The Cheshire Plain is a flat expanse of lowland formed as the last ice-sheets melted away some 15000 years ago leaving a deep sedimentary basin with a thick cover of glacial till and substantial tracts of sand, salt and gravel. Where these are not mined or excavated the land is largely used for dairy farming creating a general appearance of enclosed hedgerow-surrounded fields. The plain provides a gap between the Welsh Hills and the Pennines all the way in to Wolverhampton that allows weather systems from the Irish Sea to penetrate much further inland than they might otherwise. Towards the southern end of this plain sits the town of Drayton centrally situated being some 30 miles from Llangollen, Much Wenlock, Wolverhampton and Leek. Drayton is on the eastern edge of Shropshire, only a mile from the western edge of Staffordshire where Shifford’s Bridge crosses the river Tern. The road carries on towards Loggerheads and Newcastle, but at the top of the hill Clod Hall sits on the junction of the road to Almington, Drayton Hales and Blore and the next left would take you to Mucklestone. Drayton for 800 years was sometimes Drayton-in-Hales, as were the nearby Betton (Betton-in-Hales) and Norton (Norton-in Hales). ‘Hales’ is a Saxon district name meaning ‘a broad shallow depression’ and referred to a much larger area). Today the town is known as Market Drayton.
Drayton owes its creation as a Saxon settlement to the small escarpment on which the Saxon church of St Mary was built in about 950AD when two tiny settlement called ‘Draitune’ are recorded as being established near the church which, in the medieval period, were to be differentiated as Drayton Magna and Drayton Parva (Great Drayton and Little Drayton). The Parish of St Mary however was extensive and included Sutton, Tyrley, Almington, Betton and Longslow. The ancient parish was almost equally divided between Shropshire and Staffordshire, suggesting that it was created prior to the establishment of the shire counties, which were themselves a 10th century Saxon creation. The extremities of the Parish were at Sweet Apple Tree in the south, Loggerheads in the east, Ridgewardine in the north and Lostford Brook in the west. Thirteen miles of the parish boundary were defined by water courses. When English Civil Registration began in the early 1800s, the neighbouring ancient parish of Mucklestone (or Muxton) was also included under Drayton although St Mary’s church in that village appears to have existed also at the time of Domesday. Mucklestone Parish includes Aston, Oakley, Knighton and Winnington in Staffordshire, and Bearstone, Dorrigton, Gravehunger and Woore in Shropshire.
The Domesday Book of 1086 lists all seven former Saxon settlements of Draitune and gives sufficient information to deduce that the total population of the parish was then about 250 with 5 households in Draitune itself. Churchways (footpaths from outlying settlements to the parish church) can still to be found on modem maps. A notable former Churchway is now called Longslow Road. In Saxon times there were no shops and little currency. Trading of essentials usually took place by barter and often at the only place where people regularly met was the churchyard on Sundays and Holy-days. In 1201 the Pope issued an edict banning the practice of trading in churchyards, which must have been a practice widespread in Western Europe. This led to the formalisation of markets by royal charter.
In 1112 the manor of Great Drayton was acquired by the Abbey of Combermere (situated nine miles to the north in Cheshire). The Abbey set about developing the town, obtaining in 1245 a charter for a Wednesday market and an autumn fair from Henry III. The basic street plan, with its narrow but deep plots going back from the principal roads was probably established around these times as Burgages were defined and sold. The Black Death visited regularly in the mid 1300s halving the population. In 1459 the War of the Roses flared again when Lord Audley for the Lancastrians (for Henry VI) marched his 8-14,000 men from their base at Drayton to meet a smaller force of 5,000 led by Lord Salisbury (for the Duke of York) marching down from York. They met in a bloody battle at Bloor Heath two mile east of the town where superior tactics won the day for the Yorkists despite fewer men. It is said that the Kings wife Margaret of Anjou watched the defeat from the church tower at Mucklestone and enabled her escape on horseback by persuading the village blacksmith to reverse the shoes on her horse to disguise her getaway. The Yorkist victory was short-lived as three weeks later the Duke of York deserted his army at Ludford Bridge outside Ludlow and fled to Ireland leaving his army to surrender to the King.
