REPORT: MEETING APRIL 2008
St MARY’S CHURCHYARD, HANDSWORTH
Paulette Burkill, of the Handsworth Historical Society was the guest speaker at the April Meeting of the North Arden Local History Society on 10th April where she presented a very interesting and well illustrated talk on the historic Saint Mary’s Parish Church of Handsworth its Churchyard and many of the graves contained therein.
BACKGROUND:
Paulette explained that the work and information that she would be telling us about originated in the 1980’s as an exercise done by members of the Handsworth H.S. at the request of the Birmingham and Midlands Society for Genealogy and Heraldry. This was part of a plan originated by the Federation of Family History Societies to record the monumental inscriptions on gravestones and memorial plaques in churchyards and inside churches throughout the country. Even at that time the lettering on many of the stones was becoming difficult, if not impossible to read, largely the result of the action of atmospheric pollution (acid-rain) on the softer stone used for many of these (often local sandstone). 25 years later this situation is even worse as a walk round your local churchyard will quickly show; it is just as well that the records this survey provided are now available otherwise the information would have been lost for all time. (Records for the inscriptions at St Mary and St Margaret’s Church, Castle Bromwich were transcribed at the same time by the local Women’s Institute: the North Arden LHS does have a copy).
The earliest parts of the Church itself date from the 12th Century and there are other (‘Decorated Style’) features from the time of Edward III (1327-1377); as with most Churches there was also well meaning (if misguided) restoration work done by the Victorians. It was the only ‘Parish’ Church in an extensive area that covered a region extending from Sutton Park to the A34 at Witton (‘Aston Manor’) and then included Great Barr and Perry Barr and abutted West Bromwich in the east. It did not become a part of Birmingham until 1911. It was mainly comprised of heath-land, ground very much like the present day (remains of) Hodgehill Common that was little used for agriculture; in 1600 it supported a widespread population of about 200 persons that by 1800 had expanded to 2000. By the time it was taken over by Birmingham there was a recorded population of 85,000 thanks to the expansion of trade and manufacturing industries in the 19th Century.
Paulette used a number of slides that were copies of paintings that the Handsworth H.S. has on loan from relatives of the artist, Beatrice Bullock, these showed that the Handsworth of the past bore little resemblance to that of today. Then it was much more rural with several, named, large 19th Century houses that had been built by the wealthy (industrialist) families, some of these houses have survived to the present but are no longer the homes of a single family with servants to look after their needs!
THE CHURCHYARD:
To begin our tour of the Churchyard we first saw a picture of a funeral in progress where the mourners, all in strictly formal (black) suits and dresses were on foot in a procession and, almost unknown in 21st Century, everyone was carrying their own floral tributes: this was thought to have been taken at sometime in the 1920’s but was very much a carry-over from Victorian days when people tended to be obsessed with death. The Churchyard merges into the area taken up by Handsworth Park and the boundary demarcation has become very indistinct over time. Fortunately work is now well under way to clean up and renew this boundary from funds derived from a Lottery Grant that is aimed at renovating the park and an organisation – ‘The Friends of St. Mary’s Churchyard’ has been formed with the soul objective of making it a special place for the respect that should be accorded to the souls of the dead many of whom still have relations who visit their graves. It is a closed graveyard that does not now accept any new interments and what appears to be a vacant area in the southern corner actually contains numerous unmarked graves of paupers who are only remembered in the Church Register, - no coffins or grave markers.
