Arthur Wilson did not, like his brother, enter political life, but became widely famed as a sportsman. For twenty-five years he was Master of the Holderness Hunt, and the most famous Meet under his rule was that at Brantingham Thorpe, then the residence of Mr. Christopher Sykes, in January 1882, when more than four thousand people assembled to greet the Prince of Wales.
Charles, Baron Nunburnholme, died at Warter Priory, on October 27th, 1907, and his brother, Mr. Arthur Wilson, at Tranby Croft, on October 21st, 1909. The body of the latter was drawn to its resting-place in Kirkella Churchyard on a farm rulley by a team of farm horses, and public feeling at the time may be gauged from the following passage in one of the newspaper reports of his death:—
In Hull Mr. Wilson was known and respected as a just and honourable merchant and a philanthropist; in the county he was known and admired as a model landlord, and a keen and fearless sportsman.
| Photo by] | Arthur Wilson. | [Barry, Hull |
XXVII.
SHIPS OF THE HUMBER.
Let us ask ourselves what is our idea of a ship. However we express this in words, it will be vastly different from the idea of a ship that possessed the minds of those early inhabitants of Holderness of whom we read in Chapter III. Theirs was that of a tree-trunk hollowed out partly by fire and partly by hand labour with implements of flint, until it would balance itself on the water, and could be pushed along by its occupants with some sort of paddle.
Such were the ships that men first used on the Humber. Not long ago one of them was found buried six feet below the surface of the ground at Brigg in North Lincolnshire.
At a time when the river Ancholme spread widely over the surrounding land, this boat had been deserted on the river bank, and as years went by it sank into the mud of which the bank was composed. Then the river gradually silted up, so that what had once been a wide expanse of water became merely a narrow water-channel.
This ancient ‘dug-out’ is now one of the treasures of the Hull Museum. It has been constructed of the trunk of an oak tree, split lengthwise, and is nearly forty-eight feet long from stem to stern. Its width is from four to five feet, and its depth roughly two feet six inches. There is probably no oak tree growing in our country that would be tall enough to make a similar boat of equal length.