Category: The local history of the Lost Hamlets

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 3 – the older girls, Mary and Ann

MARY HILL (1801-1882)

Mary Hill was the oldest daughter of Timothy and Maria Hill. She was baptised on 12 January 1804, at St Giles on the same day as her next sister Ann. The Register entry notes that she was 2 years and 6 months old so must have been born in mid 1801. It appears that this branch of the Hills could be a little haphazard about getting their babies baptised!

The next event of note in her life was her marriage on 17 November 1823 to Henry Whittall, which took place at Tipton St Martin church. It was quite a grand building, erected in 1795-1797, so probably quite a contrast with the already dilapidated St Giles.

Henry was a Rowley Regis man, too and was baptised at St Giles on 24 March 1805, the son of James Whitehall and Phebe Downing, both good Rowley surnames. Whitehall and Whittall along with several variations seem to be interchangeable in records at this period. There were several weddings at Tipton involving the Hill family at about this time and Henry Whittall is named in many family weddings of the Hill family as a witness.

The Whittall name, I know, has persisted in the village. There was a Rita Whittall in my year at primary and secondary school so Whittalls were certainly still around in the 1960s and may well still be. This is perhaps not surprising as by my reckoning Henry had many male descendants who remained in the village and immediate area.

Henry and Mary Whittall had nine children: Frederick (1825-1915), Sarah (1825-1893), Eliza (1828-1829), Emma (1831-1896), James (1832-1879), Eliza (1835-1883), Thomas (1837-1903), Mary (1840-1853) and Fanny (1844-1913).  

The family lived in Perry’s Lake in the 1841 Census where Henry was listed as a nailer. Alas, in 1848, Henry died, of dropsy according to a note in the Burial Register, and he was buried at St Giles on 19 November 1848, aged only 48, leaving Mary to raise their children. Mary continued to live in Perry’s Lake until her own death in 1882.

Of their children:

Frederick Whittall (1824-1915)

Frederick was born in late in 1824 or very early in1825, he was baptised on 16 January 1825 at Dudley St Thomas. He married Mary Ann Whitmore in Oldbury in  1846 and they had six children Ann (1848), Henry (1850), Eliza (1853), Joseph (1857, Mary (1863 and William (1866). They lived in Gadd’s Green at first but by had moved to Blackheath by 1861, living in 1871 in the Causeway and then in in Powke Lane for the  next three censuses. Mary Ann died in 1895 and was buried at St Giles. Frederick re-married in 1897at Holy Trinity, Old Hill to widow Sarah Adams, nee Lowe. Sarah had been married three times before Frederick and had several children with each of her previous husbands, though none with Frederick – her family tree is, shall I say, very complicated… Frederick Whittall died in 1915 and was buried at St Giles on 6 April 1915, at the age of 91, his abode given as 46 Oldbury Road..

Sarah Maria Whittall

Sarah was born in 1826, or at least baptised on 26 March 1826 at Dudley St Thomas. She married John Blakeway, on 10 August 1845 when she was just 20, at Christ Church Oldbury, in 1851 they were living in Hawes Lane. They had five children, William (1848), Sarah Ann (1850), James (1857), Henry (1860) and Samuel (1861). John Blakeway was a Boiler Maker or Boiler Smith and this may have been why the family moved to Ross by 1861 and later to High Street Blackheath to be nearer his employment. Sarah died in 1894, John in 1906, both were buried at St Giles.

Eliza Whittall  

Poor little Eliza was baptised on 1 Feb 1829, at Dudley St Thomas. She died of ‘chin cough’ (whooping cough) and was buried at St Giles on 2 August 1829, aged 1.

Emma  Whittall 

Emma was baptised on 12 Sep 1830, at Dudley St Thomas. She married William Jarvis, a widower, on 28 June 1852 , also at Dudley. They had seven children: James (1853), Henry (1854), William (1856-1861), Thomas (1859), Caroline (1861), Mary (or Polly) (1863), and David (1872). The family lived with Emma’s mother in Perry’s Lake in 1861. In 1871 William Jarvis appears to have been living in a lodging house in Dudley. He does not appear again in censuses with his family and must have died between the 1881 and 1891census, as Emma was described as a widow in the latter but I have not been able to identify an exact date for his death. So it seems likely that Emma and William were separated. Emma continued to live in Perry’s Lake until her death in 1896. I have not been able to find burial details for either Emma or William.

James Whittall 1832-1879

James was baptised on 12 August 1832 at Dudley St Thomas. He married Caroline Hill, his first cousin by his mother’s brother Joseph Hill, on 15 May 1865 at Dudley St Thomas. They lived in Siviters Lane where they had two children Eliza Whittall (1870) and John Fred Whittall (1875). Caroline had also had an illegitimate child Joyce before her first marriage in 1857, and a daughter Patience in 1859 by her first husband Joseph While (1833-1861). James Whittall died in 1879, aged 47 and was buried at St Giles. He had not moved beyond Rowley Village. Caroline subsequently married John Payne in 1881when she moved to Hackett Street, Blackheath, and later Powke Lane. 

Eliza Whittall

Eliza was baptised on 29 March 1835 at Dudley St Thomas. She married Abraham Parish at Dudley St Thomas on 13 November 1853 and in 1861 they were still living in Tippity Green. They had seven children George (1855), Alice (1857), Sarah (1859), Charles Thomas (1860), Eliza (1864), Abraham (1866) and Mary Maria (1871). By 1871 the Parishes had moved to Grout Street, West Bromwich where they kept a pub and they remained there until Eliza’s death in 1883, aged 49. She was buried in West Bromwich.

Thomas Whittall (1837-1903)

Thomas was baptised on 24 January 1836 at St Giles. He married Phoebe Cole (also from Perry’s Lake) in 1861 and they had ten children: Kate or Katherine (1862), James (1863), Elizabeth (1866), Mary J (1869), John (1871), Edward (1874), Alice (1877), William (1878), George (1881) and Isaac (1884).  In 1871 they were living in Siviters Lane, until 1891 when they were at 89 Rowley Village. In 1901, their address was shown as 87 The Village, so they may have moved one door along or the houses may have been re-numbered. Or the enumerator may have made a mistake! Phoebe died in 1900 and was buried at St Giles on 10 January 1900, having just seen in the new century. She was 57.  Thomas died in 1903 and was buried at St Giles on 16 December 1903, aged 64, his address still given as 87 Rowley village. Another branch of the family who did not move beyond Rowley village.

Mary Whittall

Mary was baptised on 6 December 1840 at St Giles. In 1841 and in 1851 Censuses she was at home with her family, in 1851 at the age of 10, already listed as a nail maker, no doubt supporting her by then widowed mother. So there would have been six of them nailmaking, a crowded workshop if they were all working together at home. Mary died and was buried on 8 May 1853 at St Giles, aged 13 and Perry’s Lake, according to the Burial Register which added that hers was an ‘Accidental Death’. Curiously her death was registered in the West Bromwich Registration area, not Dudley so she did not die at home. The West Bromwich Registration area covered Oldbury so her death may not have been in West Bromwich itself. I have not been able to find any reports of an Inquest or details of this accident and am resisting the temptation to buy her death certificate!

But if anyone knows what happened to poor Mary, I would love to hear about it!

Fanny Whittall

Fanny was the youngest child of Henry Whittall and Mary Hill. She was baptised on 19 July 1846 at St Giles and would have been only two years old when her father died in 1848. In 1841 and in 1851 Censuses she was at home with her family, in 1851 when she was six, she was the only member of the family who was not listed as nail making but nor was she listed as a scholar so presumably she was not attending school.  By 1861, still living at home in Perry’s Lake, Fanny was listed as a nailer although her older brothers James and Thomas had now become miners, rather than nailers.

