James Patrick of Snowdrop Cottage, Mow Cop, mining engineer

James (my great-grandfather) was the first of the Mow Cop Patricks to be a skilled worker. His grandfather James (1786-1845) had been an agricultural labourer and his father William (1811-1879) was a collier who, in his sixties, also farmed 5 acres of Mow Cop land. James became a colliery engineer.

James was born in September 1832, the second son of William Patrick and Sarah Clark who had been married in Standon Church only the month before, having already had an older illegitimate son named Philip. James’ birthplace is shown in later censuses as being either in Bowers Bent, Whitmore, Newcastle or Maer Heath, but he was baptised in Standon Church, a few miles away from all these locations. By 1841 the family had moved to Madeley Heath where father William worked as a collier, probably at Leycett Colliery & Ironworks or Silverdale Colliery. Three more brothers were born there (but listed in census returns as nearby Talke-o-the-Hill): William (835), John (1837) and George (1839).

By 1845, however, William had moved the few miles NE from Madeley to the Staffordshire side of Mow Cop where the community was burgeoning because of the development of mining and quarrying. It was a rough place to live. A biographer of Hugh Bourne, the founder of Primitive Methodism, records that “the colliers of Kidsgrove and Harriseahead were quite as ignorant and debased as the Kingswood colliers of Wesley’s and Whitfield’s day. Drunken-ness, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, poaching, pugilism and profanity were rife. Apart from the chapel of ease at Newchapel (where James Brindley the canal engineer lies buried), there was no place of worship to be seen for miles”. It was to provide for this influx of working men and their families that a Primitive Methodist chapel (1841), a Wesleyan Methodist chapel (1842) and St Thomas’s Anglican Church (1842) were opened within a mile of Mow Cop castle . Both coal-mining and stone-quarrying were thriving on land owned by the Sneyd family of Keele Hall (now the site of the University of Keele). Although there were nine acres of trees and shrubs below the castle, and even more trees on the Cheshire side, there were also several small collieries on Mow Cop : near St Thomas’s church on the top of the hill, and at Stonetrough and Tower Hill further down towards Biddulph, as well as larger ones nearer Biddulph and towards Kidsgrove. A tunnel and tramway had been cut under the hill through to the Cheshire side to connect these mines with a wharf on the Macclesfield canal (opened in 1831) at Kent Green.

And so it was there on Mow Cop that another son and two daughters were born to the immigrant Patrick miners: Sarah (1846), Thomas (1847) and Mercy (1850). This made 8 children in the family. Mother Sarah died at 42 on Mow Cop in April 1850 , soon after the birth and early death of her last child. By then , 17 year-old James was the eldest son still at home and was employed as a coal miner like his father William (by contrast with his younger brothers who were just coal labourers). In 1851James acquired a step-mother, Mary Mellor, when William remarried in St Thomas’s Church.

In December 1858, James married at the age of 26. His bride was Maria Hancock, aged 20, from Brindley Ford, and the wedding was in St Margaret’s Church, Wolstanton. Their first child, Sarah Maria, was born in September 1860 in Harriseahead, and she appears in the 1861 census when the family were living at Stadmoreslow in the parish of Newchapel (on the SE slope of Mow Cop): James’s brother William is living next door with his wife Martha. James is now described as an engine-feeder while brother William is a coal miner. By 1871 , James and Maria were living on Mow Cop and had three more children: James (born 1865), William (1867) and Elizabeth (1870), but two other children had died in infancy: Joseph (in 1868) and another (in 1869). Another son, Benjamin (my grandfather), was born in May 1871 , a month after the census, and Mercy (1873) and Annie (1874) brought the number of births in this family to nine.

