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Halewood Local History Pages The Buildings of Halewood
The Grange was a large mansion house which stood opposite the junction of Wood Road with Higher Road. Built in the late 1800s, its isolated position and imposing appearance certainly had shades of Miss Haversham's Satis House in Great Expectations, especially to the impressionable children growing up in the vicinity. Or to some, it was simply 'The Haunted House'.
The Grange had a number of interesting owners, including an M.P., a shipping magnate, and the owner of a large chemical manufacturing business.
Extract from the Tithe Map of 1840, and accompanying Apportionment.
Studying the Tithe Map, the plot that The Grange was built upon (no.1232) was formerly an orchard owned by Jane Molyneux, who also owned the smaller property alongside known as the 'Old Grange'. Jane was not recorded on the 1841 census, and it is impossible to identify if there was a tenant as the properties are not named. However, the building was still standing in 1871, as again it was referred to as 'The Old Grange'. The new Grange was not recorded, but did appear for the first time on the 1881 census, placing its construction within the decade.
Extract from the 1871 Census showing a Master Mariner's wife residing in the 'Old Grange'. The Grange(134 Higher Road)
The first known occupiers of the newly built Grange were twenty-seven-year-old Harold Brocklebank and his new wife Mary.
Harold had been living with his family at Springwood House in Woolton, where his father Thomas had moved to after the focus of the family shipping business shifted to Liverpool.
Extract from the Census of 1871; the Brocklebank family home at Springwood, Allerton
[*A relative of this author. 'A History of Thomas Royden & Sons, Shipbuilders of Liverpool' is due for publication in 2023]
However, Harold's stay at The Grange came to an end in 1882, when he moved with Mary to a more substantial house in Fullwood Park, Aigburth. Meanwhile he was intent on purchasing a country retreat, which would also become his home in retirement. Both he and Mary were originally from the Cumberland/Ulverston area and were keen to return.
Edward Whitley M.P.
The next resident of The Grange was even more well known. Edward Ewart Whitley was an English solicitor and Conservative politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1880 to 1892.
Whitley was the son of Liverpool lawyer John Whitley (originally of Alvanley) and his wife Isabella Greenall, and was also a nephew of the Conservative politician Gilbert Greenall. Isabella's father Edward, and later her older brothers Thomas, Peter and Gilbert owned and managed the Greenhall's breweries in St Helens and Wilderspool.
Edward Whitley was educated at Rugby School and admitted a solicitor in 1849. He became a senior partner in the legal firm of Whitley, Maddock, Hampson, & Castle, of Liverpool. In 1866 he became a member of the Corporation of Liverpool, elected Mayor of Liverpool in 1868 and became a Justice of the Peace.
In 1878 Whitley married Elizabeth Eleanor Walker and in 1880 he was elected as one of three Members of Parliament for Liverpool, holding the seat until the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. He was then elected MP for Everton, which he held until his death. He was also a patron of Everton F.C. during their formative years in the 1880s. In the winter of 1891, he caught a chill which developed into bronchitis, and short while later he passed away on 14 January 1892 at The Grange in Halewood aged sixty-six. He was buried in Alvanley Churchyard, near Helsby in Cheshire. Whitley is commemorated by Whitley Street in Liverpool, and by a triangular piece of rocky ground in Everton called Whitley Gardens. There is a statue of Edward Whitley in St George's Hall, Liverpool.
Edwin Darlington C.I.E.Following the passing of Edward Whitley, the new residents were the Darlington family, who arrived c.1897. Edwin Darlington was a retired civil servant who spent most of his career working for the Indian Civil Service. Born in St Austell, Cornwall in 1838 the son of a mine engineer, he met and married his wife Mary Ring, youngest daughter of the late David King Esq., of Templemore, Ireland, while in Burma. The marriage service was carried by the Venerable Archdeacon Popham Blyth at the Pro-Cathedral, Rangoon, Bengal, India on 19 April 1881. Their daughter, Kathleen Mary, was born on 13 April 1884 and baptised in Rangoon on 15 July 1884. Edwin had entered government service as a Junior Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Burma in 1868. Subsequently, he joined the Customs Service and became Collector of Customs at Akyab and Rangoon, and Chief Collector for Burma between 1880-96. He combined his office with the Vice Chairmanship of the Rangoon Port Commission. Before his retirement he was awarded the Companion of the Indian Empire in the Jubilee Honours List of June 1897 for services rendered.By 1911 they had left The Grange for 153 St James' Court, Buckingham Gate in London, where he passed away on 15 March 1928. He left £41,000, the equivalent of £2.8 million today.
