From the 16^th to the 18^th centuries, three Kingswinford families appear regularly in the historical records – the Corbyns, the Bendys and the Hodgetts. As often as not the Corbyns were represented by a Thomas, whilst without exception the Bendys were Williams and the Hodgetts were named John.  In this series of three posts, based on the material in Kingswinford Manor and Parish (KMAP), I will set out what we know about these families and their interactions. This first post looks at the Corbyns of Corbyn’s Hall. Parts 2 and 3 can be found here and here.

The Corbyn family tree shown above is a long one, and the direct succession can be traced back, with some confidence, to the 12^th century. The name of Corbyn is French and in the earliest days was written as Corbin or de Corbin.  The earliest family members in the tree seem, from various deeds and other documents, to have been based around Kingswinford and Sedgley. They mostly married within the local community of gentry / minor aristocracy – for example Thomas (1260 -) married Felicia de Lulley – the daughter of John Lulley from the manor of the same name near Halesowen.  Perhaps the most significant marriage in the early period was the marriage of William (1332-1360) to Felicia de Sutton – the kinswomen (and probably daughter) of John de Sutton II, the first Baron Sutton of Dudley and the Lord of a number of manors in the area, including Kingswinford, and possibly William’s feudal Lord. It seems possible that at that stage the Corbyns settled in what was to become the Corbyn’s Hall estate in Kingswinford, perhaps given as Felicia’s dowry to cement John de Sutton’s position in the newly acquired manor. Certainly there is a record that John de Sutton granted to William a moor at Kingswinford known as the “Byrchen” and a parcel of land between the New Park in Pensnett (now the Old Park!) and the road leading to Kingswinford. The early extent of the estate is not known, and the first estate maps do not appear until after the estate has been sold in the early 1700s. At that time however it encompassed a large swathe of land bounded by the Dudley-Kingswinford turnpike road, Commonside and Tiled House Lane, stretching as far west as the Standhills area (see the map below – from the 1822 Fowler map of Kingswinford). In the thirteenth and fourteenth century however the land under cultivation in Kingswinford manor was only a small proportion of the whole, lying in the vicinity of Kingswinford village and the Wolverhampton to Stourbridge road, with the rest being part of Pensnett chase. The Corbyn’s Hall estate seems to have been effectively an early enclosure of part of the Chase.

For a hundred years after William’s marriage, the family are referred to as being from Kingswinford or Corbyn’s Hall, with further marriages between the Corbyn male heirs and the daughters of local gentry. For example, Thomas Corbyn (1425-1510) married Joan, the heir of Holbach – the Holbeach House estate at the northern side of the manor. In the time of Nicholas (around 1500) the situation changed somewhat. By his marriage to Joan Sturmey he inherited the estate of Hall End in Polesworth in Warwickshire, although this became a matter of a lawsuit with one Robert Carlile, the cousin of Joan, which was finally settled in favour of the Corbyns in 1506. After that, the Corbyn family is usually referred to as being from Hall End, although continue in Kingswinford (for example, Jane in 1632) and there are monuments in the church to George (1543 – 1636) and Thomas (1594-1637). George Corbyn (1543-1636) seems to have been the first to use the coat of arms with the three ravens of the Corbyns on his memorial in Kingswinford church.

The Hall was perhaps let out to others. In 1597 there is a record of one Walter James, Gent., of Corbyn’s Hall, and later Lieutenant H. Baggeley of the Royalist forces in the Civil War, who fought at the battle of Naseby in 1645, is referred to as being from Corbyn’s Hall.

During the Civil War, it is likely that the Corbyn family were Royalists. The mid-17^th century must thus have been difficult for them and they seem to have moved into a number of trades and professions. Records show that, in 1650, George Corbyn (1632- 1720) was a salter in London and was later to become a merchant in the East Indies. His brother Henry (1629-1675) was also in London, working as a draper, and, in 1655, he emigrated to Virginia and became owner of a number of slave plantations.  The oldest member of that generation, Thomas (1624-1688), continued to live at Hall End in Polesworth, although he is still recorded as being active at Corbyn’s Hall. In 1650 he was involved in a legal dispute concerning the building of a wall at Corbyn’s Hall that was said to encroach on the land of others. He and his wife Margaret had a number of children, but only one, a daughter Margaret, survived. She married well, to William Lygon of Madresfield in Worcestershire, and the Corbyn estates eventually passed to the Lygons. Both Thomas and his wife died at Madresfield rather than at Hall End. Margaret was to be the great grandmother of William 1^st Earl of Beauchamp.  Around that time Corbyn’s Hall was sold to John Hodgetts, who we will hear more about in the following posts, and the Corbyns play no further role in the history of Kingswinford Manor.

Introduction

The 19th century was of course the great era for the development of mass participation sports in England. At the start of the century the laws of cricket, the major summer sport, had been codified by the M.C.C. and the game developed over our period from one based on clubs and informal societies, playing “friendly” if competitive games, to one based on counties, with the highly competitive County Championship being finally established in 1890. Locally in 1889 the Birmingham and District Cricket League, the oldest in the world, was formed, consisting of seven teams from Birmingham and the Black Country.  The major winter sports were of course all variations of football, and the century saw the codification of the rules of association football, rugby union and rugby league. Again most of the games were “friendlies” but competition came through a number of cup competitions – the FA cup from 1871 and locally the Birmingham Senior cup from 1876, and later through leagues – the Football league itself from 1888 and the local Birmingham and District league from a year later.

