Etymology

The word "Wyrley" derives from two Old English words: wir and leah. Wir meant "bog myrtle" and leah meant "woodland clearing", suggesting that Great Wyrley began as sparse woodland or marshland. "Great" refers to its dominant size over Little Wyrley.^[2]

Early history

Great Wyrley is mentioned in the Domesday Book under the name of Wereleia, and as early as 1086 is said to have been indirectly owned by the Bishop of Chester St John's as part of the "somewhat scattered holdings" of the Church of Saint Chad in Lichfield. Some 480 acres of farming land were, assumingly, evenly distributed between Wyrley and nearby Norton Canes. However, all six dependencies of Saint Chad had been labelled as "wasta", which meant they had been abandoned by the time the Domesday Book was made.^[2][3]

Lord of the manor

Manorialism continued for a long period and the current holder of the rights to the feudal title of Great Wyrley Manor is Anthony Henry Lord Great Wyrley, the freeholder of Great Wyrley and Essington Estates, Red Lane Essington, South Staffordshire, having acquired the title deeds from Elizabeth Sutherland, 24th Countess of Sutherland in 1989. There is considerable documentation (dating from 1397) relating to this very large manor in terms of land currently in the safekeeping of Staffordshire libraries.

Post-Industrial Revolution

In former times the village was a mining village – The Great Wyrley Colliery – with metalworking (such as for nails, agricultural implements and horseshoes) in outlying areas. The Wyrley and Essington Canal passes nearby.

In 1848 Samuel Lewis included the settlement in his gazetteer and stated it had:

• 799 inhabitants and 1600 acres, of which the Duke of Sutherland owned part;
• Several collieries^{[n 1]};
• The road from Walsall to Cannock passing through the village, long, and consisting of detached houses;
• In 1844, Great Wyrley it formed with Cheslyn Hay a new ecclesiastical district, having a population of 1,753;
• St. Mark's Church, a highly finished structure in the early English style, built 1845, at a cost of £2,430, of which sum £1,200 was given by the Rev. William Gresley, prebendary of Lichfield; the remainder was raised by subscription, aided by £333 from the Diocesan, and £250 from the Incorporated Society;
• A perpetual curacy; patrons, the Dean and Chapter of Lichfield;
• A school, purchased from the Independents (Nonconformists), was opened in 1843 which cross-references the gazetteer entry Cannock.^[4]

In 1876 Shapurji Edalji was appointed Vicar of Great Wyrley; he served until his death forty-two years later. A Parsi convert to Christianity from Bombay, he may well have been the first South Asian to become the incumbent of an English parish.

Great Wyrley Outrages

In 1903, the place was the scene of the Great Wyrley Outrages, a series of slashings of horses, cows and sheep. In October, a local solicitor and son of the parson, George Edalji,^[5] was tried and convicted for the eighth attack, on a pit pony, and sentenced to seven years with hard labour. Edalji's family had been the victims of a long-running campaign of untraceable abusive letters and anonymous harassment in 1888 and 1892–1895. Further letters, in 1903, alleged he was partially responsible for the outrages and caused the police suspicion to focus on him.

Edalji was released in 1906 after the Chief Justice in Bahamas and others had pleaded his case. But he was not pardoned, and the police kept him under surveillance. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was persuaded to "turn detective" to prove the man's innocence. This he achieved after eight months of work. Edalji was exonerated by a Home Office committee of enquiry, although no compensation was awarded.

Local myth remembers the Outrages to have been enacted by "The Wyrley Gang", although Conan Doyle believed that they were the work of a single person, a local butcher's boy and sometime sailor called Royden Sharp. Ironically, Conan Doyle's suspicion was based on circumstantial evidence. It was an over-reliance on this type of evidence in the first place which had resulted in Edalji's flawed conviction.

Poison pen letters in the name of the "Wyrley Gang" continued for another twenty-five years, but these were subsequently discovered to have been posted from outside the town by Enoch Knowles of Wednesbury, who was arrested and convicted in 1934.^[6]

This case has been related or retold:

• Conan Doyle's The Story of Mr. George Edalji (1907, expanded re-issue in 1985).
• 1972 BBC anthology series The Edwardians: Arthur Conan Doyle (one episode) centres on his involvement in the Edaji case. Written by Jeremy Paul and directed by Brian Farnham, it stars Nigel Davenport as Conan Doyle, Sam Dastor as George Edaji, and Renu Setna as the Reverend Edaji.
• Arthur & George by Julian Barnes (2005), nominated that year for the Man Booker Prize. In 2010, Arthur & George was adapted for the theatre by David Edgar^[7] and, in 2015, for a three-part British television drama of the same title.
• A comprehensive non-fictional account Conan Doyle and the Parson's Son: The George Edalji Case by Gordon Weaver (2006).
• In Roger Oldfield's book Outrage: The Edalji Five and the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, Vanguard Press (2010),^[8] the case is set within the context of the wider experiences of the Edalji family as a whole. Oldfield taught history at Great Wyrley High School.

Association football

Great Wyrley F.C. was a football club based in Great Wyrley between 1980 and 2007

Table tennis

Great Wyrley Tennis Club is based on Norton Lane, Great Wyrley. Currently the club plays in the Walsall Table Tennis Leagues