William James Kennedy

William James Kennedy,  the youngest of Rann Kennedy’s sons,  was unlucky not to emulate his brothers in their scholastic achievements.  He was sufficiently well-regarded to be appointed a master at Shrewsbury School after leaving University, but left after only a few years and joined the activist wing of the Church of England in Preston and Manchester.  Little more than a village at the mid 1700s, by the mid 1800s it was a colossal and filthy slum with a massive population largely enslaved to great cotton mills.  This grim citadel of England’s new prosperity managed to combine squalid ghettoes populated by largely Irish immigrants – Manchester’s ‘suburbs’ of ‘Irishtown’ and ‘New Ireland’ were bywords for utter deprivation.  The Irish fled the poverty and starvation of their countryside – where British Imperial policy had prevented any development of local industries and forced the southern Irish to be consumers of British manufactured goods whilst extorting Irish raw materials for their own factories.  In truth the desperate circumstances of the people of Ireland had stemmed from centuries of military occupation, subjugation and colonisation.  The alien religion of the Irish meant that many English people felt no sympathy for them during their terrible sufferings.  Ireland was the early model for the British Empire,  and they made all the biggest mistakes there first.

The mass arrival of the suffering Irish was a disaster for the living standards of the British working classes.  They would accept much lower rates of pay and thus undercut the livelihoods of British workers already on low incomes.  They would live in the vilest accommodation according to many commentators at the time,  including the German Friederich Engels, apparently without concern.  They died in droves due to poor health and bad conditions but so many more came to take their place.  They poured off the boats in Liverpool and flooded in in their hundreds of thousands during the Famine years of the 1840s.  The response of some of the indigenous working class people was to associate with the Orange Lodges, organisations dedicated to upholding the Tory Party, the imposition of the evangelist wing of the Church of England and the suppression of the Catholic Church by force.  The Orange Order was particularly strong in Liverpool where marches and demonstrations were conducted throughout the 19^th century and beyond,  typically through Catholic Irish areas and featuring the firing of guns and attacks launched at any bystanders seeming to express opposition and their property. There were vicious anti Irish riots all around Britain including Manchester and Stockport but Liverpool saw horrendous sectarian conflict leading to deaths on both sides.  The Irish were warned not to retaliate by their priests but many were eager to fight back or even to go on the offensive.  As the arguments about Ireland’s political future began to grow,  so the conflict on the streets of the North West increased.  The police struggled vainly to keep control of the streets and were frequently,  and with reason,  accused of siding with the Orangemen.  The physical conflict in Ireland itself inevitably carried itself across the Irish Sea and Fenianism had a large reserve of support amongst the ghettoes such as Scotland Road in Liverpool.

The leaders and fomentors of the Orangemen targeted not only what they saw as rampant Catholicism associated with Irish immigrants,  but also any evidence of “ritualism” amongst the Anglican clergy.  Ritualism or Tractarianism had appeared in the middle years of the century in the writings of mainly Oxford University graduates who had explored the historical origins of the Church in Tudor times and recognised that Anglicanism was rooted in Catholicism.  They favoured a return to more demonstrative,  mediaeval forms of worship.  Some of these men actually converted to Catholicism – for example Manning and Newman who became Cardinals.  The churches where some of the ritualists who remained in the fold were liable to be invaded at times by certain noisy agressive preachers accompanied by a rabble of Orangemen.  Ugly scenes then took place. 

Moderate-minded churchmen realised that the zealots’ aim of driving Tractarianism out of the Church would reduce yet further the flow of young men wishing to serve as clergy.  Already Anglican churches were far less full on Sunday than those of the Catholics and the dissenters and a split in the Church was a nightmare to those who saw it as the religion of the whole nation.  The Orangemen and their Evangelical leaders had a mob mentality that brooked no discussion.  They were the stormtroopers of the Tories in Liverpool and their physical force ensured that party was to maintain hegemony throughout the century in the seaport.  Much as the Tory leadership disliked the crudity and brutality of their footsoldiers,  like Wellington they were happy to use them to hold onto power.

This was the toughest period yet to be a member of the clergy in the Church of England.  The industrial forces driving Britain forward were a far cry from the complexities of theology.  The Church of England had too many roles to play.  On the one hand it was the State Religion,  its mission being to underpin England’s dominant role in the world and unify the disparate peoples in the mother country and the white parts of the Empire.  It also had to present a satisfactory intellectual vehicle for the denizens of the ancient Universities and the thinking middle and upper classes.  Finally and most confoundingly it had to fulfil the role of comforter and spiritual beacon to the masses oppressed in the stricken inner cities and the often poverty-stricken countryside. 

