Rowlands of my father (part 2)

This is the second in a series of posts on the history or the Rowland family of the Rhondda Valley. This part focuses on the children of Moses Rowland the Elder (1790-1837), including my fourth great-grandfather Morgan (1816-1884). For their story so far, see Rowlands of my father (part 1). Much of the information below has been pieced together through the combined efforts of multiple researchers over several years. In particular I would like to thank Philip Richards and Peter J. Williams for their invaluable help in researching these early generations. For consistency Welsh place names have been standardised to conform to their familiar modern spellings, and I have used the original ‘Rowland’ family name rather than the Anglicised ‘Rowlands’ variant which only became dominant towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Morgan Rowland (b. c. 1816, Penderyn, Breconshire), the eldest of Moses Rowland’s seven surviving children, was working as a blacksmith around the time of his father’s death in 1837. This is confirmed in the Llantrisant parish registers, where his marriage to a young woman named Mary Foster (b. c. March 1818, Llantwit Fardre, Glamorgan) was recorded on 23 June 1838. They were twenty-two and twenty respectively, and living at Dinas Colliery at the time. Notably, despite Morgan’s father having been a teacher, both Morgan and Mary seem to have been illiterate, with each leaving an ‘x’ instead of signatures in the marriage register. Also somewhat curiously given Moses’s work as a Nonconformist lay preacher, the wedding took place in an Anglican church, but this was likely because a Methodist chapel had yet to established in the area. Mary was the daughter of a labourer and collier named Evan Foster (b. c. July 1778, Pentyrch, Glamorgan – d. c. November 1854, Cardiff, Glamorgan) and his wife Catherine (b. c. 1781, Glamorgan – d. c. November 1846, Cardiff, Glamorgan), who had moved to Dinas in around 1820. She was the seventh of eight siblings, whose names were:

• Evan (b. c. 1806, Llantrisant, Glamorgan – d. 6 June 1869, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Catherine (b. c. 1806, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)
• William (b. c. 1811, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan)
• Daniel John (b. c. 1815, Llantwit Fadre, Glamorgan – d. c. November 1882, Pontdarwe, Breconshire)
• Hannah (b. c. 1816, Glamorgan)
• Morgan (b. c. 1816, Llantrisant, Glamorgan – d. 1868)
• Thomas (b. c. 1821, Dinas, Glamorgan)

After marrying, Morgan and Mary appear to have remained in Dinas, where they were recorded in the 1841 census with their first child, a two-year-old daughter named Esther (b. 7 August 1839, Dinas, Glamorgan). At this time most of Morgan’s younger siblings, including his brothers Rowland (b. c. January 1821, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 19 March 1894 , Pontypridd, Glamorgan), Thomas (b. c. 1823, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 7 April 1888, Pontypridd, Glamorgan), and Moses (hereafter referred to as ‘Moses the Younger’ to distinguish him from his father, b. c. September 1828, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 21 September 1884, Penpisgah House, Penygraig, Glamorgan), plus his sister Anne (b. c. 1830, Llantrisant, Glamorgan), were still living with their widowed mother Mary in what is described as a ‘storehouse’ nearby.

This modest family dwelling was literally the storehouse of a local mill, where miners’ families were sometimes housed upon moving to Dinas before proper accommodation became available. Their residence here suggests that despite Moses’s status as the local schoolmaster, his wife and children were far from well-off. This is reflected in the humble occupations held by the three brothers still living at home: Rowland was a collier, presumably working for the local coal magnate Walter Coffin, and both Thomas and Moses the Younger were blacksmiths like Morgan. Anne, aged eleven, was neither working nor in school. As for Morgan’s other two sisters, Esther (b. c. January 1824, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 3 August 1895, Newton Nottage, Glamorgan) and Mary (Mary (b. 30 October 1825, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 14 April 1881, Penygraig, Glamorgan), Esther was recorded in the same census working as a servant in nearby Llanwono, while Mary’s whereabouts in 1841 are unknown. Their mother Mary Rowland (née Foster) passed away around November 1845 at the age of fifty, while some of the children were still in their teens. Following her death, her youngest son Moses the Younger, to whom we will return later, appears to have assumed the role of head of the Rowland household.

A Country Blacksmith, engraved by C.W. Sharpe after J.M.W. Turner, published 1859-1861 (via Tate).

Morgan continued working as a blacksmith in Dinas for the next decade or so, perhaps principally engaged in making and repairing horseshoes for the local pit ponies. During this time he and Mary had five more children together:

• Moses M. (b. 19 February 1842, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 12 March 1901, Thornhill House, Treforest, Glamorgan)
• Elizabeth Foster (b. c. May 1845, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Evan (b. c. 1847, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Catherine (b. c. 1851, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. c. August 1920, Penrhiwceiber, Glamorgan)
• Morgan (b. August 1853, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. c. February 1915, Bridgend, Glamorgan)

At some point between 1851 and 1853 however he left blacksmithing and began working for George Insole & Son at Cymmer Colliery in nearby Porth, first as a collier and then as a ‘fireman’ in 1854. Colliery firemen were among the first safety officers to be employed in mines, and were responsible for testing for flammable gases like methane and monitoring ventilation and air supply. This was especially important in the days when safety lamps were not yet widespread in South Wales, and most mines still relied on candlelight (Lewis, 1959, p. 62). Despite the increased status and responsibilities, working conditions for firemen like Morgan would have been just as dangerous as they were for the average mineworker, if not more so. Not only were they required to be the first down the mine before each shift to check for gas leaks or other potential hazards, they were also responsible for leading rescue and firefighting missions in the event of an emergency.

Cymmer Colliery, c. 1855, photographed by Joseph Collings. © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

Until 1854, the fireman at Cymmer Colliery had been elected by the miners themselves (North Wales Chronicle, 23 August 1856), but this practice had been banned following a strike that year. Morgan was one of the first firemen to be appointed by the management. While the exact circumstances of how this came about are unknown, it seems plausible that Walter Coffin’s fondness for his late father Moses, former clerk at Dinas Colliery, may have been a factor (see Rowlands of my father (part 1). It is easy to imagine Coffin putting in a good work for him to James Harvey Insole at Cymmer Colliery, and the fact that Morgan’s younger brother Rowland was also promoted to overman here around the same time seems to support this theory.

The fact that family connections appear to have played a role in the appointment of key officers was unfortunately part of a wider pattern of mismanagement at Cymmer Colliery, and in the Rhondda Valley more generally. Coal output was prioritised above all other considerations, especially following Britain’s intervention in the Crimean War, with the most basic safety precautions only ever implemented following major disasters. Firemen and overmen like Morgan and Rowland were reportedly “too few in number to inspect the working places regularly and to instruct the colliers, many of whom lacked previous experience of coal mining, while some of the most vital safety points – for instance, the ventilation of doors – were in the sole control of young children” (Lewis, 1959, p. 149). In 1854 H.M. Inspector Herbert Mackworth delivered a list of special recommendations to the Cymmer Colliery’s owner James Harvey Insole. These included the appointment of a qualified mining engineer, the use of artificial ventilation, replacing naked light with locked safety lamps, and daily safety inspections. Every recommendation was ignored.

• 

  James Harvey Insole, c. 1870s. Source (via Wikimedia Commons).

On the morning of 15 July 1856, a massive explosion ripped through the Old Pit mine of Cymmer Colliery, killing a hundred and fourteen men and boys and injuring dozens more. Apart from one collier who died of burns from the initial blast, the majority were poisoned by methane or suffocated to death. It was the worst mining disaster ever recorded in terms of sheer loss of life, but it also devastated the entire local community by depriving it of virtually all its primary breadwinners. There was barely a household unaffected, with many losing both fathers and sons. In his Report for the South Wales District (1856, p. 127) Herbert Mackworth laid the blame squarely on “the persons in charge of the pit neglecting the commonest precautions for the safety of the men and the safe working of the colliery”.

At the subsequent inquest, Morgan was called for questioning along with the other firemen who had been on duty that day. The coroner, noting that all of them had apparently gone home by the time of the explosion, drew attention to a rule which stated that “the overman and his deputies shall maintain, during all working hours, a careful supervision of the air-way, working faces, and travelling roads and over all things connected with the ventilation, lighting, timbering, and the general or special safety of the workmen.” To this Morgan replied “I do not think that the rule requires the constant presence in the pit of the firemen” and went on to defend his record and that of his fellow fireman, who he claimed had followed all the established procedures on the morning of the explosion. Gas had, he admitted, been found in one of the stalls, but this had been indicated through the customary use of crossed timbers to prevent the miners going in there. Despite his protestations, there was understandably much anger towards towards Morgan, his brother Rowland the overman, and the rest of the management among the surviving workers, with one miner declaring he “would never work in the old pit so long as the Rowlands were there” (North Wales Chronicle, 23 August 1856).

At the conclusion of the case Morgan was found guilty of manslaughter through negligence by a jury of seventeen to one, along with his brother Rowland, the colliery manager Jabez Thomas, and the two other fireman on duty that day, David Jones and William Thomas (The Morning Chronicle, 23 August 1856). The following year on 24 February 1857, Morgan, Rowland and Jabez Thomas were tried again in Swansea for the willful murder of William Thomas, Samuel Edmonds and one other miner who died in the explosion, but this time the judge ordered Rowland’s acquittal, and after a favourable summing up the jury found Morgan not guilty (The Morning Chronicle, 4 March 1857).

It is unknown what Morgan did in the immediate aftermath of his acquittal, but by 1861 he was no longer employed as a fireman. On the night of the census that year he was recorded as a travelling coal agent lodging in a house in Bedwellty, Monmouthshire, while his wife and children were living at ‘Tai’r Prenafalan (Apple Tree)’, possibly a public house, in the hamlet of Castellau. The census also shows they had two further children after 1853:

• Rees David (b. c. November 1856, Llanwonno, Glamorgan – 2 April 1930, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Mary Ann (b. c. May 1860, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. c. May 1926, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)

While the degree to which Morgan can or should be considered responsible for the Cymmer Colliery Disaster is debatable, survivor’s guilt and the part he played in the tragedy would doubtless have haunted him for the rest of his life. And while the likes of Morgan and especially the victims’ families would all suffer in their own ways for decades to come, it is notable that the one man with the power to implement better safety measures in the colliery he owned and ensure they were carried out, James Harvey Insole, was never brought to justice or even charged. He died an extremely wealthy landowner in 1901, two days before Queen Victoria.

* * *

We will return to Morgan Rowland and his family after looking at what happened to his siblings during this same period, whose lives were all very much intertwined. As previously mentioned, following the death of Moses the Elder’s widow Mary in 1845, their fifth son Moses the Younger became head of the Rowland household. The 1851 census records him living at Graig Ddu Cottages south of Dinas with his siblings Rowland and Anne, an eight year old nephew with the somewhat unoriginal name Moses Rowland Rowland, and interestingly a ‘grandmother’ called Elizabeth Rhys (b. c. 1766, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan), a blind pauper and dressmaker who was perhaps his maternal grandmother. That year both Moses and his brother Rowland were employed as colliers, but shortly afterwards he qualified as a mechanical engineer. And then he made a discovery.

In 1858, on a piece of farmland near Dinas, Moses uncovered a coal seam with the help of a geologist named Richard Jenkins. That year at the age of thirty he founded the Penygraig Coal Company with a local builder named William Morgan, who was his brother-in-law through his sister Esther, a clerk named William Williams, and a jeweller called John Crockett (Egan, 1987, p. 36). In 1864 they sank the Penygraig Colliery, and the village which later grew up around it was named Penygraig after this original pit.

The business proved extremely profitable, with annual coal production reaching almost 100,000 tonnes by 1870 (Lewis, 1959, p. 73). In 1875 however, following a disagreement with his partner William Williams over where to sink the next pit he disbanded the Penygraig Colliery Company and founded the Naval Colliery Company with his brother-in-law William Morgan, and they sank the Pandy Pit (or Naval Steam Colliery) that year. Along the way he married a woman named Sarah Isaac (b. 6 November 1831, Eglwysilan, Glamorgan – d. 10 February 1912, Pontypridd, Glamorgan), with whom he had at least three children:

• Emily Mary (b. c. 1859, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Sarah Ellen (b. c. 1862, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan)
• Moses (b. c. 1864, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan)

They lived together first at Mount Pleasant in Ystradyfodwg, then at Penpisgah House in Penygraig. By the time he died on 21 September 1884 aged only fixty-six he had amassed a personal fortune of £21’609 12s 8d (worth around £2,218,463 today). However, as will be shown, his business was beset by financial difficulties, and in the final years of his life two tragedies within a short space of time would take a serious toll on his mental health.

Moses Rowland (1828-1884), c. 1880.

While the sinking of the Penygraig Colliery and Moses’s subsequent business ventures would undoubtedly have a deep and lasting influence on the Rhondda Valley, their most direct impact was on his siblings. His eldest sister Esther had married Moses’s junior business partner William Morgan on 30 April 1842. Originally a stone mason by trade, William was working as a builder by the time he and Moses went into business, and he later became a successful coal exporter. During their forty-three year marriage he and Esther had at least the following seven children together:

• Emily (b. 14 March 1843, Pontypridd, Glamorgan – d. 4 October 1867)
• Moses (b. 20 October 1844, Pontypridd, Glamorgan – d. 18 April 1885, Cardiff, Glamorgan)
• John (b. 27 August 1846, Llanwonno, Glamorgan – d. 5 July 1919, Cardiff, Glamorgan)
• Mary (b. 10 April 1848, Pontypridd, Glamorgan – d. 8 December 1855, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Thomas (b. 13 April 1850, Pontypridd, Glamorgan – d. 13 April 1850, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Daniel (b. 16 February 1851, Pontypridd, Glamorgan – d. 5 May 1855, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Charles (b. 3 June 1854, Llanwonno, Glamorgan – d. 29 June 1932 Pontypridd, Glamorgan)

After a period of ill-health William died on Christmas Eve 1885. Esther passed away a decade later on 3 August 1895, at which time her personal estate was worth £4,675 0s 2d. She was buried at Pontypridd five days later.

Esther Rowland, 1824-1895, c. 1890. Courtesy of M. Jenkins.

Moses’s other older sister Mary, on the other hand, seems to be his only sibling who did not benefit in any obvious way from her brother’s success. On 6 November 1847, at the age of twenty-two she had married a blacksmith called John Martin (b. c. 1823, Bridgend, Glamorgan – d. c. 1908, Pontypridd, Glamorgan), possibly a workmate of her brothers, with whom she had at least seven children:

• Francis (b. c. 1847, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)
• Anne (b. 11 June 1848, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Mary Jane (b. c. 1851, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• David (b. c. 1854, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)
• Elizabeth (b. c. 1857, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)
• Esther (b. c. 1860, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Margaret (b. c. 1863 Dinas, Glamorgan)

The family remained in the Dinas-Penygraig area all their life, and Mary died on 14 April 1881 aged fifty-five. Unlike Mary, Moses’s younger sister Anne did appear to benefit from her brother’s success, albeit indirectly through her husband William Thomas (b. c. 1832, Llanelli, Carmarthenshire). William was recorded as a coal miner in the 1861 census, when he and Anne were living in his hometown of Llanelli, Carmarthenshire. By 1871 however they had moved back to Penygraig, and William was working as a foreman coal tipper. Given the timing it seems plausible this promotion was enabled by his brother-in-law Moses, whose mining operation was well-established by this point. After 1871 it is unclear what became of either him or Anne, but they are known to have had at least two children together:

• Mary Ann (b. c. 1857, Cymmer, Glamorgan)
• Elizabeth (b. c. 1863, Llanelli, Carmarthenshire)

Like her husband, Anne’s older brother Thomas also worked as a foreman at Penygraig Colliery for a time, another beneficiary of Moses the Younger’s nepotism perhaps. Since the age of at least eighteen he had been employed as a blacksmith like his brothers Morgan and Moses, and in around 1843 had married Mary Isaac (b. c. 1825, Dinas, Glamorgan) in Cardiff, with whom he had two children:

• David (b. c. 1848, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Mary Ann (b. c. 1851, Porth Glamorgan)

Shortly before the birth of their second child, Thomas and his family had moved to Porth, where his brothers Morgan and Rowland would soon take up positions at Cymmer Colliery. The 1851 census shows them living in a cottage with two lodgers (both coal miners), but sadly Thomas’s wife Mary passed away later that same year. He remarried about four years later to another woman, also called Mary (surname unknown, b. c. 1818, Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan – d. 22 August 1886, Llantrisant, Glamorgan), with whom he had at least one more child:

• John (b. c. 1857, Porth Glamorgan)

By 1861 they had moved again to Castellau, near where Thomas’s brother Morgan was living at the time. Their address was recorded as the Colliers Arms, which they appear to have been running as a lodging house with five guests staying with them on the night of the census. This was evidently a profitable sideline, as although Thomas was still working as a blacksmith the family were earning enough by then to employ a domestic servant.

This was still the case in 1871, by which time Thomas had been hired as a colliery foreman, presumably by his brother Moses at Penygraig, and his eldest son David had started working as a grocer. Interestingly, their address that year is given as ‘Penygraig Store Dinas’, quite possibly the same storehouse where the Rowlands were recorded living as far back as 1841. Thomas’s stint at his brother’s company was to be short-lived however, as by 1881 he had changed careers yet again and was working as a butcher alongside his son at 12-13 Penygraig Road, Ystradyfodwg. His wife Mary died on 22 August 1886, and Thomas himself passed away at the age of sixty-five on 7 April 1888. He was buried at Cymmer Independant Chapel.

Like Thomas, Moses’s other older brother, Rowland, would also become involved in the family’s colliery business. Of all his siblings, he is perhaps the most intriguing figure. In his youth, he lived at Dinas Storehouse with his mother and several of his brothers and sisters. At the time of his first marriage to Susannah Jones around 1842, he was working as a collier. Unfortunately, not much is known about Susannah except that she and Rowland had a son together, Moses Rowland Rowland (b. c. August 1943, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 24 Mar 1926, Bridgend, Glamorgan), and she likely passed away before 1851. In the census for that year, Rowland and his son were recorded living with his brother, Moses the Younger, at Graig Ddu Cottages. Curiously however, he listed his marital status as ‘unmarried’ rather than ‘widowed’. This could have been a simple error or the couple could have separated and were living apart by this time. Later, he married for the second time to a woman named Ann Williams (b. c. 1826, Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan – d. c. November 1871, Pontypridd, Glamorgan).

Rowland’s employment as a foreman at Cymmer Colliery and his subsequent trial, conviction, and eventual acquittal following the disaster of 1856 have already been discussed in relation to Morgan. After this major setback, however, like Morgan, he became a coal agent (traveling salesman). The 1861 census shows him living at ‘Ty Rowlands’ (Rowland House) in Llangendeirne, Carmarthenshire, with his wife and seventeen-year-old son, who had become an accountant, perhaps while on an extended business trip. A decade later, at the age of fifty, he was living at Bryncelyn, near Ystradyfodwg, where he was apparently prospecting for coal in the Garw Valley while also working as a colliery manager for his brother Moses at Penygraig (Morgan, c. 1975). Living with him that year were his wife Anne, his mother-in-law Jane Williams, two lodgers, and a twenty-seven-year-old domestic servant named Jane Davies (b. c. 1843, Pontyates, Carmarthenshire – d. 6 May 1914, Pontypridd, Glamorgan).

In the 1881 census, Jane was recorded living with Rowland again at 60 Trafalgar Terrace, Ystradyfodwg, however not as his servant but as his third wife. Sadly, Rowland’s second wife Anne appears to have died in late 1871, but Rowland is alleged to have divorced her before she passed in order to marry Jane, which he did in around May 1872. He and Jane had three children together, the youngest of whom would go on to serve as a Member of Parliament for Flintshire:

• Esther Mary (b. c. 1876 Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan – d. c. February 1919, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Rowland (b. c. 1878 Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan – d. 14 January 1904, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Gwilym (b. 2 December 1878 Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 16 January 1949, Penygraig, Glamorgan)

Despite his questionable personal life, Rowland was widely respected in the Rhondda Valley as a thoughtful theologian, a passionate advocate for the temperance movement, and an eloquent speaker. He served as a member of the Penygraig School Board and was a deacon with the Calvinistic Methodists at Dinas, then later at Pisgah Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, where he was appointed treasurer in 1868 (Morgan, c. 1975). He was also apparently held in high esteem by his workers, who, in an illuminated address from 1873, described him in rather florid prose as “a celebrated manager, the generous Rowlands [sic]; the abstainer’s leader, from whose zeal Penygraig is like a peaceful paradise … our unrivaled hero through whose work the “strike” is finally banished from cheerful Penygraig.”

Rowland Rowland, c. 1873, from an illuminated address.

Rowland retired sometime before 1891, by which time he was living at 9 Tylacelyn Road, Clydach, with his young family. He died three years later on 19 March 1894 at the age of seventy-three. According to his probate record, his final address was 36 Bryncelyn Road, Penygraig, and his effects worth £141 6s 3d went to his widow Jane, who herself passed away on 6 May 1914. Writing some years after his death, Dinas historian William James said of Rowland:

I have not knowingly come into contact with any working class man who was more sagacious than he. From what I knew of him I suspected he had too much spirit in him to stay on top of any matter for very long. If he could have confined himself to the matter in hand, it’s likely enough that he would have achieved his ambitions within many circles. Despite this, he moved in important situations during his life. He was a Sunday School teacher with but a few comparables in Dinas. He had a a particular attribute for gaining the attention and affection of his class, apart from being able to impart education to them. He did enormous good for many in Dinas with his efforts with abstinence; the results of his work in this direction will benefit generations to come. His family, by necessity feels a great loss with his death; his care for his children was so great; one can almost say that he was too extreme in this direction.

William James, 1902

* * *

We now return at last to Morgan, the eldest of the Rowland siblings and my great-great-great-grandfather. When we left him in 1861, he had been a travelling coal agent like his younger brother Rowland. Three of his children had already begun work by that time: his first child, and the only one to have left home so far, Esther, was employed as a servant in Llanwonno, his oldest son, Moses M., was an engineer, and Evan was a coal miner. These occupations reflect the fact that the Penygraig Colliery Company was still in its infancy at this stage, and the Rowland family were yet to benefit from it collectively.

By 1871 all of that had changed. Morgan was a manager at Dinas Colliery, and the family’s improved fortunes were evident from the fact that they were employing a domestic servant in their home at 1 Five Acres, Dinas. Of the children still living at home, Evan had risen to become a colliery overman, while Rees David was a shepherd, and Catherine was a milliner. The previous year, their eldest daughter Esther had married William Williams, a former clerk and her uncle Moses the Younger’s business partner in the Penygraig Coal Company. Williams was, by then, one of the company’s owners. Another of Morgan and Mary’s daughters, Elizabeth Foster Rowland, had married a mining engineer named William Lewis in 1869.

During his tenure as manager at Dinas, Morgan featured in a number of local news stories, which paint an interesting picture of his time there. One such story from 30 August 1871 recounts how he had apprehended a man he believed to be stealing some ‘tramroad plates’ (iron railway plates) from Dinas Colliery. The man then jumped up and grabbed Morgan by the beard, pulling out a tuft “the size of a small bird’s nest” (Western Mail, 31 August 1871), which he subsequently produced as evidence in the court case that followed. This was not the only time he appeared in court due to alleged cases of theft at the colliery. On 5 February 1875, Morgan accused an employee of stealing some sticks, however, he had already been annoyed with that particular worker because he was leaving the company. The defence argued that Morgan “always suspects people that he dislikes”, and the case was dismissed (Western Mail, 3 February 1875). Later that year, on 5 June, he featured in a report covering a robbery of 5d worth of oats from the colliery’s stables (Western Mail, 5 June 1875).

Morgan also featured in a number of more serious stories. On 26 April 1879, following a gas explosion at Dinas Colliery earlier that year, he became a key witness for the prosecution. By then, he was no longer working at Dinas Colliery, but he told the court that during his time there, he had repeatedly warned the owner about the negligence of an overman named Chubb, who had been promoted to colliery manager at the time of the explosion (Northern Echo, 28 April 1879). Perhaps his experiences after the Cymmer Colliery explosion had caused him to become especially safety conscious in the years since. An article from 14 October 1880 shows that he was present and aiding during the aftermath of a later mining disaster, but this time it was at the family firm, the Naval Colliery Company (The Glasgow Herald, 14 December 1880).”

On 10 December 1880, twenty-three years after the Cymmer Colliery Disaster, another horrific gas explosion killed one hundred and one miners at Penygraig. Once again, the Rowland family was implicated. Due to the family’s nepotistic hiring practices, one of Rowland Rowland’s sons, the former accountant Moses Rowland Rowland, had been appointed as a manager at the Naval Steam Colliery, despite lacking the necessary experience or qualifications. After the explosion, a Home Office Inquiry revealed that his only previous experience had been “as a clerk, storekeeper, and measurer, primarily involved in book work, and, as he expressly stated, not engaged in the practical duties of mine managing.” Moreover, his manager’s certificate “was entirely false…and the owners of the colliery, or some of them, must have known it to be false.”

No one was charged in the end, but the jury strongly condemned the company’s owner Moses the Younger for neglecting to follow a number of safety measures. A second explosion on 27 January 1884, which killed another fourteen men, further tarnished the Naval Colliery Company’s reputation and brought yet more suffering to an already traumatized community. Moses was said to have experienced severe anguish at the loss of life in the two explosions, and in his final months began to manifest “symptoms of mental disturbance” (Western Mail, 23 September 1884). The company also suffered as a result of the Long Depression in the 1880s, and it was eventually sold off in October 1887, less than thirty years after Moses discovered the original coal seam at Penygraig.

Naval Colliery, Penygraig, being dismantled, 1960s. Source: People’s Collection Wales.

* * *

By the early 1880s Morgan and Mary were living at Grovefield Terrace, Dinas, with their daughter Mary Ann and a domestic servant. Mary passed away on 6 June 1883 aged sixty-five, and Morgan died the following year of ‘morbis cordis ascites’ (possibly caused by cancer) at the age of sixty-eight, uncannily on the exact same day as his brother Moses the Younger, 21 September 1884. Given the timing, it is impossible to ignore the possibility that the second Naval Colliery disaster may have hastened their declining health. Morgan’s eldest son, my great-great-grandfather Moses M. Rowland was present at his death. He was buried in Ebenezer Chapel on 22 September, and his personal estate at the time was worth £318 14s. In his obituary he was described as “a remarkable man”, “one of the best colliery managers”, and “remarkable in the neighbourhood for his attachment to intellectual pursuits” (Western Mail, 23 September 1884). His only known photograph is a faded studio portrait of him sat with his younger brother Moses, taken a few years before they died within hours of each other.

