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The system of indoor relief by means of workhouses dates from the early 17th century.  Those who found themselves destitute towards the end of the century had their difficulties compounded by the Act of Settlement which prevented people moving from one parish to another in order to find work.

The accommodation of the Torrington poor house was totally inadequate so in 1737 a new one was built on the north side of Calf Street which served its purpose for nearly a century.  Then in 1836/7 a piece of land was bought on the south side of New Street on the western edge of town for a new workhouse with room for 250 inmates.  It was built of stone and designed by Sampson Kempthorne who was also the architect for other Devon workhouses at Axminster, Barnstaple, Crediton, Exeter, Okehampton and South Molton.  An infirmary was added in 1867 and a chapel was built in the grounds behind the workhouse in 1870.  A governor was appointed as well as a chaplain, medical officer and matron.

In 1871 there were 113 inmates, twice as many women (32) as men (16) and twice as many children (65) as women.  George Sellick was the governor, John Budd the porter and Elizabeth Williams the nurse.  There was also a schoolmaster, Henry Nichols, and a schoolmistress, Emma Acford, for the 36 children listed as ‘scholars’.  There were 24 children aged under 5, the youngest being just 2 weeks old.  One child is listed as ‘illegitimate’, another as an ‘idiot’ and a third as an ‘imbecile’.

Among the male inmates were a former mason, accountant, cabinet maker, innkeeper, farmer, railway labourer and 9 agricultural labourers.  Amongst the women were a former needlewoman, shoebinder, cook, plumber and glazier’s wife, 11 gloveresses and 13 servants.  All had fallen on hard times, through lack of work or care from family or general incapacity, and were unable to support themselves or their children.  Such was life for the poor and disadvantaged before the welfare state.

In 1894 there were around 95 inmates in the Torrington workhouse and by 1910 there were 48.

An elderly woman, who was a child in the 1930s, remembers attending a concert and tea party each year which was held to raise funds for comforts for the occupants.  Dr Bickford (after whom the Bickford Centre for the over 60s was named) was the star turn at the concerts and always sang ‘Widecombe Fair’.

When the building ceased to be a workhouse it became the Torrington Public Assistance Institution.  Then it was Torridge View nursing home and ‘housing with care’ – eight bungalows which were built where the chapel used to be.  The old, rather forbidding workhouse building was demolished in the mid-1990s and the single storey Woodland Vale was built on the same site and opened in January 1997.  This residential care home and day care centre is run by Devon County Council.

Sydney House was situated in South Street where the entrance to the car park is now.  The house was built by William Vaughan, a wealthy glove manufacturer who owned the factory in Whites Lane.  The house was enormous, built of local cream-coloured Marland brick and Ham stone in the Modern English Renaissance style with turrets, pinnacles and gabling.  A local woman remembers it being ‘like a fairytale castle’.  The Vaughan family moved into the house, called Enderley, in 1889.  After William Vaughan collapsed and died in 1903 on his way to the factory, his family moved away.

During the First World War Enderley was used rent-free by the Red Cross as a hospital for sick and wounded soldiers which was supervised and financed by William Martin of Chulmleigh.  The house was renamed Sydney House in his honour for that was where he had lived when he made his fortune in the wool trade in Australia.

After the war the house was used by Devon County Council as an ‘Open-Air School’ for delicate children suffering from pre-tuberculosis and asthma.  The regime in the school was strict and the conditions spartan and children often felt homesick. When the Second World War started the Devon children were joined by evacuees who needed special care.

On 19th February 1942 fire swept through the building and fifty-four children were rescued and taken next door to the Conservative Club but five boys were discovered to be missing and, despite heroic efforts to rescue them, died in their top floor dormitory.

The house was demolished in 1950 and a lot of the building materials were sold off and used in the locality.  One pair of wrought iron gates are now at the Warren Lane entrance to Rack Park gardens.

In 2002, sixty years after the boys’ deaths a commemoration ceremony was held in Torrington attended by relatives of four of the boys as well as survivors and staff from Sydney House and North Devon dignitaries.  A stone was placed at the grave of one of the boys in the cemetery and a memorial plaque was unveiled by a survivor of the fire and dedicated by the Bishop of Exeter at the entrance to South Street car park (renamed Sydney House car park).  The large slab of stone, to which the plaque was attached, was once part of Sydney House and had been used for years as a doorstep to a stable in Little Torrington.  The owners donated the stone for the memorial.

At the end of the book about Sydney House by Susan Scrutton and Harry Cramp, they say that most people who were affected by this event ‘have expressed gratitude that a suitable tribute is being paid to the boys who lost their young lives and feel that it finally closes a tragic part of Great Torrington’s history’.