On the 25 Dec 1863 Fanny married Henry Thomas Hemmings (later known as Thomas) at Dudley St Thomas. Their first three children Sarah Ann Hemmings (1864), Martha Susannah (1867) and Harry (1870) were born in Rowley Regis but by 1871 the family were living in Bordesley, Birmingham and their next two children Eliza J (1872) and John T (1875) were born there. The family remained in Birmingham, in Deritend and later Aston for the rest of their lives, Fanny dying there in 1913 and Henry Thomas in 1919.

Later years of Mary Whittall, nee Hill

Mary’s age is correctly stated in the censuses in 1841, 1851, and 1861. But in 1871, when her daughter Emma and her family were living with her, Emma was shown as the Head of the household and Mary’s age as 74. So a few years had been added. In 1881, Mary was now listed as the head of the household, although Emma was still living in the house and this time Mary’s age was shown as 84. Which was at least consistent with the previous census.

It seems to me that these small changes merely reflect the fluid living arrangements which seem to have been a theme of the Hill family in the hamlets. In the following year, when Mary was buried at St Giles, the Burial Register lists her age as 88 so she had acquired yet another four years in only one year! But the truth is that in those days people did not generally keep such accurate records of their age and some may not have known their exact age. In fact Mary was 81. But she was one of the several Hill sisters who lived long lives.

So Mary and Henry Whittall gave Timothy and Maria Hill nine grandchildren, the vast majority of whom stayed very close to home, in the hamlets, in Rowley or Blackheath. And of those seven grandchildren who lived to child-bearing age, they in turn gave Timothy and Maria forty two great grandchildren, the majority again staying in the area.

ANN HILL (1804-1890)

Ann Hill was baptised (and probably born) in 1804.

Ann had an illegitimate son John in 1826 and another, Timothy in about 1830. They are the subject of a separate article.

She married David Priest on 30 November 1830 at Old Swinford. At first I had my doubts about whether this was the right Ann Hill but checking the entry on FreeREG I saw that one of the witnesses was her brother-in-law Henry Whittall, popping up again, and by 1841 David and Ann were living in Gadd’s Green, in what appears to have been an extended family group of various Hills and in-laws.

Copyright unknown, old postcard.

David Priest gives his place of birth as Rowley Regis but he is another whose age varies from one record to another. In the 1841 Census, his age was shown as 35 which means that, since adult ages were rounded down in that census to the nearest 5 years, that he could have been anything from 36-39, giving a birth year between 1802 and 1805. In the 1851 Census his age is given as 40 which points to 1811but this is very much the outrider and may have been a recording error. In 1861 his age is shown as 58 which gives a birth year of about 1803. His death registration and burial record in 1869 show his age as 65 which brings us back to 1804.

There is only one baptism for a David Priest in this period that I have been able to find and this was for a David who was baptised at the Park Lane Chapel, Cradley Heath in 1807, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth Priest of Rowley Regis, Elizabeth nee Sidaway. Entries in this nonconformist register include people from Dudley and Kingswinford so it seems that either people travelled to Cradley to worship or the Minister travelled around the area, baptising children when he visited, rather than immediately after their birth, as tended to happen in the Church of England. Another child of Joseph and Elizabeth, Abraham, was baptised in 1814 and recorded in the same register, with, again, the abode of the parents given as Rowley Regis. To add to the confusion, it appears that there was another Joseph and Elizabeth Priest couple in Rowley Regis one or perhaps two generations earlier. And, of course, they all used the same names for their children…

Ann and David Priest had five children listed in censuses: Timothy –see separate article- (1830-1873), William (1832-1907), Mary Maria (1834-1925), Elizabeth (1836-1858), and Ann (1841-1926). As described in a separate article Timothy was Ann’s son but almost certainly not David’s.

David Priest died in 1869 and was buried at St Giles on 28 July 1869, aged 65 and of Gadd’s Green. Ann lived in Gadd’s Green her whole life, until her death in 1890. She was buried on 16 February 1890, the burial register entry says that she was 88 and her abode Gadd’s Green.

Of their children:

William Priest (1832-1907)

William married Mary Bowater (1831-) on 28 November 1864 at Dudley St Thomas, and then moved to Dog Lane (later known as Doulton Road) where they lived with his in-laws. Mary had already had an illegitimate son William in 1855 and a daughter Elizabeth in 1860, father or fathers unknown. William remained living in this road until his death in May 1907, when he was buried at St Giles, aged 75. He and Mary had four children – Sarah Jane (1865), John (1867), Ellen (1869) and Sarah (1872).  

Mary Maria Priest (1834-1925)

Mary who is also been mentioned in the article about John and Timothy Hill, married Reuben Ingram, on 18 December 1853, a marriage witnessed by her half-brother Timothy Hill and Hannah, whose marriage Mary and Reuben had witnessed in the same church just three months earlier. Reuben and Mary had eight children: Elizabeth (1859), Jane (1860), John (1861), Mary (1864), Robert (1867), Reuben (1868), Hannah (1873) and Ann (1875).

In 1861 Reuben and Mary were living with their children Elizabeth and John, with Mary’s parents David and Ann Priest in Gadd’s Green. They were still in Gadd’s Green in 1871, though no longer with Mary’s parents. In 1881 they were in Perry’s Lake, as they were in 1891 and 1901. In 1911 their address is shown as 15 Tippity Green but as the previous address shows in census returns as the first house in Perry’s Lake, it may well have been the same house! That was also the address shown in the Burial Register when Reuben was buried on 30 May 1919, aged 86. Mary Maria outlived Reuben by a few years and was buried at St Giles on 20 November 1925, ‘aged 92, of Tippity Green’ (the Burial Register actually has Perry’s Lake added in brackets so their house was apparently right on the border, I suspect that there was no gap between the two settlements!).

Elizabeth Priest (1836-1858)

Elizabeth was one of the few Hill girls not to live to a great age. She died of Typhus Fever in March 1858, of Gadd’s Green, aged 22 and was buried at St Giles on 7th March.

Ann Priest (1841-1926)

Ann had a daughter Sarah Ann who was baptised on 24th August 1862 and another daughter Phoebe who was baptised on 16th November 1865, at St Giles with their abode given as Gadd’s Green.  Both daughters appear in the 1871 Census, living with Ann and her mother at Gadd’s Green. Also in the house as a lodger is Joseph Leech, a farm labourerwhose place of birth was shown as Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. Ann married Joseph Leech on 15th February 1874 at Dudley St Thomas.

Ann’s illegitimate daughter Sarah Ann Priest married Joseph Westwood Smith in 1885 (witnesses Reuben Ingram and Phoebe Priest, just in case I was wondering whether this was the right Sarah Ann!) and they had five children, living in Perry’s Lake and Tippity Green thereafter, within the Hill stronghold.

Her other illegitimate daughter Phoebe Priest  married Edward Hopewell or or Oakwell or Brooks in 1890 at Reddal Hill. They had four daughters. They lived in Gadds Green, (with Phoebe’s mother Ann and her husband Joseph Leech) and Tippity Green until Phoebe’s death, at the age of 50 in 1916. They lived in Ross and Shepherds Fold. Readers of previous posts may remember that I did a piece on the Hopewells/Oakwells in the early days of this blog. At that time, I did not think that I had any connection with this family – but I was wrong.

After her  marriage, Ann and Joseph Leech had two sons Joseph Richard in 1875 and David in 1878. Sadly they both died and were buried at St Giles on the same day 10th February 1878, aged 3 and 1.

