The Story of Benjamin Hemstock, Thomas Cooley & a Cottage Industry
tHERE ARE HOUSES whose histories are meticulously-preserved for posterity, recorded on commemorative plaques, or which sometimes live on, linked to the grand names of their former, esteemed occupants.
Others possess more humble pasts―though are no less significant for that.
At an unassuming cottage on Ulceby’s Front Street, the clues are rather more personal.
There is the brick-built workshop at the foot of the garden, where a wooden plaque bearing the name Benjamin Hemstock was once attached to an internal door.
And there is a photograph of Thomas Cooley, a man who once lived and worked here.
There are also the recollections of Cooley’s nephew who remembers visiting Thomas and his wife at the cottage during the 1940s.
Individually, these are intriguing fragments of the past. Together with the census records and trade directories, they begin to tell a story about two men from opposite ends of Lincolnshire, whose working lives were connected by the traditional craft of saddlery.
It is a story of skilled work, changing times and village life, centred on a building that continues to serve as a home today.
My home.
A Cottage with a Working Past
TODAY, THE COTTAGE is part of the familiar streetscape of Front Street. It is easy to see it simply as a domestic building, but its long history reminds us that homes in earlier generations frequently had a working purpose too.
Before motor transport transformed everyday life, horses remained essential to agriculture, haulage and local transport. Harness and saddlery were practical necessities, and the skills of the saddler were vital to the rural economy.
For a craftsman such as a saddler, the distinction between home and workplace could be particularly close. Leatherworking required space for tools, materials and the preparation and repair of saddles, harnesses, bridles and other equipment used with horses. A workshop associated with a saddler would have been an important part of the business.
The workshop at the foot of my garden offers a tangible reminder of that world.
The wooden plaque bearing Benjamin Hemstock’s name is especially evocative. It provides a personal connection between a named craftsman and the building.
Who was Benjamin Hemstock? And how did Thomas Cooley come to be associated with the same trade and the same stretch of Front Street?
The census records provide the beginning of an answer.
Benjamin Hemstock
BENJAMIN HEMSTOCK was a saddler whose working life can be traced through successive census returns.
Our first glimpse of him is on the Ulceby census of 1851, where he is a three-year-old scholar living with his parents, John and Martha. Interestingly, not only is John Hemstock also shown as a saddler, but their home is on Front Street.
Whilst it is by no means certain, it appears that there was a saddlery on Front Street several decades prior to the construction of what is now Saddlers Cottage.
By 1871, Benjamin had not only married, but had followed in his father’s profession. The census for that year recorded him working as a saddler and harness maker at Ludford Parva in Lincolnshire. Ten years later, the 1881 census placed him in Nottingham, again pursuing the same trade.
These entries suggest a working life that extended beyond a single village. Whether his movements reflected employment opportunities, family circumstances or the establishment of his own business at different locations is a question for further research.
What is clear is that saddlery was not simply an incidental occupation: it remained a consistent feature of his recorded working life.
We do not know when Benjamin returned to Ulceby. But by the time the 1891 census was taken on 5th April that year, Benjamin was back, living once again on Front Street. His widowed father, John Hemstock, still working as a saddler at the age of 70, lived separately nearby.
That detail is particularly interesting.
Photographs of what is now Saddlers Cottage, dating from the early 1900s show the building to comprise two separate dwellings, and possibly a shop, too. Indeed, I have been informed that this was probably the case. Clues in the building’s brickwork also suggest that what is now one home, was once two.
Could it be the case, therefore, that Benjamin and his father, John, were living as neighbours and sharing the manufacturing facility at the foot of my garden? If so, perhaps this explains why Benjamin sought fit to add his name on the workshop’s internal door, a door that once divided the saddlery into two distinct work areas.
As is now evident, saddlery was not merely Benjamin’s occupation; it was also his father’s. The craft therefore appears to have formed part of the family’s working world, although the precise extent to which Benjamin learned his trade from his father has yet to be established.
