In January 1817 John Cork was baptised at St Peter’s Collegiate church in Wolverhampton by his parents Samuel Corke and Ann who are our 3x great grandparents. This is the only case in the whole of our family tree back to the 1770s where we have not found any evidence beyond the plain names of our 3x great grandparents. There a number of Corks living in and around Betley near Stoke on Trent at the right sort of times, but there is no evidence to tie them in. In Staffordshire particularly there are Samuel Corks of the correct age living with their families in both Stoke on Trent and in Audlem, Cheshire, but there are none who link to these details. We have not found any evidence of a marriage between a Samuel Corke and an Anne so do not know her maiden name, nor have we found any evidence of other children to the union. We have not identified a baptismal record for Samuel, and Ann may well have died before 1835 when Samuel (a widower) married again in St Peter’s to a widow, Martha Ferrington (nee Walhouse). On John’s first marriage certificate Samuel is described as a Caster. In the 1841 Census Samuel and Martha were living in Cross Street, Willenhall and Samuel is a brassfounder but ten years on finds him in the Union Workhouse in Wolverhampton where he died in 1857 to be buried in Merridale Cemetery. Son John meanwhile in 1838 was a Maker of Steel Toys when he married Elizabeth Heape in St Peter Collegiate in 1838.
The trade in Steel Toys comprise a number of different but small items – buckles, buttons, watch chains and stay-hooks, sugar-tongs and boxes etc that were made in numerous workshops across the region. There were many across Birmingham.
With Elizabeth, John had two children – Jeremiah in 1840 (for whom we have not found any further record) and Lavinia in 1841 who never married and thirty years later is in charge of a Baker’s shop in North Street Wolverhampton. However Elizabeth (nee Heape) died in Wolverhampton in 1847 and by 1855 John is shown in the Birmingham Trade Directories as a Corkscrew Maker at Aston’s Mill in Moor Street in Birmingham. The 1861 Census shows him in Irving Street in Birmingham with a wife Emma (nee Carter), and with Lavinia and now five other children (a sixth was to arrive in 1863) but it seems John did not actually formalise this marriage until 1872, just six years before his death. It is John Cork and Emma (nee Carter) to whom we have DNA connections. After John died, the 1881 Census shows Emma still living in Irving Street in Central Birmingham with her youngest daughter Clara, but also next door to both her son John Valentine Cork – a Steel Toy Maker – and her now married daughter Mary with her husband Henry Reeves, a Gold-Beater. Further down the same street is her other son William Howard Cork, another Steel Toy Maker, whilst the eldest daughter Emma is living slightly further away with her husband William Storey, a Lithographic Draughtsman.
William Howard Cork married Lizzie Barnes in St Bartholomew’s Church, Edgbaston in 1880. Lizzie’s family had moved down from Farewell near Tamworth in the 1840s but by now her father Samuel Barnes was a Coachbuilder in Aston. Her Mother Sarah Bray came from a family who had come to Birmingham in the 1820s from the Clee Hills in Shrosphire in order to follow their trade as Grocers and tallow Chandlers. William meanwhile continued his trade in Steel Toys for twenty five years while he and Lizzie had seven children. Of these Jack became a Coach-Builder, Samuel a Milk-Roundsman and Leonard an Electrical Burnisher. Clara married a Tailor, Florrie a Bedstead Worker, and Ada a Toolmaker. Lily never married and perhaps was not well – she died aged 36 in 1929. But once the children were grown, William Cork changed direction. Perhaps he started to be unable to make a living, or perhaps he could see the way the trade was going, or perhaps it was just the right opportunity that presented itself. Firstly they started moving house, initially to Sparkhill and then to Greet where Lizzie ran a hardware shop from her front room.
Then secondly, in the early 1900s aged 50 or so, William stopped dealing in steel toys and opened a Tripe Shop at 151 Great Lister Street just between the City Centre and Saltley. Tripe refers to the stomach lining of farm animals such as cows, sheep and pigs and was a cheap dish for those who could not afford meat. It was said that if you wanted good tripe, you went to Cork’s. The family lived above the shop until Lizzie died in 1925 and William in 1927. It was their youngest son Len Cork (b.1888) who married Nellie Crutchley from a family of Coachbuilders who came from a long line of Wheelwrights originally in Market Drayton in Shropshire. On marriage the family moved into Havelock Road in Saltley to be closer to Nellie’s family who lived in the same street. But Saltley, along with Washwood Heath, Alum Rock and Witton had long been going downhill as a pleasant place to live.
Having moved the family into Havelock Road in Saltley after their marriage, Len Cork’s health became a problem. Much like his sister Lily he suffered from TB probably contracted from the local air, and an excess of smoking earning his living on a bench in the Metropolitan Carriage and Wagon Works where his father-in-law was a Master Carpenter. Through the War he and Nellie had produced two sons Len (b.1913) and Reg (b.1918) and a daughter Edith Cork (b.1921).
But Nellie too had problems and for almost 20 years following Len’s birth she refused to go outside, and did not do so again until her husband’s funeral. She delegated all the household chores to her husband and then, when they were able, to her children. As the youngest, and being a girl, Edith’s earliest memories were of doing all the shopping and helping her father when in his last years Len supplemented his income with machines for sock knitting and stocking making in the evening when he got home from work.
Yet through this all the three children showed a remarkable intelligence considering their family background. In the mid 1920s both the boys were awarded scholarships into King Edwards School on New Street in Birmingham. Both were gifted mathematicians and Len eventually got a scholarship into Cambridge University. Following on, aged eleven Edith came 8th out of 500 children across Birmingham who took the 11-Plus exam but as the bus fare was cheaper she was sent instead to Saltley Secondary School down the road. Then, on her 14th birthday in January 1935, as soon as it was legally possible, Nellie took Edith out of school and got her a job in the Post Department in Richard Lloyds in Nechells on seven shillings and sixpence a week (between £25 and £30 per week in 2020), of which she had to give her mother seven shillings although she could have another thruppence a day for lunch (about £.85p even today). Edith did not “leave home” but she worked hard to make herself independent of both it and of her mother. By the Summer she had saved sufficient money to buy a Hercules bike for £1, which she used to go cycling with her brothers. Then she joined two organisations that would help her out of the poverty trap she was in – The Cyclists Touring Club (CTC) and the newly formed Youth Hostels Association (YHA) – and with these she could tour the country. In 1937 she met Colin Thomas (also in the CTC) and with a second-hand Joe Cook tandem they toured further. But in 1939 Colin went to War.
Colin died in 1940 in the tragedy that was the sinking of the SS Lancastria, and in December that year, she joined the Women’s Auxillary Air Force (the WAAF) where as a Teleprinter Operator she was posted into what is now known as The Listening Services, intercepting enemy broadcasts which were passed to Bletchley Park for decoding. She was initially based at RAF Chicksands outside Bedford, then later at Gloucester and Shaftsbury and then at Capel-le-Ferne on the coast at Folkestone before being demobbed from Chicksands in January 1946. Back home and in the CTC she met up again with Alan West, also recently demobbed from duty with the RAF, in Iraq and the Middle East. She married him in Solihull in 1947 and between 1950 and 1957 had 4 boys of her own, living first Billesley by Kings Heath, secondly in Solihull on the edges of Birmingham, and then in Barford outside Warwick.
Edith West (nee Cork) outlived her two brothers and died in 1998 thirteen years after her husband, when living in Barford near Warwick, aged 77.
But Came They All to Birmingham 