Hucknall High Street, looking towards the Market Place. Where William Winter once trod.

An American in Hucknall

William Winter (1836-1917), an American journalist and poet who visited Hucknall in 1884 to pay his respects at Byron's tomb, found a town with a wealth of local culture, but to his dismay it was not of the literary type. The following passage is an extract from his diary for the 8th of August 1884:

"It was near the close of a fragant summer day when having driven out of Nottingham, I alighted on the market place of the little town of Hucknall Torkard on a pilgrimmage to the grave of Byron.

The town is a modern, common place, almost squalid in appearance, a little straggling collection of low brick dwellings mostly occupied by colliers. On that day it appeared at its worst for the widest part of the main street was filled with stalls, benches, wagons and canvas covered structures for the display of vegetables and other commodities, which were thus offered for sale; and it was thronged with rough, dirty and noisy persons, intent on barter and traffic, and not indisposed to boisterous pranks and mirth as they pushed and jostled each other along the crowded booths.

The main street ends at the wall of the graveyard in which stands the little gray church where Byron is buried. Next to the churchyard wall is a little cottage with its bit of garden, devoted in this instance to potatoes, and here, while waiting for the sexton, I fell into talk with an aged man. He stated that he was 82 and his name was William Callandyne."