The Hill family were in Rowley Regis for several centuries, (and still are) and can also be found in the surrounding parishes, from Dudley, Halesowen, Cradley, Warley, Halesowen, Tipton, Sedgley and some even further afield in Wolverhampton.
Hill is not an easy name to research in the Parish Registers. The early Registers, with their lack of place names are not too difficult – if you search the first section of the St Giles digital register for Hill, you have to skip over all the Phillips and Phillises, and most of the entries then are for members of the Hill family. But once places of residence start to be regularly recorded there are hundreds of them – Turners Hill, Gosty Hill, Reddall Hill, Old Hill, Darby’s Hill, Kates Hill, Hyams Hill – very frustrating to plough through the later records only to find that the entries contain an abode or place name, rather than a family name which includes Hill!
The Hailstone (Copyright Glenys Sykes) was close to where the Hill family lived and would have been a familiar sight to them, until it was taken down.
The first entry relating to the Hill family in the Rowley Parish Registers was in the preface written by Henrietta Auden, who was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and who apparently transcribed many other parish registers as well as Rowley Regis. Her father was the Rev. Prebendary Auden. Miss Auden notes that in 1604, in the first parish register, John Hill is noted as ‘owner’. This makes me wonder whether, at the time when surnames began to be formalised, this John had owned land on and lived on Turner’s Hill, as many later generations of Hills did, and he became known simply as John of the Hill, then John de Hill, and then John Hill? As I set out in my piece on Hall houses[1], I think it is likely that the Hill family was wealthy enough at one time to build a Hall house in what later became known as Gadd’s Green and certainly some branches of the Hill family locally were well-to-do even centuries later, as I have discovered from various Hill Wills in the 1700s and 1800s. But that is possibly simplistic thinking on my part.
An early postcard image of Turner’s Hill, copyright unknown.
Other early Hill entries in the Parish Registers
Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Hill was baptised in September 1604 and the John Hill mentioned above was buried in the following March. In 1607 Lucy, daughter of Christopher Hill was baptised at Rowley and in 1612 Elizabeth, daughter of Francis Hill so it appears that there were in the early 1600s several Hill families – fathers Thomas, Christopher, Silvester, Francis, Richard and William – living in the parish and of an age to be baptising children, perhaps brothers or cousins. And a John Hill of Warley had married Anne, daughter of William Darby which was another family of some standing in the area.
The Hills had some common but regularly used names such as Thomas, Richard, Joseph and William but it also used several more distinctive names – Silvester, Jerome, Timothy (especially Timothy!), Francis, Daniel – and Elizabeth, Ann and Rebeckah also recur amongst the women which can be useful in spotting likely connections between branches of the families.
There was an entry for the marriage of Thomas Hill and Ann Cooper at St Giles on 26 June 1687 but there is no indication where either of them came from, nor does there appear to be a baptism for either of them nor a baptism for An, daughter of Pheles (Phyllis is the modern name) who was buried on 29 February 1687/88. After that there are baptisms for John and Ann Hill, a burial for Selvester and for Thomas Hill in 1689, a burial for Elizabeth Hill, widow in 1691, baptisms for William and Hannah Hill and a burial of a Rebeckah Hill, widow in 1694. In 1695 a burial of a son John for Thomas Hill describes Thomas as from Upperside. In 1696.a child Hannah, daughter of John Hill, has a note saying ‘by non-conf.’ so perhaps the family were early dissenters or non-conformists although there are no consistent indications of this. But certainly there appear to have been several branches of the Hill family in the parish at this time. The Registers at this date do have gaps and missing pages and the entries were by no means detailed so it is not possible to know whether this was one family who had moved into the parish from elsewhere or whether they had been in the parish for some years and earlier records baptisms are lost.
In 1717 an Ambrose Hill of Dudley married Esther Dudley at St Giles, Rowley Regis. In 1723 a Job Hill married Jane Dudley at St Giles so that was two Hill grooms marrying brides named Dudley in six years, so they may well have been related to each other. And my research indicates that there are many later connections between Hill families in Dudley and Rowley Regis.
It is not feasible in this article to describe all the people named Hill in the hamlets and villages over the centuries, there are simply too many of them and some very complicated family trees. There are 123 entries for Hills in the first section of the digital parish register alone, and another 35 in the next section, before place names start to appear which adds to the number. So between the first Hill entry in1604 and 1721 (when place names start to confuse the issue) there are 158 entries in the St Giles Registers for people named Hill.
So I will concentrate on some of those Hills who were in the Lost Hamlets in the 1841 Census, and their families which I will expand in a later article.
Timothy (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855)
Timothy, that favourite Hill name, was my 4xgreat grandfather. He had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas in 1763 and Maria Hipkiss was a Rowley girl, baptised in 1782. Maria was Timothy’s second wife but he appeared, at first sight to have had no children with Ann Priest, his first wife. Ann was also a Rowley girl and her marriage took place in St Giles, and she appears to have been buried at Dudley in May 1800. I have a little more to say on this in my next piece. Timothy made up for it with Maria, who he married at Halesowen in September 1800 and he had at least seven children, four daughters and three sons with Maria.
Timothy is a particularly commonly used Hill Christian name and can make it difficult to decide which branch of the Hills particular Timothys belonged to.
This Timothy died in 1831 so was not listed in the censuses but Maria appears in the first two – 1841 and 1851, both times living with one of her children, the first time (1841) with her youngest son Samuel when they were living in Blackberry town which appears to have been in Springfield below the Hailstone quarry, and in 1851 she was living in Perry’s Lake with her widowed daughter Mary.
Maria’s family, the Hipkisses, like the Hills, are another of the ‘core families’ of the hamlets who appear in all the censuses there between 1841 and 1881 and later, and although I have not yet transcribed the later censuses I strongly suspect that I will find them in the later censuses, too. Another of those families who lived in these small hamlets for at least three hundred years and possibly much longer, with numerous intermarriages contributing to the complex web of relationships between the core families.
TimothyHill (1763-1831) was baptised in Dudley, the son of Joseph Hill (1720-?) and Jane Bridgwater, the grandson of Samuel Hill (1684-?) and Martha Wright, and great-grandson of Samuel Hill (1660-?) and Issabill ?(Dates unknown) These earlier Hills had connections in Dudley and possibly, before that, in Oldswinford. But that is a tentative theory at present and there are numerous Hill families in the area so it is possible that is a different family. At some point, when time permits, I will research whether these people appeared in later registers in Oldswinford as that may rule them out. But there are so many Hills in the Dudley and Sedgley area, this might not be possible. But Timothy married two Rowley girls.
Maria was the daughter of John Hipkiss (1744-1818) and Mary Worton (1742-1832). Maria was baptised on 15 September 1782 at St Giles Rowley Regis and her forebears also go back in Rowley Regis for several generations and earlier in Dudley,too.
So this pattern is emerging of close kin living together in Gadds Green and Perrys Lake whose descendants continued to live there or very close by for several generations afterwards.
I have also noticed in the course of my research that often people from the Turner’s Hill/Oakham area used Dudley church, rather than St Giles and it may well be that many of these residents regarded the area on and below Turner’s Hill as separate communities, rather than a hamlet of Rowley Regis, even though most of this area was in Rowley parish.
I shall continue this theme on the Hill family with more posts to follow on the children of Timothy and Maria Hill.
The children of Timothy (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855) – details of these will be the subject of my next articles.
I have been working recently on another family study for my blog, this time about the Hill family, one of the core families who lived in the hamlets for centuries, mainly at Finger-i’the-hole and Gadd’s Green. As usual, it has proved more complex than I had anticipated and I have got sidetracked into considering where exactly the branch of the family I am looking at lived in the village. Many of them, it appears, lived for centuries in a group of houses in Finger-i’the-hole or Fingeryhole , or Gadd’s Green.
Regular readers may recall that I have posted previously in this blog about the whereabouts in Rowley village of Finger-i’the-hole or Fingeryhole[i].
And, in a separate post [ii] I wrote last year about a newspaper article I had found, in the Dudley Chronicle in 1925, about the delights of what the writer called Portway but which clearly included the wider area of Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green. The article referred to the dilapidated cottage in Gadd’s Green as “Finger o’the hole cottage” which the author had visited in 1925, a cottage where the front wall had collapsed in a storm some time before and never been rebuilt.
As a reminder, and for new readers, the name Finger-i’the-hole originates from a very old local story – but which was subject to several variations in later years. A lonely old widow, the story goes, lived alone in a small cottage on Turner’s Hill. A thief or rent collector, depending on which version of the story you look at, knowing that she was unprotected, put his finger into the hole in the door to lift the latch, with a view to robbing her- or perhaps collecting the rent! – only to discover that the feisty widow, hearing his approach, had picked up her axe and chopped off the offending digit as it was poked through the hole. Though there are no names attached to this tale, there is a locality and I believe that it is likely that some incident of this sort actually happened.
The date of this event is unclear but must have been before 1727, as Christopher Chambers of “Ye ffinger I’the hole” was buried then, according to the Parish Burial Register. And the name of Finger-i’the-hole for the area persisted until the 1841 Census but had dropped from official use by 1851 when the area , with exactly the same families, was called Gadds Green.
The Chambers family appear, although I have not done any detailed research on them, to have been well-to-do, they appear in the Parish Registers as living also in 1724 at ‘the Brickhouse’ and in 1723 and in 1744 as ‘of Freebodies’ so were perhaps brothers as tenant or yeoman farmers. At that time ‘the Brickhouse’ appears to have been at Cock Green, with land extending down towards Powke Lane which later was developed in the 20th century as the Brickhouse housing estate. Brick was not a commonly used building material at this earlier date and the use of bricks for a whole house was obviously distinctive and worthy of a special name.
Photograph copyright: Glenys Sykes
This is an illustration shown in Wilson Jones’s book of what the barn of the ‘Brickhouse’ farmhouse might have looked like. Note the ragstone wall and what appear to be large chunks of ragstone lying around. I took a photograph recently of the pieces of ragstone still in Tippity Green/Perry’s Lake, at the entrance to the former Hailstone quarry, they have a familiar rugged shape.
Ragstone blocks at Tippity Green November 2024, photograph taken at the entrance to the former Hailstone Quarry. Copyright Glenys Sykes.
There were lots of the Chambers family in the village throughout the parish registers. An entry in 1723 refers to a Thomas Chambers of Portway and in 1732 an Edward Chambers of Tividale so they did seem to live at this end of Rowley. There was an Edward Chambers at Freebodies Farm in the 1841 Census, albeit described as a farm servant but there were no Chambers that I can find listed in the later censuses in the Lost Hamlets and it appears that they dispersed around a wider area, including Oldbury and Birmingham.
Picturesque Portway
In the newspaper article on Old Portway, which had been written in 1926, I remembered a comment in that article about the cottages at Finger-i’the-hole and this is what it said:
“Our representative visited the now dilapidated cottage where the incident is reputed to have taken place. The cottage is the fourth of a row, and is known in the neighbourhood as “Finger ‘o the hole cottage. “, The article continues “The front of the building was blown out one winter’s night many years ago when the occupant was a Mrs Cox, now of Gornal, and it has never since been repaired. The cottage is said to be over 300 years old and one family – that of Hill, members of which reside in an adjacent cottage – lived there for nearly 200 years.
It is constructed of rough grey sandstone, and originally had two rooms, one up and one down. A stout roughly hewn oak beam, crossing the building from gable to gable, indicates where the first floor once rested, and shows that the height of the living room was under six feet. Occupying one-half of the building is a spacious old-fashioned fire-place, with a large open chimney and contiguous bake ovens.”
This description of the house known as “Finger ‘o the hole cottage. ” is very interesting.
“The cottage is the fourth of a row.” So it could originally have been the end of a much older hall house.
“The cottage is said to be over 300 years old” – which takes it back to about 1600 or even earlier.
“It is constructed of rough grey sandstone.” Would this have been Rowley Rag? Something substantial to last more than 300 years, unlikely to have been simple wattle and daub.
“A stout roughly hewn oak beam, crossing the building from gable to gable, indicates where the first floor once rested and shows that the height of the living room was under six feet.” Was this beam a later addition to divide the hall and add extra accommodation?
“one-half of the building is a spacious old-fashioned fire-place, with a large open chimney and contiguous bake ovens”. I can remember when I first read that description, something jarred with me. The original article goes on “No fewer than ten men can comfortably stand in the aperture once occupied by the grate and its side seats.”
A humble cottage in a terrace does not have half of the single living space taken up by a fireplace big enough for ten men to stand inside it and nor does it have ‘contiguous bake ovens’, it was unusual for small cottages to have even one oven, certainly not two. There may have been an external bakehouse or oven for a farmhouse or larger dwelling and with large fireplaces in bigger buildings an oven was sometimes built into it. There is an interesting piece with a brief history of baking here – https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/a-brief-history-of-baking/
So something is out of the ordinary here. Perhaps there are more clues in the rest of the description of the cottage.
“it originally had two rooms, one up and one down.”
Was this a Hall house? Hall houses had one great room which might well have had a great fireplace installed at some stage – I knew that originally such halls had a central hearth and the smoke floated up into the roof. Later fireplaces and chimney breasts were added. But why the need for such a big one?
But if it was a hall house occupied by a large family or was a busy farmhouse with farmhands to feed, two ovens might well have been provided.
And at a time after the original construction the hall might have been divided into more rooms or cottages and even divided into an upper and lower floor, although if it had been designed to have two floors surely the ground floor would have been higher than six feet when it was first built?
Hall houses
So I began to suspect that this may well have been a very old hall house, perhaps the home of a farming family but that later it was divided and subdivided. And that the Hill family lived there for centuries.
I decided to research a little more about ‘Hall houses’, to see whether my thoughts seemed reasonable. This information is taken from Wikipedia:
“The hall house is a type of vernacular house traditional in many parts of England.
Origins
In Old English, a “hall” is simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls, and in Anglo-Saxon England simple one-room buildings, with a single hearth in the middle of the floor for cooking and warmth, were the usual residence of a lord of the manor and his retainers. The whole community was used to eating and sleeping in the hall. Over several centuries the hall developed into a building which provided more than one room, giving some privacy to its more important residents.
By about 1400, in lowland Britain, with changes in settlement patterns and agriculture, people were thinking of houses as permanent structures rather than temporary shelter. According to the locality, they built stone or timber-framed houses with wattle and daub or clay infill. The designs were copied by their neighbours and descendants in the tradition of vernacular architecture. [a] They were sturdy and some have survived over five hundred years. Hall houses built after 1570 are rare.”
When considering this house I was slightly concerned that I cannot find any mention in other records of a substantial house at Gadd’s Green, although Wilson Jones in his book[iii] lists all the other significant manors or large houses.
However, David Hay, in his book The Grass Roots of English History[iv], says that although it was once believed that all timber framed houses had been built by the wealthier inhabitants of local societies and that medieval peasant houses were so insubstantial that they could not survive for more than a generation, more recent systematic recording of houses by members of the Vernacular Architecture Group and the new technological advances in dendrochronology, have overturned these views and it is now known that of the thousands of medieval houses, some of which are still standing in many parts of rural England [though not in the Lost Hamlets!] belonged to ordinary farming families. Hey states that “The sheer numbers of cruck [timber framed] houses in the Midlands confirms that they must be peasant dwellings, some villages have ten or even twenty such houses.” So it seems quite possible that there would well have been such a house in Gadds Green inhabited by a farming or working family, rather than a more aristocratic one.
Cruck framed houses
Many larger houses at this time were ‘cruck-framed’, that is the central frame, the load bearing members that supported the weight of the roof of the building was made from suitable trees – often oak, which carpenters could split lengthways into two identical ‘blades’ which were set either side of the building and then joined at the top with techniques varying from place to place to support a ridge-piece, the crucks sometimes resting on stone bases to protect them from damp and rot. Half way down the roof, between the ridge-piece and the wall plate other long timbers, known as purlins, were fixed to the outer part of the blades in order to carry the rafters which supported the roofing material, often thatch in earlier times. Because the crucks, and not the walls carried the weight of the roof, the walls could be filled in with whatever material was most easily available to them locally. This could easily be replaced in later centuries without endangering the roof.
The frames were constructed in the carpenter’s workshop or in the wood where the trees were felled before they were assembled at the site according to the sequence of the marks the carpenter had made with his chisel or gouge. Different types of marks can still be seen on timbers in old buildings and it appears that each carpenter had their own marks and systems; some buildings had several hundred pieces of timber and hundreds of joints so carpenters needed a way of sorting these efficiently when they arrived at the construction site. This construction method was a skilled job and not to be undertaken by home builders!
Copyright Wikipedia. This is a cruck house in Worcestershire where the cruck frame can be clearly seen, along with other timbering, in this case infilled with what is probably wattle and daub. In Rowley, with the abundance of local stone, the walls would have been infilled with stone and quite possibly the timbers clad with stone to protect them from the weather so that the cruck frame would not be obvious from the outside.
If the house at Gadd’s Green was constructed in this way, with a cruck frame, this might account for why the front wall of one section could be blown or fall down in a storm but the remainder of the structure remain apparently quite stable for many years afterwards, as mentioned in the article, especially if the inhabitants did not have the skills required to make the repairs.
Peasant Houses
Note: Hey suggests that “peasant” is still a convenient term to describe a small-scale farmer, the type of person who would have been the head of household in most of the surviving timber frames houses. I have continued his usage so this is not intended as a derogatory term. There is an interesting article on this here: https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/peasant-houses-in-midland-england.htm
Houses were typically arranged around a central hall that was open to the rafters. These halls could be lengthened by the addition of an extra bay or two but their almost standard width was regulated by the roof span. A wood fire in a central hearth originally provided the heating, with most of the smoke escaping through the roof but timber and plaster smokehoods attached to an internal wall were starting to replace central hearths in the wealthier districts. Sometimes later refinements, ceilings, floors, partitions, etc completely conceal this original use and it is only when the smoke darkened timbers are seen in the attic at a much later date that it is realised that the building started life as a hall house.
The lower end of the building may have housed a workshop or a kitchen, dairy or buttery. And a very large fireplace in a cottage at Gadd’s Green may have been a remnant of this earlier use.
“At the other side of the hall, larger peasant houses had a private parlour, sometimes with an upstairs room known as a solar.” Is this what the family memory of the Hills referred to when they talked about the house originally having one room downstairs and one upstairs?
Poor families had to build with whatever materials were to hand, such as clay and wattles for wall panels or earth for mud walls, as in Devon, probably ragstone in Rowley. The many timbered buildings surviving in small towns in Herefordshire, Hey notes as an example, were in well-wooded areas and where woods were managed to produce suitable crops of timber over a long period. And in poor areas, solid houses would not have been readily replaced with more modern structures. So if a substantial house had been built which lasted for centuries at Gadd’s Green, why would the family expend money to replace it? Some of the Hill family later were nail factors or nail ironmongers and relatively well-to-do but others showed no sign of great wealth.
House layouts
In Midland villages, Hey suggests, “each house was separate and protected from unwelcome intrusions. The whole property, including a garden or yard, was surrounded by a fence, hedge or wall, and accessed through a gate leading on to the street and a door with a lock, (finger hole?). Excavations on village sites show that barns, stables, cowsheds and other outbuildings usually stood close together around a yard, kitchens and bakehouses were often detached, to reduce the risk of fire”.
In the view of Hey and other scholars, “the idea of separate living and working spaces would probably not have seemed a meaningful concept to member of a peasant household. There is plenty of documentary evidence for the conversion of bakehouses, carthouses and stables into dwellings for retired peasants”, indeed barn conversions and such continue to this day!
Why and where?
There were many cruck buildings in some parts of the country and none in others for reasons not fully understood. It is possible that the native pendiculate oak trees, whose shape is ideal for cruck construction, predominate in areas such as parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, along the river Severn in parts of Wales and in other Midland Counties. In eastern England, where cruck framing is conspicuously absent, the less suitable sessile oaks are the major type.
Hey notes that the medieval houses of Midland England are predominantly cruck framed and three bays in length. The chief limitations of cruck framed buildings are in their height and width, because their dimensions were dependent on the size of the blades that could be cut from suitable local trees.
“When it became fashionable to insert a ceiling into a hall that had previously been open to the rafters, the space in the upper storey was very constricted “- or perhaps sometimes the lower storey which might account for the low ceiling mentioned in the 1925 article.
This restriction did not apply to the other main construction method which was where posts and beams were made to create a box like frame and where the roof was supported throughout the frame and the walls. It is possible to find both methods of construction in one house, perhaps with a cruck framed hall having additional wings built with box frames.
These are other things that Wikipedia has to say about hall houses.
“The vast majority of those hall houses which have survived changed significantly over the centuries. In almost all cases the open hearth of the hall house was abandoned during the early modern period and a chimney built which reached from the new hearth to above the roof.
Fireplaces and chimney stacks could be fitted into existing buildings against the passage, or against the side walls or even at the upper end of the hall.
Once the clearance within the hall was no longer needed for smoke from the central hearth, the hall itself would often be divided, with a floor being inserted which connected all the upper rooms.
In smaller hall houses, where heat efficiency and cooking were the prime concern, fireplaces became the principal source of heat earlier.
In the earliest houses combustion of wood was helped by increasing the airflow by placing the logs on iron firedogs. In smaller houses the fire was used for cooking. Andirons provided a rack for spit roasting, and trivets for pots. Later an iron or stone fireback reflected the heat forward and controlled the unwelcome side draughts. Unsurprisingly the hearth migrated to a central wall and became enclosed at the sides.”
So it does seem to me that all of these points, both from Wiki and Hey, tie in with my theory of the house at Gadds Green having been, at one time, one large dwelling, later subdivided into two storeys and into separate cottages.
