Anne Bradburn's family

Anne Bradburn's family used to live in the village. She currently lives in Sutton Coldfield. This is her account.

My Great Great Grandmother Mary Slater (nee King) lived in the cottage that is now the post office.

My Great Grandmother Sarah Ann Slater was born in the cottage prior to moving up to Blenheim when she married Fred Wharton to live next to Connie Pittam.

My Mum has always found it a bit strange to visit the post office because when you walk into the shop you are in effect walking into her grandmother's living room.

On my family tree I have traced as far back as Robert Scaldwell (1746-1820) and wife Mary (nee. Nash) on the one side and on the other Mary Crook (1750 - c.1820) and her husband Samuel Wharton who lived in Little Milton and the family and their descendents stayed in the village until the 1950's when they moved up to Birmingham and that is when I presume the Mrs Carpenter who has given an anecdote on your site moved into the shop. Each generation has lived pretty much in the same few cottages which were handed down.

All the family I can find out about from the census and parish information were agricultural labourers like the rest of the village. My Great Grandfather looked after squire horses and I suppose that those were the horses used to work the land. The women seemed to have been in service prior to marrying as did my own Grandmother who went into service aged 11 living in and was given one Sunday afternoon off a month. The rest of the time she told me she was forbidden to even acknowledge her own mother as every day she had to walk past the family home on her errands. She progressed from Char Maid to Cook prior to getting married at age 26.

They were fervent Methodists and attended the Chapel. All of them refusing houses from "The Lord of the Manor" so they were not then compelled to attend St James' Church and my grandmother was not even allowed into the church's grounds as a child.

She did say to me when she was alive that the Lords (or Toffs as she referred to them) treated everyone very badly. There was a claim that my Great Grandfather Fred Wharton who was born to Mercy Wharton when barely older than a child herself, was the result of Mercy Wharton being taken by force by a gentleman at the big house where she was in service. Whether this is true we don't know - all we have is what she herself told her son which is as I have related it - but the birth certificate shows the father to be unknown and she never accepted him. Fred was never part of her life. When she did marry she left him with her parents and he never had any contact with the then Butler family whose descendents I have been in touch with recently and were not even aware of his existence.

The move in the 1950's was necessary because at that time the houses still had no running water or electricity/gas and my mother's own words were that it was very hard and primitive. When she was eight years old in 1951 she still had to fetch water from the well at Blenheim. My Great-Grandfather Fred Wharton was then getting very old and it was purely for his increased comfort that they moved to where there was electricity, running hot and cold water and gas to the house. However, when he died the funeral cortege came all the way from Birmingham to Little Milton so that he could be buried in the graveyard of St James where he is up one row and to the left of the the front porch. When the funeral cortege arrived into the village my mother describes how the whole village came out and were lining the main road up to the church because she said she felt like it was a royal procession. We now know however, it is because this is probably because he was from the oldest original families of the village that had remained there and not gone down to London like many who did when industralisation took off. So, everybody then knew him and knew of the family.

As you know, only then did George Slater (my grandmother's cousin) remain in the village until he died there recently. So really, the presence has only just finished with the death of George Slater since the few few cottages were erected in the 1700's.

My Aunt Lily who was born Lily Dobson and the daughter of Lily Slater (my Great Grandmother's sister) is still alive at 95 although in the final stages of bowel cancer. She also lived at the Post Office with her Granny Slater after her own mother died in childbirth when she was about 2 years old.

		In this photo you may recognise the post office in the background when it was a cottage. There is my great grandmother Sarah Ann Slater who married Fred Wharton with her the family from the Slater side. The younger ladies were the Aunts of George Slater who lived on the main road until he died not long back and was the fabulous gardener who still bartered even then.

		This is my Grandmother and Grandfather in village - Phoebe Wharton and George Pullen of Kingston Blount.