Cricket in Pensnett

The information on what sports were played in Pensnett in the latter half of the nineteenth century is limited, but a little can be gleaned from local newspapers. It seems that there was a cricket team from the 1850s onwards, and several football teams from the 1880s. A cricket match between Pensnett Victoria and Kingswinford is recorded from 1859, with a win for the former.  The scorecard is given below. Note that this is a one-day game yet featured two innings from each side – the pitches were of course not prepared, and the batsman’s task was more than a little difficult.

Over the course of the following decades, further matches are recorded against a range of local sides- for example Wednesbury, Brierley Hill Amateurs, West Bromwich Peep O’Day, Netherton, Droitwich, Bridgnorth and Oldbury.  The press mentions of the club cease after a notice of a General Meeting was published in March 1875 – either because the club ceased to function or because it simply stopped sending match reports to the newspapers. Reports resume about 15 years later with a small number of matches reported between1889 and 1894. Victoria was not the only Pensnett team however. A Pensnett Albion team was reported in 1864, and for a brief period in the early 1880s there also seems to have been a Pensnett Vicarage cricket team, which played three matches in 1881 winning the first but losing the last two by large margins. Also, in 1887 a match between Pensnett Oak Farm and Smethwick Eagle Works is recorded. Most of these were again two innings matches, with scores being typically low at around 30 or 40 per innings.

An interesting variant was the “single wicket match” and a report on such a match (between Pensnett Victoria and Brierly Hill Amateur) is given below. It is not clear what the rules were for this game, but clearly it involved two players a side which batted sequentially. Cricket, Jim, but not as we know it.

Pensnett Football Teams

A Pensnett football team existed from the early 1880s and fielded both first and second teams, playing at a ground near Lenches Bridge. The first recorded match was in 1881 against Brierley Hill. Numerous further matches are recorded between 1882 and 1885 including some with the major teams in the area – for example with Stourbridge Standard first and second teams (the forerunner of the current Stoubridge club), Dudley, and West Bromwich Albion second team, as well as against more local teams such as Brockmoor Harriers and Lower Gornal Excelsior. As far as it is possible to tell most of these matches in the early days were ”friendlies”. The only competitive match that was recorded was in 1883, where Pensnett beat St John’s Swifts of Birmingham 6-1 in a “cup tie”, but the nature of the competition is not clear.

After 1885 the situation becomes somewhat confused with a paucity of press reports, and the ones that do appear refer to different teams – Pensnett Rovers, Pensnett Junior, Pensnett Villa and Commonside Unity. A Pensnett Victoria team appears in 1889, at the same time as the reappearance of the cricket club. A court case of 1892 over payment for a field at Lenches Bridge on which to play both football and cricket, refers to the Pensnett Victoria Football and Cricket Club – possibly a refoundation of the former club (BNA 1892). Again, most of the football matches that were played in the later period were friendlies, but more competitive games also took place. In 1889 the local newspapers give quite full details of the Pensnett Charity cup – a knockout competition for around twenty local teams, including Pensnett Juniors, Brockmoor Harriers, Kingswinford White Star and Kingswinford Rovers.

The situation changed however in1899 with the formation of the Brierley Hill and District Football League, in which Pensnett Victoria played. A late season league table is shown below. This really marked the end of the era of friendlies, and from this point on the structure of the game became league based, and much more familiar to modern eyes.

It was mentioned above that the Pensnett football ground was at Lenches bridge in both the early 1880s and early 1890s,  possibly on the Kingswinford side of the bridge, just outside the parish where the land was available and flat enough to accommodate a suitable pitch – see the extract from the 1882 OS map below with possible sites marked. Clearly in the early 1890s, the cricket ground was there as well, and that may well also have been its location in the 1860s and 1870s.

The players

From the match reports in the newspapers, it is possible to identify the names of some of those who played for the cricket and football teams. In principle it is then possible, through the use of census information, to find out a little more about these individuals. I say “in principle” because it is not always easy. Often only surnames or initials are published and these can’t be unambiguously identified with specific individuals. That being said, it has been possible to identify with some certainty seventeen individuals who played for the cricket team between 1859 and 1872, and seven of those who played for the football team between 1882 and 1883. In terms of their profession, both sets of players reflect the make up of the area at the time, with a mix of skilled and unskilled industrial workers, and a few from other trades. For example, the seventeen cricket players included labourers, miners, boiler and chain makers, engineers and shopkeepers and the same mix can be seen in the football players.  The three cricketers from the 1859 scorecard who can be identified are the opener batsman, Joseph Bache (27) who was a chemist and druggist on High St, John Caswell (18) who was an engine fitter from Chapel St., and William Caswell (19) who was a chain maker from Tansey Green. The two Pensnett players who took part in the double wicket match in 1867 described above were William Yates (23) an Ironworks labourer from John St in Brierley Hill, and Thomas Baker (37) a coal miner from Chapel St. The other point that emerges from these considerations is that by no means all the players came from the parish of Pensnett itself. Of the seventeen cricketers identified, seven came from neighbouring parishes (Kingswinford, Brierley Hill and Brockmoor) and of the football players, only one came from Pensnett (the captain, Albert Colley (25), a timber merchant from Bradley Street) with the rest again coming from neighbouring parishes.

Footnote

Finally, two other points are worthy of note before we end. Firstly, whilst the football played by the various teams in Pensnett was at what might be called junior level, the senior level of the game was played just outside the parish. Brierley Hill Alliance was formed in 1887 from a merger of Brockmoor Harriers and Brockmoor Pickwick and, before they moved to their Cottage Street Ground in Brierley Hill in 1888, played on the Labour in Vain ground in Brockmoor, a few hundred yards out of Pensnett parish. They went on to join the Birmingham League in 1890 and remained there, with some success, up to their eventual demise in 1981. Secondly, the name of Pensnett Victoria is not confined to the football and cricket teams. In 1880 a few matches played by a Pensnett Victoria Quoits team are reported. However, most newspaper mentions of the name refer to performances of the Pensnett Victoria Saxhorn band. If the reader, like me, doesn’t know what a Saxhorn is, then Wikipedia has the answer.

