 | | | The Rare Divorce of Sarah Ann Pickett |  The Picketts of Sandford were for generations shopkeepers and
tailors. It was probably this trade connection that took Harry Pickett to Maidstone, Kent, where he worked as Shopman for Woollen Draper Joseph Butcher, living with the Butchers at their Week Street home in the centre of the town. Less than 700 metres away Widow Eliza Gasson was licensee at the Kingsley Arms, Melville Road, Maidstone. Harry's local pub? In any event he met Eliza's only daughter Sarah Ann, and in July 1872, 23 year-old Harry married the 20 year-old at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square. The marriage was doomed. Three children were born to the couple, and all three died within 5 years. According to Sarah, about two years into the marriage Harry began a systematic course of cruelty against his young wife, striking and beating her. They moved from Maidstone to South London, living in Camberwell and Brixton. The cruelty seems to have intensified. "Whilst there my husband constantly beat me, and I was afraid he would kill me... he reduced me to a state of starvation and day after day left me without any food in the house. " Harry was seeing other women. In 1876 he contracted VD, but Sarah Ann did not find out until August 1877. This was the final straw, and at last she moved out. After her departure Harry entertained himself with Maidstone prostitutes, but Sarah seems to have retained that hope that he would reform, and that perhaps their marriage could be salvaged. Then in early 1879 Harry sailed for Australia. In July 1879 Sarah filed a petition for divorce. Her sworn statement was supported by a witness, and the divorce was granted on 30th April 1880 and became absolute in November of that year. Sarah returned to Maidstone to live with her mother, who had by then remarried. On 21st June 1881 Sarah married builder William King of Old Brompton. Sarah bore sons George and Simmonds and daughter Mary to her second husband, and in 1901 she seemed to be enjoying a comfortable marriage to a successful tradesman. Sadly she died in 1911 aged 58.
Harry had gone to Sydney, Australia, where initially, at least, he worked as a warehouseman. He settled down, married Surrey emigrant Jemima Lancashire in July 1882, and together they had 4 children who went on to establish a Pickett clan in New South Wales.
In the latter half of the 19th century there were only about 200 divorces per year, and very few of these granted to women. Harry sacrificed his opportunity to give his side of the story. Had he done so there is some doubt that Sarah would have been granted a divorce, as the law was so stacked against women. Indeed it may only have been the fact that Harry had emigrated that convinced her to attempt the divorce. That she did, and that she was successful was rare indeed for the times.
| | | | Maidstone | | | | The Sad and Unfinished Story of Ellen Wright | On 30th December 1882, Ellen Huxtable, of Berrynarbour in North Devon married Sandford blacksmith James Wright. Twenty-four year old Ellen was the daughter of farmer and churchwarden John and Harriet (nee Perrin) Huxtable. 
Less than a month after the wedding Ellen was incarcerated in Exeter Prison, (left) where she would give birth to her first daughter. How did this newly married woman, from a respectable family find herself in such circumstances?
Around the time of their marriage husband James left the family business and moved to Swansea where he was working as a blacksmith, leaving his new bride with her parents. There were several Huxtable family members working in South Wales. Perhaps this prompted James to seek work there too. In any event his absence seems to have greatly upset his new wife. Did she know she was pregnant when he moved there or did the discovery contribute to her subsequent behaviour? What is certain is that she suddenly became desperate to be with her new husband. And this desperation drove her to a foolish crime. On 19th January 1883 she cashed a forged cheque for £30 (the equivalent of perhaps £1400 today) at the National Provincial Bank in Ilfracombe. Her actions were muddled, and betrayed an ignorance of the banking system. She was bound to be apprehended, and she was, almost immediately. She made no attempt to deny her crime. She claimed that nobody else had been involved, and that she needed the money to join her husband in Swansea; she had already sent her husband £2.
She appeared before Ilfracombe magistrates the next day, and was remanded to the County Assizes in Exeter the following week when she appeared before Mr Justice Grove. A medical certificate confirming the prisoner's pregnancy was presented. The prosecuting counsel said that before the offence the prisoner had borne a most irreproachable character and the officials of the National Provincial Bank would be glad if the judge could pass a merciful sentence. The judge said there had been a number of forgery cases that day, which suggested sentencing in the past had not been sufficiently severe. Clearly of the view that he was being lenient, he sentenced Ellen to 6 months imprisonment with hard labour.
The Nominal Register for Devon County Prison, Exeter records that Prisoner 860 Ellen Wright had two cuts across her left wrist. Was there anything more sinister about Ellen's desperation to join her husband? Or about her pre-nuptial pregnancy?
Daughter Lilian was born to Ellen Wright on 19th May 1883 in HM Prison, Exeter. Ellen and Lilian joined James in Wales after her release, and a second daughter Florence was born in Cardiff in 1886. By this time James was working as a signal man on the railway. After this Ellen disappears from the record. The children are brought up by their grandmother in Sandford. James reappears in the 1901 Census working as a railway porter in Bradford, Yorkshire. He settled in Bradford, and died there in about 1926. His daughter Florence joined him there in the early years of the 20th century. She married plumber Fred Rothera, and raised a family in Yorkshire. Daughter Lilian who had such an unhappy birth, went into domestic service in Muswell Hill, North London, and seems never to have married. But of Ellen I can find no further trace.
Download a more detailed version of Ellen's story here  | | | Some unusual names in my tree:
Keturah Reep Lillicrap, b. 1878 in Halwell
Mustdie Milton, b. 1706, Crediton
Frederick Flood-Paddick, b.1886
Elisha Gullett, b.circa 1790
Seraphin Hooker, b.1837 Exeter (one of several so named)
Maurice August A Izambard, b. circa 1885
Jemima Blackburn Lancashire, b.1861, Newington
Sabina Gribble, b.1824, Crediton
Lewis Lewis, b. 1850, Crediton
Some Gems from Cornwall Record Office
Boadicea Basher, b. 1825, St Hilary
Foscurinus Turtluff Dyer, b. St Germans 1755
Honour Fraud, buried 1791, Bodmin
Obedience Ginger, married 1639, Kilkhampton
Guy Guy, Helston druggist, 1847
English Heard, married 1688, Quethiock |  | Royal Meal
Second cousin Jack Haydon (1917-1981) served 22 years in the Royal Army Catering Corps. He served in Italy and after the war was posted to Kenya for a few years. In February 1952 he was one of the cooks catering for the visit to Kenya of Princess Elizabeth and her new husband the Duke of Edinburgh. In this capacity he cooked the last meal she ate before she learned that her father had died and she was now Queen Elizabeth II.
Thanks to his daughter Val for the information. | | | | Letters of Lewis Wright and Mary Martha Berry |   Agricultural Implement Maker Lewis Wright, son of Sandford Smith James Wright, courted Mary Martha Berry, daughter of Crediton plumber John Berry, during the 1870s.
In his youth at least Lewis seems to have been something of a lad. He recorded his first trip to London at the age of 15. It is evident from his letters that his social life encompassed many such trips.
Mary Martha Berry was a striking beauty. She was more reserved than Lewis, but clearly had tremendous spirit. The letters that survive between the couple reveal their characters, and make charming reading.
"Sandford, Dec 1st 1872.
My Dear Mary, I have not heard whether you arrived home safe or not as when I was at Crediton they have not heard but I hope you are. I am happy to say that I feel in much more comfortable state of mind than I did when I wrote to you last for believe me I shall never forget that Sunday evening when you spoke that dear little word 'yes' for I am sure if I loved you before that, I know it is a great deal more now and more especially now that I know that you love me in return....There is a Grand Yeomanry Ball to be held at Crediton on Decr 12th for Mr Bullers troop in full dress uniforms.... The best of it is Jim [his brother] can't dance, so me, Jim, Mr Snow and Mr Butt have spoken to Mr Harvey to give us a few lessons. I thought I might as well learn too. So we commence on Tuesday for five nights, two hours of a night. ...Just fancy me going dancing. I expect it will be very funny at first but I shall soon learn....With love that will last for you as long as I live and believe me to remain yours affectionately, Lewis. (I never pass that road without thinking of that little word 'yes')"
"Sandford, August 13th 1873.
