The Hill family were in Rowley Regis for several centuries, (and still are) and can also be found in the surrounding parishes, from Dudley, Halesowen, Cradley, Warley, Halesowen, Tipton, Sedgley and some even further afield in Wolverhampton.
Hill is not an easy name to research in the Parish Registers. The early Registers, with their lack of place names are not too difficult – if you search the first section of the St Giles digital register for Hill, you have to skip over all the Phillips and Phillises, and most of the entries then are for members of the Hill family. But once places of residence start to be regularly recorded there are hundreds of them – Turners Hill, Gosty Hill, Reddall Hill, Old Hill, Darby’s Hill, Kates Hill, Hyams Hill – very frustrating to plough through the later records only to find that the entries contain an abode or place name, rather than a family name which includes Hill!
The Hailstone (Copyright Glenys Sykes) was close to where the Hill family lived and would have been a familiar sight to them, until it was taken down.
The first entry relating to the Hill family in the Rowley Parish Registers was in the preface written by Henrietta Auden, who was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and who apparently transcribed many other parish registers as well as Rowley Regis. Her father was the Rev. Prebendary Auden. Miss Auden notes that in 1604, in the first parish register, John Hill is noted as ‘owner’. This makes me wonder whether, at the time when surnames began to be formalised, this John had owned land on and lived on Turner’s Hill, as many later generations of Hills did, and he became known simply as John of the Hill, then John de Hill, and then John Hill? As I set out in my piece on Hall houses[1], I think it is likely that the Hill family was wealthy enough at one time to build a Hall house in what later became known as Gadd’s Green and certainly some branches of the Hill family locally were well-to-do even centuries later, as I have discovered from various Hill Wills in the 1700s and 1800s. But that is possibly simplistic thinking on my part.
An early postcard image of Turner’s Hill, copyright unknown.
Other early Hill entries in the Parish Registers
Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Hill was baptised in September 1604 and the John Hill mentioned above was buried in the following March. In 1607 Lucy, daughter of Christopher Hill was baptised at Rowley and in 1612 Elizabeth, daughter of Francis Hill so it appears that there were in the early 1600s several Hill families – fathers Thomas, Christopher, Silvester, Francis, Richard and William – living in the parish and of an age to be baptising children, perhaps brothers or cousins. And a John Hill of Warley had married Anne, daughter of William Darby which was another family of some standing in the area.
The Hills had some common but regularly used names such as Thomas, Richard, Joseph and William but it also used several more distinctive names – Silvester, Jerome, Timothy (especially Timothy!), Francis, Daniel – and Elizabeth, Ann and Rebeckah also recur amongst the women which can be useful in spotting likely connections between branches of the families.
There was an entry for the marriage of Thomas Hill and Ann Cooper at St Giles on 26 June 1687 but there is no indication where either of them came from, nor does there appear to be a baptism for either of them nor a baptism for An, daughter of Pheles (Phyllis is the modern name) who was buried on 29 February 1687/88. After that there are baptisms for John and Ann Hill, a burial for Selvester and for Thomas Hill in 1689, a burial for Elizabeth Hill, widow in 1691, baptisms for William and Hannah Hill and a burial of a Rebeckah Hill, widow in 1694. In 1695 a burial of a son John for Thomas Hill describes Thomas as from Upperside. In 1696.a child Hannah, daughter of John Hill, has a note saying ‘by non-conf.’ so perhaps the family were early dissenters or non-conformists although there are no consistent indications of this. But certainly there appear to have been several branches of the Hill family in the parish at this time. The Registers at this date do have gaps and missing pages and the entries were by no means detailed so it is not possible to know whether this was one family who had moved into the parish from elsewhere or whether they had been in the parish for some years and earlier records baptisms are lost.
In 1717 an Ambrose Hill of Dudley married Esther Dudley at St Giles, Rowley Regis. In 1723 a Job Hill married Jane Dudley at St Giles so that was two Hill grooms marrying brides named Dudley in six years, so they may well have been related to each other. And my research indicates that there are many later connections between Hill families in Dudley and Rowley Regis.
It is not feasible in this article to describe all the people named Hill in the hamlets and villages over the centuries, there are simply too many of them and some very complicated family trees. There are 123 entries for Hills in the first section of the digital parish register alone, and another 35 in the next section, before place names start to appear which adds to the number. So between the first Hill entry in1604 and 1721 (when place names start to confuse the issue) there are 158 entries in the St Giles Registers for people named Hill.
So I will concentrate on some of those Hills who were in the Lost Hamlets in the 1841 Census, and their families which I will expand in a later article.
Timothy (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855)
Timothy, that favourite Hill name, was my 4xgreat grandfather. He had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas in 1763 and Maria Hipkiss was a Rowley girl, baptised in 1782. Maria was Timothy’s second wife but he appeared, at first sight to have had no children with Ann Priest, his first wife. Ann was also a Rowley girl and her marriage took place in St Giles, and she appears to have been buried at Dudley in May 1800. I have a little more to say on this in my next piece. Timothy made up for it with Maria, who he married at Halesowen in September 1800 and he had at least seven children, four daughters and three sons with Maria.
Timothy is a particularly commonly used Hill Christian name and can make it difficult to decide which branch of the Hills particular Timothys belonged to.
This Timothy died in 1831 so was not listed in the censuses but Maria appears in the first two – 1841 and 1851, both times living with one of her children, the first time (1841) with her youngest son Samuel when they were living in Blackberry town which appears to have been in Springfield below the Hailstone quarry, and in 1851 she was living in Perry’s Lake with her widowed daughter Mary.
Maria’s family, the Hipkisses, like the Hills, are another of the ‘core families’ of the hamlets who appear in all the censuses there between 1841 and 1881 and later, and although I have not yet transcribed the later censuses I strongly suspect that I will find them in the later censuses, too. Another of those families who lived in these small hamlets for at least three hundred years and possibly much longer, with numerous intermarriages contributing to the complex web of relationships between the core families.
TimothyHill (1763-1831) was baptised in Dudley, the son of Joseph Hill (1720-?) and Jane Bridgwater, the grandson of Samuel Hill (1684-?) and Martha Wright, and great-grandson of Samuel Hill (1660-?) and Issabill ?(Dates unknown) These earlier Hills had connections in Dudley and possibly, before that, in Oldswinford. But that is a tentative theory at present and there are numerous Hill families in the area so it is possible that is a different family. At some point, when time permits, I will research whether these people appeared in later registers in Oldswinford as that may rule them out. But there are so many Hills in the Dudley and Sedgley area, this might not be possible. But Timothy married two Rowley girls.
Maria was the daughter of John Hipkiss (1744-1818) and Mary Worton (1742-1832). Maria was baptised on 15 September 1782 at St Giles Rowley Regis and her forebears also go back in Rowley Regis for several generations and earlier in Dudley,too.
So this pattern is emerging of close kin living together in Gadds Green and Perrys Lake whose descendants continued to live there or very close by for several generations afterwards.
I have also noticed in the course of my research that often people from the Turner’s Hill/Oakham area used Dudley church, rather than St Giles and it may well be that many of these residents regarded the area on and below Turner’s Hill as separate communities, rather than a hamlet of Rowley Regis, even though most of this area was in Rowley parish.
I shall continue this theme on the Hill family with more posts to follow on the children of Timothy and Maria Hill.
The children of Timothy (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855) – details of these will be the subject of my next articles.
I have been working recently on another family study for my blog, this time about the Hill family, one of the core families who lived in the hamlets for centuries, mainly at Finger-i’the-hole and Gadd’s Green. As usual, it has proved more complex than I had anticipated and I have got sidetracked into considering where exactly the branch of the family I am looking at lived in the village. Many of them, it appears, lived for centuries in a group of houses in Finger-i’the-hole or Fingeryhole , or Gadd’s Green.
Regular readers may recall that I have posted previously in this blog about the whereabouts in Rowley village of Finger-i’the-hole or Fingeryhole[i].
And, in a separate post [ii] I wrote last year about a newspaper article I had found, in the Dudley Chronicle in 1925, about the delights of what the writer called Portway but which clearly included the wider area of Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green. The article referred to the dilapidated cottage in Gadd’s Green as “Finger o’the hole cottage” which the author had visited in 1925, a cottage where the front wall had collapsed in a storm some time before and never been rebuilt.
As a reminder, and for new readers, the name Finger-i’the-hole originates from a very old local story – but which was subject to several variations in later years. A lonely old widow, the story goes, lived alone in a small cottage on Turner’s Hill. A thief or rent collector, depending on which version of the story you look at, knowing that she was unprotected, put his finger into the hole in the door to lift the latch, with a view to robbing her- or perhaps collecting the rent! – only to discover that the feisty widow, hearing his approach, had picked up her axe and chopped off the offending digit as it was poked through the hole. Though there are no names attached to this tale, there is a locality and I believe that it is likely that some incident of this sort actually happened.
The date of this event is unclear but must have been before 1727, as Christopher Chambers of “Ye ffinger I’the hole” was buried then, according to the Parish Burial Register. And the name of Finger-i’the-hole for the area persisted until the 1841 Census but had dropped from official use by 1851 when the area , with exactly the same families, was called Gadds Green.
The Chambers family appear, although I have not done any detailed research on them, to have been well-to-do, they appear in the Parish Registers as living also in 1724 at ‘the Brickhouse’ and in 1723 and in 1744 as ‘of Freebodies’ so were perhaps brothers as tenant or yeoman farmers. At that time ‘the Brickhouse’ appears to have been at Cock Green, with land extending down towards Powke Lane which later was developed in the 20th century as the Brickhouse housing estate. Brick was not a commonly used building material at this earlier date and the use of bricks for a whole house was obviously distinctive and worthy of a special name.
Photograph copyright: Glenys Sykes
This is an illustration shown in Wilson Jones’s book of what the barn of the ‘Brickhouse’ farmhouse might have looked like. Note the ragstone wall and what appear to be large chunks of ragstone lying around. I took a photograph recently of the pieces of ragstone still in Tippity Green/Perry’s Lake, at the entrance to the former Hailstone quarry, they have a familiar rugged shape.
Ragstone blocks at Tippity Green November 2024, photograph taken at the entrance to the former Hailstone Quarry. Copyright Glenys Sykes.
There were lots of the Chambers family in the village throughout the parish registers. An entry in 1723 refers to a Thomas Chambers of Portway and in 1732 an Edward Chambers of Tividale so they did seem to live at this end of Rowley. There was an Edward Chambers at Freebodies Farm in the 1841 Census, albeit described as a farm servant but there were no Chambers that I can find listed in the later censuses in the Lost Hamlets and it appears that they dispersed around a wider area, including Oldbury and Birmingham.
Picturesque Portway
In the newspaper article on Old Portway, which had been written in 1926, I remembered a comment in that article about the cottages at Finger-i’the-hole and this is what it said:
“Our representative visited the now dilapidated cottage where the incident is reputed to have taken place. The cottage is the fourth of a row, and is known in the neighbourhood as “Finger ‘o the hole cottage. “, The article continues “The front of the building was blown out one winter’s night many years ago when the occupant was a Mrs Cox, now of Gornal, and it has never since been repaired. The cottage is said to be over 300 years old and one family – that of Hill, members of which reside in an adjacent cottage – lived there for nearly 200 years.
It is constructed of rough grey sandstone, and originally had two rooms, one up and one down. A stout roughly hewn oak beam, crossing the building from gable to gable, indicates where the first floor once rested, and shows that the height of the living room was under six feet. Occupying one-half of the building is a spacious old-fashioned fire-place, with a large open chimney and contiguous bake ovens.”
This description of the house known as “Finger ‘o the hole cottage. ” is very interesting.
“The cottage is the fourth of a row.” So it could originally have been the end of a much older hall house.
“The cottage is said to be over 300 years old” – which takes it back to about 1600 or even earlier.
“It is constructed of rough grey sandstone.” Would this have been Rowley Rag? Something substantial to last more than 300 years, unlikely to have been simple wattle and daub.
“A stout roughly hewn oak beam, crossing the building from gable to gable, indicates where the first floor once rested and shows that the height of the living room was under six feet.” Was this beam a later addition to divide the hall and add extra accommodation?
“one-half of the building is a spacious old-fashioned fire-place, with a large open chimney and contiguous bake ovens”. I can remember when I first read that description, something jarred with me. The original article goes on “No fewer than ten men can comfortably stand in the aperture once occupied by the grate and its side seats.”
A humble cottage in a terrace does not have half of the single living space taken up by a fireplace big enough for ten men to stand inside it and nor does it have ‘contiguous bake ovens’, it was unusual for small cottages to have even one oven, certainly not two. There may have been an external bakehouse or oven for a farmhouse or larger dwelling and with large fireplaces in bigger buildings an oven was sometimes built into it. There is an interesting piece with a brief history of baking here – https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/a-brief-history-of-baking/
So something is out of the ordinary here. Perhaps there are more clues in the rest of the description of the cottage.
“it originally had two rooms, one up and one down.”
Was this a Hall house? Hall houses had one great room which might well have had a great fireplace installed at some stage – I knew that originally such halls had a central hearth and the smoke floated up into the roof. Later fireplaces and chimney breasts were added. But why the need for such a big one?
But if it was a hall house occupied by a large family or was a busy farmhouse with farmhands to feed, two ovens might well have been provided.
And at a time after the original construction the hall might have been divided into more rooms or cottages and even divided into an upper and lower floor, although if it had been designed to have two floors surely the ground floor would have been higher than six feet when it was first built?
Hall houses
So I began to suspect that this may well have been a very old hall house, perhaps the home of a farming family but that later it was divided and subdivided. And that the Hill family lived there for centuries.
I decided to research a little more about ‘Hall houses’, to see whether my thoughts seemed reasonable. This information is taken from Wikipedia:
“The hall house is a type of vernacular house traditional in many parts of England.
Origins
In Old English, a “hall” is simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls, and in Anglo-Saxon England simple one-room buildings, with a single hearth in the middle of the floor for cooking and warmth, were the usual residence of a lord of the manor and his retainers. The whole community was used to eating and sleeping in the hall. Over several centuries the hall developed into a building which provided more than one room, giving some privacy to its more important residents.
By about 1400, in lowland Britain, with changes in settlement patterns and agriculture, people were thinking of houses as permanent structures rather than temporary shelter. According to the locality, they built stone or timber-framed houses with wattle and daub or clay infill. The designs were copied by their neighbours and descendants in the tradition of vernacular architecture. [a] They were sturdy and some have survived over five hundred years. Hall houses built after 1570 are rare.”
When considering this house I was slightly concerned that I cannot find any mention in other records of a substantial house at Gadd’s Green, although Wilson Jones in his book[iii] lists all the other significant manors or large houses.
However, David Hay, in his book The Grass Roots of English History[iv], says that although it was once believed that all timber framed houses had been built by the wealthier inhabitants of local societies and that medieval peasant houses were so insubstantial that they could not survive for more than a generation, more recent systematic recording of houses by members of the Vernacular Architecture Group and the new technological advances in dendrochronology, have overturned these views and it is now known that of the thousands of medieval houses, some of which are still standing in many parts of rural England [though not in the Lost Hamlets!] belonged to ordinary farming families. Hey states that “The sheer numbers of cruck [timber framed] houses in the Midlands confirms that they must be peasant dwellings, some villages have ten or even twenty such houses.” So it seems quite possible that there would well have been such a house in Gadds Green inhabited by a farming or working family, rather than a more aristocratic one.
Cruck framed houses
Many larger houses at this time were ‘cruck-framed’, that is the central frame, the load bearing members that supported the weight of the roof of the building was made from suitable trees – often oak, which carpenters could split lengthways into two identical ‘blades’ which were set either side of the building and then joined at the top with techniques varying from place to place to support a ridge-piece, the crucks sometimes resting on stone bases to protect them from damp and rot. Half way down the roof, between the ridge-piece and the wall plate other long timbers, known as purlins, were fixed to the outer part of the blades in order to carry the rafters which supported the roofing material, often thatch in earlier times. Because the crucks, and not the walls carried the weight of the roof, the walls could be filled in with whatever material was most easily available to them locally. This could easily be replaced in later centuries without endangering the roof.
The frames were constructed in the carpenter’s workshop or in the wood where the trees were felled before they were assembled at the site according to the sequence of the marks the carpenter had made with his chisel or gouge. Different types of marks can still be seen on timbers in old buildings and it appears that each carpenter had their own marks and systems; some buildings had several hundred pieces of timber and hundreds of joints so carpenters needed a way of sorting these efficiently when they arrived at the construction site. This construction method was a skilled job and not to be undertaken by home builders!
Copyright Wikipedia. This is a cruck house in Worcestershire where the cruck frame can be clearly seen, along with other timbering, in this case infilled with what is probably wattle and daub. In Rowley, with the abundance of local stone, the walls would have been infilled with stone and quite possibly the timbers clad with stone to protect them from the weather so that the cruck frame would not be obvious from the outside.
If the house at Gadd’s Green was constructed in this way, with a cruck frame, this might account for why the front wall of one section could be blown or fall down in a storm but the remainder of the structure remain apparently quite stable for many years afterwards, as mentioned in the article, especially if the inhabitants did not have the skills required to make the repairs.
Peasant Houses
Note: Hey suggests that “peasant” is still a convenient term to describe a small-scale farmer, the type of person who would have been the head of household in most of the surviving timber frames houses. I have continued his usage so this is not intended as a derogatory term. There is an interesting article on this here: https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/peasant-houses-in-midland-england.htm
Houses were typically arranged around a central hall that was open to the rafters. These halls could be lengthened by the addition of an extra bay or two but their almost standard width was regulated by the roof span. A wood fire in a central hearth originally provided the heating, with most of the smoke escaping through the roof but timber and plaster smokehoods attached to an internal wall were starting to replace central hearths in the wealthier districts. Sometimes later refinements, ceilings, floors, partitions, etc completely conceal this original use and it is only when the smoke darkened timbers are seen in the attic at a much later date that it is realised that the building started life as a hall house.
The lower end of the building may have housed a workshop or a kitchen, dairy or buttery. And a very large fireplace in a cottage at Gadd’s Green may have been a remnant of this earlier use.
“At the other side of the hall, larger peasant houses had a private parlour, sometimes with an upstairs room known as a solar.” Is this what the family memory of the Hills referred to when they talked about the house originally having one room downstairs and one upstairs?
Poor families had to build with whatever materials were to hand, such as clay and wattles for wall panels or earth for mud walls, as in Devon, probably ragstone in Rowley. The many timbered buildings surviving in small towns in Herefordshire, Hey notes as an example, were in well-wooded areas and where woods were managed to produce suitable crops of timber over a long period. And in poor areas, solid houses would not have been readily replaced with more modern structures. So if a substantial house had been built which lasted for centuries at Gadd’s Green, why would the family expend money to replace it? Some of the Hill family later were nail factors or nail ironmongers and relatively well-to-do but others showed no sign of great wealth.
House layouts
In Midland villages, Hey suggests, “each house was separate and protected from unwelcome intrusions. The whole property, including a garden or yard, was surrounded by a fence, hedge or wall, and accessed through a gate leading on to the street and a door with a lock, (finger hole?). Excavations on village sites show that barns, stables, cowsheds and other outbuildings usually stood close together around a yard, kitchens and bakehouses were often detached, to reduce the risk of fire”.
In the view of Hey and other scholars, “the idea of separate living and working spaces would probably not have seemed a meaningful concept to member of a peasant household. There is plenty of documentary evidence for the conversion of bakehouses, carthouses and stables into dwellings for retired peasants”, indeed barn conversions and such continue to this day!
Why and where?
There were many cruck buildings in some parts of the country and none in others for reasons not fully understood. It is possible that the native pendiculate oak trees, whose shape is ideal for cruck construction, predominate in areas such as parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, along the river Severn in parts of Wales and in other Midland Counties. In eastern England, where cruck framing is conspicuously absent, the less suitable sessile oaks are the major type.
Hey notes that the medieval houses of Midland England are predominantly cruck framed and three bays in length. The chief limitations of cruck framed buildings are in their height and width, because their dimensions were dependent on the size of the blades that could be cut from suitable local trees.
“When it became fashionable to insert a ceiling into a hall that had previously been open to the rafters, the space in the upper storey was very constricted “- or perhaps sometimes the lower storey which might account for the low ceiling mentioned in the 1925 article.
This restriction did not apply to the other main construction method which was where posts and beams were made to create a box like frame and where the roof was supported throughout the frame and the walls. It is possible to find both methods of construction in one house, perhaps with a cruck framed hall having additional wings built with box frames.
These are other things that Wikipedia has to say about hall houses.
“The vast majority of those hall houses which have survived changed significantly over the centuries. In almost all cases the open hearth of the hall house was abandoned during the early modern period and a chimney built which reached from the new hearth to above the roof.
Fireplaces and chimney stacks could be fitted into existing buildings against the passage, or against the side walls or even at the upper end of the hall.
Once the clearance within the hall was no longer needed for smoke from the central hearth, the hall itself would often be divided, with a floor being inserted which connected all the upper rooms.
In smaller hall houses, where heat efficiency and cooking were the prime concern, fireplaces became the principal source of heat earlier.
In the earliest houses combustion of wood was helped by increasing the airflow by placing the logs on iron firedogs. In smaller houses the fire was used for cooking. Andirons provided a rack for spit roasting, and trivets for pots. Later an iron or stone fireback reflected the heat forward and controlled the unwelcome side draughts. Unsurprisingly the hearth migrated to a central wall and became enclosed at the sides.”
So it does seem to me that all of these points, both from Wiki and Hey, tie in with my theory of the house at Gadds Green having been, at one time, one large dwelling, later subdivided into two storeys and into separate cottages.
On the ground
We cannot look at the house or the site now, it has literally been obliterated.
There are no detailed maps before the mid-1800s.
Photograph copyright Glenys Sykes, apologies for the poor quality. Map Copyright: https://maps.nls.uk/
Maps of the area on the NLS website include this OS Map, at six inches to the mile, which was apparently surveyed in 1881-83 and published in 1887. This shows a row of dwellings at Gadd’s Green, with what may have been a yard or fold at the North end.
Incidentally this map also shows a stretch of water at Perry’s Lake which presumably gave this area its name. I have seen suggestions that this may originally been a fish pond for the Manor farm at Cock Green.
This second map is at 25” to the mile, was originally surveyed in 1881, revised in 1937 and published in 1947. This shows a row of four dwellings and a further one at the rear, plus an additional block of buildings. But the shape of the site including the fold or yard remains. There are also springs marked just along a lane which would have provided the essential water supply for a farmhouse. On both maps, this is the last building in Gadd’s Green before the road continues up Turner’s Hill, and that is where the home of the Hill family always appears in censuses.
There is no sign of water at Perry’s Lake on this later map. Although there is a mysterious building halfway between Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green which I suspect may be the Methodist chapel which appears in various records but later disappears. It appears to be a square building with an entrance porch at one corner and a small room at the back, perhaps a vestry or schoolroom.
And farm houses in the area do appear to have survived better than most other buildings in the Rowley area. They were probably bigger to accommodate some farm workers as well as family and it is also possible that an undercroft or part of the building could also have been used to shelter animals. There may also have been buttery or cheese stores, as well as outbuildings, barns for the storage of crops, stables for horses and vehicles and tools, plus workshops on the site any of which may have been incorporated into the farmhouse in later years.
A Will I have recently been transcribing relates to a farmer who was related to the Hills and who owned farms in Hagley and Belbroughton. The description of the Hagley Farm reads: “my Capital Messuage or dwelling house wherein I now reside with the Brewhouse, stable, Coachhouse, cowhouse and other outbuildings, Courtyard ,fold yard, Garden Ground and orchard thereunto adjoining and belonging (comprising all the buildings and the Courtyards Garden rounds Orchard and premises adjoining together on that side of the road.
Which illustrates the number of additional buildings and grounds a substantial farm might have. But even a smaller farm, like the one in Rowley village described in the Will of Ambrose Crowley, had outbuildings of a barn, workshop and yard. Thinking about this, it is clear from even later maps that the Grange site and the Portway Tavern site at Perry’s Lake were arranged in a very similar way and may also have been on an older sites and originally used as a farm.
Old Buildings in Rowley
There has been an interesting discussion this week on the “I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis” Facebook page, after I asked where the oldest buildings in Rowley were now. The answer appears to be – several pubs, more than one farmhouse, a few well built cottages still survive. It would be fascinating to see the rafters in the roof of some of these houses to see whether any of them were cruck buildings and whether they were once blackened by the smoke from a central hearth!
So the long gone ancestral home of the Hill family in the Lost Hamlets is the rabbit hole I have been exploring for the past few days. Perhaps, – although I shall never know for sure since the house is one of those which disappeared when the quarry expanded – possibly a Hall house, probably a farm house, later four cottages – including the famous Fingeryhole cottage – which I think I have identified on the map. A fascinating – for me, anyway – glimpse of how the local families lived in centuries gone by, and how local legends may have an element of truth and a thread reaching back through the centuries.
Recently, on the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page Ronald Terence Woodhouse drew my attention to a serious fire in a mine at Lye Cross, just over the hill from the Lost Hamlets and probably where some of the miners who lived in the Lost Hamlets worked. I found some basic details fairly quickly for Ronald who had remembered being told about the fire when he was a child but I have since done more research.
The pit concerned was a coal mine at Lye Cross, notLye near Cradley Heath, it was just below Oakham off Portway Hill and was owned by the Earl of Dudley. The colliery became renowned as a ‘state of the art’ pit.
There were many local pits scattered around the area, and their activities later led to many problems with subsidence for houses and buildings built above them, including amongst many other buildings the second Rowley Church, Portway Hall and – a bit out of our district – the now famous and demolished Crooked House pub.
This map, which I found online shows the local pits.
Copyright: mindat.org.
It was surprising to me to realise quite how many pits there were. You can look at this map here https://www.mindat.org/loc-302392.html and if you zoom in, more detail is shown. A green dot with a figure on it shows the number of separate mines or shafts there were on the site or in the immediate area.
An old press article about the History of Mining in the Dudley Herald dated 18 May 1898 gave a lot of information about coal mining in the area. This claimed that originally, it had been thought by local engineers that there was a layer of coal below the basalt which is Rowley Rag but ‘expert geologists who had investigated the subject’ had a contrary theory , due to the geology of the Rowley Hills, that there was no coal underneath the basalt rock. So, according to this expert,
“for many years it was usually believed that either no coal existed beneath the basalt or that whatever coal might have existed had been burnt or otherwise rendered useless by the great heat of the basalt when it flowed from the earth’s interior.”
This, despite the known belief of the colliers of the district that workable coal lay beneath the basalt. Experts, it appears, do not always get things right! The article goes on:
“This important question was not, however, easily disposed of and mining men awaited further developments. One of the most suggestive of these followed the cutting of the Birmingham Canal in 1856: this tunnel passes through the base of the Rowley Hills and no basalt was met with during its construction.”
Trade was said to be in a depressed state at the beginning of 1865,
“though the coal trade improved through the year. There was a colliers’ strike and a lockout of the ironworkers that year. “The lockout took effect in the early part of the year and was indirectly due to a strike of ironworkers in North Staffordshire; in consequence of this strike the ironmasters of South Staffordshire decided to lock their men out as a measure of defence, and to support the masters of North Staffordshire. Towards the end of the year there were about 115 blast furnaces at work in the District.”
In the years 1867-68, the No.25 Tividale Pits were sunk through the hills without passing into any basalt in position. The thick coal was pierced at a depth of about 230 yards and at some distance from the shafts was found to be thrown down for about 100 yards by a great fault. More new shafts were later successfully sunk at Grace Mary and the presence of coal was now confirmed. In the year 1874, the article confirms, the Earl of Dudley’s pits at Lye Cross were completed but unlike those before described, these passed through about 65 yards of basalt which was met at a depth of about 11 yards from the surface. When the lower part of the basalt was reached a large quantity of water poured into the shafts, and this gave considerable trouble. Later parts of the article describe drainage problems in the various mines and the equipment required to try to extract water, mainly rainwater filtering through the rock into the mines. Much is said also about fluctuations in trade in both coal and in the iron industry which was such a big customer for coal for the many furnaces and how these affected the mines. In 1873, apparently, the iron trade began to fall off and later on the coal trade was seriously affected. In March 1874 it was decided to ask the thick coal miners to accept a reduction of 1 shilling and the thin coal miners a reduction of 9pence, owing to trade depression. The men refused to give way, and a strike of about 13,000 colliers was begun and continued for four months. After the strike ended, trade was only moderately good, there being only 80 furnaces in blast in December 1874, whilst 34 were idle.
Also coming into operation about this time was the appointment of a Royal Commission. The article states
“In accordance with the common practice of the Government, when about to take effective steps for remedying evils generally felt by the community, a Royal Commission to inquire into the occurrence of accidents in mines was appointed on February 12th 1879.”
If in doubt, appoint a Royal Commission – some government practices have not changed in f150 years, it seems! This Royal Commission was in response to a series of disastrous colliery explosions in numerous places. As a result of the reports produced by the Commission the operation of the previous Coal Mines Regulation Act 1872 ceased on 31 December 1887 after a period of 15 years, during which time, it had been, directly or indirectly, a great cause of improvement in mining operations, and a new Coal Mines Regulation Act 1887 came into effect on 1st January 1888.
What other records suggestabout early coal mining in Rowley
Despite the impression given in this article that there was little or no coalmining until the late 1800s, this is not really borne out by other local records.
In his Will proved in 1844 John Beet, the Squire of Rowley Hall, made numerous references to his coal copyholds and his coal mining interests and how they should be managed for the benefit of his legatees. Later the Rowley Hall mine became a large and active mine for many years, the Bell End pits may also have been his but I have no definite information on this. But clearly local business men were well aware of the potential profits of coal mining in Rowley and did not see this as impossible.
The Burial Registers at St Giles
In the parish registers for Rowley, there is an entry in July 1695 that “Hen. Sheldon of Tivydale, Kill’d in a Coal Pit in Tippon (sic. Presumably Tipton)” had been buried so certainly some form of coal mining was going on in the area at that early date, although there was not then the demand from the ironmasters which would help to drive demand for coal for their blast furnaces.
In November of the same year, William, son of Tho. Willets was also listed as having been killed in a coalpit so it appears that boys as well as men were working in the pits, as the name of the father is not usually given unless the burial is for a child.
In October 1803, the St Giles Burial Register has a description of the death of another child killed in a pit.
“Henry, son of John and Mary Edmands. He was killed in a coal pit near Brierley Hill. His cloathes were caught by a hook, or something of the kind, of the skep, which took him up a considerable way: at length his clothes tore and he held by his hands till being unable to hang any longer, he fell and spoke no more.”
Poor lad, how terrified he must have been.
Another boy, James, son of Joseph and Sarah Darby of Dudley, was killed by a fall of coals in a pit in 1806, a man John Lenton, killed in a coal pit in 1808 and William Thomas was ‘burnt in a coal pit, also in 1808.
Pits were hazardous places above and below ground – Thomas Williams, who was 35 was buried on 29 November 1810 after
“He fell into a coal pit in the dark about 8’o’clock on Saturday evening at Windmill End, It had lain uncovered and unguarded nearly twelve months & was about twenty yards deep in water!!!”
In 1811, William, son of Thomas and Ann Davies, aged 16 was also buried after being killed in a coal pit. Throughout the following years in the early 1800s there are frequent burials of mostly young men and boys killed in coal pits, with 92, for example, between 1813 and 1849.
In the 1841 Census 13 men living in the Lost Hamlets were listed as miners, in 1851 this had increased to 36. So there were certainly men and boys mining coal in the parish well before the period discussed in the article above.
The Lye Cross Colliery
In the Birmingham Gazette on 8th March 1841 an advertisement appeared, addressed to ‘Iron-masters, coal-masters and others’. This gave notice that a One-third share of the Lye Cross Colliery was to be sold by auction in West Bromwich on the 18th March, and stated “ the ‘above-named valuable colliery, together with the Plant in and thereon’ was offered for sale. The advertisement went on
“This property consists of seventy two Acres of Thick Coal in the fast, of undoubted good quality, and of unusual thickness. The sinking of the Shafts and the driving of a Gait Road about 100 yards into the Thick Coal has just been completed, and the latter operation has proved the excellence and superiority of the quality and substance of this important measure.
The Engine is complete and powerful, the shafts within 525 yards of the upper level of the Birmingham Canal and the whole Machinery and Mines (the latter entirely free from water) ready for immediate draught.
The Quarterly Payments, which are light, commenced on the 25th March last, under a lease granted by J E Piercy, Esq., of Worley Hall, from which date thirty nine years have to run.
The present affords an opportunity rarely to be met with for the prosperous investment of a moderate capital, and is therefore especially worthy of attention.”
Further particulars could be obtained from a Solicitor Mr G H Townsend, or Mr B R Smith, Surveyor and Viewer) both of West Bromwich.
Only a few weeks later a further advertisement, couched in identical terms with regard to the mine itself appeared in the same newspaper on 21 June 1841. However, this time, it was not a one-third share being offered but the whole enterprise, to be disposed of by private contract, rather than auction. Again the same Solicitor was listed as able to give further information, along with Mr B R Smith,( in this advertisement described as a Surveyor and Brewer, rather than Viewer!) plus another surveyor, Mr Joseph Cooksey, all of West Bromwich.
Why one third should be offered for sale by auction in March and the whole by private contract is June, I am not clear, it seems rather strange.
Whatever the individual circumstances, however, this makes it clear that there was a full, well equipped and potentially very profitable mine in operation at Lye Cross by mid-1841.
New Colliery Opening
An article in the County Advertiser and Herald dated 20 February 1875 reported
“Coal under Rowley Hills
The new Colliery which has just been opened by the Earl of Dudley, at Lye Cross, furnishes additional testimony of much value as to the coal deposits underlying the basaltic rock which overspreads the Rowley Hills, a section of the Dudley District which, until the last few years, was believed to be wanting in mineral treasure other than that of the famous stone known as the ‘Rowley Rag’. To the enterprise of Mess’rs W North, D North. E T Wright and others in this until recently untested portion of the coalfield the discovery of its great and rich stores of fuel is mostly due, and the success of these pioneers has stimulated enterprise on the part of others. The newly opened Lye Cross pit adds to the previously ascertained mineral wealth of the Earl of Dudley’s estate some 500 acres of best thick coal. The depth of the coal is only 280 yards from the surface but the diameter of the shaft is much above the average, and the plant and machinery, designed and erected under the superintendence of Mr Latham, are among the finest in the District. The time of ascending or descending the shaft is only fifteen seconds. The colliery is now in full operation.”
So, had the previous mine been closed for a time or was this ‘new’ pit a revival of the previous one? Or were there two pits with the same name but in slightly different places?
Experiments with dynamite
Developments in mining and quarrying technology continued during this time. This article in the Worcester Journal dated 2 October 1875 describes experiments in both the stone quarries at Turner’s Hill and in the Lye Cross mine with the use of dynamite to dislodge stone and coal for extraction. Dynamite, as a blasting explosive, had been patented in 1867 by the Swedish physicist Alfred Nobel and it rapidly gained wide-scale use as a more robust alternative to the traditional black powder explosives. The experiments described here were apparently very successful and, what is more, the dynamite reduced loss of coal to slack, made less smoke and was substantially cheaper than earlier methods.
Note that this article described the Lye Cross pit as having “without exception, the finest plant and opening out at the bottom in the whole of the South Staffordshire district”.
In another newspaper article, an obituary for a well known mining engineer a Mr Edward Fisher Smith in 1892, there is also a reference to the special geology of the Rowley Hills. This notes that the area was of special interest to scientific men because the leading geologists of the last generation were emphatic in their declarations that no coal would ever be found beneath the basaltic rocks of which the Rowley Hills were composed. Mr Fisher Smith had experiments made which convinced him that good coal and ironstone would be won under the basalt. He caused the ‘well-known Lye Cross Pits’ to be opened and these were often visited by the late Earl of Dudley and his friends and were regarded as among the best pits in the District, ranking with the Sandwell Park and Hamstead collieries, as well for their scientific mode of working. The present Earl, with distinguished visitors, also apparently often visited this pit at that time.
I also found references to a banquet being held inside the pit by the Earl of Dudley on one occasion in 1875. The most detailed account I have been able to find appeared in the Dudley Chronicle on 3 September 1925, fifty years later and this reads:
“The Lye Cross Banquet
A Worcester contemporary draws attention to the famous banquet which was served in the workings of the Lye Cross pit just 50 years ago. This unique event has been referred to many times in these columns. The pit was visited by a numerous party. Under the courteous guidance of Mr Thomas Latham (a well -known and highly respected Dudley mining engineer) they traversed the extraordinary workings but the novel and interesting feature of this additional celebration of the opening of the colliery was the banquet given in a spacious and commodious dining room which the plodding labour of the miner had hewn out of the solid coal. The repast was on the scale of unusual liberality, wines, viands and fruit, of rare quality being provided. Upon the table there was a profuse display of flowers and ornaments, and the really fine banqueting hall was brilliantly illuminated, the occasional lighting of various coloured fires contributing to form a scene never contemplated by the visitors. The late Earl of Dudley (father of the present Earl) was the host. His lordship was the owner of the colliery which was subsequently visited by distinguished geologists. The pit, in fact, was perhaps the best known of all in the South Staffordshire coalfield. It is not in operation now.”
What an extraordinary occasion that must have been!
Another visit to the Pit was made by members of the Midland Union of Natural History Societies in 1878 to Lye Cross Colliery, and gives some idea of the scale of the pit:
‘Members of the Union and their friends, to the number of nearly 400, made an excursion to Dudley and the neighbourhood, under the auspices of the Dudley and Midland Geological and Scientific Society and Field Club, representatives of which received the party at the Tipton Station of the Great Western Railway, and conducted them in the first instance to the Open Coal Work at Foxyards, where the Ten-yard Coal Seam exposes its point of outcrop on the east side of the obstruding ridges of the Dudley Castle Hill and the Wren’s Nest. Mr, Thomas Latham, the Earl of Dudley’s Mine Agent, gave interesting information as to the mode of getting the coal, and under his direction a fall of coal was displayed.’
‘After Luncheon came the crowning event of the day – the descent by more than 400 persons, including many ladies, of the famous Lye Cross Coal Pit at Rowley, which was superintended by Mr. Latham. This pit is remarkable as the first sunk through the Basalt, or Rowley Rag. Where the pit was commenced the thickness of the basalt was unknown; it proved to be no more than 68 yards, when the rock binds of the coal measures were reached. At 168 yards the Two-foot and Brooch coals were met with, and at 228 yards the Thick coal was cut into. The pit is 258½ yards deep.’ (Anon.,1878).
Since this is in a commercial photo library I cannot reproduce it here but it is worth you having a look as it gives an idea of the scale of the workings and of the hazards of the working conditions.
The Science Museum also has a Collection of black and white glass negatives of mine workings, chiefly underground, at pits in Staffordshire and Worcestershire taken by H.W. Hughes. ca.1900-1910. This collection totals over 360 negatives. Boxes V and VI (totalling 100 negatives) primarily concern Ramrod Hall Pit and Lye Cross Pit showing a wide range of human and horse activity, machinery and tools. What an interesting collection these would make if they were ever printed.
A few of these images do appear to have been printed and can be seen at the bottom of this page, including photographs from both Lye Cross and Ramrod Hall pits. They give a bleak impression of the working conditions in the mines which were both owned by the Earl of Dudley. https://www.scienceandsociety.co.uk/results.asp?txtkeys1=Mine%20Shafts
Herbert William Hughes, the author, was the colliery manager at the Conygre Pit at Dudley and wrote a book entitled ‘A text-book of coal-mining : for the use of colliery managers and others’ which is extensively illustrated with drawings of all sorts and I note from the index pages that there are seven references to Lye Cross mine in the book. It can be seen and/or downloaded free of charge from the Internet Archive if anyone would like to learn more about mining practices at that time. https://archive.org/details/textbookofcoalmi00hughrich
Mining and other accidents
The Lye Cross pit was not completely trouble free, of course. A report I found in several newspapers, dated August 1900, tells of a collier named David Robinson, aged 60 so presumably an experienced collier, who was crushed when part of the roof where he was working fell on him, even though it was described as ‘well timbered’ and after he had inspected it and considered it safe. By the time he was extracted from under the roof fall, he was dead.
Not all the hazards were inside the pit. In March 1902there are reports of an inquest into the dreadful death of Samuel Hinton, of Oldbury, aged 15 who was buried under a pile of burning ash at the colliery which he was trying to dig out to load onto a cart. (People were apparently allowed to take the ashes produced by the mine gratuitously). His employer was Enoch Richards of Portway Farm. Samuel had already visited the ash tip about fifteen times that week with Joseph Brooks who was also employed at the farm, to collect ash to repair a road. Samuel went on his own this time and his employer stated that he had gone without his knowledge and contrary to his wishes. As Samuel was digging ashes from the bottom of the pile it collapsed onto him, partially burying him. A witness Harriet Green gave evidence that she saw the lad loading ashes at the mound and subsequently saw a cloud of dust and she had shouted that the deceased and horse were buried, although it appears that the horse was not injured but panicked and plunging. Thomas Bishton heard shouts and found the horse plunging and he then saw that the wheel of the cart was on the boy’s leg. The body of the boy was covered in red-hot ashes and terribly burnt, it was very difficult to recover it.
Louisa Hickman of Portway told the inquest that she went to the mound (which was about sixty feet high and sloped to an angle of 45 degrees. However, some of the ashes were still burning and these were about ten feet high) she saw that the boy was partially buried in the ashes but when she attempted to rescue him a second fall occurred which completely buried him. When he was dug out his body was very badly burned.
The Government Inspector of Mines also attended the Inquest and he noted that the burning slope did not look safe, it was dangerous for anyone to get onto it, it was not a safe place to send a youth to.
A verdict of Accidental Death was returned.
Pit ponies
Horses or ponies were commonly used in mines for hauling coal from the coal face to the shafts and the ponies often lived underground for their whole working lives. This description of the underground stables at Lye Cross is taken from Hughes’s book, mentioned above.
Arrangement of Stables.—Pure water and plenty of ventilation are essential. The stables at Lye Cross Pit are shown in Figs. 214 and 215. Each horse has a stall 7ft long by 6ft wide, and a corn manger made with specially shaped bricks, 4ft wide. A water bosh is placed between each two stalls, and a 2in main pipe with down branch pipes that delivers water to each bosh, which has a hole and plug in the bottom to allow of easy emptying.
Photograph copyright: Glenys Sykes.
The 1902 Fire
The disasters were not over for 1902. In the early hours of Christmas Day 1902, a great fire broke out at the Lye Cross pit. The miners reported that all had been quiet and secure when they left the mine at 4pm on Christmas Eve but shortly after 9pm that night a watchman who was on duty at the colliery saw smoke coming from what was known as the spare shaft. He and several miners descended one of the other shafts and found that a ‘great fire’ had broken out in the principal roads and was spreading rapidly. These men tried to rescue eleven horses which were in the underground stable there but the flames almost overtook them and they were forced to abandon this work and give the signal to ascend the shaft.
The report notes that they were fortunate to reach the pit bank speedily for immediately afterwards the flames from the fire ascended the spare shaft to a height of at least 20 feet above the pit mouth and began to spread towards the engine house and it was feared that the valuable machinery would be destroyed. The Dudley Fire Brigade was called out but the manual pump was inadequate to cope with such a big fire and a steam fire engine was sent for. In the meantime a gang of men were employed in damming up the air roads leading to the shaft with tons of black sand. When the steamer arrived a large quantity of water from a local pool was pumped into the shaft . One newspaper report describes this, saying that when the water was pumped in to the shaft ‘steam and ashes were shot up as though from a volcano’. But it was not until five o’clock that the flames were extinguished. Fortunately the expensively equipped engine houses were not affected but the horses were lost, poor beasts. Ronald had remembered being told of this event as a child, and had remembered that the ponies had not been rescued. Obviously this aspect had stuck in the folk memory of this event for many years afterwards.
A slightly later report in the Tamworth Herald noted that throughout the whole of Christmas Day and the following day, the workmen were engaged in damming up the mouth of the shaft and the workings were expected to be closed for at least seven or eight weeks. It was fortunate that this occurred at holiday time so that no men were in the workings. About 130 men were thrown out of employment.
A report in the County Advertiser & Herald in August 1904, however, stated that
“there is little probability that the Lye Cross Colliery being re-opened for some months yet, due to the fact that there is a less demand for coal at the present time. About 100 miners who were thrown out of employment at the time of the fire are still out of work.”
This was twenty months after the fire so the mine had been closed for a long time. I suspect that in practice most of the miners would have sought work in other pits, few men would have been able to survive out of work for that length of time before the welfare state existed.
The 1911 Fire
Alas, this was not the last fire at the Lye Cross colliery. A further report in November 1911 described another serious outbreak of fire in the ‘Staffordshire Show Pit’ at Lye Cross which this time led to the closure of the pit and the loss of their jobs for 300 miners. I have not been able to find any trace of the pit re-opening after this.
So that is the story of the Lye Cross Pit, somewhere most of us probably did not even know existed but which almost certainly employed many men from the Lost Hamlets area. Mining has always been a dirty and dangerous business, but it was an important part of the success of the Black Country and must have contributed to the substantially both to the local economy and to the wealth of the mine owners.
In family history research, all researchers, sooner or later, come up against what we call ‘brick walls’ in our research. These are people on our family trees who present a puzzle or a blockage that we cannot get past, whatever records we try, we cannot find some crucial bit of information, a baptism, a marriage, where they were born, where they died. They are brick walls between our present research and earlier generations. Sometimes those brick walls stand for a very long time.
Copyright unknown but will be gladly acknowledged on receipt of any information.
Quite early in my research, probably soon after I started researching in about 1980, I hit a brick wall in the form of my 3 x g-grandfather Thomas Morton. I just checked, he appears on my very first paper family tree that I drew up starting in 1980, (yes, I still have that paper tree, it’s the foundation of all my research!) so it must have been quite soon after I started. I had found his marriage to Elizabeth Hill at Tipton in 1825, I had found his death and burial in Rowley in 1836 and I deduced from the age given at his burial that that he had been born in about 1800. I was able to track his descendants through succeeding generations. But I could not find any earlier trace of Thomas Moreton anywhere in the area, no baptism, he died before Civil Registration started in 1837 and before any censuses to tell me where he had been born. So he was a brick wall for me.
When I later made contact with my distant cousin Margaret Thompson, who is also descended from this couple, I discovered that she had had the same problem. We were both experienced and careful researchers but both of us were standing in front of that wall. At least I knew it wasn’t just me!
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on another piece for this study on one of the ‘core families’ who were living in the lost hamlets over many decades, even centuries. This time I am working on the Hill family. As I was writing about them, I double checked all my earlier research and added to my tree any new material which has become available since I did the work originally. Since the 1980s a huge amount of material has become available online, including censuses, parish registers, indexes – there were not even computers when I started! – and, very usefully in the case of Rowley Regis, within the last couple of years, copies of the Bishop’s Transcripts have become available through Ancestry, filling some of the gaps caused by the destruction of registers in the church fire at St Giles.
Although I always check my sources carefully and never simply copy from other trees– (which is possible on Ancestry but ill advised, there are many errors which are duplicated from tree to tree), it can be helpful to look at other trees to see whether there are any properly recorded facts which I had not seen before and which I could verify independently. Similarly, I look at the wonderful Black Country Connections Tree online[i] as I have often picked up useful snippets from that – such the marriage of one 3xg-grandparent which I had not found anywhere else, which was not at that time available online but which another researcher had found at Dudley Archives and made available through that tree.
So, after checking through my research on Thomas Moreton, today I took a look to see whether he appeared on the BCC tree. He does, though sadly there was no information on his parents, that brick wall was still intact. But I checked the other information there against my information and found to my surprise that there was an additional child listed who did not appear on my family tree. Another researcher had noted that Ralph Thomas Moreton had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas, on the same day as another child William Moreton who does appear on my tree and to the same parents – Thomas and Elizabeth Moreton of Rowley Regis. This baptism took place on 2 April 1837. The other researcher had correctly noted that Ralph Thomas Moreton had been born in or before 1837. Perhaps he and William were twins? You can tell this in later records from looking at Civil Registration Records because the entries for twins have consecutive reference numbers. But Civil Registration began in July 1837, this was just a few weeks too early… sounds of teeth grinding …
Ralph Thomas Moreton did not appear again in any records – for another fifty eight years. He was absent from his family in the following censuses, did not appear to have married or had children, there was no record of a death or a burial for him. But two of his brothers, William and Thomas had named sons Ralph Thomas.
But the BCC tree had one other entry for him. In 1895, a William Morton, marrying in Oldbury, gave the name Ralph Thomas Morton as his father, a miner. So it appeared that he had a) survived into adulthood and b) married and had children. How odd. And the couple getting married later named one of their sons Ralph Thomas so it was obviously a family name. But where was he?
I looked up the Civil Registration records for the bridegroom William Morton who was 24 in 1895, so he had been born in about 1871. There was only one William Moreton (The two spellings, with and without the e become interchangeable in records in this period) in Civil Registration records who was born in that period in the area and I found from this record that his mother’s maiden name was Siviter. And when I looked at my family tree for a William Moreton born in 1871, there was one William Moreton and his parents were Thomas Moreton and his wife Alice nee Siviter. Thomas was apparently the older brother of the mysterious Ralph Thomas. So, even though the name Thomas appeared in every other record for him – census, marriage, baptisms of his children – as Thomas Moreton, this son knew that he was actually Ralph Thomas Moreton. He was the Thomas on my tree born in 1832 for whom I had not been able to find a baptism, he had been baptised at the age of five, with his new baby brother. So Thomas and Ralph Thomas were the same person!
And I had been unable previously to find a death registration or burial for Thomas Moreton, despite knowing that he had been alive in the 1891 Census but that his wife was shown as a widow in the 1901 Census so I knew he had died in that ten year period. With this new information I searched for a death registration in that period for a Ralph T Morton and there he was, Ralph Thomas Morton who had died in the Dudley Registration District in the first quarter of 1894. Bingo! How satisfying. I was now sure that Thomas Moreton/Morton and Ralph Thomas Moreton/Morton were one and the same person. I haven’t found his burial yet but I’m working on it!
Three successive generations of this family had named sons Ralph Thomas Moreton. My mind went back to the original Thomas Moreton, (1800-1836), the one for whom no-one had been able to find any baptism. Might he have been Ralph Thomas too?
So I searched FreeREG for a baptism of a Ralph Thomas Moreton anywhere within ten miles of Rowley Regis for a period of five years either side of the birth year of 1800 which had been indicated by the age shown at his burial. And up came a baptism in November 1798 at Harborne when Ralph Thomas Moreton had been baptised, the son of Francis and Anne Moreton. And when I then searched Ancestry and FindMyPast for this Ralph Thomas Moreton, I could find no further trace of him, no burial, no marriage, no trace. I think he had morphed into Thomas Moreton and moved to Rowley Regis.
Is this a chink of light, a brick nudging out of my brick wall after nearly forty-five years of chipping away at the mortar? I really think it might be. I shall do some more research on the Harborne connection and the family there, when time permits. I already know that other members of my family at this period who were living at Oatmeal Row, Cakemore were married at Harborne and described as ‘of this parish’ so the parish boundary of Harborne at that time might well have extended well into the Cakemore area.
So this sort of diversion is why I do not manage to post every week to my blog. I get side-tracked into all sorts of side alleys and rabbit holes and it all takes time to work through. So, I promise that another ‘families of the Lost Hamlets’ post is in progress for my blog and my apologies for those of you who wait hopefully for new posts on Sundays. Hopefully in the next week or two there will be another post on the Hill family – unless, of course, to mix my metaphors, I find myself down yet another rabbit hole, digging furiously!
Edit: The bricks from this particular brick wall now lie scattered around my feet! Checking out Ralph Thomas’s siblings, also baptised at Harborne, I now find that at least one sister – Phebe – married James Hipkiss also at Tipton a year after her brother and lived thereafter in Rowley, on Turner’s Hill and in Gadds Green and Perrys Lake, yards from the Moreton and Whittall families – so I am now fairly certain that I have broken through the wall. And I have now confirmed that the Harborne Parish Boundary appears to have extended right through to the Oldbury Road in Blackheath and Whiteheath so it is quite possible that the Moretons lived as close to Rowley as that. More research ongoing!
This is the title of a book by the renowned historian David Hey, which is subtitled “Local Societies in England before the Industrial Revolution” and I recently noted it from an online comment as recommended reading for those of us with an interest in particular localities, whether in the form of a One Place Study or what I have heard called ‘micro-history’ or more general interest. So I acquired a copy and it has sat on my study table in a pile of other interesting books for a couple of weeks. Until a few days ago when I wanted something to read, out in the garden, sitting in the September sunshine.
Regular readers may remember that recently I commented that in the course of my research for my One Place Study, I had come to the conclusion that many of what I had called the ‘core families’ of the Lost Hamlets in particular but also Rowley village, had been there since time immemorial .
That felt rather a brave thing for me to proclaim, since I am neither academic nor a scholar, but I have come to believe this and certainly the idea seemed to strike a chord with many local people who commented on the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook Page who appeared pleased to think that they were so deeply rooted or grounded as one person put it, in this small village.
I had started to observe this pattern when I first started transcribing parish registers for Rowley for FreeREG and realised that many of the names in the 19th century Registers which I was transcribing were names that had also been in the Attendance Registers of my classes at school, both at Rowley Regis Grammar School but especially at Rowley Hall Primary School. I had not seen many of those names, I realised, in the forty years since I had moved away from Rowley so perhaps they were local to the area. This observation was confirmed and reinforced by every subsequent record source I looked at.
I noticed what I came to think of as ‘local faces’ in old group photographs but which I also recognised from school. And I knew from my own family history research that physical likenesses had passed virtually unchanged over – in my instance – a period of seventy years and at least five generations, from my great-uncle who died without issue at Passchendaele in 1917 to an uncanny likeness to him which popped up in my son, born seventy years later, five generations apart. The likenesses were there in the men of the intervening generations when I looked properly at their photographs, too but my son not only had the same face but the same stance, the way he held his shoulders and, it appears from other records, similar aptitudes and skills. Other observations, over time, brought the realisation that gaits, stances, voices, aptitudes, skills, and mannerisms also passed unchanged through generations.
All of these elements also indicated to me that many families stayed close to their home ground over centuries. Some, of course, moved elsewhere for work or opportunity (and transmigration patterns between Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, Rowley Regis and the Clee Hills in Shropshire, due to particular granite working skills, have emerged clearly during this study) but most families stayed put, even if individual members moved away, often only for a time. I identified the ‘core families’ who lived in the hamlets over hundreds of years, intermarrying and mostly staying very close to home.
At the Black Country History Conference which I attended at the Black Country Living Museum last year, Simon Briercliffe gave a talk on Irish immigrants in the Black Country. He showed a chart (seen in this photograph, I can obtain the fullchart if anyone would be interested to see it) with the proportions of the population in various local towns and villages who had been born there or elsewhere, based on the places of birth shown in the 1851 census, the first census to show this specific information.
Copyright: Chart – Simon Briercliffe, photograph Glenys Sykes.
Of all the villages Simon had looked at, Rowley Regis had the largest proportion of people who had been born less than ten km away from the village, the smallest number of people born between 10 and 49 km away , even less who had been born more than 50km at all and none from Ireland. As I recall, this raised a little chuckle in the audience as he reviewed the various results with a comment to the effect that Rowley Regis was well known for the people there not moving far!
And when I began to read David Hey’s book, I found myself nodding happily at just about every sentence in the introduction. David Hey, who died, sadly, as the book was in production, I think in about 2016, noted in his introduction that he had been ‘much involved’ in the study of English local and family history at both the professional and amateur level over 50 years and had noted that the local approach, also sometimes called ‘micro-history’, to give it, he says, academic respectability, had helped to transform the understanding of the history of the nation at large.
There are chapters in the book on The people of England, England’s historic towns and cities, Organizing the countryside: Villages, hamlets and farmsteads, Earning a living in the countryside, The greatest buildings in the land, Parish churches and chapels, Timber framed houses, and Population, family life and society.
He notes the importance of considering the administrative framework of a place, and a familiarity with the natural surroundings, the study of farms and field systems, the pattern of highways and lanes, the buildings, the interpretation of place names. But all the while, he says, “we must have at the forefront of our minds the people who inhabited these landscapes, the ordinary English families as well as the high and the mighty.” He welcomed the interest in family history that reinforces the value of the local approach.
This was only the first page of the introduction and yet I was feeling as though he was directly addressing me and my work on the One Place Study!
He goes on to talk about the differing nature of the various local societies throughout England and notes that people used to speak of the neighbourhood with which they were familiar as their ‘country’ , (just as, of course, we refer to our neighbourhood as the Black Country), by which they meant not the whole of England but the local district that stretched as far as the nearest market towns. He says “The core groups of families that remained rooted in these neighbourhoods were the ones that shaped local culture and passed on their traditions.” He notes that they often bore distinctive surnames which were unique to their area, still evident today.
He notes a tenet of social history that most people in the Stewart and Tudor periods moved from their place of birth at some stage in their lives. Some will have moved but many will have left members of their families behind. He argues that the character of a local community was determined not so much by such comings and goings but by the families that stayed put, even though in time they may be outnumbered by incomers. These formed the core of the community and provided it with a sense of continuity. Networks of families were formed and repeatedly strengthened by intermarriage. He calls these ‘urban dynasties’ and quotes Arnold Bennett, writing in 1902 about families in the Potteries (also in Staffordshire, of course) who said “those families which, by virtue of numbers, variety and personal force seem to permeate a whole district, to be a calculable item of it, an essential part of its identity”. Hey notes that many of these old urban dynasties continued to run matters in their locality over several generations. I have also noted in the course of my research familiar names cropping up in reports of parish offices, of local councils, of those involved in the administration of local affairs, centuries after those names were recorded in the Court Rolls and the Parish Registers for Rowley, so this applied in the Rowley area, too.
Hey also discusses how the study of surnames has altered in recent years and his belief that each area or ‘country’ had its distinctive collection of surnames which had been formed locally in the Middle Ages. There is also now a school of thought, he says, that very many English family names, including the common ones as well as the rare, should be treated as having a unique history that must be traced back in time and that many would prove to have a single family origin. So each time I have looked at the first entry in the Rowley Registers for a name in my family tree, and wondered whether I could actually trace my line to that person, it seems that yes, I might well be able to and that this would not be too unusual.
In particular Hey notes that where surnames have been mapped from the 1881 census, the great majority of those distinctive surnames – those that appear to have had a single family origin – were still decidedly local in character. He notes that Staffordshire provides many examples of surnames which have remained concentrated in their county of origin. Examples relating to the area of the Potteries are described in the book, and he also discusses those which appear to have derived from small places, and discusses the use of detailed maps in this respect to identify the origins of some names, which may have been as small a place as one farmstead.
Of particular interest to Rowley folk, perhaps, is a paragraph in the introduction about Rayboulds. This name, he says, derived from an old personal name and appears to have had a single family origin in the Black Country. The 903 Rayboulds in the 1881 Census, he notes, included 306 in Dudley and 259 in Stourbridge. I could tell him somewhere else to look too! And that Francis Raball who appears in the Rowley Marriage Register in 1614 is surely one of those very early ones of that name.
And so for all the Darbys, Groves, Wards, Bridgwaters, Hipkisses, Willetts, Whites, Rustons, Whiles, Jeavons, Dankses, Lowes. Hadens, Detheridges, Mucklows, Parsonses, Cartwrights, numerous others – any of those family names still in the Rowley area and appearing in the mid-1500s in the first few pages of the Rowley Registers, it seems that it is not actually fanciful, to think that you are, very probably, a direct descendant from those original families in Rowley then.
Later in the book, talking about the structure of settlements, Hey says that “Hamlets are found in every English region, even in the heartlands of the Midland open-field villages. Far from being a somehow inferior type of settlement, as was once assumed, they were often more suited to communal farming than were large villages. Their versatility, adaptability, resilience and tenacity enabled most of them to survive the late medieval economic and demographic depressions, though many suffered and a proportion succumbed. They ensured that England was a country with complex and different rural economies.”
There is a fascinating breadth of knowledge in this book, distilled from a lifetime of study of local and family history by David Hey, about all sorts of details of living in earlier times. Thinking of my piece recently on the Inventory of Ambrose Crowley 1, I was interested to read in this book that livestock were far smaller than now and they produced less milk and meat, while disease was a constant threat. A cow gave 120-150 gallons of milk a year, about one sixth of present day yields. In Yorkshire the average dairy cow produced just 72 pounds of butter and cheese annually. Medieval hay meadows were valued at three or four times the level of surrounding arable lands because they provided the essential winter fodder to keep breeding stock alive over the winter, confirming the reason for the relatively high valuation given in the Inventory for the hay in the barn.
Yet Hey suggests that the inhabitants of England’s medieval towns formed only about 10% of the national population. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most English towns remained small, they were not yet divorced from the surrounding countryside and their fields and meadows could usually be seen from the market place. This rings true to me because in the small Gloucestershire town where I now live, where expansion and development were crippled for a long period by the collapse of the wool trade, one feature of the landscape is that the surrounding countryside is clearly visible from many of the town streets, including especially long views from the Chipping, originally the Cheaping, the market place.
Hey also considers the position of London, then, as now, not typical of other English towns and with a higher proportion of non-native residents, but he notes also that, at least since the early 1600s and probably well before, London had been connected to smaller cities and market towns in every part of the kingdom by weekly carrying services. A document of 1637 lists the London inns where provincial carriers arrived and departed and their regular schedules. A study he refers to has calculated that about 205 waggons and 165 gangs of packhorses entered and left London every week, carrying a total of about 460 tons of goods each way. By 1715, regular carrying services by road in and out of London had more than doubled since 1637 and coach services to the most provincial centres numbered nearly 1000 a week.
Amongst the goods carried, I reflect, would have been nails from Rowley Regis. Small wonder then that the more ambitious of the families in Rowley, perhaps the young men wanting to expand their horizons, opted to move, at first to larger towns such as Stourbridge where there was a thriving market for nails, possibly transported from there on the river. Nails were heavy, and dense, they could be transported by pack horse or cart but roads were generally poor and travelling slow. Water transport allowed large quantities to be moved more easily, hence the development of canals to places which did not have access to rivers. But I now know of at least three Rowley families whose descendants moved to London to trade as ‘nail ironmongers’ in the city where their wares could be sold on the London markets and also shipped across the world from the London docks where they set up their businesses. They would doubtless have arranged their own transport, from the Midlands, cutting out the middleman, the carrier and probably improving their security en route. It seems that at least some of our ancestors may have been a lot more mobile than I had always thought.
Also, some young men (not many women), from all parts of the country, came to London to be apprenticed to various trades, as can be identified from Apprenticeship Registers in the archives of the various Livery Companies, as was Ambrose Crowley 3. Hey gives very interesting descriptions about how these apprenticeships were arranged and also how many families in the provinces had one or more members who were in London. Again, this brings my mind back to my ancestor Edward Cole who was married in a Fleet Marriage in London in 1730, then returning to live in Rowley Regis for the rest of his long life. I had already, as a result of earlier research, been wondering whether he and his father had been involved in transporting nails to London, now I am wondering whether there had been an apprenticeship somewhere along the line, too. So now I am going to have to learn more about Apprenticeship Records.
Thoughts
This man is speaking my language.
By learning about this early period I am seeing not only how our ancestors lived then but how this earlier period shaped the times and society that followed.
Most dry days now, I take the book and a large mug of tea out to a sunny spot in the garden and read a few more pages, not rushing, because almost everything he writes is worth understanding and thinking about. If you have found this interesting and fancy a longer read, look out for copies on Amazon or Abebooks or try ordering it through interlibrary loans. For myself, I am enjoying every page and feeling a new confidence that my researches have been leading me in the right direction and that further research is worthwhile.
David Hey was Emeritus Professor of Local and Family History at the University of Sheffield, his roots were in the Hallamshire area of Yorkshire, on which he has published numerous books, he was a hands on family historian, as well as a renowned academic. A review on the book describes it as “a magnificent overview of England’s past, which serves to unite the worlds of landscape history, family history and local history”. Another review notes that it is “highly readable, an excellent interpretative work, up to date, wide-ranging in themes, regions and chronology.”
