The tanners’ sons
Richard Willis was the son of a Bewdley tanner, and he became successively Bishop of Gloucester, Bishop of Salisbury and Bishop of Winchester. Three sees, each one a step up, and the last of them among the greatest in the English church.
John Inett also came from one of the town’s tanning families. He became Precentor of Lincoln and wrote a history of the English church, which puts him among the serious scholars of his day rather than simply among its office holders.
There is a pattern here and it is worth naming. The same trade that produced these men also paid for the town’s schooling: Bewdley’s grammar school was endowed by William Monnox, a tanner, and topped up by others in the same business. The tanneries left no handsome buildings and almost no physical trace. What they did leave, on this evidence, was money for education and a route out of the town for the boys who took it.
Thomas Andrew Knight, and the cherries
Thomas Andrew Knight, 1759 to 1836, was a son of the Rector of Bewdley and became the first President of what is now the Royal Horticultural Society. He is generally regarded as the pioneer of scientific horticulture, and his work on cherries produced the first new varieties raised by controlled breeding with known parentage. Some of them are still growing in orchards in this area.
One thing is regularly got wrong locally and it is worth saying plainly. Knight did that breeding at Elton Hall near Ludlow, not in Bewdley. The connection to this town is his family rather than his glasshouses, and the Cherry Fayre is the better place to follow what the cherries themselves did here.
The Bishop of London, and a correction
Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, 1858 to 1946, was Bishop of London from 1901 until 1939, one of the most conspicuous churchmen of his era. His family held the manor of Ribbesford until 1904, which is why he appears in the county history’s account of this parish at all.
He was not, however, born here. He was born at Stanford-on-Teme, where his father was rector, and he died at Upton-on-Severn. The Ribbesford connection is a family one, and anybody repeating the claim that he was born in this parish should check it first. We did, and it does not stand.
The others already covered
Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels to Charles I and again to Charles II, was Member of Parliament for Bewdley in 1640, and the record of every play he licensed for the London stage sat in a chest at Ribbesford for a century and a half.
Samuel Kenrick came to the town in 1765 as a banker and stayed until he died in 1811. His correspondence with the Scottish minister James Wodrow is now the subject of a modern Oxford University Press edition, which makes him one of the best documented private residents this town has ever had, and his account of how church and dissent got along here is the most valuable thing anybody wrote about eighteenth century Bewdley.
Peter Prattinton, the physician and antiquary, is the reason a good deal of what is written about this town can be written at all.
And Stanley Baldwin, born at Lower Park House in 1867, sat for the town for nearly thirty years and was three times Prime Minister.
What they have in common
Very little, on the face of it: a horticulturist, three churchmen, a theatre censor, a banker, a doctor and a Prime Minister, spread across four hundred years. What they do have in common is the reason any of them were here. This was a working river port with money in it, a grammar school paid for out of the leather trade, and a stream of people passing through on their way somewhere else. Places like that produce more than their size suggests, and then the trade goes and the people stop coming, and what is left is a very pretty town with an unlikely number of famous sons.