The earliest marked graves, many of which are barely decipherable date from the late 1700’s with simple inscriptions such as “In memory of Elizabeth, daughter of Joseph Smallwood, died 3rd September 1773…..” The Smallwood family has survived to the present day and are in regular contact with the Church. As many Churchyards around the country exhibit there are far more funereal and elaborate monuments from the Victorian and Edwardian eras surviving with quite legible inscriptions, but as is often the way in this day and age many of these examples of the monumental masons art have been subjected to vandalism (headless angels, collapsed crosses and such like). Many incorporate carvings of symbolic items such as Ivy that signifies fidelity, Edelweiss, Lily of the Valley, upwards pointing index fingers (towards heaven); it is said that one grave incorporates a Swastika which, before its evil association with Nazi (National Socialist) Party, was said, in mythological terms to represent the heart of Buddha and in Chinese, abundance. Handsworth is no exception and contains some very interesting monuments to prominent (in their lifetimes) citizens and very often the inscriptions contain details of their addresses such as a house number/name and the road name; an example was given as ‘Rosehill House’ at the junction of Villa Road and Soho Road and is now occupied by King Edwards Grammar School for Girls.
CAUSES OF DEATH: PLACES OF BIRTH AND DEATH:
Some inscriptions are a source of the cause of death of the occupant of the grave and give us an insight into social conditions prevailing at the time: Amy Green died of Bronchitis in 1869, William Jones of ‘Black Water Fever’ in South Africa in 1910, Thomas Spittle aged 20 died from injuries received whilst playing football in 1889, his descendants still live in Handsworth in the 21st Century; Charles Duncan was accidentally drowned in Java; Charles and Florria Tongue were killed in a railway accident in Philadelphia in 1890. Many other examples were given such as ‘fell off a ladder’, ‘thrown by a horse’ it looks as if life in the Victorian years were as equally hazardous as they are today. The number of former Handsworth residents who died overseas and are commemorated in the churchyard is also rather surprising but goes to show that travel or emigration overseas was more widely practised that we may have thought. On the other hand there are graves for people from abroad who had the misfortune to end their days in Handsworth, such as Jacques Sulzberger from Switzerland, Richard Taylor of Illinois, Friedrich Willehelm Otto Dieter Bauer in 1885, Fredrick Beck of Adelaide and Sergius Spellengrable in the service of the States of Holland in the East Indies who died in 1770 who is described in the Registers as a Sales Rep for Matthew Boulton.
These records only go to show that movement around the United Kingdom, the Continent and Empire where more common place than one may imagine; the Introduction of the Turnpikes facilitated travel by coach and wagon and the coming of the railways from the 1840’s onwards increased this ability for most classes, Paulette told us that one of the objectors to this freedom of movement was the Duke of Wellington who thought it a retrograde step and “would allow the working classes to move about!”
INFANT MORTALITY AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS:
Large families were common place in the Victorian era (a safeguard against the workhouse and poverty) and are a factor apparent from studies of the gravestone inscriptions in St Mary’s Churchyard. This can be put down to two factors, the high rate of infant mortality and almost complete lack of birth control/contraception. [The writer’s own great grandfather (born 1846) was one of 10 children some of whom, from census returns, appear to have died in infancy]. Mrs Burkill went on to give us some statistics on these factors: in 1800 two out of every five babies born alive died before they reached the age of 5; by 1840 the average age at death was only 29! It was not unusual for a brother and sister to be born a generation (30 years) apart and even only 50 years ago a fifth of all births recorded in the UK were to women over the age of 35: in the later 19th Century it was not unusual for grandmothers to give birth. Of course we must not ignore the prevalence of ‘killer diseases’ that were around in those days such as cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid fever many attributable to the quality of drinking water and unsanitary living conditions amongst the poorer working classes – many of these are substantiated by gravestone inscriptions and entries in the Parish Burial Registers. Paulette amplified these facts by quoting actual entries from the Registers that gave all the gory details – many diseases that are easily curable one hundred or so years later. Another factor was death in childbirth and examples are recorded and were read out to us where both mother and child passed away.
