The Walmsley Family of Liverpool

Joshua Walmsley (1761–1823) – Stone Mason/Mariner/Letter-carrier/Grocer

The fourth-born son of Isaac Walmsley, Joshua had an unusual beginning to his life when the parish clerk recorded his birth as a daughter of Isaac! He almost certainly started his working life in his father’s stone mason trade. However, by his twenties he had become a mariner (ie merchant seaman). Perhaps he saw no future in masonry with his elder brother John so successful; perhaps he was lured by Liverpool’s burgeoning maritime trade. The mariner’s calling did not last for too long and over the years Joshua switched and combined jobs with surprising regularity.

Joshua married for the first time in early 1784. Joshua and Margaret Robinson got married in St James’ in Toxteth Park but Margaret seems to have been from a non-conformist family and their two children (Sarah b 1784 and Mary b 1787) were both christened in the Newington Chapel in Renshaw Street. Margaret (and quite possibly the children) must have died young because at the beginning of 1789 Joshua married again, this time to Elizabeth Newton, a spinster in her mid twenties residing in Liverpool. They chose the upmarket and fashionable new church of St Anne and for the occasion Joshua gave his occupation as book keeper (ie accounts clerk), the lowest rung on the non-manual ladder. This change was aspirational only since parish records indicate that, when Joshua had his first child by Elizabeth at the end of 1789, he was still a mariner.

Elizabeth Newton was from the parish of Millom in the remote south-west corner of Cumberland. She is almost certainly the Betty Newton born to Robert Newton and christened in 1763 in the township of Thwaites. A brother, also named Robert, continued to live in Cumberland as a shoemaker. Elizabeth became a teacher and presumably was sent to Liverpool to earn a living as a governess or other teacher. She is listed in trade directories of the 1790s as a teacher at the back of Shaw’s Brow and in the biography of Sir Joshua Walmsley she is described as a hard-working woman keeping a night school. Her education was clearly behind the successful careers of her children.

Joshua and Elizabeth had seven children: Sarah (b 1789), Joshua (b 1791), James (b 1794), John (b 1796), Robert (b 1798), William (b 1801) and Elizabeth (b 1803). Sarah, named after Joshua’s mother Sarah Forshaw, died as an infant in 1789 just four days before the first son Joshua was born. No further information is available about Robert (named after Elizabeth’s father), William (named after Joshua’s elder brother) and Elizabeth but Joshua, James and John went on to have successful careers, even if all three died in untimely fashion. Family circumstances were not affluent: Joshua was never in lucrative employment and his nephew Joshua, on returning to Liverpool in the early 1800s from school in Westmorland, felt unable to presume upon his generosity since he was poor and had a large family with six children.

New Post Office in Post Office Place

By 1791 Joshua had temporarily abandoned maritime life, perhaps under the influence of his educated wife, perhaps to avoid being press-ganged into the Royal Navy as war with revolutionary France came closer. On and off between 1791 and 1813 Joshua is listed in parish records and trade directories as a letter-carrier (ie postman). In Joshua’s case, this probably should be interpreted as a clerk in the Post Office, first in Lord Street and then after 1800 in the new premises in Post Office Place off Church Street.

The biography of Sir Joshua describes him as a clerk in the Post Office and he also features in a capital trial at the Old Bailey in 1796 concerning the theft of bank drafts by a letter-carrier in London. At the trial Joshua stated that he had received the letter containing the bank drafts at the General Post Office in Liverpool, having at first refused to do so: “He gave in a letter with two shillings. I perceived one of them to be a bad one and returned it to him. He told me it could not be a bad one. It had a hole in it. I immediately told him I would not take it. He asked me for trust. I told him I would not trust him; I gave him the letter back, and he returned in the course of a quarter of an hour with a half-crown and said: ‘Would that do?’ I took the half-crown, put the letter on the table to be marked as usual, and returned him one shilling, without any reply.” Joshua went on to describe his own role in the Post Office: “The course of my business is to make up all the bags, except the London ones.” So, Joshua at this time was one of two clerks responsible for making up the bags of post going from Liverpool to all parts of the country. (The 20-year old letter-carrier who stole the bank drafts was sentenced to death.)

Between 1794 and 1796 Joshua combined his Post Office duties with running a grocer’s shop. Then between 1796 and 1798 Joshua is described as a mariner again: one wonders whether he was affected by the Old Bailey trial. More fascinating still, between 1800 and 1803 Joshua then reverted to his father’s trade as a stone cutter and mason. One infers that this long neglected trade must have been more lucrative for someone struggling to support a large family than his other callings. Nonetheless, between 1806 and 1813 he resumed work as a letter-carrier.

For the first part of his married life Joshua lived in Rainford’s Garden, near Whitechapel in the centre of Liverpool. In about 1800 he moved to the newly developed Harrington district of Toxteth Park, living first in Fisher Street, then Harrington Street and finally Wolfe Street, where he died in 1823 at the age of 62. He was buried in the graveyard of St Andrew’s in Renshaw Street. A simple burial marker inscribed “Joshua Walmsley’s Burial Place” is almost certainly his (though said to be from the nearby Newington Chapel). By the time of his death one son, John, had married and moved out but his wife Elizabeth and their sons Joshua and James stayed on there until James also married in about 1827 and took up residence elsewhere in Toxteth Park. At about this time Joshua established himself as a stationer and bookseller in Church Street in the centre of Liverpool and he and Elizabeth lived together there and then in neighbouring Lord Street until her death in 1848. In these years circumstances were sufficiently improved for the family to have as a servant Elizabeth’s niece Elizabeth Myers (b 1808), also from Millom in Cumberland. At her death Elizabeth would have been 85, although the burial record gives her age as 91. She was interred with her husband Joshua at St Andrew’s.