My dearest Marie, I was very much pleased to receive your letter yesterday morning and to see that you were arrived safe.....There was an accident happened to the N Devon train on Monday afternoon, the engine got into the water at Cowley Bridge. Mother was in Exeter on Monday but fortunately came home by the train before. They have not got the Engine out yet...I have not been in to Crediton since and I don't think I shall until Sunday evening. I shall miss your dear company on Saturday night, the company that I value more than any one else in the world, for without your love Marie I should be miserable. (May I expect another letter if you have time) I must conclude as I am very busy. Accept my love and believe me to remain your ever affectionate, Lewis
May Heaven protect me for your sake
Pray both night and day
That I some day may call you mine
My own dear MMB
For you are all the world to me although so far away
I often think of the pleasant walks
And little MMB"
Mary's replies are rather more restrained, though we get a hint of her character here. Lewis is on one of his London trips. "Union Terrace, Crediton Dec 17 1875
My dear Lewis, I am very glad that you arrived quite safe and that you had it so nice going up. I thought you would be almost frozen, it was such a cold day, the coldest we have had. We had such a quantity of snow in the afternoon. I was obliged to go out in am. Whilst coming home I thought I would walk fast. The consequence was I almost fell and to save myself I leaned against an old woman's umbrella almost throwing her down. She looked very indignant while I only laughed....I can just fancy how much you enjoyed yourself last night at the Alhambra, And I suppose the final entry in today's programme will be Drury Lane Theatre or some other nice one. Tomorrow Thursday I wonder where you will be going. I shall be almost if not quite on the bars of the grate dreaming over the pages of the Family Herald. I think you told me you would not go the Crystal Palace as you had been there. I am sure you will have a lot to tell me when you return....I shall conclude wishing that you may enjoy yourself very much, and now accept the love of yours affectionately, Marie" The couple were married at Crediton Parish Church on 1st August 1877. They had six children who survived to maturity. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1927. Lewis died less than a year later, and Mary Martha, who was held in great awe by her grandchildren, survived until 1939.
 Mary Martha, Lewis and 4 of their children in 1922.  Bill for birth of Mary's first child | | | | The Connibeer Family of Colebrooke - Not Quite Respectable | Robert Connibeer and his wife Elizabeth, nee Salter, seem to have been the kind of family that might attract attention in a small rural community, and perhaps at the beginning of the 19th century not for the best of reasons.
Robert was from Sandford, and Elizabeth from Dawlish. They tried to settle in Dawlish after their marriage in 1788, but the Dawlish Overseers would not have it, and in the same year Robert and Elizabeth were removed to Robert's home parish of Sandford. But in about 1805 or 1806 the family moved to neighbouring Colebrooke and settled there legally. They had at least twelve children - seven girls and five boys. Two of the girls died in infancy, perhaps three.
The remaining four girls seem to have been most active in the parish when they reached adulthood. Between the four of them they produced 9 illegitimate children - Elizabeth (Betty) - 2, Ann - 1, Mary - 3 and Grace - 3. Collectively the four Connibeer girls were responsible for 25% of the base children baptised in Colebrooke parish between 1813 and 1837. There were a series of bastardy orders taken out against a number of different men, including my first cousin 4 times removed, James Fey.
The youngest age at which any of the sisters gave birth was Elizabeth whose first son William was born when she was just 15 or 16. According to the bastardy examination " in the month of February last past (1806) she was mett on the road leading to Crediton by a Man whose Name was unknown to her who had Connection with her and he alone is the Father of the said Male Bastard Child, he the said Stranger having had carnal Knowledge of her Body on the Spot once and not since". Betty may, of course, have been protecting the true identity of the father, or the stranger may have forced his attentions on her, though there is no suggestion of that in the bastardy examination. | 
| The orders made against the fathers (only four appear to have been identified - cousin James Fey of Colebrooke, William Preston of Drewsteignton, John Screech of Colebrooke, and Richard Stentiford of Zeal Monachorum) were for the sums of £1.00 - £1.8s for the lying-in of "the said Bastard Child" and the sum of 15-18 pence weekly maintenance. The mothers were required to pay 7-9 pence weekly to the Parish if they were not able to look after the child themselves. This was at a time when Ann Connibeer as a farm servant girl was earning 1s weekly plus board and an adult able-bodied male agricultural labourer would have earned 6s- 7s per week. Rents were about 1s per week.
Even the girls' sisters-in-law were of questionable character for the times. Sarah Hingston who married brother Samuel Connibeer had herself been responsible for two of the other base children born in the parish, to different fathers, before she married Samuel. And brother James Connibeer's wife of less than 6 months, Elizabeth, nee Burgoyne, received 6 months hard labour with 4 weeks solitary, when she and her brother G. Burgoyne appeared at the Devon County Sessions in February 1832. Her brother had stolen two pairs of shoes valued at 4s from his master J. Berry, for which he was sentenced to one month hard labour, two weeks solitary and a whipping. The new Mrs Connibeer had feloniously received the shoes, knowing them to be stolen. | | | These are quotes from actual correspondence received by the staff of a Record Office somewhere. He and his daughter are listed as not being born. I would like to find out if I have any living relatives or dead relatives or ancestors in my family. Will you send me a list of all the Dripps in your library? My Grandfather died at the age of 3. We are sending you 5 children in a separate envelope. The wife of #22 could not be found. Somebody suggested that she might have been stillborn - what do you think? I am mailing you my aunt and uncle and 3 of their children. Enclosed please find my Grandmother. I have worked on her for 30 years without success. Now see what you can do! I have a hard time finding myself in London. If I were there I was very small and cannot be found. This family had 7 nephews that I am unable to find. If you know who they are, please add them to the list. We lost our Grandmother, will you please send us a copy? Will you please send me the name of my first wife? I have forgotten her name. A 14-year-old boy wrote: "I do not want you to do my research for me. Will you please send me all of the material on the Welch line, in the US, England and Scotland countries? I will do the research."
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 | | | | The North Devon Savages | Great-Great-Great Aunt Harriet Frost had some strange daughters-in-law. They were members of the disreputable Cheriton family from the tiny parish of Nymet Rowland, who were characterised as the infamous North Devon Savages.
In 1869, a letter to the Times described their "Heathenism in Devon" -"the manner in which these people live is of the rudest, coarsest, and even savage-like character". The family were labelled "a terror and an abomination" to the district. Over the years they were to be the subject of much Press coverage, both national and local, and their activities were brought to the attention of the Home Secretary.
Patriarch of the family was farmer Christopher Cheriton, owner of Upcott, some 40 acres of freehold land. Christopher and his common law wife Mary Ann Bragg had flouted conventional standards by having their four children out of wedlock, though that was common enough. According to one account Christopher had rejected conventional mores after being spurned in love. The mate with whom he spent his life seems to have supported him in his chosen lifestyle. By about the mid 1850s the Cheritons had embarked on a course of extreme social degradation. The family comprised Christopher and Mary Ann, and children William, Charlotte, Eliza and Matilda, and at the height of their reign of terror there were grandchildren in their early teens and a clutch of babies. In a nearby parish, "on Whitestone Hill", Tedburn St Mary, was Christopher's brother Elias, living in an old barrel.
In 1854 Christopher appeared before the magistrates on a charge of assault. This seems to have been the first appearance in court. But over the next 25 years, members of the family were to appear before the courts over 65 times. They were charged with assaults, petty theft, poaching, non-payment of rates, allowing animals to stray (they weren't too fussy about whose land their livestock grazed on). Poaching in particular was a serious offence in those days, and when, in 1869, son William and friend George Bradford alias Tancock (who was to partner Charlotte) were convicted under dubious circumstances, they briefly became a cause celèbre, prompting debate in the national Press. Mary Ann, Eliza, Matilda, Charlotte and William all served prison sentences over the years, some several: all the family were fined on numerous occasions. But this was not just a criminal family. Indeed many of the charges brought against them were dismissed. It was their general lifestyle that marked them out.
Their clothes and persons were unkempt and unwashed. They lived in a hovel, in filth and squalor, in a kind of barn, with their animals. A contemporary account in 1874- "The building is not large, ... originally a farm-house, a granary, or merely a cow-house. It is perhaps forty feet long by twenty-five feet wide; its walls are apparently a mixture of lime, mud, and pebbles, and very thick; and the thatched roof is surmounted by a wide-mouthed chimney-opening, partly blown down. ... There are several apertures, designed and accidental; but the main opening...is a jagged hole about seven feet high and five wide, into which, by way of windowblind, ragged bundles of straw are piled...the ground floor of the hovel is at once the living-place, the cooking-place, the pig-stye, and the sleeping-place. Not a single article of furniture is contained within it; there is not even a bedstead. The family bed, on which repose savage old Christopher, Willie his middle-aged son, the old woman, the three strapping daughters, the big boy and the big girl, and the smaller fry, including the horrifying baby or babies, consists of an accumulation of foul straw, enclosed within rough-hewn posts driven into the earth." |  
The Cheriton's house, front and back, at Nymet Rowland, photographed in about 1860 by our relative William Hector. | Several accounts make reference to acts of vandalism against, and verbal abuse of their neighbours. There was a long-running feud with some of the local farmers. Landowner John Partridge took Mary Ann and Eliza to court for stealing turnips, and there seems to have developed a particular antipathy against Partridge and his family. In the same vein the family were extremely hostile towards the local parson - the Reverend Temple - whom they cursed roundly at every opportunity, abusing him and his new wife as they walked around the village. The family were foul-mouthed, abusive and aggressive.