NAMES AND SENTIMENTS:
It was obvious from numerous inscriptions that the Victorians and Edwardians were not the died in the wool unemotional and strictly formal attitude personalities that they are so often depicted as, and indeed as they appear to be in the posed portrait photographs of the period. We were given examples of terms of endearment from inscriptions such as, ‘Poppy’, ‘Dear Little Jack’, ‘Darling Little Freddie’ ‘Toddy’ and ‘Fairy’. Dedications tended to be a little more formal such as a simple ‘Aurevoir’; World War One casualties were ‘Duty Called, He Answered’, ‘Suffered Patiently, Submitted Willingly, Died Peacefully’, ‘They’re Calling Me’. One actually quoted four verses of an Alfred Tennyson poem that ends ‘I hope to see my pilot face to face when I have crossed the bar’ and another had a simple ‘Living, Loved, Lost, Lamented’
There are also many Christian names recorded on the monuments that you never hear mentioned in this day and age, many of Biblical origin. Amongst the ladies are Kesia, Adeliza, Bonner, Theodosia, Sabina, Decimay, and Evelina; the list of men’s names were Philemon, Alonzo, Lovelace, Jabez, Caleb, Jesper, Uriah and Zarius. Somehow you cannot help feeling sorry for the children who were landed with these names; even the writers own grandmother (born 1870) was named Elvira from the same period as the examples above – and she was named after a relative.
INSIDE THE CHURCH:
St Mary’s has sometimes been called “the Westminster Abbey of the Industrial Revolution”. This is partly because inside the church itself are the graves and memorials to the more prominent former citizens who have their final resting place herein. The foremost of these is Matthew Boulton the entrepreneur of the Industrial Revolution, founder member of the Lunar Society who had his Manufactory at nearby Soho and whose house is now a museum administered by the Council. He is buried here and together with his former partners James Watt (steam engines) and William Murdoch (Gas lighting) all three have memorials set in the walls and there is also a side chapel dedicated to James Watt that was originally outside the main body of the church but was incorporated into the church during a renovation project. The notorious are also remembered as the forger William Booth of Booths Farm (q.v. Booths Farm Road) in nearby Great Barr, the only criminal who had the distinction of being tried twice, hung twice, and being buried three times was interred in the churchyard but has a plaque inside the church. The Wyrley Family of nearby Hampstead Hall (demolished in the 1930’s) – Lords of the Manor of Handsworth from the 13th to 17th Centuries are remembered by two recumbent effigies in the chancel, and a plaque dated to 1561. Also recognised for past services to the community are Joseph Grice, died 1752 who lived at Handsworth Hall; the Gough Family of Perry Hall between Perry Barr and Great Barr; Sarah and James Russell of Endwood Court; Thomas and Francis Hollingshunt of Soho Foundry. Many of these families still have descendants in the area, even if their family homes are no more or have been converted to more mundane uses.
Other burials here include George Burrell Ramsey said to be the founder of Aston Villa Football Club (died 1935); William McGregor a Director of the Villa who is credited with founding the Football League in March 1888. George Ramsey was also responsible for arranging the clubs transfer to the Villa Park we know today from its original ground in Wellington Road (the Outer Circle Bus route from Perry Barr). In 1908 there was a tragic mining disaster at Hampstead Colliery the centenary of which was recently recognised and will be further commemorated later this year; Alfred Curtis together with three members of the Summerfield family lost their lives in this event and are buried at St Mary’s. The ashes of the Romany King, Esau Smith together with his wife Queen Henty were interred in the churchyard here in the early years of the 20th Century shortly before their community was evicted from the ‘Black Patch’ in Smethwick.
It was an absorbing and fascinating evening filled with far more facts, names and examples than we could possibly include in our report. There is a whole wealth of information to be gleaned from the report the Handsworth H.S. produced from their studies of the inscriptions, especially for those of you interested in the social aspects of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Thank you Paulette we look forward to hearing more from at some time in the future.
We are always pleased to welcome guests and visitors at our meetings, the next of which will be on 12th June when the topic will be ‘Personalities of Birmingham’ presented by Mr Patrick Baird from Birmingham Central Library. The following meeting will be 10th July on English Country Churches by Mrs Barbara Waller. Meetings are held in the Spencer Lounge Bar at Arden Hall, Water Orton Road at 7.45pm.
JERRY DUTTON.