The 1840 Fowler Map

In Kingswinford Manor and Parish (KMAP) I have written extensively about the two Fowler Maps of 1822 and 1840 – two large scale maps of the parish that were produced for the landowners  by W. Fowler and Co. and which, together with their Books of Reference that give names of owners and occupiers, give a detailed picture of the life of the parish at that time. When the Staffordshire Tithe Maps were published on line by Staffordshire Fast Track, and described in outline in another blog post, it came as a considerable surprise to me to find that the Kingswinford Tithe Map was actually a version of the 1840 Fowler map, with some added information on tithe rental values and ownership. In this post, I will belatedly (and to my shame as I should have known about this much earlier) consider this new material in the light of the discussion in KMAP, to see what new insights it brings.

Tithes before 1840

The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 replaced the old tithe system in which a tenth of the produce of the land was given to the church either in kind, or through a cash allocation, with a rental system where a tithe rental charge was allocated for each portion of land. In preparation for the Act, in 1832 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners wrote to the incumbent of every parish in the country asking for details of their income from tithes and other sources. The returns for Kingswinford parish are shown in table 1.

Table 1 Church income 1832

The chapel of St Michael at Brierley Hill had been opened in the 1760s and was staffed by a Perpetual Curate. The new parish church was Holy Trinity at Wordsley, which was built in 1831, when the old parish church of St Mary in Kingswinford village was felt to be too small for the growing population, and was also suffering damage to its fabric due to mining subsidence. The Rector was based at the former whilst the latter was staffed by a Perpetual Curate. It can be seen that the income has three components – tithes and easter offerings, rental from Glebe land (land set aside for the use of the clergy) and other sources. The Perpetual Curates relied on the latter, with the tithe and glebe income going to the Rector. The overall figure for the Rector of £1130 would have made the parish one of the most lucrative in the county (see E Evans 1970, “A History of the tithe system in England 1690-1859 with special reference to Staffordshire”, PhD thesis, Warwick University), and was much sought after by clergy in the eighteenth and nineteenth who often did not take up residence and left all their duties to paid curates, but took most of the income for themselves.

Before the passing of the Act, the collection of tithes would have been an arduous affair, and would usually have been carried out by a paid tithe collector, who would travel around the parish at harvest time to take their due from the landowner, and would also assess and collect a tenth of the other produce of the land – in terms of cattle, sheep, wool etc.. In Kingswinford there were more than a hundred tithe payers, and over two thousand distinct plots of land and tithe collection was obviously a complex affair. In addition, there were a range of extra customary dues that had to be collected, known as moduses. For example, for Kingswinford parish these included a modus of two pence / per acre on all meadow and pasture land; one penny and a halfpenny for a cow and a calf; one penny for a garden; and four pence for a colt. Not all land was treated in the same way – for example the lands enclosed by the Ashwood Hey Enclosure in 1776 were only liable for the tithes of “wool and lamb”. When the difficulties of collecting all that was due are considered, it can be seen that the move to a tithe rental was a major simplification and seems to have been broadly welcomed in the parish.

The Rector and landowners of the parish were keen to move to a new system, and soon after the Act became law they moved quickly to reach a voluntary agreement on tithe rental by June 1838. In many other parishes in the county and elsewhere agreement on tithe rentals could not be reached voluntarily and tithe commissioners imposed a valuation. The results of the agreement are contained within the Tithe Allocation agreement and the associated map. 

The Tithe Allocation agreement

The total area of the parish of Kingswinford was 7319 acres. Of this, 6032 acres (82.5%) was allocated a tithe rental.  The only recipient of tithe rentals was the Rector of the parish, George Saxby Penfold, which was one reason why reaching agreement was straightforward. The total rental allocation was £813. Of those lands that were assessed for no payment, 174 acres was Glebe (i.e. allocated to the Rector, who was not expected to pay the tithe rental to himself, and usually rented to others for farming) and 178 acres was the Corbyn’s Hall estate which was tithe free (see below). The rest of the untithed land was composed of many very small plots of land which presumably had their allocation rolled into nearby tithed land, so as to simplify the allocation and collection procedure. (Note that these figures are taken from summing those that have been transcribed from the Fowler Reference and the Tithe Agreement, and do not quite match the equivalent figures in the tithe agreement, due to  differences in the allocation of plots to different categories. The differences are however small and of no real consequence.)

The fact that Corbyn’s Hall was specified as tithe free is of interest. It is not clear why this is the case but was presumably the result of how the estate was originally established. In KMAP I speculated that the Corbyn’s Hall, Tiled House and Bromley Hall estates were originally one land unit. The fact that the latter two were allocated tithe rentals in the normal way suggests that this might not have been the case. At the time of the tithe allocation map, the extent of the Corbyn’s Hall estate was very similar to that shown on a  1703 map of the estate shown in outline in figure 1 below (again from KMAP), and included the region around Corbyn’s Hall and Shut End, some land in the Tansey green region and a block of land around Standhills.

