Turner's Hill – Page 3 – rowleyregislosthamlets.co.uk

Life on the Edge

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

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

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

Growing up and family memories on the edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Playing on the edge

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

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

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

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

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

Riding on the Edge

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

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

Driving on the edge

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

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

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

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

Dropping off the edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working on the edge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Granite Connections 1 – The Mountsorrel and Shropshire Connections

I have noted from Census entries for the Lost Hamlets over several decades that while most residents were from the village or the hamlets themselves, some people came from other areas. If a place recurs several times when I am transcribing, I look the place up to see whether I can work out the link and I often find that these places had granite quarries, just like Rowley. Researching around this theme, I have found so much information that I am splitting the results into three posts.

To illustrate this migratory pattern, I have concentrated initially on looking at one family, the Hopewell brothers who came to Rowley from Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, fifty miles away, in about 1841. There were numerous other migrant workers but I picked this family because there were three brothers to work on. I do not appear to be related to them, at least so far!

In the 1851 Census Thomas Hopewell (aged 30) and his brother Charles (24) were living in Tippity Green, probably lodging at the Bull’s Head. They both gave their occupation as Stone Cutter and both were born in Mountsorrel, Leicestershire. Thomas had already been living in Tippity Green in the 1841 Census, but the 1851 Census is the first which actually shows the place of birth, usually County and place. The 1841 Census does not show relationships within a household and just says whether someone was born in the County or not. In Rowley’s case, this means that someone could be born as close as Dudley, parts of Whiteheath or Gorsty Hill, Oldbury or Halesowen and still tick No so this is not a good indication of how far people had moved.

Thomas Hopewell had married Mary Trowman on 18 Sep 1843 at St Giles Church. His occupation then was given as a Stocktaker, perhaps at the quarry but there is no way of knowing for sure. Mary gave her abode at the time of the marriage as Club Buildings and she was the daughter of Benjamin Trowman, a Jews Harp Maker. Thomas signed the Register so he was literate, as presumably he would need to be as a Stocktaker but Mary made her mark as most people in Rowley did at the time.

The marriage registers tell us that the father of the brothers was Septimus Hopewell and his occupation was given as a ‘Frame work slitter’ who does not appear ever to have moved from Leicestershire. That would have been a very unfamiliar occupation in Rowley, and I think he was actually a frame work knitter. The framework knitting trade was common in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, making stockings but, like nailmaking, work at home which was very badly paid which is perhaps why Thomas and his brothers sought other employment. I have put a link at the end of this article to an interesting website about the conditions of Framework knitters.

There was at least one other Hopewell brother in the area, George Hopewell who married Mary Ann Masfield/Masefield in Rowley in 1842. George was also living in Tippity Green at the time of the marriage and was also a stone cutter. He died aged 47 in 1862, leaving his widow with his stepson. They do not appear to have had any other children.

Charles Hopewell, the youngest brother I have found in Rowley, married Elizabeth Lowe in St Giles in 1852 but died aged only 32 in 1860 leaving his widow with five young children. Lowe is another Rowley name which will recur in this family tree. The children from Charles’s marriage appear to have stayed in the Rowley/Blackheath area although their mother had at least two more children and then remarried in 1870 to John Brooks, living almost next door to the Gadds in Ross. The Hopewell name in this part of the family appears to have been spelled as Oakwell in various records for some time, a hazard to the illiterate (and to the family history researcher)! If you say Hopewell and drop the ‘h’ you can hear how that might happen. Later some of the children used the name Hopewell and some Oakwell and some swapped between the two…

Both George and Charles Hopewell were buried at St Giles.

In 1861 Thomas and Mary were living in Hawes Lane, Rowley with five children: Annie, born 1844, Sarah, born 1847, George born 1850, Elizabeth born 1853 and Septimus born 1860, all in Rowley Regis. He was now described as a Stone Cutter.

Living next door to them were Joseph Lowe and his sons including Samuel, then aged 20 and Joseph, aged 18, both of whom feature later in the Hopewell family story. Thomas and Mary’s eldest daughter Annie married Samuel Lowe in Dudley in May 1861 and they stayed in Rowley for some years after her parents moved to Shropshire although her later children were also born in Shropshire.

Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, where the brothers came from, is described even today as ‘The village renowned for its granite quarry, the largest in Europe… and the local area is built on granite. Organised quarrying of the granite in Mountsorrel Quarry began in the late eighteenth century, and the quarrying trade had around 500 employees by 1870.’ So there was certainly expertise in granite quarrying there.

Clee Hills, Shropshire:

There were apparently numerous granite quarries around the Clee Hills in Shropshire at this time, most of which are long closed now. Interestingly, there were a few Hopewells living in the area in the 1841 and 1851 censuses but I have not been able to link them to the brothers.

This map shows the locations of Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, Bedworth in Warwickshire, Rowley Regis and Cainham in Shropshire, all places which had a notable interchange of workers and their families.

By 1871 Thomas, Mary and three of their children were living in Cainham (now Caynham), Shropshire, thirty three miles from Rowley.

Most people in earlier censuses in Cainham were involved in agriculture but by 1871 there were many stone cutters, most of them incomers. There is no mention of a quarry at Cainham in current information online about the village but in the 1871 Census there was a Quarry House and ‘The Stone Inn’ in Cainham, which are pretty good clues that there was a quarry operating then. Quarry House was occupied by a Quarry Man, his two lodgers were from Leicestershire – one from Mountsorrel and one from Sileby which is a nearby village, both stone cutters.

Next to the Stone Inn were the ‘New Buildings’, eight or nine houses, presumably built specially to accommodate incoming quarry workers, as six of these were occupied by stone cutters or sett makers, mostly born in the Mountsorrel area of Leicestershire, one from Bedworth in Warwickshire plus a Clerk of Works who almost certainly also worked at the quarry. Amongst these were a sprinkling of wives and children from other granite producing areas, including several who gave their place of birth as Rowley Regis.

A few doors along the street from the New Buildings Thomas and Mary had living with them their sons George aged 20, Septimus aged 11 and Benjamin aged 7. All the children were born in Rowley, plus two boarders. Joseph Bissell, a familiar Rowley family name, aged 20, listed as from Staffordshire (but in all likelihood the Joseph Bissell who was baptised at St Giles on 26 Sep 1849, the son of Joseph and Mary Ann Bissell of Hawes Lane). Another lodger in their household was a Thomas Baum, born in Leicestershire, the Baum name recurs later in the Hopewell family history, too. Thomas Hopewell, his two older sons, George aged 20 and Septimus aged 11, and their two lodgers were all described as ‘stone cutters’.

Next door was Thomas Rudkin, also born in Leicestershire and also a stone cutter, with his wife Jane and his daughter Sarah who were both born in Rowley Regis, three further children born in Cainham and his brother-in-law Thomas Parkes and mother-in-law Mary Parkes, both born in Rowley Regis. Samuel Sharpe, aged 22, a few houses away was also a stone cutter, he was born in Mountsorrel, his wife in Cainham. A real mixture in Cainham of Mountsorrel , Cainham and Rowley Regis origins.

By the time of the 1881 Census, Thomas and Mary, both now 60 , were still living in Shropshire but had moved three miles along the road to Hope Baggott. Their son Benjamin, now 16, was still at home and their son George, with his wife Hannah and children Mary, aged 8, Joseph aged 6 and Anne, aged 2 were living next door. All of the men were stone cutters.

Interestingly, although George had been with Thomas and Mary in Cainham in 1871, his wife Hannah and two older children were all born in Rowley Regis, clearly in the interim George had gone home to Rowley to get married and stayed there for long enough to have two children before they all m oved to Shropshire. His bride Hannah Bissell, daughter of Joseph Bissell, lived in Tippity Green, so still in the Tippity Green area. It took me some time to find the record of their wedding in 1872, as the bridegroom’s name was recorded as Oakwell! Was Hannah the sister of the Joseph Bissell who was lodging with the Hopewells in Cainham a year earlier? Yes, she was. What you might call close family links!

By 1891 Mary Hopewell was living in Clee Hill, Shropshire, a widow, although I have been completely unable to find a record of the death or burial of Thomas Hopewell in this period. Mary had two lodgers aged 20, Albert Varnham (her grandson by daughter Elizabeth) and James Masefield, both stone breakers. The Masfield/Masefield/Macefield name has occurred in this family before, too – Mary’s brother-in-law George Hopewell was married to Mary Ann/Maria Masfield in 1842 so it is possible that there is a family connection here too.

