all roads lead to sedgley

[blossie33]

I have Shropshire connections from my maternal grandmother, her parents came from the Church Stretton and Clun area.

 

[discokermit]

I have Shropshire connections from my maternal grandmother, her parents came from the Church Stretton and Clun area.

we could be related on my mom or dads side. or both!

pugh, pughnot, pursell, crowe, middleton , jones and taylor ive got from around clun.

 

[discokermit]

Clunton and Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun,
Are the quietest places
Under the sun

said ae houseman. they would be quiet after massive forced depopulation.

 

[discokermit]

pugh, pughnot,

to pugh, or not to pugh, that is the question, thought alice pughnot sometime in the seventeen forties in hopesay. she decided to pugh, thankfully for me, which is a mark against nominative determinism.

 

[discokermit]

so far i have uncovered 430 relatives. i thought there were a couple of brummies but it was an error and so far i am brummie free.

 

[discokermit]

Here's a few higher detail (OS 25 inch) maps:

1884: View: Staffordshire LXVII.3 (Coseley; Sedgley) - Ordnance Survey 25 inch England and Wales, 1841-1952
1901: View: Staffordshire LXVII.3 (Coseley; Sedgley) - Ordnance Survey 25 inch England and Wales, 1841-1952
1913: View: Staffordshire LXVII.3 (Coseley; Sedgley) - Ordnance Survey 25 inch England and Wales, 1841-1952
1938: View: Staffordshire LXVII.3 (Coseley; Sedgley) - Ordnance Survey 25 inch England and Wales, 1841-1952

You can Alt-click and get a transparency control that allows you to see a modern map behind it.

Big differences between the last two links. But it's surprising to me that in such an industrial area, the streets you've talked about seemingly remain to this day. In East Manchester for example, whole areas got wiped from the map with only arterial roads surviving.

Now if you're interested in later periods, like the 30s and 40s, you can look at Britain From Above.

You need a (free) account to view things in detail, but here is Meadow Lane in 1946, the third blue marker up from the bottom. This is zoomed in, there is more of this image available.

Link: EAW001260 ENGLAND (1946). The industrial and residential area at Deepfields and Lady Moor, Bilston, 1946 | Britain From Above

View attachment 238970

just realised the house where my mom grew up is in this pic. the road at the bottom opposite the road that comes off perpendicular, of the four semi detached houses there, its the left hand one of the right hand two. they had nine kids in that house which didnt get an inside toilet until 1975 or 76 when it was modernised and they were moved down the road to lanesfield. my dads parents house was built a few years later just up the hill a few hundred yards.

 

[discokermit]

talking of lanesfield, my 4th great grandfather thomas pritchard lived there for a bit. born in tipton, a coal miner, did six months for larceny in 1839. died when he was 40.

 

[discokermit]

talking of lanesfield, my 4th great grandfather thomas pritchard lived there for a bit. born in tipton, a coal miner, did six months for larceny in 1839. died when he was 40.

View attachment 239207

when i say died when he was 40, it might be a bit more complicated than that. his wife, martha, got married soon after to a labourer named david guest, just before her and elizabeth guests trial for murder, of which she was found not guilty. she had a child soon after and the guests moved to rotherham.

 

[discokermit]

if i were the judge i would have convicted roger coffee of being a rapist on his name alone.

 

[discokermit]

so yeh, looks like my fourth great grandmother may have killed my fourth great grandfather.

 

[discokermit]

i knew i shouldnt have started this family tree.

 

[discokermit]

her first daughter was born four years before her and my ggg grandfather got married. she was sixteen and he was fifteen.

 

[blossie33]

we could be related on my mom or dads side. or both!

pugh, pughnot, pursell, crowe, middleton , jones and taylor ive got from around clun.

My ancestors were Luther - there were quite a few of that name around that area. When my grandmother was alive Dad drove us to Clun, Nan remembered where their house was and also that an elderly gentleman (her gt grandfather?) was living in the Almshouses.
We went to the Church, quite a few Luther graves there.

 

[blossie33]

i knew i shouldnt have started this family tree.