Figure 1 1703 map of Corbyn’s Hall estate

The way in which tithe rentals were allocated to individual portions of land is not wholly clear from the tithe agreement. The land in the parish seems to have been allocated to a small number of land use categories – arable, meadow and pasture; woodland; and a further miscellaneous category combining mines, road and houses etc. The calculation given in the tithe agreement gives 3486 acres of arable land; 1532 acres of meadow or pasture; 154 acres of woodland; and 1655 acres in the miscellaneous category. A rental / charge per acre was applied to each category other than the miscellaneous for which no charge was allocated. For the arable land this was based on a weighted average of the cost of wheat, barley and oats over the previous few years.  

If the tithe rentals for plots of land greater than one acre in size are plotted against the allocated rental (figure 2) it is clear that there were two basic rental allocations – one at around 5s per acre (the green line) and one at around 1s per acre (the red line). In general arable land and high status houses and ground cluster around the green line, and pasture and woodland around the red line. There is considerable scatter about these lines however, which no doubt reflects the specific circumstances of each plot of land and lengthy debates between the landowner and the Rector.  In the area that was enclosed by the Ashwood Hay act, the arable land is also clustered around the lower red line, no doubt reflecting the lower tithes that were prescribed by the act (see above). Most of the land in the miscellaneous category was not allocated a tithe rental.

Figure 2 Tithe Allocation

Table 2. Tithe payers and landowners

In total there were one hundred and twenty six tithe payers, although this involved some duplication due to some individuals being involved in partnerships that were assessed for tithes. Of these one hundred payed less than £5 and sixty six payed less than £1. The fourteen who payed more than £10 are shown in table 2. The cumulative tithe column in the table shows that three quarters of the tithe rental was paid by just thirteen individuals or organisations. The percentage of the tithe that each payed is also given, as is the percentage of the land that they owned (from KMAP, chapter 4). As is to be expected, the figures in these columns correlate quite well, with the percentage of tithe rental being in general greater than the percentage of land, due to the significant proportion of untithed land.

The other major landowners given in KMAP are the Glebe lands, the lands of John and Benjamin Gibbons,, and the Stourbridge Canal Company.  As noted above, the Glebe lands were tithe free and provided the Rector with an income as they were rented out for farming. The Gibbons main holdings were on the tithe-free Corbyn’s Hall estate. It would also seem that when the Stourbridge Canal Company was formed it purchased land without the tithe obligations, and the land it gained in the Fens area from the enclosure of Pensnett Chase was also tithe free.

In a recent post, I contributed to the debate on to what extent the early railways in Great Britain and Ireland were capitalized by slave-compensation funds to former slave owners. In doing so I used data from the UCL website Legacies of British Slavery. As I write, that debate rumbles on, but in this post I move away from it somewhat, to use the UCL to determine the impact of slavery on the industries in the area and period in which I am most interested – the western Black Country parish of Kingswinford in the 19^thcentury.  The discussion will thus be somewhat wider than the railway industry and will also embrace the iron and mining sectors. It will be seen that the evidence for the impact of slavery finance in this area is more than a little ambiguous, but the UCL does nonetheless add to the general body of knowledge of industrial developments in the region, and the relationships between individuals.

There are three potential links with slavery within the parish of Kingswinford in the 18^thand  19^thcentury – through the Corbyn family, formerly of Corbyn’s Hall; through the Lords of the Manor – the Barons Dudley and Ward; and through the Gibbons family. The former can be quickly dealt with. The last Corbyn in the parish was Thomas, who died in 1688. His heir, Margaret, married William Lygon, and moved to Madresfield in Worcestershire, and Corbyn’s Hall was sold to John Hodgetts – see Kingswinford Manor and Parish (KMAP), Chapter 3. The last generation of the Corbyn’s, other than Thomas, all seemed to have worked in various trades in London. His brother Henry (1629-1675) eventually moved to Virginia. Correspondence between Thomas and Henry reveals that the latter had become at least a part owner of one or more slave plantations – presumably either cotton or tobacco. The Corbyn’s seem to have prospered in North America and the story of their involvement with slave worked plantations could no doubt be told given sufficient research. But that is an American story of no direct relevance to Kingswinford in the Black Country in Britain, and will not be taken further here.

Now let us consider the Lords of the Manor – the Baron’s Dudley and Ward. Their descent is quite complicated, but the relevant parts are shown in figure 1 (from KMAP Chapter 3). The involvement of this family with slavery came through the marriage of John Ward, 6^thBaron Ward, 1^stViscount Dudley and Ward (1704-1774) to Mary Carver (-1782), who had inherited three plantations in Jamaica from her father John.  She left these to her son William Ward (1750-1823) and then in trust for her grandson John Ward (1781-1833), 4^thViscount Dudley and Ward, and from 1823, the 1st Earl of Dudley and Viscount Ednam. He was an MP for various constituencies from 1802 to 1823, before being made and Earl, and as a member of the House of Lords was Foreign Secretary from 1827 to 1828. He spoke against slavery, although advocating reformation rather than abolition of the system.  Nonetheless at his death he was still in possession of the three Jamaican estates. He was succeeded as Baron Ward by his cousin, Rev. William Ward (1781-1835), although his estates were held in trust for William’s son, another William. The trustees were John Benbow, a solicitor who sat as MP for Dudley from 1844 to 1855; Francis Downing, Lord Dudley’s Agent and mayor of Dudley from 1818 to 1819, Edward Littleton, Baron Hatherton and Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire; and Henry Phillpotts, the Bishop of Exeter, one of the more flamboyant 19^thcentury bishops. It was these trustees who made a claim for compensation for the three estates of Whitney (284 slaves); Rymesbury (320 slaves) and New Yarmouth (70 slaves), and whose names thus appear in the records, although they were never slave owners themselves.  They were allocated £12,728 in total. To put this in context, the income of the Dudley Estates in Staffordshire and Worcestershire was around £120,000 per year at the time, and John Ward left £350,000 in his will. The slavery-compensation was thus only a rather small part of the latter William’s overall inheritance. 

