Potted Histories

Tag: Hanley

  • A More Dreadful Sacrifice

    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.

  • The Ballad of Stevo and One-Armed Jack

    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 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. Staffordshire Sentinel, 22 December 1877; 19 June 1878, p. 3; 28 October 1878, p. 3. 

  • Down to the Sea in Ships

    Commander Edward John Smith in his summer uniform in later life. The grand old skipper of the White Star line had come up the hard way from ship’s boy to senior captain.

    Edward John Smith, the future captain of the ill-fated White Star liner RMS Titanic, was born at 86 Well Street, Hanley on 27 January 1850. He was the only child of pottery presser Edward Smith and Catherine, formerly Hancock nee Marsh, who had two surviving children from her previous marriage. The Smiths started out as an ordinary working-class family like most of their neighbours, but their fortunes improved somewhat when Catherine Smith opened up the family home as a small grocer’s store. As a result, young Ted Smith as he was known to family and friends, enjoyed a relatively good education at the Etruria British School. Shortly after his father’s death in 1864, he finished his schooling and for a few years worked as a steam hammer operator at the Etruria Forge. He thus seemed set for an ordinary working life in the area like his ancestors before him, but he was already feeling the pull of the sea thanks to his half-brother Joseph Hancock.

    Joseph was Catherine Smith’s eldest child, seventeen years older than Ted, who in the same year that his younger half-brother was born had gone to sea and gradually worked his way up through the merchant ranks. There had been long voyages and adventures galore, but dangers too such as in 1856, when whilst he was serving as a mate on the barque Hymen, the ship had been captured by pirates off the coast of Morocco. Joseph and his crew mates had been taken ashore and held as prisoners for nearly three weeks until the Royal Navy launched a raid on the pirate camp and freed the men. This hair-raising experience did not dent Joseph’s love of his career, though, nor hinder his rise to command his own vessel and by the time young Smith was 17 years old, Joseph was the captain of the trading ship Senator Weber. Ted was keen to follow Joseph into the service, so to prevent him from running away and serving with strangers, Joseph agreed to take Smith aboard his own vessel as ship’s boy. Ted quit his job at the forge and in February 1867 with a group of friends he travelled to Liverpool, where he was signed on as an apprentice to the shipping company of Andrew Gibson and Co.

    Joseph’s vessel, the Senator Weber was a 1,297 ton sailing ship then being loaded across the Mersey at Birkenhead’s West Float Dock and Ted was to be one of the crew of 26 men and boys. There were three ships boys, another of them, Thomas Foster, also came from Hanley, so perhaps Ted was not the only boy that Joseph had inspired.

    This first voyage was a long one to Hong Kong, a round-the-world voyage via the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. The Suez Canal would not be open for two years, so there was a long haul around Africa, past India and up through the South China Sea, braving all that nature would send their way. It, therefore, took five months to reach Hong Kong. There was a ship’s log for the voyage but there are no entries in it until the Senator Weber reached Hong Kong. Then, there are numerous entries noting desertions and bad behaviour amongst the crew. Amongst the small knot of persistent troublemakers was one named Edward Smith. This was not our Ted Smith, but an able seaman with the same name, a 20 year old man from Scarborough who annoyed Joseph so much that he eventually flogged him and then had him jailed for six weeks, by the end of which time the Senator Weber had sailed on leaving him behind.

    The ship stayed in the general region for some time, possibly transporting goods short distances to earn extra revenue prior to their departure. This final leave-taking, though, suffered a delay as on the evening of 8 September 1867, a typhoon of several hours duration struck Hong Kong and did some serious damage to many of the ships moored in the harbour. The Senator Weber was one of these, being thrown together in a jumble with several other ships and suffering considerable damage as a result. The repairs required some time to carry out. Once she was back in a reasonable state, though, the Senator Weber set off on its long journey back home.