The 1901 census again places Benjamin on Front Street, living with his wife, Croxton-born Elizabeth. Unsurprisingly, his occupation remained that of a saddler.
The records therefore establish a sustained association between Benjamin and the village. First of all, he was born there. By the dawn of the twentieth century, he was an experienced craftsman, with a working life extending back at least three decades.
It is against this background that another name enters the story.
Thomas Cooley
THOMAS COOLEY’S CONNECTION with saddlery began much earlier than his association with Benjamin Hemstock.
The 1881 census records Thomas, aged just thirteen, living at Moulton near Spalding. His occupation was given as a harness-maker’s apprentice. Unlike Benjamin, his father did not share the trade; Abraham Cooley worked as an agricultural labourer.
It is a revealing entry. At an age when many children were still receiving elementary education, Thomas was already learning a skilled trade. His apprenticeship would have introduced him to the practical demands of working with leather and the equipment required for horses.
Saddlery and harness-making were related crafts. Both required patience, precision and a knowledge of materials that had to withstand considerable strain in everyday use. A poorly made or badly repaired strap or harness component could be more than an inconvenience; it could compromise the safe use of a horse.
Thomas was therefore acquiring skills that could provide a livelihood in agricultural communities and market towns alike.
The surviving record does not tell us who employed him as an apprentice, nor what brought him from the Spalding area to Ulceby. Those details remain open questions. But his early occupational entry provides an important starting point for understanding the man in the later records.
By 1911, Thomas was living on Front Street in Ulceby, and his circumstances reveal a direct connection with Benjamin Hemstock.
The 1911 Census: Two Saddlers Together
IT IS THE 1911 census that provides the strongest evidence linking the two men.
Thomas Cooley was recorded living with Benjamin and Elizabeth Hemstock on Front Street, Ulceby, with Thomas’s occupation given as saddler’s assistant.
This is more than a coincidence of names or a shared interest in the same trade. The census places an experienced saddler and a younger man trained in harness-making within the same household, with Thomas employed in a role directly associated with Benjamin’s occupation.
The relationship between them was therefore both domestic and occupational, at least in the circumstances recorded by the census.
We should be careful not to assume that the arrangement necessarily amounted to a formal apprenticeship. The record does not establish this. What it does demonstrate is that, by 1911, Thomas was working as a saddler’s assistant while living in Benjamin’s household.
One can readily imagine how the skills Thomas had begun to acquire as a boy might have been put to use in such an environment. There would have been work to undertake, materials to prepare and repairs to complete. Experience would have been gained through the everyday demands of the trade.
Of course, the census cannot tell us of their working relationship, whether Thomas regarded Benjamin as a mentor, or how they divided their responsibilities. Yet it provides a firm foundation for a story about two generations of craftsmen connected through their work.
It also brings us back to the cottage in which I now sit to write this―and its workshop in the garden.
The evidence makes the connection between Benjamin’s saddlery and Thomas’s subsequent career particularly significant. The precise relationship between the workshop and their respective working arrangements still needs to be demonstrated, but the physical building now has a much more compelling context.
A Trade Carried Forward
THE NEXT CENSUS entry adds another important piece to the story.
In 1921, Thomas Cooley was recorded as a boarder in the household of farmer Henry Hurd at Southam Farm, on Brocklesby Road. He was no longer living on Front Street, and Benjamin and his wife were deceased by this time.
Yet his occupation continued to connect him with Front Street: he was recorded as working as a saddle and harness maker there.
This is a striking detail. Thomas’s living arrangements had changed, but his occupational association with Front Street remained.
It would be tempting to interpret this as evidence that Thomas had taken over Benjamin’s business. That is certainly a possibility, but the census alone cannot establish a transfer of ownership, the acquisition of premises or a formal succession.
What it does show is that Thomas was working as a saddler on Front Street in 1921, after having been recorded as Benjamin’s saddler’s assistant ten years earlier.
The sequence is compelling.