When I learned about this involvement of the Dudley’s with slavery I was in the first instance somewhat surprised. Whilst not being an expert on the Dudley’s by any means, I have read quite widely about them, and not seen any reference to this involvement. This may be that historians did not think this remarkable enough to discuss, or perhaps because of a slight embarrassment.  Certainly the Bishop of Exeter must have so felt when he realized he was responsible for slave owning plantations as a trustee. Alternatively it may be that the Dudley Estate itself thought little of it, other than as a profitable line item in their accounts. Either way it is perhaps somewhat shocking.

The other possible route of money earned through slavery into the Kingswinford area was through the Gibbons family. The family tree is complicated and is summarized in figure 2, again from KMAP. The Gibbons family were from the Ettingshall / Sedgley area and can be traced back to the 16th century. From Grace’s Guide

After the death of John Gibbons (1703-1778), responsibilities for the business he had built up in iron and coal were divided between his three sons – one son, William (1732-1807), ran the family’s merchant house at Bristol, buying pig iron for the midland forges and overseeing the export of metalwares to the American market. Another of John’s sons, Benjamin (1735-1832) , was entrusted with management of the iron business around Kingswinford. The eldest son, Thomas (1730-1813), took charge of the merchant house at Wolverhampton which was subsequently developed as a bank. 

They continued to work together however and in 1784 took out a lease of land, mines and furnaces  at the Level in Brierley Hill.  The partnership between the brothers was split up in the late eighteenth century. The Bristol house was signed over to William’s only son, William (1782–1848).  It was this latter William who appears in the UCL data as a Bristol merchant and ironmonger, the partner of Benjamin Bickley.  The partners in this firm were William Gibbons, Benjamin Bickley, John Latty Bickley (Benjamin’s son) and Michael Willcox. Bickley counterclaimed on an award in Trinidad for Paradise & Cane Farm plantations in the name of the firm and was awarded £8304. ‘Wm Gibbons’ appears under a second award as an unsuccessful counterclaimant for the Lodge estate on Trinidas, but it is possible that this is the firm not the man.  In both cases Bickley was acting as an Executor on behalf of a deceased person’s estate.

In 1814 Benjamin  (1735-1832) made over the Level furnaces and other industrial plant to his nephews – John (1777-1851), Benjamin (1783-1873) and Thomas (1787-1829) in return for an annuity and ownership of the Corbyn’s Hall  Estate. The three younger Gibbons brothers were declared bankrupt as bankers in 1816, in the slump following the Napoleonic Wars, pulling the iron business down with them. Fortunately the elder Benjamin, as a preferential creditor, was able to take control of some of the iron and coal interests and save the family firm from total ruin. The younger Gibbons brothers continued to develop the Corbyn’s Hall Collieries and Blast Furnaces, which were built by them about 1824. The activities around Corbyn’s Hall went through a number of different iterations over the next 100 years, being leased to a variety of industrialists, but with the Gibbons retaining some sort of interest. Benjamin Gibbons (1815-1863) and Benjamin  Gibbons(1852-) also developed fire clay works and coal mines close by at Dibdale. These works and their successors lasted into recent times. 

The relationship between the Gibbons and the Bickley families continued to the next generation.  In 1838 John Latty Bickley was living at Ettingshall Lodge in Sedgley (the old home of the Gibbons) and was engaged in land transfer deals with the Gibbons brothers John (1777-1851) and Benjamin (1783-1873) and mortgages of land around the Corbyn’s Hall estate.

The question then arises as to the nature of the Gibbons involvement with slave-owning individuals and businesses and whether or not there was significant flow of resource into their activities as a result. The only certainty is that William Gibbons and his partner acted as an Executor for some slave-owners in winning compensation for their estates, perhaps acting as a business rather than individuals. One might speculate that as a merchant trading in Bristol, even in the iron trading sector that wasn’t directly involved with slave-owning, some association would have been inevitable, but again that is supposition. And if there had been any profits from such associations that fed back into the Midlands iron and coal business, it is doubtful whether any traces of these would have survived the 1825 bankruptcy.

To conclude, it would seem to me that the extent of the involvement of industry in Kingswinford parish with slave-owning individuals and organisations was small, and probably had no lasting legacy in industrial terms. The Dudley estate certainly owned plantations in Trinidad together with their slave population, but one senses that this was almost by an accident of marriage rather than by design. Nonetheless this ownership was accepted and the estate no doubt profited from in a manner that was acceptable at the time, but would not be so regarded now. The Gibbons family also had minor associations with slave-owners through their Bristol firm, which illustrates just how difficult it would have been for any organization with activities there to avoid such associations. Thus the interactions of industries around Kingswinford with slavery were small. They are nonetheless worth recording and remembering as part of the history of the area. 

In recent weeks an extraordinary Twitter argument has broken out concerning how much the railway system in the UK and Ireland owes to the capital provided by the slave trade. On the one hand we have Gareth Dennis (@GarethDennis), the author of what will be referred to in what follows as the “Thread”, who argued “that a significant proportion of slave-owner compensation was reinvested into the railways; that Britain’s railways are a direct legacy of slavery and colonialism; and that this legacy is hopelessly under-explored”. On the other hand there was a strong argument from Christian Wolmar (@christianwolmar) that the Thread’s arguments were overstated and not properly evidenced. He has repeated this in a recent edition of RAILmagazine. This post is concerned with trying to establish how much slave owner compensation might have been used for capital investment in the early railway network in the Great Britain and Ireland.

