Barnt Green Sailing Club - History Home Page 

 Chapter One.   The Birth of Bittell

                                                                                           

From Henley-in-Arden to Feckenham and from the Lickeys to Bidford on Avon, soon after the Norman Conquest, stretched the land belonging to Bordesley Abbey.

 

It was poor land, ill drained and mainly wooded by the Forest of Feckenham in whose clearings, even in those far off times, were many small hamlets which remain to this day. Sheep farming was the only use for this land of poor pasture. Queen Maud, daughter of Henry I and Queen Matilda, founded Bordesley Abbey. Maud's reign was a short one of eight months only between 1140 and 1141 but during that brief period she granted the Charter for the Abbey under the Cistercian order. In this original document, she bequeathed the lands of Bordesley, Teneshall, Cobley, Tudeshall and Holloway, namely the lordships of Bidford and Northay.

 

The Abbey also had the right to rule over the church of Tardebigge; it possessed the well at Wich (Droitwich) and owned the fish pool at Henley. The charter was signed at Devizes and witnessed by nine noblemen, the foremost of who was Waleran, Earl of Worcester who laid the foundation stone and who, rather than Queen Maud, is generally accepted to be the founder.

 

In a subsequent charter from Waleran to the Bishop of Worcester, he dedicated the Abbey to the souls of his father, Robert of Mellant, and of his King, Henry II. The exact date of laying the foundation stone is unknown but by 1148 the Abbey was fully established and was sending out Monks to assist in the instruction of the Cistercian Order to the lay folk in the many surrounding parishes.

 

The stone for the Abbey was quarried from Tardebigge and, as time went by, it received other lands and privileges. The labour force was provided by the gift of serfs from various nobles. Ten acres of land at Bidford‑on‑Avon was donated by Peter of Studley together with a blacksmith, and the Bishop of Coventry in the adjoining diocese gave a villein together with his annual wages of three shillings (15p today!). The Abbey could also claim the services of all Saxon serfs and Norman villeins born on the lands so bequeathed. Other labour sources were also available, namely those who sought sanctuary in the Abbey, who thus exchanged the harsh life in the services of a brutal noble for the pastoral work in this religious house.

 

The Abbey grew and became well established. It was a daughter Abbey to Tintern in Monmouthshire and was of the order founded in the time of William Rufus (1057‑1100) by a young religious zealot, Stephen Harding, a Benedictine. Harding was not satisfied with this Order and so with a few other monks founded a new one in Citeaux near Dijon, hence the name which in a few years expanded and spread, in France and then in England firstly at Rievalux in Yorkshire and then at Waverley in Surrey.

 

At the time of the Dissolution in 1539 by Henry VIII, a total of 28 Abbots had ruled over Bordesley. A Royal Commission was formed (of which Thomas Cromwell was a member) that travelled the length and breadth of the King's lands and visited all the religious houses. Conveniently they found them all to be deficient in maintaining the original terms of their Charter and therefore had no qualms at declaring them illegal. They were closed and all their assets seized in the name of the King.

 

Diplomatically ‑ he had no choice! ‑ The Abbot (John Day) surrendered the Abbey and the establishment of 19 monks to the King. The gross revenue amounted to £392.8s.6d. and the net annual income was £388.9s.10 1/2d. of which £27.16s.7d. was levied from the hamlet of Redditch. The plate and jewels of the Abbey were seized by the Royal Commission and found their way into Henry’s treasure chests. The Great Seal of the Covenant was destroyed, thus ending over 400 years of the Cistercian Order in the surrounding countryside.

 

As a guarantee of the permanent dissolution and to prevent the re‑use by other religious orders re‑occupying the Abbey, Richard Cromwell persuaded the King to dispose of the land and buildings to the nobility and gentry 'by free gift, purchase or advantageous exchange'. Henry VIII adopted this last method of disposal.

 

The first of the Windsors was descended from a Norse Viking named Otho or Othere who had settled in England before the Norman Conquest and acquired land and properties in the southern counties. Walter, the son of Otho, was loyal to William the Conquerer and was appointed the Castellan (The Steward) of Windsor and from that title, his later descendants took their name. The family continued to pay service to the Kings of England and Sir Andrew Windsor was in attendance to the sister of Henry VIII when she was married to Louis XII of France and he also accompanied Henry at the meeting with Francis 1 at the Field of Gold in 1520.

