Tag: Family history

Families of the Lost Hamlets – The Nocks

A side helping of Nocks

This piece started out as part of my piece (still in progress!) about the Levett family but has got rather long so that I have decided to post it separately. But the Nock and Levett families were closely linked so keep an eye out for that instalment. And then there will be the Gaunts…

According to the Halesowen Parish Registers, on 6 October 1581, Johane, the daughter of Thomas Nocke, was buried there. This appears to be the only Nocke entry in the Halesowen Registers between 1559 and 1643 but I include it out of interest. There were Nocks in Dudley, too but I am still exploring these, there was certainly a Tobias Nock baptised there in the mid-1700s and a Tobias who was a cordwainer in business there in 1784 so it seems likely there is a connection. I shall continue to investigate this but have concentrated on the Rowley Nocks for the moment and have grouped these together below, although some of the connections are not clear.

The first Nocks to appear in the Rowley parish registers are in 1607 when Olyver Nocke married Jane Murlow. An Oliver Nock was baptised in Sedgley on 11 Mar 1575 and it seems likely that this is the same man and is another indication that there are family connections within the Dudley area. There are no baptisms of children recorded to Olyver and Jane in Rowley so perhaps it was the adult Olyver who was buried on 27  Jan 1612/13.

William and Anne Nocke  Entries 1610-1623

On 18th November 1610 a William Nocke married Anne Grove. The baptism of two daughters to this couple were noted in the register – Elizabeth on 28 March 1610 and Mary on 6 Mar 1611. It was noted in the Register in March of 1613 that William Nock had been one of the Church Wardens for the past year so William was obviously well respected in the village. Where exactly he lived is not clear.  This was followed by the baptism of son John on 15 May 1615, and Richard on 2 Nov 1617 and this is possibly the Richard Nock who was buried at St Giles on  19 April 1647.

On 17 September 1620 William, son of William Nock was baptised. This was followed on 23 Oct 1620 with the burial of a William Nock. Father or child? It seems likely that it was the child baptised in September 1620, as on 3 October 1621 another William, son of William Nock was baptised. Then on 25 September 1623 William Nock was buried – father or child?  There is no clue in the register but there were no further baptisms for children of William Nock so perhaps this time it was the adult  William.

John Nocke, Clark (sic) was buried in Feb 1624. The introduction to the Registers suggests that he may have been Parish Clerk. If so, he was an early example of the literate Nocks. Perhaps William and Thomas whose details I am listing were his sons, we do not know but certainly unless there are substantial gaps in the Registers, there were not  many Nocks about then in Rowley so it seems quite likely. And there were recurring Nock family names, for both boys and girls in these families in the records that follow.

Thomas Nocke  Baptisms 1624-1639

Another family of Nocks appears in the Registers in 1624 when Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Nock, baptised on 6th November, there is no marriage recorded for Thomas so perhaps he was married elsewhere. This is the second time that the eldest daughter was named Elizabeth, William Nocke had also called his first daughter Elizabeth. If, as I suspect, William and Thomas Nocke were brothers, might their mother’s name have been Elizabeth? 

Then there is a record of the burial of a Thomas Nock in March 1626 and then, thirteen years later, the baptism of Jane, daughter of Thomas Nocke on 26 Jan 1639.

John and Anne Nocke 1641-1655

In 1641, on 10 February, a John Nocke married Anne Hill. This may well have been the John, son of William who was baptised in 1615, as he would have been about 25 in 1641. Hill is also a common name in Rowley and there were many Hills in the very early registers so they were definitely a long term Rowley family. I cannot find a baptism of an Anne Hill in Rowley at this time but there are notes of torn pages, etc so it is possible that a record is lost or that she was baptised elsewhere.

The baptisms of several children of John and Anne then followed. John, on 12 May 1642; William on 31 Dec 1643; Anne on 14 Feb 1646. Then there is a baptism of a Mary Nock on 6 October 1651. Mary was recorded as the daughter of John Nocke and Mary, not Ann.  So were there two John Nockes baptising children at the same time? Or was the name of the mother in the record for Mary an error, substituting the name of the child for the mother? It is impossible to be sure but there were no other baptisms for John and Mary in this period so it seems feasible that it was an error. Two more children were later baptised to John and Anne, so certainly it does not seem that Anne had died and John remarried – an unnamed child of John Nock was baptised on 16 Jul 1654 and Elizabeth on 29 Sep 1655.  After that, no more children were baptised for this couple.

Josiah and Judith Nock  Baptisms 1657-1663

In 1657, during the Commonwealth period, when the recording of life events was much changed, a new family of Nocks appears in the Registers. John, the son of Josiah and Judith Nock was born on 25th December 1657and baptised on 17th January 1657, followed by his brother Josiah, born on 5 June 1660 and baptised on 18th June. Another son Thomas was baptised on 13 Dec 1663 (after the restoration of the monarchy so the Commonwealth requirement to record dates of birth had gone!)

Nock burials in this period include Thomas Nocke who was buried on 5 July 1659 and William Nocke on 25 Dec 1664.

John Nock 1665

The name John Nock reappears in 1665, ten years after the last baptism for a child of John and Anne Nock, when Anne, daughter of John Nocke was buried on 23 January 1665, perhaps the Anne who had been baptised in 1646.

John and Joan Nock 1667-1680

Then on 19 October 1667, William, son of John and Joan Nock was baptised, followed by the baptisms to the same couple of Joseph on 22 September 1672, Thomas on 5 March 1675, and Mary on 7 September 1680. Was this the John who was earlier married to Anne? That would make this John 65 by the time the last child was baptised so I am inclined to think it was not but the next generation.

More Nock burials

Elizabeth Nock, widow, of Hales (Halesowen) Parish was buried at St Giles in July 1684 and Joane, wife of John Nock was buried on 5 September 1684. John Nock was buried on 20 December 1693 and Ann Nock, widow was buried on 22 January 1694.

Following the death of Joane, there is a confusing series of entries.

William and Dorothey Nock  – Baptisms 1687-1706

I have not been able to find a marriage for William Nock to a Dorothey but a Dorothy , daughter of John Williams was baptised at St Giles on 22 Mar 1662 which would make her about the right age to be marrying and having children in these  dates so this  may be her. On 25 Dec 1687 John, son of William and Dorothey Nock was baptised, followed on 21 April 1689 by their daughter Jone. On 8 April 1692 daughter Sarah followed and on 20 May 1694 another son Joseph. On 26 December 1695 Thomas was  baptised and on 4 April 1697 Samuell, then Ann baptised on 26 Dec 1701, Moses on 15 May 1704 and Mary on 14 Jul 1706.

Right in the middle of that sequence there was an entry on 2 Mar 1690 for the baptism of a William, son of John and Dorothey – or should that be William, son of William and Dorothey?  There are no other baptisms to a John and Dorothey at this period. John and William are both Nock family names and it appears that William and Dorothey already had a son John in 1687. It seems very odd that a second Dorothey should appear for this one baptism so I am inclined to think that this is an error and that this child was another child of William and Dorothey, and the date, a year after the baptism of Jone in April 1689 and before Sarah on 8 April 1692, means that he would fit very naturally into the sequence. That’s my theory, anyway! I may be wrong…

Joseph & Ciceley Nock appear just once together in this register when their daughter Sarah was baptised on 6 Oct 1695. Joseph Nock was buried on 23 November 1697, Ciceley Nock, widow was buried on 18 April 1710.

Thomas and Dinah Nock Baptisms 1695-1718

Also in 1695 another family begins baptising children at Rowley. John, son of Thomas and Dinah Nock was baptised on 2 February  1695/6, followed by daughter Ann on 14 May 1699, son Joseph on 4 January 1701/2, Elisabeth on 17 Dec 1705, William on 21 Nov 1708, James on 20 May 1711, Benjamin on 16 Feb 1716 and finally Sarah on 8 Jun 1718.

John & Hannah Nock Marriage and baptisms 1711-1718

On 21 May 1711 John Nock married Hannah Foley. It seems likely that John was the son of William and Dorothey who was baptised in 1687. And perhaps Hannah was the child of Thomas and Hanah Foley who had  been baptised on 10 February 1688 at St Giles.

Their daughter Mary was baptised on 23 March 1712 but buried less than a year later on 21 Feb 1713. Their son William was baptised on 15 May 1715, and daughter Sarah on 27 January  1717/18.

William Nock & Elizabeth Bibb Marriage and baptisms 1714

A couple of years after John’s marriage, William Nock married Elizabeth Bibb on 7 November 1714. Again, it seems likely that William was the son of William and Dorothey, he had been born in 1690, and was the brother of John. Elisabeth may well have been the Elisabeth who was baptised at St Giles on 1 August 1692, the daughter of Benjamin and Elisabeth Bibb. 

On 19 July 1715, their first child Elisabeth was baptised, followed by Jone on 8 Oct 1716, Benjamin on 8 Dec 1717, William on 15 Nov 1719, Tobias on 8 May 1721 who was buried on 29 Jan 1723/24, Joseph baptised on 28 Sep 1723, Dorothy on 11 Jun 1726, Tobias on 10 Jun 1727 and Phebe on 29 Sep 1731, the last child of the couple listed.

Enough, enough!

I am not going to attempt to list all the Nocks in Rowley (and all the Nocks entries from 1733-1744 are recorded as Knocks  and occasionally as Nocke which adds to the fun!) from here on, as they now become too numerous but I suspect that most of the later Nocks in Rowley parish are part of this family, although many of them fall outside the immediate area of the Lost Hamlets.

The child of William and Elizabeth I am following up from here on is Tobias Nock, baptised in 1728 and his descendants because he appears to have stayed in the village and possibly in Portway and he is the one who is linked to the Levett family which was where this research started. I will continue to research the other Nock children in this family as these Nocks are on my family tree so I will be researching them in more detail at some point.

Tobias Nock the Elder 1728-1791

Tobias Nock (1728-1791) was a Rowley  boy, probably born early in 1728 in Rowley as he was baptised at St Giles on 10 Jun 1728, the son of William and Elizabeth Nock.  He had married Catherine or Kitty Fletcher, apparently in Coventry, in 1750. They had at least seven children – Sarah in 1751, Deborah in 1753, Catherine in 1760, Tobias in 1764, (dying in 1765), another Tobias in 1766, Elizabeth in 1769 and Henry in 1773, all apparently in Rowley Regis. It is not possible now to be sure where Tobias lived but in his Will he left a substantial number of properties in Rowley, Old Hill and Oldbury, as well as his nail ironmonger’s business and specifically left the house in which he was living in Rowley to his wife Catherine. His son Henry also lived in Rowley at this time, probably in Portway House or Hall so it may be that Tobias lived there, too. Tobias’s house was evidently a substantial house so Portway Hall is a possible candidate.

Tobias Nock the elder died on 5 March 1791, presumably  in Rowley but he was buried on the 10th March 1791 in the Friend’s  Burying Ground at Dudley. (Quaker  records are very detailed) Interestingly another daughter of Tobias and Catherine, Elizabeth, born in 1769, died in 1842 and there is a note in The Annual Monitor of Quaker Published Memorials for that year that Elizabeth Nock, aged 74 and living in Dudley had died – and she was described as a Minister, most unusual for those days for a woman, though possibly more common in the Quaker movement. And I have noticed that amongst these Quaker or Presbyterian families, not only are the men literate but many of the women are, too, really quite unusual for those times. And also I have noticed that these men often left property or businesses to their wives, so that women were treated much more equally than elsewhere in society generally then.

The Nock family do not feature very much in the books about the history of Rowley Regis, I can find no mention of them in J Wilson-Jones’s book and only two mentions in Chitham’s book, one of those about a James Nock who kept a pub  in Reddal Hill, rather than Rowley village. Chitham notes that by 1860, amongst the Coalmasters in Rowley Regis were Nock, Wood and Nock in Rowley village so they were still active in business and commerce then. But neither writer mentions  the earlier Nock family so I was quite surprised to discover the extent of their businesses in the area and wealth  by the late 1700s and later.    

And Tobias Nock the Elder was a very wealthy man. In his will, proved in 1792, he left a large number of properties in Rowley, Oldbury and Old Hill to various relatives, plus a cash sum of £200 to his daughter Deborah, (married to John Levett Snr and living in London).  £200 would be worth about £38,000 today. He also left £50 each to his two Adshead granddaughters, worth about £9,500 now.

