This week, to celebrate the publication of my first local history book, Bishop’s Stortford Through Time, I am very excited to be doing tour around various blogs talking about various aspects of my book: not just the subject matter, but also about writing and researching “history”.
One post a day – so 7 posts in total – spread across a wide and diverse mix of history-related blogs.
Today, day 1, you can read me on the Worldwide Genealogy Blog talking about The process of writing a local history book. Please click on the link or picture below to read my post.
Sample page from my new book…
My blog tour You can catch me on the following dates and blogs discussing “all things history”, along with explaining about my recent book, on the following dates and sites.
Friday 24 October – Essex Voices Past: Bishop’s Stortford’s postcards which got away.
About me
I have a MSt in Local and Regional History (Cantab); a BA History (Open University) and an Advanced Diploma in Local History (Oxon) – all gained as a mature student. Having been a business technologist in the City of London for the last 30 years, I am currently taking time away from my City career to write. My first history book, Bishop’s Stortford Through Time, was published by Amberley Publishing in September 2014. I have been commissioned to write a further three history books for them:-
Sudbury, Lavenham and Long Melford Through Time (due to be published summer 2015);
Saffron Walden Through Time (due to be published summer 2015); and
Postcards from the Front: Britain 1914-1919 (due to be published summer 2016).
I live in Essex, England, and regularly write about the local history of Essex and East Anglia on my blog.
Please do click on the image below to buy my book.
I am very excited to be able to tell you that starting tomorrow (Saturday 18 October 2014), I will be celebrating the publication of my local history book Bishop’s Stortford Through Time by doing tour around various blogs all around the world talking about all aspects of “history”. I’ll be talking about not just about the subject matter of my book – but also writing and researching a local history book, along with posts about what it is to be a family and local historian.
You can catch me on the following dates and blogs discussing “all things history”:-
Today’s post is the story of my 4x great-grandmother and her 4 daughters who all lived in a tiny rural Suffolk village in the early 1800s. It is a scandalous tale of a boys’ boarding school, a breach of a promise to marry, and much tippling of sherry in the local pub by my 4x great-grandmother.
I first posted this story on Worldwide Genealogy blog a couple of weeks ago. So apologies if you’ve already read it on that blog. Since I wrote my post for Worldwide Genealogy, I paid another visit to the tiny village where the events described in my post took place. Therefore, I have added some more modern-day photographs of the church and village to today’s post. I have also updated this post with more details about William Parnall (husband to one of the daughters); and also more details about the man, William John Lucock, who jilted his potential wife – including his love letters to his bride-never-to-be, Emma Redit.
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Family history One of my female ancestor’s has always intrigued me over my many years of research: Louisa Parnall – my paternal great-grandmother – the mother of my grandfather – and her family. The Parnall family has long fascinated me (always spelt Parnall, never, ever with an “e”). But, I have always found it very difficult to retell their particular story because there just is so much evidence about them and their activities. I have a mountain of information, documents and photos about them all. It’s that rare occurrence when there is simply too much evidence about a particular family to make it all into a coherent story!
Louisa Parnall – shortly before her 1880 marriage
The Parnalls from Llansteffan, Wales In a nutshell, four brothers and one sister left the tiny rural village of Llansteffan, in Carmarthenshire, Wales sometime between the 1820s and 1830, and headed for the bright lights of London. The two younger brothers and the sister (Robert, Henry and Anne) found that the pavements of London were, indeed, lined with gold and so made their fortune in the clothing industry. They ultimately died with enough wealth to make them each the equivalent of today’s multimillionaires.
Sadly, the two older brothers (William and Thomas), did not make their fortunes, and so both, at different times, were made bankrupt and possibly thrown into debtors’ gaol. Both, probably as a consequence of their financial misfortunes, died relatively young in their 40s/50s. William was my 3x great grandfather – Louisa (above) being his grand-daughter. Fortunately, the successful siblings looked after William’s many children and grand-children – employing some of them, making others their heirs, and leaving substantial bequests in their wills to all of them – including my great-grandmother (their great-niece). Thomas appears to have not married and died childless.
When researching the story of the Parnalls, it has always been very easy to track down Robert Parnall and his brother Henry Parnall because they had a very large warehouse/factory in the City of London (Bishopsgate) and also in Suffolk, and employed many hundreds of people. I have even tracked them down on Google through a very tenuous link that one of Jack the Ripper’s (suspected) victim’s lovers worked for them! Even poor William and Thomas Parnall can be tracked down via Google because of their bankruptcies.
Tallis’s London Street views – Bishopsgate Without (1838-1840).
The Parnall’s first factory is shown at number 100.
Ultimately they had 2 factories on this very busy London high-road.
Henry Parnall in 1860 in the churchyard outside St Botoph’s Church, Bishopsgate.
He left a substantial will bequest to St Botoph’s Church for them to maintain their graveyard as a garden for use by the general public. Thus my ancestor has ensured that many of today’s City-workers have somewhere to sit in the fresh air on a sunny day.
Image appears by kind permission of City of London’s Collage Collection
But over my many years of research into the Parnalls, I’d totally ignored their wives and the impact the Parnall wives had on their menfolk.
The wives of the Parnall brothers
A few years ago, the British Newspaper Archive came online and a whole new world of genealogical and local history research opened up – newspaper articles. So I started entering in my Parnall names, and as expected, found plenty about Robert’s and Henry’s two large warehouses in Bishopsgate and also their factory in Suffolk. However, all of a sudden, my searches threw up the story of William Parnall’s wife (William being my bankrupt direct ancestor). But, rather than being a story about the Parnalls, this was the story of his wife, Mary (also my direct ancestor) and her sister, Emma. Both were the children of the very respectful schoolmaster of Grundisburgh, Suffolk and his equally respectful wife, Mary and Nathaniel Redit (my 4x great-grandparents).
