Broadfield House sits on a corner of land that, in the nineteenth century, was simply called the Broadfield — a field at Stormer Hill on the edge of Tottington Lower End, just off the old turnpike road that climbs from Tottington up to Turton.

On Lady Day — 25 March 1874 — the freeholder Thomas Winter Potter, Esq., of East Court, Cheltenham, leased a 637-square-yard plot to a Tottington music teacher named Thomas Worsley. The lease ran for 999 years at a rent of £5 a year, and Worsley was bound to erect, build and completely finish a house on the land within twelve months. He did so on time. The new stone house went up alone on that plot — standing by itself in open country — and took its name from the field on which it stood: Broadfield House.

Thomas Worsley was born on 21 July 1828 in Bolton. His parents were William Worsley and Jane (née Morris), and he was baptised that October at the nonconformist Rivington Chapel. In the autumn of 1852 he married Mary Fletcher, a farmer’s daughter from Harwood, near Bolton. She was born on 20 June 1830 and baptised at St Anne’s, Tottington.

He did not start out in music. The 1861 census finds the couple at Newington, Elton, with Thomas working as a fustian shearer, trimming the raised pile on cotton cloth. They had three children at home: John, aged seven, born in Manchester; Jane, aged six; and a baby, James Fletcher Worsley, born early in 1860 and named after his Fletcher grandfather. A fourth child, Walter, was born on 28 August 1866 and baptised at Christ Church, Ainsworth. Thomas was still listed as a fustian shearer that year.

Music was already part of his life, though. In the summer of 1862 the Virtue Lodge of Independent Oddfellows held its fortieth anniversary dinner at the Red Lion, Tottington. According to the Bury Times, the evening ended in “conviviality—toast, song, and glee alternating—Mr. Thomas Worsley presiding efficiently at the pianoforte.”

Within months the mill trade was behind him. By 1867, aged thirty‑nine, he was advertising "new and second-hand cottage pianofortes and harmoniums" from a shop at Newington, near Lower Croft, Elton — in the very township the Nabbs would come from a generation later. He moved up the hill to Tottington when he leased the Stormer Hill plot in 1874, and from Broadfield House ran a busy dealership for the next fifteen years.

His regular adverts in the Bury Guardian and Bury Times offered new pianofortes for £24 to £28, "warranted for ten years from the maker," with second‑hand pianos taken in part‑exchange. The cuttings in the family papers are signed off simply: Thomas Worsley, Pianoforte Dealer, Broadfield House, Tottington. In 1879 he was also styling himself “Teacher and Tuner”, and by 1888 a tuning cost half a crown (2s. 6d.). That autumn he took a display advert on the front page of the Bury Guardian every week: “The BEST and CHEAPEST PLACE to BUY a good PIANO, new or second-hand, THOMAS WORSLEY, BROADFIELD HOUSE, TOTTINGTON. Trams every half-hour.”

Music was his life outside the shop as well. Worsley was the organist at Christ Church, Ainsworth, a couple of miles across the fields from Tottington. In July 1871 the Bury Times reported on a packed service there: the choir, helped by the Ainsworth Musical Union, “reflect the greatest credit upon their painstaking choir master, Mr. T. Worsley, who presided at the organ.” That explains the “Professor of Music” on the 1874 deed: he was a working church musician and teacher as well as a dealer. He did not move in alone. Mary came with him, and so did the children. James would have been about fourteen and Walter about eight when the family moved into the new house.

He sold up to Joseph Nabb in November 1889 but stayed in Tottington, moving to a house at Sunny Bower, and he never stopped trading. As late as June 1896 the Bury Guardian carried his small advert: “Pianos on sale, new and second-hand.—T. Worsley, Sunny Bower, Tottington.” Three months later the same paper printed his death notice:

“WORSLEY—On the 20th inst., at Sunny Bower, Tottington, Thomas Worsley, aged 68 years. No cards. Friends please accept this the only intimation.” — Bury Guardian, 26 September 1896

The following week Mary placed a notice on the paper’s front page: “Mrs. Worsley and family, Sunny Bower, Tottington, beg to thank those who so kindly sympathised with them in their late bereavement.”

He had died on 20 September 1896, and on 24 September he was buried at Christ Church, the church where he had played the organ. The burial register records him as entry No. 678, “Thomas Worsley, Tottington”, aged sixty‑eight, with the ceremony performed by the incumbent, J. A. Lauria.

