I have been dead certain for sometime that there would once have been corpse roads leading to Lichfield, bringing bodies from the surrounding hamlets and villages to be buried in the consecrated ground of their mother church.

My Scooby sense about their existence eventually translated into something a little more tangible when I found the following reference in the 1819 book,  ‘A Short Account of the City and Close of Lichfield’ by Thomas George Lomax, William Newling:

‘By the side of the chapel is Dove house lane once the burial road from the village of Wall now disused’.

Further evidence can be found in the rolls of St George’s Court held on 28th April 1656, which record how Michael Salt was fined 6D for “not making a stile into Dovehouse Field from the Clay Pitts, this being a church way”.

Given that Wall was part of St Michael’s parish, this surely must have been the mother church and the final destination. As to the exact course the corpse road took, I suspect the answers lie buried in old place names. Look out for references to anything church, burial, coffin or corpse related on old maps and documents.

Whilst you’re at it, give some thought to Shenstone too, where in October 1817 the Staffordshire Advertiser carried the following description:

…a certain road, heretofore used as a burial road, beginning at the north-westward end of a Road called the Walk, belonging to Edward Grove Esq, and extending in a north-westwardly direction over an ancient inclosure called Lower Park Field, belonging to Ann Adams, over an ancient Inclosure called New Piece, belonging to said Edward Grove, over an ancient inclosure called Over Park Field, over an ancient inclosure called Upper Park Field, and over an ancient inclosure called Near Park Field, belonging to Ann Adams, to the Birmingham and Lichfield turnpike road, then crossing the said road in a south-westwardly direction to an ancient inclosure called Bull’s Head Piece, then turning in a westwardly direction over the said Bull’s Head Piece and another another ancient inclosure called Church Piece, belonging to Henry Case, Esq.

Elsewhere in the country, numerous stories and superstitions have materialised around these paths where the dead were toted. The general flavour of the folklore associated with these roads involves rituals designed to ensure the spirit of the dead could not escape en-route nor return home. The corpse would be carried feet first and often over water as apparently ghosts can’t cross running water (although I have heard of a spectral passenger hitching a lift in a taxi as it drove over the causeway at Blithbury Reservoir). Despite these rites of passage, there are stories of the supernatural associated with burial routes –  phantom funeral processions, corpse candles and headless black dogs are just some of the shady characters to be wary of when travelling the same way as the dead did. If only we knew exactly which way that was….

Wall is surrounded by these ancient green ways. Could one of them have been part of the old burial road?

Following on from the last post about the Minors School, it seems that its founder was no stranger to controversy either. Here’s the original extract from the Victoria County History someone sent to me which unexpectedly ignited my interest in Presbyterian places of worship with mention of a meeting house in the city being burned down during riots in 1715 and a chapel at Longdon Green.

The Presbyterians remained powerful in the city after the Restoration. Bishop Hacket complained that ‘the Presbyterians of the city do what they list, come not to the holy communion, baptize in hugger-mugger, are presented for their faults but no order taken with them’, and Dean Wood allotted prominent seats in the cathedral to Thomas Minors and his brother-in-law William Jesson. Presbyterian influence extended in 1667 to the election as M.P. of Richard Dyott, who Hacket believed was completely under their control.  In July 1669 Minors and Jesson were summoned before the Privy Council for holding a conventicle in Minors’s house. They moved the meeting to a farmhouse at Elmhurst, where a conventicle later the same month lasted most of the day. According to Hacket it was attended by some 80 people, of whom the ringleader was a Lichfield carrier named James Rixam (or Rixom), a man ‘no way fit for that trust, being a transcendent schismatic’. Minors and Jesson subsequently appeared before the Council but were discharged.

 

Five houses in Lichfield were licensed for Presbyterian worship in 1672; they included Minors’s house and that of John Barker, another mercer who was later one of the trustees of the English school in Bore Street established under Minors’s will. By 1695 a Presbyterian minister, Robert Travers, was working in the area, with a chapel at Longdon Green. He baptized at Lichfield in 1700, and there was a meeting house in the city by 1707.  It was burnt down during riots in 1715 but had been rebuilt by 1718.  In 1720 Travers was living in the house of Elizabeth Jesson, possibly in Saddler Street. In 1738 his own house in Lichfield was licensed for worship. He may still have been active in 1747, but by April 1748 the congregation was served by Samuel Stubbs.  The Lichfield chapel was closed in 1753,  but the congregation continued to meet at Longdon Green.