On the ground
We cannot look at the house or the site now, it has literally been obliterated.
There are no detailed maps before the mid-1800s.
Photograph copyright Glenys Sykes, apologies for the poor quality. Map Copyright: https://maps.nls.uk/
Maps of the area on the NLS website include this OS Map, at six inches to the mile, which was apparently surveyed in 1881-83 and published in 1887. This shows a row of dwellings at Gadd’s Green, with what may have been a yard or fold at the North end.
Incidentally this map also shows a stretch of water at Perry’s Lake which presumably gave this area its name. I have seen suggestions that this may originally been a fish pond for the Manor farm at Cock Green.
This second map is at 25” to the mile, was originally surveyed in 1881, revised in 1937 and published in 1947. This shows a row of four dwellings and a further one at the rear, plus an additional block of buildings. But the shape of the site including the fold or yard remains. There are also springs marked just along a lane which would have provided the essential water supply for a farmhouse. On both maps, this is the last building in Gadd’s Green before the road continues up Turner’s Hill, and that is where the home of the Hill family always appears in censuses.
There is no sign of water at Perry’s Lake on this later map. Although there is a mysterious building halfway between Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green which I suspect may be the Methodist chapel which appears in various records but later disappears. It appears to be a square building with an entrance porch at one corner and a small room at the back, perhaps a vestry or schoolroom.
And farm houses in the area do appear to have survived better than most other buildings in the Rowley area. They were probably bigger to accommodate some farm workers as well as family and it is also possible that an undercroft or part of the building could also have been used to shelter animals. There may also have been buttery or cheese stores, as well as outbuildings, barns for the storage of crops, stables for horses and vehicles and tools, plus workshops on the site any of which may have been incorporated into the farmhouse in later years.
A Will I have recently been transcribing relates to a farmer who was related to the Hills and who owned farms in Hagley and Belbroughton. The description of the Hagley Farm reads: “my Capital Messuage or dwelling house wherein I now reside with the Brewhouse, stable, Coachhouse, cowhouse and other outbuildings, Courtyard ,fold yard, Garden Ground and orchard thereunto adjoining and belonging (comprising all the buildings and the Courtyards Garden rounds Orchard and premises adjoining together on that side of the road.
Which illustrates the number of additional buildings and grounds a substantial farm might have. But even a smaller farm, like the one in Rowley village described in the Will of Ambrose Crowley, had outbuildings of a barn, workshop and yard. Thinking about this, it is clear from even later maps that the Grange site and the Portway Tavern site at Perry’s Lake were arranged in a very similar way and may also have been on an older sites and originally used as a farm.
Old Buildings in Rowley
There has been an interesting discussion this week on the “I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis” Facebook page, after I asked where the oldest buildings in Rowley were now. The answer appears to be – several pubs, more than one farmhouse, a few well built cottages still survive. It would be fascinating to see the rafters in the roof of some of these houses to see whether any of them were cruck buildings and whether they were once blackened by the smoke from a central hearth!
So the long gone ancestral home of the Hill family in the Lost Hamlets is the rabbit hole I have been exploring for the past few days. Perhaps, – although I shall never know for sure since the house is one of those which disappeared when the quarry expanded – possibly a Hall house, probably a farm house, later four cottages – including the famous Fingeryhole cottage – which I think I have identified on the map. A fascinating – for me, anyway – glimpse of how the local families lived in centuries gone by, and how local legends may have an element of truth and a thread reaching back through the centuries.
In family history research, all researchers, sooner or later, come up against what we call ‘brick walls’ in our research. These are people on our family trees who present a puzzle or a blockage that we cannot get past, whatever records we try, we cannot find some crucial bit of information, a baptism, a marriage, where they were born, where they died. They are brick walls between our present research and earlier generations. Sometimes those brick walls stand for a very long time.
Copyright unknown but will be gladly acknowledged on receipt of any information.
Quite early in my research, probably soon after I started researching in about 1980, I hit a brick wall in the form of my 3 x g-grandfather Thomas Morton. I just checked, he appears on my very first paper family tree that I drew up starting in 1980, (yes, I still have that paper tree, it’s the foundation of all my research!) so it must have been quite soon after I started. I had found his marriage to Elizabeth Hill at Tipton in 1825, I had found his death and burial in Rowley in 1836 and I deduced from the age given at his burial that that he had been born in about 1800. I was able to track his descendants through succeeding generations. But I could not find any earlier trace of Thomas Moreton anywhere in the area, no baptism, he died before Civil Registration started in 1837 and before any censuses to tell me where he had been born. So he was a brick wall for me.
When I later made contact with my distant cousin Margaret Thompson, who is also descended from this couple, I discovered that she had had the same problem. We were both experienced and careful researchers but both of us were standing in front of that wall. At least I knew it wasn’t just me!
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on another piece for this study on one of the ‘core families’ who were living in the lost hamlets over many decades, even centuries. This time I am working on the Hill family. As I was writing about them, I double checked all my earlier research and added to my tree any new material which has become available since I did the work originally. Since the 1980s a huge amount of material has become available online, including censuses, parish registers, indexes – there were not even computers when I started! – and, very usefully in the case of Rowley Regis, within the last couple of years, copies of the Bishop’s Transcripts have become available through Ancestry, filling some of the gaps caused by the destruction of registers in the church fire at St Giles.
Although I always check my sources carefully and never simply copy from other trees– (which is possible on Ancestry but ill advised, there are many errors which are duplicated from tree to tree), it can be helpful to look at other trees to see whether there are any properly recorded facts which I had not seen before and which I could verify independently. Similarly, I look at the wonderful Black Country Connections Tree online[i] as I have often picked up useful snippets from that – such the marriage of one 3xg-grandparent which I had not found anywhere else, which was not at that time available online but which another researcher had found at Dudley Archives and made available through that tree.
So, after checking through my research on Thomas Moreton, today I took a look to see whether he appeared on the BCC tree. He does, though sadly there was no information on his parents, that brick wall was still intact. But I checked the other information there against my information and found to my surprise that there was an additional child listed who did not appear on my family tree. Another researcher had noted that Ralph Thomas Moreton had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas, on the same day as another child William Moreton who does appear on my tree and to the same parents – Thomas and Elizabeth Moreton of Rowley Regis. This baptism took place on 2 April 1837. The other researcher had correctly noted that Ralph Thomas Moreton had been born in or before 1837. Perhaps he and William were twins? You can tell this in later records from looking at Civil Registration Records because the entries for twins have consecutive reference numbers. But Civil Registration began in July 1837, this was just a few weeks too early… sounds of teeth grinding …
Ralph Thomas Moreton did not appear again in any records – for another fifty eight years. He was absent from his family in the following censuses, did not appear to have married or had children, there was no record of a death or a burial for him. But two of his brothers, William and Thomas had named sons Ralph Thomas.
But the BCC tree had one other entry for him. In 1895, a William Morton, marrying in Oldbury, gave the name Ralph Thomas Morton as his father, a miner. So it appeared that he had a) survived into adulthood and b) married and had children. How odd. And the couple getting married later named one of their sons Ralph Thomas so it was obviously a family name. But where was he?
I looked up the Civil Registration records for the bridegroom William Morton who was 24 in 1895, so he had been born in about 1871. There was only one William Moreton (The two spellings, with and without the e become interchangeable in records in this period) in Civil Registration records who was born in that period in the area and I found from this record that his mother’s maiden name was Siviter. And when I looked at my family tree for a William Moreton born in 1871, there was one William Moreton and his parents were Thomas Moreton and his wife Alice nee Siviter. Thomas was apparently the older brother of the mysterious Ralph Thomas. So, even though the name Thomas appeared in every other record for him – census, marriage, baptisms of his children – as Thomas Moreton, this son knew that he was actually Ralph Thomas Moreton. He was the Thomas on my tree born in 1832 for whom I had not been able to find a baptism, he had been baptised at the age of five, with his new baby brother. So Thomas and Ralph Thomas were the same person!
And I had been unable previously to find a death registration or burial for Thomas Moreton, despite knowing that he had been alive in the 1891 Census but that his wife was shown as a widow in the 1901 Census so I knew he had died in that ten year period. With this new information I searched for a death registration in that period for a Ralph T Morton and there he was, Ralph Thomas Morton who had died in the Dudley Registration District in the first quarter of 1894. Bingo! How satisfying. I was now sure that Thomas Moreton/Morton and Ralph Thomas Moreton/Morton were one and the same person. I haven’t found his burial yet but I’m working on it!
Three successive generations of this family had named sons Ralph Thomas Moreton. My mind went back to the original Thomas Moreton, (1800-1836), the one for whom no-one had been able to find any baptism. Might he have been Ralph Thomas too?
So I searched FreeREG for a baptism of a Ralph Thomas Moreton anywhere within ten miles of Rowley Regis for a period of five years either side of the birth year of 1800 which had been indicated by the age shown at his burial. And up came a baptism in November 1798 at Harborne when Ralph Thomas Moreton had been baptised, the son of Francis and Anne Moreton. And when I then searched Ancestry and FindMyPast for this Ralph Thomas Moreton, I could find no further trace of him, no burial, no marriage, no trace. I think he had morphed into Thomas Moreton and moved to Rowley Regis.
Is this a chink of light, a brick nudging out of my brick wall after nearly forty-five years of chipping away at the mortar? I really think it might be. I shall do some more research on the Harborne connection and the family there, when time permits. I already know that other members of my family at this period who were living at Oatmeal Row, Cakemore were married at Harborne and described as ‘of this parish’ so the parish boundary of Harborne at that time might well have extended well into the Cakemore area.
So this sort of diversion is why I do not manage to post every week to my blog. I get side-tracked into all sorts of side alleys and rabbit holes and it all takes time to work through. So, I promise that another ‘families of the Lost Hamlets’ post is in progress for my blog and my apologies for those of you who wait hopefully for new posts on Sundays. Hopefully in the next week or two there will be another post on the Hill family – unless, of course, to mix my metaphors, I find myself down yet another rabbit hole, digging furiously!
Edit: The bricks from this particular brick wall now lie scattered around my feet! Checking out Ralph Thomas’s siblings, also baptised at Harborne, I now find that at least one sister – Phebe – married James Hipkiss also at Tipton a year after her brother and lived thereafter in Rowley, on Turner’s Hill and in Gadds Green and Perrys Lake, yards from the Moreton and Whittall families – so I am now fairly certain that I have broken through the wall. And I have now confirmed that the Harborne Parish Boundary appears to have extended right through to the Oldbury Road in Blackheath and Whiteheath so it is quite possible that the Moretons lived as close to Rowley as that. More research ongoing!
This is the title of a book by the renowned historian David Hey, which is subtitled “Local Societies in England before the Industrial Revolution” and I recently noted it from an online comment as recommended reading for those of us with an interest in particular localities, whether in the form of a One Place Study or what I have heard called ‘micro-history’ or more general interest. So I acquired a copy and it has sat on my study table in a pile of other interesting books for a couple of weeks. Until a few days ago when I wanted something to read, out in the garden, sitting in the September sunshine.
Regular readers may remember that recently I commented that in the course of my research for my One Place Study, I had come to the conclusion that many of what I had called the ‘core families’ of the Lost Hamlets in particular but also Rowley village, had been there since time immemorial .
That felt rather a brave thing for me to proclaim, since I am neither academic nor a scholar, but I have come to believe this and certainly the idea seemed to strike a chord with many local people who commented on the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook Page who appeared pleased to think that they were so deeply rooted or grounded as one person put it, in this small village.
I had started to observe this pattern when I first started transcribing parish registers for Rowley for FreeREG and realised that many of the names in the 19th century Registers which I was transcribing were names that had also been in the Attendance Registers of my classes at school, both at Rowley Regis Grammar School but especially at Rowley Hall Primary School. I had not seen many of those names, I realised, in the forty years since I had moved away from Rowley so perhaps they were local to the area. This observation was confirmed and reinforced by every subsequent record source I looked at.
I noticed what I came to think of as ‘local faces’ in old group photographs but which I also recognised from school. And I knew from my own family history research that physical likenesses had passed virtually unchanged over – in my instance – a period of seventy years and at least five generations, from my great-uncle who died without issue at Passchendaele in 1917 to an uncanny likeness to him which popped up in my son, born seventy years later, five generations apart. The likenesses were there in the men of the intervening generations when I looked properly at their photographs, too but my son not only had the same face but the same stance, the way he held his shoulders and, it appears from other records, similar aptitudes and skills. Other observations, over time, brought the realisation that gaits, stances, voices, aptitudes, skills, and mannerisms also passed unchanged through generations.
All of these elements also indicated to me that many families stayed close to their home ground over centuries. Some, of course, moved elsewhere for work or opportunity (and transmigration patterns between Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, Rowley Regis and the Clee Hills in Shropshire, due to particular granite working skills, have emerged clearly during this study) but most families stayed put, even if individual members moved away, often only for a time. I identified the ‘core families’ who lived in the hamlets over hundreds of years, intermarrying and mostly staying very close to home.
At the Black Country History Conference which I attended at the Black Country Living Museum last year, Simon Briercliffe gave a talk on Irish immigrants in the Black Country. He showed a chart (seen in this photograph, I can obtain the fullchart if anyone would be interested to see it) with the proportions of the population in various local towns and villages who had been born there or elsewhere, based on the places of birth shown in the 1851 census, the first census to show this specific information.
Copyright: Chart – Simon Briercliffe, photograph Glenys Sykes.
Of all the villages Simon had looked at, Rowley Regis had the largest proportion of people who had been born less than ten km away from the village, the smallest number of people born between 10 and 49 km away , even less who had been born more than 50km at all and none from Ireland. As I recall, this raised a little chuckle in the audience as he reviewed the various results with a comment to the effect that Rowley Regis was well known for the people there not moving far!
And when I began to read David Hey’s book, I found myself nodding happily at just about every sentence in the introduction. David Hey, who died, sadly, as the book was in production, I think in about 2016, noted in his introduction that he had been ‘much involved’ in the study of English local and family history at both the professional and amateur level over 50 years and had noted that the local approach, also sometimes called ‘micro-history’, to give it, he says, academic respectability, had helped to transform the understanding of the history of the nation at large.
There are chapters in the book on The people of England, England’s historic towns and cities, Organizing the countryside: Villages, hamlets and farmsteads, Earning a living in the countryside, The greatest buildings in the land, Parish churches and chapels, Timber framed houses, and Population, family life and society.
He notes the importance of considering the administrative framework of a place, and a familiarity with the natural surroundings, the study of farms and field systems, the pattern of highways and lanes, the buildings, the interpretation of place names. But all the while, he says, “we must have at the forefront of our minds the people who inhabited these landscapes, the ordinary English families as well as the high and the mighty.” He welcomed the interest in family history that reinforces the value of the local approach.
This was only the first page of the introduction and yet I was feeling as though he was directly addressing me and my work on the One Place Study!
He goes on to talk about the differing nature of the various local societies throughout England and notes that people used to speak of the neighbourhood with which they were familiar as their ‘country’ , (just as, of course, we refer to our neighbourhood as the Black Country), by which they meant not the whole of England but the local district that stretched as far as the nearest market towns. He says “The core groups of families that remained rooted in these neighbourhoods were the ones that shaped local culture and passed on their traditions.” He notes that they often bore distinctive surnames which were unique to their area, still evident today.
He notes a tenet of social history that most people in the Stewart and Tudor periods moved from their place of birth at some stage in their lives. Some will have moved but many will have left members of their families behind. He argues that the character of a local community was determined not so much by such comings and goings but by the families that stayed put, even though in time they may be outnumbered by incomers. These formed the core of the community and provided it with a sense of continuity. Networks of families were formed and repeatedly strengthened by intermarriage. He calls these ‘urban dynasties’ and quotes Arnold Bennett, writing in 1902 about families in the Potteries (also in Staffordshire, of course) who said “those families which, by virtue of numbers, variety and personal force seem to permeate a whole district, to be a calculable item of it, an essential part of its identity”. Hey notes that many of these old urban dynasties continued to run matters in their locality over several generations. I have also noted in the course of my research familiar names cropping up in reports of parish offices, of local councils, of those involved in the administration of local affairs, centuries after those names were recorded in the Court Rolls and the Parish Registers for Rowley, so this applied in the Rowley area, too.
Hey also discusses how the study of surnames has altered in recent years and his belief that each area or ‘country’ had its distinctive collection of surnames which had been formed locally in the Middle Ages. There is also now a school of thought, he says, that very many English family names, including the common ones as well as the rare, should be treated as having a unique history that must be traced back in time and that many would prove to have a single family origin. So each time I have looked at the first entry in the Rowley Registers for a name in my family tree, and wondered whether I could actually trace my line to that person, it seems that yes, I might well be able to and that this would not be too unusual.
In particular Hey notes that where surnames have been mapped from the 1881 census, the great majority of those distinctive surnames – those that appear to have had a single family origin – were still decidedly local in character. He notes that Staffordshire provides many examples of surnames which have remained concentrated in their county of origin. Examples relating to the area of the Potteries are described in the book, and he also discusses those which appear to have derived from small places, and discusses the use of detailed maps in this respect to identify the origins of some names, which may have been as small a place as one farmstead.
Of particular interest to Rowley folk, perhaps, is a paragraph in the introduction about Rayboulds. This name, he says, derived from an old personal name and appears to have had a single family origin in the Black Country. The 903 Rayboulds in the 1881 Census, he notes, included 306 in Dudley and 259 in Stourbridge. I could tell him somewhere else to look too! And that Francis Raball who appears in the Rowley Marriage Register in 1614 is surely one of those very early ones of that name.
And so for all the Darbys, Groves, Wards, Bridgwaters, Hipkisses, Willetts, Whites, Rustons, Whiles, Jeavons, Dankses, Lowes. Hadens, Detheridges, Mucklows, Parsonses, Cartwrights, numerous others – any of those family names still in the Rowley area and appearing in the mid-1500s in the first few pages of the Rowley Registers, it seems that it is not actually fanciful, to think that you are, very probably, a direct descendant from those original families in Rowley then.
Later in the book, talking about the structure of settlements, Hey says that “Hamlets are found in every English region, even in the heartlands of the Midland open-field villages. Far from being a somehow inferior type of settlement, as was once assumed, they were often more suited to communal farming than were large villages. Their versatility, adaptability, resilience and tenacity enabled most of them to survive the late medieval economic and demographic depressions, though many suffered and a proportion succumbed. They ensured that England was a country with complex and different rural economies.”
There is a fascinating breadth of knowledge in this book, distilled from a lifetime of study of local and family history by David Hey, about all sorts of details of living in earlier times. Thinking of my piece recently on the Inventory of Ambrose Crowley 1, I was interested to read in this book that livestock were far smaller than now and they produced less milk and meat, while disease was a constant threat. A cow gave 120-150 gallons of milk a year, about one sixth of present day yields. In Yorkshire the average dairy cow produced just 72 pounds of butter and cheese annually. Medieval hay meadows were valued at three or four times the level of surrounding arable lands because they provided the essential winter fodder to keep breeding stock alive over the winter, confirming the reason for the relatively high valuation given in the Inventory for the hay in the barn.
Yet Hey suggests that the inhabitants of England’s medieval towns formed only about 10% of the national population. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most English towns remained small, they were not yet divorced from the surrounding countryside and their fields and meadows could usually be seen from the market place. This rings true to me because in the small Gloucestershire town where I now live, where expansion and development were crippled for a long period by the collapse of the wool trade, one feature of the landscape is that the surrounding countryside is clearly visible from many of the town streets, including especially long views from the Chipping, originally the Cheaping, the market place.
Hey also considers the position of London, then, as now, not typical of other English towns and with a higher proportion of non-native residents, but he notes also that, at least since the early 1600s and probably well before, London had been connected to smaller cities and market towns in every part of the kingdom by weekly carrying services. A document of 1637 lists the London inns where provincial carriers arrived and departed and their regular schedules. A study he refers to has calculated that about 205 waggons and 165 gangs of packhorses entered and left London every week, carrying a total of about 460 tons of goods each way. By 1715, regular carrying services by road in and out of London had more than doubled since 1637 and coach services to the most provincial centres numbered nearly 1000 a week.
Amongst the goods carried, I reflect, would have been nails from Rowley Regis. Small wonder then that the more ambitious of the families in Rowley, perhaps the young men wanting to expand their horizons, opted to move, at first to larger towns such as Stourbridge where there was a thriving market for nails, possibly transported from there on the river. Nails were heavy, and dense, they could be transported by pack horse or cart but roads were generally poor and travelling slow. Water transport allowed large quantities to be moved more easily, hence the development of canals to places which did not have access to rivers. But I now know of at least three Rowley families whose descendants moved to London to trade as ‘nail ironmongers’ in the city where their wares could be sold on the London markets and also shipped across the world from the London docks where they set up their businesses. They would doubtless have arranged their own transport, from the Midlands, cutting out the middleman, the carrier and probably improving their security en route. It seems that at least some of our ancestors may have been a lot more mobile than I had always thought.
Also, some young men (not many women), from all parts of the country, came to London to be apprenticed to various trades, as can be identified from Apprenticeship Registers in the archives of the various Livery Companies, as was Ambrose Crowley 3. Hey gives very interesting descriptions about how these apprenticeships were arranged and also how many families in the provinces had one or more members who were in London. Again, this brings my mind back to my ancestor Edward Cole who was married in a Fleet Marriage in London in 1730, then returning to live in Rowley Regis for the rest of his long life. I had already, as a result of earlier research, been wondering whether he and his father had been involved in transporting nails to London, now I am wondering whether there had been an apprenticeship somewhere along the line, too. So now I am going to have to learn more about Apprenticeship Records.
Thoughts
This man is speaking my language.
