Benjamin Patrick, my grandfather, served in Egypt in WW1 but became an alcoholic and did considerable damage to our line of Patricks and caused four of his five surviving children to move away from the area. He was the last male Patrick to live on Mow Cop.
Benjamin was born on Mow Cop on 15 May 1871, the seventh of nine children of James Patrick (1832-1912) and Maria Hancock (1839-1899) and the fourth son. His parents had been married at Christmas-time in 1858 in St Margaret’s, the parish church in the middle of Wolstanton, near Newcastle-under-Lyme. Maria had been a 19-year-old spinster from Brindley Ford without a recorded occupation. His father James, married at 26, had already been widowed after a short marriage with Elizabeth Bailey from Newcastle that (probably) produced 3 children, none of whom survived. James had been brought to Mow Cop as a teenager when his parents moved from Madeley, and he was employed in coal-mining like his own father William.
On arrival in the area, James and Maria lived first at Stadmoreslow and then elsewhere on Mow Cop before settling in Snowdrop Cottage before 1881. Two of their children died in infancy but seven survived to be married. James himself progressed from being a collier to being employed as an engine-feeder and later an engine-tenter in the collieries around Mow Cop, so by the standards of this rapidly developing mining village the family were relatively well off despite having seven children over a period of 14 years.
Benjamin as a boy had an older sister named Sarah Ellen (aged 10 when he was born) and another, Elizabeth, who was only a year older than himself. He also had two older brothers, James (6) and William (4). Before he was five, Benjamin had acquired two more sisters, Mercy and Annie and he was part of a large extended family of Patricks in the neighbourhood. His grandfather William (whose second wife Mary Mellor had died in 1875) was living nearby on Mow Cop, but he died in 1879 when Ben was only 8. His uncle John was living in Brindley Ford and his Uncle William in Stadmoreslow. A niece, Elizabeth, had been born to his sister Sarah Ellen and John Cotterill the year before they were married (when Benjamin was 7 years old), and would no doubt have been treated as the youngest member of the family.
By 1881, the family had moved to Snowdrop Cottage just off the Congleton Road, Mow Cop. Besides Benjamin (9), only three of James and Maria’s children were still at home: James (16) and William (14), both coal-miners, and Mercy (7). Benjamin and Mercy were at school, either at the National School in what is now the Sunday School building next to St Thomas’s Church, or at the Wesleyan Day School on the ground floor of the Wesleyan Chapel further down the hill. To get to either, they would pass the opening of colliery shafts in what became the front garden of the original St Thomas’s vicarage, and children in the Wesleyan Day School could hear the rumble of the coal-carrying trucks being pulled through the tunnel beneath.
Benjamin would probably have left school at 13 or 14 and started to work in a local colliery. By the time he was 19 years old, he was following in the footsteps of his father and working with engines, either as a locomotive engineer or a stoker. His brother James, also a stationary engine driver, had left home and was living in Newton Heath, Manchester with their Uncle George, a chapel keeper, but his brother William was still single, living at home, and working as a miner. His young sister Mercy married that year, to John Boon: she had been at home without a job at 17. So Benjamin married too. On February 8 1891, he married Minnie Porter, a 19-year-old spinster from Pitts Hill: the wedding was at St James Parish Church, Newchapel (where James Brindley, the canal engineer, had been buried in 1772). They went to live with her family at Fountain Street, Pitts Hill. It was probably not an easy start to their married life together: besides his elderly parents-in-law there were Minnie’s 17-year-old sister Annie and two teenage brothers. The two girls both worked in a pottery warehouse and the boys were still at school.
Their first child, Elizabeth (known as Lizzie), was born 18 months later, in September 1892. By then, Benjamin and Minnie had moved back to Mow Cop and were living in Rose Cottage a one-up, one-down dwelling just across the road from St Thomas’s on Mow Cop Lane. Within the first ten years of their marriage, Minnie bore four more children, none of whom survived, though Arthur was two when he died and Benjamin (the first so named after his father) a year old. Fred was born in 1902 and he was followed by Emily Menes (1904) who died at 14 months. In September 1906 my father Leonard was born, the seventh child of the marriage but only the third to survive infancy. George was the next, born in 1908, then Marion (1909; died in 1912) and Evelyn (1910). Twin boys were born in 1913: Joseph died at birth and Benjamin (the second) was killed by a bull in 1916. Minnie was 45 when the last child, Frances May, was born in March 1916. So she had at least 12 pregnancies in 24 years, but only five of her children (Lizzie, Fred, Leonard, George and Evelyn) lived to see their fifth birthdays. And that was not the worst of her problems: they were poverty-stricken and Benjamin was a drunkard.
