In our May 2003 Newsletter, we reported that we had persuaded Bellway Homes to salvage an old stone doorcase – including a lintel dated 1652 – when the former Gateacre Hall Hotel was demolished. This historic feature has now been re-erected within the grounds of the new apartments (Woodsome Park).
What we had not anticipated was that, when the demolition team came to remove the old stonework from inside the hotel, they discovered a ‘time capsule’. This was a glass jar stuffed with documents which had been hidden there in 1881, when alterations were being carried out to what was then a private house occupied by Mr George Hunter Robertson. Among these documents – which the finder has kindly donated to the Gateacre Society for safe keeping – are copies of the Liverpool Daily Post, the New York Weekly Herald and a Cheshire Lines railway timetable, together with a pen-and-ink drawing of the old doorway and a fascinating handwritten account of life in Gateacre in 1881 by Mr Robertson’s two teenage sons.
