Tweddell's Stokesley Trail: Rose Cottage (Town House)

Rose Cottage (AKA The Town House) was in Commercial Row (now called Bridge Road) in Stokesley. It was the offices of Tweddell and Sons and their home. It was No 3 Bridge Street.

Both George Markham Tweddell and Elizabeth Tweddell were born and raised in Stokesley and fro a period in the 1850's they ran the Industrial or Ragged School in Bury, Lancashire and returned to Middlesbrough in 1860 running Tweddell's printing and publishing firm there. Their son Horotio John Tweddell had established the Stokelsey wing of the Tweddell and Sons in Stokesley meanwhile. I'm not sure of the exact year in which the couple established themselves in Rose Cottage but Paul Tweddell suggests 1875. It may have been before that but certainly, once there they remained there for the rest of their lives. For George that meant until 1903.

Tweddell and Sons, (their printing and publishing firm) was round the corner but the Rose cottage served as both thier residence and the offices of Tweddell and Son's. Daphne Franks in "Printing and Publishing Stokesley" tells us that "They returned to stokesley to establish a business in Commercial Row, now Bridge Road. There, to supplement the printing and publishing and to maintain an increasing family, there were nine children, George kept a Hatter's shop, now the gun shop! (I think that was the shop over the road next to Fatso's, where Horotio John and his wife lived above.)

Daphne Franks describes an advertisement for the shop which i can illustrate here -

While at Rose Cottage, George continued to write and publish his poetry and his books and also deliver lectures as can can be seen from this list from Daphne Frank's book. Elizabeth Tweddell also published her popular book Rhymes and Sketches in a Cleveland Dialect under the pen name of Florence Cleveland.

Paul Tweddell, when we visited Rose Cottage in 2009, told me that the downstairs room was the 'office', where he would conduct business or write. In the back was the small kitchen 9now converted into part of

The back alley to Rose Cottage where the flood water
seeped into the cellar.

the modern shop). Below was the cellar, in which he stored his many papers, manuscripts and books. Sadly, in the 1930's, during the Stokesley floods, much of his unpublished notes and manuscripts and letters were destroyed because, while the descendants rushed to save the books, the papers were destroyed. A shame because there were other copies of the books but the papers were unique! We do not know what was destroyed, but there must have been the manuscripts and notes for the unfinsihed series of the People's History of Cleveland and for fruther volumes of the Bards and Authors of Cleveland and South Durham, which he had promised in the first volume. However, a significant amount of material surived in other parts of the family and are now located in Teesside Archives. under The Tweddell Collection.

Upstairs were the living room and bed rooms of the 3 story building.