Without buying the death certificates it is not possible to know why these infants died at the same time although there are various possibilities, including childhood illnesses such as measles, diphtheria and whooping cough which frequently proved fatal in those days.

Ann and Joseph Leech’s daughter Ellen was born shortly afterwards in the July/Aug/Sept quarter of 1878. Fortunately she survived infancy but I see that on the 1911 Census there is a note that she had a ‘crippled leg’ which she had had all her life.  Perhaps this was why Ellen never married and she died quite young at the age of 35 and was buried at St Giles on the 13th December 1913, when her abode was given as Tippity Green.

The grandchildren and great-grandchildren tally again

So Ann and David Priest gave Timothy and Maria Hill five grandchildren, the vast majority of whom stayed very close to home, in the hamlets, in Rowley or Blackheath. And of those five grandchildren who lived to child-bearing age, they in turn gave Timothy and Maria twenty-eight great grandchildren, the majority again staying in the area. Making seventy great-grandchildren from these two sisters and more to come! I wonder how they were able to keep track…

The Hill family in the Lost Hamlets – so far!

I think these figures show why tracing and documenting even this one branch of the Hill family is such an undertaking and how very close to the area of the Lost Hamlets most of them stayed – the grandchildren may not have borne the name of Hill if they were descended from the girls but it becomes ever clearer to me as I research that apparently unconnected neighbours and family groups were quite often siblings and cousins, once the web is untangled. Essentially it appears that a majority of the residents of Gadd’s Green in the mid and late 1800s were related in some way to the Hill family! And other descendants clustered in Siviters Lane and Ross in later years, again living next door to cousins or siblings.

I have still to post on Timothy and Maria Hill’s other children Elizabeth, Jane, Joseph and Samuel Hill, all of whom also had children. But these two sisters have provided enough material for one article so the story will be continued in the next instalment, on Ann’s illegitimate sons John and Timothy!

War Time Memories and VE Day celebrations

In the late 1970s, I persuaded my mum to write down her memories of her life. I was so glad she did this as within a few years she developed dementia and lost all of this. These are my mum’s vivid memories of life in Blackheath, during the war and on the celebrations locally when the war ended.

Strictly, this is a little self-indulgent because it is not limited to the lost hamlets area but she mentions the gun emplacement and army camp on Turner’s Hill so I’m sneaking it in. And I think it gives a very personal and vivid account of what life was like then.

The picture of Mum is the one my father carried with him throughout his service as a Sapper (Royal Engineers), slightly dog eared but treasured.

War Time and VE Day Memories by Hilda Hopkins

During the war, each Friday night, I, together with Stella Hancock, Mabel Hooper and Mrs Southall, slept at the local clinic ‘on duty’ in case of air-raids. We were supplied with biscuits and a drink for supper-time and slept on camp beds with blankets. We had our personal Gas Masks which everyone carried around in those days, disguised in boxes with shoulder straps.

We laid out First Aid Equipment in case of air raids, there were de-contamination showers in case of gas attacks. There were air raids most nights and some in daytime. There were casualties and local people were killed, quite a few, but in our clinic area there was nothing like that.

At this time, men at home worked all day and some of them then ‘fire-watched’ or were Air Raid Wardens, all night, as we did, as part of a great rota. Often a policeman or Air Raid Warden would pop in to see if all was well and to see also if our blackout was secure. A cup of tea was always appreciated.  We were each paid 10/- (Ten shillings, 50p in today’s money) for a night’s ‘duty’.

Turner’s Hill, the highest hill for miles around, was a gun battery, and a military camp. The guns from here could be heard for miles. There was a wonderful camaraderie during these times.

There were air raids and very often people had built air raids in their gardens. One evening, I was in the Rex Cinema when the screen notice said there was an air raid, in case anyone wished to leave. Some did but most people stayed. It appeared that incendiary bombs had been dropped, some on the cinema, and quite a few local people were killed, some at Rowley, near to the Grammar School, and one lady in Green Lane.

Copyright: Glenys Sykes, not to be used without my specific permission.

1945

It must have been very late in the evening that the Radio News reported that the War was over – because we were all in bed at home and John’s sister Alice came along to Birmingham Road  and ‘knocked us up’ (a real Black Country expression – used to get workmen up in the early hours). Off I went with Alice to join a procession of ‘Blackheathans’, some with torches and all singing and calling out to each other with joy! We marched to Regis Road and walked up waking people up all the way with happy singing as we went along, the younger folk among us very quickly. It was so sudden – I just couldn’t believe it that the war was really over! The throng was led on and on, walking at will through blacked out streets, using our ‘Ever Ready’ torches as we sang our way and the atmosphere was so full of joy and for some sleepyheads like me a real awakening in every way. We circled the town and woke people up who were still in bed. Everyone was so excited. The joy was intense – we sang, we shouted and walked and walked – it seems like a dream now.

On the Radio news next morning all was happily confirmed and we weren’t alone in our carousing – it happened everywhere, I believe. The day folk had longed for for dreary hard worrying years had come.

VE (Victory in Europe) Day was formally announced on radio and in newspapers to be joyfully celebrated at a later date with great happy crowds, all over our land. Joyce Goreham, Ruth Gallagher and I went off by bus to Birmingham and met there – I never knew quite how because in the city thousands of people, young, old – all wildly  happy – were dancing and singing. I am sure Queen Victoria’s statue smiled at this sight – Victoria Square will never look like this again. We did manage to meet Josie, Kathy’s sister who had previously booked theatre tickets for us. All we had to do was fight our way there through crowded and thronging streets. Through the human mass, singing or just being literally carried along by the excited crowds. Bells rang, crowds shouted and sang for sheer joy. Kathy and Josie had a brother who would now be coming home soon – each one in that massive crowd had someone to come home, sooner or later. This night in a blaze of light in Victoria Square (we hadn’t seen lights like this for years!) was a mighty outpouring of joy and thankfulness after so many years of wondering and waiting – now we knew loved ones would, in time, be coming home.

There was dancing and singing in the city streets, streams of happy people in a great surge of unbridled joy. People climbed lamp-posts to shout and sing, strangers joined hands and danced around in small groups – a very emotional and exciting time I will ever remember.

And the war was over, a new era ahead, a time of homecoming and home making. A new beginning for each person and every nation and Peace in our time, always.

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 2 – Benjamin Hill

Timothy and Maria Hill had several children and for many years I have thought that Benjamin was the first of them. Now I am not so sure this is quite correct!

I have not been able to find a baptism for Benjamin Hill. The baptism of his sister Mary Hill took place on 12 January 1804 at St Giles, Rowley Regis when she and her younger sister Ann were baptised. Mary was noted in the entry in the baptisms register to be ‘2years six months old’ which means that she must have been born in the middle of 1801, which would have been almost exactly nine months after Timothy Hill married Maria Hipkiss. Which, in turn, was only three months or so after the death of Ann Priest. So Benjamin must have been born at least nine months before that – in 1800 or before.

At the time of his death in 1844, Benjamin’s age was given as 44 which again takes us back to 1800.  I noted in my first piece on the Hill family that it appeared that Timothy and Ann had no children. But supposing that after all those years without children, Ann – at the age of thirty-five – actually gave birth to a son in 1800, and died in or after childbirth? This was before Civil Registration began in 1837 so sadly I have no way of checking. Could this – with the trauma of her death and the need for Timothy to care for this newly born son- account for why Benjamin was apparently not baptised? And why Timothy re-married so quickly – to provide his son with a mother?  And was it possible that one reason that Benjamin lived a distance from the rest of the Hill family was that he was not Maria’s son and not particularly welcome? Pure speculation but possible.

