But Came They All To Birmingham
Ancestor Miscellany
Martin Wharton – Bishop of Newcastle, and Thomas Warton – Poet Laureate
Martin Wharton – one of Sue’s 4th cousins through the Hayes family – was the Bishop of Newcastle between 1997 and 2014. He does not appear to have called us to confirm this connection. This Wharton family appear to be from Croglin, Cumberland 10 miles East of Carlisle for many generations covering at least the last 250 years.
- Thomas Warton (1728-1790) was the Rector at Kiddington, Oxfordshire from 1771 to his death and would have presided over many of the West family occasions in that time. Thomas Warton was Professor of Poetry for 10 years at Trinity College in Oxford and became Poet Laureate in 1785 prior to Robert Southey (see links with Sue’s Hayes family), William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Thomas Warton’s family appear to be based in southern England so do not appear to be related to Sue’s 4th cousin.
Ann Tennant – Murdered as a Witch
Ann Tennant (nee Smith) the wife of John Tennant – Ian’s 1st Cousin 5 times removed through the West family – in 1875 was murdered with a pitchfork aged 79 in Long Compton Warwickshire by an agricultural worker who accused her of being one of a coven of 15 witches in the village who had ‘bewitched’ him and stopped him from working. He had intended subsequently to kill all of the others but he was arrested, tried for manslaughter in Warwick Assizes and died in prison.
Another Connection to Long Compton
John Tennant’s connection to the West family was through his mother, Mary West. Mary was born in Kiddington to my 5th Gt Grandfather John West, the one who moved to Kiddington from Chadlington, possibly to help with the labouring on the designs of Capability Brown. Six generations later:
- Alan West married Edith Cork,
- Edith’s best friend from her earliest memories in Saltley in Birmingham, was Joan Tennant, descended from John Tennant of Long Compton
Further, Ian West married Susan Wells, who went to Foley Road Infants School in Streetly during the mid 1950s where Joan Tennant was – it seems – the Head Teacher.
Mary Ann Horsfall – a Severe Case of Post-Natal Depression?
Mary Ann Horsfall (nee Cull) the wife of Joseph Horsfall, Ian’s 2nd cousin 3 times removed on the West Family side – was living in Bartholemew Row, Eastside, Birmingham in 1891. She had just borne her 9th child in 18 years, a son John Thomas Horsfall when she ‘did murder him while the state of her mind was deranged’. She was convicted in the Birmingham Courts and sent to Broadmoor Prison where she died in 1933.
Charles Clark and Sarah Jemmett, Joseph Hayes and Harriett Budd
There are many churches across England yet the ancient Church of St Lawrence in Slough saw the marriages not only of Sue’s 3rd Gt Grandparents, Charles Clark (Police Officer from Windsor) who married Sarah Jemmett in 1835 but also 20 years later in 1854, that of her 2nd Gt Grandparents Joseph Hayes and Harriett Budd, both children of Manservants at nearby Sandhurst Military Academy. The families did not connect for another three generations until John Wells and Rita Clark married in Birmingham 100 years later in June 1952. Meanwhile the Astronomer William Herschel who died in 1822 is buried in St Lawrence Church and his 40ft Telescope – the largest in the World for 50 years – existed a mile up the road at Observatory House in Slough until it was dismantled in 1840. His sister Caroline was also an Astronomer and it may well have been she who discovered Uranus.
Another Horsfall family in Birmingham and the link to Penns Hall
Websters of Penns outside Birmingham had been involved in the manufacture of music wire from the 1720s. In the 1850s the Websters joined with James Horsfall from Yorkshire who had patented a new heat treatment process for wire that doubled its tensile strength and brought new industrial markets. The new firm of Webster & Horsfall now based in Hay Mills came to pre-eminence when they provided the wire for the first successful transatlantic cable in 1866. James Horsfall’s family went on to live at Penns Hall in Walmley, Sutton Coldfield. Once Joseph and Jane Horsfall (Ian’s 2x Gt Grandparents) moved from Coventry to the Dudley Road in Birmingham around 1865 and after their daughter Emily married into the West family it is said that they used to have family picnics on the lawns on Penns Hall claiming (probably only privately) some family link. Our Horsfall relations in Coventry also probably hailed from Yorkshire, but Horsfall is a very widespread Yorkshire name and if there is a link it is not yet known.
A Connection to Jack the Ripper
Two of Jack the Ripper’s victims may have crossed the paths of members of Sue’s family as their lives unwound to their appalling doom in Whitechapel in 1888.