The Redit’s story starts when William was an up and coming successful businessman – long before his financial woes – and long before his brothers Robert and Henry were even old enough to come to London to seek their fortunes. According to newspaper reports dating from 1833, William’s wife, Mary Redit, was “extremely well married, and living in London“. The Parnall’s father, Edmund Parnall, was a tenant sheep farmer in Wales and could hardly be described as well-to-do. Therefore, William had, by 1833, become so successful that Mary Redit had married “extremely well”. The story of the Redit women was told through the eyes of local and national newspapers. Reporters delighted in recounting an extremely scandalous and juicy legal story of unrequited love whilst it was played out in the court-rooms of Bury St Edmunds. The story of the Redits even made The Times newspaper and was probably debated over the breakfast table of many middle and upper-class houses! According to reports, the court-house itself was packed and “the ladies, to the infinite disappointment of their curiosity, were ordered out of the court.”
The Redit women of Grundisburgh, Suffolk
The newspaper account below is from The Times newspaper for Tuesday 6th August 1833. Emma’s case was also reported in the national newspaper, The Observer, along with all the local East Anglian newspapers.
By awarding Emma £500 in damages (a substantial amount in 1833), the judge and jury clearly believed that Emma had not misbehaved, nor had she had a miscarriage. So was not of loose virtue. She was vindicated, and her potential suitor had been found guilty of the civil crime of Breach of a Promise to Marry.
Emma’s breach of marriage was retold in even greater detail in the many different local newspapers – each newspaper relaying different aspects of the case. Her mother and her 4 sisters (including Mary Parnall nee Redit) had all been called as witnesses. Many of the newspaper reports recorded their testimonies as to their own and Emma’s behaviour. This case was not just about Emma’s good virtue, but it had put into the question the entire Redit family’s morals. Emma’s mother, Mary (my 4x great-grandmother) seems to have been on the witness stand for a long period of time and she, out of all the Redit women, was personally held to account by barristers acting for Lucock.
Mary Redit testified that:-
“I am mother of Emma Redit, who is my third child. My two elder daughters are married [this included Mary Parnall]. Emma is now 23. My husband died in February 1832; he kept a school at Grundisburgh 26 years. Defendant’s family had lived at Grundisburgh 30 years; we were intimate. Mr Lucock’s family consisted of a daughter and son. Mr Lucock [father] died in July 1831. Defendant was a scholar at my husband’s school, he was about 13 years old when he left. Defendant continued to live at the house where his father died. Mrs Grimwood (defendant’s sister) died about the end of last year. Defendant’s [Lucock] visits were frequent at my house about February and March 1831. We considered him as the intended husband of Emma. He came there much more frequently than he had previously done; and he paid more marked attentions to my daughter. He took her to Woodbridge Theatre, with her younger sister. My daughter was much attached to the defendant. [Note in the newspaper’s account: Letters were put in [to court] and identified as being in the handwriting of the defendant]. One day my daughter said she should like a letter on a plain piece of paper better than one he had given her; and he gave her another letter in which he promised to make her his wife. At that time and afterwards he was received in [the] witness’s family as her daughter’s future husband. Witness heard defendant say, he should not have a house to seek for, as he had one, and an income. He said the house was left in his father’s will to him (this was before his father’s death). He said rather more than half the property was coming to him. The latter part of March, defendant’s visits became less frequent. (Another letter was then put in [to court] and read, in which the defendant apologized for omitting to perform some engagement). When his visits were less frequent, I called a third time on Mrs Grimwood; it was not till I called a third time on Mrs Grimwood that I saw the defendant. I than asked him what he meant by not paying his visits to my daughter, as he promised; he had promised to take her to the theatre. I asked him why had had not answered my daughter’s two notes. He said, he never intended to come or to answer any notes. I asked him for his reasons, and he said he had none. I told him he must have heard something***; he replied he, he had not. He said, he never intended to make any explanation of his conduct, for if he loved the girl one day, it was no reason he should the next. I asked what he had done with the notes; he said he had burnt them. Defendant never renewed his acquaintance with my daughter after this period, and he never assigned a reason for his conduct.”
***My note: Is Emma’s mother unwittingly telling us that there had been rumours about Emma’s virtue and her alleged miscarriage? Had Lucock heard rumours about Emma – hence him breaking off the engagement? Was this just the very excuse he was looking for to get out of marrying her.
Mrs Redit was cross-examined by Lucock’s barrister. Through the newspaper’s account of the cross-examination, it is clear that Lucock’s barrister was putting her own name, and that of her late husband’s Nathaniel’s name, into disrepute. Thus, the entire Redit family was on trial. Moreover, the implications are clear in the newspaper reports: Lucock thought Emma and her family were gold-diggers and after his money. Mrs Redit testified that:-
“My husband [Nathaniel] did not die in very good circumstances. I did not dictate the letter produced. Nothing was said about a stamp for that letter. [This appears to have been the letter where Lucock had declared that he would marry Emma] Young Lucock kept his birthday at the public-house, called the Dog; I was not there. I never took wine or spirits at that house in an unbecoming way; never took more than two glasses. I may have gone to the public-house sometimes three times in the year. Defendant came of age on the 22nd and gave the promise of marriage on the 28th. I never saw defendant intoxicated in my life. He came home with my husband about three o’clock one day. They came to have a beef steak together, they had a little wine.”
The implication above was that Mrs Redit had made young Lucock write the letter of his intention to marry Emma whilst he was drunk after a heavy drinking session with Mr and Mrs Redit on his 21st birthday. The landlord of the Dog public house was called as a witness to repudiate Mrs Redit’s testimony. He testified that:-
“The defendant’s birthday was kept at his house [i.e. The Dog] in February 1831: eleven people were present and Redit [i.e. Nathaniel, Emma’s father] and the plaintiff left the house [pub] together and proceeded to Redit’s house. Mrs Redit was once at his house in company with Captain Drury (since dead) and her husband, and on that occasion drank nine glasses of sherry. He saw her take five, and the Captain said she had drank nine”.
(An eyewitness account of five sherries – but more than likely nine sherries!!! My 4x great-grandmother seemed to have liked her drink!)
