Patrick Comerford
Staffordshire’s first poet laureate Mal Dewhirst, in his poem ‘We are Tamworth’, repeats a popular one-liner about Tamworth ‘where the town hall is like an orange, it has Peel on the outside.’
The bronze statue on a stone plinth by Matthew Noble shows Sir Robert Peel with a long cloak standing on a plinth with inscribed panels. Sir Robert Peel is to be found everywhere throughout Tamworth. He was the MP for Tamworth and twice Prime Minister, and he delivered his ‘Tamworth Manifesto’ from the window of the Town Hall in 1834.
But Peel is not only outside the town hall – his memory is etched throughout the town.
I was writing on Monday about how the former Peel School on Lichfield Street and how it seems to be undergoing restoration and spring clean. This was the second Peel School in Tamworth, replacing an earlier school on Church Street. It was replaced, in turn, in 1850 by a third version of the school designed for Sir Robert Peel by the architect Sydney Smirke.
But other reminders of Peel on the streets of Tamworth include creative signs put in place by the Peel Society, and the names of pubs and hotels, along with memorial windows in Saint Editha’s Church.
A sculpture of a pig wearing a police helmet that is part of the street furniture in Tamworth stands beneath Peel’s statue in front of the Town Hall in Market Street.
It is known as the ‘Peel Pig’ and is part of a ‘Trotters Trail’ through the town, remembering both Sir Robert Peel and the town’s association with the Tamworth Pig. The trail was funded by an £8,000 grant from the Arts Council.
Two Tamworth pigs escaped from an abattoir in Wiltshire in 1998 and went on the run, earning them the nicknames ‘Butch Cassidy’ and ‘The Sundance Pig’. After their story was told in the national press, the Daily Mail bought the escaped pigs, reprieving them from slaughter in an animal sanctuary. The BBC dramatised the story in a film in 2004, The Legend of the Tamworth Two.
The Peel Pig was once decorated in purple and yellow – the Peel family colours – and it still wears a police helmet, a reminder of Peel’s role in establishing the Metropolitan Police.
Nearby, the Bow Street Runner on Market Street pub took its name from a police force that was a forerunner of Peel’s police. It was part of the Castle Hotel on the corner of Holloway and Market Street, but the pub and hotel closed suddenly when the owners Rest House Limited went into voluntary receivership at the end of January.
Yet another pub with Peel associations is the Sir Robert Peel on 13-15 Lower Gungate. This is a 17th or early 18th century Grade II listed building, with a large beer garden to the rear overlooked by Saint Editha’s Church. The garden’s ancient stone walls were once part of the mediaeval deanery of Saint Editha’s, a collegiate church that had its own dean and canons until the Reformation.
The Peel Aldergate and Christopher’s is a boutique hotel and restaurant in neighbouring Georgian town houses on Aldergate with 19 en-suite rooms, ranging from single right through to the bridal suite.
I was a guest there last year, speaking at the invitation of Tamworth and District Civic Society about the Wyatt architectural dynasty (11 April 2024).
The Peel family is also commemorated in three windows in Saint Editha’s Church. The East Window by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris in Saint George’s Chapel, where I was speaking last week, is in memory of John Peel (1804-1872), Liberal MP for Tamworth in 1863-1868 and again in 1871-1872.
A window in the South Aisle depicting David, Rizpah and Solomon is in memory of William Yates Peel (1789-1858) and his wife Lady Jane Elizabeth Peel, who died in 1847. William Yates Peel was the second son of Sir Robert Peel and a younger brother of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. He was MP for Bossiney (1817-1818), Tamworth (1818-1830, 1835-1837, 1847), Yarmouth (1830-1831) and Cambridge University (1831-1832), and was a Lord of the Treasury under Wellington and under his brother Sir Robert Peel.
A memorial window by Henry Holiday in the north aisle is dedicated ‘To the Glory of God and in affectionate memory of the Hon Maurice Berkeley Peel, BA, MC, vicar of this parish 1915-1917, who when Chaplain to the Forces in France, was killed whilst tending the wounded, May 1917. This window is placed by his family and the parishioners of Tamworth.’
The Revd Maurice Peel (1873-1917) was the son of Viscount Peel, Speaker of the House of Commons. He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and was ordained in 1899. At the outbreak of World War I, he became a chaplain in France with the 7th Division, and was awarded the Military Cross (MC) in 1915. He was wounded in action but refused medical attention until all the other men had been looked after. He was sent home to England and took a year to recover, and in the course of that year was appointed Vicar of Tamworth.
He volunteered again in 1917, and was sent to his old battalion. He was killed by a sniper shortly on 14 May 1917 at Bullecourt, while going to rescue a wounded man. The senior chaplain, the Revd Eric Milner-White, later Dean of York, set out to discover how he had died and where he was buried.
I was speaking in Saint Editha’s Church later in the evening at a Comberford family commemoration, and I reminded myself, as I visited Comberford and Comberford Hall that afternoon, of two Peel family connections with Comberford.
The loans secured against Comberford Hall and other estates by the Chichester family, who held the title of Marquis of Donegall, seem to have been transferred by the banker Henry Hoare to Sir Robert Peel (1750-1830), MP for Tamworth (1790-1818) and father of Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), who was Prime Minister (1834-1835, 1841-1846).
Robert Peel senior held the mortgages on a number of neighbouring estates in the Lichfield and Tamworth area, including some associated with families linked with the Comberford family over the generations, such as Dyott family estates in Freeford and Fulfen in Saint Michael’s Parish, Lichfield. He foreclosed the mortgages and sold the estates of Comberford and Wigginton to Richard Howard in 1809.
When James Comerford visited Comberford ca 1900-1902, William Felton Peel (1839-1907) was living at Comberford Hall, which was his family home from 1900 to 1903.
William Felton Peel, who was born in Tamworth on 13 February 1839, was a son of Captain Edmund Peel RN (1801-1871), and a great-grandson of William Peel (1745-1791), uncle of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850). William Felton Peel worked as a cotton and foreign produce merchant in Alexandria and in Bombay, where five of his eight children were born between 1868 and 1874. He later returned to England, and was in business in Broughton, Salford, near Manchester, where the other three children were born between 1876 and 1879.
William Felton Peel lived at Comberford Hall until 1902, and in 1903 he moved with his family to Hawley Hill House, in Blackwater, Hawley, Hampshire. He died on 1 August 1907 following an accident while he was playing polo in Alexandria Egypt.
Not only is the town hall is like an orange because ‘it has Peel on the outside’, but reminders of Peel and his family can be found throughout the Tamworth area.
