The Walmsley Family of Liverpool

John Walmsley (1796-1838) – Lead Merchant

View of Birkenhead from Liverpool

John was the first of Joshua’s sons to take a wife and leave the family home in Toxteth Park. On New Year’s Day in 1818, at the age of 21, he married Mary Ann Blackey at St Paul’s in Liverpool. Mary Ann was a spinster born in Liverpool and probably a year or two older than her husband but nothing else is known about her origins. Like his brother James, John started off as a book keeper (and is first mentioned as such in the 1818 election poll book), graduating to the status of merchant in 1824. His first children, christened in Liverpool in 1819 and 1821, were actually born across the Mersey: John was living in Sidney Street in what is now Birkenhead, then a tiny rural spot that was rapidly becoming built up and about to acquire a steam packet connection to Liverpool. By 1822, however, John was residing in Toxteth Park again, first in Hill Street and then Norfolk Street, before eventually taking up residence in the very respectable Upper Pitt Street, where he remained for the rest of his life.

George's Dock & Goree Warehouses

John and Mary Ann had a large family and it is an indication of their increasingly salubrious circumstances that only one child (Robert Newton) failed to reach adulthood. Their ten children were: Elizabeth (b 1819), James (b 1821), Mary Ann (b 1822), Joshua (b 1824), Margaret (b 1826), John Head (b 1828), William (b 1830), Robert Newton (b 1832), Sarah Jane (b 1834) and Emma (b 1835). The naming of the children largely conforms to expectations with Elizabeth, James, Joshua, William, Robert Newton and Sarah taking their names from the Walmsley side and Mary Ann from her mother. Perhaps Margaret and Emma also owe their names to Mary Ann’s family. John Head’s name is puzzling: just possibly it may be in honour of the Liverpool share broker John Head.

For most of his career John Walmsley was a merchant in the lead and copper trade. In the early 1830s he was a partner with Samuel Parkes and Richard Ashton in Parkes, Ashton & Co. (This company had formed in about 1829 from the earlier Mather, Parkes & Co in Cornhill.) Its premises were in the heart of old Liverpool at the George’s Dock Gates, by the imposing Goree Warehouses.

Kirkdale Sessions House

In 1830 John became involved with the law, though not in quite such dramatic circumstances as his father Joshua. In a deposition at the Lancashire Quarter Sessions sitting at Kirkdale in the new Sessions House adjacent to the imposing gaol, John gave evidence against a Toxteth Park coal dealer and another defendant charged with “misdemeanor” and assault, alleging that they had threatened to seize the Flat Kinderton, a river/canal boat owned jointly by John and his partners. The assault was probably on the Kinderton’s master. The Kinderton would have been a “Mersey Flat”, a barge-like boat of about 70 ft by 15 ft with a removable mast, a cargo hold that could take up to about 75 tons and a two-man crew. It was presumably used on the River Mersey as far as Warrington and then on the Sankey Canal up to St Helens. The source of the company’s copper was almost certainly the smelting works at Ravenhead by St Helens.

John died of tuberculosis in 1838 at the age of 42. Most of his nine surviving children were of school age or just infants. The change in family fortunes had a dramatic effect on the prospects of the children. Two of the daughters never married and none of the other children made especially good matches. To make matters worse, the decline in financial fortunes was matched by a spate of early deaths. Mary Ann established herself as a milliner and turned her daughters into straw-bonnet makers (the “Misses Walmsley” of a Liverpool trade directory). She succeeded in keeping the family together in Upper Pitt Street and, as the home gradually emptied, turned it into a lodging-house. When she was about 60 she went to live in West Derby with her son William and his wife but then returned to Liverpool in the late 1850s to live with her newly widowed daughter Emma. She died in about 1864.