The first documentary evidence of Benjamin’s existence is in 1821 when he married Ann Williams in Halesowen. One of the witnesses to this marriage was a Timothy Hill, the other was a George G Fiddian. (There are numerous instances of Fiddians acting as witnesses to marriages in Halesowen around this time so he was not likely to be a family member. The presence of Timothy Hill at this marriage is my strongest indication that I have Benjamin in the correct family. But I may be completely wrong, in which case all that follows is completely irrelevant to the Hill family of Gadds Green. But may be of general interest anyway.

In the 1841 Census Benjamin’s occupation is shown as a ‘cole miner’ and his age given as forty. He is living with Ann and their children Joseph, then 18, Timothy, then 15, Mary, then 12 and Benjamin, aged 8. All of these are regular Hill Christian names. Their address was New Street which was in Old Hill. So there were two odd things here. The first is that usually this branch of the Hills stuck pretty close to Turners Hill area, as will be shown by later pieces on Timothy and Maria’s other children. The second unusual thing is that Benjamin was a coal miner whereas most of the Hill family were nailers.

However, I found a newspaper report which may be relevant, (although there were two other Benjamin Hills in the area in 1841, only one other was described as a nailer), so it is possible that this case does not concern this Benjamin Hill at all.

The article appeared in the Worcestershire Chronicle, dated 24 January 1839. This stated, under the Police Reports,

“Richard Mountford charged Benjamin Hill, nailer, with embezzling iron he had taken out to work into nails. Hill stated, in his defence, that the plaintiff had induced him to leave another master to work for him, and had shortly afterwards given up business, when he was compelled to dispose of his stock to support his family, and afterwards to go to the workhouse; he was ordered to work in the stock 19 quarters in 19 weeks.”

This report throws up various issues.

Who was Richard Mountford?

Richard Mountford was listed in a report in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette in 1845 as a supporter of the proposed Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stour Valley Railway, described a Stourbridge businessman merchant, and was living in Coalbournbrook, Ambleside in the 1841 Census, his occupation given as a nail factor which matches the occupation referred to in the court case. But it does imply that he had not given up his nail business as Benjamin Hill had claimed.

There are a few Mountfords in Rowley Regis itself in censuses, though generally not apparently of high status. There was at one time a Mountford House in Siviter’s Lane, for many years the Doctor’s residence and surgery, now the site of a new housing development. Perhaps the Mountfords built the original house?

However, nail factors would have bought nails from all over the area although presumably most workers were accustomed to dealing with particular individuals, (very possibly in family traditions) which would be why Benjamin Hill referred to being induced to leave his previous nail master.

I wonder whether, if this was our Benjamin Hill, Benjamin’s former master refused to deal with him again or whether his family had fallen out with him off as a result of this case. It may be that he simply could not find work as a nailer after this which may be why he became a miner, moving to Old Hill which was nearer the pit at Five Ways, Cradley Heath where he was working. However, when Benjamin’s oldest son Joseph was married at St Giles in April 1845, Joseph gave his father’s occupation as a nailer, so Benjamin, despite his death in a mine, had been a nailer at the time of the court case in 1839, so for most of Joseph’s life and Joseph obviously still thought of him as a nailer. But it is also possible that Benjamin worked as a miner in the daytime and still as a nailer when he got home, this was not uncommon as a way to increase income.

However the move to Old Hill came about, Benjamin stayed in Old Hill after this for the rest of his life and his children also stayed there. Other than Benjamin’s burial at St Giles, which was, in any case, still the parish church for Old Hill at this time, there is no evidence of any later contact between Benjamin and the Hill family in Gadd’s Green.

Richard Mountford might have had a liking for litigation against his workers. I found another report that in 1841 he had indicted a Richard Sutton for feloniously damaging a steam engine’ but this case was dismissed by the Magistrate and a verdict of Not Guilty was recorded.

The Dudley Wood Colliery Disaster

On the 19 October 1844, at the Dudley Wood Colliery, Benjamin Hill, aged 44, was amongst eleven miners killed in an explosion at the mine.

This colliery was situated between Netherton and Darby End, as shown on this map.

Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

This map dates from somewhar later than this incident and the mine is marked No.2, so may not be the exact mine, which may perhaps have been on the waste land opposite.

This photograph shows a picture of buildings on Dudley Wood Road, taken in about 1905-7, and showing the buildings affected by subsidence due to coal mining, some of the houses leaning backwards, the whole area must have been terribly undermined.

Copyright Staffordshire PastTrack, Albert Henry Yelland.

A report in the Birmingham Evening Mail on 28th October gives details of the inquest, held at the Five Ways, Cradley Heath, on seven of the miners including Benjamin, the other miners must have lived elsewhere and some were the subject of a separate inquest held at Lye Waste. Other miners killed, according to newspaper reports, were William Brookes(aged 25), Thomas Botfield (aged 30), William Weaver (aged 10), and Joseph Bennett (22), John Evans (27), James Roberts(19) and William Parkes (unable to find any death registration for this name). There had been seventeen miners working in the pit that morning, the other six survived with burns and all but one were thought likely to recover. Both Richard Scriven, aged 64, the mine ‘butty’ and his son Thomas, aged 21 were also killed in the explosion.

The injured men were Thomas Evans (badly injured and not expected to survive), Benjamin Gray, Thomas and Joseph Wright (brothers), Thomas Pearson and Emanuel Hill. Some of the names appear to be incorrect in some reports but I have checked them against death registrations and entered the correct ones here, in case any readers might have family who were affected by this tragedy.

It could indeed have been worse. Also working below ground, some 16 yards below the explosion were several men employed in getting ironstone (this part of the Black Country was known for having all the materials required for iron working – ironstone, coal and clay – in layers, one above the other). When they heard the explosion above, these men instantly got into an empty skip (or basket) which happened to be at the bottom, and ‘were drawn up to light and life; had they remained a short time longer, death would have ensued from the foul air descending to the mine in which they were at work’. It was clearly a powerful explosion. The report adds ‘One skip, which was descending a shaft at the time the explosion occurred, on which was a bottle of beer, was blown into the air an immense height; the bottle was afterwards found more than 200 yards from the pit’s mouth.’

The report notes that the Inquest was conducted by Mr Hinchliffe, one of the Staffordshire Coroners and noted that there was a ‘highly respectable jury’. The pit was referred to as ‘Mess’rs Pargeter and Darby’s coal-pit’. Various witnesses gave evidence, Lemuel Miles (or possibly Emanuel), of Rowley, (a miner who had been working in the pit at the time and who had reportedly checked the pit for gas with Thomas Scriven that morning), and also including the local constable Samuel Garratt, Thomas Frederick the Mine Agent who had inspected the pit for gas that morning, and George Naylor and Thomas Weaver who had assisted with the rescue and recovery of bodies. The agent gave evidence that the proprietors of the pit had spared no expense to have it properly worked and managed, so as to insure the safety of the work people and to prevent accidents.

I was interested to note, from one of the newspaper reports, that the butty Richard Scriven was in the pit at the time of the explosion because the proprietor Mr Darby had requested him to go down to fetch up some lumps of coal, presumably to examine the quality. The explosion occurred immediately Richard Scriven reached the bottom of the shaft. So Joseph Darby, the owner of the pit, was on the premises at the time and, according to one report, immediately called in medical assistance for survivors as they were brought to the surface but he does not appear to have been called as a witness to either of the inquests I have found reports of, which seems a strange omission to me.

