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The Buxton Marshalls

and the DNA Match

Several years before I started researching the family tree, a friend treated me to a DNA test just for fun. The ethnicity estimates were surprising (and still don’t make much sense): I am apparently 58% Scandinavian, 37% English, and a little Iberian, North African, and even a bit Nigerian! My ancestry according to genealogical research is almost 100% Midlands English for the past three hundred years.

Not long after doing the DNA test, I was contacted via the website by Jim Perkins, who had noticed my Marshall name on the DNA match. Jim’s grandfather was James Marshall, my great grandfather William Marshall’s brother. Jim told me he had done his family tree years before the advent of online genealogy. Jim didn’t have a photo of James, but we had several photos with “William Marshall’s brother” written on the back.

Jim sent me a photo of his uncle, the man he was named after. The photo shows Charles James Marshall in his army uniform. He escaped Dunkirk in 1940 by swimming out to a destroyer, apparently an excellent swimmer. Sadly he was killed, aged 25 and unmarried, on Sep 2 1942 at the Battle of Alma-Halfa in North Africa. Jim was born exactly one year later.

Jim and I became friends on Facebook. In 2021 a relative kindly informed me that Jim had died. I’ve since been in contact with his sister Marilyn.  Jim’s grandfather James Marshall was the eldest of John and Emma’s children, born in 1873. James daughter with his first wife Martha, Hilda, married James Perkins, Jim and Marilyn’s parents. Charles James Marshall who died in North Africa was James son by a second marriage.  James was a railway engine fireman on the 1911 census, and a retired rail driver on the 1939 census.

Charles James Marshall 1917-1942 died at the Battle of Alma-Halfa in North Africa:

photo thanks to Jim Perkins

 

Anna Marshall, born in 1875, was a dressmaker and never married. She was still living with her parents John and Emma in Buxton on the 1921 census. One the 1939 census she was still single at the age of 66, and was living with John J Marshall born 1916. Perhaps a nephew?

 

John Marshall was born in 1877. Buxton is a spa town with many hotels, and John was the 2nd porter living in at the Crescent Hotel on the 1901 census, although he married later that year. In the 1911 census John was married with three children and living in Fairfield, Buxton, and his occupation was Hotel Porter and Boots.  John and Alice had four children, although one son died in infancy, leaving two sons and a daughter, Lily.

My great grandfather William Marshall was born in 1878, and Edward Marshall was born in 1880. According to the family stories, one of William’s brothers was chief of police in Lincolnshire, and two of the family photos say on the back “Frank Marshall, chief of police Lincolnshire”. But it wasn’t Frank, it was Edward, and it wasn’t Lincolnshire, it was Lancashire.

The records show that Edward Marshall was a hotel porter at the Pulteney Hotel in Bath, Somerset, in 1901. Presumably he started working in hotels in Buxton prior to that. James married Florence in Bath in 1903, and their first four children were born in Bath. By 1911 the family were living in Salmesbury, near Blackburn Lancashire, and Edward was a police constable. On the 1939 census, James was a retired police inspector, still living in Lancashire. Florence and Edward had eight children.

It became clear that the two photographs we have that were labeled “Frank Marshall Chief of police” were in fact Edward, when I noticed that both photos were taken by a photographer in Bath. They were correctly labeled as the policeman, but we had the name wrong.

Edward and Florence Marshall, Bath, Somerset:

 

Sarah Marshall was born in 1882 and died two years later.

Nellie Marshall was born in 1885 and I have not yet found a marriage or death for her.

Harry Marshall was John and Emma’s next child, born in 1887. On the 1911 census Harry is 24 years old, and  lives at home with his parents and sister Ann. His occupation is a barman in a hotel. I haven’t yet found any further records for Harry.

Frank Marshall was the youngest, born in 1889. In 1911 Frank was living at the George Hotel in Buxton, employed as a boot boy. Also listed as live in staff at the hotel was Lily Moss, a kitchenmaid.

In 1913 Frank and Lily were married, and in 1914 their first child Millicent Rose was born. On the 1921 census Frank, Lily, William Rose and one other (presumably Millicent Rose) were living in Hartington Upper Quarter, Buxton.

The George Hotel, Buxton:

 

One of the photos says on the back “Jack Marshall, brother of William Marshall, WW1”:

Another photo that says on the back “William Marshalls brother”:

Another “William Marshalls brother”:

And another “William Marshalls brother”:

Unlabeled but clearly a Marshall:

The last photo is clearly a Marshall, but I haven’t yet found a Burnley connection with any of the Marshall brothers.

My Grandparents

George Samuel Marshall 1903-1995

Florence Noreen Warren (Nora) 1906-1988

I always called my grandfather Mop, apparently because I couldn’t say the name Grandpa, but whatever the reason, the name stuck. My younger brother also called him Mop, but our two cousins did not.

My earliest memories of my grandparents are the picnics.  Grandma and Mop loved going out in the car for a picnic. Favourite spots were the Clee Hills in Shropshire, North Wales, especially Llanbedr, Malvern, and Derbyshire, and closer to home, the caves and silver birch woods at Kinver Edge, Arley by the river Severn, or Bridgnorth, where Grandma’s sister Hildreds family lived.  Stourbridge was on the western edge of the Black Country in the Midlands, so one was quickly in the countryside heading west.  They went north to Derbyshire less, simply because the first part of the trip entailed driving through Wolverhampton and other built up and not particularly pleasant urban areas.  I’m sure they’d have gone there more often, as they were both born in Derbyshire, if not for that initial stage of the journey.

There was predominantly grey tartan car rug in the car for picnics, and a couple of folding chairs.  There were always a couple of cushions on the back seat, and I fell asleep in the back more times than I can remember, despite intending to look at the scenery.  On the way home Grandma would always sing,  “Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed, I had a little drink about an hour ago, And it’s gone right to my head.”  I’ve looked online for that song, and have not found it anywhere!

Grandma didn’t just make sandwiches for picnics, there were extra containers of lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and so on.  I used to love to wash up the picnic plates in the little brook on the Clee Hills, near Cleeton St Mary.  The close cropped grass was ideal for picnics, and Mop and the sheep would Baaa at each other.

Mop would base the days outting on the weather forcast, but Grandma often used to say he always chose the opposite of what was suggested. She said if you want to go to Derbyshire, tell him you want to go to Wales.  I recall him often saying, on a gloomy day, Look, there’s a bit of clear sky over there.  Mop always did the driving as Grandma never learned to drive. Often she’d dust the dashboard with a tissue as we drove along.

My brother and I often spent the weekend at our grandparents house, so that our parents could go out on a Saturday night.  They gave us 5 shillings pocket money, which I used to spend on two Ladybird books at 2 shillings and sixpence each.  We had far too many sweets while watching telly in the evening ~ in the dark, as they always turned the lights off to watch television.  The lemonade and pop was Corona, and came in returnable glass bottles.  We had Woodpecker cider too, even though it had a bit of an alcohol content.

Mop smoked Kensitas and Grandma smoked Sovereign cigarettes, or No6, and the packets came with coupons.  They often let me choose something for myself out of the catalogue when there were enough coupons saved up.

When I had my first garden, in a rented house a short walk from theirs, they took me to garden nurseries and taught me all about gardening.  In their garden they had berberis across the front of the house under the window, and cotoneaster all along the side of the garage wall. The silver birth tree on the lawn had been purloined as a sapling from Kinver edge, when they first moved into the house.  (they lived in that house on Park Road for more than 60 years).  There were perennials and flowering shrubs along the sides of the back garden, and behind the silver birch, and behind that was the vegeatable garden.  Right at the back was an Anderson shelter turned into a shed, the rhubarb, and the washing line, and the canes for the runner beans in front of those.  There was a little rose covered arch on the path on the left, and privet hedges all around the perimeter.

My grandfather was a dental technician. He worked for various dentists on their premises over the years, but he always had a little workshop of his own at the back of his garage. His garage was full to the brim of anything that might potentially useful, but it was not chaotic. He knew exactly where to find anything, from the tiniest screw for spectacles to a useful bit of wire. He was “mechanicaly minded” and could always fix things like sewing machines and cars and so on.

Mop used to let me sit with him in his workshop, and make things out of the pink wax he used for gums to embed the false teeth into prior to making the plaster casts. The porcelain teeth came on cards, and were strung in place by means of little holes on the back end of the teeth. I still have a necklace I made by threading teeth onto a string. There was a foot pedal operated drill in there as well, possibly it was a dentists drill previously, that he used with miniature grinding or polishing attachments. Sometimes I made things out of the pink acrylic used for the final denture, which had a strong smell and used to harden quickly, so you had to work fast. Initially, the workshop was to do the work for Uncle Ralph, Grandmas’s sisters husband, who was a dentist. In later years after Ralph retired, I recall a nice man called Claude used to come in the evening to collect the dentures for another dental laboratory. Mop always called his place of work the laboratory.

Grandma loved books and was always reading, in her armchair next to the gas fire. I don’t recall seeing Mop reading a book, but he was amazingly well informed about countless topics.
At family gatherings, Mops favourite topic of conversation after dinner was the atrocities committed over the centuries by organized religion.

My grandfather played snooker in his younger years at the Conservative club. I recall my father assuming he voted Conservative, and Mop told him in no uncertain terms that he’s always voted Labour. When asked why he played snooker at the Conservative club and not the Labour club, he said with a grin that “it was a better class of people”, but that he’d never vote Conservative because it was of no benefit to the likes of us working people.

Grandma and her sister in law Marie had a little grocers shop on Brettel Lane in Amblecote for a few years but I have no personal recollection of that as it was during the years we lived in USA. I don’t recall her working other than that. She had a pastry making day once a week, and made Bakewell tart, apple pie, a meat pie, and her own style of pizza. She had an old black hand operated sewing machine, and made curtains and loose covers for the chairs and sofa, but I don’t think she made her own clothes, at least not in later years. I have her sewing machine here in Spain.
At regular intervals she’d move all the furniture around and change the front room into the living room and the back into the dining room and vice versa. In later years Mop always had the back bedroom (although when I lived with them aged 14, I had the back bedroom, and painted the entire room including the ceiling purple). He had a very lumpy mattress but he said it fit his bad hip perfectly.

