Tag: Family history

The Farms in the Lost Hamlets

As I have mentioned before, although the landscape around Rowley became industrialised and scarred by mining, clay extraction and quarrying, much of Turners Hill remained open countryside and in use for farming, supplying the local population with milk and eggs until well into the 20th century and much of the area on the hill is now being returned to a green condition as quarries are filled in.

There were several farms on the Rowley side of Turners Hill itself, and this post is principally about Freebodies Farm, Hailstone Farm and Turners Hill Farm with a mention of Lamb Farm, nearer to Portway Hall. To local people these farms were often known by the names of the farmers living there at the time but on maps their traditional name are usually shown.  Of the local farms, there were apparently at least four dairy farms in the area in the 1920s and 30s, run by the Monk, Richards, Merris and Skidmore families.

At an early stage there was a Mill or Windmill Farm at Tippity Green although this was not identified in the later censuses, it appears to have been on the site of the former parish windmill and this area was subsequently quarried away.

This photograph of the Ibberty (later Tippity) Manorial Mill appears in J Wilson Jone’s book, The History of the Black Country which was published in about 1950 although the date of the photograph is not known.

In 1841 Edward Alsop aged 60 was listed as a farmer at the Wind Mill Farm in Tippity Green, with his presumed wife and four children, plus a male servant. Next listed on the Census was Elizabeth Lewis, aged 40, an ironmonger, with her family and then Joseph Bowater who was a butcher and subsequent licensee of the Bulls Head so that is the correct area in Tippity Green. Neither the Alsop nor Lewis families are listed in the area by the time of the next census.

There was also a Knowle Farm but this is not quite within the area of the Lost Hamlets and I have not indexed the Census for this area.  

Also, the late Anthony Page has a picture in his first book on Rowley of Warren’s Hall Farm which was over the top of the hill on the Oakham Road, a large white house. It later also had riding stables and later still became a residential Nursing Home before being demolished and replaced by housing. Again, it is not quite within my study area and I have not indexed the census for this area.

Portway Farm, also slightly outside my study area, still exists though no longer in farming use, perhaps the only one of all these farms to have survived as a building to the present day.

The Censuses

The Censuses are not consistent about how the farms were recorded. Sometimes they were not listed by name. Where I have been able to identify the farms I have shown the results under details about each farm. To date I have only transcribed censuses for the Study area up to 1881. Later ones will follow in due course and I hope to upload the transcripts to a website for the Study at some point. 

Not all the censuses include the acreage farmed by each farm but where they do, they vary considerably from one census to the next which does not help with the identification process.

Where on Turners Hill were the farms?

I was very unclear until recently exactly where each of these farms was although I think I have them identified now. No doubt someone will help me out if I have this wrong!

Freebodies Farm and Hailstone Farm were next to each other down a lane on the left off the Turners Hill Road, above the Hailstone quarry with the Hailstone Farmyard being at the end of the track in the area shown on OS maps as Gadds Green. Hailstone Farm occupied the two buildings shown on the left on this photograph and Freebodies the three buildings on the right.

The date of this photograph is not known (copyright also unknown but will be gladly acknowledged if informed) but the two farms are very much on the brink of the quarries so probably 1960s.

Turners Hill Farm was further up the hill, on the right.

Turners Hill Farm, 1969. Copyright: Mike Fenton

Many of the fields were divided not by hedges but by stone walls which is a very common practice in areas where there is a ready supply of stone for use, as in the Cotswolds and in the Yorkshire Dales. There were some hedges, though, because Reg Parsons who grew up at 2 Turners Hill in the late 1930s told me that his mother loved the wild sweet peas which grew in the hedges near there. He remembered Vera Cartwright with the milk cart which delivered daily to Blackheath, Whiteheath, Langley and Rowley Regis, seven days a week. Before the advent of milk bottles, milk in most parts of the country was taken round in churns and cans and the cans were taken into the customer’s house to be dispensed into their own jugs. This was not just in Rowley, my husband can remember, as a boy, helping his uncle with his milk round in Gloucester where the same system was used. He also said that the horse or pony would know the route and stopping places where they would wait patiently for the milk to be dispensed before moving on to the next stop.

Reg Parsons also remembered that there was a field below his home on Turners Hill which was used as an fuel dump in the Second World War, he remembers piles of Jerry Cans on concrete bases and also an anti-aircraft gun (known apparently as Big Bertha) near the Wheatsheaf pub. My mother used to be on fire watch sometimes during the war, with the St John’s Ambulance brigade and  she also remembered the gun there. Sarah notes that one of her grandfather’s fields was requisitioned by the army so this would have been for the fuel storage that Reg remembers and she also tells of family memories that during the war a German bomb landed on one of the fields killing a cow. And during air raids, the ponies pulling the milk carts had to be unharnessed in case they bolted, with all the potential loss of milk and vehicles. Later, in the 1950s, six caravans were put on the site which were lived in by local people.

Many people have mentioned their memories of the Cartwright family who farmed at Hailstone Farm on Turner’s Hill for many decades and who had a riding school, as well as the milk round. Sarah Thomas has written a fascinating book called Hailstone Farm about life on the farms there which she has published privately and, having come across my study online, she has very kindly sent me a copy but with the stipulation that she does not wish to have any of the contents to be put on social media. However, she tells me that she has deposited copies of the book in national and local archives so it would be well worth enquiring, if you are visiting local archives or perhaps Blackheath library, whether they hold a copy. Certainly Dudley Archives lists a copy and Sandwell Archives appear to but do not specify where it is held and it is not reservable through the library system. The book is full of photographs and pictures of documents and family memories and history. I will not be reproducing anything from it but it will inform me about the farms and where they were so that this study has a more accurate record of the farms and their ownership over recent years.

Freebodies Farm, Turner’s Hill

There has been, if not specifically a farm, then an area known as Freebodies on Turners Hill for centuries.

A Survey of English Place Names refers to it as an ‘early-attested site in the Parish of Dudley , a name of the manorial type, deriving from the family of Frebodi  found in Dudley in 1275 and 1327’. Bear in mind that for centuries the main route from Rowley to Dudley ran over Turners Hill so directly through the site where Freebodies Farm later was.  There was, may still be, an area of Dudley called Freebodies in the Kates Hill area of Dudley and the Freebodies Tavern was there until very recently.

The Morgan website has a large amount of well documented and referenced information on local families and the area and notes that a document in the Dudley Archives shows that there was a Deed Poll in about 1550 by a William Chambers Alias Ireland assigning ancient ecclesiastical land of the Priory of St John’s at Halesowen. A number of his descendants for the next 150 years appear in the local records of Rowley Regis and Dudley, using the names ‘Chambers alias Ireland’  These include intermarriages with the Darby family. The name Ireland is sometimes spelled ‘Ierland’ or ‘Yearland’. The same document demonstrates that they owned ex-monastic lands at Rowley called Freebodies, and this reference recurs in a number of later Darby wills. If you have Chambers/Irelands/Darbys or Cartwrights on your family tree it is well worth looking at this site https://www.morganfourman.com/  Sadly I have none of these names in my tree!

A survey by Lord Dudley’s Stewards in 1556 produced a rent roll in which William Ireland’s Freebodys, later called Freebury Farm is recorded, suggesting that it was established before the neighbouring Hailstone Farm.

A Will of John Chambers in 1870, implies that the farm on Turners Hill was originally part of the Freebodies estate. Certainly, John Chamber’s brother William was an executor of his will and was described as a farmer of Rowley Regis.

At other times it was known as Freebury Farm. Spelling was very variable in those days!

Censuses for Freebodies: At Freebodies Farm in 1841 were Josiah Parkes and his family (including Sophia Cole who was mentioned in my earlier article about the Cole families around Turners Hill, and one male and one female servant.

However, there is no mention of Freebodies in the 1861 Census nor any farmer listed in Gadds Green.  However, listed as Farmhouse, Turners Hill and as a farmer of 30 acres is William Smith, aged 54 with his wife Sarah and his Levett granddaughter, plus two servants. Was this Freebodies?

In 1871 there is no mention of Freebodies Farm but two households are listed as ‘adjoining Hailstone Farm’ – John Bradshaw, an agricultural labourer aged 26 with his wife and his 11 month old son plus his brother aged 21 and also an ag lab. The brothers had both been born in Haselor, Warwickshire and his wife in Solihull. Also described as living ‘adjoining Hailstone Farm’ was a blacksmith Henry Russell aged 33 with his wife and daughter. So both of these households were from outside the area. It is possible that the land of the two farms was being worked together and the farmhouse used to house either farm workers or tenants.

The next building listed is Brickhouse Farm which was some distance away in Cock Green on the Dudley Road and which was being farmed by the Levett family with one ag lab and one female servant. There is sometimes no accounting for the routes taken by census enumerators!

Or was there a well established path across the fields between Hailstone and the Dudley Road at Springfield which everyone used? This seems likely as Reg Parsons mentioned to me that his father, on his way home from work, would sometimes get off the bus at Springfield to buy something from the shop there and would then cut up over the  fields to home. This does seem more practical than the residents up on the hill always having to walk down to Perrys Lake, along Tippetty Green and to the Knowle that way. There is certainly a Footpath marked on the 1904 OS Map, here, running from Knowle Farm to Hailstone Farm and also further on up Turners Hill. .

Copyright: Alan Godfrey Maps

Hailstone Farm

A lease in Dudley Archives dated 1796 is for a lease of 21 years to Samuel Round, farmer, of  Hailstone Farm (a messuage called Freeberrys alias Fingerhold – that Finger ‘I the Hole popping up again!) so it seems likely that the farm was established by the late 1700s.

Sarah’s Cartwright grandfather had been born on Hailstone Farm but the family then moved elsewhere, again this makes me think of the information on the Morganfourman site that the Cartwrights were closely linked to this area as far back as the 1500s. He took over first Lamb Farm in 1912 and then Hailstone Farm in 1924 and ran their businesses from there, including the riding school established by Sarah’s mother and the milk round (which had originally been started in the early 1900s when the family were living at Lamb Farm), later taking on the tenancy of Freebodies in addition in 1932, subletting the house to tenants. In addition to the Riding School, there were some Gymkhanas there – much more detail about this and photographs in this article in the Black Country Bugle in 2019. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/black-country-bugle/20191106/281505048027440

Later part of the family moved to another farm at Bewdley and Sarah’s mother and father continued to live at Hailstone until the 1960s when the lease was terminated and the land taken back for quarrying.

There is much more detail in the book about the farms, their construction, plans, photographs, invoices etc from the business in the book, a real very personal record of a Rowley Farm in the 20th century.

Censuses for Hailstone Farm

In 1841, the farmer at Hailstone Farm was Samuel Round who was sixty, with three servants, possibly the Samuel Round mentioned above who was granted a lease in 1796 or possibly his son . I can find no trace of Hailstone Farm or the Round family in 1851.

In 1861, Keturah Round, a married lady of 54 was at Hailstone Farm with several children though no spouse and she is described as the Head of the household though not a widow. She had married Edwin Round in Dudley in the Sep qtr if 1854 and was previously Wheale.

In 1871 Hailstone Farm was occupied by Elizabeth Stickley, a widow with her occupation given as Farmer with her two sons John aged 37 and Thomas aged 27, both described as Farmer’s son, along with Ruth Lees, a servant but possibly also related to Elizabeth Stickley as her maiden name was Lees. In the previous census this family had farmed at Oatmeal Row, Cakemore, next door to some ancestors of mine!

In 1881, there is no mention of Hailstone Farm, and no farmer listed but there are three households listed as Hailstone Hill. Susan Jones, who was 50 and a widow was listed as an annuitant aged 33, born in Middlesex, as were the two young nieces living with her who were scholars. Her femail servant was born in Kingswinford. It is tempting to think that this was Hailstone Farm. One of the other houses was occupied by Joseph Hooper, a Farm labourer, aged 48 and born in Cleverley, Shropshire and his wife Ann aged 54, born Thame, Oxfordshire. The tenants in this area certainly almost all came from outside the area, it seems.   

Turners Hill Farm

Maps show Turners Hill Farm higher up Turners Hill from the other two farms and there is also a reference on some maps to Cloudland though not on recent maps.  There appears to be a large House there, too, Turners Hill House and sometimes the owners of this house were also described as farmers. It is possible, since there is evidence that the Downing family had other land in the area which they let out, that farming was not their principal occupation and that most of the land was farmed from Turners Hill Farm, rather than house.

Censuses for Turners Hill Farm/House

At Turners Hill in 1841 was Joseph Downing with his wife Nancy, son Isaac and two female servants.

By 1851 still on Turners Hill but with no name given for their residence was his widow Nancy Downing with their son Isaac, aged 35 who was a ‘proprietor of lands’ and three unmarried daughters, all described as annuitants, plus a Thomas Whitehouse who was probably Nancy Downing’s brother as her maiden name was Whitehouse. Thomas Whitehouse was a widower, and also a ‘proprietor of lands’ like his nephew.

By 1861 Isaac Downing was still living on Turners Hill, with his three sisters. This time he has given his occupation as “Principal occupation: general superintendence of the cultivation of land. “The Enumerator has added Farmer. But Stephen Parsons on Facebook commented that he remembers that in his time there was a large house on the right of Turners Hill Road which was Turners Hill House, and that Monks Lane ran below it which led to Monks Farm and the quarry. There was also an area in this location called Cloudland on some maps. So were the Downings perhaps  living at Turners Hill House but contracting out the farming? It seems likely. I was interested to see on the Facebook page that Linda George has receipts signed by Isaac Downing in 1855 and 1856 for the letting of a farm at Darby’s Hill to Samuel Cook so the Downing family may have had substantial land holdings around the area.

The Downing siblings, still all unmarried, were still on Turners Hill, in 1871, Isaac, now 55, described as Landowner and Farmer and also on Turners Hill and described as a farmer of 88 acres in 1871 is William Whitehouse, a widower, with his two teenage sons a female servant and a farm labourer. I note that a William Whitehouse had been one of the witnesses of Joseph Downing and Nancy Whitehouse in 1810 so may well have been an uncle or cousin to the Downings.  This census is the last one showing this Isaac Downing, as he died in November 1874 and was buried in St Giles.  

There was also listed in 1871, however, a farmer of 60 acres on Turners Hill, James Bridge aged 28 with his wife Anne, one female servant and one agricultural labourer so this may have been Turners Hill Farm. By 1861 Ann Bridge, now a widow aged  39 was the farmer at Turners Hill Farm, by now farming 40 acres and employing 2 labourers, a cowman and a waggoner.

By 1881, there is the family of Samuel Woodall, an Engineer and Iron Founder listed first under Turners HIll, probably at Turners Hill House. He was 35 and born in Dudley. His wife Mary was born in Birmingham. In addition his two brothers and a sister were also living with them, with three female domestic servants, again all born outside Rowley. I presume this was the house previously occupied by the Downings.

Listed at 5 Turners Hill was William Giles, aged 30 – a farmer of 70 acres employing one additional man. This presumably was Turners Hill Farm. He and his wife were born outside Rowley, though not a great distance, being from Kingswinford and Cakemore respectively.  Their elder two children aged 8 and 6 had been born in Enville, Staffordshire, the two younger aged 4 and 2 in Rowley Regis.  

The Parish Registers

The Chambers family

On 31 October 1544, Margrett, wife of William Chambers was buried, so there were already Chambers in Rowley at this date. In 1558 William Chambers was buried. Between the two dates three Chambers girls – Mary, Margaret and Agnes were all married at St Giles. The records from 1558 to 1566 are noted by the Vicar, Adam Jevenn, as being missing. (I wonder whether he was an early ancestor of the Jeavons families in Rowley and Blackheath?)

In 1575, Jone, as daughter of John Chambers was baptised and in 1602, John, son of Thomas.

On 12 Feb 1603, a child William was baptised, described as the son of Edward Shakespurre and Joane, d. of Christopher Chambers.  Freebodies is not mentioned but certainly Christopher Chambers was associated with Freebodies then .  In January 1641, Edward, son of William Chambers of Freebodies was baptised at St Giles, in 1744 another William Chambers of Freebodies was buried . Christopher Chambers was one of two people appointed in 1650, along with three others to be ‘Collectors for the poore’ which implies a certain social standing in the parish. At times, the Chambers used the name Irelands, too. Sometimes their abode is given as Churchend though it is not clear where this was. Certainly there were 152 Chambers entries in the Parish Register between 1539 and 1684 for baptisms and burials, 1539-1754 for marriages. On occasions Chambers were also churchwardens.

By 1723, with the burial of Elinor Chambers, widow,  her abode was shown as Ffreebodies. Another branch of the Chamber, however was at Brickhouse in 1724. In 1727, Christopher Chambers of ‘ye ffinger i’ the hole’ was buried. Another branch of the Chambers was described in a marriage in 1732 as ‘of Tividale’. So the Chambers seemed to be scattered right around Turners Hill over several centuries.  

The Downing family also had a long term presence on Turners Hill. The first Downing entry in the Registers is in 1644 when Robert, son of John Downing of Warrley was baptised, with  numerous entries after that, the first Isaac Downing (that we know of) being baptised at St Giles in 1672. In 1814 Isaac Downing, of Turners Hill was buried aged 75, having died of Asthma.

Back in 1722, Mary, wife of Isaac Downing ‘de ffox oak’ was buried but he appears to have remarried the following year and had a child Samuell  baptised at St Giles, with an Isaac Downing of Foxoak  being buried in 1727, probably not the same man but possibly related.

On 23rd July 1815, Isaac , son of Joseph and Nancy Downing, was baptised and Joseph’s occupation was given as a ‘Beast Leech’ – someone who treated sick animals. Joseph and Nancy were still on Turners Hill in the 1841 Census. A daughter  Mary Ann was baptised to them in 1818, followed by Lavinia in 1821 and Amelia in 1823. Another Isaac Downing was married to Elizabeth Nutt in 1815 so there were several Isaacs around then. Joseph Downing, originally a ‘beast leech’ and later a farmer died and was buried in St Giles on 2 Jan 1849.

Not all the Downings in the area were so well-to do – Mary Downing, aged 69 of Perry’s Lake was buried in April 1821, having died of cold. In 1823 William Downing, son of Joseph Downing a miner, died in the Poorhouse. In 1828 an Isaac Downing of Perrys Lake died aged 88 of natural decay so presumably there was some connection shown by the use of the name Isaac. There were also Downings in Mincing Lane, in Windmill End and in Portway, all apparently in labouring jobs of various sorts. By the 1840s another branch of Downings were living in Gorsty Hill and another in Waterfall Lane.  