    They did not retrace their journey out and instead followed the trades, sailing east to San Francisco, pausing only when a sickly passenger Henry K. Jones died mid-Pacific and was buried at sea. At San Francisco 14 men including Thomas Foster from Hanley deserted and had to be replaced. At this point, Ted was unofficially promoted to 3rd mate, probably to help existing 3rd mate to get the new crew in line. From San Francisco, the ship sailed south to Callao, the principal port of Peru. Then on to the nearby Chincha Isles, to fill its hold with guano which was its final cargo. The ship then made its way around Cape Horn and a couple of months later returned to Europe, docking in Antwerp where the crew went their separate ways. Joseph and Ted then returned to the Potteries for a few months. According to one childhood friend, ‘After that first voyage Ted returned home to thrill the youth of the town with his stories of having sailed to America, of his experience in California, where the ship on which he made his first voyage touched. And with his mind firmly made up to spend the rest of his days on the ocean.’

    After Christmas and New Year at home, Ted went to Cardiff in February 1869 to join the Senator Weber for a second voyage to the far side of the world, but this time to Japan, which had only opened its ports to foreigners in 1854. Ted served as 3rd mate for this voyage which was even longer, the ship being away for 19 months, which is surprising as the Suez Canal was now open and there is little indication of where the ship went. Its final destination, though, were the Lobos de Afuera islands, another group of guano islands off the coast of Peru. Guano seems to have been a real money spinner for Andrew Gibson and Co. and it is also interesting to note that the future ‘Millionaire’s Captain’ of the glamorous White Star Line began his career aboard ships transporting ossified bird dung.

    The Sailor’s Home, Liverpool.

    After this voyage, Ted Smith set out on his own as an able seaman aboard a couple of other ships, the Amoy and the Madge Wildfire, sailing to North America. By now he had started lodging at the Sailors Home in Liverpool with occasional trips home to the Potteries. He and Joseph were in Well Street for the 1871 census, but this is the last time either were listed on a local census return.

    In 1871, Ted Smith applied for his 2nd mate’s certificate of competency which he gained after sitting and passing the required exams and over the next two years he served in that capacity aboard the ships Record, Agra and N. Mosher. As a 2nd mate he still served as a seaman, but as a sort of qualified foreman he had his own cabin at the rear of the ship and was in charge of the starboard watch looking after the ropes on the starboard and rear of the ship. In 1873, he passed his exams for 1st mate giving him charge of the port watch in charge of the port ropes and the bow of the ship. As mate, he no longer worked in the rigging, he was instead the captain’s executive officer – he saw that the skipper’s orders were carried out. In this capacity he served for three voyages on the ship Arzilla, under Captain C. E. Durkee. Then in 1875, at the age of 25, Smith sat and passed his master’s certificate of competency. This enabled him to command his own ship. To commemorate his success, he was presented with a loving cup dedicated to ‘Captain E. J. Smith’, the first time he had ever been called by this title. He had to wait for a year though, before he got a ship of his own.

    A ship of his own. Smith appears in the papers as the captain of the Lizzie Fennell.

    Smith’s first command was the 1040 ton sailing ship Lizzie Fennell, which he took on a ten month trip to Callao in Peru, again returning with a cargo of guano. The voyage does not seem to have been troubled by the mass desertions suffered by the Senator Weber, though there were some deaths. An Italian crewman died off the coast of Chile and three Scandinavians all drowned off Peru in October 1876, but details of how and why they died are lacking as no ship’s log has survived.

    For the next three years, Captain Smith and the crew of the Lizzie Fennell led a seemingly blameless existence transporting cotton and other assorted goods between Britain, Canada and the United States. In later life Smith seems to have had fond memories of his time aboard the Lizzie Fennell, during which time he made a number of valued acquaintances whom he still remembered many years later. But he was not blind to the fact that there were great changes happening in the shipping world where steamers were becoming more popular and profitable, and that a whole new (and much more comfortable) career could be carved out on the big passenger liners. The transatlantic passenger steamers run out of Liverpool by the prestigious White Star line had caught his attention. On seeing the White Star ship SS Britannic in dock, Smith commented to his nephew J. W. S. Harrington, who was serving in his crew, that he would happily accept a junior position to serve on such a fine vessel. A few days later Smith managed to get a tour of the Britannic, which made his mind up for him. Quitting his job as the captain of the Lizzie Fennell, he left the employ of Andrew Gibson and Co. and applied to and joined the White Star line as a junior officer determined once more to make his way to the top.

