Edward Bagnall was baptized at St Leonard’s, Broseley in Shropshire on 22 Mar 1761. He was the third of four sons of John Bagnall and Margaret Dixon. John Bagnall is described as a mining engineer, significant because Broseley was at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution, just a mile or so from Coalbrookdale and the famous Ironbridge, built in 1779.
The Bagnall family were to embrace the new technology of the revolution and by the time Edward and his older brother John had reached adulthood their father had established important coal and iron interests in the West Midlands, notably the Golds Hill Iron works and in and around Darlaston and Wednesbury where the pace of industrialization was ever increasing.
The businesses were run as a web of family partnerships and it is difficult sometimes to disentangle each brother’s role from some of the documents that have survived.
Edward married Mary Wilkes on 1 Jan 1783 at St Lawrence, Darlaston. It would appear that the Wilkes family had Iron founding interests in Tipton and it was by a series of judicious marriages that the stretch of the family businesses was extended.
At some point around 1790 Edward Bagnall almost certainly became a Wesleyan. Although his children continued to be baptized in the Church of England, those of his brothers John and Daniel were baptized in Darlington Street Methodist Church in Wolverthampton.
Edward died in 1805 at the age of 44 only five years after his father John Bagnall, the elder. He was survived by his elder brother John who lived until 1829 and his younger brother Daniel.
John Bagnall, the younger, had six sons and were the names behind the important nineteenth century iron works in West Bromwich of John Bagnall and Sons. The fortunes of Edward’s own children were more mixed. His two elder sons both married members of the Hinton family. His eldest daughter Jane married Jeremiah Dimmack. His daughter, Martha, married Edward Charles Thorneycroft, the twin brother of Wolverhampton’s first mayor George Benjamin Thorneycroft.
Sources and Notes
- The notion that the Wilkes family brought further Iron making interests and know-how to the Bagnall family set-up, is not supported by much evidence. On the Hardwicke marriage form dated 1 Jan 1783, Edward signs his name, but Mary is illiterate. A George Wilkes signs as a witness. Mary supposedly has a brother William Wilkes, who dies in Wednesbury in 1808.
- The Wesleyans were very strong in Darlaston, with John Wesley a frequent preacher at a house in Bilston Street. A new chapel was built in 1810 in Pinfold Street, adjacent to Bagnall property. A plaque to a founding member commemorates a stalwart of the church, a John Wilkes who died in 1847.