Only the Downings on Turners Hill appear to have been wealthy and one wonders whether perhaps one child might have benefitted from a scholarship to the Old Swinford Hospital and been able subsequently to have gone into a profession which improved his circumstances. I would dearly love to find out a list of Rowley boys who attended that school!

Lamb Farm

Lamb Farm was, according to Roy Slim, in an article in the Black Country Bugle in 2021, a small farm adjacent to the Lion Farm which later gave its name to the Lion Farm Estate, near Whiteheath so slightly out of my main study area but included here as there were connections to Freebodies and Hailstone Farm . Roy says that the Throne Farm, farmed by the Skidmores, was much larger than either of them and I presume that the local roads with royal names were so named because they were on land formerly part of this farm. Throne Road, Throne Crescent, Queens Drive, Hanover Road, Tudor Road, Windsor Road, Stuart Road. And I am interested to see that some of the modern roads there, built where the quack was, also have names with Royal connections, Sandringham Drive, Palace Close, Majestic Way, with the Vikings, Celts, Druids, Goths, Romans and Saxons getting a mention, too!

After the Cartwrights moved to Hailstone Farm in 1924, Lamb Farm was let to various tenants, including Hawleys, Hewitts, Slims, Matthews and Skidmores. Roy Slim has also written about his family’s time there.

Lamb Farm was sold for development in 1945.

Local memories of the farms

On the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page, Raymond Kirkham remembered that he had known the farm halfway up Turners Hill as Cartwright Farm. This would have been Hailstone Farm, as at the time Raymond was growing up, the Cartwrights were working the area of both farms from Hailstone Farm and, although they leased Freebodies too and farmed the land, the house was let to tenants. He noted that the farm further up at the top of the hill was Monk Farm and this must have been Turners Hill Farm. He said that this whole area was his playground when he was growing up and his family got their eggs from the farm.

Ian Davies remembered Hailstone farm well, as he was related to the Cartwright family. Ian’s Geordie grandfather lived with the Cartwrights at Lamb farm, near Portway Hall, when he first moved south in the early 1900s. He remembers that by the 1950s George Cartwright had moved away to a farm near Bewdley and Hailstone Farm had been taken over by their daughter Vera and her husband George Thomas. George taught Ian to ride. The quarries were already threatening to swallow the farm back then. The narrow track from Turners Hill had quarries close on both sides. The farmhouse and top of the land were swallowed up by the Tarmac mega-quarry, The lower area stretching down to Springfield was used for housing.

Ian also remembered Lamb Farm which was on the left going down Throne Road, immediately after Portway Hall. He used to walk past the drive on the way to his grandparents’ house in Newbury Lane. He thinks that St Michael’s School was built on the land and that in the 1800s Portway Hall colliery was on the farm’s land and he thinks this was responsible for the subsidence that ultimately forced Portway Hall to be demolished.

Ian also kindly added a link on the Facebook page about memories of Blackheath and Rowley Regis to an article written by Sarah Thomas in the Black Country Bugle which appeared in Nov 2019, including various photographs.

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/black-country-bugle/20191106/281505048027440

There are obviously several family connections to the Cartwrights still in the area as Margaret Higgs said that George Cartwright was her father’s uncle, her grandmother was George Cartwright’s sister.

 Mark Northall  said that his father Frank Northall had worked at Cartwright’s farm as a lad.

Jill Watkins-Beavon had lived in Gadds Green which was the land opposite Hailstone farm, later her fmily lived in one of the four houses in the quarry.

William Perry remembered in 2018 that his father had told him that when he was young he would walk up Turners Hill to Cartwright’s (Hailstone) farm where they had a lovely horse that he used to stroke.

So this is all the information that I have found to date about the farms in the Lost Hamlets, all disappeared now into the quarry but helping to sustain the local populace in their time, and about the families who farmed them over the centuries. More information would be very welcome and this can be added, corrected or a further post done if sufficient additional information is found.

A special education

In my last post to this blog, I mentioned in passing that a William Cole (my 2xg-great-uncle) had been a witness at the marriage of Edward/Edwin Hopkins and Elizabeth Cole and that it appeared that this William Cole was the older brother of Elizabeth.

I knew from my previous researches for my family tree that William was born presumably in 1837 or at least baptised at St Giles, on 17th September 1837, the eldest son of Edward and Frances Cole of Perry’s Lake and that he became a hairdresser which was a somewhat unusual occupation in the area at that time.  He was with his parents in Perry’s Lake in 1841 but not in 1851 when he would have been 13 or 14. I searched for him, wondering whether he had died in the interim between the two censuses or whether he was staying with grandparents or other relatives. But he was not in Perrys Lake or Rowley and I could not find a death registration or a burial for him.

Searching the 1851 Census for a slightly wider area, I found him listed as a Scholar at an institution named in the Census as ‘The Old Swinford Hospital’ which was on the Hagley Road, near Stourbridge, along with 80+ other boys. How on earth did he come to be there, apparently living there?

So I googled ‘The Old Swinford Hospital’ and found that this had been – and still is – a boarding school! That was a surprise to me, as I hadn’t thought the Coles were of a class who could afford to send their son to a boarding school. And, of course, they weren’t. They were ‘poor but honest’.

Founded by Thomas Foley, an ironmaster, MP and landowner from the Great Witley Estate in Worcestershire and with close links to Old Swinford and the surrounding area, Old Swinford Hospital first opened its doors to pupils in the late summer of 1670, just four years after the Great Fire of London which had probably considerably affected the Foley’s trading empire in London and may have resulted in them retiring to their country estates for a time. Local tradition has it that Foley, son of the famous Ironmaster Richard Foley, was originally inspired to start the school  after hearing a sermon by Richard Baxter, the ‘Kidderminster divine’, on the proper use of riches.  In particular, it appears, the school prepared the boys for useful lives where they could ‘make a difference’ to society and to provide them with a trade or craft, a means of earning a living.

Originally known as Stourbridge Hospital (charity), and occasionally referred to as Foley’s Blue Coat School, Thomas Foley’s vision was for the education of 60 boys from ‘poor but honest’ families nominated by specific local parishes. Families who had received poor relief at any time were excluded from this. The boys were not to come from the families of ‘the undeserving poor’. From those nominated by the eligible parishes, the Feoffees would choose boys to make up the required number.

Rowley Regis was one of those parishes and William Cole must have been nominated for a scholarship by the Vicar/Curate of Rowley Regis, at that time, the Rev’d George Barrs and perhaps the Church Wardens.  The boys boarded for two half year terms each year at the school in what were fairly Spartan conditions and were provided with a uniform. The diet was apparently  fairly basic but this was regularly inspected by the Feoffees.  

The eligible parishes and the numbers of boys to be nominated from each were set out in Foley’s Will, dated 1667, in places where the Foleys had a major interest, usually a landed or industrial link. These were:

Three from Old Swinford, four from Stourbridge Town, six from Kidderminster with three from the town and three from the foreign, four from Dudley and from Bewdley, two from each of Great Witley, Kingswinford, Kinver, Harborne, Halesowen, West Bromwich, Bromsgrove, Rowley Regis, Wednesbury, and Sedgley and one from Hagley, Little Witley, Alvechurch, Pedmore and Wombourne. In these cases the parish officers were to choose several names from which the feoffees made the final decision. The original school was for 60 boys and the remaining fourteen boys were chosen by the feoffees, though the numbers were later increased.

The 1851 census for the Hospital shows that home parish of each boy, all of them between 8 and 13 (with the exception of one 7year old!) These included Clent, West Bromwich, Harborne, , Stourbridge, Great Witley, Halesowen, Dudley, Bewdley, Kinver, Ledbury, Birmingham, Martley, Bromsgrove, Kidderminster, Wednesbury, Old Swinford, Kingswinford, Cradley, Pedmore, Wombourne, Worcester, Prestwood in Staffordshire, Hagley, Amblecote, Hallow, Holt and Banbury – so the admissions were still mainly being made in accordance with the original scheme nearly two hundred years later.

This Foundation was a huge undertaking, when you consider that Eton College had been founded in 1446 for seventy scholars and Winchester School, also for seventy in 1382, both with the huge resources of their royal and ecclesiastical founders behind them. Their intake of boys from the poorer classes was based on similar philanthropic motives, as well as on the need for choirs. In a much more local instance for me, the secondary school my children attended was founded in 1384 when Katharine, Lady Berkeley set up a school in Wotton-under-Edge, (one of the Manors owned by the Berkeley families of Berkeley Castle and treated by them as the Dowager’s residence) with one master and two students. This grew and later became a Grammar school and again, Katharine Lady Berkeley’s School still exists and is now a highly successful 11-18 mixed comprehensive school with over 1500 students.) So these educational foundations can continue to serve their local communities indefinitely, it seems.

Thomas Foley’s Will gave the Feoffees he had carefully selected and appointed the responsibility for the ‘maintenance and education and placing forth of Sixty Poore boys’ which was a considerable responsibility. In 1689 the total expenditure  was £592.16.11 (That is £592 pounds, 16 shillings and 11 pence for those unfamiliar with pre-decimal currency. There were twelve pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound!). This was funded mainly from the income from the Pedmore Estate, including rectorial tithes and rents, which had been purchased by Thomas Foley for this purpose, though he also purchased other lands in various  places including 15 acres in Rowley Regis.

The Dyett (food!) cost £173.16.07, much of the corn was home grown and the diet included a variety of meats. Apparel, including linen cloth for shirts and blue cloth for the traditional ‘Blue Coat’ coats and suits cost £124.7.6, plus salaries, husbandry, building and other minor expenses.

Later Foleys also funded an extension to provide a new aisle to Old Swinford Church, as all the boys would attend on Sundays which would have made it rather crowded.

How many local families must have benefitted over the centuries from this school and the opportunities offered to poor children? This requirement that the families of the boys had to be ‘poor but honest’ bears out my long held view that my Cole family were not rich but were respectable and industrious. I had wondered though how it was that the children of John Cole (1768-1843), unlike many of their cousins, appeared to be literate – perhaps John Cole or one of his sons was an earlier scholar at the school and passed on his learning to his siblings and children?

Copyright unknown but will gladly be acknowledge if informed.

Imagine the shock these grand buildings would have been to the poor boys of Rowley, leaving home for the first time – even Rowley church, until it was rebuilt, did not appear to be as grand as this. These buildings also remain in use at the school today, it appears as the school is still there, now a State Boarding School of high repute and they have an interesting website which says that descendants of Thomas Foley are still among the Trustees or Feoffees to this day.  

Day to day running of the school

In 1851, the school did not have a big establishment – the Census shows that the Head of the Household was a Scottish lady of 51 who was described as the Matron, although the Head Master (also a Scot)lived nearby on Hagley Road. She was assisted by one Under-Master, a Porter, a Nurse, a Cook and a Housemaid. Not many people to look after and educate more than 70 boys. The aim was that boys entered the school at about the age of seven or eight and received a grounding in many subjects although many would have been illiterate or very nearly so on entry.

Older boys were appointed as ‘hearers’, each of whom had two or three younger boys under his care for half a year and had to hear the boys of the 1st and 2nd classes reciting thirty verses of scripture and thirty of hymns, some new and some old, per week plus rules of grammar and arithmetical tables. The ‘hearers’ apparently took pride in their pupils doing well. Lessons, in 1838, for the 3rd and 4th classes included Writing, Reading, Spelling, Arithmetic, Reading and Tables, Catechism and Bible reading. By 1876 the 3rd classes were studying Writing and Dictation, Reading, Arithmetic, Arithmetic and grammar or geography, reading and sums, Grammar, Geography , Catechism and geography and scripture, a total of 30 hours teaching a week. The 4th classes studied Writing on slates and paper; Reading and dictation; Sums; Reading, spelling and scripture; Arithmetic and geography or scripture; Catechism and geography and Scripture. In 1848, boys began to attend a drawing and modelling class at the Art School in Stourbridge and were later entered for public examinations in design. This all prepared the boys for industrial or commercial apprenticeships.  Nothing if not ambitious and clearly well thought out.

Not all boys went in so early. The Headmaster’s report for 1865 mentions that some boys were already ten or more when admitted and only two were below nine. Two of those aged above ten did not know the alphabet and could not count to twenty.

All cannot have been sweetness and light at times, as in September 1854, 43 boys, nearly half the school, ran away, claiming that they were badly treated by the Master, that they were sometimes struck by the Porter with a cane and that they were not given sufficient food for breakfast and supper – perpetually hungry bolshy teenagers, it seems, perhaps not so different from boys today though I suspect most boys of that age now would be utterly astonished at the prospect of learning and reciting thirty verses of scripture and of hymns each week, in addition to the rest of the curriculum The absconding boys were mostly brought back the following day by their parents and the Feoffees looked into this and dismissed the first claim, reprimanded the Porter and increased the ration of bread with meals, at least until the following year when more boys ran away so the Feoffees decided that the amount of food did not appear to have made any difference and reduced the portions to the previous amount!

At the age of 14 the boys were apprenticed or indentured in various crafts and trades, on terms specified by the Feoffees of the school and which applied until the apprenticeship was completed. Placements were carefully selected and the Founder had set out in detail the form of indenture to be used. A Master requiring a boy had to provide a certificate signed by his local church authorities to show that he was a member of the Church of England, was a good and substantial householder, of sober life and conversation, and had sufficient employment to require and properly maintain an apprentice. He would then appear in person before the feoffees, sign the indentures, and receive a premium which was formerly of £4, afterwards raised to £10. No assignment of the indenture was allowed without the feoffees’ consent.

This was taken very seriously and the Admissions Book apparently shows the destination of every boy and the annual printed reports listed all appprenticeships agreed on. The Feoffees’ report of 1859 refers to the fact that the character of the boys stood high in the neighbourhood, and this is quite understandable. They were placed carefully, commonly within easy reach of the parent’s homes but sometimes they went further afield. For example, a boy was apprenticed to a confectioner in Aberystwyth in 1826, another to a London architect in 1848, and a third to a saddler in Manchester in I874. The kind of trades and crafts they went to varied considerably; some went into manual trades-rollers, blacksmiths, file cutters, fitters, carpenters, wheelwrights, coachbuilders; some into retail trades-grocers, drapers, bakers, confectioners; and a few were sent to professional men such as solicitors or architects, or even to surgeons, though in this last respect it was usually ‘to learn the art of a dispensing chemist’. There was a need in the area, particularly as industry and the industrial revolution expanded rapidly for literate boys with good education and Foley’s school was aimed precisely at meeting this need.

Much of this information is taken from a fascinating study entitled ‘Old Swinford Hospital School’ by Eric Hopkins who was a Principal Lecturer in History at Shenstone College, Bromsgrove. Appearing in the British Journal of Educational Studies in 1969, it can be accessed through educational links or a library interlibrary loan.  It is online and worth reading.  It is full of interesting detail and I have barely skimmed the surface! Other information comes from ‘The Seventeenth Century Foleys’ by Roy Peacock, published by the Black Country Society.

The opportunities this school presented to the boys of poor families in the area must have been life changing for them, by contrast with the schools available in the village.  Other wealthy individuals at various times also gave or left money to improve education in Rowley, including Lady Monins who set up a group of Trustees to remedy the lack of a school but died before her scheme could be implemented. She left a sum of money in her will in 1705 to found a school but it seems likely that it was not enough to do so and her relatives lived in London and Kent so probably were not really interested in Rowley matters. In 1774 it was found that income from the moneys left by Lady Monins were being used by the Gaunt family, Richard Gaunt was the Parish Clerk and also sexton at St Giles – the Gaunts were Parish Clerks for several generations – perhaps some of them too had been scholars  at the Hospital. His school was the only one in the village at that time and Richard Gaunt, according to Edward Chitham in his book on Rowley Regis, was found to be receiving £10 per annum from the Monin moneys and he educated 24 children for free, in addition to his paying pupils, his daughter Hannah also later running the school. But it seems unlikely that his teaching could have covered the curriculum and breadth of teaching at the hospital and opportunities for a real education in the village were severely limited.

The Old Swinford Hospital School continued to operate under Foley’s specifications for more than 300 years before becoming, in the last forty years, a top class residential comprehensive school.

Swinford Old Hospital Boys

At some point I hope to be able to see the original records and registers for the school and find out more detail but at present I do not know where these records are held or what access is permitted to them. But I have been able to trace quite a lot of information about the three boys there in 1851 and their stories follow.

William Cole

William Cole appears to have been trained as a barber or hairdresser and he continued this trade until the end of his working life, at least from 1861 to 1891. By 1861 William Cole was living in Corngreaves Road, Reddal Hill, lodging with a widowed plumber and glazier and with his occupation given as Barber. In November of 1861 he married Elizabeth Davies at Dudley St Thomas. Although Elizabeth’s name was spelled Davies in the Marriage Register, the children seem, in the GRO Birth Registrations, mostly to have mother’s maiden name as Davis. What is interesting about this is that the plumber and glazier that William, now 23, was lodging with in 1861 was a Richard Davis. And another lodger was a Joseph Davis who was 24 and a ‘grainer and Decorator’. I cannot help wondering whether Joseph, with that distinctive trade, had also been a scholar at the Old Swinford Hospital, there were several Davises in the school in 1851 so it is possible that he and William had become friends there. Elizabeth’s father was shown in the marriage register as Isaac Davi(e)s, so perhaps Elizabeth was related to one or other or both of the Davises in that household.

In 1871, still in Corngreaves Road, and now listed as a hairdresser, he and Elizabeth had four children – Emma Jane, born 1865, Annie Rebecca born 1867, William Edward born 1869 and Amelia born 1870. By the time of the 1881 Census three more children had arrived, Edward born 1873, Nelley born 1876 and John born 1879. It is possible that other children may have been born and died between censuses. By 1891, William was still at 4 Corngreaves Road, still a hairdresser, and with a grandson Norman Cole aged 3 living with them, in addition to his own children, possibly the illegitimate child of Amelia.

William appears to have died in the September quarter of 1900 without ever living in Rowley or Perry’s Lake again. The trade he presumably learned at the Old Swinford Hospital gave him employment for his whole life and at least one of his sons followed him into the profession.