They regularly worked in their fields in semi-nudity, the old man often wearing just a loin cloth, the women little more. Predictably it was their sexual immorality that outraged most Victorian commentators. The contemporary belief , implied in a number of articles and letters about the family, was that the children of the several daughters were the incestuous offspring of the males of the family, who all shared the communal bed. Between the three daughters there were at least eight children born without named fathers between 1855 and 1871. Witnesses declared that no men outside the family were known to have visited the daughters. Nonetheless given the condition in which they did their field work there can be no certainty about the bastards' parenthood. The women were regularly described as being coarse, with the voices of men.
Brother William was a big man, with matted whiskers and a long beard, and the sight of him was intimidating. He is said to have pursued a stranger through the country with an axe for nearly a mile! One day William was seen driving a horse whose collar he had decorated with the entrails of a sheep!
It should not be thought that the family were impoverished. Their land, their animals - at various times 4 horses, 29 sheep, pigs, 2 or 3 cows, 2 bullocks, 6 ducks - meant that they were much better off than agricultural labourers. But they chose to do no more than exploit their land and livestock on a subsistence basis only. With theft and extortion to supplement that.
Whilst it is evident that this was a wild, unconventional and lawless family, they seem to have been courteous to strangers who meant them no harm. And according to the pastor of the Independent Chapel in Lapford, they were frequent attenders there for worship. When the Rev Temple had been replaced as the incumbent of Nymet Rowland by the Rev Gutteres, it was reported that the family donned their Sunday best and worshipped at the parish church. (This apparently did not prevent them from allowing their animals to graze on the Rev Gutteres' tennis lawn, ruining it for the summer).
Perhaps not unsurprisingly their behaviour incited aggression in return - in 1878 four men were summonsed for stoning the Cheritons' house for over two hours. In 1879 a rick of wheat belonging to William was burned. Some of the charges against the family even appear to have been trumped up with the collusion of the constable, no doubt at the instigation of the local landowners, including John Partridge. In the 1870s there seems to have developed a concerted effort to rid the parish of the Cheritons. Unnecessary really, as Time intervened.
Despite their numerous illegitimate children, one by one the daughters left home to set up house with a partner, or to get married, each adding several children to their family with their partners. Charlotte moved out of the family bed pit initially to set up home with George Bradford alias Tancock in a nearby hay rick! Willoughby Farley - son of Matilda - was eventually to marry my second cousin 3x removed Mary Ann Drew. G-g-great aunt Harriet Frost was the stepmother of Eliza's husband John Drew, and mother of the husbands of two of Charlotte's daughters. (The convoluted sexual relations continued through the generations when John, a base son of Charlotte, married a daughter of Matilda, in 1890, by then called Virginia Farley after her stepfather. The bride was to die within 3 months. Ostensibly cousins, who knows who their father(s) was or were, though in all probability John was the son of George Tancock.) In 1880 matriarch Mary Ann (described as a foul-mouthed hag) died of bronchitis. Son William seems to have set up home with a partner Bessie in Zeal Monachorum. Now an old man, Christopher left the parish to live with one or other of his married daughters. By the 1881 census the savages had left: no Cheritons were living in Nymet Rowland.
An account of the Cheritons by Peter Christie - The True Story of the North Devon Savages - can be found in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association, Volume 124, 1992, pp 59-85.
An article from the Victorian Press can be found here. http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications4/strange-11.htm | | | | James Wright, West of England Iron Works | In May 1881 the Devon County Show was held in Crediton. Great Great Grandfather Wright took a stand for his West of England Iron Works, and advertised the fact in all the local papers. According to the report in Trewman's Exeter Flying Post, he had one of the largest and most varied collections of implements and ironwork to be found in the show. His exhibits included specimens of ornamental gates "for which he has been honoured with Royal and most distinguished patronage including the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Somerset, Earl Portsmouth, Earl Devon and others."
The list of implements displayed on James's stand is fascinating. Ploughs included "the A.1 Champion, fitted with steel breast plate" and several implements and other general purpose ploughs "of his own invention and manufacture". Evidently the Champion Plough had been very successful , winning ploughing competitions throughout the county, and critical acclaim at the Taunton Show, the Royal Bath and West Show and at agricultural shows throughout Devon. | 
| The West of England Works was also exhibiting an improved self-lifting wheel drag "made from the pattern of his well-known Bath and West show's first prize drag", the Royal Invincible horse-rake with wrought iron wheels and steel teeth, reapers, steel rakers, manuals, Bamlett's, Hornsby's, Woods', Hendyside' s, and Burgess and Keys mowers and reapers, Nicholson's first prize hay machines, Reeves and Son's patent improved manure, turnip and mangold drills, Reeves' elevators with horse gear attached, liquid manure cart with pump attached, Hendyside's patent flexible chain harrows, cider presses, iron folding, bar, and other rail fencing, unclimbable, game-proof, self-fixing iron sheep folding, ox and cattle hurdles, root pulpers, cake breakers, Cambridges' patent plod roller, ornamental tree seats, Ganett's combined corn drill, Baker's winnowing machines, Bartlett's weighing machines, superior two-horse waggons, farm carts and harvest carts. "The entire stand comprises as varied and superior a collection of implements as can be produced in an exhibition field". Brother and business rival Robert, of the Britannia Ironworks, Sandford, gets a rather more patronising review. " Robert Wright makes a very respectable display at stand 21".
In earlier times James and Robert had been partners in the West of England Iron Works, but something happened between the brothers that caused the partnership to be broken up in 1859. Robert started his own business - the Britannia Iron Works, and by the next generation the rivalry between the cousins was marked. It seems that by the early 20th century when great grandfather Lewis Wright should have had the business it was in trouble, and was being run by his wife. Shortly after that it was taken over by the cousins' Britannia Iron Works. | 
Wright's implements
|  | | | Our Riotous Cousins !  | 
West Street, Exeter
| In the midnight hours of Saturday 30th October 1852 PCs Martin and Holway were patrolling in the West Quarter of Exeter, when they encountered a noisy crowd in Frog Street. With some difficulty the constables managed to disperse the crowd, but a short while later their attention was called to nearby West Street, where they found "the rabble of the city, behaving in a riotous manner" There were now some 20 or 30 men gathered, and amongst them, shouting abuse and about to start a fight, was James Cann, the nephew of our wrestling champion Abe Cann. PC Martin apprehended James, but the policeman was immediately set upon by Abraham Cann, who rescued his brother James. Abraham was himself arrested, and a man called Hartnoll came to the aid of the two policemen. But the three were outnumbered by the mob, some accounts stating there were almost 100 persons then present, and a George Lewis then rescued Abraham. PC Holway grabbed him, but was knocked down, and he was then obliged to use his staff to defend himself. About then mayhem broke out, and the mob set upon the two policemen and their helper. The battle seems to have raged around the streets of Exe Island, and things looked particularly bad for constable Martin. He had been knocked down and was surrounded by three or four men kicking his head and body. He cried out "Murder!" and Holway and Hartnoll managed to extricate him from the crowd, unconscious and bleeding.
The constables escaped to the safety of their nearby station house, all with injuries from kickings and beatings, but Martin in particular had been severely beaten, and was taken to hospital where he remained for a week, unable to speak or move. | A number of the rioters were arrested in the days following the assaults, including James and Abraham Cann. They were remanded in custody until the Exeter Quarter Sessions in January 1853. Seven men were charged with assaulting police, including Lewis and the Cann brothers. There were several witnesses to the various assaults, and the accused did not seem to have much of a defence. After three hours of deliberation, all seven were found guilty. Three of the defendants, including George Lewis, were sentenced to 12 months with hard labour, whilst Abraham and James Cann seem to have got off relatively lightly, with sentences of three months hard labour each.
Abraham and James were about 29 and 28 respectively at the time of their arrest, and both were skilled artisans - Abraham a coach painter and James a harness maker. They lived with their mother in Weight Court, off nearby Cowick Street. By the time of their arrest their father, James Cann, a wrestler himself, and a butcher, had been dead for three years, having been one of the few victims of Exeter's second cholera episode, in 1849. There is no evidence of father James living with his wife Thomasine, so perhaps the seven Cann children were brought up without the presence of a father. But nor is there evidence of either brother getting into trouble again. Both moved away from Exeter, Abraham staying for a while with James and his wife in London.
