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