Our Nantwich Wainwrights

1. Thomas Wainwright (1770-1852): Wybunbury weaver and property-owner
Thomas Wainwright (my mother’s great-great-grandfather) was born in the parish of Wybunbury, Cheshire in June 1770. His father John Wainwright had married Elizabeth Briscall in the parish church of St Chad, Wybunbury on 5 March 1768 , after his first wife, Hannah Whalley had died. Thomas, possibly an only child, was baptised in the same church on 5 June 1770 . Thomas became a cordwainer (shoemaker) as a young man and when he was almost 26, on 3 May 1796, he married 20-year-old Ann Davies. She had been born outside the county in 1776 but was presumably living in Nantwich where they were married in St Mary’s Parish Church .

Their first child, John (named after his grandfather) had already been baptised in Wybunbury the year before on 18 October 1795 , and ten further children were born to the marriage between 1797 and 1821, nine boys and two girls. The fifth was Joseph who was born in May 1806 . All eleven children lived to adulthood. All got married except two: William (b 1797) who lived with his much younger brother Arthur (b 1821), and Hannah (b. 1802) who kept house for her father after her mother Ann died.

Thomas became a cotton weaver in later life and acquired some wealth. He established his family in the village of Willaston Heath on a substantial plot of land on the corner of Warren Lane (now Wybunbury Road) and Cheerbrook Lane (now Road) which comprised a dwelling-house, outbuildings and a blacksmith’s shop where Joseph worked . He had also managed to acquire other land and property in Willaston , as well as four cottages in Tunstall, Staffs . His wife Ann died in 1849 after 53 years of marriage, and two years later Thomas himself died aged 82 in Willaston on 4 November 1851 , shortly after he had written his will . He is buried in Wybunbury churchyard .

Thomas provided an annuity of £10 a year for his unmarried daughter Hannah, and left the Willaston land on Warren Lane for the use of his sons (or their sons) in strict order of seniority as tenants for life. His executors were his sons John and Joseph. His great-grandson, Francis Joseph, was later to rebuild the house (called Warren House since 1871) on that site and it remained in the family for at least 50 years.


2. Joseph Wainwright (1806-1879): Willaston farmer & blacksmith

Joseph (my great-great-grandfather) was born on 13 May 1806 in the parish of Wybunbury, Cheshire and baptised in the parish church there on June 8. His father Thomas was a shoemaker (later a cotton weaver) who had acquired some property in Tunstall as well as a house in Warren Lane in Willaston Heath. Thomas and his wife Ann (née Davis) had at least eleven children who all survived to adulthood and lived in the neighbourhood.

When he was 26 Joseph married Eleanor Bickley (21) in Nantwich Parish Church and they had nine children between 1835 and 1858. In 1841 Joseph and his young family of four children were in Willaston, owning a house with about 3 acres of land to W of Wistaston Road and farming a further 17 acres on the Middlewich Road NE of Nantwich . He also owned two plots in the village of Shavington, amounting to 2.5 acres. His oldest brother William was living at a farmstead on the Newcastle Road, Wybunbury . Another brother John lived with his wife Alice on a plot on Crewe Road, Wistaston : he farmed several acres of land including a plot north of the Crewe Road at Cheneybrook, Nantwich and another off Cheerbrook Road, Willaston .

By 1851, Joseph and Eleanor were still at Wistaston Road, Willaston and had six children, but he was now a blacksmith. His father Thomas died that year, naming Joseph and John as executors and trustees, and leaving his Warren Lane property to Joseph . By 1861, Joseph and Eleanor had produced another son, George, and were living in Warren House, Willaston Heath and Joseph was farming 8 acres of land.

By 1871 Joseph had been widowed and, at 65, was still living at Warren House with his oldest child Mary (an unmarried letter-carrier at 36) and his youngest child George (an apprentice tailor of 16). His son Joseph (born 1846) had married a 19-year-old local girl, Ellen Green, in the Parish Church in Wybunbury in 1868. He died in 1879, aged 73 years, and was buried in [Nantwich or] Wybunbury.