The verdict returned at Cradley Heath was “That the unfortunate men were suffocated, scorched and burnt by the accidental explosion of a quantity of sulphuric air or gas in Mess’rs Pargeter and Darby’s coal-pit.” Benjamin’s death certificate stated, under cause of death, ‘Accident: By an explosion of Sulphuric Air or Gas in a Coal Pit: Instant.” The death was registered by the Coroner.

A report in the Worcester Herald on the Lye Inquest noted that the coal-pit ‘belonging to Mr Joseph Darby’ produced thick coal of very excellent quality and the mine has long borne the character of being among the most dangerous in this part of the country’.

The report in the ‘John Bull’ paper has an interesting note I did not see in other reports. It relates “An interesting circumstance, in connexion with this lamentable tragedy is worthy of record. Emanuel [Lemmuel] Miles, a miner employed in the pit, and not given to prayer, was noted on the morning of the accident, before going down, earnestly imploring the Divine protection from accident during the day: his prayers were granted, and though in the pit when so many of his fellows were summoned to their final account, his life was spared, to become, we trust, a wiser and better man.”

Although I can find no further reports of the outcomes of inquests, one newspaper ends their report by stating “The explosion, there can be no doubt, was caused by negligence on the part of someone, in all probability by one of the unfortunate sufferers.” I note from the reports that the explosion happened just as Richard Scriven reached the bottom of the shaft and that he was particularly badly injured, so I wonder whether, since he was only going down to collect a few lumps of coal, he took down a candle, rather than a safety lamp and ignited gas at the bottom of the shaft. There was also mention in one report of an older adjoining mine which had been blocked off with rock and soil but it was thought that this was too well sealed to allow gas to seep through. But presumably gas could leak into the mine passages from fissures in the coal at any time and gather wherever air currents – such as those caused around the shafts by rising or descending baskets – took them.

Benjamin Hill was buried at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 22 October 1844, his abode given as Lawrence’s Lane. He left his wife Ann and four children.

In the 1851 Census Ann, shown as she sometimes was as Hannah, was in Cherry Orchard, Old Hill, still in the same area as she had lived with Benjamin, along with her youngest child Benjamin and her daughter Mary (Ann) who was married to John Pritchard in 1847, and Mary’s two children Ann and Thomas. Plus two lodgers, so a fairly full house!

I have been unable to find any trace of Ann Hill after 1851, either in censuses or in death or burial records, nor in marriages (as she might have re-married). She does not appear to have been with any of her children in later censuses.

Benjamin and Ann’s children all stayed firmly in Cherry Orchard area of Old Hill for decades, with or near their siblings.

Joseph Hill (1823-1903) married Sarah Tibbetts (1828-1902) at St Giles, Rowley Regis in April 1845. They lived for at least twenty years in Cherry Orchard before moving towards Netherton and appear not to have had any children but to have raised Louisa Dalloway, Eliza’s niece, as she is in their household in 1861 and 1871. They were both buried at St Andrew’s church, Netherton.

Timothy Hill (1824-1908) married Eliza Worton (1824-1865) on 14 February 1842 at Old Swinford. They had nine children – Phebe (1844), Emmeline (1845-1847), Sarah Ann (1848-1848), Eliza (1850), Louisa (1851), Timothy (1854), Thomas (1858-1859), Joseph (1860-1862), Anne (or sometimes Hannah, like her grandmother!) (1862). Eliza died in 1865, aged  42 (and worn out, I should think, having nine children!) and was buried on 11 June at St Luke’s, Reddall Hill. On 14 August 1865, just two months later Timothy married Sarah Marsh (nee Pearson), a widow, of Halesowen Road, Reddall Hill and they had two more sons, James (1866) and Isaac (1869). With Sarah’s children Leah (1855) and Edward Marsh (1859) the house must have been pretty crowded. Sarah died in November 1899, aged 71 and was buried at St Luke’s. Timothy died in 1908, aged 78 and was also buried at St Luke’s.

Mary Ann Hill married John Pritchard (who was born in Netherton) on 30 August 1847 at Dudley St Thomas, and they also lived in Cherry Orchard until at least 1891, next door to her parents at first and two doors away from Mary Ann’s brother Benjamin and his family. They had five children: Ann Maria (1848), Thomas (1850-1851), John (1852), Mary Ann (1865) and James (1868).

Despite a lot of searching, I cannot at present find definite Death details for either Mary Ann nor John Pritchard. And neither can any of the numerous other people who have them in their trees on Ancestry. They both appear in the 1901 Census, still together in their home of many years in Cherry Orchard, then aged 74 and 73, respectively. And I cannot find either of them in the 1911 Census. There is a likely looking death and burial at Netherton for a John Pritchard of about the correct age in 1900 but since our John appears in the 1901 Census, this cannot be he. The only other likely death appears to be in 1910 in the Stourbridge Registration District but since that covers parts of Blackheath, where at least one of their children was living, this may be him. I would have to buy death certificates to be sure. That applies also to a possible death for a Mary Ann Pritchard of the correct age who died in the Dudley Registration District in 1913 but I have not found burials for either of these deaths so this remains a mystery at present.

The last child of Benjamin and Ann, another Benjamin, married Mary Steadman at Dudley St Thomas on 16 March 1856, the marriage was witnessed by John and Mary Pritchard, Benjamin’s sister and brother-in-law. In 1861, they were in Garratts Lane but by 1871 they were back with the rest of the family in Cherry Orchard where they stayed for the rest of their lives. They had eight children: Thomas (1857), John (1859), Emiline (usually known as Emily) (1861), Mary Jane (1865), Benjamin (1867), Ellen (1870), Joseph (1872) and Harriet (1875). Benjamin died in August 1913 and Mary in December 1916, both were buried at St Luke’s Church.

All of the four children of Benjamin Hill lived for years in Cherry Orchard, three of them for their whole lives. Cherry Orchard which appears to have been off Wrights Lane, so within sight of Rowley village, was not exactly the rural idyll the name might seem to indicate but was obviously ‘home’ to this branch of the Hill family.

So this is the tale of Benjamin Hill, who I believe to be connected with Timothy Hill of Gadd’s Green and Benjamin’s descendants in Old Hill. A little outside the Lost Hamlets area but within a couple of miles. More pieces will follow on Benjamin’s other siblings shortly.

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 1 or ‘The Hills are alive…’

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.

Timothy Hill (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.

[1] https://rowleyregislosthamlets.uk/2024/12/01/a-hall-house-at-gadds-green/

Pubs of the Lost Hamlets – The Wheatsheaf, Turners Hill

When, back in February 2023, I posted for the first time on the ‘I Remember Blackheath & Rowley Regis’ Facebook page about my then new One Place Study about the Lost Hamlets, I had some very encouraging responses, one of which was from Ronald Terence Woodhouse who told me that his family had been the original licensees of the Wheatsheaf and that his grandmother had lived in the first cottage going up Turner’s Hill, so right in the centre of the study area. And ever since, I have been meaning to do a piece on the Wheatsheaf. So here it is, at last.

Copyright: Mike Fenton. This shows the pub in about 1928 and the Water Tower on Turners Hill can be seen in the distance. This building was demolished soon after this and a replacement built.

The address shown in Hitchmough’s Guide [i] for the Wheatsheaf is 1, Turner’s Hill, or Darby’s Hill, Lye Cross, Four Lane’s End, Oakham, Rowley Regis. So quite which if those it is, I would not know. Probably all at one time or another. Perhaps part of the reason for this varying address is that these are all descriptions given in the different censuses, Lye Cross from 1841-1861, when the pub was managed by Benjamin Woodhouse from about 1834-1861, then by Joseph Cox from 1861-1892. Joseph Parkes was the Licensee from 1996-1904, Walter Woodall from 1911-1912, then it was managed by Howard Woodhouse in 1916 and then Thomas Woodhouse in 1919-1920. It is quite possible that the other licensees were related to the Woodhouses and Hitchmough does not have a complete list in terms of dates, but I have not looked at those families in detail at this stage.

