To understand what drove the expansion of nineteenth century Hull, and therefore what resulted in the houses being built in between Hedon Road and Holderness Road, in that area around Crowle Street, we need to look at three things: fishing, railways, and oil seed crushing.

Fishing has been well enough documented with plenty of books, articles and even radio and TV programmes. There have even been songs written about Hessle Road!

So we assume that anyone logging on to this page probably already has a working knowledge of the rise and fall of the Hull fishing industry and its contribution to Hull’s zeitgeist over the last 200 years.

The railways were part of the massive railway expansion that covered the face of the British Isles with tracks in the space of about 20 years in the mid-Victorian period.

The railways must have been the Victorian equivalent of the internet for those lucky enough to have invested in them at the start.

Suddenly, fresh fish landed on Albert Dock that morning could be packed in ice and in the industrial heartlands of West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and the Midlands in a matter of hours. And as for fish, for other products as well.

The third element in the potent mixture that fuelled the phenomenal growth of Hull in the nineteenth century was Oil Seed Crushing.

Centred on the Sculcoates area, this industry shaped the future of the whole area and also became the foundation of the present day flour milling and oil and petrochemicals industries that still remain in Hull.

These days, Sculcoates is the heartland of the small industries that cluster up the western bank of the river Hull.

I have been back and walked the street pattern that still exists, where my ancestors used to live – York Street, Cumberland Street, Wincolmlee, and I have tried to hack back some of the overgrowth (and undergrowth) that the City Council has, to its everlasting shame, allowed to spoil the fine examples of Victorian graves in Sculcoates cemetery (where they broke up the tombstones and made crazy paving out of them).

Sculcoates in the nineteenth century was a nest of courts and alleyways, grim terraced housing cramming in the workers of such worthy concerns as the Sculcoates Oil and Grease Works, in a warren of squalid hutches.

In 1903, when the Board of Health wanted to produce a series of photographs of “how not to do it” as examples of unhealthy housing, they chose to come and photograph Sculcoates, which is how come I have these photocopies from the Record Office in the Local History Library, which are possibly the most complete photographic record of the streets where my ancestors lived, walked, worked, loved, and died.

And what fuelled the massive boom-town development of Sculcoates in the nineteenth century until it grew to be a public health hazard which could no longer be ignored? The oil seed crushing industry.

As the worthy historian of Hull, Chris Ketchell, points out, this involved at its simplest the importation of oil bearing seeds such as Rape, Linseed Cottonseed, Soya Beans and employing various processes (crushing and pressing) to extract the vegetable oil for use in the manufacture of paint, soap, linoleum, maragrine, cooking oil, animal cake, manure and fertilizer.

Oil milling was being carried out in Hull as early as the 16th century but by the 19th it had become concentrated along the banks of the Hull; Wincolmlee, Church Street, Bankside; Lime Street; Groves; Wilmington and Stoneferry being the chiefest areas.

The industry – like so many others that changed the face of Victorian Britain – has essentially a bucolic origin.

In 1796, in Wincolmlee, there were “three wind oil mills, one belonging to Messrs Jarratt and Coates, worked by a Steam Engine, besides horse-mills for the same purpose.

The cattle cake was made from the leftovers, and you can actually track the “big bang” of the oil seed crushing industry by the amount of cattle cake Hull exported.

In 1717, it was 150,000 cakes. In 1737, over 400,000. Soon after that, they gave up counting the individual cakes and recorded the exports in tons of the things instead. 52 tons of them were exported in 1758. In 1725, a mere 1,902 bushels of linseed were brought into Hull. By 1783, this had risen to over 66,000.

By 1831 Hull had eight firms of seed-crushers and by 1838, when my ancestor James Rudd, eventually to end up as an oil seed crusher in York Street, was busy being born amongst the Fens of Downham Market in Norfolk away to the south, it had thirteen.

Already, by the 1820’s one of the plants was using “vertical presses with 12-inch rams” These gradually became the standard, remaining so until 1874.

I could go on in a similar vein: in 1840 there were only (-only!) - ten mills along the River Hull, receiving the raw materials direct from the barges that moored up that muddy creek.

By 1878, there were forty-five. By the time Bulmer got round to his directory of Hull in 1892, at the high-water mark of the British Empire, there were, in Hull:-

30 Oil Brokers and Refiners
5 Oil Brokers
7 Oil Importers
20 Oil Manufacturers
48 Oil Merchants
4 Oilcake Manufacturers
19 Oilcake Merchants
4 Oil Press Wrapper Makers
and 31, (yes 31) Seed Crushers.

The rapacious needs of the seed crushing industry had to be met with a constant supply of raw materials and eventually it was realised that the existing docks needed expanding to deal with all this stuff that was heading for Hull from all four corners of the globe.

The area round the mouth of the River Hull was already old and overcrowded, but to the east lay virgin river bank, which is how first Alexandra Dock and then later, King George Dock came to be scooped out of the mud and clay, and kitted out with derricks, cranes, sheds, railway lines and of course ships.

And the people who were to work in these new enterprises, the docks and the many ancillary trades that sprung up around them, all needed somewhere to live, within a reasonable hailing distance, and so the streets and terraces came.

Blank fields on maps of about 1850, by the 1880s had become whole barracks of terraces, alleys, courts, and places.

Which needed shops, tramways and schools, to name but three, to feed and clothe and satisfy the teeming humanity that inhabited them.

On the 1888 large scale ordnance survey map of East Hull, Sweet Dews Grove, where I was born in 1955, is actually shown as “Sweet Dews Farm”.

An isolated set of buildings, on the edge of the terraced housing that was already infilling the quadrant between Hedon Road and Holderness Road, to provide quick and cheap living space for the many workers which the opening of Alexandra Dock in the 1880s, and the general boom in trade in nineteenth-century Hull had sucked in from miles around.

As to how it got from Sweet Dews Farm (a farm) to Sweet Dews Grove (a row of post-war prefabs) you can get the answer from two well known German gentlemen, neither of whom is still with us – a Mr Hitler and a Mr Goering. I recall reading a statistic somewhere that Hull was the most bombed town in Britain during the Second World War, and that something like 80% of its housing stock was damaged or destroyed. I can well believe this.

A major port, with an oil refinery at its eastern edge and an aircraft factory ten miles to the west, with a huge knotted skein of railways and marshalling yards, and lots of high, easily identifiable target buildings lining the River Hull, stuffed with things like flour and nice combustible substances like linseed oil and paint.

No wonder the Luftwaffe buzzed round Hull like wasps round a jampot. They should have painted targets on the roofs of Crowle Street.

Arthur Wall, another contributor to this web site, recalls being bombed out of his house in Lorne Terrace. In fact, we think the same stick of bombs also got the other side of Alexandra Terrace, so that by the time we moved into number 5 in 1959, all that was left was a large open space, one of the many bomb sites in that area, across which we could see the backs of the houses in Empringham Street.

The main focus of this site is about Crowle Street in the 1950s and 1960s, built from people’s memories, so it would overegg the pudding to repeat it all here in this general introducion. And of course we all know what happened once the council moved in, in the 1970s. They finished the job started in 1941. They should have got the Iron Cross.