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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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).

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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.

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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.

Halls that echo still (part 3)

This is the much-delayed, third and last installment in my series of posts on the Halls, the maternal ancestors of my grandfather Frederick England’s mother Maud Ling. In it I will be focusing on the children of Charles Buxton (1826-1903) and Miriam Hall (1833-1910) of Alfreton, including William, John Samuel, Emma Elizabeth, Rose Ellen, Frederick Charles, George Henry and Alfred Buxton, as well as Maud Ling’s mother Mary Ann Hall. For the history of the Hall and Buxton families up to this point see Halls that echo still parts one and two.

* * *

By the time Charles and Miriam Buxton died in 1903 and 1910 respectively, their surviving children had all established careers and families of their own. Although the Devonshire Arms inn passed out of the family’s hands shortly after Charles’s death (by 1911 it was under the management of Joseph Shearman), a number of his children appear to have followed him into the fish, fruit and grocery trade. The first to do so was his eldest son William Buxton (b. 24 September 1856, Alfreton, Derbyshire), who by 1881 had opened a fruiterer’s shop at 27 King Street, a few minutes up the road from the Devonshire Arms. That year’s census records him living with his wife Eliza (née Bent), with whom he went on to have seven children before her death in 1899. On later censuses William was shown working as a ‘fruit hawker’ in Brampton in 1891, and then at Chesterfield ten years later, where he was living with five of his children at 117 Chatsworth Road.

‘A Fruit Hawker’, c. 1900, London (via Old Photos UK).

The dates and locations may be significant here, for as we saw in Travelling with the Lings (part 3), several members of the Ling family were also working as hawkers in Brampton and Chesterfield in those same census years. William would undoubtedly have known the Lings through his older sister Mary Ann, who had married John Ling in 1871, but his proximity to them over such a long period suggests there may have been a history of personal and business connections between the two families which the census only hints at. It is possible this Buxton-Ling relationship predated even John and Mary Ann’s marriage, as John’s father George Ling was an innkeeper and publican based on King Street (see Travelling with the Lings (part 2)), just like Charles Buxton. George and Charles could have been old friends or business contacts who wanted to cement a profitable partnership through the marriage, or perhaps they had been rivals who saw it as a means of ending a feud.

Whatever its origin, it is clear this relationship between the Lings and the Buxtons remained strong over at least two generations. For example, Charles and Miriam’s second son John Samuel Buxton (b. 8 July 1859, Alfreton, Derbyshire) was for a time guardian to one of John and Mary Ann Ling’s daughters (a point I will return to shortly). In addition, Samuel, as he was commonly known, appears to have been cut from similar cloth to his brothers and sisters-in-law on the Ling side, as like them he was no stranger to physical altercations and occasionally found himself in trouble with the authorities.

Aged twenty one he had married a woman from Somercotes named Mary Stanton, and shortly afterwards moved with her to Skegby in north Nottinghamshire where he worked as a coal miner. By the time his first son was born in 1884 however they had moved back to Alfreton and Samuel and was employed as a county court bailiff. That same year he was named in the local press in connection with an illegal raffle which took place at the Queen’s Head inn without the landlord’s knowledge (The Derbyshire Times, 15 October 1884, p. 3, col. 5). A clock belonging to Samuel had been the main prize. A somewhat more serious allegation came the following year when he was charged with making an affray alongside Samuel College of Wessington at Oakerthorpe. Both men were bound over in the sum of £5 to keep the peace for three months (Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 26 June 1885, p. 6, col. 6).

As a county court bailiff, charged with recovering debts by forcibly entering people’s homes and seizing their property, Samuel would undoubtedly have had made a few enemies over the years, so violent exchanges like the one described above are hardly surprising. Bailiffs were widely resented by the working classes for whom they represented an iniquitous system which favoured the rich, as Kruse describes in The Victorian Bailiff: Conflict and Change (2012, Preface):

Distress [debt collection through property siezure] was compared to the bastinado used to oppress farmers in the East, an “injurious grievance” which resulted in the cottages of the poor being ransacked. These attacks developed into a full blown campaign for abolition of distress late in the [Nineteenth] century, but the bailiff in all these instances suffered for no fault of his own and was condemned however blameless his actions.

From the story below, taken from the Heanor petty sessions, it is clear Samuel occasionally found himself on the receiving end of this widespread popular anger:

‘Assault on bailiffs’. Source: The Derby Mercury, 19 December 1888, p. 3, col. 4 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Another story published nine years later reveals Samuel was also accused of “wilful and corrupt perjury” by a local farmer, who alleged that £1 in rent arrears had been wrongfully seized before it was due (The Derbyshire Times, 23 January 1897, p. 3, cols. 3-4). The charges were dropped after five hours’ deliberation, but together with his earlier assault the story clearly illustrates the thankless nature of his work and the hostility he would have faced on an almost daily basis. The engravings below from The Illustrated Police News depict similarly fraught encounters between bailiffs and tenants which would have proved popular with contemporary readers.

‘The Bailiff and the Collier’. Source: The Illustrated Police News, 13 September 1879, p. 1 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

‘Bailiffs Assaulted’. Source: The Illustrated Police News, 25 June 1881, p. 1 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Samuel appears to have left his regular employer Messrs W. Watson & Son shortly after this incident, and sued them for £10 2s. 9d. in overdue wages (The Derbyshire Times, 30 April 1898, p. 6, col. 6). The firm issued a counter-claim of £5 18s. 5d., alleging he had been drunk on duty and had left a repossessed house unguarded. A lively scene ensued at Alfreton County Court when upon hearing these allegations Samuel called his accuser a rogue, and said he would rather leave the court than stay and listen to their falsehoods. According to the report, “Buxton was then removed from the Court room to an ante-room, where he was kept until the business had been transacted”. Despite his protestations, a string of witnesses came forward to corroborate the firm’s claims, saying “he was drunk all the time”. The judge let him off with a warning but said he should not have been so foolish as to act in the manner he did, especially as he had been serving as a representative of the court.

It is possible Samuel’s drinking and erratic behaviour had been triggered by his wife Mary’s death two years earlier. There is a record of him auctioning off his household furniture and general effects on 19 September 1896, shortly after relinquishing his property at 27 King Street (The Derbyshire Times, 16 September 1896, p. 2, col. 6), and by the following census in 1901 he had moved back in with his mother and father at the Devonshire Arms. His occupation was recorded as ‘labourer’. Over the following decade however his fortunes appear to have steadily improved, as by 1911 he had married again to a woman named Elizabeth. That year’s census shows them living together with their children at 151 King Street, and records his new occupation as a furniture dealer.

Before moving on to Charles and Miriam Buxton’s other sons and daughters, a few words on Samuel’s children. Although it’s not entirely clear from the censuses, from looking at the local parish registers he appears to have had a total of nine children, four with his first wife Mary and five with Elizabeth. A tenth child, ‘Maud Buxton’ is shown living with him and his family at 27 King Street in 1891, however this was actually Maud Ling, my great-grandmother and Samuel’s niece by his sister Mary Ann. It is notable that while her siblings all went on to embrace travelling lifestyles under the influence of their itinerant pot dealer father John Ling, Maud, under Samuel’s guardianship, remained in Alfreton and married local miner Tom England. We will return to Maud and her family at the end of this post.

