Though by 1819 the gang of street thugs known as the Rough Fleet had been effectively stricken from the streets of the Potteries, trouble still abounded across the region. Groups of young men out on the town still got themselves into fights and occasionally committed worse crimes and fell foul of the law. One such incident occurred in late 1819 when Daniel Collier (aged 18), William Toft (21), William Holford (17), John Walklate (24) and John Cooper (22) were arrested and on 11 December were committed to Stafford Gaol for the rape of one Hannah Bowers at Stoke-upon-Trent. At the subsequent trial at the Stafford Assizes on 20 March 1820, evidence was presented that Bowers was hardly the most sterling character, she had been highly intoxicated on the night in question and only a few days after the alleged assault she had suggested to the men that each of them should pay her £2 which would have been ‘a sufficient compensation for the violation of her person’ – which to many hardly seemed the reaction of a genuine rape victim and more that of a prostitute. The price, (though described as ‘a trifling sum’ in one newspaper report) was far too much for the youths, who were poorly paid potters and miners and they refused to cough up and so Hannah Bowers bought the charge of rape against them. This was when things got serious, as rape if proven, was at that time a capital crime answerable with ‘a more dreadful sacrifice’ than a few pounds, namely the death penalty.
To the shock of many in the district, despite the evidence against Bowers as a loose woman, the five young men were all quickly found guilty of rape and sentenced to death. Hasty petitions were made on their behalf to the presiding judge and also to the Home Secretary in hopes of prevailing on the King for mercy. A few days later from Shrewsbury, Judge Richardson forwarded reprieves for John Cooper and William Holford, but Collier, Toft and Walklate were only granted a fortnight’s stay of execution. Then on 12 April, a letter came from the Home Secretary stating that the matter was such that it could not be referred to His Majesty and the law must follow its due course. The condemned men took the news calmly, Walklate for one had been convinced the petitions were pointless, though Collier and Toft had apparently held out hopes for a last minute reprieve.
On Friday 14 April, the men were visited by the prison Chaplain who remained there all day, preparing them for what was to come. In the afternoon, John Walklate (who seems to have been the most thoughtful and religious of the group) asked to say a few words to the other condemned prisoners and was allowed to do so. In a calm manner he urged the men to mend their ways if they were spared the gallows and to serve God and he asked them to pray for him. The Chaplain then left the three youths to whatever fitful sleep they could get that night.
The next morning at 6 o’clock, they were roused and taken to the Chapel to receive the Sacrament and stayed there until 8 when the prison bell began to toll and they were led up to the scaffold above the gatehouse. Below, a large crowd had gathered to watch and as it was a controversial sentence and there was the possibility of trouble, a party of the Sheriff’s officers on horseback with drawn swords and thirty special constables were on hand to keep the crowd in order and ensure the execution went unhindered. Toft ascended the scaffold first followed by Walklate and Collier. Whilst they were being readied by the hangman, the Chaplain, at Walklate’s request, exhorted the crowd ‘to refrain from the destructive vices of sabbath-breaking and blasphemy’ that had ultimately led them down a dark path to the gallows. During this harangue the three prisoners prayed fervently and as they were expressing the words ‘Lord remember me’ at about 8.05 a.m., they were dropped. Walklate died instantly, Toft struggled a little, while Collier writhed for some time on the rope. After hanging for an hour the bodies were cut down and were delivered to their waiting family and friends to be taken back to the Potteries for burial.
So much for the tale as related in the newspapers of the time, though Henry Allen Wedgwood expanded on the story, charting the life and fate of John Walklate, whom he erroneously names in his account as ‘William Walklate’. He describes the man as a religious convert who had however fallen back into his old vices and paid the ultimate price as a result of his relapse. As an addendum to the tale, Wedgwood also relates that on the drive back to the Potteries the carrier who transported the bodies of the three hanged men found that John Collier was still breathing and hurried on to Hanley in hopes that he might receive attention, but on arriving it was found that Collier had expired. Toft, Walklate and Collier were said to have been buried under the path to Hanley Churchyard, a great crowd turning out for their funerals.
Henry Allen Wedgwood, People of the Potteries pp. 47-52; Staffordshire Advertiser 11 December 1819, p.4; 25 March 1820, p.4; 15 April 1820, p.4; 22 April 1820. p.4; Aris’ Birmingham Gazette, 20 March 1820. p.3.
George Stevenson is shot in the backroom of the Red Lion beer house. An AI image after a drawing by the author.
On 26 January 1895, 27 year old George Stevenson, a habitual petty criminal and deserter from the British army was shot and mortally wounded in a backroom to a bar in Johannesburg, in Southern Africa, for informing on his fellow criminals after a robbery. The story made news locally as Stevenson, though born in Hixon near Stafford, had grown up in Hanley, where he had turned to a life of crime at a very early age. In December 1877, aged only nine, he was caught trying to rob a till in a second-hand clothes shop in Hope Street, Hanley, for which he received ten strokes of a birch rod and a stint at a reformatory. Little good it did him as in June 1878, he and five other boys were before the bench charged with stealing checks for Battys’ circus that was then in town, though there is no indication as to what punishment they received if any. Yet even if he got off that charge, his short inglorious career as a local ne’er-do-well was quickly brought to an end in October that year when the manager of the Stoke Conservative Club caught the scruffy kid with only one shoe, lurking behind the club bar looking for something to steal . Despite being aged only 10 years old, as he had already been imprisoned once for theft, George Stevenson was now sentenced to a four year stretch at Werrington Industrial School. This did seem to turn his life around and in 1882 he was released back to his parents and for several years Stevo, as he was known to his friends, worked in his father’s clay pits. Then in 1886 aged 18, he joined the army and the next year was posted to Pietermaritzburg in South Africa. Though he stayed in touch with his mother, Stevenson never saw his family or the Potteries again.
At first Stevo enjoyed army life, but garrison duty bored him and at the end of 1889, he deserted and fled to Johannesburg in the then independant Boer republic of the Transvaal, arriving there early in 1890. There he led a brief inglorious life as a thief being quickly caught and sentenced to a year on a chain gang and though he escaped and went on the run he was eventually recaptured and sent to finish his sentence. Shortly after his release in 1893, he fell in with a villain and fellow deserter (from both the army and the Royal Navy) named Jack McLoughlin, who went by the nickname of ‘One-armed Jack’, from having lost his lower left arm during a jailbreak. Despite their difference in appearance – Stevenson was tall, athletic and good-looking, while McLoughlin was short, disabled and plain – they were kindred spirits from similar backgrounds and at first the two men were inseperable. But only a few months passed before tattled tales between their respective lovers caused them to have a falling out and they shunned each other for a time. It was only when McLoughlin needed some more able-bodied men to help him with a robbery a few months later that they patched up their differences enough that Stevo could join the gang.
The gang robbed a safe at a railway station in Pretoria, it was a pitiful haul and their troubles started immediately after the robbery when they tried to take the train back to Johannesburg and realised the authorities were onto them. One of the gang stayed in Pretoria, while early in the journey Stevenson got cold feet and quit the train and doubled back. McLoughlin jumped through a window to escape while the train was in motion, leaving one man on the train who was arrested in Johannesburg. Stevenson and the gang member in Pretoria were also quickly caught. In custody and fearful of returning to prison, when he heard that another of the men was about to inform on them, Stevo got in first and told all to the authorities, naming McLoughlin as the ringleader. Stevenson avoided imprisonment as a result, but he knew that his life was now in danger as McLoughlin, who remained at large, was a vindictive man who hated informers.