Grandma used to alternate between the tiny bedroom and the big bedroom at the front. (this is in later years, obviously) The wardrobes and chests of drawers never changed, they were oak and substantial, but rather dated in appearance. They had a grandfather clock with a brass face and a grandmother clock. Over the fireplace in the living room was a Utrillo print. The bathroom and lavatory were separate rooms, and the old claw foot bath had wood panels around it to make it look more modern. There was a big hot water geyser above it. Grandma was fond of using stick on Fablon tile effects to try to improve and update the appearance of the bathroom and kitchen. Mop was a generous man, but would not replace household items that continued to function perfectly well. There were electric heaters in all the rooms, of varying designs, and gas fires in living room and dining room. The coal house on the outside wall was later turned into a downstairs shower room, when Mop moved his bedroom downstairs into the front dining room, after Grandma had died and he was getting on.

Mop was 91 when he told me he wouldn’t be growing any vegetables that year. He said the sad thing was that he knew he’d never grow vegetables again. He worked part time until he was in his early 80s.

The Gladstone Connection

My grandmother had said that we were distantly related to Gladstone the prime minister. Apparently Grandma’s mothers aunt had a neice that was related to him, or some combination of aunts and nieces on the Gretton side. I had not yet explored all the potential great grandmothers aunt’s nieces looking for this Gladstone connection, but I accidentally found a Gladstone on the tree on the Gretton side.

I was wandering around randomly looking at the hints for other people that had my grandparents in their trees to see who they were and how they were connected, and noted a couple of photos of Orgills. Richard Gretton, grandma’s mother Florence Nightingale Gretton’s father,  married Sarah Orgill. Sarah’s brother John Orgill married Elizabeth Mary Gladstone. It was the photographs that caught my eye, but then I saw the Gladstone name, and that she was born in Liverpool. Her father was William Gladstone born 1809 in Liverpool, just like the prime minister. And his father was John Gladstone, just like the prime minister.

But the William Gladstone in our family tree was a millwright, who emigrated to Australia with his wife and two children rather late in life at the age of 54, in 1863. He died three years later when he was thrown out of a cart in 1866. This was clearly not William Gladstone the prime minister.

John Orgill emigrated to Australia in 1865, and married Elizabeth Mary Gladstone in Victoria in 1870. Their first child was born in December that year, in Dandenong. Their three sons all have the middle name Gladstone.

John Orgill 1835-1911 (Florence Nightingale Gretton’s mothers brother)

Elizabeth Mary Gladstone 1845-1926

 

I did not think that the link to Gladstone the prime minister was true, until I found an article in the Australian newspapers while researching the family of John Orgill for the Australia chapter.

In the Letters to the Editor in The Argus, a Melbourne newspaper, dated 8 November 1921:

 

THE GLADSTONE FAMILY.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE ARGUS.
Sir,—I notice to-day a reference to the
death of Mr. Robert Gladstone, late of
Wooltonvale. Liverpool, who, together
with estate in England valued at £143,079,
is reported to have left to his children
(five sons and seven daughters) estate
valued at £4,300 in Victoria. It may be
of interest to some of your readers to
know that this Robert Gladstone was a
son of the Gladstone family to which
the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, the
famous Prime Minister, belonged, some
members of which are now resident in Aus-
tralia. Robert Gladstone’s father (W. E.
Gladstone’s cousin), Stuart Gladstone, of
Liverpool, owned at one time the estates
of Noorat and Glenormiston, in Victoria,
to which he sent Neil Black as manager.
Mr. Black, who afterwards acquired the
property, called one of his sons “Stuart
Gladstone” after his employer. A nephew
of Stuart Gladstone (and cousin of
Robert Gladstone, of Wooltonvale), Robert
Cottingham, by name “Bobbie” came out
to Australia to farm at Noorat, but was
killed in a horse accident when only 21,
and was the first to be buried in the new
cemetery at Noorat. A brother, of “Bob-
bie,” “Fred” by name, was well known
in the early eighties as an overland
drover, taking stock for C. B. Fisher to
the far north. Later on he married and
settled in Melbourne, but left during the
depressing time following the bursting of
the boom, to return to Queensland, where,
in all probability, he still resides. A sister
of “Bobbie” and “Fred” still lives in the
neighbourhood of Melbourne. Their
father, Montgomery Gladstone, who was in
the diplomatic service, and travelled about
a great deal, was a brother of Stuart Glad-
stone, the owner of Noorat, and a full
cousin of William Ewart Gladstone, his
father, Robert, being a brother of W. E.
Gladstone’s father, Sir John, of Liverpool.
The wife of Robert Gladstone, of Woolton-
vale, Ella Gladstone by name, was also
his second cousin, being the daughter of
Robertson Gladstone, of Courthaize, near
Liverpool, W. E. Gladstone’s older
brother.
A cousin of Sir John Gladstone
(W. E. G.’s father), also called John, was
a foundry owner in Castledouglas, and the
inventor of the first suspension bridge, a
model of which was made use of in the
erection of the Menai Bridge connecting
Anglesea with the mainland, and was after-
wards presented to the Liverpool Stock
Exchange by the inventor’s cousin, Sir
John. One of the sons of this inventive
engineer, William by name, left England
in 1863 with his wife and son and daugh-
ter, intending to settle in New Zealand,
but owing to the unrest caused there by
the Maori war, he came instead to Vic-
toria, and bought land near Dandenong.
Three years later he was killed in a horse
accident, but his name is perpetuated in
the name “Gladstone road” in Dandenong.
His daughter afterwards married, and lived
for many years in Gladstone House, Dande-
nong, but is now widowed and settled in
Gippsland. Her three sons and four daugh-
ters are all married and perpetuating the
Gladstone family in different parts of Aus-
tralia. William’s son (also called Wil-
liam), who came out with his father,
mother, and sister in 1863 still lives in the
Fix this textneighbourhood of Melbourne, with his son
and grandson. An aunt of Sir John Glad-
stone (W. E. G.’s father), Christina Glad-
stone by name, married a Mr. Somerville,
of Biggar. One of her great-grandchildren
is Professor W. P. Paterson, of Edinburgh
University, another is a professor in the
West Australian University, and a third
resides in Melbourne. Yours. &c.

Melbourne, Nov.7, FAMILY TREE

 

According to the Old Dandenong website:

“Elizabeth Mary Orgill (nee Gladstone) operated Gladstone House until at least 1911, along with another hydropathic hospital (Birthwood) on Cheltenham road. She was the daughter of William Gladstone (Nephew of William Ewart Gladstone, UK prime minister in 1874).”

The story of the Orgill’s continues in the chapter on Australia.

My Grandparents Kitchen

My grandmother used to have golden syrup in her larder, hanging on the white plastic coated storage rack that was screwed to the inside of the larder door. Mostly the larder door was left propped open with an old flat iron, so you could see the Heinz ketchup and home made picallilli (she made a particularly good picallili), the Worcester sauce and the jar of pickled onions, as you sat at the kitchen table.

If you were sitting to the right of the kitchen table you could see an assortment of mismatched crockery, cups and bowls, shoe cleaning brushes, and at the back, tiny tins of baked beans and big ones of plum tomatoes,  and normal sized tins of vegetable and mushroom soup.  Underneath the little shelves that housed the tins was a blue plastic washing up bowl with a few onions, some in, some out of the yellow string bag they came home from the expensive little village supermarket in.

There was much more to the left in the awkward triangular shape under the stairs, but you couldn’t see under there from your seat at the kitchen table.  You could see the shelf above the larder door which held an ugly china teapot of graceless modern lines, gazed with metallic silver which was wearing off in places. Beside the teapot sat a serving bowl, squat and shapely with little handles, like a flattened Greek urn, in white and reddish brown with flecks of faded gilt. A plain white teapot completed the trio, a large cylindrical one with neat vertical ridges and grooves.

There were two fridges under the high shallow wooden wall cupboard.  A waist high bulbous old green one with a big handle that pulled out with a clunk, and a chest high sleek white one with a small freezer at the top with a door of its own.  On the top of the fridges were biscuit and cracker tins, big black keys, pencils and brittle yellow notepads, rubber bands and aspirin value packs and a bottle of Brufen.  There was a battered old maroon spectacle case and a whicker letter rack, letters crammed in and fanning over the top.  There was always a pile of glossy advertising pamphlets and flyers on top of the fridges, of the sort that were best put straight into the tiny pedal bin.

My grandmother never lined the pedal bin with a used plastic bag, nor with a specially designed plastic bin liner. The bin was so small that the flip top lid was often gaping, resting on a mound of cauliflower greens and soup tins.  Behind the pedal bin, but on the outer aspect of the kitchen wall, was the big black dustbin with the rubbery lid. More often than not, the lid was thrust upwards. If Thursday when the dustbin men came was several days away, you’d wish you hadn’t put those newspapers in, or those old shoes!  You stood in the softly drizzling rain in your slippers, the rubbery sheild of a lid in your left hand and the overflowing pedal bin in the other.  The contents of the pedal bin are not going to fit into the dustbin.  You sigh, put the pedal bin and the dustbin lid down, and roll up your sleeves ~ carefully, because you’ve poked your fingers into a porridge covered teabag.  You grab the sides of the protruding black sack and heave. All being well,  the contents should settle and you should have several inches more of plastic bag above the rim of the dustbin.  Unless of course it’s a poor quality plastic bag in which case your fingernail will go through and a horizontal slash will appear just below rubbish level.  Eventually you upend the pedal bin and scrape the cigarette ash covered potato peelings into the dustbin with your fingers. By now the fibres of your Shetland wool jumper are heavy with damp, just like the fuzzy split ends that curl round your pale frowning brow.  You may push back your hair with your forearm causing the moisture to bead and trickle down your face, as you turn the brass doorknob with your palm and wrist, tea leaves and cigarette ash clinging unpleasantly to your fingers.

The pedal bin needs rinsing in the kitchen sink, but the sink is full of mismatched saucepans, some new in shades of harvest gold, some battered and mishapen in stainless steel and aluminium, bits of mashed potato stuck to them like concrete pebbledash. There is a pale pink octagonally ovoid shallow serving dish and a little grey soup bowl with a handle like a miniature pottery saucepan decorated with kitcheny motifs.

The water for the coffee bubbles in a suacepan on the cream enamelled gas cooker. My grandmother never used a kettle, although I do remember a heavy flame orange one. The little pan for boiling water had a lip for easy pouring and a black plastic handle.

The steam has caused the condensation on the window over the sink to race in rivulets down to the fablon coated windowsill.  The yellow gingham curtains hang limply, the left one tucked behind the back of the cooker.

