Description:SWYNNERTON is a very typical estate village, incorporating hall and landscaped park, churches, cottages and cricket ground. It is situated about seven miles north- west of the town of Stafford. There are a number of early variants of the name, which has at least three derivations: ‘the settlement at Swilford, the dirty ford’, ‘the settlement at the swans ford’ or ‘the settlement at the summer ford’.
In the Domesday Book, Swynnerton is entered as Sulverton and it was held at that time by Robert de Stafford. Aslen, sometimes interpreted as Alan, was his tenant. The population was 15 and there were seven ploughs. The value was recorded as 40 shillings.
In the Middle Ages the Swinnetons were lords of the manor. During the reign of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the daughter of Humphrey Swinnerton, married Sir William Fitzherbert of Norbury, so bringing Swynnerton into the Fitzherbert family. Swynnerton Hall the home of the Fitzherberts, now Barons Stafford, was designed by Francis Smith of Warwick and built between 1725 and 1729. Major alterations were carried out inside the house by James Trubshawe about 1810 to create the great hall in its present form. Swynnerton Hall was built on another and higher site to replace an earlier manor house, which had been a Royalist garrison during the Civil War and which was apparently attacked and destroyed in 1643. However Swynnerton Old Hall is recorded in the hearth tax returns in 1666 as having 15 hearths.
22 families were recorded in Swynnerton in 1532. The Hearth Tax returns list 33 households in Swynnerton itself as eligible for the payment of tax. A further total of 68 households were listed in Hatton, Shelton, Acton, Beech and Yarnfield.
The parish church of St Mary’s has Norman features, notably a very fine west doorway. The chancel and nave are Early English. The church is also notable for a statue of a seated Christ, some seven feet high, in the vestry chapel where some members of the Fitzherbert family are buried. Pevsner suggests that the style is 1260-1280 but it is not known from where it originated.
The Fitzherberts built a Catholic chapel adjoining Swynnerton Hall in 1868 at a cost of £8,000. The chapel was commissioned by Maria Teresa Fitzherbert and her son, Basil Fitzherbert. The architect was Gilbert Blount, an architect of the Pugin School. The chapel is a private chapel but is open for mass to parishioners of Swynnerton.
During the Second World War, a Royal Ordnance factory was built at Swynnerton. This was what was known as a filling factory where ammunition was filled with explosives and then stored in magazines on site before being issued . The building of the factory began in 1939. Production started in 1940. By 1942 a total of 18,000 people were employed at the Swynnerton factory. Seven hostels were built in the vicinity to house the factory workers, although some travelled daily, mainly from the Potteries. A new railway station was built at Cold Meece to accommodate the additional traffic.
HMS Fledgling to the west of the factory was the first purely WRNS technical training establishment, opened in April 1943. Several hundreds of Wrens were trained there for a variety of technical work. As the war progressed it became the only naval air station to be fully manned by the Royal Navy and it finally became a training establishment for dutch and Canadian ground crew personnel. It was de-commissioned in 1946..