Back in 1770 Bishops Castle was a remarkably remote place in the Shropshire countryside, and probably a long way from any huge social change. The area was predominantly agricultural and lies in the Welsh Marches with the Welsh border less than two miles to the west, Ludlow 30 miles to the southeast and Shrewsbury 20 miles to the northeast. It has history. In Saxon times Edward Shakehead was so pleased at being miraculously cured of the palsy that he gave a section of land to the Bishops of Hereford, who 500 years later in 1087 built a motte & bailey castle to protect the townsfolk from the Welsh. A Market Charter was granted by Henry III in 1249 and it is said that the original 46 Burgage Plots sold at the time can still be made out in the street plan today.
In 1642 the Three Tuns Brewery was established on its present site, and although the buildings have been renewed this makes it the oldest licenced brewery site in Britain. In 1709 the remains of the deteriorating castle were flattened to build The Castle Hotel and a bowling green which was owned first by James Brydges (1673-1744) and then by Robert Clive (Clive of India 1725-1774) whilst they amassed vast personal fortunes elsewhere some say by nefarious means. But this meant little to the general population.
The name Whittall (or one of its many spellings) is reasonably common around the border country in the late 1700s, and in 1755 Francis Whittall married Alice Medlicoat in Mainstone just outside Bishops Castle. They baptised two children, Alice and Francis in the Church at Lydham within the next 5 years. This younger Francis Whittall married Elizabeth Edwards fifteen years his junior in Lydham in 1800 when he was 40 years old, so maybe for him it was a second marriage. We have DNA links that help to prove the lines from hereon. They appear to then have moved into Bishops Castle.
Francis and Elizabeth had four children before 1812. Elizabeth is a widow aged 69 in the 1841 Census in Bishops Castle living with either her unmarried daughter or a daughter-in-law Margaret and, we assume, three grandchildren, Harriett, Caroline and Thomas who all carry the Whittall name. The last two, Caroline and Thomas, were born in Orelton, 25 miles south east just past Ludlow and into Herefordshire. Margaret shows as a Washerwoman. In the same house are two younger children aged 4 and 1 with different surnames, and possibly a lodger who is a Day Labourer.
By March 1851 her mother has probably died and Margaret Whittall is still living as a washerwoman but now in Union Street, Bishops Castle with her daughter Caroline now with her own illegitimate child, another Francis, as well as with Mary Ann’s son Richard. Margaret’s eldest daughter Harriett is now living just outside Walsall in Birchills Green Lane with her Aunt Sarah (Margaret’s sister) and her husband, Richard Knowles, an Iron Stone Miner, and only two doors away from John Anslow, a Coal Miner from Wolverhampton, whom Harriett will marry in September that year. Little is currently known of the Anslow (or Hanslow) family. John Anslow appears in the census returns between 1841 and 1891 variously described as having been born around 1825 in each of Wolverhampton, Bushbury or Blakenhall Heath, but presumably it was somewhere in the area between Wolverhampton and Walsall. Neither of his parents have been identified.
At the age of 16 in the 1841 census he is found as presumably a lodger or apprentice in the home of Thomas Westwwod in Blakenhall, a mile south of Wolverhampton, living and working maybe in in what looks like a Leather manufactory or a Bridle-Belt making establishment, surrounded by many others doing the same work and others working down a local pit mining for coal. . Ten years on, in the 1851 census he is in Birchills/Ryecroft in Green Lane near Walsall Locks on the canal on the edge of Walsall, again a lodger to a Bridle-bit Maker, but now he too is a Coal Miner. It is probably from there that he married Harriett Whittle
John Anslow and Harriett Whittall were married in St Michael’s Church in Rushall where the record states that her father was William Whittall but such a person has never yet been identified.
By 1861 John Anslow had become a Stone-Miner, a trade he stayed in for around twenty years until aged over fifty he was either injured or it became too much for him. By then the couple have their two children, John and Mary-Ann, who were then aged eight and six respectively. John became a Saddletree maker and Mary-Ann a Leather-stitcher. Harriett died in 1893, to be outlived by John by another ten years.
In 1875 Mary-Ann married Edwin Smith although the marriage register refers to her and her father as ‘Hanslow’. Two of their first six children are known to have died young, but 1894 was a tragic year for the family. First in January Edwin died, falling off scaffolding in Shrewsbury, and three months later their seventh child May died, presumably in childbirth. Then in November that year Mary-Ann Smith (nee Anslow) herself also died leaving four children under the age of eighteen as orphans – two girls and two boys. .
But Came They All to Birmingham 