Tag: Turner's Hill

Families of the Lost Hamlets – Finger-I’ the Hole, the 1841 Census

Having researched the Hill family of Finger-I’ the Hole (later known as Gadd’s Green) at such length in previous posts to my blog, I have been looking at what to explore next.  As I concluded at the end of the Hill family study, it is now apparent that, by and large, the families in Finger-I’ the Hole especially and in the adjoining areas were so closely connected that any family I now investigate there will almost certainly link back almost immediately – in one way or another – to the Hill family.

So I have gone back to the 1841 Census to see who else was living in Finger-I’ the Hole in 1841 and whether or how they related to one another. The 1841 Census does not show relationships and adult ages are rounded down to the nearest five years (mostly, occasionally a presumably accurate full age is shown) and the origins of each person are limited to whether or not they were born in the County.  So there is a certain amount of guesswork about relationships (which can sometimes be resolved by looking at the next census). I will look at the children shown here in more detail as part of further family studies but am just trying to establish how these mixed households related to each other at this point.

Copyright: The National Archives.

This was the census enumerator’s route which is shown on the first page of each batch of the census. It appears that the enumerator was approaching Finger-I’ the Hole from Tippity Green and he later moves on to Turner’s Hill before returning to The Bull’s Head and Cock Green so presumably the first families  listed lived in the first houses he came to as he climbed from Perry’s Lake. There is no mention of Freebodies Farm in this census so it is possible that some of the people listed under Finger-I’ the Hole were living there although none of the occupations are shown as farmers.

The occupations appear to be shown only for the Head of the Household, even though it is highly likely that older sons, the women and some of the younger children would also have been working or making nails. This is better recorded in later censuses.

In censuses, a double stroke after a group of entries indicates that the entries for that household are complete. A single stroke indicates that a sub-group is living in the same house. At the end of the subgroup a double stroke then shows the start of the next household. I am not totally convinced that these were always correctly recorded, perhaps omitted sometimes from the pages I am looking at as at times it appears that there is yet another group living in the same household but the stroke or double stroke are not shown. But I will work on the basis of what is shown. Where I have been able to find the maiden names of the married women I have added these in brackets, these were not shown in the Census.

My apologies that the correct layout for the table has not copied over from Word so some names are spread over two lines – very irritating!

In 1841 then, living in Finger-I’ the Hole, were:

First Group

The Priests, the Taylors and the Hills

Christian nameSurnameAge Occupation Whether born In County
WilliamPriest45 Nail m[aker] Y
Sarah (nee Smith)Priest45   Y
ElizabethPriest15   Y
Sub-household  1      
JosephTaylor40 Nail m Y
Margaret (nee Bagnall)Taylor40   N
EmmaTaylor12   Y
JosiahTaylor10   Y
ThomasTaylor8   Y
MariahTaylor6   Y
Sub-household  2      
ThomasHill45 Nail m Y
Catharine (nee Taylor)Hill45   Y
ThomasHill15   Y
ElizaHill15   Y
JamesHill12   Y
ElizabethHill9   Y
JosephHill7   Y
JohnHill5   Y
CatharineHill5m   Y

So were there really three families living in one house here? Three adult men, nailmakers, with their families of one, four and 7 children respectively? It seems there were. Or perhaps this was a once larger house sub-divided, as discussed previously in my blog.

Were they related to each other? Yes, certainly in at least some of the cases.

William Priest had married Sarah Smith at Harborne on 3 October 1813. The parish boundary of Harborne at this time covered all of the Hill part of what later became the town of Blackheath and also included much of Whiteheath. So, although this couple had not been living in the Lost Hamlets at the time of their marriage, they were probably close by.

I have not yet identified how or whether William Priest and David Priest, the husband of Ann Hill and living just a few doors away, were related but I have not yet researched the Priest family in detail so that may yet emerge. They do not appear to have been brothers but I have more work to do on David Priest’s family.

Nor have I yet discovered whether Sarah Smith was a Rowley girl but again, that may become known. Sarah’s age, given as rounded down to 45 in the 1841 Census seems to be given ten years later in the 1851 Census as 43 but it is possible that this is not the same Sarah so more research is needed. There were 17 Sarah Smiths baptised in Rowley Regis St Giles alone, between 1790 and 1810 and another 21 at Dudley St Thomas, so it is not going to be a quick process to identify her with any certainty and for these marriages before Civil Registration started in 1837, family details are not given so I do not know who her parents were!

However, looking at the marriage of the next couple listed – Joseph Taylor to Margaret Bagnall, – I was interested to find that this took place at Kingswinford on 19 May 1823. And on the same day, Thomas Hill married Catherine Taylor, also at Kingswinford – a double wedding of the Taylor siblings, presumably. So finding those two families living together now makes more sense.

So there were connections between at least part of this household and their neighbours but more to be investigated.

Second Group

The Hipkisses, the Whitehalls & the Taylors

Christian NameSurnameAge Occupation Whether born In County
JohnHipkiss70 Nail m Y
Ann (previously Nock, Nee?)Hipkiss60   Y
PaulHipkiss20   Y
Sub-household      
SolomonHipkiss30 Nail m Y
Sarah (nee Brookes)Hipkiss30   Y
ThomasHipkiss9   Y
HannahHipkiss7   Y
MariaHipkiss5   Y
AnnHipkiss3   Y
(N/k in this census, actually Solomon Jnr) 5m   Y
       
JohnHipkiss Jnr30 Nail m Y
Priscilla (nee Guest)Hipkiss25   Y
SelenaHipkiss8   N
HenryHipkiss3   N
WilliamHipkiss7m   N
Sub-household  1      
JosephWhitehall59 Nail m Y
Sarah (prev.Taylor, nee Hipkiss)Whitehall69   Y
Sub-household  2      
ElijahWhitehall25 Nail m Y
Ruth(nee Priest)Whitehall25   Y
SarahWhitehall6   Y
TabithaWhitehall4   Y
EmanuelWhitehall2   Y
       
PhilissTaylor35   Y
MaryTaylor12   Y
JosephTaylor9   Y
SamuelTaylor7   Y
WilliamTaylor5   Y

Another interconnecting group –

Looking at John’s history, John Hipkiss Senior, from his age in the 1841 Census and at the time of his death in 1850, was born in about 1770. There were three possible John Hipkisses baptised about this time, two at Dudley St Thomas and one at Harborne. Only one was actually born in 1770, John, son of George and Margaret Hipkiss who was baptised on 25 Feb 1770. Another John, son of Edward and Mary was baptised at Dudley on 29 April 1764, which is a little early. The third John was baptised at Dudley on 5 December 1773, the son of John and Sarah. None of these seem to have died in infancy so it is not really possible to know for sure which was this John. However, none of this John’s numerous children was called Edward, George or Margaret so it is possibly the son of John and Sarah that we are looking at.

A Rowley killing

I noted an intriguing burial entry in the St Giles Register on 18 December 1792 when a William Richards was buried with a note that he had been “killed by Jno. Hipkiss”. Sadly I have been quite unable to find out any more about this event, whether or not there was an inquest or a trial, no mentions in the Press and whether this is the same John Hipkiss.

Military Service

Whilst researching, I also came across an entry in the Royal Hospital Chelsea Records for a Sgt. John Hipkiss who was discharged from the 37th Regiment of Foot in August 1808 suffering from ‘diseased viscera and broken constitution’. I looked up viscera and it apparently refers to the soft internal organs of the body, including the lungs, heart, and the digestive and reproductive systems. Quite a poorly man, then. His age was given as 32 (so born in 1776) and his place of birth as Rowley, Staffs so it is possible that this is the same John. Interestingly there was another Hipkiss from Rowley on the same page of hospital records, a Corporal Joseph Hipkiss who had been discharged in October 1806, following a severe fracture at what looks like Trinidad – although the writing is not good and it may be that this is an obscure medical term I do not recognise. This Joseph was 36 then, so born in 1770. This was during the Napoleonic Wars when Britain was at war with France, which continued until 1815, and 1/6th of all British men served in the army or navy during this period. They may have been brothers or cousins but Rowley was a large parish. There were probably a lot of Rowley men who served in the army during this time.

 John’s marriages and offspring

However, it may have been this John Hipkiss who married an Ann Shaw in Dudley St Thomas in 1794, when he was about 24, the marriage witnessed by Sarah Hipkiss and J Bond. And it may have been this Ann, the wife of a Hipkiss who was buried at St Giles on 26 July 1798. An unnamed child of John Hipkiss  was buried at St Giles on 19 August 1798, less than a month later and it is tempting to think that Ann may have died in childbirth and her baby a few weeks later.  I cannot be sure but it is possible.

Certainly a John Hipkiss, a widower, married a Sarah Day, a spinster at Dudley St Thomas on 15 January 1799, just a few months later.  Joseph Hipkiss, the son of John and Sarah was baptised at St Giles on the 5 January 1800, possibly or possibly not the Joseph Hipkiss buried at St Giles on 20 July 1802. Mary, daughter of John and Sarah Hipkiss was baptised at St Giles on 12 February 1804. On the 14 September 1806, Sarah, wife of John Hipkiss was buried at St Giles and only three weeks later, John, son of John Hipkiss was also buried there. Draw your own conclusions, but sadly I suspect that John had lost another wife and child in childbirth.  And it seems possible that John had at least one living child to care for and would need another wife.

In addition to the birth of Solomon to Ann Nock, there is a baptism on 25 December 1807 of a John Hipkiss, son of Jno. and Ann Hipkiss at St Giles. Where does he fit into the picture? – I really don’t know since Ann Nock and John Hipkiss were not married until 25 November 1811. Perhaps John Snr managed to fit in yet another marriage in between which I have not yet found!  

So I think it is fair to say that John Hipkiss Senior, as he appears in the 1841 Census, had a fairly complicated marital history. But it appears that he had at least one son – Solomon Nock– born before he married Ann Nock and that this Solomon was still living in his house with his own family and who continued to use the name Solomon Hipkiss for the rest of his life. Next door to them was John Hipkiss Jnr, born to John and Ann in 1807. There had also been twin sons James and Daniel born to John and Ann, and baptised on 8 December 1811, just a month after their marriage. I wonder whether the curate had realised that John and Ann were not actually married and put pressure on them to marry before the twins were born? Little Daniel’s burial on 1 January 1818 has a note that he, aged 3 weeks, had been found dead in bed with his mother. His twin James was buried a few months later on 29 April 1812, aged 20 weeks, of a bowel complaint.

Solomon Hipkiss and his family are in the household of John Hipkiss who appears to be the right age to be his father. However, I can find no trace of baptism for a Solomon Hipkiss anywhere in the area. He is very consistent in the 1841 Census, later censuses and his age given at the time of his death in 1884 that he was born in about 1810 in Rowley Regis and, since he was living with John Hipkiss it seems likely that he was John’s son.

So I looked at children called Solomon who were baptised in Rowley Regis at about that time and there were three.

Solomon Priest was baptised on 26 October 1806, the son of Mark and Rosanna Priest. But this Solomon died in 1808 so that rules him out.

Solomon Trowman was baptised at Rowley on 28 April 1811, the son of Thomas and Mary Trowman. But this Solomon appears to be alive and living in Cradley Heath in 1841 so not our Solomon.

The third Solomon was Solomon Nock who was baptised at Rowley on 24 December 1810, so exactly the right date. He was the ‘base born son’ of Ann Nock. Aha!  And – oh look – I see from FreeREG that John Hipkiss, widower, married Ann Nock, widow at St Giles, Rowley Regis on 25 November 1811, less than a year after Solomon’s birth, their  marriage witnessed by none other than Timothy Hill and also Richard Gaunt who was the Parish Clerk and probably frequently acted as a witness to marriages.  Timothy’s wife Maria had been a Hipkiss until her marriage. Was John Hipkiss related to her? Very probably! So this was presumably the Ann who was living in the household of John Hipkiss in the 1841 Census and it seems likely that Solomon was John’s son, as he subsequently used that name.

Also in the house in 1841 was Paul Hipkiss, who had been baptised at St Giles on 5 September 1819, the son of John and Ann Hipkiss of  Finger-I’ the Hole, John’s occupation given as a labourer. In later censuses Paul is shown as Ann’s son (John’s son, too presumably but he was deceased by that time).

It seems that the John Hipkiss Junior who appears next in the census is the John who was born in 1807. He died, aged 40 and of Gadd’s Green, in 1847 and was buried at St Giles on 28 December 1847 so from the age and date it seems likely this is the same person. Poor chap was noted as having died, on 23 December 1840, of rheumatism which seems unusual as a cause of death but medical diagnoses were somewhat inexact at that time. His death was registered by John Hipkiss of Gadd’s Green, his father and his death certificate was uncertified so that there is no knowing what a medical practitioner might have put.  His death was followed in 1850 by that of his father, who died of old age, aged 80, also of Gadd’s Green and who was buried on 21 July 1850 so both of these Johns were gone before the next census.

John Hipkiss Jnr was living with his wife Priscilla nee Guest. They had married at Dudley St Thomas on 26 March 1832. The witnesses at the marriage were Thomas Allen and Thomas Whitehall, a name which will recur in this family. Their children Selina, aged 8, Henry aged 3 and William, aged 7 months were, unusually for this hamlet, noted as not having been born in Staffordshire. It took a while to find out more about Selina since she was born in 1832, before the start of Civil Registration but I eventually found her baptism at Christchurch West Bromwich where she was baptised as Ann Selina on 31 Jul 1836 with an incomplete note of her birth date as 19 ? 1832, with no month shown.  I found a birth registration for a Henry Hipkiss on 1 July 1838 when the family were at Rood End, near Oldbury  and Henry was also baptised there on 12 Aug 1838. In both baptisms the family were living at Rood End and his father was noted as a collier. The birth of William Hipkis was registered in the Kings Norton Registration District, William was born on 31 October 1840 in Streetly Street, Kings Norton and his father’s occupation was shown as a miner. He was baptised on 22 November 1840 at St Nicolas Kings Norton when his father was still shown as a Coal Miner.

However, by 1841, only a few months after William’s baptism,  the whole family had moved back to Gadd’s Green, possibly because of his illness and so that his family could support them.  

Sub-household:

The Whittalls

Also, apparently living in the household of John Jnr, was Joseph Whitehall, aged 59, as his name  was shown in this census with his family. Elsewhere he is shown as Whittall and there are several other variations of this name in use around the area! There is only one likely marriage for Joseph and his wife Sarah, (aged 69) going by ages of themselves and their children’s ages and that marriage took place at  Dudley St Thomas on 11 April 1813, both Joseph Whittall and Sarah Taylor being widowed. 

Sarah Taylor’s previous husband was Josiah Taylor and they had been married on 13 September 1795 at St Giles. She had eight children with him, from Sarah Taylor in 1796, Mary in 1796, Catherine in 1799, Joseph in 1799, Elizabeth in 1803, Benjamin  in 1803, Phillis in 1805, to Ann in 1806.

Joseph and Sarah remained in Finger-I’ the Hole, or Gadd’s Green as it was subsequently known until their deaths, Joseph died in 1855, aged 75 and Sarah in 1863, aged 93 (according to the Burial Register entry, although I make her age 88), both were buried at St Giles.

More connections:

Hmm, some of those names ring bells. When I look back to the first group, living in the household of William Priest, there are the two Taylor siblings, Catherine and Joseph who had a double wedding in 1823 in Kingswinford. And the ages of those two siblings match, given the five year variance in the 1841, with Sarah’s children.  And it appears that this is who they were. Their re-married mother was living next door to them in Finger-I’ the Hole, in the household of John Hipkiss. And, guess what Sarah’s maiden name turns out to be, when I find the marriage of Sarah and Josiah Taylor? Yes, Sarah was a Hipkiss… And Sarah’s sister was Maria who was married to Timothy Hill, also living in Finger-I’ the Hole, whose family was the subject of my last family study. 

Joseph and Sarah’s son Elijah Whitehall was also living with them in 1841 and he had been baptised at St Giles on 10 November 1813. By 1841 Elijah had married Ruth Priest at Dudley St Thomas on 1 June 1836, a first marriage for both of them, and their three children Sarah aged 6, Tabitha (sometimes known as Sabia or Sabiah), aged 4 and Emanuel aged 2 had been born.  I cannot find baptisms for any of the children at present. The family were great users of biblical names and it is interesting to speculate that they were early Dissenters who had their children baptised by Methodist or Presbyterian ministers. Their use of unusual biblical names implies a good knowledge of the Old Testament.  In later years, Elijah and Ruth had added Paarai (later known as Pharoah) in 1841, Mabel in 1844, Mary in 1846, Charity in 1848, Priscilla in 1851, Abraham in 1854 and Ruth in 1857. Elijah and Ruth remained in Gadd’s Green and Tippity Green for the rest of their lives, Elijah died in 1874 and Ruth in 1883, both were buried at St Giles. I will do some more work on the Whittalls in more detail at some point.

Phillis Taylor: Also with Joseph and Sarah was a Phillis Taylor, born in about 1805 – probably Sarah’s daughter from her first marriage, as the age is correct. Along with four Taylor children – Mary aged 12, Joseph aged 9, Samuel aged 7 and William aged 5. In the 1851 Census, Phillis is still living in Gadd’s Green with Sarah and Joseph Whittall and is described as a widow. It is possible, of course, that Phillis Taylor married a Taylor so did not change her surname but I cannot find a marriage for Phillis anywhere in the area.  I found a baptism on 16 August 1829 for a Mary Ann Taylor at Dudley St Thomas, daughter of Phillis Taylor of Rowley, also a baptism for a Joseph Taylor, also at Dudley St Thomas, on 12 August 1832 when Joseph was described as the son of Samuel and Phillis Taylor of Rowley Regis, Samuel’s occupation given as a nailer.  Phillis continued to live in Gadd’s Green, with various members of the Whittall/Priest/Taylor families but no husband, until her death in 1882.

Curiously I have found a Samuel Taylor, living in Rowley Village in 1861, aged 57 who might be about the right age to be this Samuel . He is a nailer, married to a Mary and has three children – Edward aged 18, Hannah, aged 12 and James aged 9. I was also interested to see that this Samuel was living next door to an Issachar Hipkiss (later known as Hezekiah) who was the son of James Hipkiss and Phebe Moreton – Phebe was the sister of Thomas Moreton who was married to Elizabeth Hill. This may be a coincidence but there do seem to be a lot of links between the Hipkiss/Hill/Taylor families, to say the least.

