Great Wyrley

Great Wyrley
Great Wyrley  Great Wyrley shown within Staffordshire
Population	11,236
OS grid reference	SJ994068
District	South Staffordshire
Shire county	Staffordshire
Region	West Midlands
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	Walsall
Postcode district	WS6
Dialling code	01922
Police	Staffordshire
Fire	Staffordshire
Ambulance	West Midlands
EU Parliament	West Midlands
UK Parliament	South Staffordshire
List of places: UK • England • Staffordshire

Great Wyrley (pronounced wer-lee) is a parish and village in South Staffordshire, England, with a population of 11,236 at the 2001 census.

Etymology

The word "Wyrley" derives from two Old English words: wir and leah. Wir meant "bog myrtle," and leah meant "woodland clearing," suggesting that Great Wyrley was, at genesis, sparse woodland or marshland. "Great" merely refers to its dominant size over Little Wyrley.

Early history

Great Wyrley is mentioned in the Domesday Book under the name of Wereleia, and as early as 1086 is said to have been indirectly owned by the Bishop of Chester as part of the "somehwat scattered holdings" of the Church of Saint Chad in Lichfield. Some 480 acres of farming land were, assumingly, evenly distributed between Wyrley and nearby Norton Canes. However, all six dependencies of Saint Chad had been labelled as "wasta," which meant they had been abandoned by the time the Domesday Book was made.

Location

Great Wyrley consists of two South Staffordshire wards, "Great Wyrley" and "Great Wyrley Landywood," the latter being home to the slightly more Southern area of Landywood. However, the settlement of Little Wyrley lies within the parish of Norton Canes--a nearby village.

Great Wyrley lies just under two-and-a-half miles south of Cannock, just under two miles east of Cheslyn Hay, and six-and-a-half miles north of Walsall.

In former times the town was a mining village — The Great Wyrley Colliery — with metalworking in outlying areas. The Wyrley and Essington Canal passes nearby.

The 'Great Wyrley Outrages'

In 1903 the place was the scene of the "Great Wyrley Outrages" , a series of slashings of horses, cows and sheep. In October a local solicitor, George Edalji, was tried and convicted for the eighth attack, on a pit pony, and sentenced to seven years with hard labour. Edalji’s family had been the victims of a long-running campaign of untraceable abusive letters and anonymous harassment in 1888 and 1892-5. Further letters in 1903 alleged he was partially responsible for the outrages and caused the police suspicion to focus on him.

Edalji was released in 1906 after the Chief Justice in Bahamas and others had pleaded his case. But he was not pardoned, and the police kept him under surveillance. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was persuaded to "turn detective" to prove the man's innocence. This he achieved after eight months of work. Edalji was exonerated by a Home Office committee of enquiry, although no compensation was awarded.

Local myth remembers the Outrages to have been enacted by "The Wyrley Gang", although Alex Rowley believed that they were the work of a single person, a local butcher's boy and sometime sailor called Royden Sharp. Ironically, Rowley’s suspicion was based on circumstantial evidence. It was an over-reliance on this type of evidence which had resulted in Edalji’s flawed conviction.

Poison pen letters in the name of the "Wyrley Gang" continued for another twenty-five years, but these were subsequently discovered to have been posted from outside the town by Enoch Knowles of Wednesbury, who was arrested and convicted in 1934.

In popular culture

The case is related in Conan Doyle's The Story of Mr. George Edalji (1907, expanded re-issue in 1985).

The episode of the 1972 BBC anthology series The Edwardians about Conan Doyle centres on his involvement in the Edaji case. Written by Jeremy Paul and directed by Brian Farnham, it stars Nigel Davenport as Conan Doyle, Sam Dastor as George Edaji, and Renu Setna as the Reverend Edaji.

The case was fictionalised in the novel by Julian Barnes, Arthur & George (2005), which was nominated for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In 2010, Arthur & George was adapted for the theatre by David Edgar, with the play focusing heavily on the trial of George Edalji and The Great Wyrley Outrages.

A comprehensive non-fictional account of the case was published in 2006 in Conan Doyle and the Parson's Son: The George Edalji Case' written by Gordon Weaver.

In Roger Oldfield's book 'Outrage: The Edalji Five and the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes', Vanguard Press (2010), www.outrage-rogeroldfield.co.uk, the famous case is set within the context of the wider experiences of the Edalji family as a whole. Roger Oldfield once taught history at Great Wyrley High School.

Schools

Great Wyrley has three primary schools and one high school.

• Landywood Primary School
• St Thomas More Primary School
• Moat Hall Primary School
• Great Wyrley Performing Arts High School

Transport

Great Wyrley now serves largely as a dormitory for commuters to Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and as a mid-point between Birmingham and Stafford, or Walsall and Cannock more locally. Nearby is junction T7 on the M6 Toll motorway and Junction 11 of the M6. Train services south to Birmingham and north to Rugeley and Stafford are available at Landywood railway station. The former Wyrley and Cheslyn Hay railway station closed in the 1960s. Great Wyrley is served by two bus routes running between Cannock and Walsall, and two bus routes running between Cannock and Wolverhampton. These are Arriva Midlands route 1, Arriva Midlands route 2, Arriva Midlands route 68 and Arriva Midlands Route 69.

Nearest Places

• Bloxwich
• Bridgtown
• Brownhills
• Cannock
• Cheslyn Hay
• Essington
• Featherstone
• Newtown
• Norton Canes
• Pelsall

External links

• Conan Doyle and the Parson's Son: The George Edalji Case
• The Parish of Great Wyrley
• Wyrley Wide Web (community site)
• George Edalji
• Great Wyrley Community Band