Morgan Rowland and Moses Rowland the Younger, c. 1880, Cambrian Studio, Pontypridd.

The deaths of the two great Rowland patriarchs in 1884 marked the end of an era, not just for the family, but for the Rhondda Valley as a whole. Starting from virtually nothing, by the early 1880s the Rowlands had become a kind of local industrial aristocracy. Their reliance on family connections over merit when appointing staff would ultimately prove disastrous, but their closeness as a family had also undoubtedly been key to their early success. Although the Rowland, or increasingly ‘Rowlands’, name would continue to carry some weight, Morgan’s children, including my great-great-grandfather, would never experience the same wealth and influence as their parents. In the next post, we will look at the lives they led in the aftermath of the previous generation’s spectacular rise and fall.

Sources

Egan, David. Coal Society: A History of the South Wales Mining Valleys. Gomer, 1987.

James, William. Hanes Dechreu yr Achos Crefyddol yn Ninas y Rhondda: Ynghyd a Sylwadau ar Nodweddion Amryw Bersonau. Tonypandy: Argraffwyd gan Robert Davies, Maddock, a’u Cyf. 1902. Translated by Philip Richards, 2007.

Lewis, E.D. The Rhondda Valleys: A Study in Industrial Development, 1800 to the Present Day. London: Phoenix House, 1959.

Morgan, Tudor Reynolds. The Rowlands Family, Penygraig, Rhondda Valley. c. 1975.

Northern Mine Research Society. “Cymer Colliery Explosion, Rhondda Valley, 1856”. Accessed 18 September 2023. https://www.nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/accidents-disasters/glamorganshire/cymer-colliery-explosion-rhondda-valley-1856/.

Northern Mine Research Society. “Pen-Y-Craig Colliery Explosion, Rhondda, 1880”. Accessed 20 December 2023. https://www.nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/accidents-disasters/glamorganshire/pen-y-craig-colliery-explosion-rhondda-1880/.

Rowlands of my father (part 1)

This is the first in a series of posts on the history of the Rowland family of the Rhondda Valley, the maternal ancestors of my grandfather Rowland Bevan Jones (see Keeping up with the Joneses (part 3)). In this part I will be looking at the earliest known generation of Rowlands from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Much of this story has been pieced together through the combined efforts of multiple researchers over the years, whose work I have attempted to credit wherever possible. In particular I would like to thank Philip Richards and Peter J. Williams for their invaluable help in researching these early generations. For consistency Welsh place names have been standardised to conform to their familiar modern spellings.

In the late nineteenth century the Rowland family could be counted among the most influential industrial dynasties in South Wales. While they later became closely associated with the coal mining communities of the Rhondda Valley in Glamorgan, their origins lay further west. According to a contemporary newspaper account (Western Mail, 21 March 1894, p. 6, col. 4) they were related to the renowned evangelical preacher Daniel Rowland (c. 1711-1790), a leading figure of the Welsh Methodist Revival from Cardiganshire. This claim has never been proved however, and as it did not appear in print until over a century after Daniel’s death it may have been a later family legend.

Their earliest verifiable ancestors can be traced back to the tiny villages of Caio and Llanycrwys in Carmarthenshire, where five children with the surname ‘Rowland’ were born between 1786 and 1801 (Swann, 2015):

• Ann (b. c. 1786, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. c. July 1859, Llandovery, Carmarthenshire)
• Moses (b. c. 1790, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. 1837, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Thomas (b. c. 1791, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. 1 January 1844, Dinas Middle Colliery, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Catherine (b. c. 1794, Llanycrwys, Carmarthenshire)
• Rees (b. c. 1801, Llanycrwys, Carmarthenshire – d. c. 1856, Glamorgan)

While circumstantial evidence strongly suggests these five children were siblings (and in this post I will be referring to them as such), there remains some uncertainty as to their parentage. The only matching baptism record to have surfaced so far is for a Catherine Rowland from 6 May 1794 in Llanycrwys, which gives her father’s name as Roland Thomas (no mother is mentioned, unfortunately). Rees’s marriage certificate from 1840 however asserts that his father was a farmer named Rowland Rees. This claim is backed up somewhat by a Land Tax Assessment from 1798 which confirms that a man with that name lived in the parish of Llanycrwys around the time when Rees was born, specifically in the hamlet of Mynachty. Whatever their father’s name was, it seems likely their use of ‘Rowland’ as a last name arose through the Welsh patronymic system, in which children received their father’s forename as a surname.

Little is known of the family’s early years in Carmarthenshire, however Fred S. Price (1904, p. [5]) writing a century later paints an idyllic picture of the remote, rural community the children would have known growing up:

Though far removed from railways and other conveniences of modern civilisation, [Caio] deserves to be better known to the world at large on account of its historical interest, its natural beauty, its mountains and fine rocks on the north, frequented by buzzards, ravens, badgers and foxes, and which afford pastures only for sheep and ponies; its beautiful valleys of the Twrch and the Cothi on the south, where the goldfinch, the bullfinch, the swallows, the greenfinch, and the rare kingfisher haunt every year, and there rear their young. On the north the country is bare and bleak, on the south beautifully wooded, and altogether affords as great a variety of scenery as is possible on so small a scale.

Church and village, Cynwyl Gaeo (AKA Caio), 1885, © The National Library of Wales 2023 (via People’s Collection Wales).

We can tell from the children’s birthplaces that the Rowlands moved north from Caio to Llanycrwys at some point between 1791 and 1794, where they remained until at least 1801. Ann, the eldest, was the first to marry and start a family. Her husband William Llewellyn (b. c. 1786, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. c. February 1864, Llandovery, Carmarthenshire) was a fellow Caio native, and although it is unclear exactly when they were married he and Ann are known to have had the following four children between 1812 and 1831:

• Mary (b. c. 1812, Pencarreg, Carmarthenshire)
• Elizabeth (b. 1821)
• Rowland (b. c. 1821, Caio, Carmarthenshire – d. c. February 1903. Rhondda, Glamorgan)
• John (b. 18 February 1831, Llanycrwys, Carmarthenshire)

Their birthplaces suggest Ann and William did not initially travel far from the village of their birth, settling first in nearby Pencarreg before returning to Caio and Llanycrwys by the early 1820s. Two decades later however they were recorded in the 1841 census living with William’s father, Llewellyn William, in a house called ‘Wenallt’ in the Glamorgan hamlet of Llantwit Major. William was employed as a tinplate manufacturer that year, and living alongside him, Ann, and William’s father was their daughter Elizabeth and her two sons William and Rowland Thomas. William’s elderly father Llewellyn died the following year, and by the 1851 census he and Ann had moved back to Caio. William, then aged sixty-five, was working as a shoemaker and he and Ann were caring for a grandson, their daughter Mary’s nine-year-old boy John Lewis. Ann died at the age of seventy-three in the third quarter of 1859. Her husband survived a further five years, long enough for him to be recorded in the 1861 census living at the family home ‘Ddisgwilfa’ with his daughter Mary, still working as a shoemaker in his mid-seventies.

Although she and William eventually returned to Caio, Ann’s move from the Carmarthen countryside to industrial Glamorgan was a journey shared by all four of her younger siblings. The catalyst for this family migration was their brother Moses, “a short amiable man, with a high and broad forehead” (Morgan, 1903), the eldest of the three Rowland boys, and my fourth great-grandfather. In his early twenties he had moved to Penderyn in Breconshire, where he worked as a school teacher. Prior to this he may have attended one of the dissenting academies which had been set up in West Wales, which would explain how he came to learn English. On 30 December 1815 he married a young woman named Mary Morgan (b. c. 1795, Llantrisant, Glamorgan) in Ystradfellte, Breconshire, with the consent of her father Morgan Owen. The fact that her father’s permission was required suggests Mary was under twenty-one at the time. Her father Morgan also served as one of their witnesses alongside a man named John Thomas. Unsurprisingly, as a school teacher Moses was able to sign his name but the ‘x’ by Mary’s confirms she was illiterate.

Falls at Cilhepste, Ystradfellte, drawn by J. P. Neale and engraved by T. Bonnor in 1815, the year Moses Rowland and Mary Morgan were married there. Source: Rees, 1815 (via People’s Collection Wales).

After marrying, Moses and Mary appear to have stayed in Penderyn for at least a year, where they had one son:

• Morgan (b. c. 1816, Penderyn, Breconshire – d. 21 September 1884, Hendregwilym, Penygraig, Glamorgan)

Morgan Rowland, my third great-grandfather, was baptised in Penderyn Church on 12 May 1816. Not long after, his father Moses was offered a job as a school teacher in the coal mining village of Dinas, Glamorgan, which he accepted. This fateful offer came courtesy of Walter Coffin, “the first real industrial pioneer of the Rhondda Valleys” (Lewis, 1959, p. 40) who had sunk Dinas Colliery in 1812 and was now in need of someone to teach English and arithmetic to his workers’ children. Moses had been recommended to him by Thomas Morgan, a cousin of Moses’s wife Mary who vouched for his good reputation:

There is an Abereyron man, named Moses Rowland, keeping an English School at Penderyn. He is a clever man. He is newly married at Ystradvellte to my cousin, Mary Thomas [sic] … I dare say he would accept your invitation.

Walter Coffin (1784–1867), who established the first of the deep coal mines in the Rhondda Valley.

Moses is said to have delivered his first lessons in a makeshift day school in a colliery storehouse. By the mid-1820s however he had earned a reputation as “an enthusiast in the cause of elementary education in the district” (LSJ Services [Wales] Ltd., 2009) thanks both to his tireless work at the day school, and for establishing a thriving Sunday School for children and adults in a room on White Rock Row, the precursor to Soar Baptist Chapel. In Soariana, the Centenary Book of Zoar Chapel, Penygraig he was described as a good man who was particularly active in chapel life and gave sermons as a lay preacher there despite being a Methodist himself (Hicks, 2002). Around this same time Moses apparently “became such a firm favourite with [Walter] Coffin that he later became secretary and his Clerk of Works” at Dinas Colliery (Carpenter, 2000, p. 28).

Throughout the 1820s, as Moses’s reputation and influence grew so too did his family, with Mary giving birth to at least eight children between 1819 and 1830:

• Ester (b. c. 1819, Glamorgan – d. 11 February 1820, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Rowland (b. c. January 1821, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 19 March 1894 , Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Thomas (b. c. 1823, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 7 April 1888, Pontypridd, Glamorgan)
• Esther (b. c. January 1824, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 3 August 1895, Newton Nottage, Glamorgan)
• Mary (b. 30 October 1825, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 14 April 1881, Penygraig, Glamorgan)
• John (b. c. 6 December 1827, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan – d. c. 19 December 1827, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan)
• Moses (b. c. September 1828, Dinas, Glamorgan – d. 21 September 1884, Penpisgah House, Penygraig, Glamorgan)
• Anne (b. c. 1830, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)

Two sadly died in infancy (Ester, their second-born, and John, their sixth) but of those who survived, several would go on to have a significant impact on Rhondda Valley and its community in the decades to come.

Following Walter Coffin’s sinking of a second mine shaft the population of Dinas continued to increase throughout the 1830s, and by 1941 Coffin employed 301 men and 113 boys, more than any other colliery in the Glamorgan highlands not connected to an ironworks (Lewis, 1959, p. 44). Conditions for mineworkers were notoriously harsh and dangerous at the time, however some mine owners did at least provide educational facilities for their workers’ children (and indeed the children they employed) at a time before government grants for schools were available. Initially this was on a largely informal basis, like the early arrangement between Moses Rowland and Walter Coffin, however later a number of official colliery schools were opened in the Rhondda.

Among the very first of these was Graig-Ddu School in Dinas, which was opened by Walter Coffin in 1830. Moses’s success as an educator in the local area and his good working relationship with Coffin made him the obvious candidate for the role of Dinas’s first schoolmaster. On 29 September 1829 an agreement was signed between Coffin, Moses and the owner of the Graig-Ddu and Gwaun-Adda farmland to lease that land for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, with the first rent payment due on that date the following year (Lewis, 1959, p. 191).

• 

  Graig-Ddu School, Dinas, photographed by Edna Thomas (via Rhondda Cynon Taf Library Service Digital Archive).

Moses’s tenure as schoolmaster of Dinas was to be a brief one however. In 1837 he died after suffering a case of bronchitis at the age of forty-seven. He was buried at Ebenezer Chapel, where his epitaph reads “I shall be satisfied, when I awake with Thy Likeness” (psalm 17:15). Despite the short time he spent in the Rhondda there is no doubt he left an enduring legacy, and according to Tudor Reynolds Morgan (1903), “his qualities of heart and mind influenced Dinas people long after his departure.” His wife Mary lived long enough to be recorded in the 1841 census, at which time she was working as a housekeeper and living at Dinas storehouse where her husband had taught with her unmarried children Rowland, Thomas, Moses, and Anne. She died just four years later in 1845 at the age of fifty, when her youngest children were still in their teens. Following her death her son Moses (the Younger) seems to have become the head of the house, but his story will be told in the next installment.

* * *

Among those most directly influenced by Moses (the Elder) were his three younger siblings, Thomas, Catherine, and Rees. The eldest of these, Thomas, had married a woman named Margaret “Pegi” Rowland (b. c. 1893, Llanddewi, Cardiganshire – d. c. 1874, Pontypridd, Glamorgan) on 16 August 1816 in Caio when he was around twenty-five. The signature on his marriage certificate shows that like his brother Moses he was literate, and that Pegi was not. Moses and his wife Mary also served as Thomas and Pegi’s witnesses, having themselves been married the previous year. They initially settled in the village of Myddfai where they had two children, before moving to Llandingad in the early 1820s, where they had a third:

• Ann (b. November 1818, Myddfai, Carmarthenshire)
• Rowland Thomas (b. 25 May 1821, Mydffai, Carmarthenshire)
• Esther (b. 16 September 1824, Llandingad, Carmarthenshire)

Around the middle of the decade however they followed Thomas’s brother Moses to Glamorgan, where their final three children were born:

• John (b. c. 1827, Glamorgan – d. 1 January 1844, Dinas Middle Colliery, Dinas, Glamorgan)
• Moses Thomas (b. c. 1832, Llantrisant, Glamorgan – 16 October 1895, Penygraig, Glamorgan)
• David (b. 1834, Glamorgan – d. 1 January 1844, Dinas Middle Colliery, Dinas, Glamorgan)

The 1841 census records the family living at Dinas storehouse, the same building where Moses’s widow Mary was housed at the time. Thomas was by then working as a collier, unsurprisingly given his family’s connection to the pits, and he is also said to have also served as a deacon at Ebenezer Chapel at around this time. Perhaps more surprisingly, all four of his sons were recorded as colliers as well, the youngest of whom was only seven. Beyond shocking by today’s standards, the use of child labour in coal mines was already coming under increased scrutiny by 1841. The previous year a commission headed by Baron Ashley had been established to investigate the working conditions of miners, particularly children, and Dinas was one of the collieries they visited. It was found that even by the standards of the time, Walter Coffin’s use of young children for work underground was excessive, with more boys under the age of 13 employed at Dinas than at any other colliery in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire (Lewis, 1959, p. 151). Remarkably, the report included the first-hand accounts of several boys at Dinas Colliery, which describe their long hours, low wages and the dark, dangerous conditions in which they worked. One boy even touched on the issue of elementary education in Dinas, which despite the efforts of educators like Moses Rowland was always doomed to suffer as long as economic necessity and the absence of legal protections kept so many children in work:

I have been driving horses below ground three years, and was 12 months before at a trap door [working as a ‘door boy’]; when at the traps used frequently to fall asleep; works 12 hours; would go the School if the work were not so long; cannot go now as I now have to work on the night as well as the day shifts.

Philip Davies, aged 10 (Haulier)

The commissioners added that Philip was illiterate, as well as neglected and sickly in appearance. In general they noted that the children working in the mines of South Wales “become pallid, stunted in growth, short of breath, sometimes thin and often burnt, crooked, crippled, and that, in addition, they are peculiarly subject to certain mortal diseases, the direct result of their employment and the state of the place in which they work” (Lewis, 1959, p. 153).

Engraved illustration of children working in a colliery. Source: The Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Colliers of the United Kingdom. Carefully Compiled from the Appendix to the First Report of the Commissioners … With Copious Extracts from the Evidence, and Illustrative Engravings. London: William Strange, 1842 (via British Library).

The report sparked a public outcry, and many including Charles Dickens (whose A Christmas Carol was partly inspired by the report) called for a change in the law. After being watered down considerably in the House of Lords this was granted with the Mines and Collieries Act 1842, which banned women, girls, and boys under the age of ten from working underground. The immediate effect on Thomas Rowland’s family would have been limited however, as all but one of his sons would have been over ten by 1842, and in practice the law was widely flouted due to poor enforcement and a lack of compensation for families whose incomes were hit by the new restrictions. Moreover the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842 did nothing to improve the dangerous and often deadly working conditions for those who were still obliged to work below ground.

On the morning of New Year’s Day 1844, a firedamp explosion at Dinas Middle Colliery caused by poor ventilation took the lives of twelve workers, four of whom were children. Among those killed were Thomas Rowland, and his sons, John and David. Reports from those who were there that day paint a harrowing picture of a powerless and grief-stricken community:

The agony and consternation of the wives and daughters of the employed, among whom the report spread, may be easily conceived. Each, for the moment, lamented the death of a son, a brother, or a husband; and, until the exact number of the deceased was ascertained, the neighbourhood presented a scene of wailing and alarm, which a bereavement under such circumstances is well calculated to create.

Report on the 1844 Dinas Colliery explosion which lists Thomas, John, and David Rowland among the dead. Source: The Bristol Mercury, 6 January 1844, p. 4, col. 1 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Three days after the explosion the bodies had still not been recovered, and Thomas and his sons were among the last to be found. None but one of the bodies displayed signs of burning, suggesting the rest died of suffocation. In addition to those killed, a further three suffered broken limbs and other injuries. The coroner’s inquest that followed was severely critical of the overman Griffith Williams, who it transpired had neglected to personally check if conditions were safe in each heading that morning, and had instead entrusted a fourteen-year-old boy under his charge to inspect several by himself (The Monmouthshire Merlin, 13 January 1844, p. 2, cols. 4-5). The coroner recommended the overman be charged with manslaughter, but a jury ultimately returned a verdict of accidental death. There was to be no significant legislation to improve working conditions for miners until the Mines Regulation Act 1860, which raised the minimum age boys could work underground from ten to twelve, where it would remain for several decades.

After her husband’s death, Thomas’s widow Pegi worked as a glover and was recorded living at ‘Dinas Cottages’ in the 1851 census along with her last surviving son Moses, who himself died as the result of a mining accident years later in 1895. It is unknown what became of their daughters Ann and Esther, but as Pegi would have struggled to support three children by herself with little income and no compensation, it is possible they were sent to live with relatives after their father’s death.

* * *

Thomas’s younger sister Catherine is perhaps the Rowland sibling about whom we know the least. She married relatively late at the age of thirty-six to a widower named Thomas Thomas (b. c. April 1792, Caio, Carmarthenshire), whose first wife apparently died giving birth to their seventh child. The wedding took place on 6 April 1830 in Thomas’s home parish of Caio, and they would go on to have at least the following five children over the next decade:

• Esther (b. c. 1832)
• John (b. c. 1833, Caio, Carmarthenshire)
• Moses (b. c. 1834, Caio, Carmarthenshire)
• David (b. c. 1835)
• Ann (b. c. 1840, Llantrisant, Glamorgan)

The children’s birthplaces show they remained in Caio for about five years before joining Catherine’s siblings in Glamorgan. In the 1841 census the family, including two children from Thomas’s previous marriage, William and Rees, were living at Graig-Ddu south of Dinas, close to the village school. Thomas was recorded as a labourer while his teenage boys Rees and William were both working at the colliery, as was his and Catherine’s eight-year-old son John. In 1851 they were living at ‘Gwaun Adda Cottages’, and by then Thomas was working as a coal miner alongside his sons William, John, and Moses. In a sign of the changing times, their youngest child Ann was recorded as a full-time ‘scholar’.

Unfortunately after this date nothing more is known for certain about Catherine, her husband Thomas, or any of their children. Slightly more can be said of her brother Rees, the fifth and last of this first generation of Rowlands. At age twenty he married Gwenillian Jones in Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire, on 30 January 1821, with whom he had at least five children:

• John (b. c. Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire, 1822)
• Esther (b. c. 1826)
• Margaret (b. 23 December 1826, Llywel, Breconshire
• Gwenillian (b. c. 1832)
• Ann (b. c. 1837)

From their children’s baptism records and later census returns we know Catherine and Thomas initially settled in Llanddeusant, Carmarthenshire before moving to Llywel in Breconshire by 1826, where Rees worked as a weaver. Rees’s wife Gwenillian died at some point between 1837 and 1840, and in around August that year he married his second wife Kesiah Jones (b. c. 1811, Glamorgan – d. c. August 1849 Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan) at Carmel Chapel, Merthyr Tydfil. Their marriage certificate records Rees’s address as Ystradyfodwg, confirming that he and the children had moved to Glamorgan around the same time as his sister Catherine. He gave his occupation as ‘farmer’, and in common with his brothers Moses and Thomas he signed his name on the register (unlike Kesiah whose mark indicates she was illiterate). As mentioned near the beginning of this post however, the real significance of Rees’s second marriage certificate is our only credible source confirming his father’s name, and therefore that of his siblings’, Rowland Rees. Moreover the absence of the word ‘deceased’ or ‘retired’ under his father’s name suggests that as late as 1840 he was possibly still alive and working as a farmer.

The 1841 census shows that Rees and his family farmed a piece of land known as ‘Rhondda Ffychan’, most likley on the site now occupied by Rhondda Fechan Farm in Ystradyfodwg parish. It also shows that by then he and Kesiah had had their first child together, who would soon be joined by a second. Their names were:

• Mary (b. c. 1840, Glamorgan)
• Jenkin (b. c. September 1845, Ystradyfodwg, Glamorgan)

Jenkin’s baptism record from 7 September 1845 gives the family’s address as Aberdare, where Rees was apparently still working as a farmer. Kesiah died in 1849 aged around thirty-eight, and two years later her widower Rees was recorded living at Graig-Ddu Cottages south of Dinas, the same place his sister Catherine’s family had been a decade earlier. By then Rees was no longer involved in farming and was instead employed as a ‘coal tipper’, no doubt working for Walter Coffin’s now-ubiquitous colliery like both his brothers before him. And like his brothers, he too would soon be gone, but with the passing of this first generation of Rowlands the next were ready to make their mark.

View of Dinas, c. 1874-1875. Several locations associated with the Rowlands are labelled, including (from left to right) Gwaun-Adda where Catherine’s family lived, the Methodist Chapel where some of them preached and worshipped, Dinas Middle Pit where Thomas Rowland was killed, and Graig-Ddu where Moses established his school and where both Catherine and Rees would later live. Source: Ordnance Survey (via National Library of Scotland).

* * *

In the next instalment we will look at this second generation of Rowlands, specifically the children of Moses Rowland (the Elder) and Mary Morgan, including my third great-grandfather Morgan, whose influence in the Rhondda Valley would soon come to rival Walter Coffin’s. For better or worse.

Sources

Carpenter, David. Rhondda collieries. Stroud: Tempus, 2000.

Commissioners for Inquiring into the Employment and Condition of Children in Mines and Manufactories. The Condition and Treatment of the Children Employed in the Mines and Colliers of the United Kingdom. Carefully Compiled from the Appendix to the First Report of the Commissioners … With Copious Extracts from the Evidence, and Illustrative Engravings. London: William Strange, 1842

Hicks, Gareth. “Glamorgan  County, Towns and Parishes 2”. Genuki. 2002. Accessed 27 February 2023. https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/wal/GHP/HelpPagepearlsGLA2#Merthyr.

Lewis, E.D. The Rhondda Valleys: A Study in Industrial Development, 1800 to the Present Day. London: Phoenix House, 1959.

Morgan, O. History of Pontypridd and the Rhondda Valleys. Pontypridd: Whittaker & Co., 1903.

Morgan, Tudor Reynolds. The Rowlands Family, Penygraig, Rhondda Valley. c. 1975.

Northern Mine Research Society. “Dinas Middle Pit Explosion, Glamorganshire, 1884”. Accessed 17 March 2023. https://www.nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/accidents-disasters/glamorganshire/dinas-middle-pit-explosion-glamorganshire-1844/.

Price, Fred S. History of Caio, Carmarthenshire. Swansea: Published by the author, 1904.

Rees, Thomas. The Beauties of England and Wales: or Original Delineations , Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive (Vol. XVIII — South Wales). London, 1815.

Swann, Brian. Martin and Rowlands Families of Glamorganshire. Version 1.02. 2015.

LSJ Services [Wales] Ltd. “Colliery schools in the Rhondda in the c19th.” Tribute to the Rhondda. 2009. Accessed 7 November 2011. http://www.therhondda.co.uk/general/rhondda_education.htm.

Williams, Peter J. Rowlands Family Tree. 2011.

Keeping up with the Joneses (part 3)

This is the concluding third part of my history of the Jones family of North Wales and Liverpool, the paternal ancestors of my grandfather Rowland Bevan Jones. For the first chapter in this series see Keeping up with the Joneses (part 1). Content warning: contains descriptions of violence and cruelty to children.

Of the ten surviving children born to John Ellis Jones and his wife Hannah (née Roberts), it is their eldest Hugh Lloyd Jones whose life is the best documented, but not necessarily for reasons he would have chosen. Born 30 January 1867 at Mertyn Farm in Flintshire, in his first year he had moved with his parents to Liverpool’s Bootle district, before travelling with them and his siblings to Preston, Ireland, and then Llanfairfechan. Here, at age fourteen he worked as a messenger for the London and North Western Railway. As this was usually entry-level work for young boys it is possible he progressed further in the company before the family moved back to Liverpool at some point between 1881 and 1885.

In June 1888, when he was 21 years old Hugh enrolled as an undergraduate theology student at the University of London, however his studies were conducted closer to home at the Liverpool Institute on Mount Street. Hugh was almost certainly the first person in his family to study at a higher level, and although religion was important for many in Liverpool’s Welsh migrant community, there is little to suggest any of the Joneses were especially devout before him.