Following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s the manor of Great Drayton was acquired by Sir Rowland Hill, a wealthy London mercer. In 1562 it passed by marriage to the Corbet family. The town managed to avoid major problems during the Civil War in the 1640s, showing no great enthusiasm for either side. Most of the centre of the town was destroyed by fire in 1651 although the church was unaffected. Over the next 100 years there were various deathly visitations by the plague, smallpox and influenza. The major roads in the Drayton area were improved following turnpiking in the 1760s.
In the 18th century, Drayton was essentially a centre for the farming community and the weekly market had grown to be one of the best in the county covering horned cattle, horses, sheep, pigs and hemp and woollen cloth. The open fields were not enclosed until near the end of that century, and it was not until the enclosure of the Common in 1851 that Little Drayton began to develop. Farming-related industries in the town included milling, tanning and horse-hair weaving. In the second half of the 19th century, the importance of the market began to decline as trade moved onto the new canal, and iron-founding became important with the establishment of Gower’s and Rodenhurst’s although most of their products were for agricultural use.
The town’s infrastructure developed with its workhouse in 1730 (expanded 1839 and 1854), a National School in 1835, its first sewers in 1848 (although full sewage disposal was not enabled for another 60 years), and there were gasworks in 1850, water supply by 1892 and electricity works by 1902. The Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal and associated wharf was late arriving in the canal-age and did not open until 1835, only two years before the station at Baldwin’s Gate (nine miles away) was opened on the railway from Liverpool to Birmingham. Drayton acquired its own railway station in 1863 on the line to Nantwich. About this time the town became known as Market Drayton.
It was into this world that Charles Crutchley was baptised in Drayton in October 1799. Charles became a Wheelwright.
Wheelwrighting involves working with wood, and in a farming community that means making all sorts of wooden transport, and of course, making their wheels. The origins of the wheel are lost in prehistoric times. Stone-age men would have quickly realised that a round stone or log of wood moved more easily when it had to be pulled or pushed. The first wheels were simply solid discs carved from single pieces of wood but these were bulky, heavy and needed large numbers of large trees. And they broke easily along the grain of the wood.
Gradually wheels became lighter as gaps appeared in their construction. Solid wheels from 3 shaped planks appeared around 5000BCE in Mesopotamia and quickly spread to Europe. Fully spoked wheels are known from 2000BCE in Asia Minor. The compromise was always between losing weight without losing structural strength. Early chariots had rims or felloes made from one or two pieces of wood bent into a full circle connected to the nave by wooden spokes. As the bronze age proceeded into the iron age tyres and nave-bonds came to be used with sectional felloes, much like the Victorians almost 2000 years later. In the interim wheel construction used short strakes of iron (or silver if you were the king) nailed (or shod) across the joints of the felloes and varied only with the type of vehicle being made. A cart generally had two wheels, whereas a Wagon had four with the front two wheels being smaller than the rear for the convenience of turning. Higher quality carts, and then stage coaches required higher quality wheels particularly given the state of repair of roads prior to the introduction of turnpikes in the 18th century. There were also traditional patterns for specialist vehicles, for the felloes, for cart-shafts and wagon-shafts, for side and tail-board rails, and more for the bottom timbers of a dung-carts or those taking heavy loads. Often the wheelwright was responsible for making the whole cart or wagon, complete with shafts and axle beds. Alternatively they worked closely with the blacksmith.