3rd Group

Christian nameSurnameAge Occupation Whether born in county
WilliamWoodall45 Nail M Y
Elizabeth (nee Whithall)Woodall40   Y
EdwardWoodall15   Y
PhebyWhitehall30 Nail M Y
MaryWhitehall10   Y
SamuelWhitehall7   Y

Goodness, what a small household, only 6 people, but still two families.

To look at the second part of this household first, Pheby Whitall was the daughter of Joseph Whittall/Whitehall, living next door in this census,  by his first wife Mary Worton who had died in 1810 a few months after Pheby’s birth. Mary and Samuel appear to be  Pheby’s illegitimate children, had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas, Mary Ann on 12 September 1830,  and Samuel on 4 May 1834, both described as children of Phebe Whittall of Rowley and both noted as illegitimate. So these three fit easily into the web of family relationships in Finger-I’ the Hole.

Woodall, however, is not a common name in the Lost Hamlets area, although there were Woodalls in the Rowley Parish Registers as early as 1611 and a William Woodall as early as 1626 when Elizabeth, daughter of William Woodall was baptised. In later times, the Woodalls tended to be in the Old Hill/Cradley Heath area or Dudley/Tipton/Sedgley. In fact I find that William is definitely a favourite Woodall name, it recurs constantly through the generations.

The age of 45 in the 1841 census means that William was aged between 40 and 44 so that indicates a birth year of between 1796  and 1801 and he was born in Staffordshire. When I searched FreeREG for the baptism of a William Woodall in this period in Rowley and the surrounding area, there were only two baptisms, one at Dudley St Thomas on 6 March 1796 of William, son of John and Mary Woodall, and the other at Tipton, for William, son of Thomas and Ann Woodall. The latter William appears still to be in Tipton in the 1851 Census so it may well be that the William in Rowley was the son of John and Mary baptised at Dudley St Thomas, remember that residents of Turner’s Hill and often Finger-I’ the Hole/Gadd’s Green frequently used Dudley rather than Rowley church.

The only marriage I found for a William Woodall marrying an Elizabeth was on 23 April 1821 at Dudley St Thomas when he married Elizabeth Wythall, both of Dudley. Wythall is not a common Rowley name either. This stymied me for a while. ( I can be quite dense at times!) Until it dawned on me… Hmm, was this a corruption of Whittall/Whithall? And sure enough, Elizabeth Whithall, the daughter of James and Phebe (nee Downing)Whitehall was baptised on 1796, so a good fit for this Elizabeth. And Elizabeth’s brother Henry Whittall was married to Mary Hill, eldest daughter of Timothy and Maria Hill. So that would account for this couple living in the Hill stronghold – Hill family connection firmly established!

I found a baptism at the Old Hill Primitive Methodist church, dated 9 April 1851 for an Edward Woodall which stated that he was born on 3 August 1823, that is, baptised as an adult, and that he was the son of William (a nailer) and Elizabeth Woodall, his abode given as Old Hill. And sure enough, William and Elizabeth are living in Garratts Lane, Old Hill in the 1851 Census and Edward, now a nailmaker and aged 26, is living at the ‘Back of Garratts Lane’, with his wife Ann and three children, Elizabeth aged 6, Jane, aged 3 and Edward aged 1month.

So, as I suspected at the end of my Hill family study, the Woodall family is also closely linked to the Hill/Whittall tribe! 

The Priest household

Next along the row is the household of David and Ann (nee Hill) Priest which also includes Ann’s brother Joseph Hill and his family: I list them here for completeness but both families were covered in detail in my study of the Hill family.

Christian nameSurnameAge Occupation Whether born in county
DavidPriest35 Labourer Y
Ann (nee Hill)Priest35   Y
TimothyPriest10   Y
WilliamPriest9   Y
MaryPriest7   Y
ElizabethPriest5   Y
Sub-household      
JosephHill20 Coal Miner Y
Betsey (nee Jones)Hill20   Y
JohnHill5   Y
CathrineHill2   Y

The Moreton Household

The final household in Finger-I’ the Hole is that of the widow Elizabeth or Betsey Moreton, nee Hill. Again, this family was covered in detail in the Hill family study so they are included here just for completeness.

Christian nameSurnameAge Occupation Whether born in county
ElizabethMoreton (nee Hill)35 Mail M Y
EmmaMoreton15   Y
MaryMoreton12   Y
ThomasMoreton8   Y
WilliamMoreton5   Y
ElizabethMoreton2   Y
MariaMoreton10   Y
Sub-household      
JohnSimpson20   Y
FannySimpson (nee Hill)20   Y

The sub-household consists of John and Fanny Simpson. John and Fanny were married on 12 Apr 1841 at Dudley St Thomas. John Simpson was a minor, a bachelor and a Miner, with his abode given as Dudley Wood. Frances or Fanny, his wife, was Frances Hill, of full age, also of Dudley Wood. John’s father was Joseph Simpson, a potter and the bride’s father was Thomas Hill, a miner. Interestingly, the witnesses at the marriage were Thomas Hill and Elizabeth Moreton – and here they are, living with Elizabeth on 6th June when the Census was taken. Was this Thomas Hill the same Thomas Hill who is listed in the very first household in Finger-I’ the Hole in this census? Well, it seems not as that Thomas and Catherine were not married until 1823 but there was another Thomas and Catherine Hill pairing who baptised other children, mainly in the Handsworth area at about that time. It is intriguing, though, that Elizabeth Moreton was clearly closely involved. I have not yet been able to link the Thomas Hill in the first group to the rest of the Hill family but will continue to work on this.

Summary

So there we have it, as I suspected at the conclusion of my Hill family study, it transpires that everyone living in the hamlet of Finger-I’ the Hole in 1841 was closely related to the Hill family. It seems extraordinary to me that the entire hamlet was inhabited by one family but it appears that this was the case.

I do not know the logistics of this, how ownerships or tenancies of the various parts of the family passed between members of the family, how it was decided who would live here and who would live just down the road in Perry’s Lake or Hawes Lane. But we already know that there were members of the Hill family living there for hundreds of years…

So, who owned the properties in Finger-I’ the Hole?

The Enclosure Act and Award 1807-08

About 300 acres of common pasture in Rowley in 228 separate holdings were ‘enclosed’ under this Act and various freeholders were mentioned in this. Richard Bate, a farmer bought some additional land adjoining his existing holdings at Tippity Green, Isaac Downing did the same at Turner’s Hill. Richard Gaunt acquired land at Portway Hall. Some of these names recur in later records.

The 1841 Poll Book

On Ancestry, there is a Poll Book for 1841 which gives the names and abodes of those qualified to vote in the Parish of Rowley Regis, the nature of the qualification to vote – ie. the land or property held – and where this property was. Interestingly, there are no Hills listed as voters in the Parish, so presumably they did not own land in the area but there are various other familiar local names.

A William Bennitt owned a freehold house and land in Oakham;

Benjamin Bate held freehold houses in Tippity Green; Ferdinando Smith of the Grange at Halesowen also owned freehold land and premises there. (I have a feeling that Ferdinando Smith may have been connected with the Earl of Dudley but I may be wrong!) I am slightly puzzled that the Earl of Dudley does not appear in this list as I suspect he owned a great deal of property in the area but I cannot find his name or title in the list, perhaps nobility were not permitted to vote in elections for the House of Commons, although no doubt they made their preferences known to their tenants.

Joseph Bowater is listed as the owner of a house and land at the Bull’s Head;

Other owners are listed as holding property  –

 John Bate lived in Garratt’s Lane,  but owned one third of a house and land in Cock Green, the Bate family were in the licensed trade and owned the Cock Inn and Benjamin Bate, mentioned above, also had houses at Perry’s Lake.

Joseph Cookes, of a local farming family, had a house and land in the Knoll (Knowle), and Edward Fletcher of Netherton owned a freehold house and land there.

Charles Cox lived in Hall Street, Dudley but owned a house and land in Oakham, William Cox owned freehold land in Portway. Other voters in Portway included Joseph Green Bourne who lived in Dudley, the Rev. William Lewis who lived in Sedgley, John Mallin who also lived in Portway, John Taylor who lived in Birmingham, Joseph Woodhouse and John Williams who each owned a house and land and also lived on Portway.  

Owners of land on Turner’s Hill included Joseph Downing who also lived there, Jeremiah Detheridge and Edward Foster who both lived on Portway Road, Benjamin Thompson who lived in West Bromwich, William Woodhouse who owned and lived in a house there and William Jewkes who lived in Dudley but let his house on Turner’s Hill to James Hipkiss (who is not listed as living in Finger-I’ the Hole in 1841but is listed as living just up the hill on Turner’s Hill). As might be expected John Levett had a house and land at Brickhouse and James Adshead Levett owned houses at Perry’s Lake.

Two members of the Hipkiss family appear on this Poll Book list: Joseph Hipkiss is listed as owning freehold houses at Springfield, William Hipkiss also owned a house and land at Springfield Colliery.

The Woodhouse family are also well represented: William Woodhouse owned and occupied a house and land at Oakham, Joseph Woodhouse lived in Kidderminster but owned a freehold house and garden at Portway, let to Joseph Lowe. Benjamin and Thomas Woodhouse, publican at the Wheatsheaf and farmer respectively are both listed as owning houses at Lye Cross.

Samuel Whitehouse is listed as occupying a house and land at Lye Cross Farm and John Whitehouse as owning a freehold house at Causeway Green.

There are dozens of entries in the Poll Book relating to other parts of Rowley village and the wider parish but I have concentrated on the owners of land in the immediate area of the Lost Hamlets.

There are only two specific references to Finger-I’ the Hole in the list, Samuel Partridge who lived at Long Lane, Halesowen owned a freehold house and garden there and William Partridge of Oldbury also owned a freehold house and garden, which was let to John Hipkiss. Partridge is a name I associate with the Long Lane/Quinton area (a dear life-long friend of my mother named Partridge lived off the top end of Long Lane until well into the 1980s and many of her family were from Quinton) which is indeed where Samuel Partridge was living. Perhaps their two houses were adjoining and let to various connections of the Hill family.

Or perhaps some properties in the area were under the direct control of the Earl of Dudley who was the Lord of the Manor, and were rented direct from him, which might account for the apparent continuing occupancy over such a long period of time.

But there were no Hills, no Moretons, no Whittall/Whitehalls, appearing in the Poll Lists for the Lost Hamlets area. Two members of the Hipkiss family appear to have owned houses in the Springfield area and there are members of the Priest family listed but they are all based in the Cradley Heath area where the Priests had a strong association with the Presbyterian chapel there. Some of the houses described as Turner’s Hill might also have been around Finger-I’ the Hole. So it is clear that the Hills and their immediate family were tenants of some sort and not land owners, which ties in with their apparently fairly humble status generally. This would have been the case for most ordinary people in those days, home ownership was not a common experience for humble folk.

What next? Further research on-going!

It seems possible that there were also family connections between the Hill and also the Hipkiss, Priest and Taylor families with Cradley Heath, Old Swinford and Kingswinford so there is more digging to be done there. Interestingly, whilst looking at members of the Hill family, I notice that a Thomas Hill was at one stage the curate at Oldswinford  so that may help to explain family connections in that area!  

I am also now working on the Priest and Hipkiss families to work out how or whether they interrelated and I will also be doing more work on the Whitehall/Whitall/Witall/Wytall families so more family studies are in the pipeline.

And I confess to being tempted to do a similar exercise as this for Perry’s Lake/Tippity Green in the 1841 Census and, perhaps, in due course, Turner’s Hill to further track the close contacts between these communities. But it is painstaking work, made even slower these days as I am finding that I must check that people are not duplicated on my own family tree, having arrived there through different connections. Knowing now, as a result of this research, how interrelated the local populace were, the ‘Merge with duplicate’ button on my family tree on Ancestry is coming into use more often! And, having merged duplicated individuals, the same exercise then has to be undertaken for their immediate relatives! I have eleven Edward Coles, ten Thomas Hills, ten Joseph Priests, for example, all with sufficiently different year of birth to make it likely that they are separate individuals but needing to be checked- So updates may take a little time.

Yes, I am a glutton for punishment but I hope that my faithful readers will find something here of interest!

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 9 – an overview

In all, Timothy Hill (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855) had seven children between 1800 and 1823, including Benjamin who may or may not have been the son of Timothy’s first wife Ann Priest or of Maria, his second wife. I have been aware of the number of children they had almost since I started my family history research but until now I had not realised how closely they all remained in their community.

Perhaps unusually for that period, it seems that all seven survived into adulthood and childbearing age. Although it is possible that there were other children that I have not found who lived only short periods or were stillborn.

Timothy was about 68 when he died. Two of the Hill sons died relatively young – Benjamin aged 44 in a colliery explosion and Joseph aged 49. Joseph was also a miner but the burial record contains no clues about his death. Samuel lived the longest of all the children, to the ripe old age of 90, very unusual for those days.

And the four girls also all lived long lives, most of them staying within the close neighbourhood of the Lost Hamlets. Maria, their mother, had lived to be 73. Mary Hill was 81, Ann and her sister Elizabeth (Betsey) were both 86 and Jane was 77 when they died. These were unusually long lives for those times, these girls must have inherited some strong genes!

Perhaps living up on the hill above the main settlements meant that they had space to grow some of their food, fresh air, free mostly of much pollution and similarly their water supplies from local springs were probably purer than water in wells lower in the valleys. Whereas many of the men were in quite hazardous occupations, their lungs subjected to constant exposure to coal dust, furnace fumes and quarry dust, with no safety equipment which may have impacted their health, not to mention the hazards of explosions in mines and quarries.   But the women and children nail makers would also have worked in the dusty polluted air inside poorly ventilated nailshops.

Grandchildren

So how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren did Timothy and Maria leave?

Child                      No of children        No. of grandchildren

Benjamin              4                           27

Mary                     9                           53

Ann                       6                           28

Elizabeth              8                          64

Jane                      10                         68

Joseph                   5                           27

Samuel                 4                           3

Total:                     46                    270

So, from their seven children, Timothy and Maria had about 46 grandchildren and the extraordinary total of about 270 great-grandchildren, 213 of these through their daughters so not bearing the Hill surname. Many of these stayed in the immediate area of the Lost Hamlets. So, I think it is fair to say that the Lost Hamlets were well populated with this family and their close connections.

I say about 46 and 270 grandchildren and because there are a couple of instances of people marrying their cousins so Timothy and Maria would be their grandparents twice over and there are also some children whose exact parentage is unclear. There may also have been some children who died in infancy who I have no information about. And a few people simply could not be traced after a certain point and they may have had more children wherever they were.            

The Hill children married mostly local people, usually very local. Surnames of spouses in that generation include Whittall, Priest, Moreton, Taylor/Bridgwater, Hackett, Williams, Jones, Bate and Smith.

In the 1841 Census there are twelve households listed under Gadd’s Green or Finger-i-the-Hole, as it was known then, but I can only see one family listed there which is not named either Hill or one of the first four of these names – he was William Woodall. And even then, I suspect I will tie him into the Hill family at some point as he has a Pheby Hipkiss living in his household. So it appears to me that this hamlet was essentially a Hill family enclave. There were certainly Hills in Rowley as early as 1604, as mentioned in the Parish Register and it is likely that they were in the Lost Hamlets area then.  

Timothy and Maria’s grandchildren married spouses called Tibbetts, Pearson, Worton, Pritchard, Steadman, Lowe, Whitmore, Blakeway, Jarvis, Parish, Cole, Hemmings, Bowater, Ingram, Leech, Homer, Slater, Priest, Redfern, Siviter, Beet, Parsons, Stokes, Nock, While, Payne, Westwood, Cox, Perry, Raybould, Pockett, Allen, Barnsley, Groves, Ennis,  Fellows, Hadley, almost all of these familiar Rowley names.

The next generation linked with Bastable, Gazey, Horton, Harvey – and I have barely looked at that generation, there will be more names.

And yet there are other Rowley names which do not appear – no Parkes, Darbys, Rustons, Levetts, who were all farmers or business people. It appears generally that the Hill family married into families like themselves, nailers, labourers, miners, foundrymen, quarrymen – not many rags to riches stories but plenty of hard working people.

Family life for this part of the Hill tribe essentially centred – literally for centuries – around Gadd’s Green, on the Hill above Perrys Lake and Tippety Green which also provided homes for many of the overspill, which then edged along into Hawes Lane and Siviters Lane.

As I related in a previous post (Tales of Old Portway – https://rowleyregislosthamlets.uk/2023/10/15/tales-of-old-portway/) in a newspaper report about Portway, the reporter noted that “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.” That 300 year old cottage was built then in about 1600, which ties in neatly with the first mention of John Hill in 1604.

Copyright: Alan Godfrey Maps:

This map shows Gadds Green in 1902 and there are only perhaps twelve cottages shown, none of them of any great size but as I set out in a previous post, (A Hall House at Gadd’s Green?) I think that the group of buildings shown on the right of the green circle on this map was where the Hill’s, in all their nomenclatures, lived and that it is likely that their house started as a hall house and was later sub-divided.

And when these descendants moved away they often stayed in close proximity to other members of the family, little colonies of Hills. And there were other Hill families in the area, these articles relate only to Timothy and Maria’s descendants.

Overcrowding

And the crowded conditions in which many of them lived and on which I have commented several times in these posts, were recognised by officialdom. In his 1875 report on living and sanitary conditions in Rowley Regis, Dr Edward Ballard (who prepared similar reports for many surrounding areas for the government) noted specifically:-

“Overcrowding of cottages, although, of course, not universal, nor perhaps very general, must, from my observation in this matter, be pretty common in many parts. Some of the worst cases I chanced to fall upon during my inspection were at a group of cottages at Gadd’s Green; in Mrs Siviter’s cottage at Hawes Lane, Rowley, and in one of the old cottages opposite the gas-works at Old Hill. In some of the instances of overcrowding which came under my observation, lodgers were taken in; in others the occupants belonged to the same family, but were grown-up sons and daughters of the tenant of the cottage with (in the worst case of all) a number of illegitimate children of two of the girls.”

I remember reading that paragraph for the first time, sitting in The National Archives in October 2023 and mentally noting the specific reference to Gadd’s Green. But it was only re-reading this section of the report last week that the penny dropped and, having done those detailed reports on each of the Hill children, I knew exactly which family Dr Ballard was referring to!