During his studies Hugh became involved with a woman named Annie Elizabeth Woolrich (b. 12 September 1868, Wybunbury, Cheshire – d. 29 October, 1951), a shopkeeper’s daughter from Cheshire, who became pregnant in the summer of 1889. The two were married in early 1890, a few months before the birth of their son William Ellis Jones on 19 May in Liverpool’s Walton district. In the following year’s census the family were recorded living at 292 Buck Road in Everton. Hugh gave his occupation as ‘tea traveller & student in theology’, confirming that alongside his studies he had been supporting the family through working as a travelling tea salesman.

• 

  A nineteenth century engraving depicting a travelling tea salesman (via Alamy).

Later that year, Hugh completed his theology course at the Liverpool Institute and claimed he was ordained by Bishop Baker (or Baxter) of Belmont Road. A year later however, he received a dimissory order for unknown reasons, and in 1894 founded a breakaway sect known as the Evangelical Forward Movement (Free Church of England) with himself as director (The Liverpool Echo, Wednesday 13 May 1896, p. 4, col. 3). This ‘church’ was affiliated with the Providence Orphanage for Fatherless Boys at 63 Newlands Street, of which he was the honorary treasurer.

In 1896 the orphanage (which was actually just a private house in Everton) was rocked by two successive scandals. On 20 March its president Herbert Westworth was acquitted of murdering his wife, following a trial in which it was claimed by the Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Victoria College that it was “physically impossible” for her wounds to have been self-inflicted. Blood had also been found on a poker, and on Westforth’s clothes (The Northern Echo, 21 March 1896, p. 3, col. 2). The second scandal however implicated not just Hugh himself, but his wife Annie. On 13 May that year, the couple were arrested and charged by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) with the ill-treatment and neglect of William Henry Atkinson, a two-year-old boy in their care. According to a report in The Liverpool Echo:

The child was born in Walton Workhouse, and about five weeks ago was placed in the orphanage. It was understood Mr. Jones was going to take the child and keep it at the orphanage. When the child was sent it was perfectly healthy, clean, and in good condition in regard to clothes and other respects. For some weeks past persons living in the immediate neighbourhood of the defendant’s house had heard crying and screaming and sounds as if children inside the house were being beaten.

Margaret Hazlewood, who took the child to the orphanage five weeks ago, said that when she took it away, it had two black eyes, the nose was injured, the forehead was scarred, and body looked as if there had been a strap or cane used to it.

The Liverpool Echo, 13 May 1896, p. 4, col. 3

The Joneses claimed the boy had obtained all these shocking injuries after accidentally falling downstairs, and after several witnesses gave evidence in support of Hugh’s “high character” the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. It is unknown what became of boy, but the the Joneses closed the orphanage and fled Liverpool not long after the trial (John Bull, 4 July 1914, p. 8, col. 2).

• 

  Report of the charges against Hugh Lloyd Jones and his wife Annie from The Lancashire Daily Post, 14 May 1896, page 4, column 1 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Following the birth of their first son William in 1891, Hugh and Annie had at least eight more children together. The seven whose names we know were:

• Harold Edgar (b. c. November 1893, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. 22 October 1918, Palestine)
• Albert Woolrich (b. c. May 1896, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. c. August 1956, Birkenhead, Cheshire)
• Arthur Ewart (b. 24 June 1898, Cardiff Glamorgan)
• Hannah Elizabeth G. (b. c. May 1900, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. c. May 1902, Birkenhead, Cheshire)
• Gwenddolen Elizabeth (b. 29 May 1903, Birkenhead, Cheshire – d. December 1990, Birkenhead, Merseyside)
• Leslie Lloyd (b. 3 May 1908, Birkenhead, Cheshire – d. January 1976, Wallasey, Merseyside)
• Phyllis Alice (b. c. May 1914, Birkenhead, Cheshire – d. 7 October 1936, Wallasey, Cheshire)

From their birthplaces it is possible to trace the family’s move from Liverpool to Cardiff in about 1898, then eventually back to Liverpool around 1900, where they were recorded in the following year’s census at 8 Grey Rock Street. Curiously, Hugh gave his primary occupation as a “Publisher of theological works”. He is known to have edited at least one title, Rays From the Welshman’s Pulpit, for the Cambrian Publishing Co. in 1900.

Advertisement for Rays From the Welshman’s Pulpit from The Welsh Coast Pioneer and Review for North Cambria, 16 February 1900, p. 8, col. 1 (via The National Library of Wales).

Although the 1901 census made no mention of his missionary work, later reports claim he had opened a new mission in Seacombe that year and sent out a number of collectors:

What became of the money we do not know, but he cleared out without paying his rent and left in debt to a number of tradesmen. He then went to Grange Road, West Birkenhead, where some people were organising what they called “Emanuel Free Episcopalian Church.” He was appointed “Pastor,” and the committee authorised him to collect funds. Failing to account for the amount he collected, he was dismissed. The matter was placed in the hands of a solicitor, to whom Jones admitted receiving and keeping £5 5s. from one subscriber, and £1 1s. from another.

John Bull, 4 July 1914, p. 8, col. 2.

By 1903 the family were living at 40 Dingle Road, Birkenhead, and Hugh was operating a new charitable organisation called the United Church Mission, later known as the Gospel News Mission. Advertisements from late 1903 show services were held at the Co-operative Hall on Catherine Street and then the music hall on Claughton Road, before he established a permanent base of operations at 98 and 100 Price Street. The charity claimed to provide “breakfasts for poor children, parcels for poor widows, Christmas festivities and winter fuel for poor families” (Roddy, Strange, and Taithe, 2019, ch. 4).

Advertisement for the Gospel News Mission from The Birkenhead News, 24 October 1903, p. 1, col. 5 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

The truth however is rather murkier. On 24 January 1906, The Birkenhead News reported that “a coloured man” named Frederick Henry Oxley of 113 Pitt Street, Liverpool, had been summoned by police for collecting alms in Birkenhead Market on behalf of the Gospel News Mission (p. 2, cols. 4-5). Oxley claimed he was being paid “5s. in the £ on all monies collected” and that “free breakfasts were given every Sabbath morning all year round to poor slum children at 10.30 a.m”. He went on to produce a certificate signed by Hugh Lloyd Jones on 20 November 1905 authorising him collect on behalf of the mission, as well as a ledger recording the amounts taken in donations and expenses. On one day however the mission’s expenses were shown to exceed the amount received in donations, leading the prosecutor for the police to call the charity “nothing more than a bogus mission which was carried on for the maintenance of those who ran it, and that it concerned only two or three people—Mr. Jones and his family.”

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  Report in The Birkenhead News on the ‘alleged bogus mission’ run by Hugh Lloyd Jones at 98-100 Price Street (24 January 1906, p. 2, cols. 4-5 , via The British Newspaper Archive).

The report went on to say that the mission had been under observation on Sunday mornings for some time. Detective Wright, a witness for the prosecution, claimed:

The premises consisted of a large shop with a kitchen at the back. In the shop or mission room there was a table with several seats around it. He had not seen Mr. Jones there, but he had seen a man who was generally engaged as an insurance agent. He had looked into the room on several occasions on Sunday morning between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., and found it empty. At other times he had seen four or five children there. He had seen two or three children at the table eating bread and jam on Sunday morning. From inquiries he had made in the neighbourhood he had found that tickets were sold in connection with the mission at 6d. a dozen, each one of which entitled the holder to get a cup of tea and a piece of bread and butter.

The Birkenhead News, 24 January 1906, p. 2, col. 4.

In addition to the mission’s practice of charging tickets for their supposedly free breakfasts, Wright went on to claim that on one of the few occasions he actually saw children eating there he could not even tell if they were drinking tea or coffee as no milk had been provided. For his part Oxley (described in the report as “a man of considerable intelligence”) claimed to know nothing of the mission’s workings, and had even sought permission from the market’s superintendent before collecting there, thinking it may have been against the rules.

In his defence, Hugh, “a pale black-bearded man of middle age, who was dressed in clerical garb”, complained that he had been blindsided by the case, believing that he had only been summoned as a witness:

“I never thought this attack would be made upon us otherwise we should have been prepared with our solicitors and 200 witnesses to prove the excellent work we are doing in this town.

…

“We have given 2,000 loaves at mothers’ meetings, and we have conducted 200 indoor and open-air services. We have made 60 converts who have professed faith to the Lord Jesus Christ, and it is really an inspiring sight to see these women debauched with drink and living with other men lives of sin giving their testimony as to the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Birkenhead News, 24 January 1906, p. 2., col. 5.

Returning to the subject of the mission’s balance sheet, the prosecution alleged that there was a deficit on last year’s working of £49 16s. 8d., approximately £4,000 in today’s money. In an echo of the Providence Orphanage verdict ten years earlier however, the chairman conceded there was insufficient evidence to convict and the case was dismissed. Earlier news reports do appear to support Hugh’s assertion that, for a time at least, the mission had been holding services and providing “a good substantial breakfast of ham sandwiches and a mug of hot tea” for local poor children (The Birkenhead News, 12 December 1903, p. 4, col. 7), however these same articles also prominently featured requests for financial donations.

Just six months later, Hugh was faced with another near-identical charge. Perhaps in response to the bad publicity he received in January, Hugh had founded another mission, the United Christians, in March that year, this time situated amid the slums of Bootle in north Liverpool (The Birkenhead News, 23 June 1906, p. 4, col. 4). Like his previous ‘charitable’ endeavours it was known by multiple names, sometimes being referred to as the ‘Lincoln Mission’ on account of its location at the Lincoln Rooms on Lincoln Street. In a letter to his new landlord however, Hugh expressed his intense dissatisfaction with this new address:

“It is with deep regret I inform you this hall is absolutely useless for Protestant services. We are being considerably annoyed at every meeting by young people and others in Lincoln-street. I have worked very hard to try to get up meetings, but the district is essentially Romanish, and no respectable people will come to Lincoln-street to be annoyed. On Good Friday we had a lantern entertainment, and lost 10s. on the transaction.

“Not one penny have I had from those who have attended at the hall. The room is not worth the money expended upon it, and I now quite understand why it was so long untenanted.”

The Birkenhead News, 23 June 1906, p. 4, col. 4.

Hugh’s apparent annoyance at his own decision to set up an evangelical mission in a primarily Irish Catholic district aside, the main purpose of the letter was to explain his inability to pay rent. He went on to complain that after sending off a hundred letters seeking donations he had received only 20s., which barely covered his postage costs.

On 22 June 1906 Hugh appeared at Dale Street police court following a summons for having “aided and abetted a dark-coloured man named Prince Frederick Bailey in the practice of begging.” Bailey, a former ship’s steward and cook from Kingston, Jamaica, had been arrested for seeking subscriptions for the Lincoln Mission at 15 Croxteth Road on 15 June. Inevitably this was traced back to Hugh, who was once again accused of running a bogus charity. It was noted that there was no record of any expenditure on upkeep in the mission’s account books, nor receipts for at least two known donations from prominent Liverpool shipowners, but again the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence and the mission closed voluntarily soon after. In his closing remarks the presiding magistrate condemned both Hugh’s financial activities and (perhaps surprisingly) the credulous public who enabled men like him:

“If people knew that nine-tenths of the money they gave was going into the pockets of the proprietor of the mission and his collectors, they might not be so ready to give contributions. We can’t prevent the public from making fools of themselves by giving money to institutions which they know nothing about. Yet there are institutions like the Children’s Infirmary which cannot be built because the people of Liverpool have no money to give—they prefer to fritter it away on things of this sort. You can’t protect the public from their folly.”

The similarities with the previous allegation against Hugh are striking enough to suggest a pattern. In both cases he was accused of seeking to obtain money under false pretences, following a complaint about one of his collectors. In addition, although Liverpool had an established African-Caribbean community by the early twentieth century it is notable that on each occasion his collector was described as a Black man with the name Frederick. This could be a coincidence but the fact that no record can be found of a ‘Frederick Henry Oxley’ in Liverpool at this time suggests this may have been a pseudonym of the man identified as Prince Frederick Bailey in the second case. If true, this would hint at a long-standing association with Hugh and his dubious organisations, rather than the kind of casual relationship implied in the news coverage. How such an association may have arisen is unclear, but according to census records Prince Frederick Bailey would have been in his sixties by 1906, and so could have been driven into Hugh’s orbit through poverty and a lack of opportunities elsewhere (the repeated and gratuitous references to his skin colour in the press coverage attests to the widespread racism of the period, which would erupt in a spate of anti-Black race riots in Liverpool and other port cities in the summer of 1919). By 1911 Prince Frederick was an inmate at the Liverpool Stanley Hospital for the treatment of diseases of the chest, and died just two years later in 1913 at the age of seventy.

Following the failure and exposure of the Lincoln Mission it is believed Hugh moved his operations to 67 Cambridge Road, Bootle, and Derby Road, where he had elaborate notepaper headed “The Parsonage” (John Bull, 4 July 1914, p. 8, col. 2). By 1907 however he had returned to Birkenhead, this time to 66 Queen’s Road, and it was around this time he began signing his name ‘Hugh L. Jones’. Whether intentional or not, this ‘rebrand’ intensified an already bitter rivalry with a fellow charity operator named Herbert Lee Jones, whose initials he shared. According to Sarah Roddy, Julie Marie Strange, and Bertrand Taithe in The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870–1912 (2019):

In March 1908 the Reverend Hugh Lloyd Jones (Lloyd Jones), Birkenhead, warned Herbert Lee Jackson Jones (Lee Jones), Liverpool, that he intended to sue him and his printer for defamation of character and libel. Lee Jones invited the reverend to ‘proceed at pleasure’ and forwarded the name and address of his solicitor. The legal threat was the culmination of a three-year feud between the men, much of which Lee Jones conducted through his charity’s journal, The Welldoer, and letters to the local press.

Lee Jones’s chief accusation was that Hugh’s status as a minister was fraudulent, and that his various missions (which were often known by more than one name concurrently and were linked to no recognised denomination) had just been vehicles for his personal enrichment. In addition to its history of dubious hiring decisions (including a barely literate committee member, a convicted bogus charity collector, and Hugh’s nineteen-year-old son William, a grocer’s assistant, as honorary treasurer), much of Lee Jones’s criticism focused on the mission’s account-keeping. In particular he took issue with the way the charity’s purported aims of providing meals and outings for poor children were classed as ‘general expenses’ alongside any number of vague running costs, including Hugh’s rent and fuel. In practice, this meant it was impossible to verify how much money was being spent on charitable work, and how much effectively ended up in Hugh’s pocket. In addition he observed that the accounts were signed off by internal ‘committee’ members, rather than external auditors. Despite his best efforts though, Lee Jones was unable to secure a fraud conviction because Hugh was able to prove that at least some of the money the mission raised was spent on charity work, albeit a “paltry percentage”.

Although Hugh’s Gospel News Mission was only one of six local charities ‘blacklisted’ by Lee Jones, he took particular interest pursuing Hugh because their similar names risked them being confused in the public mind. After failing to bring his case to the courts, Lee Jones turned his attention to trashing Hugh’s reputation in his journal The Welldoer. This proved so successful that by 1907 Hugh required police protection while collecting funds in Birkenhead Park due to public hostility. This would undoubtedly have been a contributing factor in his decision to sue Lee Jones for libel the following year, and his bitter words at the time attest to the personal animosity between the two men:

Who he asked, had authorized Lee Jones as ‘cock of the walk’ to legitimate charities? Charitable ‘fraud’ was subjective and Lloyd Jones exercised ‘no more tomfoolery’ in philanthropic endeavour than Lee Jones ‘or anyone else’. It was ‘scandalous’ that Lee Jones should accuse him of fraud while ‘squandering’ the funds of the LWD and failing to publish a list of subscribers. The LWD ran highly successful fundraising bazaars: what, asked Lloyd Jones, happened to all that money?

Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange, and Bertrand Taithe (2019)

Hugh’s attempt to deflect attention from his own charity to Lee Jones’s was not without some justification, as the League of Welldoers (LWD) had also been under investigation by the Charity Organisation Society due the large number of debts they had amassed. Ultimately however, they found no evidence of wrongdoing on Lee Jones’s part and the LWD remains an active charity to this day. Like Lee Jones’s fraud allegations against him, Hugh’s libel claim did not result in legal proceedings and both men remained free to continue operating, but there is no question Hugh’s reputation suffered even further as a result of this painful and protracted rivalry.

• 

  Illustration showing volunteers from the Liverpool Food and Betterment Association (later the League of Welldoers) taking food out to the sick poor, published in The Graphic, August 26 1899. Source: The Wellcome Collection (via Wikimedia Commons).

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  Blank contribution slip from Herbert Lee Jones’s Food and Betterment Association, featuring his name at the bottom (via Liverpool University Press).

Hugh’s last two notable appearances in the local press both date from 1914. The first was in February that year, when he stood unsuccessfully as a candidate in a Birkenhead Board of Guardians election. The published results show he came last with only 70 votes, 615 fewer than his nearest rival (Liverpool Evening Express, 28 February 1914, p. 5, col. 2), which is perhaps a good indication of his standing in the community by then. His second appearance came in a scathing article in the populist John Bull magazine entitled “A “Reverend” Rascal”, which catalogued his “astonishing record of chicanery” and asked “will the authorities move?” (John Bull, 4 July 1914, p. 8). The article serves as an obituary for Hugh’s scandal-ridden career, including a chronology of his alleged misdemeanors to that point, challenging him on his qualifications, and calling out his latest activities at ‘St. Jude’s Mission Church’, Birkenhead, which the magazine’s investigators revealed to be nothing more than a two-room slum in a disused pub on Chapel Street. When asked where the mission’s supposed home for poor children was, Hugh named a cottage in Moreton about five miles outside Birkenhead, which unsurprisingly turned out to house no children at all. The article went on to describe an extraordinary scene at Birkenhead Park where Hugh was giving an open-air sermon later that evening:

Mr. Jones’ platform was a van, placed close to the Park Gates, upon which was a portable pulpit. His supporters on the van consisted of two elderly women, two younger ones, and a couple of little girls. His congregation numbered less than a dozen. By way of commencement, Jones–who was in full clerical attire–took off his top hat and donned a college cap. A tremendous laugh greeted him from another open-air meeting some fifty yards away. This gathering was attended by at least two thousand people, and being curious to know what the attraction was our representative made his way towards it. The speaker turned out to be a well-known local man, and the meeting was one of protest against the Rev. H. Lloyd Jones exploiting the poor of Birkenhead for his own benefit.

John Bull, 4 July 1914, p. 8

Perhaps with this very public humiliation Hugh realised the game was finally up, as after 1914 he appears to have drifted into obscurity. It appears that he returned to Preston for a time where he was the incumbent at St. Philip’s Church (The Lancashire Daily Post, 10 September 1917, p. 6, co. 1). In 1921 when the family were living at 14 Rostherne Avenue, Wallasey, he recorded his occupation as a Free Church Minister “without pastoral charge”, and there are no known reports about his activities at this time. His son Harold was killed in 1918 fighting in Palestine, his youngest daughter Phyllis passed away in 1936, and at eighty one Hugh himself eventually died of renal uraemia and a hypertrophied prostate at Victoria Central Hospital, Wallassey, on 9 February 1948. The three of them, along with Hugh’s wife Annie, who outlived him by four years, are buried at Rake Lane Cemetery. The question of whether or not Hugh was ever drawn to religion or charity work for genuine reasons is moot. Even if his ‘missions’ ended up helping a number of people, the decades of corroborating allegations against him make it difficult to view him as anything other than a self-interested con-man. For years he succeeded in exploiting the people of Liverpool and Birkenhead by appealing to their sense of Christian charity at the peak of the Welsh Revival (which spilled over into Liverpool and Birkenhead’s Welsh community), and if he can be said to have a legacy, it is as a pioneering scammer.

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  Headstone of Hugh Lloyd Jones, his wife Annie, and his children Phyllis Alice, and Harold Edgar Jones, Rake Lane Cemetery, 2021. Courtesy of S. Potts-Bury.

* * *

It is unknown to what extent Hugh’s wider family were aware of his activities during this period, whether they supported him for his apparent piety and the money he brought in, or shunned him for the succession of scandals into which he dragged their name. Although his father John died before Hugh began ministering, his mother Hannah lived until 1927 so must have had at least some knowledge of his career. As for his nine known siblings (the 1911 census records that Hannah had twelve children in total, two of which had died by then), most lived fairly ordinary lives compared to him. John and Hannah’s second child Harriet Elizabeth Jones (b. 21 October 1868, Bootle, Lancashire) married a Welsh shipbuilding engineer’s machine fitter named James Davies (b. c. 1869, Denbigh, Denbighshire) on 16 May 1892. Later censuses show they lived at 63 Emery Street (1901), 120 Bardsay Road (1911) in Walton-on-the-Hill, and 16 Windermere Street (1921), Everton, and that they had at least six children together, including:

• Florence Edith (b. 17 June 1897, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. November 1984, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Ernest Henry (b. 19 April 1900, Liverpool, Lancashire)

The 1921 census shows that James had been employed as a mechanical engineer by Cammell Laird & Co. Ltd. of Birkenhead, the world famous shipbuilders who were responsible for constructing many of the Royal Navy’s warships and submarines during World War I. His son Ernest was also working there part-time as a mechanic while enrolled as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh. James died at some point before the outbreak of the Second World War, with the 1939 register showing Harriet living alone at Newsham House on Newsham Drive, and her last known address is said to have been at 3 Grassmere Street. She died at the age of 82 in 1951 and was buried on 27 March at Anfield Cemetery. Unfortunately little else is known about her or her descendants.

Advertisement for Cammell Laird shipbuilders where James Davies worked in Brassey’s Naval Annual, 1915 (via Wikimedia Commons).

John and Hannah’s third child Robert Thomas “Bob” Jones (b. 27 June 1871, Preston, Lancashire) was shown in the 1891 census working as a clerk in the sea trade at age twenty, when he was still living with his parents at 18 Brae Street. There were many well-known shipping companies trading in Liverpool at the time for whom he may have worked, including White Star Line and Cunard. Three years later he married Elizabeth Jane Kent (b. 2 December 1865, Toxteth, Lancashire) on 2 September 1894 in Everton, witnessed by his younger brother John. Their marriage certificate confirms Bob was living at 5 Whitefield Terrace and Elizabeth at 13 Chrysostom Street, and that he was employed as a bookkeeper.

By 1897 however Bob was recorded as a commercial traveler in his second daughter’s baptism record. He and Elizabeth had a total of three daughters together between 1895 and 1900, whose names were:

• Eleanor Gladys (b. c. February 1895, Everton, Lancashire)
• Lilian Gertrude (b.  6 March 1897, Everton, Lancashire)
• Phyllis May (b. 21 January 1900, Anfield, Lancashire)

The girls’ baptism records reveal the family lived at a number of addresses, including 17 Apollo Street in Everton in 1897, and 20 Springbank Road, Walton-on-the-Hill in 1900, where they were also recorded in the following year’s census. By 1900 Bob had left his white-collar job and was working as a wood turner for a ‘timber establishment’, like his father before him. This was also his stated occupation in 1911, when the family were living at 509 Prescot Street in the curiously-named neighbourhood of Old Swan. That year his eldest daughter Eleanor was employed as an operator for the National Telephone Company, a career she and her sister Phyllis held as late as 1939 when they were living with their parents at 58 Sandstone Road, which had been the family home since at least 1921. It is unclear what happened to the family after the war, however my grandmother recalled an ‘Uncle Bob’ coming to visit his younger brother William Arthur in the Isle of Man when he would have been in his seventies or eighties.

Bob’s unusual career trajectory from commercial traveler to self-employed wood turner by 1921 may at first seem surprising, but the Joneses clearly had a deep and longstanding connection to the trade. Most of John and Hannah’s male children worked as wood turners or in related occupations at one point or another, and the first do do so was their fourth child John Owen Jones (b. 23 August 1873, Athlone, Roscommon). John, or “Jack” as he was known (presumably to distinguish him from his father), was born in Ireland during the family’s brief stay there in the 1870s, and by the time he was eighteen was working as an apprentice turner in Liverpool, perhaps for his father. Three years later he married a warehouseman’s daughter named Mary Harriet Horley (b. 10 February 1875, Liverpool, Lancashire) in about August 1894, and by 1897 they had moved to Denbigh in North Wales. They later relocated to Llanrwst where they were recorded living at 3 Salisbury Terrace in 1901. They had at least five children together, including:

• Winifred Amy (b. c. November 1894, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Albert Richard (b. c. 1897, Denbigh, Denbighshire – d. 14 July 1916, France)
• Wilfred Arthur Owen (b. 2 April 1906, Liverpool Lancashire – d. October 1992, Lichfield, Staffordshire)
• Norman Clifford (b. c. August 1911, Liverpool, Lancashire)

The children’s birthplaces suggest the family moved back to Liverpool at some point between 1901 and 1906, specifically to 8 Ludwig Road in the district of Walton-on-the-Hill near where Jack’s older sister Harriet’s family were living at the time. The 1911 census reveals that by then Jack was no longer employed as a wood turner, and was instead recorded working as a yard foreman at a confectionary works. Unfortunately it is unknown which confectionery company he worked for at the time, but one of many possibilities is Crawfords biscuit factory on Binns Road, which was less than an hour’s walk away from Ludwig Road. The fact that his daughter Winifred was that same year working as an assistant overseer at a ‘biscuit works’ would seem to support this hypothesis, however if this was the case it is odd Jack did not describe his own place of work in the same terms.

Whoever he was working for in 1911, the 1921 census confirms that by then he was employed as a commercial traveller for Edmondson & Co. Ltd. Purity Brand Works, a confectionery company based of 50 Fox Street, about half an hour away from the family’s new address at 91 Hornsey Road. Edmondson’s had been in business since 1905, so it is entirely plausible Jack had been working for them at the time of the 1911 census too. He appears to have stayed in a similar line of work thereafter, as in the 1939 register he was recorded as a ‘commercial traveller (sugar)’, possibly for Tate and Lyle who had a factory in Vauxhall near where he and Elizabeth’s were then living at 31 Crosby Green. It is not known when or where he died, but his brother William Arthur’s family remember him coming to visit occasionally on the Isle of Man in the 1950s, where the two brothers are said to have enjoyed paddling at the beach together with their trousers rolled up.

