Work and Migration – rowleyregislosthamlets.co.uk

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.

A report in the Birmingham Evening Mail on 28^th 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.

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 1^st 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 18^th 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 18^th 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.

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, 13^th 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.

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.

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 8^th 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 18^th 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 25^th 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.

“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 19^th 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.

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!

Families of the Lost Hamlets -Yet Another John Levett

John Levett b.1847 Rowley Regis

Over the last few weeks, I have done quite a lot of work on the Levett family in Rowley Regis. After the terrible year for that family of 1902 I suspected that most of the remaining Levetts had moved away from the village. Having a quick look at the 1911 Census for Rowley to confirm my theory, I was surprised to see a John Levett aged 67 living in Springfield because he did not appear to be part of the other Levett family in any of the earlier work I had done. On searching further, I found him in Rowley and Blackheath right back to 1871, originally working as a butcher and later at the quarry. I knew that there were later generations of Levetts who were butchers in Rowley and Blackheath who did not appear to come from the branch of the family which I had been working on – was this where they came from?

This John Levett appears in his first census under this name in Rowley in 1871 and he was consistent in records thereafter over a 50 year period about his age and place of birth which showed that he was born in Rowley Regis in 1847. So who were his parents? Where was he in 1851 and 1861? He did not appear under this name in the censuses for those years.

I looked in various records for a birth or baptism of a John Levett in Rowley Regis in 1847, + or -1 year. No birth registration or baptism. Odd. Checked surrounding parishes – still no John Levett. Odder. After mulling this over for a while, it occurred to me that perhaps his birth and baptism had not appeared because he was illegitimate and his birth might have been registered in his mother’s name?

The illegitimate Johns baptised in Rowley Regis in 1847

So I checked the Baptismal Register for St Giles for 1847, looking for a child named John, illegitimate, and baptised in that year. There were only two.

John Hobbiss

One was born to Rosannah Hobbiss at Slack Hillock on 28^th February 1847 and was baptised at St Giles on 9 May 1847, according to his Birth Certificate. Although the mother’s name is given in the Baptismal Register as Louisa, I cannot find any trace of a Louisa Hobbis before or after this date and I suspect that either this is a clerical error or she lied about her name! But a John Hobbis of the right age appears in the 1851 and the 1861 Censuses, apparently the son of Rosannah Smitten, nee Hobbis, in both censuses living in Old Hill. But after that John Hobbiss is nowhere to be found. Rosannah Hobbis married Thomas Smitten at Dudley St Edmund on 25 Oct 1847 and in 1851, when they were living in Old Hill, John is described as Rosannah’s son so it appears that he was not Thomas’s as their other child Emily is specifically noted as his child. Rosannah was born in Bromsgrove so was not a Rowley or Old Hill girl. In 1861, the family were living in Cherry Orchard, Old Hill and John is again shown under the name of John Hobis, by then 14 and a coal miner. In 1871 Rosannah, by now widowed, was living in Elbow Street, Old Hill with her children by Thomas Smitten but John is no longer living with her. I have not been able to find any trace of him under that name after that date.

So this boy had associations with Slack Hillock and Halesowen Street, where the mystery John Levett was later living in 1871 and where his bride Ellen Smith lived, was only a few hundred yards away. However it is more difficult to see whether John Levett of Rowley, the farmer, had any direct connections with this area that would bring him into contact with Rosannah Hobbiss but that cannot be ruled out either.

John Moreton

The second illegitimate John was born to Emma Moreton, (who just happens to be my 2xgreat-aunt) on 16^th March 1847 at Finger-i-the-Hole and was baptised at St Giles a few weeks later on 13^th June 1847. Emma, who grew up in Perry’s Lake, married Thomas Priest (or Redfern) a couple of years later in 1850 and they had ten children together. But in the 1851 Census her four year old son John is living with them in Gadds Green under the name Priest and also in 1861, by then aged 14 and listed by the name Redfern – but that was because his stepfather Thomas Priest also used both names in different censuses, either that or it was an enumerator error, as the family was living literally between two households of Redferns – see my article on the Redferns for more on that! At that time John was a furnace labourer, a common occupation for the Redfern men. But after that John Moreton – or Priest or Redfern – depending on which name he was using at the time – is nowhere to be found on the area.

So both of these illegitimate Johns seem to disappear after the 1861 Census when they would have been 14 and going out to work – no help there, then!

However, a John Moreton, aged 22, was married at St Giles on 21 Aug 1870 to Eliza Caddick. He gave his abode as Turner’s Hill, (where the Priests/Redferns lived), and did not enter any name for his father. And the witnesses to this marriage were Solomon and Mary Ann Redfern, Solomon was only a few years older than John and was a half-brother to Thomas Priest or Redfern. He actually lived for some years next door to John so would certainly have been known to and associated with this John.

Had this John reverted to his original name for his marriage? I think he had.

John and his wife were living in Church Row, Rowley in 1871 with their 10 month old son Samuel and this John gives his place of birth as Rowley Regis. There was only one John Moreton born in Rowley in that period, so it seems likely that this is the same John Moreton who was baptised in 1847. By 1881 the family had moved to Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire and John was working in the iron works there. Again, this fits with his previous occupation as a furnace labourer when he was in Rowley.

Barrow-in-Furness Migration from Rowley

Incidentally, on this page of twenty six people in Parker Street, Barrow-in-Furness, there are no less than twenty two people who give their place of birth in the Black Country – Rowley Regis, Cradley, Brierley Hill, Tipton – on this page and those around it there are Mortons, Whitehouses, Gaunts, Willetts,Siveters, Priests, Ingrams, Westwoods, Billinghams, and Taylors, all familiar local Rowley names. It looks as though there was a considerable migration amongst the iron workers from the Black Country iron works to the Barrow area.

This Moreton/Morton family (The spelling changes at this time) remained there afterwards and it appears that John Moreton died there some time between the 1901 and 1911 censuses when Eliza Morton is shown as a widow in the latter. If this is the John Moreton who was baptised in 1847, he is not our man.

Back to the mystery man – John Levett the Butcher

At this new John Levett’s marriage in St Giles in 1867, aged 21 and a butcher, of Blackheath, he gave his father’s name as John Levett, farmer. The information given in such records is only as accurate as the priest or Clerk is told so the use of this name is not necessarily true. But his use thereafter of the Levett surname does seem to indicate that he believed that he was a Levett. Perhaps he knew who his father was and decided to name his father and use his surname when he got married and thereafter.

As to the identity of this John’s father, there is only one John Levett in Rowley Regis in the 1841 and 1851 Censuses, and that was John Levett of Brickhouse Farm, father of James Adshead Levett. Did the recently widowed John Levett find solace with a local girl in 1846? Perhaps he did. Was he the father of this John Levett? He would have been nearly seventy by 1847 so not impossible but perhaps unusual.

Or might James Adshead Levett, living in Perry’s Lake, and aged 42, and previously described in records as a farmer, be responsible? It appears from the variations in the descriptions of James’s occupations that the pub-keeping was only one of various occupations and as late as 1851 he was described as a colliery clerk. It may well have been that he also assisted his father with running the Brickhouse Farm.

Of the two possible illegitimate Johns baptised in Rowley, I tend towards thinking that the John Levett in Rowley is more likely to be the son of Rosannah Hobbiss. He was later living in Halesowen Street, Blackheath at the time of his marriage, just up the hill from Slack Hillock and it does seem likely that the other John reverted to his original name of Moreton and moved away from the area.

I can find no Bastardy Orders to help. Perhaps a DNA test would throw up some links or perhaps descendants of this couple actually know the story but otherwise this has to remain pure speculation.

John and Ellen Levett

This John Levett married Ellen Smith on 14 Oct 1868 at St Giles, Rowley Regis. He was 21 and a butcher of Blackheath. She was 19 and also of Blackheath, so presumably her father had given his consent to the marriage. The groom gave his father’s name and occupation as John Levett, farmer. Her father was Sydney Smith, a Manufacturer. The witnesses were Job and Sarah Siviter but these people were the Grave Digger and Church Cleaner for St Giles so this may have been the only connection, they may have acted as witnesses on a regular basis.

John was marrying into a respectable family, perhaps he felt under pressure to be able to name his father in the marriage record. Later in life their sons and daughters went into service with wealthy families and ran businesses so they must all have been presentable and capable.

Ellen Smith was the eldest daughter of Sydney Smith of Halesowen Street , Blackheath who was a Rivet Manufacturer, employing five men in 1871. From the description in the census then it appears that they were living towards the Gorsty Hill end of Halesowen Street, perhaps somewhere near the junction with New John Street.

After their marriage, the couple were living in Halesowen Street in 1871, in Garratts Lane, Old Hill in 1881 and by 1891 had moved to 2 Dudley Road, Springfield where he was described as a Labourer, (also in 1901 when he and his two remaining sons at home were stone breakers) whereas previously he had always been shown as a butcher. 2 Dudley Road was next to the Bull Inn and there is some evidence that this had been a shop, possibly a butcher’s shop previously. By this time John and Ellen Levett had had five sons and three daughters. They remained in Springfield until their deaths, both attaining grand old ages for that period. John Levett died in 1926 aged 81 and Ellen in 1929 aged 80, both are buried in St Giles Churchyard.

Their children were:

Harry (1870-1886), who died aged 15 and was buried at St Giles on 9 May 1886, his address was shown in the Burial Register as Tippity Green so their Dudley Road home appears to have been very close to the Bull Inn.

Their eldest daughter Alice (1872-1915) had in 1891 been living in as a servant in the household of Mr T Danks, Boiler manufacturer, at 77 Dudley Road, along with her sister Amy. In 1895 Alice married Samuel Dowell at Reddal Hill and they moved to St Johns-in-the-Vale, in Cumbria, where they were living in 1901, where Samuel was working in the stone quarry. (Regular readers may remember that many Rowley sett workers moved to St John’s-in-the-Vale in this period, this has been referred to in other pieces on this blog.) Alice’s brother Frank was also living with them, also working at the quarry. However, their stay in Cumbria does not appear to have lasted long as both of Alice and Samuel’s children were born in Rowley, Winifred in 1903 and Donald in 1907. In 1911 they were living in New Buildings, Tippity Green. Alice died in 1915, aged 42 and was buried at St Giles.

Frederick (1873-1932) This little Levett stayed at home! Frederick became a butcher, in 1901 and 1911 he was listed as a butcher in Rowley Village. In 1894 Fred, then a quarryman, married Elizabeth Payne at Holy Trinity, Old Hill, and they had six children, two daughters and four sons, one of the latter died in infancy. By 1921 Fred had a butcher’s shop at 35 Penncricket Lane and his son Harry (by then 24) had his own butcher’s shop at 48 Birmingham Road, Blackheath. It was this shop that I remember although by then it must have been run by Fred’s grandson or great-grandson.

Frederick and Elizabeth had four sons and two daughters, Harry (1896-1958),John (1899), Ellen (1902), George Frederick (1903-04), Alfred(1908) and Amy (1909). Harry continued to run the butcher’s shop in Birmingham Road and it was still run by Levetts up to the 1960s.

