Early Years The family of Mander (or Maunder) was settled at Tredington, Warwickshire, in the English Midlands, by the end of the thirteenth century. The early record is confusing, and the trail is lost in a thicket of recurrent Christian names and migrations ramifying around villages in a small area of Warwickshire and Worcestershire. We know that William and Matilda Mander, of the hamlet of Armscote in the same parish, married in 1494/5. Three further generations lived at Tredington: John of Blackwell (1518-1587), William (1543-1622) and Richard (1575/6-1629), whose will was proved at £384 4d. The Staffordshire branch of the family traces its descent from one Henry Mander (1601-1672), probably Richard’s son. He married Anne Whegham of Aston Cantlow, by the Forest of Arden (also in Warwickshire), in 1635–in the same church where, according to tradition, Shakespeare’s parents married. Shortly after, he moved to his wife’s village, where he became a responsible citizen as a constable and churchwarden. His son, Samuel (1648-1716), moved to a grander-sounding address, Lapworth Park, near Henley-in-Arden, six miles north, and married one Mary Shakespeare (probably no relation of the bard). Their son, Robert (1681-1749), lived at Ireland’s Farm, Lapworth, on the site of the old fourteenth-century manor house formerly known as Lapworth Hall. He married Catherine, daughter of John Cotterell of Bushwood Hall, the next door farm. By 1753, their second son, also Robert, was a large farmer, tenant of the three farms adjoining in Lapworth: Ireland’s, Bushwood Hall and Mill Farm. The Mander family was to occupy Ireland’s Farm for some 200 years. They had a large family, and evidently not enough land to set up all their growing tribe of sons. They were tenants of Sir Lister Holte, of Aston Hall, and were falling into arrears with their rents in the 1730s and ’40s, with the decline in corn prices. In about 1742, their fifth son, Thomas Mander (1720-1764), emigrated north again, to Wolverhampton, then a prosperous market and manufacturing town of 7,454 inhabitants and 1,440 houses (according to Isaac Taylor), leafy with gardens, poised to enter the industrial revolution and to become the chief town of the ‘Black Country’, and the thirteenth largest town in Britain.
The John Street house had been looted by a Tory mob of Jacobite rioters–described as ‘a Gang of Ragamuffins, Pick-Pockets and Gaol Birds’–in June 1715, when they ransacked the Presbyterian chapel–known as the old meeting-house–next door. The damage to the chapel was assessed by a government commission at £254 16s. 2d.; while that to Samuel Clemson’s house was also considerable, at £20: Samuel Clemson, of [Wolverhampton], currier, aged 33, deposed that on 11 July, 1715, a great number of rioters attacked his house, being his inheritance, broke the windows, flung great stones and pieces of timber into the house, threw down the pewter from the shelves, wounded and bruised the deponent and his wife, and threatened his life so that he was forced to keep a number of armed men in the house for a fortnight. Damages were estimated at £20. Gerald Mander, historian of the family, the company and the town, remarks: ‘Why Samuel Clemson should have been singled out for special treatment is a matter for conjecture: perhaps he was particularly odious, perhaps less able to command protection. His property suffered depreciation; but his sentiments lived again in his descendants, who (if truth be told) have vexed the town not a little and continue unto the present day.’ The meeting house had been built in 1701. Gerald writes of it: It did not stand unscarred and in peace and quiet, but rather became a centre of storm and resistance… Nonconformity as expressed by the Independents was still represented by a tiny body of people who worshipped in the small chapel in John’s Lane; they bore the brunt of the attack by the mob in 1715 and, although much damaged, survived it. The authorities were faced with a very heavy bill for restitution and it was to prevent disturbances of this kind in future that the Riot Act was passed into law. Only the body of the Meeting House seems to have survived and in due course it was restored to something of its former glory at the expense of the taxpayer. At this time the congregation numbered about 400 and the cause flourished. In 1720 John Scott gave an acre of land towards the endowment, and the Presbyterian Fund in London gave about five or six pounds a year towards the stipend of the minister. In due course, the site of the meeting-house was added to other John Street land owned by the family to become the nucleus of landholdings in Wolverhampton which form the Mander Shopping Centre today, a Wolverhampton landmark. Thomas died on 3 October 1774 and is buried in the family vault in the churchyard of St Peter’s Collegiate Church in Wolverhampton, the first of a score or so of Manders to be buried there. The Thomas Manders had two sons, Benjamin, born in 1752, and John, in 1754. They both became industrialists in different, but related, trades.
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