- Annie Smith was born in 1841 the daughter of a soldier in the 2nd Queens Lifeguards Regiment. She moved to Windsor as a teenager where in the 1850s she lived only a street or two from where Charles Clark (Sue’s 3rd Gt Grandfather) lived with his family as a Police Officer. Twenty years later in 1879 (by which time Charles had retired and was now a greengrocer) Annie returned to Windsor as the wife of a Coachman to Francis Barry on St Leonards Hill who mixed with the rich and famous. But Annie was an alcoholic who by late 1882 gained a reputation with the police and magistrates of Windsor for public drunkenness. Annie was returned to London where her life spiralled tragically downwards.
- Kate Eddowes was born in Wolverhampton in 1843 but moved to London when she was only one year old when her father lost his employment for trying to start a union to represent tin-plate workers. In 1857 on the death of her mother, she was sent back to Wolverhampton to live with an Aunt and Uncle but in 1862 she ran away to live in a courtyard off Moland St in Birmingham with another uncle, Tom Eddowes, a bare-fist boxer known as “the Snob”. William Clews (another 3rd Gt Grandfather) and his brother Richard (both brassfounders and Candle-stick Makers) had both lived at 79 and 86 Moland Street since the 1830s although by 1862 William lived round the corner in Gem Street. Poor Kate took up with a travelling chapman, an Irish teller of tales for money and began her journey back to the slums of Whitechapel.
Life in Moland Street was hard and was described in the story of The Five – the Untold Stories of the women killed by Jack the Ripper by Haille Rubenhold. “When Uncle Tom was not throwing punches in the ring he was driving nails into shoes either in a room partly converted for that purpose or in a nearby workshop. As a polisher Kate now sat at the end of a long table with polishing cloths, rubbing round and round at the faces of newly shellacked japanware trays. Kate’s hours would have meant rising in darkness or at dawn, home in time for supper and a shared bed with her cousin divided only by a curtain from the nightly noises of other family members. The routine of Kate’s life would be this until she married. Then it would be the life of excessive child-bearing – the pains of birth, the weariness of child-rearing, worry, hunger and exhaustion leading eventually to sickness and death”. Or she could run off with a chapman and see what life may bring.
James Bearcroft – Transported for Larceny
James Harvey Bearcroft was born in Blockley (at that time in Gloucestershire) in December 1823, the third of 5 children born to John Bearcroft (Sue’s 3rd Gt Grandfather and Parish Clerk) and his first wife Elizabeth (nee Shirley). His two younger siblings had already died in infancy, and although a younger sister arrived, his mother died in 1829 two months after the infant death of her fifth child. James’ father re-married and had another three daughters but he too died, of TB in 1839 leaving James aged only 15, his sister Mary aged 12, a step-mother and three half-sisters under the age of 8. Then Mary died in 1847 aged only 22 possibly in one of the cholera epidemics.
It is probably of little surprise that in January 1848 James was found guilty of Larceny at Warwick Assizes but he was sentenced to 7 years transportation. He left London on 4th September 1849 on the 505 ton barque Asiatic. He survived the journey and arrived in Adelaide on 22 December where, after presumably serving his sentence, he stayed. There he married Mary Craig around 1863 and settled in Port Lincoln across the bay from Adelaide – a 20-year-old pioneer town where there had initially been a ruthless putting down of the Aboriginal population. Of 7 known children born to James and Mary only one is thought to have lived beyond infancy.
John and James Hickerton – the other two sons of Thomas and Mary
John Hickerton, the third child and second son was born in 1799 in Stanton and again spent his life as an agricultural labourer. He moved to Whaddon some 26 miles North towards Gloucester and married Esther Smith in Standish in 1822. The first of their 9 children is not recorded until 1828. The 1841 census shows John as an agricultural labourer when he and Esther had 5 children but by 1851 when they lived in Haresfield, one daughter had married, three sons George, Daniel and David were still there, one daughter was still at home, one was out in service, but three had died. Of George’s four children three sons never married although Esther married Henry Magrett. Neither Daniel nor David ever married.
