Benjamin’s older brother James (Dad’s uncle) became the manager of the waterworks on Mow Cop, just down the hill from Rose Cottage. He married Caroline Harding in 1887, and is said to have been the first person on Mow Cop to have a telephone and a flush toilet.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
James Patrick (1865-1943): a note
Benjamin’s older brother James (Dad’s uncle) became the manager of the waterworks on Mow Cop, just down the hill from Rose Cottage. He married Caroline Harding in 1887, and is said to have been the first person on Mow Cop to have a telephone and a flush toilet.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Leonard Patrick (1906 - 1983)
Family background
Dad’s paternal great-grandfather, William Patrick, was baptised in Maer, a few miles west of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, in 1811. He was the fourth of eight children. In August 1832 he married Sarah Clark in nearby Standon. Their first two children, Philip and James, were born in that area in 1829 and 1833, but then the family moved to Talke-o-the Hill near Kidsgrove where the next three children were born, and then finally to Newchapel, near Mow Cop. In 1851 he married again in St Thomas’s church, Mow Cop. William was a coal-miner, but by 1871 he was listed as a farmer of 5 acres and a coal carrier in the same parish.
James (Dad’s grandfather) was the second son of William and Mary Patrick and had four brothers and a sister. He became a coal-miner like his father. In 1855, James married Elizabeth Bayley in Newcastle-under-Lyme but she died soon afterwards and in December 1858 he married Maria Hancock at St Margaret’s Church, Wolstanton. Maria bore him seven children between 1860 and 1874, and Benjamin was the fifth, born in Mow Cop on 15 May 1871. James and his family were living in Wain Lea near Mow Cop in 1861, in Harriseahead in 1871 and in Snowdrop Cottage just off the Congleton Road on the top of Mow Cop in 1881 and 1891.
Maria died in 1899, and James married for the third time in March 1902. His new wife was Annie Hancock, and they continued to live in Snowdrop Cottage and had four daughters. James died in 1912, and Annie then married Jacob Ikin and went on to have two more daughters, Joan and Alma who still lives in Snowdrop Cottage. Grandfather James appears in every one of the Victorian censuses for Staffordshire (1841 to 1901).
Dad’s maternal grandparents were Daniel and Ann (nee Birch) Porter. Daniel, a pottery worker, was born in Chell in 1831 of Thomas and Mary Porter. Ann was born in Pittshill in the Potteries in 1835. The two married in Wolstanton in March 1867 and had six children. Minnie was the third, born in Pittshill in 1871, and became a pottery painter.
Benjamin Patrick married Minnie Porter on February 8 1891 in the Parish Church at Newchapel. They first lived in Pittshill with Minnie’s parents before moving up to Mow Cop where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in September 1892.
Childhood on Mow Cop
Dad was born at Rose Cottage on Mow Cop Road just below the Castle on September 15 1906. He was christened in the parish church of St Thomas’s, just across the road, where his great-grandfather William had been buried 20 year before. He had a sister Elizabeth (14) and a brother Fred (4): four other children in the family had already died.
The family were poor and knew hunger. His father Benjamin worked as an engineer in a local open-cast mine, and at the time of a long miners’ strike (probably in 1912 when Dad was 5 or 6, the year his grandfather James died at Snowdrop Cottage), they relied on soup kitchens set up in the church’s Sunday-school building. He was given clothes first worn by the vicar’s children. Dad had a mass of flaxen curls.
Benjamin was the choir-master at St Thomas’s, but he was a drunkard and this brought the utmost misery to the family. Dad recalled that “he was the kindest man when sober, but in drink he was the devil incarnate”. Benjamin drank what he earned, and family possessions were sold or pawned: he barely provided for his family. “How my mother (Minnie) coped with feeding and clothing a large family with little or no housekeeping money, I shall never know.” Worse, he was cruel and violent: beating his wife and children, often in the night after he returned from the drinking in the Ash Inn. When friends were being entertained for Sunday tea, Dad’s father came in drunk and snatched away the tablecloth and everything on it. On another occasion he returned from the pub only to throw through the window the dinner that his wife had prepared. There was an atmosphere of fear and terror in the home. Minnie often threatened to run away, but she hung on for the sake of the children. Dad recalled his mother with great affection, and was known as “Minnie’s lad”. In later years, he declared “mother” to be a sacred word: he remembered her face and the sound of her voice, sitting on her knee as she sang hymns. George was born in 1908, Marion in 1909 and Evelyn in 1910: Marion died in 1912. Twin sons were born in 1913: Joseph died at birth and Benjamin survived only to be killed by a bull at the age of 3 in August 1916. The last of 13 children, Frances May was born in March 1916.