You put the pedal bin back it it’s place below the tea towel holder, and rinse your mucky fingers under the tap. The gas water heater on the wall above you roars into life just as you turn the tap off, and disappointed, subsides.

As you lean over to turn the cooker knob, the heat from the oven warms your arm. The gas oven was almost always on, the oven door open with clean tea towels and sometimes large white pants folded over it to air.

The oven wasn’t the only heat in my grandparents kitchen. There was an electric bar fire near the red formica table which used to burn your legs. The kitchen table was extended by means of a flap at each side. When I was small I wasn’t allowed to snap the hinge underneath shut as my grandmother had pinched the skin of her palm once.

The electric fire was plugged into the same socket as the radio. The radio took a minute or two to warm up when you switched it on, a bulky thing with sharp seventies edges and a reddish wood effect veneer and big knobs.  The light for my grandfathers workshop behind the garage (where he made dentures) was plugged into the same socket, which had a big heavy white three way adaptor in. The plug for the washing machine was hooked by means of a bit of string onto a nail or hook so that it didn’t fall down behing the washing machine when it wasn’t plugged in. Everything was unplugged when it wasn’t in use.  Sometimes there was a shrivelled Christmas cactus on top of the radio, but it couldn’t hide the adaptor and all those plugs.

Above the washing machine was a rhomboid wooden wall cupboard with sliding frsoted glass doors.  It was painted creamy gold, the colour of a nicotine stained pub ceiling, and held packets of Paxo stuffing and little jars of Bovril and Marmite, packets of Bisto and a jar of improbably red Maraschino cherries.

The nicotine coloured cupboard on the opposite wall had half a dozen large hooks screwed under the bottom shelf. A variety of mugs and cups hung there when they weren’t in the bowl waiting to be washed up. Those cupboard doors seemed flimsy for their size, and the thin beading on the edge of one door had come unstuck at the bottom and snapped back if you caught it with your sleeve.  The doors fastened with a little click in the centre, and the bottom of the door reverberated slightly as you yanked it open. There were always crumbs in the cupboard from the numerous packets of bisucits and crackers and there was always an Allbran packet with the top folded over to squeeze it onto the shelf. The sugar bowl was in there, sticky grains like sandpaper among the biscuit crumbs.

Half of one of the shelves was devoted to medicines: grave looking bottles of codeine linctus with no nonsense labels,  brown glass bottles with pills for rheumatism and angina.  Often you would find a large bottle, nearly full, of Brewers yeast or vitamin supplements with a dollar price tag, souvenirs of the familys last visit.  Above the medicines you’d find a faded packet of Napolitana pasta bows or a dusty packet of muesli. My grandparents never used them but she left them in the cupboard. Perhaps the dollar price tags and foreign foods reminded her of her children.

If there had been a recent visit you would see monstrous jars of Sanka and Maxwell House coffee in there too, but they always used the coffee.  They liked evaporated milk in their coffee, and used tins and tins of “evap” as they called it. They would pour it over tinned fruit, or rhubard crumble or stewed apples.

When there was just the two of them, or when I was there as well, they’d eat at the kitchen table. The table would be covered in a white embroidered cloth and the food served in mismatched serving dishes. The cutlery was large and bent, the knife handles in varying shades of bone. My grandfathers favourite fork had the tip of each prong bent in a different direction. He reckoned it was more efficient that way to spear his meat.  He often used to chew his meat and then spit it out onto the side of his plate. Not in company, of course.  I can understand why he did that, not having eaten meat myself for so long. You could chew a piece of meat for several hours and still have a stringy lump between your cheek and your teeth.

My grandfather would always have a bowl of Allbran with some Froment wheat germ for his breakfast, while reading the Daily Mail at the kitchen table.  He never worse slippers, always shoes indoors,  and always wore a tie.  He had lots of ties but always wore a plain maroon one.  His shirts were always cream and buttoned at throat and cuff, and eventually started wearing shirts without detachable collars. He wore greeny grey trousers and a cardigan of the same shade most of the time, the same colour as a damp English garden.

The same colour as the slimy green wooden clothes pegs that I threw away and replaced with mauve and fuschia pink plastic ones.  “They’re a bit bright for up the garden, aren’t they,” he said.  He was right. I should have ignored the green peg stains on the laundry.  An English garden should be shades of moss and grassy green, rich umber soil and brick red walls weighed down with an atmosphere of dense and heavy greyish white.

After Grandma died and Mop had retired (I always called him Mop, nobody knows why) at 10:00am precisely Mop would  have a cup of instant coffee with evap. At lunch, a bowl of tinned vegetable soup in his special soup bowl, and a couple of Krackawheat crackers and a lump of mature Cheddar. It was a job these days to find a tasty cheddar, he’d say.

When he was working, and he worked until well into his seventies, he took sandwiches. Every day he had the same sandwich filling: a combination of cheese, peanut butter and marmite.  It was an unusal choice for an otherwise conventional man.  He loved my grandmothers cooking, which wasn’t brilliant but was never awful. She was always generous with the cheese in cheese sauces and the meat in meat pies. She overcooked the cauliflower, but everyone did then. She made her gravy in the roasting pan, and made onion sauce, bread sauce, parsley sauce and chestnut stuffing.  She had her own version of cosmopolitan favourites, and called her quiche a quiche when everyone was still calling it egg and bacon pie. She used to like Auntie Daphne’s ratatouille, rather exotic back then, and pronounced it Ratta Twa.  She made pizza unlike any other, with shortcrust pastry smeared with tomato puree from a tube, sprinkled with oregano and great slabs of cheddar.

The roast was always overdone. “We like our meat well done” she’d say. She’d walk up the garden to get fresh mint for the mint sauce and would announce with pride “these runner beans are out of the garding”. They always grew vegetables at the top of the garden, behind the lawn and the silver birch tree.  There was always a pudding: a slice of almond tart (always with home made pastry), a crumble or stewed fruit. Topped with evap, of course.

The USA Housley’s

This chapter is copied from Barbara Housley’s Narrative on Historic Letters, with thanks to her brother Howard Housley for sharing it with me.  Interesting to note that Housley descendants  (on the Marshall paternal side) and Gretton descendants (on the Warren maternal side) were both living in Trenton, New Jersey at the same time.

GEORGE HOUSLEY 1824-1877

George emigrated to the United states in 1851, arriving in July. The solicitor Abraham John Flint referred in a letter to a 15-pound advance which was made to George on June 9, 1851. This certainly was connected to his journey. George settled along the Delaware River in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The letters from the solicitor were addressed to: Lahaska Post Office, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. George married Sarah Ann Hill on May 6, 1854 in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The service was performed by Attorney James Gilkyson.

In her first letter (February 1854), Anne (George’s sister in Smalley, Derbyshire) wrote: “We want to know who and what is this Miss Hill you name in your letter. What age is she? Send us all the particulars but I would advise you not to get married until you have sufficient to make a comfortable home.”

Upon learning of George’s marriage, Anne wrote: “I hope dear brother you may be happy with your wife….I hope you will be as a son to her parents. Mother unites with me in kind love to you both and to your father and mother with best wishes for your health and happiness.”  In 1872 (December) Joseph (George’s brother) wrote: “I am sorry to hear that sister’s father is so ill. It is what we must all come to some time and hope we shall meet where there is no more trouble.”

Emma (George’s sister) wrote in 1855, “We write in love to your wife and yourself and you must write soon and tell us whether there is a little nephew or niece and what you call them.” In June of 1856, Emma wrote: “We want to see dear Sarah Ann and the dear little boy. We were much pleased with the “bit of news” you sent.” The bit of news was the birth of John Eley Housley, January 11, 1855. Emma concluded her letter “Give our very kindest love to dear sister and dearest Johnnie.”

According to his obituary, John Eley was born at Wrightstown and “removed” to Lumberville at the age of 19. John was married first to Lucy Wilson with whom he had three sons: George Wilson (1883), Howard (1893) and Raymond (1895); and then to Elizabeth Kilmer with whom he had one son Albert Kilmer (1907). John Eley Housley died November 20, 1926 at the age of 71. For many years he had worked for John R. Johnson who owned a store. According to his son Albert, John was responsible for caring for Johnson’s horses. One named Rex was considered to be quite wild, but was docile in John’s hands. When John would take orders, he would leave the wagon at the first house and walk along the backs of the houses so that he would have access to the kitchens. When he reached the seventh house he would climb back over the fence to the road and whistle for the horses who would come to meet him. John could not attend church on Sunday mornings because he was working with the horses and occasionally Albert could convince his mother that he was needed also. According to Albert, John was regular in attendance at church on Sunday evenings.

John was a member of the Carversville Lodge 261 IOOF and the Carversville Lodge Knights of Pythias. Internment was in the Carversville cemetery; not, however, in the plot owned by his father. In addition to his sons, he was survived by his second wife Elizabeth who lived to be 80 and three grandchildren: George’s sons, Kenneth Worman and Morris Wilson and Raymond’s daughter Miriam Louise. George had married Katie Worman about the time John Eley married Elizabeth Kilmer. Howard’s first wife Mary Brink and daughter Florence had died and he remarried Elsa Heed who also lived into her eighties. Raymond’s wife was Fanny Culver.

Two more sons followed: Joseph Sackett, who was known as Sackett, September 12, 1856 and Edwin or Edward Rose, November 11, 1858. Joseph Sackett Housley married Anna Hubbs of Plumsteadville on January 17, 1880. They had one son Nelson DeC. who in turn had two daughters, Eleanor Mary and Ruth Anna, and lived on Bert Avenue in Trenton N.J. near St. Francis Hospital. Nelson, who was an engineer and built the first cement road in New Jersey, died at the age of 51. His daughters were both single at the time of his death. However, when his widow, the former Eva M. Edwards, died some years later, her survivors included daughters, Mrs. Herbert D. VanSciver and Mrs. James J. McCarrell and four grandchildren. One of the daughters (the younger) was quite crippled in later years and would come to visit her great-aunt Elizabeth (John’s widow) in a chauffeur driven car. Sackett died in 1929 at the age of 70. He was a member of the Warrington Lodge IOOF of Jamison PA, the Uncas tribe and the Uncas Hayloft 102 ORM of Trenton, New Jersey. The interment was in Greenwood cemetery where he had been caretaker since his retirement from one of the oldest manufacturing plants in Trenton (made milk separators for one thing). Sackett also was the caretaker for two other cemeteries one located near the Clinton Street station and the other called Riverside.

