The last knight of Baguley Hall

Dear members — good morning one and all. Today, we bring you a story that takes us from the misty mountains of eastern Kentucky to the similarly misty past of 14th century Cheshire. It was recently reported that an American man named Hurstel Edward Begley had claimed Baguley Hall, Manchester’s oldest building, as his birthright. Skeptical at first, Jack got Hurstel — who prefers Ed — on the phone and found a man steeped in Baguley family history; Ed is bent on claiming the hall so he can open it to the people of Wythenshawe. And, hopefully, finally visit someday. That’s below. But first, a round up of the news.

Your Mill briefing

🎓 The University of Manchester is one of only six universities in the UK creating more commercial companies out of its research than it was a decade ago, according to a new report. These companies, referred to as “spin-outs”, are becoming more of a focus in the city, with new business incubators cropping up around the university. Earlier this year, we wrote about how the city’s small AI sector was developing more interest, with new bodies set up to help get university ideas in front of investors.

👮‍♂️ After a string of evictions, some travellers in Bolton have found themselves back on the site from which they were originally removed in Breightmet last month. This is part of a broader trend in the borough, whose traveller community has been removed from various sites in recent weeks due to reports of violence and disorder. When we visited one such site, Crompton Lodge, we found travellers who felt they were being tarred with the same brush and unfairly evicted from their homes.

🌇 The Modernist Society, dedicated to (you guessed it) Manchester’s modernist architecture, is launching an app that will guide users through the city’s 20th century buildings. It includes the Express Building on Great Ancoats Street, which is a place after our own hearts — originally built for the Daily Express, it “tells a wider story about Manchester’s rich newspaper heritage”, writes the Guardian.

🚃 A quick transport update: Trams between Piccadilly Gardens and St Peter’s Square won’t be running for the next three weeks while track replacement works are completed. Some services will go via Exchange Square instead, and there will be rail replacement buses between Deansgate-Castlefield and Piccadilly.

🏳️‍🌈 It’s Manchester Pride this weekend. Keep an eye out for this Thursday’s to-do list, which will be full of alternative Pride events outside of the main festival. We’re also working on a story about Pride for this weekend. If you’d like to contribute any thoughts, tips or gossip, email [email protected].

By Jack Dulhanty

Somewhere in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky in the late 1970s, Saul Begley told his great-nephew Hurstel a story. 

People in Appalachia then lived hard lives — many of them still do — and Saul’s house was more like a shack. He’d sit out on his porch, chewing Red Man tobacco, spitting and telling tales. Seeing as Saul had more or less raised Hurstel’s father, their relationship was like that of a grandfather and grandson. Much of Hurstel’s childhood was spent on that porch. Appalachian communities have a rich folkloric tradition, as well as a tradition of oral family history. Saul assured Hurstel this particular story was the latter. 

He leaned in and told Hurstel, then around 7 years old, that the little boy was descended from Cheshire blue bloods, landed gentry — knights. Saul even said their family was related to William the Conqueror, and that Hurstel’s ancestors lived in a great mediaeval hall named after them: Baguley Hall. But with time the family’s influence had waned and their stature depleted, and in 1685 Peter Bagley (the name’s spelling has also changed with time) stepped off some boat and into America. 

According to Saul, Peter and his brother had stolen a goose and were shipped to the colonies as punishment. That’s contested. It’s more likely that a saying, “stealing the golden goose” — to strike lucky, in this case by being sent somewhere to make a fortune — became less figurative and was rendered as truth as the story was passed down through the generations.

Ever since that day on Saul’s porch, Hurstel developed an obsession with his family's past. Cheshire became a mythic hinterland in which he had a genuine stake. He sat in rural Kentucky, where steep valleys carved through the red mountains, and pictured a grand estate in the green rolling hills of England, imprinted with his very DNA and filled with the ghosts of his ancestors. 

The real building, a manor house in the middle of Wythenshawe (formally Cheshire, now Manchester), used as a farm and later as a council storage unit, isn’t exactly what he had originally envisaged: “I kind of pictured it would be, like, a castle or something,” he told me, laughing.

I first came across Hurstel — who prefers to go by Ed — in an article in the MEN about an American man who was claiming Manchester’s oldest building as his birthright. The hall, built around 1320, has over centuries been the home of a noble family, a farmhouse, and a direct works depot for Manchester City Council. It spent about 20 years wrapped in corrugated steel, to the chagrin of its admirers, before being uncovered around the 1980s.

In May, the building was put up for sale by Colliers on behalf of the current owners, Historic England. They will sell it to new owners on the condition that the public will be able to access the building “at least occasionally” and that the buyer restores it in a sympathetic way.

Two weeks after the listing went live, Ed posted a video to his Youtube page titled “Baguley Hall, I am trying to acquire it.” In the video, Ed rocks back and forth on his couch like someone who’s been waiting for just this moment. He describes how he’s put a submission into Historic England, outlining his plans for the hall and emphasising his heritage. “I am throwing my hat in for something I am destined to have through my bloodline, and that’s Baguley Hall.” 

I was initially sceptical of Ed’s claims. So I arranged to meet with the Friends of Baguley Hall, a society of concerned locals who want to have as much of a role as possible in the building’s future. There’s Matthew Williams, a 30-something building surveyor, and Colin Piggot, an illustrator with an interest in old buildings and a permanent, purposeful squint. We can’t access the hall at the moment, seeing as it’s for sale, so we gather instead under the awning of a nearby care home to get out of the rain. 

