On this day … 8 July 1848

The Preston Chronicle reported the arrival of the yacht, The Vision, at the Victoria Quay at Ashton: the first yacht ever to sail into town, according to the paper. The yacht, owned by Preston’s mayor, the wealthy Thomas Birchall, must have been a splendid sight, as the Chronicle recorded:

‘She arrived in our river about eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, on her arrival at Ashton firing eleven guns by way of salute … So novel a sight as a yacht at Preston, caused many visitors, and as through the kindness of the Mayor, every facility was offered for the inspection of the vessel, many received much satisfaction.’

Birchall threw a party aboard for his friends, and treated them ‘to a most sumptuous collation from the cuisine of Mr Billington, of the Bull Hotel’. The Bull was the present Bull and Royal.

The 64-foot yacht was just one symbol of Birchall’s wealth. At the time he was living at the old Ribbleton Hall, with its 124-acre estate, which his father had bought. In 1865, Birchall, a partner in a firm of solicitors with offices in Winckley Square, built himself a splendid new mansion a little distance away from the old hall.

Both the new yacht and the new mansion may have been financed by dodgy dealings, for he was far from being an honest solicitor, as was revealed after his death in 1878.

He didn’t die at home, but at the house in Manchester where he had been living with his mistress and two children, as the Chronicle reported. And, it turned out, the mistress was not his first, and the children were not hers but the offspring of an earlier mistress who Birchall had kept at the house.

And he had purchased that house at the same time as he was planning the building of the new Ribbleton Hall, and his two illegitimate children were born at the same time.

Worse was to come, for three years before his death he had written a new will that left his wife simply a life interest in the family home and an annuity. The rest of his estate, much of which his wife claimed belonged to her, not her husband, he left to his mistress and his illegitimate children.

His widow contested the will, and when the case came to trial, the judge:

‘… remarked that Mr Birchall did two things that were reprehensible in a solicitor – first, in drawing a will from which he was to derive a considerable benefit; and secondly, in appointing himself sole executor of an estate worth £160,000.’

However, the judge did not think there had been ‘sufficient proof of fraudulent conduct on the part of Mr Birchall’ to grant Mrs Birchall’s claim to the whole estate, and the result seems to have been a compromise that provided for both Mrs Birchall and her husband’s other family.