Joseph Hughes

Joseph (‘Fred’) Hughes was born in Ireleth, a village near Dalton-in-Furness, on 27 July 1916 and educated at Ulverston Grammar School. He was articled to a firm of architects in Market Place, Kendal, and, when qualified, joined the Office of Works in London, but not for long. After about a year, in August 1938 he was appointed to a vacancy in the Cumberland County Architect’s Department in Carlisle, where the county architect who had the same initials, J H, dubbed him Fred, and Fred he was for the rest of his life. Another year later, on the outbreak of war in 1939, Hughes enlisted in the Royal Engineers, attained the rank of staff sergeant, served on mulberry harbours during the D-Day landings, and was mentioned in despatches. He later served in Germany before returning to his old job in 1946. In due course he was appointed Chief Buildings Inspector, a position he held until the local government reorganisation of 1974 when he was translated into Historic Buildings Officer for Cumbria County Council. Hughes’ interest in historic buildings dated from his schooldays, ignited by field trips with an enlightened history master and, as his career progressed, he added heraldry and family history to his range of knowledge and expertise. In 1956 he helped to rescue the Senhouse family papers from Netherhall, Maryport, and completed a transcription of two of the seventeenth-century account books which were the subject of a paper by Professor G P Jones in the Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, volume lxvi. Hughes recognised the importance of the housing and conservation of original documents, alongside the preservation of ancient buildings and, in 1962 he was put in charge of the adaptation into an archive depository of the Alma barrack block in Carlisle Castle. Funding was tight; no thought had been given to the equipment and furnishings that would be required and, though Hughes’ responsibility ended with the building work, he spent much time and ingenuity in transforming the Victorian barracks into the much-admired professional offices into which the participants in the annual conference of the Society of Archivists were welcomed in 1967. He was active in the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society over many years: joint editor of the Transactions from1975 to 1982, president from 1981 to 1984 and an honorary member from 1996. The articles and notes he contributed to the Transactions reflect his wide interests – the plague in Carlisle 1597–8; Cumberland windmills; a Roman altar from Old Carlisle – among numerous other topics. He collaborated with Roy Hudleston and R S Bumphrey in the valuable reference work, An Armorial for Westmorland and Lonsdale, published by the CWAAS in 1975. Hughes was a founder member in 1976 of the Cumbrian Family History Society, a member of its council until 1990, president in 1987 and an honorary member from 1995. He died in Kendal on 18 March 2000.