Baldock Arts History
The Baldock Arts Festival will be centered around the Baldock Town Hall so we have included some history about Baldock and its Town hall.
Thomas Pryor
With the project to return the Town Hall to public use well underway it is a very timely coincidence that a photograph, believed to be of Thomas Pryor (1825-1899) has recently been discovered. As the plaque on the north end of the Town Hall tells us, it was Thomas Pryor who gave the land on which it stands to Baldock in 1897.
Thomas Pryor was the son of Vickris Pryor, who lived at the large house later know as the Wilderness, at the end of Hitchin Street. Vickris was the youngest son of John Pryor, the Baldock brewer and had inherited some of his fathers malting business and farmland in Willian parish, near to Baldock in 1819.
In the following years, he improved and enlarged his holdings. When he died in 1849 many of the maltings were sold or leased out and, on the death of his widow in 1853, his youngest son Thomas came into possession of the house and grounds and other property including New Farm and its maltings.
In 1857 Thomas married Mary Foster of Warmwell Hall in Dorset, and about that time he sold the family house and purchased the Elms nearby, a mansion house that had been built about 40 years earlier by Isaac Hindley, a Baldock lawyer, with its 50 acres of park. Thomas did not continue the family malting business (he let out such maltings as he still owned) and it is not known whether he took any direct interest in the farms; it would seem that his intention was to live the life of a country gentleman. The Pryors lived at The Elms until his death in 1899. They added a ballroom, billiard room and morning room to the house and built the lodge at the High Street entrance which still stands.
The Pryor family had been in Baldock since the late 17th century and although by the 1730s they had become substantial maltsters in the town and in 1775 its principle brewers, they had been unable, being Quakers, to exercise the influence over the towns affairs in the Parish Vestry (the town council) which might be expected of a family in their situation. This changed with the conversion of Vickris (1809) and his eldest brother, John Izzard Pryor, the brewer (1820) to the Church of England, allowing them to play their part in the Vestry. By the 1830s and 1840s, if not before, the Pryors were the dominant family in the town, but their withdrawal form their malting and brewing interests between 1849 and 1853 inevitably lessened their involvement in local matters.
Nevertheless, Thomas, and no doubt Morris Pryor, his cousin at the Manor House, would have continued to feel that sense of obligation and duty to their town as their ancestors had done and as was expected of the gentry of those days. The served as Justices of the Peace and Mrs Thomas Pryor was heavily involved in the public dinners commemorating the Royal Wedding of 1863 and the Golden Jubilee of 1887. In 1870 Thomas purchased the lordship of the Manor of Baldock and in 1869 the cousins had both offered generous subscriptions to the proposal for a public building.
This matter of the public buildings dragged on for another 28 years, dogged by difficulties over the site and cost. In February 1892, the destruction by fire of Buck and Solomans shop and warehouse meant that a prime site became available.
Eventually a committee was set up to canvass the town for subscriptions which produced promises amounting to two-thirds of the sum needed but in the course of this process it was decided instead to petition Baldock Urban District Council to borrow the money on the security of the rates. The council declined to take up the matter on the grounds that the site was too expensive and at this point Thomas Pryor stepped in.
In October 1895 he purchased the site and presented it as a gift to the town, leaving the council little choice but to proceed especially as an election at the time returned those in favour of the scheme with "triumphant majorities".
According to one contemporary, Mr Pryor had "…long desired to do something for the town, which the town desired, found this opportunity of accomplishing his purpose and of thus rendering a lasting service to Baldock and making possible a scheme which, but for his generosity would probably have remained a dead letter." By that time Thomas was the last of his family left in Baldock and perhaps some sense of this being the end of an era. A grand finale after two centuries motivated him.
Mr Pryor did not attend the opening of the Town Hall in November 1897, but Mrs Pryor came to perform the opening ceremony, and the speakers made very clear the appreciation felt for the generous gift to the town. The vice-chairman of the council talked of the very great interest Mr and Mrs Pryor took in everything that was beneficial to Baldock. Mrs Pryor was loudly cheered and was presented with a bouquet by the little daughter of Mr Simpson, the chairman. It was evident from the remarks made by the speakers that the gift was intended for the town and that the council accepted this may be seen on plaque on the north wall:
"The ground upon which these buildings are erected was given to the town of Baldock by Thomas Pryor, Esquire."
