Leicestershire Parish Councils

18th Century Blaby

For a short time Edward Lovell was rector. Then in 1711 began the long association of the Stokes family with Blaby. Edward Stokes, the elder, did much in his 13 years as rector to make provision for a school in the parish for "the poor children of the parish, with a master to teach them to read, write and cast accounts, and a mistress to spin, for £17 a year, raised by subsctiption". It is worthy of note that "children of dissenting parents were not excluded".
Edward Stokes the younger, blinded in a shooting accident when he was a child at school at Sharnford, came from Wymondham, his first living, to be rector of Blaby in 1748. He remained in Blaby for half a century, performing the services of the church for most of the time unaided except for a person to read the lessons. It is recorded that when he rode to hound, he was accompanied by a person to ring a bell when there was a fence to be jumped. He expended the greater part of a considerable private fortune on the charitable and educational work in and beyond the parish. He bought a piece of ground at Countesthorpe and erected a school building there, and in Blaby he continued the school work which his father had begun.
On the north side of the east wall of the church is the Stokes's memorial. Edward Stokes had it prepared in memory of his father, mother, brother and sister, but decided to insert his own name also "to save trouble and preserve the uniformity of the stone". The only dating he put in was "in the eighteenth century". But he nearly lived long enough to render this wording inaccurate as regards himself.
Of Blaby in the 18th century we note a reduction of freeholders from 31 in 1722 to 20 in 1775. This was a common result of the enclosure of the common fields (in 1766) when small freeholders found that they could not raise the money to pay for compulsory fencing and had to sell their land.
One note says that towards the end of the century the village of Blaby contained about 100 dwellings. Like so many other Leicestershire villages it was a place of framework knitters.

19th Century Blaby

The summer of the year 1808, when Captain Edmund Major of the Northampton Militia was lord of the manor, was apparently exceptionally hot. Readings were taken and recorded in the register showing that it was hotter in Blaby than the mean temperatures of Jamaica and Sierra Leone.
In 1810 returns were made to the Bishop of the Diocese of baptisms, marriages and burials during the preceding 10 years. At Blaby there had been 304 baptisms, 195 burials and 74 marriages. The corresponding figures for Countesthorpe are 168, 101 and 40. From 1812, through an Act of Parliament, official registers were opened for baptisms, for marriages and for burials. The entries henceforward were much more detailed and are so much more informative. For instance, we have Blaby Workhouse mentioned in 1817, Blaby Toll Bar, with John Bell as keeper, in 1820, and a child of a Methodist Preacher named Charles Sherwin baptised in 1821. Apart from his preaching Sherwin was a framework knitter, as so many other people were in Blaby until much later in the century.
In 1837 the old Blaby Hall was demolished. The owner built the present hall and landscaped the grounds. It can be assumed that the part of the Rectory, remaining after the dismantling of the 18th century wing in 1959, was also built at about the same time. Blaby Hall is first mentioned in 1843 when Jane Thornton died there. The occupants of the new Blaby Hall were John and Elizabeth Clarke.
The Baptists were no newcomers to Blaby. It is noted that the Baptist Chapel, in Chapel Street, was erected in 1807, and that a meeting house existed well before this date. There was a small Baptist Burial Ground in Chapel Street.
The 18th century was a period of great change - in 1801 the census showed 718 people living in Blaby; by 1901 there were 1842. At the start of the century there were only three buildings west of the Lutterworth Road; by its end most of the old timber-framed thatched houses in the older part of the village had gone, the 'up town' area had become a warren of 'yards', and two new areas had been opened up for buildings in the 1880's, Park Road/Auburn Road and the three streets off the Enderby Road - both by local building societies.
The increase in population created problems. As with many of the originally agricultural villages around Leicester, many turned to framework knitting for a livelihood, whole families being involved - even children as young as 7 years' old. At mid-century (1851 census) there were 255 people of Blaby origin who had moved into Leicester; of those still in Blaby 361 of a total of 1003 were in the knitting, which was a cottage industry. Not until the last quarter of the century do we see any factory work emerging.
Communications improved dramatically in the 19th century. Two new railways came through the parish from Leicester, that to Rugby in the 1940's, and the Birmingham line, with a station at Blaby, in the 1860's.
Within the village, that part of the Leicester Road from the cross-roads to the Sycamore Street junction was constructed in about 1830, and the stream from Countesthorpe which flowed along Sycamore Street was culverted, so that only at times of exceptional rain did the road live up to its old name of 'Duckpaddle'.
Poverty was a continuing problem; the records of a Vestry meeting in 1848 show that 69 householders were excused payment of rates. Originally each village had to provide for its own poor and find work for them, but in 1836 the Blaby Union was formed (its first meeting was at The Bulls Head, Blaby) and the next year the Union workhouse was built at Narborough, with room for 300 inmates.
As well as the Baptists in Chapel Street there was also a Methodist Chapel from 1813 off the Lutterworth Road (where the Waitrose store now is), but they moved later to a cottage on Enderby Road and seem to have ceased in the 1850's. The Congregational Church was, from 1851, a converted cottage in Sycamore Street, and remained there until 1926, when the new chapel was built in Park Road (the old one is now the British Legion Hall). There were major changes to All Saints Church in 1846, with re-roofing and re-arrangement of family pews and free seats to provide 138 extra places. Of the total cost of £584 the rector, the Rev. H.J. Hoskyns, himself paid £244.
The graveyard of the parish church was by 1863 so full that no more burials were possible, and in that year the Mill Lane Cemeteries were opened, there being two, with separate chapels, because the Conformists and the Nonconformists could not agree to be buried in the same piece of land.
Since the early 1800's both All Saints and the Baptist Church had run not only Sunday schools but also dayschools, and in the 1840's a separate National School building was erected in Church Street, with an additional building in 1871. A number of private schools also operated, especially in the latter years of the century.
A major advance is noted in the Vestry minutes for November 1866, when a parish meeting decided to provide for lighting the streets with gas from the Whetstone gasworks, allowing £55 for the first year's costs. The laying of the mains thus made gas-lighting possible in private houses.
In 1893 there is a record of a death in the "smallpox tents", and in the following year Blaby Hospital was built as an isolation hospital for infectious diseases.
The last noteworthy event of the 19th century was the re-organisation of local government by the creation of parish councils. The first meeting of Blaby Parish Council was on December the 31st 1894, with 8 members, all male, and a forecast expenditure of £80 for the first year.