Tag Archives: Jamaica

Sugar loaves and coal scuttles

October 12, 2013 Anne M Powers 2 Comments

Coal boats loading at North Shields c.1795 – J M W Turner (via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s that time of year when preserving garden produce for the winter is on my mind. It’s been a fantastic year for fruit in the UK and there is a glut of apples and pears, we’ve had a huge crop of blackberries and the wild rowan trees are covered in berries.

Checking the cupboard for sugar to make crab apple and blackberry jelly I found some left from last year that had hardened in the packet and that made me think of the labour involved in preparing sugar for use in the eighteenth century. Once the cane was cut and the juice boiled and crystalised most was packed into barrels for transport to Europe and further processing there. Only a small amount was ‘clayed’, further refined into white sugar loaves, in Jamaica. This was to protect the interests of the sugar bakers in Britain.

Either way the sugar bought by the eighteenth century housewife came in hard loaves from which the sugar had to be rasped or broken off and then pounded to the consistency required. Imagine taking a bag of modern sugar crystals and pounding it down to produce your own icing sugar and you will get an idea of the sheer physical labour involved and the time it took.

Then remember that to cook using your sugar you would have to light and tend your kitchen fire. By the eighteenth century London was dependent on imported coal as the medieval forests that once covered the country had been cut down for domestic fuel and for early industry. You would have ordered your coal using the old measure of a ‘chaldron of coals’, an amount which could vary from about 2000 pounds weight upwards. A London chaldron was defined as “36 bushels heaped up, each bushel to contain a Winchester bushel and one quart, and to be 19¹⁄₂ inches in diameter” (source:Wikipedia). The weight of this was about 3136 pounds so it was no wonder that a limit was put on the amount that could be drawn in one wagon – incidentally to protect the road from excessive wear rather than the horses from exhaustion!

When the coal was delivered to your house you would have to inspect it to make sure the merchant was not cheating you by including poor quality coal, wet coal or a load full of small dust called ‘slack’. It would be shovelled by hand from the wagon into your cellar or shed and from there you or your servants would have to scoop it up into the coal scuttles for use in kitchen and living rooms. Little wonder that only the well to do had fires in their bedrooms in even the coldest of weather.

Everything that happened in the eighteenth century household involved physical labour on the part of the householder or the servants. Preparing meals meant walking to market for the ingredients, scrubbing and preparing the vegetables, plucking the poultry, rendering your own fat from pork or beef to produce dripping, beating the eggs and ingredients for cakes (my grandmother beat fat and sugar for an eggless sponge by hand – that is using her own hand not a beater, the beating took up to half an hour but she made a superbly light sponge!). Even so simple an act as writing a letter might still involve mixing your own ink, and would require you to cut your own quills – paper you could at least buy ready made.

Leaving aside the digital revolution, think of any task you now undertake and then take yourself back to a time when there was no electricity, and virtually no machinery to assist. You could buy the cloth and thread for your clothes, but you or someone else would have to make the pattern, cut the cloth and sew them by hand. When they got dirty they would have to be washed by hand using soap you made yourself, although in London the air was now so filled with soot that those who could afford it sent their linen out of town to washer women in the outlying villages. If the weather was cold the water might freeze in the pump and in any case it would all have to be carried by hand to where it was needed.

In eighteenth century Jamaica the source of cheap labour that made all this possible was of course enslaved, while London and the growing cities such as Manchester and Birmingham were sucking in labour from the surrounding countryside. The nineteenth century would see a huge change with a move from human to machine power and a gradual increase in the cost of labour, with a corresponding decrease in the relative cost of machine power. We are much closer to this nineteenth century world than we are to that of the eighteenth.

So next time you put sugar in your coffee, boil a kettle, load the washing machine, cut the lawn or drive to the supermarket to load up with ready prepared goods, just pause for a moment and imagine having to do all these tasks the eighteenth century way.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest

The Jamaican Diaspora

September 28, 2013 Anne M Powers 2 Comments

British settlers landing at the Cape Colony

There was of course a huge Jamaican diaspora in the second half of the twentieth century. After the second World War the Windrush generation left the Caribbean in large numbers to work in Britain, in the USA and Canada. Many ended up remaining and making new homes rather than returning.

However, there is a sense in which there has always been a Jamaican diaspora, if it is defined as people born in Jamaica leaving for what was perceived as a better life elsewhere.

I was reminded of this when I came across the name Hercules Ross this week. I have written briefly before about the family of Hercules Ross of Rossie, who made his fortune in Jamaica as a merchant and who had two families. Like so many young white men, while in Jamaica he had a stable relationship outside marriage with a mixed race woman, Elizabeth Foord, with whom he had seven children five of whom survived to adulthood.

Ross, who was one of thirteen children of an impoverished excise man, went to Jamaica about 1760 to work as a naval clerk, became owner of a general merchant’s store and two trading sloops, captain of militia, ADC to a Major General, JP for Kingston and was owner of the 200 acre Bushy Park estate. The young Horatio Nelson was nursed back to health from a fever at Bushy Park. During the War with America from 1775 Ross became Prize Agent for Jamaica taking a cut of the prize money for captured vessels, and running his own privateers. He left Jamaica in 1782 and bought the Rossie estate in Scotland in 1785 for £33,250. Like a number of such men he then married. Harriet Parish was the daughter of a wealthy Scots Hamburg merchant and they had four legitimate children.