* * *

Charles and Miriam’s next child after Samuel was Emma Elizabeth Buxton, who was born in Alfreton on 15 February 1863. The censuses of 1881 and 1891 show her assisting her parents at the Devonshire Arms inn (perhaps as a cook or bairmaid), but sadly she died prematurely at the age of thirty two. Her younger sister Rose Ellen was born four years later on 18 March 1867, and married a greengrocer from Coventry named William Henry Beresford. She had one daughter with the unusual Old Testament name Mahalah. Like many of her siblings Rose spent most of her life on King Street, first at the Devonshire Arms and then at number 122 in 1891, when she was recorded as a dressmaker, and at number 46 in 1911. Her last known address was the Midland Hotel in Ripley where she died on 28 August 1925.

According to her probate record, in the year Rose died her effects were valued at £295. There is a stark contrast here with her younger brother Frederick Charles Buxton (b. 11 Mar 1870), Charles and Miriam’s third son, whose estate was worth £8,337 2s. 7d. by the time he died. Like his older brother William, Frederick was a fruiterer and greengrocer but also sold fish and game from his shop at the junction of Alfreton High Street and Bonsall Lane. The photograph below from Around Alfreton shows Frederick’s shop at around the turn of the century. The figures in the foreground are almost certainly Frederick himself and his daughter Lucy Buxton (b. 8 February 1899, Alfreton, Derbyshire).

Buxton’s fishmonger’s and fruiterer’s shop, c. 1904, Bonsall Lane, Alfreton (Alfreton and District Heritage Trust, 1994, 68).

Lucy was one of two children by Frederick’s first wife Lucy Matilda Thomas, who he had married at the age of twenty one in her home parish of St. Cuthbert’s in Wells, Somerset. Lucy Matilda died in early 1899, possibly while giving birth to her daughter, but within a year Frederick had already remarried. His second wedding to Scottish-born Mary Ann Taylor took place on 31 January 1900 and they went on to have three sons together. Further details from Frederick’s life can be found in his obituary in the The Derbyshire Times, which described him as one of Alfreton’s best-known residents.

‘Mr. F.C. Buxton: An Alfreton Tradesman’s Death’. Source: The Derbyshire Times, 6 August 1937, p. 13, col. 4 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Given the respect and status Frederick seems to have enjoyed in the local community it is highly likely his nephew Charles Frederick Ling was named after him. My grandfather Frederick England was in turn probably named after one or both of these men (his great-uncle and maternal uncle respectively) and I got my middle name from him. Therefore, through the transmission of this one name it is possible to trace the legacy of an individual born in 1870 across four generations, four families, and four individuals separated by more than a century.

* * *

Charles and Miriam’s fourth son George Henry Buxton was born three years after Frederick on 14 April 1873. Like his older sister Emma, George started out assisting his parents at the Devonshire Arms before working as bricklayer’s labourer and coal hewer. In 1899 he had married a Nottinghamshire woman named Alice Morton with whom he had four children. The 1901 census records him living next to his brother Frederick’s shop on Bonsall Lane, but by 1911 he was living just off King Street at 5 Independent Hill. His probate record from 1953 shows he was still living there when he died at the age of eighty, and his effects were valued at £593 5s. 11d.

Unlike some of his siblings, George’s name does not appear much in local newspapers, and therefore we know little of his personal life beyond what was included in the census and other official records. The only significant story to mention George (reproduced below) recounts an incident at the King’s Head inn when he and his younger brother Alfred were fined for refusing to leave the premises after mocking a female singer (The Derbyshire Times, 7 June 1899, p. 3, col. 4):

‘A Lady Singer And Her Audience: Unappreciative Alfreton Men Get Into Trouble’. Source: The Derbyshire Times, 7 June 1899, p. 3, col. 4 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Although this seems to have been George’s first and only brush with the law, this was not the case for Charles and Miriam’s youngest son Alfred. Born on 2 March 1877, at the age of fifteen he had already been fined £1 4s. 2d. for “using obscene language to the annoyance of passengers on the street” alongside two other boys. All three had received cautions before (The Derbyshire Courier, 27 December 1892, p. 3, col. 4). Shortly after his assault charge at the King’s Head in 1899 however he appears to have put such youthful misdemeanors behind him, and following his marriage to Harriet Jackson on 21 December that year there were no further stories like this in the press. The couple lived at West Street in South Normanton for a time, where the 1901 census recorded Alfred as a sawyer, before moving to 14 Amber Row in Wessington. Here Alfred worked as a labourer at the local coal mine before being promoted to colliery banksman.

Unusually for a thirty seven year old man in a reserved occupation, on 21 January 1915 Alfred enlisted for military service in the Great War and was appointed to the Royal Field Artillery. According to his service record he was posted to the No. 6 Depot at Glasgow on 23 April as part of the 31st Reserve Battery, where he would have served in a remount training unit preparing horses for the frontline. On 13 March the following year he was transferred to the 5th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers for two months before being discharged with pay on 2 May. There is a brief note in his service record where his commanding officer described his character as “Very Good, Sober, Thoroughly Trustworthy”.

‘A frisky horse tries to do the foxtrot’. Source: The Daily Mirror, 12 February 1916, p. 6 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

In light of these commendations the events of four years later come as an even greater shock. On 25 June 1920 Alfred and his wife Harriet were questioned by a coroner following the ‘discovery’ of a stillborn infant’s body buried in their garden (The Belper News, 2 July 1920, p. 8, col. 4). The couple were accused of concealing the birth, a crime which carried a maximum sentence of two years’ imprisonment, and a trial was held to determine their fates. A witness statement recorded in the local press gives a detailed and moving account of the incident and how the police came to learn of it (The Belper News, 6 August 1920, p. 8, col. 3):

‘Alleged Concealment Of Birth: Alfreton Couple Committed For Trial’. Source: The Belper News, 6 August 1920, p. 8, col. 3 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Following a special magisterial sitting the couple were acquitted, as there was no evidence they had ever attempted to conceal the birth (The Nottingham Evening Post, 8 November 1920, p. 2, col. 1), but having a private tragedy like this play out on such a public stage for several months must have made their victory a bittersweet one at best.

The unnamed stillborn infant at the centre of this case would have been Alfred and Harriet’s seventeenth child since their marriage. By the time of their trial the family had moved back to Alfreton and were living at Outseats Terrace, and this was still Alfred’s address when he died at the age of sixty nine on 12 June 1946. His probate record from the following year gave the value of his personal effects as £619 4s. 7d. Although no photographs of Alfred have surfaced yet, the picture below shows his eldest daughter, Ada Spencer (née Buxton), with two of his grandchildren.

Alfred Buxton’s daughter Ada (right) with her children c. 1935. The man on the poster Jack Lees was the Labour MP for Belper between 1928 and 1931. Courtesy of D. Bowbanks.

* * *

Having looked at Charles Buxton and Miriam Hall’s seven legitimate children, let us return now to Miriam’s first child, Mary Ann Hall. Born in Alfreton on 29 November 1851, Mary Ann’s first five years were spent living with her mother’s family in Carlton, Nottinghamshire. Following her mother’s marriage to Charles in 1856 however it appears she quietly dropped the Hall name and was thereafter known as Mary Ann Buxton. The question of her paternity was discussed at length in the previous post, and the reasons for my conclusions will not be repeated here, but it seems quite possible that Charles himself had been her biological father all along. This would certainly explain why he appears to have been so ready to bestow his family name on her, and why he is explicitly recorded as her father in both the 1861 census and in Mary Ann’s marriage certificate from 21 March 1871.