To his wife Catherine Nock:

“all the house and appurtenances wherein I now dwell and also all those twelve dwelling houses, shops, gardens and appurtenances situate in Rowley Regis aforesaid in the several holdings of Daniel Davis, William Downing, George Taylor, Josiah Winsor, Samuel Perry, Esther Bridgwater, Isaac Parkes, William Collouth, Joseph Windsor, James Carter, Joseph Smith and William Bolton and also all that croft of land called the Sling adjoining in his own possession with all his household goods and furniture to hold the same to his said wife during her natural life”

  • After her death, his household goods and furniture  were to be divided equally between his two daughters Catherine and Elizabeth;
  • After his wife Catherine’s death, all the said buildings and land above mentioned to his son Tobias Nock of London, Ironmonger, his heirs and assigns forever subject to the payment of two hundred pounds to his daughter Deborah Levett.

To sons Tobias and Henry:

  • all his stock in trade, money, outhouse and cart and all implements belonging to his trade. Subject to the payment of all his debts and also subject to the payment of forty pounds apiece to his three daughters Deborah, Catherine and Elizabeth to be paid to them at his decease and his  son Henry shall have one hundred guineas out of his trade [more]than his son Tobias.
  • To sons Tobias and Henry all that the freehold estate in Oldbury in the parish of Halesowen in the County of Salop in the several holdings of Henry Richards, Joseph Darby, Peter ffisher, Thomas See, William Stevens Kilsey, Thomas Danks, and Iseury Holloway to hold the same to their joint use during the natural life of his said wife Catherine Nock and after her decease he gave and devised the same to his son Henry Nock, his heirs and assigns forever subject to the payment of fifty pounds apiece to each of his granddaughters Elizabeth and Harriet Adshead.

To  Catherine Nock:

  • All the freehold estate situate in the parish of Rowley Regis in the County Stafford in the holding of Job Hawkner.

To Elizabeth Nock

  • all those several closes or points of pasture land and also those five dwelling houses shops gardens and appurtenances situate at Old Hill in the parish of Rowley Regis in the County Stafford now in the several holdings of John Westwood, John Johnson, Shelley Garrett, Hannah Garrett and the Widow O’Hara.

Jointly – what appears by my Stock Book to be saved by his hand from the date of his decease he gave equally amongst all his five children”

So, a detailed and extensive estate distributed around his family. Were his tenants nail-makers producing nails for him and his son to sell? It seems likely.

And in 1805 Catherine, daughter of Tobias and Catherine Nock, was married at the Quaker Meeting House in Stourbridge to Thomas Martin. She died on 9th March 1816 and was also buried at the Dudley Quaker Burial ground where her father had also been buried. So the Nock family clearly had a strong connection with the Society of Friends. In fact in his fascinating book ‘Men of Iron’ Michael Flinn states that “the greater part of the iron industry of the day was controlled by closely linked Quaker groups”. So it would not be surprising to find such a link. The Nock family appear to have been amongst the Rowley folk who were more than just nailers but also, like the Crowley family, moved during the late 1700s and onwards into selling and distributing the nails made in the Rowley area in London and possibly elsewhere.

The London connections of the Nock family

All of this is in the period when my 6xg-grandfather Edward Cole married in London in a Fleet marriage. It seems to me increasingly likely that families like the Crowleys and the Nocks employed local men from Rowley to transport the nails from Rowley to their London warehouses or to work for them there, leading to their presence in London at that time. Tobias’s Will leaves his business to his sons, along with “all my stock in trade, money, outhouse and cart and all implements belonging to my trade” so he definitely had a cart as part of his business.

Incidentally, the family of Ambrose Crowley of Stourbridge,  blacksmiths, nail factors and ironmongers, who had originated in Rowley Regis, were also Quakers, albeit some years before this. And their son Sir Ambrose Crowley II, who I mentioned in a previous post, was the ironmonger to the Navy so they were in the same trade, buying nails made in the Black Country and selling them in London. Crowley is known to have had a warehouse in Ratcliffe, Stepney and may have started his business there after he completed his apprenticeship but there is no definitive evidence on this.

Tobias Nock the Younger

Tobias the Elder’s son Tobias Nock the Younger moved from Rowley to London at some point in the late 1700s to set up as a nail monger and is described in his father’s Will dated 1791 as ‘Tobias Nock of London, Ironmonger ‘. Tobias the younger had married Frances Darby in St Giles church in Rowley on 17 Aug 1789 and their daughter Mary was baptised on 17 May 1790 in Shadwell.  Frances Nock nee Darby died in March the following year, presumably back at home, perhaps visiting family, as she was buried in St Giles on 6 Apr 1791.

On 20 Mar 1794 Tobias remarried to Mary Kitson, a widow, at Saint George In The East: Cannon Street Road, Tower Hamlets, and their daughter Katherine was born in Shadwell on 17 February 1795 – we know this because her date of birth was given at her baptism. Alas, Mary died in 1797 and there is a burial at St Paul, Shadwell of a Mary Nocks of  Shadwell High Street on 1 Mar 1797.

Tobias had a son Tobias born on 22 February  1799 in Shadwell. Again we know his date of birth from his baptism. Tobias was followed by Eliza in 1803, Deborah in 1806, William Cane Nock in 1811, Frances in 1814 and Edgar Hynson Nock in 1819.

 On 26 November 1807, Tobias Nock Junior (who was by then described in a Baptismal Register a “Nail Ironmonger” in Shadwell High Street ) had all five of his children baptised at once at St Paul’s Shadwell,  just six days after he had married his third – or possibly fourth – wife in the same church. The mothers of the children are listed against each child and the last three – Tobias in 1799, Eliza in 1803 and Deborah in 1806 – are said to be ‘by his present wife Sarah’. But Tobias had only married Sarah in the previous week so did she bear those children out of wedlock? Or is there yet another marriage to a different Sarah followed by a death and a burial that I have not yet found? Or did the priest misunderstand who their mother was? I do not know but will continue to ferret around this little rabbit hole, watch this space!

Had Tobias followed the Quaker practice of not baptising his infant children but succumbed to pressure from his new wife? It seems quite likely.

Looking at maps

I am not familiar at all with London and have had very little need to consider it up to now in my family researches so, unlike the Rowley area, I generally have not the faintest clue how most areas relate to each other. But I have now found three Rowley families – the Crowleys, the Levetts and the Nocks – with strong connections to the Shadwell/Ratcliffe/Stepney area in the 1700s. So I now have to look at maps to see where people from Rowley lived in London in relation to each other. I had no idea where Shadwell , the home of Tobias Nock Junior was nor Stepney where John Levett (his son-in-law) was born, nor how far apart they were. Google maps tells me that they are less than a mile apart, indeed Shadwell was within the Parish of Stepney. Is that coincidence? M W Flinn in his book ‘Men of Iron’ notes that Thames Street was traditionally the habitat of London Ironmongers’ and the road running through Shadwell and Ratcliffe was a continuation of this road.

Shadwell is in the docklands, on the bank of the river Thames, not far from Tower Bridge. According to Wikipedia, the area’s history and character have been shaped by the maritime trades.  Shadwell’s maritime industries were further developed with roperies, tanneries, breweries, wharves, smiths, and numerous taverns, as well as the chapel of St Paul’s where seventy-five sea captains are buried in the churchyard. The early growth and prosperity of Shadwell in this period has been linked to the road connections into London, which were maintained by wealthy taxpayers from Middlesex, Essex, Kent and Surrey, and presumably used on the way in from the Midlands.

I had hoped to include a map of the area but alas, it was held by the British Library which has been the subject of a disastrous cyber ransom attack which has disabled much of their operation for several months now so I cannot access it now.

There is apparently even today a Shadwell Basin, which is now a fashionable housing area in the Docklands.

St Dunstan’s church in Stepney, where John Levett and his siblings were baptised is recorded as being founded (or more likely rebuilt) by Dunstan himself in 952, and was the first church in the manor, was also known as “The Church of the High Seas” due to its traditional maritime connections. St Dunstan’s has a long association with the sea, with the parish of Stepney being responsible for registration of British maritime births, marriages and deaths until the 19th century. There is an old rhyme:

“He who sails on the wide sea, is a parishioner of Stepney”

I have noted previously that the maritime trades were very large users of nails, and ironmongery for ship building, etc. So perhaps this was an obvious place for a nail monger to have a business, in the docklands, near to the river.

The old saying ‘Birds of a feather flock together’ has some wisdom in it, what could be more natural than to choose to live near to other folk from your home community when settling in a new place where you knew no-one?

John Levett  was not mentioned in his grandfather Tobias Nock Senior’s Will but his mother Deborah  was. There will be a separate piece on the Levett’s shortly but John Levett was a farmer in Rowley in the first part of the 1800s and the Levetts were among the core families in the lost hamlets. His father was also a John Levett and his mother was Deborah Nock, they had married at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 13 May  1776 when John Levett Snr was a widower of St Dunstans, Stepney, London and a victualler or publican by trade. The marriage was witnessed by her father Tobias Nock (the Younger), just as he would witness his daughter Sarah’s marriage to James Adshead three years later.

Another Great Fire of London

In 1794, many houses in Ratcliffe and Shadwell were destroyed by a fire which “consumed more houses than any one conflagration has done since the Great Fire of London”, and also destroyed many boats, including one laden with around £40,000 of sugar. In fact only one house in Ratcliff survived, so John Levett’s pub must have gone, too. Deborah Levett nee Nock had died in 1794 so I thought for a moment that she might have died in the fire but she had been buried on 15 May 1794 and the fire was on 23rd July.

This is how the fire was described on historic-uk.com

At 3pm on 23rd July, an unattended kettle of pitch boiled over at Clovers Barge Yard, Cock Hill setting it on fire. These flames quickly spread to a nearby barge loaded with saltpetre, a substance used to make gunpowder and matches. The barge exploded violently, scattering burning fragments in all directions. Fires spread to the north and the east, consuming timber yards, rope yards and sugar warehouses.

Narrow streets and a low tide hampered fire fighting, and within a few hours the fire had destroyed 453 houses leaving 1,400 people homeless and displaced. The government erected tents as temporary shelter near St. Dunstan’s Church, whilst the Corporation of London, Lloyds and the East India Company  contributed almost £2,000 to the relief of the homeless.

Copyright: Unknown

I have a lot more material on this fire and the area and would be happy to write more on this if people would be interested.

Tobias Nock the Younger apparently stayed in Shadwell after the fire. He and his only brother Henry had inherited their father’s nail monger’s business in 1792 and appear to have managed it together until 1820 when a notice appeared in Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette stating that the brothers – Tobias of Shadwell High Street, Middlesex and Henry of Rowley Regis , nail ironmongers, had dissolved their partnership on  29 January 1820. But some if not all of Tobias’s descendants appear to have stayed in that area for some decades afterwards.

Meanwhile, back in Rowley… The Midlands Nocks – Henry Nock (1773-1835)

At this time Henry Nock, the only brother of Tobias, was living in Rowley and his address is shown in the records of the Presbyterian Chapel at Oldbury as Portway House.

Henry Nock had married Elizabeth Dixon (1777-1852)in 1793 at St Martins in Birmingham and he had stayed in the Rowley area, his children’s place of birth is shown in Presbyterian records as Portway House and the family appear to have later moved to Oldbury where he died in 1835.

Their children were Henry Dixon Nock, (1794-1870) who later moved to farm in Wigginshill in Warwickshire. Why Wigginshill I don’t know as there isn’t much information online about it, except that it had an early Quaker Meeting House. Perhaps coincidence but those Quakers do keep cropping up. Then came Elizabeth in 1796, Hannah in 1799, Agnes in 1802, Catherine in 1808, Ellen in 1809, Philip in 1812, Fanny in 1814, Edwin in 1818, and Joseph in 1820, all born in Rowley. I have not managed to research all of these but I am working on it!

One later descendant Harry Arthur Nock (1865-1946), son of Edwin above, lived for much of his life, according to census entries, in Delph House, Brierley Hill where he was apparently a Corn Merchant or Factor although intriguingly in just one census in 1891 he gives his occupation as a Civil Engineer and Surveyor as well as Corn Merchant – but only in that one census, in all the others he is a Corn Merchant. However, in 1923 he was well enough off to buy Ellowes Hall in Sedgley which was a substantial house and where his children were still living in the 1939 Register, although he was still at the Delph in 1939, retired and living with his eldest daughter Jessie who was an Elementary School teacherand appears not to have married. Harry died at Ellowes Hall (according to the Probate Grant) in 1946 but the house remained in the ownership of his family until 1963 when it was sold to Staffordshire County Council and demolished.  

The Henrys and the Harrys

There are dozens of Henry/Harry Nocks in the area, often close in age to each other, it was very much a favourite family name. They take some careful sorting out. For example, in 1851 there were two Henry Nocks, one living at 10 Dale End, Birmingham and a grocer and one at 44 Dale End, Birmingham and a Corn Dealer. This caused me some confusion although at present I have only been able to link the second Henry to this branch of the Nocks. Nevertheless the other Henry Nock was born in Tipton/Dudley so it seems likely that they were related in some way.

Tobias was another recurring name, in the Nock family, which may indicate an early connection between branches.

So that is a limited look mostly at the early Nock family, of Rowley Regis and Portway, with their many descendants, who appear mostly to have been in business in the Midlands, Dudley, Birmingham, Coventry, Oldbury, Brierley Hill, Sedgley, Sutton Coldfield, Smethwick – some as corn factors, some as farmers, others in various professions. They were a family of businessmen, dealers, shopkeepers, iron-founders, nail factors, iron-mongers and were mostly well-to-do by Rowley standards. They were literate, they kept a low profile, they left Wills – often leaving their estates to their wives, they appear as executors in the Wills of relatives, they were generally very respectable and very industrious. They appear to have been dissenters for many years and possibly to have Quaker connections.

As I have shown at least one branch moved to London in the late 1700s and it seems very likely that some descendants from that branch remained there. For any readers who have Nock connections, and I know there are many still in the area, I hope you find this interesting and even that this may give you some clues about your family tree – or perhaps you can give me some. Contributions welcome!

When I started looking at this family, I did not think I had any connection and had only one Nock on my family tree, William Henry Nock, known as Harry (of course!) and born in Waterfall Lane, Blackheath and who had married my second cousin Edith in 1959. I remember Harry with great affection, he was a lovely man, what Edith and my mother described as ‘one of nature’s gentlemen’.

Now I have dozens of Nocks in my tree, though most of them are very distantly connected to me.

A most interesting family!

A Christmas Post- a little holiday reading with a Yuletide flavour!

Sadly, I have no direct sources from people who lived in the Lost Hamlets for this, but I have pulled together a little from published sources, including Rowley Village and some other places which tell us something of the celebrations in times gone by.

Here are the Christmas memories which J Wilson Jones heard about from his elderly lady relations when he was a boy, so their memories were perhaps of the later part of the 1800s and which he recounted in his History of the Black Country.[i].

“To observe these people at Christmas was an inspiring sight. The table of the poorest was laden with home-cured ham, poultry, plum puddings and delicacies. They gathered around the harmonium or organ and sang the local carols, mainly composed by a Rowley Regis nailmaker Mr Joseph Parkes. The children received few toys, the money of the nailer being spent upon the food and probably new boots. There was, however, that great day of festivity and joy. The scene had changed little from the villain and serf forgetting his hard labour at the Church Fair but in these days  of comparative leisure, we have lost their art of celebration.

The Black Country diet has puzzled many strangers but I cannot agree with the writers who say, “they did themselves well”. I believe many of the delicacies had their foundation in the effort of the yeoman and villain housewife to make a little go a long way. Naturally pork was preferred, not because of an aristocratic taste but everyone kept a pig, from these followed the bacon. Nothing must be wasted and so there came the black pudding, chawl, pork bones, pig’s head and even pig’s tail. Served with pearl barley, leeks or onions, a tasty dish resulted but in districts less accustomed to hardship, how much would have  been thrown away? A turkey or cockerel was never wasted, the giblets, feet and even the cock’s comb seemed to have their uses. All food was dished out in far too liberal helpings, and contained much of the heavy nature as dumplings or suet puddings.”

“Black Country Songs and Carols

The Black Country has a number of songs and carols peculiar to the District and although not heard as frequently now, they were well known in the earlier part of the twentieth Century. One of the carols ‘Brightest and Best’ is sung to a tune called ‘Rowley Regis’ and composed at Blackheath in the 1860s by Joseph Parkes, a nailer. Another Christmas tune he composed was ‘Come again Christmas’ . The new Year is welcomed by a Carol with the quaint refrain:

The Cock sat in the Yew Tree

The Hen came chuckling by,

I wish you a Merry Christmas

And every day a pie.

A pie, a pie, a pie, a peppercorn,

A good fat pig as ever was born

A pie, a pie, a pie, a peppercorn.

This was sung with great enthusiasm around the Rowley district even in 1925.

Another carol contained the words

‘I saw three ships a sailing,

A sailing, a sailing

I saw three ships a sailing,

Upon the bright blue sea.

And those who should be in those three ships,

In those three ships, in those three ships,

But Joseph and his fair lady.’

A song which used to echo around the drawing room on Christmas night, in the form of a round was called Reuben and Rachel. It went as follows:

‘Reuben Reuben I’ve been thinking

What a fine world this would be

If the men were all transported

Far beyond the Northern Sea.’

A song that concerned Rowley was called ‘The poor Nailmaker’ but it seems to have died out about 1840.

                ‘From morn till night

                From early light

                We toil for little pay.

                God help the poor of Rowley

                Throughout each weary day.

                There is a house in Old Hill town

                A garden by its door,

                The keeper keeps you breaking stones

                For ever more.”

A reference, presumably, to the Poorhouse.

Wilson Jones also notes the Postage Rates in 1820. How much did it cost to send a Christmas Card?

Postage Rates, Rowley 1820

15-20 miles                          5d (d is the symbol for one old penny! Twelve pence in a shilling.)

20-30 miles                          6d (sometimes known as a tanner)

230-300 miles                     1 shilling (or a bob, there were twenty shillings in a pound).

He also lists the Poor Allowance in 1871 in Rowley.

( ½ = a halfpenny or ha’penny, ¼ = a farthing, a quarter or fourthing of a penny)

2 loaves of bread                             6 ½d

2oz butter                                           2 ¼d

2oz sugar                                            ½d

4oz bacon                                           2 ¼d

4oz flour                                              ¾d

Potatoes                                              2d

Vegetables                                         ½d

Coal                                                       3d

Fish                                                        4d

Meat                                                     9d

So the cost of sending a letter was an expensive luxury!

Other local memories

Tossie Patrick wrote a wonderful book with her memories of Blackheath, called ‘A pocketful of Memories’.published by the Kates Hill Press. [ii]

She recounts that before Christmas at school, the children would be busy for two or three weeks, making paper chains and Chinese Lanterns and decorating the classroom with them, which looked very festive. The last day of term was the school tea party which she remembered enjoying very much.

Tossie remembered her father getting a small real tree which her mother dressed with tinsel and a few carefully kept glass baubles. Plus sugar pigs and sugar fancies, some rock walking sticks and sometimes a little broken chocolate.  The tree was then hung from a hook in the ceiling and Tossie’s mother would cut the sweets off each day until they were finished. Presents, just as in earlier times mentioned by Wilson Jones, were often new clothes or shoes, and perhaps a few small toys such as a cardboard sweet shop or a toy tea set. Tossie remembered receiving a miniature cooking stove complete with pots and pans – I once got one of those, too!

Tinsel tarnished in those days, I remember, no plastic film then. My mother, too, had a few real glass baubles, perhaps made in one of the local glass works, they were very fragile. There were candle clips which were attached to the branches and real candles – the fire risk must have been terrible! I remember sugar mice and when my children were little I once found a sugar pig in a local sweet shop – I think that the diet police have succeeded in banning these giant lumps of pure sugar these days. But my children had other sweets and they never ate the sugar pig and so it was recycled every year until it became too scruffy and was disposed of! And yesterday my daughter and I were discussing presents and catering and she reported that she had managed to find a sugar mouse for my granddaughter’s stocking, some traditions go on. I don’t suppose my granddaughter will actually eat it either but it’s just one of the things that go in a stocking, along with the orange and nuts and chocolate coins in the toe!

Tossie remembered her Christmas Day tea with great pleasure. Tea included a large tin of Libby’s peaches and a tin of Fussell’s Cream  and a chocolate covered roll and bread and butter. Her Mum had to cut the ends of the chocolate log up and divide them between the children to stop squabbling about the chocolate covered ends.  Like many families, Tossie’s family used the front room at Christmas, very special and they all sat by the fire and listened to Dicken’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ on the wireless.

In the Pocketful of Memories Rowley Book, by Irene M Davies [iii], also published by Kates Hill Press, there is a whole chapter on Christmas in Rowley village, full of lovely memories and well worth reading. She recalled something which I have never come across which was a Christmas Bowl. These could not be bought, they were made at home. Two hoops from a butter barrel (some men were skilful and used three!). These were crossed to form a circle and secured at the crossing point with  string, the hoops were covered with paper strips pasted on and then covered with tissue paper which was trimmed and cut with a fringe and then attached to the bowl with flour and water paste and perhaps hung with sugar fancies as it was hung with pride on Christmas Eve. What pride and joy Irene remembers, money is not always necessary for happiness.

Irene also recalls that many families kept a few fowl in the yard and a pig and a pig would be killed before Christmas, with joints of pork and a cockerel for Christmas dinner, a joint of beef was sometimes bought for the occasion. Most people, she remembers, cooked the meat in front of the fire, using a meat-jack. The meat tin underneath the roasting joint caught the dripping which was much enjoyed at other times! When everything was prepared, it could be left while the family went to chapel before sitting down to their festive meal. Mincemeat for pies and puddings were also made at home with due ceremony. Irene tells of the ingredients for the ‘plum pudding’, made several weeks before Christmas –and containing various ingredients which had to be cleaned and chopped at home. Scraped and shredded carrots (who else thought carrot cake was a modern invention?), peeled and grated apples; currants and sultanas had to be washed and the big juicy raisins had to be stoned and chopped, breadcrumbs made from stale bread. Irene remembers that in those days candied peel came, not in little pots ready chopped, but in the form of half oranges and lemons which also had to be chopped, lumps of sugar had to be prised out of these and these lumps were shared out and sucked, obviously highly prized. Beef suet also had to be chopped along with dates and prunes which had been soaked in hot tea the night before and then stoned. When everything was mixed, with some old ale, everyone in the house would take a turn to stir the mixture and make a wish (which had to be kept secret, of course, or it would not come true) before the puddings were packed into basins and sealed down with greaseproof paper and cloth covers, tied firmly down with string before being cooked in the boiler for several hours the following day.  My mouth is watering as I write, I can almost smell that wonderful steam wafting out. Somehow, picking up even the most superior commercial Christmas pudding from the supermarket seems a great let down in comparison!

Irene is quite right about these larger pieces of candied peel, I was delighted recently to find that one of our two wonderful local farm shops keeps candied peel like this – it is delicious  cut into slices and dipped in melted dark chocolate, my own favourite treat. The French call these Orangettes.  I have even been known to resort to candying my own peel to make these at Christmas!

Copyright: Glenys Sykes

Later in the day, Irene remembered, family would visit, married older brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws and friends. Cups of tea, slices of cake and mince pies, a glass of home-brewed ale would be followed by a good gossip and, later, everyone sitting round the fire singing their favourite carols.

Irene records that her most memorable Christmas was in 1929 when her mother was not feeling well on Boxing Day and she was taken by her father to visit her aunt and uncle. A little later her father slipped out and then came back to tell Irene that she had a new sister, named Hilda. Coincidentally my mother was born on Christmas Day, a few years earlier and she was also called Hilda. Tossie noted that these days everyone just watches television, not nearly such a joyful experience and certainly not as memorable.

What will our children remember about their Christmases with pleasure in fifty or seventy years, as Tossie and Irene did? Tossie and Irene’s books are wonderful reading and I believe they are still available from Kates Hill Press.

Alison Uttley on Christmas

The writer Alison Uttley also writes of how humble houses were decorated for Christmas, in times gone by, in her book Stories for Christmas[iv] which my children enjoyed being read to them when they were small. This is the description of how a ‘kissing bunch’ was made on Christmas Eve, long before Christmas trees were introduced by Prince Albert.

“Now in every farmhouse in that part of England, a Kissing Bunch was made secretly on Christmas Eve to surprise the children on Christmas morning. For hundreds of years, this custom had been kept.