Stevenson and his lover Sarah Fredericks fled Johannesburg for a time, but foolishly drifted back into town a few weeks later and by January 1895, they were living out of a room at the back of the Red Lion bar close to their old haunts. With no sign of McLoughlin, Stevo thought he was safe, but on the 26 January he learnt that One-armed Jack was in town looking for him. Stevo and Fredericks retreated to their room hoping he would not find them. A few hours later, though, there was a knock at the door. Expecting a visitor Fredericks opened the door, only to find that it was McLoughlin, who had tracked them down. Brushing Fredericks aside, One-armed Jack then pulled a gun and shot Stevenson who was sitting on the bed, mortally wounding him before making his escape. Pursued by an angry mob, McLoughlin then shot and killed another young man who he thought was trying to stop him and fled into the night going on the run once more. Back at the Red Lion meanwhile, Stevenson lingered for a time, but died from his wound a few days later. His last request to Fredericks was that she send his ring back to his mother in the Potteries.
Many years passed, and in 1910 Stevenson’s mother told a Sentinel reporter that ‘The only intimation of the death of her son that [she had] received was a letter written by Stevenson’s supposed wife, to Mrs. Nixon, daughter of Mrs. Stevenson, in New Hall Street, Hanley.’ Sarah Fredericks, however, told a court that Stevenson had asked her to write to his folks at 10 York Street, Hanley. There is no indication in the newspaper accounts that Stevo’s ring ever found its way back to his mother. Some official communication from the South African police to North Staffordshire is suggested by Hanley’s former Chief Constable Charles Higgins, who, fourteen years later, still recalled that the Johannesburg police had contacted him shortly after the shooting, asking if he could obtain a photograph of George Stevenson. If one was supplied it seems never to have been published, and the only surviving image of Stevenson is a simple line drawing of a young man, smart and rather dapper in a checked suit. Even his parents were perhaps unsure of their prodigal son’s appearance, for in 1910 the Sentinel told a curious tale of how Stevo’s mother had for eighteen years kept a portrait of McLoughlin hanging in their house ‘and they never knew that it was the photograph of the man who was supposed to have shot George Stevenson.’
The case was hot news again in 1910, for the year before, in far‑off Australia, One‑armed Jack McLoughlin, long a fugitive, had been arrested and transported back to South Africa—now a united territory under British rule after the Boer War—to face justice for his crimes. In court, the whole cast from the drama of fourteen years earlier reappeared to tell their sordid tales of how and why Jack and Stevo’s relationship had come to its disastrous end, while McLoughlin himself cheerfully explained how he had escaped. To the embarrassment of the local police, he had actually remained in town for some time, even strolling past the police station to show his contempt for the law. Brassiness aside, he knew he had to get away, and after pulling off another robbery with a new crew, he sailed for India hoping to forge a fresh criminal career.
Things did not go to plan. He reached India, but with no contacts and his meagre funds gone, he became a vagrant and was saved from starvation only by being picked up by the authorities, who were keen to remove the negative image such European flotsam gave to the Raj and were happy to ship him to wherever he claimed was his birthplace. Drawing on his knowledge of the colony from his time in the navy, McLoughlin convinced them he was Australian and so was sent there. Many years later, after his usual round of misadventures, he was caught there, his old crimes became known, and he was shipped back to South Africa to face justice.
Justice was now served. Though many years had passed since he had burst with murderous intent into the back room of the Red Lion beer house and later fired that second fatal shot in the street, the witnesses’ evidence and George Stevenson’s deathbed deposition put the noose firmly around McLoughlin’s neck. On 10 January 1910, that noose tightened hard at last as the scaffold trap opened and One‑armed Jack plunged to his well‑deserved death.
Reference: Charles Van Onselen, Showdown at the Red Lion: The Life and Times of Jack McLoughlin, pp. 288-342. StaffordshireSentinel, 22 December 1877; 19 June 1878, p. 3; 28 October 1878, p. 3.
Bethesda Chapel, Hanley, scene of the riotous wedding. Source: Google Earth
On the morning of Tuesday 7 May 1878, a wedding took place at Bethesda Chapel in Hanley, that excited a great deal of interest due to the disturbance it caused in the town, when a large jeering mob followed the couple to the service and invaded the chapel. The uproar was apparently caused by the disparity in ages between the bridegroom and bride and perhaps concerns over the character of the groom. William Lomas, was a widower aged 68, a grocer carrying on his business in Lower Russell Street, Hanley, while his intended was 18 year old spinster, Ellen Milne, who lived with her parents at 21 Norfolk Street, Shelton. The bridegroom already had a large family of grown-up sons and daughters, and had grandchildren older than the bride he was now taking to the altar and the indications are that some of them were none too pleased with their father marrying a teenager and they probably orchestrated what followed. As the wedding date and venue had been changed several times, perhaps the groom had an inkling of what was about to happen, though the sheer scale of the protest seems to have caught everyone off guard.
The events of the nuptial day started off on a comical note with the arrival in Shelton of a donkey cart, the donkey specially dressed in branches and black and white papers and the driver wearing a long hatband as if attending a funeral. The cart proceeded to drive around that part of Shelton surrounding Norfolk Street and soon collected together a huge crowd comprising thousands of people who kept shouting as they paraded, until the bride and groom left her father’s house at 10a.m. Climbing into a four-wheel carriage the wedding party arrived at Bethesda Chapel at about 10.30, where a noisy, rowdy crowd were waiting, while more followed on behind the donkey cart.
The arrival of the couple was the signal for a general uproar to start, with jeering, hissing, coarse shouts and vulgar jokes at the couple’s expense and a number of missiles were thrown that struck both bride and groom as they exited the carriage, smashing some of its windows and damaging their wedding clothes. Two police inspectors then arrived on the scene with a force of constables who tried to keep the mob out of the chapel, but to no avail and the chapel and it’s galleries were soon full to bursting with a large, disorderly crowd. When the bride and groom with her father emerged from the vestry they were greeted with a deafening chorus of cat-calls and shouting, so loud that while the service went on not a single word said by the minister nor the bridge and groom could be heard even by those standing nearby. When Mr Lomas went to place the wedding ring on his bride’s finger he was so confused by the chaos that he placed it on the third finger of her right hand, which resulted in uproar, laughter, jeers, waiving of handkerchiefs and caps. When the mistake was pointed out to him and the groom put the ring on the correct finger, he was heard to say, “I thought this would be a quiet place to get married at, but if I had to do it a thousand times again I’d -” the last words being lost in the hubbub.
The service over, the couple left the communion rail and were quickly separated, the bride retreating to the vestry while the elderly groom was so crushed and jostled about by the mob that he could barely stand up. He reached the vestry with difficulty, the bride’s father throwing a few punches at the crowd to get him through the door. When Lomas finally made it, he collapsed exhausted on a chair while the crowd launched an attack on the vestry, smashing a window. Once the register had been signed, the couple were hurried out of the building by the police and back into their carriage, some of the ladies’ dresses being torn in the process, but no other harm was done. Eight police officers then escorted the carriage back to Norfolk Street, with the singular donkey cart still in its funeral attire following behind at a distance.