PART ONE

Torrington, Connecticut was first settled in 1735 and given permission to organise a government and incorporate as a town in 1740. The fast moving waters of the Naugatuck River were used as water power for early 19th century industries – a woollen mill and two brass mills – and in 1849 the railway connected Torrington with other population centres which stimulated further industrial growth.  Between 1880 and 1920 the population exploded from 3,000 to 22,000 and Torrington was chartered as a city in 1923.  In 1955 a huge flood destroyed much of the downtown area when two hurricanes caused local rivers to overflow.  John Brown, the abolitionist, was born in Torrington in 1805.  The population in 2010 was 36,383.

The earliest contact between Torrington, Connecticut and Great Torrington appears to be in 1883 when a local newspaper editor wrote to our mayor, William Ashplant, requesting details about the Devonshire town.  These were supplied and our borough arms were adopted as a trademark at the head of the American newspaper.

In 1897 town clerk, George Doe, received a request from the rector of Trinity Church in Torrington, Connecticut for a stone from our parish church to incorporate into their new church.  This was duly done with the consent of the vicar of Great Torrington, the Rev. Frank Emlyn-Jones.  This project was paid for by a parishioner, John Davey, a Devonshire man who had been confirmed in our parish church by the Bishop of Exeter.  In 1899 he came to England and visited Great Torrington after an absence of 50 years.

In September 1920 a deputation from Torrington, Connecticut bringing greetings from the warden and burgesses of the town to the ‘mother’ town in Devon was welcomed at the town hall by the mayor, William Luxton, and other townspeople.  In 1933 courtesies were exchanged again when Mrs Bayntun Starky, wife of the Great Torrington mayor, visited the American town.

If Torrington, Connecticut can be called the ‘daughter’ town, Torrington, Wyoming is the ‘grand-daughter’ town founded by William G. Curtis in 1889 and named by him after his home town in Connecticut.  He was the first postmaster, running the post office from his homestead, and served twice as mayor after the incorporation of the town.  By 1908 Torrington had a national bank, three general stores, two hotels and a pharmacy.  The town is situated in the fertile valley of the North Platte River and was originally a watering and coaling station for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.  Agriculture was the major occupation – sugar beet, beans, potatoes, cattle and sheep – and the Holly Sugar Company which opened in 1926 has remained the major employer in Torrington ever since.  Again, a stone from our ancient parish church was sent to Wyoming to be built into the new All Saints’ Church there. 

I visited Torrington, Wyoming with my family in 1994 and found the town to be of a similar size to ours but located on a plain surrounded by mountains.  The streets were laid out on a grid system and the main street was very ‘wild west’.  Torrington is on the Oregon Trail.   

PART TWO

Torrington, New South Wales in Australia was named after its English counterpart in Devon.  It is on the Northern Tablelands of the New England district of NSW at an altitude of 1,200 metres surrounded by a landscape of spectacular granite rock formations, streams and waterfalls.  Although there is often snow in winter, the summers are delightfully cool in comparison to the surrounding lower areas.  The inhabitants feel more Queensland oriented as they are only 30 miles from the border and 4 hours’ drive from the state capital, Brisbane, while Sydney, NSW’s capital, is a good 9 hours’ drive south.

The discovery of the very rich Torrington tin lode in 1881 created much excitement but in a very short time the small prospectors had lost control to overseas mining companies.  In the 1920s 500 men were employed at the mines but the industry virtually shut down after the Second World War. Tin mining continued in a small way in the area until the early 1980s and there are still remains of about 360 old mines.  Many gem ‘fossickers’ continue to visit to hunt for topaz, beryl, emerald, quartz and other minerals.  Like our town, Torrington NSW is surrounded by common land on which the residents run cattle to keep the roadside verges eaten down to reduce fire hazard.  At the end of the 20th century employment centred around shearing, apiary (producing NSW’s ‘top honey’),the operation of earth-moving machinery and rural employment on the surrounding sheep grazing properties.  The population in 1999 was 112.

In 2001 I went to Australia with my husband and we visited Torrington.  We turned off the main road just before Deepwater and drove, partly along a dirt road, to the village which was a collection of rather run-down homesteads.  We were made very welcome by the proprietors of the Tablelands Bar and Grill where we stayed the night.  Their son, Steve, took us for a drive into the bush and showed us old mining places, fossicking holes, a rock called ‘The Mystery Face’ and we climbed up to ‘Thunderbolt’s Lookout’ with its wonderful 360 degree view.  When we got back, a group of local people had come to the hotel to meet us.  At that time Torrington had 72 inhabitants.

Torrington NSW has had a struggle to survive.  The sawmill closed in the 1960s.  The post office and general store closed in 1997 so the nearest shops are in Emmaville, 15 miles to the west, or Deepwater, 15 miles to the east on the New England Highway.  The village school has been closed for some years so children have to go to Emmaville where the vicar, doctor and cottage hospital are also based.  The Tablelands Bar and Grill closed in October 2003.  In 2011 there were about 85 inhabitants leading isolated lives.

