Esther Green was born in 1757, the daughter of Joseph Green who would have been born maybe in the 1720s. She was baptised in Holy Trinity Church in Sutton Coldfield 20 months later in 1759. Two other births are registered to Joseph in the same church, Ann in 1750 and Joseph in 1752. There is also a Richard Green having children baptised there in that period. In neither case is their mother mentioned in the registers. In 1777 Esther, aged 19, is recorded in the registers of St Martin’s church in central Birmingham to William Walford. Esther signed with an ‘x’ but William’s signature is very neatly written. The ceremony was witnessed by Sarah Green. It seems possible that William’s parents were William Walford and possibly Hannah (nee Green) which may be a coincidence, or it may not. It is possible that William’s birth around 1756 may have been recorded at the Unitarian Church. There are a number of William Walfords in Birmingham at that time, one was a gentleman, another a brush-maker and another an engraver and chaser. Other researchers have recorded some 12 children to this marriage between 1778 and 1808 but they show 4 dying in infancy and two others before they were 25. We have the youngest three, Elizabeth (b1804 – to whom we have DNA links), William (b1906) and Richard (b1808). Elizabeth’s two younger brothers became coal and stone miners in Bilston. In 1827 Elizabeth married William Clews in St Phillips, and both of them wrote their name in the register.
Clews or Clewes is not a name that was terribly widespread across the Birmingham plateau in the 1700s and 1800s Yet while we have a number of DNA links back to this William Clews who later census records show as being born in Birmingham in or around 1804. As yet there are no baptismal records to confirm this, and different researchers have come up with at least four or five potential sets of Clews parents of the right age in the locality.
Our favourites for the direct line are Richard Clews (b1773) and christened at St Martins( son of Thomas Clews and Joanna (nee Taylor)and Ann (nee Thomas) who (i) had their marriage also recorded at St Martins in 1772, and (ii) at least lived in the immediate streets and whose children were all in the Brass Founding and Brass Candlestick trade. However the only wedding record we have found so far is between a Richard Clews and an Ann Thomas a mile or two away in St Peter/Paul in Aston. Pigot’s Directory of 1835 shows Richard Clews as being a Candlestick Maker at 15 Moland Street. Further, there is a Richard Clews of Moland St shown in the registers of St Paul’s as dying aged 61 in 1836, with Ann a year later. If these are indeed the parents of William (born in 1804) then there are potential links that take our Clews ancestors back at least a further two generations in the Birmingham area.
We are content however that William was born around 1804 probably in Moland Street close to St Paul’s in Hockley, and he may have had an elder brother Richard. Both Richard and William are found in the Censuses from 1841 where they are both recorded as married and living as Brassfounders with their families at 86 and 79 Moland Street respectively. On the certificate for Richard’s second marriage at St Phillip’s Church to Elizabeth Pritchard in 1842, both he and his father are described as Candlestick Makers. By 1861 William had moved round the corner to Gem Street, where he is a Brassfounder employing eight men and eight boys. The courtyard houses occupied by the two Clews families had been built 100 years previously and were generally poorly maintained. With only a ground-floor kitchen and cellar, and a single room on each of first and second floors, the houses would scarcely have provided sufficient space for the two growing families where by 1851 both Richard and William had eight children.
In “The Five – The untold stories of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper” by Hallie Rubenhold, the conditions that existed in Moland Street at that time are described:
“Across the way Eldridge & Merrett’s pin works, an imposing black mill with thrusting smoke stacks, pounded out tiny steel pins and needles. At Brookes & Street a few doors down brass wire was woven into sieves and spark-guards while at Thomas Felton’s Manufactory carriage lamps and chandeliers (and candle-sticks?) were melted and smelted into shape. Wedged between these larger concerns along Bagot Street were assorted workshops occupied mostly by toy-makers and gun-makers, the trade that lent its name to the quarter. They were surrounded by the incessant thud and chug of heavy machinery. There would scarcely have been a quiet hour in the day unbroken by the sound of a cranking engine or when a cloud of smoke did not hang over them. The presence of the manufactories with their metals and mercury had rendered the neighbourhoods water unfit to drink, and residents relied on deliveries from a horse-drawn cart”.
To repeat then, it was in 1827 that Elizabeth Walford (b1804) married William Clews, also recorded in St Phillips church in Birmingham. Over the next 18 years William and Elizabeth had 4 sons and 4 daughters. All the boys became Brassfounders and Candlestick Makers. The eldest daughter married into the Gun quarter but the other three daughters all married farmers, Emma married Richard Court, a farmer in Bickenhill outside Solihull, while Eliza and Rosa both married brothers in the Wells family, famers of what is now a very large housing estate in Kingstanding. Eliza was to die young in a road accident when her cart overturned at Aldridge in 1888, but Rosa lived a longer life. She married Robert Francis Wells at Oscott College and over the next eight years had three sons and two daughters. The eldest, William (b.1876) worked as a stockbroker but the other two sons, Robert and Oliver followed their father into farming, while the two daughters, married brothers William and Arthur Foden, also farmers of land across Kingstanding and Hamstead.
Rosa Wells (nee Clews) remained on Kings Vale Farm until her death in 1920, two years after the death of her husband.
But Came They All to Birmingham 