This photograph, posted on Facebook by Steve Pearce in 2014, shows Levett’s butcher’s shop in Birmingham Road, alongside the never to be completed car park construction. The abattoir was originally behind the shop, I understand and the family sold the land on which the Shoulder of Mutton was built, the name of the pub specified as a nod to the butchery business! There are many comments on Facebook from people who remember David Levett and his son still running the business and how well respected, obliging and friendly they were, as I remember myself.

Amy (1875-1952) also went into service and after leaving Mr Dank’s household, she moved to Stoke Prior where in the 1901 Census she was a nurse to the children of Mr Victor Drury, a boot manufacturer. Her sister Lizzy was Cook in the same household. However, soon after the Census Amy married William Henry Edwards (a Rowley boy) on 27 Jun 1901. And they married in St Johns-in-the-Vale, in Cumbria (popping up again!). This family stayed in Cumbria, however, their children Frederick and Ellen were born there and they later moved to Cockermouth where they died, William in 1940 and Amy in 1952.

Frank, (1877-1938) who had been living with his sister Alice in the 1901 Census, also stayed in Cumbria. On 8 Apr 1901 he married Annie Adelaide Hindmoor Benbow at St Johns-in-the-Vale, Cumbria and they had three sons Sydney (1903), James (1904) and John (1908) He and his family moved to the USA in 1913, probably to join Annie’s brother James Benbow, and Frank is still listed as a sett cutter at this time. However, Annie died in Massachusetts in 1917 and Frank returned to Cumbria with his two younger sons James (1904) and John (1908) (their eldest son Sydney (1902) staying in the USA for the remainder of his life) in 1919. They were living with his sister Amy and brother-in-law William Edwards in Threlkeld in the 1921 Census. Frank died in 1938, his death registered in the Carlisle area so it is possible that he continued to live in Threlkeld or perhaps died in the Infirmary in Carlisle which is the main hospital for the area.

Lizzie (1880-1956) or Lizzy (the spelling varies throughout her life!) also remained in Springfield, Rowley for many years, listed as late as 1940 in trade directories as a shop keeper at 7, Dudley Road, where she lived with her parents until their deaths. Whether she kept the shop open is unknown but she died at 7 Dudley Road in 1956, the last of her generation, and it appears likely that she is the Elizabeth Levett who was buried at St Giles then. She had been Lizzie all her life and her birth was registered as Lizzie but formality overtook her at the end! Records show that Probate was issued to her nephews Harry and John Levett, both butchers!

Peter (1883-1944)

Peter’s is a sad story. He was unmarried and shown as a stone quarry worker in 1911, living in Dudley Road with his parents. He served in WW1 with the Worcestershire Regiment but was discharged ‘insane’ in 1919 and in the 1921 Census was shown as a patient at Barnsley Hall Mental Hospital. He was still there in the 1939 Register, shown as an ex- soldier, which probably implies that he had been there ever since. He died at Barnsley Hall in 1944.

Ernest Levett (1877-1919)

Ernest, the youngest of the children of John and Ellen Levett, was born in 1877. In 1911 he was working as a labourer at the stone quarry. He married Beatrice Taylor at St Giles on 25 Oct 1908 and they had five daughters and one son, including twin daughters Nellie and Amy born on 28 Oct 1919. He died and was buried at St Giles on 6 Dec 1919, when they were barely a month old. No mention is made of his cause of death and he may have died of Spanish flu which killed many people then. Beatrice, at the age of only 26,was left with six children aged twelve down to a few weeks old. Ernest having returned from the war, unlike many men, this must have seemed very hard to Beatrice. In the 1921 Census, Beatrice was still at 2 Tippity Green, the address given on Ernest’s enlistment papers but by 1939 she had moved with all her children except Elsie to Queens Drive, Whiteheath. It appears that Elsie died in 1927, aged 11. The other children – Lizzie (1909), Herbert (1911), Annie (1913), Elsie (1916), Nellie and Amy (twins – 1919) mostly appear to have married fairly locally, although this is entering the period when tracking people becomes more difficult because of data protection.

Summary – the other Levett family!

This John Levett was not mentioned in any of the Levett Wills I have looked at and it is not known whether the other branch of Levetts in Rowley acknowledged them. The names John and his wife used for their children are not the same names, generally, that recur frequently in the other Levett family, although the names from the Smith family, Ellen’s family – Sydney, do recur. Like the other Levetts, however, this John Levett was a hard working man, first as a butcher and later in the quarry. He left eight children and at least twenty grandchildren. No doubt there are many more descendants in later generations. Two of his sons and one of his daughters followed him into business, running shops in Springfield and the village and later in Blackheath so perhaps he had inherited at least the Levett capacity for business.

And although the family moved around the area in later years, John and Ellen and their daughter Lizzie Levett, with their shop and home lived at 7 Dudley Road right up to Lizzie’s death in 1956.

This photograph, courtesy of Mike Fenton, shows Dudley Road in 1969, only a few years after Lizzie died and there are two shops on the left. Comments on this picture on Facebook say that the first of these was a butcher’s shop, and the second was known as Mary’s shop. I suspect that this shop was Lizzie’s shop before Mary!

The end of this part of the story of their lives has Lizzie ending up living for decades within yards of, if not actually on the site of Brickhouse Farm where the original John Levett, very possibly her grandfather or great grandfather, had lived when he moved to Rowley one hundred and fifty years earlier.

As I have commented before in this study, Rowley family roots go deep but it seems they also go in circles!

Pubs in the Lost Hamlets – The Portway Tavern

Taverns, inns, beerhouses and pubs have been in – indeed central to – our towns and villages for many centuries. The start of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, dating from 1387, begins with the pilgrims gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, prior to their setting out on their pilgrimage, and doubtless there would have been many other such houses on busy routes such as existed then.

In smaller settlements some pubs were little more than drinking clubs in an ordinary house, rather than specially built institutions. Many families brewed their own ale for home consumption and many pubs did the same. (Brewed ale was safer than water often because it had been heated in the brewing process.) These successful brewers probably expanded to supply other houses and pubs, especially if it was known as a particularly good brew, big breweries did not exist until relatively recently. Some inns will have started as lodgings for monasteries and religious houses which probably moved seamlessly to independent provision after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and many hostelries, in cities, towns and on major routes will have acted as lodging places for travellers. Others will have developed as places for workmen to get a much needed drink on their way home from dry, dusty or dirty work. The Portway Tavern certainly is on record as having fulfilled this function for the quarry workers from the nearby quarry and some of the other functions from time to time, such as being the venue for inquests.

But formal countrywide legislation to regulate the operation of such places did not reach the statute book until 1753 when the Licensing Act inaugurated the recording of full registers of victuallers, to be kept by the Clerk of the Peace at Quarter Sessions.

In 1830 a Beer Act was passed whereby, upon payment of 2 guineas to the Excise, people could sell Beer, Ale, Porter, Cider and Perry without a formal license from the Licensing Justices and many of the smaller beer houses in the Rowley area fell under this category and were not permitted to sell stronger liquors.

The Licensing Act of 1872 remains in force today and it is illegal to be drunk in charge of a horse, cow or a steam engine. Other modes of transport have been included in later legislation! The Pub History Society tells us that “Under the Act some drinkers became infamous “bona fide travellers”, who could be served outside of normal trading hours. Travelling in good faith meant that you should not be “travelling for the purpose of taking refreshment”, but you could be “one who goes into an inn for refreshment in the course of a journey, whether of business or pleasure”. While people posing as travellers were regularly charged and prosecuted, it was difficult to prosecute licensees who had a handy escape clause in the law. To find the publican guilty, the prosecution had to prove that the licensee did not “honestly believe” that his customer was a bona fide traveller when serving outside of normal opening hours.” ^[i]

The Portway Tavern

The Tavern was, I am told, situated at the foot of Turner’s Hill, facing the road that went up and over the hill and the entrance to the Hailstone Quarry. As can be seen from this photograph, the proximity to the quarrying operations continued to the end. There were several houses around and behind the Tavern, in addition to a Brewhouse and other outbuildings. Some census entries call it the Portway Inn. Some do not even record the name at all.

This map from 1918 shows a ‘P.H.’ at Perry’s Lake, which was obviously the Portway Tavern but I am still not quite sure which building it was in those clusters of cottages. Probably one of the two corner buildings, I suspect and I am inclined to think that it was the building to the right of the new road leading down to Portway. That has several outbuildings and access to a yard which would fit with both the description at the time of the sale and the site described in the prosecution. But someone may put me right on that. It also shows the Rowley Brewery in Tippity Green and how close they were to each other.

Hitchmough records that the Portway Tavern was licensed from some point before 1849, his first names licensee was James Adshead Levett Snr, in whose family occupation it remained until it was sold after Mrs Sarah Perry who was the daughter of James Adshead Levett Junior, gave up the licence in about 1901.

But situated as it was, directly on the route which later became the toll road from Halesowen to Dudley, it seems very likely to me that a beerhouse or hostelry which later became known as the Portway Tavern existed there in some form well before licensing came into force.

The Licensing system was operated by the local magistrates and there was a Licensing Session annually when licences were renewed or not, sometimes, if the applicant had offended against the licensing laws in the meantime in which case he might lose his licence, a serious consideration. There are numerous reports in the contemporary newspapers of these sessions and in each case any offences which had been committed by the Licencee were listed, whether for exceeding licensing hours, permitting drunkenness or gambling or other instances the police reported on. There are also reports in most years that I have seen these reports of the landlords of ‘beer houses’ wanting to upgrade their licence to a full licence so that they could sell wines and spirits in addition to beer but these seemed mostly to be refused and this was obviously carefully controlled.

The Black Country Bugle, in 2003, published an article by Peter Goddard on ‘Tippetty Green and the Tromans Family and Rowley Quarries’, saying:

“Quarrymen were hard workers and hard drinkers. The Portway Tavern was the first port of call after a long shift, due to its closer proximity to the quarries. It had a small bar with a low ceiling, and a little used, long room adjacent.”

And in my blog post entitled ‘Tales of Old Portway’ I noted an article in the Dudley Chronicle in 1926 which said that:-

“The Portway Tavern is described as “the rendezvous of generations of quarrymen”, referring to recent renovations which had done much to modernise the exterior but it was noted that “the interior is pervaded with an old-world atmosphere. On a rack in the smoke room are twenty-two churchwarden pipes, numbered and tobacco stained, the blackest belonging to the oldest and most regular attendant at the pipe club which meets in the tavern on winter evenings.”