    It would take years to achieve of course, but Smith was agreeable, highly intelligent, hard-working and blessed with the ability to succeed, and he would indeed rise to the peak of his career and make his fortune with White Star. However, it was also a fateful move that led ultimately to a cold, tragic night in April 1912 off the Grand Banks of Nova Scotia, when at the helm of the company’s new big ship he ventured into an ice field and sailed into history.

    G. J. Cooper, Titanic Captain, the Life of Edward John Smith (Stroud, 2011), pp.9-55; Allen’s Indian Mail, 4 November 1867, p.890.

    All images, author’s collection

  • Birth of a Fictional Landscape

    The statue of Arnold Bennett. Stoke-on-Trent’s most famous literary figure, situated outside the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Hanley.

    In 1898, A Man from the North, the first novel by a then unknown author named E. A. Bennett was published. It was the story of a young man who had arrived in London keen to set himself up as a writer and though readers at the time would not know it, the novel was largely autobiographical, Arnold Bennett himself had arrived in London from the Potteries and found work editing a women’s magazine and he penned the novel in hopes of breaking into the serious literary market.

    In truth the book was something of a failure, but it laid the groundwork for the stories that Bennett is still best remembered for. A Man from the North is largely set in the capital, but when the protagonist takes a journey back home for a funeral, the reader is given a brief glimpse of the curious parochial industrial landscape in ‘the north’ that the hero had escaped from. The towns he mentions are Bursley (Burslem) ‘the mother town’, Turnhill (Tunstall) ‘the northern outpost’ or ‘The bailiwick of Turnhill’ and Knype (Stoke-upon-Trent) that housed the train station and boasted the paramount local football team. Though not named as such until his next novel came out four years later, this is the first glimpse we get of ‘The Five Towns’, Bennett’s fictional version of the Potteries he had grown up in.

    That next novel was Anna of the Five Towns, published in 1902, in which the list of Bennett’s fictional pottery towns was expanded upon with the inclusion of Hanbridge (Hanley) ‘the Chicago of the Five Towns’ as Bennett described the commercial centre in one of his short stories, and Longshaw (Longton) the grittiest and most industrialised of the towns. Missing from this list, of course is Fenton ‘the town Arnold Bennett forgot’. In fact he did not forget Fenton, he simply felt that euphonically ‘The Five Towns’ sounded better than ‘The Six Towns’ and he adapted his topography accordingly.

    As the list of novels and short stories Bennett had published grew, so too did the make-believe landscape they were set in. There were some smaller Five Towns settlements like Bleakridge (Cobridge), Shawport (Longport), Hillport (Porthill) or Sneyd (Trentham), while beyond the borders lay Oldcastle (Newcastle) and Axe (Leek). Looking inward, Burslem saw many of its streets and buildings renamed or repurposed in Bennett’s fictional Bursley. Here Swan Bank became Duck Bank, Waterloo Road became Trafalgar Road, Nile Street was changed to Aboukir Street, The Leopard Inn became The Tiger and the George Hotel was renamed The Dragon. These were just some some of the numerous thoroughfares and locations frequented by the likes of Edwin Clayhanger and Hilda Lessways, Anna Tellwright and Willie Price, Simon Fuge, Denry Machin, the Countess of Chell, Constance and Sophia Baines and a host of other local fictional characters.

    Three of the plaques on The Bursley Trail

    In honour of the fictional landscape Bennett created, a number of buildings and sites around Burslem and elsewhere now form part of ‘The Bursley Trail’ and carry blue plaques presented by the Arnold Bennett Society, which identify their literary counterparts.

    Reference: See the novels of Arnold Bennett, notably A Man from the North, Anna of the Five Towns, The Old Wives Tale, the Clayhanger Trilogy, The Card, and the short story collections Tales of the Five Towns, Grim Smile of the Five Towns, The Matador of the Five Towns.

  • For Better… and Much Worse

    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.

  • A Potteries Teddy Boy, part 3

    Despite all the dancing there was still plenty of time for drinking.

    ‘We’d dance all night. That was the one thing we wanted do, nothing else, just dancing, dancing to rock music, continually. I used to go out dancing five nights a week. I often wonder how I ever made it to the pit the next day because we didn’t just go out for two or three hours at a time, we went out for six or seven hours.  It’s a wonder I wasn’t worn out by the time I was twenty. I’ve got in the house when Minnie was in, taken my big duffle coat and jacket off and my shirt was stuck to me, wringing wet. She’d say to me “You’ll finish up with bloody pneumonia.”