It is clear that like today, alcohol played its part in the unruly events of that night. The West Quarter and Exe Island were amongst the poorest parts of the city, the site of unsavoury workplaces, and overcrowded run-down dwellings, where the inhabitants made use of the many pubs and beer shops to take the edge off their often miserable lives. | | | | The Abandoning of Sarah Hector | | | Sarah, daughter of pioneer Crediton photographer William Hector, inherited the creative genes in the family, as she was a music teacher, and several of her descendants were musicians. Edwin Fey probably met Sarah through his brother William, who lived next door to her in Crediton. Sarah married Edwin in 1870 in Bristol. Many of the Crediton and Shobrooke Feys had moved to Bristol, for as skilled tradesmen they could make good money in the expanding city. For 10 years Edwin, who was a builder, seemed content with his lot in Bristol, and he and Sarah had five children. But the Feys seem to have had an adventurous spirit and Edwin, like two of his brothers, went to the USA looking for work. He returned to Bristol and tried to persuade Sarah to emigrate. As she was then expecting their sixth child she was reluctant to make the journey, and could not be persuaded to go with him. Feeling that he had left his family well-provided for, Edwin left his wife and "eloped" with her best friend to the USA. This companion supposedly killed herself. Edwin changed his name to Frank Green, and bigamously married Rose. It is believed that Sarah heard nothing more of Edwin. Thinking herself to be widowed, in 1911 Sarah married George Bigwood in Bristol. She died in 1939. Edwin died in California in about 1923, having been a successful builder. Family stories say that Edwin always had tears in his eyes when he spoke of the family he had abandoned. |   Sarah Hector and Edwin Fey | | | | | Isolation and Death in Winkleigh - a Rural Tragedy | | In 1796, a year after Susanna Crossman married militiaman John Heard in Sandford, Charity, a distant Wensley relative, married farmer John Luxton in North Tawton. The Luxtons had been landowners around Winkleigh for generations and could trace their line back to the 14th century.
Charity's great grandson Robert John Luxton of West Chapple Farm, Winkleigh, had been raised by his father Laurence on a creed of ruthless self-sufficiency and thrift as the only way to survive the pressures on late 19th century agriculture that had ruined his less prudent and wealthier farming cousins. In Robert John this creed developed into a tyrannical Puritanism and fear of intrusion. He drove off the suitors of his daughter Frances, hoping perhaps she would marry a cousin as so many of the Luxtons had before, keeping the land within the family. Her brother Robbie, the eldest son, inherited his father's suspicion and resistance to change, and in turn destroyed his younger brother Alan's wedding plans. |  West Chapple Farm |   Left, Laurence Luxton, 1829-1832. Right Robert John Luxton, 1872-1939 with wife Wilmot, nee Short, 1882-1949, daughter Frances Wilmot, 1908 -1975 and son Robert 1911-1975. The pedigree of William Thomas Heard can be followed back to Grace Sharland and through her brother Francis Sharland b.1837, to Grace Wensley, and thus back to Laurence's g-grandparents, John Wensley and Charity Reed. | After Robert John's death in 1939, his children Frances, Robbie, and Alan lived on, unmarried, in the remote farm. Frances and Alan sought to assert their independence, and to break out from the smothering gloom of brother Robbie's parsimony. The war brought US flyers to an aerodrome on the outskirts of Winkleigh. And for a while Frances and Alan in particular were caught up in the changes wrought by this great upheaval. After the war Alan joined the Young Farmers and strove to modernise West Chapple's farming methods. But Robbie resisted this, and in many ways West Chapple continued to be farmed much as it had been in the mid nineteenth century. There was little mechanisation. Old almanacs served as textbooks for good husbandry. The farm thrived under this care, but in some respects it was as if the dead hands of their ancestors strived to shut out the twentieth century. Robbie even made the farm less accessible, closing off an entrance. Alan suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised. When he came home he would stay in his bedroom for weeks on end. Frances too became more withdrawn, rarely venturing out except perhaps to visit family graves in Brushford churchyard three miles off, where today a bench commemorates her visits. | | Gradually the two brothers and the sister became more reclusive, miserly and eccentric, and turned in on each other and the brooding archaic farm. For a while in the 60s and early 70s Frances seemed about to escape, and would embark on long foreign tours with a friend. But always she was drawn back into the closed world of West Chapple. As old age encroached on their isolated existence it became clear that with the youngest, Alan, unfit to work the farm, their anachronistic lifestyle could not be sustained. In 1975 it seemed certain that they would sell the farm and retire to a modern bungalow in Crediton perhaps. There was talk that they had bought a bungalow, that a deal had been struck for West Chapple: but in fact there had been rows, anxiety and uncertainty. "We were born on the farm and we should die here". A worry that Frances was heard to utter again and again. This may have seemed sinister to city-dwelling outsiders, but a farming colleague of mine, much more worldly than the Luxtons, told me that the only move he had made in his life was to a different bedroom when he got married, and that it was a soul-tearing wrench he still felt whenever he had to sell any land - land that was his birthright. |   
l to r: Frances 1908 -1975, Robbie 1911-1975, and Alan Luxton 1921 -1975 | 
Left: Grave of Frances Luxton at Brushford Church, alongside the tomb of John Luxton 1767-1827, husband of Charity Wensley.
Above: Memorial Stone for Robert and Alan Luxton, on the grave of their parents and grandparents in Winkleigh Churchyard, where their cremated remains are interred.
| Alan in particular seems to have objected aggressively to the sale, arguing with both his brother and sister. They had sold their cattle, but were still not absolutely committed to the sale of the farm. But it seems that Robbie was convinced it must go forward.
On 23rd September 1975 a grocer's roundsman calling at the farm saw a white scarecrow lying next to the barn. On closer inspection he found that it was Alan Luxton in pyjamas and boots, his brains blown out. He summoned police, who cautiously searched the farm, as no gun had been found, and the gunman might still be lurking in the outbuildings. The house was deserted, but after some time the bodies of Frances and Robbie were found in the garden, both too with their brains blown out. Frances was on all fours, her knees drawn up as if in prayer. An old shotgun was beside Robbie.
The inquest found that Alan had killed himself first, Robbie had then killed Frances and committed suicide. Victims of their past and of their own dark and claustrophobic lives.
Frances is buried in Brushford churchyard. Alan and Robbie were cremated, and their ashes interred in their parents' grave in Winkleigh churchyard. John Cornwell has told the story of the Luxtons and West Chapple in Earth to Earth, published in 1982, and now apparently out of print. Genealogists should note that some of the Luxton family history there is inaccurate. | | | | | Miller Willing - revenge backfired! | | Richard Willing was born in Loddiswell in about 1820, eldest son of miller Richard and Amy Willing of New Mill, Loddiswell. Willings had been and continued to be farmers around Loddiswell for generations, but our Richard's father seems to have been the first of the family to become a miller. Son Richard determined to follow in his father's footsteps, and in 1841 he was working as a servant at Washbrook Mill, Dodbrooke, where Phillip Hingston was miller. Richard married Phillip's daughter Jane in 1843, by which time he had himself learned the trade and was a miller, at Chittlesford Mill, Halwell. Jane bore Richard two children, John and Dorothy, but she died in childbirth in 1845; the child Dorothy died too.
Richard did not grieve long. On 22 January 1846 he married Elizabeth Harley in Dean Prior. Elizabeth also bore Richard two children - Richard and Mary. In 1848 Richard and Elizabeth took on the lease of Lurgecombe Mill, Ashburton, where Elizabeth too died, in 1849, probably in childbirth again. Richard did not allow the grass to grow under his feet, and was remarried in a little over a year - this time to Susanna Sherwill, of Widecombe. The 1851 census finds Richard and Susanna still at Lurgecombe Mill, with 2 year-old Mary. Richard's sons are both with their grandparents in Loddiswell.