The Levett family and the Portway Tavern

In the 1841 Census James Adshead Levett the Elder is living in Perry’s Lake and listed as a Publican, although the pub is not named as such but this was undoubtedly the Portway Tavern. He had, according to the baptismal register at the time of the baptism of his son Richard in 1836, been living at Cock Green as a farmer but by the time of the baptism of his son John in December 1840, the family was living in Perry’s Lake although he was still described as a farmer then, a not unusual case of more than one occupation. In the 1851 Census he was shown as a Colliery Clerk and it was not until the 1861 Census that the Tavern was named and his occupation was shown as a Victualler. As early as 1842, James Adshead Levett Snr was listed in the Poll Books and Electoral Register as eligible to vote because he owned or rented ‘houses at Perry Lake’, so not just one house. Unsurprisingly, in view of this, censuses often show several Levett households living at Perry’s Lake, presumably in these houses, probably around or behind the pub.

Generally when James and Mary Levett were running the Tavern it appears that they kept their house in good order and I can only find one report of an offence in the newspapers. In August 1847 James was charged with permitting gaming with dice in his alehouse. PC Janson told the court that he had found

“two dice on the table and a cup, a man shaking it, and money on the table, for which they were playing. Defendant said there had been a raffle at this house that night, and afterwards the men did play for a few pence, but without his knowledge.”

He was fined 5 shillings and costs. In those days magistrates were local and the courts sat in local towns so people would have been well known to each other. And policemen had local ‘beats’ and would have known their licensees and kept a careful eye on them.

James Levett the Elder died , according to the Probate Record, on 23 Jun 1878, aged 75. His widow Mary retired to Gadd’s Green where two of her granddaughters Ellen (18) and Harriett (9) were staying with her in the 1881 Census. In his Will James had left to his ‘dear wife’ “such part of my household furniture and effects belonging thereto as she shall select for her own use except my clock and bureau which I give and bequeath to my son James”. The remainder of his property was to be sold and the proceeds to be shared equally between his four children. Interestingly, the Will notes that the house in which he lived belonged to his wife as tenant for life. The Will notes that as James the Younger had agreed on his father’s decease “to take it from her as tenant at a rent of twenty-five pounds a year, I direct that in the conversion of my said personal estate into money, my said son James shall be at liberty within a reasonable time after my death or on the happening thereof to exercise the option hereby given to him of taking the stock-in-trade fixtures and effects used by me in my business at my decease at a valuation to be made in the ordinary way in which valuations are made of stock-in-trade fixtures and effects of the like nature.”

It appears that the licence was transferred, perhaps initially to Daisy Levett but later to his son James Adshead Levett the Younger , by then a widower, who was listed as a Licensed Victualler in the 1881 Census at 29 Perry’s Lake, living there with his son William, aged 20, a carpenter, and daughters Daisy aged 23 and listed as a grocer, Kate aged 16 and a Pupil Teacher and Nelly aged 10 and a scholar. It is perhaps not surprising that Daisy should be listed as a grocer as this had been the occupation shown for her father James Adshead Levett Jnr in Perry’s Lake in the two previous censuses, so presumably when he took over the pub, she kept the grocery business going. Looking back at the time of James’s marriage in 1857 he had given his occupation as a grocer on the Tettenhall Road in Wolverhampton and this had been the profession into which he had been apprenticed at the age of 14.

So in addition to the pub, it seems that the Levetts ran a grocer’s shop in Perry’s Lake, very possibly in the same buildings. I have most definitely gained the impression that the Levett family were very flexible about their living and trading arrangements. And it seems the Levetts made sure their children were set up in suitable professions, their son Richard who was a shoemaker (and apparently part-time brewer) also lived in Perry’s Lake, William was a carpenter.

Licencing applications

Oddly, in August 1878, there were various advertisements in the County Express, giving notice of the intention of various people to apply for excise licences to sell various alcoholic beverages in their beerhouses and shops. The advertisement put in by James Adshead Levett was for an excise licence to sell “Sweets by retail, to be drunk and consumed on and off the house and premises thereunto belonging”. This is the only such application I can see, all the others are for licences to sell beer or cider or wine, why would you need an excise licence to sell sweets? Perhaps they were making home brewed soft drinks, as well as beer in their brewery?

I can remember as a child a van that came round selling brewed lemonade, ginger beer and American ice cream soda – strawberry ice cream soda or am I dreaming that? – in large pottery flagons, that was definitely quite fizzy and must have been brewed. I think the drinks were made in Oldbury but certainly very locally. Each week you returned the empty flagons for refilling, it was a rare treat because my father was chronically ill and there wasn’t much money to spare for such luxuries but I remember how delicious they were. And even today Fentimans produce botanically brewed drinks such as lemonade and ginger beer. Or perhaps it was a Printer’s error but I would be interested to hear whether anyone has any other suggestions!

Incidentally in the advertisement Mr Levett states that the house and premises were rated for the relief of the poor and that he was the tenant, the premises being owned by Thomas Auden. So it seems that the Levetts were not the owners after all. Since John Levett had been and appeared to be still bankrupt (See my first article on the Levett family for details) it would perhaps be slightly surprising if his son had the wherewithal to purchase multiple houses at Perry’s Lake in 1841.

Also in the Reports of the County Express of 14 September 1878, there is a report that the Licensing Magistrates approved the transfer of the licence for the Portway Tavern from the executors of the late James Adshead Levett the Elder to Daisy Levett, his granddaughter. But at some point it was obviously transferred again to James Levett the Younger as in the 1881 Census James was was described as the Licensed Victualler and Daisy as a Grocer.

You might think that James would be very careful because he already had a criminal record from an incident much earlier in his life so would not have wanted to be in trouble with the magistrates who obviously ran a tight ship. But alas, James Adshead Levett Jnr found himself in trouble with the police and the licensing authority more than once over the years. In September 1882 it was reported to the Annual Licensing Meeting of the court that he had been convicted of ‘permitting drunkenness on 30^th November’, presumably the previous year, when he had been fined £5 plus costs. However, it seems he did not actually lose his license although it, along with several other similarly blacklisted landlords did have the licence suspended for a period.

There were two reports in the West Bromwich Weekly News about this incident, the first on 25^th November 1881.

“Thomas Summerfield, Rowley Village, was summoned for being drunk and disorderly on the licensed premises of James Levett, Portway Tavern, Perry’s Lake. Prosecutor said the defendant went to his house on Sunday night, there were about 30 or 50 persons in the house, one of the men having paid for 20 quarts of ale, the defendant left but returned and commenced a disturbance, and knocked a woman down.

Superintendant Woolaston asked for the case to be adjourned, he visited the house on Sunday night in company with Sergeant Cooper and two PCs. There were about 70 persons in the house, and the landlord never interfered. A more disgraceful scene never took place. He was of the opinion that the summons was only taken out for a sham. There would be further evidence adduced. The case was adjourned.”

In the same paper in the edition of 3^rd December 1881, this report appears, when James Levett was being charged with permitting drunkenness in his house:-

“PC Birch said at seven o’clock on the night of the 20^th ult. He was sent to the defendant’s house in plain clothes, and remained there until 9.30. There was a large number of men and several women in the house, some of whom were drunk. There was a great disturbance, and the language used by the waiter and company was of the most disgraceful nature. Superintendant Wollaston said on Sunday night the 20^th ult., he sent the last witness into defendant’s house, he remained outside with PS Cooper and PC Styles. About 8.30 he saw several persons stagger out of the house but they re-entered it almost immediately. About nine o’clock he entered the house, the passage and tap room were completely crammed with persons. There was an old woman, quarrelling with a man called Summerfield, who knocked her down and fell on to the top of her. There was great confusion. There were several men under the influence of drink. There were about 70 people in the house, every room being crowded. A more disorderly house he never saw. He spoke to defendant about it who said he was very sorry.

Cross-examined: Defendant had not been summoned before. PC Cooper corroborated.

Mr Shakespeare said the case arose under unfortunate circumstances. Defendant was away from the house some portion of the time and left someone else in charge. A friend of the defendant’s, from Birmingham, came to the house and left 10s to pay for some beer for the men who caused the disturbance complained of.

Mr Bassano [the Presiding Magistrate] said the Bench considered it a bad case and inflicted a fine of £5 and costs, and endorsed the license. Mr Shakespeare [defending solicitor] appealed to the Bench not to endorse the licence as this was defendant’s first offence. Mr Bassano said they could not alter their decision as they considered it a very bad case.”

One can imagine that if this was a regular occurrence, this might not have gone down well with respectable church going neighbours in this very small and presumably quiet community!

On another occasion Levett was prosecuted for brewing offences, which I have already described in detail in another article.

James Adshead Levett the Youngerdied, aged 63 on 26 Aug 1895, according to the Probate Record which was granted to his daughter Sarah Perry. The cause of death shown on his Death Certificate was Pernicious Anaemia and Exhaustion. His Will allowed Sarah Perry to continue the business of inn-keeping for a period of seven years with the option for a further seven if she wished and for her to have the use of the furniture, stock etc at the pub for this purpose. In fact Sarah died almost exactly seven years later but appears to have given up the pub before then, perhaps because of her poor health and other problems.

The licence, according to Hitchmough, passed then to his son William Levett who held it until 1896, when it passed to Mrs Sarah Perry, which does not quite accord with the intentions in the Will but we do not know whether Sarah was already in poor health. William’s sister. Daisy Levett, his eldest sister, had married Abner Payne in 1885 and she also continued to live in Perry’s Lake until her death in 1902.

Sarah remained the licensee until about 1901 when Hitchmough notes that the licence passed to Thomas William Williams whose family ran the Bull’s Head and had at one time been in some rivalry with the Levett family . However, I do note that Thomas William Williams was listed by Hitchmough as the Licensee of the Bull in Tippity Green from 1892-1900 so he had not moved far. He was also the owner of the Rowley Brewery in Tippity Green so had very local licensing interests.

Sarah died in 1902, as did her sister Daisy – only a few days apart and aged only 42 and 44, followed less than two months later by Sarah’s husband George Perry. But on 20 September 1902 the Portway Tavern had been put up for auction, in accordance with the Will of James Levett the Younger who had left it for Sarah to run the pub for seven years with the possibility of a further term if she so wished. It seems likely that, by this time, she was so ill that she could not continue. The children of Sarah and George Perry were taken in by aunts, uncles and others and left Perry’s Lake.

This was the preliminary advertisemment in the advertisement in the County Advertiser and Herald on the 6th September 1902:

In the full advertisement which appeared on the 20^th September 1902 for the sale of the premises this fuller description was given:

“Rowley Regis, Staffs.

Highly Important Sale of a Fully-Licensed Free Public House

Alfred Hill has been favoured with instructions from the Exors. of the late Mr. James A. Levett, to Sell by Auction, on Monday, the 29th day of September, 1902, at the House of Mr. H. B. Darby, the ROYAL OAK INN, Blackheath, at 7-30 in the Evening, sharp.

Lot 1. All that Old-Established Home-Brewing, Fully-Licensed, Freehold, Free, Public House (Corner Property), now in the occupation of Mrs. Sarah Perry, and known as the PORTWAY TAVERN, Perry’s Lake, Rowley Regis, containing Tap Room, Smoke Room, Bar, Club Room, Bedrooms, Pantry, Extensive Cellaring, Brewhouse (with Maltroom over), Stabling (Six-stall), with Loft over, Range of Piggeries, and the usual conveniences, with large Yard and Gateway Entrance, and frontage to two Roads, with Tap Water laid on, and fitted with Gas throughout.