By 1881, James and Maria had moved to the Congleton Road, Mow Cop (probably at Snowdrop Cottage, the home today of Alma Crudginton). In 1878 Sarah the eldest daughter had married 21-yr-old John Cotterill, another local coal miner, and went on to have 7 children. So in 1881, only four of James and Maria’s children were still at home: James, William, Benjamin and Mercy, implying that Elizabeth and Annie had also died in childhood. James himself was now described as an engineer at [a] colliery, and young James (16) and William (14) were both coal miners. Benjamin (9) and Mercy (7) were at school, either at the National School at St Thomas’s Church (founded in 1845 in what is now the Sunday School building next to the church) or at the Wesleyan Day School (which had opened in 1874 on the ground floor of the chapel which is now a Chapel Museum).

In 1878, there were four generations of Patricks living in or near to Mow Cop. Grandfather William lived there with his second wife Mary until his death in 1879. As well as James and Maria and their children, James’ brother John lived down the hill in Brindley Ford with his second wife Harriett and his two children James and William , and his brother George lived in Stadmoreslow with his wife Elizabeth and son William H Patrick at least until 1871, though they had moved away to Lancashire before 1881. Elizabeth, James’ eldest niece (William’s great-grandchild), was born in 1878, when the Cotterills were still living on Mow Cop.

James’ eldest son James married Caroline Harding in 1887 and within three years they had produced three children, making a total of eight grand-children for James, including the five young Cotterills, all living on Mow Cop. Benjamin married Minnie Porter, a pottery painter from Pitts Hill, in February 1891 and went to live there with his new wife’s family, so by the time of the 1891 census only William (a coal miner) and Mercy and Annie (both at school) were still at home with their parents. William married Ann Bailey in Wolstanton in 1893 and moved away to Wolstanton village, and although he is said to be have been a good engineer he left the mines, served an apprenticeship and by 1901 was a journeyman bricklayer.

Maria Patrick died in October 1899 and was buried in St Thomas’s Church just six months after their youngest child Annie (25) had been married there. James (now a widower at the age of 67) soon employed 23-year-old Annie Hancock, who was probably a young relative of his late wife, as a resident house-helper. Annie, a spinster , already had a son who was born in 1899 and known as Bert Hancock. But Annie was more than a housekeeper to James: in January 1901 she bore him a daughter, Gladys Patrick, and in the following year, at the age of about 70 and notwithstanding the age-gap of 44 years, James married her at Wolstanton Register Office on 26 March 1902, and he is described on the certificate as a colliery engine-man. They continued to live in Snowdrop Cottage with its magnificent outlook over Biddulph and the Moor beyond, and had three more daughters together: Lillian, Mary and Annie, born between July 1902 and January 1908 (when James was 76).

We can find James in every Staffordshire census between 1841 and 1901, discovering that he came from Madeley Heath to Mow Cop with his parents, followed his father into the coal mines, married two local girls, and established himself in Snowdrop Cottage on Mow Cop as a family man and a mining engineer. His sons also made careers for themselves locally: James (born 1865) became the manager of the waterworks on Mow Cop, and said to be the first person there to have a telephone and a flush toilet. William (1867) became a colliery engineer and inventor before retraining as a bricklayer in Wolstanton after an injury. Benjamin (1871) followed in his father’s footsteps as a colliery engineer and was overseeing the operation of the underground steam engines as a “tenter ” in 1901. James Patrick senior died in November 1912 at the age of 80, and was buried in St Thomas's churchyard, leaving his widow in Snowdrop Cottage. Early in 1914 Annie (then 38) married Jacob Ikin (aged 36) in St Thomas’s and went on to have two more daughters: Alma (Crudgington) who lives there to this day, and Joan.

A summary of James Patrick’s life:
Born September 1832 in Bowers Bent, Standon, Staffordshire
Baptised 23 September 1832 in All Saints Church, Standon, Staffordshire
Married (1) December 1858: Maria Hancock in St Margaret’s Church, Wolstanton
Married (2) March 1902: Annie Hancock in the Register Office in Wolstanton
Died November 1912 at Snowdrop Cottage, Mow Cop
Buried 13 November 1912 in St Thomas’s Churchyard, Mow Cop

William Patrick (1811-1879): the man who brought the Patricks to Mow Cop

Our branch of the Patrick family arrived in Mow Cop in Staffordshire in 1845, and several descendants (through female lines) live there to this day . The man responsible for that move to Mow Cop was my great-great-grand-father William. He had been born in 1811 in Maer village, between Newcastle-under-Lyme and Market Drayton along the Cheshire border and 18 miles to the SW of Mow Cop, and he died on Mow Cop in 1879.

