Wombridge in the parish of Oakengates is also one of those old settlements that was encapsulated into today’s Telford. It is two miles to the north of Dawley and four miles east of Wellington. Watling street passes through the parish and the location of a twelfth-century priory lies within its borders. The parish contains the junction of the now derelict Shrewsbury canal and its double-inclined plane, with the Shropshire canal and the Marquiss of Stafford canal and at that time Wombridge Colliery and Ironworks were also established here.
There are a lot of Cadman families in the area in the mid 1700s. Around 1792 Mary Cadman was born here. Her parents were Mary and John Cadman but we have yet to establish this Mary’s parentage. Parish records suggest that there were some 21 baptisms of children to “John Cadman and Mary” in Wombridge between 1791 and 1811 suggesting there were at least two such couples. In 1783 John Cadman married in Neen Sollars some 30 miles to the south, and in 1799 John Cadman married Mary Evans in nearby Wrockwardine. Neither provide compelling evidence. And there are a lot of Cadman families in Wolverhampton at that time. The families often were coal-miners or stone- miners.
Mary was born in 1792 in Wombridge and in 1817 she married William Ramsell in St Peter’s Collegiate, Wolverhampton. She had two children, Silvanus and Mary, but William may have died aged 31 in 1826, perhaps in one of the pit disasters. Mary married again in 1827, again in St Peter’s Collegiate, this time to Thomas Colley from Loppington in Shropshire, only 20 miles to the northwest of Wombridge.
Loppington is a small village 12 miles North of Shrewsbury, and three miles to the West of Wem, on the edge of the Shropshire Lake District around Ellesmere. It has history and was in the Domesday book as Lopitone. Today the village has over 40 listed structures and buildings of historical interest dating from the 1500s to more modern times including the only remaining Bull-Ring in North Shropshire with evidence that this was still used for bull-baiting in the early nineteenth century. It is possible that the Colleys worked for the Dicken family who are recorded as gentry in the area since the late 1600s. It was they who bought Loppington Hall in 1777. Loppington was also the birthplace of the famous botanist, geologist, antiquary and philologist Edward Lhuyd (Lloyd – 1660-1709) who was a friend of Isaac Newton and who became the second Master of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
Around 1750 William Colley was born in Loppington, Shropshire, one of the youngest of nine children born to Richard Colley and Margaret (nee Woodall) who had married in 1733 at St Michael’s Church in the village. It seems that we have DNA links back to the Woodalls, who, like the Colleys, eventually moved to Wolverhampton but via different pathways.
William was second-youngest of nine born to Richard and Margaret. He was baptised in St Michael’s Loppington 1756. Twenty five years later at the same St Michael’s Church in 1781 William married Mary Payne from the same village. They are both recorded on the register as being Servants. William and Mary also had nine children in Loppington and it is again the youngest child Thomas Colley, baptised in 1809 who catches our interest, because it was he that left Loppington probably in search of regular income. By 1827 Thomas was in Wolverhampton in the Black Country working as a Stone-miner when aged 18 when he married Mary Ramsell, a widow with two children (nee Cadman) who was 15 years his elder. It should be noted that every Census return claims he was born two years earlier in 1807. Mary, as we know had been born in Oakengates near Ironbridge, close to where Thomas had been born.
Thomas Colley probably moved to Wolverhampton around 1825 when he was just 16 or 18, and had become a stone-miner by the time he married Mary Cadman in 1827, whereas Mary had probably arrived ten years earlier. Their two sons Charles and Enoch both also became stone-miners, and his daughter Phillis married another, James Hooper, all living in the Bilston area. Charles married Fanny Lloyd from Sedgley and in and around Bilston they had 9 children. But while the eldest son Richard also became a stone-miner, his younger brothers went in a different direction. Enoch and Charles became Engine Fitters, and James a Colliery Clerk and then a Corn dealer. John became a Pattern Maker (Technical Draughtsman) at Tangyes Ltd, in Cornwall Works in Soho. Meanwhile son Thomas became a Solicitor’s Clerk and the youngest son Joseph became a Colliery Manager.