The Auctioneer begs respectfully to call the attention of Investors to these desirable Properties. The Public House offers to Capitalists the rare opportunity of securing a Fully-licensed, entirely Free, Home-brewing House, and an unusually sound Investment”.

Did it sell? I don’t know because I note that in 1911/12 the licensee was George Ward who was the husband of Hannah Levett, the daughter of Richard Levett, the shoemaker, so it seems the Levett family retained an interest in the pub for some time even if it was under another name or perhaps he took it on from Thomas William Williams. George Ward, living at 19 Perrys Lake, had also been one of the Witnesses to James the Younger’s Will.

But altogether three generations of the Levett family had run the Portway Tavern for about seventy years.

Copyright: Eileen Bird who is descended from James AdsheadLevett, shared this family photograph of the Tavern which she says was taken in 1971. I was interested how different it looked when it was painted white.

Over the next sixty or so years, there were nineteen other licensees, according to Hitchmough, most having the pub for only a few years. Because of 100 year privacy rules, it is difficult to find out much about them as individuals, although local people will still have memories of some of the more recent ones and some may even have lived there when their father or other relatives held the licence.

Local memories from Facebook

Below are some of the memories which have been mentioned on the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page over the last few years. Please let me know if you object to your name being mentioned and I will remove your comments but these memories are part of the history of the Lost Hamlets in a way which will never appear in history books!

More people than I can list had their first pints there!

Several people commented that the Tavern was known locally as the ‘blood tub’. David Stokes thought this went back to the early days. His first memories were of living with his great grandfather in the cottages opposite the ‘Tavern’ in the early fifties. He said “What I can remember very well is ‘they’re fighting again’! Hence, ‘the blood tub’…as I understood it? Thankfully, a bygone era!”

Vicki Noott says that she was born in the Tavern in 1955, as her grandfather Albert Harris was the landlord in the 1950s and Maggie Bridgewater said that she also lived there in the 1950s when her parents were the licensees. Two very local surnames there! Peter Wroe’s parents were the landlords from about 1961-1966, he remembered it as a good old fashioned pub. His sister Caroline was also born there.

Joyce Connop remembered that she always used to look at the clock inside through the window to check the time on her way to Doulton Road School, to make sure she wasn’t late for school.

Ann Teague said that she remembered that there was a dirt road down the side of the tavern. The houses there were mostly occupied by Tarmac workers.

Brian Kirkham recalled that there was a row of houses behind the Tavern called Heaven and a bit down from that there was a blacksmiths shoeing horses.

Kenneth Greenhouse remembered all the old penny’s on the ceiling by the darts board.

Marie Devonport – “The road seen in the bottom of the picture was the start of Turners hill, right over the road from the Tarmac entrance. If I remember right my family lived just up the road by the telephone box on the corner.”

William Perry had recently read Wilson Jones’s book on Rowley – “it’s very informative. There is a photo of a manorial windmill that stood on the side of Hawes Hill, also there was a large pool with fish in it somewhere about opposite where the Portway Tavern used to be.”

And indeed Wilson Jones asserts in his book that on a Pre-Inclosure map of Rowley, the main habitations were around Rowley Church from about Rowley Hall to Mincing Lane . But the Manor was at Brickhouse Farm with the Manorial Green at Cock Green and the fishpond on the site of Perry’s Lake. So the original Perrys Lake was a manorial fishpond. He also states that two Manor Mills were also marked on this map, one on the opposite side to Hawes Hill, near Tippity Green and one at Windmill End. The book has a photograph of the Windmill at Tippity Green so it survived for a long time.

Andrew in 2017 said that he lived at the top of Throne Road with his grandparents in the 70’s, he used to be sent to the Portway Tavern with empty Corona bottles to be filled with sherry !

Ant Bromley particularly remembered the really good cider served there.

Marie Smith remembered her brother Eric Oddy having his 21^st birthday party there and her mother getting tired – Marie says she was a lady and she never got drunk!

Arthur McWilliams worked in the garage in the quarry opposite the Tavern and recalls that some days they would go over for a pint at lunchtime. He says he will never know how they managed to work the rest of the day!

The end of the Portway Tavern

The Portway Tavern closed in 1984 and was demolished shortly afterwards. This photograph shows it standing in isolation after most of the houses around it had been demolished. St Giles’s Church can be seen on the hill behind it, and some of the houses in Tippity Green to the right.

David Duckworth shared this rather sad photograph on Facebook of the Tavern prior to demolition, (copyright of this photograph unknown as it appears in several places).

Standing at the foot of Turners Hill Road, the Portway Tavern had been a central part of the community in the area of the hamlets for probably the best part of two hundred years, from the time when it stood alongside the toll road from Halesowen to Dudley and it had served home brewed ale to many generations of quarrymen working in the nearby quarries. Inquests were sometimes held there and some lively parties, too!

And as so often in these days when so many pubs are closing, something was undoubtedly lost from the heart of the community when it was demolished, and it was the same fate which came to the cottages and communities it once served.

[i] https://www.pubhistorysociety.co.uk/index

Families of the Lost Hamlets – The Rudkin family

Rudkin is not a common name in Rowley Regis and I only came across it while I was researching the Levett family. Yes, another rabbit hole for me to explore!

Harriet Levett (1872-1956) was the third of the four daughters of Richard Levett, he the second son of James Adshead Levett the Elder and brother to James Adshead Levett the Younger. Richard, born in 1836, was married to Mary Merris and they lived in Perry’s Lake, where Richard was a Boot and Shoe Maker and he also helped his brother out with brewing, as mentioned in my recent article about a court case.

Harriet’s mother died when Harriet was only six and subsequently she was staying with her grandmother Mary Levett in Gadd’s Green at the time of the 1881 Census, while her father and other sisters were living in Hawes Lane, and in 1891 she was in Perry’s Lake with her uncle James Adshead Levett and his son William, (also mentioned in the court case), although her father was by then immediately next door with his youngest daughter Mary Ann, aged 16 and a visitor Ann M Parkes, also 16, a dressmaker, so perhaps a friend of Mary Ann.

On 13 May 1894 Harriet Levett married John Rudkin at Holy Trinity, Old Hill, when he was 26 and she was 22.

John Rudkin, born in 1868, was not a Rowley native, but he was living at 17 Tippity Green in 1881 and at 24 Perry’s Lake in 1891, lodging with Edward Payne, along with his brother William so he had been living very close to Harriet for most of their lives, the boy next door, as it were. I say that John was not a Rowley native but his younger brother William was, born in Rowley Regis in 1875. They were two of the sons of William Rudkin. So I looked for John in the 1871 Census and found him living with his family William and Jane Rudkin in Cainham, near Ludlow in Shropshire. Now, where have we come across Cainham before? Ah, yes, when I was looking at migration patterns among the quarry workers in an earlier article when I found that quite a few sett makers had moved from Mountsorrel in Leicestershire to Rowley Regis to work, had married in Rowley and then moved on to Cainham in Shropshire. And sure enough, when I looked at this family, the pattern fitted again.

Copyright unknown, this photograph of the Clee Hills quarries in Shropshire shows that the quarrying area is not dissimilar to Rowley but without the surrounding heavy industry!

William Rudkin the Elder, John Rudkin’s father, was born in 1835 in Groby, Leicestershire. In 1851 he was living in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire where his father (also William) was a Quarry man and William himself was a Frame Work Knitter, another repeating detail as a Leicestershire occupation.In 1861, William was in Rowley Regis. The ten years between the two censuses were eventful for the Rudkin family.

The 1871 Census shows John Rudkin, with his father William, a Stone Cutter, who was living in Cainham with his wife Mary Jane (nee Parkes, I would later find). Jane, aged 25, had been born in Rowley Regis and their oldest child Sarah J, aged 14 was also born in Rowley Regis , while son Thomas aged 5 was born in Cainham, John aged 3 apparently born in Ludlow, and Elizabeth A, aged 1 also born in Cainham. And living with them were Thomas Parkes, his brother-in-law, aged 15, a labourer and his widowed mother-in-law Mary Parkes, both of them born in Rowley Regis. A classic Mountsorrel/Rowley/Cainham pattern!

And because I always try to find the birth registration in the GRO registers for my records, I was able to confirm that the mother’s maiden name of all the younger children was indeed Parkes. So that all tied together nicely. Except…

Looking at the family in 1871, I noticed that the oldest child Sarah J was 14, born in 1857, but Jane Rudkin was only 25. It seemed very unlikely that she had had a baby at 11. Technically possible perhaps but unlikely. Sarah J must have been born to someone else. So I looked for Sarah’s birth registration – and there was no birth registration for a Sarah Jane Rudkin in the right period. There was, however, a registration of a Sarah Jane Parkes in the first quarter of 1856, with no Mother’s Maiden Name recorded which is usually an indication of illegitimacy. And then I found a baptism on 27 July 1856 at St Giles, Rowley Regis for Sarah Jane Parkes, the illegitimate daughter of Ann Parkes. Not Mary Jane, who was only eleven at this time. So, another puzzle – who was Ann Parkes?

Some more digging around showed that Ann Parkes was born in 1833 in Rowley Regis, the daughter of Joseph Parkes of Tippity Green. Ann Parkes and William Rudkin had been married on 26 Oct 1857 at Dudley St. Thomas, and their son Charles (1858-1861) was born in the last quarter of 1858, followed by Mary (1861-1862) and twins Ann and Maria in 1863, all in Rowley Regis. Now I was able to find William, Ann and Charles in Tippity Green in the 1861 Census. It appears that William accepted Sarah Jane into his household as she was shown as Rudkin in all subsequent censuses. Alas, Ann died, in childbirth or soon after the twins were born, as she was buried on 21 Jul 1863 at St Giles, Rowley Regis, aged 28 and of Perry’s Lake, shortly after the birth of the twins. Baby Ann died in October and was buried on 25 Oct 1863, followed a few months later by her twin Maria who was buried on 20 Jan 1864.

So poor William Rudkin had lost his wife and all four of his children in the space of six years. It is possible that Sarah Jane was also his child but equally possible that she was not as William and Ann did not marry until Sarah Jane was at least fifteen months old.

William, a working quarryman, must have had a lot of help for those new-born twins to survive even a few months. He was living close to his in-laws and no doubt they and other neighbours would have helped to look after the children. So perhaps it is not surprising that on 19 Oct 1863, (just three month’s after Ann’s death) William Rudkin married again, at Dudley Saint Thomas, this time to Mary Jane, usually known as Jane, Parkes. Who appears to have been Ann’s sister!

Perhaps William felt Rowley was not a good place for him or perhaps better money was on offer as they must have moved to Shropshire soon afterwards. William and Jane went on to have four children in Cainham – Edward Thomas (1866-1923), John (1868-1949) who married Harriet Levett and Edith Ann, (1870-1942). As the dates show, these three children all survived into adulthood unlike most of their earlier half siblings. Another son George Henry was baptised on 13 Oct 1872 at Knowbury. But by the time of the 1881 census, everything had changed again.