And William was not the only Rowley child at the Old Swinford Hospital in 1851.

Uriah Gadd

Also from Perry’s Lake was Uriah Gadd, aged 12, the son of James and Phoebe Gadd. At the time of Uriah’s baptism in 1838 the family were living in Ross, (that Gadd stronghold), but in 1841 they were in Perry’s Lake. Uriah was the 5th child of the couple and the 3rd son.

By 1861 Uriah was back in Blackheath, aged 22 and a carpenter, living with his parents. He remained in Blackheath living in High Street and later Mott Street, and working as a carpenter for the rest of his life. Uriah was married in 1864 at St Andrew’s, Netherton to Honor Hickman of Netherton.  

By 1871, Uriah and Honor were living in High Street, Blackheath with three children, Mary (5). Charles (3) and Edward (1).  In 1881, Uriah, now giving his occupation as a Carpenter and Joiner and Honor were living at 108 High Street , Blackheath with  Charles (13), Edward (11),  Ann (9), all scholars and George (3) and Ellen (1).  Plus Honor’s mother Mary Hickman and nephew Walter Hickman (6).

By 1901 the family had moved to 25 Mott Street and Edward, now 21 was working as a bricklayer’s labourer and Uriah had given his occupation as a Carpenter Journeyman. I was slightly surprised that Edward was not also working as a carpenter but because Uriah was a Journeyman and not a Master Carpenter, he would not have been able to take apprentices. George, Ann and a last child Rachel (7) were all scholars.  By 1911 Uriah was living alone, a widower, in Mott Street, now 72 and still giving his occupation as a Carpenter & Joiner, working on his own account in the House Building Trade. Honor had died in 1907, aged 62 and Uriah died in 1921, aged 82.

William Jenks Milner

Also in the school in 1851 was William Jenks Milner , whose parish was given as Rowley Regis and who had been baptised there on 11 September 1842, the son of Richard Milner, a wheelwright and his wife Phoebe, nee Jenks (who had grown up in Clent). In 1851 Phoebe was living with her parents William and Harriet Jenks in Clatterbatch, Clent on their farm and was a widow with two other children. I was interested to see from the Census that even in leafy and green Clent, most of the inhabitants were nailmakers and a neighbour of the family was a Scythe grinder, quite a specialised trade and one for which a particular type of iron was required. Perhaps it was supplied by the Foleys.

Richard Milner had died in Wolverhampton in June 1849 so the opportunity for William to receive this education must have been a great boon for his mother. The census entry for Phoebe and her other children notes under occupation that his brother Thomas aged 5 was a ‘scholar’ and Mary at 11 ‘attended Sunday School’, which may show the level of education William would have received, had he not been awarded his scholarship. Had his father lived, it seems possible that William would have followed him into the Wheelwright’s business but in those days when a craftsman father died prematurely it also made it much more difficult for any children to learn their craft.

I have been unable to find William Jenks Milner in the 1861 Census but on Christmas day 1862 William married Louisa Perks at St Barnabas church, Birmingham, both of them aged 21 so it seems likely that he was still in the Midlands. Her father Henry Perks was a Grocer in Great Hampton Row in Birmingham. It seems likely that William had been apprenticed to a saddler in Birmingham.

In 1871 William and Louisa were living in High Street, (the Ecclesiastical District is given on the Census return as Reddal Hill so I suspect this was High Street, Old Hill but possibly Cradley Heath as he was certainly based in High Street, Cradley Heath later.  Their children were Ada L, aged 7 born on 14 December 1863 in Birmingham, and baptised at St George’s, Birmingham on 25 September 1865 with their abode given as Lozells and William’s occupation as a Saddler and Harness Maker.  Harriet, aged 4 was born in Aston and William J aged 1 born in Rowley Regis (Cradley was in the Rowley Parish so this new William Jenks  Milner was probably born in Cradley.) which suggests that their move was fairly recent.

An advertisement in the County Express on the 31 August 1878 by William Jenks Milner, states that the Saddlery, Oil Sheeting and Tenting business ‘carried on so successfully for nearly ten years and , by the wish of my grandfather William Jenks, carried on in his name’ would, from that date, be carried on as usual in his own name, William Jenks Milner. Perhaps grandfather William had helped his grandson set up business in Cradley Heath, and had wanted the business to be in his name. I have not found anything to indicate that William Jenks the elder was ever a saddler as he appears to have been a farmer.

Copyright: County Express

By 1881 William was living at 61 High Street, Cradley Heath and gave his occupation as a ‘Sadler & Oil Sheet Manufacturer, employing 1 man and 1 boy. Along with Louisa, their children Ada Louisa, aged 17, a pawnbroker’s assistant, Harriet, aged 14, William Jenks, aged 11, Anne aged 9, Mary Jane, aged 4, all of whom were scholars , Thirza aged 1 and William Jenks aged 92, his grandfather.  

William Jenks, the grandfather, must have died soon after the Census which was taken on 3rd April 1881 as his death was registered in the April-June quarter of that year. And, despite the optimistic tone of William Jenks Milner’s advertisement in 1878, everything changed for the Milner family in 1883 when the family emigrated to Queensland, Australia.

Since the business in Cradley Heath appeared to be sound, a move to the other side of the world was a big step and I wondered what had prompted this. I had noticed that, immediately below William’s advertisement in the County Express in 1878, there was an advertisement for sailings from Great Britain (Scotland) to Brisbane, seeking migrants for Queensland, especially female domestic servants and farm labourers who were offered free passage.  The Local Agent was in Brierley Hill. Who knows whether, in checking his own advertisement, William had seen this, considered all those farmers and settlers who would need saddles and harnesses and probably oil sheeting and tenting, all William’s business goods, and it had sowed a seed about new opportunities in his mind which could, perhaps, only be realised after the death of his grandfather. Certainly the Milners sailed on the 31 Aug 1883 from Dundee in Scotland, within months or even weeks of his death, arriving on 28th December, a four month voyage.

Louisa Milner died in 1919 and is buried in Toowong Cemetery, Brisbane. William Jenks Milner died on 30 Jul 1932, aged 89, at  Leichhart,  Sydney, New South Wales and is buried in the Rookwood Cemetery there, described by his children as their ‘dearly beloved father’ on his death notice in the Sydney Morning Herald. It appears that some if not all of the Milner children remained in Australia.

To sum up…

So, three boys from Rowley Regis, two of them from Perry’s Lake, were scholars at the ‘The Old Swinford Hospital’ in 1851 who all went on in good trades and crafts in the area or further afield. There were boys from Rowley there in 1861, too – James Fletcher, aged 13, Meshach S Palmer aged 11 and James Wharton aged 11 of Coombs Wood though I have not researched these boys.

Who knew? I had never heard of ‘The Old Swinford Hospital’ until now and yet hundreds of boys selected over those centuries and the community of Rowley Regis and the surrounding area must have benefitted from the generosity and care of Thomas Foley in 1670. I agree with Thomas Foley that his school was indeed the best thing he did with his wealth and which benefitted so many ‘poor but honest’ boys in the area, fitting them for new trades, crafts, skills, professions and, it appears, usually successfully assuring them of skilled work for the remainder of their lives.

An accidental shooting in the Hamlets

Life was not always without incident in the normally quiet hamlets. A brief report in the Wolverhampton Express and Star on 22 September 1876 tells of a “Fatal Gun Accident near Dudley” and goes on

“A most painful case of accidental shooting occurred at Oakham on Tuesday night. Three young  men, named Samuel Russon, William Redfern and Thomas Wellings, were in a house belonging to Redfern [or more accurately, it transpires, a house on Turner’s Hill and belonging to his father] when the young man Redfern reached down a gun which had lain on a shelf for a long time, and said he would try if it was loaded. Upon examination he said he would see of a cap was on it, and finding none proceeded to snap the trigger. As he did so, the gun went off and the contents lodged in the face of Russon, who died in great agony an hour afterwards. The affair has created a profound sensation.”

Copyright Wolverhampton Express and Star.

Samuel  Russon, aged 16, was buried on 24 Sep 1876 at St John (Kates Hill), his abode given as Oakham. Samuel was born on 20 Feb 1861, and baptised at Dudley St Thomas on 4 Aug 1861, the son of Joseph Russon and Elizabeth nee Poulton, of Cawney Hill. Joseph’s occupation then was given as a glass blower, possibly at Chance’s.

In the 1861 Census, Samuel was with his parents and his older brother William in Cawney Hill, living next to his maternal grandparents Benjamin and Rhoda Poulton. But Samuel’s father Joseph Russon died and was buried on 20 Dec 1868 at St John, Kates Hill, aged only 31.   In 1871 Samuel was living with his mother and brothers, William, and two younger brothers Joseph and Benjamin, still in Cawney Hill and still next door to his Poulton grandparents and his four uncles.

Copyright: Alan Godfrey Maps. Cawney Hill can be seen just under the printed heading St John’s Ward, top left, the map also shows the proximity to Oakham and, just to the right of the map, Turner’s Hill.

William Redfern had been baptised on 27 May 1860 at St Giles, the son of Joseph Redfern and Ann Maria nee Morris of Turner’s Hill. William was one of at least seven children.

Thomas Wellings was the son of Joseph and Harriet Wellings, born in Rowley Regis according to the 1871 Census at which time his family was living in Brades Road, Oldbury.  Although he was named in the newspaper report, he does not appear to have played any part in the incident, except that he was in the house at the time and he does not seem to have been called to give evidence at the inquest.

A longer account of the tragedy is given in the Dudley Herald on the 23rd September 1876 which reported on the Inquest which was held at The Wheatsheaf Inn, Oakham. Emmanuel Whitehall, a miner, gave evidence of identity as Samuel’s stepfather and he confirmed that Samuel was 16 and worked in a mine. He had seen Samuel at about half past five that evening. At about quarter past seven, he had gone to his mother’s house at Gadds Green, and, hearing an outcry he had gone to Joseph Redfern’s house on Turner’s Hill and found his stepson sitting on a chair bleeding heavily from his jaw and face.  He was told that Samuel had been shot by William Redfern.

Afterwards he asked what had happened and heard that Samuel had asked William to reach the gun down and he did, upon which he said he would see if there was anything in it, and through lifting up the hammer the accident was caused. He believed that it was entirely an accident and that William was not aware the gun was loaded. The gun used to hang over the screen and he had seen it there several times.

Samuel had not spoken after the accident. Mr Houghton, a surgeon of Dudley, had been sent for and his assistant was quickly in attendance but by that time, Samuel was dead.

Samuel’s mother Elizabeth gave evidence that Samuel had left home about seven o’clock on Tuesday evening and shortly afterwards she was told that he was dead. She had gone to the house but, although he was alive and knew her, he could not speak. She was also sure that it was an accident as the two boys had been such ‘excellent  friends‘.

William Redfern also gave evidence, saying that he lived at No.3 Turner’s Hill. Samuel had come for him to go out. Both of his parents were out but Thomas Wellings was in the house. As William was going out of the room to wash, Samuel had asked him to reach down the gun which was hanging up. The gun had hung there for a long time, as it was simply for protection of the house against robbers. At first he had told Samuel not to meddle with it but Samuel had said he would get it down himself. Upon that, William had got it down and pulled the hammer up to see if there was a cap on but as he could not see a cap, he let it down with its own force and it went off. At the time he was holding the gun with the muzzle towards Samuel who was sitting down only four or five feet away and the charge entered his right cheek. Neighbours had come to look after Samuel and William had run to Dudley for the doctor but by the time he got back, Samuel was dead.

William said that his father had not known that the gun was loaded but had cautioned his son against taking down the gun, and he said that he would not have taken it down if he had known it was loaded.

William’s father Joseph Redfern, a boat unloader, told the inquest that the gun produced was his and that as a rule it was not loaded. He did not know how it came to be loaded but the previous 5th November he had lent it to his eldest son to fire off [perhaps for Bonfire night] but his son did not remember leaving it loaded.  His son also said that he had not used any shot when he fired it in November.

The Coroner summed up the evidence and the jury returned a verdict of “Accidental death”.

What a terrible accident this was and how deeply affected all concerned must have been. Poor Elizabeth had lost her husband and now one of her sons. Imagine how William must have felt as he ran up and over the hill to Dudley to fetch medical help, though he must already have been in terror for his friend’s life. William, who was only sixteen himself, had accidentally caused the death of a close friend, and one would think that he may have carried a burden of guilt for this for the rest of his life, living as he did, close to Samuel’s family although it was clear from the Inquest that they knew this had been a terrible accident and did not appear to blame him.

William Redfern appears on my family tree in a very remote connection (he was the uncle of the wife of the stepson of my 2nd great-great-aunt Sophia Cole if you are really interested!)  and he married Emma Morris (who has the same surname as William’s mother so may well have been a cousin of some sort) three years later in 1879 and they had ten children. Living in Springfield Road, William was working at the stone quarry. Alas, William did not make old bones either and died of pneumonia in September 1901, aged only 43. He was buried at St Giles on 26 Sep 1901.

There are three family trees on Ancestry which include William, including one by a Redfern so it appears that some of William’s family have researched their family tree. I hope that, if they read this, they do not find it disrespectful as it is not intended to be but to recount the facts of an incident which must have very much affected these close knit local communities at the time.

The fascination of guns, particularly for boys and young men, seems a common theme in accidents of this sort, and such accidents seem to be going on even in the present day. But this was a very local tragedy involving the families of the Lost Hamlets and happening on Turners Hill. It must have remained in local memories for many years.

The Waterways Connection: The Hopkins family

My maiden name was Hopkins and I was very fortunate to have a head start when I started our family tree, as my father’s only sibling, my aunt Alice, gave me several family documents of great interest, including some original, battered and creased original birth and marriage certificates for my Hopkins family, as well as a little oral history. At that time, I had no idea that my Hopkins line originated outside the area. One of those documents, my paternal great-grandfather Arthur Hopkins’s birth certificate, showed that he was born in Perry’s Lake in 1867, the eldest child of Edward and Elizabeth Cole. This enabled me to look for the family in the 1871 census, thus starting considerable progress on building my family tree.

I have to confess that, despite being born in Springfield and going to school for several years only a few hundred yards away, I had never heard of Perry’s Lake until I started doing my family history! 

Edward Hopkins – or was he Edwin?

My g-g-grandfather Hopkins, Arthur’s father, I saw from that 1871 Census, was not a Rowley man. Although he was living in Perry’s Lake in 1871 he gave his place of birth as Gloucestershire and his first name was shown as Edward. That was a surprise to me, there had never been any hint in the family that there were any links to Gloucestershire. That was, I later realised, partly because there were no living close family there by then, or perhaps no family he wanted to stay in touch with. He stayed in the Rowley/Oldbury area for the rest of his life and many of his children did, too.

So next I looked for the marriage, shortly before Arthur’s birth, of Edward Hopkins and his wife Elizabeth, (whose name I knew from both the 1871 Census and from Arthur’s baptism) because he was their eldest child and in those days babies tended to come along quite quickly after marriage. Sure enough, I found a marriage for Edward Hopkins and Elizabeth Cole at Dudley St Thomas on 25 December 1866. I’m not sure why they were married at Dudley, rather than Rowley unless it was something to do with the fact that their first son Arthur , my great-grandfather, was born on 17 March 1867, so Elizabeth was six months pregnant at the time of the marriage. So Arthur came along very quickly! The marriage was witnessed by William and Elizabeth Cole, presumably the William who was Elizabeth’s eldest brother and his wife Elizabeth nee Davies. The other interesting thing for me about the marriage entry was that Edward was a widower.

So I next went back to the 1861 Census to see whether Edward had been in Perry’s Lake then.

And there he was, aged 21, already in Perry’s Lake and living with Benjamin Cole as his son-in-law with Edward’s wife Ann. Yes, Ann, not Elizabeth. Further investigation showed that Edward Hopkins and Ann Cole had been married on 1 April 1861 at St Giles, Rowley Regis. (you begin to see why there are quite so many Coles in my family tree, don’t you?) They had married at St Giles just one week before the Census was taken on 7 April, how lucky for me was that! Edward gave the name of his father as James Hopkins and his occupation as a cabinet maker. I was absolutely thrilled to see this, my father John Hopkins was also very proud of being a cabinet maker and I was delighted to discover that this was an inherited skill. I have subsequently discovered that there is a long line of carpenters in the Hopkins family, going back to at least 1800, although sadly my own father had died some years before so never knew this. I was very surprised to be told only a couple of years ago by someone who knew him that my grandad Hopkins was also a ‘chippy’, a carpenter although he worked at various jobs and as an ‘odd job man’, I had never realised he was also a carpenter. When I told my brother about this, he told me that, although generally he hated school, the woodwork teacher at Britannia Road School had said that he was the best woodworker he had ever taught. My brother went into the motor industry as so many local people did but the carpentry gene was obviously still going strong in the 1960s.

Edward and Ann had a son James in the June quarter of that year, presumably named after his paternal grandfather, another prompt arrival of that first baby! Alas  Ann Hopkins died in March 1864 and little James in September 1864. Both were buried at St Giles.

And in 1866 Edward Hopkins married Ann’s first cousin Elizabeth Cole, daughter of Edward and Frances (or Fanny) Cole.  Edward and Elizabeth Hopkins had ten children, nine of whom survived into adulthood – Arthur in 1867, John in 1869 (also died in 1869), Harriet in 1870, Fanny in 1872, William Benjamin in 1874, Edward , sometimes known as Edwin in 1876, Joseph in 1877, Samuel in 1879, James in 1882 and Lucy in 1884. The family later moved from Perry’s Lake to Portway and later to Taylors Lane and by 1911 Edward, (by now a widower after Elizabeth died in 1907) was living in Canal Street Oldbury, with his daughter and son-in-law Enoch and Fanny Pooler. In 1921 he had moved to live with his son Samuel in Albert Street, Oldbury. Dying in 1922, Edward was buried in the Rood End Cemetery on 8 Mar 1922.

Sometimes, in the Census Edward/Edwin just gave his name as Ed. I think that is significant, because if that is what he called himself, it seems likely that various officials assumed that he was the more popular Edward, rather than Edwin.

Father deceased – or not? A trap for the unwary!

One of the advantages of seeing images of full marriage registers or full transcriptions is that, after 1837, when the Civil Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths began, there was usually some chance of finding the names and occupations of the fathers of both bride and groom. This did not always happen, as if one of them was illegitimate, this was left blank. Similarly, it was usually indicated if the father was dead. But this was not infallible. 

