The Dukeries

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The Dukeries

The Dukeries was a district in the county of Nottinghamshire which was so called because it used to contain five ducal seats in close proximity to one another. It is south of the town of Worksop which has been called The Gateway to the Dukeries. The dukal seats were:

• Clumber House: principal seat of the dukes of Newcastle
• Thoresby Hall: principal seat of the dukes of Kingston and later of the Earls Manvers of the same family.
• Welbeck Abbey: principal seat of the dukes of Portland
• Worksop Manor: a seat of the dukes of Norfolk

The Dukeries was remarkable not only for the number of ducal families in proximity to each other, there being at most times fewer than one English ducal family for each two English counties, but also because the parks of the various houses were largely contiguous, rather than being separated from one another by miles of farmland, as is usually the case with the parks of major country houses in England, whether ducal or not. Bestwood Lodge. a seat of the dukes of St Albans, was also in Nottinghamshire, but over 15 miles to the south of the core Dukeries area.

Welbeck Abbey is the only house now in private occupation. Until 2005 the abbey was leased to the Ministry of Defence and occupied by the Army Sixth Form College, while the descendants of the last Duke of Portland occupied a secondary house in the park called Welbeck Woodhouse, which was built for the Marquis of Titchfield in the early 1930s. It is three quarters of a mile to the north east of the main house, and while much smaller than the abbey, is some 200 feet long.

The incumbent Duke of Norfolk sold Worksop Manor to the Duke of Newcastle in 1839. The Norfolks preferred to spend more time at Arundel Castle and the Duke of Newcastle only wanted the land to enlarge his estate, so he had the main part of the house demolished. However the service wing was adapted into a smaller (but still substantial) country house later in the 19th century, which survives. Clumber Park was demolished by the Dukes of Newcastle in the 1930s because they could no longer afford to live there, but the large Victorian chapel survived, and the 3,800-acre (15 km2) park now belongs to the National Trust. Thoresby Hall opened as a country house hotel early in the 21st century after a long period of neglect. The term "The Dukeries" is still sometimes used, and it appears on some modern maps, including the one linked below.

The Dukeries Coal field

In the early twentieth century the economic and social base of the Dukeries was dramatically influenced by the development of a new coalfield there, the eastern extension of the existing Midlands coal industry. The main source for these changes is Robert Waller’s Oxford Historical Monograph The Dukeries Transformed (OUP 1983)^[1].

Five new mines were opened in the Dukeries, sinking having been commenced in 1920. These were at Clipstone (coal won 1922), Ollerton (1925), Blidworth (1926), Bilsthorpe (1927) and Thoresby near Edwinstowe (1928) (p.5). The Dukeries aristocratic landowners auctioned or leased mineral rights, such as Earl Manvers’ Thoresby estate in May 1919 and Lord Savile of Rufford Abbey’s lease for Ollerton in 1921 (p.14). In each case a single colliery company was responsible, such as the Butterley Company at Ollerton and the Stanton Company at Thoresby (p.15). All the companies financed the construction of new pit villages to house the miners and their families, who largely migrated from older coalfields throughout Britain. (pp 25-53).

These villages offered more advanced facilities, such as a distinctive water system heated by the mine running in pipes between houses in New Ollerton (p.79), but as well as displaying characteristics of paternalism the new villages were also restrictive, with the employment of company policemen (pp 98-100) and the discouragement of trade unionism, with the exception of the breakaway Nottinghamshire Miners' Industrial Union (NMIU) of George Spencer in the 1930s; work at the Dukeries collieries had not ceased even during the coal and general strike of 1926. (pp 108-130). The Labour party was not electorally successful in the Dukeries mining villages until 1946, after the Second World War had weakened the power of the employers. (pp 131-162).

1. ^ Waller, Robert (1983). The Dukeries Transformed (Oxford Historical Monograph) (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-821896-6. 

External links

Aerial photo/map from multimap.com - Welbeck Abbey is in the bottom left quadrant near the largest lake; Worksop Manor was between it and the town of Worksop; Clumber Park is on the bank of the second largest lake and may be seen by zooming in; Thoresby is labelled bottom right.