Mary Ann’s marriage to the general dealer John Ling and her children by that union were described in Travelling with the Lings (part 3), but here follows a summarised account of their years together. After their marriage they lived at 135 King Street in Alfreton for around six years, during which time Mary Ann gave birth to three children, before moving to Ripley High Street in about 1877. Here Mary Ann had two more children, including my great-grandmother Maud Ling (b. 17 April 1881), and from the 1881 census we can see that both she and her husband John had begun specialising as earthenware dealers by then.

At some point before the birth of her sixth child in 1888 the family (minus Maud) relocated to Doncaster, possibly via Brampton, where they continued to trade as glass and china dealers at number 34 Silver Street. Interestingly, in the 1893 West Riding edition of Kelly’s Directory only Mary Ann’s name is recorded, suggesting she had taken over the day-to-day running of the business. One possible explanation for this could be that her husband’s health had already begun to fail by this point, as on 13 December the following year he died of lung congestion at the family home at 12 Silver Street, just three months after the birth of their last child, Olive Emma Ling.

By 1901 Mary Ann had moved the family’s china business back to Alfreton and was living with her daughters Maud and Olive above their shop at 16 King Street. That year’s census shows them sharing their home with a thirty eight year old lodger from Poland named Louis Goodman, a travelling draper and hawker. The pictures below show their former home on King Street as it appears today.

The site of Mary Ann Ling’s china shop at 16 King Street, Alfreton (now Broadbent’s Solicitors), 2011.

16 King Street from the back, 2016.

For an idea of what Mary Ann’s shop might have looked like at the time, this photograph of Arthur Smith’s china and general goods shop at 134 King Street circa 1911 may provide some insight.

A. Smith’s china shop at 135 King Street, Alfreton, c. 1911 (Alfreton and District Heritage Trust, 1994).

It is even possible Smith’s business was a continuation of Mary Ann’s, considering its location and the type of goods they sold. Indeed it would have made sense for her to sell her business at around this time, as on 9 November 1910 Mary Ann had married her second husband Thomas Bestwick, the recently widowed publican at Alfreton’s Railway Hotel, at the United Methodist Chapel in Somercotes. The 1911 census shows her and Thomas running the pub together at 105 King Street alongside her youngest daughter Olive and three-year-old step-son Melville Bestwick. Her age is recorded as fifty eight, however we know from her birth certificate Mary Ann was actually fifty nine at the time, a rather scandalous eleven years older than her new husband.

The Railway Hotel at 105 King Street, Alfreton in 1987 (via Picture The Past).

As this is the last census currently open to the public, Mary Ann’s movements after this date become harder to trace. We know her husband Thomas died on 1 February 1929, and that according to his probate record  his last address had been ‘Holly House’ on South Moor Lane in Birmington, near Chesterfield. Presumably Mary Ann had been living with him at the time. Ten years later the sale of this house was recorded in a local newspaper:

The sale of Thomas Bestwick’s home Holly House in Brimington. Source: The Derbyshire Times, 10 February 1939, p. 11, col. 5 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Sadly we know from her death certificate that Mary Ann’s final days were spent at Storthes Hall Mental Hospital near Huddersfield, where she was admitted on 19 April 1938, three months before she passed away on 30 July. The cause of death was identified as lobar pneumonia, and she was said to be eighty eight years old, although she was in fact only eighty six. Perhaps the most intriguing detail on her death certificate however is the entry in the ‘Rank or Profession’ column, which reads “of Caravan, Toll Gate Hotel Yard, Old Mill, Barnsley U.D”. This was both her last known address and that of her travelling showman son, Charles Frederick Ling, her next of kin in the hospital’s admittance records. According to one researcher, Mary Ann had been travelling ever since her husband’s death in 1929 (Steve Smith, e-mail message to author, 11 September, 2016), but even before this she and Thomas had apparently been operating automatic machines at fairs throughout the Nineteen Twenties. Despite having also been a Hall, a Buxton and a Bestwick in her time, perhaps Mary Ann had always felt most at home travelling with the Lings?

L-R: Miriam Buxton (née Hall), her great granddaughter Isabella Cicely Hobson, granddaughter Annie Elizabeth Hobson (née Ling), and daughter Mary Ann Ling (formerly Buxton, née Hall) c. 1907. Source: Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

William Henry Hall and Olive Emma Ling’s wedding, c. February 1921, Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Olive’s mother Mary Ann Bestwick (formerly Ling, formerly Buxton, née Hall) is on the second row, fourth from the right. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archives.

L-R: My great-aunt and Harry England’s wife Ethel May England (née Buxton, no relation), my great-great-grandmother Mary Ann Bestwick (formerly Ling, formerly Buxton, née Hall), my great-grandmother Maud England (née Ling), and my great-grandfather Tom England, c. 1935.

Postscript

The influence of the Hall and Buxton families on the Lings and Englands can be seen in their shared network of personal and business connections, as well as the names they passed on to their children, but perhaps most of all in the long shadow cast by a persistent rumour concerning Mary Ann’s missing fortune. Growing up my mother remembers her father Frederick England claiming there was “money in probate” on numerous occasions, and a series of letters from the Belper Register Office seems show how this elusive wealth was connected in his family’s mind with Mary Ann. Two of these from September 1949 refer to searches for her death certificate, as well as those of her parents Charles and  Miriam, which they presumably needed in order to find the corresponding entries in the National Probate Index. It is not clear how far they got but the value of Mary Ann’s effects at the time of her death was just £280 12s. 2d. Even when one adds the £123 left by her father and her mother’s £985 17s. 1d. the sum total hardly justifies the legendary status it acquired. It is possible the rumour’s origins lay with Mary Ann’s second husband Thomas Bestwick, who left behind a personal fortune worth £3,833 3s. (approximately £128,100 in today’s money), but then again it could also just have been wishful thinking on my family’s part. The search continues.

Sources:

Baker, Chris. “Royal Artillery depots, training and home defence units”. The Long, Long Trail. Accessed 17 July, 2016. http://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/army/regiments-and-corps/the-royal-artillery-in-the-first-world-war/royal-artillery-depots-training-and-home-defence-units/.

Alfreton and District Heritage Trust. Around Alfreton. Bath: Chalford, 1994.

Kruse, John. The Victorian Bailiff: Conflict and Change. [s.l.]: Bailiff Studies Centre, 2012.

Travelling with the Lings (part 4)

This is the fourth post in my series on the Lings, the maternal ancestors of my grandfather Frederick England. In this final installment I will be looking at the children of John Ling (1849-1894), including Frederick’s mother Maud. To read the family’s story so far see parts one, two and three.

* * *

Until the mid-Nineteenth Century, few members of the Ling family appear to have ventured far from their ancestral homeland in rural Suffolk. This all changed when George Ling (1824-1884) arrived in Alfreton in the 1850s, and over the next hundred years his descendants would carry his name far and wide across much of the North and East Midlands. One particularly well-travelled group were the sons and daughters of his eldest child John (1849-1894), who were briefly introduced in the previous post. Their names were Annie, Isabella, George, Maud, Bertha, Charles and Olive, and their story will take us up and down the highways and byways of England before eventually leading back to Alfreton, and an encounter with a local family we have already met.