Improvements to Housing

The general overcrowding in the parish and the poor conditions of many cottages was to lead in the 20th century to a huge programme of house building which led to the local council setting out big new estates around Britannia Road, below Britannia Park and below Rowley village in the Throne estates. Houses in poor condition were regularly inspected, condemned and either improved or demolished and the tenants were offered new houses.

The detailed inspections which were undertaken, to meet the obligations increasingly imposed on local councils by various housing legislation, can be seen free online in the Annual Health Reports which were made by the Medical Officer and Sanitary Inspectors to the Rowley Regis Council. Some of these are available at The National Archives and others can be downloaded from the Wellcome Foundation. If you search online for Wellcome Foundation and then search their site for Rowley Regis Health reports there are three pages listing reports, and you can download any of them to read later.  They date from the early 1890s to the 1960s and make very interesting reading, dealing with all aspects of health, births and deaths, housing, sanitation, water supply and refuse disposal, many reports listing all the staff by name. And there were remarkably few staff with a lot of duties, especially in the earlier years! I have not found the reports for every year but enough to be able to observe the changes that came over the area.

What a contrast it must have been to move from a poorly maintained damp possibly subsiding two up two down cottage with no damp courses, earthern floors, poor water supply and little or no sanitation, into a newly built house with generously sized accommodation and front and large back gardens, a three or four bedroom house with a separate kitchen and bathroom, all on spaciously laid out and designed estates, not just long straight rows  of cottages as had sprung up in Blackheath in the mid-late 1800s, all within easy walking access of Blackheath town, shops, churches and chapels, schools and all the facilities they needed. And very often with familiar faces living nearby as the worst areas were cleared.

Conclusion – Kith and Kin in the Lost Hamlets

I hope that my readers have found this long and detailed account of one family in the Lost Hamlets interesting and that it may have been helpful to anyone with Hill ancestors. I am seriously considering combining all these articles into an e-book to keep all the information together.

It seems likely to me that, for centuries, these small communities in these hamlets were very insular and did not really regard themselves as part even of Rowley village proper, until the growth of Blackheath, better housing and opportunities in industry enticed later generations away from the hill.

This family study has, for me, illustrated very clearly the intrinsic web of kith and kinship which existed in the area of the Lost Hamlets and the extent to which people in the Hamlets married the boy or girl next door. (Originally, “kith” meant one’s native land or country, then broadened to include friends and neighbours, kin meant immediate and wider family.)

I follow the blog of another One Placer who is working on a OPS of a village where his ancestors lived. Over the past couple of posts he has been describing how he now has one large tree which covers most of the people which he refers to as a ‘forest’, rather than a tree. I think there is something in that analogy but in my case I do not think the Lost Hamlets or even the Hill family amount to a forest. So I looked up other words for a group of trees and I decided that the word to describe the kinship in the Lost Hamlets is a ‘spinney’ which is apparently defined as “A thicket or small wood, often on higher ground”, a thicket by the way is “a dense, tangled mass of shrubs and small trees” which seems very appropriate. So my Lost Hamlets families are all part of the Lost Hamlets Spinney!

A ‘spinney’ on a hill! Copyright Mark Schofield and Glenys Sykes

It is now apparent that as I research for more family studies in this area that I will keep finding they were also kith and kin and will link back to this research and the work I have done on other families, more trees and shrubs within the Spinney! And I observe that such webs of kinship were the norm in many small places and in small places within larger places. Tribes might be another description, although that can have sinister connotations these days. But tribes looked after their own and protected them. This, albeit a long time later, is my tribe.

How astonished these people would be, I suspect, to stand in Tippity Green today and see that almost all of the places in which they, their ancestors and many of their descendants lived their lives have completely disappeared. More astonished still, perhaps, to know how much information about them we are able to put together two hundred years later, how could they have imagined such interest in them and their lives?

But these small hamlets and the people who lived in them will not be forgotten, at least by me!

Rowley Regis Hospital Sunday 1898

County Advertiser 24/9/1898

I have transcribed this article here:

“On Sunday afternoon the annual friendly societies’ Sunday service, on behalf of the hospitals, was held in a field at the back of Mountford House, Siviters Lane, Rowley, kindly lent for the occasion by Dr. J. G. Beasley. The members of various societies met at their headquarters, and were formed into a procession as below.

The Blackheath Village Band started from the WHEAT SHEAF INN, Turners Hill at one o’clock, with the Church of England Friendly Society, and proceeded through Portway and Perrys Lake, calling at the BULLS HEAD INN for the Sick Club, at the WARD ARMS INN for Court Foresters’ Pride, at the KINGS ARMS INN for Lodge Working Man’s Friend. It then proceeded by way of Ross, Holly Road, Tump Road, and John Street, to the GEORGE AND DRAGON Ground.

The Woodgate Brass Band had in the meantime covered its route from the OLD BUSH INN, Powke Lane, with Court Little Band of Hope, calling at the MALT SHOVEL INN for Lodge Lily of the Valley, the VINE INN for Court Mistletoe Bough, proceeding along Station Road to the RAILWAY INN for Court Britannia’s Pride, thence through Halesowen Street, Tump Road, and Hackett Street, meeting the other Courts at the GEORGE AND DRAGON Ground.

A united procession was then formed, and marched to Siviters Lane, reaching the ground at three o’clock. The proceedings opened with the hymn ‘All people that on earth do dwell,’ after which the Chairman (Mr. E. Pewtress, CC) delivered a short address.

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

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

When I came across this article in the local paper, I was interested that there were so many active friendly societies in the area so I found out a bit more about them. The internet is my friend…!

Friendly societies, in those days before general employment benefits and social security, were mutual aid societies which provided social and financial support to their members when they were affected by illness, unemployment or death, when widows were supported. Originally they were associated with trade guilds but later became independent organisations. They also organised social events such as the one above which must have been quite a colourful sight. I suspect most of the societies would have had their own banners and there was probably some friendly rivalry, too. Like Building Societies – such as our very own Rowley Regis Building Club which built the Club Buildings, these societies mushroomed during the late 18th and 19th century.

Many of our forebears in this area and period would have lived in dread of ending up ‘on the parish’ or, even worse, in the Workhouse, being ill or injured and unable to support their family or having a ‘Pauper’s funeral’. Membership of a Friendly Society offered some hope of avoiding these fates.

There were thousands of different friendly societies, of different sizes and not all of long duration. Smaller and early societies could struggle to calculate their insurance risks fully and to build up sufficient reserves. Events such as epidemics of infectious disease or mass unemployment could lead to the closure of such societies and the loss of members’ contributions which must have caused great dismay.

There were three main types: trade societies, local societies and interest-group societies. Some ‘Orders’ such as the Ancient Order of Foresters, which started in Yorkshire, opened branches in towns and villages across the country which allowed members to move their membership if they moved for work and also enabled risk to be spread, such as if a large employer closed suddenly. These branches were usually known as Lodges but the Foresters called them Courts and there are several Courts mentioned in the list in the article.  Some local friendly societies still exist and others moved into more formal life insurance.

To become a member, men (women were not admitted, at least until the late 1800s) had to formally apply, be proposed by an existing member who would propose them and another who would second them. They had to complete declarations about health, including whether any near relatives had died of tuberculosis or if they had had certain other diseases, such as gout, rheumatism, smallpox, etc. The club doctor would also examine candidates and admission depended on his approval, all of this to limit calls on club funds arising from chronic illness. Some societies only admitted members with a weekly wage of at least 22 shillings and many trades were excluded as “any other occupation that the committee may conceive dangerous or injurious to health”. It seems to me that most of the occupations of local residents in Rowley came under this last definition but nevertheless there were clearly enough members to support a number of local societies.

I would hazard a guess that most of the societies listed in the article were, apart from the Church of England Friendly Society, fairly small local organisations. The six main large societies were the Royal Standard, the United Kingdom, the United Patriots, the London Friendly, the Royal Oak and the Hearts of Oak. None of these was mentioned in the description of the march but probably the poor wages of nail makers working from home and the hazardous working conditions in quarries, mines and foundries precluded many local people from membership, even if they could afford the contributions but smaller local societies were perhaps more flexible.  

In the late 1800s clubs began to be set up exclusively for women who earned an income independent of their husbands. These clubs paid out on confinement with a child but again strict rules were set out and unmarried mothers were usually excluded.

Legislation

The administration of these friendly societies was regulated through legislation, including the Registration of Friendly Societies Act 1793 and the Friendly Societies Act 1855 which established a Register of such societies. More legislation in 1875 was aimed at protecting the members and ensuring the funds were kept safe. This latter legislation defined the purposes of friendly societies as “the relief or maintenance of the members, their husbands, wives, children, fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters, nephews or nieces or wards, being orphaned, during sickness or other infirmity, whether bodily or mental, in old age (which shall mean any age after 50), or in widowhood, or for the relief of the orphan children of members during minority.”

Each month members paid into the Society, often at a meeting in a pub and in return, payments from the funds were made to ill members and widows. Some societies had initiation and other ceremonies, certificates, passwords and handshakes, – which only paid up members would know – rituals, oaths, parades and feasting, such as the one described in this article, even costumes. Annual feasts were held with processions, banners and dinners, some of which may have got a little over-exuberant. Membership must have brought a real sense of belonging to a community, of brothers, of people who looked out for you. Some societies had funeral processions and graveside duties. To try to protect their funds, many societies had cash boxes with three locks and three keyholders to prevent theft by officials of the society.

And membership, based usually on a subscription basis, provided sickness or injury benefit or contributions to funeral expenses. Some, such as Oddfellows, established in 1810 and still going, had a surgeon at every lodge or branch, who members had access to.  Others, like the Rechabites which I have mentioned before, as my mother was a member, were more concerned with alcohol avoidance and ‘wholesome living’. And churches, chapels, businesses and other bodies began to run their own societies. Some societies donated to charities, for hospital beds, convalescent homes and even lifeboats. There were annual conferences, often held at the seaside, giving men the opportunity to take their part in democratic decisions, even before many of them had a vote in ordinary politics. They gave a sense of belonging and community.

However, the introduction of Lloyd George’s National Health Insurance Act in 1911 led initially to a further growth in membership as ‘state members’ were created, as the Act was largely administered through friendly societies and insurance companies. But this meant that the social side became less important and women, in particular, often did not care to go to meetings in pubs, preferring to pay their dues to the “man from the Pru” on his house visits. The loss of thousands of members in WW1 was also damaging for many societies.

By 1945, when the NHS was being set up, the membership of the friendly societies was estimated at 8,500,000, a significant proportion of the population. One estimate is that about 80% of male workers were members. However, the creation of the NHS, grants for funeral costs and changes to National Insurance took many of the functions of the societies away and led to many closures.

Since reading about this, I can remember my father being offered membership of what must have been such a society in the 1950s, perhaps the Order of the Buffalos, but I can remember my parents being somewhat puzzled about what this society was for and why he had been invited to join. And who had put his name forward?  He declined in the end, possibly because he suffered chronic ill health and could have ill afforded the membership fees. Perhaps by then, the membership was becoming more of a social commitment and the requirements as to health less stringent as most people received treatment under the NHS.

I found this subject very interesting and enjoyed finding out more about it. I would have loved to see the processions with their bands and banners and no doubt excited children, and local people gathering to watch. Although it is difficult to imagine it now, before the days of radio and television, many people learned to play instruments and to sing to amuse themselves and bands, often sponsored by the big employers, provided companionship and pride and a sense of belonging – they often provided instruments, too and to this day brass bands encourage junior musicians to belong and often have strong family involvement. So I would imagine there could well be numerous local bands who could be called upon to lead processions.  

Copyright Anthony Page.

This photograph from Anthony Page’s collection shows the Blackheath Town Band at a somewhat later date, perhaps the 1930s. But their uniforms were probably the same and one or two of the members may even have played for Hospital Sundays!

There were traditional gathering places, too. Apparently the Hackett family who kept the George and Dragon had a field at the back (mentioned in the article above) where fairs and gatherings were held and the frontage of the George and Dragon remained a stopping place for processions until within living memory.  I can picture the bands playing and puffing their way up Ross, leading the procession to Siviter’s Lane from the George and Dragon! And although a whole new housing estate was built in the area between the George and Dragon and Birmingham Road in the 1920s and 30s, this spot also was not very far from Britannia Park and the fields which were there before the park was laid out.

The only processions I can remember in the 1950s were the Whit Sunday Processions which were organised by the churches around Blackheath and ended up in Britannia Park, with games and sandwiches and cakes for tea (all in a brown paper bag for each child, if memory serves!) with orange squash or cups of tea for everyone. This spot would, of course, be just below the grounds of Mountford House and may even have been the very same field that was used then – a traditional gathering spot for celebrations!

More reading:

‘Who do you think you are?’ Magazine has an excellent article here:

https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/feature/friendly-societies

The Wellcome Collection has a most interesting and full account of friendly societies here:

https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-friendly-societies-and-healthcare

The HistoryHit has another interesting account here:

Bands of Brothers: The Roles of Friendly Societies in the 19th Century

Wikipedia even has a list of ‘friendly societies’ still operating today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Friendly_societies_of_the_United_Kingdom

Families of the Lost Hamlets – the Hill family 5 – Elizabeth

Here is the next instalment about the Hill family, about Elizabeth, the next daughter  of Timothy Hill and Maria Hipkiss. It was going to be about Elizabeth and her sister Jane but was too long and complicated before I had even finished Elizabeth so Jane will be in the next instalment.

ELIZABETH HILL (1806-1892)

Elizabeth was the first member of the Hill family that I researched when I started my family history journey in 1980. She is my great-great-great-grandmother. And, because she lived in Gadd’s Green she was perhaps the start of my interest in that place and therefore planted the seed which grew into this One Place Study all these years later. So I have a fondness for Elizabeth.

Elizabeth was born, probably in 1806 or thereabouts and was baptised on 16th March 1806 at St Giles, the daughter of Timothy and Maria Hill. There were no details in the Register at this period of abodes or occupations.

On 26 December 1825, at Tipton church Elizabeth married Thomas Moreton  (thought, by me at least, to be Ralph Thomas Moreton, born in Harborne – see my previous article on this[i]). The witnesses were Henry Whittall, her brother-in-law, who had married her older sister Mary in the same church two years before. The second witness was Thomas Shorthouse.

Many marriages at this time took place on Christmas and Feast days as they were the only days working men got holiday. The 25th December 1825 was a Sunday so presumably men got the Monday off instead.

I do not know why several weddings of Rowley people took place at Tipton at this time, there may be family connections in this case.

Another Moreton wedding at Tipton

And in November 1826, another wedding took place in this church which was of Phebe Moreton, (sister to Ralph Thomas Moreton) who married James Hipkiss. Another Hipkiss connection! The witnesses at this wedding were Thomas Moreton (brother of the bride and my 3xgreat-grandfather) and another familiar name – Thomas Shorthouse, presumably the same Thomas Shorthouse who had witnessed Elizabeth’s wedding a year earlier! Thomas Shorthouse does not appear on my family tree. Yet!

James and Phebe Hipkiss then settled – where else? In Finger I’ the Hole, later known as Gadd’s Green, just a couple of doors away from David and Ann Priest, and Phebe’s brother and sister-in-law Thomas and Elizabeth Moreton and their family.

Phebe Moreton, (also born in Harborne parish to Francis and Ann Moreton, like Ralph Thomas) had given birth at the Poorhouse in Rowley in 1822 to a ‘base-born’, an illegitimate son Thomas, according to the record of his baptism on 24 February in 1822. So Phebe had been in the Rowley area for several years. And Harborne was not as far away as it sounds – the parish of Harborne stretched right out to parts of Whiteheath so the family might have been there. This Thomas was living with Phebe and James on Turner’s Hill in 1841 so he had evidently not been cast off when his mother married.

Back to Elizabeth:

Elizabeth and Thomas Moreton had several children. The first, Emma, was baptised on 15 October 1826 at Dudley St Thomas, the daughter of ‘Thomas and Betsey Morton of Dixon’s Green, labourer’. Dixon’s Green is just past Oakham on the way to Dudley, so very close to home. Their next daughter Mary Ann was also baptised at St Thomas on 16 August 1829 but this time the parents were shown as Thomas and Elizabeth Moreton of Rowley. After that came Maria (1831) and Ralph Thomas (1832) and William, my great-great-grandfather who was baptised on 2 April 1837 . William was a posthumous baby, his father Ralph Thomas had died and was buried on 2 October 1836 at St Giles, aged 36 and of dropsy, according to the burial register. So Elizabeth was left with five children to bring up.

However Elizabeth went on to have three more children in the years after Thomas’s death – Elizabeth in 1839, Eve in 1842 and Edward in 1844. No clues exist in records as to the identity of their father but family legend has it that all three were the children of George Smith, of Oakham (just up the hill) who was the famous (or infamous) hangman. The other legend about him is that he sold, as grisly souvenirs, pieces from ropes he had used to hang people, allegedly giving rise to the phrase ‘money for old rope’.

Elizabeth continued to live in Gadd’s Green until 1871 when she is found living in Siviters Lane with her daughter Mary Ann, Mary Ann’s husband Joseph Taylor and their five children. But by 1881, she was back in Gadd’s Green, living with her daughter Eve and her husband Joshua Taylor and nine of their fourteen children. Elizabeth was also living with Eve and her family in Gadd’s Green in 1891.

Of Thomas and Elizabeth’s children:

Emma Moreton (1826-1895)

Emma was baptised on 15 October 1826 at Dudley St Thomas. Her parents may have been living in Dixon’s Green at this time. She had an illegitimate son John Moreton,( sometimes later known as Priest or Redfern – it’s confusing!) John was baptised on 13 June 1847 at St Giles. There is no indication who his father was.

Emma married Thomas Priest,( sometimes known by his step-father’s name of Redfern, just to add to the complications), on 10 June 1850 at Dudley St Thomas. Thomas was the illegitimate son of Ann Maria Priest, he was born in Rowley in 1826 and was living with his mother and stepfather on Turner’s Hill in 1841, listed as Thomas Priest.  In the 1851 Census, Emma and Thomas were living in Gadd’s Green with Emma’s son John Moreton, now aged 4 and shown as Priest, their eldest child Sarah, then aged 1, in the household of Ann Hipkiss, aged 73 and Paul Hipkiss aged 32, although I have not yet worked out whether there is a connection with the other Hipkisses in this family group. It seems quite possible if I can just untangle it!