Unsurprisingly, the marriage was not to last. The next year the couple were in the paper again where it was revealed that Lomas’s relatives had begun to interfere with the marriage so much that they could not live together as a married couple. Ellen grew so upset that for a time she moved to stay with a friend in London. Eventually returning to the Potteries, she was barred from entering her husband’s shop at 60 Lower Russell Street by William’s daughter Martha and Thomas Roden, against whom she subsequently brought a charge of assault. If Ellen failed to get back with her husband then maybe she was lucky, as the next year a bad situation seems to have got far worse when one William Lomas ‘a retired grocer living in Shelton’, was accused and subsequently convicted of molesting a six year old girl in a nearby churchyard. It is unclear if he was heavily fined or imprisoned for this, but it seems to have put paid to their comedy of a marriage. The next year, the 1881 census listed William as lodging with his daughter and her new husband and though he listed himself as ‘married’, of Ellen there was no sign. Four years later she was rid of him and his family when Lomas died aged 75.
Reference: Staffordshire Sentinel, 7 May 1878, p.3; 24 May 1879, p.6; 14 May 1880, p.3.
At about 10.10pm on the night of 28 May 1837 in Lane Delph, Fenton, on hearing a cry of ‘Murder’, out in the street, a man from a nearby house and two others from the Canning Inn went to investigate. They found two young boys, 11 year old George Colley and nine year old Josiah Colley, running down Market Street (now part of King Street) dressed in their night gowns and drenched with blood. George had one of his ears nearly cut from his head, while Josiah had suffered a severe cut to the throat. The distressed boys cried out that their mother had attacked them and was killing their brothers and sister and they had only escaped by climbing out of a window. The three men quickly passed the boys to the care of others and rushing to the house one of them went to get a candle, and once it was lit they cautiously ventured in.
Going up the stairs to the family bedroom the three men peered in, and in the faint flickering light of the candle they beheld a scene that none of them would ever forget. In the middle of the bare room they found the mother, Ann Colley, on her knees with her head down and blood streaming from her throat. Beside her was a black handled kitchen knife which she had used to kill or wound her children before using it on herself. Her six year old daughter Ann lay uncovered on the floor, her bloody head nearly severed from her body. On the right of the room was Charles Colley, aged about three years, lying on his back on a pile of blood soaked clothes. He too had suffered a deadly cut across the throat. Her infant son James aged about three months lay at right angles to the dead girl, his feet resting against her; he was a chubby infant and the slit across his throat was not easily seen in the folds in his skin; the dead baby had a peaceful look in its face.
At first, the stunned men thought that Ann Colley was also dead, but when they went to lift her up there was a flicker of life and on repeatedly being asked “What have you been doing?”, the woman replied, “I am in want. I am in want.” She then asked if any of her children were alive. Surgeons were sent for and were soon on the scene, one tending the struggling, injured mother, while another treated her two surviving children. More neighbours came in to help as did the police and George Colley the father also arrived, but was quickly led away by a neighbour. By midnight the surgeons were finished sewing up the injuries and Mrs Colley and her son Josiah were both transported to the North Staffordshire Infirmary two miles away. On Monday afternoon an inquest was held at the Canning Inn, where the numerous witnesses of the night’s events described what had occurred and a picture began to form of a once respectable family that fallen on hard times with horrifying results. The tragedy of the Colley family was explained in detail at the subsequent trial of Ann Colley at the Stafford Assizes in July that year.
The Colleys were originally from London and had arrived in the area at the beginning of the year, when the father George, who had served as a police constable in London and then in Walsall, secured a position as superintendent of police in Fenton. However, in March, he had been dismissed from his post by the inspector and was forced to make a humiliating apology for some unspecified wrong doing. The family’s formerly comfortable existence rapidly fell apart after that and they had to sell most of their belongings to live. Though fairly well-educated, Ann Colley either suffered with mental issues, or was in the grip of a severe postnatal depression that had worsened with each pregnancy. She had reportedly threatened to kill her children a few years before, but had been dissuaded by her husband. However, when George lost his job and the family sank into poverty, her depression deepened and finally tipped her over the edge.
As a result of the evidence presented at the trial, Ann Colley was found not guilty due to temporary insanity and ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure at Stafford. But hers was not destined to be a long incarceration as she could not escape the horror of what she had done. On Wednesday, 4 October 1837, George Colley paid Ann a visit in prison and foolishly gave his wife a locket containing hair from the three murdered children. This left Ann greatly agitated for the rest of the day and night. The next morning at about 10 o’clock, she went to the privy and hung herself from the rafters with a long silk handkerchief. Discovered shortly afterwards, she was cut down still alive, but the effect of the strangulation had put her beyond medical help and at 5 p.m. that day, she died. Ann Colley aged 36 was buried two days later in the grounds of St Mary’s Church, Stafford.
Reference: Staffordshire Advertiser 3 June 1837; 17 June 1837; 7 October 1837; numerous other papers nationwide, June to October 1837.
The 2nd Dragoon Guards open fire on the crowd in front of the Big House, Burslem. An AI recreation of the scene after a drawing by the author.
In 1842, a prolonged miner’s strike had crippled the Staffordshire Potteries. Hundreds of men were on the streets begging and intimidating passers by, while surly mobs raided police stations to free those who had been arrested. The situation in the Potteries was likened to that of a powder keg ready to explode and all that was needed was a spark to kindle all into combustion. Enter Thomas Cooper lay preacher and Chartist firebrand, whose powerful speeches finally struck that spark and plunged the Potteries into two days of rioting and mob rule. During this period dozens of buildings were looted and destroyed and order was only restored after a clash between rioters and the army, an incident popularly known as the Battle of Burslem.
Thomas Cooper
The confrontation took place on 16th August 1842. After a day and night of rioting and looting, early in the morning of the 16th crowds began to gather once more on streets of the Potteries. Of the five towns which had suffered in the previous day’s rioting, Hanley had been hit the worst. Plumes of heavy fire smoke curled up from either end of the town and the streets were filled with debris. The parsonage was a smouldering ruin and at the top of Pall Mall, Albion House home of local magistrate William Parker had been reduced to a charred and broken shell. On the streets of the town by 7 o’clock a crowd of 400 to 500 people had gathered and were being addressed by two of the local Chartist leaders, young William Ellis and John Richards, the elder statesman of Potteries Chartism. Ellis was urging the crowd not to give up the struggle until the People’s Charter became the law of the land. According to witnesses, though, it was the normally mild-mannered Richards who was more to the point. “Now my lads,” he said, “we have got the parson’s house down, we must have the churches down, for if we lose this day, we lose the day forever.” Ellis then spoke again and urged the crowd to go to Burslem to join the crowd there. They were expecting to meet up with a large crowd who were coming to the Potteries from Leek and extend the rioting even further. By 9 o’clock, with shouts of “Now lads for Burslem” and “Now to business”, the Hanley mob began marching north.