By the time their father died in 1894, the majority of John and Mary Ann Ling’s children were still living in the family home at 34 Silver Street in Doncaster. Their eldest however, Annie Elizabeth Ling (b. 16 July 1862, Alfreton Derbyshire – d. 11 March 1940, Ardsley, Yorkshire), had already been married for two years to a local bricklayer named Benjamin Hobson. The 1901 census shows them living just down the road from Annie’s former home at 12 Silver Street, along with their three children and a domestic servant. By this time Benjamin was working as a glass dealer, suggesting that he and Annie had taken over her late father’s business after his death.

Annie Elizabeth Ling, c. 1892, Doncaster. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

By 1911 however, things looked very different indeed. Not only was Benjamin recorded as a ‘travelling showman’ but the family were also now living in a ‘van on wheels’ in ‘a paddock off Wrawly St, [Glanford] Brigg.’ Although generally travelling showpeople were a closed community into which one had to born, there would have been a degree of cultural overlap between them and itinerant dealers like the Lings and Hobsons due to their shared nomadic lifestyles. This could partially explain how Benjamin Hobson managed to establish himself as a showman despite not coming from a fairground family himself, but as we shall see below, he also had a brother-in-law who probably influenced his career-change. Annie and Benjamin had two more children together before Benjamin’s death on 22 February 1934, by which time he had been serving as President of the Showman’s Guild of Great Britain and Ireland for three years. Their descendents continued to work in the travelling fairgrounds industry until at least the early 2000s.

Benjamin ‘Ben’ Hobson, c. 1933. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Annie Elizabeth Hobson (née Ling), c. 1912. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Hobson’s Cake Walk, 1933, Dewsbury, Yorkshire. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Annie and Benjamin’s introduction to the world of travelling fairgrounds almost certainly  came through Annie’s younger sister Isabella Ling (b. 1 October 1874, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 9 November 1941, Fairground, Central Avenue, Worksop, Nottinghamshire), and in particular her husband Enoch Clifford Farrar, “a rugged Yorkshire showman” from Wakefield (Ling,  1992, p. 1). Enoch appears to have been involved with fairs since at least 1891, when  he was recorded living at 33 Silver Street in Doncaster, next to the Lings’ home at 34. His occupation is difficult to make out in that year’s census but appears to read ‘Attends fairs, hawker.’ He and Isabella were married two years later later on 31 January 1893 and went on to have six children together, however only two sons survived infancy.

Isabella ‘Bella’ Ling, c. 1892, Doncaster. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

The Farrars have so far proved difficult to trace on later censuses, possibly because of their travelling lifestyle, however the fact that they went on to become one of the most prominent show families in England is well-documented elsewhere. The following description is taken from the National Fairground Archive’s website (The University of Sheffield, 2007):

One famous show family associated with Sheffield is of course the Farrars. Enoch Farrar, the founder of the firm, provided a mirror show and a fine art gallery. The latter was a kind of peep show which had a carved front with Sleeping Beauty featured in a glass case on the front. In 1905 Enoch Farrar broke new ground when he acquired his first cinematograph show later to be replaced by another show which by 1912 was one of the largest travelling the countryside. Other rides associated with Enoch include the Dragon Scenic Railway built by Orton and Spooner of Burton on Trent. So proud were the family of the new ride that a special opening ceremony was performed on the ride and Mrs Farrar gave a short speech and broke a bottle of champagne to christen it. Mr Enoch Farrar died in the 1930s but his sons carried on the business, always keeping up-to-date with new attractions: Dodgems, Noah’s Arks, Waltzers, Mont Blancs and Moonrocket by the outbreak of the Second World War.

A selection of these attractions can be seen in the photographs below, including Enoch Farrar’s original ‘fine art gallery’ (a travelling open-air cinema with an organ and a stage in front), also known as a ‘peep show’ or ‘bioscope show‘, and his ‘scenic railway’ (a contoured wooden merry-go-round), shown at its opening in 1910. Hundreds more are held by the National Fairground Archive and are available to browse via their NFA Digital catalogue.

Enoch Farrar’s Bioscope, c. 1905. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Detail of show stand featuring Ben Hobson (far left), c. 1907. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

May Barker and Annie Elizabeth Ling (née Julien) front of Enoch Farrar’s bioscope’s gavoli organ, c. 1908, Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive (provenance by Ling, 1992, p. 3).

Farrar and Scenic Railway, 1910, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

As showmen’s wives Annie and Isabella Ling would have played a pivotal role in running the fairs. As well as looking after children, cleaning their living wagons and providing meals for the family and its employees, they  would also have served as “secretary, accountant, worker and business partner” (Dallas, 1971, 68). While showmen of Enoch  Farrar and Ben Hobson’s generation were often virtually illiterate, their wives tended to be better educated and therefore handled the majority of correspondence and paperwork. For this same reason they would also most likely have been in charge of keeping the accounts, paying bills and counting the weekly cash takings, but according to Duncan Dallas (1971, 73) not all of their work would have been behind the scenes:

The type of work that [a showman’s wife] does will vary according to the nature of her husband’s holdings, but she will always work long hours…If the family own a show it is more than likely that the wife will be taking part, especially if it is an illusion which requires a girl to lie in one position for as long as the show may be open. Through mirrors, or under special lighting, she may be exhibited as the ‘Living Mummy’ or ‘Girl under Water’, or ‘Woman with the Body of a Bat’…The wife is involved in every show to the extent that she must design and make the costumes. She will also have to help with the spiel on the parade in front of the show. At the very least she will have to sit in the pay-box and take the money. The wife of the ride-owner is not involved in building up or maintaining the rides, but she usually sits in the cash-box and takes charge of one ride. This is a somewhat greater responsibility than just taking the money at a show, where it passes straight from the customer to the showman.

When Isabella died in 1943 the business and her £1,671 0s. 4d. fortune were passed on to her two sons, and the Farrar name’s association with travelling fairgrounds continues to this day. As we saw in the previous post however, there was a third boy who had been bought up by the Farrar family, Joseph William Ling, the son of Isabella’s uncle William. Like his adopted brothers, Joe and his descendants went on to become a highly successful showmen, making Enoch and Isabella responsible for not one but two great fairground dynasties. According to his son John (Ling, 1992, p. 2):

To begin with my father worked for Enoch Farrar on his shows, and here he met Annie Elizabeth Julien, who joined the Farrars at Maltby, working as a wagon maid for Mrs. Farrar. Later she worked as a parader on the front of the Cinematograph Show [see photograph above]. Girls were employed to dance on the front of the shows to attract crowds, and with as many as half a dozen shows at the big fairs such as Hull, competition was stiff.

[…]

When my father married, Mr. Farrar gave him his first stall to travel and from this he moved on to shows. His first was “The Great American Bear Pit”, for the craze in 1910 was for Teddy Bears. This featured “the finest collection of live teddy bears ever exhibited”.

Despite the cuddly-sounding description these ‘live teddy bears’ would in fact have been real bears, chained and trained for the audience’s amusement. The 1911 census shows the family at around this time staying in a caravan at the Blue Ram Inn’s yard in Grantham, where Joe is recorded as a ‘showman (stall holder)’. It is unclear exactly what kind of stall he would have been running at this time as his son seems to imply the Teddy Bear ‘craze’ was confined to 1910, but a reference to Joe in a local news item shows that he had previously been in charge of a coconut shy. According to the report he had fined 39s. in 1908 for using 14 lb balls of iron covered in fibres in place of real coconuts (The Cornishman, 7 May 1908, p. 2, col. 2), suggesting his later success may have had as much to do with a certain wiliness as it did with any natural charisma or business skills he possessed.