However he provided well for his three Jamaican sons and two daughters who came to Britain with him. The daughters became school teachers and his sons had positions in the East India Company. Best known was Daniel Ross, who was one of the two or three greatest hydrographic surveyors of the 19th century and has been called ‘the father of the Indian surveys’. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1822. He died in Bombay, and his obituary was published in the Straits Times dated 18 December 1849.

Of his brother David nothing seems to be known, and it is a common name which makes him harder to trace. Their brother Hercules Ross is believed to have been murdered by pirates, along with his wife, in the East Indies in 1810.

What prompted me to write this piece was encountering a reference to a young Hercules Ross who was Secretary to General Craig in the Cape Colony, on the very respectable salary of £1500 a year, in about 1798. He was referred to by Lady Anne Barnard in one of her letters to Henry Dundas, later Lord Melville, written between 1797 and 1801 and published in book form a century later. It is not certain that he was the same Hercules Ross as the son of Elizabeth Foord, but it is quite likely.

As the nineteeth century began the British Empire was expanding rapidly. No longer did young men seek their fortunes planting sugar in Jamaica, but their descendants, particularly their mixed race sons, often looked to the newly expanding colonies to make their fortunes. Parental influence could get them a place in the East India Company or the Indian Army, or a place in the colonial civil service. Moreover it may be that for those whose mixed race was more obvious it was easier to make a name abroad than at home.

And so a generation born in Jamaica spread out across the world in the first wave of the Jamaican diaspora.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest

The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society

June 29, 2013 Anne M Powers 4 Comments

Ayscoughfee Hall, Spalding (Thorvaldson: Wikimedia Commmons)

I promised to report back from last week’s University of Derby conference on Enlightenment, Science and Culture in the East Midlands c.1700-1900 if it turned out that there was any connection with Jamaica. It was no surprise to find one, although in a place I had not hitherto connected with Jamaica.

The small Lincolnshire town of Spalding is now something of a backwater, but in its hey-day it was a thriving east coast port connected to the sea via the river Welland. Now best known for its spring bulbs and for Lincolnshire’s rich agricultural lands, it also has the distinction of having been the first place in the UK where barcodes were used, according to Wikipedia!

Maurice Johnson was born at Ayscoughfee Hall in 1688. He founded the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society in 1710, the same year that he married Elizabeth Ambler with whom he went on to have twenty-five (some sources say twenty-six) children! Although some died in infancy and some in childhood, eleven seem to have lived to grow to adulthood, and it was one of his younger daughters Ann Alethea Johnson who provides the connection with Jamaica.

On the 15th of August 1751 Ann Alethea married Richard Wallin of Jamaica. He was made a member of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society on the 5th of December that year. “Proposed by the Reverend Mr Johnson That Richard Wallin Esqr (only son of John Wallin Esqr late of St Jago de la Vega in Jamaica deceased) At his own instance be elected a regular member assented to be subscribed with these proposers by the Secretary Dr Green and the Operator Mr Michael Cox”.

Their first child Ann Lydia was baptised a year later at St James, Westminster but died young, possibly before her parents sailed for Jamaica. There Richard Wallin took up his inheritance and three more children were born – Richard about 1753, Lydia Elizabeth in 1754 and Ann Alethea in December 1757. Their mother was buried in St Catherine’s parish on the 9th of June 1758, and little Lydia Elizabeth died the following year leaving Ann Alethea Wallin to inherit the Wallin estates.

Her father Richard Wallin was the only surviving child of John Wallin and his second wife Lydia Stoddard – a brother John, who may have been the elder, matriculated at Oxford in 1745 but then disappears from the record. There seem to have been no children of John Wallin’s third marriage to Mary Sackville in 1744.

John Wallin was an early settler in Jamaica and Lydia Stoddard’s mother was Anna Williamina Archbould grand-daughter of Captain Henry Archbould one of the original colonists.

Ultimately the Wallins seem to have bequeathed little to Jamaica other than their name. The widowed Richard Wallin travelled to Philadelphia where in 1760 he married Catherine Shippen and died about six months later. His daughter Ann Alethea Wallin was brought up in England and married the Rev. Charles Edward Stewart who became Rector of Wakes Colne in Essex from 1795-1819. They had at least six children between 1775 and 1794 and Ann Alethea died some time before 1817 when Stewart married a second time.

An estate referred to as Wallens in St Thomas in the Vale, which may be the same as Wallins, was recorded as being in the possession of James Blackburn in 1788 and it is reasonable to presume that the trustees appointed by Richard Wallin sold it on behalf of his only daughter.