I think you're doing amazingly well to have found all that information, it's no easy task!

 

[Smokeandsteam]

so far i have uncovered 430 relatives. i thought there were a couple of brummies but it was an error and so far i am brummie free.

Gutted to hear this. I was hoping you’d discover that all your family history led back here as you are always so complementary about Brum

 

[Smokeandsteam]

ive loved it that all my ancestors were working class and before there was a working class, agricultural labourers. its still upsetting to see them go from dying at seventy/eighty generation after generation to dying in their thirties and forties over the space of a generation or two though. the english working class was made by the theft of others. assisted by the wankers who then employed them.

When you do your family history you realise the importance of EP Thompson. He was the historian who unearthed these processes of proto-industrialisation and it’s consequences and bought them to wider attention - and he presented his findings to give all those lives meaning and agency.

As the famous quote goes “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…

Your family history sounds like mine. English labouring classes forced into the industrial zones through the enclosure act and starvation. Then starved again and worked to death making nails, working in the iron mills and digging coal. Irish migrants forced here through starvation employed as servants (women) or ‘Labourers’ (men). None could vote. Periodically those left would be made to die in wars.

Enough to make you despise capitalism ai it....

 

[discokermit]

When you do your family history you realise the importance of EP Thompson. He was the historian who unearthed these processes of proto-industrialisation and it’s consequences and bought them to wider attention - and he presented his findings to give all those lives meaning and agency.

As the famous quote goes “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…

Your family history sounds like mine. English labouring classes forced into the industrial zones through the enclosure act and starvation. Then starved again and worked to death making nails, working in the iron mills and digging coal. Irish migrants forced here through starvation employed as servants (women) or ‘Labourers’ (men). None could vote. Periodically those left would be made to die in wars.

Enough to make you despise capitalism ai it....

ay it just.
i think "backward looking" is a loaded term, implicitly negative but if your past involved owning the common land and having enough food and shelter and a community, if a small part of that community wants to use the greater part of the community as expendable fuel for that "progress", then you cant blame them for not seeing being forced into a hole in the ground and thirty years off their life as a forward movement for humanity.
ep thompson may have "rescued the poor stockinger" but i bet one of his ancestors helped kick the poor stockinger off his land.

also, the artisan part. i always thought of the artisans as the proto working class but it doesnt look like that in my family or in the black country in general all ag labourers, then miners, then miners and ironworkers, then ironworkers. so far, i havent found a single artisan or craftsman amongst them.

 

[discokermit]

and if any of the numerous species wiped out since the invention of steam power had a voice, i doubt they would see it as progress either.

 

[discokermit]

if marx and engels had the option of go down a hole in tipton and have thirty years took off your life or starve to death i doubt they would have seen it as progress either. but those werent their options so their view was coloured somewhat.

 

[discokermit]

progress for some was built on the ruin of many by that some.

 

[discokermit]

the idea that industrialism was progress should be reviewed as we stand on the brink of the global disaster caused by it.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

if marx and engels had the option of go down a hole in tipton and have thirty years took off your life or starve to death i doubt they would have seen it as progress either. but those werent their options so their view was coloured somewhat.

I think that’s one of the best sections of Thompson’s book when he takes on the argument that industrialisation was a ‘good thing’ for the working class - and demolishes it showing the upheaval, the forced destruction of a way of life and culture and the increase in starvation, poverty and forced time disciplined. He also rescues the Luddites pointing out that far from being ‘backward’ their concerns and analysis were both accurate and a defence of a way of life being smashed into nothing...‘Their aspirations were valid etc”

Anyway, back to the thread.....

 

[discokermit]

i have also found and probably shouldn't be proud of but am a little bit, that none of my ancestors so far were ever servants. they would rather dig holes than tug their forelocks.