It is also meticulously referenced and provides details of a range of other books which could tempt me, not to mention Hey’s other publications, some of which I already had. His books ‘Family names and family history’ and ‘Journeys in Family History’ have already found their way onto my TBR pile this week! I am now valiantly resisting the temptation to acquire his book “Packmen, Carriers and Packhorse Roads : Trade and Communications in North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire”, as I suspect that many of the trading conditions in metal working in that area may have been similar to those in the Black Country. And ‘Surnames, DNA, and Family History’ by George Redmonds, Turi King, and David Hey – also sings seductively to me – at this rate I am going to need another bookcase…
I have always been an avid reader and had considered myself reasonably well informed about English history, since it has always interested me. What a joy it is, in my mid-seventies, to have my knowledge and understanding of English history, of ordinary English people, (not just the powerful and wealthy who have always been well documented), and how common folk lived, my perceptions so greatly enhanced and expanded as they are being, in the course of this One Place Study and by such gifted writers as David Hey and Gillian Tindall. My only problem is that there are just not enough reading hours in the day!
The Crowley family were in Rowley Regis for much of the 1600s, later generations moving away to Stourbridge and then London. They were apparently comfortably off, were nailers, later ironmongers and perhaps farmers, Quakers, industrious and clever. And they left Wills! I don’t know for certain whether they lived in the area of the Lost Hamlets but they may have done…
A troubled century
First of all, it is worth considering what life in England generally was like in the 1600s. James 1 of England had come to the throne, following the long reign of Queen Elizabeth 1, in 1603. He was followed by King Charles 1 in 1625.
Rowley Regis was not untouched by national politics, the Gunpowder Plot against King James 1, thwarted in 1605, had led to fleeing plotters Stephen Lyttelton and Robert Winter taking refuge in Rowley Regis, and two local men Christopher White, someone called Holyhead and another man called Smart apparently sheltered them in their houses and legend has it that Holyhead was hanged for doing so. Wilson Jones[i] states that there is no trace of the fate of Smart and White and it is not known which houses they sheltered in. Edward Chitham in his book on Rowley Regis also mentions this story and notes that the plotters are said to have hidden in the cellars of what became Rowley Hall Farm but that building was later replaced on a different footing and no evidence remains of any cellars.
The Pendle Witches were tried in Lancashire in 1612. William Shakespeare died in 1616. Sir Walter Raleigh was executed in 1618. In 1625 Barbary Pirates raided Mounts Bay in Cornwall and took 60 men, women and children into slavery (and in 1645 they took a further 240!). The known world was expanding and the first settlers were sailing off to the Americas, the Mayflower sailed in 1620 with 100 Puritan separatists. Some 20,000 more emigrated to New England in the 1730s, the peak of the Great Migration. (By 1770 the population had reached 92,000), many of them migrating for religious reasons and to avoid persecution.
As a result of many plots against King Charles 1 and unrest in Parliament, a Protestation Oath was introduced in 1641 which required all adult males in England and Wales to declare allegiance to the King, Parliament and the Protestant religion. The names of those who refused was noted.
In 1642 the English Civil War began and continued until 1651. While there was no battle in Rowley itself, Chitham thinks that most Rowley people would have supported Parliament, certainly they would have been well aware of the conflicts as Dudley Castle – only three miles away – was twice besieged, the Lords of Dudley supporting the Royalist cause. The last battle of the Civil War was at Worcester, again, not very far away, so large areas of the country were affected, not just London. Approximately 3.7% of the English population died as a result of the Civil War.
In 1648 Quakerism was founded by George Fox who had strong links in the Midlands. The Quaker website[ii] notes that “Quakers have always refused to swear oaths, because it implies that there are only certain occasions in which the truth matters. Early Quakers were known for their honesty and straight dealing. This is partly why Quakers were successful in business and banking in the 18th and 19th centuries.” So this set up those of Quaker leanings to be in conflict with those in authority who wanted them to swear oaths of loyalty. As a result many Quakers were persecuted and imprisoned in this period.
Quaker records relating to the Stourbridge meeting show that as in other areas, Friends were subjected to persecution. In 1674, Sarah Reynolds was sent to prison for refusing to contribute to the cost of church repairs and in 1684 Ezekiell and Mary Partridge, Hannah Reynolds, Richard Jones, Edward Ford, Sarah Reynolds and Ambrose Crowley were excommunicated for non-attendance at church. I think this must have been Ambrose Crowley 2, who had given land for a Meeting House in Stourbridge but it is an early indicator of the family’s Quaker involvement.
At about this time a Committee began to investigate the political loyalties of church ministers and increasingly acted against those men who supported the King. Properties were sequestrated from Royalists who continued to fight for the King. There were battles between Royalists and Parliamentarians. In 1649 King Charles I was executed and the Commonwealth set up under Oliver Cromwell which made huge and unpopular changes to how people lived.
In 1660, the Monarchy was restored and Charles II came to the throne. A hearth tax was introduced to support the King and his household. A shilling was to be paid twice yearly for every hearth or stove in domestic buildings. Most Rowley homes had one hearth. Only four houses had more than three hearths and these were “Ye Brickhouse”, “Rowley Hall”, “Brindfield Hall” (at Tividale, the home of the Sheldon family) and “Haden Hall”.
The Great Plague killed more than 60,000 people in London in 1665, and in 1666 there was the Great Fire of London. No doubt news of these events would have filtered through to local people at some point.
In 1667 a ‘Pole Tax’ was imposed and the list for Rowley Regis, including all children and servants, amounted to 375 names. The total population of Rowley, according to Wilson Jones, excluding servants was 318, including children. The Bishop of Worcester sent out a questionnaire in 1676 to try to gather church statistics and the main question was the number of inhabitants. The number given in response was 420 but Chitham is convinced that this was seriously wrong and that other methods of calculating suggest a figure of nearer 1500.
The weather was much harsher then, too. In 1683, a Frost Fair was held on the frozen Thames in London, I doubt other areas of the country were much warmer so simply surviving the winter would have required fuel, shelter and food for people and animals.
In 1685 the French King revoked the Edict of Nantes, which started the persecution and killing of Huguenots and thousands fled to England bringing their skills, including – amongst many others – glass making and certainly many settled in glass making areas of the Black Country and possibly elsewhere.
In 1689, under the new monarchs, William3 and Mary 2, the Toleration Act permitted nonconformists to worship, provided they licensed their meeting places.
A window tax was introduced in 1696, to replace the Hearth tax, leading to widespread bricking up of windows.
So, that is a quick summary of events in the 1600s which would have affected local people and families, even in sleepy Rowley Village, and even smaller places like the hamlets. The 1600s were turbulent times of great changes and people must have wondered what was coming next.
The Crowley Family
I have touched on the Crowley family in a previous article about Ambrose Crowley III who became an Alderman of London.
But the first Crowleys appear in the Rowley Regis Registers in the early 1600s. M W Flinn, in his book Men of Iron, when talking about the Crowley family in Rowley and speculating about their prior origins, noted that there were Crowley families in Kings Norton but considered then (in 1961) that there was no evidence to connect the two families. I beg to differ. But then, I have the benefit of computers and access to digitised and computerised records which were not available to earlier researchers.
The first Crowley mentioned in the Rowley Registers is Ambrose Crowley 1. I call him that because his son and grandson were also Ambrose so I am numbering them for easy differentiation. Ambrose does appear to be a Crowley name, they continue to crop up in various places for centuries afterwards.
So where did Ambrose 1 come from? With the power of FreeREG at my fingertips, I searched for baptisms of surnames beginning with Cro* between 1500 and 1700 (I searched just with Cro*because spellings of the name varied considerably at that time but they all began with CRO so searching with what is called a ‘wildcard’ brings a list of them all. Crowley became quite settled by the late 1600s but there were Croleys, Croelys, Crolyes, Crolys, all popping up with the recurring family Christian names, according to whoever completed the Registers in different places and at different times.). I set the centre point of the search as Rowley Regis but included ‘nearby places’ which includes a further 100 places within 7.7 miles. This list appeared in date order and showed that there were indeed Crowley families in the 1500s and early 1600s in Kings Norton (which is, these days, a suburb of Birmingham but which was then a separate village) and, later, also in Harborne which again is now a suburb but was previously a separate village. I then did the same exercise with marriages and burials and all three show the same pattern of a family moving from one settlement to the next.
Copyright: Glenys Sykes. This 1819 Map by John Cary, (which appears in ‘The Black Country as seen through Antique Maps’) shows how the settlements of Kings Norton, Harborne and Rowley Regis lined up, with Halesowen just to the left of Harborne. Birmingham was still a fairly small place then and these villages were separate places, rather than suburbs.
Three Crowley brothers, (or possibly two brothers and a nephew) baptised in Harborne in the few years either side of 1600 start to appear in the Rowley Registers in the 1630s. And their sister Alice married in Halesowen at the beginning of this period. Had it been just Ambrose, it is conceivable that it was not the same family (although this is the only baptism for an Ambrose Crowley that I could find anywhere at this date so it does narrow the field) but there was also Richard, and later Edward. Other family Christian names from Harborne also recur amongst their offspring over the next generations. Also, none of those names appear in the Harborne registers after they appear in the Rowley Registers so it seems fairly certain that they had moved to Rowley.
So I am fairly confident that Ambrose Crowley 1, along with several brothers, sisters and probably cousins, was born in Harborne and he was baptised there on 16 June 1607. I do dearly wish that I could find out where the parish boundaries at that time were for Harborne, as I have another line on my family tree where a marriage took place at Harborne and they were described as ‘of this parish’ when I know they lived in Oatmeal Row in Cakemore. It does appear that the parish of Harborne extended well towards Quinton which was not a separate parish at that time, did not have a parish church and came under Halesowen parish. So Harborne parish register entries may be for people living much closer to Rowley than appears at first glance at a map.
On 19 May 1633Ambrose Crowley 1 married Marie or Mary Grainger or Granger at Rowley Regis. Mary had been born in Rowley, daughter of Henry Grainger and she was baptised in Rowley on 17 Nov 1602, although some early Grainger entries in the Rowley Registers note that the Grangers were from Halesowen.
Initially I thought that Ambrose’s marriage was the first Crowley connection away from Harborne but checking for local marriages, I was interested to note that, three years earlier, on 18 July 1630, a Thomas Granger married Alice Crowley in Halesowen. Was Mary Grainger Thomas’s sister or cousin? It seems very possible. (And later records suggest that the Grangers had links with Illey which is on the Harborne side of Halesowen which would reinforce my observations about the proximity to the Harborne boundary.)
There was certainly some long lasting connection between the Crowleys and the Grangers. When the Inventory was drawn up for Ambrose 1’s Will in 1680, one of the signatories to that was a George Granger and Mary did have a younger brother George. More research needed on the Grangers when time permits. However, this marriage in Halesowen does reinforce the impression of a continuing drift of members of the Crowley family in a westerly direction.
On 2 Aug 1635 Ambrose 1 and Mary’s first child was baptised at St Giles, he was Ambrose 2. More children followed – Joyes (Joyce in modern English) in 1637, William in 1639 (buried in 1655), John in 1642 (buried in 1643), Margerie in 1644 and – at some point – another daughter Mary. There are gaps in the Rowley Register, some of them quite prolonged so some other baptisms may be missing. A daughter Margaret is named in Ambrose I’s Will, written in 1680, but I have been unable to trace a baptism for her. I wonder whether Marjorie and Margaret were the same person, as spelling of names was so variable then.
I assume all of these children were the children of Mary but names of mothers are not listed in the Registers at this point in time. But Mary was buried in Rowley on 31 Oct 1674, so it seems likely that Ambrose 1 and Mary were together for forty years which must have been a long marriage in those days of short lives.
Ambrose Crowley I, having moved to Rowley, possibly on his marriage to Marie Grainger, stayed there for the rest of his life. I know this because I have read his Will, written in 1680 and he is described in that as ‘of Rowley Regis’. His son Ambrose II moved to Stourbridge at some point, married and settled there and I know that because I have also transcribed his Will, proved in 1720 and that tells me so!
The Will of Ambrose 1, which was proved in 1680, (and of which I obtained a digital copy in less than 24 hours, all kudos to Worcestershire Archives, great value for £10 and saving me a trip to Worcester) is a fascinating document for the picture it gives of the life of this family then. It is not long, all of it written on one page of parchment, and this is what it said:
“In the Name of God, Amen. The Thirteenth Day of June in the year of our Lord God One Thousand six hundred and eighty, I, Ambrose Crowley, Esquire of Rowley Regis in the County of Stafford, Naylor, being of sound & perfect memory praised be God do make this my last Will in manner following:
First and principally I commend my soul to God who gave it in hopes of a joyful resurrection at the Last Day. And my body I commit to the earth where it came to be buried at the discretion of Executrix hereinafter named.
And as for my worldly estate whereof it hath pleased Almighty God to give and bestow upon me I dispose hereof as follows:
Item: I give to my daughter Mary Francis twelve pounds in silver and to her eight children twelve pence apiece
And I give to my son Ambrose twelve pounds in silver. And I give to his wife and eight children six shillings eight pence apiece
And all the rest & residue of my goods and personal estate whatsoever my debts being first paid and my funeral expenses discharged I give and bequeath to my daughter Margaret Crowley whom I make & ordain full and sole executrix of this my Will revoking all former Wills by me heretofore made In witness whereof I have hereunto put my hand and seal today and […] first above Witness.
Signed Ambrose Crowley
Signed, sealed published and endorsed
In the sight and presence of
Jo. Grove
John Hobbes
Paulus Rock”
There are one or two words I have not been able to read but nothing of great significance. Ambrose did not sign his Will. He appears to have signed his initials, as shown on this photograph, the names Ambrose and Crowley on either side of the initials are in the same handwriting as the body of the Will so Ambrose Crowley 1 was not literate although his son Ambrose2 and later generations were.
Copyright: Glenys Sykes.
So, of his children, it appears that only Mary, Ambrose and Margaret survive at this point, or at least that we know they were alive. (It is possible that others were alive but no provision was made for them. Joyce had married Edward Johnson at Rowley in 1657 and two children were baptised in 1658 but after that there is no trace of them locally. Two other sons had already died without issue.) The bequests are very simple, money to Ambrose and Mary and their respective children, both already well established with their own households. Everything else goes to Margaret who presumably lived with Ambrose and probably kept house for him.
I find it slightly odd that there is no mention of property, land, real estate in this Will. In Wills I have previously seen any land or houses or real estate are carefully listed and disposed of. The whole process of disposal of land, whether by sale, lease or inheritance was and still is always carefully recorded in writing, verbal contracts for the disposal of land are not valid, unlike other forms of contracts. The wording is detailed, specific, hedged about. If Ambrose had had any land or house to dispose of, we can be pretty sure it would have been listed in his Will. But it wasn’t.
The Inventory, which I will show next, shows that Ambrose 1 was living in a substantial house, not a cottage, perhaps a farmhouse. There is a list of the rooms and there were outbuildings, including a barn and a workshop, plus a yard and, presumably somewhere his cows were kept. So why wasn’t this listed? And where was Margaret, who was at that time apparently unmarried, to keep all the goods and chattels she had been left? Where was she to live?
One possibility which occurs to me is that the house – wherever in Rowley it was – was actually the property of the Granger family. Perhaps they were prepared to continue to allow Margaret to live there? I have been unable to find a Will for Mary but the property rights of married women were very limited so she may not have left one. Wilson Jones, in his book, notes that there were various large mansion houses including Graingers Hall, near Cradley Heath (the name presumably preserved today in Graingers Lane) so it appears that the Grainger/Granger family were well to do. I do not think that this house was a mansion but it appears to have been more than a cottage, and perhaps operating as a smallholding. But the Crowley name does not appear in any of the various surveys of holders of weapons, hearths or householders that I have seen so they appear not to have been of any great social standing in Rowley although Flinn states that “The Court Rolls of the Manor in the seventeenth century contain many references to the Wheeler, Parkes, Haden, Foley, Darby and Crowley families”.
Flinn,in Men of Iron[iii], also reflects on the nature of the nail making business, where a fairly elaborate system of exchange developed. Raw materials and finished products in small lots moving between small independent producers and many dispersed consumers offered a route for the economic advancement of even the humblest producers, as dealers or middlemen. Many merchants, he says, who came to dominate the iron manufacturing industry of the Midlands came from the ranks of domestic nail makers, a surprising number of them from Rowley. The rise of the Crowley family, from domestic nail making in mid-1600s in Rowley to opulence in London and beyond in three generations illustrates this.
The Inventory attached to the Will
An Inventory is a list of all the possessions of a deceased individual and is drawn up at the time of his or her death by independent people, as part of the Probate process and fixing a value on what was left. This inventory is most interesting in showing what was presumably a typical household of a yeoman family at that time and I note that the signatories to the Inventory are all local Rowley names and at least one of them was probably a family member.
The values, naturally, are shown in pounds, shillings and pence. For those too young to remember, there were twenty shillings to the pound and twelve pence to the shilling. A shilling was also known colloquially as a ‘bob’, hence the ‘ten bob note’ which was half of a pound in value. Pence had nicknames, too – and coins for threepence (thruppence) and sixpence and parts of pence were also in circulation, half-pennies (ha’pennies) and farthings (fourthings, a quarter). I can just remember silver farthings, tiny coins which were often saved for use in the Christmas pudding but copper farthings later superceded the silver ones.
This is my transcription:
A True and Perfect Inventory of all and singular the goods chattels and heredits of Ambrose Crowley late of Rowley Regis in the County of Stafford, Nailer. Done, taken and apprised the twelfth day of September 1680 by those whose names are subscribed:
Description £ s d
The wearing Apparel and money in his pocket: 1 3 4
In the Hall House
Some Chyrurgery Instruments 2 6
Andiron, fire shovel, Tongs, potgailes, bowls and chafingers 4 0
One greate table board and forms, three chairs, two stooles,
one little falling (folding?)table
4 6
One little safe, pailes gawn piggins & other Earthern Ware 3 4
Brasse & Pewter and an Iron Pott 1 6 8
Two scissor & Other Trumpery 2 0
In the Chamber
One Bedstead, feather bed and all that belongs to it 2 0 0
One old Warming Pan 2 0
One hanging presse one old cupboard and chair and other oddments 10 0
In the Buttery
A Cheese Press, churn, two barrels, two firkins, five little shelves
and other odd things 8 6
In the Chamber above the Buttery
One joint bedstead and flock bed and all that belongs to it
Linnen in the House 2 10 0
One old forme one tubb one strike measure and other trumpery
3 4
In the Chamber Over the Hall
One old Bedstead good bedding and all that belongs to it 1 2 6
One Joyne chest one Joyne Box three shelfes and one pair of
yarn blades & other odd trumpery 14 0
In the Kitchen Chamber
One greate wheele, one little wheele two poker odd things 3 4
Cheese in the House 1 10 0
In the Kitchen
One old Cubbert one paire of cobberts & spit one , one poker, old
skeele & other things 5 0
In the Shopp
Double paire of Bellows, one Birkhound hammers shiddies
and other working shoppe tools 1 13 4
Hay in the Barne 3 2 6
Four ladders and other husbandry implements 5 0
Marl in the Yard 3 4
Two cowes and one weanling calfe 4 10 0
Two old cow tawes 4 0
Some old boots 2 6
Things forgotten & out of sight 4 0
Sum Total 24 4 8
Apprized by us:
Charles Colbourne
George Granger
Jo Grove
The National Archives has a currency converter on their website and shows you what a sum would be worth today and the purchasing power of the amount. This says that the value of the total of £24 pounds, 4 shillings and 8 pence in 1680 would be worth £2,773.50 in 2017 (presumably when the site was set up) :
In 1680, you could buy one of the following with £24 (pounds), 4s(shillings) & 8d(pence):
Horses: 4
Cows: 5
Wool: 40 stones
Wheat: 12 quarters
Wages: 269 days (skilled tradesman)
So this was not the Will of a rich man but of one who had the necessities of life and the means of working to keep himself and his family. I found it interesting that the most valuable things in the Inventory were the two cows and a calf, and the hay in the barn – the means by which the animals could be kept alive through the winter and ensure production of cheese which also had a substantial value in this list.
With the assistance of the book ‘Words from Wills’[iv], I can disclose that:
In the Hall House
Chyrurgery Instruments were surgical instruments. So Ambrose had some special skills. Possibly these would have included scalpels, clamps, saws but no details are given.
An Andiron was a horizontal iron bar, supported by a short foot at one end, and an upright pillar or support , usually ornamental, at the other. A pair of these were placed at either side of the hearth, to support burning logs. The uprights may also have hooks for pots, etc, to hang above the fire, or may support a spit. Potgailes appear to have been hooks for hanging pots on, (the rootform of gales is also appears in the word gallows, which was also used but for hanging people, rather than pots, today’s slightly bizarre useless information!) And chafingers were dishes for keeping food warm, even today chafing dishes are used in restaurants. Wikipedia says that historically, a chafing dish (from the French chauffer, “to make warm”) is a kind of portable grate raised on a tripod, originally heated with charcoal in a brazier, and used for foods that require gentle cooking, away from the “fierce” heat of direct flames. The chafing dish could be used at table or provided with a cover for keeping food warm. I suspect that chafingers in 17thcentury Rowley were probably rather simpler.
The little ‘safe’ would have been a cupboard, perhaps for meat. Before refrigeration came along, most households had meat safes to protect the meat from flies, etc, (I can just picture my mother’s, before we acquired our first fridge which would have been in the late 1950s I think, with a painted green wooden body with fine metal mesh sides to allow air to circulate, kept in the depths of the pantry or cellar, or the coolest place in the house. Pailes were buckets, of course. A gawn was a gallon or a ladle or pail holding half a gallon, a Piggin was “a small wooden milk pail, with one stave longer than the rest, to serve as a handle”.
These items, all concerned with preparation of food, were located in the main room of the house, according to the Inventory, the Hall, implying that this was a Hall House, a substantial dwelling but where most of the day to day life was in this room. A kitchen is listed, with various cupboards (cubberts), spinning wheels, a spit and a poker but clearly most of the household cooking did not happen there, perhaps it was used more as a pantry and store – a skeele, a wooden tub or bucket for milk was also listed in there and it appears that the production of cheese and perhaps butter was an important part of everyday life. There were also some scissors and ‘trumpery’, or items of little value.
