The Sponsored Swim That Ended an Era

Standing below these rusted iron stanchions, I cannot help reflecting on how coincidentally a name can turn up twice in as many weeks. Kathleen Elizabeth Mary Cooper Abbs, the last person to live in the Arts and Crafts house built among the ruins of Mount Grace Priory¹Fraggle. “Mount Grace Priory ~ part 4.” Fraggle ~ rocking a camera across the Universe, 03 July 2015. [https://fragglerocking.org/2015/07/03/mount-grace-priory-part-4/].²Stamp, Gavin. “The saving of Mount Grace Priory: A ruin revived in Arts-and-Crafts style.” Country Life. [https://www.countrylife.co.uk/architecture/the-saving-of-mount-grace-priory-166382].

She was nobody’s idea of a quiet tenant. A classical scholar with the constitution of an ox, she loved telling anyone who would listen about swimming in the Arctic Circle and the Norwegian fjords. Then in 1974, aged seventy-three, she decided a sponsored swim round this pier would do nicely for her local churches³“The Fatal Charity Swim of Kathleen Cooper Abbs.” Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 03 Oct. 1974. [https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0004994/19741003/007/0007].⁴Griffiths, David. A Catalogue of the Cooper Abbs Collection in the J. B. Morrell Library of the University of York. University of York Library, 2000..

A red flag was flying. The waves stood six feet high. None of that put her off. She got past the first stanchion, then the second, and the North Sea took her before she reached the third. There is something almost too neat about her surname, Abbs, echoing the abbey she made her home, a woman who died in service to her faith and who left her own small abbey and crucially the manor or lordship and all titles and rights as Lord of the Manor of Ingleby-under-Arncliffe to the National Trust⁵“The Abbs Bequest to the National Trust.” Newcastle Journal, 22 Oct. 1975. [https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002240/19751022/010/0002]..

The Trust owned the Priory already, mind, so do not run away with the idea that her death handed them the place. What her tenancy did was hold up the full restoration, since she was the last living tie to the old house. Only once she was gone could the manor open its doors to the public, which it did in 2010, and so her name links this stretch of the North Yorkshire coast to Mount Grace Priory but no information board tells the story.

• 1
  Fraggle. “Mount Grace Priory ~ part 4.” Fraggle ~ rocking a camera across the Universe, 03 July 2015. [https://fragglerocking.org/2015/07/03/mount-grace-priory-part-4/].
• 2
  Stamp, Gavin. “The saving of Mount Grace Priory: A ruin revived in Arts-and-Crafts style.” Country Life. [https://www.countrylife.co.uk/architecture/the-saving-of-mount-grace-priory-166382]
• 3
  “The Fatal Charity Swim of Kathleen Cooper Abbs.” Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 03 Oct. 1974. [https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0004994/19741003/007/0007].
• 4
  Griffiths, David. A Catalogue of the Cooper Abbs Collection in the J. B. Morrell Library of the University of York. University of York Library, 2000.
• 5
  “The Abbs Bequest to the National Trust.” Newcastle Journal, 22 Oct. 1975. [https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0002240/19751022/010/0002].