From Ormskirk to LA – how the Wiggins family influence spread
THE large family of Joseph and Anne Wiggins of Ormskirk grew up at the Queen Inn in Aughton Street.
Joseph and Anne had settled in the town after starting their married life in Anne’s home town in North Wales, but Joseph had been born in Wetherby, Yorkshire.
After his first wife, Hannah, died, Joseph appears to have travelled to find another life outside his home county.
He married Anne Vaughan in Rhyl, and the family lived in Birmingham, Southport, Wavertree and finally Ormskirk.
In Wavertree, the couple held the license of the Wellington Hotel, but by 1881 they had taken over the Bulls Head Hotel at 70 Aughton Street in Ormskirk.
After a few years, Joseph moved his family across the road to the Queen Inn at 83 Aughton Street.
His family of eight children was so large that the eldest boys lived at the pub and the daughters and youngest son lived in one of the court houses around the corner.
Joseph was a painter and decorator by trade as well as a successful licensed victualler and his sons seem to have gone into similar trades too, although, to a higher level of skill.
Eldest Arthur Vaughan Wiggins designed the exterior of the Corn Exchange building in Moor Street, now the HSBC.
He became a decorative sign writer and glass painter and travelled to Canada to try to establish his business there.
He had married his second wife, Sarah Helena Groveham Rogerson in Ormskirk Parish Church in April 1898.
They emigrated to Canada by 1910 and ran his decorating business in Toronto.
Sarah set out on a return journey to England in May 1915, boarding the RMS Lusitania in 1st May.
On May 7, a German U-boat fired a torpedo at the ship which sank in 18 minutes, 11 miles off the coast of Kinsale, Ireland.
Sarah was among the 764 survivors, but she did not return to Canada, instead she remained in Southport for the rest of her life. son
Arthur moved to the US and by 1919 he had remarried and gained US citizenship, dying in California in 1937.
His second son, Joseph, became a plumber, leaving Ormskirk to establish his trade in Ontario, Canada, where he remained until his death, raising a family there.
Third son Albert Ernest Wiggins was a journeyman butcher and his work seems to have taken him around the country quite a bit.
Albert had married in Southport in the 1890s but while working away and managing a shop in Sheffield, his wife – who he had left at home in Blackpool – ran off with an acrobat and Albert divorced her in the High Court.
Albert married his landlord’s daughter in Sheffield and moved his family back to Ormskirk.
In 1910, he took his family out to Toronto to join his brother ,Arthur.
Another divorce, another marriage and then another divorce and living in Michigan by 1922, Albert returned home to The Queen Inn that year for a short visit and then went out to live in Long Beach, California, where he ran a successful butchery business with his son.
Arthur then moved to Santa Monica Boulevard close to Venice Beach and died in Los Angeles in 1926.
Alexander William Wiggins, the fourth son of Joseph and Anne, remained in the Ormskirk area all of his life.
He became a plumber and a decorator, living initially at Rock Leigh,
Southport Road. He was also a trained engineer and in his spare time would try to invent devices to help in the household.
In October 1908, he submitted an application to the Patents Office for an invention to clean knives.
Alexander was also an excellent marksman with a rifle; just before WWI he was considered the best shot in the district and he was in the Ormskirk Territorials. At the outbreak of the war because of his shooting ability, he was attached by the War Office to the School of Musketry in Bath, with the rank of Company Sergeant-Major where he was to train officers and men how to use a rifle.
Alexander had competed at Bisley on many occasions.
Later in his life, he retired and moved to Mainswood, Cranes Lane, Lathom. Alexander died in 1955. Fifth son Walter Lloyd Wiggins lived at 60 Moor Street, Ormskirk, and worked for Gardiner and Sons of Duke Street, Liverpool, as a decorative artist.
He enlisted in WWI and served for more than two years in Salonika but was invalided out of the Army in December 1917 with myalgia.
Walter had visited his brothers in Canada before the war but in 1924 he went out to the US to his two brothers in California and established himself as a decorative artist.
He died in the San Francisco Free Hospital, San Francisco on February 12, 1938, just eight months after his older brother died in Los Angeles.