 14 year lease. The locations were closes between Whetley Lane and Thornton Road: land north and west of Daniel Illingworth’s mill seems probable. Later in the 1857 Bradford Trades Directory there is also a William Fairbank, Whetley Lane (colliery owner). Finally in 1860 there was a legal action called Leach vs Fairbank. The plaintiff claimed that a pit the Fairbanks operated in the Thornton Road – Preston Street area had caused the subsidence of his house (BRA 1860 ELL) with the result that the surface and underground workings of Brick Lane Colliery were mapped.

William Fairbank had been born c.1795, and died in 1865. James Fairbank (1823-1851), who I have taken to be his son, was a coal merchant living next door to his brother Joseph in Whitefield Place, Manningham which had just been built. In 1863 he is on the list of brick makers at Thornton Road and two years later is advertising in the Bradford Observer offering ‘common and pressed bricks’ for sale at the Fairbank’s Works. I am fairly certain that these works were on those at the corner of Preston Street and Thornton Road because the Brick Lane Colliery was almost exactly opposite and we know that Fairbank operated this since this was the site concerned in the 1860 litigation. After his father’s death he was listed as a coal merchant and brick & tile maker in his own right. In the 1871 census Fairbank was living with his wife Sarah Ellen, three children and a Welsh servant in Whetley Cottage.  We can be certain that James Fairbank owned, or at least operated, a Whetley Lane brick-yard separate from the nearby premises of the Bradford Brick & Tile Company. James Fairbank removed to Warren Park, Eldwick in 1875. He began an Elland Flag Quarry at this site. He died leaving £50,000 in 1903; there was evidently money in bricks and coal!