Later Joe began travelling his own Cinematograph Show, but this was not to be the last of his acquisitions according to the National Fairground Archive (The University of Sheffield, 2007):

After the war he had a set of Steam Yachts, along with a Hoop-la, coconut sheet, spinner and later the famous Chicken Joe stall run with Joe Barak. Later came the Ben Hur Speedway, Moonrocket, Dodgems and Autodrome.

As with the Farrars, the NFA’s website features many fascinating photographs of Joe Ling’s rides, living wagons and family members, of which the four below are only a tiny selection. Another tantalising glimpse into the Lings’ world can be found in 1912’s Easter on Shipley Glen, a rare example of early fairgrounds on film.

Joe Ling’s Steam Yachts, 1926, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Joe Ling’s Ben Hur Ark, c. 1935. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Notable showmen, featuring Joe Ling (back row, third from the left), 1936, Goose Fair, Nottingham. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Unidentified Ling family members, c. 1950. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Following Joe Ling’s death in 1953 the family continued the business under the name Ling’s Family Amusements, and today one can still find amusement arcades in northern seaside towns like Skegness and Bridlington which bear their name. Remarkably, even some of Joe Ling’s oldest rides are still travelling the roads, albeit following extensive restorations. I know this for a fact because two years ago at Carter’s Steam Fair, I came across this:

Carter’s Excelsior Steam Yachts (built for Joe Ling in 1921), 2014, London.

Detail from above describing the ride’s history, 2014, London.

Naturally my partner and I treated ourselves to a ride, and I’m pleased to say for a ninety three-year-old attraction my cousin Joe’s steam yachts are still providing good value for money. That said, we were wise enough not to try our luck at the coconut shy.

* * *

This talk of coconut shies brings us neatly to George Ling (bp. 11 November 1877, Ripley, Derbyshire – d. 16 May 1933, Sheffield, Yorkshire), John and Mary Ann’s third child and oldest son. After living with his family at Silver Street in Doncaster, the next record we have of George is that of his marriage to Agnes Amy Hunt in Lincoln on 9 February 1899. The 1901 census shows them two years on living with their infant daughter (the first of eight they had together) in a caravan in Holbeck (Leeds), where his occupation is given as ‘cocoa nut [sic] stall proprietor’. Before discovering the Lings’ fairground connections I had assumed this meant he ran a market stall selling coconuts, but of course it would in fact have been a coconut shy. His children’s baptism records reveal that while in 1901 he was still working some of the time as a general dealer, by 1905 he had established himself as a showman. According to Joe Ling’s son John (1992, p. [i]):

George Ling travelled a Theatrescope and a Peep Show, or Fine Art Gallery as they were euphemistically known. These travelled widely as early as 1906, attending fairs in Accrington, Sheffield, Goole and Hull, as well as appearing at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, for Christmas and New Year in 1907-08. The Peep Show had a splendid carved front with paintings, and a barrel organ, powered by a small vertical steam engine.

From this description it sounds like George may have been working alongside his brother-in-law Enoch Farrar and cousin Joe Ling, who were also travelling ‘fine art galleries’ at around this time. The 1911 census seems to support this conclusion, as even though his family were recorded living in a caravan at a fairground in Goole, he gives their main address as 28 North Parade in Grantham, the same town where Joe Ling was staying in 1911.

Also present in Grantham that year was George’s younger brother, Charles Frederick Ling (bp. 19 August 1888, Doncaster, Yorkshire – d. 20 February 1940, Fairground, Alveston, Derbyshire), John and Mary Ann’s sixth child, after whom my grandfather Frederick England was probably named. As Charles’s life appears to have been closely linked to that of his cousin Joe and brother George it makes sense to introduce him in this section before returning to John and Mary Ann’s fourth and fifth children, Maud and Bertha.

As a boy Charles had been apprenticed to his glass dealer brother-in-law Ben Hobson, and the 1901 census records them living together in the same house at 12 Silver Street along with his older sister Annie. Like Ben however, by 1911 he had moved into the travelling fairground industry, and in that year’s census is shown lodging in a house in Grantham together with four other fairground workers: an electric light worker, two labourers and a singer/dancer. Charles’s occupation is given as ‘Operator (Cinematograph)’, which together with his location strongly suggests he was working for either his cousin Joe or brother George at the time.

In 1913 Charles married Victoria Williams, the daughter of yet another travelling showman and cinematograph proprietor named Robert Williams of Warrington, and they appear to have had at least five children together. Just seven days after the birth of their first son however Britain declared war on Germany, and on 12 December the following year Charles enlisted as a Private in the 3/4 Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. From his service record (serial numbers 30343 and M322972) we can see that by 1915 he was working as a showman, like his older brother George, and was temporarily staying at the Greyhound Yard on Fisher Gate in Doncaster. He is described as 5’4″ with a chest measurement of 37″ when expanded.

Charles remained in the Army Reserve until he was mobilised at Pontefract on 1 June 1916 and posted to France the following day, most likely in preparation for the Somme Offensive. He returned home on 1 February 1917, possibly as a result of a gun shot wound to his shoulder which was mentioned in his discharge papers. After convalescing back in England he qualified as a steam lorry driver for the Army Service Corps, a role for which he would have been well-suited given his background transporting heavy fairground rides across the country via road locomotives. He spent the remainder of the war at a variety of locations on the home front, including Balby and Chesterfield, and on 29 June 1918 was promoted to Acting Corporal of “V” Company. He was formally discharged on 1 May 1919 on account of being no longer physically fit for war service, but was granted an army pension of 6s. per week. After the war he appears to have returned to his former occupation as a showman, as when he died in Alveston, Derbyshire at the age of fifty one, his place of death was recorded as ‘fairground.’

A Foden steam wagon, perhaps similar to the one driven by Charles Frederick Ling, 24 September 1917, near Zillebeke, West-Vlaanderen, © IWM (Q 6014).

* * *

I will return to John and Mary Ann Ling’s fourth child Maud at the end of this post after looking at their two youngest daughters, Bertha (b. c. November 1884, Ripley, Derbyshire – d. 17 October 1963, Etwall Hospital, Etwall, Derbyshire) and Olive Emma Ling (b. 19 August 1894, Doncaster, Yorkshire – d. December 1988, Weston Super Mare, Somerset). Both women went on to marry members of the Hall of Belper who (perhaps unsurprisingly) worked in the fairgrounds and amusements industry.

Bertha’s husband Harry Hall, who she married in 1905, was the son of a publican, confectioner and former painter from Belper who by the 1911 census was working as a ‘Roundabout Proprietor’ in Derby (see photograph below). Although Harry, Bertha and their three children are shown living in caravans, they do not appear to have been travelling with Bertha’s brothers and cousin Joe, who were all in Grantham Fair at the time. From the number of photographs bearing his name in the NFA’s online catalogue, Harry seems to have acquired many more rides over the following decades, and for a time traded under the name Hall & Proctor alongside his sister’s brother. By the time he died in 1954 he had accumulated a personal fortune worth £19,771 16s. 8d., and the family business was carried on by his son Harry Jr. who later opened ‘Harry Hall’s Amusements’ at Matlock Bath.

