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.