Morpathia: Fireplaces and chimney pots

We have to distinguish a chimney pot from a chimney or flue. The Romans had box-tile flues, fed from a furnace, which ran up the walls of the hot rooms in their bath houses so that the bathers could get a sweat on, but chimneys as we know them seem to have been rare.

Archaeologists often refer to finding hearths at sites along Hadrian’s Wall, but say nothing about where the smoke went.

The reconstructed Anglo-Saxon houses at Bede’s World in Jarrow don’t have chimneys, just a hole in the roof. The Normans were no better and it was a hundred years after the Conquest before they began to build chimneys over the hearths in their castles and monasteries.

Bothal Castle, built in the 1340s, has what looks like a fireplace and chimney in the curtain wall of the inner bailey – but it may equally have been a garderobe shaft!

The great keep at Warkworth dates from about 1380 and the enormous kitchen fireplaces are big enough to roast whole animals. The great height of the tower, which itself stands on a motte or mound, must have enabled the chimneys to impart a powerful draught to the fires.

Chimney pots of a sort first began to appear on the mansions of the great in the Tudor period – roughly the 16th Century. It was a time when the aristocracy began living houses in preference to castles.

It was also a time when, following the Dissolution, great monastic estates came onto the market to be bought up by the ambitious new rich. Some turned the monastery into a house, as at the Preceptory of the Knights Hospitallers at Chibburn, while others demolished it for the stone, lead and timber, as at Morpeth, but either way the object was to have a fine new house with chimneys.

The tops of these chimneys were not mere pots, but were built structures – tall and often ornamented with fantastic geometrical shapes.

Chimneys and chimney pots are functional and a lot more sophisticated than meets the eye. A chimney as such does not necessarily draw well. It may not be high enough to catch the wind and may not be of the correct profile.

The ideal chimney is smooth and amongst other features has a “choke” and no sharp bends. A good chimney pot is likewise a little wider than the flue beneath it, so as to make the fire draw better. It should also prevent rain from entering the chimney and dousing the fire, and birds from nesting in it.

Some pots have louvres or downward-pointing ‘horns’ round the side, others have bent-over cowls to eliminate unwanted draughts in the room below.

Chimneys are almost always aesthetically pleasing. A simple row of “cannon” pots on top of a brick chimney stack is a satisfying sight.

Some pots are ornate, as if they belonged to a gothic castle, and there are still some stone-built chimney tops (they aren’t strictly pots) in Howard Terrace.

Most chimney pots are terra cotta, but some are white, made of the seggar or fire-clay that is interbedded with coal seams. In fact, the making of chimney pots and all other kinds of builders’ earthenware such as bricks and roof tiles was always closely associated with coal mining.

A major change came in 1795 with the invention of the Rumford fireplace; designed by Benjamin Thompson, Reichsgraf von Rumford.

Unlike the great deep fireplaces of old, the Rumford model is shallow with the side walls of the hearth angled so that the heat reflects off them into the room and with a carefully moulded narrowing or choke just above the fire to strengthen the up-draught.

For some reason this excellent design fell out of favour after 1850, though some of its features persisted in later fireplaces. One in Morpeth Town Hall, which would have been installed when it was rebuilt in the 1860s, has a deep fire basket with an elegant tiled frame round the opening, which is splayed outwards in a sort of nod in the direction of Count Rumford.

Benjamin Thompson lived in Concord, Massachusetts, then called Rumford, in the Colonial period. He was a natural experimenter and inventor, but also a royalist and so had to leave America after the War of Independence.

He stayed in England for a few years, then went to Bavaria where his inventions and practical improvements in both civil and military life earned him the title of Count of the Holy Roman Empire – taking his title, however, from the small town in Massachusetts where he once lived.

In England, he helped to found the Royal Institution and despite his royalist past, was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and, amazingly, spent the greater part of the Napoleonic Wars living partly in France and partly in England. He died in Paris in 1814.

I was born in 1940 and the houses I grew up in were “semis” with bedroom fireplaces that we didn’t use. We only had fires in the downstairs rooms and often only in the living room.

Few people in the 1940s and 1950s thought of central heating, which at that time meant coal-fired boilers and cast iron pipes and radiators.

Our present house is a Victorian-style terrace of 1904 and one of the first things we did when we moved in was take out the bedroom fireplaces and fit the downstairs ones with gas fires. We kept the front room fireplace because it’s a nice example of a 1950s tile-built one.

Our main chimney with its four brick flues is still intact, each with its chimney pot. However, an earlier occupier of the house removed the set pot and chimney in the kitchen, and we ourselves removed the middle section of the chimney in the bathroom above, so all that’s left now is 10 courses projecting from the roof and about the same in the attic below.

Nor does it have a chimney pot any more, it’s just closed off at the top.

And herein lies the problem. Builders, being practical men – and it’s still the case that most builders are males of the species – when they revite a house, they take the chimney pots off.

They’re no use any more, so away they go to be replaced with a single stainless steel flue cap serving the central heating boiler. The trouble is, a chimney stack without its pots doesn’t look right.

Victorian builders took pride in the appearance of their houses, even small terraced ones, and often made something special of the tops of their chimneys.

Even if a house has only straight pots or “cannons”, the sight of a regular array of four or eight identical chimney pots, perhaps with the odd one a bit different, imparts a sense of propriety. It’s what a Victorian house, or any house built before the 1970s ought to look like.

So here’s a motto for every homeowner contemplating modernisation: “Builder, spare that chimney pot!”

Books by Roger Hawkins are available at Newgate News and the Old Herald Office in Morpeth, or from Amazon.