In my case, Edward had given his father’s name as James Hopkins and that he was, in the first entry, a cabinet maker and, in the second  marriage, only five years later, he was marked as a carpenter and deceased. This led to a brick wall of many years standing as I assumed from this that James Hopkins had died in the intervening period between the marriages.  I searched for a long time for James Hopkins, thinking that he was alive in 1861 but could find no definite trace of him after 1841. More on this shortly.

Where did Edward come from?

Edward gave his place of birth in subsequent censuses more specifically as Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. He was consistent about his age, indicating that he was born in about 1839. So I looked for an Edward Hopkins born about then in Tewkesbury, in both the 1841 Census and in the Tewkesbury Parish Registers. I couldn’t find him. Nor could I find him anywhere in Staffordshire or Gloucestershire in the 1851 Census. But in the 1841 Census I did find an Edwin Hopkins, born in Tewkesbury in 1839, born to parents James Hopkins, a carpenter of Barton Street, Tewkesbury and his wife Harriett(nee Evans). James and Harriett had been married in Tewkesbury in 1827.

By the time of the 1841 Census, James Hopkins was a widower (Harriet had died in May 1841 of Tuberculosis, just a couple of weeks before the 1841 Census) living in Potters Alley, off Barton Street, Tewkesbury with his children William, aged 10, Harriet, aged 8, James aged 6 (James’s twin John had died in infancy) and Edwin aged 1. If you compare that list of names with the names of Edwin/Edward’s children in Rowley, there is a striking overlap. Edwin’s birth Certificate describes his place of birth as ‘Corner of Potter’s Alley, Tewkesbury’ so I have been able to stand in front of the house and see exactly where they lived, it is still there.

Copyright: Glenys Sykes. You can see the entrance to Potter’s Alley at the left hand side of the house, still with very ancient paving which James and Harriett had probably walked on which gave me a thrill as I walked down the alley. Walking in my ancestor’s footsteps! The house on the left of that is an altogether grander place and I think it is unlikely that it would have been occupied by a carpenter, even if he was a cabinet maker! So I think this is where Edwin/Edward was born.

By the time of the 1851 Census, the only one of the family left in Tewkesbury was Harriet , by then 18 years old who was in service and living in Church Street, which is a continuation of Barton Street. Harriet was to remain in service in Tewkesbury until her death in 1912, having married the coachman of the household Joseph Wakefield, and they had two daughters Alice and Lucy (yes, those names also recur in the Rowley Hopkinses!).

So where were her brothers in 1851?

I could not find William, the eldest in the local area in the 1851 Census but he was twenty by this time and could be (and was) somewhere miles away.

William’s story (or a small part of it!)

Just to add to my fun, I later made contact with one of his descendants and discovered that he had changed his name to William Daniels and joined the merchant navy  in Gloucester in 1843, later moving to Scholing in Hampshire  – it’s a long story…. He also had numerous children, including a James and an Edwin, a Harriett and an Alice, all Hopkins family names. But although I discovered that many years later he made contact again with his sister Harriet in Tewkesbury, he was said by my contact never to have found his brothers James and Edwin, both by then in the Black Country, they were the lost  brothers he named his sons for.  

The same contact told me family lore that William, the oldest brother, had told his family – that he had changed his name and left Gloucester because of some undesirable issue with the Hopkins family that he was ashamed of, and my research has since provided clues about what that might have been. He had also said that his mother Harriet had been genteel, educated and a teacher, that her family had been related to William Shakespeare and that the family names Lucy and Alice came from that connection.

This sounded far fetched to me when I first heard it in about 1990 but I have to say that several of the elements of that story have since proved to be correct and certainly, those names continued to be used in the Black Country Hopkinses, both brothers.

However I thought that the Shakespeare connection sounded just too unlikely. After all, my Hopkins family had lived in Tewkesbury, not Stratford-on-Avon. Until one day, I casually googled ‘Shakespeare and Tewkesbury’ and discovered that there were indeed Shakespeares in Tewkesbury (buried in the very early Baptist chapel off Church Street) and they were indeed connected to William Shakespeare’s family, though obviously not of direct descent. One day, I shall do some more research on that! For the moment, Harriet and her family are another brick wall of long standing.

The younger Hopkins brothers

Of James and Harriet’s other sons in 1851, I found a possible James Hopkins, now aged 16, born in Tewkesbury and living in Northgate Street, Gloucester as a ‘visitor’ with a confectioner named Richard Davis. Although I am pretty sure this is my man, I have never been able to find out why he was there or any connection between James and his host.

And I found a possible Edwin Hopkins, aged 11, apparently born in Gloucester and a scholar, in the Gloucester Union Workhouse. This was a real puzzle. If this was my Edwin why was he in the Workhouse? And why was his place of birth given as Gloucester because if it was my Edwin he should have been in the Tewkesbury Workhouse, that was how the Poor Law worked, each area responsible for their own poor. In fact, that would have been why his place of birth was given incorrectly, if the truth had been known he would have been shipped off to Tewkesbury. So presumably, someone lied because they didn’t want that to happen. I discovered later that James’s mother Catherine had lived in Gloucester, dying in 1850 so I believe that Edward and possibly James had been raised by her, or perhaps by her oldest daughter for some years before Edwin went into the Workhouse, possibly when Catherine died. Some of James’s family in Gloucester were – to say the least – less than honest so a lie about where a child was born, would probably not have been a problem for them, especially if they were trying to get rid of an unwelcome child.

So that was two boys from the Hopkins family in Gloucester in 1851 and the eldest had joined the navy in Gloucester. They had obviously moved to Gloucester from Tewkesbury at some point and this suggested family links with Gloucester city.

The missing James Hopkins Senior

Despite diligent research, over some years, I could not find any trace of their father James anywhere in 1851, nor in any subsequent census.  Eventually, I abandoned the idea that James was still alive when Edward married in 1861 because it was possible that the Vicar had simply not asked the questionwhether he was stil alive. I began to look carefully at all the GRO Death Registrations I could find for a James Hopkins, born in 1805, dying after the 1841 Census and before the 1851 Census, concentrating specifically on the Gloucestershire deaths simply because it seemed most likely that he had stayed close to home. There were nine in that period, ranging from Chepstow to Bristol, to Monmouth and Evesham. There were none in Tewkesbury and just one in Gloucester (or Gloster as it was called then,) in December 1842. Just one!  It called to me…. 

By this time in my research, I was living and working in Gloucester (sometimes the genealogical gods smile on us!) so I decided to pay a visit to the Register Office in Spa Road, explain my quest and ask them to check the details in the Register to see whether there were any matching details. This meant I did not have to pay for the certificate upfront. The Registrar could not have been more helpful. He went and looked at the Register and came back to tell me that this James Hopkins had died in the Gloucester Infirmary, in Lower Southgate Street, overlooking the Docks, barely a quarter of a mile from the Register Office, in October 1842, aged 38, of dropsy – perhaps heart failure. Though the Registrar warned me that several deaths at the hospital had been registered on the same day by the same person, possibly a reasonably capable and mobile orderly, perhaps with what we would now recognise as learning difficulties, and the same cause of death had been given for all the deaths – dropsy. He thought it unlikely in his professional opinion that they had all died of the same thing so I should treat this with caution. And it does seem possible to me that James had also died of Tuberculosis, like his wife only a year or so earlier.

And this James Hopkins had been a carpenter– Bingo! I was convinced this was my man. This was why I could not find him later, this was probably why his children were in Gloucester. Edwin was still only three years old then, I reasoned that James must have come back to Gloucester, perhaps to family there, with his younger children, after his wife’s death or perhaps when he became too ill to work or look after them. He was buried at the church of St Mary de Crypt, a few hundred yards further along the road from the hospital. I later discovered that James’s family were living at Littleworth, Gloucester just round the corner from the Register Office and on the Bristol Road, not far from the Hospital. They were all in the area around the docks.

By now I had realised that Edwin/Edward must have had some substantial contact while he was growing up with someone else in his family. How else would he have known the correct names of his parents and the detailed occupation of his father – a cabinet maker, no less?  Someone was proud of that and must have told him, it is unlikely that the Workhouse would have had such detailed information on his background, or passed it on to him. He had been orphaned by the time he was three, he could not have remembered this by himself.

It was to be several more years before I was able to find the evidence that confirmed my theories – but it was very satisfying when I did! But that’s another story…  Do you want to know? It’s (to me anyway) a very interesting and complex story but it doesn’t really relate directly to Rowley Regis so I won’t go into more detail here but I will happily do another post on that jigsaw if anyone would find it interesting.

The Waterways connection

So up until he left Gloucestershire between sometime 1851 and 1861 my g-g-grandfather was Edwin and after that he was (mostly) Edward. He named one of his sons Edwin though I have found that this son also seemed to use Edwin sometimes and Edward at others, perhaps a practice he got from his father.

The Great Mystery

But how did Edwin/Edward get from the Workhouse in Gloucester to the tiny rural and surely not widely known hamlet of Perry’s Lake and be married to a local girl in the ten years between censuses? He wasn’t a skilled granite worker so it wasn’t that. He worked most of his life, after settling in Rowley, as a miner then in 1901 as a labourer in the brickyard, in 1911 as a stoker at a laundry and only in 1921, at the age of 83 was he shown as having no occupation.  

It took me a long time to arrive at a possible explanation and even now I cannot prove it but it seems very likely that he came up on the River Severn from Gloucester Docks, not far from the Workhouse, and the canals up to the Midlands.

What made me think that?

I am always interested in (some might say nosy about) other people’s family trees and, having got my husband hooked on his own family history, I knew that several generations of his ancestors in Gloucester had been boatmen on the canals and the River Severn.  He is indeed a proud ‘Gloster boy’ himself, born and bred in the West End of Gloucester, adjacent to the busy docks. So when I saw a book in our local library entitled ‘Working Life on the Severn and Canal, Reminiscenses of Working Boatmen’ compiled from interviews with former boatmen by that meticulous Gloucester historian Hugh Conway Jones, I knew the book  would be of interest to my husband.

Photograph copyright: Glenys Sykes – we rapidly acquired our own copy!

As I stood in the library that day, leafing casually through it to see whether any of my husband’s ‘family names’ were mentioned, another name leapt off a page at me – a mention of ‘a quarry on Rowley Beacon’!  The section was relating the memories of boatmen on what goods were transported back down to Gloucester once their inbound loads had been unloaded.

The paragraph reads :-

“During the summer months, instead of bringing coal [back to Gloucester and the West Country] some of the boats brought stone for the County Council to put on the roads. We fetched it from a quarry on Rowley Beacon – you went through the Bar Lock, out to Smethwick and then took a branch to the left, Titford Canal. The stone came down on a railway operated by a cable so that the loaded trucks took the empty ones back up. As each truck came alongside, they dropped the side down and let the stone fall into the boat. When you had twelve tons in the aft-end, you shifted the boat to load 8 tons into the middle, and then you shifted her again to load 7 tons into the fore-end. The stone was discharged on the river bank just above the Haw bridge [between Tewkesbury and Gloucester]. It was put into wheel-barrows and taken ashore across planks, although if the water level was high, the boat could sometimes get in close enough for the stone to be just thrown out on to the bank. From the Haw Bridge it was taken by horse and cart to various road-side sites to be broken up by gangs of men with hammers.”

This photograph, from Anthony Page’s book on Rowley is captioned that the boats were loading coal. But might they have been loading stone? It seems possible.

Another photograph, also from Anthony Page’s book on Rowley, shows the trucks used to move coal, and, it appears, stone down to the canal at Titford.

First of all, this book and this account fascinated me – it tied together so many things I already knew about the quarry in Rowley and the stone that was produced, and the truck systems. And it made me better understand the multiple handling and the sheer physical hard work required to shift the stone out of the boat and then to reduce the stone to the right size. Imagine pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with stone over a gang plank?! I’m sure they were skilled at it but it must have bounced and been exhausting and quite perilous.

Secondly, the whole book is really interesting and worth reading. The recounting of the personal memories reveals the formidable skills and hard working lives of these men who had to find their way up and down the river and through the canal network, summer and winter, in flood conditions and dry, so much knowledge and experience generally unrecognised and now lost, but for the memories recounted in this book. 

And thirdly – another ‘Bingo’ moment. Had Edward been working on the canals, was that how he had arrived at Rowley? I stood in that library exultant, suddenly a beam of light shone onto the great mystery  which had been in my mind all those years – I think that the waterways were the connection that brought Edwin to Rowley Regis. But I doubt I will ever prove it…

To bolster my theory, the book also has this quotation from one of the boatmen about Gloucester Docks and the people who lived on the boats.

Copyright: Tony Walker. Gloucester Docks, c. 1880.

“You normally only lived on board when you were away on a trip as most crews had their own homes in Gloucester. [This was certainly true of my husband’s ancestors]

In the early days, there were sometimes young boys without homes hanging around who went with any skipper who needed a crew. They had to learn to do what they were told and keep the boat clean, and then they were never long without a trip. If a boatman’s wife had to stay at home for a bit, one of the boys would go in her place. Also there were some unmarried skippers who didn’t have a regular crew. A few were a bit barbaric and knocked the boys about or half-starved them but others were more considerate.  One boy managed to work with two skippers for quite a long time – when he came back with one, if he was lucky, the other would be loaded and tied up by the lock ready to set off the next morning. Now and again, the one at Gloucester found his turn came up before the boy was back. So then he sent a postcard to the Worcester Office, saying he was coming up on the tug and the boy stayed with the lock keeper at Worcester until he arrived.”

What sad lives these young boys had, with no settled home and whatever work and food they could find.

But you can just imagine on those summer evenings, when they were tied up at Rowley, ready for the journey back the next day, the local girls might venture out for a stroll along the ‘cut’ and might just happen to get chatting with the boys who worked on the boats, so much more interesting than the Rowley lads they had known all their lives!

If this was how Edward/Edwin found his way to Rowley, and he thought there was regular work to be found there as a  miner, no wonder he settled in this simple village.

And, we realised, my husband and I, it is conceivably just possible – though again I will never know – that my husband’s boatmen ancestors might have brought my g-g-grandfather on one of their boats up the River Severn and the canals to Titford.  Wouldn’t that be neat?

I later discovered that Edward’s older brother James had also come from Gloucester up to Birmingham, perhaps by the same route and had married in Birmingham (also describing his father James as a cabinet maker!) and had later settled in West Bromwich. There is a suggestion that he too joined the navy as his older brother William did, though that is still uncertain. And the two brothers were definitely in touch with each other, in a later Census I found Edward/Edwin’s daughter Harriet staying with her uncle James in Oldbury as a visitor. Perhaps Edward/Edwin had managed to stay in touch, perhaps he had even come to the Midlands to be near his brother. So he was not completely alone in the world.

But imagine, for this long orphaned boy, no doubt ejected from the Gloucester Workhouse at about fourteen, if not earlier, and apparently with no other family around able or willing to take him in, what a relief it must have been to marry into and settle in the close knit community of Perry’s Lake and the large Cole clan, a real home at last, founding the dynasty of the Hopkinses in Perry’s Lake and Rowley!

The Cole families in the Lost Hamlets

Sorting out the early Coles in the Rowley area is a bit like trying to knit with overcooked spaghetti. I think I have them sorted out and suddenly a strand slips and it all unravels.  Repeatedly. It isn’t helped at all that different branches use the same Christian names – Edward, John, Benjamin, William, Sarah, Fanny, ten a penny, they are!  

In the 1841 Census, there are seven Cole households in the hamlets or immediately adjacent. (Bear in mind when looking at these that in the 1841 Census adult ages were rounded down to the nearest five, though children were recorded with their actual ages. Supposedly, because occasionally adult’s actual ages are recorded).

Perry’s Lake

In the 1841 Census, there were a total of fourteen households in Perry’s Lake, of which three were Coles and one a married female Cole sister. It appears from the order in which they were listed that they did not live in a row but were within a very close distance of each other.  This is borne out by maps which show clusters of houses, sometimes appearing to be around a yard or close.

The sons of Edward Cole and his wife Phebe

Edward Cole Jnr, aged 30, was  baptised at St  Giles on 4 June 1811 so he actually was 30, the figure wasn’t rounded down. He was living with his wife Fanny/Frances (nee Smith),who had been baptised 13 Sep 1819 at St Giles, a daughter of William and Elizabeth Smith. Her age in the Census is shown as 20 but she was about 22) they are living in Perry’s Lake, with their two children William, aged 4 (baptised 17 Sep 1837 at St Giles) and Benjamin aged 1 (baptised 8 June 1840).

A few doors away, John Cole, is shown as aged 35. He was baptised on 20 Mar 1803 at St Giles so he was actually 38. He was living with his wife Sarah (nee Willetts), possibly the Sarah Willetts baptised at Dudley St Thomas in 1808 living with their six children. The children are Anne aged 12, baptised 19 Oct 1928 St Giles, Edward aged 10, John aged 8, Hannah aged 5 and Eliza aged 3. None of the children after Anne were baptised at St Giles or any other Anglican church that I can find. It seems very possible that they were Methodists as we know that there was a Methodist Chapel in Perry’s Lake from before 1840, so very possibly there at the time of their births. Although no records have been found for this chapel from this early date, The National Archives have a Non-Parochial Register dating from 1814-1824 showing baptisms for families from Rowley Regis which may have been performed by a visiting Methodist Minister or at Dudley which appears to have been his base.

Again, a few doors away, Benjamin Cole is shown as aged 30. He was baptised on 27 Jul 1806 at St Giles so was almost 35. , with his wife Phebe (nee Smith) and  their three children Eliza aged 8, Joseph aged 4 and Ann, aged 1. (Although Benjamin and Edward both married Smith girls they were not sisters, but may well have been cousins. I still have work to do on that line.)

These three are all nailers and are brothers, the sons of Edward Cole and his wife Phebe, nee Perry.  Edward had died in 1821, so there is no entry in this census for him. Phebe, his widow, remarried in 1839 to Thomas Lane and was living with him in Dudley in 1841, along with her youngest daughter Ann Cole. 

Edward Snr and Phebe had had seven children in all, four boys and three girls, two of whom had died as children.  In addition to the three sons listed above their daughter Mary, married to Henry Taylor, was also living in Perry’s Lake with their six children.