In yet another newspaper report, The Ipswich and Bury Post, Lucock’s love letters to Emma were published in detail:-
Consequences of bringing a legal case regarding a breach of a promise
When the Redits first decided to bring the breach of a promise to marry to court, they had no idea that Lucock was going to attempt to blacken Emma’s name. As far as they were concerned, Emma had Lucock’s love letters and promises to marry her, but he breached the promise without explanation.
We know that the Redits initially did not know the extent of Lucock’s attempts to wriggle out of the court case via two further newspaper reports in local papers: one report 4 months before the August trial, and one report 3 months afterwards.
Bury and Norwich Post – Wednesday 20th March 1833
Ipswich Journal – Saturday 30 November 1833
From these two reports 8 months apart, it can be determined that the Redit family must have seriously considered the consequences of bringing their case to court. An action in which Lucock had clearly told the Redits that he intended to blacken Emma’s name. Between the first attempt at suing Lucock in March, until the eventual trial in August, the Redit family must have spent a great deal of time and money on finding all the witnesses required to testify on her behalf. Thus all 3 of Emma’s sisters took the stand, as did the husband of the eldest sister, along with former pupils of the school. All testified as to Emma’s good character: that she had not had a miscarriage; nor had her behaviour in the boy’s dorms been in anyway questionable.
That the Redits went to such a length to bring the case twice to court, and they did so the second time fully aware of Lucock’s defence, they must have been convinced of their case and Emma’s innocence.
However, sadly, it seems that although Lucock lost his case, and Emma’s good name was upheld, he was determined to make her suffer by bringing a costs action against her for the costs of the first trial in March which didn’t go ahead. And it didn’t go ahead because Lucock, at the very last minute, warned the Redits that he was going to blacken her name. Fortunately the courts decided in the November hearing that this delay in having to abandon the hearing could only have helped Lucock’s case, but he still lost. So he was not awarded any money from Emma.
From the distance of nearly 200 years, and from my (perhaps?) biased viewpoint that the Redits were my ancestors, Lucock appeared to have been an absolute cad and bounder. Emma was better off not marrying him!
In the end, as we have seen, despite all the mud-slinging, Emma’s good name was proved, and she won her case for breach of marriage. It must have been unbearable for this family to be thrown into such an intense spotlight. Even though Emma won her case, the Redit name would have been ruined locally. After all, as the old saying goes, there is no smoke without fire…
Emma’s story could have ended here, despite her winning in court, her good name and virtue (and that of her family’s) ruined forever and her reputation in tatters. She must have been very notorious, and would have had extremely poor marriage prospects.
The Redits of Suffolk and the Parnalls of Wales
However, Emma’s story did have a happy ending. On the 7th August 1836, three years almost to the day after the court case, Emma married her sister Mary’s husband’s brother, Robert Parnall in Soho, London. (I wonder if the date of her marriage was merely coincidence? Or did she use the date to reinforce the message that she was the innocent victim of scandalous gossip…)
This was the very same Robert, who, as I previously recounted further up this post went on to find his fame and vast fortune on the streets of London. At the time of their marriage Robert was 20 and Emma was 26 years old. Whatever earlier escapades Emma got up to, the Parnall family obviously believed her story and all the Parnalls stood by her and the other Redit family members. Emma died in the 1860s and lived much of her life in London, Brighton, and Llansteffan as a rich wife to a highly successful and well-connected Victorian merchant. It is not a far leap of the imagination to speculate that Emma’s £500 damages from her breach of marriage to Lucock might have been used to found the Parnall’s substantial business empire.
The newspaper reports show how close the Redit family had been, and how they all testified for Emma and her virtue. It is perhaps of a consequence of this that when William Parnall was made bankrupt in 1847, his brothers and their wives stuck by him and supported his vast family for many many years.*** The Parnalls and Redits were doubly related with sisters Emma and Mary marrying brothers Robert and William; and they really did look after their own. When Mary fell on hard times with the bankruptcy of her husband, Emma must have repaid the debt of the sisterly loyalty by financially supporting Mary’s children (and even later, Mary’s grandchildren) through the businesses of Robert and Henry Parnall. They say that revenge is best tasted cold. Emma certainly did get her revenge on Lucock: the Parnalls became so much wealthier than Lucock could ever have imagined. Emma was far from the gold-digger Lucock accused her of being, as Robert Parnall was not wealthy when they married. But, she did became fantastically wealthy through the business of her incredibly successful husband.
***My note: October 2014- Since first writing this original article in September 2014 for Worldwide Genealogy Blog, I carried out some further research into William’s bankruptcy and was extremely shocked to discover that the person who sued him for bankruptcy was none other than his wife’s sister’s husband. That is, his own brother-in-law, Marmaduke Drake, husband of the eldest Redit sister, Anne. This was extremely surprising to me because all my other research had shown that the Parnalls were an extremely close knit family and they looked after their own. Indeed, Marmaduke’s name appeared in other local newspaper’s accounts on the breach of marriage as giving evidence in favour of his sister-in-law, the jilted Emma. When William fell into financial hardship, Marmaduke Drake appears to have been the family’s turn-coat, and so William’s own brother-in-law sued him for his bankruptcy!
Grundisburgh churchyard, Suffolk
During my years researching the Parnalls, I have come across many “internet cousins” who have researched various parts of the Parnall story (Although I am the only one to have tracked down Emma Redit’s story and her breach of promise to marry court-case, and William’s bankruptcy). One thing that has always puzzled all of us is why did Robert and Henry Parnall set up a large clothing factory in the rural Suffolk village of Chevington when they were all from Wales? This factory in rural Suffolk, at its height of success in the 1850s, employed over 600 people! That is a tremendous number of people for a tiny rural village, although, most workers were probably women working piece-rate in their own homes.
The story of the Redit sisters from Suffolk and their marriage to the Welsh Parnalls part way gives one explanation why the Parnalls might have set up their clothes-making empire in Suffolk.
