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The Beardmore Story explores the history of the Beardmore family covering 12 generations from Thomas Beardmore of Farley, North Staffordshire, whose will was proved in April 1573, down to Francis Alan Beardmore and his youngest brother George Cedric, a successful late 20th century novelist.

The website has been created on behalf of George’s daughters Anthea Francis Meadows and Victoria Helen Knowles, and Alan’s son John Richard Beardmore, who has two sons and two grandsons set to continue the Beardmore name.

Much of what we know about the early Beardmores comes from Olive Dale (Mrs Olive A. Dale, née Beardmore) of Newcastle-under-Lyme, who researched the Beardmores of North Staffordshire from the early 1950s; by 1970 she had spent eighteen years on it, according to a note by Dennis Beardmore. It is remarkable that she was able to put together such a detailed picture of the family long before the internet and genealogy websites existed. Some of her typed family trees are on Thomas Beardmore’s page, and her letters to George Beardmore have a page of their own.

For more than four hundred years the Beardmores stayed within 20 miles of Farley, moving from Farley to Alton and then Leigh. Towards the end of the eighteen century they were in Audley and Talke, and then the area known as ‘The Five Towns’ after Arnold Bennett‘s 1902 novel ‘Anna of the Five Towns‘. By then Frank Beardmore, Alan and George’s father, had married Bennett’s sister. As a young writer, George hoped for Bennett’s guidance, but found him intolerant and over-bearing.

You can find out more about Arnold Bennett on Wikipedia, or from this Radio Four programme.

Frank’s business was actually in Fenton, the ‘forgotten’ sixth town which Bennett left out simply because he believed ‘Five Towns’ sounded better than ‘Six Towns’. In 1910 the six towns, Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Langton and Fenton, were unwillingly united to form one city: Stoke-on-Trent. The older borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme, a mile or so to the west, retained its independence. Sometime after the Fenton pottery business closed down Frank moved to London with his wife and four young children.

The places that feature most prominently in The Beardmore Story are shown on this map: