Tags
emigration, German immigrants, Goodge Street, Mellsop, Migration, Power, Protestant Irish, Stafford, Wexford
“Serious Robbery”
“On Sunday night last [4 November 1849] the home of Mr Melsop [sic], Earl Street [Stafford], was robbed of £49-10s belonging to a hard-working man named John Powers [sic] who lodged in the house. The money was the result of several years’ savings and was intended to defray Powers’ expenses with those of his wife and family as emigrants. The robbery, it is said, was committed when the whole of the inmates (except the children) were attending divine service. It would seem the thief must have been acquainted with the place of deposit as a watch and other articles of some value were passed over before the robber got to Powers’ room, in which the money was kept.”[1]
£49-10s was a lot of money in 1849 and worth about £4,435 at today’s prices. The thief, whoever he was, got away with his haul and no-one seems to have been brought to justice for the crime.[2]
Two recent posts in this blog have followed Stafford Irish migrants on their onward paths to new lives in the USA.[3] They would have saved money for their passage and settlement overseas just like the unfortunate John Power, but for him and his family the robbery dashed any hopes of a new life abroad.[4] We will look at what happened to the Power family shortly, but first we need to see how the paths of John Power and William Mellsop came to cross in Stafford.
William Mellsop, schoolteacher
Like John Power, William Mellsop was Irish and had been born around 1809. His place of origin is not known, though he may have been related to a Mellsop family located around Birr, Co. Offaly (then King’s County). His father, John, was a distiller.[5] William moved to England in the 1830s and in 1841 he was a lodger in the Stafford household of his probable employer, Ann Trubshaw, a schoolmistress. For William was a schoolmaster. He was also a Protestant and, in contradistinction to his distilling father, was an abstainer from drink. In 1841 he chaired a tea party of the Stafford Total Abstinence Society at which 70 members were present.[6]
On 3 December 1842 William married a local woman, Maria Smith, who had been born in Penkridge around 1818.[7] The couple moved into the house in Earl Street, Stafford, and speedily had three children. Given the poor pay of teachers at that time, the arrival of the children probably put a strain on the Mellsop family’s finances, and they needed to take in lodgers. That is how John Power and his family arrived in the house.
John Power, tailor
John Power was born around 1817 in the City of Wexford in south-east Ireland, the son of Frederick Power.[8] He was also a Protestant and worked as a tailor. He is the only person I know of from Co. Wexford who ever ended up in Stafford. Most emigrants to England from the far south of Ireland left from ports like Waterford and Cork and settled in the south of England and especially in London. That leads me to suspect he had already left Wexford in his youth and moved to Dublin. Then, like many Irish Protestant skilled workers before the Famine, he decided he would have more of a future in Britain. He probably took the natural route from Ireland’s capital to Liverpool and arrived in the Stafford area around 1841/2. The first we know of him is his marriage at Holy Trinity church, Baswich near Stafford, to Jane Simson (sic) on 24 July 1843.[9] Like the Mellsops, the Power family soon got to work producing children and indeed they jumped the gun for their daughter Maria had already been born in Stafford in the late summer of 1842.[10] Matthew (b. 1844) and Jane (b. 1847) followed, so when they moved into Mellsop’s modest house sometime in the 1840s the ten occupants must have made it pretty crowded. John Power presumably met William Mellsop through the Protestant and perhaps Temperance network in Stafford, and the cheapish lodgings he offered enabled Power to put money aside for emigration.
