by Dr Hannah Priest
In today’s blog, we’re taking a look at the man who (probably) gave his name to the woods on the northerly side of the historic Booth Hall estate.
When we’re talking about the woods, one of the questions that people often ask is, ‘Why is it called Bailey’s Wood?’ I’ve heard a few suggestions as to the answer: the most common one is that ‘Bailey’ was the name of a local farmer at some point in the wood’s history.
In fact, the exact moment when the woods acquired its name is lost to history. All we really have is conjecture, so this blog post offers my theory. Please do let me know if you think it’s convincing!
The wood doesn’t have a name at all on the earliest maps we have of Blackley. It’s clearly marked on the 1848 Ordnance Survey map of Manchester, with a footprint that looks a lot like the shape of the woods today.
As you can see from this map, there is an unnamed band of woodland to the rear of Booth Hall (the seventeenth-century house – it would be nearly 60 years before the hospital was built). By 1894, however, this woodland had gained a name: Bailey’s Wood.
Just as an aside, in case you’re curious about the other side of the estate. The name Boggart Hole Clough does appear on the 1894 OS map, but it’s only used for the area of clough at the far edge of the estate, alongside Boggart Hole Brook, and further south than Oliver Clough. The rest of what we now know as Boggart Hole Clough is marked as farmlands and fields, as is most of the surrounding area. This would change shortly after the 1894 map was produced, as Manchester Corporation purchased two-thirds of the Booth Hall estate and turned it into a public park (but that is, I’m afraid, a story for another day).
Significantly, the 1894 OS map was not, in fact, the first time the name ‘Bailey’ (or, rather, the alternate spelling ‘Bayley’) appeared on a map. The first time the name appeared was in 1786. In the late eighteenth-century, cartographer William Yates produced the first accurately surveyed map of Lancashire. You can see the map online on the Lancashire County Council website, and it gives a great snapshot of pre-industrial Lancashire.
One of the interesting features of Yates’s map is that the cartographers included the names of some landowners underneath the name of their property. This was an optional feature – landowners paid a fee of one guinea to have their name inscribed under their addresses. For instance, the map shows the name ‘Lord Grey de Wilton’ by Heaton Hall, and ‘Sir Ashton Lever’ by Alkrington Hall. And there, underneath Booth Hall, is the name ‘T. Bayley, Esq.’
So who was T. Bayley, Esq.? And how did he end up living at Booth Hall?
The Booth Hall estate was acquired in the early seventeenth century by Humphrey Booth of Salford (and, again, that’s a story for another day!). Humphrey Booth Sr. signed the land over to his son Humphrey, who built the house that was known as Booth Hall in c.1640. Between 1640 and 1700, the house was occupied by the Booths of Blackley (most of whom were called Humphrey), before it was sold and leased on the death of the final Humphrey. In 1719, the estate came into the ownership of John Diggles, a wealthy linen draper. It was then passed down through the Diggles family for around 60 years, until another John Diggles bequeathed the estate to his nephew (along with a gold watch, an amethyst ring and a chamber organ with eight barrels) in the latter part of the eighteenth century. And that nephew’s name was Thomas Bayley.
Thomas Bayley (not to be confused with Thomas Butterworth Bayley, after whom the New Bailey in Salford was named) was a well-to-do landowner in late eighteenth-century Manchester. It’s clear that he owned a number of properties, though his home is listed as ‘Booth Hall, Blackley’ from the moment he acquired it. Clearly, when William Yates surveyed Blackley for his Lancashire map, Thomas Bayley was the owner of Booth Hall – and was willing to pay the fee to have his name inscribed on the map.
Thomas Bayley was born in 1740, the son of Samuel Bayley (linen draper) and Esther Diggles (the sister of John Diggles, from whom Thomas would inherit the Booth Hall estate). Like most wealthy men in Manchester at the time, Thomas Bayley was a cotton manufacturer and linen draper. He also owned land in Blackley, and a number of other properties around Manchester. In 1773, Thomas married Mary Kennedy, the daughter of a fustian manufacturer, and the couple would go on to have eleven children: Samuel, Mary, Esther, William, John, Sarah, Thomas, Gilbert, Elizabeth, Ann and Robert.
Mary Bayley (née Kennedy) died in 1808, and Thomas Bayley died in 1817. He bequeathed his lands in Blackley to three of his sons (Samuel, John and Robert), who immediately put the estate up for sale. The advertisement described Booth Hall as ‘compact, and well attached together’, containing ‘very pleasant and desirable situations for country residences’ and ‘a considerable quantity of young thriving timber upon the estate’. As well as the house, the estate comprised three farms, which were at the time leased to John Eckersley, Peter Whitehead and John Whitehead.
