James Patrick of Snowdrop Cottage, Mow Cop, mining engineer

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