3. Joseph Wainwright (1840 -1886): Willaston trader, traveller and house-builder

Joseph (my mother’s grandfather) was born in the new family home at Warren House, Willaston on June 25 1840, the fourth of nine children of Joseph Wainwright and Eleanor Bickley who had been married in Nantwich in 1831. In 1851 the ten-year-old was living in Willaston and he was still at home there in 1861, working as a turner.

In 1868 he married Ellen Green, a 19-year-old local girl, in Wybunbury. They had four children. The first, Ada Lydia, died young and is buried in Wybunbury churchyard . Francis Joseph was born in Willaston at the end of 1874, and a sister, Florence, followed .

Joseph is absent from the Cheshire 1871 census, but may have been visiting the southern states of America where he got the idea for the design of a house with porch and balcony that he subsequently had built for himself in Wybunbury: The Hollies, now identified as 14 Main Road . There had been a house on the site before , and he bought the land from Richard Oulton in 1878 and the orchard from the Church Council in 1886 . The house bears a plaque “JW 1879” on the front gable. But in the 1881 census three years later, Joseph and Ellen are living elsewhere in Willaston, running the Post Office and General Stores on the corner of Eastern Road opposite the railway station , and their two surviving children Francis Joseph and Florence are with them. Joseph was later described as a miller .

Joseph died in December 1886, aged only 45, and was buried in the family grave in Wybunbury churchyard . Ellen, his widow, moved to The Hollies before 1890 with her two children and in 1894 made a will in their favour . But in December 1898 Florence was married, and by the spring of 1899 Frank had left home and Ellen was being treated for depression. She committed suicide there in May 1899, aged 51 : she is also buried in the churchyard . The house was sold to farmer William Robinson by the executors (Francis Wainwright and Florence Potts) in 1899 .


4. Francis Joseph Wainwright (1874 -1958): Crewe railway official

Francis Joseph (my maternal grandfather) was born in December 1874 in Willaston, Cheshire, the second of four children of Joseph Wainwright jnr and Ellen Green who had been married in Wybunbury Church in 1868. His elder sister Ada Lydia died at 4 when Frank was still a toddler, but a younger sister, Florence, survived to adulthood. In 1881, Frank and Florence were living with their parents at the Post Office and General Stores run by his father in Willaston , on the corner of Eastern Road opposite the railway station. But in 1886 when he was only 12, Frank’s father died at the age of 46, and Ellen moved with the children to the house Joseph had built in the main street of Wybunbury: The Hollies.

By the time Frank was 17 he was employed as a junior clerk in Nantwich or possibly Crewe. In May 1899, when he was 25, his mother Ellen committed suicide at the age of 50 , and she was buried in Wybunbury churchyard , . The executors were Frank and Florence (who had been married to Samuel Potts a few months before), and they sold to The Hollies to farmer William Robinson .

In October 1899, Frank married Lucy Bradbury Murdoch, a piano teacher, in Chorlton near Manchester, Lancashire . They soon moved into Warren House in Willaston, splendidly rebuilt on the corner of Cheerbrook Road and Wybunbury Road, looking down the length of the village. The plaque on the front wall bears his initials FJW and the date 1900. Their first son, Eric Francis, was born there that year and Dorothy in 1902. Frank was employed as a Railway clerk at Crewe station, and the family moved house locally several times in this period. In 1903 they lived at Highfields, a newly constructed terrace of four houses at 371-377 Crewe Road in Wistaston, Nantwich , and in 1908 they were living at Overton House on Wistaston Road in Willaston. It is not clear which of these properties he owned. Harold was born in 1904, and Marjorie Murdoch (my mother) in 1908. Warren House was sold in June 1908 , and by about 1911 the family were living at The Beeches, Wistaston (a 2 storey, semi-detached house built between 1875 and 1910 ).

In 1911, Lucy went to the US for several months, but when she got back to England she found that her mother Harriet had died (June 1911). Barbara, their last child, was born five years later (on Dorothy’s 14th birthday). Eric was sent to India for 4 years in some sort of disgrace at 21, and later emigrated to Canada. Dorothy went to Nigeria as a missionary in 1930 and married in 1933. Harold went to the US and married in Detroit in 1934, and Barbara left for the US at the age of 22 in 1938 (before her mother died).