A further connection with Jamaica is through Robert Hunter (1666-1734), Governor of Jamaica between 1727 and 1734. Maurice Johnson was Steward for his manor of Crowland near Spalding. Hunter left his extensive estates in Jamaica and England to his son Thomas Orby Hunter on condition that he did not marry Mrs Sarah Kelly, the widow of Charles Kelly! The reasoning for this was probably not any prejudice against the young widow, but rather fears of his son becoming entangled in the labyrinthine debts left by Charles Kelly.

As for the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, it was formed in a very ‘clubbable’ period of the eighteenth century, a time which spawned clubs and associations for all sort of purposes – all male of course. William Stukeley, another a Lincolnshire man, friend and contemporary of Johnson pioneered archaeology investigating Stonehenge and Avebury. Johnson and Stukeley also re-founded the Society of Antiquaries in 1717, and started the Ancaster Society in 1729 while Stukeley founded a botanical club at Boston (Lincolnshire) in 1711, the Belvoir Club in Leicestershire in 1727 and the Brasenose Society at Stamford in 1736. The latter took its name from the brazen nosed door knocker taken there in 1330 by a breakaway group of Oxford students.

All these clubs and societies very much reflected the Enlightenment, reading letters sent from abroad, papers on various subjects and discussing everything from sea shells, to new engineering techniques for fen drainage and new agricultural methods of improving crops and animals. Another member with a Jamaican connection was John Harries, who was re-embarking for Jamaica in 1732 having brought home a collection including coral to make lime for sugar boiling, shells, nuts and petrified hard wood which he presented to the Society. Among the many distinguished members of the Spalding Society were Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane (another with Jamaican connections of course), the poet Alexander Pope, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir George Gilbert Scott and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Many of these societies lasted only a short time, some had their collections preserved by amalgamation with others and some were simply dispersed. The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society is highly unusual in having survived the loss of its founding spirit – Maurice Johnson died in February 1755 barely two months after his redoubtable wife Elizabeth.

By 1770 the Spalding Society had become more of a book club with occasional lectures, but it continued throughout the nineteenth century and in 1890 it was revivified by Dr Marten Perry and its collection is now housed in a purpose built museum, opened in 1911. You can visit by appointment and see the original minute books and letters as well as the collections.

I owe my new found knowledge of the Spalding Society to a fascinating lecture given last Saturday by Diana and Michael Honeybone, who have together edited The Correspondence of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society 1710-1761, published by the Lincoln Record Society in 2010.

Biographies, General Interest, Jamaican Life

Belisario – a great Jamaican artist

June 16, 2013 Anne M Powers Comment

This is not a book to be taken lightly in any sense. It is a large and solid tome, one to be requested as a birthday or Christmas present, to be proudly displayed and frequently pored over. It is carefully researched, beautifully put together and wonderfully illustrated.

Jackie Ranston came to the story via the history of the Lindo family and rather than simply begin with the birth of the artist, born in Kingston in 1794 the son of Abraham Medes Belisario and Esther Lindo, she first sets him in his Jewish family context. The families fled to England from the Inquisition and settled in the small London Jewish community. Ranston traces their activities in London and Europe and then tracks them to Jamaica where Abraham Mendes Belisario arrived as an adventurous 18 year-old in 1786, and where Alexandre Lindo, who had arrived two decades earlier, was already established as a property developer, slave trader and Kingston’s leading Jewish merchant. In 1791 Abraham married Lindo’s daughter Esther who brought with her a generous marriage settlement.

Early in the nineteenth century Alexandre Lindo lent large sums to the French, then in conflict with the British, and subsequently unable to recover his money died demented and bankrupt in London in 1812. The Belisario family were also back in London and suffering hard times – Esther and her daughters set up a boarding school for Jewish girls in Clapton, and in 1809 Abraham Mendes Belisaro was appointed to manage a sugar estate on Tortola. There the slaves were treated with unimagineable cruelty, particularly by Arthur Hodge, owner of the Bellevue estate. Such were his excesses that he was eventually prosecuted for murder, most unusually the testimony of a black woman was accepted by the court, and Hodge was hanged. Abraham Belisario had the account of the trial published in London at his own expense, but never returned to live there, dying in Tortola in 1825 a year after Esther had died in London.

Meanwhile young Isaac Mendes Belisario had become a pupil of Robert Hills and one of his first known works was a watercolour of the interior of the Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, painted in 1812. For two decades he painted in London, became a member of the Stock Exchange, had a short lived partnership with his uncle Jacob, who had a role in the fraudulent Poyais scheme (involving a fictional Central American state) and eventually, having finally obtained access to some family funds from the sale of the last remaining Lindo properties to Simon Taylor, left London for Jamaica for the sake of his health.

Given what we know of the graveyard that Jamaica could be for white settlers this may seem an odd ddecision, until you also remember what a damp, crowded, insanitary and smog filled city London was in the 1830s.

Isaac arrived in Kingston in December 1834 and having made contact with various cousins still on the island, immediately sought out premises for a studio. Among four portraits he painted in 1835 were those of Jamaican Chief Justice Sir Joshua Rowe and his wife. Later he was commissioned by the Marquess of Sligo to paint his Jamaican estates, the Marquess having been appointed as Governor of Jamaica. Sligo was a descendant of Dennis Kelly, who with his brothers had owned large estates in Jamaica and whose Wills are transcribed here.