William’s father, James Patrick, had married Jane Myatt in St Peter’s Church, Maer in February of 1807 (the year of the first Primitive Methodist Camp Meeting on Mow Cop): both were in their early twenties. Jane was the daughter of Richard and Mary Myatt from Wolstanton, an extensive parish to the north of Newcastle-under-Lyme. She was already pregnant at the time of their marriage and their first child was christened Mary in Maer church three months later. Their second, Joseph, was born on 16 September 1809 and christened the next day. The names of these first two children suggest that these Patricks might have been a church-going family. Our William was the next child, christened on 28 March 1813 , but he was probably born earlier, in 1811 . Four further children were born to the family in Maer: George (October 1815 ), Catharine (August 1821 ), Samuel (May 1825 ) and finally Edward (May 1828 ) who died when he was only 2½ years old and was buried in Maer churchyard.

In a family with six children at home, the boy William would have grown up in relative poverty. Maer parish had a population of only 382 in scattered hamlets in 1801, rising to 505 in 1831. St Peter’s Church (above) was in the centre of the community, standing next to Maer Hall (left), the home since 1807 of Josiah Wedgwood II the potter, and it was in this same church that his daughter Emma Wedgwood married her cousin Charles Darwin in January 1839 . Emma had helped with the Sunday school held in Maer Hall laundry, and the Patrick children may have been taught by her. William’s father’s occupation is unknown, but he was probably an agricultural labourer in this predominantly farming district where the common land had just been enclosed by freeholders and James may even have worked on the Wedgwood estate itself. All his sons, however, became coal-miners . Maer is just off the old London to Chester road (now the A51), and close to the road between (Market) Drayton and Newcastle (A53). By this time a network of turnpike roads served the whole of N Staffordshire, facilitat¬ing communication and trade.

William’s elder sister and brother were both married in St Peter’s church and left home while he was still in his late teens. Mary married Joseph Clarke, an agri-cultural labourer, on 3 July 1827 when she was 21, but died when their only daughter Ann, born in 1828 , was still very young . Joseph married Margaret Murphey on 16 December 1829 when he was 20, and they had seven children all born locally (several of whom later migrated to W Yorkshire).

That same year (1829) our William fathered an illegitimate son, Philip , and only married the boy’s mother, Sarah Clark, three years later. Sarah had been born in 1811 in Madeley , four miles to the north, and was living in Bowers Bent, a hamlet in the parish of Standon, a small village three miles south-east of Maer. The two eventually married in the parish church of All Saints, Standon on 28 August 1832 just before the birth of their second son, our great-grandfather James, who was christened at the same church four weeks later. James’ birthplace, however, is given in some later censuses as Whitmore, 2 miles away on the road to Newcastle, and William and Sarah may have been living there from the time of their marriage or even before.

Soon thereafter William and Sarah moved to Madeley Heath, part of the village of Madeley (Staffs) with 1500 residents. There they had three further sons: William (born 1835), John (1837) and George (1839) whose births were registered at Talke-o-the-Hill. William probably worked as a collier at the Leycett Colliery & Ironworks or Silverdale Colliery which were providing coal for pottery manufacture in Newcastle. Communications in the area had been greatly enhanced by the opening in 1834 of the Grand Trunk Railway which linked Manchester and Birmingham and had stations at Whitmore and Madeley.

