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CLEE, a parish including Cleethorpes is 2.5 miles SE of Grimsby, and contains 4019 inhabitants and 3580 acres of land, divided into 2 townships; Clee with Weelsby containing 213 souls and an area of 2300 acres, and Cleethorpes with Thrunscoe, which has 1200 acres and 1786 inhabitants. Weelsby is a scattered hamlet, with 120 souls and about 100 acres, extending southwards from Clee village, Thrunscoe was at the south end of Cleethorpes, and comprised about 500 acres. New Clee, a modern and rapidly increasing suburb of Grimsby, is in Clee parish and has 2038 inhabitants.
Clee parish was added by the Reform Bill of 1832 to the Parliamentary Borough of Grimsby. It is said to have been anciently called Cleis, from the great quantities of chalk which were at one time deposited on its shores. At an early period the town and port of Ravenspurn on the opposite side of the mouth of the Humber, was destroyed by the incursions of the ocean, which are said to have swept away Utterby, Oule, Holm and other hamlets on this (south) side of the estuary, supposed to have belonged to Clee parish.
A little north of Clee village are three artificial mounds, thought to have been thrown up by the Romanised Britons, and to be the sites of castellated towers, erected for the purpose of repelling the incursions of the Saxons. A large conical eminence on the south side of Clee is still called Beacon Hill. The Earl of Yarborough, who is Lord of the Manor of Cleethorpes-with-Scartho, and Edward Heneage Esq., the Lord of the Manor of Weelsby, and Sdcidney Sussex College, have large estates here, and Alexander William Grant-Thorald Esq., who is one of the chief landowners, has a handsome seat at Weelsby, where there is said to have been a village.
The village and parish church of Clee are about a mile west of Cleethorpes, and near the latter are the curious Blow Wells, noticed with Grimsby. Clee church is a small cruciform structure, which was dedicated to the Holy Trinity and Virgin Mary, by Hugh de Grenoble, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1192, as is recorded on a marble slab inlaid in one of the columns. It consists of a Norman nave having two bays on the south side and three on the north, with richly carved arches, north and south transepts, chancel, south porch and a western Saxon tower containing three bells. The chancel, which has been entirely rebuilt in the Early-English style, at a cost of about £1000, defrayed by A. W. T. Grant-Thorald Esq., contains a beautiful double piscina of the transition period from Norman to Early-English, with dog-tooth moulding, and an aumbry also renovated. The aisles have been newly roofed and the body of the church re-seated and thoroughly restored, at an outlay of £400, raised partly by rate and partly by subscription. Clee Feast is on Trinity Sunday, and on that day the parishioners formerly strewed the church floor with rushes, cut on the marshy land called Bescars, where a small quantity of grass (in the absence of rushes) is still cut yearly at the feast and strewed in the church, thus preserving the ancient custom. The rectorial tythes were obtained in 1871, when the benifice, which was a vicarage for a number of years previously, was constituted a rectory, entitled Clee-cum-Cleethorpes. The living, valued in K.B. at £8, and now at £485 per annum, is in the gift of the Bishop Lincoln, and incumbency of the Rev. William Price Jones M.A., who has a neat residence, in the Elizabethan style, erected in 1853, at a cost of about £900, of which £500 was borrowed from Queen Anne's Bounty.
At Thrunscoe, which at an early period lost 700 acres by the encroachments of the ocean, there is said to have anciently been a church. The National school, originally built in 1815, and rebuilt on another site in 1856, is a commodious brick building near the rectory house, and is attended by about 140 children. The children of Clee have a right to attend the Free School at Humberstone, and the poor widows of the parish have a yearly dole of 6s. 8d. from that lordship. The Wesleyans and Primitive Methodists have each a chapel here: that belonging to the former was built in 1817 and the latter rebuilt in 1857.
Cleethorpes, a pleasant and improving bathing place and fishing village, is divided into three divisions, called High, Low and Beacon Thorpes or Far and Near Cleethorpes. It is delightfully situated 2.5 miles S.E. of Grimsby, on the south side of the Humber, near the confluence of that broad estuary with the German ocean, where extensive tracts of sand and silt are left bare at low water, when the tide recedes nearly two miles. Cleethorpes which is one of the most eligible and salubrious bathing places in Lincolnshire, has, since the opening of the railway from Manchester and Sheffield to Grimsby, been much improved and enlarged, and is occasionally crowded with many hundred visitors brought by pleasure trips from the manufacturing districts. It is connected with Grimsby by a branch railway, opened in April 1863, and is well provided with a great number of comfortable private lodging houses. The most important public work, and one which has been long wanted to render this a perfectly salubrious watering place, is the new system of sewerage which has just been designed and carried out by Mr. Alfred E Skill, C.E., under the instructions of the Secretary of State. It consists in the sewerage being conveyed by gravitation to a point about 2 miles S.E. of Cleethorpes, where it passes through settling tanks into the Humberstone Beck. These works were completed in 1871 at a cost of £2500.
About forty boats and 160 men are employed in the oyster, herring and other fisheries. Immense quantities of young oysters, brought from the south, are deposited here to grow and fatten in extensive beds or pits, leased by the Earl of Yarborough to fishermen and dealers, and which are overflowed by the tides, but are left bare at low water. Cleethorpes has long been noted for its large, cheap and good oysters, of which immense quantities, the estimated value of which amount to £1000 annually, are sent to Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds etc. A coastguard station was established at Beaconthorpe in 1858, and has a chief officer and four men, and near it is the practising ground, with four 32-pounders, used by the Grimsby Volunteers for shot and shell practice. A police station has recently been erected close to the railway station, and has three cells and a residence for the officer in charge. The Gas Works, which were completed in 1861, by a company of shareholders (the capital consisting of 1000 shares of £10 each) are also situated at Beaconthorpe, and have two gasholders, containing respectively 35000 and 10000 cubic feet of gas, which is supplied to consumers at a price of 5s. 5d. per 1000 c.f.
Cleethorpes possesses a life boat, presented by the Manchester Unity Order of Odd Fellows. The new church (St. Peter's) at Cleethorpes, is a Chapel of Ease, the foundation stone of which was laid in July 1864, and completed in July 1866 at a cost of £1000, of which the late Richard Thorald Esq., contributed £500 and the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College an equal amount: the remainder being raised by voluntary effort. It is a plain structure, in the Decorated style of architecture, consisting of nave, with aisles, chancel, south porch and a square tower, situated at the east end of the north aisle, containing one bell. It is fitted with free open sittings for 500 persons and contains a good organ. The rector or his curate officiates here.