Jackie Ranston’s book takes its title from the prospectus that Belisario prepared during the time that Sligo was Governor Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica. The lithographs were planned to illustrate the carnival known as Jonkonnu or John Canoe a fusion of African and European traditions dating back to the early days of slavery, and Belisario researched carefully for the accompanying text. Ranston’s book reproduces in full folios 1, 2 and 3, which came out in 1837 and 1838.

At this point Belisario ran into trouble, he had lost the services of the person who coloured the prints, and his own health was suffering. In fact he had tuberculosis and he now returned home to live with his sisters in Clapton, where the damp air from Hackney Marshes can have done little to improve his condition. Perhaps it was this that prompted him to journey once more to Kingston where not long after his return he witnessed a catastrophic fire which began in a foundry on Harbour Street and destroyed a swathe of downtown Kingston. Belisario captured the event in three dramatic lithographs and a map of the area affected by the fire, on which he collaborated with Adolphe Duperly.

Some time after this, Belisario left Jamaica for the last time and he died at his sisters’ home in Lower Clapton on the 4th of June 1849.

Apart from a number of maps, the book contains family trees of the Lindo and Belisario families, extensive endnotes and bibliography, and is fabulously well illustrated, not only with Belisario’s work but with numerous images relating to Jewish history, Jamaica, slavery and emancipation. Underpinning it all is a wealth of detailed research.

This is a fabulous book, and while not cheap is absolutely worth the price for anyone interested in Jamaica, Belisario, his background and his art.

Belisario : sketches of character : a historical biography of a Jamaican artist by Jackie Ranston. Mill Press, Kingston, Jamaica 2008

ISBN: 9768-16816-1 and ISBN 13: 978-9768-16816-0

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

The Genealogical Jigsaw Puzzle

April 20, 2013 Anne M Powers Comment

It is always very satisfying when another piece of the genealogical jigsaw puzzle slots into place, and this is what happened following the item I wrote last time about Robert Fotherby, who gave his body to science.

I already had a copy of his Will and decided now was the time to transcribe it and to remind myself why I knew anything about him in the first place. I had in fact come across him in the Will of John Rose of Cotterstock (c.1696-1736), which is one of those documents that is a real treasure trove. John Rose had no children and left a number of legacies to his cousins before making over his estate which included holdings in Jamaica to his nephew, then a minor, on condition that he change his name from John Pate to John Pate Rose – which in due course he did.

He listed the following cousins – Robert Fotherby and his wife Frances; Mary Stileman; Martha Milner; Thomas Bush; Thomas Pain the Elder of Oundle, and his sons John and Thomas; Rose Fuller and Francis Sadler both of Jamaica; and the widowed Mary Smith of Leicester. He left a number of charitable legacies and money for his servants as well as, intriguingly since I don’t know what the connection was, Fifty pounds to be equally divided between the two Sons of Thomas King late of Spanish Town in Jamaica aforesaid Dancing Master deceased to be paid them in Jamaica money. Whether John Rose had ever visited his estates in Jamaica, which were being managed by Francis Sadler, is not recorded. You can read the Will in full here.

To unpick all these relationships we need to go back to the early days of settlement in Jamaica when the sons of Thomas Rose of Mickleton decided that their future lay there. The eldest brother William, an apothecary, remained in London acting to some extent as family banker; Dr Fulke Rose and his brothers Thomas and Francis patented land in Jamaica; John Rose pursued a career as a merchant based mainly in London, trading goods and convicts into the island (although one of his daughters was born in Jamaica). There was also a sister Elizabeth Rose, possibly married in 1679 to Richard Phelps in Jamaica, and later to a man called Milner, finally in 1699 back in London to a widower called William Bush with whom she had several children.

So we can de-code the cousins of John Rose of Cotterstock, whose father was William Rose the Apothecary, as follows: Mary Stileman was a daughter of John Rose the merchant and you can read more about her here. Her son from her second marriage was Francis Sadler. Martha Milner was a daughter of Elizabeth Rose, and Thomas Bush was Martha’s half-brother. Rose Fuller was a grandson of Fulke Rose and as a young man he went to Jamaica to manage the estates belonging to the Fuller and Isted families.

That was as far as I had got until I looked again at Robert Fotherby and discovered a marriage licence allegation on Ancestry for an intended wedding to the widowed Frances Charnock ‘aged upwards of thirty years’, in 1732. Frances Rose had buried her daughters Elizabeth and Mary in the parish of St John Jamaica in August and October 1720, and her husband Dr John Charnock in September ten years later. Their deaths are recorded in a monumental inscription (Lawrence Archer, p.313). Returning to England she remarried and had, it is to be hoped, ten happy years with Robert Fotherby. That he was very fond of her is evidenced by the care he showed in providing for Elizabeth Lambe, who had been her companion, and perhaps her nurse in her last illness.