Vintage tin of Edmondson’s Cruising Toffees, manufactured by the company for whom Jack Owen Jones worked as a commercial travlleler in 1921.

• 

  Site of Edmondson’s confectionary works on Fox Street, 2013 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Jack was not the only one of his siblings to work in the confectionery industry. His younger sister Margaret Anne Jones (b. 30 July 1875, Athlone, Roscommon), John and Harriet’s fifth child, had like him been born while the family were in Ireland. At sixteen she was apprenticed as a dressmaker, and in 1898 she married Francis Carr Brown (7 May 1875, Liverpool, Lancashire) when she was twenty three. Together hey had three children, two of whom survived infancy:

• Francis Edgar (b. 10 March 1901, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. c. January 1947, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Doris (b. c. 1903, Liverpool, Lancashire)

The 1901 census shows them living at 6 Handfield Place in Everton. Francis Sr.’s occupation was recorded as ‘fruit selector’, which likely meant he was employed by a company like a jam or sweet manufacturer to buy fruit from wholesalers for use in their products.

Sadly Francis died just six years later in 1908 at the age of thirty three. His burial record from West Derby Cemetery gives his last occupation as ‘porter’ and his residence as 15 Lowell Street in Everton. Margaret, suddenly a widow at only thirty two, now faced the terrible challenge of paying rent and feeding her family with no source of income. The 1911 census reveals that following her husband’s death she had moved back in with her mother and younger brothers David and George at 40 Landseer Road. Although she had managed to find work as sweet packer by then (perhaps at Edmondson’s with help from her brother Jack), unfortunately her earnings would not be enough to support her children.

Her eldest son Francis Edgar Brown was sent to Wavertree Cottage Homes for pauper children, which was administered by Liverpool Workhouse. It is uncertain what happened to his sister Doris, however the 1911 census records a patient with her name at convalescent home for children in West Kirkby. In 1916 Francis enlisted in the 7th Liverpool Regiment at the age of just fourteen (a year younger than he claimed) and served in the territorial army. His service record shows that by 1916 he was back living with his mother at 83 Stockbridge Street, where they were recorded in the 1921 census alongside Margaret, her brother George, George’s son Arthur, and Doris. By this time Francis was employed as an army clerk for the 1st King’s Liverpool Regiment, and Doris (continuing the family’s association with confectionary) was working as a ‘chocolate dipper’ at the Sunbeam Chocolate Company. After this date Margaret and Doris’s fates are unknown. Francis would go on to marry a woman named Alice Fulford, but like his father died young at the age of forty five.

Liverpool Cottage Homes, Wavertree, 1906, where Margaret Anne Brown’s son Francis was an inmate in 1911 (via Mary Evans Picture Library).

* * *

John Ellis Jones and Hannah’s sixth child was my great-grandfather, William Arthur Jones, to whom I will return later. Their seventh child Hannah Roberts Jones (b. 17 April 1880 Llanfairfechan, Caernarvonshire) was born after the Joneses’ move form Ireland to Wales, but before their return to Liverpool in the early 1880s. At twenty one she was employed as a chair mattress maker, and two years later she married Hugh Lorin Jones (b. c. May 1874, Garston, Lancashire, no relation), with whom she had at least one daughter:

• Jane (b. c. 1908, Liverpool, Lancashire)

The 1911 census records that Hugh was an engineer by trade, but his place of work is said to be a ‘confectionary works’, clearly connecting Hannah’s branch of the family with those of her elder siblings Jack and Margaret. It is possible Hugh had been one of her brother Jack’s workmates at Edmonton’s confectionary works, or perhaps Hannah had briefly worked alongside him at the same factory before they were married. The family’s address at 22 Columbia Road in Walton-on-the-Hill places Hannah in the same general area as Jack and Margaret, further strengthening the link. Their whereabouts at the time of the 1921 census are unknown, but by 1939 Hannah was widowed and living at 43 Rockley Street with two lodgers. She passed away at the age of seventy eight and was buried on 2 August 1958 in Kirkdale Cemetery.

David Lloyd Jones (b. 31 March 1885, 150 Breck Road, Everton, Lancashire), the eighth of John and Hannah’s children, appears to have been part of this same tight-knit group of siblings. Like many of his brothers, he had been apprenticed in a woodworking trade as a boy, and was recorded as a cooper in the 1901 census. By 1911 however he was employed as a shipbuilder’s fitter, perhaps working alongside his brother-in-law James Davies at Cammell Laird & Co.. That year he he was living with his mother at 40 Landseer Road, along with his recently-widowed sister Margaret, his younger brother George, and his new wife Florence (b.  6 July 1883, Everton, Lancashire). David had married Florence Jane Gamblen, the daughter of a ship’s cook, two years earlier in 1909. The following year Florence had given birth to their first child, a daughter they named Vera Hannah Jones (presumably after David’s mother). Sadly Vera died shortly before her first birthday, and was buried on 7 March 1911, just four weeks before the census was taken.

David and Florence had a total of seven children together between 1910 and 1926, whose names were:

• Vera Hannah (b. 14 May 1910, Liverpool, Lancashire – bur. 7 March 1911, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Thomas William (b. c. February 1912, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. 24 February 1935, Stanley Hospital, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Hilda May (b. 30 December 1914, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. 27 April 2006, University Hospital, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Iris Edna (b. 15 Jun 1916, Everton, Lancashire – d. 4 January 1996, Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton, Somerset)
• David Lloyd (b. 3 July 1918, Northwich, Cheshire – d. 2 June 2013, University Hospital Aintree, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Elsie Winifred (b. 19 January 1922, West Derby, Lancashire – d. 3 May 1987, Halton, Cheshire)
• Doreen Florence (b. 2 March 1926, West Derby, Lancashire – d.  24 July 1943, Newton, Lancashire)

Their second child Thomas also died prematurely at the age of twenty three. According to his probate record, his effects valued at £5.15 went to a ‘David Jones packer’, which was probably a reference to his younger brother rather than his father. This same record gave his address as 341 Cherry Lane, the same semi-detached house in Liverpool’s northern suburbs where his parents and siblings Hilda, David, Elsie, and Doreen were all living at the time of the 1939 register. David Sr.’s occupation, ‘Engineering fitter’, is consistent with that which he gave in earlier censuses, and a photograph from 1951 shows him and Florence at an ‘A.E.U. Liverpool’ outing, presumably an abbreviation of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.

A.E.U. Liverpool outing, June 1951. David is stood on the far-left of the row second from the back, his wife Florence is seated just below him with wide brim hat. Courtesy of S. Potts-Bury.

With the exception of Doreen, who unfortunately passed away when she was seventeen, the rest of David and Florence’s children lived long lives and have multiple living descendants, many of them in and around Liverpool. Florence died at the age of seventy eight in 1961, followed five years later by David on 1 May 1966. He was eighty one. Both he and Florence were interred at Anfield Cemetery in the same plot as their children Thomas and Doreen.

David Lloyd Jones with ‘Fury’ in Hereford, 1961. Courtesy of S. Potts-Bury.

After David, John and Hannah’s ninth child was another son, Herbert Ellis Jones (b. c. November 1886, Liverpool, Lancashire). Like his eldest brother Hugh, Herbert’s first job was as a railway messenger when he was fifteen. At twenty one he was married to Theresa Maria Perrin in early 1907, with whom he had two boys and two girls:

• Herbert Lindsay (b. 16 August 1908, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. July 1953, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• William Stanley (b. 31 July 1910, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Hilda (b. 16 October 1912, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Margery (b. 11 November 1914, Liverpool, Lancashire – 1995, Torbay, Devon, England)

In 1911 the family were living at 39 Grange Street along with Theresa’s younger brother John, who like Herbert was working as a house painter. Shortly after they moved to 25 Curate Road, where they were recorded at the time of their second daughter’s baptism in 1914 (which unusually for the Joneses was a Church of England ceremony). At some point over the next three years, like millions of other men his age Herbert enlisted or was conscripted to fight in the Great War. His service record has not survived so it is unknown precisely when or where he signed up, but he is known to have served on the Western Front as a private in the maxim gun section of the the King’s Liverpool Regiment, and was later transferred to the 46th Division of the Machine Gun Corps Infantry Branch.

• 

  Machine gunners of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, 7th Battalion (via ww1photos.org).

Unfortunately the only reason these details are known at all is because he was killed in action in August 1917. Given the date it is likely this occurred during the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as the Battle of Paschendale), a muddy four-month-long campaign which cost both sides over half a million lives between them, and resulted in a fairly limited Allied victory. A notice in The Lancashire Daily Post (10 September 1917, p. 6, co. 1) reported his date of death as 28 August, while his army pension record gives August 30, suggesting that no one really knew for sure. His body was probably never recovered, but he is commemorated at Aeroplane Cemetery in Belgium. Herbert’s widow Theresa never remarried and died thirty years later on 3 March 1947. Of their children it is said the two boys later developed cancer as a result of working on leaded glass windows for churches, but today their descendants and those of their sisters can be found all over the country.

‘A Preston Minister’s Bereavement’, report on Herbert Ellis Jones’s death focusing on his connection to his better-known brother Hugh in The Lancashire Daily Post, 10 September 1917, p. 6, co. 1 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Like Herbert, John Ellis and Hannah Jones’s tenth and last child George Edwin Jones (b. c. August 1889, Liverpool, Lancashire) was a house painter by trade. From the age of eighteen however he is also known to have been a part-time volunteer with the British Army’s Territorial Force since its creation in 1908. The Territorial Force had been established to bolster the country’s home defence in the build up to World War I without resorting to conscription, but was not generally considered to be a success. Records show George was with the 6th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment until 30 April 1908, and then later the 1st West Lancashire Field Ambulance to 31 March 1912. Volunteers generally signed up for a four-year-term but were not compelled to serve overseas.

As the youngest in the family George was unsurprisingly still living at home with his mother at this time. The 1911 census records him at 40 Landseer Road alongside his older siblings Margaret and David, plus David’s wife Florence. At some point over the next three years he became involved with a woman named Gertrude Thomas, who he married at West Derby Road Registry Office on either 6 June or 13 July 1914. Whatever the exact date, it is certain that at the time of their wedding Gertrude was about four or five months pregnant. This possibly accounts for why the couple opted for a civil ceremony at a register office rather than a religious one, as well as the uncertainty over the date (the later one could have been an unofficial ‘public’ wedding after the official private one).

Their honeymoon period could only have lasted a matter of weeks however, as on 4 August Britain declared war on Germany and as a former Territorial Force volunteer George was one of the first to enlist (his service record shows his service actually commenced a day before the official declaration of war). He gave his address as 83 Stockbridge Street, and his occupation as ‘unemployed painter’, which perhaps explains his eagerness to sign up as early as possible. The following day he passed the medical inspection (which gave his height as 6’1/2″ and rated both his vision and physical development as ‘good’) and he was duly appointed to the 9th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment with the rank of private. Three months later, Gertrude gave birth to their son, who they appear to have named after one George’s older brothers:

• Arthur (b. 1 November 1914, Liverpool, Lancashire)

• 

  Inspection of the King’s Liverpool Regiment (the ‘Liverpool Pals’) by Lord Kitchener in front of St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, 20 March 1915 (via Wikimedia Commons).

George’s military service appears to have taken place mostly away from the frontline in England, apart from a six-month stint as part of the Expeditionary Force France between 12 March and 11 September 1915. This was at least in part due to the fact that on 20 July 1917 he was compulsorily discharged on account of disability. According to his service record, by this time George was suffering from rheumatism, an intermittent chronic pain disorder affecting the joints which would have rendered him no longer suitable for combat. He applied for munitions work in Liverpool before being officially transferred to the to the Western Command Labour Centre on 30 July, whose role was to was to coordinate the supply of labour to the Western Front. He was briefly attached to the Reserve Employment Company on 7 September and then assigned to the Royal Army Medical Corps four days later, perhaps due to his experience in a Field Ambulance unit before the war.

George remained with the RAMC for the duration of the Great War, and after the armistice was part of the army reserve. He was awarded the British and Victory Medal on 7 March 1922. The previous year’s census shows he had returned to his peacetime occupation as a house painter, this time as an employee of the firm David Rollins & Sons. He was still living at his mother’s three-room-house at 83 Stockbridge Street, along with his sister Margaret, her children, and his seven-year-old son Arthur (Gertrude appears to have been elsewhere on census night). The family family later lived at 17 Rossett Street, Liverpool, and Seacombe in Wallassey according to George’s army pension records, but it is currently unknown when or where they died or if they have any living descendants.

* * *

When looking into the lives of John Ellis and Hannah Jones’s children, a clear picture emerges of a family connected through a common geographical range centred on Walton, Everton and Anfield, plus shared occupations in wood turning, shipbuilding, house painting, and confectionary. Many of them lived under the same roof well into adulthood, and some even served in the same military regiment in World War I. The notable outlier would appear to be their ‘rogue’ elder brother Hugh Lloyd Jones, whose high-profile ministerial work seems to set him apart from the rest of his siblings, with one possible exception.

My great-grandfather, John Ellis and Hannah Jones’s sixth child, was born on 9 August 1877 in the Irish town of Sligo, at the family home on Charles Street. He was baptised William Arthur Jones but later often went by just Arthur or ‘W.A.’ When he was around two the family left Ireland for Wales, where they remained for a few years before settling in Everton when Arthur would have been about seven. As a youth he is said to have been among the crowds witnessing the first motor car drive through Liverpool, and unusually for a boy from his background received private Latin lessons at 6 d. per hour. A possible explanation for this is that his older brother Hugh was beginning his theological studies at the Liverpool Institute around this time, which may have sparked the younger son’s interest in academia.

Although his parents appear to have supported Arthur’s early educational ambitions, the family’s immediate material needs took precedence. He left school when he was twelve and began an apprenticeship as a wood turner, an occupation he shared with both his father and brother Jack at the time of the 1891 census. After his father’s death the following year, Arthur continued working as a turner until 1901, by which time he was was the oldest of his siblings living with their mother at 17 Apollo Street. Later that year however, at the age of twenty four he began preaching as a Wesleyan Methodist minister in Pontypridd, South Wales. The following April, his name was recorded in the local press for the first time, having given “a very stirring address” at the Wesley Hall for a meeting for showpeople connected with the Easter fair (Pontypridd Chronicle and Workman’s News, 12 April 1902, p. 8, col. 1).

On 8 September that year, Arthur officially enrolled as a student at the Wesleyan Theological Institution in Didsbury, Manchester, where he studied for three years before graduating on 22 June 1905. At this time Wesleyan ministers were obliged to relocate to new ‘circuits’ every three years (in order to reflect Jesus’ original three-year ministry), and as a result Arthur’s life hereafter was one of almost constant travel. After Pontypridd, his first position as an ordained minster in late 1905 was at was Barrow-in-Furness in Cumberland, where he stayed for two years before moving to Kendal for the final year of that ministry.

• 

  The Library at the Wesleyan Theological Institution, Didsbury, 1911 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In 1908 Arthur returned to South Wales to minister at the Roath Road circuit in Cardiff. Around this time he begun a relationship with a woman named Agnes Rowlands (b. 2 June 1880, Penygraig, Glamorgan), a Welsh-speaking twenty-eight-year-old school teacher and daughter of a local colliery proprietor, who had also gained a reputation as an excellent singer. Agnes had been living at Pontypridd when Arthur was ministering there in 1901, so it is entirely possible the two had known each other since then, perhaps corresponding by letter in the intervening years. They were married on 20 August 1908 at Saron Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, Treforest, by Agnes’s brother-in-law the Reverend David Richards.

Immediately after their marriage Arthur begun preaching at Caerphilly. Here, according to their friend W.T. Tilsley (who Arthur trained as a young man) “he made a deep and lasting impression by his outstanding pulpit gifts”:

He was indeed a great preacher and every sermon was most carefully prepared and delivered with “Welsh fervour” … He had a keen logical mind and impressed me with the necessity of orderliness in the presentation of my ideas … I may say that I owe more to W.A. in the field of homiletics than to any college professor, some of whom though great scholars had no idea how to preach”

W.T. Tilsley, 31 August 1960.

Reverend William Arthur Jones, c. 1910.

They were still at Caerphilly the time of the 1911 census, living at Mountain View, the manse at 63 St. Martin’s Street. A far cry from the houses Arthur has known as a boy in Liverpool, it had nine rooms in total excluding kitchens, halls and bathrooms. They even employed a domestic servant named Janet James. By this time they had also been joined by an infant daughter:

• Evelyn Mabel (b. 19 October 1909, Caerphilly, Glamorgan – d. 7 January 1993, New Zealand)

That same year Arthur was described in the 1911 Methodist Conference Handbook as “a careful student possessing a sympathetic knowledge of theological and social problems, together with real preaching ability,” suggesting his reputation as a gifted speaker was beginning to spread.

Later in 1911 Arthur was assigned to the Bilston circuit in Staffordshire. Here he, Agnes, and Evelyn stayed for a while with Agnes’s brother Moses at Wesley Manse, Ettingshall, before moving to Wednesbury in 1914. As a minister of religion Arthur was exempt from military service in World War I, and would have been forty years old when news of his brother Herbert’s death at Ypres reached him. At Wednesbury he was said to have “won for himself a good reputation as preacher and pastor and done some excellent work for the Sunday Schools” (Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard, 30 August 1918, p. 2, col. 1).

William Arthur, Agnes, and Evelyn Mabel Jones (with kitten), c. 1916.

In 1918, the last year of the war, the family moved to Royal Leamington Spa in Warwickshire. At a welcome reception held for him at Dale Street Wesleyan Church Arthur gave a brief address intimating that he had come to Leamington to do his best, but that “as a result of four years’ war the church would be severely taxed” (Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Standard, 6 September 1918, p. 2, col. 3). After the Armistice, he is reported having preached at the same church the following year using “He Is Our Peace” as his text. He emphasised that “it was through God alone that our victory was secured” (Royal Leamington Spa Courier and Warwickshire Herald, 11 July 1919, p. 8, col. 5). Two years later Agnes gave birth to their second child, my paternal grandfather:

• Rowland Bevan (b. 18 January 1920, Trinity Church Manse, Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire – d. 8 May 2000, Ramsey Cottage Hospital, Ramsey, Isle of Man)

Rowland and William Arthur Jones, c. 1922.

After three years in Royal Leamington Spa the family moved to Hainton Avenue, Grimsby, in 1921, but after 1924 the rest of Arthur’s working life was spent in Yorkshire. Their first address in the county was at 24 Wellesley Road in Sheffield, when Arthur was ministering at Carver Street Chapel in the city centre. Later in 1928 he preached at Firth Park Chapel on Ellesmere Road, near their new home at 262 Abbeyfield Road. By now his daughter Evelyn had begun working as a colliery secretary in nearby Rotherham, and Rowland was attending Firs Hill primary school. According to his obituary it was in Sheffield where Arthur did arguably his greatest work, having “built an institute and inspired hundreds of young people to serve Christ”, training up many new preachers through his homiletical classes. The teaching of others had always clearly held special importance to him, as one of his earliest students attests:

The last thing he said to me when he left Caerphilly in 1911 when I tried to thank him for all that he had done for me, was “Don’t thank me, but try and do for other young men what I have done for you.” And that I have sought to do all through my ministry and thank God, have succeeded.

W.T. Tilsley, 31 August 1960.

The Joneses left Sheffield in 1931 and resettled in the market town of Batley, where Rowland attended the local Grammar School. At the end of Arthur’s three-year-ministry they moved to Huddersfield, where Arthur preached at the chapel on Buxton Road and Evelyn worked for an organ building firm. Like her mother and a number of aunts on the Rowlands side, Evelyn was quite musical and was both a gifted singer and pianist. Rowland meanwhile, who was ten years younger than Evelyn, attended Huddersfield Grammar School where he was awarded Higher certificates, and then progressed to Huddersfield Technical College in 1937. He studied science subjects here for one year and won a town scholarship of £50 per year for six years. In 1938 he enrolled to study Medicine at the University of Leeds, conveniently near where the Joneses were then living at Brunswick House (Morley Manse) on Worrall Street, in the city’s south-western suburbs.

Agnes, William Arthur, Evelyn, and Rowland Jones, c. 1938.

When war was declared on Germany for the second time in Arthur’s life on 1 September 1939, Rowland was nineteen and thus would usually have been eligible for military service. His student status however made him temporarily exempt and he was allowed to complete his studies. The same month war was declared, Evelyn married George Mason Smailes (b. 23 January 1916, Huddersfield, Yorkshire – d. 23 October 1988, New Zealand). They moved to London shortly after where George worked as a policeman during the blitz. They they would go on to have three children together over the next five years.

Meanwhile Arthur and Agnes continued to travel around the Yorkshire circuits, although with less frequency than before as in 1933 the Methodist Church had amended their rules to allow for five year ministries. In 1941 they moved to Farnley, and then to Pudsey within the city of Leeds in 1943. Around the time of this last move Rowland had completed his degree (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) and graduated with honours. The 1947 Medical Register states that he was registered on 31 March 1943 in Bradford. His first job was as house surgeon to the Professor of Surgery at the University, before moving to Leeds General Infirmary where he was later appointed Casualty Officer responsible for treating German prisoners of war.

• 

  Rowland Bevan Jones (far left) at his graduation ceremony in Leeds, 1943.

It was while working here that he met his future wife, Joyce Patricia Sillers (b. 17 March 1920, Leeds, Yorkshire – d. 12 September 2016, Noble’s Hospital, Strang, Isle of Man), a twenty-year-old nurse and local councillor’s daughter who had been raised mostly on the Isle of Man with her mother’s family. They were engaged in 1943 and married on 17 April the following year. By this time though preparations were already being made for the D-Day Landings, and Rowland, no longer a student, was enlisted as a lieutenant (later promoted to captain) in the Royal Army Medical Corps, the same regiment in which his uncle George had served during the first war. Rowland and Joyce spent their three-day-honeymoon at Harewood House near Leeds before Rowland was sent to Bradford in June for training, then on to Chilwell tank depot in Nottingham.

He landed in Calais shortly after D-Day before proceeding to Douai, treating injured troops coming back from the front. On 17 September 1944 the British launched Operation Market Garden, an attempt to push into Germany from the Netherlands. In order to do this a number of strategic bridges across the Maas and Rhine needed to be captured in order to stop the Germans from blowing them up. One of these was at Nijmegen near the German border, and it is here where Rowland was posted at the time of the offensive. He would have been under the command of XXX Corps, possibly in the Guards Armoured Division, and based at the 8th Guards Field Dressing Station.

The Germans resisted fiercely throughout September but by 20 September the Allies had captured the bridge, which had been due for demolition, and established positions on the northern bank. Operation Market Garden itself however was largely unsuccessful as the allies failed to cross the Rhine in sufficient numbers. The Nijmegen area was part of a small corridor of land captured by the Allies which over the following weeks would be expanded and eventually used a springboard for the renewed attack on Arnhem, a key Dutch city that had resisted capture during the operation.

Captain Rowland Bevan Jones of the Royal Army Medical Corps in uniform, c. 1944.

Rowland was assigned to the Medical Incident Room at Arnhem after it was liberated by Canadian forces between the 12 and 16 April 1945. When the Germans surrendered on 8 May he was then posted to Germany where he served for two more years before being demobed in 1947. After returning home he moved in with Joyce and her mother Dorothy Maria Sillers at Lheany Road, Ramsey, on the Isle of Man, and then to their new house Claremont. Here he set up as a general practitioner with his colleague Bill Robertson, whose family lived with the Joneses at Claremont for a while. By this time Rowland and Joyce had had their first child, who would be joined by three more in the years to come.

Rowland’s father Arthur had retired in 1946, and he and Agnes had planned to move in with their son’s family at Claremont. Agnes however died quite suddenly in 1949 before the move took place and only Arthur ended up moving to Ramsey in 1950. She was sixty nine, and was described by their friend W.T. Tilsley as “a lovely lady, an ideal wife for a Methodist minister”. William Arthur spent ten years in Ramsey where, according to his obituary, “he exercised a quiet and efficient influence upon his son’s family and in the north of the island”:

All through his ministry he was characterised by earnest pastoral work for he was gracious with the children, diligent in sick-visiting, kindly to youth, and helpful to the unfortunate.

He died on 21 August 1960 in Noble’s Hospital in Douglas and was later cremated in Liverpool, the city where he had spent much of his childhood.

William Arthur Jones, c. 1955.

* * *

Arthur’s daughter Evelyn later moved to New Zealand with her husband George (who was by then a judge and industrial tribunal chairman), following two of her children who had emigrated there several years earlier. She died in 1993 aged eighty four. Rowland continued to practice as a G.P in Ramsey, during which time (according to his obituary) “he introduced new techniques and undertook an onerous on call commitment. He did GP obstetrics and looked after patients with tuberculosis at a time when there was neither an obstetrician nor a chest physician on the island.” He retired in 1985 and died on 8 May 2000 after several years of ill-health leaving behind four children and nine grandchildren.

In the next series of posts, Rowlands of my father, I will explore the ancestry of my grandfather’s mother Agnes, which will take us deep into the South Wales coalfield. Like her husband’s, her family story is defined in part by tragedy and scandal, but also an industrial legacy which would forever alter the physical and social landscape of an entire community.

Sources

Green, Geoff. “Revival on the Wirral”. Liverpoolrevival.org.uk. Merseyside Revival Trust. Accessed 26 July 2022. https://www.liverpoolrevival.org.uk/other-revivals/revival-on-the-wirral.

Roddy, Sarah, Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe. The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870–1912. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Keeping up with the Joneses (part 2)

This is the second of three posts on the Jones family of North Wales and Liverpool, the paternal ancestors of my father’s father Rowland Bevan Jones. For their story so far, see Keeping up with the Joneses (part 1).

* * *

Although Robert and Harriet Jones’s three sons were Welsh by parentage, only their eldest, my great-great-grandfather John Ellis Jones, was born in Wales. His younger brothers Thomas and Robert were born after the family moved to Liverpool the late 1840s. Here they spent the first part of their childhood living at 3 Carver’s Buildings on Hornby Street, in the heart of the city’s migrant quarter. Their father Robert appears to have died at some point between the censuses of 1851 and 1861, by which time his widow Harriet had returned to North Wales with the boys where they lived at 10 Swan Lane in Flint. John, still only sixteen at the time, was recorded as a ‘circular sawyer’ that year, while his younger brothers were employed as apprentice wood turners.