A photograph of William James Kennedy during the middle of the century shows the reverend gentleman with a perplexed expression on his face.  The backers of his organisation were rich and powerful but they could not make the divided Church appeal to an indifferent or hostile working class.  William was of a slim build and very different facially to his father and to his eldest brother.  He had less of brother Benjamin’s abstract academia in his appearance,  looking more of a man of action.

William had married his cousin Sarah Caroline Bannister Kennedy, the daughter of wealthy Maltster George Kennedy of Lichfield. George was a prominent local business figure. In 1805 for instance he had bought the Lichfield pub The Shoulder of Mutton for £400. George is listed at various addresses in Kings Bromley and Lichfield throughout the 1820s and in the 1830s he moved to neighbouring Tamworth.  

William spoke of the troubled period of the 1840s later at a conference of educationalists.  He spoke of visiting many depressed working class areas in the North West.  He said he admired the Catholic Schools for the way in which they had tamed what he saw as a ‘dangerous’ population.  Whether or not the Catholic Schools had done this,  the conflict on the streets of Liverpool between Orange and Green was set to continue well into the 20^th Century. 

He did not think that education could resolve the fundamental problems of bad housing and poor town planning but he was firm that the Church of England schools had been the main bulk of the new schools built in the past few decades for the urban poor.  He was also firmly of the opinion that parents should pay for their children’s education,  and that religious schools should never be replaced by secular institutions.

Thousands of the inhabitants of the North West at this time and long after crammed into tumbledown accommodation - often cellars - along with pigs and chickens.  They were prey to endemic diseases such as cholera,  typhus, diptheria.  Men, women and children shared sleeping space with strangers.  Drunkenness was the best way out in all probability.  After whatever sleep there was to be had,  the inhabitants would hurry to the mill before the gates were locked and their position lost to another desperate individual.  By the time that William had arrived in the North West,  men were losing their jobs in the region, to increased mechanisation and in particular to women and children.  Often the former breadwinner was forced to stay at home whilst their wife went out to work – at reduced rates from that which the husband had formerly earned.  Those who would not stand for this domestic situation went out in search of irregular money as street pedlars or took to a life of crime.

The rocketing crime levels in Britain at this time show clearly how the industrial revolution had created a subculture without a stake of any kind in the new status quo. 

The insanitary conditions in Manchester led to massive death rates among the ordinary population.  The ‘laissez faire’ philosophy of the liberal establishment of the city had certainly led to prosperity for a few mill owners and their shareholders – though they were subject to the ebb and flow of economics - but for the rest there was hunger and misery.  Skilled workers such as weavers who had been highly prosperous in the 1700s and at the start of the 1800s saw their trade mechanised in the mills and found themselves pauperised in a generation.

William James Kennedy was heavily involved in the lives of the poor throughout his career.  In 1845, the year he married, he was appointed Secretary of the National Society for the Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church.  The founding of this organisation in 1811, had followed by one year the founding of a similar but dissenting organisation,  in Lancashire.  The Manchester area was a hotbed of Dissenting Protestantism as it was a hotbed of social radicalism.  It was in Rochdale that the dissenters finally succeeded in ending the blanket levy of the church rate on the whole population,  which had up to that time been used to finance the local outpost of the Church of England.  Therefore William James Kennedy being sent to the North West signals his role in the defence of the Established Church.  The National Society (as it became known) had as its goal the building of a Church School in every parish in England and Wales.  This was the seed of the eventual national education policy that was forged by Gladstone’s great reforming Liberal government in the 1870s.  Gladstone was a staunch Church of England man and William James remained a Gladstone supporter for much of his life – until the fateful decision of the Grand Old Man to invest all his political capital in the cause of Irish Home Rule.

In the light of the struggle then in progress between the Established Church and the Nonconformists, this was a critical organisation and one of great influence.  William James Kennedy whilst a supporter of Gladstone, no doubt saw those nonconformists within Gladstone’s Liberal Party as the real opposition – and he would have been viewed likewise by them.  The progress that the nonconformists had made in converting working people was a serious threat to the principle of an Established Church.  The Church of England was organised by class- the various classes were seated separately and people took communion in order of social status,  the rich first then tradespeople followed by the masses.  This was not the case in nonconformist churches which were organised on more egalitarian principles. 