Frances was buried on the 2nd of March 1741/42 at St Mary Aldermanbury in the City of London, where her mother Elizabeth had been buried in 1735 and her infant niece Elizabeth Serocold (daughter of Martha Rose) was buried in 1716. The church was destroyed by enemy action in 1940, but in 1969 when the site was to be redeveloped the stones were sold and the church was rebuilt in Fulton, Missouri, USA as the National Churchill Museum.

So of this extensive list of cousins, all apparently relations of the Rose family, I am left with Thomas Pain and his sons who I suspect were closely related to John Rose’s wife Elizabeth (one of the witnesses to her Will was a Thomas Payne) and Mrs Mary Smith of Leicester.

I did not hold out much hope of finding Mrs Mary Smith though my guess is that she was also a member of the Pain family. However I then discovered that in 1758 the Bank of Smith and Payne was established in London’s Lombard Street. John Payne, the founding partner, and a Chairman of the East India Company, was a nephew of the Thomas Payne of Oundle mentioned in the Will of John Rose of Cotterstock. Both the Smith and Pain/Paine/Payne families had connections with Wigston near Leicester.

John Paine of Oundle, son of Thomas the Elder, was buried in the church of St Peter, Oundle on the 23rd of July 1801, aged eighty-one, at which time his younger brother Thomas and sister-in-law Sarah were still alive.

As a postscript: John Pate did obtain a private Act of Parliament in 1744 to change his name to John Pate Rose. He went on to have three daughters with Martha Henn, but I am not clear whether he was married to her. Hannah Bella born in 1753 died young. His daughters Letitia and Sophia born in 1751 and 1752 both married within a month of each other in 1784, each couple being witnesses at the others’ wedding – Letitia to the widowed Sir George Booth and Sophia to the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne with whom she had a daughter Margaret.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life

Joseph Stone Williams

March 30, 2013 Anne M Powers 2 Comments

Emancipation celebrations in Spanish Town 1838

I wrote last time about the Legacies of British Slave-ownership website, and quite by chance I have now found a Will which illustrates that period of history between the passing of the abolition act and actual emancipation.

Joseph Stone Williams died on the 6^th of February 1836 in the parish of Westmoreland, Jamaica. He was born about 1778, the eldest son of James Williams and his wife Frances Cecilia Stone. Although I have not found baptism records for all the family it is possible to piece together the records of nine children, drawing partly on Joseph’s Will for information. The Williams family were present in Westmoreland throughout the eighteenth century and it is probable that Joseph was the great great grandson of Rowland Williams, whose family arrived not long after the British seized the island.

Joseph does not appear to have married but like so many men in Jamaica at the time he fathered a number of children, and in his Will he made generous provision for them and their various mothers, in particular for Mary Pessoa the mother of three sons and a daughter, the last of whom seems to have died before the Will was written. You can read the Will in full here.

Joseph was the owner of three estates – Anglesea Pen, Cairn Curran and Carawina. Claims were made for compensation for all three as owner, plus three other claims (for twenty-four individuals) as awardee. There were forty-two enslaved persons on Anglesea Pen with compensation amounting to £688 2s 2d; there were three hundred and eighteen enslaved at Carawina with compensation equal to £5912 16s 11d; and at Cairn Curran eighty-five enslaved with compensation amounting to £1628 8s 10d.

Of these former slaves, who at the time he wrote his Will in 1835 had been converted to ‘apprentices’, a number were given to Mary Pessoa and are listed by name in the Will. Because Wills were written without punctuation it can be a little difficult to work out just how many individuals there are in this list but there seem to be about forty-two men and women, in which case they may constitute the workforce of the Anglesea Pen. Mary Pessoa was being left the services of these apprentices during the remainder of their apprenticeship, and Joseph Stone Williams made clear that the apprentices at Cairn Curran were to be allowed to continue to live in their accommodation ‘during the apprenticeship system without any hindrance or molestation whatsoever’.

As long as she remained single Mary Pessoa was to be allowed to continue to live in the Great House at Anglesea Pen where she had already been living with her children, and she also received furniture, household linen, Joseph’s wearing apparel, and the right to continue to pasture her and her family’s stock at Anglesea Pen. In addition to the legacies to Mary’s sons, Joseph also left legacies to Joseph and James Williams the two sons of Eliza Ward Robertson, to Mary Williams the daughter of Eliza Murray and to Ann Williams the daughter of Ann Anderson. There were legacies to various friends, family members, and servants, a large legacy to his brother William Williams, and the residuary legatee was his brother the Reverend Theodore Williams the vicar of Hendon in North London.

As I said, the list of apprentices was unpunctuated in the Will, but I have included it here with what I hope is correct punctuation so that anyone searching for ancestors in Westmoreland at this time may be able to find them.

