Postings of a Company man
A 19th-century gentleman's diary gives a taste of a very different age. Toby Neal turns the pages in a journal of a company man.
For 19 years, Lilleshall Company employee John Wheeler kept a diary which now, almost 140 years on, gives a fascinating insight into life in Victorian Shropshire.
Spanning the years 1869 to 1888, it records developments on the local industrial scene - including a fair degree of industrial turmoil - as well as some of the hard times and tragedies of the day and developments in his personal life, including Wheeler's natural interest in promoting the career of his eldest son Roden.
Then there are the omissions. There are, for instance, no entries whatsoever for 1870. And nothing about the death of his first wife.
Wheeler kept the diary intermittently; many of the entries are little more than jottings.
The death of his father is reported without elaboration: "January 1872 Father very ill; January 28 Father died."
The handwritten diary has been handed down to Wheeler's great-grandson John Stokes of Magnolia Drive, Ellesmere, and some of the background detail has been pieced together.
"He worked at the Lilleshall Company. He was a miner and was badly burned in a mining accident, apparently. He lived at Wharf House, Donnington, which I believe was a Lilleshall Company house," said Mr Stokes.