In the 1871 Census, the pub’s address is shown as Turner’s Hill and in 1881 it is 35 Oakham, in 1901 it was 1, Turner’s Hill – Tavern – as in 1901. So this area seems to have been called various things. As late as 2022 the site was still described as 1 Turners Hill. But certainly there was a pub or tavern there at a very early date which continued until quite recently, only the Bull outlasting it.

The Wheatsheaf was situated at the junction of Portway Hill and the road which ran from Perry’s Lake up over Turner’s Hill. This area is not strictly part of the Lost Hamlets since it is not physically lost as the other hamlets have been, the area is still there although the pub has now closed. But there was a strong family spread across this area and the Turner’s Hill/Gadd’s Green/Perry’s Lake area with a lot of connections. Families from this area also often used the Dudley churches, rather than Rowley.

Benjamin Woodhouse Licensee 1834-1855)

In August 1826 and 27, August 1829 and again in August 1830 notices appeared in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette warning ‘Gentlemen’ against ‘sporting or trespassing’ on the land of various owners or they would be deemed ‘wilful trespassers. Signatories to this Notice included Benjamin and later Thomas Woodhouse, Benjamin Hadley and Thomas Smart, all names associated with Benjamin. There were similar notices relating to several other places, including Sedgley, Kings Norton and Sutton Coldfield although I do not know what gave rise to these nor whether they had any effect on the hunting /poaching and shooting parties. There was no police force as such in those days and people had to protect their land as best they could,in this instance by working together. However, it does show that at least Joseph Woodhouse was a well established landowner in this area by 1929 and the house may well have  been operating as a beerhouse or pub by then but this is uncertain.

In November 1839, an auction was held at ‘the house of Benjamin Woodhouse at the Wheatsheaf’of a small freehold estate which was situated ‘at Portway’ within two miles of Dudley, by the side of the road leading to Oldbury, Titford and Birmingham, consisting of a Farm House, Barn, Cow-house, small tenement, and four closes of rich Pasture Land, containing about eight acres, ‘in the occupation of Thomas Woodhouse’. The notice emphasised that the property was in the immediate vicinity of numerous collieries and iron works, rendering it a ‘most desirable investment’. This may have been Portway Farm or another farm on that road.

Hitchmough lists the first licensee as Benjamin Woodhouse – from 1834-1861. In the 1841 Census Benjamin was there with his wife Sarah Woodhouse (nee Smart) and an Ann Woodhouse, aged 20, all born in Staffordshire. Benjamin and Sarah appear to have been married at Handsworth in 1812.

The 1841 Census does not give relationships but from what I have been able to research, it does not appear that Ann is the daughter of Benjamin and Sarah, I have only been able to discover one child born to them, Sarah Jane who was baptised at St Giles in 1832, when they had been married for twenty years and Sarah was forty four.

Sarah Woodhouse died in March 1854, aged 66 and Benjamin in early 1855, aged 69, both buried at St Giles. So clearly he cannot have been the licensee until 1861, as Hitchmough suggests. Perhaps the dates of 1861-1892 which Hitchmough suggests for the next licensee reflect the next licence record or possibly census that Hitchmough was able to find, there is sometimes a delay in finding records of licences changing hands.

Benjamin’s Will was made in October 1854, proved in May 1855 in which he describes himself as a publican of Lye Cross, so it seems that this was definitely the right Benjamin Woodhouse. In his Will, Benjamin leaves houses to the two sons of his niece Ann (so perhaps that was who was staying with him in 1841?) but most of his assets were left in a complex Trust for the benefit of his daughter Sarah Jane.  The Trustees were his niece’s husband Enoch Hadley and Charles Cox of Oakham, both described as cattle dealers. Benjamin appears to have been quite well to do, leaving various properties and his Will leaves, amongst other things, his brewing equipment so, like many Victuallers at that time, he obviously made his own beer. But he also listed “furniture, brewing vessels, plate, linen, china, glass, books, prints, wines, liquors, consumable stores, and other household effects” amongst his possessions. Certainly it sounds like a well furnished and decorated house, I have not seen ‘prints’ listed in any other local Wills.

I began this piece fairly sure that I was not related to this family – there was not a Woodhouse to be found on my family tree with 7000 people on it. But then I found that Benjamin’s daughter Sarah Jane Woodhouse married a Major Rose – my mother’s maiden name was Rose. That started little bells ringing in my head as I have lots of Roses from Rowley on my tree. But Major Rose was from Halesowen, so not likely to be connected. It took me about ten minutes to find his father Aaron Rose, also living in Halesowen and a Gun Barrel Manufacturer – still no connection, no gun barrel makers amongst my lot. Then, in the 1851 census I saw that Aaron Rose was born in Rowley. Ah! And his parents were Moses Rose and Mary Stephenton, who were my 5xg-grandparents… okay, I am related, very distantly. Major Rose was my 1st cousin 5xremoved. I am beginning to wonder whether I am actually related to everyone living in the Lost Hamlets then…

Sarah Jane and Major had been married on 15 February 1854 at St Martins in Birmingham, where Sarah Jane was described as ‘of this parish’. This was only a few weeks before her mother died and I am slightly surprised that she was not married in Rowley. And her father’s Will went to great lengths to try to prevent her husband from benefitting  from his estate, leaving most of his assets in Trust for Sarah’s benefit. Perhaps they did not approve of the marriage. Major’s family were involved in gun making and  Benjamin Woodhouse would probably have been aware that Aaron Rose, Major’s father had been declared bankrupt in 1852. None the less, Sarah’s was a long and fruitful marriage, she and Major Rose had at least six children together, rejoicing in the names of Benjamin Woodhouse Rose (1855), Major General Rose, (1859), Sydney Herbert Rose (1861, Baron Rose (1864), Captain Rose (1866) and Sarah Jane Rose. The first two children were born in Rowley Regis (probably at the Wheatsheaf) but the later children were born in Halesowen where the family both farmed in the Frankley/Illey area and Major and his brothers continued to be much involved with gun barrel making.

On 18 April 1855, there is a notice in the Worcestershire Chronicle, stating that the transfer of the Licence for the Wheatsheaf had been sanctioned from Enoch Hadley (who was Executor for the estate of Benjamin Woodhouse) to Major Rose, Benjamin’s son-in-law.

Interestingly Hitchmough has a note that Hoof marks were reported on the roof of the Wheatsheaf in 1855!

And Major and Sarah Jane’s elder two children were born in Rowley in 1855 and 1859 so they may have stayed at the Wheatsheaf until then. In 1857 and 1858 Major Rose also took out Game Licences in Rowley Regis. But by the  1861 Census , Major and Sarah were back in Halesowen, he describing himself as an ‘ironmaster’ and certainly he remained involved with the family gun making business for many  years to come. Also living with them in 1861, apparently as a servant, was Mary Smart, born Rowley Regis, aged 28. As Sarah’s mother was a Smart, I wonder whether she was actually related to Sarah.

The Woodhouses were numerous in Oakham and Lye Cross. There were three Woodhouse families on one page in the 1841 Census. I will do more work for a Woodhouse Family Study when time permits.

