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
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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
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
Monday, August 25, 2008
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]
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