But basically, until the latter part of the 19th century the processes undertaken by a wheelwright for the wheel remained the same as they for thousands of years. A wheel begins with the nave, a lumpish cylinder some 11 or 12 inches in diameter and 12 or 13 inches from end to end usually made from a well-seasoned piece of elm. They start being rough-hewn with an axe and then turned (smoothed and shaped) on a lathe. The places where the spokes are to be morticed into the nave are marked and the holes are bored. Spokes of oak are then shaped by axe, saw and spoke-shave to maximise strength and minimise weight. They are driven in with a sledgehammer. The surrounding felloes of ash, elm, oak or beech are shaped to a pattern and bored to take the tongues of the spokes, normally two to each felloe with dowel at each end to fix the felloes together, hammered into position. For shoeing the wheel is then set up over a pit of water. The wheelwright takes the strip of iron, already curved by heat and pierced with nail-holes and lays it red-hot on the top of the wheel-rim. As the hot iron burns into the wood, he punches in the big rose-headed nails and then turns the wheel round into the pit of water. While the newly made strake was cooling the operation was repeated on the opposite side of the wheel until 6 strakes completed the job of tyring. Finally the wheel had to be ‘boxed’. The centre of the nave had to be hollowed out and a cast-iron box inserted, fixed in place by wedges. Into this box the axle-arm was fitted, attaching it to the vehicle.
In the 1500s wheels were improved by ‘dishing’. Wheels became shaped like saucers with the hollow outwards. The spokes were driven into the nave at an angle so that the lowest spoke stood perpendicular to the road while the upper part of the of the wheel sloped away from the body of the cart or carriage. This enabled the body of the vehicle to be wider at the top than at the floor and it helped the wheel withstand the lateral thrust of the axle caused by the pulling action of the horse. The body, once loaded, then swings in time with the horse’s stride, sliding from one side to the other on well-greased arms, making contact with the nave of one wheel ramming its joints tight before bouncing the weight back to the other wheel, where the process is repeated. Hoop-tyres were introduced in the last quarter of the 18th century – solid bars of iron bent into a full circle and welded, before being heated and nailed into position on the wheel-rim. As the tyre cooled and shrank the skill was to ensure that this pulled the spokes into exactly the right amount of dish. Nave-bonds were then heated and driven into place on each side of the spokes, thus holding it firm.
Occasionally in towns and cities the wheelwright trade split into the wheel-maker, the tyre-smith and the carriage-maker but in almost every centre of population in the countryside of any size there could be a Lord, a carpenter, a bailiff, a gardener, an innkeeper, a basketmaker, a cordwinder, a thatcher, a mason, a gamekeeper, a millman, a poulterer, a tilemaker, a bricklayer, a shoemaker, a curate, a schoolmaster, a baker, a blacksmith and always a wheelwright. It was not a cheap trade to enter, with significant investments needed in the premises and in the tools of the trade, but good money could be made from it without it ever making anyone rich. Often it passed down from Father to son but where a man had a large family the children could not all become wheelwrights in the same community and continuing in the trade often meant moving away. And Charles married Ann Jervis od Drayton and had 9 sons and a daughter.
In 1670 the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights became the 68th Livery Company (Guild) of the City of London although the rules and regulations and by-laws governing the operation of the trade did not extend far outside the London city walls. Once all the wheelwrights within the city walls had been driven into the countryside by high rents this guild had little relevance to practicing tradesmen. But things change. From 2013 the Guild have maintained a flourishing government-backed apprenticeship scheme and today they represent one of the few sources of information about the trade.
Other than variances caused by the agricultural seasons and periods of growth and poverty, it was during the second half of the 19th century that the existence of the village wheelwright fell into decline. The increasing use of pre-manufactured iron hubs and the development of other factory-made parts using wood but also longer-wearing substitutes made from rubber and iron reduced the livelihood of the village or town wheelwright. The arrival of the motor car from 1900 with companies such as Henry Ford coupled with factory-based mass production facilities made the trade obsolete although it continues in specialist areas satisfying demand for traditional skills in making horse drawn vehicles for farm use, competitions and presentations of historical events such as re-enactments and living history.
But Came They All to Birmingham 