That raises the question of what John and Jane Power’s emigration plans were. We are fortunate in knowing how much they had in savings in 1849 – £49-10s.- a fact that is missing from most emigrant stories. Where would that have taken them? A steerage passage to the USA in 1849 would have cost in the region of four to five pounds for each adult, with reduced fares of around half to three-quarters for each child.[11] If we assume an average of £4-10s each for John and Jane and £3 each for the three children, that adds up to a total fare of £18 for the whole family. To that sum would have to be added the cost of provisions for the voyage, train fare from Stafford to Liverpool and onward travel and settlement costs in the USA. Nevertheless, the family’s savings of £49-10s would have been ample and this raises the question of whether they were intending to go farther afield, to Australia or New Zealand for example. The cost of a steerage passage to Sydney around the year 1849 was £20 (including supplied provisions), so assuming half price for the children, the family’s emigration cost to Australia would have been around £70, although conceivably some assistance with the fare might have been available.[12] These colonies were desperate for white settlers, particularly families.
It is clear the Stafford robbery was a body blow to John and Jane Power’s emigration plan, and they then took a different course. They left the Mellsop household, not surprising in the circumstances, and in 1851 we find them living in a small cottage, 30 Mill Bank, close to the River Sow. Jane was now working as a shoe binder, a low status domestic female job in the footware trade ideal for a woman needing to look after young children. Another baby, Mary Ann, was born in the autumn of 1851.[13]
The Power family move to Goodge Street, London
Sometime after that the Power family decided they could do better elsewhere, and they moved to London. They were already there by 1858 when their final child, Eleanor Hortense (Nelly), was born, and in 1861 they were living in Goodge Street off the Tottenham Court Road on the edge of Fitzrovia. And there they stayed for over thirty years, living at no. 16 (later renumbered 32) Goodge Street. It was (and still partly is) a street of large terrace houses developed by Francis and William Goodge from around 1746. Although superficially impressive, by the second half of the nineteenth century most of the houses were in multi-occupation and home to people who were a microcosm of migrant London. The area was particularly a focus for German immigrants spreading north from their initial concentration in Soho to the south, but many other residents, like John Power, were incomers from other continental countries, from Ireland and from the provinces of Britain.[14] They were attracted here by the availability of work in often sweated trades like tailoring and dressmaking which served the wealthier clientele of the West End. It would be interesting to know whether John Power heard in Stafford that Goodge Street would be a good place to settle or whether the family initially lived elsewhere in London while they sized up the possibilities.

At no. 16 the dominant occupier (though probably not the owner) was Hermann Cohen, a tobacconist (later jeweller) who had been born in the Jewish community of Schneidemühl in Posen, Prussia, around 1811.[15] In 1871 John Power’s family represented the Irish immigrants to London and three of the other household heads had come from the English provinces – Sunderland, Norfolk and Staffordshire. Only one was a Londoner. All were in more or less skilled trades like Power. Goodge Street was, therefore, a diverse working class area but one above the ranks of the labouring poor. The accommodation may have been small and overcrowded but the houses were not slums and only artisanal workers could afford the rents there.
Although John and Jane Power had been thwarted of their aim to emigrate, it seems the family did well enough in London. They continued living at no. 16/32 Goodge Street and by 1891 John appears to have become the dominant occupier of the building. Hermann Cohen had died in 1879 and Annie, his widowed second wife, was in 1891 a ‘needlewoman’ in two rooms, although by 1901 she had three rooms, a servant and was ‘living on her own means’.[16] Jane Power died, however, early in 1891 and John only lasted two more years, dying at 76 years of age in 1893.[17] His effects at death were valued at £197 (worth about £17,700 at 2021 prices), so it seems the family had built up a secure base in London after their disastrous start in Stafford.[18]
William Mellsop’s later life
What of John Power’s landlord, William Mellsop and his family? They had a more difficult time. William never seems to have had a secure job in teaching despite mostly sticking to that profession. Perhaps he was a rotten teacher. He and Maria had three more children during the 1850s and they moved to the Potteries sometime between 1853 and 1857. Maria died young in 1861 and William was left alone to bring up his six offspring whilst trying to make a living.[19] He moved between jobs. In the 1861 census he was a schoolmaster and living in Shelton, Hanley, but at the time of his daughter Jemima’s marriage in 1869 he was a postman. By 1871 he was back to teaching but now in Longton, whilst a year later a local directory lists him as ‘school’ in Marchington, out in the countryside of north-east Staffordshire. He died in Stone, Staffordshire, in 1875 aged about 65.[20]
Conclusion
John Power and William Mellsop had been Irish immigrants to Britain in pre-Famine times who were superficially united by their Protestant backgrounds and their somewhat aspirant occupations. They typified a substantial class of Irish migrants who are often overlooked by historians. They arrived as single men and rapidly formed unions with local women to produce typically nuclear family units. Their residential and social relationship, such as it may have been, was undoubtedly sundered by the robbery at Mellsop’s house, and the subsequent lives of these two families diverged. Whilst neither family emigrated overseas, for both Stafford proved to be merely a stopping place before they moved on elsewhere.