Ed’s wife was named Lydia. They had two daughters, Mary and Margaret and a third child who died in infancy. Mary had seven children–one was named for his grandfather–and settled in lower Bucks county. Margaret never married. She worked for Woolworths in Flemington, N. J. and then was made manager in Somerville, N.J., where she lived until her death. Ed survived both of his brothers, and at the time of Sackett’s death was living in Flemington, New Jersey where he had worked as a grocery clerk.

In September 1872, Joseph wrote, “I was very sorry to hear that John your oldest had met with such a sad accident but I hope he is got alright again by this time.” In the same letter, Joseph asked: “Now I want to know what sort of a town you are living in or village. How far is it from New York? Now send me all particulars if you please.”

In March 1873 Harriet asked Sarah Ann: “And will you please send me all the news at the place and what it is like for it seems to me that it is a wild place but you must tell me what it is like….” The question of whether she was referring to Bucks County, Pennsylvania or some other place is raised in Joseph’s letter of the same week.

On March 17, 1873, Joseph wrote: “I was surprised to hear that you had gone so far away west. Now dear brother what ever are you doing there so far away from home and family–looking out for something better I suppose.” The solicitor wrote on May 23, 1874: “Lately I have not written because I was not certain of your address and because I doubted I had much interesting news to tell you.” Later, Joseph wrote concerning the problems settling the estate, “You see dear brother there is only me here on our side and I cannot do much. I wish you were here to help me a bit and if you think of going for another summer trip this turn you might as well run over here.”

Apparently, George had indicated he might return to England for a visit in 1856. Emma wrote concerning the portrait of their mother which had been sent to George: “I hope you like mother’s portrait. I did not see it but I suppose it was not quite perfect about the eyes….Joseph and I intend having ours taken for you when you come over….Do come over before very long.”

In March 1873, Joseph wrote: “You ask me what I think of you coming to England. I think as you have given the trustee power to sign for you I think you could do no good but I should like to see you once again for all that. I can’t say whether there would be anything amiss if you did come as you say it would be throwing good money after bad.”

On June 10, 1875, the solicitor wrote: “I have been expecting to hear from you for some time past. Please let me hear what you are doing and where you are living and how I must send you your money.” George’s big news at that time was that on May 3, 1875, he had become a naturalized citizen “renouncing and abjuring all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign prince, potentate, state and sovereignity whatsoever, and particularly to Victoria Queen of Great Britain of whom he was before a subject.”

Another matter which George took care of during the years the estate was being settled was the purchase of a cemetery plot! On March 24, 1873, George purchased plot 67 section 19 division 2 in the Carversville (Bucks County PA) Cemetery (incorporated 1859). The plot cost $15.00, and was located at the very edge of the cemetery. It was in this cemetery, in 1991, while attending the funeral of Sarah Lord Housley, wife of Albert Kilmer Housley, that sixteen month old Laura Ann visited the graves of her great-great-great grandparents, George and Sarah Ann Hill Housley.

George died on August 13, 1877 and was buried three days later. The text for the funeral sermon was Proverbs 27:1: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.”

Bakewell Not Eyam

The Elton Marshalls

Some years ago I read a book about Eyam, the Derbyshire village devastated by the plague in 1665, and about how the villagers quarantined themselves to prevent further spread. It was quite a story. Each year on ‘Plague Sunday’, at the end of August, residents of Eyam mark the bubonic plague epidemic that devastated their small rural community in the years 1665–6. They wear the traditional costume of the day and attend a memorial service to remember how half the village sacrificed themselves to avoid spreading the disease further.

My 4X great grandfather James Marshall married Ann Newton in 1792 in Elton. On a number of other people’s trees on an online ancestry site, Ann Newton was from Eyam.  Wouldn’t that have been interesting, to find ancestors from Eyam, perhaps going back to the days of the plague. Perhaps that is what the people who put Ann Newton’s birthplace as Eyam thought, without a proper look at the records.

But I didn’t think Ann Newton was from Eyam. I found she was from Over Haddon, near Bakewell ~ much closer to Elton than Eyam. On the marriage register, it says that James was from Elton parish, and she was from Darley parish. Her birth in 1770 says Bakewell, which was the registration district for the villages of Over Haddon and Darley. Her parents were George Newton and Dorothy Wipperley of Over Haddon,which is incidentally very near to Nether Haddon, and Haddon Hall. I visited Haddon Hall many years ago, as well as Chatsworth (and much preferred Haddon Hall).

I looked in the Eyam registers for Ann Newton, and found a couple of them around the time frame, but the men they married were not James Marshall.

Ann died in 1806 in Elton (a small village just outside Matlock) at the age of 36 within days of her newborn twins, Ann and James.  James and Ann had two sets of twins.  John and Mary were twins as well, but Mary died in 1799 at the age of three.

1796 baptism of twins John and Mary of James and Ann Marshall

 

Ann’s husband James died 42 years later at the age of eighty,  in Elton in 1848. It was noted in the parish register that he was for years parish clerk.

 

On the 1851 census John Marshall born in 1796, the son of James Marshall the parish clerk, was a lead miner occupying six acres in Elton, Derbyshire.

His son, also John, was registered on the census as a lead miner at just eight years old.

 

The mining of lead was the most important industry in the Peak district of Derbyshire from Roman times until the 19th century – with only agriculture being more important for the livelihood of local people. The height of lead mining in Derbyshire came in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the evidence is still visible today – most obviously in the form of lines of hillocks from the more than 25,000 mineshafts which once existed.

Peak District Mines Historical Society

Smelting, or extracting the lead from the ore by melting it, was carried out in a small open hearth. Lead was cast in layers as each batch of ore was smelted; the blocks of lead thus produced were referred to as “pigs”. Examples of early smelting-hearths found within the county were stone lined, with one side open facing the prevailing wind to create the draught needed. The hilltops of the Matlocks would have provided very suitable conditions.

The miner used a tool called a mattock or a pick, and hammers and iron wedges in harder veins, to loosen the ore. They threw the ore onto ridges on each side of the vein, going deeper where the ore proved richer.

Many mines were very shallow and, once opened, proved too poor to develop. Benjamin Bryan cited the example of “Ember Hill, on the shoulder of Masson, above Matlock Bath” where there are hollows in the surface showing where there had been fruitless searches for lead.

There were small buildings, called “coes”, near each mine shaft which were used for tool storage, to provide shelter and as places for changing into working clothes. It was here that the lead was smelted and stored until ready for sale.

Lead is, of course, very poisonous. As miners washed lead-bearing material, great care was taken with the washing vats, which had to be covered. If cattle accidentally drank the poisoned water they would die from something called “belland”.

Cornish and Welsh miners introduced the practice of buddling for ore into Derbyshire about 1747.  Buddling involved washing the heaps of rubbish in the slag heaps,  the process of separating the very small particles from the dirt and spar with which they are mixed, by means of a small stream of water. This method of extraction was a major pollutant, affecting farmers and their animals (poisoned by Belland from drinking the waste water), the brooks and streams and even the River Derwent.

Women also worked in the mines. An unattributed account from 1829, says: “The head is much enwrapped, and the features nearly hidden in a muffling of handkerchiefs, over which is put a man’s hat, in the manner of the paysannes of Wales”. He also describes their gowns, usually red, as being “tucked up round the waist in a sort of bag, and set off by a bright green petticoat”. They also wore a man’s grey or dark blue coat and shoes with 3″ thick soles that were tied round with cords. The 1829 writer called them “complete harridans!”

Lead Mining in Matlock & Matlock Bath, The Andrews Pages

John’s wife Margaret died at the age of 42 in 1847.  I don’t know the cause of death, but perhaps it was lead poisoning.  John’s son John, despite a very early start in the lead mine, became a carter and lived to the ripe old age of 88.

The Pig of Lead pub, 1904:

 

The earliest Marshall I’ve found so far is Charles, born in 1742. Charles married Rebecca Knowles, 1775-1823.  I don’t know what his occupation was but when he died in 1819 he left a not inconsiderable sum to his wife.

1819 Charles Marshall probate:

 

 

There are still Marshall’s living in Elton and Matlock, not our immediate known family, but probably distantly related.  I asked a Matlock group on facebook:

“…there are Marshall’s still in the village. There are certainly families who live here who have done generation after generation & have many memories & stories to tell. Visit The Duke on a Friday night…”

The Duke, Elton:

The Housley Letters

We discovered that one of Samuel’s brothers, George Housley 1826-1877,  emigrated to America in 1851, to Solebury, in Pennsylvania. Another brother, Charles 1823-1856, emigrated to Australia at the same time.

I wrote to the Solebury Historical Society to ask them if they had any information on the Housleys there. About a month later I had a very helpful and detailed reply from them.

There were Housley people in Solebury Township and nearby communities from 1854 to at least 1973, perhaps 1985. George Housley immigrated in 1851, arriving in New York from London in July 1851 on the ship “Senator”. George was in Solebury by 1854, when he is listed on the tax roles for the Township He didn’t own land at that time. Housley family members mostly lived in the Lumberville area, a village in Solebury, or in nearby Buckingham or Wrightstown. The second wife of Howard (aka Harry) Housley was Elsa (aka Elsie) R. Heed, the daughter of the Lumberville Postmaster. Elsie was the proprietor of the Lumberville General Store from 1939 to 1973, and may have continued to live in Lumberville until her death in 1985. The Lumberville General Store was, and still is, a focal point of the community. The store was also the official Post Office at one time, hence the connection between Elsie’s father as Postmaster, and Elsie herself as the proprietor of the store. The Post Office function at Lumberville has been reduced now to a bank of cluster mailboxes, and official U.S. Postal functions are now in Point Pleasant, PA a few miles north of Lumberville.
We’ve attached a pdf of the Housley people buried in Carversville Cemetery, which is in the town next to Lumberville, and is still in Solebury Township. We hope this list will confirm that these are your relatives.

It doesn’t seem that any Housley people still live in the area. Some of George’s descendents moved to Wilkes-Barre, PA and Flemington, NJ. One descendent, Barbara Housley, lived in nearby Doylestown, PA, which is the county seat for Bucks County. She actually visited Solebury Township Historical Society looking for Housley relatives, and it would have been nice to connect you with her. Unfortunately she died in 2018. Her obituary is attached in case you want to follow up with the nieces and great nieces who are listed.