James, the youngest son, and the 8th of 9 children born to Thomas and Mary, was born in early 1814 in Stanton. At 24 he married Suzannah Tanner in Bradford on Avon and they lived the first 5 years at Turleigh, 5 miles to the West near to Avoncliff where their first 3 of an eventual 7 children were born. Turleigh is a stone village with its own running water with some arable land around. The family are missing from the 1841 Census. Turleigh also had quarries extracting stone for the building of the Kennet & Avon Canal but most were closed 20 years before this – the major employer now was the Mill and Tannery. By 1851 the family was back in Kingston St Michael as Agricultural Labourers with James’s Father but in 1861 and 1871 he shows as a stone quarryman down by the Turnpike Road between the villages. The quarry probably worked by James Hickerton has since been used for the route of the M4 motorway and as you pass through the cutting at J17 you are driving through the quarry which is now a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). The exposed Cornbrash limestone in the area had been quarried for many years. Cornbrash is an old English agricultural name applied in Wiltshire to a thin layer (between 10 and 25ft thick) of limestone thick with shells that breaks up easily into loose rubble. In Wiltshire it forms a good soil for growing corn although it has occasionally been used (not terribly widespread or successfully) for building. This thin band is remarkably persistent all the way across the country from Weymouth to the Humber estuary. James retired from heavy quarrying work sometime before 1881 and he and Suzannah died within months of each other at the end of 1891.
Of James’s children Jacob moved to South Wales in the early 1860s to be a collier, 10 years later to be followed by his brother Thomas. Jacob seems to have died in 1866 possibly through some accident at work. Within two years Thomas and another brother George emigrated to the USA, maybe Michigan or Louisiana. The three sisters Thirza, Mary and Susannah all married locally in nearby Bradford on Avon. The remaining son James became a Coachman round Trowbridge and Melksham married to Dinah Crofts, and their son George became a Life Insurance Superintendent in the Rhondda where his uncles had worked and died. He married Margaret Phillips. Of their sons James acted a minister of religion and Army Chaplain (a Captain) throughout the 2nd World War, and George was a Motorcycle mechanic in Whitchurch outside Cardiff in 1939.
Disturnals/D’Estournelles who remained in France but who are currently unconnected
The Maharajah of St Estephe
The d’Estournel family of wine fame were in Quercy in the Lot Department on 3 January 1762 when Louis Gaspard d’Estournel was born. In 1791 at the age of 29 he inherited the Chateau Pomys and its hill known as Caux outside St Estephe, halfway along the South side of the Garonne estuary between Bordeaux and the Atlantic ocean. He took an interest in the inheritance and augmented his holdings in the area with further purchases of land in the area alongside another major landowner his neighbour at the Lafite chateau lying just to the South at Pouillac.
The Lafite estate had been in the Lafite family for 400 years when it was purchased by Jacques Segur around 1650. Although vines almost certainly existed at this time, over the next 30 years the majority of the vineyard was planted out following the purchase. In the 1700s the Segurs refined wine-making techniques and the vineyard prospered, entering French high society thanks to the influential support of the Marechal de Richelieu and later by regular visits from Thomas Jefferson – who in 1785 was in France having been appointed by President George Washington as the American Minister there. Jefferson was in France for 5 years before returning home in 1790 and becoming Americas third President in 1801. Following the French Revolution the Segur family lost control of the vineyard when the subsequent Reign of Terror led to the execution of the then owner Nicholas de Pichard. The land fell into public ownership and was sold in 1797 to a group of Dutch merchants – there were renowned vintages in 1795, 1798 and 1818. In 1868 the chateau was purchased by the Rothschild family.
It is said that Gerard d’Estournel was standing in the Lafite lands in the Summer of 1811 when he realised that there were big similarities between the Lafite lands and his own lands at Caux (shortened later to Cos) and that the possibilities were there to emulate their success. He immediately planted around 12 hectares of vines and although it seems that he overextended himself he regained control of the land in 1821 and planted a further 57 hectares with the acquisition of a further 80 parcels of land. He travelled much to the far east and particularly India where he traded and bred Arabian stallions, he built a triumphal archway imported from Zanzibar and he gained the nickname of “the Maharajah of St Estephe”. The standard of his wines kept improving but in 1851 further crippling debt forced him to sell the vineyard and he died a year later in 1852. Just too late for him to see the fulfilment of his dream when in 1855 his Cos d’estournel was finally awarded a “second growth” category (an A- almost the best you can get). The d’Estournel name still shows on the Zanzibar Arch and there is a statue of him in the garden.
Paul Henri D’Estournelles – The 1909 Nobel Peace Prize
In 1909 the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to August Beernaert, a Belgian Lawyer and leading Belgian pacifist, and Paul Henri D’Estournelles de Constant, a radical Republican who firmly believed that the road to long-lasting peace lay in a United States of Europe.