Soon after this, disaster seems to have struck the family. By the beginning of July 1851, Richard was declared bankrupt. The bankruptcy hearings were completed by the end of July. Richard's response was to leave the country, more or less immediately. | 
Washbrook Mill, Dodbrooke
Chittlesford Mill, Halwell
|
Convicts in Kingston Penitentiary in 1875
Kingston Penitentiary
| We next meet him in Canada East (Quebec) in the 1851 census, which in Canada was in fact taken in January 1852. Son Richard and daughter Mary accompanied Richard and Susanna to the New World, but eldest son John Hingston Willing stayed with his grandfather in Loddiswell. The Willings were sharing a log cabin with another emigrant family in the parish of Saint Malachie, in Beauharnois County at the time of the census. Richard described himself as a miller, and it is at this trade that he seems to have worked in Canada. But in a few years he was in trouble again. By the 1861 census he was in Frontenac County, Canada West - incarcerated in the provincial penitentiary in Portsmouth Village (now Kingston Penitentiary). He had been tried in April 1858 for arson. The crime was committed in Leeds and Grenville, a nearby county in Ontario. Richard had been employed as a miller by Ormond Jones - a prominent Brockville citizen. In November 1857 the Jones mill, at Yonge Mills, was burned down, under suspicious circumstances. The fire had blazed in a part of the mill where there was no source for flames. Nobody was injured, but a considerable amount of money was lost on the under-insured mill. It emerged at Richard's trial that he had been sacked by Jones for misconduct, and had since been heard to utter threats, on several occasions, against his former employer. Suspiciously Richard had made arrangements to leave the district at about the time the fire was set, but the weather had disrupted his plans. The jury were satisfied that he had carried out his threats against his former boss. He was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
The prison regime in Kingston, harsh by our standards, but not for the times, allowed no talking; Richard seems to have found it particularly difficult to comply with the regulations. During his sentence he was often punished for his disruptive behaviour. He seems to have been, like Chaucer's Miller, a garrulous man with a coarse nature. His sins "talking in Church the whole time of the Morning Service" and later "for continuing most disgusting conduct purposely breaking wind". His punishments were mostly bread and water diet, or loss of bedding: on one occasion long term solitary, and finally in April 1865 "four dozen lashes with the cats and be confined to the Dark Cell till further orders " Perhaps this did for him. He died in the penitentiary on 5th June 1865, of consumption according to the burial record, but of typhoid according to the prison autopsy. Perhaps a death by typhoid was to be kept secret. He was buried the same day in a common grave.
Thanks to Jane Sweet for her dogged and diligent research, and to Brockville Museum for their assistance. | Richard had chosen a formidable victim when he sought revenge against Ormond Jones. He was one of the influential sons of a founding family of Brockville - that of the Hon. Charles Jones. The Jones family had been early settlers in Upper Canada. Charles acquired property in Leeds County on the undeveloped shores of the St Lawrence River. He developed the land into a successful trading business, where the town of Brockville would grow up.
Later with his brother he built a five storey stone flour mill at nearby hamlet Yonge Mills - it was the largest mill in Canada when it was built. Trade from the mill helped the village grow into a thriving community such that it outgrew nearby Brockville. Son Ormond inherited the mill. Like his father before him, Ormond was a successful business man, local politician and lawyer. He ultimately became a judge. After the fire, the mill was never rebuilt: derelict for many years, it was converted into farm buildings. By 1966 the community of Yonge Mills was all but abandoned, and the village was swept aside for the building of Highway 401. | | | | | The Rector, his Wife and the Curate | | In May 1914, scandal overtook the Reverend Theophilus Rodick Willing at Blackpool Magistrate’s Court, in messy and public revelations of a family dispute. The Court heard accusations of drunkenness and abuse, unfaithfulness, seduction and betrayal, secret correspondence, forged confessions, and shocking suggestions concerning blackmail and a brothel.
The scandal involved Theo, his young wife, his best friend the curate of South Shore Parish Church, Blackpool and the Freemasons, all stoked-up by scheming and outraged in-laws.
Little could Theo have guessed when he married his 19-year old bride in Blackpool, that in less than a year, events would land him in the town’s Magistrate's Court accused of desertion, and facing an order for maintenance.
Annie Willing, nee Stafford, the daughter of Henry Stafford, painter and decorator, charged that life with Theo was one of torture, forcing her out of the marriage home, his behaviour such that she could not bear to live with him, and thus this state of affairs amounted to his desertion of her. Theo insisted that not only had he not deserted her, but that he fervently wished her to return to their home in North Hill, Cornwall, where he was Rector of the Parish. Her lawyers claimed his pleas were bogus. The court sat from 10.45am to 7.45pm hearing the "Amazing Allegations" as the local paper described them. Lawyers for the two sides clashed fiercely throughout the day. | 
Annie Hunter Willing, nee Stafford
Blackpool 1914
| Annie outlined her allegations first - her evidence implied that Theo was cruel and brutish. She alleged that within weeks of the marriage she found that he drank to excess. She claimed he tried to force her against her will to drink whisky, and smoke cigarettes. He gave her no housekeeping, verbally abused her and threatened to thrash her. He would not give her the money to visit her parents in Blackpool. She made the trip, only after being sent the money by her father, and she returned to Cornwall with a friend, Miss Devon. One night, alarmed at his drunken attitude, when he threatened again to thrash her, she spent the night in her friend's bed. She claimed that Theo took his tools and tried to break into their room. They pushed chairs against the door.
Weeks later, when another friend was staying, Theo insisted that Annie and her friend should stay in a Temperance Hotel in Plymouth, where he would join them - this was engineered so that she should not see her father who had announced he was coming to North Hill. The first evening there, hearing voices in the corridor, she opened the door to find her husband talking to a young woman, only half-dressed in her camisole, smoking a cigarette. Subsequently Annie learned from the woman that "she was there for the purpose of receiving sailors". Shocked, Annie demanded that the party move to another hotel. | 
Rev Theo Rodick Willing
Blackpool, 1914
| Shortly after this incident, only seven months after the wedding, the marriage deteriorated beyond salvation. Theo unaccountably rushed off to her home town of Blackpool, sending Annie to stay in Brighton. She alleged she was left there for two weeks, friendless and penniless. She wrote to her husband and to her father. Theo returned to Brighton unannounced to meet her - his manner was cold and hostile. He told her that he had heard something about her in Blackpool, "that he had wished he had never seen her, and that she should leave him". He told her to go to the devil and treated her, she claimed, "like a pig", refusing to stay the night with her in the hotel. Her father arrived in Brighton later that day, and after a confrontation with Theo at the station the next day, he took his daughter with him back to Blackpool. And thus their brief marriage seemed to have ended.
On the face of it, Annie's story sounds compelling, and sadly not so unusual, at a time when women were still very much regarded as part of the man's chattels in a marriage, her story differing only from numerous other sad tales in that her husband was a mild looking young clergyman.
But Annie's demeanour during cross examination was at times uncooperative, and her answers sometimes glib, evasive or contradictory. Her husband's lawyer began to tease out an altogether different dimension to the story, despite attempts by Annie's lawyer to prevent him. | The Reverend Fearnley Youens was curate at the South Shore Parish Church where Annie taught Sunday School and was an active church member. Youens had been Theo's best friend at University, and he had introduced Theo to Annie.
What began to emerge in court was the allegation that Annie had been closer to Fearnley Youens than was seemly. During their engagement Theo had discovered a letter written by Annie to a gentleman, signed "your loving Phyllis". The court heard that shortly before the wedding whilst Theo was in Jersey on business, something had happened between Annie and Youens. Annie's solicitor intervened to prevent further discussion of what may have occurred. Then followed an accusation that Annie's mother had demanded a £100 of the Rev. Youens shortly after the wedding. The demand was apparently linked to a confession Annie had written for her mother, a shocking cofession describing what had occurred between her and Youens - a confession that Annie subsequently withdrew in letters written to Youens. This confession and the impropriety it alleged, committed by Youens, with Annie's apparent acquiescence, was at the heart of the scandal. | 
Parish Church of Holy Trinity,
South Shore, Blackpool
| Instead of trying to hush this matter up, Annie's father seemed determined to make the allegation public, by bringing charges against Youens in the Freemason's Lodge to which he and the two priests belonged. In court, rather than trying to protect her own reputation and that of Youens, Annie stated that she had unwillingly written the letters withdrawing her confession, at the insistence of Youens, and dictated by him, and that he had posted the withdrawal letters to himself. Now Annie asserted that the original confession had been true, and the letters were Youens' attempt to clear his name.
Her father admitted that he had written secret letters to his daughter at North Hill, and sent her money so that she could come to Blackpool and verify her confession in person to the Freemasons, against Youens. When cross-questioned, other Stafford family members acknowledged a conspiracy of spite against Youens.
Theo's solicitor seems to have come closest to the mark when he declared, "Three weeks after the wedding an allegation was made by the girl's mother to Mr Youens implicating him and the girl, and demanding money. The matter was taken up by Mr. Stafford who tried to get evidence to bring before the Freemason's so as to have a hold over Mr Youens. When the confession arrived, Stafford started to make use of it. The matter came before the Masons but nothing happened and the thing subsided. The girl went back and lived with her husband until an announcement was made in the papers that Mr Youens was to be married, when the matter was revived to punish Mr Youens out of spite." | 
The Rectory, North Hill, Launceston, Cornwall
| It was when he heard of this alleged impropriety between his wife and his best friend, that Theo had rushed to Blackpool to try to get at the truth, sending Annie to Brighton, away from the row. Then on hearing the allegations in full, Theo had returned to Annie in Brighton to confront her. But her father had arrived later to take her back to Blackpool to stir things up again.