At the age of nine [say Spring 1916] Dad had been a schoolboy at Mow Cop Primary School for two years. Possibly his father was away in the army during this period of WW1: he was described as “a soldier” in 1917, and may have spent time away in the army. That could have been only for the good of the family. Dad’s elder sister Elizabeth had left home on her marriage to Frank Price in 1915, though she continued to live on Mow Cop for a time. So Minnie was left with Dad and his sisters Evelyn aged 5 and the baby Frances May, and two brothers, Fred, 13, and Benjamin, 2. Because of the family’s impoverishment, a part-time job was arranged for Dad at St Thomas’s Vicarage, just across the road from Rose Cottage. The vicar, Rev Guy Parkhouse, was recently married and had moved to Mow Cop the previous September.
Dad reported for work at 6:55 each morning (except Sunday) and first tolled the heavy church bell for the early Eucharist. Then he chopped sticks, carried coal, lit fires, cleaned shoes and made the breakfast toast before going down the hill to school at 8:30. On Saturdays he worked all morning in the vicarage garden with its lawn and orchard. He was paid one shilling a week. After a year (at the age of 10), he was also engaged as the organ-blower for ten shillings a year plus the perks of going on the choir outing and sharing in the annual choir supper. No doubt he was reasonably conscientious in his duties, but Dad does confess that he sometimes invited the vicar’s anger: when he carved his name with a knife on the back of the organ, and “helped” apples to become windfalls by throwing coal into the apple-trees. He joked later, “The vicar wasn't always glad when I went into the house of the Lord”.
Early in the morning on May 26 1917, when Frances May was 14 months old, Minnie drowned herself and her baby in Church Lane Colliery (Brown’s) pool. The inquest returned verdicts of suicide and wilful murder by the mother, “being of unsound mind”. It was a tragic end to a life of sacrifice and suffering. Dad was only ten years old.
The four children left at home (Fred, Len, George and Evelyn) were temporarily accommodated in five different homes over the next two years. Benjamin remarried only a year after Minnie’s death and moved to 7 Meadowside Lane, Bank. His new wife, Sarah Lovatt, left the marital home at least once but stuck with Benjamin for over 30 years, still described as a “waddling drunk”, till his death in 1951. In later years, Dad referred to Sarah as “mother”. Dad was transferred to Woodcock’s Well School on the Cheshire side of the hill in 1917 where the head-teacher was a strong churchman. He gained a 3-year scholarship to the Grammar School in Macclesfield for entry in October 1919, but was only there for three terms before being withdrawn in July 1920 so that he could be sent to work to earn money for the family. The school records that the reason for the withdrawal was the “home [being] broken up owing to drunken father”. So Dad had 7 years of primary education and only a year of formal secondary education, but he was the only one of the family to receive any secondary education at all, and this factor may have tended to separate him from the rest of the family.
Employment
On his withdrawal from Macclesfield Grammar School, Dad was apprenticed to an iron-moulder at the Black Bull Foundry in Brown Lees, Biddulph. It was part of the coal, iron and steel empire of Robert Heath & Sons (whose proprietor then owned Biddulph Grange) which was then the largest producer of bar iron in the world. It not only ran collieries and railway networks, but also made locomotives. The experience of the foundry with its heat and dust, fire and smoke, made a deep impression on him, and in later years he often dreamed he was back working there. Dad had to walk five miles to clock on at work at 7 a.m. and he earned 8 shillings and threepence a week. Occasionally he was allowed to make for his own use a “foreigner” (an object produced without a work order), and he was proud of a pair of cast-iron horses which stood on the hearth at home and a pair of stags replete with antlers given to his married sister. After a year or so, in January 1922, Dad moved on from the foundry bearing a glowing testimonial to a “sharp, reliable and industrious boy”.
