On this day … 25 September 1739

John Nocks, a Preston merchant, signed a bond on the marriage between his daughter Mary and Thomas Grimshaw that shows what marriage could entail for the father of the bride in the eighteenth century. There is a clause in the bond in which John Nocks agrees to provide ‘meat, drink, washing and lodgings’ for the couple for one year after the wedding.

This was possibly a customary provision for marriages at that time. What was not customary was John Nocks’ choice of residence, as the historian Edward Baines noted:

‘Country villas were in those days almost as rare in the vicinity of Preston as public works, and hence a neat house, with plantations, erected near the Marsh, by Mr. John Nocks, obtained the name of Nocks’ Folly.’

Few people in Preston at that time chose to move to what were then the outskirts of the town. The wealthy preferred to live in the town centre, where new houses were being built of brick and the older timber-framed houses were being faced with brick. This preference continued with the building of Winckley Square in the next century, where John Nocks’ grandson, Nicholas Grimshaw, made his home.

It is not known when John Nocks (sometimes known as Knox) built his house. Possibly it was after 1735, for in that year he had property in Church Street. The court leet records for October of that year contain the following:

‘Mr John Nocks for neglecting to Cover the Stairs belonging to a Cellar in his possession under Mr Richard Shawes house in the Street called Churchgate Within this Town and Suffering the same to lye open and Uncovered to the great peril and danger of his Majesties Liege people passing and repassing thro’ the said Street and a Comon Nusance And Amerce him in five shillings.’

His house in Marsh Lane was clearly a major feature of the town, for when the cartographer William Yates published his map of Lancashire in 1786 it was one of only five private residences in Preston that he identified by name.

It was still standing at the time of the Ordnance Survey visit in the 1840s when it was named Knox Folly, but had gone by the time the surveyors were back in town in around 1890. The 1840s map shows a sizeable property, with extensive gardens. But it had lost its rural aspect by then, with a tannery and a cotton mill for neighbours.

John Nocks’ son-in-law, Thomas Grimshaw, was the youngest son of John Grimshaw of Simonstone, Whalley. He was aged thirty when he married and had recently settled in Preston and set up in practice as a lawyer. The Grimshaws, Thomas and his two sons, were to be prominent in the public life of the town for the next century. Between them they notched up fourteen terms as mayor of Preston. They gave their name to Grimshaw Street.

Thomas Grimshaw went on to become an alderman and was twice mayor of the town. He died in 1787 aged seventy-eight, having been a widower for twenty-five years.

His eldest son, John, was like his father a lawyer, practising as a solicitor in the town. He served five terms as mayor and continued as an alderman until his death in 1820 at the age of eighty.

Thomas’s younger brother, Nicholas, beat him in the mayoral stakes, serving seven terms in that office, twice as guild mayor. Tragedy marred that second term as guild mayor, for two of his sons, Nicholas junior, aged twenty, and George, aged seventeen, and two of their friends were drowned in the Ribble when their boat capsized.

Nicholas Grimshaw, too, was a lawyer, who set up home in a new house at the corner of Winckley Street and Winckley Square and practised as a solicitor in the town for over half a century. In later years he moved to Cadley Cottage, where he died in 1838 aged eighty.

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Sources:
Baines’ History of Lancashire
David Berry’s transcript of the Preston Court Leet Records: http://www.wyrearchaeology.org.uk/mw/index.php?title=Main_Page
Hewitson’s History of Preston