By learning about this early period I am seeing not only how our ancestors lived then but how this earlier period shaped the times and society that followed.
Most dry days now, I take the book and a large mug of tea out to a sunny spot in the garden and read a few more pages, not rushing, because almost everything he writes is worth understanding and thinking about. If you have found this interesting and fancy a longer read, look out for copies on Amazon or Abebooks or try ordering it through interlibrary loans. For myself, I am enjoying every page and feeling a new confidence that my researches have been leading me in the right direction and that further research is worthwhile.
David Hey was Emeritus Professor of Local and Family History at the University of Sheffield, his roots were in the Hallamshire area of Yorkshire, on which he has published numerous books, he was a hands on family historian, as well as a renowned academic. A review on the book describes it as “a magnificent overview of England’s past, which serves to unite the worlds of landscape history, family history and local history”. Another review notes that it is “highly readable, an excellent interpretative work, up to date, wide-ranging in themes, regions and chronology.”
It is also meticulously referenced and provides details of a range of other books which could tempt me, not to mention Hey’s other publications, some of which I already had. His books ‘Family names and family history’ and ‘Journeys in Family History’ have already found their way onto my TBR pile this week! I am now valiantly resisting the temptation to acquire his book “Packmen, Carriers and Packhorse Roads : Trade and Communications in North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire”, as I suspect that many of the trading conditions in metal working in that area may have been similar to those in the Black Country. And ‘Surnames, DNA, and Family History’ by George Redmonds, Turi King, and David Hey – also sings seductively to me – at this rate I am going to need another bookcase…
I have always been an avid reader and had considered myself reasonably well informed about English history, since it has always interested me. What a joy it is, in my mid-seventies, to have my knowledge and understanding of English history, of ordinary English people, (not just the powerful and wealthy who have always been well documented), and how common folk lived, my perceptions so greatly enhanced and expanded as they are being, in the course of this One Place Study and by such gifted writers as David Hey and Gillian Tindall. My only problem is that there are just not enough reading hours in the day!
While I was researching my piece on local shops, I came across a very tragic story which revealed that some general stores carried some unexpected wares.
Although this sad tale does not relate to Rowley itself, it took place only a couple of miles away in High Street, Cradley Heath and would no doubt have been well known at the time to local residents. And Anita Hall commented on Facebook on my piece on Ambrose Crowley 1 that she had a particular interest in Billinghams so I have decided to add this to the blog.
Much of the story comes from newspaper reports of the disaster and the inquests which followed. The first thing I came across was a report of an inquest held in April 1887 on two children who were killed in an explosion of gunpowder at the back of an ironmonger’s shop in High Street, Cradley Heath. This had occurred on 7th April 1887. Thomas Lot Billingham and Lily Birch were killed and the coroner deemed the case and the implications so serious that he adjourned the inquest to allow a Home Office Inspector to attend.
A gunpowder magazine is a building designed to store explosive gunpowder in wooden barrels for safety. Gunpowder, until superseded, was a universal explosive used in the military and for civil engineering: both applications required storage magazines. Most magazines were purely functional and tended to be in remote and secure locations.
Overcrowded housing
I was interested recently to read [i] some words of Charles Booth, the creator of the famous London poverty maps, in his analysis for the Royal Statistical Society on the Condition and Occupations of the People of East London and Hackney (1888), he stated how the process of densification of the city, with housing and workshops filling in every last piece of ground makes a mockery of the word “garden”, writing that “… many are the advantages of sufficient open space behind a house, whether it be called garden or yard, for economy, comfort, and even pleasure.”
“One can see what were the original buildings; in many cases they are still standing, and between them, on the large gardens of a past state of things, have been built the small cottage property of to-day. Houses of three rooms, houses of two rooms, houses of one room – houses set back against a wall or back to back, fronting it may be on to a narrow footway, with posts at each end and a gutter down the middle. Small courts contrived to utilise some space in the rear, and approached by archway under the building which fronts the street. Of such sort are the poorest class of houses.”
These observations referred specifically to housing in London but one can see how this also applied in these Black Country areas where industry and population had increased hugely and areas which had once been gardens, orchards and fields had additional housing squeezed in to every space. It happens today, too.
Gunpowder uses
It seems that the main use for gunpowder locally was in industry, quarrying and mining. Apparently this shop was registered to store 200lb (90kg) of gunpowder but it was certainly not in a remote location. It was stored in a brick building, about 5ft (1.5m) square, roofed with tiles, the inside being cased with wood, surrounded by dense housing and only a few feet from Cradley Heath High Street. The floor was composed of bricks covered with wood and one report mentions coconut matting. Police Inspector Walters, the inspector of explosives for the district, had inspected the magazine in the previous February when he found it in good condition and had given Mr Mould, the shopkeeper, advice about having the gunpowder in bags which Mr Mould had promised to see to.
Photograph courtesy of and from the collection of Mike Fenton: This photograph of Cradley Heath High Street is dated 1907 so a few years after the explosion. I note there is a hanging sign for a baker in the centre of the picture but do not know whether this was Mr Birch’s shop. There also appears to be an entry way on the left side which could well lead to the sort of yard where the magazine was situated.
Newspaper reports:
On the 9th April 1887, the Birmingham Daily Post reported that
“A terrible explosion of gunpowder occurred at Cradley Heath, resulting in the death of two children and in serious injuries to two others. The gunpowder was in the detached store which was about fifteen yards (13.7m) from the rear of the Ironmonger’s shop and some six yards (5.5m) from a row of half a dozen small cottages. This report says that several children whilst at play had discovered grains of gunpowder strewn about the yard and began to set fire to them with lighted paper. They gradually approached the door of the store where there was a quantity of scattered grains, which formed a train communicating with other powder inside the storehouse. Unaware of their danger, they ignited the powder, the result being that a tremendous explosion instantly ensued, the whole of the kegs being blown up. The store was completely wrecked, the bricks flying in all directions and falling upon the unfortunate children, most of whom were buried in the debris. Such was the force of the explosion that the windows of the six cottages were blown out, and the buildings more or less damaged, together with the adjoining shop of Mr Birch, Baker and also the establishment of Mr Mould. The explosion was heard at a distance of more than half a mile.
It was found that Lily Birch, about five years old, the daughter of Mr Birch before mentioned, had sustained terrible injuries and she was picked up dead. Another child, Thomas Lot Billingham died on the way to the Guest hospital at Dudley; to which institution were also removed Florence Billingham, aged 8 years and her brother James, six years old, both being seriously injured. Laura Tipton, ten years old, was also hurt but was treated at her home. Shortly after the occurrence Mr T Standish, surgeon, Mr D Denne and another medical gentlemen arrived and rendered prompt aid to the sufferers.
It seems that the powder had been removed to the store by George E Milward, Mr Mould’s assistant, who swept put the place about half-past five o’clock , and it is supposed that either the kegs had leaked or the contents of the store had been swept into the yard with the dust.
Yesterday the condition of the three children who are in the Guest Hospital, Dudley was much the same as on Thursday night when they were admitted. All are burnt about the hands, wrists, face, neck and scalp, Adam being the worst injured of the three. The surgeon at the institution gives but slight hope of his recovery.”
Photograph courtesy of and from the collection of Mike Fenton: Another photograph taken from possibly the same spot as the previous photograph, but in 1902. Many of the people in this photograph were probably living in Cradley Heath at the time of the explosion and would undoubtedly have had vivid memories of it.
Another report in the County Express on the 16th April 1887 gives a lengthy report on the first inquest on the first two children killed in the disaster. This relates:
“George Edward Millward, an apprentice in the employ of Mr Mould told the inquest that it was part of his duties to go into the powder store. The key of the store was kept in the shop and no one excepting his master and himself had access to the store. On Thursday afternoon, he went into the store to receive a consignment of gunpowder which had been brought from the Dudley magazine on a trap [Editor’s note: Traps were small open carts, drawn by a horse]. It consisted of a barrel containing 100lb and four quarters. The carter carried the powder from the trap to the store, and the large barrel was placed in the far corner on the left hand side. About six o’clock the same evening he again visited the store, for the purpose of supplying a man with two pounds of powder. He found the store in exactly the same condition as when he left in the afternoon. He opened the barrel containing the 100lb with a piece of wood and filled a tin can with the powder. In doing so he spilled about a tablespoonful on the floor. He then locked the magazine up and returned to the shop with the powder, and after serving the customer he went back again to the store. He did not label the parcel ‘gunpowder’ and he was not aware that he was required to do so by law. He had never read the Explosives Act and was not provided with a copy. When he went back to the store he took a broom with him and swept up the powder that he had previously spilt and with an iron shovel put it into the large barrel which contained 100lb. He did not know it was dangerous to do so. He knew the powder was used for blasting purposes, but he was not aware that there would be a danger of it exploding whilst being used by miners on account of the grit which was mixed with it. He returned to the shop and in about half an hour afterwards he heard the report of the explosion, and, upon going into the yard, discovered that the store had been blown up. He was quite clear that he did not sweep the powder from the store into the yard and he was not able to form any idea as to how the explosion occurred. He was confident that he did not spill any of the powder out of the can whilst conveying it from the store to the shop.
Mr E Mould, the proprietor, said he ordered the powder from the traveller on the day previous to the accident. In reply to the Coroner he admitted that he had never read the Act of Parliament relating to the storage of gunpowder.
William Felton, miner, residing in Walith’s Building, said he was walking up the yard to his home on the evening in question, when he saw some children playing with powder on the ground. They were gathering it in small heaps and setting fire to it with a lighted paper. He cautioned Adam Billingham and told him that he would have the children injured of he was not careful. The boy, who was about thirteen years of age, disregarded the caution. Shortly afterwards, whilst he was in his own house, he saw Adam Billingham with a lighted paper on the ground about a yard from the magazine. Presently he saw a flash and heard a loud report, and he was knocked down by the force of the explosion.
The witness said that he had lived in that locality for eight years and could testify that Mr Mould had been very careful in the management of the magazine and he had never seen loose powder lying about in the yard. He attributed the accident entirely to the conduct of Billingham in firing the powder close to the magazine.
Police Sergeant Hayward, who came on the scene immediately after the explosion, deposed to finding the children among the debris.
Major Condill (Her Majesty’s Inspector of Explosives) said that he had made an examination of the premises. He did not think that the magazine was a proper place in which to store 200lbs of powder. The utmost that should have been stored in a place so situated was 50lbs.
The Coroner , in summing up, remarked that if Adam Billingham had been older the matter would have assumed a serious aspect as far as he was concerned, as he would have been guilty of manslaughter. There was no doubt that it was through his act that the children lost their lives. He was astonished that a powder magazine should have been allowed to remain in the midst of a thickly populated neighbourhood; and if the store had been a proper distance away from the dwelling houses in all probability the accident would not have occurred.
The jury returned a verdict of Accidental Death and added to it an expression of opinion that the authorities ought to be strongly condemned for allowing such a place to be used as a magazine for storage of gunpowder in such close proximity to inhabited houses.”
A detailed and lengthy report appeared in the Dudley Mercury on 30th April of a further inquest which was held a few days later at Dudley on two more child victims of the explosion who had been injured by the explosion and taken to the Dudley Guest hospital where they had died. Both were Billinghams, Adam aged 14 and James aged 6, the sons of Thomas Billingham, chain maker. Adam had suffered burns to the face, scalp, face and feet, he had died on the 16thof April. James had suffered burns to his face, scalp, neck and hands and he died on the 22 April. So poor Thomas Billingham appears to have lost three sons in this explosion.
From this report it is clear that more investigations had gone on since the previous inquest and that Adam Billingham had spoken about the explosion before he died.
The apprentice George Millward again gave similar evidence (although his name this time was recorded as George Edwin Millward rather than Edward) to that given at the previous inquest. He confirmed that he had spilled a quantity of gunpowder on the floor of the magazine and had returned to sweep it up but stated that he had not given any of it to the children. Some of the children had come to the door while he was sweeping it but he could swear none of them had powder.
The store had been inspected by the Inspector of Explosives (sent by the Home Office), it was built of brick, lined with boards, and the floor covered by coconut matting (all precautions meant to reduce the chances of any sparks being struck by accident) and was said to be nearly airtight. George was quite sure that none of the powder he swept up could have got near the door. Poor lad, imagine what pressure he must have been under, as the one person who had accessed the magazine that day and who had then seen the magazine destroyed and so many children, who must have been known to him, killed and severely injured. The pressure to find the cause and allocate blame puts me in mind of similar accidents today.
Again, William Felton gave evidence, as he had previously. He was a miner and presumably familiar with gunpowder used in the mines and quarries. He repeated that as he passed through the yard shortly before the explosion, he had not seen any powder lying on the ground and he would have seen it if there had been any there.
Corry Keep, the House Surgeon at the Guest Hospital was a new witness. He told the inquest that he had treated the burned children. Adam Billingham had told him that he picked up some powder which he placed in the yard outside the powder magazine. He then went into the house, heated the poker and applied it to the powder, thus causing the explosion. He would give no further information. Up to the morning of the day on which Adam died he declined to give any information whatever but later in the day he told Mr Corry how the explosion was caused. Up to the time of his death he refused to say where he got the powder from. He had told the Government Inspector that he was in the yard but he did not see the explosion caused and knew nothing about it. But before he died he made a statement that he fired some spilt powder. In reply to this witness he said the powder might have been swept out of the magazine but he did not see it swept out. Florrie Billingham said she believed the powder was swept out of the magazine.
There was a detailed interview with Elizabeth Billingham, who was ten years old, who said she was playing in the yard with some other children on the in question, when she and a girl named Laura Tipton found some gunpowder near the door of the magazine. This is the reported exchange between the Coroner and Elizabeth which I reproduce in full as it has so much detail.
C: Can you tell how much powder he had? Two handfuls? (‘he’ presumably referring to Adam.)
E: No, only a little tiny bit.
C: When did he last pick it up?
E: He didn’t pick it up, it was Laura and I.
C: Did you pick some up just before the explosion?
E: Yes.
C: How old is Laura?
E: Ten.
C: What time was it?
E: About twenty minutes to seven.
C: How do you know?
E: When I got to the bottom of the entry it was rather better than a quarter to seven.
C: Did your father or mother tell you to say that?
E: No, Sir.
C: Did you see the boy sweep out the magazine?
E: Yes, with a big broom.
C: Who did you tell about it?
E: My father, when the Inspector came on Saturday. He asked me what I saw.
C: Didn’t anyone else ask you?
E: No.
C: Tell these gentlemen what you saw.
E: I saw him sweep the magazine out.
C: Did you go inside?
E: No, I stood outside with Laura.
C: Did he sweep the powder outside the door?
E: Yes.
C: Did he leave it there?
E: Yes, sir.
C: Was that the powder you picked up?
E: Yes.
C: Did he fasten the door?
E: Yes, he put the barrels in and fastened the door. When I went up the yard he had some little barrels outside with no powder in, and he turned them upside down and knocked the bits out.
C: Had you seen him do this before?
E: No.
C: Did you ask him for some powder?
E: No.
C: Have you ever asked him?
E: No.
C: Did you pick up the powder while he was there?
E: No, we waited until he had gone.
C: Did you hear Mr Felton tell you not to play with the powder?
E: No, I was near the magazine.”
Mr Shakespeare, the solicitor representing Mr Mould, the shop owner, pointed out that it was impossible to simply sweep the powder outside the magazine as the floor level was lower than the yard. He also noted that it was clearly proved at the previous inquest that there was not a particle of powder in the empty barrels. Mr Millward denied that he had turned the empty barrels upside down outside the magazine.
The Coroner told the inquest that he had not sworn the child as he felt she was too young in such a serious matter, she had been called at the request of the father but he had been advised by the South Staffordshire Coroner that the children were too young to give evidence. He understood that another adult witness was in a position to say exactly what Millward did when he swept up the store but she was not now present. The child’s statement suggested that Millward was careless and in such a case he would be deserving of their censure but it was for the jury to say whether they would accept the child’s statement and he was inclined to put it aside altogether, as he thought the child would have told her parents before Saturday if she knew anything about the matter. There was no doubt that Millward had swept up the spilled powder but probably it was suggested to the girl that he swept it outside.
In reply to a juryman it was stated that the proper course would have been to have slippers for use in the magazine but none were provided.
The Jury returned Verdicts of Death from Misadventure on Adam Billingham and Accidental Death on James Billingham.
On the 11th April the Birmingham Daily Post returned to the subject and had some interesting observations to make:
“All that is known at present is that on the day in question, Mr Mould received a consignment of some 200lb of [gun] powder which was stored, according to custom, in a detached shed, situated at the bottom of a yard in the rear of the main premises, and that a quantity of loose powder was subsequently found by the children of the neighbourhood, scattered about the yard. How the powder came there and why it was suffered to remain in such an exposed place are the main questions to which the jury will have to direct their attention.
It was only natural that the children, on discovering the powder, should proceed to ignite it; and as familiarity breeds contempt, that these improvised fireworks should be carried right up to the door of the storehouse where the explosive grains laid thickest. Unfortunately there must have been some loose powder inside as well as outside the shed, for presently the children fired a train which caused the whole of the contents to explode with disastrous consequences.”
“It is difficult to resist the conviction that gross carelessness was at the bottom of this lamentable accident and it will be the duty of the jury to find out who is to blame. It is supposed that the kegs may have leaked, in which case they must have been unfit for the conveyance of gunpowder, and ought not to have been used. But another theory is that the shed had been newly swept out and the sweepings, consisting largely of loose powder, suffered to lie about the yard instead of being removed to a place of safety. But the mischief, it is plain, could not have been caused by the scattered grains in the yard only. There must have been a considerable quantity of loose powder also on the floor of the shed or the train would not have been complete and the kegs could not have been fired. It will be important to ascertain who had the general handling of the powder, and what sort of precautions were adopted with it. Very stringent rules are enacted as to the storage and keeping of gunpowder by licensed retail dealers and the local authorities at Cradley Heath will be able to say how far these were observed in the case here”.
But, so far as I can see, the Jury, although berating the authorities for permitting the storage of such a large quantity of gunpowder in close proximity to dense housing , did not allocate any personal blame to any individual. Possibly the most likely to be censured would have been Adam Billingham who admitted to having heated a poker to light the grains of powder and who, only moments before the explosion, had clearly been warned by William Felton that what he was doing was dangerous to the other children but he paid the ultimate price, dying a few days later along with two of his brothers.
What really happened?
At this distance in time, we shall never know.
The last newspaper report refers to the possibility of the delivery kegs leaking which could account for a ‘trail’ of powder right into the magazine. There was also mention of slippers which should have been but were not provided and of coconut matting on the floor of the shed. Did some of the gunpowder, known to have spilled on the floor when George was measuring some out, get onto the matting and stick to George’s boots, walking a trail out of the door as he swept? Had the store been swept out earlier in the day in readiness for the delivery and the dust deposited in the yard, containing a few grains of powder? Or might those empty barrels have contained a few grains. There is more than a suggestion that the children might have played with gunpowder on other occasions, might have begged grains from George, might be familiar enough with it to look out for it and to enjoy creating their own fireworks – the ultimate ‘playing with fire’.
The miner William Felton also commented at one of the inquests that he had not seen gunpowder in the yard, so it was obviously distinctive and easily recognised, although I doubt many people would recognise it now, just as most modern people are not familiar with open fires, paper or wooden spills, fire irons and pokers, etc.
The Billingham family: On the 7thApril three children of Thomas and Lucy Billingham were fatally injured in the explosion. Thomas Lot, aged 2 had died on the way to hospital and was buried at St Luke’s Reddal Hill on the 12th April, his brother Adam, aged 14 was buried on 21 Apr 1887 and their other brother James, aged 6 was buried on 27 Apr 1887. What a dreadful time for them it must have been.
In the 1881 Census, Thomas Billingham, a chainmaker aged 33, had been living with his wife Lucy at 128 High Street, Cradley Heath, along with children Anne, aged 9, Adam then 8, Eva aged 6, Elizabeth 4, Flora 2 and James aged 4 months. By 1891, they had moved away to Fox Oak Street, Cradley Heath where only Elizabeth, Florrie and a new child Mary Ann aged 3 were with them. In 1889 they had another son who they also named Thomas but, alas, he also died in infancy.
I have been unable to trace a burial or any other information for little Lily Birch who also died at the scene.
No further details have emerged in my research about the apprentice George Millward. A George Millward, born in 1865, died in 1945 in the Rowley Regis Registration District but I do not know whether this was the same man. There was at least one other George Millward in the area and possibly more and it is possible that George left the area.
Finally…
I was astonished when I first read this story that gunpowder was apparently stored and sold in ironmonger’s shops and casually sold to members of the public in small quantities. There are so many questions raised by this whole episode. Who would have wanted to buy gunpowder and for what purpose? Where was it stored after they had bought it? If it was not supplied in tin cans as it apparently should have been, how was it kept safe? Was this the mine operators buying gunpowder? Or small quarrying ventures? One would have expected them to buy their powder direct from the magazine at Dudley but clearly there was a local demand for this in Cradley Heath. And there was sufficient demand for a traveller to be employed going round such shops taking orders for gunpowder and arranging for it to be supplied in open carts. When you think about the number of open fires and forges in the area, that mode of transport alone must have been risky, especially if the trap passed the large blast furnaces in the area. Did every small town ironmonger store and sell gunpowder? Were regulations changed to prohibit the storage of large quantities of gunpowder in built up areas? I do not know the answers to these questions or whether any changes were made to legislation as a result of this incident.