The other thing which is becoming clear from my research is that families who kept pubs tended to intermarry – their children were accustomed to the life, knew how things worked, and presumably met the children of other licensees socially. Looking at the marriages of the children of Thomas several of them and their children married into families – the Bate family, the Levett family, the Roses, the Woodhouses who were farmers , maltsters or farmers and especially publicans. Even when men marrying into the family were in other occupations, such as Joseph Cox who was a farmer, and Major Rose who was a gun barrel maker (although his father had been both a maltster and a licensee earlier in his life), these men turned their hands to becoming licensees  when people were required to run the family pub. Keeping the businesses in the family!

Joseph Cox (licensee 1861-1892)

Ah, I thought – a completely different name, nothing to do with the Woodhouses then. It did take me half an hour of checking to discover that Joseph’s wife Sophia was a Woodhouse, the niece of the original Benjamin. So the Woodhouse family were still in control of the Wheatsheaf! I should not be surprised by now at how closely inter-related all the families in this area were.

In the Worcestershire Chronicle on 18th January 1860 there is a notice that a licence transfer had been permitted for the Barley Mow at Rowley from Joseph Cox to William Griffiths, presumably prior to Joseph taking over the Wheatsheaf. Hitchmough lists Joseph Cox as the licensee at the Barley Mow at Tividale from about 1855-1860, his time at the Barley Mow may have been sufficient to give him some experience in the licensed trade before taking over the Wheatsheaf.

In the 1861 Census, Joseph and Sophia were living at the Wheatsheaf with their children John, aged 6, Sarah Jane, aged 3 and Annie E aged 1, plus a house servant Sarah Rupp, aged 17 who was from Dudley.

In the 1871 Census, Joseph and Sophia were living at the Wheatsheaf with their children Eliza Ann, aged 18, John, aged 16 – a solicitor’s Clerk,  Sarah Jane, aged 13, Ann Elizabeth aged 11, plus Mary Sophia, aged 9. (I don’t know where the eldest child Eliza Ann, then 8, was in the 1861 Census, as she is not listed with the rest of the family at the Wheatsheaf and I can’t immediately find her with other relatives in the area.)

There was an inquest held at the Wheatsheaf in October 1878 and details of this appeared in the Birmingham Daily Post on the 18th October:

Birmingham Daily Post 18/10/1878

“Yesterday afternoon Mr. Edwin Hooper, coroner, held an inquest at the WHEAT SHEAF INN, Turners Hill, on the body of Joseph Woodhouse (53), a milkseller, who died under circumstances already reported.

Mrs. Woodhouse said she had been delivering milk with her husband on Monday night, and when in Gipsy Lane, on the road home, she heard a great shouting, and saw a trap loaded with men behind them. Her husband pulled more on one side, but as he did so the horse became frightened, and bolted with them. She lost consciousness, and when she recovered her husband was lying by the road side insensible. She had fallen on her shoulder, and her collar bone was broken. At the time she recovered the men in the trap were driving off faster than ever. A young man helped witness home, and brought her husband. The men were to blame for shouting so loudly and frightening the pony.

Joseph Harvey, of Tividale, said he heard five or six men in a trap driving at full speed, and shouting to Woodhouse as though they wished him to get out of the way. When the pony bolted both were thrown out, and the trap fell over. He called to the men, but they would not stop.

Police-constable Gevin said he had made full enquiries as to the men in the trap, but had not learned who they were. He received no information of the man’s death until late on Tuesday evening.

The Coroner summed up, and asked the jury if they would have an adjournment to give the police more time. There seemed no doubt but that the men would say if brought before the jury that they were simply shouting for the old man to get out of the way. The wife evidently did not seem to think much of the blame to be attached to the men, for she made no complaint, and did not inform the police of the death of her husband for a long time.

The jury then returned a verdict of Accidental Death.”

So this, although not directly related to the Wheatsheaf, was related to the Woodhouse family, one time and perhaps continuing owners of the Wheatsheaf who continued to farm throughout this period in the immediate area of Oakham/Lye Cross.

In the 1881 Census, Joseph and Sophia are still at the Wheatsheaf with son John, now a Clerk at the Colliery, rather than a Solicitor’s Clerk, and daughters Annie and Mary.

In 1891, listed as 1 Turner’s Hill, Joseph is still listed as a licensed victualler and Sophia, Annie and Mary are still living at home and unmarried.

Sophia Cox died in 1894 and Joseph Cox re-married and retired to Smethwick with his new wife where he died in 1903.

Joseph Parkes (licensee 1896-1907)

In 1901, The Licensee is Joseph Parkes, aged 60 and his wife Sarah Jane Parkes.

So far was I know, there is no connection between this couple and the earlier licensees. Parkes is such a common local name that I have not been able to narrow down any more information. So it may be that this was the point at which the family sold the pub to Thomas Williams of the Rowley Brewery. Or it may be, of course, that Joseph Parkes or his wife may have been related to the Woodhouse/Smart/Cox families and I have simply not yet found the link! As Sarah Jane is a name much used by the Woodhouse and Cox families, it was tempting to consider whether Joseph had married into those families but it appears more likely that he was the Joseph Parkes who married Sarah Jane Adams in 1862 in Quinton.

During Joseph’s tenure as licensee, Hitchmough reports an amazing procession, starting at the Wheatsheaf in  1898.

“County Advertiser 24/9/1898

“On Sunday afternoon the annual friendly societies’ Sunday service, on behalf of the hospitals, was held in a field at the back of Mountford House, Siviters Lane, Rowley, kindly lent for the occasion by Dr. J. G. Beasley. The members of various societies met at their headquarters, and were formed into a procession as below. The Blackheath Village Band started from the WHEAT SHEAF INN, Turners Hill at one o’clock, with the Church of England Friendly Society, and proceeded through Portway and Perrys Lake, calling at the BULLS HEAD INN for the Sick Club, at the WARD ARMS INN for Court Foresters’ Pride, at the KINGS ARMS INN for Lodge Working Man’s Friend. It then proceeded by way of Ross, Holly Road, Tump Road, and John Street, to the GEORGE AND DRAGON Ground. The Woodgate Brass Band had in the meantime covered its route from the OLD BUSH INN, Powke Lane, with Court Little Band of Hope, calling at the MALT SHOVEL INN for Lodge Lily of the Valley, the VINE INN for Court Mistletoe Bough, proceeding along Station Road to the RAILWAY INN for Court Britannia’s Pride, thence through Halesowen Street, Tump Road, and Hackett Street, meeting the other Courts at the GEORGE AND DRAGON Ground. A united procession was then formed, and marched to Siviters Lane, reaching the ground at three o’clock. The proceedings opened with the hymn ‘All people that on earth do dwell,’ after which the Chairman (Mr. E. Pewtress, CC) delivered a short address.

The Rev. C. W. Barnard, MA, Rector of Kings Norton, then addressed the meeting, after which the hymn ‘Lead, kindly light,’ was sung. Addresses were also delivered by the Revs. W. Hall and N. Haigh, of Blackheath.

At the close a collection was taken on behalf of the Dudley Dispensary and Birmingham Eye Hospital. It amounted to £11 9s 5d.”

What an amazing event that must have been to see, I can imagine the local children dancing happily alongside the procession. It is clear from this that many of the local pubs, including the Wheatsheaf, ran friendly societies to assist people with illness and medical expenses, in those days when there was no health service, no national insurance and when fees had to be paid for a doctor to visit.

Walter Woodall 1907-1912

In 1911 Walter Woodall (35) was listed as ‘brewer [beer], licensed victualler’ and both he and his wife Elizabeth were born in Wednesbury and, again, there is no obvious connection to the previous owners. The elder two of their children Florence (11) and Walter (5) had been born in Tipton but the youngest Harold (1) was born in Rowley.