Lumberville General Store, Pennsylvania, Elsie Housley:

 

I noticed the name of Barbara’s brother Howard Housley in her obituary, and found him on facebook.  I knew it was the right Howard Housley as I recognized Barbara’s photograph in his friends list as the same photo in the obituary.  Howard didn’t reply initially to a friend request from a stranger, so I found his daughter Laura on facebook and sent her a message.  She replied, spoke to her father, and we exchanged email addresses and were able to start a correspondence.  I simply could not believe my luck when Howard sent me a 17 page file of Barbara’s Narrative on the Letters with numerous letter excerpts interspersed with her own research compiled on a six month trip to England.

The letters were written to George between 1851 and the 1870s, from the Housley family in Smalley.

Narrative of Historic Letters ~ Barbara Housley.
AND BELIEVE ME EVER MY DEAR BROTHER, YOUR AFFECTIONATE FAMILY
In February 1991, I took a picture of my 16 month old niece Laura Ann Housley standing near the tombstones of her great-great-great-grandparents, George and Sarah Ann Hill Housley. The occassion was the funeral of another Sarah Housley, Sarah Lord Housley, wife of Albert Kilmer Housley, youngest son of John Eley Housley (George and Sarah Ann’s first born). Laura Ann’s great-grandfather (my grandfather) was another George, John Eley’s first born. It was Aunt Sarah who brought my mother, Lois, a packet of papers which she had found in the attic. Mom spent hours transcribing the letters which had been written first horizontally and then vertically to save paper. What began to emerge was a priceless glimpse into the lives and concerns of Housleys who lived and died over a century ago. All of the letters ended with the phrase “And believe me ever my dear brother, your affectionate….”
The greeting and opening remarks of each of the letters are included in a list below. The sentence structure and speech patterns have not been altered however spelling and some punctuation has been corrected. Some typical idiosyncrasies were: as for has, were for where and vice versa, no capitals at the beginnings of sentences, occasional commas and dashes but almost no periods. Emma appears to be the best educated of the three Housley letter-writers. Sister-in-law Harriet does not appear to be as well educated as any of the others. Since their mother did not write but apparently was in good health, it must be assumed that she could not.
The people discussed and described in the following pages are for the most part known to be the family and friends of the Housleys of Smalley, Derbyshire, England. However, practically every page brings conjectures about the significance of persons who are mentioned in the letters and information about persons whose names seem to be significant but who have not yet been established as actual members of the family.

To say this was a priceless addition to the family research is an understatement. I have since, with Howard’s permission, sent the file to the Derby Records Office for their family history section.  We are hoping that Howard will find the actual letters in among the boxes he has of his sisters belongings.  Some of the letters mention photographs that were sent. Perhaps some will be found.

Phyllis Ellen Marshall

1909 – 1983

 

Phyllis, my grandfather George Marshall’s sister, never married. She lived in her parents home in Love Lane, and spent decades of her later life bedridden, living alone and crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. She had her bed in the front downstairs room, and had cords hanging by her bed to open the curtains, turn on the tv and so on, and she had carers and meals on wheels visit her daily. The room was dark and grim, but Phyllis was always smiling and cheerful.  Phyllis loved the Degas ballerinas and had a couple of prints on the walls.

I remember visiting her, but it has only recently registered that this was my great grandparents house. When I was a child, we visited her and she indicated a tin on a chest of drawers and said I could take a biscuit. It was a lemon puff, and was the stalest biscuit I’d ever had. To be polite I ate it. Then she offered me another one! I declined, but she thought I was being polite and said “Go on! You can have another!” I ate another one, and have never eaten a lemon puff since that day.

Phyllis’s nephew Bryan Marshall used to visit her regularly. I didn’t realize how close they were until recently, when I resumed contact with Bryan, who emigrated to USA in the 1970s following a successful application for a job selling stained glass windows and church furnishings.

I asked on a Stourbridge facebook group if anyone remembered her.

AF  Yes I remember her. My friend and I used to go up from Longlands school every Friday afternoon to do jobs for her. I remember she had a record player and we used to put her 45rpm record on Send in the Clowns for her. Such a lovely lady. She had her bed in the front room.

KW I remember very clearly a lady in a small house in Love Lane with alley at the left hand.  I was intrigued by this lady who used to sit with the front door open and she was in a large chair of some sort. I used to see people going in and out and the lady was smiling. I was young then (31) and wondered how she coped but my sense was she had lots of help.  I’ve never forgotten that lady in Love Lane sitting in the open door way I suppose when it was warm enough.

LR I used to deliver meals on wheels to her lovely lady.

I sent Bryan the comments from the Stourbridge group and he replied:

Thanks Tracy. I don’t recognize the names here but lovely to see such kind comments.
In the early 70’s neighbors on Corser Street, Mr. & Mrs. Walter Braithwaite would pop around with occasional visits and meals. Walter was my piano teacher for awhile when I was in my early twenties. He was a well known music teacher at Rudolph Steiner School (former Elmfield School) on Love Lane. A very fine school. I seem to recall seeing a good article on Walter recently…perhaps on the Stourbridge News website. He was very well known.
I’m ruminating about life with my Aunt Phyllis. We were very close. Our extra special time was every Saturday at 5pm (I seem to recall) we’d watch Doctor Who. Right from the first episode. We loved it. Likewise I’d do the children’s crossword out of Woman’s Realm magazine…always looking to win a camera but never did ! She opened my mind to the Bible, music and ballet. She once got tickets and had a taxi take us into Birmingham to see the Bolshoi Ballet…at a time when they rarely left their country. It was a very big deal in the early 60’s. ! I’ve many fond memories about her and grandad which I’ll share in due course. I’d change the steel needle on the old record player, following each play of the 78rpm records…oh my…another world.

Bryan continues reminiscing about Phyllis in further correspondence:

Yes, I can recall those two Degas prints. I don’t know much of Phyllis’ early history other than she was a hairdresser in Birmingham. I want to say at John Lewis, for some reason (so there must have been a connection and being such a large store I bet they did have a salon?)
You will know that she had severe and debilitating rheumatoid arthritis that eventually gnarled her hands and moved through her body. I remember strapping on her leg/foot braces and hearing her writhe in pain as I did so but she wanted to continue walking standing/ getting up as long as she could. I’d take her out in the wheelchair and I can’t believe I say it along …but down Stanley Road!! (I had subsequent nightmares about what could have happened to her, had I tripped or let go!) She loved Mary Stevens Park, the swans, ducks and of course Canadian geese. Was grateful for everything in creation. As I used to go over Hanbury Hill on my visit to Love Lane, she would always remind me to smell the “sea-air” as I crested the hill.
In the earlier days she smoked cigarettes with one of those long filters…looking like someone from the twenties.

I’ll check on “Send in the clowns”. I do recall that music. I remember also she loved to hear Neil Diamond. Her favorites in classical music gave me an appreciation of Elgar and Delius especially. She also loved ballet music such as Swan Lake and Nutcracker. Scheherazade and La Boutique Fantastic also other gems.
When grandad died she and aunt Dorothy shared more about grandma (who died I believe when John and I were nine-months old…therefore early 1951). Grandma (Mary Ann Gilman Purdy) played the piano and loved Strauss and Offenbach. The piano in the picture you sent had a bad (wonky) leg which would fall off and when we had the piano at 4, Mount Road it was rather dangerous. In any event my parents didn’t want me or others “banging on it” for fear of waking the younger brothers so it disappeared at sometime.
By the way, the dog, Flossy was always so rambunctious (of course, she was a JRT!) she was put on the stairway which fortunately had a door on it. Having said that I’ve always loved dogs so was very excited to see her and disappointed when she was not around. 

Phyllis with her parents William and Mary Marshall, and Flossie the dog in the garden at Love Lane:

 

Bryan continues:

I’ll always remember the early days with the outside toilet with the overhead cistern caked in active BIG spider webs. I used to have to light a candle to go outside, shielding the flame until destination. In that space I’d set the candle down and watch the eery shadows move from side to side whilst…well anyway! Then I’d run like hell back into the house. Eventually the kitchen wall was broken through so it became an indoor loo. Phew!
In the early days the house was rented for ten-shillings a week…I know because I used to take over a ten-bob-note to a grumpy lady next door who used to sign the receipt in the rent book. Then, I think she died and it became available for $600.00 yes…the whole house for $600.00 but it wasn’t purchased then. Eventually aunt Phyllis purchased it some years later…perhaps when grandad died.

I used to work much in the back garden which was a lovely walled garden with arch-type decorations in the brickwork and semicircular shaped capping bricks. The abundant apple tree. Raspberry and loganberry canes. A gooseberry bush and huge Victoria plum tree on the wall at the bottom of the garden which became a wonderful attraction for wasps! (grandad called the “whasps”). He would stew apples and fruit daily.
Do you remember their black and white cat Twinky? Always sat on the pink-screen TV and when she died they were convinced that “that’s wot got ‘er”. Grandad of course loved all his cats and as he aged, he named them all “Billy”.

Have you come across the name “Featherstone” in grandma’s name. I don’t recall any details but Dorothy used to recall this. She did much searching of the family history Such a pity she didn’t hand anything on to anyone. She also said that we had a member of the family who worked with James Watt….but likewise I don’t have details.
Gifts of chocolates to Phyllis were regular and I became the recipient of the overflow!

What a pity Dorothy’s family history research has disappeared!  I have found the Featherstone’s, and the Purdy who worked with James Watt, but I wonder what else Dorothy knew.

I mentioned DH Lawrence to Bryan, and the connection to Eastwood, where Bryan’s grandma (and Phyllis’s mother) Mary Ann Gilman Purdy was born, and shared with him the story about Francis Purdy, the Primitive Methodist minister, and about Francis’s son William who invented the miners lamp.

He replied:

As a nosy young man I was looking through the family bookcase in Love Lane and came across a brown paper covered book. Intrigued, I found “Sons and Lovers” D.H. Lawrence. I knew it was a taboo book (in those days) as I was growing up but now I see the deeper connection. Of course! I know that Phyllis had I think an earlier boyfriend by the name of Maurice who lived in Perry Barr, Birmingham. I think he later married but was always kind enough to send her a book and fond message each birthday (Feb.12). I guess you know grandad’s birthday – July 28. We’d always celebrate those days. I’d usually be the one to go into Oldswinford and get him a cardigan or pullover and later on, his 2oz tins of St. Bruno tobacco for his pipe (I recall the room filled with smoke as he puffed away).
Dorothy and Phyllis always spoke of their ancestor’s vocation as a Minister. So glad to have this history! Wow, what a story too. The Lord rescued him from mischief indeed. Just goes to show how God can change hearts…one at a time.
So interesting to hear about the Miner’s Lamp. My vicar whilst growing up at St. John’s in Stourbridge was from Durham and each Harvest Festival, there would be a miner’s lamp placed upon the altar as a symbol of the colliery and the bountiful harvest.

More recollections from Bryan about the house and garden at Love Lane:

I always recall tea around the three legged oak table bedecked with a colorful seersucker cloth. Battenburg cake. Jam Roll. Rich Tea and Digestive biscuits. Mr. Kipling’s exceedingly good cakes! Home-made jam.  Loose tea from the Coronation tin cannister. The ancient mangle outside the back door and the galvanized steel wash tub with hand-operated agitator on the underside of the lid. The hand operated water pump ‘though modernisation allowed for a cold tap only inside, above the single sink and wooden draining board. A small gas stove and very little room for food preparation. Amazing how the Marshalls (×7) managed in this space!

The small window over the sink in the kitchen brought in little light since the neighbor built on a bathroom annex at the back of their house, leaving #47 with limited light, much to to upset of grandad and Phyllis. I do recall it being a gloomy place..i.e.the kitchen and back room.

The garden was lovely. Long and narrow with privet hedge dividing the properties on the right and the lovely wall on the left. Dorothy planted spectacular lilac bushes against the wall. Vivid blues, purples and whites. Double-flora. Amazing…and with stunning fragrance. Grandad loved older victorian type plants such as foxgloves and comfrey. Forget-me-nots and marigolds (calendulas) in abundance.  Rhubarb stalks. Always plantings of lettuce and other vegetables. Lots of mint too! A large varigated laurel bush outside the front door!

Such a pleasant walk through the past. 

An autograph book belonging to Phyllis from the 1920s has survived in which each friend painted a little picture, drew a cartoon, or wrote a verse.  This entry is perhaps my favourite:

Looking for Photographs

I appreciate how fortunate I am that there are so many family photographs on various sides of the family, however, on some sides, for example the Warrens and the Grettons, there are no photographs. I’d love to find a photograph of my great grandmother Florence Nightingale Gretton, as she is the only great grandparent I don’t have a photo of.

I look on other people’s family trees on ancestry websites, and I join local town memories and old photos groups on facebook hoping to find photos. And I have found a few, and what a prize it is to find a photograph of someone in your tree.  None found so far of Florence Nightingale Gretton, although I found one of her sister Clara, her brother Charles, and another potential one, posted on a Swadlincote group: a Warren wedding group in 1910.

Charles Herbert Gretton 1876-1954 and his wife Mary Ann Illsley:

 

The wedding of Robert Adolphus Warren and Eveline Crofts.  Photo in the collection of Colin Smith, Eveline Crofts first cousin twice removed. Reposted with permission:

The groom was Florence’s husbands cousin, but identifying my great grandparents in the crowd would be guesswork.  My grandmother was born in 1906, and could be one of the children sitting at the front.  It was an interesting exercise to note the family likenesses.

Ben Warren the footballer is the man on the far right, on the same line as the groom. His children are sitting in front of the bride.

There are many mentions of Ben Warren the footballer on the Newhall and Swadlincote groups ~ Ben Warren was my great grandfathers cousin, and is a story in itself ~ and a photograph of Ben’s daughter, Lillian Warren was posted.

Lillian Warren (reposted with permission)

 

Lillian was my grandmothers first cousin once removed or second cousin. The resemblance to my grandmother, Florence Noreen Warren, seems striking.

Gladstone Road

My mother remembers her grandfather Samuel Warren’s house at 3 Gladstone Road, Stourbridge. She was born in 1933, so this would be late 1930s early 1940s.

“Opening a big wooden gate in a high brick wall off the sidewalk I went down a passage with a very high hedge to the main house which was entered on this side through a sort of glassed-in lean-to then into the dark and damp scullery and then into a large room with a fireplace which was dining room and living room for most of the time. The house was Georgian and had wooden interior shutters at the windows. My Grandad sat by the fire probably most of the day. The fireplace may have had an oven built over or to the side of the fire which was common in those days and was used for cooking.
That room led into a hall going three ways and the main front door was here. One hall went to the pantry which had stone slabs for keeping food cool, such a long way from the kitchen! Opposite the pantry was the door to the cellar. One hall led to two large rooms with big windows overlooking the garden. There was also a door at the end of this hallway which opened into the garden. The stairs went up opposite the front door with a box room at the top then along a landing to another hall going right and left with two bedrooms down each hall.
The toilet got to from the scullery and lean-to was outside down another passage all overgrown near the pigsty. No outside lights!
On Christmas day the families would all have the day here. I think the menfolk went over to the pub {Gate Hangs Well?} for a drink while the women cooked dinner. Chris would take all the children down the dark, damp cellar steps and tell us ghost stories scaring us all. A fire would be lit in one of the big main rooms {probably only used once a year} and we’d sit in there and dinner was served in the other big main room. When the house was originally built the servants would have used the other room and scullery.
I have a recollection of going upstairs and into a bedroom off the right hand hall and someone was in bed, I thought an old lady but I was uncomfortable in there and never went in again. Seemed that person was there a long time. I did go upstairs with Betty to her room which was the opposite way down the hall and loved it. She was dating lots of soldiers during the war years. One in particular I remember was an American Army Officer that she was fond of but he was killed when he left England to fight in Germany.
I wonder if the person in bed that nobody spoke about was an old housekeeper?
My mother used to say there was a white lady who floated around in the garden. I think Kay died at Gladstone Road!”

Samuel Warren, born in 1874 in Newhall, Derbyshire, was my grandmothers father.  This is the only photograph we’ve seen of him (seated on right with cap).  Kay, who died of TB in 1938, is holding the teddy bear. Samuel died in 1950, in Stourbridge, at the age of 76.

Left to right: back row: Leslie Warren. Hildred Williams / Griffiths (Nee Warren). Billy Warren. 2nd row: Gladys (Gary) Warren. Kay Warren (holding teddy bear). Samuel Warren (father). Hildred’s son Chris Williams (on knee). Lorna Warren. Joan Williams. Peggy Williams (Hildreds daughters). Jack Warren. Betty Warren.

Gretton Tailoresses of Swadlincote and the Single Journalist Boot Maker Next Door

The Purdy’s, Housley’s and Marshall’s are my mothers fathers side of the family.  The Warrens, Grettons and Staleys are from my mothers mothers side.

I decided to add all the siblings to the Gretton side of the family, in search of some foundation to a couple of family anecdotes.  My grandmother, Nora Marshall, whose mother was Florence Nightingale Gretton, used to mention that our Gretton side of the family were related to the Burton Upon Trent Grettons of Bass, Ratcliff and Gretton, the brewery.  She also said they were related to Lord Gretton of Stableford Park in Leicestershire.  When she was a child, she said parcels of nice clothes were sent to them by relatives.

 

It should be noted however that Baron Gretton is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, and was created in 1944 for the brewer and Conservative politician John Gretton. He was head of the brewery firm of Bass, Ratcliff & Gretton Ltd of Burton upon Trent. So they were not members of the Peerage at the time of this story.

What I found was unexpected.

My great great grandfather Richard Gretton 1833-1898, a baker in Swadlincote, didn’t have any brothers, but he did have a couple of sisters.

One of them, Frances, born 1831, never married, but had four children. She stayed in the family home, and named her children Gretton. In 1841 and 1851 she’s living with parents and siblings. In 1861 she is still living with parents and now on the census she has four children all named Gretton listed as grandchildren of her father.
In 1871, her mother having died in 1866, she’s still living with her father William Gretton, Frances is now 40, and her son William 19 and daughter Jane 15 live there.
By the time she is 50 in 1881 and her parents have died she’s head of the house with 5 children all called Gretton, including her daughter Jane Gretton aged 24.

Twenty five year old Robert Staley is listed on the census transcription as living in the same household, but when viewing the census image it becomes clear that he lived next door, on his own and was a bootmaker, and on the other side, his parents Benjamin and Sarah Staley lived at the Prince of Wales pub with two other siblings.

Who was fathering all these Gretton children?

It seems that Jane did the same thing as her mother: she stayed at home and had three children, all with the name Gretton.  Jane Gretton named her son, born in 1878, Michael William Staley Gretton, which would suggest that Staley was the name of the father of the child/children of Jane Gretton.

The father of Frances Gretton’s four children is not known, and there is no father on the birth registers, although they were all baptized.

I found a photo of Jane Gretton on a family tree on an ancestry site, so I contacted the tree owner hoping that she had some more information, but she said no, none of the older family members would explain when asked about it.  Jane later married Tom Penn, and Jane Gretton’s children are listed on census as Tom Penn’s stepchildren.

 

It seems that Robert Staley (who may or may not be the father of Jane’s children) never married. In 1891 Robert is 35, single, living with widowed mother Sarah in Swadlincote. Sarah is living on own means and Robert has no occupation. On the 1901 census Robert is an unmarried 45 year old journalist and author, living with his widowed mother Sarah Staley aged 79, in Swadlincote.

There are at least three Staley  Warren marriages in the family, and at least one Gretton Staley marriage.

There is a possibility that the father of Frances’s children could be a Gretton, but impossible to know for sure. William Gretton was a tailor, and several of his children and grandchildren were tailoresses.  The Gretton family who later bought Stableford Park lived not too far away, and appear to be well off with a dozen members of live in staff on the census.   Did our Gretton’s the tailors make their clothes? Is that where the parcels of nice clothes came from?

Perhaps we’ll find a family connection to the brewery Grettons, or find the family connection was an unofficial one, or that the connection is further back.

I suppose luckily, this isn’t my direct line but an exploration of an offshoot, so the question of paternity is merely a matter of curiosity.  It is a curious thing, those Gretton tailors of Church Gresley near Burton upon Trent, and there are questions remaining.

The Scottish Connection

My grandfather always used to say we had some Scottish blood because his “mother was a Purdy”, and that they were from the low counties of Scotland near to the English border.

My mother had a Scottish hat in among the boxes of souvenirs and old photographs. In one of her recent house moves, she finally threw it away, not knowing why we had it or where it came from, and of course has since regretted it!  It probably came from one of her aunts, either Phyllis or Dorothy. Neither of them had children, and they both died in 1983. My grandfather was executor of the estate in both cases, and it’s assumed that the portraits, the many photographs, the booklet on Primitive Methodists, and the Scottish hat, all relating to his mother’s side of the family, came into his possession then. His sister Phyllis never married and was living in her parents home until she died, and is the likeliest candidate for the keeper of the family souvenirs.

