The texts from the Bower exhibition

Following more requests (please keep them coming), we are this week putting the texts of the Bower exhibition in Wilmslow Library online, we hope to add some of the images at a later time. 

Since the beginning of the 15th century and from the start of local written records the Bower family can be found in the Great Warford area, the area between modern Alderley Edge, Mobberley and Nether Alderley . They were farmers, their holdings centering around Fields Farm, today best known for its greenhouses visible from the bypass.

By 1759 the then head of the family Ralph divided his lands between his two sons John and Ralph. While John inherited lands around Mottram and Rainow, Ralph inherited the main lands in Warford and Wilmslow. 

John's descendants continued in various roles as farmers, traders and pharmacists in Macclesfield and Wilmslow and his descendants still live in the area today.

Ralph the Younger soon decided to move away from farming and used the families longstanding experience in running grain mills to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution, by establishing spinning mills. The resulting thread was handed out to local hand loom weavers which returned the woven cloth to Bower's shops in Wilmslow and the Hough, who then sold the produce in Manchester. 

Since 1784 the Bowers had direct competition with the arrival of the Gregs at Quarry Bank. The pre-existing Bower Mills forced the Greg family to place their mill in Styal away from the main route into Manchester.

Ralph the Younger divided his holdings equally between his sons in his will.  To judge from the records the sons worked together, without forming a formal partnership and their descendants continued to develop their own businesses in Manchester, Cheshire and Derbyshire.   

The oldest son, also Ralph (III), was possibly the most successful member of the dynasty. After his father's death in 1801 he used the opportunities of the Napoleon era and the lack of competition from the Continent to expand.
Sales notices from the years document the continuing restructuring of the family holdings, maximising income, including renting some of the mill space to competitors. These sales/rentals of "room and power" limited the exposure to risk from a very volatile market.
In these early years we see a lot of investment in a 'diversified portfolio' with shares in grain mills, land, farms, tenements (low quality housing for rental), workshops, shops and inns, usually with facilities for coaches. There are also references to haulage firms. 

To document the wealth of the family the family bought Hawthorn Hall from the Leigh family thus taking over one of the old medieval seats in the parish and de facto esta-blishing themselves as one of the leading families in Cheshire. As such the Bowers are involved with many of the infrastructure projects in the area, including the enclosure and development of Lindow Common and the construction of the turnpike from Manchester to Stoke and Oxford (A34). 

One of the lasting results of this is the laying out Grove Street named after one of the Bower residences and estates it ran through. 

The infrastructure projects coincided with creation of the Bower mills. In addition to the original spinning mill in the cemetery, the Bowers also owned a weaving mill on Mill Lane, the Old Silk Mill in the Carse, shares in the Wilmslow Mill and possibly others. 

Ralph had a large family and formed partnerships with some of his adult sons, preparing them to take over his empire.
Not all of the businesses were successful and one son Warburton eventually went bankrupt in 1828. Another, Charles died two years before his father and Ralph's own 18-page will proved disastrous for the family fortune, locking much of the capital out of the control of the family and binding it in litigation for decades. 

Ralph’s son, William, continued to run the business. By now the cotton industry was undergoing rapid changes. Steam engines were replacing water power, weaving machines were replacing handloom weaving and the introduction of gas light allowed the use of the cotton mills for longer hours even in the dark winter months. William converted the mill at Mill Lane to steam power and was one of the first to built a gas works to provide gas lighting for the mill and Church Street. 

However, the arrival of the railway and general recession of the 1840s, coupled to a shortage of disposable capital forced William out of cotton spinning and weaving (while other members of the family continued until the late 1860s). 

The closure of the Mill Lane and Cemetery mill meant a sudden break in the industrial development in Wilmslow and the new land owners led by the Prescott family used the opportunity to completely change the future developments, banning the further deve-lopments of mills in the centre of Wilmslow, only the Old Silk Mill and possibly a small mill at Little Lindow were allowed to continue. 