William Grant, William Montague, William P [blank] Atkinson, George Dixon, James Arthur, James Drummond, Charles Vassall, Alexander Grant, Charles Pinnock, Thomas Williams, Richard Wellington, Nod alias William Godfrey, Amelia Murray, Eliza Grant, Grace Elizabeth Atkinson, Patience, Sarah R [blank] Arthur, Ann Wilson Bell, Margaret W [blank] Grant, Jane Smith, Jane Neill, Daphne, Hannah, Queen, Juba, Matilla, Bessy Anderson, Helen McLeod, Thomas Anderson, George Pessoa, Mary P [blank] James, Maria Williams Pessoa alias Maria Cook, James Gammon, Bonella Gammon, Maria Lewis, Robert Bowen, Jackie alias John MacLeod, Ithy (?) Girling, Mimba alias Eliza Hodges, David Bowen, William Goodin and Richard Bowen.

‘Ithy’ may be short for Ithamar in which case this is a girl or woman.

Reading the will in association with the compensation records provides an interesting snapshot of a pivotal period in Jamaican history.

General Interest, Jamaican Life

Infant and child mortality in Jamaica

February 16, 2013 Anne M Powers 5 Comments

A late 18th Century embroidered mourning scene for a young child worked on an ivory silk ground. The stylized scene includes a central tombstone with the inscription written in ink on silk: ‘In memory of Mifs Betsey Thomson who died Jun 29 1794 aged 4 years’*

I recently took some time off to look after a grandchild with chickenpox, and it was borne in on me how much things have changed even during my lifetime. A mere half century or so ago all children in the UK could expect to catch measles, mumps, whooping cough, German measles, chickenpox, and possibly scarlet fever or rheumatic fever, and to be vaccinated only against smallpox and diptheria. Many would die from polio and meningitis. Only when I was almost out of primary school did the Salk vaccine arrive from America to immunise against polio, which my sister had caught as a baby and I too had probably suffered from. In secondary school I was vaccinated against TB and tetanus, and already antibiotics were available to fight bacterial infections and pneumonia, saving many lives. My Scottish great grandmother lost only one of her twelve children – little Catherine died at eleven months of Cellulitis, Septicaemia of the arm an infection probably resulting from a small scratch or insect bite, which now would be easily treatable.

Now every child in the West, and many in the developing world, can expect to be vaccinated against virtually all of these childhood diseases and new vaccines are coming on stream all the time. However we should beware of becoming complacent since antibiotic resistance is becoming more and more common, and if it becomes entrenched we may find ourselves in a similar position to the parents of small children in 18^th-century Jamaica.

There was for a time a strand of academic thought that claimed that because infant mortality in the past was so high, and so many pregnancies and infants were lost, that parents were inured to it and did not care for their small children unprepared to make any ‘investment’ in them until they grew up and were likely to reach adulthood.

I really do not believe this. Take for example the death of little Charles MacKay, which was mentioned recently on the Facebook group of the Jamaica Colonial Heritage Society, following the discovery of some marble tomb fragments from a site that had been bulldozed. The gravestone had sadly been lost but it had previously been recorded and so we know that so precious was little Charles Mackay that he was not recorded as being simply two years old at his death but precisely two years five months and twenty-seven days.

Here lies Interred

The Body of Charles MacKay

The Son of

Hugh MacKay by his Wife Frances

Born on the 14th of November, 1751, Dyed on the 21st of May, 1754

Aged 2 Years, 5 Months and 27 Days

Oh! Early loss. Like some fair Flower, the pleasant Spring supplies, That gayly Blooms, but even in blooming dies. Memento Mori. O Death, all Eloquent you only prove, What Dust wee doat on when tis man wee love

Browsing through Philip Wright’s Monumental Inscriptions of Jamaica (Society of Genealogists 1966) shows that many children were commemorated with their ages given to the day in this way.

It is hardly surprising that parents, faced with the repeated loss of children born in the British colonies, sent them back to Britain in the hope that their chances of survival would be greater. This was a practice not only among 18^th-century Jamaican parents, but one which continued throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. My own grandfather and his siblings were sent back from India to school in England, not because the schools were so much better but because their health was likely to be improved.

More heartbreaking was the position of Lady Nugent, whose diary of her Jamaican experiences is well known[1]. Having apparently lost several pregnancies she had two children born in Jamaica with whom she returned to England. When they arrived her health had been so debilitated that she weighed a mere six stone, and when subsequently her husband was posted to India she left her four surviving children including a five week old baby behind in England for the sake of their health.

She wrote of her pleasure at her husband’s new appointment, But alas! I cannot help thinking of my children; and, while I am going through all the bustle of dinners, to meet East Indians, etc and while I am fatigued in both body and mind, with writing and various preparations, my whole heart is at Iver and at Westhorpe; for ten days ago, my dear little girls returned there, under the care of dear good Miss Dewey. I am impatient to get out of town to them…

And later she wrote, This book I shall seal up, and send to Westhorpe to be put into the desk, that is in the little breakfast room, where my dear children may find it, one of these days, should I not return; and along with it various little articles, as keepsakes, which they will value, I am sure, as relics of the father and mother, devoted to their interest and welfare.

The Nugents did return safely to England and spent the rest of their lives with the four of their children who survived to grow up. Because of their social position and Lady Nugent’s Journal we know more about them than about many of Jamaica’s colonists and their children.