NORTH ARDEN LOCAL HISTORY SOCIETY
St MARY’S CHURCHYARD, HANDSWORTH
Paulette Burkill, of the Handsworth Historical Society was the guest speaker at the April Meeting of the North Arden Local History Society on 10th April where she presented a very interesting and well illustrated talk on the historic Saint Mary’s Parish Church of Handsworth its Churchyard and many of the graves contained therein.
BACKGROUND:
Paulette explained that the work and information that she would be telling us about originated in the 1980’s as an exercise done by members of the Handsworth H.S. at the request of the Birmingham and Midlands Society for Genealogy and Heraldry. This was part of a plan originated by the Federation of Family History Societies to record the monumental inscriptions on gravestones and memorial plaques in churchyards and inside churches throughout the country. Even at that time the lettering on many of the stones was becoming difficult, if not impossible to read, largely the result of the action of atmospheric pollution (acid-rain) on the softer stone used for many of these (often local sandstone). 25 years later this situation is even worse as a walk round your local churchyard will quickly show; it is just as well that the records this survey provided are now available otherwise the information would have been lost for all time. (Records for the inscriptions at St Mary and St Margaret’s Church, Castle Bromwich were transcribed at the same time by the local Women’s Institute: the North Arden LHS does have a copy).
The earliest parts of the Church itself date from the 12th Century and there are other (‘Decorated Style’) features from the time of Edward III (1327-1377); as with most Churches there was also well meaning (if misguided) restoration work done by the Victorians. It was the only ‘Parish’ Church in an extensive area that covered a region extending from Sutton Park to the A34 at Witton (‘Aston Manor’) and then included Great Barr and Perry Barr and abutted West Bromwich in the east. It did not become a part of Birmingham until 1911. It was mainly comprised of heath-land, ground very much like the present day (remains of) Hodgehill Common that was little used for agriculture; in 1600 it supported a widespread population of about 200 persons that by 1800 had expanded to 2000. By the time it was taken over by Birmingham there was a recorded population of 85,000 thanks to the expansion of trade and manufacturing industries in the 19th Century.
Paulette used a number of slides that were copies of paintings that the Handsworth H.S. has on loan from relatives of the artist, Beatrice Bullock, these showed that the Handsworth of the past bore little resemblance to that of today. Then it was much more rural with several, named, large 19th Century houses that had been built by the wealthy (industrialist) families, some of these houses have survived to the present but are no longer the homes of a single family with servants to look after their needs!
THE CHURCHYARD:
To begin our tour of the Churchyard we first saw a picture of a funeral in progress where the mourners, all in strictly formal (black) suits and dresses were on foot in a procession and, almost unknown in 21st Century, everyone was carrying their own floral tributes: this was thought to have been taken at sometime in the 1920’s but was very much a carry-over from Victorian days when people tended to be obsessed with death. The Churchyard merges into the area taken up by Handsworth Park and the boundary demarcation has become very indistinct over time. Fortunately work is now well under way to clean up and renew this boundary from funds derived from a Lottery Grant that is aimed at renovating the park and an organisation – ‘The Friends of St. Mary’s Churchyard’ has been formed with the soul objective of making it a special place for the respect that should be accorded to the souls of the dead many of whom still have relations who visit their graves. It is a closed graveyard that does not now accept any new interments and what appears to be a vacant area in the southern corner actually contains numerous unmarked graves of paupers who are only remembered in the Church Register, - no coffins or grave markers.