Instead Wilmslow was to be developed as a leafy and “healthy suburb” to Manchester, providing homes for the mill owners and their managers, if on a less luxurious level than Alderley Edge further down the railway line.

The Bower family was able to regroup after the disastrous 1840s. Due to careful management and a number of very fortuitous inheritances, the family quickly rebuilt its influence in Wilmslow. By the 1860s Joshua and William Bower were leading members and churchwardens of St.Bartholomew’s. They and other members of the family owned  large houses in Swan Street, Church Street and of course Grove Street, as well as owning several businesses both in Wilmslow and Manchester. 

Using the opportunities offered by the new idea of Wilmslow as an affluent residential suburb to Manchester, the Bowers became property developers.

One of the first houses built was Albury Villas in Hawthorne Lane, which was originally built by William Bower as residence for the manager of the Gasworks. 

Several members of the family released land for development throughout Wilmslow during the second half of the 19th century, while others built themselves new residences in Hawthorne Lane and Grove Avenue. 

By the 1880s the building boom had taken off for good and the Bowers together with the Masseys and other Wilmslow residents formed a development company. These houses can still be seen in Pownall Park and around Gravel Lane in Fulshaw. 

Joshua Bower, one of William’s brothers was Wilmslow’s first fully university qualified surgeon and practiced for many years from his house in Swan Street, where he had a large practice. 

In addition to his position of respected medical man, he was one of the last churchwardens appointed by the minister of St.Bart’s, one of the many “peculiarities” of the parish, that were reformed in the 19th century. 

He was honoured by the congregation with his own window in the church after his death.

During the 1870s and 1880s the most influential member of the Bowers was Ann Bower, the unmarried aunt of William Bower, who used her considerable wealth generated by rental income from land and houses particularly along Gravel Lane and the Knutsford road to support numerous projects associated with St. Bartholomew's.


One of these is the completion of the such as the restorations of St. Bartholomew’s originally supported by William and Joshua in the 1860s which resulted in windows dedicated to various members of the family and numerous smaller ones.
She also supported the creation of St.Anne's and the two schools at St.Anne's and on the site of the current Parish Hall.

Anne's nephew, Ralph (IV), lived and worked originally as a cloth merchant in Oldham Street in Manchester, before he retired to Laurel House in Church Street. With the creation of the Urban District Council Ralph became a Councillor for the Tory party. He was reelected several times and eventually became the leader of the council, who provided the water drains we still use today.

With the death of Ralph Bower in 1901, the Bower dynasty comes to an end, at least in the male line. However, many of the girls throughout the generations had married a number of successful businessman and started large families in Wilmslow, Macclesfield, Manchester, Buxton and elsewhere in Derbyshire.

One of these descendants was Frank Ollerenshaw, a Wilmslow butcher and businessman, who was a life long collector of Wilmslow historical objects as well as a collector of contemporary  studio ceramics. 

He was a longterm proponent for the creation of a Wilmslow Museum, which unfortunately never materialised. His collections were in the 1930s donated to the Manchester Museum, the Manchester Gallery and the Buxton Museum, where some of them still survive.  

The Bower family shaped Wilmslow over four generations. They created large wealth from agriculture and cotton mills and through their investments gave Wilmslow gas lighting, and a lot of the high quality 19th century housing, as well as Wilmslow's main shopping street, two of its churches, and two of its schools. Their continuous influence is still with us today.

Thank you

To Cheshire Libraries and Archives, Ancestry, Findmypast, the National Archives, St. Bartholomew's parish, Wilmslow Historical Society, a number of residents in Wilmslow who shared their documents and records with us, while we have been researching this exhibition. 

Our special thanks to the

Mailboxes etc. Wilmslow
and the Waitrose Community Fund, who supported this exhibition with generous grants. 

How the Bowers obtained Hawthorne Hall

"Hawthorn" is a very common name element in the centre of Wilmslow with at least half a dozen streets and numerous houses and businesses including it in its name. The origin of this naming practice dates back to Hawthorn Hall and its estate, which seems to have been in existence since the late Middle Ages.