The family of John and Elenor/Nelly Cole

The Knowle

John (70) and Elenor/Nelly (70) Cole were at the Knowle in the 1841 Census, just round the corner from Tippity Green so not strictly within the Lost Hamlets but included here for completeness and to illustrate how close to one another they all lived.

John and Elenor had had five daughters and five sons, of whom at least three died in infancy, possibly more as I can find no trace of other children at present. 

Their son David was the farmer at Slack Hillock, of whom I have written previously on this blog. It was said at his inquest that David could not read the label on the bottle of mixture which poisoned him because it was the middle of the night and he had not lit a candle. But the important implication of that is that he could read.

Their daughter Maria married George Taylor and lived in Rowley Village. There is a substantial memorial still in the St Giles churchyard to George and Maria and their children. George was variously described as a nail manufacturer (rather than nailer) and later he became the Relieving Officer for the village, later succeeded by his second son John. Of their seven children, only one William married and had children – although he did have eleven! The other children stayed living together in Rowley Village until the ends of their lives. More prosperous family members.

Their youngest daughter Nanny married Joseph Walters of Oldswinford and they lived in Lye, then Slack Hillock where Joseph farmed and kept the Sportsman and Railway pub, (according to Hitchmough) and finally Rowley village again where they both died. Was this the same farm that Nanny’s older brother David had farmed? I do not know but will try to find out. This is another prosperous couple and their sons kept pubs in Rowley Village later.

At their marriage in Harborne, both Nanny and Joseph signed the register and theirs are assured signatures, well practised curves and not awkwardly scribed as is often the case with people who do not write much.  Notice also that the witnesses are Nanny’s sister and brother-in-law George and Maria Taylor, showing that they too had practised signatures.

I wonder how they met? Did Joseph visit Rowley to buy nails through Nanny’s father? There have been previous indications with the Cole family that they may have been involved in shipping nails elsewhere and I think it is possible that they were more than simple nailmakers. Or did Nanny meet him when he rented a farm to her older brother? David died four years after the marriage so he was farming at Sleck Hillock at the time they would have met.

All three of these marriages were apparently to successful people who had known skills and their children often went into business locally. These Cole children were literate.

Freebodies Farm

There is also a single Cole at Freebodies Farm on Turner’s Hill, Sophia Cole, born in 1819. She was the daughter of Joseph Cole who had died of a fever, aged only 24, in Sep 1919 – only three weeks before his daughter’s baptism. Sophia was part of this branch as her father  Joseph was another son of John and Elenor/Nelly Cole. Joseph’s widow Ann (nee Smart) had later married Josiah Parkes in 1825 and Sophia, Joseph’s only child, was living with them at Freebodies Farm in 1841. Although she is marked as a servant, that was not uncommon in such a situation. Sophia went on to marry a John Cole (oh joy!) who was a butcher and they moved to Darby End where they had one son Joseph Thomas in 1851. This branch of the Coles did appear to be mainly on the Lye Cross side of Turner’s Hill.

 The Previous Generation:

John Senior and Edward Cole Senior , the fathers of these families were also brothers,  the sons of William Cole (1734-1784) and Mary Price ((B.1731), it is possible that some of the other Coles may yet link back to them or to William’s parents Edward and Dianah Cole, the ones who married in a Fleet marriage and then returned to Rowley to raise a large family.

The Lye Cross Coles

Up on Turner’s Hill is another Edward Cole, aged 40, also a nailer, son of Edward Cole(70) and Sarah of Lye Cross. He was married to Leah Clift, at Sedgley and it was their daughter Sarah who I wrote about in my blog last week, ‘A wandering Cole’.

At Lye Cross in 1841 are Edward (aged  70) and Sarah Cole, nee Johnson, parents of the Edward above, with their son Henry and two other children.  I have not yet identified Edward Senior’s parents.

At Cock Green , just around the corner from Tippity Green, is another  Benjamin Cole, aged 44, a jobbing smith, with his wife Elizabeth (nee Hadley) and their seven children. I have not yet worked out where this Benjamin fits into the Cole jigsaw!

Summary

The purpose of this article is to give a glimpse of the way that these families tended to remain close to each other and where they were  living in relation to each other and to the Lost Hamlets in 1841. Note, too that almost every name of a spouse listed here is also a well known Rowley family name, naturally enough they married the people around them, adding to the complications of researching our Rowley Roots!

I will update it in future as I show how their families expanded and moved around the area. Because of the constant use of certain common Christian names, it can be difficult to be certain that these relationships are correct but I shall continue to work on this. Still knitting with cold spaghetti here!

A Cole woman to be reckoned with

Not all of the Coles, as I have learned, stayed in and around the Rowley hamlets. And previous posts have noted that women often had to move with their husbands for work and make new homes in distant places. Sarah Cole was one of these women.

Sarah Cole was born, probably, in 1826 and was baptised on the 11th June that year, the third child of Edward Cole and Leah, nee Clift, whose address was given at various times as Oakham, Turner’s Hill, Portway and Lye Cross.  (Leah’s uncommon first name was useful as it enabled me to trace the family later and to be confident that I had the right family.) It is not impossible that all four of these locations are actually the same place, place names did vary with who was making the record and there do not appear to have been any definitive boundaries in this area. Even if they were not the same place, they are all quite close together.

I say Sarah was probably born then (and Sarah’s age does become of particular interest later in this story) because the baptismal registers do not show dates of birth at this period and civil registration had not yet started so there is no way of knowing her actual date of birth. But her older brothers were baptised Joseph in May 1823 and Edward in March 1825(who died in April of that year) so it’s pretty likely that she was born close to the date of her baptism.

Looking at Sarah in the Censuses

In the 1841 Census Sarah was living on Turner’s Hill with her parents and brother Joseph , plus two more siblings Edwin 12 and Mary Ann 11.

A baby Catharine Cole was born in the second quarter of 1843 in the Dudley Registration District, with no mother’s maiden name indicated which usually means that the child was illegitimate. The baby died the following year, aged 1 year and six months and was buried at St Giles on 10 Nov 1844, with her abode given as Lye Cross and the cause of her death as ‘inflammation’.  As far as I can see from the 1841 Census there was only one female Cole of child bearing age in Lye Cross and that was Sarah Cole who I think was her mother. A later child of Sarah’s was baptised Caroline but known as Kate, so perhaps she liked the name. Unless I buy the Birth Certificate, I will not know for certain so perhaps I will, one day!

By the time of the 1851 Census Sarah had married her first husband John Winwood on 29 Jul 1846 at Tipton St Martin. He was a widower, of full age, a Labourer.  And they were living with her parents on Turner’s Hill. Their firstborn child William, abode given as Lye Cross, had lived for only a few weeks but they now had two daughters Hannah, born in 1847 and Charlotte born in 1850. Sadly Charlotte died in June of that year, a couple of months after the Census.  Another daughter Caroline was born in 1852 and another Mary Ann was born in September 1855.

Alas, they did not have long together, John and Sarah. On 12 Apr 1856 John was killed in an accident at work at Rounds Green Colliery. He was on the top of an old pit frame to assist in taking it down when it fell with him, killing him outright, according to a Mines Accident Record.

So Sarah, with her three daughters was left living, presumably, with her parents and with little means of support, although like most women in this area, she was a nailmaker.  Eighteen months later, on 20 Nov 1857 Sarah married Jonas George Walker Holdsworth at St Edmund’s, Dudley. Jonas was a Yorkshireman, a collier.

In the 1861 Census, the family were living in Ashes Road, Langley along with Sarah’s mother Leah Cole, by now a widow, and Sarah’s daughters Hannah, Caroline and Mary Ann Winwood and a new baby, son Joseph Holdsworth, who was 1. So Sarah had already moved from Turner’s Hill/Lye Cross, albeit only a mile or two away, down the Portway.

At some point between this census and the next, the whole family moved to Yorkshire. Looking at family events helps to narrow donw when this happened. Another son William was born in the second quarter of 1862 in Oldbury. And another, John in the last quarter of 1864, both in the West Bromwich Registration District so probably in Langley.

Sarah’s daughter Mary Ann Winwood, from her first marriage and born in 1856, had died in April 1867, aged 12 and was buried in Oldbury Cemetery. Both Death Registration and burial, however, were in the name of Mary Ann Holdsworth, her stepfather’s name but that was not unusual in those days.  So it appears that the family were still in Oldbury in 1867. And Sarah’s oldest daughter Hannah was married to George Holloway in 1868 in Dudley and they had remained in Oldbury so it is possible that Jonas and Sarah moved north after that. But it is also possible that Jonas moved back first while Sarah stayed to see her daughter Hannah married.

In December 1870, Sarah’s mother Leah, who was living with Sarah in 1861, died in Yorkshire and was buried in Rawmarsh which is near Rotherham.

In the 1871 Census Sarah is living in Hall Street, Rawmarsh, apparently in the household of a Thomas Etheridge, aged 24, a labourer who gives his place of birth as Stourbridge. I say apparently because the enumeration is less than clear about where one household stops and the next starts.

 In the same household are Sarah’s daughter Caroline and her husband William Potter or Leather who had been married in the Rotherham Registration District in the first quarter of 1871. William was a Lancashire man, a miner or labourer. He was illegitimate and his birth was registered in 1847 as William Leather, his mother’s name. The following year his mother married Thomas Potter and it appears that William then used the name Potter – sometimes. Up until and including the 1891 Census the whole family were listed as Potter (apart from their daughter Sophia who was staying with Sarah and was listed as Leather. But from 1901 onwards the family were known as Leather.  It is, to say the least, very confusing!

Also in the household in Rawmarsh are Sarah’s youngest son John Holdsworth, aged 6 and another lodger John Henry Smith, aged 18, a puddler born in Oldbury. Puddlers worked in iron foundries, another skill which would enable people to move.

So where was Jonas Holdsworth, Sarah’s husband,in that census? And where were Sarah’s two other sons by Jonas, Joseph aged ten, born Rowley and William aged eight, born Oldbury? I found them listed as Inmates and Scholars in the North Bierley Union Workhouse, in Clayton, Yorkshire, which was thirty miles away from Rawmarsh and under a different Poor Law Union. There is no Jonas Holdsworth listed in the Workhouse and I cannot find a death for him in this period. But immediately above the two boys on that 1871 census page is a George Holdsworth, aged 44, a collier, born in Halifax. Jonas had a second name of George and he was a collier and also born in Halifax. An age of 44 gives a birth year of 1827, Jonas was born in 1825. I think that this is the same man. There is also a Jonas Holdsworth in the neighbouring Bradford Workhouse in the 1881 Census, place of birth not known and described as an Imbecile, which probably accounts for the loss of information over the period, especially as he appears to have moved from one workhouse in the group to another and possibly back again. This Jonas seems to have been chronically ill and died in 1885, aged 60 (so born in 1825, the correct age) after at least 15 years in the Workhouse system and was buried in Clayton St John, with his abode in the parish register entry for his burial marked as the Clayton Workhouse so I strongly suspect this is our man.

The Age Puzzle!

Meanwhile…in September 1871, Sarah Holdsworth, daughter of Edward Cole, was married at Rawmarsh. She gave her age as 43, which was a bit of a white lie because she was nearer 45. But either way, she was considerably older than her new husband Thomas Etheridge – yes, the one whose household she was living in earlier that year in the Census. He gave his age as 24 in the census but that is also slightly uncertain. I have not been able to find his birth registration but his baptism was in March 1848 which would make him 23 in 1871 so this census entry appears to be correct. He gives his age on the marriage record as 20 – four years younger than on the Census, she as 43, quite an age gap. In the 1861 Census, Thomas was living with his family in Parsonage Street, Oldbury but born in Brettell Lane which is in Amblecote, and he was then shown as 12. So it seems likely that in 1871 he was about 22, so it appears that neither the 1871 Census or the marriage show his correct age. Later censuses show him as 40 (in 1881), 45 (in 1891) and 57 (in 1901) – not exactly consistent!  But many illiterate people were not absolutely sure of when they were born.

There are no photographs that I can find of Parsonage Street, which was on the Oldbury/Langley border and which has several connections with Sarah’s family but this is the chapel there which probably gives an indication of the sort of houses which were there, probably of a design and size similar to thousands of other Black Country houses of this era. Copyright unknown but will be willingly acknowledged on supply of information.

Sarah’s ages in the Censuses are even more varied. Up to 1871 her age appears to be shown correctly but in 1881, her age is shown as 45, a drop of 9 years since the 1871 and in 1891 her age was given as 50. It appears that when you are living in a place where no one knows your history you can get away with quite a lot.

Did Sarah and Thomas know each other before they arrived in Yorkshire? How did they come to be living in the same house in Rawmarsh? They had both previously been living in Oldbury. Why did Thomas move from Oldbury to Rawmarsh, near Rotherham? His brother John, two years younger was also in Rawmarsh in 1871, working as a Puddler so probably the brothers moved together for work but we do not know. Their father George Etheridge was a furnaceman and John had been born in Cwmbran where there was a large foundry and steel works, then George’s  younger children were born back in the Black Country so this is yet another instance of men moving to other places for work and then back again. In 1871 George was still in Parsonage Street, Oldbury but his son Pharoah was born in Jun 1873 in Wombwell , Yorkshire which is where two of Caroline’s children were born so George had obviously followed his sons up to Yorkshire quite soon. George Etheridge was born in 1826, the same year as Sarah Cole, I wonder what he thought of Thomas’s marriage?

Why was Sarah separated from her husband and older sons who were thirty miles away in the Workhouse? We do not know.

A bigamous marriage?

How could Sarah marry Thomas Etheridge when it appears that her husband Jonas Holdsworth was alive and would be for another 15 years? Again, we do not know. There are several possibilities. Jonas may have been injured or suffered a stroke which resulted in him being admitted to the Workhouse. If Sarah had no means of supporting all of her children, the two older boys may have had to go into the Workhouse with their father. Perhaps Sarah moved to Rawmarsh to be with her daughter Caroline who was married there. This part of the family appear  to have been in Rawmarsh since at least December 1879 when Sarah’s mother Leah died and was buried in Rawmarsh.

Did Sarah and Jonas separate for some reason after arriving in Yorkshire? Might Sarah have discovered that Jonas already had a living wife in Yorkshire, left behind when he moved to Oldbury to work, so that her marriage was null and void? I have not found any evidence of this but this would have left her free to marry Thomas Etheridge. Or was this a bigamous marriage? This was far more common than you might think at this period where marriages had broken down and divorce was very expensive and rare among working class people. So move to an area where you are not known and tell everyone you are a widow or widower. It is a total mystery but this last marriage lasted nearly thirty years, despite the age difference.  

Later Years

In the 1881 Census, Thomas and Sarah were living in Wath-on-Dearn , near Rotherham in Yorkshire, where Thomas was working as a Forgeman at an Ironworks. He gave his age as 40, Sarah as 45! Also with them was Sarah’s son John Holdsworth, though shown under his step-father’s name, now 16 and a labourer at the Ironworks and also Emma Holloway, aged 13, described as a visitor. Emma was born in Oldbury and was the eldest daughter of Hannah, Sarah’s daughter.

In the 1891 Census the surname for Thomas and Sarah is shown as Hedgewood. Which I suppose may be how the enumerator heard Etheridge. At a pinch – perhaps the Black Country accent strikes again! They were living in Widnes, Lancashire and I only found them because I was searching Sarah’s grandchildren through her daughter Caroline (who was also living in Widnes)and Caroline’s daughter Sophia Leather aged 6 was shown in 1891 living with Sarah and Thomas as a granddaughter. And Sarah is shown there as born in Rowley, Staffordshire and Thomas as Worcestershire so that all fits. Had it not been for the presence of Sophia that night of the census, I would never have found them!

Sarah appears to have died in Widnes in 1900, or possibly in 1887.

There do not appear to have been any children born to Sarah and Thomas Etheridge, which is not surprising given that she was already 45 when they married.

What became of Sarah’s children?

Of Sarah’s children, Hannah Winwood stayed in Oldbury with her husband George Holloway living in Parsonage Street for much of the rest of her life and had ten children there, of whom five survived. She died in 1917, aged 70.

William and Caroline Leather nee Winwood emigrated to Schenectady ,New York as did most of their family, appearing in US censuses from 1920 onwards. Their oldest child William Leather was born in 1875 in the Barnsley area and I discovered from a photograph of his original birth certificate, uploaded to Ancestry by an American descendant, that his birth was registered by Sarah Cole, his grandmother who had been present at the birth, rather than either of his parents. William and Caroline had seven children, the first two born in Barnsley, Yorkshire and the others in Widnes where Thomas was working in a copper  works. Caroline died in New York in 1928, aged 76.

Joseph Holdsworth survived his time in the Workhouse and was married in 1880 in Halifax. He stayed in the Bradford area for the rest of his life, dying in Bradford in 1926, aged 67.

William Holdsworth also survived but he appears to have moved back to the Oldbury area, marrying Annie Smith with whom he had seven children, (very possibly the Annie Smith who was living in Hawes Lane, Rowley in the 1881 Census) and later living in Halesowen Street, Blackheath where he was a hairdresser. If this seems an unlikely occupation for him, it is worth noting that many workhouses trained their young charges in occupations such as tailoring or hairdressing which would enable them to earn their living later.  His date of death is unclear but may have been in 1915.

There are no indications that either Joseph or William were in contact with Sarah, or with each other  but it is not impossible.

John Holdsworth , Sarah’s youngest child, was with his mother and stepfather Thomas Etheridge in Wath on Dearn, Yorkshire in 1881 when he was listed as Etheridge, born Oldbury and, aged 16, working as an Iron Works labourer – the family trade! But in records after that he used the name Holdsworth and on 22 May 1888 he had married Ann Hayfield (born in Oldbury) in Christchurch, Oldbury – both giving their address as 19 Parsonage Street and went on to have a first child in Oldbury and a further three children in Widnes.  John’s half-sister Hannah was living at 18 Parsonage Street in 1881 so they must have been in contact. By 1901 he was back in Watery Lane, Smethwick, working at a Silver Works and a further two children were born there.  He died in 1903, aged only 39.

A Wandering Cole

So, like many wives, Sarah moved for her husband’s work. More than once. And, as with quarries and sett making, the metal working skills and adaptability of Black Country men led them to find work in many other areas where metal working and foundry work were important.