It is uncertain how or why the three Jones boys came to the woodworking industry (their father Robert had been an iron moulder) but it seems this may have been how John met his future wife, Hannah Roberts. Hannah too was from North Wales; indeed she could arguably be considered more ‘Welsh’ than her husband John who had only spent the first five or so years of his life there. Her father Hugh Roberts had been born in about 1792 in Ruthin, Denbighshire, according to later census returns, although his marriage record gives his home parish as the village of Llanfair Dyffryn Clwyd about a mile south of there.

At the age of thirty one Hugh moved to Whitford in Flintshire where he married a local girl named Hannah Jones (b. c. 1804, Whitford, Flintshire – d. c. 1855), the daughter of Hugh and Margaret Jones, on 24 May 1823. As Hannah was only nineteen at the time their entry in the marriage register clarifies that they were married with the consent of her parents. Hugh and Hannah went on to have at least nine children together over the next two decades, the last of whom was my great-great-grandmother, who was named after her mother. Their names in birth order were:

• Hugh (bp. 18 September 1826, Whitford, Flintshire)
• John (b. 15 July 1828, Whitford, Flintshire)
• Margaret (bp. 9 January 1831, Whitford, Flintshire – d. c. May 1897, Holywell, Flintshire)
• Elizabeth (b. 14 November 1835, Whitford, Flintshire)
• Michael (b. c. May 1838, Whitford, Flintshire)
• Robert (b. c. May 1840, Whitford, Flintshire)
• William (b. c. 1842, Whitford, Flintshire)
• Anne (b. c. 1845, Whitford, Flintshire)
• Hannah (b. 15 November 1848, Whitford, Flintshire – d. c. December 1929, West Derby, Lancashire)

From the children’s baptism records we can tell the Robertses were Calvinistic Methodists, a uniquely Welsh denomination of Presbyterianism, and from later census returns we know that like most of their neighbours they were also monolingual Welsh speakers. Indeed, it is said of their youngest Hannah that she continued to speak only Welsh even after moving to Liverpool (not that this was unusual for the city’s recent Welsh migrants). At the time of their first son’s baptism in 1826 Hugh was recorded as a carpenter at Mertyn in the township of Isglan near Whitford, but by 1841 was working primarily as a famer. The presence of Hugh’s mother-in-law Margaret at the farm in the census of 1841 (where she is recorded as the head of the house) suggests they may have inherited it through Hannah’s family.

Map of Flintshire c. 1870 showing Hannah Roberts’s home parish of Whitford, including her father Hugh’s farm at Mertyn to the south-east (via National Library of Scotland).

Hugh must have been relatively well-known locally, as the 3 July 1844 edition of The London Gazette mentioned that the boundaries of the new parish of Mostyn were to extend along a certain path “as far as Mertyn Hugh Roberts’ farmhouse”. Indeed Hugh appears to have been quite successful as by 1851 he was said to have owned fifty one acres and was employing two labourers and one domestic servant. By 1861 however his wife Hannah had died, and at around the same time he gave up farming to return to his former occupation as a carpenter. (Despite the impression created by successive censuses, there is evidence that Hugh had continued woodworking to some extent alongside farming, as a ‘Hugh Roberts, Mertyn, Flintshire, Joiner’ is named in the Insolvent Debtors Petitions section of the 20 February 1842 edition of The Era.)

It is here where the Roberts’ and Jones’ stories converge. From their marriage record we know that Hugh’s youngest daughter Hannah married John Ellis Jones on 22 January 1866 at Liverpool’s St. David’s Church, which had been established thirty nine years earlier to serve the city’s growing community of Welsh-speakers. Given their similar occupations it is quite plausible that John, a former sawyer and wood turner, was introduced to Hannah after working with her father, who was recorded as a sawyer in their marriage certificate but had previously worked as both a carpenter and joiner. Liverpool and Mertyn may seem rather distant for them to have been likely co-workers, but just one year before John’s marriage to Hannah the 1865 edition of Kelly’s trades’ directory listed a sawyer named Hugh Roberts working at 21 Sun Street in Birkenhead, just the other side of the Mersey from Liverpool. This places the two families in roughly the same place at the same time , and in any case, as we shall see, John’s occupation would often require him to travel far from home for work.

‘A modern turner at work’ from ‘The Use of the Lathe (an open letter)’ by W.A.S. Benson, published in The Illustrated English Magazine, 1892 (via Victorian Voices).

* * *

Woodturning is the art of creating wooden objects by cutting and scraping a piece of wood on a rotating lathe. These objects can range from the small and intricate like chess pieces, to huge construction projects like the choir stalls of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, which was one of the commissions John Ellis Jones worked on according to family tradition, possibly in the employ of one of Liverpool’s many Welsh builders. As construction work could only be done on-site, this sometimes made it necessary for John and his family to travel to wherever there was work going. Consequently, the Joneses rarely stayed in one place for very long, and their travels across the British Isles can be mapped using census returns and their children’s birthplaces. The first place they appear to have stopped was near Hannah’s home in Whitford (perhaps staying with members of her family), where they had their first son one year into their marriage:

• Hugh Lloyd (b. 30 January 1867, Whitford, Flintshire – d. 9 February 1948 Victoria Central Hospital, Wallasey, Cheshire, England)

Within two years they returned to Liverpool, specifically to Bootle in the north of the city, where they had their first daughter:

• Harriet Elizabeth (b. 21 October 1868, Bootle, Lancashire – bur. 27 March, Liverpool, Lancashire)

The Joneses remained in the North West for several years, but by 1871 had migrated further inland to Preston, where for a time they lived with John’s younger brother Robert at 45 Aberdeen Street. That year’s census records that Robert was unmarried at twenty, and still working as a wood turner. This is the last confirmed location of either of John Ellis Jones’s younger brothers and it is unknown whether they went on to have families of their own. John meanwhile described himself as a ‘foreman sawyer’ that year. This not only confirms he had secured an overseer’s role by this point, but also that he had the versatility to alternate between wood turner or sawyer according to requirements of the job at hand.

It was in Preston where Hannah gave birth to their second son:

• Robert Thomas “Bob” (b. 27 January 1871, Preston, Lancashire)

Robert would be the last of their children born in England for over a decade. By 1873 the Joneses had moved again, this time to Ireland where they stayed for at least four years. Their first stop was Athlone in landlocked County Roscommon, in the west of the island. We cannot say for certain what attracted them to such a remote location, but the area did have a tradition of employing Welsh builders. Roscommon’s Presbyterian church (now the county museum) features a window in the shape of the star of David above the main entrance to commemorate the Welshmen who built it. Although the church was constructed too early for John to have worked on it, it is possible he was drawn to Athlone by a similar project.

Roscommon County Museum, 2017, formerly a Presbyterian Church whose Welsh builders are commemorated by the Star of David above the door (via Wikipedia).

A few years later the family moved to Charles Street in the Atlantic seaport town of Sligo in the neighbouring county. Even less is known about their time here or what initially attracted them, but a relative lack of opportunities in County Roscommon may have played a part. Like Liverpool, Sligo was a regional centre of trade and commerce which was industrialising rapidly during this period, and John would undoubtedly have found more work here than in Athlone. One notable building project which coincides with the Jones’ stay in Sligo was the town’s ornate French Gothic style courthouse, which was completed in 1878 and whose interiors would have required a great number of skilled woodworkers.

During their time in Ireland John and Hannah had three more children, the third of whom was my great-grandfather. Their names were:

• John Owen (b. 23 August 1873, Athlone, County Roscommon, Ireland)
• Margaret Anne (b. 30 July 1875, Athlone, County Roscommon, Ireland)
• William Arthur (b. 9 August 1877, Charles Street, Sligo, County Sligo, Ireland – d. 21 August 1960, Douglas, Isle of Man)

Eventually, the family moved back to Wales in about 1880, and stayed for around five years in the town of Llanfairfechan on the Caernarvonshire coast. The 1881 census confirms their address as Penmaen View, and unsurprisingly records John’s occupation as a wood turner, but also shows that his eldest son Hugh had started working as a railway messenger at fourteen. Here they had one daughter:

• Hannah Roberts (b. 17 April 1880, Llanfairfechan, Caernarvonshire – bur. 2 August 1958, Liverpool, Lancashire)

Penmaen View, Llanfairfechan, 2019. Courtesy of S. Potts-Bury.

Penmaen Hill, 2019, which the Jones’ house in Llanfairfechan overlooked circa 1880. Courtesy of S. Potts-Bury.

Finally in about 1885 the family returned to Liverpool where John and Hannah were married twenty years earlier, and here most of them remained (with a few notable exceptions as we shall see in the next post). So why after two decades travelling did the Joneses choose to settle down in Liverpool, rather than at any of their previous stops? The reason is likely a mixture of economics and culture. Unlike Preston or Athlone for example, Liverpool provided not only a plentiful supply of work, but also an established community and network of employers who shared the Joneses’ language, religion, and culture. As previously mentioned, much of Liverpool’s architectural development during this period owes its existence to a small number of successful Welsh building contractors, like Owen Elias the “King of Everton,” and their success would have attracted workers from nearby North Wales like John “as word of prosperity reached their home villages [and encouraged] further migration” (Morris-Jones, 2011, p. 37). And of course nepotism and cultural chauvinism played a part in advancing Welsh workers’ employment prospects in this sector, as Olwen Morris-Jones explains:

The migrants provided a pool of trustworthy, reliable labour for Welsh businessmen who were often familiar with their new employees, through family or home village connections.

Olwen Morris Jones, 2011, p. 39

The Joneses moved into number 150 Breck Road in Everton and later 18 Brae Street just east of the university in West Derby (both districts built in large part by Welsh migrants). Here John and Hannah had three more sons:

• David Lloyd (b. 31 March 1885, 150 Breck Road, Everton, Lancashire – d. 1 May 1966, 241 Westminster Road, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Herbert Ellis (b. c. November 1886, Liverpool, Lancashire – d. 30 August 1917, Ypres, West-Vlaanderen)
• George Edwin (b. c. August 1889, Liverpool, Lancashire)

By 1891 many of the older Jones children were already working for a living. Hugh, who who had married a year earlier, had already moved out and was working as a ‘tea traveller’ alongside studying theology at the Liverpool Institute (later re-opened as the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts by notable alum Paul McCartney in 1996). Robert was a clerk in the sea trade, Margaret had begun a dressmaker’s apprenticeship and John and William Arthur were apprentice wood turners, as their father and uncles had been before them. Sadly, their father would not live to see them complete their apprenticeships. John Ellis Jones died of pulmonary and hepatic congestion a year later on 15 June 1892 in the family home at 88 Adelaide Road, aged only forty-seven.

18 Brae Street, Liverpool, 21 Apr 2022.

88 Adelaide Road, Liverpool, 21 April 2022.

The 1901 census records that by then the family had moved to 17 Apollo Street in Everton, where John’s widow Hannah was supported by several of her children. William Arthur, then twenty-three, had finished his apprenticeship and was working as wood turner, while his younger brother David was now an apprentice cooper. Hannah Jr. had become a chair mattress maker, and Herbert a railway messenger. Ten years later, the only children still living with Hannah in Everton (this time at a six-roomed property at 40 Landseer Road) were Margaret Anne, David, and George, who were employed as a sweet packer, a shipbuilder’s fitter, and a painter respectively. At sixty-two Hannah was recorded as the head of the house in that year’s census, but her son David completed the form on her behalf. He appears to have misunderstood one of the questions but in doing so revealed that his mother had given birth to twelve children in total, meaning that in addition to the ten whose names we know she had a further two who died in infancy. Ten years later, she was living at 83 Stockbridge Street with her children Margaret and George, plus three of her grandchildren.

Hannah died at the age of seventy-nine and was buried in Anfield Cemetery on 30 December 1927. She was interred in section 7, plot 553, alongside her husband John. While few details of her or John’s life are known beyond what can be gleaned from official records, the same cannot be said of their children. In the next and final post in this series we will look at what happened to this generation of Joneses, whose lives were moulded by religion, war, and scandal.

Grave of John Ellis and Hannah Jones, Anfield Cemetery and Crematorium, 238 Priory Road, Liverpool, 21 April 2022. John and Hannah’s plot is unmarked but visible immediately to the left and in front of the cross-shaped headstone.

Sources

Morris-Jones, Olwen. Welsh migration and the retention of identity in Liverpool. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2011.

Keeping up with the Joneses (part 1)

This is the first in a series of three posts on the paternal ancestry of my father’s father Rowland Bevan Jones. In this instalment I will be focusing on his earliest known ancestors, who lived mostly in North Wales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

* * *

The Anglo-Welsh surname ‘Jones’, meaning ‘son of John’, is the second most common in the United Kingdom. Its ubiquity can present something of a challenge for family historians, especially when attempting to track down individuals with equally common first names. Despite this though, the paternal ancestors of my grandfather Rowland Bevan Jones have been traced back four generations to his great-great-grandfather Robert Jones, who would have been born in about 1790, probably in North Wales.

Our only source for Robert’s name is his son’s marriage certificate from 1843. This record shows that his son, who was also called Robert, married a woman named Harriet Ellis in an Anglican ceremony on 6 April in Mold, Flintshire, where they were both residing. Unfortunately their exact ages were not given, and the only information entered in the relevant column was that they were both of “full age” (i.e. over 21). Later census returns however confirm that Harriet was born in about 1822 in Llanarmon-yn-Iâl, Denbighshire, so it seems likely her husband was born around the same time if not slightly earlier. The certificate also records that Harriet’s father was named John Ellis, a labourer, and that their witnesses were Maria Ellis and John Jones, possibly siblings of the bride and groom respectively.

Shortly after the wedding, Robert and Harriet moved a few miles south to the small Welsh-speaking village of Coed Talon near Leeswood. Coed Talon had been largely agricultural in nature until the discovery of iron ore in the nineteenth century, after which an ironworks opened in the area. This is almost certainly what drew them there, as like his father Robert was an iron moulder by profession. Moulders like Robert were the foundry workers who forged the moulds into which molten iron was poured in order for castings to be made. He may also have been the one who actually poured the metal into the moulds, as he would have had a good understanding of how they worked. Although this was a skilled and sought-after craft, it was also dangerous, dirty, noisy and physically exhausting. The engraving below gives an idea of what his day-to-day working environment may have looked like, while the second image shows the remains of Coed Talon ironworks in 2007, where he probably worked:

Iron Moulders Society of Victoria Banner, c. 1880 (via State Library Victoria).

Coed Talon ironworks, c. 2007 (via Treuddyn Community Website).

In about 1845 Harriet gave birth to their first son, my great-great-grandfather John Ellis Jones. John’s exact date and place of birth are uncertain as no birth certificate or baptism record have yet been found, and the details recorded in later censuses are inconsistent. While the 1851 census gives his birthplace as Mold, it was recorded as Denbighshire in 1861, Leeswood in 1871 and 1891, and Coed Talon in 1881. Given its specificity Coed Talon seems likely to be the genuine place, with the other answers having been references to larger and better-known locations nearby. The ironworks’ presence in Coed Talon also seems to support this theory, however it is also possible the family were moving around a lot during this period and John’s own knowledge could have been somewhat hazy.

At some point during the next three years, Robert, Harriet and John crossed over the English border to Liverpool, where they had two more sons:

• Thomas (b. c. 1848, Liverpool, Lancashire)
• Robert (b. c. 1851, liverpool, Lancashire

The Joneses were just one of many Welsh migrant families who settled in Liverpool in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, attracted by the employment opportunities this wealthy, rapidly-expanding port city on their doorstep presented. This influx would go on to have a profound impact on the city’s culture, language and economy, for example Everton Football Club was founded in 1878 by members of a Methodist chapel, and the Scouse accent with its hard, rasping /kx/ sound at the end of words like ‘back’ (which does not feature in other Lancashire accents) owes much to the arrival of Welsh speakers.

The 1851 census shows the family living at 3 Carver’s Buildings, a block of apartments at 27 Hornby Street north of the city centre. Robert’s whereabouts on the night of the census are unknown, as Harriet was the only adult householder present and was listed as the head. We can assume he was still alive however, as Harriet identified herself as ‘married’ rather than widowed, and even recorded her occupation as ‘wife of moulder’. Their home was located in a solidly working class part of the city, which was also becoming known as the heart of Liverpool’s migrant community, largely due to the many Irish families who settled there after the Potato Famine of 1847-48. Among the Joneses’ neighbours in 1851 can be found Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Manx and German nationals, many of them labourers and mariners, whose younger children were mostly born in the city. Over time the area became associated with overcrowding, poverty, and inevitably disease, and the Hornby Street slums were cleared in 1903 to make way for new social housing (see The Fall, Rise and Fall Again of Hornby Street, Liverpool on John Boughton’s excellent Municipal Dreams blog).

Extract from Ackerman’s 1847 Panoramic View of Liverpool, with Hornby Street shown near the centre a few streets south St. Martin’s Church Cemetery and east of the gas works (via Historic Liverpool).

A decade later, Harriet was recorded as a widow in the census of 1861, however it is unclear when exactly her husband Robert passed away his death certificate has yet to be found. By then she had moved back to North Wales with her three sons and was living at 10 Swan Lane in Flint, perhaps to be closer to her extended family. She supported herself there by working as a housekeeper, but her teenage sons had also entered the workforce. John, then aged sixteen, is described as a ‘circular sawyer’, while his younger brothers Thomas and Robert were both apprentice wood turners. Many members of the Jones family would go on to work as sawyers and turners over the coming decades, and their stories will be told in the next two posts.

Unfortunately this is the last census on which Harriet can be identified definitively, and her ultimate fate is still unknown. There is a ‘Harriet Whelan’ recorded in the 1871 census living on Kew Street in Liverpool with her sons, including a Thomas Jones (b. c. 1846, Liverpool, Lancashire) and an American husband called Walter. Her ‘North Wales’ birthplace (while vague) suggests this could be her, however there is no evidence of Harriet having married a Walter Whelan between 1861 and 1871, and the presence of another son named William (b. c. 1852, Liverpool, Lancashire) who did not appear on the previous census also casts doubt on this theory. Another potential match in the 1871 census is a Harriet Jones (b. c. 1827, Llanarmon, Denbighshire) living in Bersham with her son Joseph (b. c. 1870, Bersham, Denbighshire) and lead miner husband Robert (b. c. 1828, Mold, Flintshire). Many of the details seem close to what we might expect to find, but the surprise reappearance of her late husband and the fact that their ages do not fit with those given in other sources cannot be easily explained. While we may never be certain what happened to Harriet later in life, fortunately for this blog it has proved easier keeping up with the many Joneses who came after.

Sources

Boughton, John. “The Fall, Rise and Fall Again of Hornby Street, Liverpool.” Municipal Dreams. Accessed 8 April 2021. https://municipaldreams.tumblr.com/post/100818377599/the-fall-rise-and-fall-again-of-hornby-street.

Spencer tracing (part 2)

This is the second of two posts on the family history of Ruth Spencer, the mother of my maternal grandmother Julia Mary Mills, and will focus specifically on her parents and siblings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the first part of the family’s story see Spencer Tracing (part 1).

* * *

Ruth Spencer’s father George was born and raised in the hamlet of Milton in Nottinghamshire. He had been baptised on 16 June 1850 in nearby West Markham, and his formative years were marked by a series of premature family deaths. At the age of five he lost his older sister Anne, whose death was followed by that of his little brother William when he was fourteen, and then his father George Sr. three years later. At some point between 1865 and 1871 he moved with his mother Elizabeth and two surviving sisters to East Markham, where he helped out on his mother’s farm at 9 Low Street.

In his early twenties George met a young woman from Lincolnshire named Emma Staples, with whom he would go on to marry and have seven children, including my great-grandmother Ruth. Emma had been born in Canwick on 15 April 1850, however the name Staples does not appear on either her birth certificate or baptism record. Her parents were John Gant (bp. 8 January 1827 Metheringham, Lincolnshire – d. 24 March 1881, Metheringham, Lincolnshire), a joiner, and a servant named Elizabeth Carter (24 December 1822, Canwick, Lincolnshire – bur. 17 January 1895, Harmston, Lincolnshire), who were unmarried but their daughter was nonetheless christened ‘Emma Gant’ on 21 September 1850. Unusually for a child of unmarried parents her father was named in the parish register.

Officially however, her birth was registered under the name ‘Emma Gant Carter’, and by 1851 she had dropped her father’s surname entirely and was going simply by ‘Emma Carter’. That year she was living in Canwick with her maternal grandparents, her mother Elizabeth, an uncle Henry, and her older sister Alice (a daughter of Elizabeth’s from a previous relationship). By the next census in 1861 she had adopted the surname of her step-father Joseph Staples, an agricultural worker from Waddington who her mother had married on 13 June 1854. Shortly before her own marriage, Emma was recorded in the 1871 census working as servant for a farmer named William Twidale in Scampton.

She and George were married in East Markham on 24 October 1873. They were both twenty three and George’s sister Mary was one of their witnesses. Emma was by this time almost eight months pregnant with their first child Joseph Henry Spencer, who was born on 8 December in Harmston, Lincolnshire, where a number of Emma’s relatives were living at the time. Given the closeness of his birth date to George and Emma’s marriage it is plausible that Emma briefly moved back to Lincolnshire after the wedding to conceal how far along her pregnancy was from George’s family. If true, this could explain why Joseph was not baptised until 24 April 1874, more than four months after he was born.

Over the next decade George and Emma went on to have four more children in East Markham, whose names were:

• George (b. 17 May 1975, East Markham, Lincolnshire – d. 7 February 1963, Stamford, Lincolnshire)
• Elizabeth (bp. 29 October 1876, East Markham,  Lincolnshire)
• Julia (b. 30 March 1878, East Markham, Lincolnshire – d. c. May 1945, Peterborough, Huntingdonshire)
• Annie (bp. 25 April 1881, East Markham, Lincolnshire)

From their baptism records it is possible to trace their father George’s career throughout the 1870s. At the time of his marriage in 1873 he was recorded as a railway labourer, however a few months later in early 1874 he described himself as a farmer in his son Joseph’s baptism record. He continued to give this as his main occupation until 1881, after which he is consistently recorded as a railway platelayer, a job he appears to have held for the rest of his life. As a platelayer his work would have involved both laying tracks and patrolling, inspecting and maintaining the lines. They were often based in wooden ‘platelayers’ huts’ at the side of the railway, as can be seen in the photograph below showing a gang of Scottish platelayers at Blackford.

Railway platelayers circa 1910 (via Blackford Historical Society).

While George appears to have identified primarily as a farmer until 1881, we know he had been working concurrently as a platelayer since at least 1875 from a story in the national press. The article in question describes an extraordinary incident from his working life which came very close to killing him. According to the story, on 1 June 1875 he and three other employees of the Great Northern Railway Company, George Jackson, George Featherstone and their foreman William Freeman, set off to work on the railway line between East Markham and Tuxford at about seven o’clock in the morning. A few hours later they found “a large number of beans, used, it is said, in the production of castor oil” (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 7 June 1875) which they set about eating. By midday they felt so sick they were forced to stop work, and their two-mile walk home took them until five o’clock in the evening. It is now known that castor beans contain ricin, one of the most toxic substances found in nature, which has been used in biological warfare and whose symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhoea and eventually life-threatening organ failure. George was lucky enough to survive the poisoning, however his co-worker George Jackson was not so fortunate and died three days later.

Report on an ‘Extraordinary Case of Poisoning at Tuxford’ involving George Spencer. Source: The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 7 June 1875 (via the British Newspaper Archive).

The 1881 census recorded the family living at York Yard in East Markham, minus their eldest son Joseph who was staying with his maternal grandparents in Harmston. In 1883 however they relocated to the village of Greatford in Lincolnshire, where they had two more children:

• Thomas (b. c. May 1889, Greatford, Lincolnshire – d. 4 November 1897, Greatford, Lincolnshire)
• Ruth (b. c. February 1895, Greatford, Lincolnshire – d. 20 December 1926, 47 Ryhall Road, Stamford, Lincolnshire)

The building in which they took up residence was known as ‘Greatford Gatehouse’, and was located at the level crossing on the western edge of the village. This would have served as both the Spencers’ family home and George’s base of operations for his work as a platelayer. The house has long-since been demolished but the photograph below shows Greatford crossing in around the mid-1960s with the gatehouse visible on the right. Its location can also be identified on contemporary Ordnance Survey maps.

Greatford crossing, looking east along Greatford Road c. 1965, photographed by Noel Ingram (via Greatford Crossing).

Greatford crossing with the gatehouse where the Spencers lived shown in red at the centre, from an 1888 Ordnance Survey map (via National Library of Scotland).

By 1891 George and Emma’s eldest son Joseph and eldest daughter Elizabeth had both left home. Their second son George was employed as an agricultural labourer at age fifteen, and all their younger children except John Thomas were at school. After the birth of their last child Ruth however, tragedy struck the family once again on the afternoon of 4 November 1897. While racing home from school with a group of friends, George and Emma’s youngest son John Thomas Spencer was struck down and killed by a train at the level crossing outside the gatehouse where he had lived all his life. He was eight years old. According to a witness, “the top of his skull was cut off and his brains were scattered about the line” (The Grantham Journal, 13 November 1897, p. 6, cols. 3-4), and his father George had the awful task of identifying his body. At a subsequent inquest at the Hare and Hounds public house questions were raised over whether the signalman on duty should be held responsible for failing to lock the gate before the train passed.  The signalman explained however that he had not seen the children approaching as they were concealed from view behind a tall hedge, and in the end a verdict of accidental death was returned.

Greatford level crossing circa 1960s, with the Gatehouse where the Spencer family lived visible to the right of the train  (via Greatford Crossing).

Unfortunately John Thomas’s premature death would not be the last to befall the family in the years surrounding the turn of the century. By the 1901 census all of George and Emma’s surviving children except Ruth had left home, however they had been joined by Emma’s nineteen year old niece Florence Pottage. Sadly this was to be the last census on which Emma would appear, as two years later on 5 December 1903 she passed away at the age of fifty three. Her youngest daughter Ruth would have been only eight at the time, coincidently the same age Ruth’s daughter Mary was when she lost her mother twenty three years later. 

