Patrick Comerford
I think it must be about 55 years since I previously Wolseley and interviewed Sir Charles Wolseley for the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury.
I was supposed to be training as a chartered surveyor through Jones Lang Wootton in Dublin and London and at the College of Estate Management, then part of Reading University, Charles Wolseley even offered to take me on as a trainee with him at Smiths Gore in Lichfield. Butat that age I had my heart set on becoming a journalist instead.
I was about 19 at that time, and that interview and feature secured my first freelance contract, writing a short series of features for the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury.
I have since passed Wolseley on the route between Stafford and Lichfield a number of times, but some inexplicable reason had never paid a return visit in all those years. I revisited it for the first time last week, when I decided to hop off the Stafford-Lichfield bus at Wolseley Bridge to have lunch at the Wolseley Arms, to walk by the River Trent and the lakes, and to visit the Wolseley Centre on the former Wolseley estate.
Family tradition says the Wolseley estate was given to the family in Anglo-Saxon times by King Edgar in 975 AD as a reward for ridding the area of wolves. As a reminder of that tradition, the Wolseley family adopted the motto Homo Homini Lupus (‘Man is a wolf towards his fellow man’), with a hunting dog in the shield of their coat of arms and a wolf’s head as the crest.
The Wolseley Arms sits on the banks of the River Trent, beside Wolseley Bridge, about 3 km (2 miles). A mediaeval wayfarers’ chapel was built on the bridge, supposedly on the central arch, but it was swept away with the rest of the bridge in 1795.
The pub is said to date back to the 15th century and originally was a hunting lodge on the Wolseley estate before being transformed into a coaching inn on the Liverpool-London route, and at one time, as a staging post for coaches, over 100 horses were kept at the Wolseley Arms.
The Wolseley Arms was the regular meeting place of the founder members of the Trent and Mersey Canal Co over 250 years ago. The first public meeting of the canal company, chaired by Granville Leveson-Gower (1721-1803), Earl Gower and later Marquess of Stafford, met there on 30 December 1765. When work on building the canal started, the inaugural spade-full of soil was dug out by Josiah Wedgewood at a point close by the inn. The stone section of the canal was completed in 1771.
Much to the chagrin of Sir Charles Wolseley (1769-1846), the seventh baronet, the coach traffic at the Wolseley Arms included the ‘Convict Van’ that stopped there in June 1834 to change horses and feed the convicts. The 18 prisoners were each offered a meal of white bread, cold beef and half a pint of ale.
Wolseley had a radical reputation and might have been expected to be more sympathetic to the plight of prisoners: as a young man in Paris, it is said, he took part in the storming of the Bastille in 1789; and in 1820, a year after his election as an MP, he was jailed for 18 months on charges of sedition and conspiracy.
The Wolseley Arms changed its name to the Roebuck Inn after the original Roebuck on the other side of the road closed in the 1870s. Apparently, the pub had become known as a place of ill-repute and the Wolseley family did not want their name linked with a place like that.
The old name was partly restored and it became the Roebuck and Wolseley Arms around 1952, and it was still known as both the Wolseley Arms and the Roebuck Inn in 1963, when the Rugeley Times suggested it was one of the few pubs in England known by two names and with two signs to reflect this.
However, only the Wolseley Arms sign remained by 1973. The Wolseley Arms was enlarged that year and given a makeover with a mediaeval theme. It was renovated again in July 1982 when it was officially opened by the photographer Patrick Anson, 5th Earl of Lichfield.
The interior decorations and fittings include many mementoes of the Wolseley family, including a faded and jaded image of Wolseley Hall, the seat of the Wolseley family, which was damaged by fire in the 1950s and finally demolished in 1966.
Interestingly, the only portraits on the walls of the Wolseley Arms of members of the Wolseley family are two of Field Marshal Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833-1913), 1st Viscount Wolseley. But he was actually from the Irish branch of the family, seated at Mount Wolseley in Co Carlow, and was born in Golden Bridge House, Inchicore, Dublin. When his military career was recognised with a peerage in 1885, he paid tribute to his family’s roots in Staffordshire, taking the title of Viscount Wolseley, of Wolseley in the County of Stafford.
In a similar vein, the only heraldic emblem of the Wolseley family decorating the interior of the Wolseley Arms is Viscount Wolseley’s coat-of-arms from his ex libris bookplate.
Outside, the Wolseley Arms has managed to mistakenly present the Wolseley coat-of-arms that gives the pub its name. The original arms display a white shield with a red talbot or hunting dog (argent, a talbot passant gules), but on the pub sign the dog has turned in colour to black (argent, a talbot passant sable), the helmet is that of an untitled man rather than a baronet, black and white feathers – seen often in ‘bucket shop’ or AI generated cheap versions of heraldry – have replaced the wolf’s head that was a play on the family’s name and the legend of clearing wolves from this part of Staffordshire, and the displays are devoid of the motto echoing the family legend, Homo Homini Lupus.
I admit to being a heraldry nerd, but I also have a life-long familiarity with the Wolseley arms in heraldry: they are an inversion of the colours on the Comberford and Comerford coat-of-arms (gules, a talbot passant argent), and there were close links between the two families over many generations.
I remember an earlier sign with the correct colours, and hope that this mistake in presenting the Wolseley arms can be rectified by the Wolseley Arms, of all places.
The Wolseley Arms is a charming country pub and one of the 180 country pubs in Vintage Inn group that includes the Hedgehog in Lichfield and the Fish and Eel at Dobb’s Weir, near Hoddesdon.
After an enjoyable lunch there, I walked along the banks of the River Trent and under Wolseley Bridge, and then across to the Wolseley Centre in the former gardens of Wolseley Hall. Sir Charles Wolseley took a brave step in 1987 when he returned to Wolseley with plans to open the 45-acre landscaped gardens, attracting 250,000 visitors a year.
Wolseley Garden Park cost £1.73 million and was opened by Lord Rothschild in 1990. But the place only took in between £26,000 and £30,000 on gate receipts in its first year. The bank withdrew funding before the garden park was completed, and so had little chance of succeeding. Charles was made bankrupt in 1996 with mounting debts of £2.5 to £3 million, which he blamed on the recession and high interest rates.
The sad failure of that promising venture ended with the Wolseley family losing the 1,490 acre estate and a home that had passed down through successive generations for 1,000 years or more – the latest generation had failed to keep the wolf from the door.
The Wolseley Visitor Centre and Nature Reserve has been a nature reserve and the headquarters of the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust since 2003.
Sir Charles Wolseley died at the age of 73 on 5 March 2018, and his funeral took place in Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda Catholic Church, Rugeley. The site at the Wolseley Centre was redeveloped later that year, and opened as the Wolseley Visitor Centre and Nature Reserve in 2019. The grounds extend to 11 ha (26 acres), including woodlands, lakes, pools and marshland with wildlife habitats, a boardwalk around the pools and marshland, wildflower meadows and display gardens, a sensory garden a café with views across the lake.
In the afternoon April sunshine, I hopped back on the Stafford to Lichfield bus outside the Wolseley Centre, and on a whim decided to stop off in Rugeley before continuing on to Lichfield and Evening Prayer in Lichfield Cathedral. But more about Rugeley, its churches, and some more memories from 55 years ago in the days to come, hopefully.
A walk in April sunshine by the lakes at the Wolseley Centre and nature reserve (Patrick Comerford, 2026)
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