It was not an encouraging time to be a Church of England clergyman in the North West.  Churchmen were targets for derision on the part of the ordinary people who saw them as quislings of the factory bosses and the police.  The working people of the North West would hardly view the official state religion kindly when the state itself was the suppressor of the trades unions and mass activism for democracy.  The shock troops of the Church were scripture readers,  sent out to areas such as Irish ghettoes to try to convert the inhabitants.  Frequently they received a hostile response.

William James Kennedy was actually one of the central figures in a political movement of the highest importance in Victorian Britain. This was the establishment of the principle that schools were to provide education first and foremost, and religious instruction was not the primary purpose of schools - even though most schools before 1870 were built by the various churches.

This is especially surprising because William was a Church of England Clergyman and Secretary to the National Society which was the Church of England organisation which oversaw its schools.  In the National Society the Church of England had its own educational civil service.

This was a revolution that came from the top.  The Church of England and the other churches strongly objected to the move. The key step was the formation of the The Education Committee of The Privy Council which was a standing body entrusted with this mission.  Senior figures in the establishment had promoted the idea - Lord Brougham and Prime Minister Lord John Russell among them. William was one of the members of this body, and worked closely with its leader, James Kay a doctor who had been a pioneering campaigner for hygiene and healthcare in Manchester on the so called Minutes of 1846.  These minutes were to define education policy up to, and indeed foreshadow the Education Act of 1870. They stipulated that in order to qualify for government subsidy, a school had to submit to government inspections.  The reaction from the Church of England, and the other churches for that matter, was fury.

Lord Brougham had long campaigned for a national education system that was not governed by the church. The churches fought strenuously against any infringement of their power over the churches they were responsible for running,  objecting to inspectors and the idea that inspection of schools would be principally of secular knowledge - religion would be regarded as a mere portion of the education received at school. Queen Victoria herself let it be known that she backed the reform.

William James Kennedy went on to be appointed as Schools Inspector in the North West,  which would have raised hackles amongst the Dissenting School Communities. He lived in Ardwick Green, Manchester near some of the worst slums in the country.  His appointment showed the determination of the government to establish education for everyone in Britain. The quality of that education still needed to be raised substantially but the principle itself was established.

Thanks to Will Kennedy for assisting the work above with material made available from his archive.

Rann Kennedy (2)

Rann grew up living with Kennedy relatives after his mother Damaris died.  Amongst them was George Kennedy who had built up a reputation as a surgeon in Birmingham.  George worked at the Hospital until late in life. The name George Kennedy is also constantly found in records of commercial transactions from this period in connection with the ownership of inns in the Lichfield and Birmingham area - this is because there was another George Kennedy from the Lichfield line, who was in the Brewing trade.  They were cousins.  Also in these papers many members of the ubiquitous Rann family are to be found.  George the surgeon acquired a handsome property in Acocks Green called Fox Hollies,  very close to the village of Yardley that had been the home of his Dolphin ancestors since the Middle Ages.  George was clearly not only a man of medical accomplishments,  he also had a keen sense of family history.

Above - a contemporary painting of Fox Hollies House (by permission of Will Kennedy)

Rann Kennedy was curate of St Pauls in the centre of Birmingham from the early 1790s.  The congregation bought him the living and he became vicar,  from the late 1790s until close to his death in 1851.  St Pauls is a grand and very elegant Georgian church in what is known as the Jewellery Quarter.  Among pew holders at St Pauls at the time were Matthew Boulton,  the industrial pioneer,  owner of the huge factory at Soho  and his partner in the development of steam engines,  James Watt. Watt lived next door to Fox Hollies House.

Rann’s position both at St Pauls and as usher at the King Edward VI school put him very much at the heart of the Church of England establishment of Birmingham.  Birmingham at this time was a city sharply divided on sectarian lines.  Dissent there dated from the Civil War when it was a stronghold of the Parliamentarian side.  In the years after the French Revolution the town’s resident ‘Church and King’ mob terrorised the many nonconformists and free thinkers.  They attacked the house of Joseph Priestley, the famous Unitarian, scientist and philosopher, one of the leading lights of the Lunar Society,  pulling it down and leading him to flee to America.  The Birmingham mob also destroyed Moseley Hall outside the town on hearing that a dinner had been lately held there in honour of the Jacobins.  The permanent occupant was an old and genteel lady with no political connections whatever and the owner of the property certainly had no knowledge of the infamous dinner.  The mob allowed the old lady to leave then literally pulled the place apart.  They also attacked dissenter places of worship such as Quaker Meeting Houses.  In the 1820s the pupils of the King Edward School would clash in the streets with dissenter apprentices.  Rann was certainly a strong monarchist,  as were many of his generation who were horrified by the excesses of the French Revolution.