By 1861 Thomas and Emma had moved to Turner’s Hill where they lived between Thomas’s Redfern step-father Joseph Redfern and his half-brother – also Joseph Redfern. In this census Thomas Priest is listed as Thomas Redfern but as his family of Emma, John and their other children are living with them, it is clear that this is the correct family. I suspect that, living in a family group, the Enumerator Richard Bate who was local, perhaps knew that Thomas had grown up in the Redfern family, probably thought of Thomas as a Redfern and listed him accordingly! Or he may just have made an error in transcribing his notes.

Thomas and Emma Priest had nine children together: Sarah’s birth was registered in the first quarter of 1850, so just before Thomas and Emma married and she was registered as Moreton so she was illegitimate. It is quite possible though that Thomas was her father and she appears as Sarah Priest in 1851, 1861  and 1871Censuses. However, I have not been able to trace Sarah after that 1871 Census, neither death, censuses nor marriage as either Priest or Moreton so she will have to remain a mystery for the moment.

Thomas and Emma Priest’s other children were Joseph (1854), Thomas (1857), Ann Maria (1858-1858), Elizabeth (1859), Ann Maria (1859), Mary Ann (1862), Eliza 1864) and Emma (1867-1944).

Mary Ann Moreton (1829-1886)

Mary Ann, Thomas and Elizabeth’s second daughter, was baptised on 16 August 1829 at Dudley St Thomas.

This is getting to be a familiar start to these pieces – it appears that Mary Ann’s daughters Hannah (1853) and Sarah (1856) were illegitimate, born several years before Mary Ann married in 1859. Certainly the birth registrations for both girls showed no name for the father and were both registered under the name Moreton, although later they appear to have used the surname Taylor, their stepfather’s name. I cannot find a baptism for Hannah or Sarah. Although the family were living next door to the Methodist chapel between Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green at this time so it is quite possible that they were baptised there. Records for that chapel have never been traced.

I also noted the birth of an illegitimate Eliza Moreton in the second quarter of 1852 in the Dudley Registration area and her death in the last quarter of that year. I could not find a baptism for this child, but I found her burial at St Giles, aged 8 months, of Gadd’s Green. So I did not know who the mother of this child was. I was tempted to send for a digital copy of the birth certificate, as this would tell me. But frustratingly, the GRO Website told me that technical reasons, a digital copy was not available so I would have to send for a more expensive paper or .pdf copy. Then I thought of buying a digital copy of the Death Registration as with luck, this would fill in the gaps. And it did. Eliza was the daughter of Mary Ann, the first of her children. She had died at only 8 months of a ‘bowel complaint’ with no medical attendant involved. Poor baby.

There was also a baptism on 10 July 1859 at St Giles, for an Emma Moreton, daughter of Mary Ann Moreton of Gadd’s Green. It was one of two Emma Moreton’s born that year, both with no father shown so perhaps two of the Moreton sisters had daughters called Emma that year. Since this child does not appear with Mary Ann or in the area in the 1861 Census or thereafter, I suspect that she may be the Emma Moreton whose Death Registration was in the last quarter of 1860, aged 1. This Emma Moreton was buried at St Giles, on 11 November 1860, aged 1 year and 5/6, that is 1 year and ten months which would put her birth in something like September 1858, which fits with the second illegitimate Emma Moreton registered that year in the last quarter of the year. I have not yet discovered who the other illegitimate Emma Moreton was!

It seems that it was quite usual for the Moreton girls to have one or two (or more!) illegitimate children before they got married, whereas their mother had three after she was widowed! With Mary Ann, however, she had four which may all have been the children of one relationship or may suggest a certain promiscuity, or even that Mary Ann was following the ‘oldest profession’ before she married. I hope I do not offend any other Hill family historians with that observation but the family patterns do seem to indicate a fairly relaxed attitude towards extra-marital encounters and the outcomes!

Mary Ann Moreton then married Joseph Taylor, at Dudley St Thomas on 18 December 1859. Thomas was a Boilermaker and gave his abode as Dudley. The witnesses at the marriage were Eve Moreton, the bride’s half sister and Joshua Taylor. In fact it was a double wedding because Eve Moreton married Joshua Taylor the same day and Mary Ann and Joseph were the witnesses to their wedding! From their respective father’s names Joshua and Joseph were not brothers but may well have been related in some way. Research continues on that.

In 1861 Joseph and Mary were living in Gadd’s Green and all the surviving children were shown as their children and listed under Taylor but by 1871 they had moved to Siviters Lane where Mary Ann’s mother lived with them for a time, I also found the family there in 1881 although by that time Elizabeth Moreton had returned to Gadd’s Green to live with daughter Eve.

In all, Joseph and Mary family consisted of six children, five daughters and one son (only the latter four of these were apparently Joseph’s). These were Hannah (1853), Sarah (1856), Ann Maria (1864), John (1866), Elizabeth (1868),and Mary Ann (1869).  (Hannah later married a Job Taylor, too – the mind boggles, I have not done any work on that generation yet!)

Mary Ann Taylor, nee Moreton died in 1886 and was buried at St Giles on 8 November 1886, aged 57 and ‘of Rowley village’. Joseph Taylor died in 1901 and was buried at St Giles on 7 November 1901, aged 70.

Maria Moreton (1831-?)

In the course of my researches into infant births in the Hill family, I found a baptism at St Giles for a Sarah Moreton on 26 Jun 1854, an illegitimate baby and her baptism gives her mother’s name as Maria Moreton of Gadd’s Green, who was Mary Ann’s next sister. Unfortunately I can find no trace of Maria after that census. It is possible that she married but if so, I cannot find the Civil Registration entry for it. Nor can I find a death. Perhaps Maria went into service elsewhere, although I have not found her in any censuses, I suppose it is possible that she emigrated, although the family seemed to stick very close to Rowley. Nor can I find any trace of Sarah after her baptism, no census entry in the next census in 1861, no death entry, just another brick wall. Watch this space!

Various trees on Ancestry appear to confuse Mary Ann Moreton and Maria but they are definitely separate people, both appear on the 1841 and 1851 Censuses and were each baptised on different dates.

Ralph Thomas Moreton (1832-1894)

Thomas Moreton was born to [Ralph] Thomas and Elizabeth Moreton in 1832, this is the approximate year which computes from six censuses and his death registration.He was not baptised, however, until 2 April 1837 when he was baptised at Dudley St Thomas at the same time as his younger brother William. By this time his father was dead, having died in October 1836. In most records he was recorded as Thomas Moreton but not all, at baptism he was baptised as Ralph Thomas, his death was registered as Ralph Thomas and he named his son Ralph Thomas, it seems to have been a family name!

Thomas was at home in Gadd’s Green with his mother and siblings in the 1841 and 1851 Censuses. On 6 September 1857 Thomas married Mary Ann Siviter at Dudley St Thomas.

Mary Ann Siviter was a minor, according to the record and no details were given of her father in the marriage record so she was presumably illegitimate.

Mary Ann’s year of birth has been a puzzle to work out. In all of her records Mary Ann gave her place of birth as Rowley Regis. But her age varies between censuses. In 1841, she was five months old, giving a birth year of 1841which is, let’s face it, most likely to be accurate, it is difficult to make a mistake of several years at that point! And in 1851, she was ten, then in 1861, 1871, and 1881 her age gives a year of about 1835 – but in those years she was shown as being the same age as her husband Thomas so this may have been an error or whoever was completing the form genuinely believed they were the same age. In 1891, the birth year is about 1841, in 1901, she was noted as 57, giving 1834 again and in 1911, it is back to 1841.  But in 1911, she is listed as an Old Age Pensioner and to claim that she would have had to prove her date of birth. So it seems likely that this is the correct year. And there is an illegitimate Mary Siviter born in the last quarter of 1840 which would tally with the 1840/1 date. And this would make her seventeen at the time of her marriage so she was indeed a minor.

And I did find a baptism for a Mary Ann Siviter, born to Judith Siviter. This baptism was at St Giles on 12 November 1843 and Judith Siviter was the only parent listed. In 1841 Judith Siviter was living in Treacle Street which was in Springfield, with three children Elizabeth, aged 5, Samuel, aged 3 and Mary Ann. Judith was also from a Rowley family. So Mary Ann grew up close to the Moretons, who were living just up the hill in Gadd’s Green.

[Ralph] Thomas and Mary Ann Morton (at about this point the name began to be spelled without the ‘e’) lived in Cock Green, later described as Dudley Road, Springfield and had eight children. These were: Emma (1853), John (1855), Eliza (1860), Joseph (1864), Ralph Thomas (1866-1923), Sarah Ann (1869), William (1871) and Samuel (1877).

Ralph Thomas Morton’s death was registered under that name in the first quarter of 1894 and he was buried at St Giles on 28 March 1894, aged 58 and of 102 Dudley Road. His widow Mary Ann Morton died in February 1913 and was buried at St Giles on 18 February 1913.

William Moreton 1837-1899

William Moreton was my great-great-grandfather on my dad’s side. He was baptised on the 2 April 1837  at Dudley St Thomas. William’s father had been buried in October the previous year so he never knew his father. But his family continued to live in the Hill enclave in Gadd’s Green!

In 1841 and in 1851 the Moreton family, with the widowed Elizabeth as the Head of the household, were in Gadd’s Green, in 1841 with a couple living with them as lodgers. In 1851 Frederick Whittall, Elizabeth’s nephew and his wife and two young children were living with them. It must have been quite crowded with twelve living there. William was 15 in 1851 and working as a coal miner.

On the 4 April 1858 William married Elizabeth Beet at St Giles and their first daughter Mary Jane (also known as Polly) was born in August 1858. William and Mary eventually had thirteen children: Mary Jane (Polly) (1858), Emma (1861), Ralph Thomas (1863-1863), Elizabeth (1864-1865), Ann Maria (1866-1866), Alice – my great-grandmother – 1868-1902, Joseph (1871-1871), Sarah (1872-1872), William (1873-1928), Hannah (1876-1953), Ann Eliza (1878), Minnie (1881-1956, and Edward (1885).

Elizabeth Beet was born in 1839, the daughter of Joseph and Mary Ann Beet (nee Parkes). The Beet family were originally from the Nuneaton area but had been settled in Rowley Regis since the early 1800s. They were distantly related to John Beet, the ‘Squire’ who had also been born near Nuneaton and who lived at Rowley Hall until his death in 1844. Whether it is coincidence that Elizabeth’s father at one time lived in Spring Row which was apparently ‘retainer’s cottages’ for Rowley Hall or that they later lived in Beet Street, I do not  know. Certainly John Beet’s widow was described in 1851 Census as the ‘owner of Land and houses’ so it is possible that she developed the land off the Causeway that became Beet Street, and allowed Joseph to rent a house there. Or it might simply have been that the street was named for a local family as so many were in Blackheath – Darby Street, Hackett Street, etc. My distant cousin (through the Beet family) Margaret Thompson will no doubt have more information on this than me! Our great-grandmothers were sisters.

 In 1861, William, Elizabeth and Mary Jane and Emma were lodging in Rowley village. By 1871, they had moved to the fast expanding new town of Blackheath and were living in the Causeway, although this may have been what later came to be known as Beet Street, which was off the Causeway, as this was where they lived later.  In 1881 and 1891 they were living at 14 Beet Street.

Health – Drainage and water supplies in the area

You may note from the lists of children that several of William and Elizabeth’s children died in infancy in the 1860s and 1870s. I do not know the specific reasons for the individual deaths but am reminded of a Report which I found in The National Archives a couple of years ago. This Report, entitled “Dr Ballard’s Report to the Local Government Board on the Sanitary Condition of the Registration Sub-District of Rowley Regis” and was dated April 1875. This Report was commissioned as part of the Government’s efforts to prevent Cholera outbreaks. Fortunately it is a typed copy of the report, rather than manuscript. Most of the correspondence in this file is manuscript so I’m not sure how this came to be typewritten but very grateful it is!

I will at some point do an article on the whole report because it gives a detailed account of how our ancestors in Rowley Regis were living but one paragraph had stuck in my mind. It is discussing the contamination of water sources in various places but singles out Causeway and Beet Street in Blackheath.

It reads:

“In one well in this village [Blackheath] where the surface of the water stood at a level  of 8-10 feet from the surface of the earth, I was told that there was scarcely any water to be had in the summer time. It was situated in ‘The Causeway’, in an undrained, unpaved yard abounding in surface nuisances [Nuisances in this context has a specific meaning relating to sources of contamination], with a large accumulation of sewage water in one corner, and a row of leaking overfull privies at one side of it. In Beet Street, the pump well for the supply of a row of cottages is situated in a narrow passage between the cottages and a row of nail-shops. Slops and sewage were stagnant in an imperfect channel close to the pump, and the inhabitants told me that the water could not be drunk on account of its sickly and bad flavour and that they got water where they could. Not far from this place in High Street, I found in a yard a well about 40 feet deep to the surface of the water but water was trickling in from the surface soil through the brickwork at a depth of about 6 feet. The quality of this water thus polluting the well may be estimated from the fact that a few yards off from the well there were a privy ashpit full of excrement, an enormous heap of filth, and accumulations of sewage water, besides other surface nuisances.”

This Report was written by an experienced medical professional who had carried out inspections all over the country and prepared many such reports. The language may read more like a sensationalist report in a newspaper but I found it sobering to realise the terrible conditions our ancestors lived in and surprising, quite honestly, that so many survived at all. It is not a criticism of the inhabitants who were clearly doing what they could to obtain potable water and in another section Dr Ballard notes “Many of the cottages in the District are clean and decent, and if it were not for want of proper drainage and of good water supply, and for the abominable privy nuisances and filth about them, would be wholesome residences enough.”

So perhaps the high rate of child deaths should be viewed in the light of these findings. The yards the children, often barefoot I imagine, (and adults) had to walk through and play in were a constant threat to their health, it seems and there would have been little clean water for washing. It was to be more than twenty years after this report before any substantial improvements to drainage and water supply in the area were made and then only at the continuous strong urging of the Government officials. Cholera, enteric fever and similar diseases continued to be a problem in the worst areas during that time, the great frustration of the officers of the Government Health Ministry is apparent in the correspondence in the files at Kew between them and local officials. 

Willliam died and was buried at St Giles on 18 March 1899, aged 63 and of Blackheath.  In 1901 Elizabeth was living at 28 Hackett Street, a widow and the head of the household, with her sons William and Edward and her married daughter Minnie and Minnie’s husband Richard Woodward and their son Aaron. Elizabeth died in 1909 but I have not been able to find a burial for her.

Elizabeth’s other children

Now we come to Elizabeth’s other children Elizabeth (1839), Eve (1842-1912) and Edward (1844). As previously noted, I have been told that the father of all three of these children was George Smith, the Dudley hangman, who lived at Oakham. I have no proof of this but family stories often have more than a grain of truth.

Elizabeth 1839- ?

Elizabeth appears with her mother in the 1841 and 1851 Censuses at Gadd’s Green, aged 2 and 12 respectively.After that things are less clear. I suspect that it is this Elizabeth who married Frederick Parsons in 1860 at Dudley St Thomas, where no details are shown for the father of the bride.

In 1861, this couple are living in Blackheath where Frederick is shown as being born in Chadwich, Lancashire. However, in the 1841 and 1851and several later Censuses, there is a Frederick Parsons of the correct age who was born (and living in the first two censuses mentioned) in Chadwich, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire! Which is just a few miles away and seems a lot more likely than Lancashire.

I am fairly confident that this is the right couple as, in 1861, they have a lodger who is Pheby Moreton, Elizabeth’s aunt, previously living on Turner’s Hill. But by 1871 Pheby is living in the Causeway, as the head of her own household.

But of Frederick and Elizabeth Parsons, I can find no trace after that. I can find no children born to the pair, nor a death registration for a Frederick of the right age.

In the 1871 and 1881 Censuses, there is a Frederick Parsons of the right age, born in Bromsgrove, living with a William Parsons and his wife in Aston, Birmingham. But he is described as unmarried. Could the marriage have failed and Frederick moved away? Or had Elizabeth died? In 1882 this Frederick Parsons married Harriet Haynes in Aston and they continued to live in Erdington with their several children until I last found them in 1911. By 1921 Harriet was a widow but I have not been able to identify a likely death registration for Frederick. There is a death of a Frederick Parsons in the Aston Registration District in the first quarter of 1910 which is for a man of the right age but since our Frederick was alive in the 1911 Census and indeed completed and signed the Census form, it cannot be him. Another unresolved life.

So what happened to Elizabeth Parsons, nee Moreton? I cannot find any trace of her after 1861. She does not appear to have died or remarried and I cannot find her under either name in any of the later censuses. But, unless they obtained a divorce, how was Frederick able to re-marry? Perhaps, as people often did in those days, they split up, pretended to be unmarried or widowed and went through a form of marriage with someone else. Or Elizabeth may have been living with someone else, recorded under his name, there is no way of checking that. But she does not appear to be with any of her close family in later censuses so must remain a puzzle.

Eve Morton 1842-1912

Eve was baptised, the daughter of Elizabeth Moreton, on 16 March 1845 at St Giles. A note on the entry in the Baptisms Register says that she was aged 3 years but I cannot find any trace of her birth being registered in or around 1842. She was baptised on the same day as her future husband Joshua Taylor, I noticed when I looked at the register, who was six years old then, she was three! Their first meeting?

The rest of her life, however, is much better documented.

Eve Moreton married Joshua Taylor at Dudley St Thomas on 18 December 1859 when she would have been 17. The witnesses at the marriage were Mary Ann Moreton , Eve’s half sister and Joseph Taylor. In fact it was a double wedding because the two couples married the same day and were the witnesses to each other’s weddings! From their respective father’s names Joshua and Joseph were not brothers.

Eve and Joshua had twelve children, according to the 1911 Census (which asks how many children have been born alive to their marriage): Fanny or Frances (1860), Elizabeth (1861), Mary (Polly) (1862), Ann Selina (1864), George (1866), Elizabeth (1869), Emma (1870), Samuel (1873), Sarah Ann (1875), Eleanor or Ellen or Nelly (1879), Anne (1883), and Harry (1884). This last child is shown in the 1891 and 1901 censuses as the child of Eve and Joshua but his birth registration and baptism show that he is the son of Fanny, their eldest daughter. This leaves only eleven children that I have found birth registrations for. There are Birth and Death Registrations for a John Taylor in 1865 who may be the twelfth, although I cannot find a burial to confirm this.