In 1901 Mary was still living independently in Cainham, still with two (different) lodgers, one of whom was born in Rowley Regis, sadly I cannot read his name but he was, as you might expect, a stone cutter.

Mary Hopewell, nee Trowman, died in March 1907, aged 88 and was buried at St Paul’s, Knowbury.

I have created a family tree for the Hopewells on Ancestry; if anyone has connections and would like to see it do let me know and I will give you a link. At present the tree is private.

I have not yet been able to trace all the Hopewell descendants although I know that Septimus Hopewell moved to Pistyll, near Pwllheli, where he was working as a sett maker in 1881 and lodging with Daniel Baum and his family, (in 1871 a Thomas Baum had been lodging with his parents). Septimus appears to have been with his brother Benjamin in the Bradford area by 1901, both working as sett dressers. He returned to Cainham later and was living with his sister Elizabeth and her family there in 1911. He had then returned to Rowley Regis by 1921, still single, when he was living at 1 Tippity Green, as a lodger and working as a quarryman, full circle for this Hopewell! He appears to have died in the Dudley Registration District in 1930.

There are some connections with the Bradford area where some of the family worked as sett dressers at one point but I have not done a great deal of research on that. Again, the granite dressing skills, this time used in road making, are the connecting factor.

Several of the Varnham family, children of Elizabeth Hopewell, later moved to the Alnwick area of Northumberland, where most of them were sett makers! Follow the granite…

A moving pattern

So there is a pattern in the mid-1800s of stone cutters moving from Leicestershire, in particular the Mountsorrel area, to Rowley Regis, marrying local girls and having children there and then moving on to other quarrying areas. The family patterns felt rather like ribbons intermingling on a maypole at times when I was trying to sort them out. Suddenly a familiar name would pop up again!

It was obviously very common, even for families with several children , to accommodate and living in what were probably quite small cottages, for young single men to be taken in as lodgers, though it appears that in the case of the Hopewells they were often related or in close friendship groups.

Stone cutters were clearly not simply labourers, there are other entries in the censuses for labourers, both general and agricultural but stone cutters and sett makers, wherever their origins, are listed by their skill.

This photograph (brought to my attention by Ronald Terence Woodhouse) shows workers in the Hailstone Quarry and shows the size of some of the rocks they were working with. Imagine the effort needed to manually reduce that very hard rock down to small evenly shaped setts. Hard and dangerous work. It is also used on the front over of Anthony Page’s book on Rowley in Old Photographs and he notes that it was from the Ken Rock Collection: the photograph itself refers to BlackCountryMuse.com. Whichever owns the copyright, due acknowledgment is made!

Whether these movements of workers happened because the quarries sent recruiters to particular areas which had the skills they needed is not clear or whether word was spread by the men themselves that work was available or a combination of both. Some of these skilled workers settled in their new areas and many moved on again to another granite quarrying location where their skills would have been at a premium. If you have ancestors in Rowley who you know came from Leicestershire, or who subsequently moved to Shropshire, this may well account for it!

I will do another post about the Nuneaton/Bedworth connections to Rowley.

And there was another migration wave, a little later on in the century , which I will write about in another piece – The Threlkeld Connection, to follow soon!

Other resources:

https://intriguing-history.com/the-framework-knitters-1821/

The Hailstone

The scene our ancestors would have known in and around Rowley village would have been very different a couple of hundred years ago, it changed enormously during the Industrial Revolution and has changed again, almost beyond recognition, since I grew up there in the 1950s and 60s. One sight which would have been familiar to local people in the past was ‘The Hailstone’ on Hailstone Hill and I do not mean the modern pub bearing that name!

The Hailstone was a curious natural rock formation, comprising blocks of Dolerite stone, and was probably left with large boulders tumbled around it due to Ice Age erosion when the Ice Age retreated. It was at one time thought to be a meteorite. The Hailstone was on Hailstone Hill, above Tippity and Cock Greens and could apparently be seen clearly from Clent before the contours of the hills were destroyed by quarrying. An impression of the size can be had from the sketch below which is based on an engraving by W W Baker in 1845.

Whites Directory of 1834 has this description:

“On the western side of the hills, and not far from the town, a compact mass of this stone, about 7 or 8 feet square, rises to the height of 8 or 9 feet above the summit, and from 50 to 60 feet from the base of the hill, which, from time immemorial, has been called the Hail Stone; the upper surface, though from its extreme hardness impenetrable to any tool, is worn perfectly smooth by time and the action of numberless feet of persons who have climbed upon it.