But, perhaps even more reason for the Parnall’s connection to Suffolk, is the tiny grave I discovered this summer in the churchyard of Grundisburgh’s parish church – a tiny grave laid next to the grave of Nathaniel Redit, schoolmaster of Grundisburgh. Nathaniel, the father of the scandalous Redit sisters, and the husband of the sherry-loving Mary Redit. The tiny grave next to Nathaniel’s is that of an infant, Robert, the eldest child of Robert and Emma (nee Redit) Parnall. Long before their vast riches came their way, their first born child died as an infant, and instead of being buried with his father’s Parnall family in Llansteffan in Wales, was laid to rest in the tiny Suffolk churchyard in Grundisburgh – the home of the Redit family.
Nathaniel Redit
School master in this parish 30 years.
Highly esteemed.
Born 17th July 1778. Died 8th February 1832.
Robert Redit Parnall.
Infant son of Robert & Emma Parnall of London.
Grandson of the late Nathaniel Redit school master of this parish.
Born 16th June 1837. Died 16th January 1838.
The taller gravestone of Nathaniel’s overlooking his baby grandson’s grave
It is interesting that Nathaniel was “Highly esteemed“. With his death occurring just 18 months before his daughter’s Emma’s court case, it could be speculated that his headstone was put up after the court case (perhaps at the time of the infant Robert’s death) and, with his epitaph, the Redit’s were, once again, asserting that they were a respectable family. The infant Robert’s epitaph also shows that the Redits and Parnalls still considered themselves to be firm respectable members of this small rural community. Robert Parnall was an extremely shrewd business-man: it might have made considerable financial reasons to have part of his empire so far out of London in rural Suffolk. But perhaps even more so, he was appeasing his wife, the redoubtable Emma (nee Redit) so she could visit her family still living in Suffolk, and visit the grave of her only child, Robert Redit Parnall.
William John Lucock
Of Emma’s hapless one-time suitor, Lucock (who, according to the newspaper reports was born in February 1810), I now know the following information:***
– His name was William John Lucock.
– He died in 1849 – from the newspaper reports of the trial, it is known he was born in February 1810). So he was 39 when he died.
– His father was William Lucock, gentleman of Grundisburgh who died in 1831.
– He married Anne (1809-1874) and they lived at Seckford Hall, Great Bealings (Just look at pictures of the Hall to imagine how grand this house must have been when the Lucocks were living here!)
***This is extra information is due to Anne Young – who read my original post on Worldwide Genealogy blog and then researched this extra information about Lucock.
Grundisburgh village through time
The Dog Inn, Grundisburgh.
The location of Lucock’s coming-of-age party when he drunk heavily with Emma’s father, the school-master Nathaniel Redit. Also the scene of Mary Redit’s tippling of no less than 9 sherries in one session.
The village of Grundisburgh on a postcard from the early 1900s – some 70 years after the scandalous events of the Redit women. The school on this postcard is still there in the village – but now residential apartments and flats. However, as it was constructed in the Victorian period, this was not Nathaniel Redit’s school. The village of Grundisburgh is tiny, it is therefore possible that Nathaniel’s school was located in roughly the same position as the later Victorian building.
Grundisburgh Church. Underneath the round tree on the right of this picture lies the remains of Nathaniel Redit and his baby grandson, Robert Redit Parnall. There is a tree at this location today (probably the same tree as the one in this Edwardian photograph) and this tree has ensured that Nathaniel’s and Robert’s graves are relatively untouched and unmarked from nearly 200 years of standing in a rural churchyard. Their graves having been protected from the elements was there waiting for me, their direct descendant, to find and finally link together the story of the Parnalls of Llansteffan, Wales and the Redits of Grundisburgh,Suffolk.
Grundisburgh Village today
In late September 2014, following my post on the Worldwide Genealogy blog, I paid another visit to the village of Grundisburgh. The village is beautiful, but tiny. The scandal of the Redits and the Lucocks must have been the subject of gossip from the lowest to the highest in the village during the 1830s. Villagers must have taken sides as to whom they believed. I found it extremely interesting that the Emma’s baby was buried next to his grandfather in the churchyard; and William John Lucock was also laid to rest in the same churchyard a few yards away from the Redit graves. The rivalry and dislike between the two families must have gone on for years after the events of 1831 when Lucock jilted Emma. But now the two families are reunited in death in the same churchyard.
Grundisburgh Parish Church – if you follow the path on the right up to the very end of the church, you will see two large rectangle monuments just by the church. The monument on the left (very white one, with ivy on it) is the grave of the cad and bounder William John Lucock (1810-1849), his wife Anne (1809-1874), his father William Lucock (died 1831), and (possibly) his mother Mary Lucock (died 1817 aged 63). (I’m not sure if Mary was William John’s mother as Mary would have been 56 when William John was born. But they are all buried in the same grave – so I’m not sure Mary’s relationship to William John and his father.) The large white monument on the right of the path is to another Lucock – John Lucock (1772-1821) and his wife Susannah (died 1826 aged 47) – John and Susanna were possibly William John’s grandparents. Just beyond John and Susanna’s grave are the two Redit/Parnall gravestones.
The hapless William John Lucock’s memorial inscription on the family tombstone
Inside Grundisburgh church – looking towards the 14th century rood screen and the altar. In 1833, the gossip must have been rife in this church with all the parishioners gossiping about Emma and her allegedly outrageous behaviour in the village’s boarding school. In my mind’s eye, at the height of the scandal, I can see the matriarch Mary Redit sweeping into Sunday church with her 4 daughters, their husbands, and Emma’s supporters and putting on a massive display that they were the wronged family. From reports of the court case, I cannot for one minute imagine that the Redits hid away at home during the scandal. Sunday church would have been the family’s one significant chance of putting on a great display.
Inside Grundisburgh church – looking towards the back of the church and the church’s tower. The picture on the right is an exquisitely beautiful 15th century medieval wall painting – it was only uncovered in the 1950s. Until that time it lay undiscovered as had been white-washed over during time of the English Reformation of the 16th century by the edicts of either Henry VIII or his son Edward VI. The Redits and the Lucocks of the nineteenth century would not have known about the existence of such devotional beauty in their church.
Medieval wall painting of St Christopher. Because the painting appears to disappear into the church’s windows, this shows that the windows were possibly added into the church after the date of the painting.
15th century baptismal font.