 

The family home of the Windsor family was at Stanwell near Staines adjacent to Windsor Castle and whilst still in the service of the King, Sir Andrew was made the first Baron Windsor in 1529. Stanwell Manor was a well built and attractive building and the King cast envious eyes on it so, after dissolving the Monasteries, he proposed an 'exchange' of Stanwell for the land, farms and the Grange at Tardebigge, previously belonging to Bordesley Abbey, for a total sum of £2,197.59.8d. The transaction took place so rapidly that the provisions which the Windsors had laid in for Christmas 1542 were left at Stanwell, so quickly did the King require vacant possession. And so the Windsors of Stanwell moved to Tardebigge, a far less promising and attractive home. The Abbey had been demolished and the materials sold to local farmers. This money, however, did not find itself channelled into the royal coffers! The King appeared to have had a pang of conscience as he now issued a State paper in the same year as the sale, saying. All remaining buildings in the Abbey grounds were no longer to be sold but that any lead remaining on the roof could be offered for sale and the proceeds given to Lord Windsor.

 

The one redeeming feature of the transaction was that the rent from farms and land let by the Abbey now belonged to the new owner and that at least part of the estate was being cultivated. Furthermore, all the tithes court fees and fines were perquisites of the Manor together with the timbers in the Abbey Park. These were, in 1549, valued at £4,000.

 

The new estates in Worcestershire of the Windsors were not a particularly paying proposition. The family was further taxed as they continued in the Catholic faith after the Reformation and as such were not eligible for Government appointments and the accompanying stipends.

 

The Windsors were later suspected of many plots against the crown including that of the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth and were, at one time, thought to have been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. As a result, part of their lands was annexed because of suspected Papal support. They were so impoverished that when James I demanded funds for the war in France, Lord Windsor replied that he could not afford any contribution as his estate was 'so decreased and burdened with debt.'

 

Despite his religious beliefs and fall from royal favour, the 6th Baron was made a Rear Admiral and although he had no

naval training or seafaring background, he was put in charge of the fleet taking the King's son to Spain to woo the Spanish Infanta, which proved to be abortive. Once again the family was heavily taxed during the Commonwealth as the Baron was considered by Oliver Cromwell to be a supporter of the Royalists. After the restoration of the monarchy, the 7th Baron was made Lord Lieutenant of Worcestershire, but seeking something more adventuresome and financially rewarding, he acquired the title of His Excellency the Governor and Admiral to the new colony of Jamaica. King Charles II rewarded a naval victory over the Spaniards, which Lord Windsor commanded, by conferring the title of the Earl of Plymouth in 1682.

 

The fortunes of the family were now on the upturn and after 250 years of relative impoverishment since they had inherited Bordesley Abbey. They at last became wealthy with the sale of land and property due to the sudden industrial growth of Redditch and the rest of the needle making district, all belonging to the estates of the Windsors/Plymouths.

 

Such is the first part of the story, to set a background to the formation of Barnt Green Sailing Club, with the lands and waters we all know so well as Bittell. Both Upper and Lower, Cofton Reservoir, Upper and Lower Arrow and Mill Shrub, all part of the Plymouth Estate and eventually to become Barnt Green Waters Ltd.

 

The second part of the story relates to how the water came, as it did in 1833. Previously Upper Bittell was a grassy hollow under the east slopes of the Lickey Hills.

 

THE BIRMINGHAM TO WORCESTER CANAL

 

In 1728 a company was formed to build a canal from Birmingham to Worcester, whence the Severn, easily navigable up to Worcester, but only with difficulty beyond, would provide easy onward transit to Bristol and the outer world.

 

The effect of building this canal would be to reduce the cost of carrying goods from Birmingham to Bristol from £4 per ton by road to 7s.6d by water. The proposals encountered intense opposition, and the necessary Act of Parliament was not passed until the third attempt in 1791.

 

This opposition came from two sources, the proprietors of the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal, and all the owners of mills on the rivers that would be crossed by the proposed canal. The Staffordshire and Worcester Canal knew that the new canal would provide a much more direct and easier route between Hull and Bristol than the canal which joined the Severn at Stourport. The mill‑owners feared loss of water, for which there was an insatiable demand in the neighbourhood of Birmingham to meet the requirements of the rolling, slitting, grinding and other metal trades.

 

To satisfy this opposition which was capable of preventing the Bill for the new canal ever being passed by Parliament, the Worcester and Birmingham Canal Company had to make concessions which rendered their waterway impracticable and uneconomic. They had to guarantee a 15% dividend to the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal Company, and agree to the maintenance of a substantial barrier (the Worcestershire bar) in Birmingham to prevent water or barges passing through the Birmingham canal system into their canal. This prevented the new canal from providing a direct route between Hull and Birmingham and from drawing water from the reservoirs of the existing Birmingham system.