Although Sarah left the Black Country in about 1869 and there is no record of her ever returning, at least three of her children remained or made their way back to the area. And from visiting grandchildren it is apparent that at least some of the siblings stayed in touch with Sarah and with each other too. We know from Shipping Passenger Lists that Caroline made at least three trips back to the UK after moving to New York, though we cannot know where she went on these visits.

There are recurring places – Parsonage Street, Oldbury, Widnes, areas of Rotherham, Yorkshire and Lancashire which crop up in the life stories of various children.  

One Rowley woman, three husbands, nine children, thirty-one grandchildren – (that is to my knowledge, there may have been more grandchildren). And her Cole descendants were scattered across the Oldbury area , Birmingham, Yorkshire, Lancashire and New York.

Sarah Cole, I think, was quite a woman to be reckoned with!

The Granite Connection 3 – The Threlkeld Connection

There was a report in the February 2013 Edition of the Newsletter of the Black Country Geological Society about Rowley Rag, the local granite which provided work for so many local people. One of their members Julie Schroder had visited the Threlkeld Quarry and Mining Museum  the previous year which lies in the valley between the Blencathra mountain and the village of  Threlkeld, close to Keswick in the Lake District. What, she pondered, is the connection with Rowley Rag?

Julie wrote

“The museum is housed in an unprepossessing building, but inside is an Aladdin’s cave of historical and geological treasures. We learned that the quarry opened in the 1870’s, initially to supply ballast for the Penrith – Keswick railway. The stone is a light grey in colour and was also used for kerbs and as dressed stone to face buildings. But there was also a demand for 4 inch ‘setts’ for roadways, which required the expertise of skilled stone dressers. And where better to find this expertise than in the quarrying community of Rowley Regis?

In the 1870’s some skilled quarry workers answered the call from far away Cumbria and took their skills to Threlkeld. One of these was our guide Donald’s grandfather. In Donald’s words: “My Grandfather on my mother’s side moved from Rowley in the 1870s as a sett maker. My Grandmother was a Levett. I believe they were butchers in Black Heath”. That was all Donald could tell us, but I felt that there’s a story here waiting to be unearthed.

I wonder how big was this exodus from the Black Country? Do you have any connections with the sett makers who went to Threlkeld?” asked Julie.

Copyright: The Black Country Archaeological Society

On the  ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page a while ago Natalie Gazey mentioned that some families from Rowley had moved to Threlkeld in Cumbria in about 1900, as the quarry there needed their expert skills in making stone setts from granite. And Joyce Neech commented at the time that her great-aunt had retired there and wondered whether there was a connection.

So, yes, it seems that many Rowley folk, including myself, have a connection or two to the sett makers who went to Threlkeld. So I have spent a few hours finding out more about this expedition.

As with my previous information gathering about migrating workers, the Censuses were my first port of call. Mining for various minerals has been going on in the Cumbrian area since at least the 1600s and very possibly since Roman times. But Threlkeld is a very small village and it was a quick job to see in the censuses whether anyone born in Rowley Regis was living there. The 1870s had been mentioned as a possible start date and Natalie had said that her family had gone up there in about 1900.

The 1871 Census showed that there were Lead miners in Threlkeld who were from Devon and Cornwall but none from Rowley. In 1881, again, there were no Rowley folk there. Of course, these were only snapshots every ten years so it is possible that some people had come and gone in the intervening years. The overwhelming majority of the population there was native to Cumbria and mostly from an even closer area.

By 1891, that had changed. By then, there were thirty-six people living in and near Threlkeld who had clearly moved there to work at the quarry.

In the nearby village of Wanthwaite, St Johns-in-the-Vale, living in Blencathra Vue, there was a household headed by James Holcroft, a widower aged 38, a Granite Quarryman with his two nephews William Taylor, aged  16 who was a quarry labourer and James Taylor, aged 9, a scholar and Martha Haywood, aged 23 a domestic servant, all born in Rowley. James was still in St Johns in the next census in 1901.

Martha Haywood was to be married on 7 Dec 1891 to Thomas Smith, aged 22. Perhaps this was the Thomas Smith of Rowley Regis who was living along the row with Thomas Hill at the time of the Census. Or she may have married the Thomas Smith, a local lad, who was living with his family next door. Sadly this Martha appears to have died in Sept 1893 in St Johns, aged only 25 aand no children appear to have been born to this marriage.

Two doors away again in 1891 were John Clark aged 50, a sett maker born in Leicestershire and his wife Merriel, aged 39 who had been born in Staffordshire, although their four oldest children had been born in Shropshire, the next three in Yorkshire and the youngest aged 1 in Penrith, Cumberland, a familiar pattern from my previous studies, reflecting family movements between quarrying areas.  Moving on another house and there was George Burns, aged 33, a quarryman, born in Shepshed in Leicestershire where there was – of course – a large quarry, less than ten miles from Mountsorrel. His family were all born in Leicestershire. So not all the sett makers came from Rowley Regis.

Next door to him in Blencathra Vue was Thomas Hill, aged 24, a sett maker, born Rowley Regis, as were his wife Sarah aged 23 and their children Annie aged 5 and Edward aged 3. Lodging with them were Thomas Smith, aged 18, a Mason, born Rowley Regis (later to marry Martha Haywood in St John in the Vale), and John Bishop aged 18, also a mason but born in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire. Also William Dowell, aged 18 and William Dingley aged 36, both born in Rowley Regis, and William Wood, aged 36 from Graby , Leicestershire, John Sowell aged 30 from Yorkshire and Ben Derrey from Leicestershire. All these lodgers were single and all the last five were sett makers. These houses appear from later census details to have been two up, two down cottages without bathrooms or toilets, they must have been very crowded.

Their widowed neighbour George Noon, aged 40, was from Mountsorrel, all of his five children had been born in Durham.

A little way along the terrace was Thomas Clift, aged 22, lodging with a local family who was a general labourer and gave his place of birth as Portway, Staffordshire. (I have Clifts on my family tree, though somewhat earlier than this – but they lived in Lye Cross, Portway so were almost certainly connected! ) By 1901, Thomas was still in St Johns in the Vale but was married to a local girl and had three children born in Threlkeld.

A couple of doors down were Frederick Edwards who was 37 and a quarryman gave his birthplace as Staffordshire, as were his wife Ann Maria and their four children. I have been unable to find out for sure much about this Frederick Edwards. Edwards was a relatively common name in the area, well before the Rowley men arrived.

Two doors on again were Thomas Morton, aged 24 and a sett maker with his wife Maria, aged 21 and their son Thomas, aged 2, all born in Rowley. Thomas was my 1st cousin 3xremoved. They must have moved back and forth to Rowley at some point because by 1901, they were living in Northumberland (Thomas still working as a sett maker) and had three more children all born in Rowley Regis and then two more born in Blencathra, Cumberland in 1898 and 1900.  Also in his household in 1891 were seven single lodgers aged between 18 and 30, including William Dowell aged 18 and William Dingley, aged 30, both from Rowley Regis, the others from Leicestershire, all sett makers.

By Tango22 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3826239

All of these were living in Blencathra Vue as it is listed in the census or Blencathra View in other records – and a glorious view it must have been, this is a very unspoiled area even now. The impression is that this must have been a terrace or terraces of cottages built for incoming workers. There is the pattern which became familiar when we were looking at the Mountsorrel and Shropshire connections in an earlier post, of young men moving to an area where their skills were in demand, where they lodged with local people or with fellow immigrants, often ten or a dozen to a cottage. I can find no reference to Blencathra View on modern maps but it seems likely that either it fell into dereliction or acquired other names in later years. Next time I visit my sister-in-law in Penrith, we may just go exploring and see whether we can find a likely row of houses!

Interestingly, in Church Street, Keswick, only a couple of miles away, was an Emily Mayo, born in Tividale who was a widow aged 60 and who was a Bookseller and Stationer, also there in 1901.

1901

By the time of the 1901 Census, there were still some Rowley people in the Threlkeld area. Thomas Hill who had been in St John in the Vale in 1891 was now living in Threlkeld village and giving his age as 39 (thirteen years older than the previous census!) and was now a quarryman and Innkeeper. His wife Sarah and children Annie and Edward were still at home, Annie working as a Barmaid and would marry a local man in 1904 and Edward gave his occupation as a Lead washer at the mines. Their domestic servant Elizabeth Davis, aged 18 was also born in Rowley Regis.

Also in the village was William Redfern, aged 25, a sett maker, born Staffordshire and married to a local girl with their 11 month old son.  

However, the overwhelming majority of Threlkeld residents were locally born.

Over in Quarry Cottages in St Johns in the Vale, Thomas Clift was still in residence and had married his local girl Laura and was still a granite quarryman.  Further along the row Samuel Knight, aged 22, born in Rowley, a Granite Kerb Dresser was lodging with a local family. It appears that young men who fancied a change of scene were still making their way to Threlkeld. Quarry Cottages seems to be the new name for Blencathra View because again, just along the row is James Holcroft, now 48 with his nephew William Taylor still living with him, but now with William’s locally born wife and their two small children. Both James and William were described as Granite Stone workers. Also still boarding with them was his nephew James Taylor, now aged 20, born Rowley Regis –  an engine driver in the granite quarry.

Next door was George Long, aged 45 who was also a quarry worker, born in Strensham, Worcestershire but his wife Rebecca, aged 43 came from Rowley and their three children had been born in Birmingham, Rowley Regis and Threlkeld.

Samuel Dowell aged 27 was also living in Quarry Cottages  with his wife Alice aged 29 and a boarder Frank Levett, aged 22, all from Rowley and both men working in the quarry. Samuel Dowell had married Alice Levett at St Lukes church in Cradley Heath on 16 Sep 1895, Alice was 23 and living in Rowley Regis , and was the daughter of John Levett who was a butcher in Garratts Lane, Old Hill. That Alice did have a brother Frank according to the 1881 Census so this was probably the Frank Levett boarding with them.

A few doors along was Frederick Edwards, a widower, aged 46 and his four sons, William aged 22, Joseph aged 20, Alfred aged 18 and Thomas aged 16, all born Rowley Regis and all working in the quarry. Frederick’s daughters Martha, aged 9 and Alice aged 7 had been born in Threlkeld.  

Next door to Frederick was Thomas Hackett, also a widower, aged 32 with his children William, aged 8, Ellen, aged 6, both born in Rowley Regis and Thomas aged 1 born in Threlkeld. There is only one GRO Death registration for a female Hackett in the Cockermouth Registration District in this period and that is for Sarah Ann Hackett who died in the June quarter of 1900, aged 32. The birth registration for Thomas, in the December qtr of 1899 shows her maiden name as Davis. Also in the household were Jesse Hackett (28) and what appears to be his wife Mary Hackett (28) who was described as a Housekeeper (Domestic). Jesse gave his place of birth as Baptist End, Worcestershire but Mary was from Rowley Regis.

Again, the majority of residents, including those working in the quarry were locally born in Cumberland though there was a sprinkling of workers from Leicestershire. It appears that marrying locally made it much more likely that you would stay in the area.

Emily Mayo was still in Keswick, still running her stationery and bookshop there.

Hailstone quarry workers, about 1910, shared by Ronald Woodhouse. Some of these may have been to Threlkeld or even been born there, they would certainly have known the families who went there.

1911

By 1911 the numbers of Rowley people had reduced considerably again. In Threlkeld there was only Robert William Stuart, aged 30, a quarryman who was born in Threlkeld and his wife Annie (nee Hill)  who was 27 and their lodger Edward Davies, aged 24 and also a quarryman and described as a cousin were both from Rowley so it is likely that Edward was Annie’s cousin. Robert and Annie had been married in the Penrith Registration District (which covers Threlkeld) in 1904 and Annie appears to have been the daughter of Thomas Hill who had been in the area for the two previous censuses.  

Frederick Edwards was still living in Quarry Cottages in St John’s in the Vale, with his son Alfred aged 28, a quarryman and daughter Alice aged 16 who was their housekeeper. Frederick and his wife Annie had been married in 1876 at Gornal, although Frederick was living in Perry’s Lake. Annie had died in 1896.

Also in Quarry Cottages Frank Levett , now 34, had married Annie Hindmoor Benbow in Threlkeld in June 1901 and they had three children, all born locally.

William Redfern , now aged 38 was also still living there with his wife Sarah Ellen (nee Airey) they had been married in 1900 locally and had four children, all born in Threlkeld.

James Taylor, now 29, (the nephew of James Holcroft) was by now married to Jane, nee Young Watson, and they had a one year old daughter.

Thomas Hackett, still a widower, now aged 42 was still in Quarry Cottages with his children William, (now aged 18 and a sett maker like his father), Ellen, aged 16, both born in Rowley Regis and Thomas aged 11 born in Threlkeld. The cottage is noted as having just four rooms so quite where they fitted in their boarder Elizabeth Harding, aged 38, a dressmaker and her two children aged 12 and 11 is interesting! Perhaps best not to ask…

In Keswick, Ellen Dora Long, aged 21 born in Rowley Regis and single, was a housemaid.

1921

By 1921, even fewer Rowley born people remained. Alfred Edwards, now 38 and still a quarryman, was living with his father-in-law Robert Stuart and Robert’s Rowley born wife Annie . Alfred’s wife Sarah Jane was the sub-post mistress in Threlkeld and they had a son Ernest, aged 6. Their boarder Edward Davies, aged 33 and born Rowley Regis was still with them, as in the previous census. So this family had strong Rowley connections.

In Lake Road, Keswick, Ellen Dora Long, aged 31, born in Rowley Regis and single, had advanced from housemaid to Cook!

So these are the official records I have been able to find which reflect the migrations between Rowley Regis and Threlkeld, apologies if I have missed anyone. There may have been shorter trips which were not captured by the censuses at ten year intervals but certainly the names mentioned by several members of the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page are included here.  And the Levett family mentioned by one of the volunteers at the Threlkeld Mining Museum.

GRO Births,  Marriages and Deaths

Another set of records which can show where families were at any given time since 1837 is the General Register Office Indexes of Births Marriages and Deaths. These are divided into quarters of the year and when I started working on my family history, you had to go to Somerset House in London and physically haul down the huge original registers and check each quarter separately. And it was very busy and if someone else had the volume you wanted to check, you just had to wait until they had finished with it. Time consuming, difficult to access, but still sometimes important. These days the indexes are available online, births and deaths through the GRO website, but also through Ancestry and FindMyPast . And they have been transcribed by FreeBMD, the sister organisation of FreeREG so I was able to spend a few hours today checking for births and deaths for some of the Rowley names in the Threlkeld area from 1880 through to 1930. And then to check some of those entries against marriages to see where those marriages had taken place. To do that in a matter of a few hours would have been unimaginable only a few years ago!

As a result of that, I was able to establish that there were four children born in the Cockermouth Registration District between 1883 and 1889 to a Hackett family, with a mother’s maiden name of Billingham. Now there is a Rowley combination if ever there was one! And sure enough, I found a marriage for a James Hackett and Ellen Billingham in the Dudley Registration District in the June qtr of 1882. But in fact this James Hackett was not a quarry worker and he was living in 1901 with his family in Workington, on the Cumberland coast, where he was working at the steelworks there. One can never assume even when something looks so obvious!

Similarly the family of Hackett/Sloan who baptised three children in the same registration district came from Ireland and Lancashire and were also living in Workington.  And the family of Hackett/Walker who had nine children in the same Registration District between 1897 and 1914 were also in Workington, though James, the head of the household and his uncle William who as living with him were both from Old Hill. So some but not all of the local Hackett families in Cumberland came from the Midlands and not all were involved with quarrying. Quarrying was not the only mobile skill!

There were Redfern births registered in the area between 1895 and 1910 and, interestingly a marriage of a Redfern in 1937. Similarly there were Dowell births in 1903 and then with a different mother’s maiden name in 1913 and 1919.

The Levett births in this period relate to Frank Levett who married Annie Hindmoor Benbow in 1901 and they had two children in 1902 and 1907. By 1911, Frank and Annie, with their children Sidney, James and John were living in Threlkeld with Annie’s parents James and Elizabeth Benbow, both men working as stone dressers. James Benbow was born in Clee Hill, Shropshire, Elizabeth in St Johns in the Vale, Frank Levett in Rowley, Annie and their first two children in Threlkeld and the last child in St Johns. A real granite area blended family!

But also in the June qtr of 1901, when Frank Levett had married Annie Benbow, Amy Levett, Franks sister, had married William Henry Edwards also in the Cockermouth RD. It is tempting to think that this was a double wedding! Sadly, the original registers do not appear to be available online so I cannot check this but it seems a coincidence that brother and sister married in the same area and the same time period.

William Henry Edwards aged 32 and Annie, aged 35 were living in Threlkeld in 1911, with their two children and both William and Annie were born in Rowley. The local schoolmistress was boarding with them. So were these the grandparents of the tour guide who was quoted right at the beginning of this post? I think they probably were. And he was quite correct, the Levetts still had a butcher’s shop in Birmingham Road, Blackheath, just opposite my grandfather’s house, in the 1950s when I was growing up, I can remember the smell of the sawdust which used to be scattered on the floor!

Joyce Neech has noted that her great-aunt , a later Martha Haywood (born in Rowley in 1891 and the niece of the Martha Haywood who was in Threlkeld in the 1891 Census) retired to Threlkeld after working most of her life in Rowley Regis so some connections obviously remained so that she knew enough of the area to want to live there.  There were other Haywoods not so far away, including a family of Haywoods in Sheffield, at least one of whom was married in the Cockermouth area.  But all of the Haywood families who were registering births in this area from 1903 onwards were in Workington and working at the steel works, which is also a trade associated with Sheffield. So how Martha came to retire to Threlkeld remains something of a mystery. But this Martha had nine brothers and sisters and her father had ten, one of who was married to a Redfern so it was entirely possible that one or more of these retained connections with the Rowley people who had stayed in Threlkeld. And yes, Martha Haywood is on my family tree, too – my 5th cousin, once removed!

So there was a certainly strong connection at this period between quarrymen and their families in Rowley and Threlkeld and some of those who had travelled to the area stayed there and some apparently have descendants there to this day. I hope this might be of interest to anyone who has this connection on their family tree. Rowley genes are spread around the country, it seems! It will certainly add some interest to my next visit to Penrith to see my sister-in-law and I shall be viewing the countryside with new interest.

