Saturday, December 08, 2007

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.