From Hanley to Burslem is a steady half hour walk for a healthy man and as they entered the town at about 9.30am, the crowd were singing a song that Thomas Cooper had taught them, “… the lion of freedom’s let loose from his den, and we’ll rally round him again and again.” On their arrival in the town a part of the mob barged into George Inn which had only ten days earlier been attacked by outraged strikers and suffered substantial damage. To try and avoid further trouble, the owner of the Inn, Mr Barlow tried to buy the rioters off by giving them a shilling each; some of this was in half crowns and a dispute arose at the door as to the division of it. By this time the greater part of the mob had arrived and they immediately rushed in and filled the house. Mr Barlow had taken the precaution to remove the bulk of his cash; there was however £14 in coppers wrapped up in parcels of five shillings, which were all taken. Numerous bottles of wine, whisky and rum was also stolen, and the taps attached to the beer kegs were left running. Prominent amongst those who conducted this raid was George ‘Cogsey Nelly’ Colclough, a local lout who had flitted from one town to another the previous day, joining in with the burning and looting wherever he went. Like a moth to the flame he had followed the trouble back to his native Hanley and now thought to export his brand of local thuggery to the Mother Town. But the invasion of the inn did not go unopposed, for while the mob had previously only faced outnumbered police constables, they now found that they were in a town containing a small but formidable force of regular soldiers. They were surprised by a sergeant of dragoons and one or two other soldiers who were billeted at the inn, who hearing the noise, rushed into the bar and lobby to confront the troublemakers. Being in their undress uniforms they only had their swords to hand, but undaunted, the sergeant immediately drew his sword and began to cutting and swatting at the looters and in a few minutes the house was cleared. On being forced back into the street, the mob vented their anger by throwing stones at the windows, and in a very short time all the newly fitted glass was smashed and the house soon presented the same dilapidated appearance as it did after the attack in the night of the 6th.
At the Leopard Inn, meantime, local magistrate Captain Thomas Powys was with Brevet-Major Power Le Poer Trench the commander of the 50 or so 2nd Dragoon Guards, who had been stationed in Burslem the week before. The two men had met shortly after the news had come in of a large crowd coming from Leek and Powys was doubtless consulting with the military as to what should be done if they tried to join the rioters. It was at this point that Thomas Lees the landlord of the inn came over with news that trouble that had broken out in Chapel Square. Captain Powys immediately asked for the Major’s assistance and Trench quickly ordered his available men to horse. Most of the men were billeted at the inn, their horses being stabled outside and the troopers now came out into the cobbled courtyard and hurriedly got themselves and their animals ready for action. A flurry of stones came flying over the gate striking at least one soldier on the helmet, but unfazed they were soon clattering out of the courtyard and through the streets. Mounted on their big bay horses, the soldiers dressed in scarlet tunics, dark blue trousers with a yellow stripe down the side and tall, crested brass helmets on their heads, they were a sight to see and doubtless provided the townsfolk with a gallant if alarming show as they rode towards the Market Place.
The Leopard Inn, Burslem.
The mood in the town had grown increasingly ugly with the arrival of the soldiers and Captain Powys knew that the crowd of people from Leek were even now on the outskirts of the town. If the two mobs joined up and went unopposed Burslem might well be utterly wrecked, so Powys decided that it was now time to restore law and order before things got completely out of hand.
Riding up to the top of St John’s Square with Trench’s dragoons posted on either side and 200 special constables behind them, Captain Powys faced the mob and began to read out the Riot Act in a loud voice. He then gave several other warnings and then read the Riot Act again, urging the crowd to disperse and go home peacefully. The crowd, however, were unmoved and milled about between the market or the Shambles, as it was called, and the Big House, Thomas Wedgwood’s former home that still stands at the junction of Moorland Road and Waterloo Road, though at that time there was a walled garden before it. Powys then called out, “Clear the streets!” Then shouted, “Charge!” and led the dragoons towards the crowd. He had hoped to scare them off and the horse soldiers beat with the flats of their swords any who were slow in getting out of their way. The ruse did not work, though, for as one portion of the crowd fell back others spilled out of the side streets and alleys, back into the main crowd. Seeing the opportunity to cause more trouble, George Colclough set about the nearest soldiers with his stick, beating at their sword arms as they attempted to swat him. After a time several of the cavalrymen were so bruised by Colclough’s attacks that they left him alone, which is said to have raised a cheer from some in the crowd.
By now it was getting towards noon and despite the best efforts of Captain Powys and the soldiers, the streets were still full of people. Some had climbed onto the roof of the Town Hall and the covered market, from where they threw stones at the troops and special constables. Powys, increasingly alarmed that the situation might escalate to the point where he might have to use the soldiers more forcefully, was repeatedly seen riding up to the crowds and calling out that the Riot Act had been read and urging people to return to their homes. He was joined in his efforts by others including an Irish naval officer, 41 year old Captain William Bunbury McClintock, who had come to town to meet his friend Major Trench, only to find himself in the eye of a storm. McClintock now rode back and forth from where the bulk of the troops were gathered by the Leopard Inn to check on what the crowds were doing. He saw ‘a vast concourse of people in the Hanley Road, and a dense mob on the Smallthorne Road – the latter were accompanied by a band of music. I returned again to the troop, and told Captain Powys there would soon be bloody work.’
Word quickly spread, to the delight of the rioters in the town that the Leek mob of between 4,000 to 5,000 people was advancing down Smallthorne Road and they began moving up Chapel Square to meet them. As McClintock had noted, at the head of the crowd marched a band playing ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ preceded by a large number of men and boys shouting and waving makeshift weapons overhead, all of which could be clearly seen from Market Square. Captain Powys described it as ‘the most tumultuous and violent mob which I have ever seen assembled, having seen many riots in the country and in London.’ He guessed that a clash was now inevitable and barely three minutes after McClintock had ridden back to the troop, Powys ordered Major Trench to move the troop forward to meet the crowd and he formed his dragoons up in sections diagonally across the road from the Big House to the Post office, so cutting the newcomers off from the bulk of the Potteries’ mob in the Market Square. The special constables, meantime, closed up nervously behind the cavalry, among them local manufacturer Joseph Edge and his friend Samuel Cork. They looked so alarmed at this point that a kindly lady watching the action from a nearby house sent her servant over with a glass of wine for them both, hoping that the drinks would revive their spirits.
An officer of the 2nd Dragoon Guards. The black crest was only worn on parade or for ceremonies
They needed it, for by now the fresh crowd was closing on the thin line of soldiers. Captain Powys on horseback was on the left of Major Trench, who with the other officers were in advance of the dragoons. A large crowd was assembled in the area above the Wesleyan chapel, to witness the arrival of the Leek mob. When about eighty or a hundred yards from the spot where the dragoons were stationed, the Leek party began to cheer and those in front waved their bludgeons. As the head of the procession entered the open space, the front ranks turned to the left, with the apparent intention of making their way by the Wesleyan chapel. About twenty or thirty deep of them had got so far when as Captain Powys later recalled, ‘Immediately large volleys of stones, and brick ends were thrown by this mob at myself, and also at the military, I being then in the advance. Similar stones were thrown at the same time by the mob coming in the direction from Hanley at the military, myself and also at the special constables.’
