Wilberforce House Museum And Attached Garden Wall

This substantial town house was built around 1656, probably by William Catyln for the Lister family. A phase of alterations took place around 1730, and the house was refenestrated and internally remodelled around 1755–60. Hull City Corporation bought the property in 1903 and opened it as a museum in 1906. Since then, only minor alterations have been carried out, along with the addition of a single-storey extension to the north-east wing.

Exterior

The building is constructed of red brick with moulded brick and ashlar dressings, and has hipped and gabled pantile roofs with three gable stacks and two ridge stacks. Architectural features include a moulded ground-floor sill band, ground-floor cornice, string course, moulded coped parapet, and rusticated front and angle pilasters. The house is two storeys high with a three-storey tower porch, and has a nine-window range of 12-pane sashes with brick and ashlar ornaments below them. The eighth window is a wooden-framed cross casement with leaded glazing. Between the outer pairs of windows are bossed-out Corinthian pilasters on brackets. The ground floor has similar fenestration with brick flat arches and keystones.

The central tower porch has upper floors flanked by bossed-out Corinthian pilasters on pedestals, topped with a coped parapet. The first floor has a 12-pane sash to the front and on either side, with a similar window above. Below is a round-arched moulded brick doorway with keystone, imposts and decorated spandrels. On either side is a round-arched niche under a pediment. At the rear, flanking a courtyard, are two long wings of single-storey and two storeys with seven windows.

Interior

To the south is a noteworthy cantilevered wooden dogleg stair with ornamented vase and stem balusters and a ramped scrolled handrail. The stairwell has an elaborate dentillated cornice and ceiling with vine trail plasterwork framing a modelled eagle—the Wilberforce crest. The landing has a Venetian window with an eagle crest above it with a vine trail festoon.

The first-floor banqueting room, dating from the mid-17th century, has full-height panelling with pilasters and a wooden chimneypiece with overmantel flanked by clustered columns and bearing the Lister coat of arms in relief. The adjoining bedroom has framed panelling and an overmantel flanked by pilasters.

On the ground floor, the room to the right is a restored 17th-century-style panelled room with reeded frieze and pilasters, with a chamfered brick Tudor arched fireplace and strapwork overmantel flanked by pilasters. The room to the left has moulded wooden wall panelling and a modillion cornice. It contains a re-sited marble fireplace with a central relief panel and an eared and shouldered overmantel with floral swags and a portrait of Wilberforce, flanked by fluted Ionic pilasters. Moulded doorcases have fielded six-panel doors.

The central rear room has matchboard dado to two walls, moulded cornice and span beam. The adjoining room has a similar moulded span beam and cornice and a late 18th-century marble fireplace with fluted columns and dentillated cornice. The former saddle room, at the rear, has re-sited eared wall panelling and dentillated cornice, with a corniced marble fireplace with eared surround and panelled overmantel with broken scroll pediment. There are two enriched doorcases with swagged panels above and fielded six-panel doors.

Subsidiary Features

To the front is an attached brick garden wall with string course, rusticated panels and moulded brick coping, measuring approximately 20 metres by 10 metres. The central pair of brick gatepiers have bossed-out pilasters, moulded ashlar cornices and ball finials, with renewed round-arched wrought-iron gates. In the garden at the front stands a listed 19th-century statue of Wilberforce, erected in 1884.

Setting

The Wilberforce House Museum is the only remaining 17th-century house in the High Street, though the street contains a large number of listed buildings, including Georgian merchants' houses and warehouses. A pair of Georgian houses directly to the north of Wilberforce House (numbers 23 and 24) were incorporated into the Museum in 1957.

History

The house is built on the site of a house dating from around 1590. The present house was built around 1656 for Hugh Lister, on land bought by his father, Sir John Lister. Hugh Lister was a merchant, probably exporting Derbyshire lead to Holland as his father had done. He was also the principal shareholder in the Hull waterworks. The house remained in the Lister family until 1709, but appears to have been rented from around 1682. In that year the house became available for use by the Governor of Hull, Thomas Windsor, Earl of Plymouth, and the Deputy Governor, Captain Lionel Copley. The former supported James II; the latter, William of Orange. From around 1688–1700 it was the home of Alderman William Mowld, a merchant who was mayor of Hull in 1698. By 1701 the tenant was John Thornton, a leading exporter of lead and cloth. Thornton bought the house in 1709.

