Packwood is a medieval settlement and a former civil parish between Hockley Heath and Kingswood that today sits across the boundaries of Warwickshire and the West Midlands, today with Packwood House and the adjacent Church of St Giles with origins in the thirteenth century being part of the Warwick District. Jane Beaufoy, daughter of Samuel Beaufoy and Jane (nee Leeke) was baptised here in 1746, presumably in the Church of St Giles, one of their eight children baptised there although their marriage was in Meriden in 1741. Jane’s mother Jane (nee Leeke) had been born in Meriden, where in 1731 Francis Beaufoy of Meriden took on as an apprentice Butcher Samuel Beaufoy (probably Jane’s father) of Meriden, son of William Beaufoy of Knowle. Life however took Jane to Coventry where in 1781 she married John Keene in Holy Trinity Church.
Thomas Keene and Mary (nee Winterton) married in Holy Trinity Church in 1750 and went on to have six known children. Thomas may have been born in Daventry whereas Mary’s family had lived in Coventry for at least two generations and in 1757 her brother John had taken on an apprentice Butcher in Coventry. We have DNA links back to this family.
Their son John in 1781 married Jane Beaufoy in Holy Trinity Church and they had six children over the next thirteen years. Benjamin became a Weaver, and Esther in 1806 married another – John Horsfall the son of William Horsfall and Ann Pearmain. Three years later, Esther’s uncle – James Keene – married Sarah Horsefall, a daughter of her husband’s uncle John and aunt Hannah (nee Symonds). Jane Keene (nee Beaufoy) died in Coventry in 1815.
The Horsfalls had been in the silk trade in Coventry since the early 1700s, since William Horsfall had arrived in Coventry and married Suzannah Avery in St Michael’s Coventry in 1737. William may well have come from Yorkshire with knowledge of the Woollen Cloth trade because there is no trace of him in the City before that. He took on an Apprentice Silk Weaver, Caleb Copson, in 1767. Of their 8 children only 3 are known to have survived.
The youngest, Lambert, while still only a minor (aged 20) married Elizabeth Mullis at Holy Trinity church in 1775 with the permission of his father, witnessed by his brother John. There have been no children identified to the union but after Elizabeth died in 1790 it was probably this Lambert who took on an apprentice weaver William Smith in 1799. Lambert died in 1824.
The eldest, John (b.1740) married Hannah Symonds in February 1762. The marriage is recorded both under St John’s church Coventry and under the Independent Church in Vicar’s Lane for Dissenting Protestants. Of their 4 daughters and 5 sons and there is little to suggest that they did not initially continue in the silk trade although it seems that increasingly they and their children sought employment in other trades or elsewhere. Three sons Thomas, John and Richard all continued recording the baptisms of their children in the Dissenting Chapel. The only one to reach the 1851 Census in Coventry, Thomas, is therein described as a Ribbon Manufacturer although still living in Bishop St near the centre of the City that heads up towards the by-then 80-year-old Bishop Street Canal Basin.
The middle son, William Horsfall (b.1749) is our direct line, and he led a more complicated life. His first marriage in St John’s Church in 1769 was to Mary Haddon by Licence, witnessed by his brother John and with the permission of his father because he was not yet 21 but Mary died within two years presumably in childbirth and no children survived from this marriage. His second wife was Nancy Cox whom he married two months later in July 1771. The ceremony was this time witnessed by his two brothers John and Lambert. With Nancy he had 6 children including a set of twins and mother died the same year as their fifth child, in 1782. In October 1783 William married his third wife, Ann Pearmain, witnessed by Lambert in Holy Trinity Church.
Ann was likely from a weaving family, likely born in Coventry around 1766 to Samuel Pearmain and Ann (nee Wolfe) who had married in Holy Trinity Church in 1750. The children that survived this marriage remained in the silk trade – Ann married a Ribbon Weaver and moved to Nuneaton, Joseph also was a Ribbon Weaver in 1841 living in Spon St, Lambert was in 1841 a Ribbon Weaver out in Radford but 10 years later he and his family were in Tower Street just to the North of the city centre.
Both William and Ann (nee Pearmain) appear to have died in 1809.