By 1881, Mary Parkes, now 68, was back in Tippity Green, living with her daughter Elizabeth Parkes, aged 28, the three Rudkin grandchildren, a granddaughter Annie Parkes, aged 6 and another Rudkin grandson named William who was aged 5 and born in Rowley. (Also a lodger William Foley, a miner aged 43). When you think how small the cottages in that area were, it must have been quite crowded.

Where were William Rudkin and Jane? William had died in Shropshire in 1872, just a couple of months after the baptism of their new son George Henry and William was buried on 10 Dec 1872 at St Paul’s church, Knowbury. I do not know what he died of and can find no other records about him but he was only 37 so possibly an industrial accident or perhaps a disease. And Jane? She had obviously moved back to Rowley with her mother and the children by 1874 because George Henry died and was buried at St Giles on 15 Feb 1874, aged 1. And she had had another child William in Rowley Regis in 1875. There is no way of knowing who was little William’s father but it could not have been William Rudkin, her late husband since he had died in 1872.

Jane herself was not in that 1881 Census entry because she, too, had died and had been buried at St Giles on 21 Apr 1878, aged 31.

So poor Mary Parkes, herself elderly, was now responsible for her four Rudkin grandchildren, although by 1881 both Thomas and John were working at the quarry.

What became of the Rudkin children?

I have not been able to trace Sarah Jane Parkes or Rudkin after the 1871 census, there are no definite sightings of her under the name Rudkin and there are so many Sarah Parkes that it is not possible to be sure which if any of them is her. She could have married, gone into service, died under either name – it remains a mystery.

Edward Thomas Rudkin joined the army at some point shortly after this, and when he married Kate Cook in Buriton, Southampton in 1887 he was a Corporal. Presumably travelling with the army, they had two daughters in India, one of whom died there. When they returned to England, they lived in Army Cottages in Kempsey, Worcestershire, presumably based at the Barracks there and later moved to Saltley in Birmingham where Edward was working as a Commissionaire at the Motor Works in 1911. By 1923, they had returned to the Portsmouth area where Edward died in 1923 and Kate in 1936. Their surviving daughter Edith married George Henry Day in Portsmouth in 1915 and she was still living there until she died on 27 May 1941, listed among civilian war deaths there so possibly killed in bombing raids on Portsmouth. She and George Day appear to have had three sons, the first born in Leicester. I wonder whether she had gone back to her Rudkin family there? Pure speculation, of course!

Edith Ann Rudkin went into service and in 1891 she was living at 6 Siviters Lane, Rowley as a domestic servant to Dr Beasley. In 1901 she was still described as a domestic servant but was visiting a friend in Dudley. In 1908 she married a widower Charles Upton in Aston, Birmingham and in the 1911 Census they were living in Hednesford, Cannock with his two daughters from a previous marriage and Edith May, their own daughter born in 1910. Sadly little Edith May died in 1915. Edith Ann was a widow according to the 1921 Census and she died in Cannock in 1942, aged 72.

John Rudkin, my starting point for this family mini-study, had married Harriett Levett in 1894 at Holy Trinity, Old Hill and they had four children. In 1901 they were still living in Perry’s Lake with their son Lawrence (1895-1951) who was six. John was working as a hewer in a coal mine.

By 1911, they had left Rowley and were living in Rugeley Road, Hednesford, Cannock – yes, the same place as John’s sister Edith, nineteen miles from Rowley, according to Google maps. Whether Edith moved to be near John or vice versa, I don’t know but they were living less than a mile apart. By this time John and Harriett also had Edith (1904-1979), Mary (1907-1927) and William Thomas (1909 – ?). John was still working as a miner or Stallman at the pit face and now his son Lawrence, aged 16, was also working in the pit as a driver (underground).

In 1921, John and Harriett had moved again and were living in Kingsbury, near Meriden, the other side of Birmingham. All their children were still at home and again both John and Lawrence were working as miners at the Kingsbury Colliery.

Most of the children stayed in the Meriden area from then on, although it is possible that the youngest William Thomas settled elsewhere as he joined the Navy in 1927 and his service details note him as having been traced for his pension in 1949, though I cannot find any other definite information for him.

John and Harriet appear only to have had two grandchildren, one of them Betty, (the illegitimate daughter of Lawrence) who was born in Tamworth in 1926 and emigrated to the USA with her American husband in 1947, perhaps a War Bride. The only photograph I have been able to find of the Rudkin family in this country is of a young Lawrence in what looks like WWI army uniform, which was uploaded to Ancestry and was marked on the back as ‘Betty’s father’. Her application for naturalisation in the USA gives Rudkin as another name so it appears that this was an acknowledged connection. So the Rudkin genes stretch over the Atlantic, it seems.

Lawrence Rudkin as a young soldier, possibly in WW1. Copyright unknown.

John’s daughter – another Edith – had married William C Monk in Sutton Coldfield in 1941 and had one son Peter in 1942 so he was their only grandson.

The Rudkins in Rowley

So none of the Rudkin family stayed in Rowley Regis, mostly they and their descendants ended up in Warwickshire or further afield and the name will be unknown to most Rowley folk.

So why have I written in such detail about a family who had such a brief encounter with the village?

I have recently been reading some books by Gillian Tindall who is known, according to reviews, as a superb ‘micro-historian’. She is someone who writes about small communities, individual people, a village, a single house – in great detail. Her writing is fascinating and I learn from her writing constantly. The first book of hers which I read was ‘The house by the Thames’ and it is all about a single very old house which survives even now, between the Globe theatre and the Tate Modern on the Embankment in London. It is most interesting and I have learned much about the history of the area and the people who lived there. (I now have three other books by Gillian Tindall waiting to be read!) But it was in the first pages of this book that I read about the philosophy which drives her research and this sang to my heart. She wrote in the first chapter:

“the vast majority of men and women in every time do not leave behind them either renown or testimony. These people walked our streets, prayed in our churches, drank in our inns or in those that bear the same names, built and lived in the houses where we have our being today, opened our front doors, looked out of our windows, called to each other down our staircases. They were moved by essentially the same passions and griefs that we are, the same bedrock hopes and fears, they saw the sun set over Westminster as we do. Yet almost all of them have passed away from human memory and are still passing away, generation after generation –.”

“Witness to the living, busy complex beings that many of these vanished ones were tends to be limited to fleeting references on pages of reference books that are seldom opened. At the most, there may be a handwritten note or a bill, perhaps a Will, a decorative trade-card, a few lines in a local newspaper or a report from a long obsolete committee, possibly an inscription on a tomb. There may perhaps be a relevant page or two in an account of something quite other, or a general social description which seems to fit the specific case.

Scant evidence, you may say, of lives as vivid and as important to the bearers as our own are to us today. But by putting these scraps together, sometimes, with luck, something more coherent is achieved. Pieces of lost lives are genuinely recovered. Extinct causes clamour for attention. Forgotten social groups coalesce again. Here and there a few individual figures detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned them. They walk slowly towards us. Eventually we may even see their faces.”[i]

‘Neither renown nor testimony’

In Rowley Regis today, of course, there are very few old buildings and our ancestors did not live in our particular houses, look out of our windows or call down our stairs. But the landscape they gazed on has not changed so much and indeed with much of the polluting heavy industry gone or cleaned up, the local scene is perhaps now closer in appearance to the pre-industrial landscape our earlier ancestors would have known. They, too would have gazed across the valley to the Clent hills and been able to spot distant church steeples and the ruins of Dudley Castle, still visible today.

While I was researching Harriet Levett and her marriage to John Rudkin, I had realised that John had grown up in Tippity Green and Perry’s Lake, in the heart of the Lost Hamlets, and that his father had been married to not one but two Rowley girls, the older of whom had borne him four children in Rowley. The children had all died as infants, buried, like Ann herself, in Rowley Regis at St Giles and only one of her children Sarah J had grown to adulthood. Sadly this would not have been an unusual situation with babies in those days. Then I realised that, looking at other Rudkin family trees on Ancestry, that they only listed William Rudkin’s marriage to the second Parkes daughter Mary Jane. Poor Ann Parkes and her infant children had been lost in the mists of time.

I hope that my One Place Study is helping to make the history of the lost hamlets, with the complex web I keep finding of family relationships and intermarriages, more coherent , as Gillian Tindall suggests is possible. And I hope, in particular, that this piece has helped to preserve the memory of this family, and especially of Ann Parkes, (1835-1863), daughter of Joseph and Mary Parkes of Tippity Green. This ordinary and short-lived Rowley girl, has previously been lost in that ‘dark and silence’ to which Gillian Tindall refers, and, although we may not see Ann’s face, I hope that she has at least ‘walked slowly a little way towards us’.

[i] Copyright Gillian Tindall – The House on the Thames, published by Pimlico 2007. ISBN: 9781844130948

A double charge against Licensed Victuallers at The Portway Tavern

The Portway Tavern 1889 -– Concealment of Wort – a Midnight Brew – Heavy Penalty

I came across this story while I was researching material on the Portway Tavern but am posting it separately as it is fairly detailed and lengthy. There will be a more general post on the Portway Tavern soon.

In 1889, James Adshead Levett Jnr and another man Joseph Pensotti of Cross Guns Street, Kate’s Hill faced a more serious charge of concealment of Wort.

A quick diversion – An Italian in Dudley?

The name Pensotti sent me off down a rabbit hole because I wondered how he came to be charged with this offence and whether he was Italian. Mr Pensotti was not a Rowley man, in the 1891 Census he was listed at the Cross Guns Street address in Kates Hill but listed as a Post messenger. That was his occupation in a couple of earlier censuses too which showed that he had been born in Dudley but in 1851 he was a publican in Dudley and prior to that I found an entry for him in a trade directory when he was listed in Dudley as a “Barometer, Thermometer etc Manufacturer”, along with three other men, all of whom had Italian names – Charles Cassera, Carlo Cetti, Andrew Comoli and Joseph Pensotti!

Intriguing. I wondered whether the ‘etc ‘ they were making included hydrometers which are using for checking the alcohol content of liquids? (almost certainly yes, is the answer!) Every brewery would be required to have these, I would have thought, as part of their tools of the trade. Perhaps his specialist knowledge led to him being involved in the brewing trade with James Levett.

A little more research informed me that many makers of barometers in this period had originated in Italy and moved to London initially and gradually spread around the country, and it seems likely that these men were all of Italian descent although they may well have been born here. Another little glimpse of unexpected things in the Black Country! There is a most interesting website about Italian makers of fine instruments, many from the Como area of Italy[i]. Since the decorative cases for the barometers would have been made of wood, it is interesting to reflect that the fine woodworking skills required for this would not have been so very different from those famous Italian makers of violins, Stradivarius, Guarneri and Amato who were also from Northern Italy within a few miles of Milan. The barometer pictured here was not made locally and is a Torricelli barometer from the mid-1800s but illustrative of the sorts of instruments made by Italian craftsmen.

Torricelli barometer, copyright unknown but will be acknowledged on further information being provided.