“It’s possibly the oldest timber-framed great hall, mediaeval great hall, in England,” says Colin. “Which makes it very special”. It ought to be made clear that only parts of the building, which is Grade I listed, date back as far as the 1300s; extensions have been added over the centuries, and now its timber mediaeval core is crowded out by brick-built appendages from the 17th and 18th centuries. 

That doesn’t dampen Colin’s enthusiasm — he makes illustrations and models of the building throughout the ages — or that of the other society members. “There is a doorway in there,” he says excitedly, pointing at the hall we can’t see behind some trees, “that was put on its hinges when Edward II was on the throne! And it still works!”

The building has been out of use for decades, and the Friends want to try and get themselves in with whoever buys it so that they can help manage it. Their ideal situation would be opening up the hall to the community of Wythenshawe as a multi-use building. Right now, they aren’t aware of any offers, but they feel the hall’s lack of use is a sin. “It’s just one of those buildings that was overlooked,” Colin says.

After Matthew tells me about the “strategic importance” of Baguley Hall’s location (given its proximity to the airport, the site has the potential to be an international tourist attraction), I pop the question about Ed. What do they make of this American? Is he legit?

“I think the right thing to do with that, is just wait for it to go through the Historic England tendering process,” says Matthew, carefully. “Other members of the group are in contact with him. We do know him, as it were.”

Another Friend of Baguley Hall, David Bell-Hartley, is much more enthusiastic about the transatlantic interest. “He is an incredibly knowledgeable gentleman and has done some stellar research into the Baguley Family,” Bell-Hartley tells me over email. “He’s far more than ‘just another enthusiastic American’ — he genuinely knows his stuff.”

Ed started researching the Baguleys when he was 18, working with his uncle and a few others who he says had been looking into the family history for some 50 years. They traced their ancestry back to Robert Bagley of Norbury, according to Ed, who’s updating me from his living room in Ohio, via Zoom. Ed has a heavy-bottomed goatee and scraped-back hair, and he immediately puts you at ease with his manners and civility. I believe he called me “friend” more times than any of my actual friends have.

Robert of Norbury died in 1590. His son, Hugh, married Anne Chauntrell; the couple had Peter, who grew up and went to America. Why Peter emigrated is still unclear, given that goose robbery is almost certainly not the real reason. But Ed did find reference in one archive to a Peter Bagley who got caught up in an alehouse brawl around the same time his Peter, as it were, went to America. So he thinks maybe his ancestor was charged with assault and shipped to the colonies.

Those reference points — an alehouse brawl, a beheading, the annual gifting of a third best pig (seriously) — are how Ed and his family traced themselves back to Sir William de Baguley. The family’s patriarch was knighted by King Edward II, and acquired the land Baguley Hall now stands on. 

Other parts of Ed’s research are more theoretical, such as how certain types of wood came to be used in the hall’s construction, and how the family ended up in England (he thinks they descended from Vikings in Ireland). 

Ed’s key claim is that Sir William de Baguley’s line, thought to have died out not long after the construction of the hall following the death of his two sons, actually survived. He found documents that show William’s granddaughter, born with a different surname, married a relative and therefore back into the Baguley line. There is also evidence of Baguleys bearing William’s coat of arms as late as 1402, Ed says, years after the line is understood to have died out.

Nevertheless, this genealogical snag means Ed has had trouble claiming the Baguley coat of arms, because the College of Arms go off visitations — essentially surveys carried out by the church — and they didn’t record that marriage.

He has done all of this research while working as a custodian — a janitor — in two Ohio school districts, working 15-hour days, and recording music that he self-releases (latest single: Frisky Whiskey). “I'm a custodian trying to do the work of a scholar,” he says. He used to be a boxer named White Tiger; he retired in 2014 at the age of 42. Having fought in green and white shorts, he was astonished to find out his ancestors wore the same coloured tunics into battle. Coincidences like that one bolster Ed’s certainty of his birthright. 

“I’ve had a lot of weird experiences like that,” he says, referencing psychics and paranormal investigators who have supported his claim. “Might sound weird, but I feel like my ancestors are driving me towards this, kind of. You know, what I’m doing now.” 

What Ed wants to do to the hall is, essentially, claim it: not to hoard it for himself, he says, but to secure it for the local community. Though he’s never visited the site in person, it’s one that’s occupied him for over 40 years, and he feels like securing the rights to it is a sort of higher calling. “I pray about the hall, bringing this back into my family,” he says. “That’s how much of a sentimental thing this is to me. It’s a duty.”

If Ed’s bid was successful, he would allow the Friends of Baguley to run it as a non-profit; other than that, he says, he would be pretty hands off. “Just having a Baguley being a part of it in whatever way I need to be a part of it is going to be the heartbeat of the hall. Because it needs that: a bit of living history.” 

Ed would want any money made to support the hall’s upkeep, or else benefit the local community. “We can put money back as grants for the people of Wythenshawe, educational grants, food, health, whatever.” 

Researching his family history, Ed found evidence for plenty of dastardly deeds: The murder, the barn-burning, the betrayal and scheming. “You’re looking at, you know, mobsters, mafia guys, you know?” he says. If he does inherit the hall, he’ll be reaching for something more rarified. “It’s not what I can do for me, but what I can do for the community,” he says. “That’s true chivalry.”