Mother Mary Augustina More was the ninth and last lineal descendant of St. Thomas More and the sister of Fr. John More, S.J., Provincial of the English Jesuits at his death in 1794. She was among the most important figures in eighteenth century English Catholic life, and has been somewhat neglected by historians of the period. Born at Barnborough (or Bamburg), Yorkshire, in 1732, she was the daughter of Thomas More and Catherine Giffard. In 1753 she made her first profession at the Priory of Nazareth, Bruges and, in 1766, succeeded Mother Olivia Darrell as seventh prioress of the community, a duty she fulfilled until her death, on 5th May 1807. These were some of the most difficult years that the community ever suffered, and it was largely because of Mother More’s resolute leadership that the community survived as the only English convent remaining in mainland Europe.

The middle years of the nineteenth century witnessed the crest of a wave of rapid growth in English towns begun when workers, attracted by the higher wages offered by industry, started to migrate from rural areas to the towns, thereby swelling the populations of the latter at enormous rates.

Birmingham was no exception to this growth spurt. During the last forty years of the eighteenth century Birmingham’s population doubled, a phenomenon that owed not a little to its canal system. ‘By the end of the eighteenth century, the canals [crucial to a region farther away from a coast than any other industrial area in England,] had already transformed the Birmingham neighbourhood, and factories and workshops clustered along their banks.’ Then, between 1831 and 1871 its population increased from 144,000 to 344,000.

Another Catholic who for a number of years was in business as a timber merchant, was Robert Watmough, who was born in 1762 or 1763, the son of Thomas Watmough, husbandman of Litherland, a village five miles north of Liverpool. Though much of Watmough’s career as a timber merchant falls into the early nineteenth century, he is mentioned here as he provides a link with another business connected with the operation of the port, namely shipbuilding. He was a partner for a number of years of John Dwerryhouse, who was possibly the leading local Catholic shipbuilder of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In the choir of the chapel at St Mary’s College, Oscott, is a stained glass window dedicated to the memory of Fr John Wheble, a military chaplain who died in the Crimean War. Whereas the four upper lights of the window depict scenes from the life of St John the Apostle, Fr Wheble’s patron saint, the four lower ones show Wheble setting sail for the Crimea, giving absolution to soldiers, attending the wounded at the Battle of the Alma, and his death on board the hospital ship Arabia on November 3, 1854. St Edmund’s College, Ware, also has a Crimean window and again Fr Wheble, a benefactor of the college, is depicted along with two alumni of the college, Fr Michael Canty and Fr Denis Sheehan, who also died in the Crimea.