In a perhaps unexpected twist, the Booth Hall estate was purchased by Dr William Henry, an esteemed chemist. William Henry was, in fact, Thomas Bayley’s son-in-law (he was married to Thomas’s daughter Mary). At first glance, this might seem an odd arrangement – Mary’s husband was essentially buying her father’s land from her brothers – but it’s important to remember that this happened over sixty years before the Married Women’s Property Act was passed. As a married woman under the legal doctrine of coverture, Mary wouldn’t have been able to inherit property from her father or make contracts in her own name. It’s quite possible that this odd contractual arrangement, in which Thomas Bayley’s son-in-law bought the property from his sons, was a way to get around this and allow Mary to ‘inherit’ in a round-about way. (NB: It clearly wasn’t a satisfactory arrangement, as William and Mary Henry only kept Booth Hall for a couple of years before selling it on to someone who I have no doubt will be cropping up in another blog post at some point.)
While he was a wealthy and successful merchant, Thomas Bayley left little mark on the city of Manchester, outside of putting his name to a map in the 1780s. However, the same can’t be said of his descendants.
In 1812, Thomas’s daughter Esther (whose portrait you can see here) married Thomas Potter, who ran a warehouse in Manchester with his brothers William and Richard. The family were wealthy Unitarians, and became members of both Cross Street Chapel and the Portico Library. Thomas and Richard became involved with politics, feeling that Parliament didn’t adequately represent the industrialized towns in the north and the midlands. Spurred on by the events of the Peterloo Massacre and its aftermath, Thomas Potter became involved in local politics, while his brother Richard went on to become an MP for Wigan.
In the 1830s, Thomas Potter was part of the political battle that would eventually see Manchester incorporated under the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. He was elected to Manchester Borough Council in the first council elections in 1838, and served as Mayor of Manchester from 1838-1840. He was knighted in 1840.
Esther Bayley was Thomas Potter’s second wife. The couple had four children Esther, John, Mary and Thomas. Sadly, neither daughter survived infancy, but their sons went on to have significant careers. John Potter would serve as Mayor of Manchester from 1848-1851, before being knighted in 1851 and elected as one of the MPs for Manchester in 1857. His younger brother Thomas Bayley Potter also pursued a political career, joining the Liberal Party and fighting for, amongst other things, universal suffrage and the emancipation of enslaved people. Thomas Bayley Potter was elected MP for Rochdale in 1865, and he was known in the House of Commons as ‘Principles Potter’.
Thomas Bayley owned Booth Hall and its estate for around 30 years, and he was the only Bayley who owned it. Other families – the Booths, the Diggles and the Taylors – had longer, multi-generational tenure of the hall and its surrounding farmland and woods. And yet, it is Bayley’s name that became attached to the woodland to the rear of Booth Hall.
It is tempting to think this was a way of remembering Thomas Bayley’s name in the rapidly municipal landscape of North Manchester. After all, both his son-in-law and his grandson served as Mayor of Manchester. As Blackley was incorporated into the City of Manchester in 1890, and two-thirds of the Booth Hall estate were bought by Manchester Corporation in 1893, one might imagine that the OS map recorded ‘Bailey’s Wood’ for the first time in 1894 in recognition of the family that gave Manchester its first ever leader of the council.
Personally, I think this is a bit tenuous. Thomas Potter (the first mayor) had no connection to Booth Hall other than it being the former home of his second wife. Neither John Potter nor ‘Principles Potter’ had any real connection to Booth Hall or its woods, aside (again) from it being their mother’s childhood home. The woods were sold to the Taylor family when both men were still little children.
No, I think a more logical answer is that, at some point, the cartographers drawing up the 1894 OS map got sight of Yates’s 1786 map – or perhaps someone in the Taylor family remembered the name of the family from whom they’d bought the estate – and simply named the distinctive and ancient patch of woodland after its former owner.
In the 1780s, Thomas Bayley paid William Yates’ map-making team a guinea to have his name written next to his address. In 1894, that name was reinstated, and it’s remained ever since, through subsequent Ordnance Survey maps and into the era of Google maps.
All in all, that was a guinea well spent!
Dr Hannah Priest is a local history and pop culture researcher from North Manchester, who has authored numerous articles and edited four academic collections. She is a founder member and the current Secretary of Friends of Bailey’s Wood, and she is a councillor for Charlestown Ward on Manchester City Council.
Friends of Bailey's Wood 
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