The 1901 Census shows a Henry Taylor (aged 17), Mabel Taylor (7) and Ivan Taylor (1) all as children of Joshua and Eve. In fact, as noted above Henry is the son of Fanny, and was baptised as such on 16 April 1884 so he was their grandson. Ivan, whose birth was registered in 1899, again as an illegitimate Taylor birth, was baptised as Ivan Gould Taylor on 4 June 1899, the son of Nellie Taylor of Gadd’s Green so he was also a grandson.

Mabel Taylor proved difficult to allocate to one of the daughters, although her birth was registered in April 1894 again as an illegitimate Taylor birth, I could find no baptism for her to give me a clue, although I found quite a lot of other information. Mabel married Charles Knight (of Perry’s Lake, of course!) on 13 June 1915 at St Giles. He was killed in a mine explosion and buried at St Giles on the 27 October 1915, only four months later, his abode given as Perry’s Lake. There are numerous reports of the accident and a couple of reports of the funeral, one of which notes that Mabel was supported by her mother but the mother is just about the only person in the report who is not named! Mabel probably needed that support because she was heavily pregnant, giving birth to their daughter Edith Eva Knight on 19th November 1915, only a couple of weeks later. Mabel re-married on 28 April 1919 at St Giles, to – ah, another Ingram connection! – Ernest Reuben Ingram of Tippity Green. All very close to home as usual. At the time of the marriage, Mabel’s abode was shown as the Portway Tavern, Perry’s Lake. They had a son Jack in 1920.

So who was Mabel’s mother? I had to buy the birth certificate to get the answer. Mabel’s mother was Emma Taylor, Eve and Joshua’s daughter, so again she was a grandchild, not a daughter as shown in the census.

Copyright: GRO. Do not reproduce!

But it does appear that Eve and Joshua were very happy to help raise their grandchildren and it is possible that some of them believed Eve and Joshua to be their parents.

Eve Taylor, nee Moreton, died and was buried at St Giles on 20 June 1912, her address given as Gadd’s Green where she had been born and where she lived her entire life. Joshua Taylor had died the previous year and was also buried at St Giles, on 26 Sep 1911, aged 71. 

Edward Moreton 1845-1909

The last lap of what has been a complicated research project and the last of Elizabeth Moreton, nee Hill’s children.

Edward was baptised on 16 March 1845 at St Giles, the son of Elizabeth Moreton, father unknown but possibly George Smith.

Edward married Mary Ann Nock in the last quarter of 1867, at Dudley St Thomas.  Mary Ann’s son George had been born in the Dudley Registration District, in the first quarter of 1867, so it was not clear whether Edward was his father. Nevertheless George is shown in the 1871 Census, in the Causeway, Blackheath, listed as George Morton, living with Edward and Mary Ann and their daughter Elizabeth, then 7 months old. They had also had a son Joseph in 1869  who had died in the same year.

Mary Ann Moreton died in the second quarter of 1872, aged 28. I have not been able to find a burial for her but it seems quite likely that she was buried at St Paul’s, Blackheath and those records have not yet been added to FreeREG.  Baby Elizabeth Moreton also died in the third quarter of 1872, leaving only George of their children.

Edward re-married on 16 August 1874 at Halesowen, to Sarah Stokes. Sarah had been born in Cradley where she and Edward later lived but her parents Benjamin Stokes and Mary Bridgwater were both born in Rowley Regis.

I think this is the same Edward, he was aged 30, a miner and a widower which all seem to fit.  In the 1881 Census this Edward was shown as born in Rowley which also fits. With Edward and Sarah in Overend, Cradley were Sarah’s son Arthur Stokes, aged 9 and Thomas (3) and Harry Morton (9 months).  

Not listed is George. Nor can I find any trace of George Moreton or Morton after the 1871 Census. I cannot find a death, a burial, marriage, a census entry, he has disappeared. Perhaps he was taken in by a relative, an aunt or grandparent and appears in censuses under their name, but as I am not sure which of the several Mary Ann Nocks was his mother, I am unable to look into this at the moment.

At least, that is what I wrote then, anyway. But, as you know, I enjoy a challenge…

Where was George?

I thought that perhaps George had been taken in by family after his mother’s death in 1872 and that I might find him with family in the 1881 Census. And it has become clear that this extended family is usually very ready to take in any number of grandchildren!

But which family? I had checked all the likely Moreton parents, grandparents and siblings, no sign of George there. Hmm, perhaps his mother’s Nock family? Since I knew Mary Ann’s approximate year of birth was 1845, (from the 1871 Census and her age at death) I looked for the baptism of a Mary Ann Nock in Rowley in 1845 and there was, on 16 March 1845, a baptism of a Mary Ann, daughter of Hannah Nock of Yew Tree. This tallied with a birth registration in the last quarter of 1844 for an illegitimate Mary Ann in Dudley Registration District. So this seemed a reasonable possibility to look at first.

Now I already had some Nocks in my tree so I rootled around those and found that there was one branch which was in Yew Tree Lane. And, curiously this family – William Nock, a nailer of Yew Tree and his wife Mary had had three daughters baptised in one ceremony on 1 July 1845, with their ages shown in the Register entries. All were adults or at least teenagers, Eliza (13), Martha (17) and Susannah (24). This was just a couple of months after Mary Ann had been baptised. Another family, Titus and Phoebe Newton, a farmer of Blackheath, also baptised six adult children the same day and three other teenagers were also baptised. How odd. But no Hannah listed there with the other baptisms.

So I checked the 1841 Census for William’s family, and there was Hannah listed, aged 15 and with her younger sisters Martha and Eliza. The 1841 Census, remember, rounds ages down to the next five years so Hannah could have been up to 19. Were Susannah and Hannah the same person? I have sometimes seen Rosanna spelled Roshannah in local registers, might this name have been the same, a pet name, abbreviated?

So I decided to investigate Susannah a little more. She married Joseph Portman on 5 December 1847 in  Christ Church, Oldbury and I was able to find them in 1851 in New Ross, Blackheath with their son William James, in 1861 in Shepherd’s Fold (very possibly the same place as 1851 with a new name and both of them yards away from Yew Tree Lane and Susannah’s family), with daughters Elizabeth, Susanna, Parthenia and Ellen, in 1871 in  Halesowen Street, Blackheath with the same girls plus Samuel, and in 1881 now living in Coombes Wood Cottages, Gorsty Hill, with Ellen, Samuel, and – oh, look – her grandson George Nock, aged 14 and a labourer at the Tube Works! Bingo! So perhaps George was not Edward’s son, and his grandmother took him in when his mother died.

However George had survived to marry Mary Ann Oliver in 1896 at St Giles and they had six children, eventually moving to the Quinton area. George was a socket maker at the Tube Works, in the 1911 census he names this as the Anchor Tube Works but the enumerator has crossed the name out and added ‘Iron and Steel’. So perhaps not Coombs Wood, although he may have worked there earlier when he was living in Coombs Wood Cottages. I have been unable to trace any of the family after the 1911 census and wonder whether they emigrated as there is a George Nock, mechanic, on a ship sailing to Canada in April 1914. But it was satisfying to track George down to his maternal family and expand that Nock twig on the family tree.

Back to Edward and Sarah Morton who lived most of their married life in Overend, Cradley and went on to have more children, nine in all. These were Thomas Henry (1878), Harry (1880), Mary Elizabeth (1882), Leah (1885), Harriet Lily (1886), Katie Ann Eliza (1888), James Edward (1890), Howard (1892) and Francis William (1896). In the 1911 Census Sarah, by now a widow, states that she had eleven children in this marriage, of which one had died but I have been unable to find any other birth registrations. She may have included her son Arthur in her total. The family continued to live in Cradley until at least 1911.

There is a death registration for Edward Morton of a similar age in 1909 in the Stourbridge Registration District which I think is this Edward but I have not been able to find a burial for him. Sarah died in 1927, aged 75 but, again, I have not found a burial record for her.

ELIZABETH MORETON, nee HILL died in February 1892, fifty six years after her husband and was buried at St Giles on 14 February, aged 87 ‘of Gadd’s Green’. She had had 8 children and at least 71 grandchildren, most of them staying in the lost hamlets, or in Rowley village and Blackheath.

You really could not be much more a part of the Lost Hamlets than this family.

The next instalment is about Jane Hill, the next sister.

[i] https://rowleyregislosthamlets.uk/2024/11/03/chipping-away-at-the-brick-walls/

War Time Memories and VE Day celebrations

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

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

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

War Time and VE Day Memories by Hilda Hopkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hill family were in Rowley Regis for several centuries, (and still are) and can also be found in the surrounding parishes, from Dudley, Halesowen, Cradley, Warley, Halesowen, Tipton, Sedgley and some even further afield in Wolverhampton.

Hill is not an easy name to research in the Parish Registers. The early Registers, with their lack of place names are not too difficult – if you search the first section of the St Giles digital register for Hill, you have to skip over all the Phillips and Phillises, and most of the entries then are for members of the Hill family. But once places of residence start to be regularly recorded there are hundreds of them – Turners Hill, Gosty Hill, Reddall Hill, Old Hill, Darby’s Hill, Kates Hill, Hyams Hill – very frustrating to plough through the later records only to find that the entries contain an abode or place name, rather than a family name which includes Hill!

The Hailstone (Copyright Glenys Sykes) was close to where the Hill family lived and would have been a familiar sight to them, until it was taken down.

The first entry relating to the Hill family in the Rowley Parish Registers was in the  preface written by Henrietta Auden, who was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and who apparently transcribed many other parish registers as well as Rowley Regis. Her father was the Rev. Prebendary Auden. Miss Auden notes that in 1604, in the first parish register, John Hill is noted as ‘owner’. This makes me wonder whether, at the time when surnames began to be formalised, this John had owned land on and lived on Turner’s Hill, as many later generations of Hills did, and he became known simply as John of the Hill, then John de Hill, and then John Hill? As I set out in my piece on Hall houses[1], I think it is likely that the Hill family was wealthy enough at one time to build a Hall house in what later became known as Gadd’s Green and certainly some branches of the Hill family locally were well-to-do even centuries later, as I have discovered from various Hill Wills in the 1700s and 1800s. But that is possibly simplistic thinking on my part.

An early postcard image of Turner’s Hill, copyright unknown.

Other early Hill entries in the Parish Registers

Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Hill was baptised in September 1604 and the John Hill mentioned above was buried in the following March. In 1607 Lucy, daughter of Christopher Hill was baptised at Rowley and in 1612 Elizabeth, daughter of Francis Hill so it appears that there were in the early 1600s  several Hill families – fathers Thomas, Christopher, Silvester, Francis, Richard and William – living in the parish and of an age to be baptising children, perhaps brothers or cousins. And a John Hill of Warley had married Anne, daughter of William Darby which was another family of some standing in the area. 

The Hills had some common but regularly used names such as Thomas, Richard, Joseph and William but it also used several more distinctive names – Silvester, Jerome, Timothy (especially Timothy!), Francis, Daniel   – and Elizabeth, Ann and Rebeckah also recur amongst the women which can be useful in spotting likely connections between branches of the families.

There was an entry for the marriage of Thomas Hill and Ann Cooper at St Giles on  26 June 1687 but there is no indication where either of them came from, nor does there appear to be a baptism for either of them nor a baptism for An, daughter of Pheles (Phyllis is the modern name) who was buried on 29 February 1687/88. After that there are baptisms for John and Ann Hill, a burial for Selvester and for Thomas Hill in 1689, a burial for Elizabeth Hill, widow in 1691, baptisms for William and Hannah Hill and a burial of a Rebeckah Hill, widow in 1694. In 1695 a burial of a son John for Thomas Hill describes Thomas as from Upperside. In 1696.a child Hannah, daughter of John Hill, has a note saying ‘by non-conf.’ so perhaps the family were early dissenters or non-conformists although there  are no consistent indications of this. But certainly there appear to have been several branches of the Hill family in the parish at this time. The Registers at this date do have gaps and missing pages and the entries were by no means detailed so it is not possible to know whether this was one family who had moved into the parish from elsewhere or whether they had been in the parish for some years and earlier records baptisms are lost.

In 1717 an Ambrose Hill of Dudley married Esther Dudley at St Giles, Rowley Regis. In 1723 a Job Hill married Jane Dudley at St Giles so that was two Hill grooms marrying brides named Dudley in six years, so they may well have been related to each other. And my research indicates that there are many later connections between Hill families in Dudley and Rowley Regis.

It is not feasible in this article to describe all the people named Hill in the hamlets and villages over the centuries, there are simply too many of them and some very complicated family trees. There are 123 entries for Hills in the first section of the digital parish register alone, and another 35 in the next section, before place names start to appear which adds to the number. So between the first Hill entry in1604 and 1721 (when place names start to confuse the issue) there are 158 entries in the St Giles Registers for people named Hill.

So I will concentrate on some of those Hills who were in the Lost Hamlets in the 1841 Census, and their families which I will expand in a later article.

Timothy (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855)

Timothy, that favourite Hill name, was my 4xgreat grandfather. He had been baptised at Dudley St Thomas in 1763 and Maria Hipkiss was a Rowley girl, baptised in 1782. Maria was Timothy’s second wife but he appeared, at first sight to have had no children with Ann Priest, his first wife. Ann was also a Rowley girl and her marriage took place in St Giles, and she appears to have been buried at Dudley in May 1800. I have a little more to say on this in my next piece. Timothy made up for it with Maria, who he married at Halesowen in September 1800 and he had at least seven children, four daughters and three sons with Maria.

Timothy is a particularly commonly used Hill Christian name and can make it difficult to decide which branch of the Hills particular Timothys belonged to.

This Timothy died in 1831 so was not listed in the censuses but Maria appears in the first two – 1841 and 1851, both times living with one of her children, the first time (1841) with her youngest son Samuel when they were living in Blackberry town which appears to have been in Springfield below the Hailstone quarry, and in 1851 she was living in Perry’s Lake with her widowed daughter Mary.

Maria’s family, the Hipkisses, like the Hills, are another of the ‘core families’ of the hamlets who appear in all the censuses there between 1841 and 1881 and later, and although I have not yet transcribed the later censuses I strongly suspect that I will find them in the later censuses, too. Another of those families who lived in these small hamlets for at least three hundred years and possibly much longer, with numerous intermarriages contributing to the complex web of relationships between the core families.

Timothy Hill (1763-1831) was baptised in Dudley, the son of Joseph Hill (1720-?) and Jane Bridgwater, the grandson of Samuel Hill (1684-?) and Martha Wright, and great-grandson of Samuel Hill (1660-?) and Issabill ?(Dates unknown) These earlier Hills had connections in Dudley and possibly, before that, in Oldswinford. But that is a tentative theory at present and there are numerous Hill families in the area so it is possible that is a different family. At some point, when time permits, I will research whether these people appeared in later registers in Oldswinford as that may rule them out. But there are so many Hills in the Dudley and Sedgley area, this might not be possible. But Timothy married two Rowley girls.

Maria was the daughter of John Hipkiss (1744-1818) and Mary Worton (1742-1832). Maria was baptised on 15 September 1782 at St Giles Rowley Regis and her forebears also go back in Rowley Regis for several generations and earlier in Dudley,too.

So this pattern is emerging of close kin living together in Gadds Green and Perrys Lake whose descendants continued to live there or very close by for several generations afterwards.

I have also noticed in the course of my research that often people from the Turner’s Hill/Oakham area used Dudley church, rather than St Giles and it may well be that many of these residents regarded the area on and below Turner’s Hill as separate communities, rather than a hamlet of Rowley Regis, even though most of this area was in Rowley parish.

I shall continue this theme on the Hill family with more posts to follow on the children of Timothy and Maria Hill.

The children of Timothy (1763-1831) and Maria Hill nee Hipkiss (1782-1855) – details of these will be the subject of my next articles.

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

Pubs of the Lost Hamlets – The Wheatsheaf, Turners Hill

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

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

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

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

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

Benjamin Woodhouse Licensee 1834-1855)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Cox (licensee 1861-1892)

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

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

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

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

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

Birmingham Daily Post 18/10/1878

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

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

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

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

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

The jury then returned a verdict of Accidental Death.”

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

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

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

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

Joseph Parkes (licensee 1896-1907)

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

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

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

“County Advertiser 24/9/1898

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

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

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

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

Walter Woodall 1907-1912

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

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

Purchase of the Wheatsheaf by Thomas Williams of the Rowley Brewery

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

Thereafter, Hitchmough  listed thesucceeding licensees as :

Howard Woodhouse 1916

Thomas Woodhouse1919-1920

Edward Harrison (1920-1929)

Frank Green (1929)

Frank Jinks (1929-1957)

Walter Raymond Harris (1957 – 1960);

Frederick William Hughes (1960 – [1965]

Frederick Brown (1968 – [ ]

C Swarbrick (1970 – [ ]

Arthur Isherwood (1981 – [ ]

Glenn Whitehouse [1988]

Sara Harvey (2015 – [ ]

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hall house at Gadds Green?

I have been working recently on another family study for my blog, this time about the Hill family, one of the core families who lived in the hamlets for centuries, mainly at Finger-i’the-hole and Gadd’s Green. As usual, it has proved more complex than I had anticipated and I have got sidetracked into considering where exactly the branch of the family I am looking at lived in the village. Many of them, it appears, lived for centuries in a group of houses in Finger-i’the-hole or Fingeryhole , or Gadd’s Green.

Regular readers may recall that I have posted previously in this blog about the whereabouts in Rowley village of Finger-i’the-hole or Fingeryhole[i].

And, in a separate post [ii] I wrote last year about a newspaper article I had found, in the Dudley Chronicle in 1925, about the delights of what the writer called Portway but which clearly included the wider area of Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green. The article referred to the dilapidated cottage in Gadd’s Green as “Finger o’the hole cottage” which the author had visited in 1925, a cottage where the front wall had collapsed in a storm some time before and never been rebuilt.

As a reminder, and for new readers, the name Finger-i’the-hole originates from a very old local story – but which was subject to several variations in later years. A lonely old widow, the story goes, lived alone in a small cottage on Turner’s Hill. A thief or rent collector, depending on which version of the story you look at, knowing that she was unprotected, put his finger into the hole in the door to lift the latch, with a view to robbing her- or perhaps collecting the rent! – only to discover that the feisty widow, hearing his approach, had picked up her axe and  chopped off the offending digit as it was poked through the hole. Though there are no names attached to this tale, there is a locality and I believe that it is likely that some incident of this sort actually happened.