The Thread uses the quite outstanding UCL web site “Legacies of British Slave-ownership” which attempts to chart where the legacies of slave ownership, and in particular the compensation paid to slave-owners following theSlave Compensation Actof 1837, was used in commercial and social ventures.  The Thread takes the data from this web site for those who had both been compensated, and who also invested in the early railway companies, and a simple addition of the sum invested by these individuals in railway companies in Great Britain and Ireland comes to £5,261,768 (a little less than in the Thread, no doubt due to a minor omission somewhere that I can’t locate, but this is of no consequence to what follows). The implication in the Thread is that this sum comes directly from slave compensation and it is argued that this forms a significant proportion of the railway capital in the early years – for example the cumulative capital by 1840 was £30 million, and thus the total invested by the slave owners was around 1/6^thof the total.  

However, all is not as simple as it looks. Firstly, an inspection of the UCL web entries indicates that a few of the identifications of slave owners with railway investors are not totally firm and that there is some doubt about them. Nonetheless these are unlikely to affect the above figure significantly, perhaps reducing it by a few tens of thousands pounds and no correction will be made. Secondly the web site lists a few payments to trustees, usually of minors. It is a moot point as to whether the future railway investment of these trustees in their own right should be included in the sum. Again, this is not a significant issue and no corrections have been made for it. 

A much bigger issue however is that, as I read it, the UCL web site shows the total investment of individuals in the railways, and that is what the figure of £5,261,768 actually refers to. Many of the slave-owners received far less in compensation than they actually invested in the railways – these figures are given on the pages for individuals in the list. So that figure for capital investment, which the Thread uses as the basis for its arguments, is a very significant overestimate of they investments that were made from slave compensation. For example, consider the three individuals who feature in the Thread. The first, John Moss invested £222,470 in railway concerns, but only received £40,353 in slave compensation; Robert Browne invested £577,260 but only received £797 in compensation; and Thomas Dunlop Douglas invested £396,100 having received £15,907 in compensation. One Robert Pulsford is included in the database as investing £291,000 in railways concerns. However his inclusion is as a result of five unsuccessful claims for compensation and he actually received no compensation at all. Similar discrepancies between total investment and compensation sums can be identified for nearly all the major investors, although the amounts invested for the smaller investors were often very similar to the amount of compensation they received. So the figure of £5,261,768 money that found its way into the railways cannot all be from compensation payments. In fact if one limits the amount of investment for each investor to the amount they received in compensation, the figure falls to £1,134,031 i.e. 21.6% of the original figure.  

But even this is without doubt an overestimate, as not all the compensation money would have been invested in the railways. It might be more realistic to say that the proportion of invested compensation should be the same as the proportion of the total investment to the overall wealth of the investor. The UCL site allows an estimate to be made of this for a subset of those named by giving their recorded wealth at death. The median of the ratio of investment to total wealth at death comes to 10% (excluding those individuals who went bankrupt or suffered major financial distress at the end of their lives). I am of course very well aware that this methodology is more than a little suspect! On this basis however the amount of slave-compensation money that was invested in the railways falls to around £110,000.

On the basis of these figures, the actual amount of compensation that became railway capital was between £0.1 million and 1 million. Whether of not this is significant in terms of the overall capital investment (£30 million by 1840) I will let the reader decide.  But it is best to use as accurate a figure as possible in coming to a view.

The Thread has done the community a service by raising the issue of slave-compensation investment on the railways, which should not be ignored, although it needs to be carefully looked at to investigate whether it was significant in comparison to other investment. In future posts, I intend to look at this issue further – both in relation to those who received large compensation sums and made large investments in the railways (not necessarily those mentioned in the Thread); but also in relation to that area of the Black Country about which I have posted regularly – the parish of Kingswinford – where traces of slave-owner investment can indeed be found if one looks carefully. 

Preamble

Elsewhere on this web site and in “Kingswinford Manor and Parish” I have written about the Pensnett or Earl of Dudley’s Railway, which developed in the mid-nineteenth century from the original Kingswinford Railway to carry coal and metal products around the Brierley Hill, Pensnett and Kingswinford area. It was centred on the Round Oak Iron Works, but extended to Ashwood in the west, Baggeridge in the north, Saltwells in the east and Cradley in the south. Along with others who have written on the subject, I have primarily concentrated on the development of the system and the industry it served. However, the railway was an integral part of the local society, and impinged on the inhabitants in ways both good and bad. In this post I want to present some information on how the wider public perceived the railway, from a keyword search of the British Newspaper Archive for the phrases “Pensnett Railway”, “Earl of Dudley’s Railway” and “Kingswinford Railway” from the opening of the Kingswinford Railway in 1827 up to 1920. The extent and quality of this information is thus wholly dependent upon what the local newspapers thought it worthwhile to report on. As is the way with press reports, the material primarily concerns accidents that often resulted in inquests presided over by a coroner, or criminal activity that found its way to the local police and magistrate’s courts. We will thus consider firstly accidents on the railway, both to its workers and to others and then move on to consider criminal cases associated with the railway, principally small scale stealing of coal, but also some more serious incidents. 

Accidents and inquests

Accidents to railway workers were by no means unusual, and occurred throughout the period being considered. One major cause of accidents involved workers being run over by the trains, either through failing to see a train approaching, or through slipping from the train itself. For example, in the County Advertiser of 15/9/1877 we read that Thomas Jones, a labourer at the Wallows, was on the railway just after a possession (a flag) had ended, and was not aware of a train of 13 trucks approaching him. 