Two years later, George was married for a second time to a domestic nurse named Betsy Stanniland (b. 20 January 1865, East Markham, Nottinghamshire – d. 21 March 1965, Stamford, Lincolnshire). It is uncertain how the couple met but as Betsy came from East Markham near where George grew up it is possible they were family friends. They were living together at Greatford Gatehouse at the time of the 1911 census, which also recorded that George had switched employers and was now working for the Great Midland Railway Company. In his daughter Ruth’s marriage certificate from 1913 his occupation is given as ‘foreman platelayer’ suggesting he had secured a promotion in the intervening years, although he was also named as a foreman in the report on his son’s death sixteen years earlier. That same year he appeared again in the local press, but fortunately the reason was far less serious this time, having been given a 1 shilling fine for riding without reins at Uffington (The Grantham Journal, 3 May 1913, p. 5, col. 2). George died at the age of sixty nine on 9 December 1919 and was buried in St. Thomas Beckett churchyard in Greatford. His effects valued at £752 6s. 5d. went to his widow Betsy, who went on to live a  further forty six years but never remarried. She finally passed away in 1965 in her hundredth year.

* * *

The surviving children of George and Emma Spencer went into a variety of occupations, many of which were connected to the railways. Their eldest, Joseph Henry Spencer had been a ‘railway telegraph lad’ at the age of eighteen, when he was lodging at 43 Frenchgate in the house of a grocer named Sarah Tinson. Ten years later he was recorded in the 1901 census at 28 Haddon Place in Burley, Leeds, working as a railway telegraphist. Electrical telegraphy had been used by British railway companies since 1846, and telegraphists like Joseph were responsible for to communicating messages across the transport network via morse code. It was skilled and relatively high paying work and could be considered one of the first high-tech occupations.

A telegraphist at work, pre-1927 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The same census also showed Joseph living with his wife Hannah Maria (née Hirst), with whom he had been married for two years. They had one son, Tom, in 1909 before Hannah’s death in 1922. Joseph was married again on 29 September 1924 to Hannah Elizabeth Louth, by which time he was employed as a railway clerk. His marriage certificate also shows he had moved to 29 Haddon Place by then, where he lived until his death on 7 September 1950. His will was proved on 9 November, and his effects were valued at £752 13s.

George and Emma’s second son, who like his father and grandfather before him was also named George Spencer, had worked as an agricultural labourer in his teens. After leaving Greatford he found employment as a foundry worker in East Retford, where he lived as a boarder at 34 West Street. By 1911 he had moved in with his sister Annie’s family at Belmesthorpe in Rutland, and was once again working as an agricultural labourer. At some point during the next four years however George moved back in with his father and step-mother at Greatford Gatehouse, and it was while living here that he enlisted for military service on 25 November 1915. His World War I service record attests that he was already forty years old when he signed up, and was 5’5″ tall.

George was initially assigned the rank of private in the Lincolnshire Regiment on 5 April 1916, but was transferred to the 13th Battalion of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment five days later. Perhaps on account of his age, on 29 April he was deployed as a non-combatant in the regiment’s Labour Company A, and became part of the Labour Corps after it was formed on 11-12 May 1917. Details of his service are sketchy, but we know he was deployed on the Western Front and his duties would have involved essential manual work like digging trenches and repairing roads throughout key campaigns including the Somme offensive. As the war wound down George was posted to the 507th Agricultural Company on 28 December 1918, which would have been tasked with ensuring the army’s food supply, and he was finally demoblised on 13 March 1919 at the age of forty three.

Troops of the Labour Corps at work on the Hazebrouck Road near Bailleul, June 1916 Copyright: © IWM (via Imperial War Museums).

After returning home, George settled in Stamford close to his sister Annie’s family, with whom my grandmother Mary lived between 1923 and 1926. According to her recollection, George remained a bachelor his whole life, and was known as “a singer of some repute”. Upon finally hearing him sing in church one day however, she remembered being embarrassed by how loud he was. By 1939 he was living at 59 Cemetery Road in the house of a woman named Anna M. Rippon, and was still apparently working as an agricultural labour at the age of sixty four. In his old age he retired to Brownes Hospital almshouses, where he died on 7 February 1963, leaving behind £793 17s in personal effects. He was eighty seven years old.

According to census records, a least three of George’s four younger sisters began their working lives in the domestic service industry. In 1891 the eldest of these sisters Elizabeth was working in the household of a retired farmer from Preston, Rutland, called John Pretty at age fifteen. Three years later she married a Nottinghamshire railway signalman named George Edward Baguley and moved to Pudsey near to her brother Joseph in Leeds. Here she gave birth to her first child in 1898, before moving again to the village of Tyersal between Leeds and Bradford for her second a year later.

In the 1901 census the family were recorded living at Whitehall Lane in the Leeds parish of Drighlington, where their third child had been born the previous year. By 1906 however they had returned to George and Elizabeth’s home county of Nottinghamshire, first settling in Arnold before finally coming back to Elizabeth’s home village of East Markham by 1910. The 1911 census shows they had a further three children in Nottinghamshire and lived on Askham Road. After this it is unclear what happened to Elizabeth, as neither her entry in the 1939 register nor a death certificate have yet been found. Her husband George died on 1 October 1947, leaving behind £285.

Elizabeth’s younger sister Julia Spencer was also employed as a domestic housemaid for a time, and in 1901 was recorded in the service of a William Taylor of Hanbury, Staffordshire. Also like her sister, Julia went on to marry a man worked on the railways, Yorkshire engine driver Thomas Crowe. The couple were wed in Thomas’s home district of Guisborough in 1909 when Julia would have been around thirty one and Thomas forty seven. The following year Elizabeth gave birth to their first child, Thomas Spencer Crowe.

By 1911 the family were living at 25 Oxford Street in Saltburn-by-the-Sea on the Yorkshire coast. They appear to have stayed in the vicinity until at least 1920, and during this time had at least two more sons. Their whereabouts over the next nineteen years are largely unknown, but the 1939 register revealed that Julia had been running a boarding house at 33 Broadway in Peterborough. Her husband Thomas had by then retired, and all their children had left home. Thomas died the following year, and Julia passed away five years later at the age of sixty one.

We know rather more about the third Spencer girl, Annie, whose family my grandmother Julia Mary Mills stayed with for several years as a little girl. Continuing a pattern set by her older sisters, in 1899 Annie married a railway worker named George Henry Johnson when she was eighteen and he was twenty four. Prior to their marriage, George (whose name seems inescapable within the Spencer family) had been a railway telegraph lad. According to the staff registers of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway he was then employed by the company as a signalman at South Elmsall, Yorkshire, on 16 June 1897, where he earned a wage of £1 3s per week. Given their shared occupation and geographical proximity it seems entirely plausible that George met Annie through her older brother Joseph at around this time. A later entry in the register reveals that he received a caution in December that year but the reason was not recorded. A final entry states that he was “transferred to G.M” on 19 April 1898. This perhaps stood for ‘Great Midland’, a misnaming of the Great Central Railway which had succeeded the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway a few months earlier.

Shortly after their marriage, Annie moved with George to Ryhall in Rutland, a short distance from Greatford, where she gave birth to her first son Cecil Henry Johnson on 17 June 1900. The following year the census recorded the three of them living together in a house on Main Street, however within a year they had relocated to the nearby hamlet Belmesthorpe. Here they had two more children named Reginald Edgar (b. c. August 1902) and Constance Mabel Johnson (b. 8 December 1903), and by 1911 Annie’s unmarried older brother George had also joined them in the family home.

Meanwhile, many miles away in Derby, George and Annie’s sixteen-year old younger sister Ruth Spencer was working as a domestic servant for the railway architect Charles Trubshaw at 123 Osmaston Street. This building was later absorbed by the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary, which may explain why her daughter believed Ruth had once worked as a cook there. Much of Ruth’s story has already been covered in Going through the Mills (part 5) but to recap the pertinent details, in 1913 she had married a bootmaker named Harry Mills with whom she went on to have two children, George Kenneth (b. 28 September 1915, Derby, Derbyshire – d. c. 1980 New Zealand) and my grandmother Julia Mary Mills (b. 24 July 1918, Derby, Derbyshire – d. 19 September 1993, Derbyshire Royal Infirmary, Derby, Derbyshire). Unfortunately the marriage did not last, and following her separation from Harry Ruth and her daughter Mary went to live with her sister Annie’s family, which is where we re-join them in about 1925.

From my grandmother’s account we know her aunt Annie’s family had moved from Belmesthorpe to 47 Ryhall Lane in Stamford by this time, however her older cousins Cecil and Reginald had already left home. She remembers her aunt as a “staunch Methodist”, and there is evidence to suggest the other Spencer children shared her faith (most notably the absence of Anglican baptism records for their children and the fact that Ruth was buried in the non-conformist section of Stamford Cemetery). Mary also fondly recalled her cousin Mabel, a milliner who made her hats and apparently had “a lump on her back”. Being only young at the time Mary asked her about this, but Mabel apparently did not take offence.

Mary also confirms that her unmarried uncle George Spencer (the “singer of some repute”, who would attempt to surreptitiously give her a penny whenever he came to visit) and aunt Julia (Crowe) were living nearby at the time, and the impression one gets from reading her account is of a close, loving and supportive extended family. Julia appears in the photograph below alongside her sister Annie, her brother-in-law George Henry Johnson and Mary from 1925:

L-R: Aunt Annie Johnson (née Spencer), uncle George Johnson, Julia Mary Mills (in front), aunt Julia Crowe (née Spencer), in front of 47 Ryhall Road, Stamford, 1925. Their identities can be discerned from note on reverse which “Mother, father, aunt June(?) and Mary, 1925,” probably written by Constance Mabel Johnson.

Unfortunately due to the actions of my grandmother’s step-mother this is the only surviving photograph in our family’s possession which features any of the Spencers. After Ruth’s premature death in 1926 (which was registered by her sister Annie) Mary moved in with her father Harry and his new wife, and appears to have lost contact with her mother’s side for several years. 

The 1939 register shows her aunt Annie had by then moved to Peterborough, and that her husband George Henry Johnson had sadly died sometime before. The house on Chain Close where she lived was known as ‘Greatford’, a name with great significance to the Spencers and perhaps a reminder of happier times for a woman who had endured more than her share of family tragedies over the years. It is unknown when she died, or what happened to her son Reginald, but her other two children Cecil and Mabel were both living with her in 1939 working as a window cleaner and a shop assistant and dressmaker respectively. The register also records the presence of another woman in the house named Olive A.L. Rigeon, who is said to be Mabel’s partner in a draper’s business. Cecil passed away in 1963, and his will was proved by his sister Mabel, whose own death certificate has yet to be found.

It is known that my grandmother had re-established contact with some of her mother’s family by the mid-1950s, when her two youngest daughters went to meet them in Stamford. She would later revisit her adoptive home on Ryhall Lane shortly before her death in 1993, and in 2011 I was able to identify the unmarked grave in Stamford Cemetery where her mother Ruth had been buried eighty five years before. Sadly in the absence of any photographs, this may now be as close as her descendants can get to a woman whose face we may never see, but my search continues regardless.

The unmarked site where Ruth Mills (née Spencer) was buried in the non-conformist section of Stamford Cemetery (section H plot15 e, approximately where the wreath is). Taken by the author on 2 January 2011.

* * *

Here ends, for now, the account of my mother’s family history. In the next series, ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’, I will be turning my attention to the Land of My Fathers and my paternal ancestors in Wales.

Spencer tracing (part 1)

This is the first of two posts on the ancestry of Ruth Spencer, the mother of my maternal grandmother Julia Mary Mills. For the story of her patenal ancestors the Mills family, see Going through the Mills (part 1).

* * *

Like her husband Harry Mills, Ruth Spencer came from a long line of East Midlanders, with roots in Nottinghamshire but also further east in Lincolnshire. Her great-great-grandparents were John Spencer and Phoebe Bird, who were married in Phoebe’s home village of East Markham, Nottinghamshire, on 27 November 1781. Phoebe would have been around twenty two at the time and John was twenty four, having been baptised in nearby Weston on 17 July 1757. Two years later the couple had their first son, Ruth Spencer’s great-grandfather, who they named after John’s father Thomas. He was born on 30 December 1783 and baptised on 4 January the following year in East Markham.

Thomas was followed by a sister Mary, who was baptised on 23 January 1786. A second sister Ann Wilson Spencer was born seven years later on 19 December 1793, however her baptism record dated four days later only includes her mother’s name, Phoebe, who by this time is described as a “single woman and pauper”, meaning she was in receipt of parish pay. This wording and the lack of any father’s name on the record tells us Ann was the ‘illegitimate’ daughter of a man Phoebe became involved with after John presumably died, but her unusual middle name ‘Wilson’ suggests they may have wanted her to carry on his name despite not marrying.

Many years later Phoebe remarried on 5 August 1816 at the age of fifty seven to a Thomas Bacon of West Markham (confusingly also known as Markham Clinton). By the time of the 1841 census she was widowed again and living with her eldest daughter Mary’s family, the Tessingtons, at nearby Ordsall. Her last known address in 1851 was at her son Thomas’s home at Top Street, East Markham, at which time she is recorded as a “pauper (cottager)”. She died two years later aged ninety three.

We know from census returns that her son Thomas Spencer was a life-long agricultural labourer, and given his age would have lived through some of the most turbulent years in rural England’s history, including the Swing Riots of the early 19th century. On 17 March 1807 he was married to Mary Watts, with whom he had one son, John (b. 25 January 1808, East Markham, Nottinghamshire). Mary appears to have died within the first seven years of their marriage however, after which Thomas was married a second time to a Lincolnshire woman named Hannah Huntrick (b. c. 1787, Butterwick, Lincolnshire – bur. 5 September 1854, East Markham, Nottinghamshire) on 28 November 1815 in Fledborough.

Although it is unclear what bought Hannah to Nottinghamshire from her small village near the Lincolnshire coast, it is possible she was a domestic servant. After their marriage she and Thomas moved to up the road to nearby Askham, where they had at least three children:

• George (bp. 28 October 1821, Askham, Nottinghamshire – bur. 27 April 1868, East Markham, Nottinghamshire)
• David (bp. 5 March 1826, Askham, Nottinghamshire)
• Elizabeth (bp. 22 June 1827, Askham, Nottinghamshire)

The family were living in Askham as late as 1841, although by then their second son David had either died or left home. In 1851 they were back in Thomas’s birthplace of East Markham living in the cottage on Top Street along with his mother Phoebe and two lodgers. Hannah died three years later at the age of sixty seven and was buried on 5 September 1854. Thomas survived her by seven years, and by the last census on which he was recorded in 1861 he was living alone in a house on Church Street, still working an agricultural labourer. He died at the age of seventy eight a year later and was buried on 28 February 1862 in East Markham churchyard.

Church Street, East Markham, 1925, Thomas Spencer’s last address (via Inspire Picture Archive).

* * *

Thomas and Hannah’s eldest son George was Ruth Spencer’s paternal grandfather. At age twenty three he married a woman named Elizabeth Hewitt (bp. 7 May 1817, Askham, Nottinghamshire) in her home village of Askham on 22 July 1845. Elizabeth was the fourth child of a miller named John Hewitt and his wife Mary, and the 1841 census shows that four years prior to her marriage she had been living in Rockley with her parents and siblings. George was recorded in the marriage register as a brickmaker, and an Ordnance Survey map from 1885 confirms that a brick yard where he likely worked once stood to the west of East Markham village centre.

A bankrupcy notice in the Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury (10 August 1849, p. 1, col. 9) suggests the brick yard closed down a few years after George’s marriage in 1849. This would explain why by the time of the 1851 census he was working not as a brick maker but a ‘land drainer’. This new occupation was shared by his older brother-in-law Thomas Hewitt, who may have been instrumental in helping him find work after the brick yard’s closure. As a land drainer George would have been responsible for digging ditches and laying clay drainage pipes on the farms where he worked, perhaps even making them. It is possible therefore that his background in brick making was what enabled him to develop this specialism.

Land drainer laying pipes. Fig. 83 from ‘Farm drainage: The Principles, Processes, and Effects of Draining Land with Stones, Wood, Plows, and Open Ditches, and Especially with Tiles‘ by Henry F. French, 1860 (via Project Gutenberg).

In around 1848 the Spencers relocated to Milton, a small village in the parish of West Markham. The approximate date of their move can be discerned from the birthplaces of their five children, whose names were:

• Anne (b. c. November 1848, Askham, Nottinghamshire – bur. 12 December, West Drayton, Nottinghamshire)
• George (b. c. 16 June 1850, Milton, Nottinghamshire – d. 9 December 1919, Greatford, Lincolnshire)
• Mary (b. c. 20 February 1853, Milton, Nottinghamshire)
• William (b. c. 16 April 1853, Milton, Nottinghamshire – d. c. 2 December 1864, Milton, Nottinghamshire)
• Elizabeth (b. c. 30 August 1857, Milton, Nottinghamshire – d. 27 November 1918, Nottinghamshire)

George passed away at the age of forty six, when his youngest child was only ten. He was buried in East Markham on 27 April 1868. After this his wife Elizabeth was listed as the head of the house in subsequent censuses, and she appears to have become quite a successful woman. By 1871 she had moved the family to 9 Low Street in East Markham, where she was recorded as a farmer of eleven acres. Her only children living with her at the time were George Jr. and Elizabeth Jr., however her older brother John (a miller) had joined them as a lodger, which would have provided another source of income. Elizabeth Jr. was still at school but George Jr., then twenty was listed a ‘farmer’s son,’ suggesting he was helping his mother out on their farm.

Low Street and Old Manor, East Markham, 1930, where the Spencers lived in 1871 (via Inspire Picture Archive).

At the next census in 1881 Elizabeth was said to be farming ten acres and was living at 2 Chapel Street, East Markham, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Her children George Jr. and Elizabeth Jr. had left home but her daughter Mary, then a dressmaker, had moved in. By 1891 Mary was still living with her mother on Chapel Street, along with her husband, a widowed agricultural labourer from Sutton On Trent called James Gilbert. Elizabeth died a few weeks later on 10 April 1891 aged seventy four. At the time of her death her personal estate was valued £174 3s. 4d. (approximately £14,290.25 in today’s money), which was proved by her daughter Mary.

* * *

After living for a time at The Green in East Markham Mary and James moved south to Cromwell, where James worked as a farmer. When she died in 1927 her effects worth £1,427 16s went to her step-son John Henry Gilbert, James’s son from a previous marriage. The census of 1911 shows that Mary’s unmarried younger sister Elizabeth Jr. also lived with them in Cromwell for a time. She died just seven years later aged sixty one, leaving behind £412 9s to her sister Mary. Of George and Elizabeth’s other children, Anne and William both died in childhood at the ages of seven and eleven respectively. Their eldest son, George Spencer Jr., was Ruth Spencer’s father. His story, and those of his wife and children, will be told in the next post.

Extract from a 1899 One Inch Ordnance Survey map showing the villages of East Markham, Milton, and Markham Clinton where the Spencer family lived for much of the nineteenth century (via National Library of Scotland).

Going through the Mills (part 5)

This is the much-delayed fifth and final post tracing the history of the Mills family, focusing specifically on my great-grandfather Harry Mills, his siblings, and my maternal grandmother Julia Mary Mills. To catch up on their story so far, see the first post in this series, Going through the Mills (part 1).

* * *

The seven surviving children of George and Fanny Mills all grew up in their family home at 17 Loughborough Road, Kegworth, in the 1880s and 1890s, before moving to London Road sometime before 1901. Their eldest son John George Mills (b. 13 May 1886, Kegworth, Leicestershire), better known as ‘Jack’, was the first to enter work, and is recorded as a pantry boy in that year’s census. This was considered one of the lowliest forms of domestic service, and would have involved assisting the kitchen staff of large houses with basic tasks like washing dishes, peeling potatoes and sweeping floors.

John George “Jack” Mills, c. 1905. Courtesy of R. Watkins.

In  1909, at age twenty two he married Elsie Ethel Mills (b. c. November 1889, West Leake, Nottinghamshire), a dairy engineer’s daughter who by the time of their wedding was already several months pregnant with their first child. Over the next three years they would go on to have two daughters together, whose names were:

• Edith (b. 19 July 1909, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. November 2001, Mansfield, Nottinghamshire)
• Frances Hilda (b. 21 August 1911, Kegworth, Leicestershire –5 August 2010, Leicester Royal Infirmary, Leicester, Leicestershire)

Jack, Edith, Frances Hilda, and Elsie Mills, c. 1915. Courtesy of R. Watkins.

The 1911 census records the family living in a row of cottages off Kegworth High Street known as ‘The Rookery’. By this time Jack was working as a lace maker or twist hand, the same occupation he gave decades later in the 1939 Register, and before that he is said to have been a stockinger. Lace making had been an important part of Kegworth’s economy since the industrial revolution but by 1911 the majority of the village’s lace workers like Jack would have been employed at A. Leatherland’s factory at Borrowell. The work here would have been very different to the kind lace makers would have known a century earlier, as Sheila A. Mason writes:

During the period 1820 to 1860 the hand-operated lace frames were gradually replaced by steam-driven, factory-based machines. Hours were regulated by the steam boiler; power and heat were usually provided between 4 am and midnight Monday to Friday and 4am to 8pm on Saturday. Lace machines required a constant temperature so the factories were heated to between 65 and 70 degrees. A factory containing 100 machines would have about 500 workers.

Lace machine operatives, called ‘twisthands’, were male and as the machines were lubricated by black lead, (graphite), and oil they often finished work as black as coal miners.

Until the 1920s shift work was a feature of the industry and the twisthand and his mate, known as a ‘butty’, worked five or six hour shifts of five or six hours a shift; the first man usually working 4am to 9am and 1pm to 6pm and the second man 9am to 1pm and 6pm to midnight. Twisthands were paid by the amount of work produced, not by the hours worked, and take-home pay varied considerably according to the type, width and speed of the machines and the type of lace being produced.

This picture is confirmed by his second daughter Frances, who recalled taking her father’s billycan and sandwiches to the factory as a little girl and finding the noise frighteningly loud. In later years he went on to work at Slack & Parr Ltd., an engineering factory on Sideley Road.

A. Leatherland’s lace factory at Borrowell, Kegworth, early 20th century (via Kegworth Village).

Lace machines at Kegworth (via Kegworth Village).

Outside work however, we know from his descendants that Jack was also an accomplished musician, and that he played the euphonium in Kegworth Brass Band. Contemporary newspaper accounts show both bands performing at a huge number of functions over several decades, including military parades, dances and country fairs, highlighting the centrality of brass bands to northern and midlands culture at this time.

According to Dave Russell (1997, p. 213-214):

The membership of brass bands … was exclusively male and solidly working-class. […] Bandsmen always described themselves as ‘working men’, as did middle class observers, whether friendly or hostile. The majority, judging by the evidence of oral testimony and the personal details that appeared in the band press, appear to have been from the skilled or semi-skilled sections of the working class. Hardly surprisingly, given the social and geographical base of the movement, many, perhaps a majority, were miners. Others simply reflected the occupational structure of their area.

From this description it is clear Jack’s background was fairly typical for a bandsman of this era. Despite the bands’ humble backgrounds and lack of formal training however, by the Edwardian era the best of them were attracting crowds of over 70,000, and at the peak of their popularity it is thought most communities in England of over a thousand people supported an amateur brass band of some kind. Consequently, and with some justification, the brass band movement in England has been described by Russell as “one of the most remarkable working-class achievements in European history” (p. 205).

Kegworth Brass Band, c. 1910. Jack Mills is seated on the middle row, second from the left (via Kegworth Village).

‘Drilling in Kegworth’. A 1914 report which mentions Kegworth Brass Band accompanying a local military parade at the outbreak of World War I. Source: The Loughborough Echo, 4 September 1914, p. 5, col. 1 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

‘Kegworth’. A description of the band’s involvement in the 1919 peace celebrations at Kegworth. Source: The Loughborough Echo, 18 July 1919, p. 6, col. 5 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Sadly Jack’s wife Elsie died prematurely in 1921 when she was only thirty one years old. Their daughters Edith and Frances would have been eleven and nine. Four years later, Jack married a second time to Lucy Ethel Marchant (b. 8 April 1896, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. c. February 1971, Nottinghamshire), with with whom he had two more children:

• Eileen (b. 10 April 1926, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. 14 June 2012)
• John (b. 7 July 1930, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. c. April 2006, Rugby, Warwickshire)

Shortly before his death, my mother recalls meeting Jack and his family for the first time in Kegworth when she was around ten years old, and noted how much he resembled her grandfather Harry (as well as how much his daughter Eileen looked like her mother Mary). Jack died on 11 September 1963 at the age of seventy seven. His probate record shows his effects at the time were £341 15s, which went to his widow Lucy.

Jack’s younger brother Alfred William “Fred” Mills (b. c. February 1888, Kegworth, Leicestershire) was recorded working as a farmer’s boy in the 1901 census at the age of thirteen, and then as a ‘coachman (domestic)’ in 1911, however his whereabouts after this date are unknown and so far no death record has been identified. Fortunately, more is known about Jack and Fred’s younger siblings, including their brother Harry (my great-grandfather, to whom we will return shortly), and their sister Edith Ellen Mills, better known as ‘Nell’, thanks to the research of one of her descendants.

Nell was born on 8 February 1891 in Kegworth, and by the time she was twenty had begun work as a machinist specialised in skirt making, possibly at the same lace factory as her brother Jack. The census of 1911, taken on 2 April that year, records her living at her parents’ house on London Road, however just ten days later she was married at Long Eaton Register Office to an iron pipe jointer named Samuel John Terry (b. 12 March 1886, Bolton, Lancashire – d. 8 August 1966, Boultham Park House, Lincoln, Lincolnshire). Her brother Harry was one of the witnesses. The wedding’s timing and non-religious setting is noteworthy as by the time they were married Nell was five months pregnant with their first child. The photograph below, purportedly taken around this time, shows Nell with her pregnancy concealed discretely behind a well-positioned gate.

Edith Ellen “Nell” Mills, c. 1911, possibly around the time of her wedding. Note her pose and the position of the gate concealing her pregnancy. Courtesy of T. Lang.

Shortly after the birth of their daughter, who they named Ellen (b. 13 August 1911, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. 18 April 1985, Denny, Stirlingshire), Samuel accepted a job as a pipe jointer at a London waterworks, and the family relocated to the capital. During this period Nell ran a lodging house for navvies at 26 Dock Street, North Woolwich, which was said to have been very difficult as by this time the family had grown to include their second daughter Isabella (b. 7 June 1913, North Woolwich, Essex- d. 12 Apr 2013, Kings Mill Hospital, Sutton In Ashfield, Nottinghamshire), later known as “Cis”.

