Description:Following the death of the first Duke of Sutherland in 1833, monuments of the Duke were erected in Trentham and Lilleshall. The minutes featured above are from a meeting held at the Trentham Inn on 30th December 1833 relating to the erection of the monument at Trentham.
Earlier in 1833 a Committee had been established to oversee the erection of the monument. It had been decided that there should be an inscription on the monument. The minutes state that it had been ‘resolved that the Inscription furnished by the Reverend Mr Butt be adopted’. Everyone appears to have been in favour of the Reverend’s inscription, remarks in the minutes commenting that it ‘so well accords’ with the feelings of the Committee.
The minutes tell us that a man named Mr. Winks had produced ‘a Design of a Monumental Pillar surmounted by a Statue’. The second Duke and Duchess had ‘highly approved’ the design, and the Committee had decided to employ Winks to produce the monument ‘at the estimate now produced amounting to £810 exclusive of the Statue’. William Lewis, an Estate Agent working for the Duke of Sutherland, was to commission a monument in the same design as the one which had been erected recently in Lilleshall. Donations from local people would fund the building of the monument, and it was resolved at the meeting ‘that the Committee proceed forthwith to collect the Subscriptions’.
The Mr. Winks referred to in the minutes was the surveyor Charles Winkes. The Sutherland Papers contain a number of plans produced by Winks in the early nineteenth century. In 1817 Winks was employed as a surveyor at Trentham Hall. His plan of the house survives in the Sutherland Papers. In the 1820s Winks produced plans of buildings at Lane End and Clayton Field in Newcastle.
Click on the images on the left to see Winks’ design of the first Duke’s monument, and to learn more about the monument in Lilleshall.