Often we can only deduce the deaths of children when we read a Jamaican Will that leaves an estate to nieces and nephews, distant cousins or friends, from which it can be assumed that no immediate heirs had survived. Such children were often buried on the planter’s estate in a family plot and it was not uncommon for the grave to be unmarked, the grave marker lost or the death and burial to have gone unrecorded in the parish register. This makes it difficult to estimate levels of child mortality. How much more difficult is it to estimate mortality among Jamaica’s slaves and their children, particularly in the earlier part of the 18^th-century for which fewer plantation records survive.

What can be said with certainty is that malaria, smallpox, yellow fever, measles and other infections killed adults and children alike. Poor hygiene and a lack of knowledge of how infection was spread, or understanding of the role of mosquitoes in transmitting malaria and yellow fever, meant people were unable to take preventive measures and survival was often due to luck rather than a strong constitution.

[1] Lady Nugent’s Journal of her residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. New and revised edition edited by Philip Wright, Institute of Jamaica, Kingston, 1966.

* from http://locutus.ucr.edu/~cathy/dress/mourn.html

General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Pancakes 18th century style

February 9, 2013 Anne M Powers Comment

With Lent fast approaching I thought it would be good to dip once again into the cookbook of Hannah Glasse to see how she made pancakes.

This is an 18th century Dutch dish such as Hannah Glasse might have used to serve up her pancakes*.

Traditionally of course pancakes were made on Shrove Tuesday, when western Christians were shriven of their sins and used up foods they were forbidden to eat during the fasting period of Lent. Because the date of Easter is moveable so is the start of Lent, which this year begins on Ash Wednesday, February 13th.

This time of year is also known as the ‘hungry gap’, when foods stored over the winter are running out and new spring crops have not yet come in.

Hannah Glasse lists seasonal foods in her book and mentions a huge range of fish available during the winter – many now unavailable or ignored, including a surprisingly large range of freshwater species the fishing for which, of course, would not be so adversely affected by winter weather.

She mentions dorey, brile, gudgeons, gollin, smelts, crouch, perch, anchovy and loach, scallop and wilks, periwinkles, cockles, mussels, geare, bearbet and hollebet. She also advises on how to chose for freshness salmon, pike, trout, carp, tench, grailing, barbel, chub, turbot, cod, ling, skate and thornback, sole, sturgeon, herring, mackerel, lobsters, prawns and more.

Of January Fruits which are yet lasting, she lists some grapes, fifteen varieties of apples (most of which I regret to say I have never heard of) and five kinds of winter pears. In February she adds to the list the Pomery, the Winter Pipperning and the Dagobent Pear. Even in March, and with no refrigerated storage, she expected to have available five apple varieties and two pears. By April her list of available vegetables and salads is increasing and includes cucumbers, mushrooms and purslane grown on hot beds – making use of the huge quantities of manure available to 18th century farmers and market gardeners.

We are not so used now to having to think seasonally about our food, but even in our relatively sheltered economy the UK is suffering some shortages due to having experienced an eighteen month drought followed by many months of exceptionally high rainfall. Farmers are still unable to lift root crops from saturated ground, two weeks of heavy snow meant crops such as leeks and greens could not be harvested, and until the ground dries out new seed cannot be sown as cultivation with heavy machinery only compacts the soil destroying its structure. In any case the ground is so wet that seed would rot if planted.

Although food prices are pushed up by such conditions, the wealthy West can today afford to import food to make up any shortfall. It is worth remembering that 18th century Jamaicans too were heavily dependent on imports, despite the island’s potential for growing its own food, with planters preferring to give their land over to the monoculture of sugar, coffee and other cash crops. Some native foodstuffs, such as the green turtle, were exported to the profitable markets of London, and in the fifth edition of her book Hannah Glasse included lengthy instructions on preparing a turtle in the West Indian Way. This was for a turtle weighing sixty pounds!

And so back to pancakes. Hannah Glasse included several pancake recipes in her book, most of which are far more generous with cream, eggs and butter than is fashionable now. Most use spices such as cinnamon, mace and nutmeg as well as sugar, and in the case of at least one recipe the quantity of nutmeg is quite large.

If you are thinking of trying the recipes remember 18th century eggs would have been smaller than today, and spare a thought for Hannah when you reach for the packet of caster sugar. She would have had to shave her sugar off a Jamaican sugar loaf and to pound it with pestle and mortar to achieve the desired fineness; her nutmegs would have been bought whole and her cinnamon as curled bark, all to be grated and pounded by hand.

Several of the recipes make use of ‘sack’ which was a fortified white wine approximating to a sweet sherry. It was imported into England, but would also have been imported into Jamaica from the Canaries which were on the shipping route for the outward journey of many of the supply ships.

18th Century Cream Jugs recently sold by Lacy Scott and Knight.

To make Fine Pancakes.

Take half a Pint of Cream, half a pint of Sack, the Yolks of eighteen Eggs beat fine, and a little Salt, half a pound of fine Sugar, a little beaten Cinnamon, Mace and Nutmeg; then put in as much Flour as will run thin over the pan, and fry them in fresh Butter. This sort of Pancake will not be crisp, but very good.

Pancakes.