 

[discokermit]

I think that’s one of the best sections of Thompson’s book when he takes on the argument that industrialisation was a ‘good thing’ for the working class - and demolishes it showing the upheaval, the forced destruction of a way of life and culture and the increase in starvation, poverty and forced time disciplined. He also rescues the Luddites pointing out that far from being ‘backward’ their concerns and analysis were both accurate and a defence of a way of life being smashed into nothing...‘Their aspirations were valid etc”

Anyway, back to the thread.....

i was re reading engels (condition of the working class in england) a while back and couldnt help but notice all its bourgeois cliches about the irish and stuff and even though he was acknowledging the suffering it still had those overtones of "progress" that you would expect from any of those dickhead statues in brum of top hatted twats with tailcoats who never even knew anybody who went down the holes they made their money from.
books and books and books for hundreds of years, written by the sad and sympathetic sons and daughters of the people whose education was paid for by the enslavement of the people they feel sorry for, either by their ancestors or assisted by their ancestors.
im sick of reading books about us by people who arent us and dont and cant think like us. im sick of books to be honest.

 

[discokermit]

Gutted to hear this. I was hoping you’d discover that all your family history led back here as you are always so complementary about Brum

i was very pleased, lol!
on a serious note though, it does show the degree of separation despite their geographical closeness.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

im sick of reading books about us by people who arent us and dont and cant think like us. im sick of books to be honest.

You’ve hit the nail on the head there pal.

Talking of nails I’ve just re-read Arthur Willett’s book on the Black Country nailworkers riots of 1842.

Usual working day 4.00am to 10.00pm. Youngest workers 5 years old. Average life expectancy 23.4

When the bosses cut the piece rate by 20% (and in many cases there was no pay - it was a ‘truck’ system of payment in kind where workers were paid in goods by the master at double the usual price) the workers rioted and went into the homes of the bosses -roughing some up a bit - forcing them into Dudley for ‘further negotiations’ on lay rates.

This after none of the nail workers had eaten for two days. The army was sent in from Birmingham to slash and batter the rioters. New cops and magistrates were sworn in.

The leaders were then sentenced to hard labour and/or deportation.
Benjamin Bache, Joseph Linney, Eber Johnson, Joseph Foster, Charles Bridgwater, E Edwards, Elijah Bingham, Elijah Chapman and Edward Greenfield - names of our own class and history who nobody remembers......

 

[discokermit]

You’ve hit the nail on the head there pal.

Talking of nails I’ve just re-read Arthur Willett’s book on the Black Country nailworkers riots of 1842.

Usual working day 4.00am to 10.00pm. Youngest workers 5 years old. Average life expectancy 23.4

When the bosses cut the piece rate by 20% (and in many cases there was no pay - it was a ‘truck’ system of payment in kind where workers were paid in goods by the master at double the usual price) the workers rioted and went into the homes of the bosses -roughing some up a bit - forcing them into Dudley for ‘further negotiations’ on lay rates.

This after none of the nail workers had eaten for two days. The army was sent in from Birmingham to slash and batter the rioters. New cops and magistrates were sworn in.

The leaders were then sentenced to hard labour and/or deportation.
Benjamin Bache, Joseph Linney, Eber Johnson, Joseph Foster, Charles Bridgwater, E Edwards, Elijah Bingham, Elijah Chapman and Edward Greenfield - names of our own class and history who nobody remembers......

it was those riots that got me started on this. i was reading about the nailor riot in sedgley and one of the rioters was named richards, got two months and is now buried just up the road. knowing i had richards blood in me (twice, as it happens) it made me wonder if we were related. i didnt even know if i had any ancestors around here at that time or what they did but i do now.
another thing about it was the magistrates name was badger, which was also the name of the works manager at the foundry down the hill where i did my apprenticeship.

 

[discokermit]

im gonna make a telly programme about this called "ood'nya think yow am?"

 

[discokermit]

funny thing is my brother has gone the opposite way from the general trend. he now lives with his wife and children, he is an agricultural labourer (nearly, clearing brush from the side of railway lines), living in a tiny little village in devon on the edge of the moor. his wife would be listed as unpaid domestic duties and his kids have stopped going to school. he couldnt be happier. he is even growing his own tobacco, along with the chickens and rabbits hes got.

 

[discokermit]

brothers house, council,




brothers view from the back door,






we all used to live like this.