BMIHT’s Assistant Archivist, Grace Jordan, explores the curious question as to why our archive includes records which date back to the 18th century, more than a century before the first cars were ever built.
The Marriage Settlement between Mary Morris and John Wigston, 1740
In 1740, in the parish of Dormston, Mary Morris married John Wigston, and in doing so became a part of automotive history. Their marriage settlement document lives in the BMIHT Archive at the British Motor Museum, alongside records from across the history of the British motor industry. The question is: why?
In tracing the connection between this document and the motor industry, it is impossible to ignore the name of Morris. William Morris was, of course, the founder of Morris Motors, which was one of the most significant car manufacturers in Britain in the 20th Century. It seems probable, when first studying the document, that the Mary and John Morris who are mentioned were ancestors of William Morris, hence the document finding its way into the Morris archive collection.
However, upon greater scrutiny, the Morris name appears to be a red herring.
William Morris, when he became Lord Nuffield, had his ancestry traced all the way back to 1278. This ancestry was published in The Complete Peerage, Vol. XIII: Peerage creations 1901–1938. What this lineage shows is that, at least amongst Morris’ direct ancestors, there are no persons who could be the Mary and John Morris named in the marriage settlement. This is because none of the members of Morris’ direct ancestry align with what the deed tells us about Mary and John Morris: that they were father and daughter, they were from Dormston in Worcestershire, they were both alive in 1740, and that Mary was engaged to a man named John Wigston (Worcestershire parish records confirm that the marriage did indeed take place, in 1740). While William Morris’ direct ancestors feature several Marys and Johns, none of them are a father-daughter pair which line up with the date of the marriage settlement.
It is not possible to rule out any relation- however distant- between the document’s Morrises and William Morris. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that Mary and John Morris were not direct ancestors of Lord Nuffield along the Morris line. Their main link to the motor industry, and thus to Morris Motors, must lie in a different direction.
Looking past the Morris surname, the marriage settlement chiefly relates to a piece of land, known in the document as ‘New Season’. The land is said to be located in Great Alne, and be around 10 acres, ‘abutting upon Aston Cantlow River on the east and upon a highway leading from Henley to Alcester on the west’. It is therefore possible that the document is tied to the motor industry not through the Morris name, but through the ownership of land. If a motor company came into possession of the land which is detailed in the marriage settlement, then it is entirely plausible that the company would have inherited the real estate records for that place. The question therefore becomes whether any motor companies owned land in the area which is described in the settlement.
Part of the indenture describing the land in question. It reads:
“All that Close with the appurtenances in Great Alne aforesaid commonly called or known by the name of New Season… about ten acres (be the same more or less) abutting upon Aston Cantlow River on the east and upon a high-way…”
Luckily, the answer to that question is very simple. Great Alne was the location of a factory for the Maudslay Motor Company, known as Castle Maudslay. Production moved there during the Second World War in order to avoid the air raids which were devastating Coventry, and the factory remained in operation into the 21st Century. The site had previously been home to Great Alne Hall, built by Daniel Ratcliffe in 1876, and demolished in the 1940s upon Maudslay relocating to the area.
Maudslay was generally known for the production of commercial vehicles. In 1948, the Associated Equipment Company (AEC) purchased Maudslay, along with Crossley Motors, and set up Associated Commercial Vehicles (ACV) to bring the three manufacturers together under one holding company. ACV was, in turn, taken over by Leyland in 1962, setting the stage for its eventual fate as part of British Leyland. The archival holdings of British Leyland would subsequently become the foundation for the BMIHT Archive.
Thus the Morris marriage settlement, through a series of corporate takeovers and mergers, happened to come under the same ownership as Morris Motors. The archives of British Leyland were later arranged by their company of origin (Austin, Morris, Wolseley, etc.), and during this process, it appears that the red herring of the Morris name may have caused the marriage settlement to be placed amongst the real estate records of Morris Motors. A quick look inside some of the AEC real estate boxes reveals over two centuries’ worth of deeds relating to land in Great Alne, which would have been inherited by the company upon the acquisition of Maudslay. It is even possible to see some of the names mentioned in the marriage settlement feature in these other real estate records, although any more evidence of Mary or John Morris in the AEC deeds is yet to be found.
Today, the site of ‘New Season’/Castle Maudslay is a retirement village. If we look at a modern map, we can see that the village is, as the marriage settlement describes, ‘abutting upon Aston Cantlow River [the River Alne] on the east’, although the ‘highway leading from Henley to Alcester’, presumably now Henley Road, is to the east of the site, rather than the west, as the settlement states.