But even when I was a child in the 1950s we children could purchase individual fireworks from our local shops without any restrictions that I can remember, and many of these had screwed or folded paper tops which could be opened to expose the powder inside. I seem to remember that boys seemed to particularly enjoy buying bangers and ‘jumping jacks’ and even throwing them at people or setting them off to make people jump, so perhaps these children did not see their games with grains of gunpowder as being very different. And every now and again, one hears of firework factories exploding with spectacular results, so gunpowder is still dangerous but hopefully not stored close to houses these days. Gradually sales of fireworks have become more and more restricted in terms of age and I believe adults can now only buy prepackaged boxes and I suspect most people these days prefer to attend organised bonfires where they do not have to worry about setting them off.
The Crowley family were in Rowley Regis for much of the 1600s, later generations moving away to Stourbridge and then London. They were apparently comfortably off, were nailers, later ironmongers and perhaps farmers, Quakers, industrious and clever. And they left Wills! I don’t know for certain whether they lived in the area of the Lost Hamlets but they may have done…
A troubled century
First of all, it is worth considering what life in England generally was like in the 1600s. James 1 of England had come to the throne, following the long reign of Queen Elizabeth 1, in 1603. He was followed by King Charles 1 in 1625.
Rowley Regis was not untouched by national politics, the Gunpowder Plot against King James 1, thwarted in 1605, had led to fleeing plotters Stephen Lyttelton and Robert Winter taking refuge in Rowley Regis, and two local men Christopher White, someone called Holyhead and another man called Smart apparently sheltered them in their houses and legend has it that Holyhead was hanged for doing so. Wilson Jones[i] states that there is no trace of the fate of Smart and White and it is not known which houses they sheltered in. Edward Chitham in his book on Rowley Regis also mentions this story and notes that the plotters are said to have hidden in the cellars of what became Rowley Hall Farm but that building was later replaced on a different footing and no evidence remains of any cellars.
The Pendle Witches were tried in Lancashire in 1612. William Shakespeare died in 1616. Sir Walter Raleigh was executed in 1618. In 1625 Barbary Pirates raided Mounts Bay in Cornwall and took 60 men, women and children into slavery (and in 1645 they took a further 240!). The known world was expanding and the first settlers were sailing off to the Americas, the Mayflower sailed in 1620 with 100 Puritan separatists. Some 20,000 more emigrated to New England in the 1730s, the peak of the Great Migration. (By 1770 the population had reached 92,000), many of them migrating for religious reasons and to avoid persecution.
As a result of many plots against King Charles 1 and unrest in Parliament, a Protestation Oath was introduced in 1641 which required all adult males in England and Wales to declare allegiance to the King, Parliament and the Protestant religion. The names of those who refused was noted.
In 1642 the English Civil War began and continued until 1651. While there was no battle in Rowley itself, Chitham thinks that most Rowley people would have supported Parliament, certainly they would have been well aware of the conflicts as Dudley Castle – only three miles away – was twice besieged, the Lords of Dudley supporting the Royalist cause. The last battle of the Civil War was at Worcester, again, not very far away, so large areas of the country were affected, not just London. Approximately 3.7% of the English population died as a result of the Civil War.
In 1648 Quakerism was founded by George Fox who had strong links in the Midlands. The Quaker website[ii] notes that “Quakers have always refused to swear oaths, because it implies that there are only certain occasions in which the truth matters. Early Quakers were known for their honesty and straight dealing. This is partly why Quakers were successful in business and banking in the 18th and 19th centuries.” So this set up those of Quaker leanings to be in conflict with those in authority who wanted them to swear oaths of loyalty. As a result many Quakers were persecuted and imprisoned in this period.
Quaker records relating to the Stourbridge meeting show that as in other areas, Friends were subjected to persecution. In 1674, Sarah Reynolds was sent to prison for refusing to contribute to the cost of church repairs and in 1684 Ezekiell and Mary Partridge, Hannah Reynolds, Richard Jones, Edward Ford, Sarah Reynolds and Ambrose Crowley were excommunicated for non-attendance at church. I think this must have been Ambrose Crowley 2, who had given land for a Meeting House in Stourbridge but it is an early indicator of the family’s Quaker involvement.
At about this time a Committee began to investigate the political loyalties of church ministers and increasingly acted against those men who supported the King. Properties were sequestrated from Royalists who continued to fight for the King. There were battles between Royalists and Parliamentarians. In 1649 King Charles I was executed and the Commonwealth set up under Oliver Cromwell which made huge and unpopular changes to how people lived.
In 1660, the Monarchy was restored and Charles II came to the throne. A hearth tax was introduced to support the King and his household. A shilling was to be paid twice yearly for every hearth or stove in domestic buildings. Most Rowley homes had one hearth. Only four houses had more than three hearths and these were “Ye Brickhouse”, “Rowley Hall”, “Brindfield Hall” (at Tividale, the home of the Sheldon family) and “Haden Hall”.
The Great Plague killed more than 60,000 people in London in 1665, and in 1666 there was the Great Fire of London. No doubt news of these events would have filtered through to local people at some point.
In 1667 a ‘Pole Tax’ was imposed and the list for Rowley Regis, including all children and servants, amounted to 375 names. The total population of Rowley, according to Wilson Jones, excluding servants was 318, including children. The Bishop of Worcester sent out a questionnaire in 1676 to try to gather church statistics and the main question was the number of inhabitants. The number given in response was 420 but Chitham is convinced that this was seriously wrong and that other methods of calculating suggest a figure of nearer 1500.
The weather was much harsher then, too. In 1683, a Frost Fair was held on the frozen Thames in London, I doubt other areas of the country were much warmer so simply surviving the winter would have required fuel, shelter and food for people and animals.
In 1685 the French King revoked the Edict of Nantes, which started the persecution and killing of Huguenots and thousands fled to England bringing their skills, including – amongst many others – glass making and certainly many settled in glass making areas of the Black Country and possibly elsewhere.
In 1689, under the new monarchs, William3 and Mary 2, the Toleration Act permitted nonconformists to worship, provided they licensed their meeting places.
A window tax was introduced in 1696, to replace the Hearth tax, leading to widespread bricking up of windows.
So, that is a quick summary of events in the 1600s which would have affected local people and families, even in sleepy Rowley Village, and even smaller places like the hamlets. The 1600s were turbulent times of great changes and people must have wondered what was coming next.
The Crowley Family
I have touched on the Crowley family in a previous article about Ambrose Crowley III who became an Alderman of London.
But the first Crowleys appear in the Rowley Regis Registers in the early 1600s. M W Flinn, in his book Men of Iron, when talking about the Crowley family in Rowley and speculating about their prior origins, noted that there were Crowley families in Kings Norton but considered then (in 1961) that there was no evidence to connect the two families. I beg to differ. But then, I have the benefit of computers and access to digitised and computerised records which were not available to earlier researchers.
The first Crowley mentioned in the Rowley Registers is Ambrose Crowley 1. I call him that because his son and grandson were also Ambrose so I am numbering them for easy differentiation. Ambrose does appear to be a Crowley name, they continue to crop up in various places for centuries afterwards.
So where did Ambrose 1 come from? With the power of FreeREG at my fingertips, I searched for baptisms of surnames beginning with Cro* between 1500 and 1700 (I searched just with Cro*because spellings of the name varied considerably at that time but they all began with CRO so searching with what is called a ‘wildcard’ brings a list of them all. Crowley became quite settled by the late 1600s but there were Croleys, Croelys, Crolyes, Crolys, all popping up with the recurring family Christian names, according to whoever completed the Registers in different places and at different times.). I set the centre point of the search as Rowley Regis but included ‘nearby places’ which includes a further 100 places within 7.7 miles. This list appeared in date order and showed that there were indeed Crowley families in the 1500s and early 1600s in Kings Norton (which is, these days, a suburb of Birmingham but which was then a separate village) and, later, also in Harborne which again is now a suburb but was previously a separate village. I then did the same exercise with marriages and burials and all three show the same pattern of a family moving from one settlement to the next.
Copyright: Glenys Sykes. This 1819 Map by John Cary, (which appears in ‘The Black Country as seen through Antique Maps’) shows how the settlements of Kings Norton, Harborne and Rowley Regis lined up, with Halesowen just to the left of Harborne. Birmingham was still a fairly small place then and these villages were separate places, rather than suburbs.
Three Crowley brothers, (or possibly two brothers and a nephew) baptised in Harborne in the few years either side of 1600 start to appear in the Rowley Registers in the 1630s. And their sister Alice married in Halesowen at the beginning of this period. Had it been just Ambrose, it is conceivable that it was not the same family (although this is the only baptism for an Ambrose Crowley that I could find anywhere at this date so it does narrow the field) but there was also Richard, and later Edward. Other family Christian names from Harborne also recur amongst their offspring over the next generations. Also, none of those names appear in the Harborne registers after they appear in the Rowley Registers so it seems fairly certain that they had moved to Rowley.
So I am fairly confident that Ambrose Crowley 1, along with several brothers, sisters and probably cousins, was born in Harborne and he was baptised there on 16 June 1607. I do dearly wish that I could find out where the parish boundaries at that time were for Harborne, as I have another line on my family tree where a marriage took place at Harborne and they were described as ‘of this parish’ when I know they lived in Oatmeal Row in Cakemore. It does appear that the parish of Harborne extended well towards Quinton which was not a separate parish at that time, did not have a parish church and came under Halesowen parish. So Harborne parish register entries may be for people living much closer to Rowley than appears at first glance at a map.
On 19 May 1633Ambrose Crowley 1 married Marie or Mary Grainger or Granger at Rowley Regis. Mary had been born in Rowley, daughter of Henry Grainger and she was baptised in Rowley on 17 Nov 1602, although some early Grainger entries in the Rowley Registers note that the Grangers were from Halesowen.
Initially I thought that Ambrose’s marriage was the first Crowley connection away from Harborne but checking for local marriages, I was interested to note that, three years earlier, on 18 July 1630, a Thomas Granger married Alice Crowley in Halesowen. Was Mary Grainger Thomas’s sister or cousin? It seems very possible. (And later records suggest that the Grangers had links with Illey which is on the Harborne side of Halesowen which would reinforce my observations about the proximity to the Harborne boundary.)
There was certainly some long lasting connection between the Crowleys and the Grangers. When the Inventory was drawn up for Ambrose 1’s Will in 1680, one of the signatories to that was a George Granger and Mary did have a younger brother George. More research needed on the Grangers when time permits. However, this marriage in Halesowen does reinforce the impression of a continuing drift of members of the Crowley family in a westerly direction.
On 2 Aug 1635 Ambrose 1 and Mary’s first child was baptised at St Giles, he was Ambrose 2. More children followed – Joyes (Joyce in modern English) in 1637, William in 1639 (buried in 1655), John in 1642 (buried in 1643), Margerie in 1644 and – at some point – another daughter Mary. There are gaps in the Rowley Register, some of them quite prolonged so some other baptisms may be missing. A daughter Margaret is named in Ambrose I’s Will, written in 1680, but I have been unable to trace a baptism for her. I wonder whether Marjorie and Margaret were the same person, as spelling of names was so variable then.
I assume all of these children were the children of Mary but names of mothers are not listed in the Registers at this point in time. But Mary was buried in Rowley on 31 Oct 1674, so it seems likely that Ambrose 1 and Mary were together for forty years which must have been a long marriage in those days of short lives.
Ambrose Crowley I, having moved to Rowley, possibly on his marriage to Marie Grainger, stayed there for the rest of his life. I know this because I have read his Will, written in 1680 and he is described in that as ‘of Rowley Regis’. His son Ambrose II moved to Stourbridge at some point, married and settled there and I know that because I have also transcribed his Will, proved in 1720 and that tells me so!
The Will of Ambrose 1, which was proved in 1680, (and of which I obtained a digital copy in less than 24 hours, all kudos to Worcestershire Archives, great value for £10 and saving me a trip to Worcester) is a fascinating document for the picture it gives of the life of this family then. It is not long, all of it written on one page of parchment, and this is what it said:
“In the Name of God, Amen. The Thirteenth Day of June in the year of our Lord God One Thousand six hundred and eighty, I, Ambrose Crowley, Esquire of Rowley Regis in the County of Stafford, Naylor, being of sound & perfect memory praised be God do make this my last Will in manner following:
First and principally I commend my soul to God who gave it in hopes of a joyful resurrection at the Last Day. And my body I commit to the earth where it came to be buried at the discretion of Executrix hereinafter named.
And as for my worldly estate whereof it hath pleased Almighty God to give and bestow upon me I dispose hereof as follows:
Item: I give to my daughter Mary Francis twelve pounds in silver and to her eight children twelve pence apiece
And I give to my son Ambrose twelve pounds in silver. And I give to his wife and eight children six shillings eight pence apiece
And all the rest & residue of my goods and personal estate whatsoever my debts being first paid and my funeral expenses discharged I give and bequeath to my daughter Margaret Crowley whom I make & ordain full and sole executrix of this my Will revoking all former Wills by me heretofore made In witness whereof I have hereunto put my hand and seal today and […] first above Witness.
Signed Ambrose Crowley
Signed, sealed published and endorsed
In the sight and presence of
Jo. Grove
John Hobbes
Paulus Rock”
There are one or two words I have not been able to read but nothing of great significance. Ambrose did not sign his Will. He appears to have signed his initials, as shown on this photograph, the names Ambrose and Crowley on either side of the initials are in the same handwriting as the body of the Will so Ambrose Crowley 1 was not literate although his son Ambrose2 and later generations were.
Copyright: Glenys Sykes.
So, of his children, it appears that only Mary, Ambrose and Margaret survive at this point, or at least that we know they were alive. (It is possible that others were alive but no provision was made for them. Joyce had married Edward Johnson at Rowley in 1657 and two children were baptised in 1658 but after that there is no trace of them locally. Two other sons had already died without issue.) The bequests are very simple, money to Ambrose and Mary and their respective children, both already well established with their own households. Everything else goes to Margaret who presumably lived with Ambrose and probably kept house for him.
I find it slightly odd that there is no mention of property, land, real estate in this Will. In Wills I have previously seen any land or houses or real estate are carefully listed and disposed of. The whole process of disposal of land, whether by sale, lease or inheritance was and still is always carefully recorded in writing, verbal contracts for the disposal of land are not valid, unlike other forms of contracts. The wording is detailed, specific, hedged about. If Ambrose had had any land or house to dispose of, we can be pretty sure it would have been listed in his Will. But it wasn’t.
The Inventory, which I will show next, shows that Ambrose 1 was living in a substantial house, not a cottage, perhaps a farmhouse. There is a list of the rooms and there were outbuildings, including a barn and a workshop, plus a yard and, presumably somewhere his cows were kept. So why wasn’t this listed? And where was Margaret, who was at that time apparently unmarried, to keep all the goods and chattels she had been left? Where was she to live?
One possibility which occurs to me is that the house – wherever in Rowley it was – was actually the property of the Granger family. Perhaps they were prepared to continue to allow Margaret to live there? I have been unable to find a Will for Mary but the property rights of married women were very limited so she may not have left one. Wilson Jones, in his book, notes that there were various large mansion houses including Graingers Hall, near Cradley Heath (the name presumably preserved today in Graingers Lane) so it appears that the Grainger/Granger family were well to do. I do not think that this house was a mansion but it appears to have been more than a cottage, and perhaps operating as a smallholding. But the Crowley name does not appear in any of the various surveys of holders of weapons, hearths or householders that I have seen so they appear not to have been of any great social standing in Rowley although Flinn states that “The Court Rolls of the Manor in the seventeenth century contain many references to the Wheeler, Parkes, Haden, Foley, Darby and Crowley families”.
Flinn,in Men of Iron[iii], also reflects on the nature of the nail making business, where a fairly elaborate system of exchange developed. Raw materials and finished products in small lots moving between small independent producers and many dispersed consumers offered a route for the economic advancement of even the humblest producers, as dealers or middlemen. Many merchants, he says, who came to dominate the iron manufacturing industry of the Midlands came from the ranks of domestic nail makers, a surprising number of them from Rowley. The rise of the Crowley family, from domestic nail making in mid-1600s in Rowley to opulence in London and beyond in three generations illustrates this.
The Inventory attached to the Will
An Inventory is a list of all the possessions of a deceased individual and is drawn up at the time of his or her death by independent people, as part of the Probate process and fixing a value on what was left. This inventory is most interesting in showing what was presumably a typical household of a yeoman family at that time and I note that the signatories to the Inventory are all local Rowley names and at least one of them was probably a family member.
The values, naturally, are shown in pounds, shillings and pence. For those too young to remember, there were twenty shillings to the pound and twelve pence to the shilling. A shilling was also known colloquially as a ‘bob’, hence the ‘ten bob note’ which was half of a pound in value. Pence had nicknames, too – and coins for threepence (thruppence) and sixpence and parts of pence were also in circulation, half-pennies (ha’pennies) and farthings (fourthings, a quarter). I can just remember silver farthings, tiny coins which were often saved for use in the Christmas pudding but copper farthings later superceded the silver ones.
This is my transcription:
A True and Perfect Inventory of all and singular the goods chattels and heredits of Ambrose Crowley late of Rowley Regis in the County of Stafford, Nailer. Done, taken and apprised the twelfth day of September 1680 by those whose names are subscribed:
Description £ s d
The wearing Apparel and money in his pocket: 1 3 4
In the Hall House
Some Chyrurgery Instruments 2 6
Andiron, fire shovel, Tongs, potgailes, bowls and chafingers 4 0
One greate table board and forms, three chairs, two stooles,
one little falling (folding?)table
4 6
One little safe, pailes gawn piggins & other Earthern Ware 3 4
Brasse & Pewter and an Iron Pott 1 6 8
Two scissor & Other Trumpery 2 0
In the Chamber
One Bedstead, feather bed and all that belongs to it 2 0 0
One old Warming Pan 2 0
One hanging presse one old cupboard and chair and other oddments 10 0
In the Buttery
A Cheese Press, churn, two barrels, two firkins, five little shelves
and other odd things 8 6
In the Chamber above the Buttery
One joint bedstead and flock bed and all that belongs to it
Linnen in the House 2 10 0
One old forme one tubb one strike measure and other trumpery
3 4
In the Chamber Over the Hall
One old Bedstead good bedding and all that belongs to it 1 2 6
One Joyne chest one Joyne Box three shelfes and one pair of
yarn blades & other odd trumpery 14 0
In the Kitchen Chamber
One greate wheele, one little wheele two poker odd things 3 4
Cheese in the House 1 10 0
In the Kitchen
One old Cubbert one paire of cobberts & spit one , one poker, old
skeele & other things 5 0
In the Shopp
Double paire of Bellows, one Birkhound hammers shiddies
and other working shoppe tools 1 13 4
Hay in the Barne 3 2 6
Four ladders and other husbandry implements 5 0
Marl in the Yard 3 4
Two cowes and one weanling calfe 4 10 0
Two old cow tawes 4 0
Some old boots 2 6
Things forgotten & out of sight 4 0
Sum Total 24 4 8
Apprized by us:
Charles Colbourne
George Granger
Jo Grove
The National Archives has a currency converter on their website and shows you what a sum would be worth today and the purchasing power of the amount. This says that the value of the total of £24 pounds, 4 shillings and 8 pence in 1680 would be worth £2,773.50 in 2017 (presumably when the site was set up) :
In 1680, you could buy one of the following with £24 (pounds), 4s(shillings) & 8d(pence):
Horses: 4
Cows: 5
Wool: 40 stones
Wheat: 12 quarters
Wages: 269 days (skilled tradesman)
So this was not the Will of a rich man but of one who had the necessities of life and the means of working to keep himself and his family. I found it interesting that the most valuable things in the Inventory were the two cows and a calf, and the hay in the barn – the means by which the animals could be kept alive through the winter and ensure production of cheese which also had a substantial value in this list.
With the assistance of the book ‘Words from Wills’[iv], I can disclose that:
In the Hall House
Chyrurgery Instruments were surgical instruments. So Ambrose had some special skills. Possibly these would have included scalpels, clamps, saws but no details are given.
An Andiron was a horizontal iron bar, supported by a short foot at one end, and an upright pillar or support , usually ornamental, at the other. A pair of these were placed at either side of the hearth, to support burning logs. The uprights may also have hooks for pots, etc, to hang above the fire, or may support a spit. Potgailes appear to have been hooks for hanging pots on, (the rootform of gales is also appears in the word gallows, which was also used but for hanging people, rather than pots, today’s slightly bizarre useless information!) And chafingers were dishes for keeping food warm, even today chafing dishes are used in restaurants. Wikipedia says that historically, a chafing dish (from the French chauffer, “to make warm”) is a kind of portable grate raised on a tripod, originally heated with charcoal in a brazier, and used for foods that require gentle cooking, away from the “fierce” heat of direct flames. The chafing dish could be used at table or provided with a cover for keeping food warm. I suspect that chafingers in 17thcentury Rowley were probably rather simpler.
The little ‘safe’ would have been a cupboard, perhaps for meat. Before refrigeration came along, most households had meat safes to protect the meat from flies, etc, (I can just picture my mother’s, before we acquired our first fridge which would have been in the late 1950s I think, with a painted green wooden body with fine metal mesh sides to allow air to circulate, kept in the depths of the pantry or cellar, or the coolest place in the house. Pailes were buckets, of course. A gawn was a gallon or a ladle or pail holding half a gallon, a Piggin was “a small wooden milk pail, with one stave longer than the rest, to serve as a handle”.
These items, all concerned with preparation of food, were located in the main room of the house, according to the Inventory, the Hall, implying that this was a Hall House, a substantial dwelling but where most of the day to day life was in this room. A kitchen is listed, with various cupboards (cubberts), spinning wheels, a spit and a poker but clearly most of the household cooking did not happen there, perhaps it was used more as a pantry and store – a skeele, a wooden tub or bucket for milk was also listed in there and it appears that the production of cheese and perhaps butter was an important part of everyday life. There were also some scissors and ‘trumpery’, or items of little value.
In the Chamber
In addition to the great Hall, there was a chamber perhaps adjoining it, clearly what we would now think of as the’ Mastersuite’ but without the ensuite! This had the best bedstead and a feather mattress, and ‘all that belongs to it’ perhaps bed hangings or pillows or bolsters and an old warming pan. Household linen is listed separately and also had a considerable value, two pounds and ten shillings, nearly ten per cent of the value of the entire inventory. So being left a bed with all the bedding was obviously a worthwhile legacy in those days. There was also a ‘hanging presse’, a wardrobe for hanging garments, rather than laying them out in a chest, an old cupboard, a chair and some oddments. Not an overfurnished room.
The next room is the the Buttery where the cheesemaking went on and where the equipment for this was listed.
In the Chamber above the Buttery
Over that was another bedroom with a jointed (wooden) bedstead with a flock mattress, not as luxurious as a feather bed! The household linen (perhaps made at home)was also listed in this room and also an old form (presumably a bench), a tubb, one strike measure and other trumpery. There are two possible definitions of a strike in the book. One is that it was a measure of corn, from a half to four bushels, varying by locality, or a measuring vessel of this capacity. The other is ‘a bundle of hemp or flax’. I lean towards this definition because there is “a great and a small wheel” listed in the house, these were spinning wheels and for spinning flax to make linen. And when Mary Crowley was married in 1657 she was described as a ‘spinstress’, so it would make sense to have a supply of flax or hemp in the house for spinning and linen making which was probably also done by her sister(s).
The next room described as another bedroom, In the Chamber Over the Hall , where there was another old Bedstead with good bedding and all that belongs to it and also a wooden (joyne or jointed) chest , a wooden jointed Box , three shelves and one pair of yarn blades – another indication that spinning was a household activity.
In the Shopp
This was the workshop, the forge, where the nails were made and a pair of bellows is listed. There is also a description of the hammers and tools there but I am unable to provide any translation of what sort of hammers they were! It looks like Birkhornd but that doesn’t mean anything to me – expert advice on this most welcome if there is anyone out there who knows.
In the yard there was Marl, valued at three shillings and fourpence. Marl is another word for clay and is still used in that way now but in the book there is another definition of ‘a type of calcareous clay used as fertiliser’, further confirming that this establishment was more in the nature of a smallholding that a simple house. I also had to look up what tawes were (two old cow tawes are listed) and it appears that a taw was a whip or lash, so something for herding the cattle.
And even some old boots were mentioned. MW Flinn read this in the Will as some old books but this appears to be the area of the yard and barn which would be an unlikely place to keep books which would have been of some value, and being old does not necessarily make books less valuable. I think books would have been treated with more respect by him and kept in the house. And even old boots would be kept until they literally could not be worn any more, clothing and footwear was expensive.
Conclusion
So there we have a glimpse of how a household in Rowley was furnished in 1680. Some trumpery and little things are listed but mostly the inventory lists very practical goods which enabled the household to earn a living and to grow or buy enough food to see them through each winter.
Where did the Crowleys live in Rowley? I have not been able to work out where exactly this Hall house was, it is unlikely that it was Rowley Hall as hearth tax records show that this was occupied by Thomas Willetts, or Portway Hall occupied by the Russell family at that time. Richard Amphlett was at Warren’s Hall in 1670. Wilson Jones mentions some large houses at Perry’s Folly and Isabela de Botetourt’s house at Isabel Green, which he says became Ibberty and later still Tippety Green. These were not the only Crowleys in Rowley, there were two other Crowley families baptising children in the mid-1600s and up to the early 1700s so it is possible that these families were also living nearby.
Edit: Since first publishing this, a thought about the possible location of this house has occurred to me. Supposing that the farmstead next to Rowley Church was known then as Granger’s Farm, rather than Grange Farm or the Grange because it belonged to Mary Granger’s family? This building later became a pub, the Grange. It would have been about the right size and maps show that it had the yard and outbuildings described in the Inventory, only in later years did it become a pub. The name might just have lost that final ‘r’ through the years, especially if no-one could remember that it had been owned by the Granger family. It is common in Rowley for farms to be known by the name of their tenant, rather than the formal name shown on the deeds, so it seems possible and this is one of the few substantial houses in the village which is not accounted for by other families. Maybe, just maybe…!
What became of Margaret after Ambrose 1 died?
Probate was issued on 3 October 1680 to Margaret Crowley. On 30 Jan 1680/81 – just four months later – she married William Jones (alias Gadd) at Clent Parish Church. Had she waited until her father died? Did she suddenly become an attractive bride as a result of the Will? Did she need to marry to find a home? Where did they go? I don’t know. I do not know why they were married at Clent instead of Rowley as there were William Gads, father and son, in Rowley in the period and the parish register states that she was ‘of Rowley’ so this does appear to be the correct person. Because I have been unable to find a baptism for Margaret I do not know how old she was at this time but most of her siblings were born in the 1630s and 1640s, as was William Gad Junior, so she may well have been a mature woman. A simple search for baptisms does not appear to show any children born to the pair, although there are baptisms for a William Gad and his wife Mary!
In the Will of Margaret’s brother Ambrose 2, written in 1716 and proved in 1720, he lists a bequest to Margaret – “Item: I give unto my sister Margaret Gad ten guineas and to her husband Ten Guineas.” So presumably they were both alive then and on good terms with the rest of her family. William Gad alias Jones was buried at St Giles on 12 Jun 1720. I cannot find a burial for Margaret but then I cannot find a burial for her father in 1680 either and I think it is possible that both were buried in Quaker Burial Grounds, possibly at Stourbridge.
I shall continue to do more research on this Ambrose and his son, Ambrose 2 and may at some stage do a piece on his Will which is much more extensive!
I hope you have found this look at an early Will and Inventory relating to Rowley interesting.
[i] The History of the Black Country, J Wilson Jones, published c.1950 by Cornish Brother Ltd of Birmingham
[iii] Men of Iron, M W Flinn, published by Land of Oak and Iron, ISBN: 978-0-244-43925-5
[iv] Words from Wills and other Probate records by Stuart A Raymond, published by the Federation of Family History Societies (Publications) Ltd, ISBN: 1 86006 1818
Over the last few weeks, I have done quite a lot of work on the Levett family in Rowley Regis. After the terrible year for that family of 1902 I suspected that most of the remaining Levetts had moved away from the village. Having a quick look at the 1911 Census for Rowley to confirm my theory, I was surprised to see a John Levett aged 67 living in Springfield because he did not appear to be part of the other Levett family in any of the earlier work I had done. On searching further, I found him in Rowley and Blackheath right back to 1871, originally working as a butcher and later at the quarry. I knew that there were later generations of Levetts who were butchers in Rowley and Blackheath who did not appear to come from the branch of the family which I had been working on – was this where they came from?
This John Levett appears in his first census under this name in Rowley in 1871 and he was consistent in records thereafter over a 50 year period about his age and place of birth which showed that he was born in Rowley Regis in 1847. So who were his parents? Where was he in 1851 and 1861? He did not appear under this name in the censuses for those years.
I looked in various records for a birth or baptism of a John Levett in Rowley Regis in 1847, + or -1 year. No birth registration or baptism. Odd. Checked surrounding parishes – still no John Levett. Odder. After mulling this over for a while, it occurred to me that perhaps his birth and baptism had not appeared because he was illegitimate and his birth might have been registered in his mother’s name?
The illegitimate Johns baptised in Rowley Regis in 1847
So I checked the Baptismal Register for St Giles for 1847, looking for a child named John, illegitimate, and baptised in that year. There were only two.
John Hobbiss
One was born to Rosannah Hobbiss at Slack Hillock on 28th February 1847 and was baptised at St Giles on 9 May 1847, according to his Birth Certificate. Although the mother’s name is given in the Baptismal Register as Louisa, I cannot find any trace of a Louisa Hobbis before or after this date and I suspect that either this is a clerical error or she lied about her name! But a John Hobbis of the right age appears in the 1851 and the 1861 Censuses, apparently the son of Rosannah Smitten, nee Hobbis, in both censuses living in Old Hill. But after that John Hobbiss is nowhere to be found. Rosannah Hobbis married Thomas Smitten at Dudley St Edmund on 25 Oct 1847 and in 1851, when they were living in Old Hill, John is described as Rosannah’s son so it appears that he was not Thomas’s as their other child Emily is specifically noted as his child. Rosannah was born in Bromsgrove so was not a Rowley or Old Hill girl. In 1861, the family were living in Cherry Orchard, Old Hill and John is again shown under the name of John Hobis, by then 14 and a coal miner. In 1871 Rosannah, by now widowed, was living in Elbow Street, Old Hill with her children by Thomas Smitten but John is no longer living with her. I have not been able to find any trace of him under that name after that date.
So this boy had associations with Slack Hillock and Halesowen Street, where the mystery John Levett was later living in 1871 and where his bride Ellen Smith lived, was only a few hundred yards away. However it is more difficult to see whether John Levett of Rowley, the farmer, had any direct connections with this area that would bring him into contact with Rosannah Hobbiss but that cannot be ruled out either.
John Moreton
The second illegitimate John was born to Emma Moreton, (who just happens to be my 2xgreat-aunt) on 16th March 1847 at Finger-i-the-Hole and was baptised at St Giles a few weeks later on 13th June 1847. Emma, who grew up in Perry’s Lake, married Thomas Priest (or Redfern) a couple of years later in 1850 and they had ten children together. But in the 1851 Census her four year old son John is living with them in Gadds Green under the name Priest and also in 1861, by then aged 14 and listed by the name Redfern – but that was because his stepfather Thomas Priest also used both names in different censuses, either that or it was an enumerator error, as the family was living literally between two households of Redferns – see my article on the Redferns for more on that! At that time John was a furnace labourer, a common occupation for the Redfern men. But after that John Moreton – or Priest or Redfern – depending on which name he was using at the time – is nowhere to be found on the area.
So both of these illegitimate Johns seem to disappear after the 1861 Census when they would have been 14 and going out to work – no help there, then!
However, a John Moreton, aged 22, was married at St Giles on 21 Aug 1870 to Eliza Caddick. He gave his abode as Turner’s Hill, (where the Priests/Redferns lived), and did not enter any name for his father. And the witnesses to this marriage were Solomon and Mary Ann Redfern, Solomon was only a few years older than John and was a half-brother to Thomas Priest or Redfern. He actually lived for some years next door to John so would certainly have been known to and associated with this John.
Had this John reverted to his original name for his marriage? I think he had.
John and his wife were living in Church Row, Rowley in 1871 with their 10 month old son Samuel and this John gives his place of birth as Rowley Regis. There was only one John Moreton born in Rowley in that period, so it seems likely that this is the same John Moreton who was baptised in 1847. By 1881 the family had moved to Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire and John was working in the iron works there. Again, this fits with his previous occupation as a furnace labourer when he was in Rowley.
Barrow-in-Furness Migration from Rowley
Incidentally, on this page of twenty six people in Parker Street, Barrow-in-Furness, there are no less than twenty two people who give their place of birth in the Black Country – Rowley Regis, Cradley, Brierley Hill, Tipton – on this page and those around it there are Mortons, Whitehouses, Gaunts, Willetts,Siveters, Priests, Ingrams, Westwoods, Billinghams, and Taylors, all familiar local Rowley names. It looks as though there was a considerable migration amongst the iron workers from the Black Country iron works to the Barrow area.
This Moreton/Morton family (The spelling changes at this time) remained there afterwards and it appears that John Moreton died there some time between the 1901 and 1911 censuses when Eliza Morton is shown as a widow in the latter. If this is the John Moreton who was baptised in 1847, he is not our man.
Back to the mystery man –John Levett the Butcher
At this new John Levett’s marriage in St Giles in 1867, aged 21 and a butcher, of Blackheath, he gave his father’s name as John Levett, farmer. The information given in such records is only as accurate as the priest or Clerk is told so the use of this name is not necessarily true. But his use thereafter of the Levett surname does seem to indicate that he believed that he was a Levett. Perhaps he knew who his father was and decided to name his father and use his surname when he got married and thereafter.
As to the identity of this John’s father, there is only one John Levett in Rowley Regis in the 1841 and 1851Censuses, and that was John Levett of Brickhouse Farm, father of James Adshead Levett. Did the recently widowed John Levett find solace with a local girl in 1846? Perhaps he did. Was he the father of this John Levett? He would have been nearly seventy by 1847 so not impossible but perhaps unusual.
Or might James Adshead Levett, living in Perry’s Lake, and aged 42, and previously described in records as a farmer, be responsible? It appears from the variations in the descriptions of James’s occupations that the pub-keeping was only one of various occupations and as late as 1851 he was described as a colliery clerk. It may well have been that he also assisted his father with running the Brickhouse Farm.
Of the two possible illegitimate Johns baptised in Rowley, I tend towards thinking that the John Levett in Rowley is more likely to be the son of Rosannah Hobbiss. He was later living in Halesowen Street, Blackheath at the time of his marriage, just up the hill from Slack Hillock and it does seem likely that the other John reverted to his original name of Moreton and moved away from the area.
I can find no Bastardy Orders to help. Perhaps a DNA test would throw up some links or perhaps descendants of this couple actually know the story but otherwise this has to remain pure speculation.
John and Ellen Levett
This John Levett married Ellen Smith on 14 Oct 1868 at St Giles, Rowley Regis. He was 21 and a butcher of Blackheath. She was 19 and also of Blackheath, so presumably her father had given his consent to the marriage. The groom gave his father’s name and occupation as John Levett, farmer. Her father was Sydney Smith, a Manufacturer. The witnesses were Job and Sarah Siviter but these people were the Grave Digger and Church Cleaner for St Giles so this may have been the only connection, they may have acted as witnesses on a regular basis.
John was marrying into a respectable family, perhaps he felt under pressure to be able to name his father in the marriage record. Later in life their sons and daughters went into service with wealthy families and ran businesses so they must all have been presentable and capable.
Ellen Smith was the eldest daughter of Sydney Smith of Halesowen Street , Blackheath who was a Rivet Manufacturer, employing five men in 1871. From the description in the census then it appears that they were living towards the Gorsty Hill end of Halesowen Street, perhaps somewhere near the junction with New John Street.
After their marriage, the couple were living in Halesowen Street in 1871, in Garratts Lane, Old Hill in 1881 and by 1891 had moved to 2 Dudley Road, Springfield where he was described as a Labourer, (also in 1901 when he and his two remaining sons at home were stone breakers) whereas previously he had always been shown as a butcher. 2 Dudley Road was next to the Bull Inn and there is some evidence that this had been a shop, possibly a butcher’s shop previously. By this time John and Ellen Levett had had five sons and three daughters. They remained in Springfield until their deaths, both attaining grand old ages for that period. John Levett died in 1926 aged 81 and Ellen in 1929 aged 80, both are buried in St Giles Churchyard.
Their children were:
Harry (1870-1886), who died aged 15 and was buried at St Giles on 9 May 1886, his address was shown in the Burial Register as Tippity Green so their Dudley Road home appears to have been very close to the Bull Inn.
Their eldest daughter Alice (1872-1915) had in 1891 been living in as a servant in the household of Mr T Danks, Boiler manufacturer, at 77 Dudley Road, along with her sister Amy. In 1895 Alice married Samuel Dowell at Reddal Hill and they moved to St Johns-in-the-Vale, in Cumbria, where they were living in 1901, where Samuel was working in the stone quarry. (Regular readers may remember that many Rowley sett workers moved to St John’s-in-the-Vale in this period, this has been referred to in other pieces on this blog.) Alice’s brother Frank was also living with them, also working at the quarry. However, their stay in Cumbria does not appear to have lasted long as both of Alice and Samuel’s children were born in Rowley, Winifred in 1903 and Donald in 1907. In 1911 they were living in New Buildings, Tippity Green. Alice died in 1915, aged 42 and was buried at St Giles.
Frederick (1873-1932) This little Levett stayed at home! Frederick became a butcher, in 1901 and 1911 he was listed as a butcher in Rowley Village. In 1894 Fred, then a quarryman, married Elizabeth Payne at Holy Trinity, Old Hill, and they had six children, two daughters and four sons, one of the latter died in infancy. By 1921 Fred had a butcher’s shop at 35 Penncricket Lane and his son Harry (by then 24) had his own butcher’s shop at 48 Birmingham Road, Blackheath. It was this shop that I remember although by then it must have been run by Fred’s grandson or great-grandson.
Frederick and Elizabeth had four sons and two daughters, Harry (1896-1958),John (1899), Ellen (1902), George Frederick (1903-04), Alfred(1908) and Amy (1909). Harry continued to run the butcher’s shop in Birmingham Road and it was still run by Levetts up to the 1960s.
Copyright – Steve Pearce
This photograph, posted on Facebook by Steve Pearce in 2014, shows Levett’s butcher’s shop in Birmingham Road, alongside the never to be completed car park construction. The abattoir was originally behind the shop, I understand and the family sold the land on which the Shoulder of Mutton was built, the name of the pub specified as a nod to the butchery business! There are many comments on Facebook from people who remember David Levett and his son still running the business and how well respected, obliging and friendly they were, as I remember myself.
Amy (1875-1952) also went into service and after leaving Mr Dank’s household, she moved to Stoke Prior where in the 1901 Census she was a nurse to the children of Mr Victor Drury, a boot manufacturer. Her sister Lizzy was Cook in the same household. However, soon after the Census Amy married William Henry Edwards (a Rowley boy) on 27 Jun 1901. And they married in St Johns-in-the-Vale, in Cumbria (popping up again!). This family stayed in Cumbria, however, their children Frederick and Ellen were born there and they later moved to Cockermouth where they died, William in 1940 and Amy in 1952.
Frank, (1877-1938) who had been living with his sister Alice in the 1901 Census, also stayed in Cumbria. On 8 Apr 1901 he married Annie Adelaide Hindmoor Benbow at St Johns-in-the-Vale, Cumbria and they had three sons Sydney (1903), James (1904) and John (1908) He and his family moved to the USA in 1913, probably to join Annie’s brother JamesBenbow, and Frank is still listed as a sett cutter at this time. However, Annie died in Massachusetts in 1917 and Frank returned to Cumbria with his two younger sons James (1904) and John (1908) (their eldest son Sydney (1902) staying in the USA for the remainder of his life) in 1919. They were living with his sister Amy and brother-in-law William Edwards in Threlkeld in the 1921 Census. Frank died in 1938, his death registered in the Carlisle area so it is possible that he continued to live in Threlkeld or perhaps died in the Infirmary in Carlisle which is the main hospital for the area.
Lizzie (1880-1956) or Lizzy (the spelling varies throughout her life!) also remained in Springfield, Rowley for many years, listed as late as 1940 in trade directories as a shop keeper at 7, Dudley Road, where she lived with her parents until their deaths. Whether she kept the shop open is unknown but she died at 7 Dudley Road in 1956, the last of her generation, and it appears likely that she is the Elizabeth Levett who was buried at St Giles then. She had been Lizzie all her life and her birth was registered as Lizzie but formality overtook her at the end! Records show that Probate was issued to her nephews Harry and John Levett, both butchers!
Peter (1883-1944)
Peter’s is a sad story. He was unmarried and shown as a stone quarry worker in 1911, living in Dudley Road with his parents. He served in WW1 with the Worcestershire Regiment but was discharged ‘insane’ in 1919 and in the 1921 Census was shown as a patient at Barnsley Hall Mental Hospital. He was still there in the 1939 Register, shown as an ex- soldier, which probably implies that he had been there ever since. He died at Barnsley Hall in 1944.
Ernest Levett (1877-1919)
Ernest, the youngest of the children of John and Ellen Levett, was born in 1877. In 1911 he was working as a labourer at the stone quarry. He married Beatrice Taylor at St Giles on 25 Oct 1908 and they had five daughters and one son, including twin daughters Nellie and Amy born on 28 Oct 1919. He died and was buried at St Giles on 6 Dec 1919, when they were barely a month old. No mention is made of his cause of death and he may have died of Spanish flu which killed many people then. Beatrice, at the age of only 26,was left with six children aged twelve down to a few weeks old. Ernest having returned from the war, unlike many men, this must have seemed very hard to Beatrice. In the 1921 Census, Beatrice was still at 2 Tippity Green, the address given on Ernest’s enlistment papers but by 1939 she had moved with all her children except Elsie to Queens Drive, Whiteheath. It appears that Elsie died in 1927, aged 11. The other children – Lizzie (1909), Herbert (1911), Annie (1913), Elsie (1916), Nellie and Amy (twins – 1919) mostly appear to have married fairly locally, although this is entering the period when tracking people becomes more difficult because of data protection.
Summary – the other Levett family!
This John Levett was not mentioned in any of the Levett Wills I have looked at and it is not known whether the other branch of Levetts in Rowley acknowledged them. The names John and his wife used for their children are not the same names, generally, that recur frequently in the other Levett family, although the names from the Smith family, Ellen’s family – Sydney, do recur. Like the other Levetts, however, this John Levett was a hard working man, first as a butcher and later in the quarry. He left eight children and at least twenty grandchildren. No doubt there are many more descendants in later generations. Two of his sons and one of his daughters followed him into business, running shops in Springfield and the village and later in Blackheath so perhaps he had inherited at least the Levett capacity for business.
And although the family moved around the area in later years, John and Ellen and their daughter Lizzie Levett, with their shop and home lived at 7 Dudley Road right up to Lizzie’s death in 1956.
Copyright: Mike Fenton
This photograph, courtesy of Mike Fenton, shows Dudley Road in 1969, only a few years after Lizzie died and there are two shops on the left. Comments on this picture on Facebook say that the first of these was a butcher’s shop, and the second was known as Mary’s shop. I suspect that this shop was Lizzie’s shop before Mary!