Catherine Housley married George Purdy, and his father was Francis Purdy, the Primitive Methodist preacher.  William Purdy was the father of Francis.

Record searches find William Purdy was born on 16 July 1767 in Carluke, Lanarkshire, near Glasgow in Scotland. He worked for James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, and moved to Derbyshire for the purpose of installing steam driven pumps to remove the water from the collieries in the area.

Another descendant of Francis Purdy found the following in a book in a library in Eastwood:

William married a local girl, Ruth Clarke, in Duffield in Derbyshire in 1786.  William and Ruth had nine children, and the seventh was Francis who was born at West Hallam in 1795.

Perhaps the Scottish hat came from William Purdy, but there is another story of Scottish connections in Smalley:  Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.  Although the Purdy’s were not from Smalley, Catherine Housley was.

From an article on the Heanor and District Local History Society website:

The Jacobites in Smalley

Few people would readily associate the village of Smalley, situated about two miles west of Heanor, with Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 – but there is a clear link.

During the winter of 1745, Charles Edward Stuart, the “Bonnie Prince” or “The Young Pretender”, marched south from Scotland. His troops reached Derby on 4 December, and looted the town, staying for two days before they commenced a fateful retreat as the Duke of Cumberland’s army approached.

While staying in Derby, or during the retreat, some of the Jacobites are said to have visited some of the nearby villages, including Smalley.

A history of the local aspects of this escapade was written in 1933 by L. Eardley-Simpson, entitled “Derby and the ‘45,” from which the following is an extract:

“The presence of a party at Smalley is attested by several local traditions and relics. Not long ago there were people living who remember to have seen at least a dozen old pikes in a room adjoining the stables at Smalley Hall, and these were stated to have been left by a party of Highlanders who came to exchange their ponies for horses belonging to the then owner, Mrs Richardson; in 1907, one of these pikes still remained. Another resident of Smalley had a claymore which was alleged to have been found on Drumhill, Breadsall Moor, while the writer of the History of Smalley himself (Reverend C. Kerry) had a magnificent Andrew Ferrara, with a guard of finely wrought iron, engraved with two heads in Tudor helmets, of the same style, he states, as the one left at Wingfield Manor, though why the outlying bands of Army should have gone so far afield, he omits to mention. Smalley is also mentioned in another strange story as to the origin of the family of Woolley of Collingham who attained more wealth and a better position in the world than some of their relatives. The story is to the effect that when the Scots who had visited Mrs Richardson’s stables were returning to Derby, they fell in with one Woolley of Smalley, a coal carrier, and impressed him with horse and cart for the conveyance of certain heavy baggage. On the retreat, the party with Woolley was surprised by some of the Elector’s troopers (the Royal army) who pursued the Scots, leaving Woolley to shift for himself. This he did, and, his suspicion that the baggage he was carrying was part of the Prince’s treasure turning out to be correct, he retired to Collingham, and spent the rest of his life there in the enjoyment of his luckily acquired gains. Another story of a similar sort was designed to explain the rise of the well-known Derbyshire family of Cox of Brailsford, but the dates by no means agree with the family pedigree, and in any event the suggestion – for it is little more – is entirely at variance with the views as to the rights of the Royal House of Stuart which were expressed by certain members of the Cox family who were alive not many years ago.”

A letter from Charles Kerry, dated 30 July 1903, narrates another strange twist to the tale. When the Highlanders turned up in Smalley, a large crowd, mainly women, gathered. “On a command in Gaelic, the regiment stooped, and throwing their kilts over their backs revealed to the astonished ladies and all what modesty is careful to conceal. Father, who told me, said they were not any more troubled with crowds of women.”

Folklore or fact? We are unlikely to know, but the Scottish artefacts in the Smalley area certainly suggest that some of the story is based on fact.

We are unlikely to know where that Scottish hat came from, but we did find the Scottish connection.  William Purdy’s mother was Grizel Gibson, and her mother was Grizel Murray, both of Lanarkshire in Scotland.  The name Grizel is a Scottish form of the name Griselda, and means “grey battle maiden”.  But with the exception of the name Murray, The Purdy and Gibson names are not traditionally Scottish, so there is not much of a Scottish connection after all.  But the mystery of the Scottish hat remains unsolved.

George Gilman Rushby: The Cousin Who Went To Africa

The portrait of the woman has “mother of Catherine Housley, Smalley” written on the back, and one of the family photographs has “Francis Purdy” written on the back. My first internet search was “Catherine Housley Smalley Francis Purdy”. Easily found was the family tree of George (Mike) Rushby, on one of the genealogy websites. It seemed that it must be our family, but the African lion hunter seemed unlikely until my mother recalled her father had said that he had a cousin who went to Africa. I also noticed that the lion hunter’s middle name was Gilman ~ the name that Catherine Housley’s daughter ~ my great grandmother, Mary Ann Gilman Purdy ~ adopted, from her aunt and uncle who brought her up.

I tried to contact George (Mike) Rushby via the ancestry website, but got no reply. I searched for his name on Facebook and found a photo of a wildfire in a place called Wardell, in Australia, and he was credited with taking the photograph. A comment on the photo, which was a few years old, got no response, so I found a Wardell Community group on Facebook, and joined it. A very small place, population some 700 or so, and I had an immediate response on the group to my question. They knew Mike, exchanged messages, and we were able to start emailing. I was in the chair at the dentist having an exceptionally long canine root canal at the time that I got the message with his email address, and at that moment the song Down in Africa started playing.

Mike said it was clever of me to track him down which amused me, coming from the son of an elephant and lion hunter.  He didn’t know why his father’s middle name was Gilman, and was not aware that Catherine Housley’s sister married a Gilman.

Mike Rushby kindly gave me permission to include his family history research in my book.  This is the story of my grandfather George Marshall’s cousin.  A detailed account of George Gilman Rushby’s years in Africa can be found in another chapter called From Tanganyika With Love; the letters Eleanor wrote to her family.

George Gilman Rushby:

 

The story of George Gilman Rushby 1900-1969, as told by his son Mike:

George Gilman Rushby:
Elephant hunter,poacher, prospector, farmer, forestry officer, game ranger, husband to Eleanor, and father of 6 children who now live around the world.

George Gilman Rushby was born in Nottingham on 28 Feb 1900 the son of Catherine Purdy and John Henry Payling Rushby. But John Henry died when his son was only one and a half years old, and George shunned his drunken bullying stepfather Frank Freer and was brought up by Gypsies who taught him how to fight and took him on regular poaching trips. His love of adventure and his ability to hunt were nurtured at an early stage of his life.
The family moved to Eastwood, where his mother Catherine owned and managed The Three Tuns Inn, but when his stepfather died in mysterious circumstances, his mother married a wealthy bookmaker named Gregory Simpson. He could afford to send George to Worksop College and to Rugby School. This was excellent schooling for George, but the boarding school environment, and the lack of a stable home life, contributed to his desire to go out in the world and do his own thing. When he finished school his first job was as a trainee electrician with Oaks & Co at Pye Bridge. He also worked part time as a motor cycle mechanic and as a professional boxer to raise the money for a voyage to South Africa.

In May 1920 George arrived in Durban destitute and, like many others, living on the beach and dependant upon the Salvation Army for a daily meal. However he soon got work as an electrical mechanic, and after a couple of months had earned enough money to make the next move North. He went to Lourenco Marques where he was appointed shift engineer for the town’s power station. However he was still restless and left the comfort of Lourenco Marques for Beira in August 1921.

Beira was the start point of the new railway being built from the coast to Nyasaland. George became a professional hunter providing essential meat for the gangs of construction workers building the railway. He was a self employed contractor with his own support crew of African men and began to build up a satisfactory business. However, following an incident where he had to shoot and kill a man who attacked him with a spear in middle of the night whilst he was sleeping, George left the lower Zambezi and took a paddle steamer to Nyasaland (Malawi). On his arrival in Karongo he was encouraged to shoot elephant which had reached plague proportions in the area – wrecking African homes and crops, and threatening the lives of those who opposed them.

His next move was to travel by canoe the five hundred kilometre length of Lake Nyasa to Tanganyika, where he hunted for a while in the Lake Rukwa area, before walking through Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) to the Congo. Hunting his way he overachieved his quota of ivory resulting in his being charged with trespass, the confiscation of his rifles, and a fine of one thousand francs. He hunted his way through the Congo to Leopoldville then on to the Portuguese enclave, near the mouth of the mighty river, where he worked as a barman in a rough and tough bar until he received a message that his old friend Lumb had found gold at Lupa near Chunya. George set sail on the next boat for Antwerp in Belgium, then crossed to England and spent a few weeks with his family in Jacksdale before returning by sea to Dar es Salaam. Arriving at the gold fields he pegged his claim and almost immediately went down with blackwater fever – an illness that used to kill three out of four within a week.

When he recovered from his fever, George exchanged his gold lease for a double barrelled .577 elephant rifle and took out a special elephant control licence with the Tanganyika Government. He then headed for the Congo again and poached elephant in Northern Rhodesia from a base in the Congo. He was known by the Africans as “iNyathi”, or the Buffalo, because he was the most dangerous in the long grass. After a profitable hunting expedition in his favourite hunting ground of the Kilombera River he returned to the Congo via Dar es Salaam and Mombassa. He was after the Kabalo district elephant, but hunting was restricted, so he set up his base in The Central African Republic at a place called Obo on the Congo tributary named the M’bomu River. From there he could make poaching raids into the Congo and the Upper Nile regions of the Sudan. He hunted there for two and a half years. He seldom came across other Europeans; hunters kept their own districts and guarded their own territories. But they respected one another and he made good and lasting friendships with members of that small select band of adventurers.

Leaving for Europe via the Congo, George enjoyed a short holiday in Jacksdale with his mother. On his return trip to East Africa he met his future bride in Cape Town. She was 24 year old Eleanor Dunbar Leslie; a high school teacher and daughter of a magistrate who spent her spare time mountaineering, racing ocean yachts, and riding horses. After a whirlwind romance, they were betrothed within 36 hours.