John Colley’s wife Hannah (nee Hadley) was the daughter of William and Selina Hadley (nee Peace) from a family that had dealt in iron and who had farmed and maybe sold potatoes around Langley and Oldbury for at least three generations. Hannah’s cousins ran the drapers in Oldbury High Steet from the 1882 to the 1930s. John and Hannah had three daughters Beatrice, Dora and Fanny followed by two sons Harold and Albert. Harold Colley was born at 64 Winson Street, Smethwick, Staffordshire on 26th May 1895 off the Dudley Road in the Cape Hill area, not far from the Cape Hill Brewery. He attended Dudley Road Council School until he was about ten when he went to work part time at Henry Pooley’s in The Albion Works in Brook Street, Smethwick, a manufacturer specialising in scales and weighing machines. At 14 he left school and became a silver spinner for J & R Griffin Ltd, a jewellers/silversmiths at 99-105 Hockley Street at the junction with Barr Street. Harold was a member of the Smethwick Baptist Church on Regent Street, he played wicket- keeper for the church’s Mission Cricket Eleven and was also a notable gymnast, practiced in the art of Indian Clubs. He was also an active member of the Smethwick Crescent Wheelers Cycling Club. Aged just 18 and 19 years old Albert and Harold answered the call to War in 1914 and enlisted on 1st September. Albert was placed as Private 2451 with The Warwickshire Fusiliers, while Harold became Private 5615 with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (DCLI). Harold started out with the Army Cyclist Corps attached to the DCLI; in the early months of the war these cyclists were used as advance cavalry armed with Lewis guns and organised in small groups. The role was largely abandoned as the Western Front became embroiled in trench warfare and Colley moved on to become a despatch rider, in which position he was by early 1915. Both fought on The Somme, just a couple of miles between them
Albert was mustard gassed in May 1916 and was invalided out of the War. Harold meanwhile became embroiled in the mud of Flanders fields. By March 1917 Private Harold Colley was still on The Somme when he was wounded while digging out, under heavy fire, two men buried by a mortar bomb. For this he was promoted to Lance-Corporal and received a certificate of Meritorious Conduct following a despatch by Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig on 9th April where his “gallant and distinguished services in the field” were praised.
HJ Colley before the MM and VC
Because of his injuries he was sent back to England for treatment and to spend time with his family. He returned to the Front having been transferred to the 10th Battalion of The Lancashire Fusiliers.
On 4th June 1918 he was awarded the Military Medal for his actions at Beaumont Hamel. At 2:30am the Germans bombarded the front of the 52nd Brigade and then at 2:40am attacked with infantry. The 10th Lancashires (under Lieutenant Colonel R.E. Cotton) and the 7th Yorkshire Regiment bore the brunt of this attack as the Germans made good use of their old trench positions to break into the Fusiliers’ front lines. They managed to overwhelm the left flank but on the right they were met with vigorous Lewis gun fire. The Sergeant and four other men were wounded but Colley took two men with him and bombed the nearest trench succeeding in ejecting the intruders at 2.50am. Many casualties were inflicted on the enemy but the Battalion lost an officer and 12 men killed, 21 men wounded and 2 officers and 13 other ranks missing. For this action Lance Corporal Colley was promoted to the rank of Acting Sergeant and recommended for the Victoria Cross.
On 25th August 1918 during a strong counterattack at Martinpuich a couple of miles north-east of the town of Albert, Sergeant Colley’s company was holding an advanced position with two platoons in advance and two in support. The forward platoons were ordered to hold on at all costs but seeing they were becoming overwhelmed Sergeant Colley went, without orders, to help these two platoons. He rallied the men then formed a defensive flank and held it. Out of the two platoons only three men remained uninjured and the Sergeant himself was dangerously wounded. He died the same day. For his actions in the field this day he was again recommended for the Victoria Cross which was subsequently awarded posthumously and after the War collected from the King by his father at a ceremony in London. Harold Colley VC MM is buried in Mailly Wood Cemetery near Albert in France. Today his medals are held with ten other VCs won by the Lancashires in the Great War in the Fusilier Museum in Bury, Lancashire having been donated there by his family. In 1923 his Father was invited “open” the new Smethwick War Memorial in the High Street and today his name is also recorded on a special stone at the Memorial as part of a campaign by The Fusiliers Association to ensure we never forget.