It was a common thing for poetic clergymen to compose poetry but not to publish their work,  to publish was widely regarded as vulgar.  Luckily several of the works were published during and after his lifetime.  Rann’s poems were highly regarded by literary circles but especially amongst the “Church and King” sections of the population. His poem upon the succession of George IV was read out to a packed theatre at the time by a prominent actor, one Mr Vandenhoff. 

One of his poems that has survived concerns the death of  Princess Charlotte.  This poem might be viewed as a (heavily) veiled attack on the then King George IV,  previously the Prince Regent, who was held in very low estimation by many Britons.  He had tried to divorce his wife, resulting in a court case which dragged her reputation through the mud and was the cause of much rioting and protest on her behalf.  Her daughter Princess Charlotte was seen as an innocent amongst the scandal-ridden royal family and some radicals used the opportunity of her death to attach yet more ignominy to the King.

One letter to him that is held by the family is from Samuel Coleridge,  his old friend from University, and is a lengthy critical appreciation of this poem. 

Washington Irving,  the American author best known for writing ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ was a great ambassador of American letters to Britain and Europe.  He visited the Kennedys and became a great friend of Rann and Julia,  finding the rector of St Pauls a lovable eccentric.  Rann would regale his circle of friends with his works which he kept in his head.  Irving was also particularly amused by the educationalist, clergyman, Greek Scholar and academic Samuel Parr, who in his later years was a frequent visitor to the Kennedy household. 

Parr was the rector of Hatton,  on the road between Warwick and Birmingham.  He was a cantankerous man who had purposefully modelled himself, as a raconteur, on Doctor Johnson,  though some have said without the authority or humour of that distinguished Lichfieldian. He had met and spent time with Johnson and had managed to parry the inevitable barbs that the old Tory launched in his direction.  He wrote the epitaph on Johnson’s tomb – in fact he did so for Fox,  Gibbon and many others of the distinguished departed.  He was a diehard Whig and had corresponded, or conversed with all of the Whig politicians and thinkers of his era.  He liked to be known as a very particular gourmand,  and he would make fearful demands at dinnertime, much to the fury of Julia Kennedy,  according to Washington Irving.  One project of Parr’s was to preserve a well from which Richard III was believed to have refreshed himself before the Battle of Bosworth.  This was done after much negotiation with local farmers and  landowners,  though the numbers of subsequent visitors to Dick’s Well was not recorded.

Parr was a radical throughout his life.  In the 1780s he was an enthusiastic fund raiser for Charles James Fox.  In the 1820s he was an associate of the Unitarian Joseph Parkes who campaigned for democracy during the repressive period after the Napoleonic wars.  Parkes was hardly the sort of figure that radicals would have pictured in company with Rann Kennedy but nonetheless they shared a very good friend in Parr.

One of their shared interests was education.  Parr had at one time been fancied to take the headmastership of Harrow and the boys there had rioted when he was not awarded the position by the governors.  He went along to talk the boys out of their protest.  This is interesting because he was noted as a strong proponent of corporal punishment in schools.  He was a frequent visitor to Shrewsbury School whilst Rann’s eldest son Benjamin Hall Kennedy was a pupil there, and often attended at prize givings. When Parr died on March 5^th 1825,  Rann officiated at the funeral which was in Birmingham.

Meanwhile King Edward’s School had become the centre of controversy.  The headmaster Reverend J Cooke MA was a ferocious disciplinarian and the physical punishments were such that even in those birch-happy times parents began to complain.  The complaints received short shrift from the head.  Rann was one of the principal staff members in charge of meting out punishments.  To be fair physical violence was common in the schools of the period,  much of it dealt out by the boys themselves who were frequently fighting each other – sometimes in class -  or scrapping with locals outside the school walls.  The policy of the King Edward’s School as elsewhere was generally to condone fist fighting amongst the pupils as long as it was a ‘fair fight’.