It seems that in time, Theo soon either came to disbelieve that anything had happened, or forgave his wife and his friend.
But what of Annie's allegations against her husband? It was established that there was no suggestion of impropriety in the incident with the half-dressed woman in Plymouth.
Several witnesses, including Annie's friend and the family servants testified that there had been no evidence of harsh treatment of Annie in Cornwall, nor of excessive drinking. | Letters were produced from Annie to her husband that were couched in the most tender terms. It transpired that having only just come into the living at North Hill, with no tithes yet received, Theo was short of money, and had been unable to afford an allowance for Annie until he had become financially more secure.
Rather strangely, Annie seems to have insisted on being called Miss Willing when she was away from North Hill, and would pass herself off as Theo's sister. The Court learned from the letters she wrote during her two weeks in Brighton that, far from being abandoned, friendless and penniless, she had struck up a friendship with a clergyman and his family in her hotel, who knew Theo, and she went to the theatre with them. Pretending to be single, she seems to have become over-friendly with the son of the family, who subsequently wrote to her.
We can conjecture perhaps that Annie, very young and immature, and used to a busy social life in Blackpool, where she was a successful and celebrated singer, found herself married to an older man, confined in a remote rural parish, in a large and gloomy Rectory. Had she discovered too late the reality of her married life. Pretending to be single probably reflected her wishful thinking. She perhaps saw an end of the marriage as the only way to recapture the life she had led, and although she obviously had some affection for Theo, she was content to be drawn into her parents' malicious conspiracy as a way out of the marriage.
However culpable Annie and her parents in all this, it is difficult to accept that the smoke was without fire; it seems likely that there was something in the behaviour of both Theo and Youens that was inappropriate.
Nonetheless, after their marathon sitting, the Bench was unconvinced by Annie's story, and they announced that they would not make any order for maintenance. At this, Theo's solicitor told the court that his client was still anxious for his wife to return to him, but if she still refused, then Theo would not see her penniless, and would make her an allowance for her maintenance.
Annie was not to return to the marriage. Their separation became permanent and legal, and eight years later Theo was to marry again and have three children. He remained as incumbent of North Hill until 2 years before his death in 1967.
Eight weeks after the court hearing, in July 1914, the world was plunged into a rather more momentous dispute that would change it for ever. | | | With gratitude to Philip Haynes for his help with the research | | | | | The Farthings - a Family of Felons? | | We first encounter Thomas Farthing at the Quarter Sessions in Taunton Castle in 1819, when he was found guilty of stealing " ten hundred weight of oak cleft wood, value 7s 6d, two hundred weight of elm cleft woof value 1s 6d, one iron cross axe value 4s and one hogshead cask value 10 s" - a value totalling more than two weeks wages for an agricultural labourer of the time. Thomas was sentenced to 12 months hard labour and 1s fine. He and his family would certainly not be regarded as major villains these days, indeed we would regard this as petty theft. However, the family seemed to have planned some of their crimes; others were opportunities seized, and one might suspect they always had an eye for the main chance.
Thomas was not the only member of his family to acquire a criminal record. In 1825 his wife Mary was on remand in Ilchester gaol for "want of sureties" - we do not know her crime. In 1827 she was again on trial, this time for stealing for stealing 5 earthenware jugs at Wincanton Fair, aided and abetted by her 12 year-old daughter Sarah, and "Aunt Ann Read".
Sarah was judged to have been under the influence of her mother and was freed. Mary, however, was committed to trial at the Quarter Sessions, where she was sentenced to three months in Wilton House of Correction. |
Taunton Castle
| In 1828, son Charles, aged 16, was sentenced to four months gaol, with two weeks solitary and twice whipped for stealing hay. He was released in August 1828. Thomas seems to have taken his paternal duties serious enough to try to help his son, as he was charged with "feloniously rescuing out of the custody of James Willis, tythingman [constable], one Charles Farthing, who had been committed for a felony". Thomas's attempt was unsuccessful, as he appeared at the same Wells Quarter sessions as his son, on 14th April 1828, when he was also sentenced to four months imprisonment, and to be twice whipped.
Later, in 1836, daughter Frances was sentenced at Wells Quarter Sessions to two calendar month's imprisonment, apparently for assault. But by the time of Frances's imprisonment, the Farthing family had already paid a heavy price for their criminal activities. |
Prison hulk at Devonport
| Six years earlier in 1830, Thomas had been accused of stealing 50 sheaves of newly reaped wheat belonging to John Gatehouse, gentleman of North Cheriton, Somerset.
Unfortunately for Thomas his next door neighbour James Holly testified against him.
"I heard a cart stop at the prisoner's door about 3 in the morning of yesterday ... and saw the prisoner with the cart ... loaded with wheat. I saw the prisoner carry the wheat ... into his house. When I got up afterwards about a quarter before 5, I saw the prisoner's daughter brushing the wheat which had fallen from the sheaves from the door. On seeing me she drew back"
Inside the house attempts had been made to disguise the stolen grains, as leazed corn (gathered by villagers from the ground after the harvest), and by mixing in poorer quality grain with the stolen wheat. But 4 sacks of wheat were identified as that belonging to Gatehouse. This had all the appearance of a calculated crime.
Thomas was convicted and was sentenced to be transported "beyond the seas" for life, on 30th October 1830.
The sentence was not to be carried out. In November 1830 Thomas was sent to await transportation in the prison hulk Captivity at Devonport. Conditions on the hulks were appalling. They were filthy, and disease-ridden. Epidemics of typhoid and cholera were commonplace. As many as a third of the prisoners held on hulks died of disease . Thomas Farthing was one of those who succumbed. His death is recorded on 30 June 1831.
The rest of the family survived, and from Frances's line a Farthing was to marry a Heard four generations later. | | | | | Our Middle Classes, Family Networks, Politics and Funny Handshakes | The 19th century saw an expansion of the middle-class, a term that referred to a social category of such a diverse range of people that there could be no satisfactory single definition of it. This diversity encompassed everything from the great industrialists and manufacturing entrepreneurs, professionals, politicians and public servants to shopkeepers, merchants, clerks, and tradesmen. Class was not determined by wealth, for it was not unusual for skilled working class men to earn more than many who would be considered middle-class. In reality there was a middle-class and a lower middle-class. And in Crediton, a small Devonshire market town, the make-up of both differed from the middle-classes of the Metropolis, or the great manufacturing and industrial conurbations. So how to define it?
Historian E.P.Thompson suggested a criterion that might define our middle- and lower middle-classes wherever they were living.
"Class happens when some men, as a result of common experience (inherited or shared) feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from theirs." - it was how people regarded themselves and were in turn regarded.
The study of our families in 19th century Crediton suggests that a strong middle class emerged, as the tradesmen of the town began to regard themselves as distinctly separate from other social groups. They identified joint interests, and realised that their economic power and status set them apart from both the local squirearchy and the labouring classes in a more cohesive way than before. They established social networks with merchant neighbours who shared their interests, often cementing the relationships through marriage. |
|  Victorian Middle Class family at tea |
W.B.Berry's design for the Masonic Hall, Union Street, Crediton
| Throughout the 19th century in Crediton it was as if a local mafia sprang up, with shopkeepers, tradesmen, innkeepers and similar socialising with each other, and marrying into each other's families. It seemed that occupying commercial premises on the town's High Street was an entrée into a marriage club! Master tailor Bicknell married mason's daughter Prawl, currier Adams married baker's daughter Vicary, plumber Berry married publican's daughter Milton, jeweller and watchmaker Bellringer married builder's daughter Berry, builder Berry married grocer's daughter Boddy, photographer's son Cornish married auctioneer's daughter Helmore...These were some of the members of our extended family in Crediton's middle-class. These people all had businesses that in the main employed others. But our families did more than reinforce their collective identity through marriages.
Although the magistracy seems to have been the preserve of the traditional landowning aristocracy of Mid-Devon, our burgeoning middle class in Crediton sought to exercise some influence through participation in local politics.
We find in the minutes of the Crediton Parish Vestry between the 1850s and 1880s that our family is represented by the participation of builders William and John Berry and William Boddy Berry, photographer William Hector, watchmaker William Hector, John Hector, plumber James Gover, tailor Charles Bicknell, overseer Thomas Pollard, tanner William Adams, and machinist Lewis Wright.
