Cowbrook Mill, Glossop: 1801 to 1898

Cowbrook Mill stands at Old Glossop, just north of the Hurst Brook — the stream also recorded as Scotland Brook. It was a cotton spinning mill for almost a century, and it has been a private dwelling for rather less time than most people assume.

1801: a roller turner takes a lease

The mill was built in 1801 by William Hadfield, a roller turner of Hadfield, whose family had come from Wash, near Chapel-en-le-Frith, and had lived for some years at Padfield. He obtained the lease of the land on 30 May 1801. The site was then beyond the eastern edge of the township of Glossop — open ground, chosen for the water rather than the neighbours.

It was built of stone, and it was water powered: a ten horsepower wheel fed by a leat drawn off the brook. That single detail explains both the mill’s position and, eventually, its end.

Three generations

By 1824 the mill was working 4,656 spindles, and Cowbrook appears among the cotton spinners of the district in the Derbyshire trade directories of the period — Glover’s of 1829 and Pigot’s of 1835.

William Hadfield died on 22 June 1843, and the mill passed to his only surviving son, John. John died on 22 June 1876 — the same date, thirty-three years later — and the running of it went to his elder son, Joshua Henry Hadfield. It stayed in the one family for its entire working life.

It grew considerably. By 1891 the mill was recorded at 18,000 spindles, close to four times the 1824 figure.

1898: the water runs out

Cowbrook Mill closed in 1898. The reasons given are unglamorous and entirely characteristic of the period: machinery that had fallen behind, and a water supply that could not be relied upon. Steam had long since freed the larger mills from the brooks, and the mills built for water found themselves in the wrong place. The machinery and stock were auctioned on 11 May 1898.

Closing was not the end of the family’s connection. Joshua Henry Hadfield died in 1906, and the property then passed to Edward Platt of Mersey Bank — which is why accounts of Cowbrook sometimes give 1898 and sometimes 1906. Both are right: the first is when the spinning stopped, the second when the Hadfields let go.

Afterwards

What survives at Cowbrook today is not the spinning mill. The buildings that now carry the name are the ground-level boiler house and the upper-level garages — a double and three singles — converted into a dwelling, with annexes added to both levels.

The Wilsons, from 1923

My own family, the Wilsons, owned Cowbrook House from 1923 until approximately the 2000s — some eighty years. The holding encompassed the old mill and the surrounding land, so the buildings William Hadfield put up in 1801 passed into my family’s hands seventeen years after the Hadfields released them, and stayed there for the rest of the twentieth century.

This is the part of the history I can speak to directly rather than by citation, and it is the reason this site exists. The paper record of Cowbrook is thin. Its dates and spindle counts survive in the archives; who lived there, what was agreed with whom, and why a gate stands where it does are not written down anywhere, and they disappear with the people who remember them.

What the family did here

The Wilsons did a good deal for people in Glossop during those years, and almost none of it is written down anywhere.

My grandfather, George Henry Wilson, bought the land for the Dinting Scouts and had the original building put up on it. The 1st Dinting Scout Group is still there today, at Adderley Place in Dinting.

The group has been running since 1938 — fifteen years into my family’s time at Cowbrook — and is still going after more than eighty years. The hut there now is a modern one, so the building he paid for may since have been replaced; the ground it stands on is the ground he bought. A man bought a piece of land, put a building on it, and three generations of Glossop children have used it since.

The family’s support did not stop with the gift. Later, with the permission of Kathleen Wilson, some of the land was sold to provide funds for the scout group — so a second generation kept it going, this time by turning part of the holding into money the group could use.

It appears in no trade directory, no insurance record and no auction notice — which is to say it appears in none of the places local history is usually drawn from.

The right of way across the common ground, granted by the same man so that neighbouring residents could reach Sheffield Road from Cowbrook Avenue, belongs in the same category. It is still in daily use. It was a gift, not an obligation, and it is now simply how people get to their houses.

I record these not out of family pride but because there is nowhere else they are recorded at all.

Why the Wilsons are not in the record

Search for Cowbrook and you will find a great deal about the Hadfields. Lease dates, spindle counts, the deaths of William and John on the same day of the year thirty-three years apart, the auction of the machinery. Then the record stops, more or less at 1906, and picks up again only with whatever is written about the house today.

Eighty years are missing from the middle of it, and they are the years my family were here.

The likeliest explanation is not a conspiracy but a category. Almost everything written about Cowbrook was written as mill history — part of surveys of the lost mills of Glossopdale, drawn from trade directories, insurance records and auction notices. Those sources exist because a mill was a business. When the spinning stopped in 1898 the business ended, and the paper trail that documented it ended with it. What the buildings became afterwards was of no interest to an industrial historian, because it was no longer industry.

So the Wilsons are absent for the same reason most twentieth-century owners of most former mills are absent: the records were never about the place, they were about the trade. A family living somewhere quietly for eighty years generates almost nothing an archive collects.

It is still an odd thing to look at. The people who ran it for ninety-seven years are documented to the day; the people who owned it for the next eighty are not there at all. That asymmetry is not unique to Cowbrook, but it is stark here, and it is the reason for writing any of this down.

If you have photographs, documents, or recollections of Cowbrook House, Cowbrook Mill or the land around them from the twentieth century, they would be worth preserving. Very little of it exists anywhere else.

Sources

The mill’s construction, ownership, spindle counts and closure follow the Glossop Heritage Trust archive and Notes on the Mills of Glossopdale; the 1891 spindle figure is from Grace’s Guide. Trade directory references are Glover’s Directory of Derbyshire (1829) and Pigot’s Directory of Derbyshire (1835).