Sir Joshua Walmsley in 1849 (ILN)
As befits the most famous member of the Walmsley family, copious information is available about the political career of Sir Joshua. His son Hugh Mulleneux Walmsley had his biography Life of Sir Joshua Walmsley published in 1879 eight years after his death. There is also a full article in the Dictionary of National Biography. More colour is provided in a feature article in the Illustrated London News in 1849.
What comes across most forcefully is how the typical Victorian virtues of commercial enterprise and public service are complemented by the life-long striving to improve the lot of the working classes, whether through campaigning for reform of the corn laws or Sunday admission to the British Museum.
The Illustrated London News celebrated his parliamentary success at Bolton in 1849 with the following encomium: “Sir Joshua Walmsley is truly a ‘man of the people’. Sprung from their ranks and gifted with the energy characteristic of ‘the industrial classes’, he has devoted his talents and his influence to promote their interests, moral, social, and political.”
Joshua was born at his father’s home and builder’s premises in Wood Street/Concert Street in Liverpool on 29 September 1794. Little else about his family origins emerges from his son’s biography but the simple fact that he came from a family of stone masons marked his social position. John Walmsley could afford to have his son educated away from home, first in Knowsley outside Liverpool and then at Eden Hall in Westmorland. Hugh Walmsley says that young Joshua taught at Eden Hall after his father died in 1807 and then returned to Liverpool in 1811 following a quarrel with the headmaster's brother. Teaching whilst still a teenager was not uncommon in this period and would have spared Joshua the worst effects of his father's financial dificulties and subsequent death. In fact, John Walmsley died in 1811 and Joshua probably stayed at Eden Hall until at least 1812.
According to his son's biography, Joshua felt unable to impose upon his poor uncle and aunt (it is interesting that no mention is made of his father’s surviving wife Ann), and so he found a teaching post at Mr Knowles’ school. However, he soon found a job with better prospects, working as a book keeper for a corn broker, and thereafter stayed in this line for the next 30 years or so. In marriage also he aspired to higher things, winning the love of Adeline Mulleneux (b 1795) and eventually persuading her father Hugh Mulleneux (an affluent rectifier – ie distiller – and spirit merchant from a long established Liverpool family) to agree to the match. The couple wed at St James’ in Toxteth Park in 1815 and lived for the first few years of their married life in Gloucester Street and St Vincent Street in the newly developed – but hardly salubrious – area around Lime Street that was replacing the lime kilns and cock-fighting pits of the previous century.
Joshua’s early career can be traced through Liverpool trade directories. His first appearance was as a book keeper in 1818 (though before then he was already styling himself a merchant) but, in a rapid rise, by 1823 he was indeed a corn merchant and a partner with Henry Booth in Booth, Walmsley & Co, corn merchants of Brunswick Street (location of the Corn Exchange). The Liverpool corn trade in large part meant importing wheat, oats and flour from Ireland for onward transportation to the Lancashire hinterland. In the first part of the 19th century the volume of trade tripled. Joshua’s association with the Booth family continued until the early 1840s when – perhaps after the death of Henry – he assumed full control and renamed the company Walmsley & Co. However, the business seems to have lapsed in the late 1840s after Joshua’s departure from Liverpool. His business life was not confined to corn broking; he had interests in all sorts of commercial enterprises (including mining and newspapers) and, in particular, was close to the railway pioneer George Stephenson for many years.
In about 1829, after some years of residence in first St James’ Road and then Nile Street in another newly developed part of the city, Joshua had moved his personal residence to Mount Pleasant and secured a prominent mansion. In the late 1830s he had moved further up the property ladder, taking Wavertree Hall just outside Liverpool. Although featuring the property, Lancashire Illustrated described it in less than glowing terms: “Without much pretension to architectural elegance, it exhibits a degree of quiet old-fashioned comfort and sober antiquity, which is almost peculiar to itself in the immediate neighbourhood of Liverpool, where every thing speaks of modern affluence and recent acquirement.”
In 1835 Joshua was elected a member of the town council. He is credited with excellent work in reforming and improving public services, especially education and policing. He served as Mayor in 1839-40 and was knighted in 1840 following Queen Victoria’s marriage. After failing to secure election to Parliament for the Liverpool constituency in 1841, he moved to Ranton Abbey in Staffordshire. (Wavertree Hall was sold to Liverpool Corporation and demolished with a view to a gaol being built on the site but that plan never materialised.) In 1847 Sir Joshua was finally elected for Leicester but unseated soon afterwards. He was, however, returned for Bolton in 1849, only to switch to Leicester in 1852.
On losing his seat 1857, Sir Joshua largely retired from public life. The last years of his life were spent in Hampshire, first at Wolverton House and then in Bournemouth. He died there at his newly-built mansion, Hume Towers, in 1871 aged 77. His wife Adeline died in 1873.
Joshua and Adeline had nine children: Elizabeth (b 1817), Joshua (b 1819), Hugh Mulleneux (b 1822), Adeline (b 1824), James Mulleneux (b 1826), Emily (b 1830), Mary (b 1832), Louisa (b 1835) and Adah (b 1839). Surprisingly for such an affluent family, three children did not survive to adulthood: Louisa died in 1836 at the age of one, Adeline and Mary within weeks of each other in 1842 aged 19 and 11 respectively. All were buried at St Mary’s, Edge Hill, just outside Liverpool on the road to Wavertree. When many years later Joshua and Adeline died, they too were buried at St Mary’s.
> Joshua Walmsley at Eden Hall
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