With the urbanisation of local government, our middle class began to consolidate its influence, and these same family members were elected to the board of Improvement Commissioners and Urban Sanitary Authority. | When the new Urban District Council was established our cousins William Adams and William Boddy Berry were elected, the latter being appointed chairman.
The 19th century saw a tremendous growth in friendly societies. They were to evolve into different guises over the years, but for the purposes of our socially mobile ancestors in Crediton, membership of such a society confirmed their collective identity: an oath, secret signs and knowledge, exclusive regalia marking office and achievement, members’ contributions and a sense of exclusiveness based on a line drawn between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ - thus did our middle class receive their recognition and respectability.
There have been several friendly societies in Crediton over the years - the Ancient Order of Foresters, the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffalos, the Loyal Order of Moose, and the Freemasons. It was the latter that perhaps offered the greatest kudos to our aspirant family- for the last quarter of the century the Prince of Wales was the Grand Master of the Freemasons! It is no surprise therefore that examination of the membership of the Crediton Unity Lodge No1332 of the Freemasons from 1870 to 1920 reveals that familiar family names appear. Worshipful Masters of the Lodge included painter William Thomas, builder William Boddy Berry, jeweller William Hector and auctioneer Frederick Helmore. Other family members "on the square" included lawyer Thomas Hector, tanner Percy Bruce Adams, photographer Henry Cornish.
William Boddy Berry was both the architect and the builder of the brand new Masonic Hall in Union Road in 1888, the year in which he was Worshipful Master.
It is clear from the names of the Crediton Freemasons that our family members and other tradesmen did not simply join the ancient order. Fathers in the 1880s were followed by their sons in the 1900s and 1910s. They, their friends and in-laws were the local Freemasons. They had consolidated their middle class status through tacit engineering of social networks and local structures. By the middle of the 20th century, with the disappearance of the aristocracy, many of these families were regarded as the "gentry" of Crediton. |
Members of Unity Lodge No.1332, the Crediton Freemasons
outside the Masonic Hall, Union Road, Crediton, awaiting the triumphal return of General Sir Redvers Buller on 10th November 1900. The banner reads, "Praise the Great Architect of the universe for Sir Redvers' safe return". Cousin William Boddy Berry is third from left.
| | | | | Tragic Fire at Shobrooke | | Shobrooke House, some two miles from Crediton, has featured in the family history in several ways. The manor house and park was known as Little Fulford for most of its history, and was in the hands of the Tuckfield family and their descendants. In the late 18th and early 19th century Day Books of our builder John Prawl, and then his protégé , John Berry, Fulford appears as a source of much work, and almost daily one or more of the builders' craftsmen are working there.
With its pleasant parkland and ornamental pond, it became a favourite place for a picnic, particularly when courting. At least one Heard made a photographic record of trips to the park.
The Shelley family, cousins to the Tuckfields, took over the estate in 1880. In the mid nineteenth century the name had been changed from Fulford to Shobrooke Park. |  |
| During the Second World War, St Peter's Preparatory School was evacuated from Broadstairs to Shobrooke House. Former pupils had included the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Gloucester. Amongst the pupils evacuated then was Peter de la Billiere who was to become General Sir Peter, Commander of British Forces in the Gulf War of 1991.
Rachel Wright, nee Pett (1922-2007), was cook at the school. Separated from husband Jack by his wartime posting, Rachel was one of a handful of domestic staff who lived in at the mansion, some of whom had moved with the school.
Some time before 4.00 am on 23rd January 1945 the alarm was raised. The mansion was ablaze. The telephone lines had been destroyed by the fire, so a schoolboy in pyjamas and his bare feet ran to Crediton to raise the alarm. Children and staff, including Rachel, jumped from the upper floors to the frozen snow-covered ground to escape the smoke and flames that had engulfed the building. Ladders were made from sheets and blankets, and several boys escaped down these. The fire brigade arrived from Crediton in time to rescue a group of 18 boys who were trapped on a porch. | Despite their efforts two boys and a school nurse were overcome by smoke and perished in the fire. Rachel was one of nine people taken to hospital, suffering from burns and other injuries. Her father-in-law John Berry Wright had seen the fire from Sandford, and cycled to Shobrooke, anxious for his daughter-in-law. Husband Jack had been posted to the North of England. He heard on the BBC wireless news of the fire at Shobrooke. Unaware of how serious were her injuries, Jack was given compassionate leave, and rushed back to Devon to be with her in hospital. Rachel was made of strong stuff, and recovered from her ordeal.
The house was never rebuilt and its ruins are there to this day.
Read a contemporary newspaper account of the fire | 
Rachel Wright, nee Pett 1922-2007 |  | Perhaps it's easy for us to forget these days how great a hazard fire was for our ancestors, in their thatched cottages, with open grates and scant regard for fire precautions. I can remember in my childhood decorating Xmas trees with real miniature candles in clip-on holders!
My grandparents lost all their possessions when their cottage at Redhill, Morchard Bishop (left) was destroyed by fire in December 1939. Kate Pitts, her daughter Sadie and a blind lodger, Miss Willmet, were at home, Nicholas Pitts and son Laurie having gone to work. About 8.45 am a spark from the chimney ignited the thatched roof. In no time at all the cottage was ablaze, and the fire quickly spread through the entire row of four cottages. A passer-by raised the alarm, and a retired policeman who lived nearby helped to rescue some of the elderly residents who were still in bed. The cottages stood on the brow of a hill, and the December wind fanned the flames. There was no time to retrieve much in the way of furniture or possessions. When the fire brigade arrived 45 minutes later the blazing roof had fallen in; nothing could be done to save the buildings. 13 people were left homeless. No trace of the cottages remains today. They have been replaced by smart bungalows.
Read a contemporary newspaper account of the fire | | | | | George Bubear - Champion Fraud | | At the end of his sporting career, cousin George Bubear (1859-1927) - professional sculler and twice Champion of England - seems to have fallen prey to the temptations of "easy money". At his peak he had won £500-£600 in prizes per year, at a time when the average wage was about £50 per year. No doubt his backers took the lion's share of the prizes, but George must have been comfortably off , not least because he was also working as a Licensed Victualler for much of his career. Over the years there had been several barely veiled accusations in the Press that some of George's races had been fixed - probably a common occurrence in those days, in a barely regulated professional sport where enormous sums of money were gambled. So it is likely that George was not averse to sharp practice where money was involved. Perhaps he saw the opportunity presented to him in 1898 as no more than an extension of match fixing. Though it must be said that several victims of his fraud bore witness to his previous upright character during the trial.
The fraud was quite a complicated one, but essentially was a variation on the past-posting scam operated in The Sting.
George was persuaded by bookmaker's clerk Edward Barker to make arrangements with several bookmakers to place bets by telegram. Barker, aided by George or other accomplices, would visit a number of post offices and hand in a batch of 15 or 20 telegrams, asking that they be time stamped and sent as soon as possible. After the post office clerk had time stamped and then started to send the batch (which would take the clerk some considerable time to code) Barker or George would interrupt and ask for the unsent telegrams to be returned to them on the pretext of making a correction. The telegrams were addressed to bookmakers, containing bets that George was placing on races that were about to start. The names of the horses had been left off the last telegrams in the batch. A confederate would determine by telephone which horse had won the race, and pass the name on to his colleagues in the post office. The winning horse's name was inserted in the telegrams. These were then returned to the post office clerk and were sent stamped with the earlier time. In theory the clerks were supposed to start the whole process again with a different time stamp when the sending of telegrams had been so interrupted, but in practice they either did not know the procedure or felt it to be too onerous. The first telegrams in the batches, sent on time, were bogus. The doctored telegrams arrived late, but the time stamp indicated that they had been sent before the race started so they appeared legitimate. Some of the bookmakers paid up. Most were suspicious of the long delayed arrivals of the telegrams, often thirty or forty minutes after the end of the race, and after the stamped time. Several challenged George, so he backed off and would not take any winnings if they thought there was something wrong with the bets "but there are two or three of us in the syndicate, and I have already paid the others so I will lose out". But he seems to have lost his nerve when suspected. Several of the bookmakers were not content with that, and reported their suspicions. In consequence on George and Barker were arrested in June 1899 and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. The case was heard at the end of October, and both men were found guilty, Barker being sentenced to 6 months with hard labour, and the sentencing of George deferred. A clergyman and the Kingston MP, Mr Skewes-Cox, spoke as character witnesses for George. The latter said that he had known Bubear for 10 years and that he was a man of excellent character and a very simple-minded man. The MP was sternly rebuked by the Recorder who said that as a solicitor he should know better than to abuse his position as an MP by giving testimony that was contrary to the rules of evidence (that George was a simple-minded man). He had no right to come there to champion a constituent.