Tragically and coincidentally, also fighting nearby that month in August 1918 was his Brother-in-Law Walter West. Walter was 20 days older than Harold having been born in Birmingham in May 1895 and despite having the protection of a “protected profession” of brass and metal manufacture, and unlike his 5 brothers, he also joined up in the early days of the War, an action for which his mother never forgave him. Like Harold by August 1918 he also had survived 4 years of fighting on The Somme initially with the 5th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers although by this time he was with the 23rd (First Sportsman’s) Battalion. Walter was to survive another 44 days before he was killed on 8th October in a minor skirmish near Cambrai, some 24 miles closer to the German border and only 33 days before the Armistice. He is buried at Masnieres British Cemetery, Marcoing with only his gravestone to remember him by. I do not know what happened to his War Medals. His Mother never mentioned him again, and neither did his sister, my Grandmother.
After the Great War, Albert married Doris Hunt. They had one son, Anthony in 1923 to whom they gave middle names of Harold John, and although Albert rose to be a Superintendent at the Bakery Department of Midland Counties Dairies, he spent much of his life trying to contact his late brother Harold through mediums and spiritualists and at one stage contacted the well-known believer, Arthur Conan-Doyle. Meanwhile Anthony emigrated to Rhodesia via South Africa in 1953 as a qualified Veterinary Surgeon, and his family stayed in Harare, Zimbabwe through the troubles, many qualifying as Pharmacists. He took Harold’s medals with him, but has since donated them to the Regimental Museum of the Lancashire Fusiliers in Bury where they are on display.
Albert’s sister Fanny married Richard Pritchard, but she died young and without children in 1927. Albert’s next sister Dora married Robert Best in 1915, the youngest son of the Baptist Preacher and Missionary John Samuel Best, and between them they had two children, Ivy and Norman. Finally Albert’s eldest sister Elizabeth Colley (also known as Beat or Beatrice) married Albert West in the Spring Hill Chapel, Birmingham in 1911, the second of ten children born to William West and Emily Horsfall.
Albert was the son of William West who had founded his own brass manufacturing company in the early 1900s and by 1911 he and his five surviving brothers were gradually becoming more and more involved in the brass company, and as they attained sufficient age – excepting Walter who died in the Great War – all became directors. Beat and Albert had three sons of her own, Ray (1913), Don (1916) and Alan (1918) all of whom went on to work for West Brothers Ltd and West Wire Mills Ltd. They were wealthy enough that in the mid 1920s Beat and Albert went on a cruise to Egypt leaving their children with relatives. Between 1945 and 1957 Beat and Albert had eight grandchildren who she took pleasure in, and then another two appeared in the early 1960s already teenagers when details of Ray’s infidelity became known. Beat and Albert initially lived at The Laurels near Yardley on the Coventry Road out of Birmingham, then in 1921 were at Trinity Road in Handsworth. By 1939 they lived at 222 Streetsbrook Road on the edges of Solihull but after the Second World War they bought a lovely cottage out in the wilds of Worcestershire at Wychbold outside Droitwich. This was compulsorily purchased when the M5 was built through the back garden when they moved to Blue Lake Cottage (now demolished) in Dorridge. As they aged they moved to a house on the bridge at Barford near Warwick, the village where Alan and his family lived, but not far from all of their three sons and their families.
Beatie West (nee Colley) died in Barford in 1973 aged 87, outliving her husband by three years.
But Came They All to Birmingham 