On 25 July 1930 George landed back in Dar es Salaam. He went directly to the Mbeya district to find a home. For one hundred pounds he purchased the Waizneker’s farm on the banks of the Mntshewe Stream. Eleanor, who had been delayed due to her contract as a teacher, followed in November. Her ship docked in Dar es Salaam on 7 Nov 1930, and they were married that day. At Mchewe Estate, their newly acquired farm, they lived in a tent whilst George with some help built their first home – a lovely mud-brick cottage with a thatched roof. George and Eleanor set about developing a coffee plantation out of a bush block. It was a very happy time for them. There was no electricity, no radio, and no telephone. Newspapers came from London every two months. There were a couple of neighbours within twenty miles, but visitors were seldom seen. The farm was a haven for wild life including snakes, monkeys and leopards. Eleanor had to go South all the way to Capetown for the birth of her first child Ann, but with the onset of civilisation, their first son George was born at a new German Mission hospital that had opened in Mbeya.

Occasionally George had to leave the farm in Eleanor’s care whilst he went off hunting to make his living. Having run the coffee plantation for five years with considerable establishment costs and as yet no return, George reluctantly started taking paying clients on hunting safaris as a “white hunter”. This was an occupation George didn’t enjoy. but it brought him an income in the days when social security didn’t exist. Taking wealthy clients on hunting trips to kill animals for trophies and for pleasure didn’t amuse George who hunted for a business and for a way of life. When one of George’s trackers was killed by a leopard that had been wounded by a careless client, George was particularly upset.
The coffee plantation was approaching the time of its first harvest when it was suddenly attacked by plagues of borer beetles and ring barking snails. At the same time severe hail storms shredded the crop. The pressure of the need for an income forced George back to the Lupa gold fields. He was unlucky in his gold discoveries, but luck came in a different form when he was offered a job with the Forestry Department. The offer had been made in recognition of his initiation and management of Tanganyika’s rainbow trout project. George spent most of his short time with the Forestry Department encouraging the indigenous people to conserve their native forests.

In November 1938 he transferred to the Game Department as Ranger for the Eastern Province of Tanganyika, and over several years was based at Nzasa near Dar es Salaam, at the old German town of Morogoro, and at lovely Lyamungu on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. Then the call came for him to be transferred to Mbeya in the Southern Province for there was a serious problem in the Njombe district, and George was selected by the Department as the only man who could possibly fix the problem.

Over a period of several years, people were being attacked and killed by marauding man-eating lions. In the Wagingombe area alone 230 people were listed as having been killed. In the Njombe district, which covered an area about 200 km by 300 km some 1500 people had been killed. Not only was the rural population being decimated, but the morale of the survivors was so low, that many of them believed that the lions were not real. Many thought that evil witch doctors were controlling the lions, or that lion-men were changing form to kill their enemies. Indeed some wichdoctors took advantage of the disarray to settle scores and to kill for reward.

By hunting down and killing the man-eaters, and by showing the flesh and blood to the doubting tribes people, George was able to instil some confidence into the villagers. However the Africans attributed the return of peace and safety, not to the efforts of George Rushby, but to the reinstallation of their deposed chief Matamula Mangera who had previously been stood down for corruption. It was Matamula , in their eyes, who had called off the lions.

Soon after this adventure, George was appointed Deputy Game Warden for Tanganyika, and was based in Arusha. He retired in 1956 to the Njombe district where he developed a coffee plantation, and was one of the first in Tanganyika to plant tea as a major crop. However he sensed a swing in the political fortunes of his beloved Tanganyika, and so sold the plantation and settled in a cottage high on a hill overlooking the Navel Base at Simonstown in the Cape. It was whilst he was there that TV Bulpin wrote his biography “The Hunter is Death” and George wrote his book “No More The Tusker”. He died in the Cape, and his youngest son Henry scattered his ashes at the Southern most tip of Africa where the currents of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet .

George Gilman Rushby:

Helper Belper: “Let’s start at the beginning.”

When I found a huge free genealogy tree website with lots of our family already on it, I couldn’t believe my luck. Quite soon after a perusal, I found I had a number of questions. Was it really possible that our Warren family tree had been traced back to 500AD? I asked on a genealogy forum: only if you can latch onto an aristocratic line somewhere, in which case that lineage will be already documented, as normally parish records only go back to the 1600s, if you are lucky. It is very hard to prove and the validity of it met with some not inconsiderable skepticism among the long term hard core genealogists. This is not to say that it isn’t possible, but is more likely a response to the obvious desire of many to be able to trace their lineage back to some kind of royalty, regardless of the documentation and proof.

Another question I had on this particular website was about the entries attached to Catherine Housley that made no sense. The immense public family tree there that anyone can add to had Catherine Housley’s mother as Catherine Marriot. But Catherine Marriot had another daughter called Catherine, two years before our Catherine was born, who didn’t die beforehand. It wasn’t unusual to name another child the same name if an earlier one had died in infancy, but this wasn’t the case.

I asked this question on a British Genealogy forum, and learned that other people’s family trees are never to be trusted. One should always start with oneself, and trace back with documentation every step of the way. Fortified with all kinds of helpful information, I still couldn’t find out who Catherine Housley’s mother was, so I posted her portrait on the forum and asked for help to find her. Among the many helpful replies, one of the members asked if she could send me a private message. She had never had the urge to help someone find a person before, but felt a compulsion to find Catherine Housley’s mother. Eight months later and counting at time of writing, and she is still my most amazing Helper. The first thing she said in the message was “Right. Let’s start at the beginning. What do you know for sure.” I said Mary Ann Gilman Purdy, my great grandmother, and we started from there.

Fran found all the documentation and proof, a perfect and necessary compliment to my own haphazard meanderings. She taught me how to find the proof, how to spot inconsistencies, and what to look for and where.  I still continue my own haphazard wanderings as well, which also bear fruit.

It was decided to order the birth certificate, a paper copy that could be stuck onto the back of the portrait, so my mother in Wales ordered it as she has the portrait. When it arrived, she read the names of Catherine’s parents to me over the phone. We were expecting it to be John Housley and Sarah Baggaley. But it wasn’t! It was his brother Samuel Housley and Elizabeth Brookes! I had been looking at the photograph of the portrait thinking it was Catherine Marriot, then looking at it thinking her name was Sarah Baggaley, and now the woman in the portrait was Elizabeth Brookes. And she was from Wolverhampton. My helper, unknown to me, had ordered a digital copy, which arrived the same day.

Months later, Fran, visiting friends in Derby,  made a special trip to Smalley, a tiny village not far from Derby, to look for Housley gravestones in the two churchyards.  There are numerous Housley burials registered in the Smalley parish records, but she could only find one Housley grave, that of Sarah Baggaley.  Unfortunately the documentation had already proved that Sarah was not the woman in the portrait, Catherine Housley’s mother, but Catherine’s aunt.

Sarah Housley nee Baggaley’s grave stone in Smalley:

“Tikfijikoo, of course” said June with a wink. “Where else?”

Before the quizzical look of April, she ventured “Thought I’d forgotten all about that dolls mystery on that weirdo website, have you?”

April yawned. “Well, beats the daily boredom for sure. Wait,” she added with a second thought “how are you sure the carotene virus hasn’t travelled the Sarcastic Sea?”

“Ella Marie was formal about it, her voodoo isn’t that out of touch, you know.” She mouthed detaching all the syllables “Nothing harmful ever ventured past the Bermuda Triangle.” June was beaming. Then, she thought again. “Unless she said the contrary, you silly tart, you’re making me doubt now. No matter, it’ll just be a quick touch and go.”

“Touch and go, it is then.” pouted April not all too sure where that next chapter was heading to.

Truth be told, April was missing the US. She missed all their little coterie of maids living in the shadows of the powerful. Missed the drama most of all.

She’d been secretly texting Norma and May, while June was lazily sipping mojitos with Jacqui.
Norma was fine, but May and the other alien staff had suddenly disappeared when the Secret Services had started to investigate more deeply into the staff’s backgrounds after all the kidnapping fiasco. At least, August had been covering for Norma, such kind soul he was. Besides, the President’s wife could no longer live without her butter chicken. But May and the others couldn’t face the music apparently. Funnily, they couldn’t find “real” American maids nowadays suited to replace them. Good luck with that!

April couldn’t tell June, obviously, since her friend harboured such hatred for the system that had them put in jail. As for herself, she couldn’t argue with the fact they’d deserved it. Nothing a good lawyer couldn’t fix though. That’s why she loved the idea of America. Guilty as charged, indeed. Those charges now vanished.

She’d thought first that it would fuel her inspiration nicely, but it was the opposite. The sudden extra time had distracted her entirely, and her inspiration seemed inaccessible.

She was starting to make up her mind. She would go back, to her family in Arkansas. That could only be temporary of course, as her mother, bless her soul, would start to have her meet all the gents in the neighbourhood in the hopes to finally get her only daughter married. Talk about drama. If that doesn’t kick-start her inspiration engine, nothing would.

Problem was, with the virus around spreading mass panic, there seemed to be no sure way to fly back. She would have to devise some circuitous plan.

Jerk had been tracking all of it. He’d done a nice map of all the location the both of  them had travelled, with little animated pins for the dolls they’d collected.

It was a bit difficult to get them all to focus, and by them he didn’t mean the pins.

After Shawn-Paul and Maeve had come back home, their little lives at the building had resumed with some slight changes. For one, he’d finally realized through some fine deductive work worthy of Sherlock that Maeve was the one behind the dolls postings on his website. He was finally sure after a firewall update got her locked out of the website and she requested to get back in. Anyways, that made things easier, although they still mostly exchanged and discussed though the website despite them being front door neighbours on the same floor. But the arrangement was convenient, especially since Shawn-Paul had kind of unofficially moved in with her and Fabio.

He’d invited them in Lucinda’s apartment to do a little old fashioned slide show  —Lucinda’s apartment was bigger he’d argued; and all the funny collection of paraphernalia she’d gathered on the walls and cabinets tops was always great to set the mood or do an improvised theme party. For sure, it didn’t have anything to do with the fact he wouldn’t need to clean up and push all the mess in the corners of his own apartment.

Lucinda was all excited. And not just by her new boyfriend Jasper. She wanted to make a book about their expedition, and everybody had immediately rolled their eyes. Books in this century, she must be the last one dinosaur raving about books.

The slide show started by the end. Where the dolls all ended up finally. La Isla de las Muñecas in Mexico: the Island of Dolls.

That’s when they were all appreciating the fitting finish line that the door bell rang.

“Uncle Fergus?!” Maeve was incredulous; it was months they weren’t in contact.

“I’m here for Jasper.” he said ominously.