By now the situation was intolerable. Stones were being hurled from both sides of the Market Square, striking horses and men alike and rattling over the cobbles. Captain Powys had thus far been the model of restraint, giving the crowd ample opportunities for a peaceful withdrawal, but it was now obvious that they were bent on trouble. Fearing for the safety of the soldiers, special constables and himself, by his own account he felt he had no choice but to use the soldiers to full effect and turning to Major Trench, Powys asked him to get his men ready to open fire. Trench agreed that the situation was getting out of control and gave the appropriate orders. As the soldiers sheathed their swords and primed their carbines, the large crowd moved forward as far as the Big House. The dragoons advanced slightly to counter them and only at the last moment when the front of the crowd was only six or seven yards away from the soldiers did it seem that the rioters saw the line of guns being raised and levelled at them. ‘This movement on the part of the soldiers caused a strange movement amongst those in the front of the mob, and a look of terror came over their faces. Another moment and the order “fire” was given’ and the rattle of musketry echoed out loud over the town.’
The soldiers fired directly into the crowd, not over their heads as some reported, and many bullets found a mark. Standing in front of the large brick wall that then stood in front of the Big House, was a 19 year old shoemaker from Leek named Josiah Heapy. Despite glowing reports from his employer, who later extolled his gentle character and claimed he had been forced to join the crowd, Heapy appears to have been actively engaged in throwing stones at the soldiers, at least, that is, until a musket ball struck him in the temple and blew his brains out against the gate post.
As Heapy’s lifeless form slumped to the pavement, in another section of the crowd, a bricklayer named William Garrett got a ball through his back that exited through his neck and he too fell to the ground gravely wounded but he was eventually whisked off to the infirmary. According to reports others were hit, but in the confusion no one stopped to count the casualties, though it has been supposed that some of the wounded were carried off by their friends and died later. A report in the Bolton Chronicle later claimed that the true tally had been three people killed and six wounded, while reports from Leek spoke of numerous wounded being brought back into the town after the riots.
The Big House in Burslem, where the fateful clash occurred
Some in the crowd seem to have been expecting this development, for shortly after the soldiers had fired their volley someone released a number of carrier pigeons which set off in the direction of Manchester. One of these birds was later captured and found to be carrying a note reporting that the mob had been fired on by dragoons and calling for 50,000 workers to join them in the Potteries. Some witnesses also recalled seeing plumes of gun smoke coming from the crowd just before the soldiers fired, though if this was the case, none of the soldiers or special constables were injured.
Most of the mob, though, was just shocked by the gunfire. From his position behind the dragoons, special constable Joseph Edge had watched all this in fascinated horror, as his son later noted: ‘such a scene presented itself which we may pray may never be repeated in this good old town. So panic stricken was the mob that the men simply lay down in heaps in their efforts to get away from the cavalry… ‘
Having stunned the rioters, the soldiers kept moving forwards and slinging their carbines, they drew their swords and followed by the special constables they charged their horses into the head of the crowd which scattered in panic before them. Immediately, thousands of people began rushing in all directions, many falling over each other in tangled heaps, others leaping through open windows, or into any available hiding place. Apocryphal tales abound. One Joseph Pickford of Leek is said to have taken shelter in a pig sty, much to the annoyance of its porcine occupants, whose squeals threatened to reveal his hiding place. Hundreds more escaped into the adjoining fields. Another story recalled how Thomas Goldstraw, a powerfully built man from Leek and a noted drummer, dropped his drum when the soldiers charged and quickly fled from Burslem back the way he had come, unaware at first that his son who had been nearby at the time had been shot through the thigh and was lying wounded in a field just outside the town. According to the storyteller, Goldstraw junior was later placed on a cart and transported to the surgery of an obliging physician, Dr Wright at Norton-in-the-Moors, who soon had him back on his feet again.
As the military swept past into the Moorland Road, a portion of the mob from the direction of Hanley, rallied and began throwing stones at the body of special constables, who advanced to the conflict in a dense mass, playing away with their truncheons, and completely routed the mob in that quarter. After the soldiers had charged a short distance up the Smallthorne Road, they were halted and recalled: their job was done as the mob, which just before had consisted of five or six thousand people was completely dispersed and the danger to Burslem had passed.
Reference: Staffordshire Mercury, 20 August 1842; Staffordshire Advertiser, 20 August 1842, p.3; John Wilcox Edge ‘Burslem fifty years ago’, quoted in Carmel Dennison’s Burslem:People and Buildings, Buildings and People, (Stoke-on-Trent, 1996), pp. 36-37; Leek: Fifty Years Ago, (Leek, 1887), p.107 and 121.
In 1796, whilst visiting Brownhills Hall, near Burslem, the home of wealthy pottery manufacturer John Wood and his family, a young apothecary named Thomas Millward Oliver, became enamoured of the Wood’s teenage daughter Maria, a noted local beauty, who returned his affections. Oliver came of a respectable Stourbridge family and as a well-educated, popular and respected medical man locally, he would seem to have been the perfect suitor for Maria Wood. Certainly Oliver himself believed this and he thought at first that Mr Wood actively encouraged him in his courtship of the young woman. In this, though Oliver was mistaken and when John Wood learned of the affair he quickly put a stop to Oliver’s visits, professional or otherwise, and had forbidden the young couple to meet. This threw Thomas Oliver into a fit of lovelorn despair that festered for some time before coming to a head early the next year in the most dramatic fashion.
Brownhills Hall, from an engraving made some years later. Source: John Ward, The Borough of Stoke-Upon Trent (1848)
At 8 a.m., on 27 January 1797, Oliver arrived unannounced at Brownhills Hall and asked to see John Wood. Mr Wood was in bed, but on hearing of his visitor and thinking that the apothecary had come to present his final bill, he went to his Compting House behind the hall and asked his foreman William Bathwell to bring Oliver down to see him. Bathwell went, but returned without Oliver, who had sent word that he would wait for Mr Wood in the parlour. So, along with his foreman, a slightly puzzled Mr Wood returned to the hall to see what his visitor wanted. Here the two men greeted each other coolly, but politely, and as expected Oliver presented his bill, but hardly had he done so than he drew two pistols that he had recently borrowed from a neighbour and pointed one at Mr Wood, asking him to take it, possibly to fight a duel. Mr Wood refused and Oliver lowered the gun for a moment. Alarmed, Bathwell started to take Oliver to task over the pistols, but the apothecary brushed his comments aside and brought one gun up and saying “I wish to die here!” fired directly at Wood, who was struck in the right breast. Oliver then raised the second pistol, probably intending to shoot himself, but Bathwell threw himself on the man, knocked the gun from his hand and pinned his arms to his sides. Others in the house, alerted by the noise, soon rushed into the room to help the struggling foreman and tend to the injured man. The wounded Mr Wood was then quickly carried upstairs to his bed and a doctor was called for, while Oliver, now apparently aghast at what he had done, was handed over to the local constables.
John Wood had been mortally wounded and died three days later, being buried in Burslem on 2 February 1797; he was only 50 years old. Oliver meanwhile was left languishing in Stafford Gaol until the Summer assizes that year. Here on a sweltering day in August, he was put on trial on a charge of murder and though many witnesses came forward to speak of his gentle nature and good deeds, or argued that the act took place due to temporary insanity, the evidence against him was overwhelming and Thomas Oliver was quickly sentenced to death.