The four Redit sisters – Anne, Mary, Emma, and Francis – were all baptised in this font – as was their mother, Mary Redit (nee Smith)
The beautiful, but tiny, village of Grundisburgh. The building on the left is the Victorian school (now converted to flats) – this is the possibly location of Nathaniel Redit’s boarding school. Behind the weeping willow is the beautiful parish church. Behind the photographer, and about 50 paces to the right, is the village pub, The Dog.
The Dog Inn. It would have been a short stagger from the pub to Nathaniel’s school in February 1831, when Nathaniel Redit, his wife Mary, along with a newly 21 year old William John Lucock returned to Nathaniel’s school. Back at the school, they continued the birthday celebrations by tucking into beef steak, whilst William John wrote his incriminating love letters and intention to marry to Emma.
My book
My local history book on the historic East Hertfordshire town of Bishop’s Stortford has just been published. Please do click on the image below to buy my book.
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Today’s post is continuing on my posts about Edwardian postcards and Victorian photographs which didn’t make it into my new local history book, Bishop’s Stortford Through Time. I have published this photograph before on my blog and on Twitter, but so far have had no success in identifying it. So I’m going to try once again to see if anyone can identify these young ladies. Someone has suggested to me that it is probably from the inter-war period – possibly the 1920s – because of the dropped waists on the girls’ dresses.
Do you have any idea who these young ladies of Bishop’s Stortford were? The photographers were H & A Gurton who were active in the town from the First World War and on into the 1920s.
My book
If you want to learn more about this historic East Hertfordshire town, please do click on the image below to buy my book.
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This blog
If you want to read more from my blog, please do subscribe either by using the Subscribe via Email button top right of my blog, or the button at the very bottom. If you’ve enjoyed reading this post, then please do Like it with the Facebook button and/or leave a comment below.
I am very pleased to say that my new book on the local history of the town of Bishop’s Stortford is now available in all good local bookshops. If you are not local to the town (and I think a great number of my blog’s readership has an ocean or two between you and Bishop’s Stortford’s local shops!), you’ll be pleased to know that Amazon now has their copies in stock.
I had immense fun researching and writing my book. “Having” to consult archives, consult Tudor churchwardens’ accounts (my favourite bed-time reading!), read Victorian newspaper articles and write my text was absolute bliss. Not to mention the countless nights I had to stay up late, so I could bid at the last minute on that well known internet auction site, thus securing that precious and highly important postcard of the town’s past. (Unfortunately for my pocket, there were many many postcards which I just “had to have” at any cost!) After years spent commuting and working in the City of London as a business technologist, being able to do my passion – researching and writing about history – was absolute bliss. Now, when people ask me what my profession is, I hover in deciding to tell them which of my two careers is my profession. That I am a freelance business technologist working for some of the world’s largest international law firms in the City of London. Or, a published local historian and author working from home. (I am immensely proud of both my careers.)
There were several postcards that “got away”. Postcards and images in my collection which I would have loved to have included in my book – but for one reason or another, I couldn’t. Some images were excluded because I simply didn’t know what the image was about – apart from it was “somewhere” in Bishop’s Stortford; and others where I had so many images of the same building/view/area that I had to choose one postcard over the many other images. With other views of Bishop’s Stortford, I had written their story but then had to cull that story and images from my book because there simply wasn’t room.
So, every week, starting this week, I’ve decided to blog some of the photos and stories that I couldn’t include in my book. These are the ones that got away!
St Michael’s Church, Windhill, Bishop’s Stortford
The image below is an intriguing one. It is a small Victorian carte de visite (or CDV) photograph of St Michael’s Church, in Windhill. The CDV has perfectly square corners, and a plain back but, unfortunately, there’s no photographer’s information. It is probably one of the earliest photographs of Bishop’s Stortford: according to my research, square cornered CDVs are normally pre 1870. I thought that the gas lamp might give me a clue as to the date of the photograph – but according to good ole wikipedia, many towns were lit by gas lamps as early as 1823. I think that this view might roughly date from before 1870.
St Michael’s Parish Church, Windhill, Bishop’s Stortford, sometime between 1850s and 1870s
The intriguing part of this photograph is the wooden structure at the front of the church. At first glance it looks like a small ticket booth. However, look closely… It is actually a very large structure. It is big enough to have what looks like 2 oval church windows at the front. Look again: there’s two tiny children climbing up a ladder – a ladder of about 7 steps. A very strange “ticket booth” if you have to climb up a ladder to get into it! The structure has a wooden board at the top with printed words on it (if only the Victorian photographer had got just a little bit nearer – and then we could have read it on our modern-day computers!).
There were building works which took place in St Michael’s church and were completed in November 1866. At this time, the east windows in the north and south aisles were replaced with new ones in the same style as the existing windows. Maybe the structure was the master craftsmen’s workshop to help them build new windows. Maybe the little girls have shimmed up the ladder to take a peak in the work rooms. Inquisitive Victorian children captured forever.
What’s going on! Can you help me and tell me what this structure was?
Was it the craftsmen’s workrooms for the work which took place in 1866??
My book
If you want to learn more about this historic East Hertfordshire town, please do click on the image below to buy my book.
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Along with collecting (no, hoarding!) books on East Anglia, I also enjoy picking up from antique and collectors shops, East Anglian magazines dating from the 1950s and 1960s. One such recent purchase was the magazine shown below – a 63 year old copy of the East Anglian Magazine from September 1957.
It fascinates me that with these type of magazines, its contributors often wrote about their own childhood, which had occurred some 50 years previously. Thus, in one fell-swoop, a modern reader from the twenty-first century can quickly get transported back to the rose-tinted halcyon days of the author’s Edwardian summers.
The author of one such article, reminiscing about Great Yarmouth in the early 1900s wrote:-
“I can look back upon my childhood with a happiness that is not given to many, certainly not in these days when children have so much done for them and are unable or unqualified to make their own fun and games.”