The end of this part of the story of their lives has Lizzie ending up living for decades within yards of, if not actually on the site of Brickhouse Farm where the original John Levett, very possibly her grandfather or great grandfather, had lived when he moved to Rowley one hundred and fifty years earlier.
As I have commented before in this study, Rowley family roots go deep but it seems they also go in circles!
Taverns, inns, beerhouses and pubs have been in – indeed central to – our towns and villages for many centuries. The start of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, dating from 1387, begins with the pilgrims gathered at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, prior to their setting out on their pilgrimage, and doubtless there would have been many other such houses on busy routes such as existed then.
In smaller settlements some pubs were little more than drinking clubs in an ordinary house, rather than specially built institutions. Many families brewed their own ale for home consumption and many pubs did the same. (Brewed ale was safer than water often because it had been heated in the brewing process.) These successful brewers probably expanded to supply other houses and pubs, especially if it was known as a particularly good brew, big breweries did not exist until relatively recently. Some inns will have started as lodgings for monasteries and religious houses which probably moved seamlessly to independent provision after the Dissolution of the Monasteries and many hostelries, in cities, towns and on major routes will have acted as lodging places for travellers. Others will have developed as places for workmen to get a much needed drink on their way home from dry, dusty or dirty work. The Portway Tavern certainly is on record as having fulfilled this function for the quarry workers from the nearby quarry and some of the other functions from time to time, such as being the venue for inquests.
But formal countrywide legislation to regulate the operation of such places did not reach the statute book until 1753 when the Licensing Act inaugurated the recording of full registers of victuallers, to be kept by the Clerk of the Peace at Quarter Sessions.
In 1830 a Beer Act was passed whereby, upon payment of 2 guineas to the Excise, people could sell Beer, Ale, Porter, Cider and Perry without a formal license from the Licensing Justices and many of the smaller beer houses in the Rowley area fell under this category and were not permitted to sell stronger liquors.
The Licensing Act of 1872 remains in force today and it is illegal to be drunk in charge of a horse, cow or a steam engine. Other modes of transport have been included in later legislation! The Pub History Society tells us that “Under the Act some drinkers became infamous “bona fide travellers”, who could be served outside of normal trading hours. Travelling in good faith meant that you should not be “travelling for the purpose of taking refreshment”, but you could be “one who goes into an inn for refreshment in the course of a journey, whether of business or pleasure”. While people posing as travellers were regularly charged and prosecuted, it was difficult to prosecute licensees who had a handy escape clause in the law. To find the publican guilty, the prosecution had to prove that the licensee did not “honestly believe” that his customer was a bona fide traveller when serving outside of normal opening hours.” [i]
The Portway Tavern
Copyright:Mike Fenton.
The Tavern was, I am told, situated at the foot of Turner’s Hill, facing the road that went up and over the hill and the entrance to the Hailstone Quarry. As can be seen from this photograph, the proximity to the quarrying operations continued to the end. There were several houses around and behind the Tavern, in addition to a Brewhouse and other outbuildings. Some census entries call it the Portway Inn. Some do not even record the name at all.
Copyright: Alan Godfrey Maps.
This map from 1918 shows a ‘P.H.’ at Perry’s Lake, which was obviously the Portway Tavern but I am still not quite sure which building it was in those clusters of cottages. Probably one of the two corner buildings, I suspect and I am inclined to think that it was the building to the right of the new road leading down to Portway. That has several outbuildings and access to a yard which would fit with both the description at the time of the sale and the site described in the prosecution. But someone may put me right on that. It also shows the Rowley Brewery in Tippity Green and how close they were to each other.
Hitchmough records that the Portway Tavern was licensed from some point before 1849, his first names licensee was James Adshead Levett Snr, in whose family occupation it remained until it was sold after Mrs Sarah Perry who was the daughter of James Adshead Levett Junior, gave up the licence in about 1901.
But situated as it was, directly on the route which later became the toll road from Halesowen to Dudley, it seems very likely to me that a beerhouse or hostelry which later became known as the Portway Tavern existed there in some form well before licensing came into force.
The Licensing system was operated by the local magistrates and there was a Licensing Session annually when licences were renewed or not, sometimes, if the applicant had offended against the licensing laws in the meantime in which case he might lose his licence, a serious consideration. There are numerous reports in the contemporary newspapers of these sessions and in each case any offences which had been committed by the Licencee were listed, whether for exceeding licensing hours, permitting drunkenness or gambling or other instances the police reported on. There are also reports in most years that I have seen these reports of the landlords of ‘beer houses’ wanting to upgrade their licence to a full licence so that they could sell wines and spirits in addition to beer but these seemed mostly to be refused and this was obviously carefully controlled.
The Black Country Bugle, in 2003, published an article by Peter Goddard on ‘Tippetty Green and the Tromans Family and Rowley Quarries’, saying:
“Quarrymen were hard workers and hard drinkers. The Portway Tavern was the first port of call after a long shift, due to its closer proximity to the quarries. It had a small bar with a low ceiling, and a little used, long room adjacent.”
And in my blog post entitled ‘Tales of Old Portway’ I noted an article in the Dudley Chronicle in 1926 which said that:-
“The Portway Tavern is described as “the rendezvous of generations of quarrymen”, referring to recent renovations which had done much to modernise the exterior but it was noted that “the interior is pervaded with an old-world atmosphere. On a rack in the smoke room are twenty-two churchwarden pipes, numbered and tobacco stained, the blackest belonging to the oldest and most regular attendant at the pipe club which meets in the tavern on winter evenings.”
The Levett family and the Portway Tavern
In the 1841 Census James Adshead Levett the Elder is living in Perry’s Lake and listed as a Publican, although the pub is not named as such but this was undoubtedly the Portway Tavern. He had, according to the baptismal register at the time of the baptism of his son Richard in 1836, been living at Cock Green as a farmer but by the time of the baptism of his son John in December 1840, the family was living in Perry’s Lake although he was still described as a farmer then, a not unusual case of more than one occupation. In the 1851 Census he was shown as a Colliery Clerk and it was not until the 1861 Census that the Tavern was named and his occupation was shown as a Victualler. As early as 1842, James Adshead Levett Snr was listed in the Poll Books and Electoral Register as eligible to vote because he owned or rented ‘houses at Perry Lake’, so not just one house. Unsurprisingly, in view of this, censuses often show several Levett households living at Perry’s Lake, presumably in these houses, probably around or behind the pub.
Generally when James and Mary Levett were running the Tavern it appears that they kept their house in good order and I can only find one report of an offence in the newspapers. In August 1847 James was charged with permitting gaming with dice in his alehouse. PC Janson told the court that he had found
“two dice on the table and a cup, a man shaking it, and money on the table, for which they were playing. Defendant said there had been a raffle at this house that night, and afterwards the men did play for a few pence, but without his knowledge.”
He was fined 5 shillings and costs. In those days magistrates were local and the courts sat in local towns so people would have been well known to each other. And policemen had local ‘beats’ and would have known their licensees and kept a careful eye on them.
James Levett the Elder died , according to the Probate Record, on 23 Jun 1878, aged 75. His widow Mary retired to Gadd’s Green where two of her granddaughters Ellen (18) and Harriett (9) were staying with her in the 1881 Census. In his Will James had left to his ‘dear wife’ “such part of my household furniture and effects belonging thereto as she shall select for her own use except my clock and bureau which I give and bequeath to my son James”. The remainder of his property was to be sold and the proceeds to be shared equally between his four children. Interestingly, the Will notes that the house in which he lived belonged to his wife as tenant for life. The Will notes that as James the Younger had agreed on his father’s decease “to take it from her as tenant at a rent of twenty-five pounds a year, I direct that in the conversion of my said personal estate into money, my said son James shall be at liberty within a reasonable time after my death or on the happening thereof to exercise the option hereby given to him of taking the stock-in-trade fixtures and effects used by me in my business at my decease at a valuation to be made in the ordinary way in which valuations are made of stock-in-trade fixtures and effects of the like nature.”
It appears that the licence was transferred, perhaps initially to Daisy Levett but later to his son James Adshead Levett the Younger , by then a widower, who was listed as a Licensed Victualler in the 1881 Census at 29 Perry’s Lake, living there with his son William, aged 20, a carpenter, and daughters Daisy aged 23 and listed as a grocer, Kate aged 16 and a Pupil Teacher and Nelly aged 10 and a scholar. It is perhaps not surprising that Daisy should be listed as a grocer as this had been the occupation shown for her father James Adshead Levett Jnr in Perry’s Lake in the two previous censuses, so presumably when he took over the pub, she kept the grocery business going. Looking back at the time of James’s marriage in 1857 he had given his occupation as a grocer on the Tettenhall Road in Wolverhampton and this had been the profession into which he had been apprenticed at the age of 14.
So in addition to the pub, it seems that the Levetts ran a grocer’s shop in Perry’s Lake, very possibly in the same buildings. I have most definitely gained the impression that the Levett family were very flexible about their living and trading arrangements. And it seems the Levetts made sure their children were set up in suitable professions, their son Richard who was a shoemaker (and apparently part-time brewer) also lived in Perry’s Lake, William was a carpenter.
Licencing applications
Oddly, in August 1878, there were various advertisements in the County Express, giving notice of the intention of various people to apply for excise licences to sell various alcoholic beverages in their beerhouses and shops. The advertisement put in by James Adshead Levett was for an excise licence to sell “Sweets by retail, to be drunk and consumed on and off the house and premises thereunto belonging”. This is the only such application I can see, all the others are for licences to sell beer or cider or wine, why would you need an excise licence to sell sweets? Perhaps they were making home brewed soft drinks, as well as beer in their brewery?
I can remember as a child a van that came round selling brewed lemonade, ginger beer and American ice cream soda – strawberry ice cream soda or am I dreaming that? – in large pottery flagons, that was definitely quite fizzy and must have been brewed. I think the drinks were made in Oldbury but certainly very locally. Each week you returned the empty flagons for refilling, it was a rare treat because my father was chronically ill and there wasn’t much money to spare for such luxuries but I remember how delicious they were. And even today Fentimans produce botanically brewed drinks such as lemonade and ginger beer. Or perhaps it was a Printer’s error but I would be interested to hear whether anyone has any other suggestions!
Incidentally in the advertisement Mr Levett states that the house and premises were rated for the relief of the poor and that he was the tenant, the premises being owned by Thomas Auden. So it seems that the Levetts were not the owners after all. Since John Levett had been and appeared to be still bankrupt (See my first article on the Levett family for details) it would perhaps be slightly surprising if his son had the wherewithal to purchase multiple houses at Perry’s Lake in 1841.
Also in the Reports of the County Express of 14 September 1878, there is a report that the Licensing Magistrates approved the transfer of the licence for the Portway Tavern from the executors of the late James Adshead Levett the Elder to Daisy Levett, his granddaughter. But at some point it was obviously transferred again to James Levett the Younger as in the 1881 Census James was was described as the Licensed Victualler and Daisy as a Grocer.
You might think that James would be very careful because he already had a criminal record from an incident much earlier in his life so would not have wanted to be in trouble with the magistrates who obviously ran a tight ship. But alas, James Adshead Levett Jnr found himself in trouble with the police and the licensing authority more than once over the years. In September 1882 it was reported to the Annual Licensing Meeting of the court that he had been convicted of ‘permitting drunkenness on 30th November’, presumably the previous year, when he had been fined £5 plus costs. However, it seems he did not actually lose his license although it, along with several other similarly blacklisted landlords did have the licence suspended for a period.
There were two reports in the West Bromwich Weekly News about this incident, the first on 25th November 1881.
“Thomas Summerfield, Rowley Village, was summoned for being drunk and disorderly on the licensed premises of James Levett, Portway Tavern, Perry’s Lake. Prosecutor said the defendant went to his house on Sunday night, there were about 30 or 50 persons in the house, one of the men having paid for 20 quarts of ale, the defendant left but returned and commenced a disturbance, and knocked a woman down.
Superintendant Woolaston asked for the case to be adjourned, he visited the house on Sunday night in company with Sergeant Cooper and two PCs. There were about 70 persons in the house, and the landlord never interfered. A more disgraceful scene never took place. He was of the opinion that the summons was only taken out for a sham. There would be further evidence adduced. The case was adjourned.”
In the same paper in the edition of 3rd December 1881, this report appears, when James Levett was being charged with permitting drunkenness in his house:-
“PC Birch said at seven o’clock on the night of the 20th ult. He was sent to the defendant’s house in plain clothes, and remained there until 9.30. There was a large number of men and several women in the house, some of whom were drunk. There was a great disturbance, and the language used by the waiter and company was of the most disgraceful nature. Superintendant Wollaston said on Sunday night the 20th ult., he sent the last witness into defendant’s house, he remained outside with PS Cooper and PC Styles. About 8.30 he saw several persons stagger out of the house but they re-entered it almost immediately. About nine o’clock he entered the house, the passage and tap room were completely crammed with persons. There was an old woman, quarrelling with a man called Summerfield, who knocked her down and fell on to the top of her. There was great confusion. There were several men under the influence of drink. There were about 70 people in the house, every room being crowded. A more disorderly house he never saw. He spoke to defendant about it who said he was very sorry.
Cross-examined: Defendant had not been summoned before. PC Cooper corroborated.
Mr Shakespeare said the case arose under unfortunate circumstances. Defendant was away from the house some portion of the time and left someone else in charge. A friend of the defendant’s, from Birmingham, came to the house and left 10s to pay for some beer for the men who caused the disturbance complained of.
Mr Bassano [the Presiding Magistrate] said the Bench considered it a bad case and inflicted a fine of £5 and costs, and endorsed the license. Mr Shakespeare [defending solicitor] appealed to the Bench not to endorse the licence as this was defendant’s first offence. Mr Bassano said they could not alter their decision as they considered it a very bad case.”
One can imagine that if this was a regular occurrence, this might not have gone down well with respectable church going neighbours in this very small and presumably quiet community!
On another occasion Levett was prosecuted for brewing offences, which I have already described in detail in another article.
James Adshead Levett the Youngerdied, aged 63 on 26 Aug 1895, according to the Probate Record which was granted to his daughter Sarah Perry. The cause of death shown on his Death Certificate was Pernicious Anaemia and Exhaustion. His Will allowed Sarah Perry to continue the business of inn-keeping for a period of seven years with the option for a further seven if she wished and for her to have the use of the furniture, stock etc at the pub for this purpose. In fact Sarah died almost exactly seven years later but appears to have given up the pub before then, perhaps because of her poor health and other problems.
The licence, according to Hitchmough, passed then to his son William Levett who held it until 1896, when it passed to Mrs Sarah Perry, which does not quite accord with the intentions in the Will but we do not know whether Sarah was already in poor health. William’s sister. Daisy Levett, his eldest sister, had married Abner Payne in 1885 and she also continued to live in Perry’s Lake until her death in 1902.
Sarah remained the licensee until about 1901 when Hitchmough notes that the licence passed to Thomas William Williams whose family ran the Bull’s Head and had at one time been in some rivalry with the Levett family . However, I do note that Thomas William Williams was listed by Hitchmough as the Licensee of the Bull in Tippity Green from 1892-1900 so he had not moved far. He was also the owner of the Rowley Brewery in Tippity Green so had very local licensing interests.
Sarah died in 1902, as did her sister Daisy – only a few days apart and aged only 42 and 44, followed less than two months later by Sarah’s husband George Perry. But on 20 September 1902 the Portway Tavern had been put up for auction, in accordance with the Will of James Levett the Younger who had left it for Sarah to run the pub for seven years with the possibility of a further term if she so wished. It seems likely that, by this time, she was so ill that she could not continue. The children of Sarah and George Perry were taken in by aunts, uncles and others and left Perry’s Lake.
This was the preliminary advertisemment in the advertisement in the County Advertiser and Herald on the 6th September 1902:
In the full advertisement which appeared on the 20th September 1902 for the sale of the premises this fuller description was given:
“Rowley Regis, Staffs.
Highly Important Sale of a Fully-Licensed Free Public House
Alfred Hill has been favoured with instructions from the Exors. of the late Mr. James A. Levett, to Sell by Auction, on Monday, the 29th day of September, 1902, at the House of Mr. H. B. Darby, the ROYAL OAK INN, Blackheath, at 7-30 in the Evening, sharp.
Lot 1. All that Old-Established Home-Brewing, Fully-Licensed, Freehold, Free, Public House (Corner Property), now in the occupation of Mrs. Sarah Perry, and known as the PORTWAY TAVERN, Perry’s Lake, Rowley Regis, containing Tap Room, Smoke Room, Bar, Club Room, Bedrooms, Pantry, Extensive Cellaring, Brewhouse (with Maltroom over), Stabling (Six-stall), with Loft over, Range of Piggeries, and the usual conveniences, with large Yard and Gateway Entrance, and frontage to two Roads, with Tap Water laid on, and fitted with Gas throughout.
The Auctioneer begs respectfully to call the attention of Investors to these desirable Properties. The Public House offers to Capitalists the rare opportunity of securing a Fully-licensed, entirely Free, Home-brewing House, and an unusually sound Investment”.
Did it sell? I don’t know because I note that in 1911/12 the licensee was George Ward who was the husband of Hannah Levett, the daughter of Richard Levett, the shoemaker, so it seems the Levett family retained an interest in the pub for some time even if it was under another name or perhaps he took it on from Thomas William Williams. George Ward, living at 19 Perrys Lake, had also been one of the Witnesses to James the Younger’s Will.
But altogether three generations of the Levett family had run the Portway Tavern for about seventy years.
Copyright: Eileen Bird who is descended from James AdsheadLevett, shared this family photograph of the Tavern which she says was taken in 1971. I was interested how different it looked when it was painted white.
Over the next sixty or so years, there were nineteen other licensees, according to Hitchmough, most having the pub for only a few years. Because of 100 year privacy rules, it is difficult to find out much about them as individuals, although local people will still have memories of some of the more recent ones and some may even have lived there when their father or other relatives held the licence.
Local memoriesfrom Facebook
Below are some of the memories which have been mentioned on the ‘I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis’ Facebook page over the last few years. Please let me know if you object to your name being mentioned and I will remove your comments but these memories are part of the history of the Lost Hamlets in a way which will never appear in history books!
More people than I can list had their first pints there!
Several people commented that the Tavern was known locally as the ‘blood tub’. David Stokes thought this went back to the early days. His first memories were of living with his great grandfather in the cottages opposite the ‘Tavern’ in the early fifties. He said “What I can remember very well is ‘they’re fighting again’! Hence, ‘the blood tub’…as I understood it? Thankfully, a bygone era!”
Vicki Noott says that she was born in the Tavern in 1955, as her grandfather Albert Harris was the landlord in the 1950s and Maggie Bridgewater said that she also lived there in the 1950s when her parents were the licensees. Two very local surnames there! Peter Wroe’s parents were the landlords from about 1961-1966, he remembered it as a good old fashioned pub. His sister Caroline was also born there.
Joyce Connop remembered that she always used to look at the clock inside through the window to check the time on her way to Doulton Road School, to make sure she wasn’t late for school.
Ann Teague said that she remembered that there was a dirt road down the side of the tavern. The houses there were mostly occupied by Tarmac workers.
Brian Kirkham recalled that there was a row of houses behind the Tavern called Heaven and a bit down from that there was a blacksmiths shoeing horses.
Kenneth Greenhouse remembered all the old penny’s on the ceiling by the darts board.
Marie Devonport – “The road seen in the bottom of the picture was the start of Turners hill, right over the road from the Tarmac entrance. If I remember right my family lived just up the road by the telephone box on the corner.”
William Perry had recently read Wilson Jones’s book on Rowley – “it’s very informative. There is a photo of a manorial windmill that stood on the side of Hawes Hill, also there was a large pool with fish in it somewhere about opposite where the Portway Tavern used to be.”
And indeed Wilson Jones asserts in his book that on a Pre-Inclosure map of Rowley, the main habitations were around Rowley Church from about Rowley Hall to Mincing Lane . But the Manor was at Brickhouse Farm with the Manorial Green at Cock Green and the fishpond on the site of Perry’s Lake. So the original Perrys Lake was a manorial fishpond. He also states that two Manor Mills were also marked on this map, one on the opposite side to Hawes Hill, near Tippity Green and one at Windmill End. The book has a photograph of the Windmill at Tippity Green so it survived for a long time.
Andrew in 2017 said that he lived at the top of Throne Road with his grandparents in the 70’s, he used to be sent to the Portway Tavern with empty Corona bottles to be filled with sherry !
Ant Bromley particularly remembered the really good cider served there.
Marie Smith remembered her brother Eric Oddy having his 21st birthday party there and her mother getting tired – Marie says she was a lady and she never got drunk!
Arthur McWilliams worked in the garage in the quarry opposite the Tavern and recalls that some days they would go over for a pint at lunchtime. He says he will never know how they managed to work the rest of the day!
The end of the Portway Tavern
The Portway Tavern closed in 1984 and was demolished shortly afterwards. This photograph shows it standing in isolation after most of the houses around it had been demolished. St Giles’s Church can be seen on the hill behind it, and some of the houses in Tippity Green to the right.
Copyright: Mike Fenton
David Duckworth shared this rather sad photograph on Facebook of the Tavern prior to demolition, (copyright of this photograph unknown as it appears in several places).
Standing at the foot of Turners Hill Road, the Portway Tavern had been a central part of the community in the area of the hamlets for probably the best part of two hundred years, from the time when it stood alongside the toll road from Halesowen to Dudley and it had served home brewed ale to many generations of quarrymen working in the nearby quarries. Inquests were sometimes held there and some lively parties, too!