Paul Henri Benjamin Balluet D’Estournelles, Baron de Constant de Rebecque to give him his full title was born at Le Fleche in the Sarthe district of the Loire valley on 22 November 1852. His ancestors go back to before the Crusades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_de_Rebecque
Both a diplomat and a politician, he could fence, sail a yacht, and paint landscapes, and he took a close interest in the new inventions of the automobile and the aeroplane. He attended the Lycee Louis Grande in Paris and after he completed his legal studies he received a Diploma from the School of Oriental Languages. He represented France in Montenegro, Turkey, the Netherlands, England and Tunis. Recalled to Paris in 1882 he assumed the Assistant Directorship of the Near Eastern Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was named charge d’affairs in London in 1890 and helped avert a war between England and France over a conflict of interests in Siam. In a speech in Edinburgh in 1906 he said that he had become convinced of the general impotence of those in the Diplomatic Service and resolved to help them abandon their gilded existence stressing the importance of education and the real struggle against ignorance.
In 1903 he founded a cross-party parliamentary group dedicated to the advancement of international arbitration helping to pave the way for the Franco-British Entente Cordiale of 1904. A visit to Berlin set the groundwork for the Franco German association. Whilst aiming for European union he was a member of the French delegation to the second Hague Peace Conference of 1907, a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and President of the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
During the First World War, d’Estournelles supported the French effort, interesting himself particularly in measures against German submarines and turning his home – the Chateau de Clermont-Créans on the Loire – into a hospital for the wounded. In 1918 he denounced the armistice as meaningless as long as German soldiers remained on French soil. At the same time, however, he continued his campaign for international understanding: he joined Leon Bourgoise (Nobel Peace Prizewinner for 1920) in presenting a plan for the League of Nations to Clemenceau in 1918, and in later years he never ceased trying to bring together parliamentarians of various nations, especially those of France and Germany.
Throughout his career d’Estournelles proved a gifted writer and speaker. He published translations from the classical Greek, as well as a book on Grecian times; wrote a play based on the Pygmalion myth; won the French Academy’s Prix Thérouanne in 1891 with a book on French politics in Tunisia; produced speeches, pamphlets, and articles covering topics that ranged from French politics to feminism, from arbitration to aviation. Possessed of an admirable command of English – helped, no doubt, by his marriage to an American, Daisy Sedgwick-Berend – he made a number of lecture tours in the United States and published in 1913 a comprehensive review entitled Les États-Unis d’Amérique [America and Her Problems]. He became, indeed, a leading French authority on the United States.
D’Estournelles served as Senator for Sarthe as an active radical-socialist until his death in Paris in 1924 at the age of seventy-two. Two days after his death his final speech commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Peace Conference was read by his son Paul at The Hague.
Jacques (Jean) D’Estournelles de Constant – his younger brother – competed for France in Sailing in the 1900 Summer Olympics. He came 5th in both the half ton and 1 ton categories.
Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque (his Great Uncle, who much to the dismay of his family generally shortened this to Benjamin Constant). Born in 1767 in Lausanne, Switzerland to descendants of French Huguenot Protestants who had fled from Artois during the earlier persecutions of the 16th century, Constant lived for 63 years through the ups and downs of the French Revolution. He is remembered as a renowned political activist of the time, and a writer on philosophy, political theory and religion. In 1795, back in France, he became the leader of the Liberal opposition to Napoleon and was a great supporter of a two-tier house of Parliament and Constitutional Monarchy based on the British system (for which he was largely ignored in France). He knew both Rousseau (who he disagreed with) and Goethe (who liked him) and looked to Britain rather than Rome for a practical model of modern Mercantile society. He believed in civil liberties and the rule of law and freedom from excessive state interference and he criticised several aspects of the French Revolution. He tried desperately to understand the subsequent “reign of terror” where nobody was safe. He blamed the pervasive mob-mentality for deterring many right-minded people and thus helping to usher in despots such as Robespierre and Napoleon. After the Battle of Waterloo (July 1815) Constant moved to London with his wife until 1817 when he returned to Paris elected to the 2nd level Chamber of Deputies from where he opposed Charles X of France during the Bourbon Restoration of 1815-1830.
Ramrod Hall, Ramrod Hall Farm and the Hadley Family
Ramrod Hall was different from Ramrod Hall Farm. Originally sometime before 1768 an Ironworks had been established near Brades Village, Oldbury on the side of the Birmingham Canal. From the start of the American War of Independence 1775 – 1782 it was noted that the rate and accuracy of the American forces musket fire was far better than the British and the answer lay in the type of Ramrods used. Whereas the British used wood the Americans used iron which enabled them to ram more charges home properly and at a better rate. The order soon went out to produce iron Ramrods and the bulk of the orders ended up in Birmingham. Brades Ironworks got some of the work from William Hunt, a Birmingham ironmaster who made so much money from this work that in 1782 when the war ended he came to Oldbury and started an Edged Tool Ironworks at Brades Village. The firm continued among the many other products, to turn out Iron RamRods for the skill required was little and there was plenty of very cheap local labour.