His grave lies in the churchyard: a flat granite ledger, half‑hidden today under hawthorn and leaf litter, with lettering worn almost smooth. Under the right light the inscription can still be read:

“In loving memory of Thomas Worsley, formerly organist of this church.” — Christ Church churchyard, Ainsworth

Beneath his dates the family chose a short prayer: “O holy merciful Reaper, have mercy in the day Thou puttest in Thy sickle, and cast us not away.” The rest of the family was laid in the same grave over the next forty years. Mary outlived her husband by twenty‑two years. She died on 28 November 1918, aged eighty‑eight, at 285 Bury Road, Tottington, and was buried on 2 December. James Fletcher Worsley, still “of Tottington”, lived a few doors away at 309 Bury Road. He died seventeen months after his mother, on 14 April 1920, aged sixty, and was buried three days later by the Vicar of Tottington. His wife, Margaret Jane Worsley, outlived him by many years and died on 13 May 1956, aged sixty‑two. That makes four Worsleys under one stone, all with roots in the house on Turton Road.

In November 1889, Worsley sold up. The buyer was Joseph Nabb, a brass founder from Elton, just outside Bury — and, in time, a director of the Bury Brewery Company. He paid £475 for the house and took on what was left of the lease. Joseph, his wife Margaret, and their six children would make Broadfield House their family home for the next seventy years.

When Joseph died in July 1906 he left everything in trust for his children — Oswald, Mary Elizabeth, Gertrude, Helena, William Stanley and Sally — with Margaret looking after things in the meantime.

Joseph’s last years were not easy ones. He was diabetic, with an old shoulder injury that meant Margaret had been helping him dress for two years. On the evening of 14 July 1906 he came home, took tea and went up to bed; while she was helping him undress, he fell backwards onto the bedroom floor and cut the back of his head. Erysipelas set in within days, and he died on 20 July, aged sixty-one.

The District Coroner, S. F. Butcher, sat at the Tottington Liberal Club the following Saturday and returned a verdict of accidental death — though the Sunday papers, less kindly, billed the story as:

“Director’s Fatal Intemperance.” — The Sunday papers, July 1906

The years that followed were not easy ones either. Sally, the youngest daughter, moved out of Tottington altogether in April 1913, taking the train north to become Mrs Paterson of Balnagowan, Alva, in Clackmannanshire. Oswald, meanwhile, had borrowed against his share of the inheritance, fallen into trouble, and signed his interest over to a Mrs Hannah Mansergh; he died in early 1915 with no children of his own. Margaret followed in late 1916. By spring 1917 the five surviving brothers and sisters had clubbed together and bought Oswald’s share back for £150, putting the house firmly back in family hands.

William Stanley Nabb died without leaving a will. At the end of 1929 his widow Gertrude Elizabeth, by then living in Southport, sold her share of the house to her two sisters‑in‑law — Mary Elizabeth and Gertrude Nabb — for £100. The two unmarried sisters made Broadfield House their home for the rest of their lives. Mary Elizabeth died there in September 1957 and Gertrude in October 1961, ending seventy years of the Nabb family at the house.

In 1962, just months after Gertrude’s death, Broadfield House was sold by her executors — John Woodcock of Bury and John Daynes of Turton Road — to Neville Foote, “Master Painter and Decorator,” and his wife Elizabeth Robertson Thoms Foote (always known as Lena), who moved up the road from 98 Bury Road, Tottington. Neville ran his firm from Canal Wharf, Bury Bridge, and his trade adverts in the Bury Grammar School magazine The Clavian carried the line "Residence: Broadfield House, Turton Road, Tottington."

Behind the quiet Tottington address, however, lay an extraordinary war. As a young Lance Bombardier Signaller, Neville had landed on Juno Beach on D‑Day, 6 June 1944, in an advanced party setting up an artillery position. He fought on through Caen, Lisieux and Le Havre, helped liberate Antwerp and Brussels, took part in Operation Market‑Garden at Nijmegen, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and crossed the Rhine in March 1945. On 14 April 1945 he was among the troops who liberated Bergen‑Belsen concentration camp. He came home without a scratch, and lived to be interviewed for the 75th anniversary of D‑Day at the age of ninety‑nine.

