From pastures green to dark satanic mills
Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: In the City
This week’s topic was an incentive to check through the family’s relationships to Britain’s cities. When I grew up the only grandparent I knew, my maternal Granny (Gilvray) Harley lived in London, so I assumed, unthinkingly, that that was where we came from. But not so.
The Harley family lines trace back to the middle of England, settling in the Birmingham area. Granny’s Gilvray ancestors were from the north-eastern city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. My father’s family I always knew were from Glasgow, though I did not know that his mother’s family were also from the English Midlands.
For many of the ancestors the move to the cities occurred in the early 19th century.
My Harley 3G grandfather, John Harley, as well as five of his seven brothers, moved to the Birmingham area from the country village of Hopton Castle, in Shropshire, in the 1830s.
The village of Hopton Castle., Shropshire.
John Harley soon became a successful builder and contractor and built houses in the rapidly expanding suburb of Smethwick. The cities of the industrial Midlands were the home of this family line from the late 18th to the late 19th century.
These houses on South Road, Smethwick may have been built by John Harley “South Road was built up from the 1840s by John Harley, a Smethwick builder, who was later joined by his son James.” (From British History Online, Smethwick: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=36173)
The Harleys were linked by marriage with two families who had been Birmingham based for generations - Wards and Lillys - and several others who were only now moving to the metropolis from nearby Staffordshire towns: West Bromwich (Blissetts), Tipton (Rounds) and Rowley Regis (Websters). While Rounds were grocers and brewers, the Wards were metal dealers, and Lillys had a metal manufacturing business. Along with the Harleys they were part of transforming England’s pleasant pastures into the “dark satanic mills” of William Blake’s poem.
Dark Satanic Mills (photo from englishtutorhome2.blogspot.com)
Granny Gilvray’s own family lived in Newcastle for several generations, till her own father and mother moved south to London in 1882. But the family had roots in the Dundee area of Scotland.
Dundee, 1893. (from Dundee Courier, December 1893)
William Beat and Agnes Forrester, my 3G grandparents, were born near Dundee and moved to Newcastle with at least 5 of their 13 children at some date between 1825 and 1841, as did, I believe, 3G grandfather William Gilvray.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1877.
Plate from the Illustrated London News, found at https://www.ssplprints.com/image/94337/newcastle-upon-tyne-1877.
Were they pushed to Newcastle or pulled, from an area with little economic opportunity? Hard to tell. William Beat was described as a ‘cartman’ in the 1841 and 1851 censuses, perhaps a sign that his reasons for moving did not pay off. Gilvray, on the other hand, was a hairdresser and wigmaker, an occupation that may have had more customers in Newcastle than in the small town of Dundee.
I always knew my father’s parents lived in Glasgow. But they were newcomers to the city in the 1870s, having continued a generation-by-generation migration south from the southern highlands. My great great grandfather, John MacNie, worked the land on one way and another. His son, my great grandfather, Robert MacNie, lived in small-town Falkirk, where he made and sold umbrellas for many years.
Falkirk from the south. From “Brewster's "Pictorial History of Scotland", https://collections.falkirk.gov.uk/objects/36092/falkirk-from-the-south
Robert moved to Glasgow in his fifties, perhaps following his two sons who had moved there a few years earlier.
Roslea Terrace, Glasgow, where the MacNie family lived for about 30 years, from the 1870s.
There is another Birmingham family on my father’s mother’s side. Emma Carr was descended from a line of Birmingham grocers. My 3G grandfather Thomas Carr was a farmer in Beckley, Oxfordshire. The move from the countryside took place in the life of his son, Deodatus Carr senior, who moved to Birmingham at the age of sixteen, where he was apprenticed to become a druggist (pharmacist). By 1815 he had his own business on the Bull Ring in the centre of Birmingham.
The Bull Ring, Birmingham, 1812, by Thomas Hollins, artist and etcher. The Bull Ring had been the center of life in Birmingham since the twelfth century. Originally the village green, facing the parish church of St. Martin’s, it had acquired its name from a hoop of iron to which bulls were tied for baiting before they were slaughtered. https://www.chartistcollins.com/places-and-spaces-of-chartism.html. One of those shopfronts might have belonged to Deodatus Carr.
By the mid-nineteenth-century, then, four of Britain’s cities were home to the major lines in my family. In most cases they had migrated to the cities from small towns or rural villages. This was a time of great change.
Fields and hills near Hopton Castle, Shropshire, where the Harley family lived before John and his brothers moved to Smethwick.
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
OR Was Jerusalem, builded here, Among those dark Satanic Mills?
William Blake, Jerusalem.