When reading the article, it amused me considerably that these feckless children he was writing about are now probably in their 70s and 80s and, more than likely, have the same sentiments about their grandchildren! Some things never change…
Here’s the article in full…
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This September marks my 25th anniversary of arriving in Essex via the leafy (and not-so-leafy) suburbs of S’rf London. Having reached a landmark birthday in July, I can now say that I’ve spent exactly half my life living and breathing Essex air – but I am still considered an outsider to those living within its more rural areas. To say Essex is an “interesting” county is an understatement with its reputation as being one of England’s brashest and loudest counties – a reputation actively encouraged by television programmes such as The Only Way Is Essex. But, more positively, its long history is fascinating with a curious mix of influences from its neighbouring counties, alongside the local impact of monarch-enforced policies during the medieval and early modern period.
In 1958, John Betjeman (who became the Poet Laureate in the 1970s) complied a book on the churches of England. He personally wrote the introduction to the chapter on Essex’s churches. 50 years later, much of his observations on Essex still hold true today. Here are his pithy words, accompanied by my selection of images from vintage postcards and my own photographs, which I think perfectly encapsulates his words. John Betjeman wrote about my Essex. He wrote about the good, the bad, and the ugly (although not the beautiful Essex village of Ugly).
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“Essex is a large square with two sides water. It is a stronger contrast of beauty and ugliness than any southern English county. Most of what was built east of London in this and the last century was a little bit cheaper and little bit shoddier than that built in other directions. Southend is a cheaper Brighton. Clacton a cheaper Worthing and Dovercourt a cheaper Bournemouth. Over a million Londoners live Essex. Leyton, Canning Town, Silvertown, Barking, Ilford and West and East Ham are all in the county. Only the Norman parish church of East Ham and the scant abbey remains of Barking and Leyton parish church tell us that these were once country places. Our own age has added the planned and sad dormitories of Becontree and Harold Hill. Along the Thames bank factories and power stations can be seen for miles over the mud flats and the hills of Kent on the opposite bank look countrified by comparison.
The 12th Century St Mary Magdalene, East Ham in the early 1900s
Remains of Barking Abbey in 1818
Bradwell Power Station. Unsurprisingly, as it was built in the 1950s/1960s, I could not find vintage postcards of it. However, even modern postcard publisher didn’t think it worthy of a postcard. So, here is one of my own photographs taken in 2012 during one of our many walks around the banks of the River Blackwater.
But Essex is a large country and the ugliness is only a part of it. The county has the deepest and least disturbed country within reach of London. Between the Stour, Blackwater, Crouch and Thames Estuaries is flat agricultural scenery with its own old red brick towns with weather-boarded side streets like Rochford, Maldon and Georgian Harwich, the first named the headquarters of the Essex puritan sect, The Peculiar People. Colchester is, as Dr. Pevsner says in Essex (Buildings of England Series), more impressive than any town in England for ‘the continuity of its architectural interest. It began before the time of the Romans and lasted through to the 18th century’. The flat part of Essex has not the man-made look of the fens. It is wild and salty and its quality is well described in Baring-Gould’s novel of Mersea, Mehalah. It is part of that great plain which stretches across to Holland and Central Europe.
Heybridge Basin in the early 1900s. It is very much the same today with its weather-board clad cottages.
Maldon in the early 1900s. It is for valid reasons that the town is unkindly known throughout Essex as Maldon on the Mud. But, putting the oceans of mud aside, it is one of the nicest locations in the whole of Essex.
Osea Island and Northey Island from the rooftops of Maldon town centre. Two of the beautiful but wild islands within the Blackwater Estuary. Osea Island has a Roman-built causeway which is exposed twice a day at low tide. It has been much used by film-crews needing a desolate and bleak island. Most recently it was used in 2012 as the location of Eel Marsh Island for Daniel Radcliffe’s Woman in Black. Northey Island also has a twice-daily uncovered causeway, and is the alleged site of the Battle of Maldon in 991 AD when the Vikings invaded England.
Most of inland Essex, east and north of Epping Forest, is undulating and extremely pretty in the pale gentle way suited to English water-colours. Narrow lanes wind like streams through willowy meadows past weather-boarded mills and unfenced bean and corn fields. From elms and oaks on hilltops peep the flinty church towers, and some of the churches up here are as magnificent as those in neighbouring Suffolk – Coggeshall, Thaxted and Saffron Walden and Dedham are grand examples of the Perpendicular style. Thaxted, for the magnificence of its church and the varied textures of the old houses of its little town, is one of the most charming places in Britain.
Town Street, Thaxted in the early 1900s
Thaxted Guildhall, with Stony Lane running along its side. The second house in the lane is known as “Dick Turpin’s House”, although there is no evidence that this notorious highwayman lived in the town.
Chiefly, Essex is a place of varied building materials. “It would be interesting study from an antiquary of leisure to trace the various sources of materials employed in Essex church-building, and the means by which they were brought to their destination.” (G. Worly, Essex, A dictionary of the county, 1915). To build their churches, the East Saxons and the Normans used any material that came to hand, Roman tiles, split oak logs, as at Greensted, pudding stone taken from the beach deposits and flints. The 15th century tower of South Weald was made of ragstone brought across from Kent on the opposite shore. But chiefly Essex is county of brick which was made here as early as the 13th century. There are many brick church towers with unexampled beauty, red as bonfire; there are brick arcades and brick porches and brick window tracery. And when they left off building churches in this beautiful red brick, moulded into shapes and patterned with blue sanded-headers, the Essex people continued it in houses until the past century.
The beautiful Tudor red-brick building of Layer Marney, where I was married.
Essex looks its best in sunlight when the many materials of its rustic villages, the brick manor houses, the timbered “halls” and the cob and thatched churches, the weather-boarded late Georgian cottages, the oaks and elms and flints recall Constable. The delightful little town of Deham and one half of the Stour Valley, be it remembered, are in Essex, and were as much an inspiration to Constable as neighbouring Suffolk, where he was born, and to which Essex is often so wrongly regarded as a poorer sister. It may be poorer in church architecture, but what it lacks in architecture it makes up for in the delicacy and variety of its textures.”
John Betjeman’s Essex is my Essex – full of textures that change from village to village, town to town. And Essex is at its most beautiful bathed in the sunlight…
Old wooden beach huts at Mill Beach on the River Blackwater
Sailing boats by the Blackwater Sailing Club. The red sails of a Thames Barge in the distance.