The date of this event is unclear but must have been before 1727, as Christopher Chambers of “Ye ffinger I’the hole” was buried then, according to the Parish Burial Register. And the name of Finger-i’the-hole  for the area persisted until the 1841 Census but had dropped from official use by 1851 when the area , with exactly the same families, was called Gadds Green.

The Chambers family appear, although I have not done any detailed research on them,  to have been well-to-do, they appear in the Parish Registers as living also in 1724 at ‘the Brickhouse’ and  in 1723 and in 1744 as ‘of Freebodies’ so were perhaps brothers as tenant or yeoman farmers. At that time ‘the Brickhouse’ appears to have been at Cock Green, with land extending down towards Powke Lane which later was developed in the 20th century as the Brickhouse  housing estate. Brick was not a commonly used building material at this earlier date and the use of bricks for a whole house was obviously distinctive and worthy of a special name.

Photograph copyright: Glenys Sykes

This is an illustration shown in Wilson Jones’s book of what the barn of the ‘Brickhouse’ farmhouse might have looked like. Note the ragstone wall and what appear to be large chunks of ragstone lying around. I took a photograph recently of the pieces of ragstone still in Tippity Green/Perry’s Lake, at the entrance to the former Hailstone quarry, they have a familiar rugged shape.  

Ragstone blocks at Tippity Green November 2024, photograph taken at the entrance to the former Hailstone Quarry. Copyright Glenys Sykes.

There were lots of the Chambers family in the village throughout the parish registers. An entry in 1723 refers to a Thomas Chambers of Portway and in 1732 an Edward Chambers of Tividale so they did seem to live at this end of Rowley. There was an Edward Chambers at Freebodies Farm in the 1841 Census, albeit described as a farm servant but there were no Chambers that I can find listed in the later censuses in the Lost Hamlets and it appears that they dispersed around a wider area, including Oldbury and Birmingham.

Picturesque Portway

In the newspaper article on Old Portway, which had been written in 1926, I remembered a comment in that article about the cottages at Finger-i’the-hole and this is what it said:

“Our representative visited the now dilapidated cottage where the incident is reputed to have taken place. The cottage is the fourth of a row, and is known in the neighbourhood as “Finger ‘o the hole cottage. “, The article continues “The front of the building was blown out one winter’s night many years ago when the occupant was a Mrs Cox, now of Gornal, and it has never since been repaired. The cottage is said to be over 300 years old and one family – that of Hill, members of which reside in an adjacent cottage – lived there for nearly 200 years.

It is constructed of rough grey sandstone, and originally had two rooms, one up and one down. A stout roughly hewn oak beam, crossing the building from gable to gable, indicates where the first floor once rested, and shows that the height of the living room was under six feet. Occupying one-half of the building is a spacious old-fashioned fire-place, with a large open chimney and contiguous bake ovens.” 

This description of the house known as “Finger ‘o the hole cottage. ” is very interesting.

“The cottage is the fourth of a row.” So it could originally have been the end of a much older hall house.

“The cottage is said to be over 300 years old” – which takes it back to about 1600 or even earlier.

“It is constructed of rough grey sandstone.” Would this have been Rowley Rag? Something substantial to last more than 300 years, unlikely to have been simple wattle and daub.

“A stout roughly hewn oak beam, crossing the building from gable to gable, indicates where the first floor once rested and shows that the height of the living room was under six feet.” Was this beam a later addition to divide the hall and add extra accommodation?

 “one-half of the building is a spacious old-fashioned fire-place, with a large open chimney and contiguous bake ovens”.  I can remember when I first read that description, something jarred with me. The original article goes on “No fewer than ten men can comfortably stand in the aperture once occupied by the grate and its side seats.”

A humble cottage in a terrace does not have half of the single living space taken up by a fireplace big enough for ten men to stand inside it and nor does it have ‘contiguous bake ovens’, it was unusual for small cottages to have even one oven, certainly not two. There may have been an external bakehouse or oven for a farmhouse or larger dwelling and with large fireplaces in bigger buildings an oven was sometimes built into it. There is an interesting piece with a brief history of baking here – https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/a-brief-history-of-baking/

So something is out of the ordinary here. Perhaps there are more clues in the rest of the description of the cottage.

“it originally had two rooms, one up and one down.”

Was this a Hall house? Hall houses had one great room which might well have had a great fireplace installed at some stage – I knew that originally such halls had a central hearth and the smoke floated up into the roof. Later fireplaces and chimney  breasts were added. But why the need for such a big one?

But if it was a hall house occupied by a large family or was a busy farmhouse with farmhands to feed, two ovens might well have been provided.

And at a time after the original construction the hall might have been divided into more rooms or cottages and even divided into an upper and lower floor, although if it had been designed to have two floors surely the ground floor would have been higher than six feet when it was first built?

Hall houses

So I began to suspect that this may well have been a very old hall house, perhaps the home of a farming family but that later it was divided and subdivided. And that the Hill family lived there for centuries.

I decided to research a little more about ‘Hall houses’, to see whether my thoughts seemed reasonable. This information is taken from Wikipedia:

“The hall house is a type of vernacular house traditional in many parts of England.

Origins

In Old English, a “hall” is simply a large room enclosed by a roof and walls, and in Anglo-Saxon England simple one-room buildings, with a single hearth in the middle of the floor for cooking and warmth, were the usual residence of a lord of the manor and his retainers. The whole community was used to eating and sleeping in the hall. Over several centuries the hall developed into a building which provided more than one room, giving some privacy to its more important residents.

By about 1400, in lowland Britain, with changes in settlement patterns and agriculture, people were thinking of houses as permanent structures rather than temporary shelter. According to the locality, they built stone or timber-framed houses with wattle and daub or clay infill. The designs were copied by their neighbours and descendants in the tradition of vernacular architecture. [a] They were sturdy and some have survived over five hundred years. Hall houses built after 1570 are rare.”

When considering this house I was slightly concerned that I cannot find any mention in other records of a substantial house at Gadd’s Green, although Wilson Jones in his book[iii] lists all the other significant manors or large houses.

However, David Hay, in his book The Grass Roots of English History[iv], says that although it was once believed that all timber framed houses had been built by the wealthier inhabitants of local societies and that medieval peasant houses were so insubstantial that they could not survive for more than a generation, more recent systematic recording of houses by members of the Vernacular Architecture Group and the new technological advances in dendrochronology,  have overturned these views and it is now known that of the thousands of medieval houses, some of which are still standing in many parts of rural England [though not  in the Lost Hamlets!] belonged to ordinary farming families. Hey states that “The sheer numbers of cruck [timber framed] houses in the Midlands confirms that they must be peasant dwellings, some villages have ten or even twenty such houses.” So it seems quite possible that there would well have been such a house in Gadds Green inhabited by a farming or working family, rather than a more aristocratic one.

Cruck framed houses

Many larger houses at this time were ‘cruck-framed’, that is the central frame, the load bearing members that supported the weight of the roof of the building was made from suitable trees – often oak, which carpenters could split lengthways into two identical ‘blades’ which were set either side of the building and then joined at the top with techniques varying from place to place to support a ridge-piece, the crucks sometimes resting on stone bases to protect them from damp and rot. Half way down the roof, between the ridge-piece and the wall plate other long timbers, known as purlins, were fixed to the outer part of the blades in order to carry the rafters which supported the roofing material, often thatch in earlier times. Because the crucks, and not the walls carried the weight of the roof, the walls could be filled in with whatever material was most easily available to them locally. This could easily be replaced in later centuries without endangering the roof.

The frames were constructed in the carpenter’s workshop or in the wood where the trees were felled before they were assembled at the site according to the sequence of the marks the carpenter had made with his chisel or gouge. Different types of marks can still be seen on timbers in old buildings and it appears that each carpenter had their own marks and systems; some buildings had several hundred pieces of timber and hundreds of joints so carpenters needed a way of sorting these efficiently when they arrived at the construction site. This construction method was a skilled job and not to be undertaken by home builders!

Copyright Wikipedia. This is a cruck house in Worcestershire where the cruck frame can be clearly seen, along with other timbering, in this case infilled with what is probably wattle and daub. In Rowley, with the abundance of local stone, the walls would have been infilled with stone and quite possibly the timbers clad with stone to protect them from the weather so that the cruck frame would not be obvious from the outside.

If the house at Gadd’s Green was constructed in this way, with a cruck frame, this might account for why the front wall of one section could be blown or fall down in a storm but the remainder of the structure remain apparently quite stable for many years afterwards, as mentioned in the article, especially if the inhabitants did not have the skills required to make the repairs.

Peasant Houses

Note: Hey suggests that “peasant” is still a convenient term to describe a small-scale farmer, the type of person who would have been the head of household in most of the surviving timber frames houses.  I have continued his usage so this is not intended as a derogatory term. There is an interesting article on this here: https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/peasant-houses-in-midland-england.htm

Houses were typically arranged around a central hall that was open to the rafters. These halls could be lengthened by the addition of an extra bay or two but their almost standard width was regulated by the roof span. A wood fire in a central hearth originally provided the heating, with most of the smoke escaping through the roof but timber and plaster smokehoods attached to an internal wall were starting to replace central hearths in the wealthier districts. Sometimes later refinements, ceilings, floors, partitions, etc completely conceal this original use and it is only when the smoke darkened timbers are seen in the attic at a much later date that it is realised that the building started life as a hall house.

The lower end of the building may have housed a workshop or a kitchen, dairy or buttery. And a very large fireplace in a cottage at Gadd’s Green may have been a remnant of this earlier use.

“At the other side of the hall, larger peasant houses had a private parlour, sometimes with an upstairs room known as a solar.” Is this what the family memory of the Hills referred to when they talked about the house originally having one room downstairs and one upstairs?

Poor families had to build with whatever materials were to hand, such as clay and wattles for wall panels or earth for mud walls, as in Devon, probably ragstone in Rowley. The many timbered buildings surviving in small towns in Herefordshire, Hey notes as an example, were in well-wooded areas and where woods were managed to produce suitable crops of timber over a long period. And in poor areas, solid houses would not have been readily replaced with more modern structures. So if a substantial house had been built which lasted for centuries at Gadd’s Green, why would the family expend money to replace it? Some of the Hill family later were nail factors or nail ironmongers and relatively well-to-do but others showed no sign of great wealth.

House layouts

In Midland villages, Hey suggests, “each house was separate and protected from unwelcome intrusions. The whole property, including a garden or yard, was surrounded by a fence, hedge or wall, and accessed through a gate leading on to the street and a door with a lock, (finger hole?). Excavations on village sites show that barns, stables, cowsheds and other outbuildings usually stood close together around a yard, kitchens and bakehouses were often detached, to reduce the risk of fire”.

In the view of Hey and other scholars, “the idea of separate living and working spaces would probably not have seemed a meaningful concept to member of a peasant household. There is plenty of documentary evidence for the conversion of bakehouses, carthouses and stables into dwellings for retired peasants”, indeed barn conversions and such continue to this day!

Why and where?

There were many cruck buildings in some parts of the country and none in others for reasons not fully understood. It is possible that the native pendiculate oak trees, whose shape is ideal for cruck construction, predominate in areas such as parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, along the river Severn in parts of Wales and in other Midland Counties. In eastern England, where cruck framing is conspicuously absent, the less suitable sessile oaks are the major type.

Hey notes that the medieval houses of Midland England are predominantly cruck framed and three bays in length. The chief limitations of cruck framed buildings are in their height and width, because their dimensions were dependent on the size of the blades that could be cut from suitable local trees.

“When it became fashionable to insert a ceiling into a hall that had previously been open to the rafters, the space in the upper  storey was very constricted “- or perhaps sometimes the lower storey which might account for the low ceiling mentioned in the 1925 article.

This restriction did not apply to the other main construction method which was where posts and beams were made to create a box like frame and where the roof was supported throughout the frame and the walls. It is possible to find both methods of construction in one house, perhaps with a cruck framed hall having additional wings built with box frames.

These are other things that Wikipedia has to say about hall houses.

“The vast majority of those hall houses which have survived changed significantly over the centuries. In almost all cases the open hearth of the hall house was abandoned during the early modern period and a chimney built which reached from the new hearth to above the roof.

Fireplaces and chimney stacks could be fitted into existing buildings against the passage, or against the side walls or even at the upper end of the hall.

Once the clearance within the hall was no longer needed for smoke from the central hearth, the hall itself would often be divided, with a floor being inserted which connected all the upper rooms.

In smaller hall houses, where heat efficiency and cooking were the prime concern, fireplaces became the principal source of heat earlier.

In the earliest houses combustion of wood was helped by increasing the airflow by placing the logs on iron firedogs. In smaller houses the fire was used for cooking. Andirons provided a rack for spit roasting, and trivets for pots. Later an iron or stone fireback reflected the heat forward and controlled the unwelcome side draughts. Unsurprisingly the hearth migrated to a central wall and became enclosed at the sides.”

So it does seem to me that all of these points, both from Wiki and Hey, tie in with my theory of the house at Gadds Green having been, at one time, one large dwelling, later subdivided into two storeys and into separate cottages.

On the ground

We cannot look at the house or the site now, it has literally been obliterated.

There are no detailed maps before the mid-1800s.

Photograph copyright Glenys Sykes, apologies for the poor quality. Map Copyright: https://maps.nls.uk/

Maps of the area on the NLS website include this OS Map, at six inches to the mile, which was apparently surveyed in 1881-83 and published in 1887. This shows a row of dwellings at Gadd’s Green, with what may have been a yard or fold at the North end.

Incidentally this map also shows a stretch of water at Perry’s Lake which presumably gave this area its name. I have seen suggestions that this may originally been a fish pond for the Manor farm at Cock Green.

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

This second map is at 25” to the mile, was originally surveyed in 1881, revised in 1937 and published in 1947. This shows a row of four dwellings and a further one at the rear, plus an additional block of buildings. But the shape of the site including the fold or yard remains. There are also springs marked just along a lane which would have provided the essential water supply for a farmhouse. On both maps, this is the last building in Gadd’s Green before the road continues up Turner’s Hill, and that is where the home of the Hill family always appears in censuses.

There is no sign of water at Perry’s Lake on this later map. Although there is a mysterious building halfway between Perry’s Lake and Gadd’s Green which I suspect may be the Methodist chapel which appears in various records but later disappears. It appears to be a square building with an entrance porch at one corner and a small room at the back, perhaps a vestry or schoolroom.

And farm houses in the area do appear to have survived better than most other buildings in the Rowley area.  They were probably bigger to accommodate some farm workers as well as family and it is also possible that an undercroft or part of the building could also have been used to shelter animals. There may also have been buttery or cheese stores, as well as outbuildings, barns for the storage of crops, stables for horses and vehicles and tools, plus workshops on the site any of which may have been incorporated into the farmhouse in later years. 

A Will I have recently been transcribing relates to a farmer who was related to the Hills and who owned farms in Hagley and Belbroughton. The description of the Hagley Farm reads:  “my Capital Messuage or dwelling house wherein I now reside with the Brewhouse, stable, Coachhouse, cowhouse and other outbuildings, Courtyard ,fold yard, Garden Ground and orchard thereunto adjoining and belonging (comprising all the buildings and the Courtyards Garden rounds Orchard and premises adjoining together on that side of the road.

Which illustrates the number of additional buildings and grounds a substantial farm might have. But even a smaller farm, like the one in Rowley village described in the Will of Ambrose Crowley, had outbuildings of a barn, workshop and yard. Thinking about this, it is clear from even later maps that the Grange site and the Portway Tavern site at Perry’s Lake were arranged in a very similar way and may also have been on an older sites and originally used as a farm.

Old Buildings in Rowley

There has been an interesting discussion this week on the “I remember Blackheath and Rowley Regis” Facebook page, after I asked where the oldest buildings in Rowley were now. The answer appears to be – several pubs, more than one farmhouse, a few well built cottages still survive. It would be fascinating to see the rafters in the roof of some of these houses to see whether any of them were cruck buildings and whether they were once blackened by the smoke from a central hearth!

So the long gone ancestral home of the Hill family in the Lost Hamlets is the rabbit hole I have been exploring for the past few days. Perhaps, – although I shall never know for sure since the house is one of those which disappeared when the quarry expanded – possibly a Hall house, probably a farm house, later four cottages – including the famous Fingeryhole cottage – which I think I have identified on the map. A fascinating – for me, anyway – glimpse of how the local families lived in centuries gone by, and how local legends may have an element of truth and a thread reaching back through the centuries.  

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

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

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

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

The farms in and around the Lost Hamlets 2

WWII Farming Survey

In 1941 and over the next two years detailed surveys were carried out by the Government to assess the quantity and quality of farmland available to feed the nation during the War. The original forms , known as MAF (Ministry of Agriculture and Food) 32, can be seen at The National  Archives so on a recent visit I arranged to see the file for farms in Rowley Regis and photographed many of them, from which I have extracted the information which follows. With full copyright acknowledgment to The National Archives, I have used different sections of the form relating to one farm – Hailstone Farm – in this article but the same farms were available for each farm and I have extracted details below.

First Section: The first set of forms No.C51/SSY in 1941 listed various crops and how much land was in use for each sort of crop being grown. Under Small Fruit were listed Strawberries, Raspberries,Currants – black, Currants red and wite, Gooseberries, Loganberries and Cultivated Blackberries, with a sub-total for the Total Acreage of Small Fruit.

The next section was for Vegetables for Human Consumption. Flowers. And Crops under Glass. Here the crops listed were Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage (Savoys, Kale and Sprouting Broccoi), Cauliflower or Broccoli (Heading), Carrots, Parsnips, Turnips and Swedes (not for fodder), Beetroot, Onions, Beans – Broad, Beans – runner and French, Peas – green for market, Peas – green for canning, Pease – harvested dry, Asparagus, Celert, Lettuce, Rhubarb, Tomatoes – growing in the open, Tomatoes – growing in Glasshouses, Other Food Cops growing in Glasshouses, Crops growing frames – fruit, vegetables, flowers and plants, Hardy Nursery Stock, Daffodils and Narcissi – not under glass, Tulips –not under glass, Other bulb flowers – not under glass, other flowers – not under glass, with again, an acreage total for each category and a subtotal.