Education had changed little in the King Edward VI School since the days of Queen Elizabeth when the first post-Catholic education system was put in place.  Classes in the school at the time of Rann Kennedy involved the pupils gathering around an outer railing and listening to the teacher,  usually lecturing on Latin or Greek.  There was some mathematical teaching  but little of any other subject.  French was discontinued on grounds of patriotism.  Classical learning was believed to contribute to building a sound character in a boy,  though the ex-pupils seem to have found Latin and Greek of little direct use in their subsequent careers.  The fact that so many educated men in Victorian England shared a background in these studies led to a profound bond between many of them,  able to converse in their ancient tongues.  The influence of the Classics pervaded the nineteenth century in many very subtle ways and stood for a lot.  In the mid-twentieth century a Kennedy son was asked something in Latin by his great uncle,  and when he was unable to answer the great uncle was mystified that a Kennedy boy was not a classics scholar.

Radicals in the town are said by some writers to have reviled Cooke and Kennedy for their repressive regime.  However when he retired,  he was honoured by the townspeople so it is clearl not everyone felt that way.  Also Kennedy was a prominent supporter of  the campaign for equal rights for Roman Catholics in Birmingham in the 1830s,  so in this respect he was ahead even of the future great reformer Gladstone who at that time was resisting those changes in Parliament.

King Edwards School by Rann’s time had fallen into a dilapidated state. The grant to maintain it was limited by statute,  and therefore it needed to amended by Act of Parliament.  The governors moved for a bill in Parliament to rebuild the school.  Naturally they wanted it to be a Church of England school as before,  with them in control.  The dissenting community of Birmingham protested loudly and used their growing influence in Parliament to try and kill the bill.  The school was in a desperate state - for example a large hole had appeared in Rann’s kitchen floor.

Eventually the bill was ushered through parliament with the Established Churchmen maintaining their grip on the rebuilt school.  The period of this bill was the culmination of conflict between the Dissenting communities of Birmingham and the adherents of the Church of England.  At times this conflict manifested itself yet again in open violence on the streets,  some of it involving pupils of King Edwards School alleged by some to be orchestrated among the staff. 

Rann retired from the school soon afterwards,  upon the retirement of Reverend Cooke.  He was too old to succeed Cooke by this time.  Though late in life, Reverend Rann continued to be the rector of St Paul’s Chapel. In the last years of his life he collaborated on some latin translations with the son to whom he was particularly close, Charles Rann Kennedy, who had become a barrister.  The old scholar was still as sharp as ever.  He also finally published some of his own poetry.

Rann Kennedy as a man represented many different and seemingly conflicting things to many people during his life.  To some this poses to the biographer an impossibility.  How can a man be a puzzling eccentric, a profoundly spiritual figure,  friend to a radical,  a devout royalist, a poet,  married to the worlds of theatre and art,  a great teacher, loving father, brutal disciplinarian  and accessory to municipal despotism?   But the fact is that he was all these things and more.  As we glimpse Rann Kennedy in the few remains he left behind,  and in the eyes of others,  his life demonstrates the futility of attempting to summarise a life in a few sentences.

More on Rann here

The Rann Family of Birmingham (2)

This page continues from here

By the mid-Eighteenth Century, Ranns owned many brewing and innkeeping establishments – a lucrative business to be in at a time when the Coaching Era was at its height.  Another of Thomas Kennedy’s sons (see my post on him on this blog), George Kennedy, who is noted in local records as Maltster – and elsewhere as surgeon - at the end of the 1700s, is documented as buying brewing and innkeeping properties in Birmingham together with numbers of Ranns.  It can be argued from this evidence that there is a general family alliance between the Kennedy and Rann families – and families operated very much in this way,  doing business as a collective.  What is also becoming evident in this picture is the happy coexistence of the Established Church and the Innkeeping and Brewing Industry.  Lichfield was noted for its ale which was considered to be both very strong and of excellent flavour by such as James Boswell, as has already been noted.

Revd. John Rann is a mystery in his own right.  His father Joseph was from Birmingham.   John grew up during the controversial reign of William III and matriculated at Trinity College Oxford in 1703 aged 17, in Queen Anne’s reign, at a time when it was a hotbed of old Toryism.  Five years later he received his Bachelor of Arts degree.  Oxford was commonly believed to be a nest of Jacobitism,  as indeed was the Church of England in general.  Most aristocratic English Jacobites had no serious intentions of taking up arms against the ruling Royal House.  They would simply grumble amongst themselves about the Whig government and dissipate their energies hunting,  shooting and drinking.  Rann was no aristocrat. The Ranns were tradespeople so he would have felt the scorn of the sons of the upper classes whilst at University.