The sun setting over Saltcote Maltings.
Christopher Sexton, Essexiae Comitat’ Nova Vera ac Absoluta Descriptio (1576)
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I am absolutely delighted to tell you that my first local history book is in the final stage of its publication. It’s due to be in all good book shops in the UK 15 September 2014 – but you can pre-order it at a very reasonable price from Amazon.co.uk. In the USA, it will be available on 28 September – Amazon.com
I hope that if you do decide to buy it, you will like it. Many readers of my blog and correspondents on Twitter have actively encouraged me to write my book, and many have helped with the identification of postcards and photographs of Bishop’s Stortford. A massive thank you to everyone who helped me.
If you wish to pre-order my book from Amazon, please do click on the picture below. I’d love you to tell me in the comments section below on this page if you do decide to buy it. If you’re out and about, and see my book in a bookshop, I would love it if you sneakily made it more prominent to potential browsers and purchasers.
From its earliest days, Bishop’s Stortford was a prosperous town, something that continues up to the present day. After the manor of Stortford was purchased by the Bishop of London in the eleventh century, Bishop’s Stortford developed into a thriving market town in the Middle Ages. The opening of the Stort Navigation in 1769, along with the introduction of the railway in the nineteenth century, further increased its prosperity. Today, with excellent transport links to London, and Stansted Airport providing access to the rest of the world, Bishop’s Stortford is a town on the rise. Featuring full-colour images and fantastic vintage postcards, Bishop’s Stortford Through Time takes the reader on a fascinating journey of the town’s history and how it became what it is today.
One of the pages from my book- my wonderful children and their husband/partner alongside an image from the early 1900s. Some parts of Bishop’s Stortford haven’t changed at all (apart from the cars!).
I am delighted to say that during my research into the town, one of my daughters and her partner fell in love with the town, and so have decided to make Bishop’s Stortford their home. They moved into the town in July – one of the many young couples who have found that Bishop’s Stortford certainly has a lot to offer them.
PS: You may wonder why the town is called “Bishop’s Stortford” (always always always with an apostrophe after “bishop”). It’s because at the time of William the Conqueror’s Doomsday survey (1086), the manor of Storteford was owned by the Bishop of London. Hence the town should really be called “The Bishop of London’s Stortford”. But I guess Bishop’s Stortford or, as it’s more commonly known to locals, simply “Stortford”, will do. If you want to find out more about this historic town, then please do buy my book Bishop’s Stortford Through Time
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Frequent readers of my blog will know that I cannot resist a good rummage around a good-quality second-hand book shop. On Friday, I made a visit to my favourite bookshop – well, not quite a shop but a large stand in an antiques centre in the middle of Suffolk – to spend a few hours perusing the stand’s excellent antiquarian books on East Anglia. To my delight, the owner was there restocking his stand, and, realising he had a captive audience, managed to sell me two fascinating books from the 1920s on Essex. A deal was struck – he was happy and I was happy. So now I’m the proud owner of the book Essex Survivals; a bookwritten and illustrated in 1929 by the Cambridge-born artist Fred Roe (b 1864, d 1947) who was a member of the Royal Academy.
The quality of the pen and ink drawing within the book, and Fred’s written caricatures of long-gone Essex men and women are outstanding and just begging to be shared with my national and international readership of current and ex residents of Essex. Fred opens his book with the following words, words which I think will having meaning for any readers of my blog who love this, the strangest (if not brashest!) of English counties.
Regarded, as that county [Essex] has been for many years as a species of backwater only to be approached through the eastern fringe of the metropolis, it is extraordinary how many of its antiquities and curiosities have been preserved, which under other conditions would have probably long ago been improved out of existence. To those who have Essex blood in their veins the county is often little less than a religion…
The first image from Fred’s book I want to share with you is a map from the inside front page. It is a pen and ink drawing of the entire county of Essex with Fred’s own tiny caricatures of each town and village he felt worthy of comment. Thus, the tiny picture for Colchester shows General Fairfax besieging the town in 1648 during the English Civil War; the picture representing Great Dunmow shows the Ancient Custom of the Dunmow Flitch; and the picture representing Manningtree shows a tiny picture of Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled witch-finder general of the English Civil War. Although I’m not sure if today’s discerning local historian would consider that most beautiful of Essex medieval towns, Thaxted, to fit Fred’s description of A decayed town!
If you are a past or present resident of Essex, or your ancestors came from this diverse county, then look closely at this map to see just a tiny part of this county’s rich and diverse heritage.
Fred Roe’s Map of Essex, from Essex Survivals, 1929. Click on the picture above to make taken to a high resolution digital image. Then use your computer’s zoom options to view these outstanding tiny caricatures of the history of Essex.
Fred did not draw a pen and ink drawing of my most favourite place in the whole of Essex (in fact, my most favourite place anywhere in England) – which, surprisingly, considering my blog and academic research on the town of Great Dunmow, is not that town. Instead, my favourite place in the whole of Essex is a tiny river-side hamlet on the River Blackwater.
X marks the spot of my favourite place in the whole of England.
Although Fred did not draw on his map a tiny representation of my favourite place, he did write about it in his book. And his comments on this, the tiniest of hamlets in Essex, I will write about another time.
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I have written before on my blog about the aerial photography taken of the town and environments of Great Dunmow by a small aircraft flying high in the skies of East Anglia in 1928. During the same flight, the small airplane also flew over the tiny village of Little Dunmow and captured for posterity one of the area’s main employers, the factory of the Anglo Scottish Sugar Beet factory. This part of Essex and East Anglia has a long history of the refining of sugar beet and it is incredible to see an aerial photograph of a factory in it’s inter-war heyday.
Anglo-Scottish Sugar Beet Factory, Little Dunmow, 1928. This photo is from English Heritage’s Britain from Above project. Click the photo to be taken directly to a zoomable image of this photo from their website.