 

The proposed Birmingham to Worcester canal therefore had to build new reservoirs under the control of the mill‑owners on every river crossed by their canal, and every river had to flow under the canal in a culvert without any abstraction of water for the canal. The canal from Birmingham to Tardebigge had to rely for water entirely on springs in the bed of the canal and the rain that drained into it. Yet every time a barge descended or ascended the 430 feet difference in height between the summit level and the Severn at Diglis Dock at Worcester, a lockful of water weighing one hundred tons was lost from the summit level (22,400 gallons)

 

The canal gains access from Birmingham to the Arrow basin through a tunnel one and a half miles long through Wost Hill between Kings Norton and Hopwood ‑a remarkable feat in the late 18th century. The canal itself does not enter the parish of Cofton Hackett, but one of its reservoirs is entirely, and another partly, in that parish. The original Act of 1791 provided for the construction of a filler reservoir of eleven and a half acres (Cofton Reservoir ‑ previously owned by Barnt Green Waters Ltd but sold to the Birmingham Corporation in 1950) from the River Arrow almost immediately it leaves the Lickey Hills, and another, an overflow of thirty acres (now Lower Bittell) in Alvechurch parish immediately before the Arrow flowed under the canal in a culvert (the embankment of the canal itself forms the dam of the reservoir at this point). ‘Jacob’s Cut’ to the east of Lower Bittell carried the water from Cofton reservoir to the canal.

 

Shortage of money and water delayed the completion of the canal until 1815. In 1809, the firm of Boulton and Watt provided steam pumps capable of raising 80 lockfuls of water per day (8040 tons of 1,792,000 gallons) from the level of the River Severn to the summit level. The Canal Company also reopened talks with the proprietors of the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal and with the mill‑owners, as the latter had never had to use the elaborate system of reservoirs that they had insisted on being constructed by the Canal Company. So under the terms of the two acts of Parliament in 1815, a stopcock replaced the Worcester bar and water from the Birmingham canal system was allowed to flow into the canal by gravity.

 

Although the Birmingham mill owners had no use for the water in Cofton reservoir, the mill owners in the growing town of Redditch still found that this supply was insufficient for the needlemakers mills lower down the Arrow valley, so another larger reservoir was constructed. This was Upper Bittell, a reservoir of ninety‑nine and a half acres, partly in the parish of Cofton Hackett and completed in 1833. One can even now visualise the task that was before the canal builders; hundreds of men were employed to build the dam. This remember, was long before the days of earth‑moving machines. The soil that formed the base of the dam had to be shovelled on to carts by hand and with inclined ramps was dragged up the bank and tipped to form the centre of the dam. Upstream, they faced the wall with engineering blue bricks and on the lower side of the dam they constructed a stone valve chamber that was connected through to a 12" cast iron pipe that led the water along Jacob's Cut (the canal arm) into the canal along the side of Lower Bittell. This greater supply of water also provided the canal with the top‑up water to replace that, which was lost by the many barges going down to Worcester and up to Birmingham, and satisfied the needlemakers.

 

This new reservoir meant that the flow of water in Lower Bittell was not interfered with to such an extent as hitherto. It also met the growing demand for water for the canal. Even so, there were times when the combined volume of water in Cofton and Upper Bittell was insufficient due to the loss of waters in the flight of locks down to Worcester. In 1836 the company bought a steam pump from Boulton and Paul to pump water from Lower to Upper Bittell if there was enough water in the lower reservoir not to affect the mill owners of Redditch or deprive the local farmers of their riparian rights.

 

Over a thousand barges were using the Worcester and Birmingham canal in 1840 but the prosperity of this waterway was short-lived as in 1836 Parliament passed an Act for the construction of a railway from Birmingham to Gloucester and this was completed by 1840; a startling contrast to the twenty four years spent constructing this canal. The railway spelt the death knell to the future of the canal so that now, instead of the Birmingham merchants using the canal, the railway had superseded it.

 

Had the railway been built a mere four or five years earlier, Upper Bittell would not have been needed and therefore Barnt Green Sailing Club can thank the entrepreneurs of Birmingham for delaying the railway line to Gloucester. As it was, the canal and the headwaters to feed it were on the land owned by the Earl of Plymouth. so, taking advantage of this beautiful stretch of water, he built the keeper's cottage and boathouses for his own use to fish and shoot over. The canal, however, provided one final bonus for the Plymouth estate: when the old building at Hewell was demolished to make way for the present Grange, all the bricks were transported from the brickyards in the Potteries to Hewell on this waterway!

 

And so, as the first part of this chapter deals with the early days of the land on which Upper Bittell stands, the second part tells how the water got there for us to sail on, and sometimes capsize into. Now comes the story of how Barnt Green Waters Ltd came into being (this sounds like one of Rudyard Kipling's stories ‑ e.g. 'How the Elephant got his Trunk’!)