In the Chamber
In addition to the great Hall, there was a chamber perhaps adjoining it, clearly what we would now think of as the’ Mastersuite’ but without the ensuite! This had the best bedstead and a feather mattress, and ‘all that belongs to it’ perhaps bed hangings or pillows or bolsters and an old warming pan. Household linen is listed separately and also had a considerable value, two pounds and ten shillings, nearly ten per cent of the value of the entire inventory. So being left a bed with all the bedding was obviously a worthwhile legacy in those days. There was also a ‘hanging presse’, a wardrobe for hanging garments, rather than laying them out in a chest, an old cupboard, a chair and some oddments. Not an overfurnished room.
The next room is the the Buttery where the cheesemaking went on and where the equipment for this was listed.
In the Chamber above the Buttery
Over that was another bedroom with a jointed (wooden) bedstead with a flock mattress, not as luxurious as a feather bed! The household linen (perhaps made at home)was also listed in this room and also an old form (presumably a bench), a tubb, one strike measure and other trumpery. There are two possible definitions of a strike in the book. One is that it was a measure of corn, from a half to four bushels, varying by locality, or a measuring vessel of this capacity. The other is ‘a bundle of hemp or flax’. I lean towards this definition because there is “a great and a small wheel” listed in the house, these were spinning wheels and for spinning flax to make linen. And when Mary Crowley was married in 1657 she was described as a ‘spinstress’, so it would make sense to have a supply of flax or hemp in the house for spinning and linen making which was probably also done by her sister(s).
The next room described as another bedroom, In the Chamber Over the Hall , where there was another old Bedstead with good bedding and all that belongs to it and also a wooden (joyne or jointed) chest , a wooden jointed Box , three shelves and one pair of yarn blades – another indication that spinning was a household activity.
In the Shopp
This was the workshop, the forge, where the nails were made and a pair of bellows is listed. There is also a description of the hammers and tools there but I am unable to provide any translation of what sort of hammers they were! It looks like Birkhornd but that doesn’t mean anything to me – expert advice on this most welcome if there is anyone out there who knows.
In the yard there was Marl, valued at three shillings and fourpence. Marl is another word for clay and is still used in that way now but in the book there is another definition of ‘a type of calcareous clay used as fertiliser’, further confirming that this establishment was more in the nature of a smallholding that a simple house. I also had to look up what tawes were (two old cow tawes are listed) and it appears that a taw was a whip or lash, so something for herding the cattle.
And even some old boots were mentioned. MW Flinn read this in the Will as some old books but this appears to be the area of the yard and barn which would be an unlikely place to keep books which would have been of some value, and being old does not necessarily make books less valuable. I think books would have been treated with more respect by him and kept in the house. And even old boots would be kept until they literally could not be worn any more, clothing and footwear was expensive.
Conclusion
So there we have a glimpse of how a household in Rowley was furnished in 1680. Some trumpery and little things are listed but mostly the inventory lists very practical goods which enabled the household to earn a living and to grow or buy enough food to see them through each winter.
Where did the Crowleys live in Rowley? I have not been able to work out where exactly this Hall house was, it is unlikely that it was Rowley Hall as hearth tax records show that this was occupied by Thomas Willetts, or Portway Hall occupied by the Russell family at that time. Richard Amphlett was at Warren’s Hall in 1670. Wilson Jones mentions some large houses at Perry’s Folly and Isabela de Botetourt’s house at Isabel Green, which he says became Ibberty and later still Tippety Green. These were not the only Crowleys in Rowley, there were two other Crowley families baptising children in the mid-1600s and up to the early 1700s so it is possible that these families were also living nearby.
Edit: Since first publishing this, a thought about the possible location of this house has occurred to me. Supposing that the farmstead next to Rowley Church was known then as Granger’s Farm, rather than Grange Farm or the Grange because it belonged to Mary Granger’s family? This building later became a pub, the Grange. It would have been about the right size and maps show that it had the yard and outbuildings described in the Inventory, only in later years did it become a pub. The name might just have lost that final ‘r’ through the years, especially if no-one could remember that it had been owned by the Granger family. It is common in Rowley for farms to be known by the name of their tenant, rather than the formal name shown on the deeds, so it seems possible and this is one of the few substantial houses in the village which is not accounted for by other families. Maybe, just maybe…!
What became of Margaret after Ambrose 1 died?
Probate was issued on 3 October 1680 to Margaret Crowley. On 30 Jan 1680/81 – just four months later – she married William Jones (alias Gadd) at Clent Parish Church. Had she waited until her father died? Did she suddenly become an attractive bride as a result of the Will? Did she need to marry to find a home? Where did they go? I don’t know. I do not know why they were married at Clent instead of Rowley as there were William Gads, father and son, in Rowley in the period and the parish register states that she was ‘of Rowley’ so this does appear to be the correct person. Because I have been unable to find a baptism for Margaret I do not know how old she was at this time but most of her siblings were born in the 1630s and 1640s, as was William Gad Junior, so she may well have been a mature woman. A simple search for baptisms does not appear to show any children born to the pair, although there are baptisms for a William Gad and his wife Mary!
In the Will of Margaret’s brother Ambrose 2, written in 1716 and proved in 1720, he lists a bequest to Margaret – “Item: I give unto my sister Margaret Gad ten guineas and to her husband Ten Guineas.” So presumably they were both alive then and on good terms with the rest of her family. William Gad alias Jones was buried at St Giles on 12 Jun 1720. I cannot find a burial for Margaret but then I cannot find a burial for her father in 1680 either and I think it is possible that both were buried in Quaker Burial Grounds, possibly at Stourbridge.
I shall continue to do more research on this Ambrose and his son, Ambrose 2 and may at some stage do a piece on his Will which is much more extensive!
I hope you have found this look at an early Will and Inventory relating to Rowley interesting.
[i] The History of the Black Country, J Wilson Jones, published c.1950 by Cornish Brother Ltd of Birmingham
[iii] Men of Iron, M W Flinn, published by Land of Oak and Iron, ISBN: 978-0-244-43925-5
[iv] Words from Wills and other Probate records by Stuart A Raymond, published by the Federation of Family History Societies (Publications) Ltd, ISBN: 1 86006 1818
When I look into my family history and into life in the Lost Hamlets, I do find the history of the place interesting, especially how the landscape affected industries and work and transmigration for Rowley people, but I am also very interested in what everyday life was like for people then, how they worked, worshipped, moved around, socialised, amused themselves, how they shopped and cooked and celebrated. I want to know the minutiae of their lives – which is probably very boring to most people but which provides a rich vein for research for me!
Of these activities, shopping has changed in the most amazing ways even since since I was a child.
In the 1950s, my mother took a weekly grocery order to George Mason’s shop in High Street, Blackheath (not least because my father worked for George Masons at their Head Office in Birmingham, although I don’t think they got such a thing as a staff discount) and the order was boxed up and delivered by a boy on a bicycle later.
Copyright: Mike Fenton. This was a few years before my time, of course, taken in about 1925. Aren’t the staff all smartly turned out? And the store had their own brand tea, I see, from the poster on the right, 8d a quarter it appears, for those who still know what the weight and price means – old weights and old money!
Sugar was still sold in the 1950s in packets made of thick blue paper then, (this paper was saved by the thrifty and used to cover school books in the days when we had to do this! My granddaughter started secondary school this week and commented on all the books that she was being given which brought back some memories of RRGS for me, though I don’t think they are expected to wrap them these days! But even now there is a type of paper called sugar paper which is used for crafts, thick and slightly rough, just like the paper sugar was bagged in)
And biscuits – custard creams, Nice, pink wafers, rich tea, Bourbons, plain and chocolate digestives – were also sold loose from large aluminium cube shaped tins in grocerrs’ shops, Woolworths and on the market. Mixed broken biscuits were sold at a cheaper price. Mum bought meat for our Sunday roast from Levett’s butchers in Birmingham Road, bacon and other groceries from Mr Darby’s shop, also in Birmingham Road, where the shop always smelled of coffee beans roasting and smoky bacon. I can’t remember us drinking coffee much at home, Typhoo tea was the beverage of choice for the adults although I hated it then, although I seem to remember a bottle of Camp coffee on the shelf in the pantry. It was there for years, probably because it tasted so awful. But later instant coffee became available which in our house was made with hot milk and lots of sugar! Mum always made a cup for my Grandad Hopkins when he visited us on Sunday mornings.
I can’t remember where Mum bought vegetables, perhaps in the local shops or in Blackheath market although my grandad probably gave her some produce sometimes from his garden and allotment. My father brought ham, sausage and bacon from George Mason’s curing house at their Head Office in Digbeth, every Friday and he probably also brought home fruit and veg from the Bull Ring market just up the road. I can certainly remember him bringing home tangerines and pomegranates, usually just before Christmas and him teaching me to prise out the pomegranate seeds with a silver pin, though I have no idea where that method came from. I still think of my dad whenever I get a pomegranate.
Milk, of course, was delivered to the door in glass bottles and bread could also be delivered. Although sometimes, I can remember going up to Bell End to the bakery at the bottom of Newhall Road, where we could knock at a side door and buy freshly baked bread- it smelled delicious and rarely survived the five minute walk home without a corner of crust being torn off and nibbled!
But for oddments and urgent items, we had the local shops –there were several near Uplands Avenue, the little one on the corner of Uplands Avenue and Mincing Lane which had a bell above the door which pinged as you went in, another shop a hundred yards or so up Mincing Lane and two or three more in a row on Bell End just at the junction with Mincing Lane, the biggest of them also run by a Mr Darby, another member of the indefatigable trading family with grocery and other businesses all around the area.
Copyright: Anthony Page. This picture from Anthony’s first book on Rowley is looking along Uplands Avenue from Mincing Lane, with the corner shop on the left here. We lived about half way along here on the right so we were pretty close to this shop, a two minute walk.
These shops were the ones my family mainly used for convenience shopping although there were more shops down on the Oldbury Road, several at the bottom of Uplands Avenue and one at the bottom of Mincing Lane, below the Pear Tree Inn. From these local shops we would get items we had run out of at home, ham – freshly sliced to order, butter – carved from the tub of Danish butter and wrapped in greaseproof paper – they were very skilled at carving exactly the amount requested. and as children, we would buy our sweets, chocolate and crisps. And in October the Fireworks would come into stock, displayed in a glass case under the counter and in those days individual fireworks could be bought as pocket money permitted- my brother loved bangers and I liked Roman Candles, Catherine wheels and sparklers! Every one saved their fireworks up at home ready for Bonfire Night and begged for pennies with a guy to buy more. And there were no age restrictions on sales in those days so even as little ones we could buy explosives…
On Saturday mornings we would walk along Bell End and down the Birmingham Road to Blackheath where my dad would take us to the market where we were allowed to choose some sweets from Teddy Gray’s stall. I expect we got other things from the market as well but the sweet stall is a vivid memory. Chocolate covered coconut ice, chewy toffee and coconut teacakes, chunks of rock, herbal tablets and herbal candy, coconut mushrooms, we each had our favourites.
Over the road from the market in Blackheath was Robinsons the cake shop where again we had favourites. I loved the pineapple tarts, chocolate tarts, I seem to remember big puffy choux buns. And they also sold bread – light airy Viennese loaves for special occasions and tiny bridge rolls, as well as sliced ham to go in those rolls, cut in the shop. Hovis was available if you wanted brown bread but wholemeal, rye, seeded and sourdough loaves were unknown in the 1950s.
These excursions to Blackheath usually ended with a visit either to my Grandad Rose in Birmingham Road, next to the Handel Hotel or to my Grandad Hopkins in Park Street, opposite the back entrance to the market. Here we might be allowed to go down the back garden and pick the raspberries which grew along the fence or to accompany Grandad to his allotment further down Park Street, just behind a mission hall.
What would our ancestors have thought of the colossal choices of goods which are now available to us at the touch of a button, delivered to our doors, though not generally by a boy on a pedal bike these days? Instead of the high-ceilinged shops with wooden counters, shelves stacked with familiar tins and packets, the wire pulley system which zinged your cash payment around the store to the cashier upstairs and back; how bewildering would they have found the tens of thousands of items from all over the world? Fresh food available regardless of season – though not necessarily the better for that – displayed in a modern supermarket? What would they have made of people waving small cards over machines or pointing little gadgets in their hands at another gadget to make their payments?
So where did the people living in the Lost Hamlets shop in and access the services they needed in centuries gone by?
There were no supermarkets or chain stores until relatively recently. Chain stores did not start until the second half of the nineteenth century for chain stores and in then only in towns. Small local shops tended to sell all sorts of useful things, besides food. And there would be specialists such as butchers or bakers, perhaps shoemakers, other specialists such as fishmongers or greengrocers were probably uncommon, at least in small villages such as Rowley in early days. Where did people buy their tobacco, their alcohol, their medicines, their tools and needles, thread, yarn, cloth and clothes? Some of these, perhaps, from village stores, beer from the off-licence door at the pub, probably or home brewed by many. Medicines perhaps from the local shop or from some local person known to be knowledgeable about such things, a herbalist in effect. This was touched on in my piece on this blog entitled “Murdered by his wife”. People had to use what was available to them, be it services or goods. There were few doctors, few midwives and dentists, no vets. Yet people with these skills would have been known to local people and sought out when needed. The 1680 Will of Ambrose Crowley of Rowley Regis, Naylor included some ‘Chyrurgery Instruments’ – surgical instruments, perhaps scalpels or similar, but whether these were for use on humans or animals is unknown. Items such as pins, needles, scissors – like nails, these tended to be made in particular areas of the country – needles in Redditch, cutlery and scissors in Sheffield – would have been costly and loss or breakage would present a difficulty until a replacement could be obtained.
Before shops developed, most such occasional needs would have been met from the visits of pedlars who travelled around the country and from weekly markets, with some items sought out at annual ‘fairs’ when traders from afar would work their way round an established and ancient round of such fairs, when not just fairground rides featured but also hiring of labourers and servants and exchanges of goods, including luxuries such as ribbons and fancy goods.
You may hear, even now, occasionally, of ‘market rights’. Towns could not simply start a market because they wanted to, the right to hold a market was a valuable commodity and was organised carefully, often negotiated or sponsored by a benefactor or Lord of the area. There were generally two ways early markets were held, either by the by virtue of a specific royal grant, where there is likely to be a charter recording it, or by prescriptive right, that is, based on immemorial custom, where there may not be any charter to be found. There are also unlikely to be charters for markets and fairs held on the land within the royal demesne.
Market rights were so highly prized by towns because they attracted both shoppers and traders and the market fees went to the owners of those rights. Grants of such rights also usually included the right for the town to hold an annual fair which would have been a much bigger affair and would have been held on a specified Saint’s Day each year. These rights were carefully calculated not to clash with other nearby markets and fairs and indeed to allow regular fair traders to move from one to another on a regular circuit and to this day these ‘fair families’ mourn when places no longer hold their fairs, as I know from my time working for my Town Council. We were approached repeatedly by the family which had historically provided the fair in the town to reinstate the annual fair, impossible now alas, because of the constraints of narrow roads, development of traditional fair sites for other purposes and the size of modern fairground rides. To this day, ‘fair people’, families who travel the country between fairs still prize their traditional circuits between towns to coincide with their annual fairs, although most of the trading aspects of the fairs have long since disappeared. And to this day, the trustees of market rights still actively protect and control the markets within their towns, such as Cirencester.
Such markets and fairs had to be within reach of their customers, preferably within a reasonable walking distance because roads were poor or non-existent and it is noticeable, certainly within the countryside area where I live now, that towns tend to be about seven to ten miles apart (so at most a five mile walk or horse ride each way for people living between them, such as farmers wanting to take goods to market) and bigger centres seem, generally, to be about twenty miles apart.
Rowley village was not big enough to support a full market, although both Blackheath and Cradley Heath grew big enough eventually to do so. So where were the market towns which served Rowley?
Dudley was the obvious candidate and nearest market town for centuries. Blackheath did not exist as a town until the middle of the nineteenth century so although it still today has a good market, it did not exist in early times. Birmingham was not then a bustling city. And no doubt Rowley folk would have walked over Turner’s Hill to Dudley for some purposes. But the official market town for Rowley, as revealed by notes in the Parish Register at the time of the Commonwealth (1649-1660) was designated by the Government of the day to be Walsall, much further away then Dudley by several miles and without an obvious connection. But Dudley was in Worcestershire and it seems that Cromwell’s new laws applied within County Districts so Walsall, in Staffordshire, was deemed the local market town, although in practice I have my doubts that many people chose to walk the additional miles to get there, unless forced to do so by the requirement to publish notice of impending marriages. Perhaps there were also shops or facilities at Halesowen or Oldbury or Stourbridge or Kidderminster to attract people. Certainly Stourbridge was apparently a busy trading centre for nails.
But on a day to day basis there were small local shops within and near to the area of the Hamlets, especially in Rowley Village, perhaps Hawes Lane and certainly in Tippity Green and Perry’s Lake. These appear to have sold groceries and perhaps some hardware or clothing items. Perhaps some vegetables, potatoes, onions, carrots, beans etc were grown in people’s gardens, pigs for bacon were commonly kept in back yards, sometimes shared between households and it seems likely that many people kept chickens for eggs but certainly there were numerous butchers’ shops and most butchers slaughtered their own animals on the premises. Those who kept a pig at home might call in a pig butcher to slaughter and joint their pig when the time came but for beef, mutton and lamb, they needed a butcher.
Was bread made locally or did everyone make their own? I know that there was later a bakery in Bell End but there may have been others. Did flour come from the local mill or was this one of the items sold in the small shops?
I recall that in the press reports about the deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning of a family in Cradley Heath in 1873, the bodies were discovered by one of the neighbours who had gone to the house because she wanted to use their oven for baking. So it appears that not every house had such facilities and that it was commonly accepted that neighbours would go into each other’s houses to use them. I have also seen many reports from other areas and sources that it was common for people to take their Christmas goose or joint of meat to the baker on Christmas Eve so that these could be cooked in the bakery ovens. So it seems likely that in earlier times, few small houses would have had ovens and much of the home cooking would have been done over the open fires in houses, limiting the range of dishes possible.
Tea and sugar were comparative luxuries and I suspect that exotic items such as coffee and chocolate were not commonly available in these remoter parts of the area until relatively recent times. Local dairy herds would have supplied milk and perhaps cheese and butter, although many families in earlier times would have used dripping, collected from roasting of meat and bacon, for spreading on bread. Nowadays, if you seek out dripping in supermarkets or butchers, you will find it as beef or goose dripping or lard, according to which animal or bird it comes from but I believe that in earlier times, any dripping would have been collected together and saves carefully for later use, all mixed together and all the tastier for it.
So the whole experience of shopping would have been much more limited than it became in later times, and, of course, because many of the families in the area were poorly paid, every penny of expenditure would have been carefully controlled. Perhaps many poorer folk would have obtained food on ‘tick’ where goods would be taken and then paid for later when the man’s wages were brought home at the end of the week. Provided he did not spend too much of his wages in the pub on the way home. Was this why the Levetts ran a shop as part of their pub business? Different customers, perhaps but from the same families. Many women probably never went to the pub and many men probably never did the shopping!
Another aspect of shops was the Truck or Tommy system. This was a system where employers paid their workers partly in ‘truck or Tommy tokens’ which could only be used in specified ‘truck shops’, usually also controlled by them or their families. This system was doubly unfair in that the employers and/or truck shop owners could set the prices of the goods, usually considerably higher than in independent shops and they also controlled the quality of the goods supplied, frequently substandard or of poor quality, adulterated or even inedible foodstuffs. Although the ability to make bulk purchases could in theory benefit the customers by offering lower prices, generally, it was the employers who made profits from the system. An Act of Parliament was passed in 1821 to outlaw this system but as late as 1860 it was reported that it still operated in the area around Tipton. I have not seen anything to suggest that any such shops operated in the area of the Lost Hamlets, possibly because there was no one dominant employer in the area as there tended to be around the major iron works.
Chains of shops began to appear in the mid 1800s, nationwide chains such as Home and Colonial and Liptons had thousands of branches by 1900 but of these chains the only one which survives today is the Co-op. Home and Colonial had, I believe, a branch in Blackheath High Street until as late as the 1950s and there were branches of the Co-op in Blackheath and, at one time, opposite Bell End. W H Smith had begun to appear in the 1840s, mainly originally at railway stations but the local stations were not big enough to merit this facility. Boots the Chemist was another High Street chain which is still on our High Streets – or some of them – and I am old enough to remember Timothy Whites which was a similar chain but again, the hamlets were not big enough to support these.
More legislation affecting shops followed in later years, in 1892, restricting the hours that young people under the age of eighteen could be required to work to seventy four hours, inclusive of meal times. Shops were also required to provide stools for staff (though whether the staff felt able to use them is another matter!) and the Shops Act, passed in 1911, was a United Kingdom piece of legislation which allowed a weekly half holiday for shop staff. This became known in Britain as “early closing day”. However, provisions of the act of 1892 did not apply to members of the same family living in a house of which the shop formed part, or to members of the employer’s family, or to anyone wholly employed as a domestic servant so, yet again, most of these protections did not apply to the sorts of shops in small villages and hamlets.
So the shops in the Lost Hamlets area were mostly much smaller outfits, often in front rooms of ordinary houses and run by local business people, often by the wives of men who went out of the house to work.
In the 1841 Census, Elizabeth Lewis, aged 40, was listed in Tippity Green as an Ironmonger. There was no adult male in the household so perhaps she was a widow, we cannot tell from this census which gives no indication of marital status or relationships. Among so many people who worked with iron, this seems a little contrary but perhaps she sold such items as buckets, pots and pans, small tools and implements, lamps or candle holders – items which could not easily be made in small forges. Joseph Bowater, aged 50 and the landlord at the Bull, was listed as a butcher in Tippity Green, and Edward Richards, aged about 50, was also listed there as a shoemaker. There are no other shop trades mentioned.