By 1845, however, William had moved to the Staffordshire side of Mow Cop. The community there was burgeoning because of the development of mining and quarrying, and it was a rough place to live. A biographer of Hugh Bourne records his opinion that “the colliers of Kidsgrove and Harriseahead were quite as ignorant and debased as the Kingswood colliers of Wesley’s and Whitfield’s day. Drunkenness, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, poaching, pugilism and profanity were rife. Apart from the chapel of ease at Newchapel (where James Brindley the canal engineer lies buried), there was no place of worship to be seen for miles”. It was to provide for this influx of working men and their families that a Primitive Methodist chapel (1841), a Wesleyan Methodist chapel (1842) and St Thomas’s Anglican Church (1842) were opened near to the castle. Both coal-mining and stone-quarrying were thriving on land owned by the Sneyd family of Keele Hall now the site of the University of Keele). Although there were several acres of trees and shrubs below the castle on the Staffordshire side, and even more trees on the Cheshire side, there were also several small collieries on Mow Cop: near St Thomas’s church on the top of the hill, and at Stonetrough and Tower Hill further down towards Biddulph. Some of these mines were rather simple, using bell-pits or sloping shafts from the surface . A tunnel and tramway had been cut under the hill connected these mines with the Williamson wharf on the Macclesfield canal (opened in 1831 and linking James Brindley’s Trent & Mersey canal to Maccles-field) at Kent Green.

It was there on Mow Cop that another son and two daughters were born to the newly-immigrant Patricks: Sarah in 1846, and then Thomas in 1847 who died in infancy. In March 1850 Sarah senior gave birth to her last child Mercy, but both mother (aged 39) and baby died within a month and were buried in St Thomas’s Churchyard on Mow Cop in April 1850. So during their marriage of 18 years, Sarah carried at least eight pregnancies and probably died of the consequences.

Living on Mow Cop, the newly-widowed William employed a widow from Audley named Margaret Davenport of about his own age as a resident servant to help look after his surviving children . Philip, the eldest son, aged 20 in 1851, was lodging with the Green family on Williamsons Row nearby , but the next four sons, James, William, John and George (aged 18 down to 12), were living at home. Sarah, the youngest at 6 years, was at school. That year (1851) their father William re-married at St Thomas’s Church: his second wife was Mary Mellor, a 40 year old widow from Ashton-under-Lyme in Lancashire. She brought two young daughters and a son to live with them, and also had four older children who had left home. William and Mary do not appear to have had more children together.

In 1855, the family celebrated at St Thomas’s, Mow Cop the wedding of William (20) who married Martha Hancock, the youngest child of a Longport potter. The following year John (19) married Lydia at St Margaret’s Parish Church in Wolstanton and lived next door to William and Mary . Then at Christmas-time in 1858 when he was 26 years old, James then married Maria Hancock, a 19-year-old girl from Brindley Ford, also in St Margaret’s Church. In 1863 George (24) married Elizabeth Trueman at St Thomas’s, Mow Cop. By 1871, all William’s own children had left home and he and Mary were living with Mary’s children by her previous marriage. Now aged 60, William made a living as a coal-carrier and as a farmer with 5 acres of land on Mow Cop.

William would have known many of his grandchildren who still lived locally. James and Maria produced nine children (including a William and a Benjamin) between 1860 and 1874; John had only one son, William, born in 1860 before his first wife died, and his brother George had another William in 1865. William’s second wife Mary died at the age of 64 in 1875 , after 24 years marriage, leaving him a widower yet again. William himself died in February 1879, aged 68, and was buried in St Thomas’s churchyard.

So William, the man who brought the Patrick family to Mow Cop, started life in poverty as one of a six surviving children of an agricultural labourer in Maer. He worked for most of his life as an unskilled collier in the expanding coal industry of the North Staffs coalfield, moving to Mow Cop in 1845 and ultimately working as a coal-carrier but also farming five acres of land. A family man, twice married, with eight children (including James my great-grandfather) and a dozen grandchildren (including Benjamin my grandfather), he ended his days on Mow Cop where some of his descendants have lived for a further 100 years.