Mr and Mrs Dale planned to make their bunch when the children were fast asleep. So they brought out the best pieces of berried holly, which had been kept apart in the barn, away up the outside steps across the yard. Adam brought the slips of holly indoors, with his lantern swinging, and Mr Dale tied them together in a compact round bunch, arranging them in a double circle of wooden hoops for a frame. The ball was shaped slowly and carefully, with bits tied to the foundation till a beautiful sphere about eighteen inches across was made. It hung from a large hook in the kitchen ceiling.

 [Just like Irene’s Christmas Bowl, perhaps bowl is a corruption of ball? Alison grew up in Derbyshire. Other areas called this the Christmas Bough. Bowl/Bough/Ball – there is a similarity in those names so the name used appears to have been very much a local tradition, used to describe the same thing, made in the same tradition, in different parts of the country. ]

Mrs Dale had been busy with her ribbons and toys, and now she threaded the scarlet and yellow ribbons among the leaves, so that they dropped in streamers. She tied the silver balls, the red and blue glass bells, by strings which were hidden in the greenery. Little bright flags were stuck in the Kissing-bunch here and there, to remind everyone that Christmas was all over the world. Oranges and the brightest red glossy apples from the orchard store, tangerines and gilded walnuts were slung from threads to hang in the bunch as if they grew there.

It was a magical bush of flowers and fruit, of gold and silver. The oranges and apples caught the light of the lanterns and the blazing fire, the holly leaves glittered and the silver and gold bells and balls were like toys from Paradise.

Give me the first kiss, said Farmer Dale and he took his wife in his arms and gave her a smacking kiss under the brilliant Kissing-bunch. “

Copyright: Alison Uttley.

Is that not a lovely description? There is much more of the story in that chapter of Alison’s book.

Some family memories of Christmas

I, too, have memories if Christmas in Rowley and Blackheath in the 1950s. My father was chronically ill and unable to work sometimes and money was very tight. I can remember one year the Minister from our chapel turning up on Christmas Eve with a present each for  my brother and I which he had been asked to deliver anonymously. We might not have had much that year without that kindness. We never knew who had sent them.

We always went to chapel on Christmas Day, of course but it was a fairly low key service and, if I remember correctly, there was not so much as a Christmas tree in church, you know we Methodists liked to keep the chapel simple and relatively unadorned. I can remember being surprised the first time I went to an Anglican church at Christmas and seeing that they had a fully decorated tree in church! Even if there was no tree in chapel though, the favourite carols were always sung fervently, we were good singers at Birmingham Road, a favourite, of course, being Brightest and best of the sons of the Morning, sung to Rowley Regis. I still love that tune.

The first Sunday of December was always the annual performance of the Messiah at Birmingham Road, my childhood introduction to the glories of oratorio, sung in our very own church by our very own (augmented) choir, many of whom had sung in that for many decades and in which I was able to take part in the chorus as I grew up. My mother told me that her mother had such a wonderful alto voice that, one year, when the alto soloist who was booked to perform was taken ill, my granny sang the alto part instead. Sadly she died when I was only three so I don’t remember her but I, too sang alto in choirs for many years which felt like a little link with her.

My mum kept numerous Messiah programmes, this is the one from the year I was born, but I can remember Frank Green the organist from when I was growing up, a faithful servant to the church but somewhat grumpy!

Even though I don’t sing any more,  I still have my battered Messiah score, bought for me by my musical grandad Hopkins who was delighted that his two granddaughters, my cousin Joyce and I enjoyed singing. Grandad certainly enjoyed it, my cousin recently recalled her embarrassment as a child, my grandad’s loud enthusiastic singing in chapel, seated near the front and holding on to some notes long after the rest of the congregation had finished. But he wasn’t embarrassed!

My happiest memories are of Christmas day afternoons when, after lunch, we would walk up from our home in Uplands Avenue to a lovely Edwardian house called Brodawel in Halesowen Street to spend the afternoon with my mother’s cousin Edith and her extended family, her daughters Ann and Christine, Edith’s brother Major Harris and his wife Dot, and a table groaning with a magnificent spread including turkey, ham, cakes, wonderful trifles, including one reserved for the adults with plenty of sherry – and us all good teetotal Methodists, too! I can remember sitting by the glowing coal fire in the front room, cracking nuts and peeling tangerines, and throwing the shells and peel  into the fire. My aunt Edith, as I called her, was the most generous and hospitable hostess and I remember that she nearly always gave me a classic book for Christmas. Heidi, I particularly remember was one and also Little Women and Black Beauty. I loved her dearly, to the end of her days.

Copyright: Glenys Sykes. I am the only person surviving from this photograph taken in the late fifties, at Auntie Edith’s. From left to right, Dot Harris, my mum, my dad, my brother Michael behind, Uncle Harry who was Auntie Edith’s second husband, myself down at the front and someone who I think was cousin Christine’s husband Paul. As you can see, they were very jolly gatherings.

A few years later, our Christmas Day visit changed and we went instead to my mother’s cousin Claude Hadley and his wife Elisabeth in Hurst Green Road. Claude was a wonderful pianist and would play for us on his piano and also play us records of his favourite – and, he said, the greatest ever pianist Horovitz. Elisabeth was German and it was on these occasions that I first tasted this strange but delicious dish called potato salad, a German delicacy which was served with the cold meats and pickles etc. It was lovely, I have to this day never tasted any as good as Elisabeth’s recipe. Claude always seemed to spend his time when we were there trying to get everyone more than a little tiddly, he served very generous tots of spirits to my mum and dad who were not usually great drinkers. Fortunately perhaps, this was before we had a car so we were walking home afterwards, no danger of drinking and driving.

My mum’s hospitality day was always on Boxing Day when our family would gather, my uncle Bill and aunt Dora, Uncle Leslie and Auntie Alice with Joyce, my grandparents in earlier days. My grandad Hopkins always gave my mother a large glass sweet jar full of his home pickled onions or shallots for Christmas, grown on his allotment in Park Street and prepared with his own hand, complete with the pickling spices still in the jar. The best Christmas presents are made with love. This jar usually lasted us for several months and, perhaps it is just nostalgia but again I have never since found any pickles which tasted so good, even when I pickled my own. Perhaps the Blackheath soil gave them a special flavour.

I especially remember Boxing Day 1962 when, after a jolly afternoon in the warmth of the house, we opened the front door for our guests to depart in the late afternoon, and were startled  to find several inches of snow had fallen while we were partying, the start of the terrible winter that year. There was still the odd lump of frozen compacted ice and snow in the gutters of Rowley Village in early April, although even at the beginning it didn’t stop us getting to school and work, life carrying on pretty much as usual. No school closures in those days!

So there we are, a sprinkling of Christmas cheer in Rowley Regis and other places from days gone by, gathered from various sources. So I finish with a description of the food shops in London on Christmas Eve, taken from Dicken’s A Christmas Carol,[v] with a glorious word picture of the bounty on display. I read this a couple of weeks ago, for the first time for many years and much as I love the film versions, especially The Muppets version, Dickens has a wonderful way of drawing word pictures for us. And in this age of the internet, you can download a digital copy free from the Gutenberg Press.[vi]

“The fruiterers were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy person, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.”

“The Grocers’! Oh, the Grocers’! Nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks; or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.”

“But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the same time, there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes and nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners to the bakers’ shops.”

“In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker’s oven where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking, too.”

Dickens closes this chapter with this philosophy from the Spirit of Christmas Present, which seems worth pondering on now, all these years after A Christmas Carol was first published  in 1843.

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who  lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion pride, ill-will, hatred,  envy, bigotry and selfishness in our name who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

I wish my readers a very merry Christmas, even if not quite up to the Dickens standard,  and will be back soon with more posts to my blog!

[i] The history of the Black Country by J Wilson Jones, published c.1950 by Cornish Brothers Ltd.

[ii] ‘A pocketful of Memories’.published by the Kates Hill Press, 1998. By  Tossie Patrick. ISBN: 0 95203117 3 6

[iii] A Pocketful of Memories: Rowley, by Irene M Davies, published by The Kates Hill Press in 2005, ISBN 978 1 904552 45 1

[iv] Stories for Christmas by Alison Uttley. My copy published by Puffin Books in 1977. ISBN: 0 14-031349-4

[v] A Christmas Carol in Prose; being a Ghost Story of Christmas by Charles Dickens.

[vi] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm

The Poorhouse in Rowley

Recently I came across an article in Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette dated 11 April 1825.

Coroner’s Inquest: Rowley Regis

A long examination took place on Saturday at Rowley Regis before Mr H Smith, Coroner, on the body of Jonathan Taylor, a pauper, upwards of 85 years of age. The deceased, who possessed excellent bodily health but whose mental faculties had for some time failed him, was  an inmate of the poorhouse, and frequently became so unmanageable that he was obliged to be put  under restraint. It was on an occasion of this kind that on Monday afternoon he was confined in a room called the dungeon where there was clean straw for him to lie on, and his victuals were regularly taken to him, and he made a hearty dinner on Tuesday with beef, bread and potatoes; but towards evening he stripped himself naked, and refused to eat his supper.

At five o’clock on Wednesday morning he was heard to cough, and about seven he was found dead, lying on his side with his shirt under his head. Several of the paupers deposed to the kind and humane treatment which the deceased had always received, in common with themselves, from the Governor and Governess of the Workhouse, and it appears that the dungeon was dry and wholesome and had a boarded floor. The Rev. George Barrs, Minister of the parish, stated that he had often made enquiries from the poor as to their treatment and they always expressed themselves perfectly satisfied with it. Mr Kenrick, the surgeon, who opened and examined the body of the deceased, said there were no marks of injury whatever upon it, and that he had never before seen so healthy a subject, considering his extreme age, and that he had no doubt he died a natural death. The jury therefore returned a verdict to that effect.

So what we would now recognise as dementia and mental health problems were a similar problem almost exactly two hundred years ago, and although treatment has mostly moved on a little, even now, in the 21st century, there are periodoc cases one hears of where the treatment of such people has not improved a great deal since then.

I cannot find a baptism locally for a Jonathan Taylor at any time around 1740 or any other record of him but he must have had some local connection to be in the Poorhouse.  

The Poorhouse in Rowley was at the Springfield end of the village, just above Tippity Green and the Bull’s Head, on the same side of the road. It is apparently shown on this map which is a copy of the map drawn up in about 1800 in connection with the Enclosure process, above the Bull’s Head, with two buildings and marked ‘Poor’ and ’27’. but considerably before Brickhouse Green. The second building may have been a nailshop which Chitham says was used by the inmates to earn their keep.

Copyright Glenys Sykes.

Later there seems to have been some alms provision in Tippity Green itself.

Edward Chitham (in his 1972 book The Black Country) says
“The Rowley Poorhouse was situated at Tipperty Green where nowadays the Christadelphian church stands. It was a stone building, limewashed white and contained separate accommodation for men and women. In addition to stone breaking both sexes worked in the adjoining nailshop, which was closed in 1829 to provide space for a small sickbay.  In the sickbay the floor was to be laid with bricks and the window looking out on to the garden stopped up, being replaced by another looking onto what is now the Dudley Road. This was to be “above the height of persons” who might look in and see the paupers.”

Perhaps the provision of a sickbay in 1829 was as a result of the death of Jonathan Taylor in 1825.

How were Poorhouses run?

Under legislation arising from the Poor Relief Act of 1601, by the Parish, who appointed Overseers of the Poor (along with Churchwardens and other Parish Officers) from among their number. But those Overseers clearly delegated some of the practical work of running the Poorhouse.

On 3rd March 1818 this advertisement appeared in Ariss’s Birmingham Gazette:

Copyright: Glenys Sykes

Yes, it does say ‘the farming’ of the Poor, a curious term. So it appears that this work was let on an Annual Basis.

What life in the Poorhouse was really like

It is possible that life in the Rowley Poorhouse was not quite as rosy as the picture painted at the inquest above.

These are entries from the Parish Records at about that period:

Rowley Regis Poorhouse 3 January 1820

Resolved that Sarah Challenger be set to break stones at the Poor House under the inspection of J Evans and that she be kept to do that work every day and always do a reasonable quantity of it before every meal is given to her, and that the same course be taken with all other paupers who are capable of work, and that the stones to be broken by the women be first broken into pieces or brought to the place in pieces not exceeding ten or fifteen pounds and be broken by a hammer not exceeding two pounds into pieces not exceeding 3 or 4 ounces.