In removing one block near the Hail Stone, about 40 years since, an earthen vessel nearly full of Roman silver coins, some of which were of Antoninus and Faustina, was found deposited in the foundation of the wall. “

It was reported at the time that the pot had an opening at the top to allow coins to be posted in – a Roman piggy bank! Sadly the pot and the Roman coins were apparently removed for safekeeping and no trace of them can now be found.

Various stories were told locally of the Hailstone, including the legend that it could not be destroyed without the spilling of Anglo-Saxon blood, or so I was told by Reg Parsons who grew up on Turner’s Hill. And when the Hailstone was destroyed in 1879, as part of quarrying operations, two workmen were killed during the process, and local people thought that they were anglo-saxon by blood, thus fulfilling the old prophecy.

Dr. Plot, in his History of Staffordshire published in 1688, describes the rock on the Rowley Hills as being “as big and as high on one side as many church steeples are.” He relates that he visited the spot in the year 1680, accompanied by a land-surveyor, who, ten years before that time, had noticed that at this place the needle of the compass was turned six degrees from its due position. The influence which the iron in basaltic rocks has on the needle was not known at that period, and the Doctor makes two conjectures in explanation of the phenomenon observed. First, he says, ” there must be in these lands that miracle of Nature we call a lodestone;” and he adds, ” unless it come to pass by some old armour buried hereabout in the late civil war.” The sonorous property of the rock led him to conjecture “that there might be here a vault in which some great person of ancient times might be buried under this natural monument; but digging down by it as near as I could where the sound directed, I could find no such matter.”

The following description appeared in “A description of modern Birmingham” by Charles Pye , supposedly in 1908. I have included some of his less flattering comments about the church and the village itself.

“You proceed towards Kidderminster, until you arrive at the toll gate, two mile and a half distant, when the right hand road leads to this village where in all probability there are more Jews Harps manufactured than in all Europe beside.

The admirer of nature, (for no art has ever been practised here) may be gratified with various extensive and luxuriant views. There is not anything either in the church or in the village deserving of notice, but there is, not far distant, a rude rugged, misshapen mass of stone, which is situated on the summit of a hill, and projects itself several yards higher than the ground adjoining; it is by the inhabitants denominated Rowley Hail-Stone and when at a considerable distance from it, on the foot road from Dudley, it has the appearance of some considerable ruins.

From this spot the views are more extensive than can be easily imagined over a beautiful and romantic country, Birmingham being very visible.”

It seems rather odd that this description should have been published in 1908, as the Hailstone was removed in 1879. It is not often that one sees descriptions of this area as ‘beautiful and romantic’ or luxuriant by 1908, though extensive is undeniable. (The view over the valley from the top floor of the classroom building at the Grammar School below Hawes Lane was truly awe-inspiring and there were still some foundries operating at that time.) But other observers report, by 1908, the huge amount of industry, mines, quarries, furnaces, canals, railway lines and spoil heaps which despoiled most views in this area so I wonder whether this account was actually written much earlier, perhaps in 1808.

Another account appears in Stone Pillar Worship (Vol. vii., p. 383.) Date not known.

—The Rowley Hills-near Dudley, twelve in number, and each bearing a distinctive name, make up what may be called a mountain of basaltic rock, which extends for several miles in the direction of Hales Owen. From the face of a precipitous termination of the southern extremity of these hills rises a pillar of rock, known as the ” The Hail Stone.” I conjecture that the word hail may be a corruption of the archaic word holy, holy ; and that this pillar of rock may have been the object of religious worship in ancient times. The name may have been derived directly from the Anglo-Saxon Haleg stan, holy stone. It is about three quarters of a mile distant from an ancient highway called “The Portway,” which is supposed to be of British origin, and to have led to the salt springs at Droitwich. I have no knowledge of any other place bearing the name of Hail Stone, except a farm in the parish of West Fetton in Shropshire, which is called ” The Hail Stones.” No stone pillars are now to be found upon it: there is a quarry in it which shows that the sand rock lies there very near the surface.

This picture of the Hailstone gives a better impression of the size and appearance of the Hailstone within the landscape and accompanied the article above.

The artist for this drawing is unknown, Hailstone Farm is shown in the distance.

There are some other snippets about the Hailstone which I have found online, sources unfortunately not credited but included for interest.

