Welch family, their homestead in Willenhall stood in the location known as Welch End.
Concerning Pedley’s Charity, which has not been distributed these 50 years, the Churchwardens have, as recently as 1895, made earnest attempts at its recovery. The lands once chargeable for the dole were identified as Shares Acres, lying between the canal and the road leading to New Invention from Monmer Lane. The property, however, was found to be in the hands of the Trustees of the late W. E. Jones; and as, through the remissness of someone, the estate had been sold and conveyed without due provision for the payment of the annuity once charged upon it, the Trustees had not power to make such payment. While the minerals under this land have been yielding wealth, the Poor have been defrauded from their rightful share in the same.
Painstaking inquiries for the other “lost charities” have also been made, but with no success. For many years the Incumbent and Wardens have provided and distributed a Dole of 40 loaves, for which there has been no legal responsibility resting upon them.
In 1881 Jeremiah Hartill gave £200 to the Vicar and Wardens, which was invested in Consols, and the interest is annually distributed on January 1st amongst twenty poor people of the township. The Hartill Charity and the Tomkys and Welch Doles are the only ones now administered.
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Thirty or more years ago a Mr. Stokes gave the Incumbent of Willenhall £500 to be applied in his absolute discretion for the benefit of St. Giles’s School. The interest until recently was applied by him for that purpose. The principal has recently been spent in purchase of an extended playground for the new Infant Schools, and in the part purchase of a site for a new Mixed Department, adjacent thereto.
A few years after the passing of Sir Robert Peel’s Act of 1847, advantage was taken of it to split the populous area of the ancient chapelry into new district parishes; and by 1855 the said chapelry was divided into three nearly equal parts, the new parishes of St. Stephen and Holy Trinity, leaving to St. Giles’s Church
Bentley and the remaining portion of the Willenhall township. The fourth daughter parish, St. Anne’s, came a few years later.
St Stephen’s Church, in Wolverhampton Street, was erected mainly through the exertions of its first vicar, the Rev. T. W. Fletcher, M.A., and opened in 1854, seven years after its ecclesiastical district had been formed. Mr. Fletcher died in 1890, and the living is now held by the Rev. Herbert Percy Stevens, M.A. This parish maintains a Parochial Hall and Mission at Portobello.
St. Anne’s Church, Spring Bank, was built largely as a memorial to his wife by Mr. H. Jeavon. It was consecrated in 1861.