By the time of the 1851 Census, Joseph Bowater, again listed in Tippity Green and now 64, was described as a ‘vittler and butcher’ and was now employing a second butcher who was living with them. Sarah Parkes, also in Tippity Green aged 50 and the wife of a Nailer, was a dressmaker but it not clear that this meant that she had an actual shop. No other shopkeepers were listed.
In the 1861 Census, William Badley, aged 26 and a House Agent was listed living with his father and family but it is difficult to imagine that this involved shop premises as modern estate agents do. In any case, it is likely that he was employed by an estate or owner of houses in the locality, to manage them and collect rents, rather than to sell properties. James Levett, then 29 was listed in Perry’s Lake as a grocer. I have included information about the grocery business run by the Levett family in my articles about that family. Also in Perry’s Lake were two ladies born in Ridgmont, Bedfordshire who were both ‘bonnet sewers’, although again, one cannot imagine there would be sufficient trade for a shop, bonnets may well have been sold from their house.
There is an interesting article on the hat making and straw plaiting industries in Bedfordshire in this period, much of which was a cottage industry in the 1800s, much like nail making in Rowley.[i] However, it seems unlikely that there would have been the logistical set-up for straw plaiting in Rowley village so perhaps these ladies were making the end product of actual hats for local customers.
Also in the 1861 Census, Benjamin Rock was listed in Tippity Green as a Blacksmith and grocer, immediately next to the Bull Inn. Living very close to them were the Whitehouse family in their private residence which included William Whitehouse, the Registrar of Births and Deaths (his signature well known to many Rowley family historians and his father had performed the same role before him) and his brother Thomas who, aged 19 was listed as a Chemist and Druggist but with no indication of where he practised this profession. Benjamin Bate was listed in Perry’s Lake as a grocer and his house described as a Grocer’s shop; other members of the Bate family kept the Cock Inn in Cock Green and Mary Ann Batehad married into the Levett family so this shop may have been associated with the Levetts .
In the 1871 Census, James Whitehouse, aged 40 is listed as a grocer at Tippity Green but no other shops are mentioned.
In 1881, Daisy Levett is shown as a grocer in Perry’s Lake. Again, this is the only shop that I have found mentioned.
There would have been more shops just a little way away in Rowley village and probably also in Hawes Lane but I have been concentrating on the area of the Lost Hamlets. Later there were shops at Springfield and Doulton Road and on the Dudley Road.
In 1901, in the Census, my paternal great-grandfather Arthur Hopkins, lived at 3 Tippity Green ‘the fish shop’ and his occupation was shown as a ‘fishmonger’.
Copyright: The National Archives. This is the only reference I have ever found to a wet fish shop in this area and obviously didn’t last long as he was living in Coventry by the time of the next census in 1911!
My mother could remember in the early 1920s, as a small child, being taken to visit elderly ladies in Bell End. In her memoir, she said “I particularly liked Aunt Mary Ingram, mother’s first cousin. She lived in Bell End, where previously the Pits had been until they were worked out. Now it was all fields, with a row of small terraced miners’ cottages. There was a tiny pantry with a front facing window. Aunt Mary made it into a little shop with sweets and chocolate, lucky bags and pop.” [Editor’s note: There was at least one sweet manufacturer in Holly Road in Blackheath but perhaps some sweets, such as toffees, were home made.] “ I suppose she sold groceries too but they wouldn’t have interested me! Oh, yes, I can remember blue paper bags of sugar. Well, of course, as the grown-ups chatted, I was continually asking for pennies and usually got a penny or two for goodies. I loved this tiny windowed shop. Inside was a huge wooden screen or settle padded with cushions – the back was tall and right to the ground and the wooden arms kept one very cosy by the big deep open fire. Hot ashes were falling and glowing cascades as we poked the fire and ‘made it up’ with new coals. Further along the road my mother’s Aunt Liza lived with her grumpy husband Alf. We never stayed too long here. She never had a family but Uncle always retired to his precious garden and greenhouse. He can’t have been too bad because he was kind enough to show me his precious plants and vegetable garden”
Also in the 1920s mum remembered buying vegetables from a greengrocers run by “the Bird family, who traded as greengrocers in Blackheath for many years.” Dick Bird visited my dad’s cobblers shop every day for a gossip or ‘cant’, as did some other men, especially in winter. A good coal fire was a great attraction.” My mother remembered arguments about football – her father and brother were loyal West Bromwich Albion supporters and other customers favoured Aston Villa! This is another aspect of these small shops, the social life which revolved around them, much more than a simple cash transaction.
By the later 19th and most of the 20th century, with a hugely expanded population by comparison with even fifty years earlier, there were dozens of small ‘corner’ shops of varying size, serving small local communities with all sorts of goods. Many of them are remembered with affection by those of us who grew up in that time. But alas, most of them are gone now, overtaken by changes in shopping and cooking habits, long trading hours, the loss of tobacco sales and post offices, perhaps excessive regulation, business costs, the increased availability of personal transport making it easier to shop somewhere else, especially as more people work a distance from their homes and may pass supermarkets on their way home. Not to mention home delivery services, now offered by all the big supermarkets with the exception of Aldi and Lidl, I believe. Ironically, the nearest equivalent to these corner shops now is probably the small local stores introduced into small towns and neighbourhoods by the big supermarkets- the Tesco Expresses, the Sainsburys Locals, the Morrison’s Daily, the little Waitroses – going back to small convenient local shops which sell a big range of goods and are open for long hours.
These are some of the Facebook Comments over a number of years on the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ page, about memories of local shops:
There was some discussion about one shop at Perry’s Lake:
Le Hughes – “I used to live in Regent Road and walk to the local shop every Sunday with my dad and the dog 😊”
Cynthia Cole – “I remember the shop – Always known as Peggy’s.”
Andy Jakdaw Dawes – “How about the one at the bottom of Turners Hill by the Portway Tavern, it was the only shop open Sunday afternoons where we could get suck from little old lady ran it, if I remember right.”
Carl Fisher – “Yes, I do, we used to go in there when we went to my nan’s
Maggie Smith – “Alison, do you mean the shop at the top of Oakham Road on the corner of Turners Hill? That was also Peggy’s – belonged to the Slim family.
Alison Prosser – Yes Maggie, Aunty Peggys maiden name was Slim.
Maggie Smith – We must have known each other then. I was good friends with her nieces Ann and Joan Davies and Peggy’s daughter. Also Peggy’s other niece whose parents had the shop in Hilton Road. I think Ann and Joan must have been on Peggy’s side. Their mother, I think, was a Slim. I remember Kathleen, she was younger than me. I spent a lot of my childhood at your Aunty Peggy’s house. I hadn’t seen her for about 50 years and popped into the shop a couple of years ago – I was really surprised that she actually remembered me. We lived in Ashleigh Road, just down from Hadley’s farm. Ann and Joan lived a few houses away. I think it was Peggys brother who was a minister at the mission we attended at the top of Portway Hill.”
Diane Williams asked “Who remembers Bob Woodhouse, he owned the tyre yard & the big house behind Peggy’s shop…..
Peter Hackett – I remember it! Used it once!
Marie Devonport said “I walked past Peggy’s old shop today. Went for a walk over to Warrens Hall park. When you walk down the side of the old people’s home, feed the ducks in the pond and then walk down past the riding stables you’re in a different world. You could be anywhere. I love it on a sunny day.”
Paul Scerri remembered“I worked with a bloke on the buses in Wolverhampton, whose mother had the shop before Peggy and George.”
Sue Lynn Babington said “There is still a little paper shop there as I get off the bus there when walking over Turners Hill and pop in for my Kit Kat.”
Joyce Connop – Yes, I can remember that nice to pop in for and ice cream when we’d been for a walk over the golf links.
Doris Crump recalled “There was a green shed across Portway Road, it was a cafe to start with then it was a sweet shop, years ago, sold the best icecream.”
Kath Harris also remembered shops in that area: “I also remember Mrs McKay and Brenda in the sweet shop, Agnes and Ted king Frank the butcher (possibly Tippity Green but not sure)!”
Tony Holland said “ I think Tippity Green started from Portway Tavern to the junction, Bulls Head facing you. I was born in Portway Road in 1959.
Kelvin Edmunds said there were two shops in Tippity Green, just past the Tavern on left was Faulkner’s two sisters who kept that last, the House on the right before the junction, he thought it was Mrs Tromans.
Keith Fenton commented that he had been told that there was a sweet shop in Tippity Green, he didn’t remember it, did anyone else?
He remembered one of the terraced houses opposite the entrance to golf range used to be a shop.
Sean Comfort agreed that was exactly where it was, opposite his grandparents who lived in the cottages over the road that backed onto the quarry. Jane Davies agreed, she had lived at number 8 Tippity Green from the 70s and her mom only moved from there about 11 years ago. That’s exactly where the shop was.
Janet Harris said “My uncle had the sweet shop in the terraced house about 65 years ago, his name was Albert Haden.”
Mike Fenton noted that in 1939 Albert Haden was living at No. 11 Tippity Green but was listed as a worker in Seamless Steel Tubes. Presumably, the sweet shop came later perhaps he worked at both with his wife Ada?
So many local connections came up!
Jill Tarr said “My auntie Renes full name was Ada Irene.”
Shirley Jordan said “There was 3 shops across Tippity Green, Mrs Haden and then Mrs. Vine took it over and there was Mrs Faulkner’s shop. Over the road a little further along was Mrs Mullets who sold grocery and sweets. Terry Greenhouse believed Mrs Mulletts husband was Reuben if his memory was correct.
Sharon Whitehouse said “Yes I remember it very well, my dad took me in there for sweets, on the way to my nans. I remember it had a red door with a large black knob in the middle of it and all the jars were in the window2.
Peter Wroe had lived in the Portway Tavern as a kid and remembered “going to the shop for sweets, especially flying saucers or rainbow drops, yummy.”
Andrea James also had more reason than most to remember the shop – she noted “Yes there were actually two, one up the steps was owned by two old sisters and it burnt down through faulty electrics. We lived 2 doors away and lost our house in the fire too.
Susan Bowater said her nan had a cafe just below the Port way Tavern on the other side of the road. She remembered going to the sweet shop for yellow kali. Joyce Connop asked whether that was Ada’s cafe? She remembered Ada well. She said “On the way to school we used to call and she would sell us cakes left from the day before for a penny and I remember when she moved to a new house in Throne Rd with her daughter .
Brian Kirkham remembered that he used to like the barley twist canes with the chocolate centre. He also recalled that Joe and Johnny slater lived next door, he thought the row of houses was the villa and the pub was the Portway Tavern.
Roger Harris said “I remember the little shop owned by two sisters on the left hand side past the Portway Tavern. It was the only shop open on Sunday afternoon, there was nothing to do on Sundays in the 60s as everywhere else was closed on the afternoon when the newsagents closed at lunchtime .
David Hilton also had family connections with the shop: He said “The sweet shop up the steps was owned by my aunt, Sarah Faulkner. Three of her sisters, Edna, Doris and Mon also worked in the shop.
As a child I lived directly opposite the shop. At quiet times the shop would be locked but regular customers knew that if they stood on the step, one of the sisters would run over the road from where I lived and serve them. It was often my job to “watch the shop”. It was not only a sweet shop but sold most things from food to a few clothes.
I thought the greengrocers was Levers and the other shop was Parkes.”
Gaynor Brockley asked whether anyone remembered the hairdressers, ‘Maureens’ right next to the Bull’s Head in Tippity Green? And she remembered a greengrocers , she thought his name was Jim Levett .
Those shops in Tippity Green certainly provoked a lot of memories, even today but alas, I have not been able to find any photographs of them or even of Tippity Green. There were also various shops on the Dudley Road , including the Post Office at Springfield and in Doulton Road and later at least one fish and chip shop on Dudley Road which was remembered with appreciation by many people on the Facebook page.
Another memory on Facebook which makes me smile is one from Tracie Evans who said in 2014 “I used to work on the cake stall at Blackheath market, every Saturday we would get the lovely pensioners saying ‘I’ll tek a pound of bosted biscuits and mek sure they ay bosted'” , wonderful, I can just hear them, pure Black Country in word and wit!
Copyright Anthony Page. This is the older of two images in Anthony’s first book of photographs of Rowley, of Bayley’s Post Office at Springfield, which would have been very familiar to residents in the Lost Hamlets, this one is dated about 1920. Not much traffic about, so the many children are quite safe gathering in the road, possibly to gawk at the photographer, although there is one motorcar parked by the Post Office, I wonder who it belonged to?!
And from the mid 1800s onwards an evergrowing range of shops was established in the ‘new town’ of Blackheath which would have drawn many local people to the shops and market there. Hopping on the 140 Bus, probably! And as roads and bus sevices improved, trips to Dudley and even the grand shops in Birmingham would have become possible.
The Tibbetts shop-keeping ladies of Rowley Regis
Copyright: Anthony Page. This picture gives us a glimpse of the interior of one of those shops in Rowley village, with members of the Tibbetts family.
So I have done my best to consider how and where our ancestors in the Lost Hamlets shopped and what they might have bought there, I hope you have enjoyed this little exploration of shopping in years gone by.
Over the last few weeks, I have done quite a lot of work on the Levett family in Rowley Regis. After the terrible year for that family of 1902 I suspected that most of the remaining Levetts had moved away from the village. Having a quick look at the 1911 Census for Rowley to confirm my theory, I was surprised to see a John Levett aged 67 living in Springfield because he did not appear to be part of the other Levett family in any of the earlier work I had done. On searching further, I found him in Rowley and Blackheath right back to 1871, originally working as a butcher and later at the quarry. I knew that there were later generations of Levetts who were butchers in Rowley and Blackheath who did not appear to come from the branch of the family which I had been working on – was this where they came from?
This John Levett appears in his first census under this name in Rowley in 1871 and he was consistent in records thereafter over a 50 year period about his age and place of birth which showed that he was born in Rowley Regis in 1847. So who were his parents? Where was he in 1851 and 1861? He did not appear under this name in the censuses for those years.
I looked in various records for a birth or baptism of a John Levett in Rowley Regis in 1847, + or -1 year. No birth registration or baptism. Odd. Checked surrounding parishes – still no John Levett. Odder. After mulling this over for a while, it occurred to me that perhaps his birth and baptism had not appeared because he was illegitimate and his birth might have been registered in his mother’s name?
The illegitimate Johns baptised in Rowley Regis in 1847
So I checked the Baptismal Register for St Giles for 1847, looking for a child named John, illegitimate, and baptised in that year. There were only two.
John Hobbiss
One was born to Rosannah Hobbiss at Slack Hillock on 28th February 1847 and was baptised at St Giles on 9 May 1847, according to his Birth Certificate. Although the mother’s name is given in the Baptismal Register as Louisa, I cannot find any trace of a Louisa Hobbis before or after this date and I suspect that either this is a clerical error or she lied about her name! But a John Hobbis of the right age appears in the 1851 and the 1861 Censuses, apparently the son of Rosannah Smitten, nee Hobbis, in both censuses living in Old Hill. But after that John Hobbiss is nowhere to be found. Rosannah Hobbis married Thomas Smitten at Dudley St Edmund on 25 Oct 1847 and in 1851, when they were living in Old Hill, John is described as Rosannah’s son so it appears that he was not Thomas’s as their other child Emily is specifically noted as his child. Rosannah was born in Bromsgrove so was not a Rowley or Old Hill girl. In 1861, the family were living in Cherry Orchard, Old Hill and John is again shown under the name of John Hobis, by then 14 and a coal miner. In 1871 Rosannah, by now widowed, was living in Elbow Street, Old Hill with her children by Thomas Smitten but John is no longer living with her. I have not been able to find any trace of him under that name after that date.
So this boy had associations with Slack Hillock and Halesowen Street, where the mystery John Levett was later living in 1871 and where his bride Ellen Smith lived, was only a few hundred yards away. However it is more difficult to see whether John Levett of Rowley, the farmer, had any direct connections with this area that would bring him into contact with Rosannah Hobbiss but that cannot be ruled out either.
John Moreton
The second illegitimate John was born to Emma Moreton, (who just happens to be my 2xgreat-aunt) on 16th March 1847 at Finger-i-the-Hole and was baptised at St Giles a few weeks later on 13th June 1847. Emma, who grew up in Perry’s Lake, married Thomas Priest (or Redfern) a couple of years later in 1850 and they had ten children together. But in the 1851 Census her four year old son John is living with them in Gadds Green under the name Priest and also in 1861, by then aged 14 and listed by the name Redfern – but that was because his stepfather Thomas Priest also used both names in different censuses, either that or it was an enumerator error, as the family was living literally between two households of Redferns – see my article on the Redferns for more on that! At that time John was a furnace labourer, a common occupation for the Redfern men. But after that John Moreton – or Priest or Redfern – depending on which name he was using at the time – is nowhere to be found on the area.
So both of these illegitimate Johns seem to disappear after the 1861 Census when they would have been 14 and going out to work – no help there, then!
However, a John Moreton, aged 22, was married at St Giles on 21 Aug 1870 to Eliza Caddick. He gave his abode as Turner’s Hill, (where the Priests/Redferns lived), and did not enter any name for his father. And the witnesses to this marriage were Solomon and Mary Ann Redfern, Solomon was only a few years older than John and was a half-brother to Thomas Priest or Redfern. He actually lived for some years next door to John so would certainly have been known to and associated with this John.
Had this John reverted to his original name for his marriage? I think he had.
John and his wife were living in Church Row, Rowley in 1871 with their 10 month old son Samuel and this John gives his place of birth as Rowley Regis. There was only one John Moreton born in Rowley in that period, so it seems likely that this is the same John Moreton who was baptised in 1847. By 1881 the family had moved to Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire and John was working in the iron works there. Again, this fits with his previous occupation as a furnace labourer when he was in Rowley.
Barrow-in-Furness Migration from Rowley
Incidentally, on this page of twenty six people in Parker Street, Barrow-in-Furness, there are no less than twenty two people who give their place of birth in the Black Country – Rowley Regis, Cradley, Brierley Hill, Tipton – on this page and those around it there are Mortons, Whitehouses, Gaunts, Willetts,Siveters, Priests, Ingrams, Westwoods, Billinghams, and Taylors, all familiar local Rowley names. It looks as though there was a considerable migration amongst the iron workers from the Black Country iron works to the Barrow area.
This Moreton/Morton family (The spelling changes at this time) remained there afterwards and it appears that John Moreton died there some time between the 1901 and 1911 censuses when Eliza Morton is shown as a widow in the latter. If this is the John Moreton who was baptised in 1847, he is not our man.
Back to the mystery man –John Levett the Butcher
At this new John Levett’s marriage in St Giles in 1867, aged 21 and a butcher, of Blackheath, he gave his father’s name as John Levett, farmer. The information given in such records is only as accurate as the priest or Clerk is told so the use of this name is not necessarily true. But his use thereafter of the Levett surname does seem to indicate that he believed that he was a Levett. Perhaps he knew who his father was and decided to name his father and use his surname when he got married and thereafter.
As to the identity of this John’s father, there is only one John Levett in Rowley Regis in the 1841 and 1851Censuses, and that was John Levett of Brickhouse Farm, father of James Adshead Levett. Did the recently widowed John Levett find solace with a local girl in 1846? Perhaps he did. Was he the father of this John Levett? He would have been nearly seventy by 1847 so not impossible but perhaps unusual.
Or might James Adshead Levett, living in Perry’s Lake, and aged 42, and previously described in records as a farmer, be responsible? It appears from the variations in the descriptions of James’s occupations that the pub-keeping was only one of various occupations and as late as 1851 he was described as a colliery clerk. It may well have been that he also assisted his father with running the Brickhouse Farm.
Of the two possible illegitimate Johns baptised in Rowley, I tend towards thinking that the John Levett in Rowley is more likely to be the son of Rosannah Hobbiss. He was later living in Halesowen Street, Blackheath at the time of his marriage, just up the hill from Slack Hillock and it does seem likely that the other John reverted to his original name of Moreton and moved away from the area.
I can find no Bastardy Orders to help. Perhaps a DNA test would throw up some links or perhaps descendants of this couple actually know the story but otherwise this has to remain pure speculation.
John and Ellen Levett
This John Levett married Ellen Smith on 14 Oct 1868 at St Giles, Rowley Regis. He was 21 and a butcher of Blackheath. She was 19 and also of Blackheath, so presumably her father had given his consent to the marriage. The groom gave his father’s name and occupation as John Levett, farmer. Her father was Sydney Smith, a Manufacturer. The witnesses were Job and Sarah Siviter but these people were the Grave Digger and Church Cleaner for St Giles so this may have been the only connection, they may have acted as witnesses on a regular basis.
John was marrying into a respectable family, perhaps he felt under pressure to be able to name his father in the marriage record. Later in life their sons and daughters went into service with wealthy families and ran businesses so they must all have been presentable and capable.
Ellen Smith was the eldest daughter of Sydney Smith of Halesowen Street , Blackheath who was a Rivet Manufacturer, employing five men in 1871. From the description in the census then it appears that they were living towards the Gorsty Hill end of Halesowen Street, perhaps somewhere near the junction with New John Street.
After their marriage, the couple were living in Halesowen Street in 1871, in Garratts Lane, Old Hill in 1881 and by 1891 had moved to 2 Dudley Road, Springfield where he was described as a Labourer, (also in 1901 when he and his two remaining sons at home were stone breakers) whereas previously he had always been shown as a butcher. 2 Dudley Road was next to the Bull Inn and there is some evidence that this had been a shop, possibly a butcher’s shop previously. By this time John and Ellen Levett had had five sons and three daughters. They remained in Springfield until their deaths, both attaining grand old ages for that period. John Levett died in 1926 aged 81 and Ellen in 1929 aged 80, both are buried in St Giles Churchyard.