One of the main characters in Sebastian Faulks’s novel, ‘Human Traces’, comes from Torrington in Lincolnshire.  Looking at a present-day map, there are two small hamlets on the edge of Gleasby Moor north of Wragby just off the A157 called East and West Torrington.  As far as I am aware, our town has had no contact with these places.

Sir Joshua Reynolds was an influential 18th century English painter, specializing in portraits.  He promoted the ‘Grand Style’ in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect.  He was born in Devon in 1723 and died in London in 1792.  He was the founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.  He occasionally visited his eldest sister, Mary, who lived with her husband, John Palmer, at Palmer House in Torrington.  On one visit in 1762 he was accompanied by Dr Johnson and it is said that they sat together in the gazebo which was situated in the garden but, after restoration in the 1990s, is now in the gardens of RHS Rosemoor just outside the town.  Reynolds’s portrait of his sister Mary is in the Cottonian Library, Plymouth.

Castle House nursing home, a grand late 18th century house in Castle Street, was once the home of Mrs Elizabeth Deane, one of the nieces of Joshua Reynolds.  She modelled for him as ‘Fortitude’, one of the Virtues in his memorial window at New College Chapel, Oxford.   

Torrington square and the roads leading into it are a conservation area with a certain degree of Georgian feeling and there are many Grade II listed buildings worthy of notice.  These include the Black Horse Inn which is believed to date from the 15th century, the Globe Inn, formerly a hotel and coaching inn, the present building dating from 1830, and the Plough arts centre, a red brick neo-Georgian building of 1913.  The colonnaded Town Hall, once called the Guild Hall, dates from the 16th century and there have been additions and restorations made over the years, the present Town Hall being built in 1861.  Behind the Town Hall is an area which in the 17th century held the old slaughter house and meat market, known as ‘the shambles’, as well as the ancient lock-ups and stocks.  

At the lower end of the square is the Market House in South Street which was built in 1842.  At 28 South Street is a fine house built in 1701 and completely restored by the Landmark Trust in 1996 using authentic materials wherever possible.  This house can be rented by holidaymakers from the Landmark Trust and can sleep up to seven people.  Further up the street, on the same side, is number 42, Furse House, built in about 1810.  Number 50 South Street, known as Windy Cross House, is a large four-storey house which dates from the 1820s which may have been built as a boarding house and was owned by a couple of doctors in the early 20th century who may well have held surgeries there.  In Whites Lane stands the old glove factory built in 1884 which has lain empty for some years waiting for a buyer to convert it into a building with a present-day use.

The vicarage opposite the parish church in New Street dates from 1841 although it stands on the site of a much older manor house.  Palmer House opposite the western entrance to the church is one of Torrington’s most historic buildings and has been called a ‘house of style and consequence’.  It was built in 1752 by John Palmer, an attorney who was several times Mayor and whose wife, Mary, was the eldest sister of Sir Joshua Reynolds who used to visit occasionally.

(For more details of these and other buildings of interest, see ‘Torrington Uncovered’ by Moira Brewer)

The Rolle family were Lords of the Manor for some 350 years.  They lived at Stevenstone in the adjoining parish of St Giles-in-the-Wood.  George Rolle (c1485-1552), who acquired the manor of Torrington from the Fortescue family in Henry VIII’s time, was the founder of the dynasty which came to an end with the death of Mark Rolle in 1907.

Dennys Rolle (1614-1638) made many benefactions to the people of Torrington during his short life, including the foundation of the Blue Coat School.  Sir John Rolle (1626-1706) was knighted by Charles II in 1660.  He had remained loyal to the King during the Civil War, had helped Charles II when he was in exile by payments of money and had actively supported the Restoration.  Another Dennys Rolle (1720-1797) was Mayor of Torrington for two terms and Recorder from 1781-97.  He was also MP for Barnstaple from 1761-74.  He provided schools and garden allotments for the poor.

John Lord Rolle (1750-1842) was elected MP for Devonshire in 1780 and retained the seat in the general elections of 1784 and 1790.  He was a supporter of Pitt and a staunch Conservative.  In June 1796 he was raised to the Peerage, receiving the title of ‘Baron Rolle of Stevenstone’.  He was Colonel of the South Devon Militia and Royal North Devon Yeomanry and a county magistrate.  He commissioned plans for the building of a canal which was completed in 1827.

Although he was married twice, John Lord Rolle had no children and his Torrington estates were left to his nephew, the Hon. Mark George Kerr Trefusis (1835-1907), son of Lord Clinton, on the condition that he changed his name to Rolle which he did by Royal Licence in 1852.  Mark Rolle sold the canal land for the building of a railway in 1871.  He donated land for the cottage hospital, paid for the pannier market to be roofed and for a drinking fountain to be erected in the square in 1870.  In 1868 he started the building of an extravagant new manor house at Stevenstone but in less than a hundred years it lay in ruins.  Mark was the last of the Rolle dynasty.  He died leaving no male heir and his estates then passed to his nephew, Charles Trefusis, the 21st Baron Clinton.