In 1928, Lucy suffered a heart attack and remained an invalid for the rest of her life. Apparently, marital relations with Frank were strained, and they had separate bedrooms and never went out together. Marjorie was the last child in the home. She may have left school early to help look after the family , and later trained as a nurse and midwife in Nottingham. She returned to live with her parents at The Beeches, and worked as a health visitor in the Crewe area.

Lucy died in 1938 and was buried at Nantwich cemetery. Only then did Marjorie feel able to marry and leave home. Frank stayed on at The Beeches and employed housekeepers to assist him. Frank had worked all his life in the accounts department at the Railway Office in Crewe and probably retired during WW2. He owned residential property in Crewe from which he received a small rental income. In his final years there was a plan for him to move to live with Marjorie and her family in Birmingham but that never materialised. Frank died in January 1958 and is buried alongside his wife at Nantwich Cemetery. He left various household items to his children , many of which are still in the family.

Where the Wainwrights have lived

My mother was a Wainwright from near Nantwich in Cheshire. In 1881 (L map) the Wainwrights were concentrated in the north-east of the English midlands and in mid-Wales. By 1998 (R), they were still there, but had also spread across to South Yorkshire.

Purple and then red show the highest concentrations, then brown and yellow.
Data from Surname Profiler.

Benjamin, mining engineer and soldier: the last of the Mow Cop Patricks (1871-1951)

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

Patrick migrations mapped by Google

Click the link to show where our Patrick family lived in the 19th century.

Four Patrick mining families migrate from Mow Cop to Yorkshire

Over a period of twenty years in the late 19th century, at least four mining families belonging to our Patrick clan moved north from Mow Cop in the North Staffordshire coalfield to work for the New Sharlston Colliery Company near Wakefield in West Yorkshire. They may well first have been attracted by reports that they would have a more comfortable life there. From 1865, the company operated three pits in Sharlston : Haigh Moor, Stanley Main and Sharlston West (opened 1890). Supported by the Crossleys (carpet manu-facturers) of Halifax, the company built miners’ housing along with a chapel, school, Penny Bank, literary institute, reading room, library, coffee room and co-op store. Francis Crossley (MP and later a baronet) even bought out a beer shop to keep the village alcohol free . The mines are now gone (though they lasted until just before the Miners Strike in 1979) replaced by a Nature Park, but there is a monument to the coal workings and worker’s dwellings on Long Row and Crossley Street remain as listed buildings .

The Breeze family were the first to go. They were headed by Thomas James Breeze whose mother had been Jane Patrick (born in Maer in 1833 of Joseph Patrick and Margaret Murphey. Thomas was born in Maer in 1856, and his parents moved to the Potteries. His father died before he was 15 and he became an iron-miner by 1871. He married Elizabeth Rowley at the Primitive Methodist Chapel in Tunstall in December 1876 where his first child Elizabeth was born in 1878. By the date of the census in 1881 they had moved 60 miles north-east across the Peak District to Sharlston, West Yorkshire, a few miles east of Wakefield, where he was employed as a coal miner. His next two children were born there by 1884, and then they moved a mile or two west to Crofton where the next two were born. In 1891, he was employed as a colliery “banksman” in charge of the cages at the pit-head. By 1893 the family had moved again, to Sandal Magna, where their last two children were born between 1893 and 1899. In 1901, Thomas was a general labourer at 45, supporting a wife and 6 children at home. The descendants of his sixth child, Emma (born 1890), are still living in the area .

The second Patrick couple to leave Mow Cop for West Yorkshire were Jane’s brother Solomon (born in Maer in 1832) and Elizabeth (nee Jones). They had been married in Wolstanton in 1869 and had three children in Tunstall by 1880. There is no record of them in the census of 1881 and they may already have moved to Sharlston with Jane and Thomas Breeze, and their fourth child, Joseph, was born there in 1881. Solomon had been a stone-miner in Tunstall, but worked in the colliery in Sharlston before running a grocer’s shop by 1901. He appears on the electoral roll in Sharlston in 1896 .