The earliest marked graves, many of which are barely decipherable date from the late 1700’s with simple inscriptions such as “In memory of Elizabeth, daughter of Joseph Smallwood, died 3rd September 1773…..” The Smallwood family has survived to the present day and are in regular contact with the Church. As many Churchyards around the country exhibit there are far more funereal and elaborate monuments from the Victorian and Edwardian eras surviving with quite legible inscriptions, but as is often the way in this day and age many of these examples of the monumental masons art have been subjected to vandalism (headless angels, collapsed crosses and such like). Many incorporate carvings of symbolic items such as Ivy that signifies fidelity, Edelweiss, Lily of the Valley, upwards pointing index fingers (towards heaven); it is said that one grave incorporates a Swastika which, before its evil association with Nazi (National Socialist) Party, was said, in mythological terms to represent the heart of Buddha and in Chinese, abundance. Handsworth is no exception and contains some very interesting monuments to prominent (in their lifetimes) citizens and very often the inscriptions contain details of their addresses such as a house number/name and the road name; an example was given as ‘Rosehill House’ at the junction of Villa Road and Soho Road and is now occupied by King Edwards Grammar School for Girls.
CAUSES OF DEATH: PLACES OF BIRTH AND DEATH:
Some inscriptions are a source of the cause of death of the occupant of the grave and give us an insight into social conditions prevailing at the time: Amy Green died of Bronchitis in 1869, William Jones of ‘Black Water Fever’ in South Africa in 1910, Thomas Spittle aged 20 died from injuries received whilst playing football in 1889, his descendants still live in Handsworth in the 21st Century; Charles Duncan was accidentally drowned in Java; Charles and Florria Tongue were killed in a railway accident in Philadelphia in 1890. Many other examples were given such as ‘fell off a ladder’, ‘thrown by a horse’ it looks as if life in the Victorian years were as equally hazardous as they are today. The number of former Handsworth residents who died overseas and are commemorated in the churchyard is also rather surprising but goes to show that travel or emigration overseas was more widely practised that we may have thought. On the other hand there are graves for people from abroad who had the misfortune to end their days in Handsworth, such as Jacques Sulzberger from Switzerland, Richard Taylor of Illinois, Friedrich Willehelm Otto Dieter Bauer in 1885, Fredrick Beck of Adelaide and Sergius Spellengrable in the service of the States of Holland in the East Indies who died in 1770 who is described in the Registers as a Sales Rep for Matthew Boulton.
These records only go to show that movement around the United Kingdom, the Continent and Empire where more common place than one may imagine; the Introduction of the Turnpikes facilitated travel by coach and wagon and the coming of the railways from the 1840’s onwards increased this ability for most classes, Paulette told us that one of the objectors to this freedom of movement was the Duke of Wellington who thought it a retrograde step and “would allow the working classes to move about!”
INFANT MORTALITY AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS:
Large families were common place in the Victorian era (a safeguard against the workhouse and poverty) and are a factor apparent from studies of the gravestone inscriptions in St Mary’s Churchyard. This can be put down to two factors, the high rate of infant mortality and almost complete lack of birth control/contraception. [The writer’s own great grandfather (born 1846) was one of 10 children some of whom, from census returns, appear to have died in infancy]. Mrs Burkill went on to give us some statistics on these factors: in 1800 two out of every five babies born alive died before they reached the age of 5; by 1840 the average age at death was only 29! It was not unusual for a brother and sister to be born a generation (30 years) apart and even only 50 years ago a fifth of all births recorded in the UK were to women over the age of 35: in the later 19th Century it was not unusual for grandmothers to give birth. Of course we must not ignore the prevalence of ‘killer diseases’ that were around in those days such as cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, typhoid fever many attributable to the quality of drinking water and unsanitary living conditions amongst the poorer working classes – many of these are substantiated by gravestone inscriptions and entries in the Parish Burial Registers. Paulette amplified these facts by quoting actual entries from the Registers that gave all the gory details – many diseases that are easily curable one hundred or so years later. Another factor was death in childbirth and examples are recorded and were read out to us where both mother and child passed away.
