From peace-keepers to time-keepers – family’s history in guns and clocks
ACURIOUS letter, written from Kirkdale on February 7 1843, contains a demand for payment from the estate of the late Charles Wignall for £97 6s 1d, (s = shillings, d = pennies) that equates to approximately £13,131.00 in today’s’ money.
Apparently Charles Wignall had owed the money since September 1838. Charles Wignall was born in Rainford to William and Ann Wignall nee Rockcliffe and baptised at Ormskirk Church in December 1803.
William was a clockmaker, as were several members of the Wignall family. William had established his business in Rainford, his wife’s family being from Windle originally.
Charles had married Sarah Parkinson in Liverpool in 1829 and set up his own watch finishers business in Soho Street, Islington, Liverpool.
Charles and Sarah had six children, the youngest daughter Charlotte was baptised six weeks after her father’s death.
Charles died of jaundice on Saturday, June 20 1842 aged 38. Little Charlotte died on September 15 1848 aged just four years old; she was buried with her father in the Necropolis Cemetery, Low Hill.
The letter is addressed to Mr John Wignall, Church Street, Ormskirk. John was a gun maker in the town until he took over the Snigs Foot, his daughter Margaret was married to James Almond of the Wheatsheaf Inn, Burscough Street in 1843.
John was cousin to Charles Wignall, his father John was brother to Charles’s father William.
The Wignall family from 200 years ago in Ormskirk were known as watch and clock makers and before that gun makers. The shop in Church Street, close to the Snigs Foot and the shop in Aughton Street had been run by several generations of the family.
Their business can be traced back into the early 1700s and as gun making required the precision of watch and clock making, the clock and watch parts were brought in from Prescot to be assembled to order, much the same as the gun making had been carried out.
The sons of the family growing up in the light industry of watch and clock making would become an apprentice watchmaker and often this meant moving away from the town.
This made practical sense from a logistics point of view too as the occupation of watch finisher was established on the routes out of Prescot, where watch makers would manufacture the parts of a watch and the less skilled but still adept watch finishers would assemble the time pieces to order locally, creating their own trading areas.
Charles Wignall will have taken out a mortgage on the Soho Street Shop and it may well be that his health started to deteriorate and apart from one mortgage payment he defaulted.
The claimant sent the demand for payment to John Wignall and expected the sum to be paid from the estate of the late Charles Wignall.
Within a few months of Charles dying, his widow Sarah had to leave the home her children had been born in and move to a small cottage in St Ann Gardens, off Birkett Street, Islington, Liverpool.
Without any husband to bring in an income that she had been used to, Sarah needed to find a position, her younger sons James and Thomas, aged 18 and 16, were lucky in that they had secured apprenticeships from the age of 14, James as a coach builder and Thomas as a tailor.
The expense of funding their apprenticeship would fall to Sarah and with the huge debt paid out of her late husbands’ estate, there was little left. Sarah became a monthly nurse; her job was to attend to an expectant mother just before the birth and for a number of weeks afterwards.
The qualifications for the job in the 1850s were quite simple, honesty, good character, sober and with experience of raising children. The work would have been erratic, meaning an unreliable income.
It also meant that Sarah was putting herself in a position where there could be serious consequences if anything went wrong with a birth.
It would be another 40 odd years before midwifery was controlled by legislation.
Sarah must have been considerably good at the job though as she could afford to advertise her services in Gore’s Directory of Liverpool in 1853.
Sarah’s eldest son John went to work for Richard Pilkington of the Glass family at Windle Hall, he would have likely found the job through Sarah’s family from Rainford.
This branch of the Wignall family did not return to Ormskirk. Cousin John who was the recipient of the demand for the payment of the outstanding debt had given up his career as a gunsmith and took on the running of the Snig’s Foot but he died in 1850 aged 52 and is buried in the Parish Church graveyard.
His widow Jane was the first postmistress in Ormskirk, running the mail office on Moor Street next door to the Queen’s Head during the 1850s but she retired by 1860 and lived with her married daughter at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, Burscough Street.
At the time of her death in 1874 she had been living with her other married daughter Bessie Smith in Sale and is buried there rather than with her late husband John in Ormskirk.
The gun making industry became more and more restricted even in provincial towns due to the pressure from the Worshipful Company of Gunsmiths which is why the Ormskirk gun makers moved into watch and clock production.
They became craftsmen at not only assembling the workings of the clocks and watches but in the carpentry skills that went into manufacturing the long case clocks and these obtain high prices today.