Soon afterwards the family returned to the East Midlands, settling in Lincoln where they had five more children:

• Frances Anne (b. 28 December 1914,  Lincoln, Lincolnshire – d. September 1987, Lincoln, Lincolnshire)
• Kathleen (b. 7 June 1917, Lincoln, Lincolnshire – d. 28 December 1995, Lincoln, Lincolnshire)
• John “Jack” (b. 23 November 1918, Lincoln, Lincolnshire – d. 29 December 1984, Lincoln, Lincolnshire)
• Bessie (b. c. November 1920, Lincoln, Lincolnshire – d. 16 March 1929, Lincoln, Lincolnshire)
• Colin (b. August 1933, Lincoln, Lincolnshire – d. 23 March 1935, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England)

Samuel, Nell and their children appear to have remained in Lincoln for the rest of their lives, however they changed address a number of times. Their first home in 1914 was at 14 Gaunt Street, and later they are known to have lived at 7 Water Lane in around 1925, at 17 Albany Street in 1939, and finally at 51 Holly Street in about 1958 after Nell suffered a stroke. She died a few years later on 27 April 1960 at the age of sixty nine and was buried at All Saints Churchyard, Bracebridge. Her husband Samuel died aged eighty in 1966.

The Terry family, c. 1955. Back (L-R): Ellen Terry, Frances Anne Terry, John “Jack” Terry, Isabella “Cis” Terry, Kathleen Terry. Front (L-R): Samuel John “Jack” Terry, Edith Ellen “Nell” Terry (nee Mills). Courtesy of T. Lang.

Comparatively less is known about Nell’s three younger sisters. Alice (b. 12 March 1893, Kegworth Leicestershire) was recorded as a glove maker in the 1911 census, and seven years later she married Thomas Alfred “Alvy” Wilmott, a twenty seven year old labourer (and later fruit and potato salesman) from Sawley in Derbyshire. The couple do not appear to have had any children, but are shown living with Alice’s elderly father George in the 1939 register when they were living at 220 Tamworth Road, Long Eaton. The photograph below of Alvy and George was probably taken in their back garden at around this time. Alice died in Long Eaton on 3 February 1961 at the age of sixty seven, at which time her effects were valued at £312 16s 4d. Her husband Alvy lived a further twenty three years before passing away in 1984 at the age of ninety three.

Alice Mills, c. 1913. Courtesy of R. Watkins.

Thomas Alfred “Alvy” Wilmott and George Mills, c. 1930, possibly at Long Eaton. Courtesy of R. Watkins.

Even less is known of Frances Harriet Mills (b. 22 April 1895, Kegworth, Leicestershire). Like Nell, as a teenager she she was recorded in the 1911 census as a machinist (skirt maker). She is known to have been married twice, first to a transport foreman named Samuel Hardy Tyers, then later to a man with the frustratingly untraceable name of John H. Smith whose occupation is uncertain. She was thirty three at the time of her first marriage on 14 July 1928, which was three years older than her husband Samuel. In the 1939 register the couple were recorded living at 16 Hawthorne Avenue, Long Eaton, which would have been about ten minutes away from her older sister Alice’s house on Tamworth Road. On 27 November 1943 Samuel died at the age of forty five, leaving Frances a widow at just forty eight. Ten years later though she was remarried to her second husband John H. Smith, and she would go on to live a further thirty nine years. Her death was registered at Ilkeston in the first quarter of 1982 when she was eighty seven. She is not believed to have had any children from either marriage.

The youngest daughter of George and Fanny Mills youngest, Elizabeth Ann “Lizzie” (b. 9 December 1899, Kegworth, Leicestershire) was only eleven at the time of the 1911 census so any jobs she may have held prior to getting married are unrecorded. Given her older sisters’ occupations it is possible she could have worked as a machinist or at the local glove factory on Pleasant Place. Like Alice, she married relatively late in life at age thirty five to George Frederick Steel, with whom she had one son, Richard David (b. c. August 1937, Derbyshire). It is unclear how the family supported themselves, but they are said to have lived above a branch of Boots in Nottingham, which her probate record conforms was at 71A Bracebridge Drive. An unusual story about Lizzie which has been been passed down to some family members was that she believed the stairs in her home were haunted, having experienced a ‘presence’ walk past her and ask the question “what troublest thou?” She died on 8 January 1979 at the age of seventy nine, and her effects were valued at £1,943.

* * *

We return now at last to Harry, the third son of George and Fanny Mills and my great-grandfather, born on 7 October 1889 in Kegworth. As a boy he was taken on as a cobbler’s apprentice, and by the time he was twenty one he was recorded working as a ‘boot repairer’ in the census of 1911. That same year he featured in a local news report on a ‘social and dance’ at Kegworth Temperance Hall, at which he performed in a play called ‘Who’d be a bachelor’.

Description of a ‘social and dance’ held at Kegworth Temperance Hall by the Men’s Adult School in 1911. Harry Mills is reported as having performed a role in the play ‘Who would be a bachelor’. Source: The Leicester Chronicle and Leicestershire Mercury, 4 February 1911, p. 11, col. 5 (via the British Newspaper Archive).

At some point between April 1911 and March 1913 Harry moved to Derby in the hope of setting up his own business. Although his first known address there was at 95 Gerard Street, by 1915 he was running a bootmaker’s shop at 117 Abbey Street. Bootmaking is a related but distinct trade to cobbling (boot and shoe repair), and it is notable that even at this early stage Harry was showing signs of an enterprising, ambitious streak that would serve him well in the years to come.

Shortly after moving to Derby, Harry had met met a young woman named Ruth Spencer (b. c. February 1895, Greatford, Lincolnshire – d. 20 December 1926, 47 Ryhall Road, Stamford, Lincolnshire). Ruth was the daughter of a platelayer and had grown up in Greatford Gatehouse by the railway lines in a small village in Lincolnshire. Coincidentally or otherwise, by 1911 Ruth was working as a domestic servant at 123 Osmaston Street in the house of Charles Trubshaw, a renowned architect with her father’s employer the Midland Railway Company. It is not clear how Harry and Ruth met but they were married on 23 March 1913 in Christ Church, when they were twenty three and eighteen respectively, and soon afterwards moved in together above Harry’s shop on Abbey Street.

A few months later Ruth became pregnant with twins, who they named Mary and Kathleen, however both died shortly after they were born in early 1914. They tried again for a child the following year, and this time the baby survived. They named their first son George Kenneth Mills (b. 28 September 1915, Derby, Derbyshire – d. 17 1980, Wellington, New Zealand), perhaps after his grandfather. Four years later Ruth gave birth to his little sister Julia Mary Mills (b. 24 July 1914, Derby, Derbyshire – d. 19 September 1993, Derbyshire Royal Infirmary, Derby, Derbyshire), known as Mary in later life, who was my maternal grandmother.

Given Harry’s youth and non-reserved occupation it is curious how he was never conscripted for service in World War I, although exemption on the grounds of a health condition is a possibility. Whatever the reason his business clearly benefitted from the relative lack of competition during the war, as the 1925 edition of Kelly’s Directory shows that by then the family were operating at two premises on Abbey Street, a boot repair shop at number 8 and a wardrobe dealership in Ruth’s name at 117. This picture is backed up by their daughter Mary’s account of her childhood written seventy years later, in which she states that Harry employed one man in the bootmaker’s shop and that the other shop dealt in “[second] hand furniture, kitchenware etc.,”and later expanded into antiques.

At this time the family were not poor but neither were they especially well-off. They lived in a simple terraced house, kept a pig in their back garden and the children received nuts, an orange and a shined-up penny for Christmas. According to Mary, her father Harry, a small balding, bespectacled man, was hard-working but emotionally distant. Ruth was the polar opposite: warm, affectionate and attractive, with the distinctive auburn hair which Mary would pass on to her own daughters. As for her older brother, Mary idolised Ken and used to follow him around wherever he went, but it seems Ken occasionally exploited his sister’s unwavering loyalty for his own amusement. One of Mary’s earliest memories is of throwing a silver coffee pot and jug out of a bedroom window at age four because Ken told her to, and on another occasion he apparently made her dig a hole in the garden and bury her teddy bear in it.

An interesting news story from around this time reveals that despite Mary’s angelic view of her mother, Ruth was actually charged with larceny on 8 August 1920 after finding two rings in Belper River Gardens and “making no reasonable attempt to find the owner or acquaint the caretaker of the premises.” Ruth explained that she had intended to keep them until they were advertised for and “had not thought to mention the finding of the rings, or leave her name and address at the gardens.” The Bench fined her £7 10s., stating that there had been no obligation to go to the police but there might have been a risk of prosecution once she was found out.

Details a charge of larceny made against Ruth Mills after she took two rings from Belper River Gardens. Source: Derby Daily Telegraph, 12 August 1920, 12 August 1920, p. [3], col. 6 (via the British Newspaper Archive).

Ruth’s true intentions that day can never be known, but the story’s publication must have been hugely embarrassing for both her and Harry and could only have contributed to what was by then already a strained relationship. The aforementioned 1925 edition of Kelly’s Directory, which gives Harry and Ruth’s business address as 117 Abbey Street, must have been compiled several years earlier as by 1925 they were no longer living together. According to Mary they had separated when she was about four, which would place the date at around 1922. Of her parents’ separation Mary wrote:

I was too small to wonder…what had caused the break-up of my parents’ marriage. I just remember that I was not really surprised to be in the position I was.

She later came to believe her mother had been involved in an affair, though there is of course no way of verifying this, and her parents’ separation could just as easily have been caused by their seemingly incompatible personalities. It was agreed that Ken would stay with Harry at Abbey Street and Mary would go with Ruth.

Mary and Ruth stayed with a friend named Emma Taylor (known as Aunty Pem) in Sheffield for a few weeks before moving in with Ruth’s sister Annie and brother-in law George Johnson at 47 Ryhall Road in Stamford. Mary lived here with her aunt, uncle and older cousins Reg, Cecil and Mabel, while her mother went to work in a hotel in London. She later recalled her time at Ryhall Road as “a tiny corner of my childhood that was happy” as her adopted family were very loving and treated her well, but we will return to Mary’s maternal family in a future post.

L-R: Aunt Annie Johnson (née Spencer), uncle George Johnson, Julia Mary Mills (in front), aunt Julia Crowe (née Spencer), in front of 47 Ryhall Road, Stamford, 1925.

47 Ryhall Road, Stamford, the house where Ruth and Mary Mills stayed with Annie and George Johnson in the mid-1920s. Photographed c. 2000.

Among Mary’s fondest memories from this time included being crowned May Queen at a carnival in Stamford (an experience ruined somewhat when some jealous girls started chanting “May Queen margarine!”), and playing in her front garden with her school friend Vera Holmes.

The little front garden…was once a place of magic to me, lined down one side with Canterbury Bells all those years ago…we used the bells of the flowers for fairies hats or dolls hats – and I have a distinct feeling that we were probably forbidden to pluck them, thus making the game even more enjoyable. Even so, I was not disobedient with intent! I merely was the sort of child that got carried away with my imagination.

At school Mary was a bright, sporty pupil with a particular love of drawing, reading and writing stories, and she recalled first learning how to form letters by tracing them with her finger in a sand tray. Around this age she also acquired her first (and least favourite!) nickname, ‘Mary Pom-Pom,’ after coming to school wearing a hat with a pom-pom decoration on top.

This happy period was to be cut tragically short however when her mother Ruth fell ill with cervical cancer. Mary recalled a painful conversation shortly before Christmas 1926 with her mother, who had been forced to leave her job due to her declining health and had returned to her sister’s family at Ryhall Road:

I walked into the room and found her crying, and when I asked her why she said “I’m crying because I haven’t a penny to give to you” and I hastily and honestly tried to comfort her by saying “I was only trying to cheer you up!” which was so true that I was distressed that she thought I wanted any money [sic]. It must have been about this time that I said “when you are better mum” we will do something or other, and she said quite calmly and unemotionally that she would never get better as she had something very wrong with her tummy, so possibly preparing me for what was to come a few weeks later.

Ruth died on the twentieth of December 1926 at the age thirty two at Ryhall Road. Her sister Annie was present at the death, and also acted as the informant. She was buried in an un-purchased grave in the non-conformist section of Stamford Cemetery three days later.

After her mother’s death Mary left Stamford and moved in to 40 Heskey Street, Nottingham with her father and brother. She had been estranged from Harry and Ken since she was four so readjusting to this new home must have been hard enough, but to make matters worse her relationship with Harry’s second wife Ethel Irene Morris was to prove an enduringly difficult one. “Aunt” Ethel, a farm labourer’s daughter from Plungar in Leicestershire, was twenty five when she married Harry Mills on 2 June 1928, thirteen years younger than him and thirteen years older than Mary. Ethel seemed to resent Mary’s presence in the home, perhaps because she served as a reminder of Harry’s first wife Ruth, but whatever the reason she treated her more like a servant than a daughter. In stark contrast to her brother Ken who was indulged as the favourite, Mary was only ever seen as a source of cheap labour, and even after winning a scholarship at school she was forbidden from furthering her education because she was a girl. Perhaps the cruellest thing Mary was forced to endure was when Ethel burned all her pictures of her mother, and to this day it is unknown whether any photographs of Ruth Spencer survive.

Notice of Harry Mills’s wedding to Ethel Irene Morris. Source: The Grantham Journal, 9 June 1928, p. 8, col. 4 (via the British Newspaper Archive).

Given this combination of Ethel’s vindictiveness and her father’s apparent complicity or indifference, it is not surprising that Mary left home as soon as soon as she was able at around the age of seventeen. After securing her first job at I.R. Morely’s hosiery factory in Heanor, Derbyshire, she began lodging in the home of her friend and co-worker Hilda Hunter, with whom she would remain close for the rest of her life. On hearing of Mary’s death many years later Hilda wrote a letter of condolence to one of her daughters in which she gave a vivid account of her and Mary’s work and life during this period. Their hours at the factory were “7.30 AM – 1 PM, 2 PM – 5.30 & Sat AM. No tea or coffee breaks & until I was 16 I earned from 10/- – 12/- a wk” (around £20 in today’s money).

We used to go to the pictures – “the Cosy” [Heanor’s Cosy Market] & the Empire…& when we went dancing to the Town Hall in Heanor at the interval Mary & I would rush over to Elliot’s chip shop in Ray St. for tripe – but Mary only ate the crinkled bits so I had all the thick pieces. We occasionally went dancing at Annesley, & Mary would say “leave it to me I’ll get us a lift home,” & she did, you wouldn’t dare do it today. She was a happy person with a laughing smile.

It was said that when she went out dancing Mary was pretty enough to “fetch a duck off water,” and the impression one gets from Hilda’s account and contemporary photographs is that for the first time in almost a decade Mary was truly happy. She was financially independent with an active social life and a good circle of friends, but by far the most significant relationship she would go on to develop during this period was yet to come.

Julia Mary Mills, c. 1935.

L-R: Hilda Hunter and Mary, c. 1935.

The life and family history of my maternal grandfather Frederick England has been discussed elsewhere in this blog (see There’ll always be an England (part 3)). He was born on 23 July 1912 to a Heanor coal miner named Thomas and his wife Maud Ling. His father’s family had lived in Derbyshire for generations, were strongly connected to the area’s major extractive and manufacturing industries and had been active in local politics. His mother’s family by contrast were geographically dispersed and made their living mainly from general dealing and traveling fairgrounds (see Travelling with the Lings (part 4)). From this unlikely union came Fred, who worked as a silk hose finisher at I.R. Morley but was also a talented gymnast with ambitions of becoming a professional. Given that he and Mary worked in the same factory and his best friend at the time was Hilda Hunter’s brother it was perhaps inevitable that their paths would cross at some point. During their courtship they would go to dances together and on one occasion went on a cycling holiday to the seaside on a tandem (although apparently Mary left all the pedalling to Fred). At some point around Christmas 1937 however, Mary became pregnant with Fred’s child, and a few months later they were married in Heanor on 16 April 1938. In recognition of her four-month-old baby bump Mary wore a white dress with a subtle hint of apple, and a Juliet cap beaded with pearls.

Frederick and Julia Mary England (née Mills), photographed the day of their wedding on 16 April 1938 in Fred’s parents’ garden at 98 Hollbrook Street, Heanor.

Article describing the marriage of Frederick England and Julia Mills at Heanor, 16 April 1938. Source: Ripley and Heanor News, 22 April 1938, p. 7, co. 1 (via the British Newspaper Archive).

Following the wedding Mary and Fred moved in with Fred’s parents at 98 Holbrook Street, Heanor. Shortly after Mary gave birth to their daughter  Gillian Maureen England on 23 September 1938 they found a house to rent across the road at number 119.

Had Gillian been born at almost any other point during the twentieth century she could have expected to have been followed within a year or two by a younger brother or sister, but of course just under a year after she was born Britain declared war on Germany, and any hopes Mary and Fred may have had of settling down and having more children were quickly dashed. Among his five brothers Fred was the only one at this point to have started a family, but unfortunately he was also the only one of fighting age working in a non-protected industry and was drafted into military service in 1940. He joined the local tank regiment the 9^th Lancers as a trooper and after training was sent to Egypt as part of the 1^st Armoured Division in General Montgomery’s famous 8^th Army.

While Fred was away fighting, Mary was left to raise their one year old daughter Gillian by herself. Thanks to Fred’s large extended family though she had a strong support network, and during the height of the blitz she even welcomed several evacuees into her home at the age of only twenty two (after they had been thoroughly de-loused of course). Local businesses like I.R. Morley were adapted to manufacturing parachutes for the war effort but the lack of heavy industry in the Heanor area meant the threat of German air raids was relatively low (aside from the odd stray bomb on its way to Derby’s Rolls Royce factory where Fred’s brother Ken worked). Despite her husband’s absence Mary’s memories of the war years would be largely happy ones of her and Gillian surrounded by loved ones, who were brought closer together through their shared struggle.

This neighbourly spirit even led to a brief reconciliation with her father Harry, who by this point was running the Greendale Oak inn in Cuckney, Nottinghamshire, and whose business was booming by 1944 thanks to the large number of American G.I.s stationed nearby. Harry was first recorded as a publican at the Coach & Horses in Billinghay in the 1939 register (which also mentioned that he was a sergeant, perhaps in the Home Guard), and by 16 February 1940 he had been promoted to manager of the Hurt Arms in Ambergate, which was owned by the same brewer. By all accounts he was a very shrewd businessman. His sister Nell even recalled visiting him with her family at the Greendale Oak during the War and being rather affronted when Harry asked them to pay for their drinks. His ascent up the social ladder is evident from his membership of the the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes fraternal society, for whom he was reported to be the “Retiring Provincial Grand Primo for South Lincolshire”  (Lincolnshire Standard and Boston Guardian, 6 January 1940). Later in life he was also said to have been a member of the Freemasons.

The Coach & Horses, Billinghay.

The Hurt Arms Hotel, Ambergate.

The Greendale Oak, Cuckney.

After the war there was to be no easy return to the way things had been for Fred and Mary. Fred, shell-shocked by his experiences struggled to readjust to civilian life, and for Mary there would remain a sense that the gentle man she had fallen in love with had been brutalised, as Mary’s friend Hilda wrote many years later:

I remember your mum saying Fred wasn’t the fellow you knew after the war – but it changed all the young men, they went through so much, & to our generation it is still in our minds.

Their relationship would gradually recover over the next twelve months, and 1946 was to be a pivotal year for them in more ways than one. Not only did it see the birth to their second daughter, but a few months after this they were granted a mortgage loan of £700 for their house at 119 Holbrook Street. The approval of this loan, worth around £18,165 in today’s money, is the first indication of Mary and Fred’s steadily improving financial situation during the late forties and fifties. After the war Fred had intended to retrain as a P.E. teacher, however he instead took a job as a dyer at Aristoc, another hosiery manufacturer based in Langley. After a time he was promoted to foreman and eventually gained managerial position which paid well enough to enable the family to move into a larger detached house at 34 Crosshill in Codnor, Derbyshire. Their new house was purchased on 16 May 1959 for the cost of £2000, about £30,000 in today’s money, and both Mary and Fred would remain here for the rest of their lives.

As was common among women of her generation, Mary had left work after getting married to become a full-time mother (her third daughter having arrived in June 1953). Like Ruth before her, Mary is remembered as being a very affectionate, loving mother who always put her children first. Perhaps as a result of her father and step-mother’s dismissive attitude to her own education, she always encouraged her daughters to work hard at school and pursue fulfilling careers. In time her three daughters would grow into assertive, confident, professional young women. Seeing her daughters leave home and establish careers would in turn encourage Mary to re-enter the world of work. Aside from a brief stint working as a meal supervisor at Loscoe Road Infants’ School Mary had not been in paid employment since giving birth to Gillian in 1938, but after attending a number of Red Cross classes she decided to retrain as an occupational nurse. In about 1966 she took an industrial nursing course at Nottingham General Hospital before going on to work as a factory nurse at Burnham spring works and Tinsley Wire Ltd. until her retirement in around 1974.

Julia Mary Mills’s retirement, c. 1974.

The mid-to-late sixties was to be a period of significant change for Mary both professionally and personally. Not only was she establishing a career for herself for the first time in thirty years, but she was also starting to rekindle a relationship with her estranged family. It began in 1963 with a visit from her brother Ken, who after serving as an army cook in the war had emigrated to New Zealand and started a family of his own. During the visit he convinced Mary that if she did not make peace with their father now, she might never get the chance again as by this point Harry was already in his seventies.

Mary and her father had never been close, but following an argument between Harry and Fred in around 1952 they had not spoken in more than a decade by the time of Ken’s visit. At Ken’s prompting therefore, Mary took Fred and her two youngest daughters to the Station Hotel in Worksop which Harry and Ethel were running at the time, and from that point onwards she did manage to maintain a civil relationship of sorts with her father. Even when Harry and Ethel lost most of their money from their hotel business in the mid-sixties, Fred and Mary graciously helped re-home them in a terraced house in Heanor. Harry died in early 1968, and Ethel on 19 November 1981. Although Mary had been the one to rehouse her and even arrange her funeral, the entirety of Ethel’s £20,015 inheritance passed to her brother Ken.

L-R: George Kenneth Mills, his uncle John George “Jack” Mills, and father Harry Mills, possibly taken during Ken’s visit to England c. 1963. Courtesy of T. Lang.

Since retiring together in 1974 Mary and Fred had been enjoying their free time together, finally unencumbered by work or child-caring responsibilities. That was all to change quite unexpectedly one day when Fred was crossing the road on the way back from the local garage and was struck by a severe heart attack. He died on 24 September 1980 at the age of only sixty eight. The sudden loss of her husband deeply affected Mary, and for at least two years she was quite inconsolable. It was only the birth of her third granddaughter in 1982 which eventually brought her out of this depression and provided her with a renewed sense of purpose. In her later years she also felt more free to develop her own opinions and interests, and there is no question that Mary became a far more independent and assertive woman than she had been in her youth. For example, ever since Fred had become a manager at Aristoc Mary had voted Conservative in accordance with her husband’s wishes. After Fred died however her views shifted dramatically to the left to the point where she could not see Margaret Thatcher on the television without declaring “if she came up Crosshill I’d kill her,” and she was overjoyed on witnessing Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. She also rediscovered her love of drawing, painting, gardening and needlework, skills she would enjoy passing on to her grandchildren.

This is the woman I knew growing up. Among my earliest and happiest memories are of going to visit my ‘Gaga’ at Crosshill with my family at least once a week, playing in the garden or sitting in the big armchair with her learning how to paint. She was always smiling and laughing and was never stern in the least. Even in her final days, when I visited her in the hospital and remarked that her respirator mask made her look like an elephant she seemed to find this greatly amusing. Sadly Mary would spend the greater part of her final years in and out of hospital owing to various illnesses. She eventually died in Derby Hospital on 19 September 1993 at the age of seventy five. The huge collection of heartfelt commemoration cards which have survived stand as testament to the number of lives she touched over the years. Although not a believer in an afterlife herself, I think she would definitely have appreciated the following words from my mother’s friend:

I’m sure she’ll be alright…I bet right now she’s fluttering her eyelashes & looking for a big pan to make everyone some piccalilli!!

Today her descendants include her two youngest daughters, plus four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and her brother Ken has living descendants in New Zealand. On 29 July he had married Marjorie Bradshaw in Billinghay, with whom he had one daughter. They appear to have lived at various places including Christchurch and Wellington up to the 1970s and he died on 17 March 1980. Members of the wider Mills family can be found all over the UK and beyond, and several have been generous enough to provide me with images and anecdotes for this blog. In the next series of posts I will be looking at the ancestry of Mary’s mother, Ruth.

Julia Mary England (née Mills) and unidentified friend, c. 1942.

Julia Mary England (née Mills) and her daughter Gillian, c. 1942.

Sources

Mason, Sheila A. “Black Lead and Bleaching: The Nottingham Lace Industry.” BBC website. Accessed 20 March 2019. http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/work/england/nottingham/article_2.shtml.

Russell, Dave. Popular Music in England, 1840-1914: A Social History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Going through the Mills (part 4)

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my maternal grandmother’s family, the Millses. This installment follows the lives of her grandfather George Mills and his siblings. For information on the preceding generation see Going through the Mills (part 3).

* * *

Of the five children Reuben and Charlotte Mills had between 1862 and 1877, only three are known to have survived into adulthood. Their two daughters Ellen (b. c. 1865, Codnor, Derbyshire) and Elizabeth (b. c. 1870, Codnor, Derbyshire) appear on just one census each (1871 and 1881 respectively) suggesting they both died in childhood. Their second son however, William H. Mills (b. c. November 1866, Codnor, Derbyshire), appears in every census between 1871 and 1911, meaning we can say rather more about his life.

Aged fifteen William was recorded working as a farm servant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, the same occupation his father held as a young man. A report in The Grantham Journal however reveals that by 1888 William had moved to Saxby in Leicestershire, where he was employed as a cowman by a farmer named Mr. Rose (12 May 1888, p. 8, col. 8). The report in question was from the Melton Mowbray petty sessions, and recounted an incident where William was accused of stealing “two fronts and collars, and one shirt, valued 4 d, the property of John Ashwell, farm pupil” of the same household. During the trial it was argued there was no direct evidence of William’s guilt, and that there were in fact several others in the house who could have taken the items. In addition his parents Reuben and Charlotte said he “had been out to service eleven years, and had never been discharged from a situation…had always borne a good character and was a dutiful son”. Despite these protestations he was found guilty, fined “£1 and costs, or fourteen days’ imprisonment with hard labour”.