Rowley Regis Poorhouse 7 May 1820

Ordered that those of the Poor House that are capable of using a hammer with both hands be so put to work, and others with a hammer to be used with one hand only, and that they be not suffered to eat till the appointed quantity be broken by each of them, the stones to be broken down to the size of a hen’s egg.

Bearing in mind that the stone referred to was probably the local notoriously hard Rowley Rag, they certainly earned their keep. And all the local Guardians had supplies of ragstone delivered to their Work and Poorhouses and presumably received an income from the broken stone when it was sold on.

Poor House Rowley Regis 6 July 1821

John Haden was employed to maintain all paupers in the Poor House and he was paid the sum of two shillings and sixpence for each person each week.

One can see why entering the Poorhouse was very much something people dreaded and did their best to avoid. Even for those who needed financial support but could remain outside of the Poorhouse, the authorities would not give any financial assistance, for example, if the applicant owned a dog and they would require the dog to be destroyed before making any payments.

Government Enquiries

The Government was also taking an interest at this time in how these institutions were being managed. A Poor Rates Order was passed in the House of Commons on 20th June 1821,

“That the Churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor of every Parish, Township or other place, in England and Wales, do prepare an Account showing the total amount of the Money levied in the year ending on the 25th March 1821,upon such Parish, Township or other place, maintaining its own Poor; and also, the total amount of Money expended in that year; distinguishing in the said Account the amount of Money paid for any other purpose than the relief of the Poor; and that such Churchwardens and Overseers do, as soon as may be, transmit such Account to the Clerk of the House of Commons, stating, in addition thereto, the number of persons (if any) maintained in any Workhouse or other Poor-house, distinguishing in such Statement the number of children under 14years of age; and also stating whether any Select Vestry has been formed or an Assistant Overseer appointed by Virtue of the Act 59 Geo 3 C.12 and any other observations which may be thought necessary.”

The Report was to be brought back to the House of Commons in six months’ time. At this time, although the first national censuses had been held, the information from them was very limited and not detailed at all so probably this was the only way for the Government to gather this information.

Perhaps as a result of these researches, it appears that the Government was not satisfied that individual parishes were coping well or consistently with their responsibilities for the poor and the wealthier classes considered that they were paying for the poor to be idle. In 1834 ‘An Act for the Amendment and better Administration of the Laws relating to the Poor in England’, known widely as the New Poor Law was passed in Parliament which attempted to impose a system which would be the same all over the country.

Provision was made for Unions of parishes to be set up where several parishes would make provision jointly. Except in special circumstances, poor people could now only get help if they were prepared to leave their homes and go into a workhouse.

Conditions inside the workhouses were deliberately harsh, so that only those who desperately needed help would ask for it. Families were split up and housed in different parts of the workhouse. The poor were made to wear a uniform and the diet was monotonous. There were also strict rules and regulations to follow. Inmates, male and female, young and old were made to work hard, often doing unpleasant jobs such as making nails (although most Rowley folk would have been well used to this) or breaking stones. Children could also find themselves hired out to work in factories or mines.

The National Archives says that “Shortly after the new Poor Law was introduced, a number of scandals hit the headlines. The most famous was Andover Workhouse, where it was reported that half-starved inmates were found eating the rotting flesh from bones. In response to these scandals the government introduced stricter rules for those who ran the workhouses and they also set up a system of regular inspections. However, inmates were still at the mercy of unscrupulous masters and matrons who treated the poor with contempt and abused the rules.”

In 1836 the Parish of Rowley joined the Dudley Union of the Board of Guardians and later a new Workhouse was built at Sedgley where conditions were supposedly very much improved. From that point all of the residents of the Poorhouse in Rowley should have transferred there and certainly there were burials after that date of Rowley people who had died in the Sedgley Workhouse, as this is recorded in the Burials Register in some cases, although some were buried at Sedgley.

The New Workhouse for the Dudley Union

The provision of a new Workhouse for the Union had met with considerable opposition in Rowley, from those who  were liable to pay the Poor Rate. In 1849 Mr F W G Barrs attended a meeting of the Guardians of the Dudley Union, (at which he was one of those who represented Rowley) and presented a Memorandum against the erection of a New Workhouse, which he said bore the signatures of ‘a great majority of the resident proprietors, rate-payers, and influential iron and coal masters’.  According to the report in the Birmingham Gazette the presentation of this document “gave rise to some derisive observations from Mr Thomas Darby, one of the Rowley Guardians, and which drew from the Chairman the remark that a memorial of such a nature was deserving of the utmost attention and respect, instead of being met with a sneer and made a subject of ridicule.” After some discussions about the potential excessive cost of running a new Workhouse and evidence adduced by the Chairman who had consulted various ‘eminent medical men’ who had given it as their opinion that “in all the Kingdom cannot be found more healthy poor-houses than those now used in the Dudley Union” [which seems quite a remarkable claim] but he left it to the Guardians to act ‘according to the dictates of humanity and their own consciences’.

A proposal was made to the meeting to build a new Workhouse, an amendment was proposed by Mr Barrs “that under the existing depression of every kind of trade, and particularly of the iron trade which is the staple trade of the [Dudley] Union, it is the opinion of this meeting that this is not the time to impose any additional burthen on the already heavily burthened rate-payers.” Eventually, this proposed amendment was withdrawn and the proposal to build a new Workhouse was put to a simple vote. There were seven votes in favour and sixteen against.

This clearly did not put a stop to the proposal entirely as a new Workhouse was built in Sedgley in 1855-56.  

The Rowley Poorhouse Building

There is some evidence, however, that the original Poorhouse building in Rowley was no longer in use before the new Workhouse was opened because in August 1849 there was an article in the Birmingham Gazette which related that:

‘At the weekly meeting of the Dudley Board of Guardians on Friday last, it was proposed, and, notwithstanding the strenuous remonstrances of Mr Barrs, one of the Rowley Guardians, ultimately resolved “that the Poorhouse at Rowley Regis be forthwith put in repair and used as a place for the reception of cholera patients for the whole of the Dudley Union.” This Union includes the densely populated parishes of Sedgley, Tipton, Dudley and Rowley.’

Mr Barrs was one of the sons of the late Rev. George Barrs and it seems that he may have inherited the combative style which had made his father so unpopular with his parishioners as the reports of his contributions to meetings of the Dudley Union Board seem to have him vigorously protesting against various proposals. It might be considered that it appears that in doing so he was usually representing the financial interests of rate payers and local businessmen, rather than the welfare of the poorer people who needed poor relief.

However, on this particular topic, one can imagine that the residents of the village around the former poorhouse would not have welcomed the use of the old buildings as a cholera hospital for the whole of this large area, especially as it was recognised to be so contagious so on this occasion Mr Barrs probably was speaking for most local residents. There was a cholera outbreak in the area in 1849 and there were 13 cases in the Rowley Parish, mostly in Old Hill in October and November. It is not known whether this plan was ever carried out or whether alternative arrangements were made. The former Poorhouse would not have appeared to have been very big so it is not clear how many people it would have accommodated nor who would have nursed the patients.

Up until this time, it appears that Overseers had been generally appointed from among local people and were probably not paid, it being perceived as a public service to the community. However, times were changing. By the middle of the 1800s the job of the Overseer or even the Assistants to the Overseer were not confined to the supervision of the Poorhouse or Workhouse itself, it seems. There was an advertisement in July 1849 for the neighbouring Union of Walsall for an Assistant Overseer which read:

Assistant Overseer wanted

The Guardians will, on the 10th August next, appoint some Person to perform the duties of ASSISTANT OVERSEER for the several Parishes in this Union.

Candidates, between the ages of 25 and 55 years, must be thoroughly competent to undertake settlement cases and parish appeals, and value all rateable property to the poor-rate. Salary £50 a year.

So the appointees would have had considerable administrative duties and would have required knowledge of the law to interpret whether people had a right  of settlement and so were entitled to poor relief, a responsibility parishes were always keen to repudiate if that responsibility could be passed on to another parish where someone had lived or worked previously.

In the same paper an advertisement by the Parish of Birmingham was seeking to appoint ‘a properly qualified, active and experienced married couple to undertake the offices of Master and Matron of the Workhouse. Joint Salary £150 per annum with Board and Rations.’ They would be required to devote the whole of their time to the duties of their respective offices, and to enforce the observance of the Rules and Regulations of the Poor Law Board, and of the Board of Guardians, with the strictest care. The Master was required to be fully competent to keep the Books required under the Order of Accounts and to give a security of £200 for the faithful performance of his office. So this post did not appear to include the same responsibility for investigating rights of settlement as the Rowley job but it would have been a much larger operation. The report about Jonathan Taylor shows, though that in 1825 there were a Governor and Governess running the Poorhouse on a day to day basis.

The social care profession was slowly being made more professional, although compassion still did not appear to enter into the picture very much.

The Right of Settlement

Priot to the New Poor Law, the Right of Settlement meant that the place where you had this right had to assume responsibility for keeping you if you became poor or ill and unable to support yourself. My 4xg-grandfather Thomas Beet had been born in Nuneaton in 1764 and married there in 1802, having four sons of whom two survived, his wife dying in 1819. My fourth cousin Margaret who is also a descendant of Thomas kindly shared with me her discovery of a Removal Order in Nuneaton in 1820 relating to Thomas and his two sons who were deemed to have no Right of Settlement in Nuneaton and were removed to Rowley Regis. The reason for this is unclear but it is probable that in previous years he had worked in Rowley for some time, possibly for his cousin John Beet at Rowley Hall and this residence overtook his right to be maintained in Nuneaton.

Thomas appears in the 1841 Census in Tippity Green, along with two other elderly residents in the household of Elizabeth Thomson who is said to be of Independent Means. There is no mention of the Poorhouse. In the 1851 Census he was still in Tippity Green, aged 88 and Blind, as was Elizabeth Thompson, now shown as a Widow, and they are both described as Almspeople. So even several years after Rowley had joined the Dudley Union, there were still people described as Almspeople living in Tippity Green (and I have seen a suggestion that there was a Poorhouse in Tippity Green though I cannot find it on any map from the period. ) When Thomas Beet died in 1852 and was buried at St Giles, his abode was still given as The Poorhouse. Almshouses and Poorhouses are not the same thing but it is not clear who gave alms to support local people such as Thomas. I have not heard of any Almshouses as such in Rowley but I am aware that John Beet, the wealthy squire of Rowley Hall, had left the following legacy in his Will which was proved in 1844

“I give and bequeath unto the clergyman of Rowley Church and the occupier of Rowley Hall for the time being the sum of three hundred pounds. And it is my wish and I direct them to nominate and appoint under their hands in writing six proper persons to be trustees jointly with them for the purposes hereinafter mentioned, that is to say: Upon trust to invest the said sum of three hundred pounds upon freehold or governmental security and to crave the interest and proceeds thereof and give and divide the same unto and between such poor persons residing in the parish of Rowley as they or the major part of them shall consider fit and proper objects for relief, part in clothes and part in money.”

So the Vicar and the resident in Rowley Hall (at this time the widow of the late John Beet) appear to have had a sum of money for the assistance of the poor at their disposal and I wonder whether this was how Thomas came to be supported within the village, as an Almsperson. I will do some more research to see whether I can find out what happened to any such Trusts in later years. There is no apparent record of such a charity at the Charity Commission now but it is possible that it may have been consolidated in with other small charities at some point. A record may also have appeared on Charity Boards inside the church. If so, these may well have been destroyed in the church fire. If anyone has any information about this, I would be most interested to hear about it.

There is an interesting article on the workhouses.org website from the Dudley Guardian with a ‘pen and ink sketch’ which waxes lyrical about conditions in the new workhouse in 1866 which makes it sound almost like a delightful rest home.  There is also a history and a plan of the new Workhouse on the website.

So this was the Poorhouse and Alms provision which served Rowley village and the Lost Hamlets two hundred or so years ago and illustrates how local people who could no longer support themselves were cared for. At least we know rom that inquest report that the Vicar took an interest in the Poorhouse and that, when someone – even someone who was 85 – died unexpectedly in the Poorhouse there was an inquest held locally and reported on and a real attempt was made to discover whether he had been ill-treated. It also gives us a glimpse of life as a pauper then, for our poor, old or infirm ancestors who could not be cared for by their families.

https://www.workhouses.org.uk/Dudley/

Would you recognise your ancestors?

