Genealogy & Staffordshire Potteries

In the mid seventeenth century farmer potters began to make use of the abundance of clay and coal in North Staffordshire.  Farmers began by making butterpots for the easier marketing of butter in Burslem. Eventually the trade spread from Burslem to the nearby hamlets of Tunstall to the north, and Cobridge, Hanley, Shelton, Stoke, Fenton and Longton to the South becoming the areas primary trade.   One of these potteries, Ruston Grange, had a long history, involving many families. 

Ruston Grange   

In the early 13th century the estate known as Rushton comprising 420 acres was the property of Henry de Audley. 

In 1223 he included the estate among the endowments of the Cistercian abbey at Hulton. The monks established a grange or sheep farm on the land which they held until the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 1538. 

The Crown granted the estate to James Leveson of Wolverhampton in 1539 who sold it in the following year to Richard Biddulph of Biddulph for £130 7s. 

The Biddulph family were Roman Catholics and the Parliamentary Committee for the County of Stafford sequestered the estate during the civil war.

The Bagnalls: 

The Bagnalls another Roman Catholic family were tenants of Francis Biddulph. 

Part of the farmhouse was used as a place of worship by the Roman Catholics in the area. Their tenant, John Bagnall was forced to flee the house during the disturbances associated with the flight of James II in 1688 and the property was ransacked by a mob from Burslem and the neighbourhood. 

John Bagnall described himself as a potter in his will made in the same year and Josiah Wedwood’s list of master potters in Burslem records that the Bagnall family “of Grange" were making butter pots with a weekly production to the value of £2 in 1710-15. 

The farmhouse at Rushton Grange in about 1800
from Ward's "The Borough of Stoke-upon-Trent" 1843

In the second half of the 17th and the 18th century the Biddulph family sold the land on the east side of Rushton Grange and by the early 1840s the estate had been reduced to 220 acres. 

Most of the land was let to William Gething who was recorded in the 1851 census returns as the occupier of 103 acres on which he employed 4 agricultural labourers. By then the Grange farm had been divided into two with the other part occupied by William a farm bailiff, his wife and an agricultural labourer. 

The expansion of the pottery factories at Cobridge and the construction of new houses after the building of Waterloo Road brought problems as well as opportunities for the occupier of the Grange Farm. 
One result was that more and more people used the footpaths which crossed the estate between Cobridge Burslem and Wolstanton.

The Development of the Grange Estate, Cobridge

In 1835 of John Biddulph of Burton upon Trent, the last of the senior male line of the family, died and his estates were divided between his coheirs:

• Thomas Stonor (Baron Camoys, 1839) of Stonor Park (in Pyrton parish, Oxon.).

• Anthony George Wright of Burton-upon-Trent who in 1837 assumed the name of Biddulph. They still held it in 1840.

By 1842 the 220 acre Rushton Grange estate had passed to Lord Camoys. Shortly afterwards he began to redevelop the land on the east side of the estate next to Waterloo Road. Development was first of all limited to plots immediately adjacent to Waterloo Road, though gaps were left in the building plots to facilitate the construction of side roads at a later date. Building began on the plots at the northern end of the road nearest to Burslem. It is clear that Lord Camoys intended to create a high-class residential development for middleclass occupiers.

The first phase of development included the construction of “Camoys Terrace” (No 184 & 186 Waterloo Road), a pair of large semi-detached houses in the Gothic style. No 184 contained 8 rooms and No 186 7 rooms, each with a front garden and a large rear garden plus a coach house and driveway to Waterloo Road. 

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