Whatever the truth behind the accusations, it is unsurprising to find that by the following census in 1891 William was recorded living back at home with his parents in Kegworth, Leicestershire, where he had taken on the slightly less prestigious role of an ‘agricultural labourer.’ By this time he also appears to have met and married his wife Elizabeth, but so far no marriage record has been uncovered and her original surname remains unknown. Ten years later, with his life seemingly back on track, the 1901 census shows William employed as a ‘stockman’ (cattle specialist) on a farm in Toton near Nottingham, where he and Elizabeth were living with their five children. By his final census appearance in 1911 however, he was back living in Kegworth and working as a plumber. The reasons for this rather abrupt career change in his forties may never be discerned but regardless, this is the final identifiable appearance of William in the historical record.

William’s younger brother John Thomas Mills (b. c. October 1877, Underwood, Nottinghamshire), Reuben and Charlotte’s youngest son, begun his working life as a ‘rod buffer’ in Kegworth according to the 1891 census. Quite what this occupation entailed is unclear, however it may have had something related to agricultural drainage. By 1901 however, John Thomas had found employment as a footman in the service of the wealthy Lancashire quarry and colliery owner William Brooks, Second Baron Crawshaw of Crawshaw Hall. As the household’s only footman he would have reported directly to the butler, and his work would have involved a mix of domestic duties such as waiting at table, attending the door, cleaning silver, and perhaps acting as a valet. A good contemporary description of a footman’s daily routine can be found in Mrs Beeton’sThe Book of Household Management(Beeton, 1907, 1764-1766).

Crawshaw Hall, Rawtenstall, c. 1880, where John Thomas Mills served as a footman to the wealthy quarry and colliery owner William Brooks in 1901 (via CrawshawHall.co.uk).

Valued highly as status symbols in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, footmen were often tall, good looking and athletic young men whose function was as ornamental as it was practical. Perhaps because of this, footmen were sometimes denied the respect they deserved. The master of the house would typically call all footmen by a generic name (e.g. ‘William’) to avoid having to learn a new name each time a man was hired. In addition, by the early 1900s domestic service was beginning to be seen as a somewhat ‘unmanly’ occupation due to the growing number of female household servants in the late Nineteenth Century (Lethbridge, 2013, 46-47). Despite this social stigma John Thomas continued working as a footman until at least 1911, when at the age of thirty four he was recorded living back in Kegworth in the employ of a local clergyman named Henry Major Stephenson.

The Rectory at Kegworth, where John Thomas Mills was employed by the clergyman Henry Major Stephenson (via Fretwelliana).

Unidentified footman, c. 1905, wearing the distinctive livery of the period which indicated his status (via Servants’ Stories).

By the time he was thirty eight however, there is evidence John Thomas had left domestic service and had begun working as a labourer in Derby, where he lived at 97 Shaftesbury Crescent. This evidence comes from his army service record, which tells us that on 19 November 1915 he had enlisted as a private in the 16th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment. The timing is especially poignant given that his mother Charlotte had died the previous day in Kegworth Union Workhouse, and his father Reuben, who he gave as his next-of-kin, would also be gone within four days.

His service record also attests that he was 5’5 1/2″ tall (average for the time, but relatively short for a footman), and that he had initially been relegated to the army reserve. On 19 March 1917 however he was mobilised and a week later was posted to Beaumarais in south-west Germany. Over next few months he was attached to a succession of different regiments, as the war’s rising death toll forced shrinking regiments to merge and reorganise. On 14 April he was transferred to the 25th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry (7th Labour Battalion), then on 30 April to the 4th Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment (L Company), and then the Labour Corps on 14 May. A few days later, on 25 May he returned to his original regiment, the 16th (transport workers) Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, and on 16 June was transferred one last time to the 1st Battalion of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment.

The number and type of regiments to which John Thomas was assigned suggests he may have served mostly in non-combatant roles, providing labour to build and maintain the army’s transport and communications infrastructure when and wherever this was required. These roles, typically filled by older or less physically able recruits like John Thomas, were not without risks however. On 31 January 1918 he was diagnosed with ‘myalgia’, a form of chronic muscle pain, and was evacuated to England a few days later. According to his army pension record, his condition was attributed to his service, which entitled him to a 20% bonus to his weekly pension (total 5s 6d). His pension record also records his last known address as 3 Trenville Avenue, Fulham Road, Sparkhill, just south of Birmingham. He appears never to have married or had any children, and it is currently unknown when or where he died.

* * *

Like his younger brothers William and John Thomas, my great-great-grandfather George Mills was recorded in the 1881 census living at his parents’ home in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire. As we saw in the previous post, he was born at Langar Lodge on 9 April 1862, and had moved with his parents to Codnor, then Underwood. In the 1881 census he was listed as a farm servant, but by 1884 was working as an agricultural labourer in the nearby village of Kegworth, just over the Leicestershire border. This we know from his marriage certificate, which tells us that at the age of twenty one, on 10 March that year he married a eighteen year old local dressmaker named Frances “Fanny” Hardy Oldershaw.

Born in Kegworth on 4 June 1863, Fanny’s birth certificate recorded no father, and confirms she had actually been born Frances Hardy. She would not take the name Oldershaw name until her mother, a seamstress named Millicent Hardy (b. c. 1837, Kegworth, Leicestershire), married framework knitter Joseph Oldershaw (b. c. 1833, Kegworth, Leicestershire) on Christmas Day the following year. They would go on to have at least six children together, however Joseph appears to have been a far from perfect father or husband. At age twenty he was charged with assaulting a woman named Lydia Hudson following a quarrel between two children (Leicestershire Mercury, 15 October 1853), and four years later was fined 5s. and costs (or six hours in the stocks) for being drunk and disorderly (Leicestershire Mercury, 7 November 1857). During the incident the arresting officer PC Butterworth claimed Joseph “threatened to knock his brains out with the poker”. Years later Given he was given “a school attendance order in respect of four of his children for whom he neglected to provide sufficient elementary instruction,” most likely referring to his four youngest (The Derby Mercury, 29 October 1879). There are even two accounts of him being drunk and disorderly in his sixties (Leicester Chronicle, 1 September 1894 and 6 November 1897), the latter of which notes he had been convicted on several occassions. In the 1901 census he is recorded as being in receipt of parish pay, and he and Millicent were no longer living together. Joseph died a year later, and Millicent followed six years later on 18 December 1908.

A chaotic home life and an unpredictable step-father could partly explain why Fanny and George chose to get married in Langar, George’s Nottinghamshire birthplace, even though they were both living in Kegworth at the time. It was also likely chosen because it was a discreet distance away from both Fanny and George’s families. As Fanny was under twenty one at the time the couple would have required her parents’ permission to marry, and perhaps this was an attempt to get around that.

Is it possible to guess why her parents may have refused to support the marriage? A birth certificate for a girl named Minnie Hardy Oldershaw registered the previous year may provide a clue. This certificate confirms that on 12 July 1883 Fanny had given birth to a baby girl in Kegworth, eight months before her marriage to George. Perhaps when her pregnancy became public knowledge her parents shunned her and refused to have anything to do with the baby? As Fanny was unmarried at the time, no father’s name was recorded on her daughter’s birth certificate, but when Minnie sadly passed away from measles and capillary bronchitis on 25 November 1886 her father was named as ‘George Oldershaw’. This appears to be a false name given by George Mills, the informant, in an attempt to pass off Minnie as his legitimate daughter. Whether or not he had also been her biological father all along we can only speculate.

Tragedy was to strike the family twice in late 1886, for not only did they lose Minnie but also their second daughter, one-year-old Ellen Elizabeth Mills. Ellen’s cause of death has not yet been ascertained but it seems plausible she could have been carried off by the same measles outbreak which took her older sister. George and Fanny’s third child John George “Jack” Mills would have been just a few months old at the time, but fortunately he is known to have survived to adulthood, as did all six of his younger brothers and sisters. The Mills children were all born in Kegworth and grew up in the same family home near the hermitage at 17 Loughborough Road (later called London Road). Their names were:

• Ellen Elizabeth (b. c. February 1885, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. c. November 1886, Kegworth, Leiecestershire)
• John George “Jack” (b. 13 November 1886, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. 11 September 1963, Leicestershire)
• Alfred William “Fred” (b. c. February 1888, Kegworth, Leicestershire)
• Harry (b. 7 October 1889, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. c. February 1968, Heanor, Derbyshire)
• Edith Ellen “Nell” (b. 8 February 1891, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. 27 April 1960, 51 Holly Street, Lincoln, Lincolnshire)
• Alice (b. 12 March 1893, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. 3 February 1961, Long Eaton, Derbyshire)
• Frances Harriet (b. 22 April 1895, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. c. February 1982, Ilkeston, Derbyshire)
• Elizabeth Ann “Lizzie” (b. 9 December 1899, Kegworth, Leicestershire – d. 8 January 1979, Bilborough, Nottinghamshire)

The two photographs below from around 1888 and 1894 show Fanny with some of her and George’s children. In the first, she is shown with Jack and Fred in black clothing, which could have been mourning attire for her daughters Minnie and Ellen. Rather poignantly, the dresses her sons are shown wearing had probably belonged to their older sisters before being handed down to them (the tradition of dressing of young boys in dresses had always been one borne of economic necessity, rather than a conscious fashion choice). It is a posed, studio photograph, perhaps taken to commemorate Fred’s christening. The second more informal photograph was probably taken outside the family home and shows her with Jack, Nell, Alice, Fred, and my great-grandfather Harry Mills.

L-R: Jack, Fanny, and Fred Mills, c. 1888. Courtesy of R. Watkins.

L-R: Jack, Nell, Fanny, Alice, Fred, and Harry Mills, Kegworth, c. 1894. Courtesy of R. Watkins.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s George had continued supporting the family working as an agricultural labourer, but by 1901 he had found employment at a plaster and cement mill works, most likely the one owned by the Winser family which stood over the river at the bottom of Mill Lane. The map below shows its location on the eastern edge of the village, as well as the Millses’ home on London Road to the south.

1901 6″ OS map of Kegworth (via National Library of Scotland).

By 1911 George was once again working as a farm labourer. At around this time, according to one of his descendants, he is said to have had his picture featured in a local newspaper after preventing a bank robbery. He was apparently on his way to fetch Dr. Bedford for his daughter Lizzie when he saw two men attempting to break into Westminster Bank. He quickly went off to find a policeman who lived nearby and the robbery was stopped in time. After all their children left home George and Fanny moved into in a house opposite the cinema on Derby Road, where they lived until Fanny’s death at the age of sixty seven on 26 August 1930. The official cause of death was a carcinoma of the liver, and her daughter Elizabeth was the informant.

L-R: Unknown, Fanny Mills, unknown, George Mills, c. 1930. Image courtesy of R. Watkins.

Following his wife’s death, George moved in with his daughter Alice and her husband Thomas Alfred “Alvy” Wilmot, who are recorded living at 220 Tamworth Road, Long Eaton in the 1939 register. He remained in Long Eaton for the rest of his life, and his last known address was 16 Hawthorne Avenue. Two days before Christmas 1950, at the age of eighty eight he died in Shardlow hospital of broncho-pneumonia, cerebral thrombosis and a carcinoma of the rectum. He was buried alongside his wife Fanny in Kegworth Parish churchyard.

Memorial headstone of Fanny and George Mills, their daughter Elizabeth Ann and her husband Frederick Steel, Kegworth, c. 2010. Image courtesy of T. Lang.

In the fifth and final post in this series we will look at what happened to George and Fanny’s children, before focusing specifically on my great-grandfather Harry, his wife Ruth Spencer, and my grandmother Julia Mary Mills.

Sources

Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of household management : a guide to cookery in all branches, daily duties, mistress & servant, hostess & guest, marketing, trussing and carving, menu making, home doctor, sick nursing, the nursery, home lawyer. London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1907

Lethbridge, Lucy. Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Going through the Mills (part 3)

This is the third in a series of posts about the Mills family, the direct male-line ancestors of my maternal grandmother Julia Mary Mills. In this part I trace the stories of her great-grandfather Reuben’s generation who lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

* * *

The children of John and Elizabeth Mills were among the first members of their family to abandon their ancestors’ rural way of life in search of work in the towns. In the previous post I speculated that this may have been a consequence of the Great Depression of British Agriculture which began in 1873, but the census shows that at least two of the Mills children left their parents’ home in Sutton Bonington in the 1860s, a time of relative prosperity. There could be a more local explanation however, as at around this time their landlord’s manor at West Leake had been put up sale (East Leake & District Local History Group, 2001, 8) and the threat of change would have led to a general unease among the agricultural workforce.

The first to leave was John and Elizabeth’s eldest son Thomas Mills (b. c. March 1830, West Leake, Nottinghamshire), who had already moved to Codnor in Derbyshire by 1861. That year’s census records him and his wife Elizabeth (née Hywood) living there with their two children George and Emma on Jessop Street, and Thomas’s occupation was given as ‘labourer on coal field’. Although the fact that Thomas’s wife hailed from Bolsover probably explains how the family ended up in Derbyshire, his occupation suggests the area’s well-established coal mining industry was another likely attraction.

So-called open-pit mining had been in operation at Codnor since at least the fifteenth century, but as Stuart Saint explains:

It wasn’t until the Butterley Company was established in 1790 that mining in the area began to get more advanced. The company invested huge amounts of money into mines that penetrated the coal and ironstone seams deeper than ever before. The local community grew from a small agricultural based workforce to a rapidly growing industrial one. The increasing population needed more housing and many of the streets in Codnor did not exist until the mid 1800s, when they were built to accommodate hundreds of workers needed for the many mines in the area.

One of these streets was Jessop Street, built in around 1860 and named for William Jessop, one of the Butterley Company’s founders, where Thomas and his family lived until at least 1881.

Jessop Street, 1906 (via The Codnor & Disctrict Local History & Heritage Website).

By that year’s census Thomas was recorded as an ‘iron worker’, so it is likely he had begun working at the Butterley Company’s vast ironworks just north of Ripley. Although the company was one of the most distinguished engineering firms in the country, and had been responsible for such innovations as the great arched train shed at St Pancras Station, they would nonetheless face calls from their employees to improve pay and working conditions later in the century. These calls were initially fiercely resisted by the company, who fired eleven workers in 1874 for their role in a strike over pay, although no official charges were ever brought. Thomas was not among those who lost his job as a result of the strike, however given his union activity later in life (more of which later) it seems plausible he could have participated in it.

Thomas Mills’s co-workers at the Butterley Company, who were refused work in 1874 for taking part in strike action (via Healey Hero).

Like any under-regulated nineteenth century workplace, the Butterley ironworks would also have been an incredibly dangerous place to earn a living, especially for men like Thomas who were forced to work well into old age. On Thursday 23 January 1890, Thomas, by then almost sixty, accidentally dropped a heavy iron plate he had been picking up, which fell and crushed one of his legs. Upon his arrival at Derby Infirmary the doctors were forced to amputate the smashed limb.

‘Serious Accident at Butterley Ironworks’. Description of Thomas Mills’s accident which inaccurately gives his age as sixty eight. He is also said to be living on Nottingham Road by this point, the same address he would give in the next three censuses. Source: The Derby Daily Telegraph, 24 January 1890, p. 2, col. 6 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Fortunately Thomas survived the procedure, and the following year’s census shows he had already found work as a general labourer, one would hope with the assistance of a new wooden leg. Ten years later in 1901 he was recorded as a ‘head furnace weighman’ at the ironworks, a more prestigious but less physically demanding role better suited to a seventy one year old amputee. His work here would have involved leading the team who checked, weighed and recorded the coke and iron ore being charged into the blast furnace. A unique insight into the lives of the Butterley Company’s workforce at this time can be gained from this rare footage from 6 October 1900, which shows workers leaving the ironworks at the end of a long day’s work.

At some point before 1911 it appears Thomas returned to the coal mining industry, as in that year’s census his occupation was given as ‘colliery checkweighman (above ground) previously’ (i.e. recently retired). This job, while similar to what he had been doing at the ironworks, differed in that he would have been working not for the enrichment of the Butterley Company but for the benefit of his co-workers through their union, the Derbyshire Miners’ Association. At this time miners were paid by the amount of coal produced, so it was important the weights recorded were accurate. Two weighmen were therefore employed, one working on behalf of the company, and a trade union representative (a ‘checkweighman’) elected by the miners to verify his findings. The photograph below taken at Denby colliery in 1898 shows the type of weighing machine Thomas would have used on a daily basis. Note also the elderly one-legged man on the right. As Denby colliery was situated only about an hour’s walk from Thomas’s home on Nottingham Road, it is tempting to think the man in the picture could be him, even though the census suggests he was still working at the ironworks at the time.

A pit top weighing machine at Denby Colliery, Derbyshire, in 1898 (via Picture The Past).

It is interesting to compare Thomas’s story to that of Thomas England (see There’ll Always Be An England (Part 2)), whose grandson Frederick would go on to marry Thomas Mills’s great-grandniece, my grandmother Mary, in 1938. Not only did both men survive potentially fatal accidents at work, but as a result both ended up as  colliery weighmen instead of manual workers. Unlike Thomas England though, Thomas Mills’s accident happened near the end rather than at the beginning of his working life, which perhaps explains why his career did not benefit to quite the same extent. He died in the last quarter of 1914 at the age of eighty four.

It is unclear what happened to John and Elizabeth Mills’s second son Charles (b. c. 1833, Sutton Bonington, Nottinghamshire). Oddly, there is a baptism record for him from 8 June 1845 at Sutton Bonington, when he would have been around twelve, but after that we can only speculate. Charles’s baptism appears to have been a joint ceremony with his younger brothers Reuben (b. c. December 1835, West Leake, Nottinghamshire) and John Jr. (b. c. June 1845). Reuben we will return to shortly, but John Jr. is another son whose later life is a mystery.

We know a little more about their younger brother, John and Elizabeth’s last child Robert Mills (bp. 11 October 1849, Sutton Bonington, Nottinghamshire). Born almost twenty years after their eldest, by the time he was twenty one Robert was still living at his parents’ house but working as a labourer at an iron foundry. Six years later he married Charlotte Musson, another Derbyshire girl from Heanor, on 18 December 1877. The next census shows that by 1881 they had left Sutton Bonington and moved to Leake Road in nearby Normanton on Soar. It also shows that Robert had begun working as an agricultural labourer, an occupation he would still hold ten years later, and that Charlotte was employed as a hosiery seamer. The final census on which Robert appears records that by 1891 his family had moved back to Sutton Bonington where they lived at Rectory Farm, a short distance away from where he had grown up at Pit House. Robert died at the age of only forty nine and was buried on 1 September 1899 at West Leake. Over the course if their marriage he and Charlotte had twelve children together, and after Robert’s death many of them went with their mother when she returned to Heanor to work as a charwoman.

1901 25″ OS map showing the locations Pit House and Rectory Farm in Sutton Bonington, where Robert Mills lived in 1871 and 1891 respectively (via National Library of Scotland).

* * *

We return now finally to Rueben Mills, John and Elizabeth’s third son and my grandmother’s great-grandfather. Like his brothers, Reuben grew up at Pit House in Sutton Bonington, but by the time he was sixteen he was working as a farm servant for a  widow named Rebecca Oakley in Wilford. According to the 1851 census, Oakley’s farm covered thirty acres and employed three other servants (two domestics and a charwoman). Farm servants like Reuben differed from agricultural labourers in that they typically lived in the farmer’s house and received board as part of their pay. As a result, they were considered to be “just a little further up in the pecking order” according to Crawford MacKeand (2002):

If single, he “lived-in” and bed and board were part of the contract for hire, and if married, he was provided with a house or a cottage, with possibly some grazing rights or strip of land to use and some provisions for the family. Cash wages were maybe less than 40% of total income. Hiring could be a continuation of existing employment or a new contract established at a “hiring fair”, and was normally for a one year period, or at least six months.

[…]

In some areas the Farm Servant was also known as a “confined man” and this was a desirable status to be aimed at. He, almost always he, was skilled typically in horse or other livestock care…and was therefore employed continuously year round…The Agricultural Laborer on the other hand was paid day wages, hired on a short term as and when work was needed, and therefore much more characteristic of arable farming, for planting, hoeing, reaping etc. He or she was given no accommodation, often operated as part of a gang under a contractor, and received only wages.

It it may be hard for those familiar with Wilford as a Nottingham suburb to imagine it populated with farm servants and agricultural labourers, but in the mid-nineteenth century it still retained much of its original rural character. It is possible to get an idea of what the village looked like in Reuben’s day from the surprising number of Victorian oil paintings of it. Writing in 1914 Robert Mellors even noted that “Wilford has the honour of being the most painted, and best illustrated village in the county”, and that there were several paintings referring to it at the Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery:

There is a view of the Trent, shewing the church, ford, etc., painted by Thomas Barber, about 1840; a view at Wilford from the Trent, “Looking to the Castle,” by Benjamin Shipham; “Wilford Ferry” (The Cherry Eatings) about 1858, by John Holland, Junr, shows a boat being towed over, full of passengers, while a crowd of ladies wearing crinolines, and gentlemen top hats, are waiting their turn. The vendors of cherries are doing a busy trade.

The three paintings described by Mellors can be seen below, and more can be browsed via the Culture Grid website.

“View At Wilford, Nottingham” by Benjamin Shipman, c. 1830. Source: Nottingham City Museums and Galleries (via Culture Grid).

“Wilford Ferry, Nottingham (The Cherry-Eatings)” by John Holland, 1858. Source: Nottingham City Museums and Galleries (via Culture Grid).

“Wilford Ferry, Nottingham (The Cherry-Eatings)” by John Holland, 1858. Source: Nottingham City Museums and Galleries (via Culture Grid).

Reuben did not settle permanently in Wilford however. By April 1861 he had moved back in with his parents at Sutton Bonington, and that year’s census records his occupation as ‘agricultural labourer’, suggesting something of a downturn in his fortunes. This would prove to be a temporary state of affairs though, as by November he was once again working as a farm servant twenty two miles away at Langar Lodge. Soon after he would be joined there by his new wife Charlotte (née Wilcox), who he married on 25 November 1861 at St Helena’s church in West Leake.

Charlotte was the third daughter of an agricultural labourer named Thomas Wilcox (b. 1797, Beeston, Nottinghamshire – d. c. February 1872, Nottinghamshire) and his wife Mary Attawell (b. 27 June 1799, Bradmore, Nottinghamshire – d. 1862, Stanton On The Wolds, Nottinghamshire). She was born on 2 May 1840 in the village of Stanton On The Wolds, Nottinghamshire, and in 1861 had been working as a domestic servant for a farmer named Thomas Hardy on Main Street, West Leake. As Reuben would have been living only half a mile away at the time it is unsurprising that the two of them eventually crossed paths, they may have even shared the same employer. Whatever the circumstances of their first encounter, sometime around August 1861 Charlotte became pregnant with Reuben’s child, and six months after their wedding she gave birth at Langar Lodge on 9 April 1862. The boy who was christened George Mills on 11 May that year was my great-great-grandfather.

Langar Lodge, where Charlotte gave birth to her and Reuben’s son George in 1862 (via Little Langar Lodge).

Shortly after their son’s birth Reuben and Charlotte left Nottinghamshire and rural life altogether to settle in Codnor, where Reuben’s brother Thomas’s family had moved a few years earlier. The 1871 census records both families living on Jessop Street just eight houses apart, and like his brother Reuben’s first job here was at the local colliery. There he worked as a banksman, which involved directing the loading and unloading of the cage that carried men from the top of the pit down to the coal face below.

The family stayed in Codnor for at least six years, during which time they had the following three more children:

• Ellen (b. c. 1865, Codnor, Derbyshire)
• William H. (b. c. November 1866, Codnor, Derbyshire)
• Elizabeth (b. c. 1870, Codnor, Derbyshire)

At some point before 1877 they moved back across the county border to Underwood in Nottinghamshire, another mining village, where they had their fifth and last child:

• John Thomas (b. c. October 1877, Underwood, Nottinghamshire)

Unlike his brother Thomas however, Reuben would not stay in the coal industry for long. The 1881 census shows that by then he had returned to farming, and that his family had resettled in Ratcliffe-on-Soar near where he grew up. Of Reuben and Charlotte’s children, sadly only George, William, Elizabeth and John Thomas were living with them at this point, suggesting their eldest daughter Ellen may have died. Their oldest sons George and William, then eighteen and fourteen, had started work as farm servants, while Reuben was once again an agricultural labourer, an occupation he would continue to hold for the rest of his life.

Sometime before the next census in 1891 Reuben and Charlotte moved for the fourth and final time  to Kegworth in Leicestershire, where they lived on Nottingham Road. Their eldest son George had moved here a few years earlier, and many of their descendants would continue to live here well into the twentieth and even twenty first centuries. By this time all Reuben and Charlotte’s children except William and John Thomas had moved out, so they had been obliged to take in a lodger, a plumber and gas fitter named William Smart who was still living with them in 1901 and 1911.

Nottingham Road in Kegworth, where the Millses lived from the 1890s to the 1910s (via Kegworth Village).

Charlotte and Reuben died within just five days of each other on 18 and 23 November 1915 respectively. Charlotte’s cause of death at the age of seventy five was given as ‘old age [and] myocardial degeneration’, and Reuben apparently succumbed to ‘senile decay’ aged seventy nine. While Reuben died at the family home on London Road, sadly Charlotte’s last recorded address was the Shardlow Union Infirmary and Workhouse, suggesting she may have been unwell for some time.

The informant on Reuben Mills’s death certificate was his daughter-in-law Fanny Mills, who was also present at the death. Fanny was the wife of Reuben’s first son George and my great-great-grandmother, and I will be looking at this next generation of Millses in the next post.

 

Sources

East Leake & District Local History Group. 200 Years of Basketmaking in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, West Leake and East Leake, Nottinghamshire. East Leake: East Leake and District Local History Society, 2001.

MacKeand, Crawford. “Farm Servants and Agricultural Laborers”. The Wigtownshire Pages. 2002. Accessed 24 March, 2017. http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ainsty/articles/profession/aglab.html.

Mellors, Robert. “Wilford: Then and Now.” Nottinghamshire History. 2010. Accessed 26 March, 2017. http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/articles/mellorsarticles/wilford6.htm.

Saint, Stuart. “Mining.” Codnor & District Local History & Heritage Website. Accessed 9 March, 2017. http://www.codnor.info/mining.php.