A summary of William Patrick’s life:
Born September 1811 in Maer Moss, Staffordshire
Baptised 28 March 1813 in St Peter’s Church, Maer, Staffordshire
Married (1) 28 August 1832: Sarah Clark in All Saints Church, Standon, Staffordshire
Married (2) June 1851: Mary Mellor at St Thomas’s Church, Mow Cop, Staffordshire
Died February 1879 at Mow Cop, Staffordshire
Buried 8 February 1879 in St Thomas’s churchyard, Mow Cop

New photos of my grandparents discovered

These pictures were copied from photos in the album of my cousins Phyllis and Menes in Blackpool. (a) My grandmother Minnie (nee Porter) in a relatively relaxed moment [ca. 1916], and (b) my grandfather Benjamin Patrick and his second wife Sarah Ann (nee Lovatt) [ca.1950]

Marjorie Murdoch Wainwright (April 20 1908 to April 13 1998)

Marjorie Murdoch Wainwright (my mother) was born on April 20 1908 at Overton House, Willaston, nr Nantwich. She was the fourth of five children of Francis Joseph Wainwright, a railway accountant then aged 34, and Lucy Bradbury Murdoch, aged 36. She had two brothers, Eric (8) and Harold (4), and a sister Dorothy (6). Soon afterwards, the family moved a short distance to The Beeches, Crewe Road, Wistaston (halfway between Nantwich and Crewe) which remained the family home until 1958.

Marjorie was first educated at Wistaston School less than a mile from home, and later at the Nantwich and Acton Grammar School, about three miles away in Welsh Row on the west side of Nantwich. When she was 8 (in 1916) a younger sister, Barbara, was born and her older sister Dorothy had to leave school at 14 to help look after the family at home. Her eldest brother Eric had served as a soldier in Germany and after the war worked in a bank in Crewe before going off to India in some sort of disgrace in 1921 when Marjorie was 13. She matriculated from her grammar school probably at the age of 16 in the summer of 1924.

Marjorie only knew a few relations: she had a single aunt on each side of her family in the UK. Her mother Lucy’s sister Jessie was living in Chorlton, near Manchester, with her husband Frederick Hazell and their four children (all older than her). Her maternal uncles had all emigrated to North America after the desertion and death of their father David Murdoch in 1873, though Uncle Fred, the dentist, came back to visit Nantwich in 1932 . On her father’s side, Frank’s only surviving sister Florence lived locally in Wybunbury with her husband Samuel Potts and five children (again all older) and Marjorie kept up contact all her life with the youngest, her cousin Irene Ward (known as Rene, née Potts).

The family belonged to the Methodist Church in Hospital Street, Nantwich, and her sister Dorothy eventually married Willoughby, the son of Rev David Lambert who was the minister there between 1916 and 1919. Her mother Lucy was a regular attender at the Sisterhood between 1911 and 1927, and sang in the choir, as did Dorothy and Marjorie.

After leaving school, Marjorie spent 5 years at home without gainful employment, but at the age of 21, in September 1929, she started nurse training at the Nottingham General Hospital Nursing School. She lived in the new Nurses’ War Memorial Home where the rules were strict and supervision tight, but she was able to return to Nantwich for annual three-week holidays. She had a long period of illness in her first year and this may have contributed to her failing her first state examination in February 1931, though she passed it in the May. She passed the Final State Examination in February 1933 and finished the course in December 1933 as a State Registered Nurse. She probably went to Leeds to complete the midwifery part of her training.

On qualifying as a nurse and midwife, she returned to Wistaston to live at home with her parents and work as a health visitor in Crewe until her marriage in 1939, aged 31. Barbara had also been living at The Beeches until soon after their mother died in January 1938: in May that year she went to live with their uncle Fred Murdoch, a dentist in Connecticut, USA.