The third section was for Stocks of Hay and Straw on the holding.

This is the completed form for Hailstone Farm.

Copyright The National Archives Document MAF 32/604/177, Extract.

So this was a comprehensive assessment of what was being grown that summer on the farms and small holdings of the country. A remarkable number of these for Rowley were Nil returns – nothing being grown, I was beginning to think that the Rowley farms were remarkably unproductive.

What  happened next?

I have to confess that I cannot quite work out how the forms fitted togeether and whether they all went out at one time. But the information is pretty clear. Much more detailed surveys were compiled  on Form No. C.47/S S Y which went into the size, condition, usage of the farm, the number of men employed, details of Live Stock broken down into very specific detail.

The first section listed the Statute Acres for growing each of these crops on 4th June – Wheat, Barley, Oats, Mixed corn with wheat in mixture, Mixed corn without wheat in mixture, Rye, Beans – winter or spring, for stock feeding, Peas for stock feeding, not for human consumption. Then the acreage used for vegetables had to be listed – Potatoes – first early, Potatoes – main crop and second earlies, Turnips and Swedes for fodder, Mangolds and Sugar Beet. Kale – for fodder, Rape (or Cole), Cabbage, Savoys and Kohl Rabi for fodder, Vetches or Tares, Lucerne, Mustard – for seed, Mustard for fodder, Flax – for fibre or linseed, Hops – Statute Acres – not Hop Acres, the form says sternly – who knew there was a difference?

Then acreage of  Orchards had to be shown – those with crops, fallow or grass below the trees and those with small fruit below the trees had to be shown separately, and Small Fruit not under orchard trees.

Vegetables for human consumption (excluding potatoes) had a line to themselves but included Flowers and Crops under Glass. All other crops followed, including clover, Sainfoin, grass for mowing and got grazing. Then the form details information about the labour employed on the farm (not including the occupier, his wife or domestic servants). Followed by full details of the stock held, right down to the last piglet and hen, with horses required to be listed by their use and their age. 

A copy of the  form for Hailstone Farm is shown here, it makes interesting reading.

copyright The National Archives  Document MAF 32/604/177, Extract.

The next section of the form required details to be given of the Labour employed on the 4th June 1941, including the family of the occupier and whether regular or casual, whole or part time. Then a section on Motive Power on each holding had to be completed, water wheels or turbines  – in use or not, whether repairable if not in use, Steam engines, Gas Engines, Oil or Petrol Engines, Electric Motors or others – state kinds, the form says. It’s difficult to think of any other kinds, but there was obviously no excuse for not declaring it if there were any! Edit: A later part entry for one farm lists a horse – which was of course for many the main source of motive power for centuries, those or oxen. Then there was a section requiring information on Tractors held, of various sorts, with information required on the make and model.

Next the form required details of the rent being paid for the holding – if the land was owned by the occupier, the owner was required to give their best estimate of how much the rental value was. And how long the holding had been occupied by the current occupier.

copyright The National Archives  Document MAF 32/604/177. Extract

Later Survey

A later  Survey gave a detailed picture, not only of the amount of land held but how it related to such things as access to transport, condition of buildings, facilities and an assessment of whether the farm was being farmed efficiently. Again, this is the form relating to Hailstone Farm, part of the same form as previously.

Copyright The National Archives  Document MAF 32/604/177. Extract

There were a few copies of each of these forms relating to farms in Rowley. I have grouped the details under each farm and although they are, to some extent, repetitive, I hope they will be of interest.

Hailstone Farm

The name of the Occupier at Hailstone Farm was C or G Cartwright. What was he growing in that first survey? Ah, sadly, none of the crops listed, except that he had 6 tons of hay – just one entry!

At Hailstone Farm on the longer form, there were no additional labourers so all the work must have been done by the occupier Mr Cartwright and his family. He had one 3½ horsepower Oil or Petrol engine and no tractors at all.  His rent was £74 per annum. Under the length of tenancy, he stated that he had rented 35 acres for 16 years, 10 acres for 9 years and a further 7 acres for 6 years.

Farm Survey:     The survey was carried out on 16 July 1942.  The owner of Hailstone Farm, with 52 acres was Rowley Granite Quarries Ltd., which was based in Smethwick High Street. Mr Cartwright was a full time farmer, but occupied no other land and had no grazing rights elsewhere. T he farm was said to be conveniently laid out.

All of the land was classified as medium weight., as opposed to Heavy, Light or Peaty. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 50% Fair and 50% Bad, with fair access to roads, good access to railways. The condition of the farmhouse was fair but that of the farm buildings was bad. Farm roads and fences were in fair condition as was the general condition of the field drainage but there were no ditches nor cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds nor derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and buildings was by pipe and to the fields by stream. There was no electrical power supply at all. The condition of the arable land and pasture was judged to be poor and, although fertilisers were used to some extent on arable land, they were not used at all on grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded B (out of a possible A, B or C, it appears). Of the possible reasons for this, it was noted that this was due to personal failings – a lack of ambition! They certainly weren’t pulling any punches, were they?

Turner’s Hill Farm

T E Monk at Turner’s Hill Farm was another nil return on the first form. The later form showed that he had no additional workers and no machinery. He was paying £67 per annum for 27 acres and had rented it for 13 years in 1941.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 31 Aug 1943. Turner’s Hill Farm was also owned by Himley Estates. Mr Monk was described as a ‘spare time’ farmer who was also a Factory Employee., with no other land or grazing rights.  The farm was said to be conveniently laid out. The farm conditions showed that the soil was 50% Medium and 50% Light and the proportions of the farm was judged to be naturally 40% Fair and 60% Bad, with good access to roads, and fair access to railways. The condition of the farmhouse and buildings was fair. The farm roads were good and fences were in fair condition as was the general condition of the field drainage although the ditches were noted as Bad. There was one cottage within the farm area. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and to the farm buildings and fields was by pipe. There was no electrical power supply at all. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. The condition of the pasture land was good and fertilisers were used adequately on grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded B (out of a possible A, B or C, the reason given for the downgrading was ‘Divided Interests’, presumably relating to Mr Monk’s other employment.

Old Portway Farm

The first form for Old Portway Farm, occupied by Phoebe Cooks, showed just 2 tons of hay.

But the more detailed form showed that Mrs Cooks was growing a total of three acres of Main Crop potatoes, turnips/swedes and mangolds. She had 8½  acres of mowing grass and 15 acres of grazing grass plus 2½  acres of rough grazing – there seems to have been a lot of this in Rowley, perhaps due partly to the effects of quarrying and mining settlement. She had three workers, one male and one female whole time workers and one part-time male. These cared for her 6 cows in milk, her 6 cows in calf but not in milk and 1 bull (used for service). There was one other female cattle aged between one and two years, giving a total of 14 cattle. There were no sheep or pigs but she had 85 fowls over 6 months old, 68 under 6 months and 3 ducks! The remaining live stock consisted of three geldings and one other horse.

On the next page, Mrs Cooks stated that she had one wholetime family worker (male, so not herself) and one part-time casual male worker. She also, like Mr Cartwright at Hailstone Farm, had one 4hp horsepower Oil or Petrol engine and no tractors at all.  Her rent was £56/10shillings per annum for 29 acres. Under the length of tenancy, she stated that she had rented the land for 30 years.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 22 May 1942. The owner of Old Portway Farm, with 26½  acres, we can now see, was again Rowley Granite Quarries Ltd., which was based in Smethwick High Street. Mrs Cooks was a full time farmer, but occupied no other land and had no grazing rights elsewhere.  The farm was said to be conveniently laid out.

All of the land was classified as medium weight, as opposed to Heavy, Light or Peaty. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 100% Fair, with fair access to roads, and good access to railways. The condition of the farmhouse and buildings was fair. There were no farm roads and fences were in fair condition as was the general condition of the field drainage and ditches. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were 2.5 acres of derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse was by pipe and to the farm buildings fields by well. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was no electrical power supply at all. The condition of the arable land was judged to be fair and of the pasture good and, although fertilisers were used adequately on arable land, they were only used to some extent on grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded A (out of a possible A, B or C, it appears).

Lower Portway Farm

Joseph Cooks, at No. 17 – Lower Portway Farm had even less hay – he had nothing entered on his farm on the first form but more detail on the second.  He had two acres growing the same crops as Mrs Cooks, plus 5 acres of mowing grass and 10½ acres  of grazing grass. He had 3 cows in milk and two in calf with their first calf plus a bull under 1 year old which was being reared for service. No sheep or pigs but 120 fowls over 6 months, 50 fowls under six months and three ducks. He had no horses!

Farm Survey: Carried out on 14 May 1942. The owner of Lower Portway Farm, with 17¼   acres, was Himley Estates Ltd, with an office address in Dudley. Mrs Cooks was a full time farmer, but occupied no other land and had no grazing rights elsewhere.  The farm was said to be conveniently laid out.

All of the land was classified as light weight, as opposed to Heavy, Medium or Peaty. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 100% Fair, with good access to roads, and fair access to railways. The condition of the farmhouse, farm buildings and farm roads was fair. The fences and ditches were in fair condition and the general condition of the field drainage and ditches was good. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and the farm buildings was by pipe and to fields by stream. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was no electrical power supply at all. The condition of the arable and pasture land was good and fertilisers were used to some extent on both arable and grass land. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded A (out of a possible A, B or C).

175 Dudley Road

The Danks brothers were listed on the first form at 175 Dudley road and they had just 1 ton of hay.

The later section shows that they were farming 15½ acres, of which they were the owners. The farmer was described as a part-time Dairyman, with no other land or grazing rights. All of the land was classified as light weight and the farm was said to be conveniently laid out.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 20 Sep 1943. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 40% Fair and 60% Bad, with good access to roads and to railways. The condition of the farmhouse and farm buildings was fair. There were no farm roads. The fences and ditches were in fair condition and the general condition of the field drainage and ditches was fair. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse, the farm buildings and to fields was by pipe. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was electrical power from the public company for light and power, which was used for household but not farm purposes. The condition of the pasture land was good (no arable land)and there was adequate use of fertilisers on the grass land. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded A (out of a possible A, B or C).

‘The Stores’, High Street, Rowley Regis

Samuel Goode was listed at ‘The Stores’, High Street, Rowley Regis and he, too had a zero return on the first form. On the later form he had no crops, no workers and no animals – or at least none of his own, he had a note saying that he had no fowl of his own but let a corner piece of land to someone called Jackson who had about 50 fowl there.

He had no additional labour, no machinery and held 7 acres at a rent of £3/10shillings which he had rented for 7 years,  noted in pencil at the bottom of the form as for rough grazing only. I wonder where his land was?

Farm Survey: Carried out on 2 Sep 1943. As might be expected he had a nil return to almost all of the questions on the last section, though his land was classed as 100%light and was not stated to be derelict but the proportion of the farm which was naturally bad was 100%. There were no buildings and the water supply to his field was noted to be by ‘pit’. No power!  Fertiliser was used to some extent on what was classed as grass land but the holding still managed to be classed as A, somehow.

Brickhouse Farm

The first return for the Brickhouse Farm was completed by the Borough Surveyor at the Old Hill Offices  of the RRUDC and he listed a half acre of onions being grown and half a ton each of Hay and Straw. The later form reported that there were 6 ¼ acres growing oats, 2 acres growing first early potatoes and 15 acres with main crop potatoes, 1 acre growing vegetables for human consumption, 1 acre bare fallow, and 45 acres of mowing grass, plus 17 acres of rough grazing. Contrary to what is stated elsewhere on these forms, he states that there are two full time male workers or 21 and one under 18, and four casual seasonal workers, giving a total of seven. Perhaps these were actually Council employees, rather than specifically employed by the farm. There were no animals on the farm other than one horse, a gelding.  But a later part of the form shows that this was apparently the only local farm with a tractor so they did not need to keep many horses.

The next part of the return for Brickhouse Farm shows that it had no men working it and that 57 ½ acres had been rented since April 1939 for a mere £12. Presumably this land was what later became the Brickhouse housing estate. A second return by the same officer still employed no men but boasted a 25hp Fordson tractor. Here 49 acres was owned by the Council with an estimated rent value of £85pa, and a further 38¼ acres rented at £19/2/6. I suppose this could include the land on which the Grammar School was built in the early 1960s. Of this land, 67 acres had been held for only 2 years and 20¼ acres for 5 years. Perhaps the Rowley Regis Council was buying up land as it became available for future uses.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 11 Oct 1943. The owner of Brickhouse Farm, with 70  acres is shown to be Rowley Regis Boro’ Council. The full time farmer was noted as a Bailiff but he occupied no other land and had no grazing rights elsewhere.  The farm was said to be conveniently laid out.

All of the land was classified as medium weight, as opposed to Heavy, Light or Peaty. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 50% fair and 50% bad, with good access to roads and railways. The condition of the farmhouse and the farm buildings was fair. The farm roads and fences were fair and the general condition of the field drainage and ditches was fair. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and the farm buildings was by pipe and to fields by pit. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was no electrical power supply. The condition of the arable land was judged to be fair and of the pasture poor and fertilisers were used adequately on arable land and grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded A.

Throne Farm

W Skidmore at Throne Road had 4 tons of hay on the first form.  The next form shows that he had two additional full time workers but no motors of any sort or any tractor. His 33 acres was apparently valued at a rental of £40 and he had occupied it for 20 years.

Mr Skidmore was growing 1 acre of turnips and swedes for fodder and 2 of mangolds with 20 acres of mowing grass and 10 of grazing grass. He had two adult male workers who looked after 17 milking cows and 3 cows in calf. He also had a sow in pig and 5 piglets aged 2-5 months but no fowl of any sort. He had 2 mares and 5 other horses, 7 in total.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 16 Jul 1942. Mr Skidmore was the owner of the farm and that he was a full time farmer, he occupied no other land and had no grazing rights elsewhere.  The farm was said to be conveniently laid out. The soil was deemed to be naturally 50% medium and 50% light. The proportion of the farm which was naturally good was 60%and 40% fair, with good access to roads and railways. The condition of the farmhouse was fair and the farm buildings good. The farm roads and fences were fair and the general condition of the field drainage and ditches was good. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and the farm buildings was by pipe and to fields by stream. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was electrical power supply used in the farmhouse and for farm purposes. The condition of the arable land was judged to be good and of the pasture fair and fertilisers were used adequately on the arable and grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded A.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 12 Sep 1944. Mr Skidmore also owned land at Whiteheath Farm, 31 acres of this. All of the land was classified as medium weight, as opposed to Heavy, Light or Peaty and the farm was said to be conveniently laid out. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 25% fair and 75% bad, with good access to roads and fair  access to railways. There was no farmhouse, farm buildings or farm roads and fences were good and the condition of the ditches and the field drainage was fair. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the fields was by stream. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was no electrical power supply. There was no arable land and the pasture was rated fair and fertilisers were used adequately on the grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded A.

1 Oakham Farm

David Whitehouse at 1 Oakham Farm had nothing to list  on the first form.  But the next form shows that he was growing maincrop potatoes, turnips/swedes and mangolds, and there were 16 acres of mowing grass and 20 of grazing grass. Two whole time men over 21 were employed and one 18-21 year old. There were 8 cows in milk, no poultry but three mares, plus one unbroken gelding and one other horse.

The next section shows that he had just one full time male family worker – presumably himself and no engines, although he did add that he had one source of motive power – a horse! He owned 1 acre and had rented a further 44 acres for £54pa for 11 years.

This farm was owned by F W Gould who had an address in Tipton. The farmer was full time and had no access to other land or grazing rights. All of the land was classified as medium weight and the farm was said to be conveniently laid out.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 5 Aug 1942. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 65% good and 35% fair, with good access to roads and railways. The condition of the farmhouse the farm buildings was fair as was the condition of the farm roads, fences and the field drainage. There were no ditches or cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse was by pipe and to farm buildings and fields by pits. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was no electrical power supply. The condition of the arable land and pasture land was rated fair and fertilisers were used adequately on the arable land but only to some extent on the grass land. The overall verdict on management of the farm was graded B, with a note that the reason for this was ‘personal failings – lack of Ambition’.

2 Oakham Farm

Bert Whitehouse at 2 Oakham Farm was another farmer with nothing to list on the first form. But the next form shows a name of Joseph Whitehouse  –  brothers  to David, perhaps? – at 2 Oakham Farm which had 13 acres of rough grazing, and one adult man working. There were 10 cows in milk and 50 fowl, plus 21 ducks, with one horse which did not fall into any of the agricultural designations, perhaps a riding horse.

This farm also had one additional full time worker – a  daughter. There were no motors or tractors either and the ten acres of land had been rented for 35 years, the rent was £28pa.  

Farm Survey: Carried out on 11 Aug 1942. Mr Whitehouse was noted as the owner of the farm and was a full time farmer, though with no access to other land or grazing rights. All of the land was classified as medium weight, as opposed to Heavy, Light or Peaty and the farm was said to be conveniently laid out. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 100% fair, with good access to roads and fair  access to railways. The condition of the farmhouse and the farm buildings was fair. There were no farm roads and fences were bad and the general condition of the field drainage and ditches was fair. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and the farm buildings was by pipe and to fields by pits. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was no electrical power supply. There was no arable land and the pasture was rated fair and fertilisers were used adequately on the grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded B with a note that the holding was farmed by an old widow who ‘lacked management’. This is slightly contradictory because elsewhere on the forms the farmer is described as Bert Whitehouse but perhaps the farm was owned by his mother.

Lamb Cottage, Throne Road, Whiteheath

J Matthews at Lamb Cottage, Throne Road, Whiteheath had nothing to list on the first form.  The second form shows that he had no crops but 4 acres of grazing grass and 2 acres of rough grazing. His livestock comprised one sow kept for breeding, 3 piglets aged 2-5 months and 10 under 2 months. There were 25 Fowls over 6 months, 4 ducks, 6 geese, 2 turkeys over 6 months and 8 under 6 months. But no horses.

Details on the next page show that he had rented just 6 acres for one year at £6. And had neither additional workers nor motive power. Of this land, a pencil note adds that 2 acres was rough grazing.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 2 Sep 1943. This farm was owned by Mr Cartwright of Hailstone Farm. The farmer Mr J Matthews was described as a part-time farmer and his other occupation was given as Farm Worker.  He had no access to other land or grazing rights.