Bertha died nine years later at Etwall Hospital in Derbyshire, by which time the family’s wealth had dwindled to just £521. Despite the lengthy intervening period between their deaths, both their probate records give their address as 85 Mansfield Road, Derby, suggesting that despite their travelling lifestyle they had a fixed base from which they operated. According to members of her extended family, their home served as a gathering place at Christmas time, and apparently included a cellar, snooker room, and barn, as well as a showman’s yard at the back  where Bertha’s sister Olive and her husband kept their living wagon.

Harry Hall’s gallopers, c. 1903, Derby Fair. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archive.

Olive Emma Ling, the youngest of her seven siblings by some distance, married William Henry Hall in Chesterfield in 1921. Like her sister Bertha’s husband Harry, William was the son of a publican from Belper, however his family also appears to have spent time as “van dwellers” according the the 1901 census. From the photograph below featuring an engine belonging to ‘W.H. Hall & Sons Amusements’ it appears that William’s father, William Henry Hall Sr., had become involved with travelling fairgrounds at some point before about 1920. Olive continued travelling until around 1970 when she settled in Bristol after her husband’s death. Olive lived to the grand age of ninety four, and died peacefully at her home in Backwell, Somerset in December 1988. She and William Henry had three children together, and some of their descendants can still be found travelling today.

William Henry Hall & Sons’ engine, c. 1920. L-R: Ben Lewis Hobson (son of Ben Hobson and Annie Elizabeth Ling), his wife Sarah Hobson (née Corrigan), possibly Violetta Hall, Henry “Harry” Hall, Horace Hall, up identified child. Provenance Keith Henry Hall. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archives.

William Henry Hall and Olive Emma Ling, c. February 1921, Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archives.

William Henry Hall and Olive Emma Ling’s wedding, c. February 1921, Chesterfield, Derbyshire. Olive’s mother Mary Ann Bestwick (formerly Ling, formerly Buxton, née Hall) is on the second row, fourth from the right. Courtesy of the National Fairground Archives.

* * *

We come now, at last, to my mother’s paternal grandmother Maud Ling, who was born in Ripley on 17 April 1881 but not baptised until 3 July in Alfreton. She is not recorded living with the rest of her family in Doncaster at the time of the 1891 census, as according to a descendent of her sister Olive, she was taken in by her maternal uncle John Samuel Buxton’s family at 27 King Street, Alfreton (see Halls that echo still (part 3)), who were desperate for a child at the time. The 1891 census even shows that she briefly took on the Buxton family name. After John Ling’s death and the birth of Olive in 1894, Maud’s mother Mary Ann is said to have “had her hands full”, and the arrangement with her brother’s family continued until Olive no longer required full-time care. By 1901 however Maud was back living in Alfreton with Olive and her mother, who had taken over her late husband’s china dealership and was managing her own shop on King Street. The family lived in the flat above at number 16, and although it is not explicitly stated in the census it seems highly likely that Maud and Olive would have been helping their mother with the day-to-day running of the business (one of Olive’s daughters claims many of the Ling girls met their showmen husbands through selling china at markets where funfairs were held). Also at around this time Maud is said to have been working as a nanny for the vicar of Moorwood Moor near South Wingfield, and apparently used to walk the four mile journey there and back every day.

King Street, Alfreton, 2011. Maud, Olive and Mary Ann would have lived above their china shop at number 16 which today is home to Broadbents Solicitors.

I have speculated that Maud may have met her future husband Tom England while working in her mother’s shop on King Street, and the details of their marriage, the sons they had together and their subsequent move to Langley have been covered in my previous post There’ll Always be an England (part 3). While that post focused mainly on Tom and the challenges he would have endured as a coal miner in the early Twentieth Century, Maud’s role as a wife and mother running a household with six working-age men in it should not be underestimated. In addition to her ‘unpaid domestic duties’ (her occupation recorded in the 1939 register) such as cooking, cleaning and managing the family budget, she must also have provided a much needed source of stability if and when Tom’s drinking threatened to become disruptive. Outside the home Maud is also said to have been quite political, and was closely involved in the local co-operative movement (most likely the Langley Mill and Aldercarr Co-operative Society). This would undoubtedly have influenced her son Harry’s decision to stand as a Labour candidate for Heanor Urban District council, which he was elected to in 1936. She is remembered as a lovely person by those who knew her.

Maud died in my grandfather Frederick’s house at 119 Holbrook Street, Heanor, on 22 July 1950, and like her husband she chose to be cremated rather than buried. Her effects were valued at £915 17s. 11d. Looking at Maud’s life it is perhaps remarkable how very different it looks to those of her siblings, who without exception all became involved with travelling fairgrounds. For whatever reason, Maud preferred to remain in and around Heanor for close to fifty years, dedicating herself to her family and the local community, but neither she nor her children ever tried to hide their traveller connections. Her sons stayed in touch with ‘the cousins’ for many years, some of them even working on their fairs for a time, and they remained Lings every bit as much as much as they were Englands.

Left to right: my grandfather Frederick England, my grandmother Julia Mary England (nee Mills), great-uncle Norman England, Maud England (nee Ling), my aunt Gillian Maureen England, and great-uncle Albert England, c. 1940, 7 Grace Crescent, Heanor, Derbyshire.

Maud England (nee Ling), 1881-1950.

Sources:

Dallas, Duncan. The Travelling People. London: Macmillan, 1971.

Ling, John. John Ling’s Memories of a Travelling Life. Newcastle under Lyme: Fairground Association of Great Britain, 1992.

“Showmen’s Guild: Yorkshire Section.” The University of Sheffield. 2007. Accessed 14 April, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20140922135506/http://www.nfa.dept.shef.ac.uk/history/showmens_guild/yorkshire.html.

Weedon, Geoff, and Richard Ward. Fairground Art. London: New Cavendish, 2002.

There’ll always be an England (part 3)

This is the third and (for now) last in a series of posts describing the paternal ancestry of my grandfather Frederick England, the first two of which can be found here and here. This part mainly focuses on his grandfather Thomas England’s children, including Frederick’s father Thomas England Jr. (1878-1944).

* * *

The funeral of Cllr. Thomas England at Swanwick Baptist Church on 24 February 1918 would have been one of the largest family gatherings the Englands had held for many years. The extensive list of mourners reported in The Derbyshire Courier (2 March 1918, p. 1, col. 5) gives some indication of the family’s size at this time, but also raises some puzzling questions. Among those present were his older brothers George and James, his older sister Mary and younger half-sisters Alice and Elizabeth, plus a fourth sister, ‘Mrs. Watson,’ who I have yet to identify. His two other known sisters, Hannah and Ann, had both died decades earlier, and while this Mrs. Watson could have been his half-brother William Grice’s widow Mary, I can find no proof that William died before 1918 nor that Mary later remarried and took the name ‘Watson.’ The identity of the second mystery mourner, ‘Mrs. T. England (widow),’ is even more obscure. Thomas’s wife Mary Ann had died in 1913 according to the same headstone beneath which Thomas was interred. This newspaper report is the only evidence I have ever found of him marrying for a second time between 1913 and 1918, and although it’s possible the they could have made a mistake I think this is unlikely given how detailed and comprehensive the rest of their account is. The idea of Thomas remarrying in his mid-sixties is perhaps surprising but at present I can think of no other explanation for this enigmatic widow’s presence at his graveside. Hopefully further research will reveal more in time.