In September 1970 Neville bought a further plot of land at the rear of the house from Mrs K. M. Whitehead for £90, extending the garden to its present footprint — the conveyance handled by George Clough, Willis & Co., solicitors of 2 Manchester Road, Bury. It is very likely (though not yet confirmed) that Mrs Whitehead was a member of the Stormer Hill Whitehead family who, after a V1 doodlebug killed seven villagers on Chapel Street on Christmas Eve 1944, gave the village what is now Whitehead Gardens — the memorial plaque records the donation by “Mr & Mrs S. D. Whitehead of Stormer Hill.”

Their son Gordon Foote (1947–2017) grew up at Broadfield House and made his own quiet mark on the West Pennine Moors: he is remembered on a small memorial near the route as "co‑creator of The West Pennine Way."

On 10 December 2022 Broadfield House was bought by Tony and Kirsten Gibson (née Rhodes), who would move into the house with their children Amalie Eve and Louis Anthony in August 2023. The intervening months were spent restoring a house that had quietly been waiting for them — covered, in places, by decades of more recent decoration that had crept over its original Victorian bones.

The Gibsons spent nine months patiently uncovering it. Lime plaster came down to reveal the names hidden inside the walls; years of laid carpet and lino were peeled back to reveal the original encaustic tiled hall floor in its full geometric glory; the panelled internal doors were stripped, repaired and rehung; a few original timber window shutters were rediscovered in the loft and used as the pattern for new ones, made and fitted to match; and original cornices, skirtings and chimneypieces were brought back to life.

One particularly fine find was a stretch of Lincrusta wallpaper — the pressed‑relief wallcovering patented by Frederick Walton in 1877 — panels of which have been carefully preserved and remain on display in the hallway. The restoration was documented week by week on Instagram at @broadfieldrenovation.

Their stewardship is the latest chapter in a story that began on a stretch of Lancashire turnpike land in the spring of 1874.

When the Gibsons stripped back the lime plaster during their 2022–23 restoration, they uncovered something the original Victorian builders had quietly tucked away — the signatures of two men who had been there at the very beginning.

A few details from the original lease parchment — signed beside a red wax seal by Thomas Winter Potter — are worth pausing on. The full word‑for‑word transcript is here.