I’ve wandered around Longdon a fair few times, and news of a 17th century chapel was new to me . Local historian J W Jackson went for a wander around there in the glorious summer of 1876 and described in his Lichfield Mercury column how he stumbled upon the chapel:

‘On this occasion, we decided on following the Stafford Road, via Lyncroft and taking the lower road to Longdon Green, then turning to the right by Lysways Hall….As we stood feasting our eyes on the beauty around us, our attention was attracted to a solitary building in front of us. At first, we took it to be a cottage but as we got nearer we saw that the windows were much like those of a church, deep and arched, and as we had to pass near it on our way we decided to examine it closer. As we came near it we heard voices singing a hymn and at once concluded it was a small chapel. Crossing over a tiny stream we entered the small graveyard and walked quietly to the open door, when the hymn had ended, we quietly entered and took our seats on the nearest vacant bench and a grey-haired old caretaker handed us books. The singing had not been led by a trained choir and organ but the small congregation sang as if from the heart, and fairly well in tune…At the time we little thought we were in the first Lichfield Congregational Church which like a great wide spreading tree had sent its branches over the district’.

In the glorious summer of 2018, local nosey parker K L Gomez decided on following the road from the Red Lion pub down Lysways Lane, looking for the site of the small chapel. I knew it had been demolished from the description on Pastscape but, as ever, I was curious to see if some trace remained.

It says Chapel House. Please beleaf me.

The name of the nearby house on the opposite side of a tiny stream (the Bilson Brook) confirmed that I was more or less in the right place. The sweet singing of the choir has been replaced by the noise from the road which the chapel was demolished to make way for in 1966 and the holly and the ivy (and hawthorn bushes and nettles) are both so full grown that the public path running alongside is inaccessible. Further exploration to try and find traces of the lost chapel and its graveyard will need to wait until winter when some of the Longdon greenery has died off a bit.

In the meantime, I want to know more about those incendiary events of 1715. Where was the meeting house which was burned down and is its replacement still standing?

Sources

Lichfield Mercury Archive
Lichfield: Roman Catholicism and Protestant nonconformity’, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 14, Lichfield, ed. M W Greenslade (London, 1990), pp. 155-159. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol14/pp155-159

The Minors School was only supposed to form a minor part of another post I’m writing about a lost chapel in Longdon. However, when I came across a series of letters and articles in local newspapers documenting the attempt of Lichfield City Council to save the 17th century building from destruction and the offer of its Norman oak door to the city’s museum by a bill-posting company, it became a major point of interest. The chapel will have to stay lost for just a little longer…

Someone researching Presbyterians in Lichfield had emailed me with an extract from the Victoria County History asking if I knew anything about any of the buildings mentioned in it. It was the mention of a chapel in Longdon Green which caught my attention but the only one I really knew anything about was the school which once stood at the corner of Bore Street and St John Street and was built in 1670 by Presbyterian mercer Thomas Minors for 30 poor boys in the city to be taught, without charge, until they were able to read chapters in the Bible.  What I didn’t know anything about was the controversy it caused at the start of the 20th century.

Lichfield – Minors’ School: sepia drawingView Full Resource on Staffordshire Past Track

At a Lichfield City Council meeting in March 1902, the Streets and Highways committee recommended that the Council should pull down Minors House (an alternative name for the school building), take what land was required to widen St John Street and sell the remainder. The property, consisting of Minors House, a warehouse, and shop plus three adjoining cottages, had been purchased by the Council in April 1900 for the sum of £1,680 from the representatives of Mrs Sarah Cooper (deceased) with a view to widening the corner of Bore Street. However, only the schoolroom end of the building was demolished and later that year, councillors discussed what should be done with the remainder. Cllr Raby was keen to ensure that the property was sold under the most advantageous terms so that the Council could recoup the cost of the road improvement to as great an extent as possible. Cllr Wood asked about the strip of land where the schoolroom had once stood, as in a previous meeting it had been decided that it should not be included in the sale and Cllr Andrews thought it unwise to offer the property without the land. Cllr Raby questioned whether one of the most valuable business corners of the City should be turned into a shrubbery or flower garden or some other unprofitable experiment as the improvement had been carried out at great expense to ratepayers and it would be wise to seek to make the best of the property. He also said that it was hardly to be expected that in the future the Minors School, which had been half pulled down, could be retained in its present ugly and unsightly state and the purchaser of the property ought to have sufficient space allowed him and a free hand to erect something which would be an ornament to the city.