And as so often in these days when so many pubs are closing, something was undoubtedly lost from the heart of the community when it was demolished, and it was the same fate which came to the cottages and communities it once served.
My previous article was about John Levett and his connections. James Adshead Levett was the son of John Levett and Elizabeth Adshead. He was baptised at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 6 Jul 1805, followed by his sister Catherine Levett who was baptised at Halesowen Parish Church on 30 Jul 1813. James’s mother Elizabeth had died in 1822 and his father remarried in London in 1823.
I have limited myself in this piece mostly to those descendants who stayed in the immediate area of Rowley. There are many others who lived in surrounding towns and villages as well as much further afield but I have stuck for now with those who continued to be associated with the area of the Lost Hamlets. These lived consistently in Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green, Brickfields and Tippity Green.
Incidentally, I was very interested, in looking at various Levett Wills to see that at least some of them regarded Perry’s Lake as a separate place and not part of Rowley Regis, so that they gave their address as Perry’s Lake, near Dudley. All of the Lost Hamlets were, of course, within the parish of Rowley Regis but clearly at least these residents did not see it as simply part of the village.
Copyright Glenys Sykes. I apologise for these somewhat fuzzy images, I am exploring ways of producing better ones!
Catherine Elizabeth Levett and the Thorne family
John and Elizabeth’s only daughter Catherine or Kate Levett married John Brooke Thorne, a widower and a Mercantile Clerk of Bradford Street, Birmingham at St Giles on 4 Oct 1837 and they later lived in Aston in Birmingham. They appear to have had only one child, Ellen Levett Thorne who was born in Aston in July 1838 but died aged 3 years and 8 months in 1842. In 1841Ellen is not in their household, she appears to be with a Sarah Thorne, who was aged 23, living in Handsworth, along with two Finney children who were possibly related to William Finney who married Hannah Gaunt in 1833, although I have not been able to confirm any connection. Why Ellen was with Sarah Thorne is unclear and I have been unable to confirm any relationship between Sarah Thorne and John Brooke Thorne but it seems a considerable coincidence that the child should be entrusted to Sarah Thorne unless they were related.
At a later stage, on a family tree on Ancestry, there is a photograph of a beautifully bound Family Bible which has embossed on the front of it that it was presented to John Levett (1840-1922) and Sarah Petford (1844-1917) on their wedding day, 18th March 1867, by ‘their aunt Sarah Thorne’. This John Levett was the son of James Adshead Levett the Elder and his only blood aunt was Catherine Levett who was married to John B Thorne. Was Catherine/Kate known as Sarah – I have not seen this suggested anywhere else although she was frequently referred to as Kate and all official documentation shows her as Catherine or Katherine or Kate. Or was this the unknown Sarah Thorne who was caring for John and Kate Thorne’s daughter in 1841? Sarah Thorne is very elusive in the censuses, does not appear to be in the Midlands over a period of forty years and this remains a mystery – unless there is a member of the Levett family who can tell me? I would love to know!
In later censuses John and Kate Thorne had Catherine’s nephew John Levett (the one who was later presented with that bible)staying with them in Birmingham in 1851, in 1861 a niece Lissie Levett aged 11 and born in Rowley, and in 1871, a niece Janet Pearson aged 10 and said to be born in Penkridge. However, I cannot work out who this child could be, as Catherine had only one brother and he did not have a daughter called Janet. However there is a birth registration in 1860 in Penkridge for an Esther Jane Pearson, and the Mother’s maiden name is shown as Thorne, so presumably Mary was the sister of John Brooke Thorne.
John Brooke Thorne died in 1873 and was buried in Key Hill Cemetery in Birmingham.
By 1881, the widowed Catherine had moved to Sutton Coldfield where in 1881 her unmarried niece Esther Pearson, aged 20 and also born in Penkridge, was living with her, together with a Mary Pearson, aged 46, who was married and a visitor, born in Stafford. Was Esther the Janet who had been staying in 1871? It appears that Esther was indeed Janet or rather Jane, because an Esther Jane Pearson was born in Penkridge in 1860 and her Mother’s Maiden name was Thorne so it appears that this was a niece of Catherine’s husband, rather than Catherine herself. Was Mary her mother? It seems likely. However, tantalising as this rabbit hole is, it is not directly connected with the Lost Hamlets area and I will resist exploring it further! For now, anyway…
Catherine Elizabeth Thorne’s death was registered in the first quarter of 1893 in the Dudley Registration District, although I have been unable to find her burial. Perhaps in her final years she came back to the family with whom she had clearly remained in close contact through the years of her widowhood. From the number of nieces staying with her in various censuses, it would be good to think that for much of her life ‘going to stay with Aunt Kate’ was a pleasing prospect. Catherine’s Death Certificate shows that she died of ‘senectus’ – old age, and that she died at 28 Tump Road, Blackheath (later Beeches Road) and her death was registered by Mrs Ann Barker, who had been present at the death. Who Ann Barker was and why Kate was there, I have no idea but her only brother and her nephew were both dead and several of his children were to die shortly afterwards so may already have been unable to take Kate in. It is possible that Kate was buried at St Paul’s churchyard, the burial records for there have not yet been transcribed for FreeREG. She was not buried at Key Hill Cemetery with her husband, according to their records.
James Adshead Levett the Elder 1805-1878
James was married to Mary Ann Bate on 21 Feb 1832 at Wolverhampton St Peter, the witnesses being H Adshead, possibly Harriet Adhead, his aunt and James Adshead who may have been his grandfather. The Adsheads appear to have been a Wolverhampton family. Perhaps James had been staying with his Adshead relations. The first child of James and Mary Ann- also James Adshead Levett (who I shall refer to as JAL the Younger from hereon) – was baptised at Dudley St Thomas on 27 May 1832, shown in the Baptism Register as James, son of James Adshead and Mary Ann Levett of Rowley. James’s occupation was given as Farmer, perhaps at Brickfield Farm which was still in the ownership of his father. Two more sons Richard in 1836 and John in 1840 followed. A daughter Elizabeth, again probably named for her Adshead great-grandmother, was born in 1849.
The Bate family – publicans and Victuallers in Cock Green
Mary Ann Bate gives her place of birth in later censuses as Rowley Regis and her ages in those censuses consistently compute to give her a birth year of about 1813. But there is no baptism at St Giles for a Mary Ann Bate in that period. There is a baptism in 1814 for a John, son of Richard and Hannah Bate of Cock Green where the father’s occupation is shown as Victualler so in the licensed trade and he was apparently her brother.
However, there was a baptism at Dudley St Thomas on 8th Aug 1813 for a Mary Ann Bate, daughter of the same couple, Richard and Hannah Bate of Rowley, said to be a labourer so this appears to be the correct Mary Ann, and this was during is the period when extensive repairs were being carried out at St Giles which may account for the Dudley baptism.
Checking out my theory that Mary Ann’s Bate family were in the Licensed trade, I looked without success in the 1851 Census for Richard Bate and then for Hannah Bate and found her, by then a widow, listed at Cock Green, next door to Brickhouse Farm, aged 64 and a Victualler. This later became known as the Cock Inn and it certainly reinforces the idea that John and Mary Ann grew up as neighbours. I was then able to find that Richard Bate of Cock Green was buried at St Giles on 26 March 1832, aged 41, said in the Burial Register to have died of Dropsy.
Hannah Bate had also been at Cock Green in 1841, also a publican then and living apparently in the same household as her son Benjamin Bate, aged 37 and his family, although he had no occupation shown. Perhaps his mother was the licensee but he also worked in the pub.
Hitchmough shows that three members of the Bate family owned the Cock Inn between 1814 and 1873, with John Bate, mentioned above, the last of these. In 1818, a daughter Sarah had been baptised at St Giles to Richard and Hannah Bate of Cock Green but this time Richard’s occupation was given as a farmer, another instance of double occupations for victuallers. Multi-generation pub-keeping seems to have been quite common in Rowley!
There are numerous entries in the St Giles Registers for the Bate family and many of them are in the Cock Green area which was adjacent to Brickhouse so James and this Mary Ann would have known each other from childhood as neighbours. Why they were married in Wolverhampton is another matter, (although there is a marriage of a Richard Bate in Wolverhampton in 1808 so perhaps the Bate family had connections there, like the Adsheads). Or it may simply have been that Mary Ann was at least six months pregnant at the time of the marriage on 21 Feb 1832, as James Adshead the Younger was baptised on 27 May 1832 at Dudley, again, not in the parish so perhaps an attempt to keep a low profile on this. Or simply that James was in busisness there or perhaps that one or other of their families did not approve of the marriage, we cannot tell.
The 1841 Census shows James Adshead Levett and his family in Perry’s Lake where his occupation is shown as ‘Publican’. Richard at that time was 5 years old and John just 8 months old. Little James would have been nine and was not shown in the household, because he was with his grandfather John Levett at BrickhouseFarm. So by that time James had already moved from Brickhouse Farm to Perry’s Lake and become a publican, presumably at The Portway Tavern although it was not named as such in the census. We can narrow the date of that move down even more. At Richard’s baptism on29 May 1836, the abode is given as Cock Green and his father’s occupation as a Farmer but by the time John was baptised on 6 Dec 1840 his father’s address was shown as Perry’s Lake, although he was still shown as a farmer. So James and Mary Ann must have moved from Cock Green, in all likelihood from Brickhouse Farm, although possibly from Mary Ann’s family residence at Cock Green, to Perry’s Lake at some point between 1836 and 1840.
According to Hitchmough’s Guide to Black Country pubs, James Adshead Levett the Elder was the Licensee at the Portway Tavern from at least 1841 until 1887 and his son James Adshead Levett the Younger from 1887-1895, followed by William Levett from 1892-1896, some overlap there. Interestingly, Hitchmough lists the owner of the pub as Thomas B Williams and Lizzie Bate and also states that it was acquired by Ansells on 15th June 1846 which seems a very early date, especially as Ansells itself was not founded until 1858, so I suspect that Ansells acquired it in 1946, not 1846. The name Bate is also of interest here as Mary Ann, the wife of James was a Bate so perhaps her family bought the pub.
But James appears to have had more interests than the Portway Tavern in Perry’s Lake, he was listed in the Poll Books and Electoral Registers as the ratepayer of Freehold houses there between at least 1841 and 1878, though there may be other Poll Books which have not yet been digitised.
In August 1847, the Worcestershire Chronicle reported that James Levett of Rowley Regis was summonsed before the Magistrates as P.C.Janson had charged him with
“permitting gaming with dice in his house, an ale house on the 7th August. On the table were two dice and a cup, a man shaking it and money on the table for which they were playing. Defendant said that there had been a raffle at his house that night and afterwards the men did play for a few pence, but without his knowledge. – Fined 5 shillings and costs. “
In the 1851 Census, James and Mary Ann were at Perry’s Lake, though there is still no mention of the Portway Tavern and James’s occupation is shown as Colliery Clerk. It was quite common for publicans to have other jobs and if, as I suspect, Mary Ann was the daughter of a publican, it is quite likely that she would have been very involved in the management of the pub. Their children, shown as Richard aged 15 and Elizabeth aged 1 were at home but John was not.
In the 1861 Census, James is shown for the first time at the Portway Tavern and as a Victualler, along with Mary Ann, and their unmarried son Richard, now 26 and a shoe maker.
In the 1871 Census, James and Mary Ann are again shown at the Portway Tavern, and he is shown as a Licensed Victualler.
Perhaps there was a little rivalry between the Bull’s Head and the Portway Tavern – Hitchmough relates an account that after Thomas Williams had taken over the licence of the Bull’s Head in 1875,
“The pub prospered much to the reported displeasure of the Levett family who were running the PORTWAY TAVERN …… One night the windows of the BULLS HEAD were mysteriously smashed. The following night, Thomas, always called Master by his wife, was seen leaving his pub with a poker up his sleeve, and setting out over Allsops Hill. The following day it was reported that the windows of the PORTWAY TAVERN had been broken during the hours of darkness! The BULLS HEAD suffered no further damage.”
James Adshead Levett the Elder died , according to the Probate Record, on 23 Jun 1878, aged 75. Mary Ann had moved to Gadd’s Green by the time of the 1881 Census, described as a Retired Licensed Victualler, where her granddaughters Ellen Levett, aged 18 and Harriet Levett aged 9 were living with her. Mary Ann died 15 Jan 1890, according to her Probate Record, aged 76, her burial record states that she died in Perry’s Lake, she was buried on 20 Jan 1890 at St Giles.
The children of James and Mary Ann
Copyright Glenys Sykes.
Of the children of James the Elder and Mary Ann, James Adshead Levett the Younger and Richard stayed in the Perry’s Lake area for the rest of their lives. I shall deal with James in more detail later as he is the one I have most information about but this is what became of the other children of James Adshead Levett the Elder and Mary Ann:
Richard (1838-1907) and his family
Richard, the Boot and Shoe maker, married Mary Merris in 1863 at Dudley St Thomas and they had five daughters – Ellen in 1863, Hannah in 1864, Elizabeth or Lizzie in 1867, Harriet in 1872 and Mary Ann in 1875. Mary Merris died in 1878 and Richard never remarried.
Of these girls, I have been unable to find any trace of Ellen after 1881, no marriage or death.
Hannah married George Ward and they stayed in Rowley Regis, living in Perry’s Lake. They had two children Amy Ward in 1887 and William Ward in 1893. Alas Hannah also died aged 41 in 1906 and she was buried in St Giles on 26 Jun 1906.
Elizabeth (or Lizzie) had gone into service and was in Manningham, Yorkshire for the 1891 Census. I think it was this Lizzie Levett who died in the Sheffield area, possibly in the North Bierlow Workhouse and was buried on 9 Jun 1899 at the City Road Cemetery, Sheffield, Yorkshire, aged 31.
Harriet married John Rudkin and I have already uploaded a whole article on the Rudkin family. Harriet’s children were all born in Rowley, the last in 1909 but she then moved to Cannock in 1911 and later to Meriden and then possibly Nuneaton as that was where she died in 1956.
Mary Ann Levett married Charles Jones in 1897 at Reddall Hill and they lived in Ross in Rowley and later Oldbury. I have been unable to trace the couple after 1921 when they were living in Church Street, Oldbury with their five children and looking for Charles or Mary Jones is a difficult exercise!
So it appears that Hannah was the only one of Richard’s daughters to stay in Rowley and she had died by 1906.
John Levett (1840-1922) and his family
John Levett, the third son, married Sarah Ann Petford at St Giles in 1867 and they moved to live in Harts Hill, Dudley where they had ten children. These were Kate Elizabeth (1867), Fred (1870), Florence Mary (1872), Kezia Beatrice (1873), Daisy (1874), Harry Brooke (1875-1875), Janet (1877), William A (1879), Major (1881) and May (1887). Sarah died in 1917 in Dudley and John died in September 1922 in Halifax, Yorkshire where he was living with his daughter Daisy. So this branch of the Levett family had moved completely out of the Lost Hamlets area.
Elizabeth Levett and her family
Elizabeth Levett married Edward J Stamps in 1871 in Handsworth, Birmingham and they had one daughter Violet Stamps (1873) and three sons Edward Levett Stamps (1875), Thomas Bernard Stamps (1876) and Ernest Cecil Stamps (1877). The family lived in Sutton Coldfield until 1911 but by 1921 the widowed Elizabeth was living with her son Edward in Carshalton, Surrey where Elizabeth died in 1925. Another branch of the Levett family which had moved completely out of the Lost Hamlets area.
James Adshead Levett the Younger (1832-1895) and his family
In those days, it was quite common for boys to be apprenticed at about the age of fourteen, which was usually a seven year commitment. And James was apprenticed to Mr Gill of Bilston, a Provision Dealer, at the age of fourteen, which would have been in about 1846. Following my research on the Old Swinford Hospital School, and their apprenticing practices, it does occur to me that James may have attended the school but I have not been able to check their records, so the apprenticeship may simply have been arranged by his family. He apparently left before his apprenticeship was completed, with Mr Gill’s concurrence and went into the employ of Mess’rs Hallam and Spikes who may have been in Birmingham. Mr Gill had apparently always found James to be ‘a faithful, honest and industrious servant’ whilst in his employ. His new employers also found him steady and faithful until in 1850 he seems to have had a momentary aberration.
A spell ‘inside’!
In October 1850 James Adshead Levett the Younger was convicted at Birmingham of stealing five shillings and sixpence from his employer and sentenced to 12 months in Birmingham Boro’ Gaol, or possibly the Moor Street lock-up. (A new Gaol had been built in 1849 so if this was where James was held it was very new. Or he may have been held in the Birmingham Lock up in Moor Street, it is not clear.) James was now 19 but his former employers, both Mr Gill and Mess’rs Hallam and Spikes evidently did not think of him as an habitual criminal as Mr Gill expressed willingness to take him back into his employ. Mess’rs Hallam and Spikes were said to regard the taking of the money as ‘an act of peculation’, rather than a determined theft.’ and bore witness to his general honesty. Peculation is the act of illegally taking or using money, especially public money, that you are responsible for managing.
How do I know all this? Because in The National Archives is a letter to the Home Secretary [i] Sir George Grey, dated 10 December 1850, from the Mayor of Dudley Thomas Fereday, urging that James’s sentence should be commuted. This letter emphasised the good standing of James’s family in the local community, that the signatories had known them for many years and that they had always ‘maintained the highest character for honesty and integrity’.
Copyright: The National Archives – Reference HO 18/294
The letter goes on that James’s mother had been ‘greatly depressed in spirits ever since his committal and her health which has been gradually declining, is now in a precarious state’.
The letter therefore asked the Home Secretary to consider remitting or commuting James’s sentence. The number and identity of signatories to this letter is impressive. The signatories were:- Thomas Fereday, Mayor of Dudley; William Crump, Incumbent of Rowley Regis; Samuel Nicklin, Churchwarden of Rowley Regis; Thomas Sidaway, Churchwarden of St Luke’s Church at Reddal Hill; William F Peart, Curate of Rowley Regis; Samuel Gill, Provision Dealer of Bilston, the former Master of J A Levett; Francis Northall of Rowley Regis; Charles Hallam, Tea Dealer, Birmingham.
Also appended to this request was a statement that “We the undersigned are desirous of certifying that the parents and family of James Adshead Levett whom we have known many years, have always borne a high character for honesty and integrity.” This statement had been signed by Isaac Budge, and Councillor Cartwright, both Magistrates for the County of Worcester and Stafford.
What an impressive list of supporters for the family had put together this letter. Did it work? It seems unlikely. There is a note on the outside of the paper that James would have immediate employment if he was released and that an answer was sent on the 4th January 1851 but a scribbled note appears to say Nil and certainly James was still in prison at the time of the census in 1851. What a terrible time this must have been for the family. I found it touching that so many people of position and standing in the community tried to intervene to get James’s sentence reduced. And, it seems, James’s mother Mary Ann survived and lived on until 1890.
James Adshead Levett the Younger obviously served his time and rebuilt his life over the next few years. He married Elizabeth Smith by Banns on 26 Nov 1857 at St Mark’s Wolverhampton (Wolverhampton keeps cropping up, doesn’t it?) at which time he was a grocer in Tettenhall Road and their daughter Daisy, the first of ten children, was born in Rowley in 1858, with their abode given in the baptismal register at St Giles as Perry’s Lake and James’s occupation shown as Grocer, the trade he had been apprenticed to originally. A son William followed in 1860, twins Sarah and Mary in in 1863, Kate in 1865, Harriet in 1867, Nellie in 1870, Alice in 1872, Fred in 1873 and Amy in 1875.
In 1861 James Adshead Levett the Younger and Elizabeth, with William, are in Perry’s Lake, in a grocer’s shop, although Daisy is with her maternal grandparents William and Sarah Smith on Freebodies Farm on Turner’s Hill.
Another Bankruptcy? But in the Birmingham Journal of 12 May 1866 there was a Notice that there had been a First Meeting in re Bankruptcy for James Adshead Levett the Younger of Deritend, which is in Birmingham, a labourer, formerly of Rowley Regis, with debts of £204 6s and assets of £202. 5s 2½d, when an assignee was appointed. How strange that Bankruptcy should have been involved for a difference of a couple of pounds.
Did he move to Birmingham for a time in between the two censuses? Did his grocery shop run into trouble? Twins Sarah and Mary were baptised at St Giles on 9 November 1862, Kate Elizabeth on 30 Apr 1865, and James’s occupation in all of these was given as grocer. So if there was a bankruptcy, it appears to have been resolved very quickly because I have not been able to find any other formal Notices which are usually involved in the process. Other bankruptcies I have seen in this research have generated numerous advertisements and meetings but this one does not appear to have had this happen. Had it not been for the reference to the full name and James being formerly of Rowley Regis I would have thought that this was a case of mistaken identity. Or perhaps family realised what was happening and helped James out of his difficulty.
In 1871, the family are still in Perry’s Lake although James is now described as a Labourer. ElizabethLevett, nee Smith, died in 1876, aged only 45 and was buried at St Giles.
Taking over the Portway Tavern
After his father’s death in Jun 1878, James Adshead Levett the Younger applied early in September 1878 for a new Licence for the premises in Perry’s Lake, apparently successfully. I cannot think this would have happened if James was still bankrupt.
In 1881, James was listed as a Licensed Victualler in Perry’s Lake, and his daughter Daisy, by then 23, was a grocer. Other children William, aged 21, a carpenter, Kate, aged 16 a pupil teacher and Nellie, aged 10, a scholar were also living with him. Twins Sarah and Mary, aged 18, were also listed in Perry’s Lake though not apparently in the same house but their occupations were described as ‘Licensed Victualler’s daughters with a note on the census ‘see note on Portway Tavern. Sadly the note is not visible but it appears that the flexible living arrangements of the Levett family in Perry’s Lake was well established. The twins were each married soon after that census.