Marjorie had met Leonard Patrick at a Temperance Rally in 1922 when she was 16 and he was 18, but it was 1936, when he was a middle-manager in a textile factory in Congleton, before they fell in love. He came from a very disturbed family background on Mow Cop on the Staffordshire border 10 miles away: his mother had committed suicide when he was 10 and he had been withdrawn from Macclesfield Grammar School at 14 after only one year on a scholarship. However, by then he was a popular Methodist local preacher and had educated himself at night-school, holding down a responsible job and supporting his father and step-mother. In 1937 Leonard started working as Area Officer with the Associated Road Operators in Broad Street in the centre of Hanley.

They were married at Hospital Street Methodist Church, Nantwich, on her 31st birthday, Thursday April 20 1939. The reception was held at Churche's Mansions, a splendid Tudor building nearby, and it looks as though no expense was spared. They spent their honeymoon at an hotel at Blue Anchor Bay, Minehead, in Somerset.

They first went back to live with Marjorie’s father Frank at The Beeches for three months before moving to a rented house at 3 Delves Place in The Westlands, a newly-built model estate in Newcastle-under-Lyme. This would have been an enormous step for both of them, living independently of their parents for the first time after many years and in a place new to them. Marjorie would have given up her nursing job, probably on marriage and certainly on moving to Newcastle. Their semi-detached house was new and spacious, much bigger than the modest workman’s cottage that Leonard had known on Mow Cop for 20 years. They joined the new Methodist Church at the Westlands , now called St Peter’s. I was born there in March 1940 , their first child.

In July 1940 Leonard moved to Birmingham to take up a new job with the Commercial Motor Users Association whose offices were in the centre of Birmingham at 60 Newhall Street. The family lived in a rented house at 51 Webb Lane, a quiet and leafy suburban lane in Hall Green. A second son, David, was born there in July 1942 and Marjorie had a miscarriage in 1943. All confinements were conducted at home with the help of a midwife and under the supervision of old Dr Stubbs, a general practitioner on Stratford Road, Hall Green. This was wartime, and South Birmingham was bombed many times between August 1940 and April 1943. Leonard served in the ARP , being exempt from military service because he was in a reserved employment. He kept chickens in the garden in which he also grew vegetables and American relations sent food-parcels once in a while. With the end of hostilities in sight, Peter was born in August 1944, and then Malcolm in May 1946; in peacetime but in a period of continuing hardship and food rationing. So when Marjorie reached the age of 40 (in 1948) she was blessed with a husband in secure employment, a pleasant home in Birmingham (which they had purchased) and a growing family of four boys. Her nurse training gave her skills which helped her care for them. Leonard was promoted several times and made a success of his career in transport.

After the war, the four boys were brought up in a happy and supportive home. Malcolm had been born with mild spina bifida giving him a slightly deformed leg and a limp which had been treated by physiotherapy. The other boys were healthy: all attended Hall Green Primary School about a mile away and they first went to a Sunday School at the Congregational Church in Etwall Road and later to Hall Green Methodist Church. Family entertainment comprised outings on foot to local parks and weekend drives to places like the Clent Hills, Malvern or Henley-in-Arden. On Whit Monday Bank Holidays there was a local horse show and several times a season Leonard and the older boys would go to watch League football at West Bromwich Albion. Summer holidays were spent at beach resorts in England and Wales. In 1946, the family stayed in a caravan on the sands at Dyffryn north of Barmouth. In later years they would spend one or two weeks in boarding-houses in places like Aberdovey, Prestatyn and Boscombe, suggesting a relative prosperity that Leonard could not have imagined 20 years earlier. The family would make the 60-mile journey to Nantwich two or three times a year to see Marjorie’s father, with whom Leonard got on well and for whom he would do heavy gardening tasks like turning the compost in “the hole”.