There is next a gap in the employment record: this may have been the time he worked for an undertaker in Hanley, riding in a horse-drawn carriage. Then he was employed for 18 months as a general factotum by Ridley & Williamson, chemical manufacturers in Scholar Green, nearer home. However, he appears to have been frustrated by a lack of opportunity for advancement there and in December 1924 (aged 28) he moved on as a costing clerk to Redfern, Rhead & Co, manufacturers of knitted goods, at the Edward & Albert Mills in Congleton. He worked there until 1932 when he moved across town to RH Lowe & Co, another textile manufacturer where he worked in a similar capacity until May 1936 and was given an engraved gold watch. During this first phase of his employment, Dad had been furthering his education by attending evening-classes in book-keeping, shorthand and psychology. He was proud of his personnel skills and claimed that he had had only a single 1-hour strike in 12 years. His testimonials show that he was appreciated as honest, painstaking and studious. In the summer of 1936 he moved to W & H Pownall, a clothing manufacturer in Manchester and was there for about a year, living south of the city centre in Whalley Range, but commuting back to Bank at the weekends for preaching. This is near Chorlton-cum-Hardy where Lucy Murdoch, his future mother-in-law, had lived before her marriage.
1933 Dad had tried unsuccessfully to obtain a post in the probation service, but in 1937 he did manage to change jobs. He became the area organiser for Associated Road Operators in Broad Street in the centre of Hanley, thus beginning a successful 30-year career in transport which culminated in the award of his MBE in 1971.
Christian life
At about the time of his mother’s death in 1917 when he was only 10, Dad moved from St Thomas’s Parish Church to the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel at Bank: it became his spiritual home. He was co-opted into an adult class meeting at 12 and came under the influence of George Dale an old coal-miner who lived near Snowdrop Cottage. He became a teacher and later the superintendent in the Sunday-school, and was chosen to switch on the new electric lights when the chapel upgraded from its old oil lights in 1932.
Dad described that he was “converted” in 1922 (aged 16) at an LPMA service in Bank Chapel, and he revered as a sacred spot the very place where he was sitting at that service. An elderly local preacher soon asked Dad to assist him at his services, and in 1926 he started to preach himself. His step-mother recorded the text of that first sermon in a note kept in the family bible. He became a popular preacher, and while yet “On Trial” he was invited to preach at the famous Primitive Methodist Memorial Chapel on the top of Mow Cop. In the prayer meeting following that service, an old iron-worker prayed “Lord bless the lad, he’s doing his best. We’ll do better before he’s done!”
Dad became a fully-accredited Methodist local preacher in 1934 (aged 28), and was soon very active among the 26 preaching places on the Tunstall plan and beyond, including churches in Congleton and in other denominations. Nevertheless, he was planned several times each year in his own chapel at Bank. His preaching record, kept meticulously from July 1933 to October 1938 (when perhaps he mislaid it temporarily) shows that he preached at a new chapel in the area every month for 6 years, conducting an average of nine services each quarter.
He continued to preach when he moved first to Newcastle in 1939 and then in 1940 to Birmingham. He joined Hall Green Methodist Church and took around 20 services a year in the circuit and beyond, almost attaining 50 years as a local preacher. He drew on his own most vivid personal experiences when sharing his faith with his congregations, and used the rich imagery of Christian metaphor and secular poetry to illustrate his message of personal salvation and social holiness. He preached with conviction and humility, and was much loved and respected. Dad was also a teacher and then Superintendent in the Sunday-school, and held many offices in the local church and was a member of the District Synod and was a representative to the Methodist Conference in Bristol in 1974.
The Birmingham years
Dad had met Marjorie Wainwright at a Temperance Rally in 1922, but they did not see much of each other until 1936. They married in the Methodist Church in Nantwich on Mum’s 31st birthday on April 20 1939, and that was when Dad, 32, finally left the Bank home of his father and step-mother, 23 years after his mother’s suicide. It must have been a great relief. They first moved into The Beeches, Wistaston, with Mum’s widowed father for a few months before moving to 3 Delves Place, Westlands, Newcastle-under-Lyme where I was born in March 1940. Three months later, Dad finally left the Potteries for a new life in Birmingham in which he was closely and loyally supported by his wife.
