Image: Sutton Coldfield in the first half of the nineteenth century. Reproduced with the permission of Sutton Coldfield Library.
In November 1846, an account of a visit to Sutton Coldfield appeared in the Manchester Times. Although reports from different towns across England by itinerant journalists were a newspaper staple of the time, these men usually visited large centres of population. A description of a small market town in Warwickshire was an unusual subject to occupy the columns of a leading Lancashire newspaper. The author of this piece identified himself as ‘One who has whistled at the plough’. A little detective work has enabled me to establish his actual identity. His name was Alexander Somerville (1811-1885). Scottish by birth, Somerville grew up in the deepest poverty and, from the age of eight, was engaged in farm work whilst reading and studying in his spare time. This autodidact went on to become a soldier and was court-marshalled and flogged after making clear that he would not suppress political reformers. The episode brought him fame and he became a prolific writer of novels, pamphlets and newspaper articles. All of this was recorded in his autobiography, a copy of which I have owned for many years without making the connection between the author and Sutton Coldfield.
Alexander Somerville was interested in visiting Sutton because it was ‘where the first effort was made to begin that system of spinning cotton which has made Lancashire what Lancashire is …’ The inventor who it was said had designed a spinning frame thirty years before Richard Arkwright did in 1769 was John Wyatt; his son claimed that ‘by a model of about two feet square, in a small building near Sutton Coldfield, without a single witness to the performance was spun the first thread of cotton ever produced without the intervention of the human fingers …’
Somerville arrived by coach at the Three Tuns in High Street. This was the hub of commercial, social and political activity in Sutton. Its proprietor for 45 years was Harry Smith. Somerville took a room there, and left us this account of his arrival:
‘Stranger, if you have any luggage with you, give it to the elderly lady at the Three Tuns. It is the head inn of Sutton; she will take care of it for you and not let it be mingled with the coats, cloaks, scarfs, bags, books, maps, theodolites, levels and other appurtenances of the Trent Valley branch railway surveyors. The room is sacred to them; the old lady says “master” ordered the room to be kept shut. Master is pleased that a railway is coming to Sutton and so master may. Where the artisans of Birmingham have come by the hundred to the meadows and wooded park, to the streamlets and the little lakes in the park of Sutton to recreate themselves, they will come by the thousand, wives and children with them, when they have a railway. Give the good lady everything but the walking stick and, with it in hand, let us out.’
The railway surveyors referred to by Somerville were employed by the London & North Western Railway Company which had undertaken to build a line between Birmingham and Lichfield, with a stop at Sutton. In the event the line was not to be opened for another 15 years.
It was Somerville’s intention to find the building – or, at least, the site – where it was claimed that the spinning frame had been invented by John Wyatt. He stepped out of the Three Tuns and discovered that Sutton was an attractive place:
‘A church with a gothic tower in the centre of the town; the town with a main street inclining down a gentle hill; the houses of that street with the brightest of windows and the cleanest of doorsteps; some of them with gardens behind and in front; trees overhanging the gardens, and rooks cawing and fluttering around the old nests in the trees; the green meadow grass growing on ground higher than the town and the eye viewing from that height the chequered gardens and grassy enclosures down in that valley; and on the opposite side of it westward whence the forest-looking country is seen and the smoke of a coalpit by the forest side; and all up south-west towards Birmingham where that road is with the two mile-stones on it, between which more money has been lost and won on pedestrian matches than on any other mile of road in England.’
This charming portrait was enhanced when Somerville informed his readers that Sutton and its park were well known to William Shakespeare. He claimed that it may well have been Sutton Park that inspired the woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. He remembered a bank referred to in the first of those plays and thought he may have discovered it in the park; ‘let us sit upon it, stranger, and believe it to be so.’
This was, of course, all hopeful speculation. Somerville’s original mission did not end in the way he imagined it would:
‘No trace can be found at Sutton of that house where John Wyatt, the inventor, made the rollers first spin their cotton thread. Nobody there knows anything of it.’
There was, however, some truth in the story. John Wyatt, originally a carpenter from Lichfield, provided the mechanical skills for a spinning machine developed and funded by Lewis Paul. This spinning machine was constructed in a shed at Powell’s Pool and was powered by donkeys. It proved, however, to be unreliable – but did help Richard Arkwright develop his own spinning machine.
Stephen Roberts, February 2022