    When you wanted to go dancing in Stoke, you’d either go up the Ideal Skating Rink, or to the TA places, like the one at the top of Bucknall Road. But after a while we started clubs of our own, one at Meakin’s club near Meakin’s pot bank and we started another for rock and roll dancers at the Northwood Mission. It was there I taught Minnie’s eldest Marie how to rock and roll and she used to go up the Northwood Mission with me on a Tuesday night. 

    There were bigger halls of course, but they wouldn’t let us in. You couldn’t get into Kings Hall if you were wearing a Teddy Boy suit in the early 1950’s, they’d kick you out. They probably thought we were going smash the place up. Aye, well, some of them did! There were plenty of fights. Every time you went anywhere there was nearly always a punch up. It was like it is now, no different – boozing and fighting. No different at all. The only thing that wasn’t around then much was drugs. You could get marijuana – a couple of sailors, blokes doing their National Service used to sell it at the Ideal – but at five bob a time it was too much. It was expensive five shilling was! A pint of mild was seven pence and the bitter was nine pence a pint. So reckon that up. You could have nearly six pints for five shilling. I mean, it used to be a shilling to go in the dance hall.

    In the Ideal they didn’t sell alcoholic drinks, you could only have orange squash, tea or coffee. If you wanted a drink you used to have to go out and when you went out they stamped your hand so you could get back in again. You could guarantee that everyone would rush in quick, get a seat in there, or sit around the side, because you danced on the skating rink. All as they did was throw chalk down to make it less slippery, because they had ballroom dancing and then jiving in between that. They played a bit of ballroom, a bit of jiving. We all used to go in and get a seat, but you could guarantee at half past nine that half of them would be across the Sea Lion, or the Golden Lion further down.

    Well at that time when I was seventeen I only had to have three pints and I was drunk! But some were worse. One of my mates, Tony Smith, he was terrible at getting us in fights when he’d been drinking. Terrible, he was. We got that fed up with him that we used to tell the blokes he was falling out with “Give him a bloody good hiding, it’ll serve him right. He only does it for try and drag us in for pull him out again.” One bloke did give him a good slapping one night. We said to Tony afterwards “That serves you bloody right. It’ll teach you a lesson that will.” Mind you, they could have hurt him bad because there was a gang of them that night, but they let this one lad slap him around, he didn’t hurt him all that much anyway.

    Then on another occasion, about six of us were sitting down at the side in the Ideal and Tony says “That bloody lad over there keeps bumping into me when I’m dancing.” We said, “Well what’s up with that?” He says, “He won’t do it again.” Next minute he runs on the floor, jumps on this bloke’s back and starts pulling him over. He’d been drinking and being the size he was he only had to have a pint and he was drunk. Of course, this bloke’s mates all started kicking and hitting Tony so we all joined in. They finished up chucking us out and it took us three weeks to get back in again. We had to go up and apologise to them.

    With the boys in Blackpool.

    I remember one big punch up in a dance hall at Blackpool when I was about eighteen or nineteen. It was absolutely packed in there. They’d got these three rock bands on and it was just solid rock and roll. There was a big gang of us and we were dancing with these girls from different parts of the country when the fight started. The next thing I knew a fist had hit the side of my face. Then somebody hit me with something. Then I was hitting somebody else. The next minute I said to Harold and John Hale and one or two others, “Come on! Out of here!” We dashed through the door and ran on up the stairs to the balcony, then we were looking over the top watching them fight. Then all these security blokes in uniforms came in. They just grabbed anyone who was fighting and must have thrown about a hundred and fifty of them out. We got well out of that, but my ear hurt the next day where somebody had punched me!