During his time in prison, Oliver is said to have impressed everyone, prisoners and gaolers alike, with his courteous behaviour and his obedience of the rules. All were struck by the calm and dignified manner in which he accepted his fate and in which he finally met his end. On Monday 28 August 1797, he displayed this same calm manner as he mounted the scaffold above the prison gatehouse, bowing to the large crowd that had gathered below to watch. Moments later the noose was placed around his neck and the trap door opened. Apothecary Thomas Millward Oliver, aged just 28, died without a murmur.
Reference: Trial of T. Milward Oliver at Stafford Summer Assizes, 1797
Smithfield Hall c. 1794. Detail of an engraving by W. C. Wilson after an illustration by E. Dayes. The field in the foreground may be where Theophilus Smith attacked Peter Wainwright. (Author’s collection)
During a visit to Liverpool, a financially insecure pottery manufacturer, Theophilus Smith of Tunstall, asked one of his creditors, a merchant named Peter Wainwright, to return to the Potteries with him for a meeting. Very early in the morning of 21 June 1800, after travelling most of the way back to Tunstall, Smith stopped their carriage near to his home Smithfield Hall and said to Mr Wainwright, that as he wished to avoid being seen that they should proceed the remaining short distance across the fields on foot.
The two men were seemingly on good terms and had enjoyed a pleasant ride despite the distance, but as they crossed the field in the half-light before dawn, suddenly and without warning Smith drew a gun from his pocket. Thinking that the desperate potter was about to shoot himself, Wainwright pounced on the man, wrestled the gun out of his hand and threw it away. The crisis seemed to be over, but moments later as they continued their walk, Smith drew another pistol and fired at Mr Wainwright, but missed. The two men fought and Smith was thrown to the ground and begged forgiveness of his would-be victim. Evidently stunned by events, Wainwright relented and even let Smith get up and go to collect a coat he had left behind after leaving the coach, never thinking that Smith may have another pistol hidden there, which he produced as they neared his home and shot Wainwright through the body just below the stomach. Though badly wounded Peter Wainwright again fought back, but Smith then drew a knife, lashing out, and the merchant received numerous cuts to his hands and jawline before he finally threw his attacker off. Smith then retreated to his house, leaving the badly injured man to stagger several hundred yards to a neighbouring cottage for help. Doctors were called who at first despaired of his wounds, but against the odds Mr Wainwright survived, though he spent several weeks lodged in a gentleman’s house, recovering from his wounds and the shock of his ordeal.
The alarm was immediately raised and constables raced to Smithfield Hall to arrest Theophilus Smith, but he had already fled his home and 50 guineas were offered for his capture. This was achieved a few weeks later in London where Smith was arrested without incident in his lodgings by the Bow Street Runners. Sent for trial at Stafford, Smith was easily found guilty and sentenced to hang, but he cheated the hangman when on New Years Day 1801, whilst in the hospital at Stafford Gaol and having by some means got his hands on a couple of pistols, he shot and wounded his wife who was visiting him, then shot himself through the head, dying instantly. It has been suggested that this final act and Smith’s earlier attack on Mr Wainwright were because he suspected that Wainwright and his wife were lovers, though there seems to be no clear evidence to support this.
So ended the mysterious affair of Theophilus Smith, at least for the protagonist, and it turned out his was the only death to result from his sudden murderous mania, as Mary Smith like Peter Wainwright before her recovered from her wounds. By the end of February 1801, it was reported that she was well enough to leave Stafford and she seems to have returned to her family in Whitchurch, Shropshire. Before the year was out both Smithfield Hall and the Smithfield estate were sold to John Breeze, who renamed both ‘Greenfield’ to disassociate them from the stigma of Smith’s crimes. What happened to Mary Smith after that is unclear. If there ever had been any romantic association between her and Peter Wainwright it was never rekindled.
After recovering from his severe injuries Mr Wainwright had returned to Liverpool, but he did not long remain in Britain. Many years previously, before the War of Independence, he had settled in the American colonies and had stayed on there for some time as a successful tobacco merchant. In 1790, he had married another English emigrant, Elizabeth Mayhew, before returning to Britain in the early 1790s prior to the birth of their first child. Now, perhaps, the shock of the attack and the ill rumours it had promoted had made him reconsider the move and in either late 1801 or 1802, Wainwright returned with his wife and children to the United States of America, settling in near his wife’s family in Boston, where he continued to trade successfully for many years. Their children would stay on and prosper in the New World, but he and his wife eventually moved back to Britain, she dying in 1829 and Peter on 10 January 1841, aged 81.
Reference:Staffordshire Advertiser, 12 July 1800, p.3; 19 July 1800, p.4; 2 August 1800, p.3; 3 January 1801, p.4; The Annual Register 1800, Vol. 42; Bury and Norwich Post, Wednesday, 25 February 1801, p.2.
In early March 1783, the local economy was in decline and people were going hungry. A poor harvest the year before plus the knock-on economic effects of the American War of Independence had caused food to become scarce and prices to rise sharply and a number of food riots broke out in Newcastle and the Potteries as a result. The most serious of these took place around the canal at Etruria and may well have been started by some of Josiah Wedgwood’s workers.
A view of Wedgwood’s Etruria works from across the canal. From The Life of Josiah Wedgwood (1865) by Eliza Meteyard.
There had been some trouble in Newcastle for several days and the rioters there seem to have joined or inspired the riot that broke out at Etruria on Friday 7 March. The trouble started when a barge carrying much-needed supplies of cheese and flour moored up at Etruria where the food was to be off-loaded before being distributed around the Potteries. However, at the last moment the barge’s owners decided to send the boat on to Manchester. Within a short time of this decision shop owners in Hanley and Shelton heard the news and they in turn informed their angry customers. They had probably heard about the barge’s departure from some of Wedgwood’s own workers, certainly that suspicion was voiced in a letter written by Josiah Wedgwood junior, son of the famous potter. Later that same day Josiah junior wrote to his father (who was then in London on business) describing how when the news spread about the departing barge, several hundred men women and children had quickly gathered and chased after it along the canal, finally catching up with it at Longport. Believing that the boat had been sent away to increase the scarcity of provisions and thus up the prices even more, the crowd were in a black mood and not to be trifled with, so when they found that the boatman would not pull the boat over one of the crowd leapt aboard to tackle him. The boatman immediately cut the tow rope and slashed at the man with his knife and voices from the crowd on the towpath called out “Put him in the canal.” A ducking may well have been the man’s fate had not another boatman come to his rescue and he had been able to escape onto another craft, albeit leaving his own barge in the hands of the mob as he did so.
The captured boat was then hauled it back to Etruria in triumph and by late afternoon was tied up alongside Wedgwood’s Etruria works where the crowd unloaded the cargo into the factory’s crate shop. Most of the rioters then went home meaning to return the next day for distribution of the goods. In the meantime a few men were set as guards. At about 7.30 that evening four of these sauntered up to Etruria Hall and asked for something to eat and drink while they were on watch. Another of the Wedgwood children, Josiah’s older brother, 17 year old John went to them and stood talking with them for a time then too did their mother Sarah Wedgwood, who also spoke with them for a while before the men went off. The nervousness of the Wedgwood household at this point is, evident in young Josiah’s hasty missive to his father, but the family were not bothered any further that evening and at breakfast the next day things were still quiet.