Their children were:
Harry (1870-1886), who died aged 15 and was buried at St Giles on 9 May 1886, his address was shown in the Burial Register as Tippity Green so their Dudley Road home appears to have been very close to the Bull Inn.
Their eldest daughter Alice (1872-1915) had in 1891 been living in as a servant in the household of Mr T Danks, Boiler manufacturer, at 77 Dudley Road, along with her sister Amy. In 1895 Alice married Samuel Dowell at Reddal Hill and they moved to St Johns-in-the-Vale, in Cumbria, where they were living in 1901, where Samuel was working in the stone quarry. (Regular readers may remember that many Rowley sett workers moved to St John’s-in-the-Vale in this period, this has been referred to in other pieces on this blog.) Alice’s brother Frank was also living with them, also working at the quarry. However, their stay in Cumbria does not appear to have lasted long as both of Alice and Samuel’s children were born in Rowley, Winifred in 1903 and Donald in 1907. In 1911 they were living in New Buildings, Tippity Green. Alice died in 1915, aged 42 and was buried at St Giles.
Frederick (1873-1932) This little Levett stayed at home! Frederick became a butcher, in 1901 and 1911 he was listed as a butcher in Rowley Village. In 1894 Fred, then a quarryman, married Elizabeth Payne at Holy Trinity, Old Hill, and they had six children, two daughters and four sons, one of the latter died in infancy. By 1921 Fred had a butcher’s shop at 35 Penncricket Lane and his son Harry (by then 24) had his own butcher’s shop at 48 Birmingham Road, Blackheath. It was this shop that I remember although by then it must have been run by Fred’s grandson or great-grandson.
Frederick and Elizabeth had four sons and two daughters, Harry (1896-1958),John (1899), Ellen (1902), George Frederick (1903-04), Alfred(1908) and Amy (1909). Harry continued to run the butcher’s shop in Birmingham Road and it was still run by Levetts up to the 1960s.
Copyright – Steve Pearce
This photograph, posted on Facebook by Steve Pearce in 2014, shows Levett’s butcher’s shop in Birmingham Road, alongside the never to be completed car park construction. The abattoir was originally behind the shop, I understand and the family sold the land on which the Shoulder of Mutton was built, the name of the pub specified as a nod to the butchery business! There are many comments on Facebook from people who remember David Levett and his son still running the business and how well respected, obliging and friendly they were, as I remember myself.
Amy (1875-1952) also went into service and after leaving Mr Dank’s household, she moved to Stoke Prior where in the 1901 Census she was a nurse to the children of Mr Victor Drury, a boot manufacturer. Her sister Lizzy was Cook in the same household. However, soon after the Census Amy married William Henry Edwards (a Rowley boy) on 27 Jun 1901. And they married in St Johns-in-the-Vale, in Cumbria (popping up again!). This family stayed in Cumbria, however, their children Frederick and Ellen were born there and they later moved to Cockermouth where they died, William in 1940 and Amy in 1952.
Frank, (1877-1938) who had been living with his sister Alice in the 1901 Census, also stayed in Cumbria. On 8 Apr 1901 he married Annie Adelaide Hindmoor Benbow at St Johns-in-the-Vale, Cumbria and they had three sons Sydney (1903), James (1904) and John (1908) He and his family moved to the USA in 1913, probably to join Annie’s brother JamesBenbow, and Frank is still listed as a sett cutter at this time. However, Annie died in Massachusetts in 1917 and Frank returned to Cumbria with his two younger sons James (1904) and John (1908) (their eldest son Sydney (1902) staying in the USA for the remainder of his life) in 1919. They were living with his sister Amy and brother-in-law William Edwards in Threlkeld in the 1921 Census. Frank died in 1938, his death registered in the Carlisle area so it is possible that he continued to live in Threlkeld or perhaps died in the Infirmary in Carlisle which is the main hospital for the area.
Lizzie (1880-1956) or Lizzy (the spelling varies throughout her life!) also remained in Springfield, Rowley for many years, listed as late as 1940 in trade directories as a shop keeper at 7, Dudley Road, where she lived with her parents until their deaths. Whether she kept the shop open is unknown but she died at 7 Dudley Road in 1956, the last of her generation, and it appears likely that she is the Elizabeth Levett who was buried at St Giles then. She had been Lizzie all her life and her birth was registered as Lizzie but formality overtook her at the end! Records show that Probate was issued to her nephews Harry and John Levett, both butchers!
Peter (1883-1944)
Peter’s is a sad story. He was unmarried and shown as a stone quarry worker in 1911, living in Dudley Road with his parents. He served in WW1 with the Worcestershire Regiment but was discharged ‘insane’ in 1919 and in the 1921 Census was shown as a patient at Barnsley Hall Mental Hospital. He was still there in the 1939 Register, shown as an ex- soldier, which probably implies that he had been there ever since. He died at Barnsley Hall in 1944.
Ernest Levett (1877-1919)
Ernest, the youngest of the children of John and Ellen Levett, was born in 1877. In 1911 he was working as a labourer at the stone quarry. He married Beatrice Taylor at St Giles on 25 Oct 1908 and they had five daughters and one son, including twin daughters Nellie and Amy born on 28 Oct 1919. He died and was buried at St Giles on 6 Dec 1919, when they were barely a month old. No mention is made of his cause of death and he may have died of Spanish flu which killed many people then. Beatrice, at the age of only 26,was left with six children aged twelve down to a few weeks old. Ernest having returned from the war, unlike many men, this must have seemed very hard to Beatrice. In the 1921 Census, Beatrice was still at 2 Tippity Green, the address given on Ernest’s enlistment papers but by 1939 she had moved with all her children except Elsie to Queens Drive, Whiteheath. It appears that Elsie died in 1927, aged 11. The other children – Lizzie (1909), Herbert (1911), Annie (1913), Elsie (1916), Nellie and Amy (twins – 1919) mostly appear to have married fairly locally, although this is entering the period when tracking people becomes more difficult because of data protection.
Summary – the other Levett family!
This John Levett was not mentioned in any of the Levett Wills I have looked at and it is not known whether the other branch of Levetts in Rowley acknowledged them. The names John and his wife used for their children are not the same names, generally, that recur frequently in the other Levett family, although the names from the Smith family, Ellen’s family – Sydney, do recur. Like the other Levetts, however, this John Levett was a hard working man, first as a butcher and later in the quarry. He left eight children and at least twenty grandchildren. No doubt there are many more descendants in later generations. Two of his sons and one of his daughters followed him into business, running shops in Springfield and the village and later in Blackheath so perhaps he had inherited at least the Levett capacity for business.
And although the family moved around the area in later years, John and Ellen and their daughter Lizzie Levett, with their shop and home lived at 7 Dudley Road right up to Lizzie’s death in 1956.
Copyright: Mike Fenton
This photograph, courtesy of Mike Fenton, shows Dudley Road in 1969, only a few years after Lizzie died and there are two shops on the left. Comments on this picture on Facebook say that the first of these was a butcher’s shop, and the second was known as Mary’s shop. I suspect that this shop was Lizzie’s shop before Mary!
The end of this part of the story of their lives has Lizzie ending up living for decades within yards of, if not actually on the site of Brickhouse Farm where the original John Levett, very possibly her grandfather or great grandfather, had lived when he moved to Rowley one hundred and fifty years earlier.
As I have commented before in this study, Rowley family roots go deep but it seems they also go in circles!
Taverns, inns, beerhouses and pubs have been in – indeed central to – our towns and villages for many centuries. The start of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, dating from 1387, begins with the pilgrims gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, prior to their setting out on their pilgrimage, and doubtless there would have been many other such houses on busy routes such as existed then.
In smaller settlements some pubs were little more than drinking clubs in an ordinary house, rather than specially built institutions. Many families brewed their own ale for home consumption and many pubs did the same. (Brewed ale was safer than water often because it had been heated in the brewing process.) These successful brewers probably expanded to supply other houses and pubs, especially if it was known as a particularly good brew, big breweries did not exist until relatively recently. Some inns will have started as lodgings for monasteries and religious houses which probably moved seamlessly to independent provision after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and many hostelries, in cities, towns and on major routes will have acted as lodging places for travellers. Others will have developed as places for workmen to get a much needed drink on their way home from dry, dusty or dirty work. The Portway Tavern certainly is on record as having fulfilled this function for the quarry workers from the nearby quarry and some of the other functions from time to time, such as being the venue for inquests.
But formal countrywide legislation to regulate the operation of such places did not reach the statute book until 1753 when the Licensing Act inaugurated the recording of full registers of victuallers, to be kept by the Clerk of the Peace at Quarter Sessions.
In 1830 a Beer Act was passed whereby, upon payment of 2 guineas to the Excise, people could sell Beer, Ale, Porter, Cider and Perry without a formal license from the Licensing Justices and many of the smaller beer houses in the Rowley area fell under this category and were not permitted to sell stronger liquors.
The Licensing Act of 1872 remains in force today and it is illegal to be drunk in charge of a horse, cow or a steam engine. Other modes of transport have been included in later legislation! The Pub History Society tells us that “Under the Act some drinkers became infamous “bona fide travellers”, who could be served outside of normal trading hours. Travelling in good faith meant that you should not be “travelling for the purpose of taking refreshment”, but you could be “one who goes into an inn for refreshment in the course of a journey, whether of business or pleasure”. While people posing as travellers were regularly charged and prosecuted, it was difficult to prosecute licensees who had a handy escape clause in the law. To find the publican guilty, the prosecution had to prove that the licensee did not “honestly believe” that his customer was a bona fide traveller when serving outside of normal opening hours.” [i]
The Portway Tavern
Copyright:Mike Fenton.
The Tavern was, I am told, situated at the foot of Turner’s Hill, facing the road that went up and over the hill and the entrance to the Hailstone Quarry. As can be seen from this photograph, the proximity to the quarrying operations continued to the end. There were several houses around and behind the Tavern, in addition to a Brewhouse and other outbuildings. Some census entries call it the Portway Inn. Some do not even record the name at all.
Copyright: Alan Godfrey Maps.
This map from 1918 shows a ‘P.H.’ at Perry’s Lake, which was obviously the Portway Tavern but I am still not quite sure which building it was in those clusters of cottages. Probably one of the two corner buildings, I suspect and I am inclined to think that it was the building to the right of the new road leading down to Portway. That has several outbuildings and access to a yard which would fit with both the description at the time of the sale and the site described in the prosecution. But someone may put me right on that. It also shows the Rowley Brewery in Tippity Green and how close they were to each other.
Hitchmough records that the Portway Tavern was licensed from some point before 1849, his first names licensee was James Adshead Levett Snr, in whose family occupation it remained until it was sold after Mrs Sarah Perry who was the daughter of James Adshead Levett Junior, gave up the licence in about 1901.
But situated as it was, directly on the route which later became the toll road from Halesowen to Dudley, it seems very likely to me that a beerhouse or hostelry which later became known as the Portway Tavern existed there in some form well before licensing came into force.
The Licensing system was operated by the local magistrates and there was a Licensing Session annually when licences were renewed or not, sometimes, if the applicant had offended against the licensing laws in the meantime in which case he might lose his licence, a serious consideration. There are numerous reports in the contemporary newspapers of these sessions and in each case any offences which had been committed by the Licencee were listed, whether for exceeding licensing hours, permitting drunkenness or gambling or other instances the police reported on. There are also reports in most years that I have seen these reports of the landlords of ‘beer houses’ wanting to upgrade their licence to a full licence so that they could sell wines and spirits in addition to beer but these seemed mostly to be refused and this was obviously carefully controlled.
The Black Country Bugle, in 2003, published an article by Peter Goddard on ‘Tippetty Green and the Tromans Family and Rowley Quarries’, saying:
“Quarrymen were hard workers and hard drinkers. The Portway Tavern was the first port of call after a long shift, due to its closer proximity to the quarries. It had a small bar with a low ceiling, and a little used, long room adjacent.”
And in my blog post entitled ‘Tales of Old Portway’ I noted an article in the Dudley Chronicle in 1926 which said that:-
“The Portway Tavern is described as “the rendezvous of generations of quarrymen”, referring to recent renovations which had done much to modernise the exterior but it was noted that “the interior is pervaded with an old-world atmosphere. On a rack in the smoke room are twenty-two churchwarden pipes, numbered and tobacco stained, the blackest belonging to the oldest and most regular attendant at the pipe club which meets in the tavern on winter evenings.”
The Levett family and the Portway Tavern
In the 1841 Census James Adshead Levett the Elder is living in Perry’s Lake and listed as a Publican, although the pub is not named as such but this was undoubtedly the Portway Tavern. He had, according to the baptismal register at the time of the baptism of his son Richard in 1836, been living at Cock Green as a farmer but by the time of the baptism of his son John in December 1840, the family was living in Perry’s Lake although he was still described as a farmer then, a not unusual case of more than one occupation. In the 1851 Census he was shown as a Colliery Clerk and it was not until the 1861 Census that the Tavern was named and his occupation was shown as a Victualler. As early as 1842, James Adshead Levett Snr was listed in the Poll Books and Electoral Register as eligible to vote because he owned or rented ‘houses at Perry Lake’, so not just one house. Unsurprisingly, in view of this, censuses often show several Levett households living at Perry’s Lake, presumably in these houses, probably around or behind the pub.
Generally when James and Mary Levett were running the Tavern it appears that they kept their house in good order and I can only find one report of an offence in the newspapers. In August 1847 James was charged with permitting gaming with dice in his alehouse. PC Janson told the court that he had found
“two dice on the table and a cup, a man shaking it, and money on the table, for which they were playing. Defendant said there had been a raffle at this house that night, and afterwards the men did play for a few pence, but without his knowledge.”
He was fined 5 shillings and costs. In those days magistrates were local and the courts sat in local towns so people would have been well known to each other. And policemen had local ‘beats’ and would have known their licensees and kept a careful eye on them.
James Levett the Elder died , according to the Probate Record, on 23 Jun 1878, aged 75. His widow Mary retired to Gadd’s Green where two of her granddaughters Ellen (18) and Harriett (9) were staying with her in the 1881 Census. In his Will James had left to his ‘dear wife’ “such part of my household furniture and effects belonging thereto as she shall select for her own use except my clock and bureau which I give and bequeath to my son James”. The remainder of his property was to be sold and the proceeds to be shared equally between his four children. Interestingly, the Will notes that the house in which he lived belonged to his wife as tenant for life. The Will notes that as James the Younger had agreed on his father’s decease “to take it from her as tenant at a rent of twenty-five pounds a year, I direct that in the conversion of my said personal estate into money, my said son James shall be at liberty within a reasonable time after my death or on the happening thereof to exercise the option hereby given to him of taking the stock-in-trade fixtures and effects used by me in my business at my decease at a valuation to be made in the ordinary way in which valuations are made of stock-in-trade fixtures and effects of the like nature.”
It appears that the licence was transferred, perhaps initially to Daisy Levett but later to his son James Adshead Levett the Younger , by then a widower, who was listed as a Licensed Victualler in the 1881 Census at 29 Perry’s Lake, living there with his son William, aged 20, a carpenter, and daughters Daisy aged 23 and listed as a grocer, Kate aged 16 and a Pupil Teacher and Nelly aged 10 and a scholar. It is perhaps not surprising that Daisy should be listed as a grocer as this had been the occupation shown for her father James Adshead Levett Jnr in Perry’s Lake in the two previous censuses, so presumably when he took over the pub, she kept the grocery business going. Looking back at the time of James’s marriage in 1857 he had given his occupation as a grocer on the Tettenhall Road in Wolverhampton and this had been the profession into which he had been apprenticed at the age of 14.
So in addition to the pub, it seems that the Levetts ran a grocer’s shop in Perry’s Lake, very possibly in the same buildings. I have most definitely gained the impression that the Levett family were very flexible about their living and trading arrangements. And it seems the Levetts made sure their children were set up in suitable professions, their son Richard who was a shoemaker (and apparently part-time brewer) also lived in Perry’s Lake, William was a carpenter.
Licencing applications
Oddly, in August 1878, there were various advertisements in the County Express, giving notice of the intention of various people to apply for excise licences to sell various alcoholic beverages in their beerhouses and shops. The advertisement put in by James Adshead Levett was for an excise licence to sell “Sweets by retail, to be drunk and consumed on and off the house and premises thereunto belonging”. This is the only such application I can see, all the others are for licences to sell beer or cider or wine, why would you need an excise licence to sell sweets? Perhaps they were making home brewed soft drinks, as well as beer in their brewery?
I can remember as a child a van that came round selling brewed lemonade, ginger beer and American ice cream soda – strawberry ice cream soda or am I dreaming that? – in large pottery flagons, that was definitely quite fizzy and must have been brewed. I think the drinks were made in Oldbury but certainly very locally. Each week you returned the empty flagons for refilling, it was a rare treat because my father was chronically ill and there wasn’t much money to spare for such luxuries but I remember how delicious they were. And even today Fentimans produce botanically brewed drinks such as lemonade and ginger beer. Or perhaps it was a Printer’s error but I would be interested to hear whether anyone has any other suggestions!
Incidentally in the advertisement Mr Levett states that the house and premises were rated for the relief of the poor and that he was the tenant, the premises being owned by Thomas Auden. So it seems that the Levetts were not the owners after all. Since John Levett had been and appeared to be still bankrupt (See my first article on the Levett family for details) it would perhaps be slightly surprising if his son had the wherewithal to purchase multiple houses at Perry’s Lake in 1841.
Also in the Reports of the County Express of 14 September 1878, there is a report that the Licensing Magistrates approved the transfer of the licence for the Portway Tavern from the executors of the late James Adshead Levett the Elder to Daisy Levett, his granddaughter. But at some point it was obviously transferred again to James Levett the Younger as in the 1881 Census James was was described as the Licensed Victualler and Daisy as a Grocer.
You might think that James would be very careful because he already had a criminal record from an incident much earlier in his life so would not have wanted to be in trouble with the magistrates who obviously ran a tight ship. But alas, James Adshead Levett Jnr found himself in trouble with the police and the licensing authority more than once over the years. In September 1882 it was reported to the Annual Licensing Meeting of the court that he had been convicted of ‘permitting drunkenness on 30th November’, presumably the previous year, when he had been fined £5 plus costs. However, it seems he did not actually lose his license although it, along with several other similarly blacklisted landlords did have the licence suspended for a period.
There were two reports in the West Bromwich Weekly News about this incident, the first on 25th November 1881.
“Thomas Summerfield, Rowley Village, was summoned for being drunk and disorderly on the licensed premises of James Levett, Portway Tavern, Perry’s Lake. Prosecutor said the defendant went to his house on Sunday night, there were about 30 or 50 persons in the house, one of the men having paid for 20 quarts of ale, the defendant left but returned and commenced a disturbance, and knocked a woman down.
Superintendant Woolaston asked for the case to be adjourned, he visited the house on Sunday night in company with Sergeant Cooper and two PCs. There were about 70 persons in the house, and the landlord never interfered. A more disgraceful scene never took place. He was of the opinion that the summons was only taken out for a sham. There would be further evidence adduced. The case was adjourned.”
In the same paper in the edition of 3rd December 1881, this report appears, when James Levett was being charged with permitting drunkenness in his house:-
“PC Birch said at seven o’clock on the night of the 20th ult. He was sent to the defendant’s house in plain clothes, and remained there until 9.30. There was a large number of men and several women in the house, some of whom were drunk. There was a great disturbance, and the language used by the waiter and company was of the most disgraceful nature. Superintendant Wollaston said on Sunday night the 20th ult., he sent the last witness into defendant’s house, he remained outside with PS Cooper and PC Styles. About 8.30 he saw several persons stagger out of the house but they re-entered it almost immediately. About nine o’clock he entered the house, the passage and tap room were completely crammed with persons. There was an old woman, quarrelling with a man called Summerfield, who knocked her down and fell on to the top of her. There was great confusion. There were several men under the influence of drink. There were about 70 people in the house, every room being crowded. A more disorderly house he never saw. He spoke to defendant about it who said he was very sorry.
Cross-examined: Defendant had not been summoned before. PC Cooper corroborated.
Mr Shakespeare said the case arose under unfortunate circumstances. Defendant was away from the house some portion of the time and left someone else in charge. A friend of the defendant’s, from Birmingham, came to the house and left 10s to pay for some beer for the men who caused the disturbance complained of.
Mr Bassano [the Presiding Magistrate] said the Bench considered it a bad case and inflicted a fine of £5 and costs, and endorsed the license. Mr Shakespeare [defending solicitor] appealed to the Bench not to endorse the licence as this was defendant’s first offence. Mr Bassano said they could not alter their decision as they considered it a very bad case.”
One can imagine that if this was a regular occurrence, this might not have gone down well with respectable church going neighbours in this very small and presumably quiet community!
On another occasion Levett was prosecuted for brewing offences, which I have already described in detail in another article.
James Adshead Levett the Youngerdied, aged 63 on 26 Aug 1895, according to the Probate Record which was granted to his daughter Sarah Perry. The cause of death shown on his Death Certificate was Pernicious Anaemia and Exhaustion. His Will allowed Sarah Perry to continue the business of inn-keeping for a period of seven years with the option for a further seven if she wished and for her to have the use of the furniture, stock etc at the pub for this purpose. In fact Sarah died almost exactly seven years later but appears to have given up the pub before then, perhaps because of her poor health and other problems.