The children went to school half a mile down the hill at the Castle Primary School which had opened in 1891 when the St Thomas’s and the Wesleyan Schools merged. They started school at about the age of seven and left at 13 or 14. The family were poor and knew hunger. At the time of a long miners’ strike in 1912, the year Ben’s father James died at Snowdrop Cottage, they relied on soup kitchens set up in the church’s Sunday-school building. In 1915 when she was 23, Lizzie married and left home, though still continuing to live on Mow Cop with her husband Fred Price, depriving the family of her earning-power. Because of their impoverishment, Leonard (aged 9) was sent to work at St Thomas’s Vicarage for an hour and a half each day before school and on Saturday mornings. He did domestic and gardening jobs for the vicar, Rev Guy Parkhouse, who had recently married and had moved to Mow Cop the previous September, and was given clothes first worn by the vicar’s children. He earned one shilling a week.
Their grandfather James had died at Snowdrop Cottage in November 1912 and was buried at St Thomas’s. Benjamin was the choir-master there, but after a dispute over the staging of a concert he left the church. He became a drunkard and this brought the utmost misery to the family. Leonard 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. He would drink at the Ash Inn or at the Mow Cop Inn, both within 500 yards from home at Rose cottage. Leonard wrote “How my mother (Minnie) coped with feeding and clothing a large family with little or no housekeeping money, I shall never know.” Worse, Benjamin 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, he 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.
At that time, Benjamin was supervising the engines at an open-cast mine at Newbold Colliery on the Cheshire side of the Congleton Edge a mile NE of St Thomas’s Church. During WW1, in August 1915, Benjamin enlisted as a private in the Cheshire Regiment and after a year in a battalion garrison he was sent out to Egypt in August 1916. The time he spent away from home can only have been good for the family but was writing threatening letters home demanding money, probably for drinking.
We can only imagine what life was like for Minnie and what might have been the final straw. 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 Minnie’s life of sacrifice and suffering. Benjamin was away in Egypt at the time. Fred was 14, Leonard 10, George 8 and Evelyn was only five years old. The four children were temporarily accommodated in five different homes over the next two years, with Lizzie and Frank at The Rocks on Mow Cop, with Annie Ikin at Snowdrop Cottage, and with the Bentleys in Stockport. Because Benjamin never paid the rent or supported them, they were shunted around. On May 19 1918, just a year after Minnie’s death, Benjamin remarried in Holy Trinity parish church, Sneyd, Burslem. He had been invalided out of the army. His new wife was Sarah Lovatt, and they moved into 7 Meadowside Lane (previously called Smiths Row in Brake Village), just above the Wesleyan Chapel at Bank.
Fred probably remained at home until his marriage in Macclesfield in 1922 (aged 20). George left home in about 1925 (aged 17) and went to live in Bollington where he worked for the local GP as a chauffeur-handyman. He married Minnie there in 1930. Lizzie and her family also moved to Bollington in 1928. Evelyn, who lived most of the time with the Ikins in Snowdrop Cottage, married in 1939, at the age of 29. Leonard (aged 11) was moved to Woodcocks Well Primary School in 1917 and in 1919 won a 3-year scholarship to Macclesfield Grammar School. After only one year there, he was withdrawn and sent out to work in an iron-foundry to help maintain the family because his father was still drinking. He became an active supporter of the Temperance Movement, especially through his membership of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and met his wife-to-be at a Temperance rally on Mow Cop. He lived at home with his father and step-mother until 1936 when he went to work in Stockport for a few months, and only left finally in 1939 when he married in Nantwich at the age of 33.
Benjamin did not fully mend his ways even after that tragedy. Sarah, his second wife, left him at least once and set up a separate home with Evelyn and Leonard in Scholar Green for a time but she returned to her husband in the end and stuck with Benjamin for almost 30 years. His children had little to do with him: Evelyn, who moved away to Sandbach for a while early in her married life, surprisingly returned to live not far from her father but in her later years could barely allow herself to pronounce his name. His grandchildren barely knew him, and I recall visiting him and Sarah at Bank only once. Sarah died in 1947, and he moved to Arclid Green Nursing Home in the village of Arclid and died there in April 1951.
Despite his awful behaviour, Benjamin had his good qualities. After his time at St Thomas’s he became associated with the Wesleyan Chapel on Mow Cop. A grand-niece still living on Mow Cop remembers that he sang hymns to her when she visited him in Smiths Row. She recalls that he was a "rumpty-fizzer" (i.e. a drinker), but judges that he was a “good man”. He was respected as being sociable and friendly, despite his drinking. His neighbours in Meadowside Lane, however, remember him mainly as a “waddling drunk” and he was the last with the surname Patrick to live on Mow Cop, ending the family’s hundred years of residence there.
A summary of Benjamin Patrick’s life:
Born 15 May 1871 in Mow Cop, Staffordshire
Married (1) 8 Feb 1891: Minnie Porter, at St James Church, Newchapel,
Married (2) May 19 1918: Sarah Ann Lovatt, at Holy Trinity Church, Sneyd,
Died April 1951, at Arclid Nursing Home, Arclid, Cheshire
Buried 1951 in St Thomas’s Churchyard, Mow Cop, aged 79