“If you stand on the site of the Devil’s Footprints and look towards the Rowley Hills, Hailstone Hill comes into view. The Hailstone itself is long gone, demolished in 1879. The Hailstone was also associated with the Devil and was said to be cursed, there is a story that the Devil threw stones at the Rowley hills from Clent which landed on Hailstone Hill and formed the mighty Hailstone, a huge outcrop of basalt rock from which he could survey his kingdom. There are also tales of the Devils footprints being found in the vicinity of the Hailstone and the local quarries; some said it had to be destroyed because of its evil associations. When it was finally destroyed by dynamite in 1879 two men died in the process, fulfilling the curse of the Hailstone”

Here is another account of a similar phenomena.

“In the Black Country, in January 1855, cloven hoofmarks, similar to those of a deer, were found on the vertical walls and roofs of a number of pubs, starting with The Cross at Old Hill in Rowley Regis. Elizabeth Brown, landlady of The Lion pub, suggested a supernatural explanation for the mystery, telling a public meeting that ‘her house was mainly frequented by quarrymen and the tracks were nothing new to them. Similar hoofmarks were to be seen burnt into the rock at Pearl Quarry, on Timmins Hill, and trails of them led from that place to the Hailstone.’ Since the Rowley hoofmarks appeared nowhere but on the walls and roofs of pubs, however, it seems at least as likely that the Lion marks were made by local chapel ‘ranters’ who wanted to make a point about the pernicious effects of alcohol “.

So the name ‘Hailstone’ may have been a corruption of Holy Stone, it may have been used as a perch by the Devil and was regarded with awe and great superstition by local people. Anthony Page says in his book on Rowley that it had been removed by the summer of 1879 with festivities to celebrate the event. Frederick Wright of Hawes Lane, aged 30, was killed in February 1879 in the process of uprooting the rock and Benjamin Bate, of Cocks Green, aged 41, one of the last men to bore shot holes, was killed in December 1879. After the removal of the rock, a tramway incline was made in 1880, connecting the Hailstone quarry to the canal at Windmill End.

This photograph of the Hailstone Quarry, taken in the mid-1950s, gives an impression of how the Hailstone must have looked.

What an imposing sight the Hailstone must have been, how many millennia it towered over the local landscape, it is no wonder that there were so many stories about it – but at least we have drawings to help preserve the memory of it.

The Tippity Green Toll Road – an update

Further reading on this subject has brought me to a paragraph in J Wilson Jones’s book, published in 1950. He talks about the early road system around Rowley and says

“Let us consider the early roads from the early enclosure and pre-enclosure maps, knowing that a Manor of Rowley would be connected by the earliest of roads, being the all-important demesne. Then locate the toll gate houses, not the turnpike of the busy roads, but houses where toll or tax was paid, often situated near the Lord’s Mill [which was at Tippity Green]. We have the Rowley-Dudley Road through Knowle and Powke Lane as the only marked roads, both converging upon ‘Ye Brickhouse Estate’ [which Jones thought was located at Cock Green which was between Tippity Green and Knowle] . The Toll houses are again on Powke Lane at Yewtree Gate and near Tippity Green as Tippity Green Gate. The only other land marks on the 1821 map being Freeberry’s, Hailston Hill, Perry’s Lake and Hawes Hill.”

So my surmise in the last article that the Toll related to the new road from Perry’s Lake to Portway seems to be wrong. If Jones is correct, the Toll Road ran from an area known as Yew Tree on Powke Lane to Tippity Green, up what was then called Dog Lane, subsequently known as Doulton Road, (though I have been told that the canal bridge there is still called the Dog Lane Bridge on canal maps).

I have not been able to identify the map dated 1821 to which Jones refers. What is now called Yew Tree Lane and the public house called the Yew Tree is much higher up Powke Lane than the road Jones describes, but Yew Tree is clearly marked at the bottom of the lane on the map below . This extract from the first edition OS map, surveyed in the 1830s, shows the road which Jones says was a Toll Road and which I have marked in red.

The road to Portway may well have been built later by the quarry operators to facilitate the movement of their stone, and they did, after all, have plenty of material to build it with.

Always learning…

Reference: A History of the Black Country by J Wilson Jones, published c.1950.