Portrait believed to be of John Rann

Early in his career, John Rann testified in 1710 against an incumbent of the position of Headmaster of the King Edward VI School in Birmingham who was perceived in the town as being an extreme Whig.  The headmaster in question was said to have stated that Cromwell was right to execute King Charles,  among other inflammatory statements.  He was joined at this tribunal by Joseph Rann who appears to be recognised as a kinsman – and was certainly familiar to the young clergyman.  Thus the Ranns were shown by this time as Tories,  having some years before been in the vanguard of Parliamentarianism.  The evidence is that this was true of most of the inhabitants of Birmingham.  The Ranns all testified to have attended the Birmingham School,  though Joseph Rann said he had moved his son to Lichfield Grammar School in protest at his son’s excessive workload.

There were plenty of Tories, indeed many correspondents with the Jacobite Court, among the Establishment at this time.  A contemporary of John Rann’s at Oxford was Lord Mansfield,  a famous QC who later became Lord Chancellor.  He was of the Murrays of Scone, a family elevated to nobility by James I and VI.  Lord Mansfield went so far as to visit Paris and convey his respects to the Chevalier De St George,  but ultimately the pursuit of career and prosperity took him on the high road to the woolsack,  unlike his brother who had joined the intriguers,  adventurers and diehards at the Stuart cabinet in exile at St Germain in France.  The Duke of Marlborough himself kept in regular contact with St Germain, just in case.  According to Owen’s History of Shrewsbury, written in 1800, all the squires in Shropshire were Jacobite,  and Mary Alden Hopkins in her book ‘Doctor Johnson’s Lichfield’ holds that the gentry in the region of Lichfield were similarly inclined (though she actually refers to them as ‘Jacobins’ - the term given to French revolutionaries from forty years later!)

The purpose of the great universities of the period was chiefly to produce clergy for the Church of England.  Oxford and Cambridge controlled huge numbers of the ‘livings’ (as positions in parishes were known) and the staff held ecclesiastical offices which meant that they must remain celibate – a situation directly inherited from the old Roman Catholic ideal of priesthood.  Few lectures were delivered at the universities and  little learning was acquired from these grandees.  If the students chose to spend their time reading then it was a matter of personal choice.  What mattered was that a student acquired social connections which would increase the numbers of livings and therefore his future prosperity.  The students mostly spent their time in drinking, gambling and loose living.  This had been the situation for centuries and few saw any reason for a change.

Whatever his feelings towards learning or the Chevalier,  Reverend John Rann successfully pursued his career in the Church,  acquiring multiple livings in the Black Country.  He is said by different sources to be Vicar of several parishes in the West Midlands,  apart from Rushall and Coldmore in Walsall,  West Bromwich, Wolverhampton and is also mentioned in connection with Wednesbury.  The more careerist churchmen collected livings through the patronage of local lords, and often amassed large salaries as a result. However John Rann was not always the canniest of operators.

He was appointed incumbent of West Bromwich in 1710 but left in 1743 after a lengthy but “unsatisfactory and troubled ministry”. It was in that year that as vicar of All Saints Church West Bromwich John Rann, when apparently very drunk, rode his horse through an open air meeting being addressed by John Wesley (who was also an Oxford man) using "unseemly words".  By doing this he seems to have alienated the Earl.  This did not affect his other livings,  the patrons of whom seem to have approved of his raid on Wesley.  He continued to officiate at Rushall where the church accounts of 1732 bear his signature,  and a letter in the possession of the family shows he was there in 1770.  The tithes of Walsall were in the gift of the Dolphin family of Shenstone.