In the late 18th century the Hawthorn estate consisted of 44 Cheshire acres (which seems to have been a bit of a moveable feast in terms of size), much of which was held in tenancy by a number of local farmers, including Samuel Roylance, Thomas Clarke and William Lawton with most of the land lying around the old Hawthorne Hall. Today this hall still exists and is now back in use as a private residence after a long and varied history of a school and later as offices. It lies now in the middle of the Pownall part of Wilmslow, but by the early 19th century, it was considered to be part of Morley, a term used to describe the entire Western part of the town from Kennersley's Lane to the parish boundaries to the West and to Knoll's Green in the South. For the most part, the area consisted of the moor and heathland of the Lindow Common with a few well-established farms around modern-day Morley and Pownall Hall - and of course Hawthorn Hall.

In addition to the main hall and the farm land, Hawthorn Hall had its own private chapel as part of St. Bartholomew's, documenting the pre-reformation origins of the Hall and its importance to the parish life. Unlike the main nave, it was private property and could (and was) sold and rented out at the will of the owners of the Hawthorn estate, who had the right to be buried in perpetuity inside the chapel and later inside the nave, when the majority of parishioners saw their remains moved from temporary graves in the outside cemetery to a communal ossuary after 20 years (this practice only changed with the extension of the cemetery in the 1860s).

By the late 1700s the estate had long since passed out of the original ownership of the younger branches of the Booths of Dunham Massey (and via the Lathom family) into the hands of the Leighs, some of which served as Sheriffs of the County of Cheshire. In the 1770s the Hall was owned by Thomas Leigh Page and his wife Susan, two of whose children were born in the Hall (and christened in St.Bartholomew's) in 1772 and 1774. However, by 1799 the family decided to move to Devon, where Thomas Leigh Page's will was proved in 1810.

The estate and all its furniture and equipment were put up for sale from the 28th May onwards and the sale advertised in the Cheshire Courant, the Chester Chronicle and the Manchester Mercury.
The Pages clearly decided to make a fresh start in Devon and the sales notice most of the house inventory, including a mahogany dining set, four-poster and "tent" beds (we would call them canopy beds) and dressing glasses (large dressing mirrors) as well as several draft horses and 'brewing equipment' (Chester Chronicle 31/5/1799).

Despite this far-reaching advertising, no buyer could be found for the Hall on the first sales day on August 26th and the sale (which took place in the Swan Inn (now Anthology) in Swan Street) had to be rescheduled for the 23rd of September 1799 (Manchester Mercury 3 September 1799), when Ralph Bower decided to buy the entire estate.

This slow sale of a large house is by no means unusual during the Napoleonic era. It is thought that the period 1795-1820 saw the biggest upheaval in land ownership until the 1920s. The British economy was very much under stress, with the Continental Blockade cutting Britain off from some of its export markets and also to a lesser extent from its possessions and trade partners in the Caribbean and elsewhere. On the other hand, the blockade also stopped the import of a lot of Italian, but especially French luxury goods and opened large business opportunities for businessmen willing to run high risks. With these large changes, it is hardly surprising, to see that large estates unable to adapt might run into financial difficulties or decide to restructure, while a lot of the entrepreneurs especially in the North of England were able to take advantage of offers and invest heavily in land, and the opportunity it offered in providing amongst others beef to the British forces for the duration of the Napoleonic Wars.

By 1799, the Bower family had already invested heavily in a diverse portfolio of businesses, from cotton spinning and weaving to ownership of mills (including for grain) and different farms as well as investment into Turnpike Trusts. We don't know, what attracted Ralph Bower specifically to buy the Hawthorn Estate, but it is possible, that beyond the economic opportunities he saw the chance to obtain a prestigious seat for the family and the chance to document for the rest of Wilmslow that the Bowers had arrived.

Bibliography:
T.Cadell and W.Davies (1810), The county Palatinate of Chester. Vol. 2,2.