Dad worked for the Commercial Motor Users Association in 1940 and then transferred to work as an assistant organiser for the Midlands Region of the Road Haulage Association and later as Organiser for the Traders Road Transport Association which was renamed Freight Transport Association. His offices were at 60 Newhall Street, in Birmingham City Centre, thereafter at 99 Baker Street, Sparkhill, and finally at 1128a Stratford Road, Hall Green. He became an Associate of the Institute of Transport in 1944, and organised the transport for the World Scout Jamboree in Sutton Park in 1957. He was Secretary of the W. Midlands Maintenance Advisory Committee for Goods Vehicles for 16 years. He retired with an MBE “for services to transport” in 1971, after a solid and successful career.
In Birmingham, Dad first rented and eventually bought a semi-detached house at 51 Webb Lane, Hall Green. There was a small garden which gave on to a small field which Dad used as an allotment and where the children built various dens and tree-houses. Dad always ran a car which was used for work, trips and for holidays.
David was born at home in Hall Green, Birmingham in 1941, Peter in 1944 and Malcolm in 1946. Life was hard bringing up the first three of four small children in wartime, even without the mortal threat of air-raids. Some protection was provided by an Anderson shelter next door or a Morrison shelter at home. Dad served in the ARP, being exempt from military service because he was in a reserved employment. Our American relations sent food-parcels once in a while and Dad kept chickens in the garden in which he also grew vegetables.
After the war, the four sons were brought up in a happy and supportive home. There was always a cat around, and family entertainment comprised outings on foot to local parks or drives to places like the Clent Hills, Malvern or Henley-in-Arden. On Whit Monday Bank Holiday Dad would get tickets to a local horse show. Several times a season he would take us to watch West Bromwich Albion, a substitute for his favourite Potteries team, Port Vale. Summer holidays were spent at beach resorts in England and Wales. In 1946, we stayed in a caravan on the sands at Dyffryn north of Barmouth. In later years we would spend one or two weeks in boarding-houses in places like Aberdovey, Prestatyn and Boscombe, suggesting a relative prosperity that Dad could not have imagined 20 years earlier. The family would make the journey to Nantwich 2 or 3 times a year to see Mum’s father, with whom Dad got on well.
On Dad’s side of the family, relationships were fraught, not surprisingly considering his family background. I remember visiting his father and step-mother only once in their home in Bank, and I don’t believe they ever came to Birmingham in those dozen years before they died. Dad was good friends with George and Minnie, and with Evelyn and George Dixon but we boys never really knew his much older sister Lizzie or his brother Fred from whom Dad was estranged after a business disagreement.
Dad was a pillar of the society of Hall Green Methodists and the whole family attended church there. His three married sons all met their wives there, and two became local preachers themselves. Not surprisingly, Dad was an ardent teetotaller, and even poured away Christmas business gifts of whisky. Many times he told the story of his abusive and tragic childhood in Temperance sermons, and described the outcome of the drunken brawls that he witnessed as a Special Constable in inner-city Birmingham.
The family had moved to a much larger detached house at 56 Tixall Road, Hall Green, May 1953, a move made possible by a legacy from Mum’s Uncle Fred, a dentist in America. In their retirement in 1976, they moved back to a semi-detached house, this time at 39 Painswick Road, Hall Green.
So starting from a distressing childhood in a working-class family with little formal education, Dad made a successful career and owned his own home. Three of his four sons went to university and all achieved professional employment. The second great tragedy in his life after the death of his mother was Malcolm’s untimely death in 1976 which caused him to cease his preaching for a time, but he was consoled by the success of his other sons and the ultimate arrival of eight grandchildren.
Summary BMD
Birth:
15 September 1906 at Rose Cottage, Mow Cop, near Biddulph, Staffordshire. Father: Benjamin Patrick (1871–1951). Mother: Minnie Porter (1871–1917).
Baptism:
September 1906 at St Thomas’s Parish Church, Mow Cop
Marriage:
20 April 1939, at age 32 years, to Marjorie Murdoch Wainwright (aged exactly 31 yrs) at Nantwich Methodist Church, Hospital Street, Nantwich, Cheshire. The reception was held at Churches Mansions, Nantwich.