The living of West Bromwich was in the gift of the Earl of Dartmouth,  whose grand family seat was  near Birmingham. The Earl who appointed Rann to West Bromwich was the son of the notorious Jacobite George Legge.  He had commanded the regiment that escorted The Duke of Monmouth to his fateful meeting with James II after the failed Rebellion that bore the name of that illegitimate son of Charles II.  Legge commanded the Navy under James and had been high in the Senior Service,  and close associate of Samuel Pepys the diarist, during the reign of Charles II when James had commanded the Navy.  Dartmouth had refused to conduct the heir to France on principle,  when the crown was already starting to slip from the Stuart King.  However he was removed as head of the Navy when William of Orange took the throne.  He used his influence in the Navy to conspire on behalf of his former Jacobites,  one of the most highly-placed Jacobite sympathisers of all.  He paid for this by being clapped in the Tower when one of those plots fell apart,  and there he died,  still protesting his utter hatred of Frenchmen.   The Earl who succeeded him was exiled from political life by William of Orange but upon the death of the Dutchman became a faithful servant to Queen Anne’s governments.  He retired when George I succeeded the last of the Stuart monarchs.  He was not the Jacobite stalwart that his father was,  but he was certainly a Tory and showed no love of the House of  Hanover.

The future 2nd Earl of Dartmouth,  Viscount Lewisham, Baron Dartmouth of Dartmouth, William Legge  (1731 – 1801) was growing up at the time when John Rann was chaplain to the Earl.  The 2^nd Earl was to become sometime First Lord of Trade,  Lord Privy Seal (or Minister Without Portfolio),  Lord Steward and crucially Colonial Secretary during the period 1772-1776. The Earl was also stepbrother of Lord North,  the British Prime Minister during the Revolutionary War period,  who acceded to the post in 1770.  Dartmouth was appointed to the government because of his family relationship to North, though Dartmouth was a supporter of Rockingham – whom North detested.  ‘Brother’ Legge was a Methodist,  though he was too young to have been behind Rann’s swift departure from the living of West Bromwich after the incident with Wesley.  Rann was evidently a man with wide political connections some of which he probably cultivated whilst he was chaplain to the old Earl – particularly Lord North, whom he would have known during his lordship’s childhood and formative years.

The Reverend John Rann himself made a most distinguished marriage with Damaris also known as Mary, the beautiful dark-haired daughter of John Dolphin of the elegant Moss Manor,  in  Shenstone,  which still lies on the road between Lichfield and Walsall.  Shenstone was favoured as a coaching halt because it allowed coaches on the Watling Street route to bypass the narrower and somewhat tortuous roads in and out of Lichfield.  The Dolphin family had inherited Moss Manor from a branch of the Stanley family at the beginning of the 1600s.  The Dolphin family had been based in Yardley apparently as long as it had existed - it is  now swallowed up by Birmingham but back then it was a village in open countryside. They had been noted landowners and cattle farmers in that area since Norman times.  When Reverend John Rann died at a great age he was commemorated in marble along with his wife among the Dolphin Family memorials in the Parish Church in Rushall.  The name Dolphin was adopted during the 1400s – Stebbing Shaw says that previously they had the name of Swanshurst – also the name of the house in Birmingham that remained in the family until the 1800s.  The Swanshursts were involved in a legal controversy with local villeins during the 1200s when he had attempted to enclose some land up to that time regarded as commons.  Their feudal overlords were the Earls of Warwick.  The existence to this day among the possessions of some of the Kennedy family of some elegant and opulent portraits of these 17-18^th century Dolphins testifies to their wealth and power.

Around 1745 when he was rector of West Bromwich, one of John Rann’s several daughters fell for a young man who claimed to be the heir of a very rich man in another town. She gave him her gold watch. Rann was reluctant to upset the father so he went along with it. However his son-in-law, an attorney, investigated and at length found that the suitor was actually a tailor's son who looked very like the heir who had just died of smallpox. They intercepted a letter the young man had asked to be posted which had details of his plot in it, whereby he was planning to help himself to her dowry then scarper. The trickster was marched off to gaol but the Rann's daughter never got her watch back. The whole tale was related in a love letter from a man in Wolverhampton to his intended in Leek. The story was widespread in the tea rooms of the Black Country at that time according to the narrator.  No doubt the embarrassment of the Parson was equalled by fury that he was the subject of gossip for miles around.

John Rann had other children,  one of whom,  Joseph, went on to be Vicar of Coventry,  and who wrote a six volume edition, with commentary, of William Shakespeare’s works.  Clearly John Rann was able to pass on a love of literature and drama to his family though some critics have accused Joseph of unimaginativeness in his commentary.

One daughter of John Rann named Mary – possibly the one duped by the tailors son - went on to marry an attorney at law from near Shrewsbury named Illedge Maddox of whom more here.