“The buffer of one of the trucks struck him and rolled him over. The wheels of six trucks went over him and he died in about five minutes”.

And from the County Express of 21/6/1910 we read of Richard Teague, aged 60, who worked on the incline between Level St. and Saltwells.

“…. several trucks loaded with ironstone had just reached the summit, when he attempted to disconnect the rope from the first wagon. He slipped down, and in a moment his body was cut in a frightful manner by the wheels, death being instantaneous.”.

Shunting was also a hazardous occupation, and there were a number of incidents of workers being crushed between wagons. From the Staffordshire Sentinel of 15/9/1877, concerning John Small at Sandfield Bridge.

“…the trucks did not stop at the proper time and he was crushed against a wall….. in a space of eight inches and was frightfully mangled…”

From the County Express of 28/5/1910, concerning Benjamin Parker (24), a shunter at Round Oak, 

“…both his legs were caught between the wagon and locomotive, with the result that they were frightfully smashed, and a thigh and a leg bone broken…”

There were also accidents to those other than railway workers. The most common seem to have been to children (almost always boys) who tried to jump on or off a moving train for a free ride. In the County Advertiser of 30/4/1904 we read that nine-year old Samuel Oakley of Lower Church St, Pensnett attempted to mount a train on the Barrow Hill incline, but slipped and fell beneath the train

“Two of the trucks passed over him and when the train had been stopped it was found that both legs had been severed from the body and his right arm and hand were terribly crushed”

He died soon afterwards at the Guest Hospital.  In the Dudley Chronicle of 17/6/1916, we read again of children from Church St. in Pensnett – Robert Clowes (14), George Adlington (14) and Thomas Downey (12). They jumped onto a train of empties on its way to Baggeridge. After riding some distance, Downey jumped off, and turned to see Clowes and Adlington disappear through the bottom frame of the truck. Clowes was killed and Adlington seriously injured, one of his arms being badly mangled. 

Much of the railway was used as walking routes by those in the locality, and inevitably this could lead to accidents. In 1882 George Shakespeare (13) had walked along the railway with a friend, Isaac Hardwick, who was taking supper to his father at the Round Oak works. As many readers will be aware one of the idiosyncrasies of the Pensnett Railway was that it crossed the GWR main line at Round Oak on an extended flat crossing across six or more tracks.  When the two lads were using this crossing, George missed the approach of an express train from Wolverhampton, and he was “swept down by the express” ((County Express 21/1/1882). We read further

“….when the train had passed the lad was found to be quite dead, the top of his head being crushed to pieces and his brains scattered about the place”. 

If an accident resulted in a fatality, an inquest was held within days at a local public house under the jurisdiction of the coroner, with a jury drawn from the locality. For example for George Shakespeare, the inquest was held in the Commercial Inn in Bromley. The verdict for accidents of the type described above was nearly always “accidental death” with little blame being attached to employer or operator.  In the early days these seem to have been relatively informal affairs, but in the early twentieth century, there was a greater level of formality, with factory inspectors often involved, and the Earl of Dudley being represented by legal council. 

Not all accidents resulted in injury to either workers or local residents. In 1916, Charles Mace, an engine driver, was shunting trucks in a siding near Tansey Green, when a number of trucks ran into the engine and through him off. The driverless engine and its coke trucks then ran for about a mile towards the Stallings Lane crossing where it derailed  (Dudley Chronicle, 28/1/1916). The report also notes that 

“It is a curious fact that the same engine, in charge of the same driver, was overturned at the same spot sometime ago.”

Curious indeed. Finally, it is worth mentioning the accident that received the most press coverage of them all, the same text being reported in newspapers the length and breadth of the country. Naturally it involved animals rather than humans. We quote the Worcestershire Chronicle of 6/11/1867 in full.

“On Friday evening at the Earl of Dudley’s railway at the Old Park  Coliery near Dudley, a singular accident occurred. Mr Phineas Parsons, a farmer of Pensnett, has the  right to run his sheep on the pasturage near the Old Park Colliery; and on the night in question one of Mr. Parson’s men proceeded to drive a flock of 65 sheep from one portion of the land to another, and in doings o the whole flock got onto the tramway. A couple of trucks, loaded with coal had been started in charge of one of the men down the incline, and these trucks overtook the sheep in a narrow cutting, and the consequence was that 23 were killed on the spot, and six others were so mutilated as to render it necessary to slaughter them at once. “

Phineas Parsons worked Hollies Farm (1872 Post Office Directory), so it is natural he would have pasturage rights in the Old Farm area nearby. It is not however clear which incline is referred to here – the Barrow Hill incline seems too far away from Old Park to be the incline in question, so perhaps there was a smaller incline within the Old Park colliery complex itself. 

Crime and punishment

The stealing of coal was endemic in the area in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, both from pits themselves and the railway, and scores of incidents are reported in the press.  This perhaps reflects the relative poverty of the area , as well as the easy availability of coal. Those involved were of all ages, although children and young adults were in the majority, with the magistrates court imposing fines of between 5s and £1 or 7 to 14 days imprisonment. In 1916 the local Superintendent of Police complained in court that “the local people went and fetched the coal away as though they had a right to it” (Dudley Chronicle 15/1/1916). Marxist historians would no doubt agree that they did, as the land from which the coal came had been common land on Pensnett Chase until a century before, when the rights of commoners had been extinguished by the Pensnett Chase Enclosure Award, and ownership of all underground resources had been “stolen” from the locals and given explicitly to the Earl of Dudley. Whether or not one accepts this analysis, it is hard not to feel sympathy for some of those arrested for coal stealing. For example Letitia Garbett (63) of Lower High St, Pensnett  was fined £1 for stealing coal from the railway, or fourteen days imprisonment. She complained she had no money and would have to go to prison in her old age (County Express 25/11/1911). Similarly, in 1916 Oswald Smith (11), Mary Parkes (12), Albert Beddard (10) and Alice Timmins (10) all of Chapel St Pensnett were caught with small amounts of coal in their possession by the local constable, and their parents were each fined 10s, or 6 days imprisonment if they could not pay (Dudley Chronicle 22/4/1916). 

