Mander family
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The Mander family has held for over 200 years a prominent position in the Midland counties of England, both in the family business and public life. In the early industrial revolution, the Mander family entered the vanguard of the expansion of Wolverhampton, on the edge of the largest manufacturing conurbation in the British Isles. Mander Brothers was a major employer in the city of Wolverhampton, a progressive company which became the Number One manufacturers of varnish, paint and later printing ink in the British Empire. The family became distinguished for public service, art patronage and philanthropy. Charles Tertius Mander (1852-1929) was created the first baronet of The Mount in the baronetage of the United Kingdom in the Coronation honours of George V, on 8 July 1911.
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[edit] Early history
The family had been farming quietly since 1291 on the Warwickshire/Worcestershire borders of Midland England, when in 1742 Thomas Mander (1720–1764), a younger son, migrated a few miles north from Lapworth to Wolverhampton, then a market town of just 7,500 people. There he settled as a merchant and manufacturer, and in due course inherited property from the family of his wife in John Street, which today forms the core of the modern city.
[edit] Family members
Benjamin (1752–1819) and John Mander were Thomas's sons. By 1773, they were setting up a cluster of loosely-integrated businesses in Wolverhampton, including one of the largest chemical manufacturing works in the country, together with businesses in baking, japanning and tin-plate working, canals and gas manufacture. Benjamin Mander was chairman of the Wolverhampton Union Flour and Bread Company, a charitable milling company set up in order to provide subsidised bread and flour in the period of social distress following the Napoleonic Wars. The two brothers campaigned actively against the slave trade, founded chapels, libraries and schools, and entered into local politics as town commissioners, four Manders sitting at one time for the Georgian borough. Hereafter, the eldest sons of the senior line of the family have been given the first name Charles:
Charles Mander (1780–1853), the eldest son of Benjamin, founded a varnish works in 1803 which was to prosper though the 19th century. He was a penal reformer who campaigned against the Blood Money Act, successfully petitioning with others for its repeal in 1818. The romantic story of how he rescued two soldiers from the gallows accused of stealing just 1s.1d. became the subject of a novel by the jurist Samuel Warren, Now and Then (1848). He was a noted nonconformist, whose exertions for the tenure of endowments by a 23-year Chancery case led to the Dissenters Chapels Act of 1844.
Charles Benjamin Mander (1819–1878) was the eldest son of Charles. He established the first publicly-funded institution for art education in Britain in 1852. As a town councillor, he campaigned for clean drinking water fountains, and for the free library in Wolverhampton. With the rise of the railways, he greatly expanded the business of Mander Brothers, forming a partnership with his brother Samuel in 1845.
Sir Charles Tertius Mander (1852–1929), the eldest son of Benjamin, among many public offices was uniquely four times mayor of Wolverhampton 1892-6, an alderman, was awarded an honorary freedom of the borough; he was a colonel in the Staffordshire Yeomanry, and the first of the family to serve as high sheriff of the county of Staffordshire. He was a progressive industrialist and manufacturer as the first chairman of Mander Brothers, the family paint and varnish works, but also in many other companies, including a Midland electrical company credited with the invention of the spark plug. He was created the first baronet of the Mount, Tettenhall Wood, for his public services on 8 July 1911.
Sir Charles Arthur Mander (1884–1951), the second baronet, was the elder son of Charles Tertius by Mary Le Mesurier, daughter of Henry Nicholas Paint, an Member of the Dominion Parliament of Canada. He was twice mayor of Wolverhampton, and an honorary freeman of the borough. He shot for England while at Trinity College, Cambridge, fought in Egypt, Syria and Palestine in World War I, where he was wounded at Beersheba in 1917, and after the decisive battle of Megiddo entered Damascus in triumph with General Allenby. He served on over 65 committees and organisations at one time, was in demand as a public speaker, and presented early radio discussion programmes. He was Vice-Chairman of the National Savings Committee and President of Rotary International for Britain and Ireland. In the USA, he was made an honorary chief Red Crow of the Blackfoot tribe in Montana when he gave the address at the dedication of the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the first national park to be so dedicated, in 1932.
Sir Charles Marcus Mander (1921–2006), the third baronet, was the only son of Charles Arthur by Monica Neame, of Kent. He fought with the Coldstream Guards in World War II in Italy, where he was gravely wounded in the fierce fighting at Calabritto, on the slopes of Monte Camino, in October 1943. He was a director of Mander Brothers, responsible for its property portfolio, and redeveloped the centre of Wolverhampton, establishing the Mander Shopping Centre and Mander Square on the site of the site of the early family works in 1968. He developed a township for 11,500 people at Perton outside Wolverhampton on the family agricultural estate, which had been requisitioned as an airfield during World War II.
Sir (Charles) Nicholas Mander (b. 1950), the elder son of Charles Marcus by Dolores, nee Brödermann, of Hamburg, is the fourth baronet. He lives at Owlpen Manor in Gloucestershire. He was a co-founder of Mander Portman Woodward.
(Charles) Marcus Septimus Gustav Mander (b. 1976) is the eldest son of Charles Nicholas by Karin Margareta Norin, of Stockholm. He is heir apparent to the baronetcy. He is a barrister of the Middle Temple.
[edit] Other members of the family
Jane Mander (1877–1949), distantly related to the Staffordshire family, was one of the foremost New Zealand novelists of the early twentieth century. Her most successful novels were The Story of a New Zealand River (1920) and Alan Adair (1925). She was the daughter of the Hon. Francis Mander, pioneer sawmiller and owner of The Northern Advocate, a popular newspaper for which she wrote; he was a member of the Parliament of New Zealand and of the Legislative Council.
Sir Geoffrey Le Mesurier Mander (1882-1962) was a Midland industrialist and chairman of Mander Brothers, an art collector and radical parliamentarian. He was the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton East from May 1929 until he lost his seat in the Labour Party landslide at the 1945 general election. He was the Liberal Party specialist on foreign policy between the wars, strongly anti-Appeasement and a crusader on behalf of the League of Nations. He gave the family house, Wightwick Manor, with its outstanding collections of Victorian art, to the National Trust in 1937. His wife, Rosalie Grylls, was a biographer of writers and artists of the romantic period and an early authority on William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Miles Mander (1888–1946), younger brother of Geoffrey, broke away from the mould of public service and industry, and became a well-known character actor of the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, and film director, playwright and novelist. He was an early aviator, who had spent his 20s in New Zealand farming sheep. He achieved success with The First Born which he directed and acted in, and which was based on his own novel and play. He is better remembered for his character portrayals of oily types, many of them upper-crust villains - such as Cardinal Richelieu in the Three Musketeers (1939). In his Hollywood debut, he had portrayed King Louis XIII in the 1935 version of that same Alexandre Dumas classic. Other films credits included Wuthering Heights with Lawrence Olivier and Merle Oberon. His first wife was an Indian princess, Princess Prativa Devi, the daughter of the Maharajah Nripendra Narayan of Cooch Behar. His brother Alan married her sister, Princess Sudhira.
[edit] Sources
- Sir Geoffrey Le Mesurier Mander (ed), The History of Mander Brothers, Wolverhampton. 1955
- C. Nicholas Mander, Varnished Leaves: a biography of the Mander Family of Wolverhampton, 1750-1950, Owlpen Press, 2004
- Patricia Pegg, A Very Private Heritage: the private papers of Samuel Theodore Mander, 1853-1900, Malvern, 1996
