Great Ayton’s Cook loss was Melbourne’s gain

Then in 1933 - In 1933 Captain Cook’s Cottage in Great Ayton was dismantled and shipped to Australia where it was rebuilt in Fiztroy Park in Melbourne.
  
Viewed in the light of present day restrictions imposed on buildings of significant English heritage, it is difficult to comprehend how such an historic asset was ever allowed to leave the village let alone the country.
  
It was built by his father in 1755 after he retired as bailiff to Thomas Scottowe the Lord of the Manor and owner of Airey holme farm in Great Ayton where Cook senior had worked for almost 20 years, and although there is no evidence that his famous son ever lived in the cottage, he did visit his parents there, (there is documentary evidence that he rode across the moors from Great Ayton to Whitby on New Year’s Day in 1772) and this together with the fact that he was educated in the village, was reason enough for the dwelling to adopt his title.
  
Seven years after his wife Grace died in 1765, father James sold the cottage and went to live with his daughter in Redcar. A hundred years later the property came into the possession of the Dixons, a Great Ayton family which had been associated with the village for 300 years. In 1933 the property had been passed down to three Dixon brothers, William, Hansell and Arnold, and like many families at that time, they were feeling the effects of the slump which had caused the General Strike in 1926 and the property was put on the market.
  
At one time the cottage, had been one much larger dwelling or perhaps two smaller cottages and when the nearby road was widened, half of the building was swept away. The rent in modern terms was 12.5p a week.
  
However before blame is laid at the Dixon’s door for selling the village’s family silver, it must be remembered that this was 1933, no-one was interested in a decrepit old cottage with no electricity or main drains. There was no lottery cash available or government preservation grants in those days. And the Dixons did insert a clause into the sale by insisting the cottage should stay in this country, but as the late Joyce Dixon pointed out in her excellent account of this transaction this condition was overturned once Mr. Russell Grimwade came onto the scene.
  
Grimwade was an astute Australian businessman who saw the potential in having the cottage re-erected in Victoria to commemorate the State’s centennial year. He moved fast, invoking help from high places including the Premier of Victoria Sir Stanley Argyle, and the Dixons were persuaded to alter their restrictive removal clause to “not outside the Empire” and on 1st July 1933 Mr. Richard Linton, the Victoria Agent-General and the Dixons shook hands on the deal and Cook’s Cottage was sold for £800.
  
Interestingly the Great Ayton Parish Council had showed no interest whatsoever in preserving the cottage although there was much regret and bitterness after it had gone.
  
If the task facing the dismantlers was a daunting one with every brick, stone and timber having to be numbered and catalogued, the job of re-erecting it from the 253 cases shipped out of Hull, must have been a jigsaw on a gigantic scale. Even the original nails were used in the reconstruction, and the walls were constructed slightly out of plumb as they had been in Great Ayton.
  
One can but speculate on the impact the cottage might have had on the local economy had it been standing and marketed in a manner that sees 80,000 visitors each year calling at Wordsworth’s Dove cottage in the Lake District, or the 300,000 who visit Anne Hathaway’s Cottage at Stratford on Avon. Millions of Australians have visited Cook’s Cottage in Melbourne and thousands of wedding parties in search of a scenic backcloth have gone to the Cook shrine.
  
To placate the growing resentment at losing the cottage, the villagers of Great Ayton were bestowed a gift from Mr. Grimwade in the form of a granite obelisk to be erected on the site of the old cottage near Low Green on the very day the original was being erected in Melbourne. It stands today, like a stump from an amputated limb, a somewhat poor exchange for the loss of a significant piece of our heritage, and what would have been a wonderful tourist attraction.

This article originally appeared in the November 1998 issue of Now & Then