The licence, according to Hitchmough, passed then to his son William Levett who held it until 1896, when it passed to Mrs Sarah Perry, which does not quite accord with the intentions in the Will but we do not know whether Sarah was already in poor health. William’s sister. Daisy Levett, his eldest sister, had married Abner Payne in 1885 and she also continued to live in Perry’s Lake until her death in 1902.
Sarah remained the licensee until about 1901 when Hitchmough notes that the licence passed to Thomas William Williams whose family ran the Bull’s Head and had at one time been in some rivalry with the Levett family . However, I do note that Thomas William Williams was listed by Hitchmough as the Licensee of the Bull in Tippity Green from 1892-1900 so he had not moved far. He was also the owner of the Rowley Brewery in Tippity Green so had very local licensing interests.
Sarah died in 1902, as did her sister Daisy – only a few days apart and aged only 42 and 44, followed less than two months later by Sarah’s husband George Perry. But on 20 September 1902 the Portway Tavern had been put up for auction, in accordance with the Will of James Levett the Younger who had left it for Sarah to run the pub for seven years with the possibility of a further term if she so wished. It seems likely that, by this time, she was so ill that she could not continue. The children of Sarah and George Perry were taken in by aunts, uncles and others and left Perry’s Lake.
This was the preliminary advertisemment in the advertisement in the County Advertiser and Herald on the 6th September 1902:
In the full advertisement which appeared on the 20th September 1902 for the sale of the premises this fuller description was given:
“Rowley Regis, Staffs.
Highly Important Sale of a Fully-Licensed Free Public House
Alfred Hill has been favoured with instructions from the Exors. of the late Mr. James A. Levett, to Sell by Auction, on Monday, the 29th day of September, 1902, at the House of Mr. H. B. Darby, the ROYAL OAK INN, Blackheath, at 7-30 in the Evening, sharp.
Lot 1. All that Old-Established Home-Brewing, Fully-Licensed, Freehold, Free, Public House (Corner Property), now in the occupation of Mrs. Sarah Perry, and known as the PORTWAY TAVERN, Perry’s Lake, Rowley Regis, containing Tap Room, Smoke Room, Bar, Club Room, Bedrooms, Pantry, Extensive Cellaring, Brewhouse (with Maltroom over), Stabling (Six-stall), with Loft over, Range of Piggeries, and the usual conveniences, with large Yard and Gateway Entrance, and frontage to two Roads, with Tap Water laid on, and fitted with Gas throughout.
The Auctioneer begs respectfully to call the attention of Investors to these desirable Properties. The Public House offers to Capitalists the rare opportunity of securing a Fully-licensed, entirely Free, Home-brewing House, and an unusually sound Investment”.
Did it sell? I don’t know because I note that in 1911/12 the licensee was George Ward who was the husband of Hannah Levett, the daughter of Richard Levett, the shoemaker, so it seems the Levett family retained an interest in the pub for some time even if it was under another name or perhaps he took it on from Thomas William Williams. George Ward, living at 19 Perrys Lake, had also been one of the Witnesses to James the Younger’s Will.
But altogether three generations of the Levett family had run the Portway Tavern for about seventy years.
Copyright: Eileen Bird who is descended from James AdsheadLevett, shared this family photograph of the Tavern which she says was taken in 1971. I was interested how different it looked when it was painted white.
Over the next sixty or so years, there were nineteen other licensees, according to Hitchmough, most having the pub for only a few years. Because of 100 year privacy rules, it is difficult to find out much about them as individuals, although local people will still have memories of some of the more recent ones and some may even have lived there when their father or other relatives held the licence.
Local memoriesfrom Facebook
Below are some of the memories which have been mentioned on the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page over the last few years. Please let me know if you object to your name being mentioned and I will remove your comments but these memories are part of the history of the Lost Hamlets in a way which will never appear in history books!
More people than I can list had their first pints there!
Several people commented that the Tavern was known locally as the ‘blood tub’. David Stokes thought this went back to the early days. His first memories were of living with his great grandfather in the cottages opposite the ‘Tavern’ in the early fifties. He said “What I can remember very well is ‘they’re fighting again’! Hence, ‘the blood tub’…as I understood it? Thankfully, a bygone era!”
Vicki Noott says that she was born in the Tavern in 1955, as her grandfather Albert Harris was the landlord in the 1950s and Maggie Bridgewater said that she also lived there in the 1950s when her parents were the licensees. Two very local surnames there! Peter Wroe’s parents were the landlords from about 1961-1966, he remembered it as a good old fashioned pub. His sister Caroline was also born there.
Joyce Connop remembered that she always used to look at the clock inside through the window to check the time on her way to Doulton Road School, to make sure she wasn’t late for school.
Ann Teague said that she remembered that there was a dirt road down the side of the tavern. The houses there were mostly occupied by Tarmac workers.
Brian Kirkham recalled that there was a row of houses behind the Tavern called Heaven and a bit down from that there was a blacksmiths shoeing horses.
Kenneth Greenhouse remembered all the old penny’s on the ceiling by the darts board.
Marie Devonport – “The road seen in the bottom of the picture was the start of Turners hill, right over the road from the Tarmac entrance. If I remember right my family lived just up the road by the telephone box on the corner.”
William Perry had recently read Wilson Jones’s book on Rowley – “it’s very informative. There is a photo of a manorial windmill that stood on the side of Hawes Hill, also there was a large pool with fish in it somewhere about opposite where the Portway Tavern used to be.”
And indeed Wilson Jones asserts in his book that on a Pre-Inclosure map of Rowley, the main habitations were around Rowley Church from about Rowley Hall to Mincing Lane . But the Manor was at Brickhouse Farm with the Manorial Green at Cock Green and the fishpond on the site of Perry’s Lake. So the original Perrys Lake was a manorial fishpond. He also states that two Manor Mills were also marked on this map, one on the opposite side to Hawes Hill, near Tippity Green and one at Windmill End. The book has a photograph of the Windmill at Tippity Green so it survived for a long time.
Andrew in 2017 said that he lived at the top of Throne Road with his grandparents in the 70’s, he used to be sent to the Portway Tavern with empty Corona bottles to be filled with sherry !
Ant Bromley particularly remembered the really good cider served there.
Marie Smith remembered her brother Eric Oddy having his 21st birthday party there and her mother getting tired – Marie says she was a lady and she never got drunk!
Arthur McWilliams worked in the garage in the quarry opposite the Tavern and recalls that some days they would go over for a pint at lunchtime. He says he will never know how they managed to work the rest of the day!
The end of the Portway Tavern
The Portway Tavern closed in 1984 and was demolished shortly afterwards. This photograph shows it standing in isolation after most of the houses around it had been demolished. St Giles’s Church can be seen on the hill behind it, and some of the houses in Tippity Green to the right.
Copyright: Mike Fenton
David Duckworth shared this rather sad photograph on Facebook of the Tavern prior to demolition, (copyright of this photograph unknown as it appears in several places).
Standing at the foot of Turners Hill Road, the Portway Tavern had been a central part of the community in the area of the hamlets for probably the best part of two hundred years, from the time when it stood alongside the toll road from Halesowen to Dudley and it had served home brewed ale to many generations of quarrymen working in the nearby quarries. Inquests were sometimes held there and some lively parties, too!
And as so often in these days when so many pubs are closing, something was undoubtedly lost from the heart of the community when it was demolished, and it was the same fate which came to the cottages and communities it once served.
Rudkin is not a common name in Rowley Regis and I only came across it while I was researching the Levett family. Yes, another rabbit hole for me to explore!
Harriet Levett (1872-1956) was the third of the four daughters of Richard Levett, he the second son of James Adshead Levett the Elder and brother to James Adshead Levett the Younger. Richard, born in 1836, was married to Mary Merris and they lived in Perry’s Lake, where Richard was a Boot and Shoe Maker and he also helped his brother out with brewing, as mentioned in my recent article about a court case.
Harriet’s mother died when Harriet was only six and subsequently she was staying with her grandmother Mary Levett in Gadd’s Green at the time of the 1881 Census, while her father and other sisters were living in Hawes Lane, and in 1891 she was in Perry’s Lake with her uncle James Adshead Levett and his son William, (also mentioned in the court case), although her father was by then immediately next door with his youngest daughter Mary Ann, aged 16 and a visitor Ann M Parkes, also 16, a dressmaker, so perhaps a friend of Mary Ann.
On 13 May 1894Harriet Levett married John Rudkin at Holy Trinity, Old Hill, when he was 26 and she was 22.
John Rudkin, born in 1868, was not a Rowley native, but he was living at 17 Tippity Green in 1881 and at 24 Perry’s Lake in 1891, lodging with Edward Payne, along with his brother William so he had been living very close to Harriet for most of their lives, the boy next door, as it were. I say that John was not a Rowley native but his younger brother William was, born in Rowley Regis in 1875. They were two of the sons of William Rudkin. So I looked for John in the 1871 Census and found him living with his family William and Jane Rudkin in Cainham, near Ludlow in Shropshire. Now, where have we come across Cainham before? Ah, yes, when I was looking at migration patterns among the quarry workers in an earlier article when I found that quite a few sett makers had moved from Mountsorrel in Leicestershire to Rowley Regis to work, had married in Rowley and then moved on to Cainham in Shropshire. And sure enough, when I looked at this family, the pattern fitted again.
Copyright unknown, this photograph of the Clee Hills quarries in Shropshire shows that the quarrying area is not dissimilar to Rowley but without the surrounding heavy industry!
William Rudkin the Elder, John Rudkin’s father, was born in 1835 in Groby, Leicestershire. In 1851 he was living in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire where his father (also William) was a Quarry man and William himself was a Frame Work Knitter, another repeating detail as a Leicestershire occupation.In 1861, William was in Rowley Regis. The ten years between the two censuses were eventful for the Rudkin family.
The 1871 Census shows John Rudkin, with his father William, a Stone Cutter, who was living in Cainham with his wife Mary Jane (nee Parkes, I would later find). Jane, aged 25, had been born in Rowley Regis and their oldest child Sarah J, aged 14 was also born in Rowley Regis , while son Thomas aged 5 was born in Cainham, John aged 3 apparently born in Ludlow, and Elizabeth A, aged 1 also born in Cainham. And living with them were Thomas Parkes, his brother-in-law, aged 15, a labourer and his widowed mother-in-law Mary Parkes, both of them born in Rowley Regis. A classic Mountsorrel/Rowley/Cainham pattern!
And because I always try to find the birth registration in the GRO registers for my records, I was able to confirm that the mother’s maiden name of all the younger children was indeed Parkes. So that all tied together nicely. Except…
Looking at the family in 1871, I noticed that the oldest child Sarah J was 14, born in 1857, but Jane Rudkinwas only 25. It seemed very unlikely that she had had a baby at 11. Technically possible perhaps but unlikely. Sarah J must have been born to someone else. So I looked for Sarah’s birth registration – and there was no birth registration for a Sarah Jane Rudkin in the right period. There was, however, a registration of a Sarah Jane Parkes in the first quarter of 1856, with no Mother’s Maiden Name recorded which is usually an indication of illegitimacy. And then I found a baptism on 27 July 1856 at St Giles, Rowley Regis for Sarah Jane Parkes, the illegitimate daughter of Ann Parkes. Not Mary Jane, who was only eleven at this time. So, another puzzle – who was Ann Parkes?
Some more digging around showed that Ann Parkes was born in 1833 in Rowley Regis, the daughter of Joseph Parkes of Tippity Green. Ann Parkes and William Rudkin had been married on 26 Oct 1857 at Dudley St. Thomas, and their son Charles (1858-1861) was born in the last quarter of 1858, followed by Mary (1861-1862) and twins Ann and Maria in 1863, all in Rowley Regis. Now I was able to find William, Ann and Charles in Tippity Green in the 1861 Census. It appears that William accepted Sarah Jane into his household as she was shown as Rudkin in all subsequent censuses. Alas, Ann died, in childbirth or soon after the twins were born, as she was buried on 21 Jul 1863 at St Giles, Rowley Regis, aged 28 and of Perry’s Lake, shortly after the birth of the twins. Baby Ann died in October and was buried on 25 Oct 1863, followed a few months later by her twin Maria who was buried on 20 Jan 1864.
So poor William Rudkin had lost his wife and all four of his children in the space of six years. It is possible that Sarah Jane was also his child but equally possible that she was not as William and Ann did not marry until Sarah Jane was at least fifteen months old.
William, a working quarryman, must have had a lot of help for those new-born twins to survive even a few months. He was living close to his in-laws and no doubt they and other neighbours would have helped to look after the children. So perhaps it is not surprising that on 19 Oct 1863, (just three month’s after Ann’s death) William Rudkin married again, at Dudley Saint Thomas, this time to Mary Jane, usually known as Jane, Parkes. Who appears to have been Ann’s sister!
Perhaps William felt Rowley was not a good place for him or perhaps better money was on offer as they must have moved to Shropshire soon afterwards. William and Jane went on to have four children in Cainham – Edward Thomas (1866-1923), John (1868-1949) who married Harriet Levett and Edith Ann, (1870-1942). As the dates show, these three children all survived into adulthood unlike most of their earlier half siblings. Another son George Henry was baptised on 13 Oct 1872 at Knowbury. But by the time of the 1881 census, everything had changed again.
By 1881, Mary Parkes, now 68, was back in Tippity Green, living with her daughter Elizabeth Parkes, aged 28, the three Rudkin grandchildren, a granddaughter AnnieParkes, aged 6 and another Rudkin grandson named William who was aged 5 and born in Rowley. (Also a lodger William Foley, a miner aged 43). When you think how small the cottages in that area were, it must have been quite crowded.
Where were William Rudkin and Jane? William had died in Shropshire in 1872, just a couple of months after the baptism of their new son George Henry and William was buried on 10 Dec 1872 at St Paul’s church, Knowbury. I do not know what he died of and can find no other records about him but he was only 37 so possibly an industrial accident or perhaps a disease. And Jane? She had obviously moved back to Rowley with her mother and the children by 1874 because George Henry died and was buried at St Giles on 15 Feb 1874, aged 1. And she had had another child William in Rowley Regis in 1875. There is no way of knowing who was little William’s father but it could not have been William Rudkin, her late husband since he had died in 1872.
Jane herself was not in that 1881 Census entry because she, too, had died and had been buried at St Giles on 21 Apr 1878, aged 31.
So poor Mary Parkes, herself elderly, was now responsible for her four Rudkin grandchildren, although by 1881 both Thomas and John were working at the quarry.
What became of the Rudkin children?
I have not been able to trace Sarah Jane Parkes or Rudkin after the 1871 census, there are no definite sightings of her under the name Rudkin and there are so many Sarah Parkes that it is not possible to be sure which if any of them is her. She could have married, gone into service, died under either name – it remains a mystery.
Edward Thomas Rudkin joined the army at some point shortly after this, and when he married Kate Cook in Buriton, Southampton in 1887 he was a Corporal. Presumably travelling with the army, they had two daughters in India, one of whom died there. When they returned to England, they lived in Army Cottages in Kempsey, Worcestershire, presumably based at the Barracks there and later moved to Saltley in Birmingham where Edward was working as a Commissionaire at the Motor Works in 1911. By 1923, they had returned to the Portsmouth area where Edward died in 1923 and Kate in 1936. Their surviving daughter Edith married George Henry Day in Portsmouth in 1915 and she was still living there until she died on 27 May 1941, listed among civilian war deaths there so possibly killed in bombing raids on Portsmouth. She and George Day appear to have had three sons, the first born in Leicester. I wonder whether she had gone back to her Rudkin family there? Pure speculation, of course!
Edith Ann Rudkin went into service and in 1891 she was living at 6 Siviters Lane, Rowley as a domestic servant to Dr Beasley. In 1901 she was still described as a domestic servant but was visiting a friend in Dudley. In 1908 she married a widower Charles Upton in Aston, Birmingham and in the 1911 Census they were living in Hednesford, Cannock with his two daughters from a previous marriage and Edith May, their own daughter born in 1910. Sadly little Edith May died in 1915. Edith Ann was a widow according to the 1921 Census and she died in Cannock in 1942, aged 72.
John Rudkin, my starting point for this family mini-study, had married Harriett Levett in 1894 at Holy Trinity, Old Hill and they had four children. In 1901 they were still living in Perry’s Lake with their son Lawrence (1895-1951) who was six. John was working as a hewer in a coal mine.
By 1911, they had left Rowley and were living in Rugeley Road, Hednesford, Cannock – yes, the same place as John’s sister Edith, nineteen miles from Rowley, according to Google maps. Whether Edith moved to be near John or vice versa, I don’t know but they were living less than a mile apart. By this time John and Harriett also had Edith (1904-1979), Mary(1907-1927) and WilliamThomas (1909 – ?). John was still working as a miner or Stallman at the pit face and now his son Lawrence, aged 16, was also working in the pit as a driver (underground).
In 1921, John and Harriett had moved again and were living in Kingsbury, near Meriden, the other side of Birmingham. All their children were still at home and again both John and Lawrence were working as miners at the Kingsbury Colliery.
Most of the children stayed in the Meriden area from then on, although it is possible that the youngest William Thomas settled elsewhere as he joined the Navy in 1927 and his service details note him as having been traced for his pension in 1949, though I cannot find any other definite information for him.
John and Harriet appear only to have had two grandchildren, one of them Betty, (the illegitimate daughter of Lawrence) who was born in Tamworth in 1926 and emigrated to the USA with her American husband in 1947, perhaps a War Bride. The only photograph I have been able to find of the Rudkin family in this country is of a young Lawrence in what looks like WWI army uniform, which was uploaded to Ancestry and was marked on the back as ‘Betty’s father’. Her application for naturalisation in the USA gives Rudkin as another name so it appears that this was an acknowledged connection. So the Rudkin genes stretch over the Atlantic, it seems.
Lawrence Rudkin as a young soldier, possibly in WW1. Copyright unknown.
John’s daughter – another Edith – had married William C Monk in Sutton Coldfield in 1941 and had one son Peter in 1942 so he was their only grandson.
The Rudkins in Rowley
So none of the Rudkin family stayed in Rowley Regis, mostly they and their descendants ended up in Warwickshire or further afield and the name will be unknown to most Rowley folk.
So why have I written in such detail about a family who had such a brief encounter with the village?
I have recently been reading some books by Gillian Tindall who is known, according to reviews, as a superb ‘micro-historian’. She is someone who writes about small communities, individual people, a village, a single house – in great detail. Her writing is fascinating and I learn from her writing constantly. The first book of hers which I read was ‘The house by the Thames’ and it is all about a single very old house which survives even now, between the Globe theatre and the Tate Modern on the Embankment in London. It is most interesting and I have learned much about the history of the area and the people who lived there. (I now have three other books by Gillian Tindall waiting to be read!) But it was in the first pages of this book that I read about the philosophy which drives her research and this sang to my heart. She wrote in the first chapter:
“the vast majority of men and women in every time do not leave behind them either renown or testimony. These people walked our streets, prayed in our churches, drank in our inns or in those that bear the same names, built and lived in the houses where we have our being today, opened our front doors, looked out of our windows, called to each other down our staircases. They were moved by essentially the same passions and griefs that we are, the same bedrock hopes and fears, they saw the sun set over Westminster as we do. Yet almost all of them have passed away from human memory and are still passing away, generation after generation –.”
“Witness to the living, busy complex beings that many of these vanished ones were tends to be limited to fleeting references on pages of reference books that are seldom opened. At the most, there may be a handwritten note or a bill, perhaps a Will, a decorative trade-card, a few lines in a local newspaper or a report from a long obsolete committee, possibly an inscription on a tomb. There may perhaps be a relevant page or two in an account of something quite other, or a general social description which seems to fit the specific case.
Scant evidence, you may say, of lives as vivid and as important to the bearers as our own are to us today. But by putting these scraps together, sometimes, with luck, something more coherent is achieved. Pieces of lost lives are genuinely recovered. Extinct causes clamour for attention. Forgotten social groups coalesce again. Here and there a few individual figures detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned them. They walk slowly towards us. Eventually we may even see their faces.”[i]
‘Neither renown nor testimony’
In Rowley Regis today, of course, there are very few old buildings and our ancestors did not live in our particular houses, look out of our windows or call down our stairs. But the landscape they gazed on has not changed so much and indeed with much of the polluting heavy industry gone or cleaned up, the local scene is perhaps now closer in appearance to the pre-industrial landscape our earlier ancestors would have known. They, too would have gazed across the valley to the Clent hills and been able to spot distant church steeples and the ruins of Dudley Castle, still visible today.
While I was researching Harriet Levett and her marriage to John Rudkin, I had realised that John had grown up in Tippity Green and Perry’s Lake, in the heart of the Lost Hamlets, and that his father had been married to not one but two Rowley girls, the older of whom had borne him four children in Rowley. The children had all died as infants, buried, like Ann herself, in Rowley Regis at St Giles and only one of her children Sarah J had grown to adulthood. Sadly this would not have been an unusual situation with babies in those days. Then I realised that, looking at other Rudkin family trees on Ancestry, that they only listed William Rudkin’s marriage to the second Parkes daughter Mary Jane. Poor Ann Parkes and her infant children had been lost in the mists of time.
I hope that my One Place Study is helping to make the history of the lost hamlets, with the complex web I keep finding of family relationships and intermarriages, more coherent , as Gillian Tindall suggests is possible. And I hope, in particular, that this piece has helped to preserve the memory of this family, and especially of Ann Parkes, (1835-1863), daughter of Joseph and Mary Parkes of Tippity Green. This ordinary and short-lived Rowley girl, has previously been lost in that ‘dark and silence’ to which Gillian Tindall refers, and, although we may not see Ann’s face, I hope that she has at least ‘walked slowly a little way towards us’.
[i] Copyright Gillian Tindall – The House on the Thames, published by Pimlico 2007. ISBN: 9781844130948
rowleyregislosthamlets.co.uk 
