Description:Great Wyrley is situated south of Watling Street and is a former township of the parish of Cannock. Landywood is part of the parish. Although it is now a largely modern residential area, Great Wyrley has a long history.
The name ‘wyrley’ means the ‘glade of the bog myrtle’.
Great Wyrley does not occur in the Domesday Book of 1086. Before the Norman Conquest and throughout the Middle Ages, land in Great Wyrley was attached to the office of the keeper of the royal forest of Cannock. The ownership of the manor appears to have descended with this role until the 15th century. One of the services due to the Crown for the holding of the manor was that of giving a barbed arrow to the king whenever he passed through Great Wyrley on his way to Wales to hunt. By 1544 the manor had been acquired by the Leveson family of Wolverhampton. They were wealthy wool merchants who were eventually to become Dukes of Sutherland in 1833. Information about the early modern history of Great Wyrley can therefore be found in the Sutherland Papers at the Staffordshire Record Office.
The parish church of Great Wyrley is dedicated to St Mark and was built to the design of T Johnson of Lichfield in 1844-1845. It is in the Early English style. A Wesleyan Methodist chapel was built in Upper Landywood in 1846 and replaced by a larger new chapel next to it in 1858. This too was eventually replaced by a new chapel built in 1925 in Lower Landywood on the corner of Shaw’s Lane. A Primitive Methodist chapel was built in Streets Lane in Upper Landywood in 1906. Another Primitive Methodist chapel was built fronting to Walsall Road in 1927.
Great Wyrley is on the former Cannock Chase coalfield. Coal and ironstone mines were being worked here in the first half of the 17th century and continued to develop slowly. By 1862 there were two collieries in operation, the Wyrley New Colliery Company and the Hatherton Colliery. The Wyrley Cannock Colliery Company operated between 1872 and 1882 and the Great Wyrley Colliery Company between 1872 and 1924. Local pits in the area had names such as Fair Oak, the ‘Fair Lady’, and Grove where there was a major disaster in 1930 when 14 miners were killed. Wyrley No 3 Pit was opened by Messrs W. Harrison in 1896 and this continued to work until 1956. The recreation ground was given in 1921 by Harrison’s Ltd in trust for the benefit of local people. The entrance gates were erected by public subscription in memory of those men from Great Wyrley who served and died in the First World War.
In 1849 a National School was built supported by Lord Hatherton and other local subscribers. However it had closed by 1884. In 1882 a mixed Board School was built. This eventually became Great Wyrley County Primary School, now Moat Hall Primary School. Landywood Council School opened in 1908, now Landywood Primary School.
Great Wyrley is also known for the Wyrley Outrages which took place in the vicinity between 1903 and 1915. These were cases of mutilations of animals, especially horses, which were perpetrated by the ‘Great Wyrley Gang’. The case of the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of George Edalji in 1903 as the alleged gang leader attracted considerable interest and still does today. Edalji was a Birmingham lawyer and the son of the local vicar, Shapurji Edalji, a Parsee convert to Christianity. The family had been subject to anonymous letters and hoaxes for some time before. Eventually the conviction attracted the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle and a press campaign was launched to free Edalji. Edalji was granted a free pardon in 1907.
Great Wyrley has its own local ‘hero’ known as ‘Jellyman’, who is the subject of a particular brand of paradoxical stories.