The report* on Kidsgrove prepared by S.S. Scriven in 1841 for the Children’s Employment Commissioners says:
“Some five or six years ago the inhabitants of this place were said to be in a state little removed from barbarism, notoriously ignorant, vicious and depraved and as much a terror to the surrounding countryside as the now equally notorious people from ‘Biddle (Biddulph) Moor’.
“About this time Mr Kinnersley (the owner of Kidsgrove’s ironworks and coal mines) erected at his own expense an exceedingly elegant and commodious church together with a Sunday School for both sexes. He appointed the Rev. Wade to the living and shortly afterwards established a day school for boys and girls with a master and mistress who worked under the Rev. Wade’s supervision.
“The character of the people is now totally different from what it was. They attend church regularly. They are steady and domesticated at home. At work they are industrious and hard-working and respectful and obedient to their superiors.
“Those miners I have spoken to appear to be conscious of the blessings bestowed upon them by Mr Kinnersley. Judging from their own admissions and from reports of what they were like, I should say they must indeed be an altered people.”
Frederick Tobias Wade, the son of the Rev. Thomas Wade, was born in Ireland.
Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, he graduated in 1833 and was ordained two years later. He started his ministry at Runcorn and came to Kidsgrove in 1837 when industrialist Thomas Kinnersley built St. Thomas’s Church in The Avenue.
Designed by Kinnersley’s wife Anna, the church was erected in six weeks. It had a tower which contained a clock and a peel of six bells. The building could accommodate 600 worshippers and the first service was held there on May 7th, 1837.
Frederick’s personality quickly made an impact on Kidsgrove – an industrial town with a high crime rate whose constables were unable to maintain law and order. Colliers spent their wages on drink, turning to theft and poaching to feed their families.
A miner’s life was hard and dangerous. Semi-naked men and women worked together at the coalface. Boys and girls, who could neither read nor write, were harnessed to wagons which they hauled through narrow, rat infested tunnels.
Abandoned by the churches, the miners lived in filth and squalor. They enjoyed prize fighting and gambling. Many were semi-illiterate and Frederick realised he would have an uphill struggle converting them to Christianity.
He persuaded Kinnersley, who owned Clough Hall Collieries and Iron Works, to build a school in The Avenue. Mission halls were opened at Mow Cop and Goldenhill and appeals were launched to build schools and churches in the two villages. North Staffordshire’s most generous philanthropist, Smith Child, endowed the living at Goldenhill and gave it to Frederick, who retained his position at St. Thomas’s.
Recession hit Kidsgrove bringing short time working and unemployment. To prevent the miners being forced to sell their homes and apply for poor relief, Frederick found them employment building a road from The Rookery to Mow Cop.
On February 17th, 1848, he married Emma Cassons. They had four children – Henrietta, Ferdinand, Helen and Evelyn.
Kidsgrove was made a parish in 1852 and Frederick became the vicar.
The school in The Avenue was now too small to accommodate all the children who wanted to attend. Frederick asked Kinnersley for help and he agreed to build new schools.
Designed by Hanley architect Henry Ward, whose other buildings include Bucknall Church and Stoke Town Hall, the new schools were erected in Liverpool Road. Opened in 1854, the single storey Gothic style red brick building with stone facings, which was demolished a few years ago, contained three schools, a boys’ school, a girls’ school and an infants’ school. Each school had accommodation for 80 pupils and there were covered playgrounds where the children could play when it rained.
Frederick remained Vicar of Kidsgrove until 1880 when he was appointed Rector of Tettenhall. He died there aged 75 on March 15th, 1884. His body was brought back to Kidsgrove and buried in the cemetery which overlooked the schools in Liverpool Road
Kidsgrove was already an industrial village when Thomas Kinnersley inherited Clough Hall and his father’s coal mines at Birchenwood in 1819.
The miners lived in terraced cottages called rows and there was a small Methodist Church, which had been built during 1815 by lay preacher Sammy Kelsall and his daughter.
Kinnersley’s home, Clough Hall, was a mansion erected by John Gilbert, junior, at the beginning of the 19th century. Surrounded by parkland and walled gardens, the hall had over 40 rooms, including two dining rooms, two drawing rooms and a breakfast room.
During 1829, Kinnersley married Anna Dixon from Daisy Bank Hall, Congleton. The marriage took place at Astbury Church and the couple spent most of their time entertaining or being entertained by the county set.
While he was enjoying a hectic social life, Kinnersley’s industrial empire was being expanded by his manager Robert Heath. New mine shafts were sunk and in 1833 the Clough Hall Ironworks was created when four blast furnaces were built at Birchenwood.
Colliers and ironworkers were paid in tokens that could only be used to buy poor quality food and shoddy goods at inflated prices from the truck shop Kinnersley owned.
A miner’s life was hard and dangerous.
Semi-naked men, women and children worked underground. Men, who wore leather caps, worked at the candle lit coalface. Women and children were harnessed to coal wagons which they pulled along low, narrow, dimly lit, rat infested tunnels from the coalface to the bottom of the mineshaft.
Neither Kinnersley nor the sub-contractors he employed to dig the coal cared about safety. They were only interested in profits. Risks were taken and accidents causing death or serious injury occurred frequently.
Miners employed by the sub-contractors earned 3/2d (16p) a day.
Their wages were paid monthly at the Plough Inn on a Saturday afternoon. The innkeeper employed a fiddler from Tunstall to entertain them. After being paid, many men and women who had worked underground from dawn till dusk for 23 consecutive days, remained at the inn and took part in a drunken orgy that lasted until Monday night.
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