A former Erewash journalist with a long fascination with the story of one of the area's most colourful families has crafted his long-term research in a book chronicling the extraordinary history of characters with personal histories well worth the telling.
Philip Dalling references five main characters whose stories are told in The Hooleys of Risley comprise a lace manufacturer turned country squire, a financier/company promoter and friend of royalty who won and lost vast fortunes, an acclaimed poet and political firebrand, a tragic war hero and a mystery man.
Family patriarch Terah Hooley rose from humble beginnings as a lace industry twisthand to become a wealthy manufacturer and property developer. He built many towering tenement lace mills along the Erewash Valley, on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, before retiring to the quiet village of Risley to reinvent himself as a country gentleman and sportsman.
Terah’s son by a first marriage, Ernest Terah Hooley, had a meteoric rise to wealth and fame in the 1890s having discovered, to quote an earlier biographer, ‘a talent for making large sums of money by selling off companies at inflated prices and pocketing a sizeable percentage of the proceeds’.
By the mid-1890s he was reputed to be the wealthiest man in Europe, with a fortune estimated at £30million, or £3billion in today’s values and was described by the future King Edward V11 as ‘my particular friend Hooley’.
By the turn of the century his star was in decline, with the same biographer claiming that ET’s spectacular failure, his bankruptcies and prison sentences for fraud, were at least partly due to ‘the erratic nature of his business methods, including a total absence of accounts!
The three remaining family members, the poet Teresa Hooley and her brothers Basil Terah and Noel Joseph, were the children of patriarch Terah Hooley’s second marriage.
Teresa, whose work is still published and performed today, married the son of a Nottingham lace manufacturer and for a short time joined him in his business life in Egypt. The marriage failed but her experience of expatriate life in a British-controlled Egypt made Teresa a staunch socialist, a renowned political activist and an early supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Basil Terah Hooley joined the Sherwood Foresters at the start of World War One, before switching to the new Tank Corps. He won the Military Cross in the 1918 battle which marked the beginning of the end for the German army. After surviving years of conflict on the Western Front he returned to Derbyshire on leave shortly before the war ended, only to succumb to the ravaging Spanish influenza.
The final Hooley character, Noel Joseph, remains largely a mystery man. After living in Australia and Canada, he returned to England, where he became dependent on handouts from a family trust.