However, if Thomas was continuing to work at what had been the Hemstocks’ Front Street workshop, why was he living as a boarder half a mile away?
One clue may be found in the fact that, at some point, significant structural work was done to the cottage; work which saw the building reduced to one, smaller cottage, leaving part of what had been its end wall as a boundary wall between the property and what is now the car park of the Fox Inn.
Could this work have necessitated that Thomas move out temporarily, boarding at nearby Southam Farm? We may never know.
In 1881, Thomas was a thirteen-year-old harness-maker’s apprentice. In 1911, he was a saddler’s assistant living with Benjamin Hemstock. In 1921, he was working independently in the occupational sense of being recorded as a saddler, although the precise nature of his employment or business arrangements remains uncertain.
Across those forty years, saddlery connected the lives of the two men and linked Thomas’s early training with his later working life in Ulceby.
The craft itself was also approaching a period of profound change. Motor vehicles were gradually transforming transport, while agricultural mechanisation would eventually reduce many traditional uses of horses. Saddlers continued to have work, but the world in which their trade had flourished was changing.
For Benjamin and Thomas, however, saddlery was not an abstract part of a disappearing rural economy. It was their livelihood.
Thomas Cooley at Home
THE STORY DOES not end with the census records.
Census returns reduce people to a series of facts: age, occupation, birthplace, relationship to the head of household and place of residence. Such information is indispensable to family historians, but it cannot convey the full character of a person.
Thankfully, we also have a photograph of Thomas, offering a glimpse of the man behind the occupational descriptions.
A photograph changes that relationship. Thomas becomes someone we can look at, rather than simply a name on a page.
The picture also complements a recollection passed down by a local resident who remembers visiting Thomas and his wife at Saddlers Cottage during the 1940s.
This recollection is particularly valuable because it takes us beyond Thomas’s working life and into his domestic world. By then, the young apprentice of 1881 was a man of mature years, and the skilled worker who had been recorded alongside Benjamin Hemstock in 1911 had become an integral part of the working life of the village.
It also gives us something that official records rarely provide: a personal connection between a named individual and the cottage as a lived-in home.
It is, too, an important reminder that the history of a building is not confined to the dates of its construction or the names of its owners. It includes the people who crossed its threshold, the visitors they welcomed and the ordinary events that made it a home.
Connections to the Past
THE WOODEN PLAQUE bearing Benjamin Hemstock’s name brings the story back to the workshop.
The plaque has a remarkable power to connect the present with the past. A census entry can tell us that Benjamin was a saddler on Front Street. The plaque suggests a more immediate association between the man and the working space.
The workshop itself survives as a physical link to that earlier world, even as the purposes for which buildings are used inevitably change.
There is something especially satisfying about discovering that a place we inhabit today was once associated with a craft that played such an important part in village life. The history is no longer somewhere else, preserved in an archive or displayed in a museum.
It is here, in the garden and the building at the foot of it.
The Workshop Today
The saddlers’ original workbench remains as an integral part of the nineteenth-century workshop, incorporated within the building’s structure. Running the entire length of the building it would have easily accommodated two craftsmen.
The workbench includes some strange, but no doubt practical embellishments. And, just as the bench is incorporated within the fabric of the building, so too are the array of wooden racks from which will have once hung collars and harnesses.
The Cottage
TODAY, I OCCUPY the cottage and use the garden in which the old workshop stands. The men who once worked in this world are long gone, but their names have not entirely disappeared. They remain in the census records, in a photograph, in local memory and in the history of a building that has survived them.
Perhaps that is one of the simple pleasures of researching local history. A familiar place can suddenly become unfamiliar in the most rewarding way. A door is no longer simply a door, a workshop is no longer simply an outbuilding, and a name on a census page becomes part of a human story.
Saddlers Cottage has a history that extends beyond the lives of its present occupants. Through Benjamin Hemstock and Thomas Cooley, it offers a glimpse of a working village, of a skilled trade and of the men who made their living from it.