A Brief History of  the Mander Family              by Nicholas Mander

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, as entrepreneurs, city fathers and philanthropists. The family had been farming quietly since 1291 on the Warwickshire/Worcestershire borders of Midland England, when Thomas Mander, a younger son, migrated a few miles north to Wolverhampton, then a market town of 7,500 people, in 1742. There he settled as a merchant, and in due course inherited property in John Street which became, just over two hundred years later, one of the first large-scale shopping mall developments in Britain, known as the Mander Centre. A large area of the family agricultural land at Perton, outside Wolverhampton, was developed for housing by the third baronet in the 1970s.

From the outset, as successful trades people, the family espoused many local causes. They were noted nonconformists, grave and earnest, but always progressive and public spirited, and became champions in their small way of the religious and social reforms of the early nineteenth century, financing prolonged litigation personally-one Chancery suit lasted 22 years-lobbying for reform in the criminal code, involving themselves wholeheartedly in philanthropic movements and civic affairs, four of them standing at the same time among the first commissioners of the Georgian borough, and helping to found free libraries, chapels and schools. As they prospered, they served as mayors and aldermen, high sheriffs, deputy lieutenants and magistrates, in the yeomanry and in national government.

It was an age of confident and powerful city governments in the heyday of the industrial city, when public life was a fashionable pursuit, and England's great new trading cities, businesses-and by definition families-were seen as the dynamos which powered the Empire to international pre-eminence. The Manders had fingers in many pies, becoming involved in a wide variety of charities and in the manifold affairs of the wider county, also one of the biggest employers in a thriving manufacturing town. They became typical examples of the high-minded liberal, with a strong belief in public service and a patrician sense of social duty. As such, they were at the centre of a network of connections by marriage and association with a small group of local families who were, for 150 years, the satraps of Wolverhampton. Charles Tertius (the third) Mander was made a baronet for his public services in the Coronation honours of George V in 1911. Charles Nicholas (the sixth) Mander, the owner of Owlpen, is heir to the title.

An advert from the autumn 1937 edition of Printing Review.

The family were equally remarkable, living in the same large houses for successive generations, for never throwing anything away, and so accumulating a rich and haphazard archive. Mander papers, including diaries, letters, notes and publications, as well as watercolour sketches, well-kept press-cuttings books of their public lives, photographs and ephemera, give a well-documented history of their careers as pioneer manufacturers, merchant industrialists and public figures with wide-ranging interests and social contacts over seven or eight generations, against the background of the emergence of modern Britain. Among publications on the family, a company history was published in 1952, and the private papers of Samuel Theodore Mander were published in 1996.

They contributed not only to stolid industry and public life: they produced a modest quota of soldiers, antiquarian scholars, artists and writers of distinction, a suffragist and Irish nationalist, even a Hollywood actor who married an Indian princess. Invariably, they were cultivated and well read, with opportunities for foreign travel, friendships and marriages, and art collecting.

Charles A. Mander, Bart. Mayor of Wolverhampton in 1937.

The family were responsible for building two great Arts and Crafts houses. Wightwick Manor was built by the architect Edward Ould for Theodore Mander in 1889-93. In a sixteenth-century picturesque, half-timbered style of exquisite workmanship and detailing, and with its richly-textured surfaces of stained glass, tiles, metalwork and William Morris furnishings and textiles, it is the ideal of the 'Old English' house. The outstanding collections were extended by his son, the Liberal MP Sir Geoffrey Mander, to include pre-Raphaelite and late Romantic paintings and literary manuscripts, so that it is now one of England's most representative late Victorian houses. It was given by the family to the National Trust in 1937 as one of its first country houses. The Mount, also completed by Ould in two phases, but most successfully in the more splendid 'English Renaissance' style of 1909, was a lighter, more visible house, visited by many public figures of the day, including Queen Mary, and Lloyd George, who announced his General Election campaign of 1918 there.

Today it has adapted well as a hotel with 56 bedrooms. Many of its collections survive at Owlpen Manor, a romantic Tudor manor house open to the public, which was saved from ruin in 1926 and now contains family portraits and works by the Cotswold Group of craftsmen. The three contrasting houses illustrate successive themes of the Arts and Crafts movement, and their patrons' interaction with the industry which made the houses possible.

Manders PLC remained based in Wolverhampton, the town where it was established, into its third century, with interests in paint, property and printing ink. The successful mini-conglomerate was broken up in the 1990s by a career management no longer involved with the family or the town. First the paint and property businesses were sold in 1994. Finally, after 225 years, the core business, by then an international company developing the higher-technology activities of speciality chemicals and coatings, with particular emphasis on printing inks, was sold for £100 million in 1997 to Flint Ink of Detroit, in the United States, so ending a long chapter in the British chemicals industry. The Mander brands survive in the global coatings industry and Manders Premier has established itself as one of the world's largest suppliers of coatings and inks, as well as graphic arts products, consumables, and machinery.

An Abridged Mander Family Tree

We would like to thank Nicholas Mander for allowing us to use the text, which is from the OwlPen Manor website:    http://www.owlpen.com