Daily life in the hamlets in times gone by

In our generally comfortable living conditions today, it can be quite difficult to imagine the conditions in which our ancestors lived and worked. These are some memories which relate to Rowley and Blackheath, so technically may be considered outside of the area of the Lost Hamlets but I am sure that many of them apply also to the houses and residents there. Some of my own memories of growing up in Long Lane and Uplands Avenue are also included.

What the Vicar thought…

The Reverend George Barrs, who was Curate of St Giles from 1800 to 1840. He did not seem to have a high opinion of his parishioners and he wrote in the 1830s:-

“In 1831 the number of inhabited houses in the parish was 1366, the number of families occupying them 1420 made up of nearly 7500 individuals, an equal number of each sex, within a very few, the males predominating by only 7 or 8. 82 homes were then without inhabitants and only 5 building. Since then the state of trade has considerably improved, many houses have been built or are in progress but few unoccupied.  

Of the above number of families 140 were occupied in agriculture and 909 in manufacture, trade etc. Many however who are ranked as agriculturists are frequently engaged in some branch of trade or manufacture. A very large proportion of the manufacturers are nail makers and nearly all the women and girls; that being the chief pursuit of the operatives in this and surrounding parishes. Here chains of various descriptions and the making of gun barrels especially in time of war, find work for many hands. Here also the manufacture of Jews Harps is carried on and sometimes employs a considerable number of persons.

 A great many of the manufacturers are very poor and their families frequently appear clad in rags, and as if they could obtain but a slender pittance of life’s comforts or even necessities. This however is not to be attributed to their being destitute of the means of procuring these comforts in a degree unknown to other manufacturers but in their want of frugality, domestic economy and good management. Their work is laborious but they can generally earn good wages, which, if discreetly applied would furnish them with a comfortable competence. Unhappily however many, from their very youth contract habits of idleness and prodigality and these are a certain and fruitful source of rags and wretchedness. Since the national pest the “Beer Act” came into operation in 1830 their manners have become more dissolute, their morals more corrupt, their habits more idle and unthrifty and of course neither their personal appearance nor their domestic comforts has much improved.

Such is the degraded and grovelling condition into which many of the nailers are sunk that during the late war when wages were high those who could make a miserable living by earning 2 shillings a day would not earn another 2 pence when they might by no great exertion have earned 2 shillings a day. Of all descriptions of individuals these appear most anxious to observe to the very letter that maxim of holy writ “take no thought for the morrow for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself” The wretchedness that results from their conduct is indeed an undeniable proof of its criminality and of the enormous evil of such perversions.”

[Note: It is likely that this statistical information is taken from the 1831 Census which is not generally available and did not include as much detail as later censuses. This information relates to the whole ecclesiastical Parish, including Old Hill, Cradley Heath, Whiteheath and Tividale, not just the village of Rowley.]

It is evident that Barr was a man of strong opinions and a striking contempt for his working class parishioners. He had married into the Haden family and apparently lived at Haden Hall, rather than in the village. The resistance he met from local people in his campaign to build a new church may have contributed to his dislike for his parishioners, but surely there must have been a few decent people? Excessive drinking was undoubtedly a general problem in those times, though not limited to the Black Country and certainly the non-conformist churches were strongly against alcohol because of the problems it gave rise to in society. And I suspect that non-conformism, particularly amongst Methodists and Baptists was already strong in the area, perhaps even encouraged by the contempt of clergy such as Barrs.

A visitor’s view of Rowley Regis

Walter White, a traveller from London, visited the Black Country in 1860 and wrote about his observations in his book ‘All round the Wrekin’ . He walked through the village of Rowley Regis and along Hawes Lane and noted the numerous quarries producing ‘Rowley Rag’. He would have seen the breathtaking view over Old Hill from Hawes Lane, a view I later gazed out at from RRGS many a time. Later he went through Tippity Green, Perry’s Lake and over Turner’s Hill to Oakham, right through the Lost Hamlets, a long walk! He also noted, echoing round the village, the click-click and thump-thump of hammers, finding that nearly every cottage had a workshop with a forge in place of a washhouse. In each workshop he and his friend observed the same scene, three or four women hard at work together, sometimes with children helping.

He noted “The fire is in common; and one after another giving a pull at the bellows, each woman heats the end of two slender iron rods, withdraws the first, and by a few hammer strokes, fashions and cuts off the nail, thrusts the end into the fire and takes out the second rod and gets a nail from that in the same way. So the work goes merrily on.”

For the women working thus, it may not have been quite as merry as he found it.

Memories recorded by Wilson Jones

In his book The History of the Black Country (now available as a reprint)  J Wilson Jones recounts that he, born in Walthamstow, had moved as a boy to Rowley Regis in 1921, following the death of his mother. He was often taken by his father to visit elderly relatives on Sundays – one born in 1839, one in 1844, one in 1845 and one in 1847 so their memories went back a long way. How fortunate we are that Wilson Jones listened to and remembered their tales and recorded them for posterity.

He tells that “One old lady had been sold as a bond servant at Halesowen Cross and had received three pence per day wages; another had been employed down the mines, harnessed like a horse and drawing tubs. They had all been nailers and had walked three miles to fetch iron, laboured 109 hours weekly for a penny halfpenny an hour, raised 11 children and saved enough to be owners of three houses. Recreational hours were unknown and children did part time work from seven years of age, school was voluntary and the majority could not read. “

Black Country houses were mostly of a pattern, and I recall that my first family home in Long Lane, my grandfather’s house in Park Street and my great-aunt’s house in Darby Street all exactly fitted this pattern. Built in terraces there was a long entry from the street to the back of the house (because the front doors were never used!)  At the rear there was a scullery or kitchen, in later years sometimes using what had been a nailshop or Brewhouse joined to the house with a bluestone or blue brick yard. There were usually two rooms up and down with a cellar below.  The lavatory was also in the yard at the rear – luxury was having a separate one for each house, often two or three or more houses shared one and people have commented on Facebook, remembering this arrangement in cottages in Tippity Green, Perry’s Lake and Gadds Green.  And a garden where vegetables could be grown and perhaps room for pig and some chickens was a bonus and not always provided.  My grandad Hopkins produced wonderful pickled shallots and grew beautiful flowers, in his garden and allotment. To this day I think of him when I see drumstick primulas which I remember him wearing in his buttonhole, in a tiny silver holder, when he visited us on Sundays.

Later, when nailmaking at home ceased,  many workshops or brewhouses were linked to the house, sometimes with a glass roof and became the scullery or kitchen, often with bathrooms or toilets later added on at the back. My grandfather’s Victorian house in Park Street, Blackheath and our 1930s house in Uplands Avenue still had cast iron ranges in the 1950s with a lovely coal fire and a kettle that could be put on it. The range in Uplands Avenue even had a little oven and I can remember my dad cooking some little lamb chops in there, they tasted wonderful. And toast made in front of the fire, using a wire toasting fork and slices of bread, fresh from the bakery in Bell End, lavished with tub butter from the shop at the top of Mincing Lane, (this was Danish butter, I think, I can remember it was cut from the block in the tub in front of you, according to how much you wanted. The shop owner could judge perfectly how much to carve off, showing long years of experience.) That toast was glorious! Toast made now with mass produced bread and toasted with electric devices doesn’t taste the same at all.

My grandparents had rag rugs on the floor, no fitted carpets in those days – from memory these were made of rags clearly from old suits and any other sturdy fabric available, hooked into pieces of sacking and warmer on the feet than lino or brick floors, though the floor in the entry and in the link from the house to the scullery was made of blue bricks. The range in our house was taken out at some point in the late fifties and replaced with a fireplace with a posh gas fire with a Baxi Bermuda boiler behind it which made the whole house warmer and undoubtedly less dusty. And yes, like many people of my vintage, I can remember ice, exquisite ferny patterns, on the insides of the (unheated) bedroom windows in bad winters, hot water bottles were an essential and when it was really cold my dad used to put his army greatcoat over the bed, it was very heavy.  

When we moved from Long Lane to Uplands Avenue in about 1957 we had an indoor bathroom for the first time – at Long Lane the bath was a tin tub which hung on the wall, filled on bath nights from the copper in the outside washhouse. There were still gas brackets on the wall at Uplands Avenue, (though disused) which had provided the lighting originally, and I remember we had a gas fridge, not something you hear of today with a tiny freezer section which just accommodated a little metal ice-cube tray. Not that we got ice-cubes out of it very often, as the freezer box accumulated frost around itself so that it usually became a block of ice itself. And your fingers stuck to the metal tray if  you tried to extract the cubes. The trick was to hold it under the tap and hope the ice-cubes came out before they completely melted!  If the little gas pilot light on the fridge went out, as it did periodically, my dad had to crawl into the space under the sink with a taper to relight it through the tiny hole at the back with a distinct ‘whoomph. Funny memories!

In most houses, including my home well into the 1960s, the front room or parlour was rarely used. In Victorian times it might have had an aspidistra, hard uncomfortable horsehair stuffed furniture, and a glass display cabinet. Perhaps a harmonium or a piano – my grandad Hopkins loved playing piano and had a white one!  I can remember my great-aunt’s middle sitting room in Darby Street had a dining table with a deep red velour cloth with a fringe I loved playing with as a child, with a lace-edged white cotton table cloth over that. My aunt could remember visiting the same house in Darby Street when she was a child in the 1920s when her grandfather still made nails out in the workshop and she could remember that she was sometimes allowed to work the bellows for the forge for him. Despite being asthmatic, he walked regularly to the bottom of Powke Lane with a little cart to collect iron rod and coke for his forge from the Gas works, and to take his completed nails to be weighed.

On one occasion, Aunt Alice remembered, while ‘helping’ her grandfather, that she had got some ashes on her white pinafore and, realising that her mother would be cross with her, my great grandmother washed, dried and ironed it before she went home. In the days before washing machines, tumble driers and electric irons, this was no mean task and speaks volumes of her kindness. My aunt also remembered that her granny was a wonderful cook and she remembered freshly baked cakes and particularly custard tarts set out to cool on the window sill. Is it coincidence that my father, myself and my son all loved custard tarts? Who knows, perhaps there is such a thing as genetic memory!

Black Country dress remained the same, probably  until the 1920s. Women nailmakers wore black lace-up boots, woollen stockings, long black skirt with a shawl , sometimes a man’s cap. Men wore checked shirts and sturdy leather belts.  The photograph here shows my great grandmother Betsy Rose and my great aunts, taken in the doorway of their shop in Birmingham Road probably in the early 1920s or thereabouts, and her dress fits this description although her daughters are more fashionable! Old photographs from the time of chapel gatherings show that many of the older ladies appeared to be still wearing their ‘Sunday best’ outfits and hats from some decades before. ‘Sunday best’ was definitely a feature of life in those days and even in the 1950s with new outfits for children for the Anniversary each year and I can remember that the men in church always wore smart suits and ties, the ladies dresses or costumes and often hats – no dressing down!

My great-granny Rose with her daughters. Copyright: Glenys Sykes

Weekly routines

Each week in earlier times apparently had routines. Monday was washday and nailmaking , Tuesday brewing and nailmaking, Wednesday and Thursday house cleaning and nailmaking, Friday ess-hole and grate cleaning, knife polishing and nailmaking, Saturday Window cleaning and nailmaking, Sunday   – preparing the Sunday dinner, church, chapel and Sunday school – no work, not even sewing! The days were long, starting at six and often not ending until 10pm. For women, all of this on top of bearing children, caring for and feeding them,  there was little time for rest. Men often worked during the day at outside jobs, in the quarry, mines or farms but also made nails when they got home.

Meals also followed a routine – Sunday, the joint, Monday cold leftover meat, Tuesday broth, Wednesday boney pie, Thursday stew, Friday faggots or tripe. What they would have thought of our supermarkets, online shopping and ready meals I do not know!

But Wilson Jones notes also that, in his words,’ Black Country people had “hearts as big as buckets”, they would laugh with the merry and weep with the sad. Neighbours would share the duties of a sick woman, share their meals, deliver each other’s babies. There was never any knocking at the door, they lifted the latch and walked in. They would draw a pint of home brewed beer for the visitor, be he a vicar or insurance agent. Brewing reached an art that no other district shared. Each home had its ‘secret’ upon how many hops or what kind of malt was to be used. The fermentation had to be produced by no synthetic yeast but from the ‘barm’ passed from one relation to another. The visitor would be handed the glass of beer after it had been inspected for clearness and he had to express his opinion that it was better than ‘so-and-so’s’  – their beer was too muddy, too sweet or too sour’.

Looking back

So – living in tiny overcrowded houses with earthen floors, no running water or sanitation, big families, polluted air, deadly diseases when no cures were available leading to high infant mortality and often early deaths, men working in dangerous jobs in mines and quarries or in the constant heat and grime of factories and the nailshop, children working in nailshops, mines, quarries and factories from the age of seven or so, few shops,  little money, little or no healthcare provision, plenty of hard work – our ancestors had tough lives, and few luxuries but often a strong faith and caring communities.  I am deeply proud to be descended from them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Life on the Edge

As I mention in the introduction to this One Place Study, it was the loss to quarrying of whole hamlets in which my ancestors had lived which prompted me to start this study in the hope of recording information about the hamlets and the people who lived there. Quite a few people have mentioned on the Facebook Page ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ their own memories of living on the edge of the quarries on Turner’s Hill.

Peter Hackett was amongst those saddened by the loss of these hamlets. He said in 2014 “You forget that Perrys Lake was almost a little community of its own. Obliterated. Fair enough you have the new houses now. You would have thought that the planners would have kept its original name….”

Marilyn Holder at the same time said “I took a drive over to see the lost community of Perry’s Lake today and found it rather sad that it has disappeared into history like so many parts of the Black Country.”  Marilyn’s  4 x Great-grandad Isaac Bishop lived in one of these cottages and worked as a nail maker in his late 70s – no pension then, work or poor house! Her father-in-law was born in one of the cottages in Perry’s Lake in 1919. She thought that there were 6 terraced cottages, which according to the 1841 census housed around 75 occupants. No bathrooms and one toilet up the back yard served all the houses.

Growing up and family memories on the edge

Cottages at Perry’s Lake, just prior to demolition, early 1960s. Copyright Linda George.

Perry’s Lake was the biggest of the hamlets and in close proximity to the entrance to Rowley Quarry in an area known as “Heaven”. The Portway Tavern was once the haunt of quarry workers after a long shift. For many years the Portway Tavern was owned by the Levett family, up to 1900, who were also butchers in Rowley and Blackheath for many years. It remained open until The Portway Tavern was demolished in 1984.

Many people have commented that Perry’s Lake was known as ‘Heaven’ though this does not appear on any maps that I have seen.

Sue Cole was born in a quarry cottage up on Turners Hill. It was next to a farm. Her mum told her that she had to fetch water from the farm as they didn’t have running water, or electricity, they had Tilley lamps for lighting. And she had to sleep in the wicker washing basket, because her brother was still sleeping in the cot. She also remembers that she used to play on the top of the quarry, and had to go inside when the siren blew when they were going to blast. When she was about six weeks old they moved to one of the houses round the back of the Tavern. Her Dad worked at the Hailstone quarry.

Carol Adney was born in Number 16 in the row of cottages along the top of Turners hill in 1950 and lived there until she was 4yrs old. 

Shirley Jordan recalled that her aunt Mary had lived in the first house round the corner from the Portway Tavern and then there was the road that was called round heaven. She used to play round heaven at the bottom and there were some horses down there. A lady and family called Onions lived round there as well.

David John Reynolds also remembered that Joe Onions had looked after the quarry horses. When David was a child in the 50’s Joe only had one horse to look after, a white one called Dolly. Geoff Skelton  noted that the field is still there where they kept the horses, the golf course fence is where the fence was to stop people  going to the edge of the quarry. Stephen Hall remembered Geoff Onions whom he had worked with at Albright and Wilson and who later kept the Portway Tavern with his wife Joan.

Eileen Hadley remembered that her great-aunt Kate Faulkner lived across Perry’s Lake, and that it used to be known as Heaven. Other residents included families called Bird and Harcourt . Jus Joan had a Great aunt whose name was Redfern, she lived in the first cottage set back from the road about half way down with a small front garden.  George Webb said that his in-laws lived at the back of the Portway Tavern, aka Heaven in old cottages ,they were Harcourts and Reynolds , both worked in the quarry. He also recalled that Syd and Joe Dowell lived opposite the Tavern . Alma Webb also remembered that she visited the cottages by Portway Tavern. George’s wife Mary used to take her to see her sister who lived there. Her husband worked at the quarry and the cottage was on the edge of the quarry.

Jus Joan had a great-uncle Jesse Plant who was killed in the 1st World war who lived at no. 12 Perry’s Lake.

Tony Holland said that he lived in the Portway Tavern from 1959 to about 1962. (It’s surprising how many people lived at the Portway Tavern at various times! I shall write a separate article on the Portway Tavern and the other pubs in the hamlets at some point!) He also knew the area as ‘Heaven’. At the end of Heaven on the left hand side was a field owned by a chap called Joe, presumably Joe Onions. The children played football there and called it Joe’s stadium. Tony said he hung about with kids from Irish families that lived there. He knew that the houses did not have electricity and relied on gas lighting. The cottages were still there in 1962 and there were about half a dozen then.

Stephanie Pullinger says that her great-grandad was a quarryman. As they lived in Tipperty Green she assumes that he worked at the Hailstone quarry but has very little information and would love to find out more. He and his brother, according to family legend, were characters. Apparently one night he brought a donkey home that he found on the way home from the pub. On another occasion he brought an old gypsy woman back much to her great grandmother’s disgust! Stephanie says that every time she thinks about that donkey she imagines its hooves clattering on the cobbles in the entry between the terraced houses.

Hailstone Quarry workers c.1910. Copyright unknown but will be gladly acknowledged on receipt of more information.

Mention of the entries between houses brought back a memory of his teenage years for David Steventon when he was helping the local milkman with deliveries each weekend. Obviously on such days one would collect payment for the week’s milk from the lady of the house. So at the front end of each entryway I would start singing, “Milk ho, milk ho, milk ho, ho, ho!” And sure enough, when he reached the back door the customer would be waiting with purse open to settle the debt.