The next group to migrate were John and Harriett Patrick and their three children. John was born in 1837 in Talke-o-the-Hill, and married twice: first to Lydia in Wolstanton in 1856 and then to Harriett Adams at St Thomas’s, Mow Cop in 1871. In 1881 John was a coal miner in Brindley Ford, and this couple’s third son, William, was born there in 1883. By 1891, however, the family had moved to Sharlston, Yorkshire where he too, (like Thomas Breeze his first cousin once removed) was a coal miner and 17-yr-old William worked with pit-ponies underground. In 1896, John appears on the electoral roll in Sharlston.

The fourth family to follow the same route northward were James and Caroline Patrick. James was born in Audley in 1839, the brother of Solomon and of Jane Breeze (nee Patrick), and he married Caroline in about 1850. They had six children and lived in Goldenhill, Tunstall where James worked as a coal miner. Between 1881 and 1891 they moved to Crossley Street, Sharlston where James continued to work as a miner. One of the three older girls (Charlotte) had gone into domestic service in Hyde, Cheshire, and Annie presumably married in Staffordshire like her sister Mercy (below), but James and Caroline had with them their two sons John (b 1878) and Joseph (b 1873), both working in the mines, and their youngest daughter Caroline (b 1877). In 1896 James was living in High Street, New Sharlston , and when he retired, before 1901, he moved a few miles to Green Lane in the centre of Featherstone village.

In 1885, their daughter Mercy (aka Nancy) (born in 1859) and son-in-law Henry Goodfellow also moved to Sharlston. Mercy had married Henry in Tunstall in 1876 and the couple had four children there. In 1881 they had all been living with her parents in Oldcott, Staffs. They moved to Yorkshire in 1885, possibly at the same time as Mercy’s parents, and a fifth child was born in Sharlston in 1890. However, within a year Mercy had died of TB , and Henry married again and had three more children with his new wife Elizabeth Shepherd from Wensleydale. Henry was a coal miner, and both his son Frederick and George, Elizabeth’s son by a previous marriage to George Shepherd, worked as pit-pony drivers underground. Descendants of Henry and Mercy’s third son Frederick Goodfellow still live in Wakefield .

Their daughter Caroline (born 1877) married John Hill (a coal hewer from Ilkeston, Derbyshire) in Wakefield in 1898, and their two children were born in Sharlston in 1898 and 1899 and baptised in the Primitive Methodist Chapel. In 1901 they were living with James and Caroline in Featherstone. Their descendants also still live in the area. John Patrick, eldest son of James and Caroline was living in Sharlston, at Ellen Terrace in 1896 but appears to have to have left the area by 1901. His brother Joseph (1873) however, stayed there at least till then.

David Francis Patrick (1941 - 2006)

David was born in Hall Green, Birmingham on July 15 1941, the second of four sons of Leonard and Marjorie Patrick. From King Edward's School, Birmingham, he went to Durham University to read English & Philosophy, gaining a II.2 degree in 1962. After contemplating ordination in the Methodist Church, he taught briefly in a secondary modern school in Birmingham before completing a PGCE in Bristol in 1965. He became a school-master first at Bristol Cathedral School and then at Kingswood School, a Methodist foundation in Bath.

In 1972 he moved back to Birmingham and, after gaining a Diploma in the Teaching of English at the University, joined the staff at King Edward VI Five Ways, a co-educational voluntary-aided school. There for 25 years he taught English to A-level and for Oxbridge entrance with some success, and was much appreciated by his pupils. Always keen on outdoor activities from his time as a Scout leader at school and an Outward Bound course in Scotland, David enjoyed activity weeks at Tyn-y-Waen, the Five Ways School Cottage in Powis, and walking holidays in Snowdonia. He was a keen squash and volley-ball player.

After early retirement in 1998 he blossomed as a voluntary hospital visitor and was the literature expert at the OXFAM bookshop in Harborne. In 2001 his 40 years' service as a Methodist Local Preacher was celebrated at his church in Selly Oak where he had served as a steward and Church Council secretary. His last sermon was preached at Bank Chapel near Mow Cop, Staffordshire on July 23 2006 in a service to celebrate the centenary of his father’s birth. He never married but in his later years he enjoyed the companionship of his fiancée Sheila Wilkins with whom he bought a house in Bournville and holidayed in Italy. He died on December 12 in St Mary’s Hospice, Selly Oak, Birmingham, after a short illness. He will be sadly missed by Sheila, his brothers John and Peter, the wider Patrick family, and his many friends.