Armstrong family in Dipton

[Elliven]

Thank you this is the only map I have ever seen with house/street names in the Hoppers Nook area.  It also shows Bute Cottages which appear in jonwarrn's contribution so it is very helpful even if it is relatively recent.  I live within a quarter of a mile of Hoppers Nook so it has helped me to understand a lot more about it.  The area was demolished about 20 years before I moved here.

[AlanBoyd]

I was looking for old photos of Dipton and one of your previous threads came up — probably worth linking from here.

https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=821197.0

[AlanBoyd]

Also a picture of one of the bottles that you have mentioned.

[AlanBoyd]

I’ve just rediscovered the Thomas Armstrong, beer retailer, living in Dipton in 1891, as found in your earlier thread linked above in reply#5. This is the family with the son Robert, baptised 1868 Throckley.

Where does this family fit, in your opinion? Why is this not the Armstrongs of Dipton at this time? And if it is, have you tried to trace them backwards?

This is the 1891 enumerator’s sequence:
Storfords Houses
Hopper's Nook
Marquis Houses
Gardeners(?) House
Smith’s Houses
Johnson Houses
Front Street, Fox Inn
Front Street
Todd's Houses
Wilkinson Houses

There are six households at Smith’s Houses, the first listed being Thomas Armstrong, 48, born Burnopfield.

[Elliven]

Whellan's Directory 1894 for Dipton Parish has:
Robert Armstrong ale and porter, wine and spirit merchant, and mineral water manufacturer
[sadly no clue as to where he lived]

AlanBoyd
The Halmote Rolls indicate that the Armstrongs held the licence for a pub in the same building as the bottling plant ie Belle Vue House.  This must have been The Swan which they held by copyhold and they surrendered when it was sold to Dover & Newsome Baxter Ltd.  They (D&NB) seem to have put their own manager in and he appears to have stayed on when it was taken over by Archibald Arroll and Sons who sold it to Calder & Co.  Meanwhile Dover & Newsome Baxter went into liquidation and eventually the whole operation closed down.

There is no way I can prove it but I believe that the whole of Armstrong's business was reduced in scale and operated from the Blackhall Mill site.  It would have been a lot easier if the family imagination extended beyond Thomas and Robert when naming their sons!