    I’ve been in fights when they’ve been whirling bike chains, once at Blackpool and once down Stoke when one of us got stabbed. It was that quick. I remember leaning over him with a jumper, holding it on the wound until the ambulance came. The blood seemed to be everywhere! But I suppose it seemed a lot because he was wearing a white shirt. I think he must have been stabbed with a penknife myself. He was all right, though, it wasn’t all that deep. He was out next day walking around. I saw him in the pub. I said, “Art owrate? I thought thay’d have been in hospital for a month!”  He says, “Nah, they give me a couple of pints of blood and stitched me up.” I said, “Let’s have a look.” – three stitches. The best part of it, him that got stabbed, he’d only been with us about three or four times. He was no trouble at all, he wasn’t aggressive or anything. It wasn’t his fault, it was just that the fight started and he was the one that was in the road and got stabbed. And those that started it had all run. Of course the cops came and they were asking us all these questions, who was it, what’s their names – and how the bloody hell did we know? We didn’t know them. We just got into a fight with them in a dance hall which finished up outside.

    I saw a lot of rockers and bands in the 50s and early 60s. Roy Wood of Wizard, I saw him when he was nobody, when he first started out. Joe Brown and the Brothers too and Tommy Steele. One time, I think it was with Ted Heath and his orchestra, Cliff Richard and the Shadows were there and me and Tony Hughes were talking to Cliff outside. He’d got a pink jacket on, a black shirt and a pink tie. We’d come out, we’d seen the show, come round the side, round where that little car park is – the stage door used to be there. Anyway, he was there with two of the Shadows – I think it was that Bruce Welch who used to play with them and somebody else. But they went in and we were talking to Cliff – I can’t remember what we said to him. I know Tony Hughes had his autograph, but we were talking to him for about five minutes and then he says, “I’ll have to go, because we’ve got another show.” And he went in. He was standing outside, he wasn’t smoking but the other two were. And then the Americans started coming to the Theatre Royal, but I can’t remember them all. And then what happened in 1965, when Rock and Roll was still going – even though the Teddy Boy era had finished – and it was bigger than ever? He came here, Chuck Berry, the greatest.

    The Teddy Boy era went, though. As quick as it started, it finished, it just died out almost overnight. The music was still there, rock music was as big as ever, it’s just that the people themselves changed, I don’t why. I think it was partly because the Teddy Boy suits got that expensive; the tailors they twigged on. Plus the Teddy Boys, they started getting married and what have you and a lot of them were called up for the army, because National Service was still on. So, it just died out everywhere. But, they were good exciting years and I wouldn’t have missed them for anything.’

    Reference: Interviews with William Cooper, 2007.

  • Thunderstruck

    In the late 19th century, Nelson Place, a small undistinguished back street in the Wellington estate to the east of Hanley town centre, was home to a flint mill owned by a Mr George Edwards. It was a small establishment that ground flint for the pottery industry and was just one of many similar works that were dotted around the Potteries, all part of a larger infrastructure that fed into the manufacture of ceramics. There was the mill itself and its out-buildings, plus some stables where several horses belonging to a carter named George Flower were housed at the time, Mr Flower himself living further down the street at number 40 Nelson Place. The mill’s main feature, though, was a fine chimney that had been erected half a century earlier, which in size and dimensions was said to be a copy of Pompey’s Pillar, a Roman triumphal column in Alexandria, Egypt. Whether it was a true copy of the famous column – complete with square base and Corinthian capital – or was simply an 88 feet tall tubular shaft is not made clear, but it was a notable landmark in the surrounding streets, at least that is, until the night of Wednesday 8 November 1882.

    It had rained heavily in Hanley all afternoon and into the evening, the rain driven in hard by a heavy gale that had caused serious damage elsewhere in the Potteries. In Stoke, the roof of the parish church had been partially torn up by the wind and dashed down onto the north side of the church. This in turn had knocked down some of the decorative masonry on the roof, which was smashed to pieces when it hit the floor, destroying a gravestone as it did so. In Burslem, it was the culmination of a couple of days of variable weather, a frost on Tuesday had given way to a fall of snow on Wednesday morning, then a hail storm in the early afternoon which transformed into a full-blown thunderstorm in the evening, with an incredible play of lightning in the sky.

    This seems to have been the same storm that rolled in over Hanley late on Wednesday evening. The Staffordshire Sentinel reported, ‘Such a disturbance of the elements has not been known in the town for very many years, the nearest approach to it, perhaps, being during a heavy storm which took place about forty years ago, when the Old Wind-mill was struck.’

