Former mayor and tycoon who became convict down under
OHN Kenyon Winterbottom was a selfmade man who started as a solicitor’s clerk, became a successful businessman, and as Mayor of Stockport laid the foundation stone of the Infirmary on Wellington Road in 1832, watched by a crowd of 20,000.
In 1823 he had purchased Underbank Hall for 3,000 guineas, opening it with three partners as the Stockport and Cheshire Bank.
He acted as steward for local landowners, was agent for turnpike trusts, a partner in cotton manufacture, and his company promoted the building of Wellington Road.
But by 1839 he was on the point of bankruptcy and it was discovered that he had cashed a £5,000 life policy, payable to the widow and children of John Isherwood, squire of Marple Hall.
An agent for the Pelican Life Assurance demanded a warrant for his arrest and it was then that Winterbottom did a runner.
For four years his whereabouts was a mystery, until he was chased and grabbed by a singer at public houses in Manchester for the £200 reward money. Lodged in the lock up on Vernon Street his old friends came to view their once corpulent and self assured ex-colleague.
He looked ill and emaciated, wearing old clothes with the soles of his shoes worn away, ‘the caricature of a fallen man’.
Despite pleas for clemency from the Stockport Advertiser and a petition 62 yards long signed by local people, he was sentenced at Chester Castle to transportation for life.
In August 1845 the convict ship Mayda dropped down the Thames carrying 199 convicts from Millbank Prison and set sail for Norfolk Island, Britain’s toughest penal colony. Winterbottom, loaded with irons, was among them.
Dismasted in a gale en route the ship finally arrived in January 1846.
Here the harsh regime resulted in a prisoner’s riot followed by hangings.
He was transferred to Tasmania and a fellow convict commented ‘we now have two ex-clergymen, several solicitors and one an ex mayor!’.
By 1856 he was freed and soon after appointed town clerk for the island’s capital of Hobart, directing the building of a new town hall.
Apart from a drunken frolic when he stole another man’s hat which earned two month’s hard labour, the plausible rogue seemed to have entered a new chapter.
But in 1867 at the age of 78 he retired and it was shortly discovered that several hundred pounds of public money were unaccounted for.
Sentencing him to a further two years the Chief Justice expressed the hope ‘that the prison authorities will not impose any task calculated to shorten your days’.
Winterbottom survived the sentence and died a free man aged 83, being given an honourable send off at the cathedral church attended by many mourners who were ex-convicts like himself.
More details in back copies of Stockport Heritage Magazine on sale in St. Mary’s Heritage Centre and the book exchange Covered Market Hall, or at stockportheritagemagazine.co.uk.