The Tippity Green Turnpike

The 1851 Census shows that there was a Turnpike Gate in Tippity Green. The Gate Keeper Hannah Hadley, aged 34, was listed, along with her husband Samuel (35) who was a Nailer’s Tool Maker and their nine children. If the Toll Keeper’s cottage was like most tollhouses that you see, it would have been fairly crowded, though that appeared to have been true of most houses in this area.

I was not previously aware that there was a turnpike road in this area. From the census enumerator’s route, it was at the end of Tippity Green and just before Perry’s Lake.

This map is an extract from the OS First Edition, which had been surveyed in the period up to the early 1830s. The road from Tippity Green goes up Turner’s Hill, there is no road straight on to Portway from Perry’s Lake as shown in later maps, so perhaps the very straight wide road from Perry’s Lake to Portway at what became Four Ways was a new Toll Road. In which case there would have been another Toll House, presumably where it joined Portway, with Newbury Lane on the other side of the road leading on to Oldbury. It would have been a very convenient and much flatter improvement to the route, much to the benefit of industrial traffic and at least better off people would have been willing to pay a toll to avoid the hill.

Turnpikes were apparently usually set up to improve existing roads which parishes were struggling to maintain. They were roads administered by Trusts authorised by private Acts of Parliament, on which tolls were charged at gates. They first began in 1663 and gradually increased in numbers so that by 1820 over 1000 turnpike trusts controlled about 22,000 miles of road with 7000 or more gates. Mostly they followed the old roads up hill and down dale. But by the early 1800s, new turnpike roads were being planned along routes whhich had not previously existed. This may have been such a road.

I am now trying to track down more information about this, in the form of the Act of Parliament setting up the Trust or plans and documentation and have sent enquiries to local archives. This may take some little time so this is a teaser and I will keep you informed of any more information I find. Watch this space!

In the meantime, if anyone knows of any information about this turnpike, I would be very pleased to hear from you.

I have been unable to find another Toll House Keeper listed anywhere in the Portway area in the 1851 Census but it is possible that a different enumerator might have recorded only the main occupation of the husband.

It does occur to me that perhaps the new road from Springfield to Dudley might also have been a turnpike road, and, if so, there would have been a gate keeper’s cottage there, too. But that is pure speculation!

The windmill off Tippity Green, which is documented as being there for centuries, was also still marked on the earlier map, where Windmill Farm was later.

Incidentally, you can also see from this map that the road to Whiteheath from Rowley village goes past the church and then bends round in front of Rowley Hall (I am old enough to remember where Rowley Hall was!) and straight on to Throne Road and past what became known as Ramrod Hall Farm. There was no Hanover Road then. When the quarrying and mining to the North of Rowley Hall expanded it cut off this road so another route must have been found by local people who would still have needed to access the parish church for services, baptisms, marriages and burials.

This photograph shows the ‘small quarry’ below Rowley Hall. No chance of walking the old route across this.

This closure must have been inconvenient for people living in the Whiteheath and Mincing Lane area but the quarrying and mining did offer work opportunities. In due course, another road was built from Mincing Lane/Bell End to the Hall to provide a road for vehicles, called, of course, the New Hall Road which is still there, now called Newhall Road.

I recall that, more than a century later when I was a child, people still cut from Bell End up the side of the ‘bonk’, over the now flattened old pit and quarry workings, past the old reservoir to come out at Rowley Hall, on their way to Rowley village and church (or school in Hawes Lane in my case) as the shortest route available. Old habits die hard!

Rowley Regis was not always a ‘blasted landscape’.

This may seem obvious but to those of us who grew up there in the mid 20^th Century, seeing across the landscape almost always through an industrial haze, it was easy to forget that the hills and heaths had once been rural and agricultural landscapes and that my mother could remember, as late as the 1920s, walking over fields from Oldbury Road in Blackheath to Bell End in Rowley, seeing haystacks, picking wild flowers, paddling in the stream and watching the farmers at work.

My childhood walk to primary school at Rowley Hall was across the ‘Bonk’, one of the many huge spoil heaps from mines and quarries and in later years, unofficially, even less child friendly substances from chemical works. It was stony, gritty, pink or grey in places, green and shrubby in others with steep slopes for sliding down on tin trays, unfathomed pools and, my brother and his friend swore, a tunnel which they had explored and which led down to Whiteheath. He was right, it turned out, though I never found it, it would have been part of the tramway from Rowley Hall quarry and mine to Titford Basin. A similar tramway ran from the Hailstone quarry under the road at the Knowle down to the Dudley Canal, using gravity to move the heavy coal and stone to the waterways which would transport it further afield. The bonk was not somewhere many parents nowadays would allow their children to play unsupervised, but to us, the many children who used it as a giant playground, it was simply a natural part of our surroundings. It was only when I was an adult that it dawned on me that we had been playing on a waste heap!