If we were able to travel back through time to a century or two ago in the Lost Hamlets and Rowley, would those of us with ancestors there be able to pick out members of our family? Or are our genes since then so genetically jumbled that we would not be able to do so?

Recently I went to fascinating talk by Dr Turi King who is the DNA specialist who appears on DNA Family Secrets on BBC1 and who is also the DNA expert at the University of Leicester who helped to exhume and subsequently identified the skeleton of Richard III through DNA. It was a most interesting talk and Dr King also has a website with some interesting videos on it (Link at the end of this article).

During the question and answer session afterwards, there was some discussion – and recognition – that physical appearances pass through DNA. And I put in my two penn’orth that I had observed that other physical characteristics such as gait and mannerisms also passed in that way. She looked rather surprised at this. I gave a couple of instances.

In the small town where I live now I once asked a locally born friend who a particular man coming towards us was, as I often saw him about the town but did not know his name. She thought for a moment and said that she wasn’t sure of his Christian name but he was definitely a P***tt as she could tell by his walk. She was so matter of fact about this that I was interested. Some months later I was standing outside the Co-op in the town and out of the corner of my eye I noticed this same friend approaching me – I knew it was her by her figure and especially because she also had quite a distinctive walk or gait. As she drew near I turned to say hello and found that I was looking at, not my friend, but her aunt – another distinctive family appearance and/or gait!

Dr King was quite interested to hear this though she commented that she had never heard of gait being passed like this – and then remembered that gait most definitely did pass in horses – she gave an instance of a particular breed of horses which had been imported to another country but the descendants of these horses could be identified as belonging to the imported horses by their particular gait. If it can be passed in horses, it seems to me, it can certainly be passed in humans.

At the end of the evening, as we all gathered our coats, a member of the audience came to find me and told me that I was right, gait did pass in families, her brother walked in exactly the same way as her grandmother had. It appears that sometimes genealogists recognise such traits before the science can prove it!

Recently I was discussing this with my cousin and she reminded me of something that happened when we were attending her daughter’s wedding. For various reasons, mostly distance and family commitments, although we had grown up as close friends and family, we had not seen much of each other for some years but my grown-up children and I travelled to Hertfordshire  for this family occasion. It was interesting to see friends and family who we had not seen for some years and yes, likenesses were definitely clear – my cousin’s husband had turned into a replica of his father who I had known throughout my childhood. During the evening reception, my cousin and I stood chatting outside while various people were strolling around taking photographs of the grounds as the sun went down. Suddenly my cousin clutched my arm and pointed to someone – “Is that your R***?” she asked? “I thought it was Uncle John. He stands exactly like Uncle John.” It was my son. My father, his grandfather – her Uncle John – had been dead for many years before he was born and there were and are very few people now alive who knew him or would recognise such a thing as the way he stood.

But I already knew that my son had inherited a strong family likeness from the Hopkins side of my family. A newly acquired photograph of my great-uncle John Thomas Hopkins, killed unmarried and without issue, at Passchendaele in 1917 had shown that he and my son, his great-great-nephew, born seventy years after his death, could have been twins. Intriguingly, from the obituary with the photograph, it appeared that they also had various other traits in common, including artistic ability. Now, thanks to my cousin, I knew that my son had also inherited his gait or stance from that side of the family, too.

So it seems possible that, on our time trip to the Lost Hamlets in earlier times, we might have a clue as to which were our family members by recognising the way they walked or stood, as well as their looks.

Looking at a group photograph of ladies from the Birmingham Road Methodist church Women’s Own some years ago I pointed out one lady to my mother, saying “There is your cousin Edith.” who I knew well.  “No, that’s not Edith,” said my mother “That’s her mother, my Aunt Blanche”.  Likeness passed complete between mother and daughter!

Back in my little country town in Gloucestershire, where I have lived for forty years now, I once took a visitor from New Zealand into our primary school, at his request, as his ancestors had attended that school, and he gave a talk to the children about his life in New Zealand. As we waited to start, and the children were assembled in front of us, he commented to me how many familiar faces there were amongst the children. How could they be familiar to someone born and raised on the other side of the world? He knew the faces from old photographs of family and friends which his family in New Zealand had. I could not dismiss his observation.

And a few years ago, my husband and I travelled up to Ashcroft Nurseries, near Kingswinford (I collected Hellebores then and they are Hellebore specialists). Sitting in their café I looked around at the other customers and commented to my husband how many familiar faces there were. He was startled and looked round him. Who did I know? he asked, thinking I had spotted some old friends from my childhood. No-one, I didn’t actually know anyone individually, but I recognised the shapes of faces, the bone structures, the eyes, the hairlines – they were my tribe.

Whilst researching my family tree, I have often looked at old photographs of Rowley and Blackheath folk in books or online, particularly of groups taken in schools or chapels or sports teams, and have caught glimpses of faces which were familiar. Am I alone in this?

Photographs in some of Anthony Page’s books can also show up strong likenesses. Sometimes I can put a name to a face – Tromans or Baker, before even looking  at the caption, from people I know.

From Anthony Page’s book Old Photographs of Rowley.

From Anthony Page’s book Old Photographs of Rowley.

These photographs are almost certainly of Rowley girls and women. In fact, because they appear to be dated ten or fifteen years apart, some of them may be the same children!

Copyright: Glenys Sykes

I posted this photograph of my class at Rowley Hall Primary School, taken in about 1961, on the Facebook group, some years ago. These were the faces around me in my childhood school years. Here are children named Harper, Spittle, Raybould, Whitehead, Sidaway, Ward, Franks,Whittall, Cole, Russell, Mullett, Tibbetts, Crump and many others if I could only remember them all more than 60 years later! I now know many of these are Rowley family names, although I hadn’t known that at the time.

And, looking at the old group photographs, I see the faces of their descendants, especially of the children in my class , appearing to me among the faces in the old photographs. It gives me a curious sense of belonging since many of my ancestors, too, have been in Rowley since parish records began and possibly since time immemorial.

Rowley quarrymen. Copyright unknown but will be gladly acknowledged if claimed. (If you can positively identify individuals in these photographs, please let me know. That information can then be added to the Lost Hamlets Study.)

Few poor people had cameras in those days and were certainly not of a class to have portraits painted so sometimes these more or less anonymous group photographs will be the only photographs which exist of our poorer ancestors. The men shown in photographs of groups of quarry workers, such as the one above, in all likelihood lived in and around the Lost Hamlets, some of them fathers and sons or brothers or cousins to each other – if we only knew their names. Do you look at them and see familiar faces? Is there a particular ‘walk’ or way of standing that you have noticed in your family?

So please tell me, Rowley and Blackheath people, do you know of family likenesses or family gaits or other characteristics which you have seen in your family? I would be interested to know.

We may never time travel but it is fun to consider what our ancestors looked like.

Useful link: https://turiking.co.uk/

The family of Joseph and Ann Maria Redfern, Part 2

Later Redferns after 1851

Following on from my last piece about the older children of this couple, this piece looks at the children born after the 1941 Census.

By 1851, the family was still on Turner’s Hill, Joseph still a labourer but now with his age given as 48 and his place of birth as Rowley Regis as were the whole family. Maria was now 50, Eliza 20, Joseph 18, William 16 both boys working as labourers; Ann at 13 was still a scholar. In the interim between the censuses, Solomon, aged 9, John aged 7 and Samuel aged 5 had all been born. All were described as scholars.

Incidentally, when I looked at later Censuses, I noticed that Joseph’s widow Maria, later described herself as the widow of a Highways Labourer and in 1871, he described himself as a Furnace Labourer, although he and Maria had a boarder who was a Highways Labourer so perhaps he moved from one job to the other. Certainly other Redferns were Furnace Labourers, gruelling hot work for much of the year, I suspect. Their family has grown in ten years.  

In 1851 Eliza is still living at home, now aged 20, Joseph aged 18, William, aged 16 and Ann, aged 13, the two boys were working as labourers and Ann and the younger children were Scholars. But Elizabeth, like her mother, had no occupation shown. Also Solomon, aged 9, John, aged 7 and Samuel aged 5 had come along. The household is almost next to Turner’s Hill Farm so they were pretty high up on the hill.

Henry Redfern

I also noted that there was another Redfern in the later censuses, living with Joseph and Ann Maria and later with his own wife and family. This was Henry Redfern who was born in 1854, the illegitimate son of Eliza Redfern. Henry was baptised at St Giles on 22 Mar 1854 as the son of Eliza Redfern of Turners Hill with no father named and appears to have been raised by his Redfern grandparents as he was with them in the 1861 and 1871 censuses, and after his mother had married Daniel Hughes in 1859 and moved to Dudley.

Family trees on Ancestry state that on his marriage certificate in 1875 (when Henry married his cousin Elizabeth Redfern), his father’s name was given as Luke Lashford. I can find only one reference to this name in the locality and this was in 1851 when a Luke Lashford, born in Birmingham, was living and working as a butcher for Joseph Bowater at the Bulls Head in Tippity Green – the dates fit, so presumably this is Henry’s father.  After this census Luke Lashford disappears without trace. I cannot find a death for him, nor any other record of him later, it does look as though he may have ‘done a runner’! Fortunately, the Redferns were obviously a very supportive family for Eliza.

Henry worked for most of his life in the stone quarries and he and Elizabeth lived on Turners Hill all their lives, it appears from censuses, and had nine children. Their children were Mary A (1874), Henry (1875), Eliza (1878-1878), Joseph (1879), Martha (1882), Louisa (1885), Walter (1889), Sarah Jane (1891) and Ernest (1895) – another nine great-grandchildren for Joseph and Ann Maria.

It seems likely to me that, since Henry worked in the quarry for at least forty years, he may appear on some of the numerous photographs of quarry workers which are in various books and online. Alas, I have no way of identifying him if so but perhaps some members of the Redfern family might recognise a family likeness. Do tell if you can!

Younger children of Joseph and Ann Maria Redfern

Solomon Redfern 1841-1928

Solomon stayed in the hamlets all of his life, working in the quarry. He married Mary Ann Mole of the Club Buildings, Hawes Lane, on 8 Feb 1863 at St Giles when he was 21 and she was 22. They initially lived in Hawes Lane, possibly at the Club Buildings but by 1881 they were back in Perrys Lake where they stayed for the rest of their lives. In the 1901 Census, the address is given as Hailstone Quarry, following on from Perrys Lake in the list so perhaps they were further up the hill, actually within the quarry. Family members may be able to tell me this.

Solomon’s children:

Solomon and Mary Ann had six children that I know of.  These were William (1863-1863), Ann (1864-1948), Alfred (1866-1940), Edward (1868-1871), William (1872-1956) and Samuel (1876-?).

Of those children, the first William died aged 15 weeks, sadly not unusual in those days.

Ann (1864-1948) married Eli Eades at Reddal Hill church on 19 Dec 1891. They had three children, Annie in 1893, William G in 1895 and Jesse in 1901. Eli Eades was a draper and died in 1023. William appears to have followed him into this trade and they may have had a shop in Long Lane, somewhere in the area of Shell Corner. Ann lived on until 1948.

Alfred (1886-1940) stayed in Perrys Lake in Rowley, marrying Kate or Catherine Whithall, also of Perrys Lake on 25 Dec 1887 at St Lukes, Cradley Heath.  He appears to have worked at the quarry for his whole life and they lived at 12 Perrys Lake but had no children. He died in 1940 and Catherine died in 1954.

Edward (1868-1871) had died at the age of three and was buried on 12 Nov 1871 at St Giles, Rowley Regis.

William moved to Threlkeld in Cumberland to work in the quarry there, at some point between 1891 when the census shows that he was still in Perry’s Lake and 1900 when he married Sarah Ann Airey in Threlkeld. They had five children – Ernest in 1901, Edith in 1902, Alfred in 1903, Mildred in 1907 and Annie in 1909. By 1939, William and Sarah had moved to Langcliffe, Craven where William still gave his occupation as a Limestone quarryman. Their son Alfred lived next door but one with his family, he was also a quarryman.  William died in 1956 and Sarah in 1957, they are buried together in Langcliffe, Craven District, North Yorkshire, England.

