The area around Chapel-en-le-Frith is noted for the high proportion of great houses. Some of these are the remnants of the estates within the Royal Forest that were allocated by the early Norman Kings to ‘Foresters of Fee’. A charter of 1222 lists the men whose family names are still evident in some of the halls, mansions and houses in this cache series.
Ollerenshaw Hall
The settlement of Ollerenshaw in the township of Bowden Edge been there for over a 1000 years. The old form of Ollerenshaw (Alreshage) is a derivation of the Anglo-Saxon for the alder tree -Alr. A family calling themselves (de) Ollerenshaw settled there after the Norman conquest and by the sixteenth century had a large land holding including farms in Combs, Tunstead and Fernilee. The Olrynshagh’s (sometimes Holrenshaw) lived here until the seventeenth century when Ollerenshaw was sold to John Shallcross of Shallcross Hall.
The Hall has passed through many hands since the eighteenth century.
Whilst he resided there only a short time the most notorious occupier of Ollerenshaw Hall must be Robert Barker who seems to have lived there in the early 1850s. He was a nineteenth century purveyor of a British equivalent of ‘snake oil’ for babies and toddlers!
This took the form of Atkinson and Barker’s Royal Infant's Preservative. Although advertisements like the ones below published in the 1852 first edition of Dicken's 'Bleak House' claims it contains ‘no stupefactive, deadly narcotic’ it did in fact contain Laudanum.
THE BEST MEDICINE IN THE WORLD for INFANTS
AND YOUNG CHILDREN IS ATKINSON AND BARKER'S ROYAL INFANTS' PRESERVATIVE
Under the Patronage of the Queen.
The high and universal celebrity which this medicine continues to maintain for the prevention and cure of those disorders incident to infants; affording instant relief in convulsions, flatulency, affections of the bowels, difficult teething, the thrush, rickets, measles, hooping-cough, cow-pox, or vaccine inoculation, and may be given with safety immediately after birth. It is no misnomer cordial; no stupefactive, deadly narcotic!; but a veritable preserver of infants! Mothers would do well in always keeping it in the nursery. Many thousands of children are annually saved by this much-esteemed medicine, which is an immediate remedy, and the infants rather like it than otherwise.
Prepared only by ROBERT BARKER, Ollerenshaw Hall, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire,
late of Manchester, (Chemist to Her most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria),
in bottles at 1s. 1½d., 2s. 9d., 4s. 6d., and 11s. each.
Sold by all druggists and medicine vendors throughout the United Kingdom.
CAUTION.
Observe the name of ATKINSON & BARKER, on the Government Stamp.
Established in the year 1793.
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Atkinson & Barkers Infant Preservative was one of many ‘quieteners’ available in the 19th century. The cartoon below highlights the faith that parents and carers erroneously held in the ‘medicine’.
When Mrs Easy sitting on the right is informed that her house is about to fall down with her baby inside, she replies
‘Never you mind, I gave it a bottle of Infant’s Preservative before I come out so there is no danger.’
There are Coroner’s records of the time where the Atkinson & Barker preparation is mentioned by name in cases of unexplained infant and toddler death.
In 1886, an inquest on the body of a six-week-old baby decided that a mere six drops of Royal Infants’ Preservative had been enough to kill it, as it was already weakened by illness. Surgeon Mr H S Leigh told the jury that when he saw the baby the morning after the dose,
…its pupils were contracted to the size of a pin’s head; it was covered with a cold, clammy sweat; it was breathing about six in the minute, and was apparently moribund. The child ‘lingered on till evening, when it died.
In 1876 a Kilburn doctor William H Platt wrote to medical journals highlighting that flyers similar to the grand one shown below were included with the compulsory smallpox vaccination papers given to parents registering a birth in Kilburn London. This ‘clever’ marketing trick suggested that Atkinson and Barkers Royal Infant Preserver was recommended by the same authority that required smallpox vaccination. The doctor concluded that the Board of Guardians been probably been bribed to combine the flyer with the official documents.
Ollerenshaw Hall is now divided into 3 separate residences.
With permission I have plundered the thequackdoctor.com website to write this!