In 1732 Thornton's son Godfrey sold the house to his brother-in-law, William Wilberforce, grandfather of the abolitionist of the same name. William Wilberforce senior had been apprenticed to John Thornton and had married Thornton's daughter Sarah in 1711. The house in the High Street was already the headquarters for his business, as well as the home of his family, when he bought it. Alterations to the house around 1730 were probably made under his direction. It was this William Wilberforce who established the family fortune, mainly through the Baltic trade. He acquired land in Yorkshire and was twice mayor of Hull. Alderman Wilberforce, as he was known, retired to his country house at Ferriby around 1755, when the Hull house was taken over by his son Robert, father of the great William Wilberforce. It was during Robert Wilberforce's occupation that the house was remodelled.

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was born in the Wilberforce house (according to tradition, in the small room to the north of the banqueting room) and baptised at Holy Trinity Church. His early years were spent in Hull, and he attended the grammar school, but on his father's death in 1768 he was sent to live with his uncle and aunt in London and Wimbledon. His aunt's enthusiasm for Methodism caused his mother to bring him back to Hull after about two years, and thereafter the house in the High Street was Wilberforce's home. Hull was the centre of his family and social life. As a member of one of Hull's most prominent families, his days were filled with music and other diversions.

In 1776 Wilberforce entered St John's College, Cambridge. Whilst there, he resolved to follow a political career. Elected Member of Parliament for Hull in 1780 and for Yorkshire in 1784, his political stance was independent from the first. In 1785 he experienced a conversion to evangelical Christianity and resolved to devote his life to God. He was counselled by the evangelical minister John Newton and by his friend, the prime minister William Pitt, that he could best serve God by remaining in politics. In 1787 he was persuaded by prominent abolitionists to represent their cause in Parliament. Whilst Thomas Clarkson and others gathered evidence against the slave trade and sought to mobilize public opinion, Wilberforce worked ceaselessly in Parliament, introducing bills calling for an end to the slave trade and speaking in their support. In 1788 he secured a select committee to examine the trade. The campaign met with fierce opposition and frequent setbacks before the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill at last received royal assent on 25 March 1807.

Slavery continued to exist in Britain's colonies, and Wilberforce continued to strive for the abolition of the institution itself, joining with others to form in 1807 the African Institution (its purpose being to ensure that the new law was adhered to, as well as ameliorating conditions for slaves) and in 1823 the Anti-Slavery Society. He remained in the House of Commons until 1825, by which time Thomas Fowell Buxton had taken on leadership of the parliamentary campaign. On 26 July 1833 Wilberforce heard that the bill for the emancipation of all slaves in British colonies had passed its final reading, and on 29 July he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, where a monument by Samuel Joseph was erected in 1840. In 1834–5 a monument honouring Wilberforce was erected in Queen Victoria Square, Hull; this was moved to Wilberforce Drive in 1935.

William Wilberforce had inherited the house in the High Street when he reached the age of 21, but his mother continued to live in it until her death in 1798. From 1787 she shared the premises with the bankers Abel Smith & Sons and the merchants Wilberforce & Smith, both firms connected with the family. Following Mrs Wilberforce's death in 1798, Thomas Thompson, the senior partner in both the bank and the merchant company, took over the living accommodation of the house. In addition to his business interests, Thompson became the first Methodist Member of Parliament when he was elected to represent Midhurst in 1816. Thompson died in 1828, and in 1830 Wilberforce sold the house. From that time it was owned, often in partnership, by a succession of merchants and tradesmen, and fell into a state of dilapidation.

In the 1890s Councillor (later Alderman) John Brown campaigned for the preservation of the house in the High Street, arguing that Wilberforce's birthplace could claim 'a degree of veneration... not merely local, or even national, but worldwide'. Brown cited the example of other house-museums: 'Stratford-on-Avon shows the house of Shakespeare, Edinburgh shows the house of Knox, Chelsea shows the house of Carlyle. Why should not Hull show the house of Wilberforce?' In 1903 the house was bought by Hull Corporation, which undertook essential repair work. The Museum opened to the public in 1906, with exhibits relating to the social history of Hull, as well as the life and work of William Wilberforce. In 2007 the Museum reopened after a major refurbishment, and is now devoted to Wilberforce, abolition, and the history of slavery to the present day.