The area was mainly rural and he decided to build himself a house Rowley Hall, choosing a spot well away from the smoke of the Ironworks at the then very quiet White Heath on a small piece of land leased from the Earl of Dudley. His workers who were all local who knew full well in what trade he had made his money, nicknamed his house Ramrod Hall. Far from being a grand ‘Hall’ it was what Hunt described as a very comfortable Gentleman’s Country Residence and he spent a few idyllic years there. He had not however foreseen the swift march and advance of industry, nor the Earl of Dudley’s relentless search for profit from the mineral wealth of the area to which he had staked a claim. The area soon began to be despoiled by quarrying and mining and the Earl started a Coal Mine almost in the front yard with the intention to extend beneath it over time. Hunt abandoned the area and sold the house back to the Earl of Dudley. The Earl had no use for the house, which by now had fallen into wrack and ruin, and the tenants he put in it failed to do any maintenance. In the late 1840s it was proposed to sink a shaft for a new mine this time in the backyard of the house. As the house stood in the way it was demolished about 1853 and they named the Pit after it. One of the outbuildings was used for many years as the Pit Office until that too was demolished. The pit closed in 1925, as by then it was worked-out and prone to persistent flooding.
Meanwhile Ramrod Hall Farm was across the field off Mincing Lane in Rowley Regis and comprised an old rented Cottage and Nail shop, all that was left of some buildings that were erected in the 1670s by the Baron Edward Lord Dudley. By the 1870s what was left (after much of the land had been sold for building) comprised a cottage in need of urgent repair, a rickety old cowshed and three small fields – today you would call it a smallholding. Rent charged in 1798 had been £65 per year. The last one to hold the lease on the place, allegedly a “dishonest and disreputable old reprobate” called John Hadley, threw himself into the Marlhole of the Cakemore Brick Company after he went bankrupt. The owner, Viscount Edam Earl of Dudley, sold the land to developers around 1900 and the site is now covered by a housing development.
A West Family Metallurgy Gene?
I think I have found four metallurgy degree holders in the West family. Working backwards:
1. Dave West – son of Donald, son of Albert.
2. Leonard West – youngest brother of Albert. He qualified at Birmingham University in 1921, becoming I think the first of our family to go to university and gain a degree. His life of course became West Wire Mills working closely with Ray. He died in 1967 aged 66.
3. Terry West (Albert’s brother Harold’s first son). I don’t know where or when he qualified. His dad and his uncle Ernie famously left the employ of West Bros in 1933, and they bought Alfred Case Ltd in Great Tindall St, Birmingham – also a non-ferrous rolling mill. Terry was born in 1929, so if the world back then worked the same as it does now, he would have gone to university about 1947 and gained a Metallurgy degree around 1950. Alfred Case was sold to the Delta Metal Group around 1960 and Terry went to Saudi Arabia to ply his trade (I am still finding out what he did there). At some stage he came back to the Uk and died only 15 months ago in December 2021.
4. The fourth Metallurgy degree is a bit more distant, and I only found out about him the other day. The West family journey to Birmingham started in 1845 when two West boys, David age 21 and George age 18 (there were also 3 younger sisters) became orphans in Chipping Norton. The two boys (and later one of the girls) upped sticks and moved to Birmingham where they became Brass Casters, probably all working for Henry Wiggin & Company in Ladywood. We directly descend from David West, while his brother George raised his family just off the Hagley Road between Ladywood and Smethwick. To keep the story short George had a son George in 1858, who in turn had a son William George in 1880, and in turn again, he had a son Edward George West in 1909, all families being born and raised in Harborne/Smethwick. (As a complete aside, Edward had a brother Jeffrey – I don’t often see that spelling). His children would be our 4th cousins, sharing our 3x great grandparents.
Anyway it appears that despite his father being a Water Meter Inspector, Edward George West gained a Metallurgy degree probably in the early 30’s, and used this knowledge to earn the award of an OBE maybe sometime in the 50’s or 60’s. The 1939 register shows him as being a Research Metallurgist BSc, Phd. living in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Then in 1962-3 he was made President of Institute of Metallurgists, and in 1974-76 he became President of the Institute of Metallurgical Technicians. He died in 1988 when he was living just outside Aylesbury.
But Came They All to Birmingham 