Many of those brought to court were serial offenders. For example, Edward Jones (16) from Pensnett was said at his trial in 1881 to have been convicted six times in the previous four years, and was lucky not to be sent to the Quarter Sessions. He was imprisoned for six weeks with hard labour (County Express 31/12/1881). A year later Caroline Pulley (32), who was sent to prison for two months, was said to have nine previous convictions (Birmingham Daily Post 13/6/1882). 

One particular area of activity seems to have been the Queen St / Church St / Chapel St area of Pensnett, with many defendants coming from that area.  At the same hearing where  the elderly Letitia Garbett was sentenced, Eliza Wilde of Queens Lane, Pensnett was fined 10s; Barbara Watkins of Church St was fined £1; Gertrude Barker of Church St and Mary Hunt of Lower Church St were fined 5s each. This might be simply due to press reporting giving a false impression of the prevalence of crime in the area, but it may also be due to the assiduousness of the local night watchman, Josiah Hickman. He lived at Woodside and is recorded a number of times in the press as “proving cases” against a wide variety of offenders.  As an example of his modus operandi, we have a report in the County Express of 9/4/1910 of him lying on the ground somewhere around the end of Church St., waiting for Joseph Westwood to leave his home 50 or 60 yards away. The latter picked up a large chunk of coal from a truck on the railway (weighing about half a hundredweight), before Hickman detained him by putting his stick around his neck. Westwood managed to struggle free. It would seem that Ellen Horton was also in the area and tried to warn Westwood when Hickman appeared, shouting “Hey Up, Joe”. Westwood was fined 10s and Horton 5s for aiding and abetting. 

There are also indications of more organized activity. In hearings in 1916, several dozen women were charged with coal stealing from the Wallows area, where, it was said in court, the average loss on that part of the line was 25 to 30 tons per week (Dudley Chronicle 29/1/1916). It seems that there was an elaborate system of pickets to warn of approaching constables or watchmen. If any were caught and fined, then the fines were covered by a whip-round of all those involved. It was revealed that in total there were 215 convictions for coal stealing at Brierley Hill magistrates for the year ending January 24^th1916, 57 involving children (and their 57 guardians who paid the fines), 90 involving women and 11 involving men.  For all involved at the cases being heard that day the sentences were quite severe – a 25s fine, or 21 days in jail. It was clear the magistrates were significantly swayed by the fact that most of the women were in receipt of army allowances, as their husbands were in the forces, and were thought well able to afford to buy coal.

From time to time the minor criminality associated with the railway took on a more dangerous form. Of particular concern was deliberate vandalism by youths. In 1906 Hezekiah Price and Joseph Rider (both of Lower Church St. again) were charged with moving points and putting a brick between the rail and the points in order to derail a train. Although they claimed they were only playing, the magistrate took the matter very seriously and sentenced them to six strokes of the birch each (County Advertiser 22/9/1906). In a similar manner in 1913, George Treadwell (11) and Percy Treadwell (10) of Vine St, Hart’s Hill were charged with tampering with points at Round Oak, through the insertion of a brick. This time it actually resulted in a derailment of truck, with the brakeman on the buffers of the truck being thrown off, and the tearing up of 30 yards of permanent way.  

At the other end of the railway in 1914, Albert Greenaway (10) and Joe Andrews (10) of High St., Wall Heath, were charged with releasing a truck at the top end of the Ashwood incline by tampering with its brakes (Dudley Chronicle 9/5/1914). Fortunately nobody was injured, although the seriousness of the offence was stressed. On hearing that the boys had already been whipped by their fathers for the offence (which, said the magistrate, “was the proper thing to do”), the boys were discharged and ordered to pay costs of 7s 6d each only.

Some of the components of the railway of course were worth stealing in their own right. In 1906, Josiah Hickman caught two brothers from Low Town (near Holly Hall), James and Joseph Bagley, removing “keys” from the line – wooden pegs used to attach the rail to the chair. 18 were removed in total to a value of 3s. The brothers were fined 21s each, or a month in jail. The railway also carried valuable items of course other than coal. In 1917 there was a spate of thefts from trucks on the railway, but no culprits could be found. It seems that a trap was set, and two constables kept watch under cover on some trucks laden with “sharps” near Sandfield Bridge (Dudley Chronicle 3/11/1917). They waited from 3.00 in the afternoon, till 1.00 the next morning. Whilst they were watching, at about 12.50am, they saw Harry Darrell (20) a bricklayer of Smithy Lane, and Joseph Mason (45), a stallman from somewhere in Pensnett, make two visits to the truck to remove two bags of sharps. After the second bag was removed, Darrell was seized, but Mason ran away. On following him home, they found the other bag of sharps there, along with stolen bags of flour.  Similar bags of flower were found at Darrell’s home. The constables were commended by the magistrate for their actions.  Both Darrell and Mason pleaded guilty and asked for their previous exemplary character to be taken into account. Unfortunately, and frustratingly, the quality of the copy of the report in the BNA becomes very poor at this point, so I am unable to say what the magistrate made of the plea!