NAMES AND SENTIMENTS:
It was obvious from numerous inscriptions that the Victorians and Edwardians were not the died in the wool unemotional and strictly formal attitude personalities that they are so often depicted as, and indeed as they appear to be in the posed portrait photographs of the period. We were given examples of terms of endearment from inscriptions such as, ‘Poppy’, ‘Dear Little Jack’, ‘Darling Little Freddie’ ‘Toddy’ and ‘Fairy’. Dedications tended to be a little more formal such as a simple ‘Aurevoir’; World War One casualties were ‘Duty Called, He Answered’, ‘Suffered Patiently, Submitted Willingly, Died Peacefully’, ‘They’re Calling Me’. One actually quoted four verses of an Alfred Tennyson poem that ends ‘I hope to see my pilot face to face when I have crossed the bar’ and another had a simple ‘Living, Loved, Lost, Lamented’
There are also many Christian names recorded on the monuments that you never hear mentioned in this day and age, many of Biblical origin. Amongst the ladies are Kesia, Adeliza, Bonner, Theodosia, Sabina, Decimay, and Evelina; the list of men’s names were Philemon, Alonzo, Lovelace, Jabez, Caleb, Jesper, Uriah and Zarius. Somehow you cannot help feeling sorry for the children who were landed with these names; even the writers own grandmother (born 1870) was named Elvira from the same period as the examples above – and she was named after a relative.
INSIDE THE CHURCH:
St Mary’s has sometimes been called “the Westminster Abbey of the Industrial Revolution”. This is partly because inside the church itself are the graves and memorials to the more prominent former citizens who have their final resting place herein. The foremost of these is Matthew Boulton the entrepreneur of the Industrial Revolution, founder member of the Lunar Society who had his Manufactory at nearby Soho and whose house is now a museum administered by the Council. He is buried here and together with his former partners James Watt (steam engines) and William Murdoch (Gas lighting) all three have memorials set in the walls and there is also a side chapel dedicated to James Watt that was originally outside the main body of the church but was incorporated into the church during a renovation project. The notorious are also remembered as the forger William Booth of Booths Farm (q.v. Booths Farm Road) in nearby Great Barr, the only criminal who had the distinction of being tried twice, hung twice, and being buried three times was interred in the churchyard but has a plaque inside the church. The Wyrley Family of nearby Hampstead Hall (demolished in the 1930’s) – Lords of the Manor of Handsworth from the 13th to 17th Centuries are remembered by two recumbent effigies in the chancel, and a plaque dated to 1561. Also recognised for past services to the community are Joseph Grice, died 1752 who lived at Handsworth Hall; the Gough Family of Perry Hall between Perry Barr and Great Barr; Sarah and James Russell of Endwood Court; Thomas and Francis Hollingshunt of Soho Foundry. Many of these families still have descendants in the area, even if their family homes are no more or have been converted to more mundane uses.
Other burials here include George Burrell Ramsey said to be the founder of Aston Villa Football Club (died 1935); William McGregor a Director of the Villa who is credited with founding the Football League in March 1888. George Ramsey was also responsible for arranging the clubs transfer to the Villa Park we know today from its original ground in Wellington Road (the Outer Circle Bus route from Perry Barr). In 1908 there was a tragic mining disaster at Hampstead Colliery the centenary of which was recently recognised and will be further commemorated later this year; Alfred Curtis together with three members of the Summerfield family lost their lives in this event and are buried at St Mary’s. The ashes of the Romany King, Esau Smith together with his wife Queen Henty were interred in the churchyard here in the early years of the 20th Century shortly before their community was evicted from the ‘Black Patch’ in Smethwick.
It was an absorbing and fascinating evening filled with far more facts, names and examples than we could possibly include in our report. There is a whole wealth of information to be gleaned from the report the Handsworth H.S. produced from their studies of the inscriptions, especially for those of you interested in the social aspects of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Thank you Paulette we look forward to hearing more from at some time in the future.
We are always pleased to welcome guests and visitors at our meetings, the next of which will be on 12th June when the topic will be ‘Personalities of Birmingham’ presented by Mr Patrick Baird from Birmingham Central Library. The following meeting will be 10th July on English Country Churches by Mrs Barbara Waller. Meetings are held in the Spencer Lounge Bar at Arden Hall, Water Orton Road at 7.45pm.
JERRY DUTTON.
NORTH ARDEN LOCAL HISTORY SOCIETY
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