    The lightning was unusually vivid throughout the storm, particularly one flash which occurred shortly after 10 p.m., the thunderclap that came with it being likened to a short, sharp volley of artillery. People who were out of doors, were staggered by the flash, the noise and the rush of displaced air that hit them. Sergeant Jones of the Hanley Borough police, on duty at the lower end of Charles Street, was bowled over by the shock, but not physically hurt.

    The cause was a massive lightning strike that hit the chimney of the flint mill and blew it apart. A mass of bricks fell straight down onto the nearby stables, crushing them and killing and burying two of the three unlucky horses housed there while seriously injuring the third. Debris was scattered over a wide area, the houses nearest to the mill taking the brunt of the damage with nearly every window broken, while a finger of the lightning had entered a house at the top of the street, struck a cupboard and destroyed its contents, consisting of crockery, which was scattered around the room. On other homes, chimney pots were gone, rain spouts and gutters were missing, and tiles were blown off the roofs. Indeed, scarcely a house in Nelson Place escaped damage. Telephone lines were brought down in the street and pieces of brick from the collapsed chimney were hurled great distances. Some smashed back windows in Hassall Street, while the cross was knocked off the west end of St Luke’s Church and holes were made in the roof. The lightning blast also seems to have done some damage to J. and R. Hammersley’s pot bank at the bottom of Hassall Road, but to what extent is unknown.

    Today, such an event would garner serious press attention, but for papers in the late 19th century where news tended to be presented in a digest form, the reportage was restrained to a relatively small account the day after and a repeat of the story at the weekend. As a result it is impossible to go into any more detail on what the overall effect was on the area. The destruction to the Nelson Place mill was considerable, the once admired chimney was now just a mass of broken rubble. Estimates placed the damage at about £300 (nearly £32,000 in 2026), a hefty sum for a small business to shoulder. Thankfully, no one was killed or injured save for the horses and only on that subject was there anything further in the paper. The death of the two horses and the injuries to the third had robbed George Flower of his only source of income and a couple of days after the storm, a letter written by one Edwin J. Hammersley appeared in the Sentinel, making an appeal on Mr Flower’s behalf. Describing the carter as ‘one of the most industrious and persevering working-men in the borough’ he proposed a subscription fund to help Mr Flower in his distress. Headed by the Mayor Mr John Emery, who acted as treasurer, this soon gained legs and numerous manufacturers, neighbours and most of the workforce of Hammersley’s factory chipped in. So successful was the appeal, that by 20 November an additional letter to the paper announced that so much had been collected that George Flower was now nearly fully compensated for his losses. Certainly, nine years later in the 1891 census, he was still listed as a carter at 40 Nelson Place.

    That was all that was written about the lightning strike that demolished Nelson Place’s most distinctive landmark, but what of the flint mill itself? Well, that too seems to have literally ridden out the storm, trade directories indicating that George Edwards continued to do business as a flint grinder in Nelson Place, certainly up until 1912. At some point between then and the 1940s, though, the mill ceased working and was finally demolished and the land cleared, much to the delight of the local kids, who adopted it as a playground, known simply as ‘The Mill’. One of those children was my own father, who told me many tales of life in the street, of it’s people and it’s buildings, but he seems to have been completely unaware of that dramatic night, six decades before he was born, when the sky fell in on Nelson Place.

    Reference: The Staffordshire Sentinel, Thursday, 9 November 1882, p.3; Friday, 10 November 1882, p.3; Monday, 20 November 1882, p.3.

  • England Expects

    ‘The Battle of Trafalgar’ by William Clarkson Stanfield
    Source: Wikimedia Commons

    On 21 October 1805, a British fleet of 27 ships commanded by Admiral Horatio Nelson caught up with and attacked a combined Franco-Spanish fleet of 33 ships as they made their way towards the Mediterranean. The fleets met off Cape Trafalgar between Cadiz and the Strait of Gibraltar where the British attacked (albeit at a snail’s pace due to lack of wind) in two divisions striking at right angles into the enemy line splitting it into sections and the battle then became a series of small struggles between individual ships or groups of vessels, in which superior British gunnery and seamanship carried the day. Casualties on both sides were heavy, Nelson himself being mortally wounded by a French sharpshooter. Before he died, though, he received news that his fleet had inflicted a devastating defeat on the enemy force, capturing 20 ships, thus ending any immediate threat of a French invasion of Britain. Trafalgar was also the victory that established British naval dominance for the next century.

