Historic Liverpool Dwellings - West Dingle

 

The Dingle

 

The Dingle was one of four 'lost' streams that flowed through Toxteth Park to join the Mersey. The Dingle stream rose in the higher land around the present High Park Street, flowed down what is now Park Road past the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth, passed through the grounds of the Turner Home and the present allotments, before entering the Mersey at Knott Hole behind a rocky outcrop known as Dingle Point. As late as the mid-19th century the Dingle was still a rural area of large houses, vast gardens, babbling streams and a long beach on the Mersey known as Jericho Shore that stretched from Knott’s Hole at the mouth of the Dingle towards Garston in the south east.

West Dingle

Joseph Brooks Yates was one of Liverpool’s great nineteenth-century philanthropists and was a major slaveholder on his plantations in Jamaica. He was a founding proprietor of the Liverpool Royal Institution and was instrumental in the establishment of a number of other important Liverpool learned societies. He was also one of the founders of the Southern and Toxteth Hospital and was a prominent Unitarian, a number of whom were amongst Liverpool’s few eighteenth-century abolitionists. However his religious beliefs did not prevent him from investing in plantations which saw him receive more than £43,000 in compensation when slavery was abolished in 1834, for the 2,287 enslaved people that he owned. Joseph was a great antiquarian and bibliophile, who used his considerable wealth to purchase many rare books. He lived at West Dingle and when he died in 1855 was interred at the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth, that still stands on Park Road. It was his brother though, Richard Vaughan Yates, who owned the estate and the property which fronted onto what is now Aigburth Road (then known as Park Lane), on the site now occupied by the Turner Nursing Home and the old Shorefields school building. He was the man who financed the first public park in Liverpool, Princes Park and employed the great 19th century landscapist, Joseph Paxton, to design it. Being a wealthy iron merchant and philanthropist he was 'desirous…that a place of healthful and pleasant recreation should be secured for the people’, so paid the Earl of Sefton the hefty sum of £50,000 in 1842 for the land. The two days a week on which the family allowed the public access across their land to the Dingle in the 1830s and 1840s, before there were any public parks in Liverpool, became known locally as 'Dingle Days'.

The Turner Home

In 1823 the Yates family sold the nearby estate of Dingle Bank to the Cropper family, who were Quakers well known in Liverpool throughout most of the nineteenth century for their philanthropic works. James Cropper was a wealthy shipowner whose firm, Cropper, Benson & Co., formed in 1799, carried mail and passengers as well as cargo between Liverpool and America. At one stage the company was making £1,000 per day profit. Cropper built three large houses at Dingle Bank for members of his own family, and Dingle Bank Cottages on the shore for estate workers. Cropper Street is named after the family and Dingle Bank remained secluded and intact until 1919 when the whole estate was bought by the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board and all the buildings were demolished to make way for the Dingle oil jetties and petroleum storage tanks. The Yates family eventually sold their estate to Charles Turner, a shipowner, M.P, and first chairman of the Dock Board (Mersey Docks and Harbour Board). After he died in 1875 at Dingle Head, the home he had built on the estate, his widow gave £40,000, with an endowment, to establish the Turner Home, originally called 'The Turner Memorial Home of Rest for Chronic Sufferers', to provide accommodation and residential care for chronically sick men and boys. With the demolition of Dingle Head, that had happened before 1909, the Home, named in memory of her late husband and their only son who had died in his twenties, was built in the grounds of Dingle Head and opened in 1884.

see also :- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2022/07/historic-liverpool-dwellings-parklea.html