On the Saturday morning the crowd gathered back at the canal side and some of the goods seized the day before were sold off at what were considered by the crowd to be more reasonable prices. One of the letters states that this was at two-thirds the normal price, while sometimes the goods were given away. The meagre proceeds were then handed over to the disgruntled owners of the captive barge. The authorities meanwhile had taken steps to deal with the rioters. An express message had been sent to Lichfield asking for some companies of the Staffordshire Militia to come to their aid. Closer at hand, though, were a company of the Carmarthen Militia who that day had arrived in Newcastle on their way back to Wales. Due to the troubles in Newcastle itself and now in Etruria, the commanding officer was asked if he could help in dealing with the rioters. He agreed, and the force put itself at the disposal of the local magistrates who now had the job of quelling the disturbances.
Some justices went to meet with the mob still gathered around the captured boat, but the Militia were kept at a distance while the officials tried to settle matters peacefully. Here the letters are at odds with one another, one stating that all efforts to get the mob to disperse, including getting the master potters (whose workers formed the bulk of the mob) to try and influence them, but to no avail, while the other letter states that the magistrates’ efforts were a success and that the mob agreed to leave, providing the boat was left where it was. Judging by the fact that several days later the mob was demanding the return of the boat the latter seems the most likely state of affairs, but the details still remain confused.
Nothing of great significance seems to have happened on the Sunday, though some of the local manufacturers and officials held a crisis meeting at Newcastle to discuss how best to calm the situation down and deal with the mob. A subscription was entered into perhaps to placate the rioters, Josiah Wedgwood’s son John was present at the meeting and donated £10 to the fund. But after the quiet Sunday, Monday saw a return to the stand-off of previous days as the mob gathered at Etruria once more. This time they were in a far more bullish mood and sent messengers to the magistrates outlining their demands, namely to have the boat delivered back to them and its contents sold there.
After a quiet Sunday, Monday saw a return to the stand-off as the mob gathered once more, this time outside Billington’s (probably the premises of Richard Billington, who carted coals for Wedgwood and rented 38 acres of the Etruria estate), where there was a meeting of the master potters and several officials. These included John Wedgwood in his father’s stead, Dr Falkener of Lichfield, Mr Ing and Mr John Sneyd of Belmont (a neighbour of the Wedgwoods), who harangued the mob on their bad behaviour and the detrimental effect it would have on the price of corn, as too did John Wedgwood and Major Walter Sneyd of the Staffordshire Militia. The latter was there at the head of a detachment of the Staffordshire Militia, who stood by ready if needed. The masters and officials though still hoped that the rioters would listen to reason and a generous subscription was again raised, John Wedgwood giving £20 this time. The mob, though, did not accept this graciously remarking caustically that the money would not have been provided had they not caused trouble and made the manufacturers sit up and pay attention. They continued calling for the boat to be returned to them and the corn to be sold on fairly. Their demands became so loud and threatening that the Riot Act was read out and the mob was told that if they did not disperse to their homes in an hour’s time, that the Militia would be ordered to fire on them. The crowd, though, were defiant, jeering that the militia men dared not fire on them and that if they did then the rioters would attack and destroy Keele Hall, the ancestral home of the Sneyd family of Major Sneyd was the current heir. According to some accounts the rioters also put their women and children at the front confident that the soldiers could not fire on them.
Despite this, after the hour had passed, the chief magistrate Dr Falkener was apparently on the verge of ordering the nervous militiamen to fire, when two of the rioters accidently fell down and made him pause and consider his actions. One of the Sneyds, huzzaring as he did so, got about 30 of the men to follow him, intending perhaps to charge the mob, but his effort was thwarted by women in the crowd who called out, “Nay, nay, that wunna do, that wunna do.” and embarrassed by the mocking cries the militiamen baulked, turned back and left the crowd alone. Unable or unwilling to take firm action, the officials agreed that the corn taken in the boat should be sold on at a fair price. And for now that was that and the crowd had their way. The magistrates, though, were now determined to make the leaders of the riot pay for the trouble they had caused and to bring the disturbances to an end once and for all.
Two of the ringleaders of the mob had been quickly identified as Stephen Barlow and Joseph Boulton. According to report, Barlow was born in Hanley Green, was aged about 38 and seems to have had a chequered history prior to the riots, having apparently served in the Staffordshire Militia, but had been drummed out for bad behaviour. He may also have had previous with the law as records show that four years earlier at the Epiphany Assizes at Stafford of 1779, one Stephen Barlow was in court for some unspecified crime he had committed in Penkridge. At some point he had married and by 1783 was the father of four small children and was living in Etruria. The authorities certainly knew where to look for him and that night after the riot, magistrates and constables converged on his house. On hearing the men at the door, Barlow quit his bed naked and attempted to escape by climbing up the chimney. He probably would have got away except that in his haste he dislodged some bricks and when his pursuers came out to see what was happening they caught sight of him hiding on the roof behind the chimney stack. When he was brought down, Barlow refused to get dressed and though it was a cold night suffered himself to be transported stark naked all the way from Etruria to Newcastle. After subsequently being taken to Stafford Gaol, Stephen Barlow was held there until his trial.
So too was Joseph Boulton, but he remains a shadowy figure in this drama as nothing seems to be known of his background. Beyond noting that two ringleaders had been captured at home that night and sent to Stafford gaol, his name was not mentioned in contemporary newspapers, though John Wedgwood who was at Stafford to witness the trial wrote to his father in London and noted that the man had been acquitted by the court. Stephen Barlow, on the other hand was not so lucky. The judge in summing up at the trial on 15 March, detailed Barlow’s offence and laid out the law regarding riots in the clear and clinical manner of the Riot Act. “That all persons to the number of twelve or more, who remain in any place in a tumultuous manner after proclamation has been made for the space of one hour, subject themselves to an indictment for capital felony.” In other words, the death sentence.
The message this sent out was clear, namely those hundreds who had assembled and been involved in the rioting on 10 March, most of whom had since either fled the area or had thus far escaped detection, were just as guilty as Barlow and could expect the same treatment if caught and convicted. Barlow meanwhile was sentenced to death without a quibble and on Monday 17 March 1783, exactly a week after the riot, at Sandyford near Stafford, he was escorted to the gallows by a body of militia and there he was hung by the neck until he was dead. His body was then returned to the Potteries and buried locally two days later.
It had been a startlingly quick chain of events which did indeed have the desired effect quelling any further disturbances, but it perhaps shocked many law-abiding citizens too, disturbed by such arbitrary use of the law. Looking back from over half a century later even local historian John Ward – who as a solicitor and witness to the Pottery Riots of 1842 had very little sympathy with rioters – seems to have been taken aback by this blatant show trial. Writing about Stephen Barlow, he noted that he ‘became a victim rather to the public safety, than to the heinousness of his crime.’ According to some accounts Barlow was not the only victim, as more than one paper reported briefly that following the execution, Barlow’s wife hung herself in despair.