    Despite hailing from so landlocked a region, several men from the Potteries and neighbouring Newcastle were involved in this decisive sea battle. Two Royal Marines, Corporal William Taft, aged about 30 at the time of the battle, from Hanley Green (modern day Hanley town centre) and Private William Bagley aged 31 from Stoke, served aboard Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, which led one of the two squadrons attacking the Franco-Spanish line and was in the thick of the fighting from the beginning. Bagley got through the battle uninjured, but Corporal Taft was badly wounded in the left arm, which had to be amputated near the shoulder. After the battle and the week of storms that followed it, Taft was transferred to Gibraltar, then to a hospital ship and transported with other wounded back to Britain. He survived, but was pensioned off and his fate after that is unknown. Bagley too returned to Britain early in 1806, but on 26 January he suffered a fall at Chatham and died from his injuries. His belongings were later returned to his daughter Susannah in Hanley.

    At the head of the other British squadron was HMS Royal Sovereign, the flagship of Admiral Collingwood, aboard which was 24 year old Royal Marine Private Richard Beckett from Burslem. The Royal Sovereign had recently had her hull re-coppered and as a result of her clean hull was a faster ship than most and was the first to pierce the enemy line. For most of the battle the ship was engaged in a prolonged duel with a Spanish vessel and suffered heavy damage. Private Beckett, though was fortunate and escaped injury. Equally lucky and untouched that day was another locally born Royal Marine, 29 year old Private Joseph Sergeant from Clayton aboard HMS Prince, which joined the battle late and saw little action.

    Only two local men that we know of, served as sailors in the British fleet that day and both survived the battle unhurt. John Bitts, a 24 year old landsman from Stoke was aboard the frigate Naiad which took no part in the fighting between the bigger ships, but joined in with the mopping up after the battle, while 28 year old ordinary seaman John Williams also from Stoke was part of the carpenter’s crew on board HMS Leviathan, which was one of the ships of the squadron that followed the Victory into the enemy line and captured a Spanish ship.

    Unlike the soldiers who later fought at Waterloo, no special medal was issued for the men of Trafalgar, but all were entitled to a share of the prize money from the captured enemy vessels, plus a special Parliamentary award. In the event some, for whatever reason, did not bother to claim their shares and the monies were donated to the sailor’s hospital at Greenwich. Corporal Taft, the man in most need of the cash, though, did take his share. His prize money came to £1 17s 8d, plus the Parliamentary award of £4 12s 6d, and presumably because of his life-changing injury, Taft also received £40 from the Lloyds Patriotic Fund.

    Reference: The National Archives, ADM 44 Dead Seamen’s Effects; ADM 73 Rough Entry Book of Pensioners; ADM 82 Chatham Chest: ADM 102.

  • Reg Mitchell Takes the Proverbial

    Colin Melbourne’s statue of R. J. Mitchell
    outside the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery,
    Hanley.

    In 1911, long before he went on to design his world-beating racing planes and later the Supermarine Spitfire, 16 year old Reginald Joseph Mitchell, served a local apprenticeship. Originally from Butt Lane near Kidsgrove, but raised in Normacot, Reg was enrolled as a lowly apprentice engineer at Messrs Kerr, Stuart and Co, locomotive engineers in Fenton. Before moving on to the drawing office where he would make his name, he like the other apprentices had to spend time in the workshops getting his hands dirty working on the firm’s machines. Reg’s pragmatic father Herbert saw this as a sensible grounding for his ambitious son, but young Mitchell loathed this introduction to his profession, hating the grime-caked overalls he had to wear and the monotony of the work that kept him from what he really wanted to do. He was also less than enamoured with the workshop foreman.

    One of the first jobs that Reg had when he started at Kerr, Stuart was the traditional one of tea boy, brewing up for the other apprentices and the foreman, the latter, though regularly complained that Mitchell’s tea tasted like piss. Tired of his grumbling, Reg decided that if that was what he thought, then that was what he would get. The next morning Reg arrived at work and as normal took the kettle to the wash room, but instead of filling it with water he urinated into it, then boiled the kettle and made tea. Warning his fellow apprentices not to drink, Reg served the foreman as usual. The man took a sip, then a larger gulp and said, “Bloody good cup of tea, Mitchell, why can’t you make it like this every day?” 