All of the land was classified as medium weight, and the farm was said to be moderately conveniently laid out. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 100% fair, with good access to roads and railways. The condition of the farmhouse and that of the farm buildings was fair. The condition of the farm roads, fences and ditches was fair as was the general condition of the field drainage. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and the farm buildings was by pipe and to fields by stream. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was apparently an electrical power supply to the house but not the rest of the farm. The condition of the pasture land was rated fair (no arable land)and fertilisers were used adequately on the grassland. The overall verdict on management of the farm was graded A.

Warrens Hall Farm

At Warrens Hall Farm, the Wooldridge Brothers had nothing to enter on the first form. They were growing 7 acres of oats, 2 of mangolds and 1½ acres of kale for fodder on the next. There was 30 acres of mowing grass and 45 of grazing grass, plus 16½ acres of rough grazing and 69 acres of golf course!  For this they had one whole time and one part time seasonal worker – there were 20 cows in milk, and 12 in calf but not in milk. Under Poultry, there were 60 fowls over 6 months old and 40 under, 5 ducks and 4 turkeys over 6 months old, the first turkeys I have seen mentioned in these returns. The horses included 3 geldings and 2 other horses.

The next part of the form shows that there was one whole-time male family worker, plus one male and two female part time workers, with – again – no motive power of any sort. The annual rent for the 171 acres was £110 and it had been rented since 1913, 28 years.

Farm Survey: Carried out on 11 May 1942. Warren’s Hall Farm was owned by the Himley Estates Ltd with an office in Dudley. The farmer was recorded as full time and the farm included access to 69 acres held by Dudley Golf Club. But the farmer had no other grazing rights.

All of the land was classified as medium weight, and the farm was said to be moderately conveniently laid out. The condition of the farm was judged to be naturally 10% good and 90% fair, with fair access to roads and railways. The condition of the farmhouse was good and that of the farm buildings was fair. The condition of the farm roads, fences and ditches was fair as was the general condition of the field drainage. There were no cottages. No problems were noted with infestations of rabbits, rats or rooks, etc nor any heavy infestation with weeds, there were no derelict fields. Water supply to the farmhouse and the farm buildings was by pipe and to fields by stream. There was no seasonal shortage of water noted. There was apparently an electrical power supply to the  house and farm. The condition of the arable land was good and the pasture was rated fair and fertilisers were used adequately on them both. The overall verdict on management of the farm? It was graded A.

Who  completed the forms?

All of these forms were prepared by independent officials, one recording field information and visits taking place over a period of two years in all and the primary record being completed by another official at a later point. The visiting officials were J Griffin who seems to have visited some sites in July, August ,  September  and October 1942, August, September and October 1943, and September 1944.  C A Dickinson visited a couple of farms in May 1942.

The signing off of the primary record seems to have been the responsibility of E M Powell or E M Casstles and happened sometimes months or even more than a year later. The writing of the E M in the signatures is identical so I suspect that it was the same person who was a woman who got married!

Summary

These forms related to the farms which I could identify in the file as in and around the area of the Lost Hamlets. There were a few more forms with vague descriptions of the land they referred to – (land off …Road, etc) – often small areas and usually owned by companies or contractors and not with local family names that I recognised and I have not included these in this piece. Nevertheless I hope that I have covered most of the farms and smallholdings known to local people.

The information gathered was clearly to inform the Government of what capacity for growing food there was and where labour such as the Land Army should be directed, as well as controlling the distribution of food in the form of livestock, chickens, pigs etc so as to safeguard the ration system. And now, thanks to The National Archives, the best part of 100 years later, we can use it to build ourselves a picture of farming life in the hamlets during the Second World War.

It does appear that the farms in this area were, mostly through no fault of the farmers, generally of only fair or poor quality, partly due to historic industrial processes including quarrying and mining which resulted in subsidence and spoil tipping with consequent damage to the farmland above and around the mines and quarries. This was recognised at much earlier times than this war, as Farmer John Levett at Brickhouse Farm was reporting in 1820 that much of his farmland could not be used because of undermining and spoil tipping. Although some of this external damage  will have settled and greened over to some extent after the mines closed, it seems likely that even more waste chemicals and other substances were deposited in unrecorded dumping in later years and as local industries diversified and expanded. The damage to the quality of the soil seems likely to have persisted for many years, if indeed  it was ever very good. Alas, much of the land on the Rowley Hills had always been ‘rough grazing’ and it seems that farming in Rowley was often a struggle and the farmland did not, could not feed many people, even in the 20th century, other than for dairy purposes.

I hope you have found this an interesting chapter in the story of our local Farms.

Health in Rowley Regis and the Hamlets – the Official View in 1895

Anyone who has researched their ancestors back much beyond 1900 knows that general health, life expectancy and particularly child mortality were very much worse than they were later. As Chitham notes in his History of Rowley Regis, cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849 had made it clear that small parishes had problems coping with such outbreaks and health issues generally. As a result Local Boards of Health were set up and Rowley Regis had one of these, later succeeded by the Rowley Regis Urban District Council in 1871.

The cholera epidemic did not leave Rowley village untouched. Between 16th July and 8th October 1832 there were 71 burials at St Giles with cholera given as the cause of death. Of those 11 were from Rowley Village including 5 members of the Westwood family, 1 from Portway, 1 from Tippity Green, 5 from Bourne Brook and 21 from Windmill End, which was below Rowley, between Springfield and Netherton. Bourn Brook was also in that area. There were also several from Primrose Hill, again very close to Windmill End so the cholera really was rife in that area, though it appears to have been largely avoided by the folk in the hamlets living higher up the hill. The age range of those affected was from 6 months to 78 years, with many adults in middle life, leaving their families without a mother or a father.

In 1849 the published transcribed burial registers stop at the end of 1849 and between 10 Oct 1849 and the end of December that year there were 12 burials of cholera victims but there may be more after that. All of these came from the Old Hill area.

This week online I have found the Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health to the Rowley Regis Urban District Council , many of which have been digitised with the assistance of the Wellcome Foundation, very possibly from the Foundation Library and which can be read and downloaded free from the Internet Archive.  And they make fascinating reading, giving an official view of many aspects of life in the Rowley Regis area. The earliest report I have been able to find so far is dated March 1894 and the last in 1965 when the Council was abolished.

All photographs here my copyright.

The Medical Officer of Health in 1895 was J G Beasley. The members of the Rowley Local Board were listed in a newspaper report in the County Express on 24 December 1887 so fairly close in date to the first report I can find and they were all local names – Mr W Bassano presided, other members present were Mess’rs Lowe, Priest, Plant, Wood, Robertson and Whitehouse. The Board apparently met monthly. Dr Beasley had clearly been in post for several years by the time of the report I found for 1895 and he knew his area well.

The report is extremely detailed and thorough, much of the information broken down into the Electoral Wards in Rowley Regis, which were Tividale, Rowley Regis, Blackheath, Old Hill and Cradley Heath so it is possible to look at much of the information just for Rowley Regis. Much of what follows, however, relates to the wider area of Rowley, rather than just the hamlets. Nevertheless I hope that you will find it of interest as undoubtedly the issues covered in the report relate to the residents of the Lost Hamlets to some extent. The photograph below shows the list of streets in the Rowley Ward in 1891. The population of the ward then was 5,005, it comprised 1347 acres, had 920 inhabited houses and 29 void houses.

The report also notes the number of births – 1252 in the District in 1895, there were also 622 deaths in all.

The page also shows the numbers of sicknesses of particular types – Smallpox, Scarlet Fever, Diptheria, Croup, Erysipelas, Enteric Fever, Puerperal Fever and Cholera, whether they related to people under or over five years of age, and the number of deaths resulting, all divided into quarters of the year.  Fortunately in this year, there were no cases of small pox, diphtheria, enteric fever or Cholera.

There are mortality returns – 622 deaths in the year1895, 326 males and 296 female, giving a death rate of 18.7 per 1000 inhabitants. In 1894, the report says, there were 510, and the death rate then was 15.6 per 1000. The report then breaks these down by age – 243 deaths of infants under the age of one year, a rate of 7.3 per 1000 inhabitants, more than twice the rate of any other age group – 103 between one and five years, 22 between five and fifteen years, 19 between fifteen and twenty-five years, 115 between twenty-five and sixty five years and 120 aged over sixty five. None of these latter were more than 3.6 per 1000.

The infant mortality rates were a subject of much concern amongst both Council Health officers and members. The report goes on:

“Infant mortality again forces itself very prominently on our notice. Three hundred and forty six deaths under five years of age out of a total of six hundred and twenty two which had been registered. This is a very serious condition of affairs and the solution to the problem of how this waste of infant life is to be prevented does not appear to me to be forthcoming in the near future. In addition to the old conditions mentioned in my previous reports, all of which conditions still exist, a severe epidemic of Scarlet Fever has been prevalent in the District for the last eight months concurrent with which has been an epidemic of Whooping Cough and, during the last quarter and epidemic of measles. “

Smallpox

The report also notes that in the year there were three cases of smallpox, all in the Halesowen Road. In these cases, all the patients had been vaccinated against smallpox and had mild attacks from which they recovered. It is clear from the report that the medical officers made vigorous attempts to trace the origin of the infection and although all three cases were in the same street, he had been unable to find any connection between them. In the report for the previous year, I noted that there had been fourteen cases of smallpox, all treated in isolation at the Tividale Isolation Hospital.

It was noted that several were connected and from the same area of High Street and Hackett Street, Blackheath. The report notes

“All these people, in my opinion, had the disease conveyed to them by our Sub-Inspector who is brother-in-law to the first case admitted this year. I had foreseen the danger for some time and had attempted to minimise it by instructing him not to handle the patients or otherwise unnecessarily expose himself to infection, also to disinfect his own clothing at frequent intervals. This risk will always be attendant on those engaged in disinfecting clothing and infected houses.”

Poor sub-inspector. Fortunately all the patients were well vaccinated, had the disease in a very mild form and made good recoveries. Another cluster of cases in Tividale were thought to have originated with a policeman who regularly patrolled past the isolation hospital where smallpox patients were nursed.

The report noted that the Medical Officer considered that they had been very fortunate in confining the disease to the houses in which it had appeared and he attributed this success in a great measure to the prompt removal of the patients to the hospital and the thorough process of disinfection to which they subjected the houses and their contents.

There had also been one case of suspected cholera in July 1894 in Tividale and again swift and thorough measures were taken. The Medical officer says in a letter sent the same day to the Local Government Board that

“I have ordered the closets at his residence and at the works to be emptied tonight, the contents to be buried after being freely treated with carbolic powder, and the midden holes also to be freely dressed with the same powder. I have supplied disinfectants (sanitas oil emulsion) for all soiled linen to be soaked in and the first thing in the morning, shall have all soiled articles disinfected by our steam disinfector. I have removed all the occupants of the house (including two lodgers) and have left him in the care of his wife and mother.”

How thorough is that? Fortunately the man survived and recovered and laboratory tests on samples subsequently showed that the infection was not cholera. But it might have been…

Scarlet Fever – unknown for my childhood and since until quite recently – 541 cases of this had occurred in 1895, amongst 352 families with 24 deaths resulting. This was 353 more than the previous year. Fortunately most of these had been of a very mild type, hence the ‘small proportion’ of deaths. By the middle of August 1895 the outbreak had become so severe that Dr Beasley had to report it to the Local Government Board. The letter is shown in full in the report. He details his efforts to stop the spread of the disease,

“taking all the means at my disposal’ including confining patients to their homes ‘until desquamation has been completed’  (the peeling of scales of skin due to the disease), preventing children from infected houses attending any school or public assembly, disinfecting by stean disinfector all clothes, bedding etc and disinfecting all infected houses as early as possible after the convalescence or death of the patient. A free distribution of disinfectants and a strict surveillance over all notified cases.” 

He also noted that one person Mary Jane Dunn – had been convicted of exposing a child in public whilst suffering from Scarlet Fever, for which they had been fined twenty shillings and costs. They were certainly very proactive in trying to combat this disease. He notes that almost all the cases were confined to Old Hill and Cradley Heath at the time (August) though it later appeared in Blackheath and Rowley Regis and was also in neighbouring areas and indeed the whole country.

Seven cases of Diptheria had also occurred among five families with one death. Again, unheard of in our modern lives, thanks to vaccinations. The Medical Officer attributed most of these cases to drainage problems and offensive drains.

Six cases of membranous croup had occurred, all isolated cases spread around the district and five of them in under fives, four deaths resulting from these.

There had been twenty one cases of Enteric  (Typhoid) Fever, among seventeen families again scattered around the District though usually attributed to impure drinking water or ‘effluvia’from a night soil tip or pigstys, or contaminated wells or water supplies. He notes that the water supply to these houses had received ‘careful attention’ and other sanitary defects had been rectified.

Measles, although not a notifiable disease,had also proved a considerable problem. Eight deaths had been registered from this cause. There had been a few cases in Old Hill and Cradley Heath in the first quarter and then none until November and December when it became so prevalent that the Endowed School at Reddal Hill and the Infant Department at the Old Hill Board School had been advised by him to close a week prior to the Christmas holidays to try to slow the spread of the disease by person to person infection. A full report had been submitted to the Local Government Board again, once more included in the report, and it was stated that at Reddal Hill School, 120 children out of 610 pupils  and at the Old Hill Board School, 200 out of 417 children were absent on account of some members of the various families being attacked with either measles or scarlet fever. The schools had closed immediately and would not re-open until 6th January.

This photograph shows the Preventive Measures adopted to try to contain the spread of infectious diseases.

As part of this report there is also an ‘Epitome of Sanitary Work for the Past Year’ in the report. Work was being done to provide ‘deep drainage’ throughout the District but this could not be turned into the pipes until the whole work was completed, understandably! 

To improve surface drainage extra men were still employed in attending to the open ditches and water courses in the parish and 5,507 yards of ditches had been cleared out during the year. It has to be said that although parts of Oakham were included in the list of areas where ditches had been cleared out, there is no mention of any of the lost hamlets – perhaps there weren’t any ditches on the quarry side of the hill. Also 1,335 yards of kerbing and channelling had been laid on local roads in the area. It is difficult to imagine so much work being done in such a small area in one year these days.

Night soil removal was done under contract which was said to be ‘far from satisfactory’ – complaints were made of the nuisance arising from some of the tips and of the night soil being tipped in unauthorised places – the more things change the more they stay the same! Early fly tipping, obviously… In the previous April an extra assistant inspector had been appointed to look after the privies and closets in the Upper Division – which would include Rowley – and since then, complaints of delay in having them emptied has been less frequent.

There had been continuing efforts to improve the safety of water supply  in the District – 261 houses had been connected to the South Staffordshire Water Company supply and two wells had been closed in 1895 and the water from fifteen tested and fourteen of those had been condemned as unfit for use. But finally a reference to Turners Hill –

Reference to the water supply to Turners Hill appears in both the 1894 and 1895 Reports.

In 1894:

“The water supply of Turners Hill and District still remains unchanged, although further very special efforts have been made to procure a proper supply from the SSWWCo for this area. It is a matter of deep regret to the Board and to myself that these efforts have been unsuccessful, notwithstanding the engagement by the Board of an eminent Water Engineer, with the hope of effecting the required supply. The Water Works Company have considered several schemes suggested by the said engineer but have not accepted any of them, nor does it seem possible to get the company to lay on their water without the payment of a very considerable sum of money, which it is feared could not be met by a rate on the locality. This particular area is rural in character but is nevertheless within that covered by the Company’s Act of Parliament. It is a great pity that the service reservoir for the parish of Rowley Regis was not constructed on this highest point of the parish so that all parts could have been supplied from it.”

And the 1895 Report has:

“In spite of all efforts on the part of the Council the water supply of Turners Hill district remains unchanged. An effort has been made to get the mains extended either from Perrys lake or Whiteheath to the lower part of Portway and Throne but without success and this part of the parish is practically without any reliable water. Two springs and a number of surface wells are the only sources from which water can be obtained.”

Inspections

In addition to all these other responsibilities Inspections had also been carried out under the Factory and Workshop Act. And 22 dairies and Milkshops had been inspected with 18 formal notices issued and 17 nuisances abated as a result. 219 Cowsheds and 131 slaughter houses, 92 canal boats and 67 pigsties had been inspected. Dwellings, houses and schools had been the subject of 281 inspections for ‘foul conditions’, resulting in 133 notices and 130 improvements, 31 buildings had been found to have structural defects , 14 to be overcrowded  and 17 unfit for habitation. Of these latter notices had been issued in 15 cases and the nuisances abated. There had also been 1098 lots of infected bedding stoved or destroyed, 458 houses disinfected and 1 school and 330 houses had been limewashed. The Department had purchased a ‘Disinfector’ apparatus which was judged to be a great requisition and was performing its work ‘in a most satisfactory manner’, and public prejudice against it was said to be gradually wearing away.

Conclusions

I was struck by the diligent efforts shown in this report to prevent disease and to identify the origins, the work to improve housing, sanitation, drains etc, to make life better for local people. Taxes, it has been said, are paid with resignation, rates are paid in anger and it is certainly true that, in my experience as a local government officer, many people find it hard to identify the services which their rates pay for. But I don’t think that this can have been said then. There appears to have been quite a small team making a very strong effort to improve people’s lives and to assist those afflicted by infectious diseases and to remove the causes where these could be traced back to environmental issues.

I am also sure that it is not insignificant that the people sitting on this board were local people, they lived here, they worked or had their businesses here, they met the local inhabitants at their churches and chapels, in the shops, as their neighbours – they knew them. These were not ‘jobsworths’ doing this for the sake of looking good, of being a committee member, this committee also had a vigorous committed professional staff who, frankly, appear to have been working their socks off to improve the living conditions of local people, and many of them appear to have stayed in their posts for many years. So they knew their area intimately. I have the impression that they achieved an enormous amount given the limitations of scientific knowledge then.

I wonder, has local government been greatly improved by combining authorities into bigger and bigger councils so that your representatives will certainly not have the local knowledge and commitment that these people did?

These reports show a very detailed picture of the public health concerns of local councils at this time and by looking at later reports it is possible to see great changes and to appreciate why some courses of action were taken in slum clearance and demolishing houses in later years. I will look at a couple of later reports in a later post, some of the changes are very striking.  

To read some of the reports for yourself, go to the Internet Archive at archive.org and search for “Rowley Regis” and specify ‘texts’. You can also limit it by dates so I searched from 1850 – 1970, lots of interesting results and many of these reports.