I think at some point over the next twelve years, Cllr Raby must have joined the National Trust or something because at a council meeting in May 1914 he protested against plans to transform the building into a modern business premises despite it having been passed by the Streets and Highways Committee. Cllr Raby argued that as this was an exceptional case, it should therefore be be dealt with by the council in an exceptional manner. The Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act had been introduced the previous year and Cllr Raby believed that given that Minors House was a historic building of unique interest to the citizens of Lichfield, it should be dealt with under the new act. He described the grounds upon which he wished to place the exceptional resolution as follows:

I have seen the plans submitted by the present owner of this property and I find that, broadly, they mean the complete transformation of this old building – the demolition of many of the rooms, and the utter desecration of the facade of the building and the placing of a tawdry shop front in its stead.

Cllr Raby urged his peers to protest against ‘wanton vandalism of this kind’ but not all those present were convinced. Cllr J.R. Deacon queried that given the building had been the property of the council who had sold it, it ‘could not have been thought of very great value, or it would not have been disposed of’. The Town Clerk urged caution, stating he was not against Cllr Raby’s resolution but that he did not think any good would come of it. In his opinion, the time to raise the question of the preservation of the building was at the when the property was sold, and given that the plans submitted by the new owner complied with the bye-laws, the Council were bound to pass them. Cllr Jones was also sceptical and commented that he believed the building had been spoiled when the schoolroom was demolished years ago and considered it too late to be talking about preserving an ancient fabric now. Alderman Andrews was keen to ensure that the new owner of the building, a clothier called Mr F M Tayler, was treated fairly. Despite these concerns, the amendment was carried with four members voting against.

In the months that followed, a gentleman, whose name isn’t given in the press but might well rhyme with ‘maybe’, offered to buy the building from Mr Tayler along with the adjacent strip of land where the demolished schoolroom had stood, and was now owned by the Lichfield and Rugeley Billposting Co who had erected a hoarding on it. When negotiations failed, the correspondence between the three parties was published in both the Lichfield Mercury and the Staffordshire Advertiser, along with letters of support for the preservation of the building from a representative from the Society of Antiquaries and one of Thomas Minors’ descendants. In the face of public criticism, Mr Tayler, wrote to the Lichfield Mercury asking for a right to reply, and they obliged by publishing the letter which he had sent to the Town Clerk which sheds light on his reasons not for selling whilst also throwing shade at the council:

In answer to your enquiry re Am I willing to place a purchase price on Minors’ House?, I regret that under the circumstances I cannot, as the lease of tenancy of my present business is drawing to a close. Having purchased Minors’ House with the definite purpose of converting the same into business premises for my own use, I cannot in justice to myself and my family, consent to sell. I certainly thought that your Council placed no historic value on this property, for did they not themselves destroy that portion of the said building which was in reality the key for which it was originally built, and after, placed the remainder upon the market without any restrictions, thus closing its historical career?

Fast forward to November 1954. F M Tayler is now an Alderman on whom the Freedom of the City is about to be conferred and a Lichfield Mercury column called ‘Round and About’ looks back to the controversy surrounding Minors House. Apparently, hanging on the wall in Alderman Tayler’s house at the time was a large metal key and wooden bolt which belonged to a Norman oak door from the Minors School, which had been offered to the council for the city’s museum.  Presumably it never ended up there as the columnist was trying to track it down and was told by Mr Birch the solicitor that it might be the one in the old Friary wall on St John Street, which ran around his property, as the council had put it there about 20 years ago and he didn’t know where it came from. With nothing but this circumstantial evidence to go on, the columnist asked if anyone could throw any further light on this. Now, I only have a dark and grainy picture of the door and I am no expert in Norman carpentry but I’m sure that this is not the door we are looking for.

Minors House and the Norman door circa 1914.  Photos from the Lichfield Mercury via the British Newspaper Archive

Not the Norman door

If you know where to look, traces of Minors House can still be found. One of the steeped gables from the original 17th century building remains and I am sure that I have seen masonry from the porch in the museum at St Mary’s. However, door to door enquiries about where that ancient bit of oak ended up are continuing.

Minors House at the present day

I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that you don’t have to travel far from your doorstep to find stories and traces of the past. Even if you live on a spanking brand new estate there will be stories in the soil on which your new build was built. In more recent years, developers seem to have moved away from giving pretty but vacant names to the roads they create and instead are looking to local history and the disappeared landscape for inspiration. Good local examples of this include Fradley where street names honour those killed whilst serving at RAF Lichfield, and the Darwin Park estate in Lichfield where old field names have been preserved in the naming of new roads.