    Reference: Gordon Mitchell, R.J. Mitchell, from Schooldays to Spitfire, pp. 21- 25

  • A Potteries Teddy Boy, part 2

    ‘The first time we went to Manchester was after we’d talked with a bloke named Danny. I remember him saying he’d been in Manchester on a Saturday night with a couple of mates of his and they’d visited some rock and roll clubs there. Because there wasn’t all that much of it going  on around in Stoke at that time, we started going to Manchester on the train. It used to be 3s 6d return, and the trains used to run every half hour so you could catch one back early in the morning from Manchester to Stoke. We would catch the train at six o’clock on a Saturday night, arriving in Manchester three quarters of an hour later and would go the clubs until one or two o’clock in the morning. Then on the Sunday morning we would catch the mail trains back, that were coming down to deliver the papers from Manchester to Stoke and Birmingham. We went there plenty of times visiting all the different clubs in Moss Side in Manchester.

    The Teddy Boy was also a miner. L to R: Stuart Colclough, Bill Cooper and Derek Ford at Hanley Deep Pit.

    There were a  few times when we didn’t take the train and instead had a lift up there in a car. I worked at Hanley Deep pit at the time and I knew this big, tall black guy named Jim Brown who had come down from Manchester to work in the pits here as he couldn’t get any well paid jobs where he came from. He’d got an old Standard Vanguard car – he was the only bloke I knew that had got a car – and he asked us if we wanted to go with him to Manchester for a weekend. We said “Well, it’s going cost us a bit.” – “Ooh no, you can stay with my family.” he said.

    Anyway, he took us, five of us, in his Standard Vanguard, from the pit on a Friday night when we’d finished, straight to Manchester. When we got there we found that his family had a three storey house, a big old Victorian place with a stack of bedrooms! It was like being in one of the boarding houses at Blackpool. His parents were nice people and his mother especially was a right jovial woman! Jim had about five or six brothers and sisters and they all lived at home. I said, “Where are we going stay?” His mother said,” Well, there’s a lot of us here. Just grab somewhere to sleep. There are plenty of rooms. If you go in somebody’s bed you’re all right, they’ll go in another one.”

    We went out that first night, but we were all tired because we’d been at work, so we only stayed out until about two o’clock. But on the Saturday night Jim took us to a party in Moss Side,  where all the warehouses were. Going down some steps he opened an ordinary looking door and we went into a huge cellar. There were old settees scattered all around the place and tables too, a band was playing and there were records in between! It was packed, mostly with black people, but there were quite a few white folk there as well. But, bloody hell, it was five o’clock in the morning when we finally came out, from about seven at night! And talk about drunk! Well, they were selling beer out of wooden barrels on trestles and you’d just helped yourself. You just gave them the money and filled your pint; or you could have bottled beer or whisky, or whatever you fancied. It was licensed, the blacks ran their own club. We went again on the Sunday night and then went to come home the next morning, because we had to go work on Monday night. 

    We went to that place two or three times and Jim’s mother used to feed us up like mad. She had a large room and she’d had two big tables put in it, with chairs all around and then a kitchen with a serving hatch she’d had knocked in. She said, “I was fed up of carrying the stuff in, so I’ve had this knocked in so I could just pass it through to them.” 

    They’d got a big range to cook all the stuff on and two of the grown up girls used to help her. They used to have a stack of food, a quantity of food I’ve never had since. I remember going in once and she said “We’re having chicken.” She got these big bowls out and they were full of chicken legs piled high, all cooked, it was steaming hot and you just helped yourself! 

    They seemed to have plenty of money but, there were a lot of them and most of them worked. I’m not sure, but I think I remember something about a shop they’d got. Well in that area there were a lot of big shops down the main street and I think one of them was theirs. The mother didn’t work, I think it was the old man and two or three of the lads that run the shop. But, she used to come with us when we went out at night time, either that or she and the father used to come along later. She would dance as well, she wasn’t all that old, I should say she was in her late forties, but she seemed old to me because I was only sixteen or seventeen.

    Reference: Interviews with William Cooper, 2007.