Daniel Montgomery McKechnieDaniel McKechnie was the son of chemical manufacturer Duncan McKechnie, and after the departure of the Darlingtons moved with his family to The Grange from their home in Lodge Lane Liverpool.
McKechnie Brothers Founder Duncan McKechnie opened his first factory - collecting, smelting and recycling scrap metals - in St. Helens in 1871. When he became a director of the United Alkali Company, his sons Daniel Montgomery and Alexander Miller founded a smelting business known as McKechnie Brothers, and opened a new factory in Widnes refining copper and silver. In 1898 Duncan McKechnie, a third son of Duncan Senior, joined the partnership. However, this expansion was carried out without Daniel of The Grange, Halewood, who passed away in 1914. 
The following year it became a limited company with its headquarters in Birmingham. The company diversified its products, developing and selling the by-products of the smelting process. In 1920 they moved their headquarters back to Widnes. McKechnie Brothers became a public company in 1953, with the family holding a majority of voting rights. Diversification continued with the addition of plastics to their products. The family eventually lost overall control of the company in 1971. New businesses were acquired, and in 1984 the company was renamed McKechnie plc.
Left: Major A.B.Skinner DSO (Officers of the Jodhpur Lancers in France in 1915)
Daniel was survived by his wife Kate, sons Duncan (b.1888) and William (b.1891) and daughter Agnes (b.1893). How long Daniel's family continued to live at The Grange is unclear. Agnes married in 1916, while Duncan and William continued their work with the chemical company. Their war record, if any, is as yet unknown, but the family seems to have moved out of The Grange by the end of the war. By 1921, Duncan was also married, and living in Little Crosby. Daniel's widow Kate was living in Fulham by 1921 with her daughter Agnes and her husband Major A.B.Skinner DSO. The Skinners retired to Cheltenham in the 1930s, Kate living with them until she passed away in 1956 aged ninety-three.
The Grange - O.S.Map 1905 
Wood Road / Higher Road 1947 
The Grange - O.S.Map c.1966 Charles WillingtonBy the 1930s (or possibly earlier), the residents of The Grange were the Willingtons. Charles Willington was born in Rickenhall, Suffolk in 1882, but his father relocated the family to Birkenhead in the 1890s, where Charles worked as a boot dealer/salesman. In 1903 he married Phoebe Susanna Davies of Bromborough Pool, whose father was working at Price's Candle Factory close by. On leaving school she went into service, and after their marriage they were both living with their three year-old son Malcolm in 38 Woodchurch Road, the home of her employer, Robert Owen Knowles, a young doctor from Denbigh, Phoebe working as his housekeeper, while Charles was an assistant house furnisher in the town. A second son Robert Alexander Willington, was born in 1911. In 1939, the whole family, with spouses and children, were living in The Grange as the census record reveals; 
[*The pub was the Halewood Hotel, not quite on the actual site of The Grange, as three pretty cottages were demolished to be replaced by a scruffy pub car park, an eyesore dreamt up by unimaginitive planners of the 1960s.
The former site of The Grange
Of course, the imagery of Mrs Willington with her bladed walking stick eerily walking through the house and basement full of antiques, stuffed animals and paintings on the wall, with eyes watching your every move, was the creation of children's imaginations, both inside the house and those living locally. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a grain of truth in the story. Once, as a youngster, I actually plucked up the courage to ring the bell on the front gate, curious to see what lay inside. A young, pretty girl skipped down the drive, and called out, 'What name?' 'Pip, I've come to play' 'Quite right', she replied. And in I went.
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In 1903 Harold Brocklebank, a wealthy Liverpool based merchant and shipping magnate bought Grizedale estate. He was born in 1853, being the third son of Sir Thomas Brocklebank, 1st Baronet. After the old hall was pulled down, Harold Brocklebank completely rebuilt Grizedale Hall in 1905, the interior design having been completed by 1907. The architects of the new stone-built 40-room mansion in neo-gothic style were Walker, Carter & Walker of Windermere, Cumbria. Brocklebank inhabited Grizedale Hall with his wife Mary Ellen Brogden, three daughters and two sons until his death in 1936, when the hall and the 4,500 acre estate were taken up by the Forestry Commission.
