DEMOLISHING A CASTLE

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 24 August 1935, Page 11

DEMOLISHING A CASTLE

TN his own way, Cromwell may be regarded as a demolition contractor. He knocked a, good few historical places about in his zeal for advancement and reform, writes Mr H. de Winton Wigley in the “Daily Express.” But I met a man in Coventry recently who can do more towards the demolition of a castle ini a day than Cromwell did in a month. This man, Mo Eli Pearson, is a, modern demolition contractor. He and his father and grandfather before him have been literally hacking paths for progress up and down England. His men attack haunted castles, gloomy mansions, derelict and out-of-date factories, and buildings whose useful days are over. They cut through monumental buildings as pioneers cut through forests, and leave behind them not ruins, but wide new thoroughfares, housing estates, and modern works. They are the advance troops in the army of progress, and in the modern growth of th© city of Birmingham in particular the Pearson family have been in the van. Mr Eli Pearson recently demolished old Warwick gaol, but, unlike Cromwell, who left sentimental ruin at Kenilworth a few miles away, he cleared everything away, and is now planning a housing estate on the site. The huge quantities of bricks that penned in the law breakers are now being used for homes all over the Midlands and as far south as Oxford. The walls of the prison serve excellently for garden walls and cottage homes. A collector in the Midlands bought the gibbet or scaffold.

When a Church Goes on the Road

j Scon after dawn, one morning men ’ went to Warwick secretly and began - to exhume from the burial ground in the prison the bodies of those who had been executed; and buried “within the precincts of the prison.” The bodies have been reinterred in another prison. The governor’s house has been left. It is to- become a hotel, with the name of “The •Governor’s Arms.” Imagine an ex-convict silently entering the erstwhile sanctum and ordering a glass of ale! Mr Pearson also demolished. Hereford gaol. “A very tough job is gaol breaking,” he said. A remarkable feat was the pulling down of St. Philip’s Anglican Church (in Leeds. Each stone was taken down. ) The spire was carefully removed. Every bit of stained glass was removed, and marked. All the little pieces of mosaic work were taken out and put in boxes for relaying. Within nine months Mr Pearson had the church down and had carted it eight miles away, where it was re-erected and consecrated a Roman Catholic Church. Not a stone was broken. Another big job was the demolition of Haggerston Castle, Berwick, which cost a, million and a- quarter to build. The stones are now in buildings, all over the country. “I am pulling down seven Lancashire cotton mills,” Mr Pearson said. Now and then souvenirs come to light in the course of the work, and are bought by collectors. A Midlands collector has bought two or three prison cells, and an American bought a bath from a mansion because it was reported that Queen Victoria had bathed in it.