Reference: John Ward, The Borough of Stoke-Upon-Trent, pp. 445-446; Ann Finer and George Savage (Eds.), The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood p.268: Correspondence of Josiah Wedgwood, Vol. 3, pp. 8-9; Derby Mercury, Thursday 13 March 1783, p.3; Cumberland Pacquet and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser, Tuesday 25 March 1783, p.3; Manchester Mercury, Tuesday 25 March 1783, p.1; Kentish Gazette, Saturday 29 March 1783, p.3; Northampton Mercury, Monday 24 March 1783, p.3; Stamford Mercury, Thursday 27 March 1783, p.2; Ipswich Journal, Saturday 22 March 1783, p.1; Hereford Journal, Thursday 3 April 1783, p.3.
The Rough Fleet, an amorphous gang of street thugs under the leadership of John ‘Mad Jack’ Wilson were a terror to the locals, notably in and around Hanley, for many years at the very beginning of the 19th century. Born in 1787, Wilson was the eldest surviving son of David Wilson, a respectable pottery manufacturer who ran the Church Works, Hanley, which stood on ground between St John’s Church and what later became Hanley Deep pit, ground now given over to the swirl of roads and traffic islands where Town Road coming out of Hanley joins the Potteries Way. John Wilson was also the man who accidentally killed his brother and niece when he was firing off cannons to celebrate the Hanley Wakes in 1807 (see ‘An Awful and Melancholy Accident’ above). Maybe this family tragedy had in some way adversely affected him and set him on the criminal path he henceforth followed, but it is easy to look for excuses for bad behaviour and there is too little information on John Wilson’s early days to know for sure what started him on his criminal career; perhaps he had always been a bad lot who just got worse over time.
The approximate site of the Church Works just outside of the centre of Hanley Source: Google Earth
Concrete information on the early origins of the gang is likewise thin on the ground. Writing in the early 1840s and thus well within living memory of events, John Ward in his history The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent, noted that ‘In the years 1808 and 1809 a gang of reckless young men, some of whom were respectably connected, carried on a system of nocturnal outrage, rather from a wanton and mischievous spirit, than for the sake of plunder, which greatly annoyed and terrified the peaceable community. They obtained the name of The Rough Fleet, from their daring and buccaneering-like exploits’. This may have been when they started their reign of terror, but if so it seems that they continued causing trouble and dodging any real justice for the better part of a decade before the gang’s chief members were finally brought to book.
Between 1816 and 1818, The Staffordshire Advertiser noted that the gang or its individual members were involved in several brushes with the courts for assaults, riotous behaviour and attempted shootings. At the Swan Inn in Hanley’s Market Square in early 1816, John Wilson was confronted in the bar by one outraged local, potter John Sheridan of Cobridge, who accused him of threatening his life and shooting at him, describing Wilson as ‘the terror of the neighbourhood’ and ‘the Captain of the banditti’. Wilson took Sheridan to court for slander when the latter accused Mad Jack of murdering his own brother, but he lost the case perhaps as a result of the growing ill-feeling towards him and his confederates. Incidents continued to be reported through to early 1818, while in the same paper John Wilson’s financial fall was also chronicled. His father David Wilson had died suddenly in 1816 and as John was his heir, the Church Works and family business had passed to him. Little good he did with it, though, being more interested it seems with his incessant drinking, partying with his gang and trouble-making and by July 1817 he was declared bankrupt and as numerous notices in the papers showed, his pot bank and other properties quickly passed out of his hands.
The end for the gang followed shortly after this in early 1818, when as Ward put it, ‘several of them were ultimately prosecuted at the Sessions, and convicted of various misdemeanors, which at length broke up the lawless confederacy.’ It came about as the result of an attack on a local constable Ralph Barton, who was left wounded by the encounter. Eight members of the Rough Fleet including John Wilson, were arraigned on a charge of riot and assault at the March Assizes at Stafford, being committed to Stafford gaol in June with the case being deferred until October; and it was there, doubtless much to the relief of the locals, that they finally got their comeuppance.
‘John Wilson, Samuel Shelley, Thomas Shufflebottom, John Clews, Henry Brereton, John Wallbank, Wallace Lockett, and Samuel Earnest, were convicted of riot, and of assaulting a constable in the execution of his office at Hanley. These prisoners are part of a corps too well known in the Potteries by the name of the Rough Fleet. Wilson (the Captain) was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment; Shelley (Lieutenant) to ten months; and the other six to four months; each of them to find security for a year longer. The three first-named pleaded guilty.’
Following this conviction as Ward noted, the Rough Fleet seems to have been broken and it disappeared from the streets of the Potteries. Certainly that infamous title does not seem to crop up in any further stories in the contemporary press, save as a bad memory and the fates of its former members remain unknown.
Reference: John Ward, The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent (1843) p. 369; Staffordshire Advertiser 16 March 1816, p.4; 5 July 1817, p.4; 18 October 1817, p.4; 31 January 1818, p.4; 21 March 1818, p.4; 13 June 1818, p.4; 24 October 1818, p.4.
The oldest profession in the world had its place in soft underbelly of the Regency Potteries. Prostitutes plied a regular trade usually around the local inns where there were rich pickings when the potters and miners rolled in with their wages. A brief memoir of the period reveals that then as now many of the local working girls were ordinary women driven to extremes by circumstances, the probable cause being abject poverty. A Short Memoir of Ann Sheldon, published in 1821, tells the story of the short life of a dedicated Burslem Sunday School teacher. Constructed around entries in Ann’s diary, it reveals her to have been a noble spirited young woman, who saw it as her Christian duty to visit the sick and try to save the fallen.
Burslem town centre in the early 19th century.
In April 1813 following a class, one of her class members asked Ann if she would visit a woman who was very ill. Accompanied by a fellow teacher ‘Miss B’, she went to see the woman whom she soon discovered to be a local prostitute. They found her to be, ‘a little better and very penitent.’ Ann continued : ‘she had been a very wicked woman for years, and is now little more than 30 years of age. Her parents died when she and her sister were young. As they advanced in years they got into bad company and lost their character. Masters would not employ them and they became common prostitutes.’ The woman, exhausted and frightened by her illness, told the two teachers that if she lived she was determined to leave her ‘wicked course of life.’
After praying together they left her. The two young teachers had obviously been shocked by the interview and though the nature of the woman’s illness is never stated, the impression we are left with is that it was contracted as a result of her calling. Both came away from the house burning with a desire to save others from such a dangerous and degrading career.
The next day, Ann and Miss B set out once more and found a woman to direct them to the ‘houses of ill fame’. They visited two buildings, but met with a mixed reception, made all the more galling no doubt, by the fact that at least two of the girls they encountered were old Sunday school scholars.
In the first house ‘we found a young woman about seventeen years of age, who lived by herself, and was three years ago a Sunday scholar.’ The girl was unmoved by the teachers’ entreaties, Ann went back many times to invite her back to the school, but to no avail.
There were two women in the other house: ‘we found a woman about twenty-seven years of age; who met in class about two years ago: we both spoke as close as possible for an hour and a half; they shed many tears and confessed they had a hell upon earth. There was another woman present, a companion in sin, who appeared to take no notice: – I said to her come down on your knees, and cry to the Lord, to have mercy upon your soul, before it is too late: we all bowed the knee before God, and found much liberty in prayer.’
It is unknown whether Ann and Miss B efforts were successful. The biography remains silent on the matter. Ann herself died at a young age in 1819.
Reference: John Tregortha (publisher) A Short Memoir of Ann Sheldon, Burslem 1821
