Mander family

Early history

Family members

• Benjamin 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 milling co-operative company set up for charitable purposes 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. A third brother, Thomas Mander, set up in the hardware trade, as a factor and gun and flintlock manufacturer of Five Ways, Birmingham; he was ancestor of the Sparrows, iron masters, of Albrighton Hall, Shrewsbury.

• Charles Mander, 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 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. He was a noted nonconformist, whose exertions for the tenure of endowments by a 23-year Chancery case led, with other similar cases, to the Dissenters' Chapels Act 1844.
• Charles Benjamin Mander JP was the eldest son of Charles. He was the force behind the establishment of 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. He is commemorated by a blue plaque at The Mount, Tettenhall Wood, the house he built after 1862.
• Sir Charles Tertius Mander JP, DL, 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 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 JP, DL, TD, the second baronet, was the elder son of Charles Tertius by Mary Le Mesurier, daughter of Henry Nicholas Paint, a 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. In World War I he was a major in the Staffordshire Yeomanry, attached to the Yeomanry Mounted Division in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign. He was wounded in the Third Battle of Gaza at Beersheba in 1917, and following 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 US, 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, 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 North Africa, Germany and Italy, where following the Salerno landings 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, from 1968 establishing the Mander Shopping Centre and Mander Square on the site of the early family works. Sir Charles was High Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1962–63 before two City posts, first as chairman of Arlington Securities and then as chairman of another property group, London & Cambridge Investments, which went bust in 1991. 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. His wife sustained underwriting losses as a Name in the Lloyd's insurance market in the 1990s. The Times newspaper reported on 24 June 2000, that Lady Mander, having refused a settlement offered to her by Lloyd's, was declared bankrupt. In due course, the mansion house at Little Barrow, Donnington, near Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, was sold to meet a debt believed to be well over one million pounds.
• Sir (Charles) Nicholas Mander, the elder son of Charles Marcus by Dolores, née Brödermann, of Hamburg, is the fourth baronet, a knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a FSA. He lives at Owlpen Manor in Gloucestershire. He was co-founder of Mander Portman Woodward and of Sutton Publishing, and is the author of a history on the family and other books and articles.
• Marcus Septimus Gustav Mander 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.

Other members of the family

Descendants of the above Henry Mander (1601–72), of Aston Cantlow

• The Hon. Francis Mander was a member of the Parliament of New Zealand and of the Legislative Council. He stood first as an Independent Conservative and then from 1909 for the Reform Party. He won the Marsden electorate in Northland in the 1902 general election, which he held until 1922, when he retired. He was subsequently appointed to the Legislative Council in 1923 and served to 1930. In business he was a pioneer sawmiller and owner of The Northern Chronicle newspaper, based in Whangarei. He then purchased a popular newspaper, The Northern Advocate, and closed the Chronicle. He was the father of the noted New Zealand novelist and journalist, Jane Mander.
• Jane Mander 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 and Allen Adair. She was the daughter of the above Francis Mander and started as a journalist writing for his newspaper, The Northern Advocate.
• Theodore Mander, paint and varnish manufacturer, public servant and philanthropist, was the eldest of seven children of Samuel Small Mander. He was educated at London and Berlin Universities, and at Clare College, Cambridge. He entered the partnership of Mander Brothers with his first cousin Charles Tertius Mander in 1879. As a Congregationalist with a fervent interest in the arts and education, he was active in the building of the Wolverhampton Free Library, governor of several local schools and of Birmingham University, and one of the founding benefactors of Mansfield College, Oxford, the first Nonconformist college in the university, as his father had been of Tettenhall College, established in 1862 for the children of those disadvantaged for their religious principles. A selection of his journals and letters was edited and published in 1996. He was an art collector and patron, and is remembered as the builder of Wightwick Manor in 1887 and 1893 to the designs of Edward Ould, with decorations and furnishings by C.E. Kempe, William Morris and William de Morgan, which was given by his son Geoffrey Mander to the National Trust in 1937. He was an alderman and magistrate, who died in office as Mayor of Wolverhampton at Wightwick Manor on 14 September 1901 at the early age of 47, when he was given a civic funeral.
• Sir Geoffrey Le Mesurier Mander, was the eldest son of Theodore Mander, the builder of Wightwick Manor. He 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 Wightwick Manor, with its outstanding collections of Victorian art, to the National Trust in 1937. His second wife, Rosalie Glynn Grylls, was a biographer of writers and artists of the Romantic period, and an early authority on William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His autobiography was published posthumously in 2021 as Lemons for Chamberlain: The Life and Backbench Career of Geoffrey Mander MP, edited by Patricia Pegg.
• Sir Frederick Mander FEIS was a headmaster and trade unionist and the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers from 1931 to 1947. Mander College of Further Education in Bedford College was named after him. Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, he was descended from the above Henry Mander of Aston Cantlow.
• Miles Mander, 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 and racing car enthusiast, who spent his 20s in New Zealand farming sheep. He achieved success in films 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. In his Hollywood debut, he portrayed King Louis XIII in the 1935 version of that same Alexandre Dumas, père classic. Other films credits included Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. His first wife was an Indian princess, Princess Prativa Sundari Devi, the daughter of the Maharajah Nripendra Narayan of Cooch Behar. His youngest brother Alan married her sister, Princess Sudhira.
• John Mander, a British political commentator, writer, translator from the German, editor and poet, was the younger son of Geoffrey Mander by his second wife, the author and biographer Rosalie Glynn Grylls.
• Raymond Mander, theatre historian, author and collector. Together with Joe Mitchenson, he was the founder of the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection of theatrical memorabilia and archives, since 2010 housed in the Theatre Collection of the University of Bristol.
• Lewis Norman Mander,, FAA, FRS was an Australian organic chemist; of the New Zealand branch of the family, he was born in Auckland. He has widely explored the synthesis and chemistry of the gibberellin class of diterpenes over a 20-year period at the Australian National University.