[1] Staffordshire Advertiser (SA), 10 November 1849
[2] There may have been more to this incident than is revealed by the simple reported facts. It seems odd that the case was not followed up and that the robbery took place with the six young children in the house. The suspicion must be that William Mellsop was somehow complicit in the robbery, but that would seem to conflict with his religious and public activities. It is futile to speculate further.
[3] Posts on 4 July 2022 and 16 July 2021.
[4] John Power was by error or uncertainty named Powers with an ‘s’ in some of the early records but later he became consistently ‘Power’ in the singular.
[5] Information from Rosalie-Ann Nicholson, New Zealand, 2003.
[6] SA, 14 August 1841.
[7] Penkridge RD, marriages, October-December 1842, William Mellsop and Maria Smith, 14/141.
[8] England, Select Marriages, 1538-1973, England and Wales Civil Registration Index, Marriages, 1837-1915, Stafford RD, 17/121, and Staffordshire Birth, Marriages and Deaths index, 1837-2017, Holy Trinity Church, Berkswich (now Baswich), 24 July 1843, John Powers and Jane Simson, Father, Frederick Power.
[9] Jane’s family name was probably Simpson and she was baptised as such at Gnosall, her birthplace, on 18 January 1818. She was the daughter of John Simpson, a shoemaker, and his wife Jane in that village. John Simpson is listed in the 1841 census in Gnosall but his daughter Jane seems to have escaped the enumerators and her whereabouts at that time are unknown.
[10] Stafford RD, births, July-September 1842, Maria Powers (sic), 17/128.
[11] John Killick, ‘Transatlantic steerage fares, British and Irish migration, and return migration, 1815-1860’, Economic History Review, vol. 67, no. 1, February 2014, pp. 170-191.
[12] Some details are given in theshipslist.com/fares/1849.shtml, accessed on 10 August 2022.
[13] Stafford RD, births, October-December 1851, Mary Ann Power, 17/139 or 189 (the figure is indistinct).
[14] P. Panayi, ‘The settlement of Germans in Britain during the Nineteenth Century’, IMIS-BEITRÄGE, Heft 14/2000, (Universität Osnabrück), p. 32.
[15] The Polish name for the town was and is now again Pile. It became Prussian at the first Partition of Poland in 1772. Like Hermann Cohen, many Jews left Schneidemühl during the nineteenth century and the community was in decline. In the twentieth century the remaining Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis. See https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/pila/ and P. S. Cullman, History of the Jewish Community of Schneidemühl: 1641 to the Holocaust, (Ayataynu, 2006)
[16] St Pancras RD, deaths, January-March 1879, Hermann Cohen, 1b/41.
[17] St Pancras RD, deaths, January-March 1891, Jane Power, 1b/18; January-March 1893, John Power, 1b/38.
[18] National Probate Calendar, 1858-1995, John Power, 32 Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, Middx., died 26 March 1893, administration and will, London, 15 April 1893 to Mary Ann Power, spinster. Effects £197. Modern values are estimated using the Bank of England Inflation Calculator: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
[19] Stoke-on-Trent RD, deaths, January-March 1861, Maria Mellsop, 6b/115.
[20] Stone RD, deaths, October-December 1875, William Mellsop, 6b/26a.