Swanwick Baptist Church, c. 2010 (via Geograph). Thomas and Mary Ann’s headstone is the light grey cross-shaped one directly behind the darker one on the right.

Also present at the funeral were, of course, all of Thomas’s surviving children with the exception of one, to whom I will return later. His five daughters Lucy Ann, Emma Jane, Lottie, Nellie and Amy all attended with their husbands and families. The eldest, Lucy Ann, had married an electric crane driver from Northamptonshire named John George Smith with whom she’d had one daughter. John had died not long afterwards however, and by the time of her father’s funeral she was married to another man named Herbert Hoskin, a labourer at a chemical works. Thomas’s second daughter Emma Jane had at least six children with Frederick James Fido, and Lottie, who was recorded as a dressmaker’s assistant in the 1911 census, had married George Whylde in 1913. Both husbands were local coal miners. Lottie’s death at the age of ninety two in 1987 makes her the longest lived of Thomas’s children, as well as the only one whose life overlaps with my own. Nellie, unmarried at the time of the funeral, went on to marry a lorry driver named Walter Syson three years later but it is unknown whether or not she had any children. Thomas’s youngest daughter Amy had four boys and two girls with Bertie Crownshaw, a baker from Sheffield, but sadly, as is the case with the rest of  Thomas’s daughters, not much else is known about her. The only son of Thomas’s named in the list of mourners is his third, John James England. According to one of his descendants, John had been a boot boy at the Royal Alfred Hotel in Alfreton when he was ten before securing an apprenticeship as a sawyer’s labourer. By 1911 he was working at a chemical works (possibly Kempson & Co. of Pye Bridge, his father’s company) and had married Bertha Ellen Sparham, with whom he had five children. He is remembered fondly as a very “quiet, gentle man.”

So where were Thomas’s other sons? His eldest George William England had, like his father, been a coal miner since he was a boy, and by his early twenties was working as a hewer, one of the most dangerous occupations in an industry comprised largely of dangerous occupations. Hewers were responsible for loosening rock at the coalface with picks, working deep underground in sweltering conditions. By the time George started working in the 1890s there were still no restrictions on the number of hours a miner could be obliged to work per day, wages could be cut arbitrarily and safety measures were still minimal. But while the average miner’s working conditions could be said to have improved little since George’s grandfather’s fatal accident in 1850, the organised labour movement had grown in strength by then and was starting to demand a better deal.

In 1893 when George was sixteen the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain called a strike against a proposed 25% pay cut, in which George’s union, the Derbyshire Miners’ Association (according to The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4), were participants. The strikers held out for many weeks, and eyewitnesses at Swanwick Colliery recalled seeing pit ponies, which perhaps had not seen daylight for years, grazing freely above ground (Stone, 1998). Unlike earlier strikes in the area though this one was a success, and the management agreed not to reduce any wages. Industrial action by miners would of course continue throughout the twentieth century, including the National Coal Strike of 1912 which began in Alfreton and soon spread across the country. Their core demands were expressed in a popular chant, which could be heard at pits from Kent to Clydeside:

Eight hours work, Eight hours play,
Eight hours sleep and
Eight bob a day

The miners’ victory that year led to the passing of the Coal Mines (Minimum Wage) Act 1912, one of the first minimum wage laws passed anywhere in the world and a huge milestone in the history of workers’ rights. Many of the basic freedoms we enjoy at work today owe a great deal to the efforts of people like George, his brothers, their wives and workmates.

At the time of the strike George had been working at Birchwood Colliery in Alfreton for about seven years, about thirty minutes away from where he lived at 118 Prospect Street with his wife Amy (née Kinnings) and four children. By 1915 he had been promoted to the position of colliery stallman, an overseer’s role which perhaps could have been the start of a promising career had disaster not struck later that year. On Thursday 17 June, George was working alongside fellow stallman Henry Jenkins when at around 12.30 midday they heard a crash. Henry, on hearing George cry out, ran to his aid only to discover that he had been almost completely buried under the fallen pit roof, fracturing his spine and inflicting several other internal injuries. He was quickly pulled out and conveyed to his house on Prospect Street but it was too late, he died of his injuries almost three weeks later on 5 July. The coroner’s inquest which followed returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ but noted that a slight crack in one of the pit’s supporting posts had been detected before the accident and that nothing had been done about it. His funeral took place on Thursday 8 July at Alfreton Cemetery. At the following Monday’s meeting of Alfreton Council his father Thomas received a vote of condolence from the other councillors. He was, he said “passing through troubled waters, ” having lost his son-in-law (John George Smith), his wife and his son in such a short space of time (The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4). Sadly, 1916 would see no reversal in the England family’s fortunes.

‘The late Mr. G.W. England’. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 10 July 1915, p. 5, col. 4, via The British Newspaper Archive).

Edwin England, Thomas’s youngest son, was born on 8 November 1893. His three older brothers were all at least ten years older than him and had already started their first jobs by the time he came along. It therefore seems likely he would have been closer to his sisters growing up, all of whom were nearer to him in age. From the 1911 census we know Thomas and Mary Ann had a total of thirteen children together, but sadly only nine of them appear to have survived infancy. Of the four who died the only name we know is that of Ernest Edward England, who was born in early 1892 and died on 27 November that same year. Although infant mortality rates were much higher back then I believe the timing of Ernest’s death must have had an impact on how Edwin was raised, even his name sounds like it may have been intended as a tribute. Having gone through the experience of losing a son the year before would surely have made Edwin’s birth and survival feel even more special, and it’s easy to imagine him as the youngest boy in the family becoming something of a favourite. Unlike his older brothers, when Edwin started work his father would have been successful and influential enough to help him out, and perhaps it was Thomas’s recommendation which had secured him a clerk’s job at Birchwood Colliery by the time he was eighteen (The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2).

While as a young man Edwin may have seemed poised to follow in his father’s footsteps, there was of course a key difference between him and his father. When Thomas had turned twenty one it had been 1871 and Britain was at peace. When Edwin reached the same age the year was 1914. On 4 August that year Britain declared war on Germany, and Edwin, as the only England brother not employed in a reserved occupation would have faced enormous social pressure to enlist in the army. On 9 June the following year he enrolled as a private in the 9th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters at Nottingham, and a month later he left Liverpool on a ship bound for the North Aegean. On 7 August he disembarked with his battalion at Sulva Bay, Gallipoli.

Men of the 9th Battalion, Sherwood Foresters, refilling mess tins and bottles at a well. Gallipoli, August 1915 (via the Imperial War Museum).

The events of that famously ill-fated campaign to capture the Dardarnelle Straits from the Ottoman army hardly need repeating here, but the 9^th Battalion are said to have “maintained stout hearts and a soldierly spirit” despite heavy losses. Edwin apparently escaped the battle “without a scratch” (The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2) before his battalion were evacuated to Egypt via Crete in December. In July 1916 they were redeployed to France, and on 26 September 1916, at the Battle of Thiepval Bridge, the first large offensive of the Battle of the Somme, Edwin was killed in action near the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle. He likely fell during the capture of the German Hessian and Zollern trenches however his body was never recovered. He was twenty two. His memory is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France, and on his parents’ headstone in the churchyard of Swanwick Baptist Church.