I could at first find no trace of Solomon’s youngest child Samuel after 1901 when he was still living at home. None of the online family trees had any further information on him either. He did not appear to have died between 1901 and 1939 in the UK, he did not die in the First World War, I could not find him in the 1911 or 1921 Censuses . Did he start using another name? Did he emigrate?

But I think I have now found him. The 1939 Register, (which was not a census but a listing of the whole population taken by the Government just before the Second World War and which was to be the basis of rationing and later used by the NHS, ) is a useful source as it shows dates of birth, addresses, implied family groups, occupations but not places of birth. Many newer entries are redacted, blacked out for 100 years from their date of birth because those people are or are assumed to be still alive, although people who have died can be opened up. But I could search the Register for the whole country for a Samuel Redfern born in 1876. There were six Samuel Redferns in the whole of England and Wales in 1939 who had been born between 1875 and 1877. Of these most were in Derbyshire or Cumberland. But one was in the Cockermouth area, where, as I showed in a previous post, quite a number of Rowley quarry workers had settled, recruited by the quarries there for their sett making skills. Those had included William Redfern, Samuel’s brother who had settled in the Threlkeld area.  

It appears that Samuel had followed his older brother up to Cumberland, he had married in the Cockermouth area in 1908 to Mary Elizabeth Charters and they had two children William Lawrence in 1909 and Mary Frances in 1911. In 1939 Samuel was living in Rakefoot, Embleton, Northumbria with his wife and daughter, his occupation was given as a Roadstone Quarry Worker – the granite connection again! Using this information I was then able to find the family in the 1911 Census in Wythop Mill Nr Cockermouth and in Tile Kiln Cottage, Arlecdon, Cumberland in the 1921 Census, Samuel always working in quarries.

John Redfern 1844-1929

John was living at 26 Rowley Village in 1911, with his two daughters Ann Maria 1871- and Phoebe 1880.  He had married Leah Tromans on 24 December 1865 at Dudley St Thomas and states in the 1911 Census that they had had 8 children of whom only four were still alive in 1911. I can only find the birth registrations for six children between their marriage in 1865 and 1890, the last child I can find was John, born in 1883. The first two children Martha (1866-1866) and Sarah Ann (1868-1868) had both died in their first months and were buried in St Giles. It is possible that there were another two stillbirths which would not be registered but which would still be counted by the family as their children.

Some of the trees on Ancestry have a photograph of a farm called Upper House Farm, Wolferlow in Herefordshire, attached to the information about this John, stating that John farmed there with his son John before returning to Ockbrook, Derby and Stanley, Derbyshire where the family had originated from, a Moravian settlement , where John’s grandfather German Redfern had lived.

This may be possible and may come from family information, since the trees are those of Redferns. However, this may not have been over a prolonged time period as both John and his son John are in the Rowley and Blackheath area for all of the censuses that I have been able to find and all of their children were born in the area.  John the older died in Rowley Regis in 1948. Neither of them appears to have any farming experience from their listed occupations which does not necessarily preclude a period of farming, family members may be able to explain how this came about. There were certainly Redferns farming in Wimborne, Dorset but I have not looked at the Derby Redferns in any detail. His father was given as John Redfern, a labourer and hers as Joseph Stokes, deceased, also a labourer. The witnesses were Joseph Stokes and Jane Hadley.

Leah Redfern died in 1905 and was buried on 17 Aug 1905 at St Giles, aged 58. John Redfern , of 26 Rowley Village, where he had lived with his family for many years, died in 1929, aged 85 and was buried at St Giles on 4 Mar 1929.

John’s children

John and Leah’s known surviving  children were Ann Maria born 1871, Joseph born 1875, Phoebe born 1880 and John born 1882.

Ann Maria 1871-1955, Phoebe 1880-1955

Neither Ann Maria or  Phoebe married and they lived in Rowley Village with their father until his death in 1929, after which they appear to have continued to live together in the same house. Online family trees record that Phoebe died on 9 February 1955 aged 75 and Ann Maria died only a few days later on the 17th, aged 84. Whereas Ann Maria seems to have taken care of domestic life for the family, Phoebe worked, in 1901 as a Nail Bag Maker, in 1911 as a ‘counter of nuts and bolts’ in Rowley, in 1921 as a ‘weigher of nuts and bolts’ at T W Lenches in Ross, and in 1939 as a ‘checker of nuts and bolts’ so it appears likely that she worked at Lenches all her life.

Joseph Redfern 1875-1943

Joseph married Eliza Stokes at St Paul’s Church, Blackheath on 22 Apr 1895. He was 21, a labourer and gave his abode as 74 Halesowen Street while Eliza was also 21 and gave hers as 97 Halesowen Street.  They had at least seven children and in 1911 were living at 91 Rowley Village. He was then working as a Brick Kiln Labourer. Their children were Joseph (1896), Ethel (1899), Doris (1902), May (1905), Leonard (1908) and Lily (1910) and Annie (1912). In 1901, the family were living in Rowley Village and Joseph was working as a labourer at the Cement Works; in 1911 they were at 91 Rowley Village, and Joseph was working as a Brick Kiln Burner; in 1921, still living at 91, Rowley Village, Joseph was working as a Yard Labourer at T W Lenches. The 1939 Register shows Joseph living at 6 Limes Avenue, Blackheath and working as a Works Watchman. With him is his daughter Ethel with her husband Thomas Astley, and Joseph’s youngest daughter Annie.

Although Joseph is noted as a Widower in the 1939 Register, Eliza appears still to be alive and she is listed in the 1939 Register in the Staffordshire Mental Hospital near Stafford, she lived until 1957 by which time she was back in Rowley Regis. There may have been an assumption that Joseph was a widower on the part of the person completing the 1939 Register as Joseph was living alone in Limes Avenue. Joseph died in December 1943 and was buried on 18 Dec 1943 at St Giles, Eliza in 1957.

John Redfern 1882-1948

John married Annie Crumpton in about 1906, in the Stourbridge Registration District. They went on to have at least nine children – Leah – 1906-1906, Percy in 1907, Lily in 1910, Phoebe in 1913, John in 1915, Arthur James in 1919, Harry in 1922, Hilda in 1924 and Stanley in 1928. The family lived in various roads in Blackheath and John was at times a labourer but in 1921, a storekeeper at British Thompson Houston. In 1939, the family were living in Grange Road and John was listed as a general labourer and also as an Air Raid Warden. Annie died in 1947 and John died in 1948.

So all of John and Annie’s  children stayed in the Rowley and Blackheath area for the rest of their lives.

Samuel Redfern

Samuel Redfern 1845-1911

Samuel was the youngest child of Joseph and Ann Maria and by 1861, at 15 years of age he was already a labourer, still living at home with his parents on Turners Hill. In 1871 he was again still living at home and both Samuel and his father were described as Furnace Labourers. In 1891, Samuel appears to have been a patient in the North Lonsdale Hospital, Barrow in Furness where he was described as a ‘Stoker at the Steelworks’. Yet another instance of Rowley men moving up to the North for work, in this case in the steel industry, rather than quarries. But he did, after all, come from a family where many of the men were furnace workers.

After that, records become sparse for Samuel. In 1901 he is still in Barrow in Furness living with his wife Sarah, formerly Hartley and a son named in the census as Henry H Redfern, Samuel’s occupation given as a Steelworks labourer. Samuel and Sarah had been married in Barrow in Furness in 1896. But there is no birth registration for a Henry Redfern in this area in 1882, I suspect that Henry was actually, as so often in those days, put down as Redfern because that was the name of the head of the household and he was actually Henry Hartley, that Sarah was a widow at the time of her marriage to Samuel and Henry was one of three sons of that previous marriage. And there is a Birth Registration for a Henry Hartley in Barrow in Furness in 1882 and a Henry Hartley appears in the 1911 Census in Barrow in Furness, too. So I do not think Henry was Samuel’s son.  

Samuel appears to have died in Barrow in Furness in the early months of 1911. His widow Sarah remarried in 1912.

Redfern Overview

Any errors in this research are all my own, corrections welcome. I have looked at Redfern Trees online and sometimes used those to guide me to additional information (I have said so where I have done this) but generally I have only included information where I can confirm information and sources.

So although I have not gone any further back from Joseph and Ann Maria in that first 1841 census, in two generations they had between them 11 children and at least 54 grandchildren in the Rowley area or within a few miles, shown on this screenshot here (of the Redfern part of my own family tree – Joseph is the paternal grandfather of the husband of my 1st cousin 3x removed, so not exactly closely related!). 

Copyright: Glenys Sykes, all rights reserved.

The screenshot is, I’m afraid, much too small for you to read the details but Joseph and Ann maria are at the top just under those little green symbols. And I couldn’t even get all of the grandchildren on the screen, too many of them, the tree is too wide but it gives an idea of how big their family was! And the majority of them stayed in the Rowley and Blackheath area, although a few went North, no wonder there are still many Redferns in the area today.

There are several Redfern family trees on Ancestry and the Redfern Family website https://redfernsworldwide.com/   and One Name Study which I mentioned in my last article so plenty of opportunities for co-operative researching!

More family studies from the Lost Hamlets coming in due course!

The Redfern Family in the Lost Hamlets 1

The 1841 Census for the Lost Hamlets has one family of Redferns – Joseph Redfern was living on Turners Hill, a labourer, with his age given as 35. His wife Maria (sometimes Ann Maria), nee Priest, has her age as 40. Joseph and Maria appear to have been married at Tipton on 16 Jul 1827. Maria sometimes used Ann Maria and sometimes Maria, in records throughout her life. Their children Sarah aged 12, Eliza aged 10, Joseph aged 8, William, aged 6 and Ann, aged 4 completed the family, all of the children were born in Rowley Regis.

In later censuses, Joseph gave his age as 48 in 1851, giving a birth year of about 1803. I can find no baptism for a Joseph Redfern in the area in that year, so it is possible that he was born elsewhere, though he consistently says in censuses that he was born in Rowley Regis. Another possibility is that he was baptised in a non-conformist chapel. Certainly, the Priest family into which he married had very strong connections with the Presbyterian Chapel in Cradley Heath which was also in the parish of Rowley Regis.

Maria or Ann Maria gives her age in 1851 as 50 which gives her birth year of 1801. The only baptism I can find for this period of a likely Ann Maria is Maria, the daughter of Cornelius and Mary Priest of Bournbrook , Cradley Heath who was baptised at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 4 Oct 1801. But this is by no means certain, there may be another baptism somewhere that I have simply not been able to find.

The fact that Joseph and Maria were married in Tipton perhaps argues that she was not connected to the Cradley Heath Priests but I cannot find another Maria or Ann Maria baptised in the Tipton area either. And since Maria had had a baby out of wedlock, it seems possible that her family sent her to stay with relatives in Rowley to hide the shame for the family (possibly their view, not mine!). And it seems that David Priest , living with his family in Gadds Green in 1841 was born in Cradley Heath and directly related to the Priest families there so they would have been known to each other and were probably related.

At various points Joseph gives his occupation as a labourer or a furnace man or a furnace labourer. This seems to have been a common occupation for the Redferns as at least two of his sons were also furnace labourers. In 1856, at his son Joseph’s marriage his occupation was given as a Blast Furnace man. One census entry notes that he is a furnace labourer in a coal mine (fires were kept burning at the bottom of shafts to pull air through the mines and reduce the build-up of explosive gases) but others were noted as Blast Furnace labourers, a very different job. I am unsure where the nearest blast furnaces were to Turner’s Hill, possibly at Tividale/Tipton where there were extensive iron works and at least three furnaces shown on the 1st Edition OS Map though there were almost certainly others in the area including Brades where a furnace is also shown. If Joseph was working at the iron works in the Tividale/Tipton area, this may account for the marriage at Tipton church.

Ist Edition OS Map, copyright David & Charles, surveyed about 1830. Several furnaces and iron works are shown on this map including ones at Tipton and Dudley Port, also at Brades.

Ann Maria

The name Ann Maria is used frequently in the family from this point on, often, it appears, with the name Maria being used day to day. Almost all Joseph and Ann Maria’s children and many of their grandchildren named one of their daughters Ann Maria so they are liberally scattered around the family tree!

Are they on my family tree?

Yet again, having thought when I started this study that I had no connections with the Redferns, I now find that I have two, so far, as Cornelius Priest was already in my family tree!  I suspect that the more I look in detail at the families in the Lost Hamlets, the more I shall find that my lines are married into them at some point, sometimes several points, perhaps a natural result of them living in such small communities with limited contact with other communities.  So yes, they are on my tree!