It turned out from evidence given at the trial that Mr Pensotti took no active part in the business and both men were executors of the late James Adshead Levett. Who had died in 1878, more than ten years earlier! Evidence was given that the entry in the book was made jointly which was why they were both prosecuted. Quite why this was still happening so long after James’s death is another mystery but I will investigate further.

Back to the Wort

What is Wort, I hear you ask? Well, I had to look it up too. Wort is basically a liquid made from grain intended to be turned into beer by yeast. Mostly water—about 80% to 90% for most types of beer—wort is mixed with extracts from the grain. This is what goes into the brewer’s mash tun, which is a large vessel where the brewer combines barley or other grains with hot water, initiating the process called mashing. Mashing is like a hot bath for crushed malted grains (usually barley). Immersing the barley in hot water releases enzymes that break apart the barley’s starches into simple sugars. This sugary substance is the unfermented wort.

The charge against Levett and Pensotti was that “they, being brewers, did, on the 31st March, use certain malt, to wit, 8 bushels, the brewing of beer, without making or having made an entry in the book duly delivered to and kept by them, as such brewers for such purpose, as by the statute in that case made and provided, as was required to be made. “ They were also charged with concealing six gallons of wort, on the 1^st May, so as to prevent certain officers of the Inland Revenue from taking an account of the said worts.

Tax evasion is nothing new, it appears. But I had not previously realised how strictly the brewing business was regulated by the authorities. But it appears that every single brewing had to be accounted for and recorded in this book.

The defendants pleaded guilty to the second charge which was therefore not gone into entirely, the reporter notes, although there was the information given below.

The entry for the two men in what was presumably the start of the brewing book, the court was told, stated that they intended to carry on the business of brewers for sale and which rooms within the premises were marked on a plan as those in which the brewing would be carried on. Other parts of the premises were not so marked but when an Officer (it is not clear whether this was a police officer or an excise officer) visited the premises on 1^st May he found ‘practically six gallons of wort’ in the fowl house, which was not part of the approved area. Two brewings had apparently taken place during that day, one in the morning and one was in the course of being collected. These worts ‘for no apparent reason’ were in the fowl house and was not brought to charge with the other wort. When spoken to about it, Levett had said that the wort was part of the first wort and had been put there to cool. The officers thought this was a very funny place to put it! The officers alleged that while they were making their survey, a son of Levett’s was heard to remark “they had got it now”, though they did not at the time understand what this referred to.

As for the other charge relating to malt concealment, it seems that brewers should make an entry in the brewing book twenty four hours before it was to be used. There was such an entry on the 29^th March, which made the officer think that there would be two brewings on the first April.

The Witnesses for the Prosecution

The Policeman’s Story

Police Constable Himan gave evidence that he knew both of the defendants, as James Levett ‘carried on the business of the public’ which was part of his division. He remembered something in connection with the 30^th March. He went to the defendant’s house that night from something he had heard about 12.15. He waited a few minutes outside the doors and at length saw them open. There were lights and lots of steam especially from the direction of the Brewhouse. Noticing the lights, he thought there was a police offence being committed. He therefore kept quiet and watched, and ultimately saw the defendant Levett come to the doors and look down the road, and afterwards heard him remark “It’s all right, Will,now.” Then his son William came and shut the doors. After that they appeared to be busy in the Brewhouse.

There being a space between the gates when shut the officer inserted a stick and lifted the bar which was placed across inside, and went into the Yard. He there saw the defendant Levett, standing by the door of the Brewhouse. He commented to Levett that he seemed busy and Levett responded that “We’re only brewing”. The Brewhouse door was open and he could see inside. He saw the son William and Levett’s brother Richard standing by the mash tub. One was emptying malt into it and he believed Richard was pouring in the malt while William was stirring it. He could see the steam rising from the tub. He told the court there was no doubt in his mind as to what they were doing, they were mashing malt up, he felt confident.

He noted that there were two females in the house at the time. He had first observed the brewing at about a quarter past twelve and from the time he first observed it to the time he went into the Brewhouse would be about twenty-five minutes. He was on the premises about twenty minutes to one. He saw Mr Levett, his son and his brother but did not see Mr Pensotti there and had never seen him in the house. He also noted that he had frequently seen lights and signs of persons being busy on Saturday nights but since this night he had not.

The Excise Man

The Excise Officer was John Stanislaus O’Dea, a good Black Country name if ever there was one! In fact I understand that it was common practice in those times for Excise Men to be drawn from outside the area so that they had no personal loyalties to distract them from their duties.

Mr O’Dea told the court that the defendant’s house was in his division. He delivered the Brewing Book and had surveyed the premises and made entries in the book. There was an entry in the book on the 30^th March to brew on the 1^st April. He visited the premises on the Monday and took the produce of the morning’s brewing. His survey book showed the temperature as regular. He was on the premises at nine o’clock in the evening and the brewing was then in operation and the produce of that brewing was collected next morning.

On being cross-examined, he had said that he personally knew nothing about the alleged brewing on the Saturday night or Sunday morning. The first intimation he had from the policeman was on about the 15^th April. He was asked whether he had sought out the policeman or whether the policeman had sought him out, to which he replied that he had met the policeman on the road and he had mentioned it to him. When he had gone to the premises, on the Monday evening, he found the produce was all regular and also the brewing which had taken place in the morning.

He had had considerable experience as an officer, and it would all depend on the circumstances as to the time it would take to remove the traces of brewing. They brewed nine bushels of malt which should produce 162 gallons of beer. There were worts in the vessels, the results of the brew, at one o’clock. The defendants had about eight barrels but he could not tell how many barrels were used for ale. Wort could be fermented at the temperature of the atmosphere. The fowl house was about 9ft by 6ft. On the Monday he went into the cellar; no barrels were gone. There were plenty of barrels in the yard of the defendants had chosen to use them.

The prosecution then asked further questions and he said that the brewing premises were close to the house and that Levett’s brother and mother lived near.

The evidence for the defence

The Levetts had a solicitor to defend them, a wise decision, I think. As lawyers in our courts do now, his first argument was that his clients had voluntarily pleaded guilty to the first charge of concealing the worts although he suggested that technically the question would have been raised as to whether it was or was not a concealment which had taken place, but over and above what the vessels would contain were these six gallons of worts which were put into the casks. Seeing the officer come onto the premises, the brewer, instead of letting them remain, foolishly, and, so far as the prosecution held, criminally, took the vessels into the fowl house. That was more a technical offence than a wilful intention to defraud the authorities of their proper due. No one could see why they wanted to conceal the worts as the duty on them only amounted to something like 1 shilling and 3 pence, knowing they were liable to such a heavy penalty.

The real point at issue with the other charge, however, was that it was alleged that on Saturday night or Sunday morning his clients used eight bushels of malt wort without entering it in the book. It was established beyond doubt that it was entered in the book that a brewing was to take place and that fact was in favour of the defendant. What became, he asked, of the 160 gallons which the prosecution alleged the defendants had brewed?

It would have been better if there had been any evidence to corroborate the police officer, because the witnesses for the defence would swear that the officer was never on the premises; his client was entitled to the benefit of any doubt about this. His client had pleaded guilty to one charge and could have pleaded guilty to the second charge but disputed this.

As regarded Mr Pensotti, he had nothing whatsoever to do with the business and was not liable for the first offence even if the prosecution held he was liable in the second. The prosecuting lawyer did not agree and said that Mr Pensotti had become liable by signing the entry.

The Witnesses for the Defence:

Richard Levett, the first witness, said that he was brewer for his brother. (Richard Levett was recorded in all other records I have seen as a Boot and Shoe maker, living in Perry’s Lake but this is another instance of people having more than one job and it may well have been that his brother did not pay him for this or perhaps in kind or he did this as a family habit or in lieu of rent.) He stated that he remembered the 30^th March, the Sunday and the following Monday. He brewed on the Monday at one o’clock. He was on his brother’s premises on Saturday but went home about seven, and returned again at seven on Sunday morning. He did not see Police Constable Himan. He had brewed for his brother for twelve months and had never brewed for his brother on a Saturday night. He usually brewed on a Monday morning and it took him seventeen hours to get through the brewing. He lived next door to the public house and his mother lived next door but one. The prosecuting counsel commented that they were all relatives in that little corner with which he agreed.

He then referred to a date in May when the supervisor was about when he had begun to brew about one o’clock. They bought their malt ground. It took him six or seven hours sometimes to get up steam. He did not remember anything about putting wort down the pigstye(sic). His brother usually carried the malt down. It was then shot into the mash tub and was stirred up with the mash rule. The police had never come into the Brewhouse and spoken to him when he was brewing.

He could remember that he had never brewed upon a Saturday night or early on a Sunday morning, he had never seen a policeman at the Brewhouse door on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday night.

The magistrates wanted to know more about how the wort had got into the fowlhouse, the subject of the first charge. He put the wort into the fowl house. He told Mr Davies (the supervisor) that he put it there. He put it into cans. He could work well up to the standard, that was to say he could get more out of the malt than was generally supposed to be by the law. He was told by his brother to put the cans in the fowl house to cool. (This evidence does appear to be somewhat less than consistent!)

William Levett, the next witness, was the son of the defendant and he also denied that brewing was carried on on the 30^th March on his father’s premises. They brewed the following Monday and he helped. He said that Constable Himan did not come into the Brewhouse and see them brewing, as they never brewed late on Saturday night or early on Sunday morning. On being cross-examined he stated that Himan had never been on the premises when they were brewing. His father had never said anything to him about the policeman being there. He did not know the cans were in the fowl house. He had no reason to say, when the officers were inspecting the premises that “It’s only the fowl house.” He did not exclaim “By —, he’s seen it now!”

Eve Taylor, charwoman, said she was cleaning the defendant’s house on Saturday night, the 30^th March and was there till two o’clock. She had never seen any brewing there on Saturday night or Sunday morning. Cross-examined, she said that she was no relation to the Levett family. She had hot water to clean with and the small boiler was used to heat the water. She remembered the night because Mrs. Perry’s child had a fit. Mr Levett, his son and daughter were all the persons on the premises at twelve o’clock. She did not see Richard Levett there after she went at ten.

Sarah Perry, daughter of defendant Levett, said that she was at her father’s house till eleven, and there were no preparations for brewing. She did not see her uncle Richard there after seven.

Nellie Levett, another daughter, said Constable Himan did not come to the house at all on the 30^th March.

The Verdict

The Magistrates then retired briefly to consider their decision. After only a few minutes they returned and Mr Bassano said that they had decided to fine Mr Levett on the first charge of brewing £40 and costs; in the second case of concealing wort he would be fined £5 and costs.

As to Mr Pensotti, they felt that they ought to make him feel he had some responsibility and fined him £5 and costs in respect of the charge of concealing wort.

The total amount of fines and costs was £56 1s 6d.

What a long and convoluted tale!

The Levetts obviously closed ranks in their evidence but it does seem odd to me to have a charwoman cleaning at two o’clock in the morning! A tidy up and clean around would surely not take several hours, especially when it was dark and lighting was probably quite poor.