Walter Woodall appears only to have been there for five years and the only mention of him in the Press is for the transfer of the licence for the Wheatsheaf from him to Thomas Henry Holland in 1912. Which is rather odd because the same report also notes the transfer of the licence of the Barley Mow in City Road, Oakham to the same Thomas Henry Holland! And Hitchmough does list Holland as the licensee at the Barley Mow from 1911 -1916 but does not mention Holland in relation to the Wheatsheaf. Perhaps a reporter error, as Hitchmough lists the new licensee for the Wheatsheaf in 1912 as Howard Woodhouse, succeeded in 1919-1920 by Thomas Woodhouse. Yes, the Woodhouses, after a gap of more than 50 years  (or perhaps 20 if you take into account the Cox family who were also close Woodhouse connections).

Purchase of the Wheatsheaf by Thomas Williams of the Rowley Brewery

Despite all my efforts to associate later licensees with the Woodhouse family, it may well be that in fact the pub was sold in 1896 when the Cox family retired and it is simply coincidence that Woodhouses were back in 1916. Hitchmough notes that the owner of the Wheatsheaf was T B Williams (who had taken over the Bull in about 1875 and who died in 1908) and the Rowley Brewery, followed by Thomas W Williams and Lizzie Bate, before being sold to Ansells in 1946 and subsequently Admiral Taverns.  I had noted in my piece on the Bull [ii] that T Williams, the owner there had expanded his brewing and pub-keeping activities from when he took over as licensee of the Bull and had bought both the Wheatsheaf at Turners Hill and the Grange in Rowley Village. So it appears that although the Woodhouses  were licensees in 1916, they no longer owned the pub.

Thereafter, Hitchmough  listed thesucceeding licensees as :

Howard Woodhouse 1916

Thomas Woodhouse1919-1920

Edward Harrison (1920-1929)

Frank Green (1929)

Frank Jinks (1929-1957)

Walter Raymond Harris (1957 – 1960);

Frederick William Hughes (1960 – [1965]

Frederick Brown (1968 – [ ]

C Swarbrick (1970 – [ ]

Arthur Isherwood (1981 – [ ]

Glenn Whitehouse [1988]

Sara Harvey (2015 – [ ]

Twentieth century genealogical records are much sparser than earlier ones and I have no further information about these licensees although many Rowley people will have memories of more recent ones, as customers at the pub!  The licensees in 1988, Mr & Mrs Whitehouse, complained that when the road over from Perry’s Lake over Turners Hill was closed, they lost a substantial amount of trade from Rowley Regis.

Copyright unknown. Taken in 2018, this shows the replacement pub, looking prosperous and well maintained.

The original pub was demolished in about 1930 and a replacement built behind it.  This closed permanently in 2019, like so many pubs, still described as 1 Turner’s Hill and planning permission was sought in 2022 to redevelop the site with a very modern block of flats. However I note, from the Sandwell Planning website, that the Council Officers considered that this site was an adopted open space within the Strategic Open Space & a Wildlife corridor, no decision notice or withdrawal of the application is listed and there appears to be no further progress on this application since then.

So far as I am aware, the pub building remains boarded up on site at present, another previously well used pub which has now gone.  

[1] https://longpull.co.uk/index.html [1]

[2] https://rowleyregislosthamlets.uk/2023/09/19/pubs-in-the-lost-hamlets-1-the-bulls-head/

Timber framing in the modern age

Faithful readers who ploughed through my piece about Hall Houses last week may recall that I had quite a lot to say about timber framed houses and the skills and production methods used in their construction.

So I was delighted today to read an article in the Daily Telegraph about the carpentry skills which have been used to rebuild the roof of the fire damaged Notre Dame in Paris. For anyone who has access to the online Telegraph this is the article https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/06/glutton-punishment-british-carpenter-notre-dame/

The fire at the Cathedral, in April 2019, caused extensive damage to some parts of the cathedral but the windows and bell towers, relics and art survived the fire. But the spire fell, through the roof. The things which were extensively damaged were parts of the structure, some many centuries old, that most people probably didn’t notice when they visited. But, as the Telegraph noted, “as la forêt – the latticework of timber over the nave that had supported the roof for eight centuries – had been engulfed in flames and would need rebuilding.”

In the immediate aftermath, work began on finding craftsmen with the necessary skills to re-create the timbering exactly as it was and using the same techniques as 800 years ago, and also to find the timber required. That was the task of the French equivalent of the Forestry Commission who worked with the carpenters to identify the trees required for the work. Eleven principal trusses were needed and forty five secondary trusses, each 1.4m wide and 10m high. The task of carrying out the work was given to a group specialising in heritage projects – Charpentiers sans Frontières (Carpenters without Borders) – which brings together experts to work on historical construction sites.

English carpenter Mike Dennis is one of the small number of carpenters in the world with the skill and knowledge to undertake such work. And he was already living in France. Much of the work,  according to him, had to develop from such plans and dimensions as they had available to them. The architect Remi Fromont had done a study of the roof in 2014 and his knowledge was vital. But to recreate the roof in every detail, as they were determined to do, meant drawing on many other resources, including trawling the internet for photographs visitors had taken, which might enable the carpenters to see details and angles of the trusses and tie-beams, including the carpenters’ assembly marks, to which I referred in my previous article.

Tree felling began in December of 2022 and the carpenters would go into the forests with a team from the commission to identify suitable trees for their purposes. They also had a team of blacksmiths who made tools, 13th century style axes, and gouges for them to recreate the marks on the timbers. The work was organised in much the same way as in a medieval workshop, Dennis says, the timber would arrive at the workshop, the carpenters would work on the trusses which would then be piled up ready to be sent to Paris as soon as the masons had prepared the walls. He describes the structure as “a flat pack on a massive scale”. All of the hewing  and carpentry work was done by hand, with the carpenters working out the best and quickest ways to create what was needed with hand tools, just as the carpenters would have done originally. The only modern tool used was a circular saw to cut the joints.

The pictures from the restored cathedral look absolutely wonderful but you will not see la forêt – that is hidden above the ceiling but it is there, doing the job of holding up the roof, thanks to the wonderful skills of carpenters like Mike.

Mike Dennis is on Instagram and this is his page there – there are some amazing images of cruck timbers in various old buildings as well as his own work. https://www.instagram.com/mike_dennis_craft/?hl=en

Since completing this work, Mike has apparently been involved in a project to recreate the ship on which William the Conqueror sailed to England.

It was lovely to read about this work on Notre Dame and to realise that it was the same skills, on a smaller level which created timber framed houses in our past and in our neighbourhoods, and especially good to know, as the daughter of a traditionally apprenticed and trained carpenter, that there are still dedicated craftsmen keeping these skills alive today.

A Hall house at Gadds Green?

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.

Map Copyright: https://maps.nls.uk/

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.  

[i] https://rowleyregislosthamlets.uk/2023/02/17/finger-i-the-hole/

[ii] https://rowleyregislosthamlets.uk/2023/10/15/tales-of-old-portway/ 

[iii] J Wilson Jones, The History of the Black Country, ISBN unknown, published c.1950, Cornish Brothers Ltd.

[iv] David Hay, The Grass Roots of English History ISBN: 978-1-4742-8164-5, Bloomsbury Publishing

The Lye Cross Pit Fire

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 suggest about 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).

I have not been able to find any images of this apparently famous pit, other than one which is here. https://images-cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.UIG.79727050.7055475/5069618.jpg

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.

Chipping away at the brick walls…

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!

[i] https://bcconnections.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=bcconnections&view=9&ver=659117

“The Grass Roots of English History”

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!