Who was Thomas Priest?

Thomas Priest, aged 15 was also living with the Redfern family on Turners Hill. The 1841 Census does not show relationships within households. Thomas was baptised at Dudley St Thomas on 26 Mar 1826, the son of Ann Maria Priest and there is no name shown in the Register for the father so he was probably illegitimate. Joseph and Ann Maria were married in July 1827, fifteen months later so this was certainly not a hasty marriage shortly before or after Thomas’s birth. There are several family trees on Ancestry which suggest that this Thomas was the illegitimate son of Ann Maria and Joseph, born before they were married.

My expert consultant on such issues agreed with me however that, at this time, when parents of an illegitimate child subsequently married, that child usually then became known by the father’s name and is shown in sequence in censuses as the oldest child whereas step children tend to be listed after full children. Since Thomas is shown at the end of the household in 1841, and with the name Priest, not Redfern, and after Joseph and Ann Maria’s other younger children, I suspect that he was not Joseph Redfern’s child but a stepson. It was very common at that time for stepchildren to use their stepfather’s surname or to swap between the two names so the later use of the Redfern name is not conclusive. The only document I can find which lists Thomas as Priest is the 1861 Census when Thomas was living in between his stepfather and stepbrother. I suspect that the enumerator knew that Thomas had grown up in the Redfern household and perhaps thought of him as a Redfern so that the use here is an enumerator error. Certainly all of Thomas’s children were registered as Priest, not Redfern.

At his own marriage to Emma Moreton in 1850, at Dudley St Thomas, Thomas gave the name of his father as Joseph Priest, a Furnaceman, not Joseph Redfern – although he was also a Furnaceman!

There was at least one Joseph Priest in the area who is of about the right age and could have been this man but although there was one family of Priests at Finger i’ the hole in 1841 there is no Joseph listed there and other Priest families appeared to have been in Blackheath and especially in Cradley Heath (which is also where I theorise that Maria’s family were living). It is also possible that the priest asked ‘What is your father’s name and Thomas replied ‘Joseph’ and this was attached to Thomas’s surname of Priest so that gave Joseph Priest. Or Thomas may simply have invented a father’s name, rather than have that space empty, thus showing that he was illegitimate, something that genealogists find is not uncommon with illegitimate children.

A DNA test might prove the final answer to this, perhaps the current members of the Redfern family have done this and established the answer to their satisfaction!

Certainly in later years, Thomas remained in the hamlets, at one stage he and his family were living next door to other members of the Redfern family for several decades.

I shall do a separate post about the Priest family.

Where had the Redferns come from?

One of the crests associated with the Redfern family, courtesy of Andrew Redfern.

Wikipedia suggests that Redfern is an English surname of French Norman origin. It originally appeared as De Redeven.

The first Redfern mentioned in the St Giles’s Parish Registers is the baptism of Ann, the daughter of William and Sarah Redfern on 9th December 1792, followed by John, their son on 20 May 1798. This John must have died, (although I cannot find a burial for him), as another John was baptised to William and Sarah on 11 Jul 1802.

In 1813,Elizabeth, daughter of William (a farmer) and Sarah Redfern of Piddocks Green, Rowley Regis was baptised on 5th August, in June 1815 Edward, son of William and Sarah of Plants Green, farmer,  was baptised . Plants Green was certainly in the Old Hill/Cradley Heath area but I do not know where Piddocks Green was, it may well have been the same place, place names were sometimes quite flexible.

On 19th January 1817 Henry Smith Redfern, base born son of Mary Redfern of Turner’s Hill was baptised (there may just be a clue as to the identity of his father there, although I haven’t looked any further into that!).

On 15th July 1821, William, son of John and Mary Redfern of Turners Hill, a nailer, was baptised, followed by sister Rebekah on 7 September 1823. On 25 September 1825 Joseph, son of John and Mary, now described as a labourer and of Lye Cross was baptised. On 9 Mar 1828 Mary Ann Redfern of Lye Cross, died, aged 28 of Fever.

On 4 December 1832 Esther Redfern of Mincing Lane, aged 30, died of diabetes.

On 7 Jul 1833 Elizabeth Redfern of Dudley Wood was buried, aged 27, having died of decline.

On 16 Oct 1839, John Redfern of Turners Hill, aged 9 months died of measles.

On 13 February 1848, Harriet, daughter of William (a miner) and Ann Redfern of Portway was baptised.

On 2 December 1849, William Redfern of Turners Hill was buried, aged 81, the cause of death being given as Old age.

So clearly there were Redferns in the area, including Turner’s Hill and Lye Cross as early as 1821.

Both Joseph and Ann Redfern give their place of birth consistently in all censuses as Rowley Regis. And yet, I cannot find baptism for a Joseph Redfern in Rowley or in the surrounding area.

At least some of Joseph and Ann Maria’s children were baptised at Dudley St Thomas, Joseph and Eliza both on 12 Aug 1832, with Joseph’s occupation given as a Furnaceman and their abode as Rowley Regis. William was baptised there on 2 Jul 1837 and Ann Maria was baptised the same day.

Also at St Thomas, John, son of John (another Furnaceman) and Mary Redfern of Portway, was baptised there on 18 Oct 1835.

So it appears that these Redferns moved between St Thomas at Dudley and St Giles at Rowley, which seems to be quite common for families living in this area. And there were Redferns scattered around both Rowley and the wider neighbourhood after about 1790.

To muddy the waters, Solomon (one of Joseph and Ann Maria’s later children, to be covered in a later post) appears to be a Redfern family name. There are Solomon Redferns in Stockport in Cheshire in 1866 and in Meltham near Huddersfield in 1852, though that name is spelled Redfearn.  And in Denton, Lancashire in 1866. Although all of these Solomons were married to a Mary so it is possible that they are all the same person, moving around!

Online trees trace Joseph’s birth to Stanley in Derbyshire, but I have not investigated this possibility any further, since Joseph himself believed that he had been born in Rowley Regis and there were certainly Redferns in the area at that time.

So this is the Redferns in the Lost Hamlets in the 1841 Census. Since this is such a short piece, I will add some details about:

Joseph and Maria’s older children (those listed in the 1841 Census)

Sarah Redfern 1829-1885

The oldest daughter Sarah, who was aged 12 in 1841 was no longer in the household by 1851. In fact she was living at 84 Snow Hill, Birmingham where she was a servant in the household of Josiah Blackwell, who was a grocer. She was described as a House Servant but there were also three other Assistant Grocers living in so there would have been plenty to keep her busy. Snow Hill Station was, of course, the Birmingham Station familiar to those of us who used the train into Birmingham, that trains from Rowley and Blackheath later ran in to on the Great Western line but the station was not built until 1852 so it was not open when Sarah was working there. But a long row of shops remained long afterwards, running down the hill. Rowley Regis and Blackheath Station did not open until 1867! But even without the busy station that Snow Hill became later, there must have been quite a contrast between the rural outlook of Turners Hill and the increasingly busy city of Birmingham.

On 25 Dec 1854 Sarah Redfern was to marry William Damby or Danby, a miner, at Dudley St. Thomas.

Her father Joseph’s occupation then was given as a Furnace labourer and a Joseph Redfern was one of the  witnesses, possibly her brother Joseph who would have been 21 by this time but more likely to have been her father. Sarah and William had ten children, born in Cradley Heath and then The Knowle before William died at The Knowle in January 1873, aged only 41. He was buried in St Giles. By 1881 Sarah had moved to Dudley with the younger four of her children. Among the children of the couple were several with the recurring Redfern names, including Ann Maria (known as Maria) and a Solomon. Sarah died in December 1885, aged 58 and was buried on 20 Dec 1885 at St Giles, with her abode shown as 26 Cinder Bank, Netherton.

So Sarah does not appear in the hamlets after the 1841 Census, although at one later stage she was living at The Knowle, just around the corner from Lost hamlets.

Eliza Redfern – 1831-1909

The next daughter was Eliza, born in about 1831/2, and baptised on 12 August 1831 at Dudley St Thomas was still at home in 1851. On 15 Jun 1859 Eliza married Daniel Hughes at St. James Church Parish, Dudley, and the couple made their home in Dudley, where they had 5 children. Eliza died in September 1909. So Eliza only appears in the hamlets in one more Census, the 1851, before moving to Dudley.

Joseph Redfern 1833-1912

Joseph stayed firmly on Turners Hill, all his life, and married Ann Maria Taylor in 1856, another Ann Maria! Was she related? There were certainly Taylors living on Turners Hill so I shall check this out. Emma Redfern was born in the June qtr of 1854, but Joseph and Ann Maria did not marry until June 1856 so it is not known whether or not Emma was Joseph’s child. However, she was always described as his daughter on census returns and used the name Redfern until her marriage so she may have been. Joseph and Ann Maria went on to have Thomas in 1856, William in 1858, Sarah in 1860, Ann Maria in 1864, Samuel in 1866, Joseph in 1869, John in 1870 and James in 1873.

In 1861 there were three Redfern families living in a row on  Turners Hill, this Joseph, his brother (or half-brother) Thomas Priest/Redfern and his father. By 1871, Joseph was working as a labourer in a ‘potyard’, presumably Doulton’s factory. In his census entry in 1901, Joseph was, at 69, still working as a labourer in the stone quarry. In 1911, still at Turners Hill, he was noted as a pottery labourer but also Old Age Pensioner, a whole lifetime of hard physical labouring of one sort or another.  

He states in 1911 that his marriage had resulted in 9 children of whom only four were still alive. Ann Maria died in 1903, buried on 14 Jul 1903 and Joseph died in 1912. He was buried on 07 May 1912 at St Giles, his abode given as 3, Turners Hill.

William Redfern 1835-1917

William also stayed in the hamlets, living on Turners Hill until his marriage to Elizabeth While in Halesowen in 1871, when he moved to 6 Perry’s Lake where he stayed until his death in January 1917. William and Elizabeth had no children. William was a general labourer all his life, sometimes working at the pottery and his last census entry in 1911 he stated that he was an “Old Age Pensioner, Retired Labourer Moving Pipes”. William was buried at St Giles on 17 Feb 1917. Elizabeth died in 1926 and the entry in the Burial Register at St Giles says that she was ‘late of Perrys Lake’.

Ann Redfern 1838-1919

Ann Maria married Frederick Hadley in the Dudley Registration District in the last quarter of 1857, (although I only know this from GRO Index and have not yet found the marriage).  They lived in Lye Cross for a while before moving to Turners Hill and they had at least eight children: Joseph in 1859, William in 1861, Mary in 1863, Ann Maria in 1865, Thomas in 1868, Sarah in 1871, Eliza in 1877 and Ellen in 1881. They stayed living on Turners Hill, next door to Ann’s older brother Joseph until their last census entry in 1901. Frederick died in 1909 and was buried at St Giles on 31 Jul 1909. Ann died in 1919 and was buried at St Giles on 13 Mar 1919.

Thomas Priest or Redfern 1823-

Thomas was the illegitimate son of Ann Maria or Maria Priest, probably not the son of Joseph Redfern. He married Emma Morton on 10 June 1850 at Dudley St  Thomas. Emma had two children before this marriage, John in 1847 and Sarah in the March quarter of 1850. It is not clear whether these were Thomas’s children although they both subsequently used the Priest surname. Thomas and Emma had at least a further eight children: Joseph in 1854, Thomas in 1857, Ann Maria in 1858 (who died the same year), Ann Maria and Elizabeth (twins) in 1859, Mary in 1862, Eliza in 1865 and Emma in 1867. Emma, wife of Thomas died in 1895 and was buried on 04 Aug 1895 at St Giles.

Thomas Priest died in January 1905 and was buried on 19 Jan 1905 at St Giles, with his abode still given as 2 Turners Hill so he had lived there for nearly 50 years.  

So this is all relating to the Redfern family as they were shown in the 1841 Census. There were more children born to Joseph and Ann Maria later but I will cover them in another post.

The Redfern Family One Name Study

There is a website about the Redfern family which is linked to a Redfern One Name Study and this may be of interest and allow Redfern family members to join forces to compare their information. Andrew Redfern who runs the website and study would welcome contacts with members of the Redfern family wherever they are. Here is the link:

https://redfernsworldwide.com/

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!