More recently, I’ve decided that when looking for those stories, I should make an extra effort to seek out those which tell us something about the women who lived in this old city and the lives they led.

This story starts at the end, in the graveyard at Christ Church which is currently strewn with primroses. Victorians once planted clumps of these flowers on the graves of children but here and now they cover the final resting places of both young and old.

At the edge of the churchyard is the grave of Edith Mary Heath and the matching monuments of members of her family. Edith died on 27th February 1952 at the age of 78. In her will she left £35, 365, a large proportion of which was left to Christ Church where she had served as vicar’s warden for twenty years, for the creation of ‘The Martin Heath Memorial Fund’. As part of this, a New Year’s gift of £1 was to be paid to 12 deserving poor persons (six men and six women) aged 60 and over in the parish.

In 1964, the fund was use to build ‘Martin Heath Hall’. It might surprise those coming to the hall to vote or to Brownies or to yoga classes, that it’s not named after a man called ‘Martin Heath’ but a local woman’s maiden and married names.

Edith lived at Angorfa, a house built on the Walsall Rd in the early 20th century and demolished in the 1960s, with flats and houses were built on the site. I had assumed for years that apart from the name ‘Angorfa Close’ (well done 1960s developers!), no trace of the original house remained. However, as I found out in a booklet produced by Richard Paulson for an open gardens and local history event in Leomansley back in 2015, two gate posts from Angorfa survived and can be seen from Christchurch Lane. Leomansley is a lovely place to live apart from the local weirdo who takes photos of her neighbours’ garages.

Edith’s father George Martin had lived at Sandyway on the Walsall Rd and he was a benefactor of the Lichfield Victoria Nursing Home which had opened at 15 Sandford Street in 1899.

Remains of Sandyway Farm, Walsall Rd 2013. Now demolished and houses built on site.

On his death in 1908, he left an adjoining house on Sandford St to the Trustees who converted it into nurses quarters and offices. The institution became known as the ‘Lichfield Victoria Nursing Home and Cottage Hospital’ and moved to the Friary in the 1930s.

Site of the Nursing Home on Sandford Street.

Despite opposition from many, the Victoria Hospital was demolished in 2007. In a blog post which discusses both street names and women, it would be remiss of me not to mention that on the Victoria Place development, built on the site of the hospital, there is a Mary Slater Road, named after a woman who left money in her will to help found The Lichfield Nursing Institution & Invalids’ Kitchen which later became the Victoria Hospital.

(I should insert a photo of the Victoria Hospital here but to my shame and annoyance, I did not ever take one! Take more photographs of your surroundings people – you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…)

The only physical trace of the hospital that survives on the site is the foundation stone which incorrectly states that it was laid by Mrs Swinfen Broun of Swinfen Hall, Lichfield, on Empire Day 1932. In fact, Mrs Swinfen Broun was too unwell to attend the occasion and so the honour of laying the stone instead fell to her husband. The stone also incorporated a time capsule of sorts, containing copies of the Lichfield Mercury, coins and other ephemera. I wonder if it still does?.  At the time of the ceremony, the President of the Hospital was Edith Heath, a position which she retired from in June 1947 having served on the committee for 32 years.

The foundation stone may be the only part of the old Vic that survives onsite. However, there’s another bit of medical evidence of its existence elsewhere. In a twist of fate, as a result of a twisted ankle (that actually turned out to be a fractured tibia) and a broken toe, in-between taking the photos for this post and getting around to writing it, I’ve found myself at the Victoria’s successor, the Samuel Johnson Community Hospital, twice in the last two weeks. Whilst in the treatment room, I spotted the famous old chair from the Vic’s casualty department.  I may be lacking in the ‘having a photograph of the hospital building’ department but I was determined to furnish the blog with a photo of the chair so that you don’t have to injure yourself in order to see this bit of hospital history. As a result of this public spirited act, someone should probably name a street after me. Anyone suggesting it should be a dodgy back alley will be escorted from the premises.

The pile of crutches is significantly smaller now thanks to my two children

Sources:
Lichfield Mercury Archive
http://www.burtonhospitals.nhs.uk/history-of-the-hospitals.htm
‘Lichfield: Churches’, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 14, Lichfield, ed. M W Greenslade (London, 1990)