George was sentenced in November 1899 to three months imprisonment with hard labour. | 
| | | | | John Berry - the Boy Done Well! | | 
John Berry 1780 - 1863 | In about 1791 11 year-old John Berry seems to have left home, to live with family in Crediton, perhaps to ease the burden on his twice-widowed father, Sandford thatcher George Berry. Somehow he is taken under the wing of Crediton builder John Prawl, and about 1794 apprenticed to him. Prawl was mason to the Governors of the church in Crediton - the highest office open to a local craftsman. The young John seems to have impressed his master, and the business day books reveal that often Prawl and Berry would work together on a job. The young man became a close confidant of his master. In 1802 they went off together to the militia muster, when the Napoleonic threat seemed particularly strong. The bond between Master and Worker was strengthened even more when the apprentice was given the hand in marriage of the boss's daughter. In 1803 John married Martha Prawl at Crediton. The event passes with little comment in the day book - "Self, Berry, Edwards, Tremblett, Wreford and Manley not at work". Berry, Edwards, Tremblett, Wreford and Manley were not at work the next day either, but two days later, all, including the groom, were back in harness. John Prawl seems to have been a good master, making loans to his workers, and not pressing them for clearance of their debts, to the extent that some were never cleared. | By 1819, when he was well advanced in years John Prawl had passed effective control of the business to his son-in-law, for John is given an agreed wage and 50% of the profits. In 1822 on the death of master and father-in-law, John Berry took over the business, and proceeded to develop it into a more ambitious undertaking. From the day books it was evident that much of John Prawl's work had been for the large estates around the town, at Fulford estate, at Downes and at Newcombes. John Berry seemed to have continued with that business and began to win contracts for local civic improvements, including the contract for the construction of brick built drains for the town.
Canny John apprenticed his three sons to different trades. John [my g-g-grandfather] was a plumber, Thomas a mason, who had no taste for building, and went to sea, and William a carpenter, who took over the business from his father. Father and son secured a maintenance contract for some 20 road bridges around Crediton. When John retired, comfortably off, in 1850, he had established a dynasty of builders and contractors. | Crediton Railway Station 
| Below: The business in 2007. Sadly it closed in 2008 after 250 years
 | Son William gained lucrative work with the expanding railways, for the building of stations and bridges, including those at Newton St Cyres and at Crediton. Work began on the latter on 5th August 1846. (The opening of the railway was delayed for several years after its construction by legal disputes. On 18th July 1850 William Berry noted "Agricultural Show. Self and wife went to Exeter by Railway in a 'trawler' and was accompanied by about 20 others and 2 horses". So the tracks were pressed into service without the engines! The railway was inaugurated finally on 2 May 1851) William suffered severe injuries after falling from a ladder whilst building a bank in Crediton High Street. He eventually died from the injuries sustained. William was succeeded by his son William Boddy Berry. As well as continuing with the expansion of the business, William became a pillar of the community. He was Chairman of the Council , a Magistrate and a Grand Juror. | Despite generally benign treatment of his workers, apparently not all were happy with their lot under Prawl. On 26 May 1808 a small advertisement in the Exeter Flying Post announced that Apprentice John Manley, aged 19 had run away from his master, John Prawl, Mason of Crediton. "Whoever employs, harbours or detains the said John Manley after this notice will be prosecuted as the Law directs" | By 1890 the business became " Builder and General Contractor, Stone and Marble Monumental Mason, Undertaker and Dealer in Building Materials". William's son Hubert ran it from about 1900. Edwin Vincent became a partner in 1923. The business subsequently changed hands a few times before finally going under in 2008 after more than 200 years. |  | The contract to maintain several county road bridges continued into the third generation under the care of William Boddy Berry. His son Hubert Berry, who took over the business about 1900, was something of an inventor and innovator. In 1907 he won the contract to replace the 16th century bridge over the Exe at Thorverton. Using reinforced concrete, which was a novelty at the time, the single span structure is believed to be the first of this construction in Devon. It was opened on 1st December 1908, for a final cost of £2392. It was load tested to 66 tons, which caused the middle two arch ribs to deflect 3/32 in. at the centre of the span, and the two outer ribs to deflect 1/16 in. The bridge was strengthened in 1997.
Thorverton Bridge | | | | | The Hangman's Wife and the Prince of Wales | | 
Above: William Mordey, wife Florence, nee Palmer, and children William, Annie, Henry and Eddie, in about 1914
Below: Centre - William on a boar hunt
| Distant Crocker in-law William Mordey (1870-1923) was a colourful character. He was born in Southwark, but spent much of his working life in the East.Whilst serving in the army in Hong Kong, he was made a prison warder at Changi gaol, Singapore, which was to gain a notorious reputation during Japanese occupation in the War. After further army service in India, William returned to the prison service as Chief Warder at Pudu gaol, in the Federated Malay States, at Kuala Lumpur. As part of his duties he served as the last Hangman in the gaol. He also joined the volunteer Fire Service there at Selonga Fire Station.
He married beautiful Anglo-Malay Florence Palmer. They had nine children. He was evidently a sportsman, kept polo ponies and played against or with the polo team of Prince Edward of Wales. And his wife Florence really was a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales! Her great-granddaughter still has her dance card from the reception at government House in KL which shows she had two dances with Prince Edward. Having lived a full life, William died of a twisted colon in 1923, and was buried in Malaya. His family moved to England after his death. | 
Changi Gaol
| | | | Some Tragic Accidents in the Family Captain George Blackler, lost at sea from the SS Archimedes, 1923, aged 53
Ernest Fey, knocked down and killed by an army truck in 1945, aged 77 Mary Dicker, knocked down and killed by a Harrods electric van in the blackout in 1939, aged 70 William Berry, Builder, fell from a ladder while building a bank in Crediton; he never fully recovered, dying in 1874, aged 67
John Perrin Huxtable died of injuries received in a railway accident in Australia in 1893.
Ernest Heard drowned at Middlecott, Morchard Bishop, in 1894, aged 11
John Ashplant, killed by an LSWR train near Crediton, in 1901, aged 54 Charles Procter, died as a result of an accident whilst working for his father's haulage firm, in 1936, aged 38 Gerald Manning Goding, who worked for the railway in Queensland, died aged 59, in 1936, following a collision between two rail trolleys when his head struck a rail sleeper. Henry Goding, killed by a fall of rock at the Band of Hope Mine, during the Australian goldrush in 1898, aged 25. Solomon Hughes, Trinity Pilot, died on his schooner Margaret, caught up in an anchor whilst trying to disentangle it, in 1878, aged 45 John Dunn, run over by a train, in 1866, aged 25
William Osborn, 6, and sister Esther Osborn, 4, drowned in the mill stream at Cullompton in 1899. Astonishingly their sister Lucy, 1 year 9 months, drowned in the river at Cullompton less than three years later.
 Mill Stream at Cullompton
Sidney Willing, 4 years old, fell from the mast of the Yalta whilst en route to Australia in 1869. Kate Pitts, blown over by high winds whilst on holiday, and suffered a brain haemorrhage, in 1954, aged 76 George Drew, 58, killed in a rail accident in 1889 Neville Stone, overcome by fumes, fell down a manhole and was killed whilst working for the Sewage Authority in Brisbane, aged 25, in 1928.
Gertrude Horsell, killed in a rail accident in Sydney in 1954, aged 91
Alfred Harris, working for the Grand Trunk Railway, in 1917 fell from "Black's Bridge",Verdun, Montreal into the Verdun aqueduct: his body was retrieved when they drained the canal.
| On 28th March 1991 great great uncle James Wright suffered the accident described below, (from Trewman's Exeter Flying Post of April 4 1891)
 His sister-in-law noted in her diary " James Wright - first accident took place at Sir John Shelley's sawmills, Shobrooke Park". She had noted it some years after the event, perhaps on the occasion of a second accident of some description. But in fact accident-prone James had injured his eye in an earlier accident in 1866.
Despite the apparently horrific nature of this injury, James somehow survived. The census was held a week after the accident, and James was with his wife in Crediton, his mother also there, presumably helping to care for him.
In fact James outlived his first wife, having moved to Yorkshire with her to live and work. He married again in 1903. He died in 1909. Strangely there was no mention of this accident in subsequent Wright generations, perhaps because he died before the birth of any nephews and nieces.
|  William Berry sustained injuries that were to prove fatal after falling from a ladder whilst building this bank. |
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