In 1891, James was still at the Portway Tavern with his son William, and his niece Harriet. But in August 1895 he died and was buried at St Giles on the 30th August.
What happened to James and Elizabeth’s children?
Daisy Levett was married in 1885 to Abner Payne but they do not appear to have had any children before her early death on 24 Oct 1902 at the age of 44. Daisy was buried on 31 Oct 1902 at St Giles.
William Levett stayed in the area and died on 5th June 1904, his abode at the time of his burial on 8th Jun 1904 was shown in the Burial Register entry as Gadds Green. He did not marry, so far as I have been able to discover and in his Will, his married sisters Catherine and Elizabeth were his executors. He was also 44 at the time of his death.
Mary Adshead Levett was married to Joseph Foley on 6 Sep 1881 at Halesowen and lived in Powke Lane and later Garratts Lane, before moving to West Bromwich, never returning to live in Rowley village. Though Mary and her daughter Sarah both later ran sweet shops in West Bromwich and Oldbury so they carried on the trading traditions of the Levett family. Mary and Joseph had five children of whom two died in infancy. The eldest son John James Adshead Foley died in 1902, aged only 19. 1902 , indeed the first decade of the 1900s, were terrible years for the Levett family. Mary’s remaining son Albert Edward married in 1915 but did not have had any children, so far as I can find and appears to have been divorced as his wife re-married in 1931. In the 1939 Register Alfred was living with his sister Sarah in Station Road, Oldbury, and was described as a retired Motor Engineer (incapacitated), whereas she was still described as a shopkeeper (Sweets and Tobacco). I have not been able to identify a death or burial for Arthur.
Mary Foley, nee Levett was living with her daughter Sarah in High Street, West Bromwich in the 1921 Census, both were widows and Mary died in West Bromwich in 1922, aged 59. I suspect that she and Joseph may have separated before 1901, and there is no evidence of them being together after 1891. Evidence suggests that Joseph ‘married’ his barmaid Amy Read, twenty years his junior, in 1901 (according to the number of years married shown in the 1911 Census) although I have not found any evidence of such a marriage or of a divorce. It is not impossible that a divorce did happen, although Mary Foley was still describing herself as married in the 1911 Census!
Sarah Adshead Levett, Mary’s twin, was married in 1882 at Netherton to George Perry, (whose brothers Samuel and Daniel kept the Why Not Inn in Reddall Hill, another pub-keeping family) and Sarah and George lived at Gadds Green and subsequently took over the Portway Tavern, although George seems also to have kept up his other occupation as an iron or scrap dealer. Sarah and George had five children, Ada, born 1888, Mabel born 1891, James, born 1892, Alfred born 1894 and Miriam born 1896.
Sadly Sarah Adshead Perry, nee Levett died on 28th October 1902, aged 40, only four days after her oldest sister Daisy who was 44 when she died. Their funerals were held three days apart. And only weeks later on 31 December 1902 Sarah’s husband George Perry also died, aged 47, so that their children were orphaned.
Alcoholism seems to be an occupational hazard for publicans and all three adults who died in late 1902 died of alcoholism and related causes. There is also some evidence of epilepsy in the family, as epilepsy was given as one of the causes of death for Daisy and some years earlier, during the trial of James Levett for brewing offences, it was mentioned in evidence that one of Sarah’s children had suffered a fit on the evening of the alleged offence.
Of Sarah and George Perry’s children, the two older girls of the Perry family were living with their aunt Mary in Smethwick in 1911, both working as shop assistants in a draper’s shop. Ada went to New York, USA in 1912, marrying there and dying in Pennsylvania in 1964. I have been unable to trace her sister Mabel in this country after the 1911 Census but note with interest that a Mabel Perry of the correct age travelled to New York in 1914 and I wonder whether she went to join her sister there.
The two boys went to their father’s brothers at the Why Not Inn in Reddall Hill. James Perry became a mechanic and subsequently emigrated to Canada where he married and had two children, dying in Ontario in 1965. Alfred stayed in Reddall Hill, where he married and had one son, he had taken over the management of the Why Not Inn by 1921, that common family trade but died – yet another premature Levett death, at the age of 38 in 1933.
Little Miriam, the youngest at only five when her mother died, appears to have been adopted by the Pearson family who kept the Haden Cross Inn at Haden Hill. I believe that she married George Yarranton in 1927 and had two sons, dying in the Sandwell area in 1980.
Nellie Levett, the youngest of the children of James Adshead Levett the Younger married James Kirby in 1890 and they had ten children. They continued to live in the area, in Gadds Green and in Perry’s Lake. In 1921 the family were living at 7 Tippity Green, with nine of the children and two grandchildren.
The Kirby children were William James (1891-1941), Elizabeth (b.1892), Frederick (b.1894), Mary known as Polly) b.1895, Sarah Helen (1897-1906), John (b.1898), Miriam (b.1900), Mabel (b.1902), Samuel (b.1904), Ada (b.906), Lily (b.1908), Nellie (b.1911) and Beatrice May (b.1913). In 1939, for the Register commissioned for identification and rationing purposes, many of these brothers and sisters were living at 6 Windsor Road, with the oldest William as Head of the Household, their mother Nellie having died in 1925 and father James Kirby in 1937. At the time of James Kirby’s burial the abode is given as Hailstone House, Tippity Green so this part of the family had stayed in the immediate area. Nellie gave her children so many Levett Christian names there, familiar from her siblings and her wider family! Many of the Levett girls gave their children the names Levett and Adshead as second names, which can help a lot with tracing them in the records.
Born, as most of Nellie’s children were, on the cusp of the 20th century, it is not always possible to trace their whereabouts properly, as records tend to be closed for privacy reasons for 100 years but it appears from those who I have been able to track, that many or most of this family stayed in or close to Rowley, often in the immediate area of Perrys Lake, Gadds Green and Tippity Green, true Lost Hamlets people.
The descendants of John Levett in the Lost Hamlets
So there we have the Levett family – from the arrival in Rowley of John Levett, from Stepney, London, grandson of the Nock family, in about 1800, through his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – they lived in the Lost Hamlets area for almost exactly a century, although their Nock ancestors had been there much longer – also spreading around the wider area and further afield. They ran pubs, shops and businesses, brewed ale, suffered bankruptcies, prosecutions and even prison and conducted bitter disputes with the Curate in that time. They married members of other families in the licensed trade numerous times. And the other familiar names of the Lost Hamlets families appear frequently on their family tree.
But by 1911 the last of this branch of the Levett name in the village had died, many of them after relatively short lives, and the family had suffered some grievous losses. At the end of that time, although there were descendants from the female line still living in the village, there were no Levetts who could trace their descent directly from the original John Levett.
Or were there?
Where did Levett’s Butchers , who I remember from Blackheath and mentioned right at the start of the first article, fit into this? I had not found any connection between this family and those Levetts. And when I double checked for Levetts in the village in the 1911 Census, I was surprised to see that there was still a John Levett with his family in Springfield in 1911 and his son Fred in the village, John keeping a shop in Springfield and Fred a butchers shop in Rowley village.
But that’s another story… and a third instalment to come about the Levetts!
Rudkin is not a common name in Rowley Regis and I only came across it while I was researching the Levett family. Yes, another rabbit hole for me to explore!
Harriet Levett (1872-1956) was the third of the four daughters of Richard Levett, he the second son of James Adshead Levett the Elder and brother to James Adshead Levett the Younger. Richard, born in 1836, was married to Mary Merris and they lived in Perry’s Lake, where Richard was a Boot and Shoe Maker and he also helped his brother out with brewing, as mentioned in my recent article about a court case.
Harriet’s mother died when Harriet was only six and subsequently she was staying with her grandmother Mary Levett in Gadd’s Green at the time of the 1881 Census, while her father and other sisters were living in Hawes Lane, and in 1891 she was in Perry’s Lake with her uncle James Adshead Levett and his son William, (also mentioned in the court case), although her father was by then immediately next door with his youngest daughter Mary Ann, aged 16 and a visitor Ann M Parkes, also 16, a dressmaker, so perhaps a friend of Mary Ann.
On 13 May 1894Harriet Levett married John Rudkin at Holy Trinity, Old Hill, when he was 26 and she was 22.
John Rudkin, born in 1868, was not a Rowley native, but he was living at 17 Tippity Green in 1881 and at 24 Perry’s Lake in 1891, lodging with Edward Payne, along with his brother William so he had been living very close to Harriet for most of their lives, the boy next door, as it were. I say that John was not a Rowley native but his younger brother William was, born in Rowley Regis in 1875. They were two of the sons of William Rudkin. So I looked for John in the 1871 Census and found him living with his family William and Jane Rudkin in Cainham, near Ludlow in Shropshire. Now, where have we come across Cainham before? Ah, yes, when I was looking at migration patterns among the quarry workers in an earlier article when I found that quite a few sett makers had moved from Mountsorrel in Leicestershire to Rowley Regis to work, had married in Rowley and then moved on to Cainham in Shropshire. And sure enough, when I looked at this family, the pattern fitted again.
Copyright unknown, this photograph of the Clee Hills quarries in Shropshire shows that the quarrying area is not dissimilar to Rowley but without the surrounding heavy industry!
William Rudkin the Elder, John Rudkin’s father, was born in 1835 in Groby, Leicestershire. In 1851 he was living in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire where his father (also William) was a Quarry man and William himself was a Frame Work Knitter, another repeating detail as a Leicestershire occupation.In 1861, William was in Rowley Regis. The ten years between the two censuses were eventful for the Rudkin family.
The 1871 Census shows John Rudkin, with his father William, a Stone Cutter, who was living in Cainham with his wife Mary Jane (nee Parkes, I would later find). Jane, aged 25, had been born in Rowley Regis and their oldest child Sarah J, aged 14 was also born in Rowley Regis , while son Thomas aged 5 was born in Cainham, John aged 3 apparently born in Ludlow, and Elizabeth A, aged 1 also born in Cainham. And living with them were Thomas Parkes, his brother-in-law, aged 15, a labourer and his widowed mother-in-law Mary Parkes, both of them born in Rowley Regis. A classic Mountsorrel/Rowley/Cainham pattern!
And because I always try to find the birth registration in the GRO registers for my records, I was able to confirm that the mother’s maiden name of all the younger children was indeed Parkes. So that all tied together nicely. Except…
Looking at the family in 1871, I noticed that the oldest child Sarah J was 14, born in 1857, but Jane Rudkinwas only 25. It seemed very unlikely that she had had a baby at 11. Technically possible perhaps but unlikely. Sarah J must have been born to someone else. So I looked for Sarah’s birth registration – and there was no birth registration for a Sarah Jane Rudkin in the right period. There was, however, a registration of a Sarah Jane Parkes in the first quarter of 1856, with no Mother’s Maiden Name recorded which is usually an indication of illegitimacy. And then I found a baptism on 27 July 1856 at St Giles, Rowley Regis for Sarah Jane Parkes, the illegitimate daughter of Ann Parkes. Not Mary Jane, who was only eleven at this time. So, another puzzle – who was Ann Parkes?
Some more digging around showed that Ann Parkes was born in 1833 in Rowley Regis, the daughter of Joseph Parkes of Tippity Green. Ann Parkes and William Rudkin had been married on 26 Oct 1857 at Dudley St. Thomas, and their son Charles (1858-1861) was born in the last quarter of 1858, followed by Mary (1861-1862) and twins Ann and Maria in 1863, all in Rowley Regis. Now I was able to find William, Ann and Charles in Tippity Green in the 1861 Census. It appears that William accepted Sarah Jane into his household as she was shown as Rudkin in all subsequent censuses. Alas, Ann died, in childbirth or soon after the twins were born, as she was buried on 21 Jul 1863 at St Giles, Rowley Regis, aged 28 and of Perry’s Lake, shortly after the birth of the twins. Baby Ann died in October and was buried on 25 Oct 1863, followed a few months later by her twin Maria who was buried on 20 Jan 1864.
So poor William Rudkin had lost his wife and all four of his children in the space of six years. It is possible that Sarah Jane was also his child but equally possible that she was not as William and Ann did not marry until Sarah Jane was at least fifteen months old.
William, a working quarryman, must have had a lot of help for those new-born twins to survive even a few months. He was living close to his in-laws and no doubt they and other neighbours would have helped to look after the children. So perhaps it is not surprising that on 19 Oct 1863, (just three month’s after Ann’s death) William Rudkin married again, at Dudley Saint Thomas, this time to Mary Jane, usually known as Jane, Parkes. Who appears to have been Ann’s sister!
Perhaps William felt Rowley was not a good place for him or perhaps better money was on offer as they must have moved to Shropshire soon afterwards. William and Jane went on to have four children in Cainham – Edward Thomas (1866-1923), John (1868-1949) who married Harriet Levett and Edith Ann, (1870-1942). As the dates show, these three children all survived into adulthood unlike most of their earlier half siblings. Another son George Henry was baptised on 13 Oct 1872 at Knowbury. But by the time of the 1881 census, everything had changed again.
By 1881, Mary Parkes, now 68, was back in Tippity Green, living with her daughter Elizabeth Parkes, aged 28, the three Rudkin grandchildren, a granddaughter AnnieParkes, aged 6 and another Rudkin grandson named William who was aged 5 and born in Rowley. (Also a lodger William Foley, a miner aged 43). When you think how small the cottages in that area were, it must have been quite crowded.
Where were William Rudkin and Jane? William had died in Shropshire in 1872, just a couple of months after the baptism of their new son George Henry and William was buried on 10 Dec 1872 at St Paul’s church, Knowbury. I do not know what he died of and can find no other records about him but he was only 37 so possibly an industrial accident or perhaps a disease. And Jane? She had obviously moved back to Rowley with her mother and the children by 1874 because George Henry died and was buried at St Giles on 15 Feb 1874, aged 1. And she had had another child William in Rowley Regis in 1875. There is no way of knowing who was little William’s father but it could not have been William Rudkin, her late husband since he had died in 1872.
Jane herself was not in that 1881 Census entry because she, too, had died and had been buried at St Giles on 21 Apr 1878, aged 31.
So poor Mary Parkes, herself elderly, was now responsible for her four Rudkin grandchildren, although by 1881 both Thomas and John were working at the quarry.
What became of the Rudkin children?
I have not been able to trace Sarah Jane Parkes or Rudkin after the 1871 census, there are no definite sightings of her under the name Rudkin and there are so many Sarah Parkes that it is not possible to be sure which if any of them is her. She could have married, gone into service, died under either name – it remains a mystery.
Edward Thomas Rudkin joined the army at some point shortly after this, and when he married Kate Cook in Buriton, Southampton in 1887 he was a Corporal. Presumably travelling with the army, they had two daughters in India, one of whom died there. When they returned to England, they lived in Army Cottages in Kempsey, Worcestershire, presumably based at the Barracks there and later moved to Saltley in Birmingham where Edward was working as a Commissionaire at the Motor Works in 1911. By 1923, they had returned to the Portsmouth area where Edward died in 1923 and Kate in 1936. Their surviving daughter Edith married George Henry Day in Portsmouth in 1915 and she was still living there until she died on 27 May 1941, listed among civilian war deaths there so possibly killed in bombing raids on Portsmouth. She and George Day appear to have had three sons, the first born in Leicester. I wonder whether she had gone back to her Rudkin family there? Pure speculation, of course!
Edith Ann Rudkin went into service and in 1891 she was living at 6 Siviters Lane, Rowley as a domestic servant to Dr Beasley. In 1901 she was still described as a domestic servant but was visiting a friend in Dudley. In 1908 she married a widower Charles Upton in Aston, Birmingham and in the 1911 Census they were living in Hednesford, Cannock with his two daughters from a previous marriage and Edith May, their own daughter born in 1910. Sadly little Edith May died in 1915. Edith Ann was a widow according to the 1921 Census and she died in Cannock in 1942, aged 72.
John Rudkin, my starting point for this family mini-study, had married Harriett Levett in 1894 at Holy Trinity, Old Hill and they had four children. In 1901 they were still living in Perry’s Lake with their son Lawrence (1895-1951) who was six. John was working as a hewer in a coal mine.
By 1911, they had left Rowley and were living in Rugeley Road, Hednesford, Cannock – yes, the same place as John’s sister Edith, nineteen miles from Rowley, according to Google maps. Whether Edith moved to be near John or vice versa, I don’t know but they were living less than a mile apart. By this time John and Harriett also had Edith (1904-1979), Mary(1907-1927) and WilliamThomas (1909 – ?). John was still working as a miner or Stallman at the pit face and now his son Lawrence, aged 16, was also working in the pit as a driver (underground).
In 1921, John and Harriett had moved again and were living in Kingsbury, near Meriden, the other side of Birmingham. All their children were still at home and again both John and Lawrence were working as miners at the Kingsbury Colliery.
Most of the children stayed in the Meriden area from then on, although it is possible that the youngest William Thomas settled elsewhere as he joined the Navy in 1927 and his service details note him as having been traced for his pension in 1949, though I cannot find any other definite information for him.
John and Harriet appear only to have had two grandchildren, one of them Betty, (the illegitimate daughter of Lawrence) who was born in Tamworth in 1926 and emigrated to the USA with her American husband in 1947, perhaps a War Bride. The only photograph I have been able to find of the Rudkin family in this country is of a young Lawrence in what looks like WWI army uniform, which was uploaded to Ancestry and was marked on the back as ‘Betty’s father’. Her application for naturalisation in the USA gives Rudkin as another name so it appears that this was an acknowledged connection. So the Rudkin genes stretch over the Atlantic, it seems.
Lawrence Rudkin as a young soldier, possibly in WW1. Copyright unknown.
John’s daughter – another Edith – had married William C Monk in Sutton Coldfield in 1941 and had one son Peter in 1942 so he was their only grandson.
The Rudkins in Rowley
So none of the Rudkin family stayed in Rowley Regis, mostly they and their descendants ended up in Warwickshire or further afield and the name will be unknown to most Rowley folk.
So why have I written in such detail about a family who had such a brief encounter with the village?
I have recently been reading some books by Gillian Tindall who is known, according to reviews, as a superb ‘micro-historian’. She is someone who writes about small communities, individual people, a village, a single house – in great detail. Her writing is fascinating and I learn from her writing constantly. The first book of hers which I read was ‘The house by the Thames’ and it is all about a single very old house which survives even now, between the Globe theatre and the Tate Modern on the Embankment in London. It is most interesting and I have learned much about the history of the area and the people who lived there. (I now have three other books by Gillian Tindall waiting to be read!) But it was in the first pages of this book that I read about the philosophy which drives her research and this sang to my heart. She wrote in the first chapter:
“the vast majority of men and women in every time do not leave behind them either renown or testimony. These people walked our streets, prayed in our churches, drank in our inns or in those that bear the same names, built and lived in the houses where we have our being today, opened our front doors, looked out of our windows, called to each other down our staircases. They were moved by essentially the same passions and griefs that we are, the same bedrock hopes and fears, they saw the sun set over Westminster as we do. Yet almost all of them have passed away from human memory and are still passing away, generation after generation –.”
“Witness to the living, busy complex beings that many of these vanished ones were tends to be limited to fleeting references on pages of reference books that are seldom opened. At the most, there may be a handwritten note or a bill, perhaps a Will, a decorative trade-card, a few lines in a local newspaper or a report from a long obsolete committee, possibly an inscription on a tomb. There may perhaps be a relevant page or two in an account of something quite other, or a general social description which seems to fit the specific case.
Scant evidence, you may say, of lives as vivid and as important to the bearers as our own are to us today. But by putting these scraps together, sometimes, with luck, something more coherent is achieved. Pieces of lost lives are genuinely recovered. Extinct causes clamour for attention. Forgotten social groups coalesce again. Here and there a few individual figures detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned them. They walk slowly towards us. Eventually we may even see their faces.”[i]
‘Neither renown nor testimony’
In Rowley Regis today, of course, there are very few old buildings and our ancestors did not live in our particular houses, look out of our windows or call down our stairs. But the landscape they gazed on has not changed so much and indeed with much of the polluting heavy industry gone or cleaned up, the local scene is perhaps now closer in appearance to the pre-industrial landscape our earlier ancestors would have known. They, too would have gazed across the valley to the Clent hills and been able to spot distant church steeples and the ruins of Dudley Castle, still visible today.
While I was researching Harriet Levett and her marriage to John Rudkin, I had realised that John had grown up in Tippity Green and Perry’s Lake, in the heart of the Lost Hamlets, and that his father had been married to not one but two Rowley girls, the older of whom had borne him four children in Rowley. The children had all died as infants, buried, like Ann herself, in Rowley Regis at St Giles and only one of her children Sarah J had grown to adulthood. Sadly this would not have been an unusual situation with babies in those days. Then I realised that, looking at other Rudkin family trees on Ancestry, that they only listed William Rudkin’s marriage to the second Parkes daughter Mary Jane. Poor Ann Parkes and her infant children had been lost in the mists of time.
I hope that my One Place Study is helping to make the history of the lost hamlets, with the complex web I keep finding of family relationships and intermarriages, more coherent , as Gillian Tindall suggests is possible. And I hope, in particular, that this piece has helped to preserve the memory of this family, and especially of Ann Parkes, (1835-1863), daughter of Joseph and Mary Parkes of Tippity Green. This ordinary and short-lived Rowley girl, has previously been lost in that ‘dark and silence’ to which Gillian Tindall refers, and, although we may not see Ann’s face, I hope that she has at least ‘walked slowly a little way towards us’.
[i] Copyright Gillian Tindall – The House on the Thames, published by Pimlico 2007. ISBN: 9781844130948