Death:
19 December 1983, aged 77 years, in Birmingham General Hospital, Birmingham, Warwickshire, of a sudden pulmonary embolus after a heart attack.
Dad’s paternal great-grandfather, William Patrick, was baptised in Maer, a few miles west of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, in 1811. He was the fourth of eight children. In August 1832 he married Sarah Clark in nearby Standon. Their first two children, Philip and James, were born in that area in 1829 and 1833, but then the family moved to Talke-o-the Hill near Kidsgrove where the next three children were born, and then finally to Newchapel, near Mow Cop. In 1851 he married again in St Thomas’s church, Mow Cop. William was a coal-miner, but by 1871 he was listed as a farmer of 5 acres and a coal carrier in the same parish.
James (Dad’s grandfather) was the second son of William and Mary Patrick and had four brothers and a sister. He became a coal-miner like his father. In 1855, James married Elizabeth Bayley in Newcastle-under-Lyme but she died soon afterwards and in December 1858 he married Maria Hancock at St Margaret’s Church, Wolstanton. Maria bore him seven children between 1860 and 1874, and Benjamin was the fifth, born in Mow Cop on 15 May 1871. James and his family were living in Wain Lea near Mow Cop in 1861, in Harriseahead in 1871 and in Snowdrop Cottage just off the Congleton Road on the top of Mow Cop in 1881 and 1891.
Maria died in 1899, and James married for the third time in March 1902. His new wife was Annie Hancock, and they continued to live in Snowdrop Cottage and had four daughters. James died in 1912, and Annie then married Jacob Ikin and went on to have two more daughters, Joan and Alma who still lives in Snowdrop Cottage. Grandfather James appears in every one of the Victorian censuses for Staffordshire (1841 to 1901).
Dad’s maternal grandparents were Daniel and Ann (nee Birch) Porter. Daniel, a pottery worker, was born in Chell in 1831 of Thomas and Mary Porter. Ann was born in Pittshill in the Potteries in 1835. The two married in Wolstanton in March 1867 and had six children. Minnie was the third, born in Pittshill in 1871, and became a pottery painter.
Benjamin Patrick married Minnie Porter on February 8 1891 in the Parish Church at Newchapel. They first lived in Pittshill with Minnie’s parents before moving up to Mow Cop where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in September 1892.
Childhood on Mow Cop
Dad was born at Rose Cottage on Mow Cop Road just below the Castle on September 15 1906. He was christened in the parish church of St Thomas’s, just across the road, where his great-grandfather William had been buried 20 year before. He had a sister Elizabeth (14) and a brother Fred (4): four other children in the family had already died.
The family were poor and knew hunger. His father Benjamin worked as an engineer in a local open-cast mine, and at the time of a long miners’ strike (probably in 1912 when Dad was 5 or 6, the year his grandfather James died at Snowdrop Cottage), they relied on soup kitchens set up in the church’s Sunday-school building. He was given clothes first worn by the vicar’s children. Dad had a mass of flaxen curls.
Benjamin was the choir-master at St Thomas’s, but he was a drunkard and this brought the utmost misery to the family. Dad recalled that “he was the kindest man when sober, but in drink he was the devil incarnate”. Benjamin drank what he earned, and family possessions were sold or pawned: he barely provided for his family. “How my mother (Minnie) coped with feeding and clothing a large family with little or no housekeeping money, I shall never know.” Worse, he was cruel and violent: beating his wife and children, often in the night after he returned from the drinking in the Ash Inn. When friends were being entertained for Sunday tea, Dad’s father came in drunk and snatched away the tablecloth and everything on it. On another occasion he returned from the pub only to throw through the window the dinner that his wife had prepared. There was an atmosphere of fear and terror in the home. Minnie often threatened to run away, but she hung on for the sake of the children. Dad recalled his mother with great affection, and was known as “Minnie’s lad”. In later years, he declared “mother” to be a sacred word: he remembered her face and the sound of her voice, sitting on her knee as she sang hymns. George was born in 1908, Marion in 1909 and Evelyn in 1910: Marion died in 1912. Twin sons were born in 1913: Joseph died at birth and Benjamin survived only to be killed by a bull at the age of 3 in August 1916. The last of 13 children, Frances May was born in March 1916.