 

The water and land of all the pools were on the Plymouth estate and in 1875 the Trustees of Lord Windsor to the Sharpness New Docks and Gloucester and Birmingham Navigation Co leased them.

 

The site of Upper and Lower Bittell Reservoirs, Upper and Lower Arrow Pools, Mill Shrub and the Canal Arm, with the Water Bailiff's house, boat house and adjoining land formed part of the Plymouth Estate. In 1875 the Estate leased to the Sharpness and Gloucester and Birmingham Navigation Company:

 

"certain pieces of land the greater part whereof was covered with water and formed into reservoirs known by the names of Upper and Lower Bittell (otherwise Bittell) Reservoirs and certain streams, canals, watercourses and other property for the term of 999 years from the 25th March 1873."

 

But the Right Honourable Robert George Orlando, Earl of Plymouth and his Trustees had at that time the foresight to exclude from the lease and to take and grant back to the Earl of Plymouth: -

 

"The full and exclusive right of fishing in the said reservoirs and the full and exclusive right of hunting, coarsing, shooting and fowling in and about the said land and water and ... the full and exclusive right of boating on and over the said Upper Bittell Reservoir...

 

In 1911, Charles Frederick Milward, J.P., of the Leys, Alvechurch, William George Ashford, Lionel Foley Lambert* and Charles William Beatson Moore, J.P., leased the fishing and boating rights on these waters from the Earl of Plymouth for 14 years from the 24th June 1911 at a yearly rent of £50. The Lessees were, of course, the founders of the Barnt Green Fishing (and Sailing) Club.

 

In January 1920, Barnt Green Waters Limited was incorporated, the subscribing shareholders being Leslie Boughton Chatwin and William Arthur Baldwin, and formation being carried out by Messrs Gem and Co., Solicitors, of 2 Bennetts Hill, Birmingham. The company was formed to "adopt an Agreement dated the 22nd September 1919 for the purchase of certain freehold property and shooting, fishing and boating rights. Lots 22, 23, 30, 31, 32 and 62 of the Hewell Estate, Worcestershire, situated in, near and adjoining to Upper and Lower Bittell Reservoirs and Cofton Reservoir in the parishes of Alvechurch and Cofton Hackett in the County of Worcester at the price of £5,000."

 

On the 24th August 1920, the conveyance of the property to the company was completed and so "the Club" through its newly formed company became the owner of the freehold of the properties over which it exercised its sporting rights at Upper and Lower Bittell Reservoirs and adjacent waters. The ownership of all (except Cofton Reservoir, sold in 1950) has remained in the company ever since and it is as a result of these founding members and their foresight in the purchase of this property, at what must then have seemed a large sum of money, that Barnt Green Fishing Club and Barnt Green Sailing Club are now able to enjoy the benefits of sailing (boating) and other rights over these waters set in one of the most charming areas of the Worcestershire countryside so near to the city of Birmingham.

 

The Sharpness New Docks etc. had to "maintain the reservoirs in good and sound condition without leaks (what about the leaking valve in Upper Bittell? Ed.) or dangerous overflows and to repair the weirs, sluices, watercourses, banks, dams and all other works connected therewith". The "Navigation Co." still has the right to draw off what water is needed to maintain the level of the canal.

The Company offered £100 shares to would‑be members, firstly to fish and later the sailing club was formed from the original fishing members to indulge and follow in the growing sport of dinghy sailing, so that today Barnt Green Sailing Club is one of the oldest and most successful clubs on inland waters.

 

Full membership now consists of 112 members equally divided between the fishing and sailing fraternity with Associate (non‑shareholding sailors) and Coarse Fishing (ditto, known as ATF) members and Licenced Bird Watchers. So that today there is the addition of dinghy and sailboard members and their families making up the Barnt Green Sailing Club in addition to the 56 full members.

 

Barnt Green Waters Ltd has a Board of Directors and an Executive Committee consisting of an equal number of sailors and fishermen with a chairman who alternates every two years from the two sections.

 

The Sailing Club therefore owes a great debt of gratitude to the original syndicate of gentlemen who negotiated for the first lease of land and waters for their foresight for the untold amount of pleasure that all have enjoyed as members of the sailing and fishing sections.

 

 

(Author's note. *Lionel Foley Lambert was the estate agent for the Earl of Plymouth, and in researching this detail I found that the witness to his signature on the covenant was my great uncle who was Head Clerk of the Hewell Estate)

 

  Chapter Two - The early days of the Sailing Club...click  here

 

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