Sources & References

1. Original deeds & abstract of title to Broadfield House — the indenture of lease of 25 March 1874 (Thomas Winter Potter to Thomas Worsley); the assignment of 15 November 1889 (Worsley to Joseph Nabb, brass founder of Elton, £475); the will of Joseph Nabb (proved Manchester District Probate Registry, 15 October 1906); subsequent settlements between the Nabb siblings 1909–1929; the deaths of Mary Elizabeth Nabb (18 September 1957) and Gertrude Nabb (8 October 1961) at Broadfield House.
2. Assignment of leasehold premises known as Broadfield House, Turton Road, Tottington — John Woodcock and John Daynes (executors and trustees of the late Gertrude Nabb) to Mr Neville Foote, Master Painter and Decorator, and Mrs Elizabeth Robertson Thoms Foote, both of 98 Bury Road, Tottington. 1962. Hope & Co., Solicitors.
3. Bill of costs — purchase of additional land at the rear of Broadfield House from Mrs K. M. Whitehead by Mr & Mrs N. Foote, consideration £90. George Clough, Willis & Co., Solicitors, 2 Manchester Road, Bury — account no. 5171, dated 18 September 1970.
4. Trade advertisement. “Pianofortes on Sale, new, from £24 to £28: warranted for ten years from the maker; always on hand. Second-hand pianos taken in exchange. — Thomas Worsley, Pianoforte Dealer, Broadfield House, Tottington.” Bury Times, Saturday 24 July 1880, page 4 — British Newspaper Archive.
5. Newspapers (British Newspaper Archive). Bury Times, 2 August 1862, p.3 (Tottington: Virtue Lodge of Oddfellows, “Mr. Thomas Worsley presiding efficiently at the pianoforte”); Bury Times, 1867 (harmonium and pianoforte adverts, Newington, near Lower Croft, Elton); Bury Times, 22 July 1871, p.5 (Ainsworth Church Schools sermons: “their painstaking choir master, Mr. T. Worsley, who presided at the organ”); Bury Times, 20 December 1879, p.4 (“Thomas Worsley, Teacher and Tuner, Broadfield House”); Bury Guardian, September–December 1888, p.1 (front-page piano adverts); Bury Guardian, 27 June 1896, p.4 (“T. Worsley, Sunny Bower, Tottington”); Bury Guardian, 26 September 1896, p.8 (death notice); Bury Guardian, 3 October 1896, p.1 (family’s notice of thanks).
6. Register of burials, Parish of Ainsworth, County of Lancaster, 1896, page 85, entry No. 678: Thomas Worsley, abode Tottington, buried 24 September 1896, aged 68; ceremony performed by J. A. Lauria; grave reference E 4.
7. Worsley family gravestone, Christ Church churchyard, Ainsworth. Thomas Worsley, “formerly organist of this church”, born 21 July 1828, died 20 September 1896; Mary, his wife, born 20 June 1830, died 28 November 1918; James Fletcher Worsley of Tottington, their son, died 14 April 1920, aged 60; Margaret Jane Worsley, his wife, died 13 May 1956 (the year is worn and could possibly read 1936), aged 62. Visited and photographed by Tony Gibson, October 2026.
8. Baptisms. Thomas, son of William & Jane (formerly Morris) Worsley of Bolton le Moors, born 21 July 1828, baptised 19 October 1828 at Rivington Chapel. Mary, daughter of James & Mary Fletcher of Harwood, farmer, born 20 June 1830, baptised 18 July 1830 at St Anne, Tottington. Walter, son of Thomas & Mary Worsley of Elton, fustian shearer, born 28 August 1866, baptised 30 September 1866 at Christ Church, Ainsworth. Transcriptions by Lancashire Online Parish Clerks.
9. Civil registration. Marriage of Thomas Worsley and Mary Fletcher, Bolton district, December quarter 1852 (vol. 8c, p. 369). Birth of James Fletcher Worsley, Bury district, March quarter 1860 (8c/413). GRO indexes via FreeBMD.
10. 1861 census, Newington, Elton (RG9/2853, f.27, p.48): Thomas Worsley, 32, fustian shearer; Mary, 30; John W., 7; Jane, 6; James F., 1. Transcription via FreeCEN.
11. Later Ainsworth burials. Mary Worsley, aged 88, of 285 Bury Road, Tottington, buried 2 December 1918 (entry 1423). James Fletcher Worsley, aged 60, of 309 Bury Road, Tottington, buried 17 April 1920 by H. Reeder, Vicar of Tottington (entry 1470). Transcriptions by Lancashire Online Parish Clerks.
12. Trade advertisement. Painter and Decorator, Works: Canal Wharf, Bury Bridge, Bury; Residence: Broadfield House, Turton Road, Tottington. Published in The Clavian, the magazine of Bury Grammar School, 1964.
13. Neville Foote — D‑Day veteran’s account. Lance Bombardier Signaller, second-wave Juno Beach landing, 6 June 1944; through Caen, Lisieux, Le Havre, Antwerp, Brussels, Operation Market-Garden at Nijmegen, Battle of the Bulge, the Rhine crossing March 1945; among the troops who liberated Bergen‑Belsen on 14 April 1945. Originally published in The Sun, June 2019; archived by the Belsen Online Archive.
14. Gordon Foote — co‑creator of The West Pennine Way. Memorial near the route, recorded at comewalkwithmeuk.co.uk ("Walks on the West Pennine Way").
15. Original photograph of Broadfield House, c. early 1900s — printed sepia photograph held with the family papers.
16. Encaustic tiled hall floor — original Victorian floor uncovered during the Gibson restoration.
17. Etched glass fanlight bearing “BROADFIELD HOUSE” — a new commission by the Gibsons (2023), set above what is now the rear door of the house, the principal entrance having been moved during the building’s history. The double medallion-and-rosette chain framing the lettering was copied from the tile floor.
18. Inscriptions on the original lime plaster — signatures of William Warburton, Cabinet Maker and Father Michael, a Moorman Priest, uncovered by the Gibsons during the 2022–23 restoration.
19. Lincrusta wallpaper. A run of original Victorian Lincrusta — a pressed-relief wallcovering patented by Frederick Walton in 1877 — was uncovered during the restoration. Several panels have been carefully preserved and remain on display in the hallway.
20. Restoration record. The full nine-month restoration, including the discovery of the tile floor and the plaster signatures, was documented week by week by Tony Gibson on Instagram at @broadfieldrenovation.

Compiled by the Gibson family at Broadfield House, from the original deeds, abstracts of title and family records.