At the age of nine [say Spring 1916] Dad had been a schoolboy at Mow Cop Primary School for two years. Possibly his father was away in the army during this period of WW1: he was described as “a soldier” in 1917, and may have spent time away in the army. That could have been only for the good of the family. Dad’s elder sister Elizabeth had left home on her marriage to Frank Price in 1915, though she continued to live on Mow Cop for a time. So Minnie was left with Dad and his sisters Evelyn aged 5 and the baby Frances May, and two brothers, Fred, 13, and Benjamin, 2. Because of the family’s impoverishment, a part-time job was arranged for Dad at St Thomas’s Vicarage, just across the road from Rose Cottage. The vicar, Rev Guy Parkhouse, was recently married and had moved to Mow Cop the previous September.
Dad reported for work at 6:55 each morning (except Sunday) and first tolled the heavy church bell for the early Eucharist. Then he chopped sticks, carried coal, lit fires, cleaned shoes and made the breakfast toast before going down the hill to school at 8:30. On Saturdays he worked all morning in the vicarage garden with its lawn and orchard. He was paid one shilling a week. After a year (at the age of 10), he was also engaged as the organ-blower for ten shillings a year plus the perks of going on the choir outing and sharing in the annual choir supper. No doubt he was reasonably conscientious in his duties, but Dad does confess that he sometimes invited the vicar’s anger: when he carved his name with a knife on the back of the organ, and “helped” apples to become windfalls by throwing coal into the apple-trees. He joked later, “The vicar wasn't always glad when I went into the house of the Lord”.
Early in the morning on May 26 1917, when Frances May was 14 months old, Minnie drowned herself and her baby in Church Lane Colliery (Brown’s) pool. The inquest returned verdicts of suicide and wilful murder by the mother, “being of unsound mind”. It was a tragic end to a life of sacrifice and suffering. Dad was only ten years old.
The four children left at home (Fred, Len, George and Evelyn) were temporarily accommodated in five different homes over the next two years. Benjamin remarried only a year after Minnie’s death and moved to 7 Meadowside Lane, Bank. His new wife, Sarah Lovatt, left the marital home at least once but stuck with Benjamin for over 30 years, still described as a “waddling drunk”, till his death in 1951. In later years, Dad referred to Sarah as “mother”. Dad was transferred to Woodcock’s Well School on the Cheshire side of the hill in 1917 where the head-teacher was a strong churchman. He gained a 3-year scholarship to the Grammar School in Macclesfield for entry in October 1919, but was only there for three terms before being withdrawn in July 1920 so that he could be sent to work to earn money for the family. The school records that the reason for the withdrawal was the “home [being] broken up owing to drunken father”. So Dad had 7 years of primary education and only a year of formal secondary education, but he was the only one of the family to receive any secondary education at all, and this factor may have tended to separate him from the rest of the family.
Employment
On his withdrawal from Macclesfield Grammar School, Dad was apprenticed to an iron-moulder at the Black Bull Foundry in Brown Lees, Biddulph. It was part of the coal, iron and steel empire of Robert Heath & Sons (whose proprietor then owned Biddulph Grange) which was then the largest producer of bar iron in the world. It not only ran collieries and railway networks, but also made locomotives. The experience of the foundry with its heat and dust, fire and smoke, made a deep impression on him, and in later years he often dreamed he was back working there. Dad had to walk five miles to clock on at work at 7 a.m. and he earned 8 shillings and threepence a week. Occasionally he was allowed to make for his own use a “foreigner” (an object produced without a work order), and he was proud of a pair of cast-iron horses which stood on the hearth at home and a pair of stags replete with antlers given to his married sister. After a year or so, in January 1922, Dad moved on from the foundry bearing a glowing testimonial to a “sharp, reliable and industrious boy”.