But there were several farms and farmers in or near the lost hamlets on the 1841 census and some of these were still there in the 1940s; perhaps someone will tell me one or two are still there.

They were, like other places, called by different names at different times. Sometimes Freebodies Farm, Hailstone Farm, Brick House Farm, Gadds Green Farm, Turner’s Hill Farm, Windmill Farm, Portway Hall Farm – different records used different names, perhaps depending on the source of the information. At other times they would have been known by the names of whoever was farming there. Even in the 1950s and 60s, once you had left Springfield on the way to Dudley, there were green spaces either side of the road, though there may once have been quarries and mines there. Not smooth green meadows but greenish.

Reg Parsons, who was born and grew up on Turner’s Hill told me that his mother and father, who had a shop in Doulton Road, were walking on Turmer’s Hill one day and his mother saw some wild sweet peas growing in the hedge. What a lovely place this would be to live, she said. So when a piece of land with three condemned cottages became available there, they bought it, Reg’s father demolished the cottages and built a new house, No 2, Turner’s Hill and they moved to it. That was later sold to a local businessman who wanted to live looking over the golf course before that, too was demolished. What a view some of these houses must have had and how lovely to think that wild sweet peas grew in the hedges.

Reg recounts that his father worked in Dudley and, when he needed items from the shop at Springfield, he would get off the bus there, get his shopping and then cut across to walk up over the fields and home. Reg also recounted that, when he was at Britannia Road School (a fair walk in itself) he would call in at a farm off Hawes Lane to milk two of their cows. On the way home he would call in and milk the cows again, having his evening meal with the farmer and then walking home. As Reg said, he was working longer days than when he started his first real job. But his family – and other families in the area were mostly self-sufficient, keeping chickens and a pig, growing vegetables and getting milk from the local farm.

The map from which the extract below is taken, the First Edition of the Ordnance Survey, shows the Turner’s Hill area. This One Inch to the Statute Mile map was derived from two topographical surveys, the first completed between 1814 and 1817 by members of the Royal Military Surveyors and Draftsmen and probably assisted by local surveyors hired for the task. Numerous revisions for the rapidly changing Black Country were completed by 1831-1832, shortly before the first printing in 1834. Copies of the original surveys are preserved in the British Museum. Sheet 62, from which this small extract is taken, was engraved on four separate sheets of copper by the engravers’ workshop at the Tower of London where the first copies were also printed. The names of surveyors, engravers and printers are all recorded. This fascinating information is printed on the David and Charles Reprint edition, along with a great deal more detailed information. My recently acquired copy cost me the grand sum of less than £10, including postage so if, like me, you love old maps, it is worth seeking one out.

Information on the maps tells us that “The engravers’ workshop at the Tower was under the direction of Benjamin Baker. He employed six or seven assistants, each of whom was responsible for a particular aspect of the map – hills, water, woods, lettering and so on.” The Rowley Hills would have provided plenty of work for the one responsible for hachuring the hills!

The map shows that most of the area of the Rowley Hills was still undeveloped then, although clusters of houses and some quarries are shown, the steel works at the Brades is shown and the railways are already marked.

The map shown below is an extract from the very useful Alan Godfrey Reprint of the 1904 OS 6″ to the mile, sixty years or so after the 1st Edition where you can see much more detail of the quarries around the hamlets. The hatching shows that many of the houses backed on to sheer drops into the quarries and many would end up being consumed by the quarrying operations. The Prospect Quarry was the site of a windmill at one time and there was still a Windmill Farm in Tippity Green appearing in records long after the mill had gone.

So while we may have gone to Quinton in my childhood to see the bluebells or to Clent to ‘the real countryside’, there were some green spaces of sorts all around us and around our ancestors, despite the prevalence of quarrys, factories and pits. Interestingly, the old quarries are apparently now being filled in and greened over so perhaps the hills will become a green and pleasant land again after all these years. Though one suspects that the push for new housing may take priority…