I do not doubt that it would have been possible for some barrels of beer to have been spirited away to other houses before the Monday if an illicit brewing had taken place. I wasn’t at all clear either whether these offences all happened on the same night or whether there was one policeman or more. Why was the policeman on patrol at that time of night in this sleepy hamlet (unless it was to look for after hours drinking in the pubs and beerhouses, which may well have happened on a fairly regular basis!)? With dark streets and cold nights, it’s hard to imagine that there would have been much else happening in Perry’s Lake on a cold March night to require a regular police presence and I would have thought that he would have been quite conspicuous in his uniform, loitering in Perry’s Lake late at night. One can’t help feeling that Mr Levett and his establishment , for whatever reason, were being kept an eye on by the authorities!

A typical policeman’s uniform in about 1880 – copyright unknown.

There was also no reference in the evidence described to any smell of brewing – and yet the smell is quite distinctive – I can remember when I worked in Smethwick for a couple of years and travelled there past the brewery in Cape Hill, the smell when they were brewing was very strong, it must have been apparent to anyone nearby that brewing was taking place, late at night on a Saturday – perhaps local people knew and just kept their mouths shut! Or perhaps there was no brewing, as the Levetts claimed. I am surprised that the police constable did not mention this smell when he was saying that he was sure they were brewing.

Who do you believe? What would your verdict have been? I would be interested to hear your views!

[i] This is the site about Italian craftsmen in the UK. http://italophiles.com/london_italians2.htm

Families of the Lost Hamlets – The Levetts

The Levett Family – with side Orders of Gaunts, Nocks and Fletchers!

Among what I think of as the ‘core families’ in the Lost Hamlets, ie the families who appear in every census so far transcribed, are the Levetts.

I am ancient enough to remember a Levett’s butchers in Blackheath, just opposite my grandfather’s home in Birmingham Road. It was on the same side of the road as the Shoulder of Mutton public house and there is a story which tells that a Levett, who was a Butcher in Birmingham Road sold the land on which the pub was built and which had previously been used as his abattoir or shambles, and that he had specified that it should be called “The Shoulder of Mutton” as a nod to his trade. The Levetts Butcher, if my memory serves me correctly, was run by Fred Levett who was a very traditional butcher and still had sawdust on the shop floor in the 1950s. As the daughter of a carpenter, I remember the small of sawdust with nostalgia! My research so far has not yet established a link to these Levetts but may yet do so.

My starting point when looking at the Levett family was that there were Levetts in Perry’s Lake in the 1841 Census. James Adshead Levett, aged about 35, was a Publican, running what became known as the Portway Tavern with his wife Mary, 25 and his children Richard, aged 5 and John aged 8 months, plus a servant girl Eliza Cooper who was 12. James Adshead Levett (1805-1878) was the first Levett baptism to appear in the Parish Registers and he was baptised on the 6 Jul 1805 at St Giles, the son of John Levett and his wife Elizabeth. Adshead was Elizabeth’s maiden name. But I will start with:

Earlier Levetts – John Levett (1777-1861) of Brickhouse

James’s father John Levett farmed for many years at Brickhouse Farm which was then adjacent to Cock Green which was between Tippity Green and Springfield. John had married Elizabeth Adshead (1873-1822) at Wolverhampton St Peter on 22 December 1803. They had two children in Rowley, James Adshead Levett (1805) and also Katherine Elizabeth Levett (c.1813) who was baptised, for some reason, at Halesowen rather than Rowley on 30 Jul 1813 although it was noted in the register that her parents were ‘of Rowley’.

I have subsequently realised that there were extensive repairs to the roof and walls of the church in that period so the church may simply not have been in use.

John and Elizabeth Levett

If there were any other children born to the couple in that long period I have not yet found them although, as I found later, the Levetts moved around a lot more than I had expected and appear to have been nail merchants, so it is possible that there were children born to them and baptised elsewhere that I have not found yet. Elizabeth Levett, of Brickhouse, died in 1822 and was buried at St Giles on 5 Jun 1822, aged 39.

Elizabeth Adshead was the daughter of James Adshead of Wolverhampton and his wife Sarah Nock, born in 1783. James and Sarah had been married at St Giles, Rowley Regis by Licence on 16 Nov 1779, the marriage witnessed by her father Tobias Nock. In addition to Elizabeth, James and Sarah Adshead also had a daughter Harriet who was born in 1784. Sarah Adshead died in 1786 in Wolverhampton.

Please see my post on this blog about the Nock family for more details about them.

Where was John Levett born?

I have not been able to find John Levett in the 1851 census although he was at Brickhouse in 1841 when it shows that he was not born in the County. (The 1841 Census says whether someone was born in the County they were now living in but it is a simple Yes or No, there are no clues as to where if the answer is No.) In 1851 there is an entry at Brickhouse Farm that he was a farmer of 66 acres of land, employing men and the head of the household but that he was away from home on the night of the Census and was enumerated at Birmingham. If so, I cannot find him in Birmingham or indeed anywhere else – perhaps whoever he was staying with in Birmingham thought he was being enumerated in Rowley! In the 1861 Census John, aged 84 and a retired farmer, described as a ‘gentleman’ born in London was living in Queen Street, Smethwick apparently with a Partridge family.

The London Levetts

It appears, however, that John Levett, the father of James Adshead Levett, was born in Stepney, London and was baptised on the 18^th Apr 1779 at St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, Tower Hamlets, Middlesex. In the baptismal registers John’s father John is recorded as being a Victualler or a publican in Ratcliff which is in the parish of Stepney.

But that does not mean that the family had no previous link with Rowley Regis. John Levett’s father was also a John Levett and his mother was Deborah Nock. They had married at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 13 May 1776 when John Levett Snr was a widower of St Dunstans, Stepney, London. This marriage was the first time that the Levett name appears in the St Giles Registers and the marriage was witnessed by her father Tobias Nock, just as he would witness his daughter Sarah’s marriage to James Adshead three years later. Perhaps Deborah and John Levett Senior had met while she was visiting her brother Tobias in Shadwell.

So John Levett, the son of John Levett and Deborah Nock and his wife Elizabeth Adshead, daughter of James Adshead and Sarah Nock were first cousins by their mothers. Definitely Rowley roots!

The Great Fire

In 1794, many houses in Ratcliffe and Shadwell were destroyed by a fire which “consumed more houses than any one conflagration has done since the Great Fire of London”, and also destroyed many boats, including one laden with around £40,000 of sugar[i]. In fact only one house in Ratcliff survived, so John Levett’s pub must have gone, too. Deborah Levett nee Nock had died in 1794 so I thought for a moment that she might have died in the fire but she had been buried on 15 May 1794 and the fire was on 23rd July. So in less than 2 months, John Levett Snr had lost his wife, leaving him with at least five children to care for and then his pub. John Levett Jnr was 17 and the youngest Elizabeth only five. More details on the fire in the piece already posted to this blog on the Nock family.

John’s uncle Tobias Nock the Younger, newly married to his second wife Mary Kitson, and his businesses would presumably also have been affected by the fire.

One has to wonder whether John Levett decided to send one or more of his children back to their maternal Nock family in Rowley Regis, while he rebuilt his business in Stepney. Many residents there were apparently accommodated in tents in the churchyard and it would inevitably take time to sort out insurance claims and rebuild properties. Perhaps this was how John Levett Jnr came to be in Rowley and an established part of the community there.

Eileen Bird, who is descended from James Adshead Levett, tells me that she thinks John was the only child to return to Rowley. Certainly the other Levett children appear in Stepney in many later records, though I have not looked into these in any detail.

John’s maternal grandfather Tobias Nock the Elder had died in 1791 and his grandmother Nock in Jan 1794 so perhaps he came back to Rowley to assist other members of the family. He is not mentioned by name in Tobias Nock’s Will, nor are any grandchildren, but his mother and aunts and uncles are all named and are beneficiaries.

Some background – The Economic Situation

In 1815 the Battle of Waterloo had taken place and, as the war with France ended, demobilisation of the Army led to mass unemployment as tens of thousands of men returned to their homes. In the same year the first of the Corn Laws was passed, which were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and corn, including all cereal grains including wheat, oats and barley. These restrictions were designed to keep corn prices artificially high to favour domestic farmers but had a disastrous impact on the poor. Not only bread would have been affected, barley was used for making ale or beer so that trade would have been affected, too. In 1816 harvests were dire due to poor weather, causing widespread hunger and large scale emigration to North America, particularly from Ireland. 1816 became known as ‘the year without a summer’ due partly to a volcanic eruption the previous year in what is now Indonesia which disrupted weather patterns and caused famines across the world. Riots broke out in England against the Corn Laws which were seen as benefitting the landowners and farmers but keeping prices high for everyone else. Many in the working classes also saw their wages cut, compounding the problems. Armed guards had to defend MPs as ordinary people saw the laws as showing little thought for them. The Corn Laws, by the way, stayed in place until 1846.

Rowley Regis was clearly also affected by this. A report in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette on 2 September 1816 says “The subscription for the relief of the poor is now about £37,000. – The Committee have already extended relief to the poor of Spitalfields, Hinckley, Bilston, Bolton-le-Moors, Stockton, Dudley, Rowley Regis, Kingswinford, Sudbury, Bridport and Stockport; and also voted considerable sums for the relief of distressed parts in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.” I was surprised to see that the distress in Rowley Regis and other Black Country towns was such that they were listed alongside other much bigger areas.

In the same paper on the 11th November that year a notice appeared signed by George Barrs which is shown here, which acknowledged a donation of £250 from the Right Honourable Viscount Dudley and Ward ‘for the relief of the almost unexampled Distresses of the Poor Manufacturers in this Parish”. Just above it is a notice from the Birmingham Workhouse about the claims being made on it, and to the right there may be seen a reference to a Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor in Staffordshire, which had already raised more than £6000 for this purpose.

The problems were widespread in the area. It is possible that the individual nature of nail making in small workshops and without an overall employer contributed to these problems in the Black Country as nailers were reliant on what they could sell their nails for, there was no overarching employer to assist them.

John Levett in 1818

John seems to have been in Rowley for some years by 1818, (by then aged about 40) because he had married locally in 1803 and had been a Church Warden and the Overseer of the Poor for some time, which were roles generally only assumed by known and respectable members of the community. This must have been a considerable responsibility in this period of poverty and distress. Although it appears that relations between the Curate George Barrs and his church officers in this period left much to be desired.

The year 1818 seems to have been a busy one for John Levett.

On 25 May 1818, in Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette, the following advertisement appeared:

“To Iron and Coal-Masters

To be disposed of by Tender, the Mines of Coal and Ironstone in an Estate at Rowley Regis, called the Brickhouse Farm, in the holding of Mr John Levett.