Reg Parsons was born at Number2 Turner’s Hill in the bungalow his father had built after demolishing some old cottages which had stood on the site. He recalled Slim’s sweet shop which was the nearest shop and his parents’ shop in Doulton Road. He remembered Vera Cartwright with her milk cart. Amongst the local  boys he had played with were those from the Simpson, Parkes, Robinson and Hopkins families who lived nearby. During WWII the field below the bungalow was used as a fuel dump, which consisted of concrete bases with piles of Jerry cans of fuel, securely fenced! There was an anti-aircraft gun nearby, near the Wheatsheaf Inn, something my late mother had also told me about. Reg’s brother Harry was in the Grenadier Guards and his sister Edna was in the Land Army, based in Evesham.

I have recounted elsewhere that Reg went to Britannia Road school and milked the cows at a farm on the way through Rowley, walking to and from school. From what Reg told me about where the bungalow was, I believe this was later replaced by a much bigger house by a local motor dealer Sid Riley who owned the Garage in Dudley Port, Caldene Motors. His niece Maggie Smith tells that he had a swimming pool in the basement of his house, which flooded the rest of the house, when quarry blasting damaged the footings. 

If I am correct, this would have been the view from Reg and later Sid’s home.

View from top of Turner’s Hill. Copyright Catherine Ann.

Joyce Connop remembered that when she used to walk across Tippity Green (73 years ago!) to Doulton school there was nothing on the right hand side, only Ada’s cafe then she would cross over the bottom of Turners Hill. There  was a row of houses, one had a shop in the front room, on the other side there were the grey looking council houses then and Stiffs concrete works, Portway Tavern and a row of terraced houses lay back where the golf range is now. There were a about half a dozen houses just round the corner from Ada’s cafe at the bottom of Turners Hill which were really old, Joyce remembers her mother saying they had earth floors. There were also about half a dozen terraced houses on the corner opposite the Bulls Head.

Joyce loved Ada’s café, Ada used to serve them with penny cakes on our way to school . She was seven, and remembers that it was lonely across there and no pavement then, noting that 7 year olds don’t walk all that way on their own to school now .

Playing on the edge

There were lots of places for children to play and have fun as with so much  of the derelict land in the area, known as the ‘quack’, the ‘bonk’, the marlholes which abounded in the area.

Many children played around the quarries and some could remember falling over the edge.  Pam Veal said that she fell off the top on to the ledge once. 

Peter Greatbatch remembered in about 1965 when he was about 13, that he fell down the Hailstone quarry from top to bottom after climbing down it after a paper jet. He walked away, through the lorry entrance, with a sprained ankle and a cut at the back of his head, neither of these injuries serious! His brother David Greatbatch was there and also his friend Raymond Knowles who said to him after the incident “I thought you had had your chips there”.  Peter says he will never forget it, the luckiest day of his life. Some years later, he added, he had another incident at the other quarry at Turner’s hill in the 70’s when he hit the big rocks put by the side of the quarry at the bottom of the hill. He was trying to broadside his Ford 1600E there in the snow. If those rocks weren’t there he and his three passengers would have ended up in that quarry. He says he would not have walked away from that one.

There was a pool at the Blue Rock quarry where David Wood and JJSmith used to fish, JJSmith commenting that he fell in more than once – the sides were very steep where the perch were and David Wood agreed that the sides were so steep you were lucky if you got out. Joyce Connop recounted that her brother had fallen in there when he was 10 and another lad got a lifesaving award for getting him out.  Roger Harris remembered that he and his mates used to swim there, they used to make rafts out of old wood. One of his mates had a deep gash on his leg after hitting a sharp rock when he fell off an old bit of wood, noting that these were mad days in the 60s before such places were fenced off. There was little mention of Health and Safety in those days.

Sadly, not everyone who fell in got out. There were tragic memories of two brothers who drowned there, within living memory. It was believed that the younger fell in and his older brother jumped in to help him but neither could swim and both were lost, devastating their family and no doubt worrying legion mothers who urged their children not to go near such pools.

Riding on the Edge

Many people remembered riding lessons at Hailstone Farm. Ian Davies recalled that the Cartwrights ran Hailstone Farm which was off to the left on the way up Turners Hill.  They were his relatives; his Geordie grandfather lived with them at Lamb Farm, near Portway Hall, when he first moved south in the early 1900s. By the 1950s George Cartwright had moved away to a farm near Bewdley and Hailstone Farm had been taken over by their daughter Vera and her husband George Thomas. George taught him to ride. The quarries were already threatening to swallow the farm back then. The narrow track from Turners Hill had quarries close on both sides. The farmhouse and top of the land were later swallowed up by the Tarmac mega-quarry.

Hailstone and Freebodies Farms, on the edge! copyright D Morris

Driving on the edge

The road between Perry’s Lake and Oakham, going up Turner’s Hill also had memories for many people. This was later closed and quarried away. There was a sheer drop on either side within a few feet of the road. Many people could remember walking up that road on their way to visit family. Roy Martin could remember when it was still open to two way traffic when he first drove up there. But being narrow with passing places, it was still dodgy so they made it one-way it uphill. But as John Packer remembered, a few people still used it as a short cut, as late as autumn 1968. Michael Bowater recounted that he just managed to escape serious injury walking up there one night on his way back from Brickhouse. A car coming up the hill was going too fast and he just about scrambled up the bank on the left, it was a close call, he noted, it was a good job he was young ,fit and agile. John Packer hoped the car wasn’t his red Hillman Imp!

This photograph shows the three main quarries with the Turner’s Hill Road, climbing between the top two roads. Note also the steep edge of the bottom quarry immediately behind Tippity Green.

Eileen Herbert could remember driving up Turners Hill with her dad to visit her aunt Rose Kite, Eileen lived in Highmoor Road and the siren before blasting was very loud from there. They always knew what time was as they could hear Lenches ” Bull” as well. “Long time ago but I can still hear them in my head!” 

Angela Kirkham also recalled going to visit her gran, auntie and cousins (Tonks and Madley were the names), they used to visit on Sundays and always went over the quarry. She recalls that she spent most of her early childhood playing round the top of the quarry and the banks, sometimes with her brothers throwing bricks at other kids and sometimes at one another ! Angela’s Kirkham grandfather, father and uncles all worked in the quarries, they lived in Dane Terrace and Angela remembered that the blasts used to shake the house. These were presumably the Kirkham brothers Brian and Clifford who commented on the Facebook page that they all worked in the quarry, bringing the rock to the crusher or as a mechanic. Roger Harris also worked with them and said that, although the work was hard and the money wasn’t good, they had some laughs. Which sounds like a lot of life in the area!

Dropping off the edge

Not only people fell into the quarries. Gardens did too and other things! The map shows clearly that the quarries came right up to the edge of gardens in the hamlets.

1st Edition OS Map extract, Copyright David and Charles.

Graham Evan Beese recounted that his grandparents lived at number 50 Tippity Green until the bottom half of the garden fell down the quarry, pigs chickens and shed too. There is no word on the fate of the poor livestock! Graham’s grandparents were quickly moved to Eagle Close on the Brickhouse Farm estate.

Andrea James had a similar experience and recounts “We used to live along Tippity Green and our garden backed right onto the quarry , with only a tiny wire fence that , as children we could easily climb over. Every time they blasted we would lose a little of our garden.

In those days we didn’t have an inside toilet, ours was at the top of the garden and one morning I went to go to the loo …only to find out it had disappeared.  

To add insult to injury I had a further telling off from mom when I woke her up to tell her the toilet had fallen down the quarry.”

Andrea added that, unlike Graham’s grandparents, her family were not rehoused after losing their loo, they used Mrs Faulkner’s loo next door for years!  They stayed there until the row of terraced cottages were destroyed by a fire that started in the sweet shop . Their roof caught fire and Andrea’s father woke them all up to get out … her  mom said “Oh my God ..where’s the dog ? “

Andrea’s dad said “He’s in the car with my fishing rods”. Andrea’s dad clearly had a good grasp of his priorities. They lost everything in the fire (except the dog and the fishing rods, of course) but her mom refused to move into the horrible maisonette she was offered so they lived in the burnt out shell, with help from local people, until they were offered a better house. Tough Black Country folk, these!

And if your garden didn’t fall into the quarry, it was still a risky place to live! Paul Pearson remembered when the air brake failed (or forgot to be put on) on one of the quarry wagons, and it rolled back down the driveway, across Portway road, down the gardens and into two houses. He said that there are still steel girders out in the front of the houses now that the quarry put up after this incident.

Working on the edge

As can be seen from all these memories the quarry loomed large over the village and especially the hamlets. Many local men and boys worked there, quite a few died there or were injured or maimed.  Sarah Preston recounted that her great grandfather died in an accident there before her grandmother was born, he had done an extra shift to get extra money but didn’t live to see his daughter born.

There was regular daily blasting to loosen rock. Apparently when the blasting happened the workers sheltered under metal containers to save coming up away from the area.  Anyone who lived or went to school within hearing distance of the quarries can remember how the day was punctuated by the regular sound of the siren at 10am and 1pm. Certainly I can remember it from my days at Rowley Hall Primary, although I do not remember it from my days at RRGs in Hawes Lane, perhaps the school there was that much lower down and on the other side of the hill. Recollections may vary, others may remember it from there, too.

Maggie Smith also notes that her son in law’s father owned a cafe in Low Town, Oldbury, called the Polar Bear. The cafe had to be pulled down to make way she thought for the magistrates court. It was taken in one piece and used as the cafe at the Hailstone quarry.

Many members of the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page have told of their memories of the sirens and the blasts. The blasting was not always without incident. Alan Homer recalled a rock coming through the roof of Toyes chippy on Dudley Road. Someone else (sorry, I can’t find this entry now!) remembered a rock coming through the roof of a toilet, just after she had finished cleaning it. Fortunately it was unoccupied at the time!

Kelvin Taylor noted that his family lived in Limes Avenue, a mile away below Britannia Park  and could hear the siren and the blast if the wind was blowing in the right direction.

Graham Lamb remembered that his mother used to go mad because they had metal window frames and the blasts used to crack the glass, nearly every week his dad had to put a new pane in somewhere.

I have tried to gather these memories into a more or less coherent form and hope that people will enjoy reading about the life of the ordinary working people who lived in the Lost Hamlets. They had full, active, hard working and hard playing lives and formed strong communities. Though their physical homes have gone, something of their lives is recorded through these memories.  Please feel free to contact me if there are more memories of family here that you would like to add.

Alias Hunt & Johnson and the Commonwealth Gap

In the same way, that I had (wrongly, as it turned out) assumed that my ancestors had stayed pretty firmly in Rowley Regis, I tended also to have assumed that, by and large, they would have been law abiding, if somewhat inclined to non-conformism.

So I was intrigued to find, early on in my researches, that from about 1665, some of my ancestors were appearing in the Parish Registers with an alias which continued over several generations! Johnson, alias Hunt.  I could not imagine what could have given rise to this. And they were not alone. Other families in the village also appeared to have aliases. I tended to associate the use of aliases with murky deeds but it seemed a bit odd that so many families had apparently turned outlaw and over such a long period.

We Rowley family historians owe a great debt of gratitude to Miss Henrietta Mary Auden, as she had transcribed most of the older parish registers before many of them were destroyed or damaged in the church fire in 1913. This enabled these records to be published in book form by the Staffordshire Parish Registers Society after the fire and this book, in Smethwick Local Studies Library, was an important source of information for me when I began researching. I would go to the library with a list of ancestors who I needed to check and I was very grateful that the book was indexed, thus saving me precious research time. Nonetheless, I can remember my frustration that I often ran out of time and had to continue on my next visit.

I could not have known then how developments in technology would change this process beyond recognition. Some years ago, I was able to purchase a digital copy of the entries from the Registers from Midland Ancestors, which could also be searched digitally; later still, searching to see whether any second hand copies of this book were available to buy, I was amazed to find that I could purchase a facsimile copy of it for a few pounds, photographed from a copy deposited in a library in the USA and printed to order for me. Such luxury, I could now browse the Register to my heart’s content! And sometimes, there is no substitute for reading through a parish register in sequence over a period of years for building a picture of a family or a place.  Miss Auden commented in her introduction to the book (which I now had time to read properly) on the number of families in the village using aliases. She said “there are many curious nicknames and aliases’. So what was happening that so many people in this little village were apparently using two different names?

My first alias was used after the union of my 8xgreat-grandfather Richard Hunt and Elizabeth Johnson. I say union because I have never found a record of their marriage. It is quite possible that this is because some records at this period were lost or it may be that they simply did not get married. Their first child John Johnson alias Hunt was born in 1655. The date was my first clue.

This was just after the Civil War and was during the period of Government known as the Commonwealth, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. The Commonwealth Parliament passed an Act regulating the keeping of civil records of births marriages and deaths, taking this responsibility away from the church.  It was called ‘An Act touching Marriages and the Registring thereof;  and also touching Births and Deaths.’ It was quite clear. Officers were to be appointed by each parish, to be called the ‘Parish Register’ and all marriages now had to be performed by a Justice of the Peace.  The wording was clear –

‘no other Marriage whatsoever within the Commonwealth of England, after the 29th Sept, in the year One thousand six hundred and fifty three, shall be held or accounted a Marriage according to the Laws of England.’

 Photograph from ‘Birth, Marriage and Death Records’ by David Annal and Audrey Collins.

Oh my, what a huge change for ordinary people from the customs which had been practised from time immemorial. So how did this affect that little village of Rowley? A lot, it seems.

These are extracts from the Parish Registers for the time, the spelling is the original spelling in the Register!:

“12 Mar 1654      William DOBBES, minister, buried.

These names of Birthes, Burials and Marriages above mentioned were entred in another paper booke by Mr Dobbes & written out in this as it was entred by him.

Stafford. At Wolverhampton the 20th day of March 1654.

O Tempora! Memorandum that Josias ROCKE, of Rowly Regis, was this day sworne before us by virtue of the Act of Parliament of the 24th of August 1653, to execute the office of Parrish Registor for Rowly aforesaid according to his best skill and knowledge & according to the said Act so longe as hee shall continue in the said office.

Witness our handds the day and yeare above written.

John WYRLEY

Hen. STONE

Staff. At Walsall, ye 22th June 1657.

Be itt remembred that William WHITTORNE, of Rowley Regis, in ye said county was this day sworne before mee to execute ye office of parrish Register there according to ye forme of a late Act of Parliamt. Intituled An Act touching Marriages and the Registring thereof and touching birthes and burialls soe long as hee shall continue in ye said office.

Witness my hand ye day and yeare  above written.

O mores!

Hen Stone”

Several pages of births, baptisms and burials follow. The marriage record which follows is the most detailed of those recorded and shows the effort required to be married under the new system. Some of the marriages, starting in 1655, had notice published in the church on three Sundays but others went through a more elaborate procedure.

“John MARTINE, of Rowly, Co. Stafford, Joyner, & Joyce COLBURNE, d. of John COLBURNE, of Rowly, Gentleman, was published in the market towne of Walshall (being conceived to bee the next market towne to the p’ish church of Rowly afforesaid) three market dayes sevrally each after other between the howers of Eleaven & two of ye Clocke (that is to say) the 14th, 21th and 28 dayes of August 1655, without contradiction of any.  As by the Certificate of the pish Register of Walshall doth appeare. The said John MARTINE & Joice COLEBURNE above named were declared Husband and Wife Sept 29 1655.

By mee, Hen Stone.”

There are then several pages in the Parish Register of ‘marriages’ performed by these Magistrates, most of which say that they were performed at Hampsted, a few at Walsall or Kidderminster, presumably transferred from the Registers kept during the Commonwealth period.

Note that Walsall (9 miles away) and not Dudley (less than 4 miles away) was deemed to be the closest market town, presumably because Dudley was in Worcestershire, Walsall in Staffordshire. Not too much of a problem if you had a horse or carriage of some sort but in this period, most poor people did not have this, they had to walk. The minor inconvenience of the extra miles to be walked which this implied for the parties to the marriage was apparently not considered.

I was puzzled by the references to Hampsted as I wasn’t familiar with this place. The only Hamstead I could find anywhere near was on the Handsworth border, more than seven miles away from Rowley. For some years, I couldn’t work out why marriages should have taken place there.  Then, while I was reading “A Birth, a Death and a Barrellage” by Kate Creed which is about Ridgacre at Quinton, she commented in connection with some land transactions

“The Wyrleys were the earliest family recorded as being seated at Hamstead. They came from Little Wyrley and although some of them were referred to as ‘de Hamstede’, they finally adopted  the name de Wyrley. They continued to hold Hamstead for generations and became the largest landholders in Handsworth.” And I have since read that in early times the Wyrley family also held a lot of land in Rowley.

So that was why so many Rowley marriages took place in Hamstead, John Wyrley, who was one of the magistrates appointing the Register right back at the beginning, lived there and anyone wanting to be married had to go to him. Imagine the nuisance for poor folk who had to miss a day’s work and walk a fifteen mile round trip, instead of being able to be married in the parish church – one suspects quite a lot just didn’t bother. By 1658 there is no mention of where the marriages took place and by 1659 it seems that some marriages were happening in churches again, but it isn’t absolutely clear. 

Unfortunately for family historians, and probably for all the reasons mentioned above, the new secular system was not a success. It is not clear whether proper records were not kept or whether these were lost in the upheavals but many places have gaps in their registers around this time – it is known in genealogical circles as the ‘Commonwealth Gap’.

But after the Restoration of the Monarchy, in 1660, these regulations were revoked and responsibility for records reverted to the church.  The legitimacy of all marriages by Justices was confirmed by the Government so that children of these marriages were not deemed illegitimate.  However, what of the children born to couples who had not been married at all or where there was no record of the marriage, as with my Richard Hunt and Elizabeth Johnson? And apparently, some of the newly restored Clergy refused to recognise the circumstances or perhaps the marriages and any children born of that marriage were called by their mother’s name, alias their father’s name. Hence my Johnson, alias Hunts. Imagine how those fathers must have felt, not being allowed to give their name to their own children (almost like a mother who takes her husband’s name on marriage, even now!). I suspect that is why the aliases continued for so long, it was the only way to keep the paternal name in use. There were still Johnson Hunts in the parish many years later. No wonder the Puritans came to be so disliked!

So if you have an alias in your family at around this date, this is probably the reason – the Commonwealth Gap and the problems caused by a remote government imposing demanding new rules without any apparent understanding of the problems this would cause for poor people. Plus ca change, you might think, I couldn’t possibly comment…