Edwin England, 1893-1916. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 7 November 1916, p. 4, col. 3 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

‘A Pye Bridge Loss’. News of Edwin’s death reaches Derbyshire. Source: The Derbyshire Courier, 4 November 1916, p. 1, col. 2 (via The British Newspaper Archive).

Unlike George and Edwin, Thomas England’s second son Thomas England Jr. would go on to outlive their father by several decades, however his name is conspicuously absent from the list of mourners at his funeral. Apparently, his wife Maud did attend (identified as “Mrs. T. England (daughter-in-law)” in The Derbyshire Courier, 2 March 1918, p. 1, col. 5), which makes Thomas’s unexplained absence even stranger. There are a number of possible explanations for this of course, but before exploring these let us first take a look at his early life. To avoid confusion with his father I will from this point on refer to Thomas Jr. as ‘Tom,’ as this is the form he used on two of his sons’ baptism records and therefore was probably the name by which he was best known.

Born on 28 July 1878, by the time he was thirteen Tom had already left school and was listed as an ‘errand boy’ in the 1891 census. He would likely have started down the mines not much later, as by 1901 he is recorded as a coal miner. It is unknown which pit he was based at then but he would probably have been working for the Babington Coal Company at Birchwood Colliery alongside his brothers George and Edwin. At around this time, just up the road from the England family home on Park Street was a china shop at number 16 King Street run by a widow named Mary Ann Ling, who lived above it with her daughters Maud and Olive. Maud (b. 17 April 1881, Ripley, Derbyshire – d. 22 July 1950, 119 Holbrook Street, Heanor, Derbyshire) would undoubtedly have helped her mother out from time to time at the shop, and it was perhaps here where Tom met her for the first time. It’s tempting imagine a romance blossoming between them over the counter during Tom’s frequent visits as an young errand boy, but that’s maybe a little fanciful. Their wedding, which took place on 16 November 1901 at Alfreton, has already been described elsewhere but I’ve reproduced their marriage certificate below which gives their names, their witnesses, and their fathers’ names and occupations.

Thomas England and Maud Ling’s marriage certificate with missing left quarter, 1901, Alfreton, Derbyshire.

Tom and Maud appear to have left Alfreton shortly after getting married. They had one son there in 1902 but the rest of their children were all born in Langley in south Derbyshire, including my grandfather Frederick England. Their names were:

• Albert (b. 6 September 1902, Alfreton, Derbyshire – d. 17 October 1948, The City Hospital, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire)
• Arthur (bp. 15 December 1904, Heanor, Derbyshire – d. c. May 1905, Derbyshire)
• Harry (bp. 23 January 1908, Heanor, Derbyshire – d. 26 January 1958, 7 Grace Crescent, Heanor, Derbyshire)
• Frederick England (b. 23 July 1912, Langley, Derbyshire – d. 24 September 1980, Codnor, Derbyshire)
• Herbert Kenneth (b. 30 April 1915, Langley, Derbyshire – d. 27 March 1984, Derby, Derbyshire)
• Norman (b. 23 April 1921, Langley, Derbyshire – d. c. May 1983, Nottinghamshire)

In the 1911 census the family were living in a three-room house at 15 ‘Odessa Yard’ in Langley. I initially had some difficulty locating the present-day site of this address but after checking the house numbers which came before and after the Englands in the census schedule I now believe they were actually based at 15 Laceyfields Road. Like his older brother George, Tom was a coal hewer, and we know from an article in The Nottingham Evening News (12 Nov 1910, p. [4], col. 4) that he was employed by the Butterley Company Ltd. at the New Langley Colliery (Thomas had been a witness to a recent pit fatality and was giving evidence during the inquiry). In 1912 he would most likely have participated in the National Coal Strike, as well as the General Strike of 1926. By then though he was no longer working as a hewer but an ‘onsetter’ (according to an application for a copy of his son Frederick’s birth certificate dated 4 August 1926). Onsetters were in charge of loading the cages at the bottom of the shaft which conveyed miners to the surface, as well as giving the appropriate signals to the winding engineman. Their equivalent above ground was known as a ‘banksman,’ which is the occupation Tom gave the following decade in both his son Frederick’s marriage certificate from 1938 and in the recently-released 1939 register.

An onsetter signals for the cage to be raised up the shaft, Denaby, Derbyshire, c. 1910 (Elliot, 2014, xii).

By this time he was sixty one years old and living at 98 Holbrook Street in Heanor with his wife Maud and their son Kenneth (Frederick and his wife Mary also stayed with them for a period in the late 1930s before moving across road to number 119). Tom died in 1944 while his sons Frederick and Norman were away fighting in Europe. Unusually for the time he chose for his remains to be cremated rather than buried, which was perhaps appropriate for a man who had already spent so much of his life below ground.

Although I know a great deal about my grandfather Frederick from my mother, and over time have managed to piece together almost as much about his grandfather Thomas England Sr., many of the details of Tom’s life are still shrouded in mystery. I have neither the wealth of anecdotal information about him which I have for his son, nor the extensive news coverage on his activities which I have for his father, and that has somehow always made him even more intriguing to me. This curiosity has been fed by the two major pieces of anecdotal information I do have about him: that he was an excellent fiddle player and a heavy drinker.

The former has always struck me as unusual. Given the time and place in which he grew up, if Tom was musically inclined one would probably have expected him to gravitate towards the local colliery brass band, or perhaps some form of sacred music (which I’m sure his father would have preferred). In contrast to these more traditional, community-based forms of music-making, to me playing the fiddle feels more individualistic, more romantic and possibly a little wilder. This image of him seems to fit well with the fact that he was also known to enjoy a drink. Although it was fairly common for miners to be heavy drinkers at this time, the very fact that this is one of the few pieces of information about him which has been passed down to me suggests his habit was somehow exceptional he may have suffered from alcoholism (Maud apparently had to hide money around the house to stop him spending it on drink). This is pure speculation, but based on the few details I have about him, Tom seems like very different character to his father Thomas England Sr., the respected town councillor, Freemason and deacon, so perhaps his absence from his father’s funeral was due to some kind of falling out? Alternatively Tom may just have been sick or unable to get out of work that day, and his drinking habit could have developed later (perhaps triggered by the deaths of his parents and two brothers in the space of five years). Like so much else about his life, the truth is now lost to us and we must make do with what have the faculty to imagine.

Tom England (far right), with (L-R) his sister-in-law Ethel May England, mother-in-law Mary Ann Bestwick, c. 1935.

Tom England (far left) with Maud (seated) at his son Harry’s wedding to Ethel May Buxton, 1935.

* * *

Although I fully intend to return to Tom’s sons in future posts, because their stories are inextricably tied up with those of several living persons I am ending my in-depth history of the England family here in order to to preserve their privacy. In the posts to come I’ll be turning my attention to the family of my grandfather Frederick’s mother, the Lings, a family so different to the Englands with their deep roots in the Derbyshire coalfield it’s a surprise their paths ever crossed.

Sources:

Baker, Chris. “Sir Ian Hamilton’s Fourth Gallipoli Despatch.” The Long, Long Trail. Accessed 2 March, 2016. http://www.1914-1918.net/hamiltons_gallipoli_despatch_4.html.

Elliot, Brian. Tracing your coalmining ancestors: a guide for family historians. Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2014.

Stone, G. Strike action at Swanwick Colliery during the Nineteenth Century. Matlock: Derbyshire County Council, 1998.