Proposals addressed to Mr John Lowe, of the Ravenhurst in Bordesley, near Birmingham (Postage paid) will be duly attended to. “

The Brickhouse Farm estate, according to J Wilson Jone’s book[ii], had been given on 21 August 1677 by Humfrey Lowe, the descendant of the Stewards of the Manors and Sheriffs of Stafford, as an endowment for the maintenance and repair of St John’s Chapel, Deritend, an old Roman Catholic church. It would have been let by the trustees to John Levett (and many others before him) but the chapel presumably retained the mineral rights to what was under the ground.

So it seems possible from this that some of his farmland was going to be taken for mining of coal and ironstone and certainly Edward Chitham[iii] notes that a colliery at Brickhouse was leased by Joseph Fereday and John Jones, possibly as a result of this advertisement. They were not very successful as a geological fault known as the Russell’s Hall fault ran through Rowley Parish and surveyors reported that the terrain was ‘very much thrown up and down by faults’. Such were the problems that Fereday and Jones went bankrupt in June 1829, followed in subsequent years by several later owners.

In July 1818 John Levett published this Notice in the Birmingham Gazette, after an apparent dispute about the accounts he had kept in his role as Overseer of the Poor in the previous year, which were, however, subsequently found to be correct.

In August 1818 about three months after the previous sale, an advertisement appeared in Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette for the sale of land at Old Hill. The advertisement in August was for two lots of properties and John Levett of Rowley is described as the Proprietor. The ad reads

“Freehold Land and Building at Old Hill

To be sold by auction at the Dudley Arms, in Dudley, on Tuesday 25th day of August inst. at Four o’clock in the afternoon, in the following lots:

Lot 1: A desirable Public House, Stable, Garden and other Outbuildings, in the Occupation of Mr B Stokes, at Old Hill in the Parish of Rowley Regis and County of Stafford with a large Nail Warehouse adjoining, which, at a small expense, may be converted into a Malthouse, and two other Dwelling Houses and Nail Shops adjoining, with twelve acres of rich Arable, Pasture and Meadow Land, Tythe-Free, called the OLD HILL FARM, with the valuable Mines of Coal, Clay and Ironstone under the same.

These premises are bounded by Lands belonging to Lord Viscount Dudley and Ward and Mr Daniel Granger and front the Turnpike Road leading from Dudley to Hales Owen.

Lot 2: Eight other Dwelling Houses, Nail Shops and Gardens, in the Occupation of John Johnson and others, nearly adjoining the above Lot, together with five Acres if exceedingly good Meadow and Pasture Land with the valuable Mines of Coal, Clay and Ironstone under the same.

These premises are bounded by Lands belonging to the Rev G Barrs and Mr Pearce and adjoining the said Turnpike Road.

The above Lands and buildings may now be let for £150 per year.

This estate is within a few hundred yards of the Netherton Canal and Mess’rs Attwoods Iron Furnaces near Dudley.

*The land is very valuable for building upon, as a great part is fronting the Turnpike Road; and for further particulars enquire of William Bunch, Auctioneer, Dudley or the Proprietor Mr John Levett, Rowley. “

Now this sounds to me very much like the land and houses that had been left to Elizabeth Nock by her father Tobias the Elder. Even down to the name of one of the tenants.

Land at Old Hill

In 1793 Tobias Nock the Elder had left the following bequest –

“I give and devise unto my daughter Elizabeth Nock her heirs and assigns forever all those several closes or points of pasture land and also those five dwelling houses shops gardens and appurtenances situate at Old Hill in the parish of Rowley Regis in the County Stafford now in the several holdings of John Westwood, John Johnson, Shelley Garrett, Hannah Garrett and the Widow ohara.”

So, since Elizabeth did not die until 1842, how was it that John Levett, her nephew, was described as the Proprietor? Had Elizabeth made over the properties to him? In her own Will, drafted in 1835, Elizabeth leaves most of her property to her niece Harriet Adshead including her ‘real estate (if any)’.

Whether the sale took place and how much money that raised we do not know. Did John Levett need money because he had bought the rights advertised previously and some of which, perhaps, he was selling on? It seems unlikely we shall ever know.

Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette is a rich resource for local historians! In February 1819, another Advertisement appeared, concerning John Levett. This stated:

“Valuable live Stock and Farming Implements

To be sold by AUCTION, on the Premises, by W Bunch on Monday next, February 19, all the Farming Stock, etc belonging to Mr John Levett, at the Brick House Farm, in the Parish of Rowley Regis and County of Stafford, who has let the principal Part of his Land; consisting of one Cow and Calf, seven exceeding good cows in calf, four useful Draught Horses and their Gearing, black half-bred Colt, 3 years old, bay Waggon Colt 2 years old, grey Filly Colt, of the Cart Kind, three Sows in Pig, five Store Pigs, three six-inch Wheel Carts with Iron Arms, six-inch Wheel Waggon with Iron Arms, three Pair of Harrows, two ploughs, Land Roll, Winnowing Machine, new Tax Cart with good brass mounted Harness, two Ricks of Oats – about 26 tons, two ricks of Hay – about 25 tons, and a large Quantity of other implements, which will appear in the Catalogues.

The Horses are well known to be good Workers; the Waggons, Carts, Ploughs and Harrows are nearly new; the Cows are known to be good milkers; the Hay and the Oats will be sold by the Ton, in such Quantities as will suit the Purchasers; and the Whole will be sold without Reserve.

The Sale to begin precisely at Ten o’Clock in the Morning.”

Now that is a substantial sale of seemingly all the stock, equipment and effects of a substantial farming operation. By someone who is leaving that profession of farming behind, it appears. Perhaps this was a reaction to the poor summer the previous year when crops failed because of the weather, as related above. But as we will see, John Levett continued to be described – including by himself – as a farmer of Brickhouse for many years to come. It’s a puzzle!

A new marriage for John Levett

Following his wife Elizabeth’s death in Rowley in late May or early June 1822, John Levett of Brickhouse Farm, Rowley Regis married barely nine months later for a second time to a widow Alice Ryan, in Edmonton, north of London on 25 Feb 1823. I was puzzled as to how he came to know Alice Ryan well enough to marry her in such a short time when she lived so far away but, of course, John Levett had London roots and probably had business dealings there as well as family connections. And she was a fairly wealthy widow so he probably wanted to marry her before someone else stepped in!

I have detailed this part of the story in a separate piece on my blog – A side helping of Gaunts, although it is only the history of this very small part of the prolific Gaunt family in a very restricted period!

John Levett the Bankrupt

In view of the economic woes in manufacturing in the period, perhaps it is not surprising that John Levett was not immune to financial problems. On 25^th November 1826, only three years after his marriage to Alice, from Notices in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, we find that John Levett was declared bankrupt. He was described as a ‘farmer, nail ironmonger, dealer and chapman’.

This description appears in this newspaper notice relating to his declaration of bankruptcy! I have also seen similar descriptions relating to other bankrupts at about this time, so perhaps it was not unusual for men of business to have several areas of interest balanced against each other. Various further notices followed of the usual procedures involved in Bankruptcy, including meetings of creditors, usually held in Birmingham and later Dudley. This process went on for some years.

In July 1827 a Warehouse in Oldbury, adjacent to the Birmingham Canal and previously used as a Nail Warehouse by John Levett, was put up for sale by Thomas Goode, a solicitor of Dudley, who had been appointed by the Court to deal with this process, with the proceeds to be distributed to creditors presumably. In June 1828, Thomas Goode gave Notice in the newspaper that Creditors who had proved their debts against John Levett would receive a second and final dividend on their respective debts, on application to his office. There is no further mention of the bankruptcy then for many years and John and Alice disappear from public notice for some years.

Alice’s Will

On the 13^th Jan 1844 , following Alice’s death on 6 Nov 1843, John Levett and Alice’s sister Hannah Finney, nee Gaunt were granted:-

“Admon (with the Will and codicil annexed of all and singular the goods chattels and credits of Alice Levett (wife of John Levett/ late of Rowley Regis in the County of Stafford deceased was granted to the said John Levett, the husband and Hannah Finney (Wife of William Finney), formerly Gaunt, spinster, the sister of the deceased the surviving executors named in the Will as having both first sworn by common duty to administer. The said John Levett being as the lawful husband of the said deceased entitled to all her goods chattels and credits over which she had no disposing power and concerning which she is dead intestate.”

So John Levett was claiming the whole of Alice’s estate. What is unclear is whether this included the property which had been put in trust in their Marriage Settlement, presumably with his agreement, and it seems likely that the Trustees would have been duty bound to resist any attempt to set aside this trust. But by this time, all but one or possibly two of the Legg family whom Alice had tried to benefit from her London estate were also dead and, as will be shown in a separate piece, the family appear not to have derived any benefit from Alice’s Will.

And it appears that the matter of bankruptcy was still not resolved in 1844 as this notice appeared in the paper:

“12 January 1844 – Birmingham Court of Bankruptcy

In the Matter of John Levett, of Rowley, Farmer Mr Bolton of Dudley, applied to the Court for a meeting to choose trade assignees under this bankruptcy, which occurred eighteen years ago. It appeared that both the original assignees were dead and that a fresh appointment was necessary in consequence of property to the amount of £200 having recently fallen in to the estate. The application was granted with the proviso that the choice, the audit and the dividend should take place on the same day.”

Since this is only a few weeks after the death of Alice Levett, it seems likely that this claim relates to her estate. And her estate was certainly originally worth a great deal more than £200 so where that figure came from is unclear. And where the rest of her money went. Presumably not to her husband as nearly twenty years after the original declaration, this advertisement implies that John Levett was presumably still a bankrupt.

John Levett’s death was registered in the Smethwick area, he died on 15 September 1861 and was buried at St Giles on 19 Sep 1861.

The next odd thing is that in John Levett’s Will was not proved until 1876: The following is the statement at the end of his Will:

11 December 1876

Administration of the effects of John Levett, late of Rowley Regis in the County of Stafford, a Widower, who died 15 September 1861 at Smethwick in the said County was granted at the Principal Registry to James Adshead Levett of Perry’s Lake Rowley Regis, Licenced Victualler the son and one of the Next of Kin.

And ten days later:

21 December 1876

Special Administration of the effects of Alice Levett (wife of John Levett) late of Rowley Regis in the County of Stafford who died 6 November 1843 at Rowley Regis, left unadministered by the said John Levett and Hannah Finney (wife of William Finney) the sister the surviving Executors was granted at the Principal Registry to James Adshead Levett of Perry’s Lake Rowley Regis, Licenced Victualler. Special Administration (with Will) granted by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury January 1844.

So John Levett had not administered Alice’s estate and his son James Adshead Levett did not apply to administer his father’s Will, and that of his stepmother, until fifteen years after his father’s death. How very mysterious!

That convoluted tale deals with the Levetts up to John Levett’s death in 1861. I shall deal with John’s children James Adshead Levett and Catherine Elizabeth Levett and later family in a separate article I am working on which will follow shortly.

[i] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Ratcliffe-Fire-of-1794/

[ii] J Wilson Jones, The History of the Black Country, published by Cornish c.1950.

[iii] Edward Chitham, Rowley Regis A History, published by Phillimore 2006. ISBN:1-86077-418-0