There is next a gap in the employment record: this may have been the time he worked for an undertaker in Hanley, riding in a horse-drawn carriage. Then he was employed for 18 months as a general factotum by Ridley & Williamson, chemical manufacturers in Scholar Green, nearer home. However, he appears to have been frustrated by a lack of opportunity for advancement there and in December 1924 (aged 28) he moved on as a costing clerk to Redfern, Rhead & Co, manufacturers of knitted goods, at the Edward & Albert Mills in Congleton. He worked there until 1932 when he moved across town to RH Lowe & Co, another textile manufacturer where he worked in a similar capacity until May 1936 and was given an engraved gold watch. During this first phase of his employment, Dad had been furthering his education by attending evening-classes in book-keeping, shorthand and psychology. He was proud of his personnel skills and claimed that he had had only a single 1-hour strike in 12 years. His testimonials show that he was appreciated as honest, painstaking and studious. In the summer of 1936 he moved to W & H Pownall, a clothing manufacturer in Manchester and was there for about a year, living south of the city centre in Whalley Range, but commuting back to Bank at the weekends for preaching. This is near Chorlton-cum-Hardy where Lucy Murdoch, his future mother-in-law, had lived before her marriage.
1933 Dad had tried unsuccessfully to obtain a post in the probation service, but in 1937 he did manage to change jobs. He became the area organiser for Associated Road Operators in Broad Street in the centre of Hanley, thus beginning a successful 30-year career in transport which culminated in the award of his MBE in 1971.
Christian life
At about the time of his mother’s death in 1917 when he was only 10, Dad moved from St Thomas’s Parish Church to the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel at Bank: it became his spiritual home. He was co-opted into an adult class meeting at 12 and came under the influence of George Dale an old coal-miner who lived near Snowdrop Cottage. He became a teacher and later the superintendent in the Sunday-school, and was chosen to switch on the new electric lights when the chapel upgraded from its old oil lights in 1932.
Dad described that he was “converted” in 1922 (aged 16) at an LPMA service in Bank Chapel, and he revered as a sacred spot the very place where he was sitting at that service. An elderly local preacher soon asked Dad to assist him at his services, and in 1926 he started to preach himself. His step-mother recorded the text of that first sermon in a note kept in the family bible. He became a popular preacher, and while yet “On Trial” he was invited to preach at the famous Primitive Methodist Memorial Chapel on the top of Mow Cop. In the prayer meeting following that service, an old iron-worker prayed “Lord bless the lad, he’s doing his best. We’ll do better before he’s done!”
Dad became a fully-accredited Methodist local preacher in 1934 (aged 28), and was soon very active among the 26 preaching places on the Tunstall plan and beyond, including churches in Congleton and in other denominations. Nevertheless, he was planned several times each year in his own chapel at Bank. His preaching record, kept meticulously from July 1933 to October 1938 (when perhaps he mislaid it temporarily) shows that he preached at a new chapel in the area every month for 6 years, conducting an average of nine services each quarter.
He continued to preach when he moved first to Newcastle in 1939 and then in 1940 to Birmingham. He joined Hall Green Methodist Church and took around 20 services a year in the circuit and beyond, almost attaining 50 years as a local preacher. He drew on his own most vivid personal experiences when sharing his faith with his congregations, and used the rich imagery of Christian metaphor and secular poetry to illustrate his message of personal salvation and social holiness. He preached with conviction and humility, and was much loved and respected. Dad was also a teacher and then Superintendent in the Sunday-school, and held many offices in the local church and was a member of the District Synod and was a representative to the Methodist Conference in Bristol in 1974.
The Birmingham years
Dad had met Marjorie Wainwright at a Temperance Rally in 1922, but they did not see much of each other until 1936. They married in the Methodist Church in Nantwich on Mum’s 31st birthday on April 20 1939, and that was when Dad, 32, finally left the Bank home of his father and step-mother, 23 years after his mother’s suicide. It must have been a great relief. They first moved into The Beeches, Wistaston, with Mum’s widowed father for a few months before moving to 3 Delves Place, Westlands, Newcastle-under-Lyme where I was born in March 1940. Three months later, Dad finally left the Potteries for a new life in Birmingham in which he was closely and loyally supported by his wife.