During a recent rummage around an antiques shop in Lavenham, Suffolk (a small beautiful town which also has a history of small sugar beet factories), I found the 1976 book Essex and Sugar by the local historian Frank Lewis. It is to him I turn to now regarding the Anglo-Scottish Sugar Beet Factory in Little Dunmow, Essex. In his book, Mr Lewis refers to the factory as being in Felsted, the neighbouring village to Little Dunmow. As the two villages are so near each other, the location of the factory changes in documents/books between Little Dunmow and Felsted. The factory also appears to have changed name over time and at points in its history was known as the “Anglo-Scottish Sugar Beet Factory” or the “British Sugar Corporation Sugar Beet Factory”.
Our main Essex interest in beet sugar lies now with the Felsted factory of the British Sugar Corporation. With Mr. and Mrs. Chartres, I spent a full and interesting day at the village, now for over three decades [i.e. by the time of the book’s publication in 1976] associated with sugar production, but famed more for its ancient school [Felsted School]. In the morning at Princes Farm Mr. Gordon Crawford showed us the “Forecaster” at work, the most advanced beet-harvesting machine, and far from the days of hand-digging of obstinate roots is the operation of this mechanical giant, also an advance on machine harvesters needing an accompanying lorry in which to deposit the uplifted beet. The Forecaster is an Essex development, and is constructed as a compact unit, carrying the extricated beets to a receiving space at the top of the machine, detaching earth or mud en route, at the same time slicing off the tops of the next row of beets preparatory to lifting. Only when full did the harvester go off to deposit its contents in a lorry, thus one man only was needed for the actual harvesting; in the early days, several laboured at an arduous and unpopular toil. The crops, destined for the nearby factory are grown from seed supplied by the buyers to ensure uniformity and quality. Mr. Crawford harvested his first sugar beet with a pair of horses in 1930, and he is a member of the family formerly of Suttons Farm, Hornchurch, the site of the R.A.F. Station.
The Forecaster in 1976
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During the day we had observed the lofty buildings of the British Sugar Corporation establishment with its plume of white smoke, and later its dominance in the scene when lit up at night. One writer has remarked that with a favouring wind the factory smell carries for miles around, and a former woman member of the office staff recalled her strongest memory was of the ‘sickly sweet smell you couldn’t get away from’, but though beet processing has its characteristic odour, as does a refinery, our party were not conscious of strong odours, either in or out of the buildings, though I questioned a girl on this point, knowing from experience how responsive young women are to sugar smells, pleasant or unpleasant. The warmth of the building was felt by her, not to a too trouble-some extent. On commencing this conducted tour, we were made aware of the fact that this was a factory in the country when we were informed that the visiting party in which we were included would be the last for a long period, as a precaution against the foot and mouth epidemic appearing in that region.
The factory tour showed the cleansed beets pass to machines slicing them into strips, a glimpse of the revolving drums in which the strips yielded their sweetness into water (diffusion), the resulting thin syrup of ‘juice’ charged with lime and carbonic acid gas which combined to form a precipitate trapping impurities in the juice (Carbonatation) the extraction by filtering of this precipitate, a second carbonatation and filtering, the juice treated with sulphur dioxide to a neutral reaction, the concentration of juice containing 15% sugar to syrup containing 65% sugar under vacuum in huge boilers or vessels called evaporators, another close filtering, no char, and the rest of the process as described in a refinery with vacuum pans, centrifugal machines, final drying.
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This huge Essex successor to the ventures of Marriage and Duncan treats annually over 300,000 tons of beets from 23,000 acres spread over Essex and surrounding counties from Cambridge to Kent, and each day can process 2,500 tons of beet to yield 350 tons of white sugar, 250 tons of dried pulp or pulp nuts for cattle food and 130 tons of molasses for industrial and other uses. (An acre of beet will yield from 38 to 40 cwt of sugar against 8 to 12 tons per acre from cane; and the sugar content of the beet is 15% to 16%, the cane about 13%.) The personal of 325 men and women operate the process continuously day and night for approximately 120 days, each season or campaign from about late September to the end of January; and this seasonal labour force is recruited from the surrounding locality and from Ireland. Delivery of beets to the factory is by road, though in the past some cargoes in sailing boats travelled from Walton to a suitable point for Felsted.
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Mrs B. McArdle, who mentioned the ‘sickly smell’ has provided me with some other early memories of the Felsted factory where in her early 20s she was employed as a compotometer operator in the 1927 and 1928 campaigns. In those days no refining plant existed and she recalls the piles of brown sugar to be sent to Tate and Lyle. The small office had a canteen attached for the clerical and similar staff of 12; she can remember that wellington boots were worn for the necessary journeys to muddy and wet floors where the beet was washed and writes of having to work out prices for the farmers according to sugar content of beets, and allocating molasses on the amount of beet sent in. She lodged at a farm near the Flitch of Bacon [a pub still in existence today] in Little Dunmow, where only one shop existed, and without public transport the journey to and from the factory was a fair walk, unless a lucky car picked her up. Apparently there was little time for amusements as she worked ‘fairly late’, also Saturday and Sunday mornings when the beets were coming in; but a hard tennis court was outside the office, there were whist drives and dances in surrounding villages, a cinema at Braintree where you had to book your seat and the music was supplied by one tinny piano, and the manager sprung a party at his home for the staff. She was young and evidently found her situation not uncongenial, for both in her letters to me and to the Essex Countryside [a monthly local interest magazine] she writes of a ‘happy time of long ago’ and ‘pleasant memories of the happy time I spent at Felsted’.
Sugar-beet harvesting in 1948. Click on the image above to be taken to British Pathe’s website to see a short film of Felsted’s sugar-beet harvesting in 1948.
In February 1999, the Sugar Beet factory was demolished and now in its place is a large housing development. The estate was originally known as Oakwood Park, but in very recent years has now been renamed to Flitch Green – a throw-back to the days of the Dunmow Flitch, when it was originally held in Little Dunmow.
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Sample page from my new book…
St Michael’s Parish Church, Windhill, Bishop’s Stortford, 
What’s going on! Can you help me and tell me what this structure was?
The Forecaster in 1976
Sugar Beet Factory in 1976