After primary school, the two eldest boys moved on to King Edwards School, Birmingham (a direct grant school), Peter went to Wheelers Lane Secondary Modern School, and Malcolm to King Edwards Camp Hill Grammar School which had just relocated to Kings Heath. In 1953 the family moved from Webb Lane to a large detached house at 56 Tixall Road, Hall Green, which they purchased with the help of a legacy to Marjorie from her uncle Fred Murdoch. A sign of their raised aspirations was the arrangement Marjorie had for a “traveller” to visit weekly from Barrows to take her order for groceries to be delivered to the door. As her sons grew less demanding, Marjorie volunteered to start a new Girl Guide Company at Hall Green Methodist Church. Leonard was a local preacher, Sunday School Superintendent and church steward there, so they were pillars of that thriving community where three of their sons were eventually to meet their wives.

When Marjorie was almost 50 (in 1958) her father Frank died in his own home at the age of 82 and was buried in Nantwich. In his later years he had been cared for by a housekeeper, and Marjorie and Leonard had been preparing to extend the house at Tixall Road ready to have him to live there. His estate was divided equally between the five children (three in N America and one in Scotland) but it was complicated by the possession of four terraced houses in Crewe which were a liability and soon sold off.

By 1958 she had four sons at secondary school and the eldest was preparing to go to University College, Oxford, the first person on either side of the family to get to university. Two others followed, graduating in due course from Durham and Cardiff. John qualified as a doctor and went off to Nigeria for his first job and then settled in Dundee as a university lecturer. David became a secondary school teacher and worked for a year in Birmingham before moving to Bristol and Bath. Peter was trained as a chef and worked in restaurants in Birmingham, and was the last son to live at Tixall Road. Malcolm graduated in engineering and after working for Rolls Royce in Derby moved back to Birmingham to work for Gillette.

David never found a wife but by 1970, John, Peter and Malcolm had all been married at Hall Green Methodist Church, and in 1975 the last of Marjorie’s eight grandchildren (five boys and three girls) was born. Four lived nearby and she was able to see them develop through infancy. The other four grand-children spent most of their early years away in tropical countries but visited Birmingham most years for festivals and holidays. However, the whole family met together very rarely. Marjorie visited her sister Dorothy in Scotland occasionally: Barbara visited from the US two or three times and Harold came once. Her brother Eric returned to try to settle in UK in his declining years but this attempt failed and he returned to Vancouver where he died in 1965. In 1961 and 1965 Marjorie and Leonard flew to New York to spend time with Barbara and Fred in Meriden, Connecticut, and in 1971 Marjorie went alone. Marjorie’s health was reasonably good, though she suffered with gall-bladder disease for which she had surgery in Birmingham in her fifties.

In January 1976, when Marjorie was 68 and Leonard 70, the family was devastated by the tragic suicide of their youngest son Malcolm , not yet thirty. He left a widow Anne and two young daughters Rachel and Louise. Family relationships were not really strong enough to help them through it, and their grief and incomprehension hardly lightened with the passage of years. Soon afterwards they moved a mile from Tixall Road to 39 Painswick Road, Hall Green, a semi-detached house not unlike their earlier one in Webb Lane, despite the fact that Leonard was beginning to struggle with arthritis which made walking painful. By this time David was working in Birmingham again and Peter was living in Solihull, so they had some local family support. John and his family visited from Nottingham fortnightly. They enjoyed their small garden and continued with church work. Leonard died in the Birmingham General Hospital after a short illness in December 1983.

Marjorie was left a widow with a rather modest pension at the age of 75. She continued to drive for a while, but became increasingly disabled by a series of falls attributed to poor cerebral circulation. Eventually, she moved into the Grey Gables residential home in Acocks Green and the house was sold to pay the fees. She suffered a facial burn after a fall against a hot radiator and was admitted to Selly Oak Hospital for treatment. She was then moved to the Prince of Wales Nursing Home in Solihull Lodge, Birmingham, where she died just before her 90th birthday in April 1998. The last survivor of her Wainwright family, she was cremated at Robin Hood Cemetery, Solihull, within sight of Malcolm’s grave, just as Leonard had been 15 years before. She left three sons (John Murdoch, David Francis and Peter Leonard), eight grand-children (David, Jonathan, Daniel and Joseph; Leigh and Katie; Rachel and Louise) and one great-grandson (Daniel).