Dad worked for the Commercial Motor Users Association in 1940 and then transferred to work as an assistant organiser for the Midlands Region of the Road Haulage Association and later as Organiser for the Traders Road Transport Association which was renamed Freight Transport Association. His offices were at 60 Newhall Street, in Birmingham City Centre, thereafter at 99 Baker Street, Sparkhill, and finally at 1128a Stratford Road, Hall Green. He became an Associate of the Institute of Transport in 1944, and organised the transport for the World Scout Jamboree in Sutton Park in 1957. He was Secretary of the W. Midlands Maintenance Advisory Committee for Goods Vehicles for 16 years. He retired with an MBE “for services to transport” in 1971, after a solid and successful career.
In Birmingham, Dad first rented and eventually bought a semi-detached house at 51 Webb Lane, Hall Green. There was a small garden which gave on to a small field which Dad used as an allotment and where the children built various dens and tree-houses. Dad always ran a car which was used for work, trips and for holidays.
David was born at home in Hall Green, Birmingham in 1941, Peter in 1944 and Malcolm in 1946. Life was hard bringing up the first three of four small children in wartime, even without the mortal threat of air-raids. Some protection was provided by an Anderson shelter next door or a Morrison shelter at home. Dad served in the ARP, being exempt from military service because he was in a reserved employment. Our American relations sent food-parcels once in a while and Dad kept chickens in the garden in which he also grew vegetables.
After the war, the four sons were brought up in a happy and supportive home. There was always a cat around, and family entertainment comprised outings on foot to local parks or drives to places like the Clent Hills, Malvern or Henley-in-Arden. On Whit Monday Bank Holiday Dad would get tickets to a local horse show. Several times a season he would take us to watch West Bromwich Albion, a substitute for his favourite Potteries team, Port Vale. Summer holidays were spent at beach resorts in England and Wales. In 1946, we stayed in a caravan on the sands at Dyffryn north of Barmouth. In later years we would spend one or two weeks in boarding-houses in places like Aberdovey, Prestatyn and Boscombe, suggesting a relative prosperity that Dad could not have imagined 20 years earlier. The family would make the journey to Nantwich 2 or 3 times a year to see Mum’s father, with whom Dad got on well.
On Dad’s side of the family, relationships were fraught, not surprisingly considering his family background. I remember visiting his father and step-mother only once in their home in Bank, and I don’t believe they ever came to Birmingham in those dozen years before they died. Dad was good friends with George and Minnie, and with Evelyn and George Dixon but we boys never really knew his much older sister Lizzie or his brother Fred from whom Dad was estranged after a business disagreement.
Dad was a pillar of the society of Hall Green Methodists and the whole family attended church there. His three married sons all met their wives there, and two became local preachers themselves. Not surprisingly, Dad was an ardent teetotaller, and even poured away Christmas business gifts of whisky. Many times he told the story of his abusive and tragic childhood in Temperance sermons, and described the outcome of the drunken brawls that he witnessed as a Special Constable in inner-city Birmingham.
The family had moved to a much larger detached house at 56 Tixall Road, Hall Green, May 1953, a move made possible by a legacy from Mum’s Uncle Fred, a dentist in America. In their retirement in 1976, they moved back to a semi-detached house, this time at 39 Painswick Road, Hall Green.
So starting from a distressing childhood in a working-class family with little formal education, Dad made a successful career and owned his own home. Three of his four sons went to university and all achieved professional employment. The second great tragedy in his life after the death of his mother was Malcolm’s untimely death in 1976 which caused him to cease his preaching for a time, but he was consoled by the success of his other sons and the ultimate arrival of eight grandchildren.
Summary BMD
Birth:
15 September 1906 at Rose Cottage, Mow Cop, near Biddulph, Staffordshire. Father: Benjamin Patrick (1871–1951). Mother: Minnie Porter (1871–1917).
Baptism:
September 1906 at St Thomas’s Parish Church, Mow Cop
Marriage:
20 April 1939, at age 32 years, to Marjorie Murdoch Wainwright (aged exactly 31 yrs) at Nantwich Methodist Church, Hospital Street, Nantwich, Cheshire. The reception was held at Churches Mansions, Nantwich.
Death:
19 December 1983, aged 77 years, in Birmingham General Hospital, Birmingham, Warwickshire, of a sudden pulmonary embolus after a heart attack.
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