But it was their eldest son John Horsfall who married Esther Keene in 1806. Although this union is also recorded under St Michaels’ they were Particular Baptists under the Cow Lane Chapel, off Jordans Well. The records of eight children are meticulously recorded in the records of that church between 1807 and 1826 and 6 are known to have survived. But tragedy was to follow when the 9th child Joseph was born in 1829 The fact that his mother Esther Horsfall (nee Keene) died that same year aged only 44 suggests possible complications in childbirth.
The birth of Joseph was never recorded at the Cow Lane Chapel. Four years later in 1833 his (maybe heartbroken) father aged only 49 also died (but it could have been from an epidemic of some kind) making orphans of 6 children under the age of 17. The daughters were put into service and eventually married while the 1841 census shows Charles as an apprentice cordwainer, and Stephen as an apprentice weaver. Joseph meanwhile was somehow baptised in St Michael’s Church in June 1837 when aged 8 and the register shows him as living in Much Park Street but he does not appear in the 1841 census. In 1851 he appears living with his sister Mary’s family, Weavers, in the Bull & Anchor yard, where he was a Whitesmith. The following year he married Jane Hulk, daughter of a Hand Loom Ribbon Weaver living in Gosford Street. Ten years later in 1861 they were living in Little South Street, still as a Whitesmith and wife Jane as a Ribbon Weaver and by then they had three children, Thomas, Joseph and Emily Jane.
But sometime in the mid 1860s Joseph, Jane and the three children moved to Birmingham down the City end of Dudley Road, where Joseph, and when they were old enough also his two sons, became Bolt Forgers probably in the employ of Henry Wiggin & Co, an established firm of nickel alloy, brass and German silver at his works on the Mani-Line Canal junction at Ladywood. As a family they had moved closer to work by 1881 living at 12 Northbrook Street but early that year Jane (nee Hulk) died leaving Joseph a widower in the Census on 2 April.
Around the corner to them, in Coplow Street lived the West family of whom David, his brother George and his three surviving sons Joseph, William and Henry were brass casters and filers, possibly work colleagues of Joseph at Henry Wiggin. In 1892 Emily Jane Horsfall married William West in St John’s Church in Ladywood and moved into No12 where they had their first two children. As more children arrived they kept moving house, to Aberdeen Street, to Warstone Lane and to Icknield Port Road until finally they moved back to Northbrook Street (no48, then no47) where the last six of their eventual eleven children were born, and where Joseph Horsfall died in 1897. One child, George, died young.
But William was a man with plans who was looking, listening and learning. By 1891 he had moved into the German Silver trade and by the turn of the Century he had amassed sufficient capital to set up on his own perhaps with some financial input when Emily’s father died in 1897. By 1899 they already had eight surviving children and two more were to arrive within a couple of years, so the risks were great.
Whilst the children probably attended the school round the corner in Barford Road, William took them all out as soon as he was allowed at 14 and put them to work in his factories to learn the trade. The Great War arrived and whilst the family had the protection from enlistment of being in a required profession, their 5th son Walter signed the pledge in 1914. He died in October 1918 fighting for the Royal Fusiliers and is buried in France near Cambrai breaking the heart of his Mother who by then was living with her son Harold in Yardley. When in the mid-1920s the remaining sons, Albert, Ernest and Harold rebelled against their father for the preferential treatment given to the firstborn son William, it was Emily who provided the capital for the remaining sons to set up separately. And perhaps it was Emily, after the War, who ensured that her youngest son Leonard went to Birmingham University to study Metallurgy, a subject in which he qualified as a BSc. in 1921 before he too joined the break-away firm West Bros. (Birmingham) Ltd.
William and Emily appear together in subsequent wedding photographs of their children in the 1920s in the gardens of their magnificent house along the Bristol Road out of Birmingham, just after it crosses Priory Road by what is now the Edgbaston Cricket Ground. By the mid-1920s William was not a well man and he died in 1927. The firm of William West and Sons Ltd was wound up the following year, and the eldest son William died in 1930. Emily will have witnessed the new family firm having its problems when in 1933 Albert sacked his two brothers Ernie and Harold, and went his own way with Leonard who was the Company Metallurgist. The family seemed remarkably fractured from then on, perhaps despite Emily’s best endeavours.
Sometime after her husband’s death Emily Jane moved from their house at 222 Bristol Road (it has since been demolished in a road widening scheme) and moved around the corner into 20 Pebble Mill Road. Emily Jane West (nee Horsfall) died there in November 1941 and is buried next to her husband in Lodge Hill Cemetery, Selly Oak.
But Came They All to Birmingham 