Image: Sutton Park, as it would have been known to J.E. Bagnall in Victorian times (ref 393)
Reproduced with the permission of the Sutton Coldfield Library
In 2014 I marked the centenary of the death of Sir Benjamin Stone by bringing out a biography of him. The first mayor of Sutton Coldfield had many interests – photography, collecting curios, geology and botany. And he liked nothing better than spending an evening smoking a cigar or two and chatting with like-minded men about these topics. And so, in July 1888, he founded the Vesey Club, which met once a month at the mayor’s parlour in Sutton Park. There is material relating to the Vesey Club in Local Studies in Sutton Library, and I spent an interesting few hours delving into it. Limited to a membership of forty gentleman who paid an annual subscription of ten shillings, ‘the club … sought to assemble the brightest intellects of the neighbourhood in order that they might exchange noble thoughts …’ Looking around a meeting, Stone observed that ‘he was surrounded by men who were as familiar with the whole world as some of them were with Sutton Park.’ The leading members of the Vesey Club were experts in their fields, but all self-taught. There was Charles Lapworth of Mason College and the Revd. Henry Crosskey of the Church of the Messiah (and about whom I have written a chapter in a forthcoming book). These men were noted geologists. There was also James Eustace Bagnall, born in 1830, who had devoted his life to the study of the flora of Warwickshire. When members of the Vesey Club set out across Sutton Park to explore the flora, it was Bagnall who acted as their guide.
If a plant was growing in Sutton Park, Bagnall knew where to find it. His knowledge of the flora in the park (and in many other places in Warwickshire) was simply extraordinary. Long before the Vesey Club was established, Bagnall, who lived in Aston, was walking across Sutton Park, identifying plants and recording their locations. For example, in 1868 he noted geraniums growing in Pool Hollies Wood; and in 1876 he observed cichorium (chicory) on the embankment of the railway that ran through the park. He was superbly equipped to escort members of the Vesey Club to different locations. He knew exactly where to find peplis – ‘rare in this district’ at that time and today believed to be extinct. He could say that serratula (saw-wort) could be found by the wall of Four Oaks Park, that salix were flourishing at Pool Hollies Wood and that vicia tetrasperma (lentil vetch) was ‘abundant on the new dam at Bracebridge Pool.’   It wasn’t just Sutton Park that Bagnall explored. He reported that linaria (toadflax), lolium (ryegrass) and the phalaris (reed canary grass) were to be found, respectively, by the wall in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, in sidings at Sutton Coldfield railway station and on waste heaps in Wylde Green. Just how many of these plants can still be found in the locations Bagnall identified is a job for a botanist not an historian!
All this information Bagnall set out with great care in The Flora of Warwickshire (1891). This immensely detailed book was clearly a labour of love. It is, frankly, astonishing that one man was able to compile such a thorough record of local plants. In this venture Bagnall had the support of a number of Suttonians. The list of subscribers who put money up front so that the book could be published included: William Ansell of Wylde Green House and a city councillor; William Kirkpatrick Riland Bedford, the rector;  Henry Duncalf of Tudor Hill and a doctor; Thomas Hooper of Holly Hurst in Wylde Green and a manufacturer of metal pen holders; J. Alfred Jones of Woodlands and a manufacturer of bicycle parts;  W. Sherwood of Eastbourne House and a basket manufacturer and amateur photographer; and W.H. Tonks, a keen gardener who exhibited his own plants at local shows. In the preface to his book Bagnall made clear that ‘all my work, whether clerical or botanical, has been done in the scant leisure of a manufactory clerk; and that my knowledge of botany has been self-acquired.’ Only 500 copies of the book were published. I recently bought copy number 172, in nice condition and signed by Bagnall himself. I am delighted to own it – the cost was just £40.
Working as a clerk at the pen factory of Hinks, Wells & Co. in Aston until his retirement in his mid-sixties, Bagnall had limited leisure hours. But what use he made of them! At weekends he went in search of plants, and on weekday evenings attended meetings of the Vesey Club and the Birmingham Microscopical and Natural History Society. This body often arranged exhibitions and Bagnall contributed mosses – a favourite area of investigation about which he produced a handbook – and fungi on behalf of the gentleman of Edgbaston and Sutton Coldfield he advised. Described as ‘a great reader and possessed of a wonderful memory’, he also took great pleasure in sharing his knowledge of herbs with young men beginning their careers in medicine and always refused payment. His reputation was so great that this ‘manufactory clerk’ became a Fellow of the Linnaean Society, which in due course awarded him a gold medal for his work. Bagnall died at his home in Witton Road, Aston, on 4 September 1918, at the age of eighty six. ‘He only follows one branch of science – botany’, one contemporary observed. It was a remark lacking in generosity. If you saw a man bending over a plant and making notes near Bracebridge Pool or Wyndley Pool at any point from the mid-1860s onwards, it was very likely J.E. Bagnall, the forgotten botanist of Sutton Park.
Stephen Roberts, September 2020