Take a Quart of Milk, beat in six or eight Eggs, leaving half the Whites out, mix it well till your batter is of a fine thickness. You must observe to mix your Flour first with a little Milk, then add the rest by degrees; put in two Spoonfuls of beaten Ginger, a Glass of Brandy, a little Salt, stir all together, and take your Stew-pan very clean, put in a piece of Butter as big as a Wallnut, then pour in a Ladleful of Batter, which will make a Pancake moving the Pan around, that the Batter be all over the Pan; shake the Pan, and when you think that side is enough, toss it, if you can’t, turn it cleaverly; and when both sides are done, lay it in a Dish before the Fire, and so do the rest. You must take care they are dry; when you send them to the Table, strew a little Sugar over them.

A Quire of Paper

Take a Pint of Cream, six eggs, three Spoonfuls of fine Flour, three of Sack, one of Orange-flour Water, a little Sugar, and half a Nutmeg grated, half a pound of melted Butter, almost cold; mingle all well togeether, and Butter the Pan for the first Pancake; let them run as thin as possible; when just coloured they are enough: And so do with all the fine Pancakes.

Interestingly her pancakes seem mainly to have been served on their own with sugar rather than with sweet or savoury fillings.

* By Leoboudv (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Jamaica in the 18th century British Press

January 26, 2013 Anne M Powers 1 Comment

I was searching the British Newspaper Archive last week and in an idle moment wondered just how much coverage there was of Jamaica. A search for the single word ‘Jamaica’ was revealing. Even bearing in mind the rapid increase in the number and size of newspapers, particularly during the 18th century, the increase in references to Jamaica is an indicator of its rising importance to the British economy, and sadly during the 20th century also its decline.

1710-1749 5,703
1750-1799 28,818
1800-1849 169,096
1850-1899 390,761
1900-1949 74,838
1950-1999 648

A further breakdown in the first half of the 18th century is also revealing (again bearing in mind that the number of papers was also increasing).

1710-19 96
1720-29 996
1730-39 1,147
1740-49 3,464

Incidentally re-running the search a day later produced a few more references, either due to minor vagaries of the indexing system, or to the addition of new newspaper scans. The ten year project to digitise the newspaper collections of the British Library is on-going, so as with many on-line sources it’s worth popping back from time to time to see if an item of interest is now available.

And like maps, I find old newspapers endlessly fascinating. Where else could you learn that in 1742 a clerk to a vinegar merchant in Hoglane, reputed to be worth £2000, a widower for thirty years and who had pass’d his Grand Climackterick five years had married a lass of nineteen!

More particularly for the family or other historian you may find mention of someone in an unexpected context – perhaps a house sale, or as victim (or perpetrator) of a crime.

For example I wrote a while back about the scandal involving Joseph Biscoe and his wife and found that not long after the court case Biscoe sold all the contents of the house he had owned in Derbyshire, from which it sounds as if he was getting rid of everything that might be connected with her.

But to return to Jamaica. Many of the early references are records of which ship has arrived and what the cargo was. On the 2nd of September1712 the Newcastle Courant announced that a galley called the Rapier had arrived from Jamaica carrying a cargo of ‘sugar, cocoa, indigo etc.’ Many announcements during periods of war related to British ships being captured, or enemy ships that had been captured and their cargo taken. For people anxiously awaiting news of the arrival of friends or family, or whose fortune was tied up in a particular cargo, the shipping news in the papers was a vital source of information, especially for those who did not live in one of the major ports.

It was through the British Newspaper Archive that I discovered a reference in 1768 to a box addressed to Joseph Lee being washed up on the shore near Penzance with a large quantity of mahogany presumed to be from a shipwreck. As I knew that Joseph Lee was visiting London at the time and the box was addressed care of Messers Thomas and Stephen Fuller, Merchants in London, I knew for certain this must relate to the Joseph Lee whose letters feature in A Parcel of Ribbons.

Sadly also there are sometimes adverts relating to runaways.

This one appears to be a boy who was free rather than a slave, but one wonders what it was that made John Thomas run away from his apprenticeship and offer himself to someone else. The age given is young for an apprentice, so was he in fact a slave whose master wished to disguise the fact at a time when emancipation and an end to the slave trade was very much under discussion?

Newspapers are an invaluable source of information I’ve only touched on the British ones here, but of course there were newspapers published in Jamaica, and you will also find many references in American newspapers.

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

Murder most foul

January 19, 2013 Anne M Powers 3 Comments

The Old Bailey By Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin via Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes in family history research wandering down an unrelated byway reveals a story you could not have invented.

Reading the Lee letters [1] I wondered who was the school master at Chelsea who had married an heiress? According to the letter written in November 1749 – Mr Rothery was marry’d last May to that Lady at Chelsea with 3 thousand pound fortune.

A little investigation through British History Online revealed that At Turret House, Paradise Row, the parish lecturer William Rothery taught boarders and day boys including the botanist Thomas Martyn (1735-1825), who attended for ten years and remembered him as an excellent master but one who had died in 1759 ‘lost in drink’ [2]. Indeed it is likely he is also the same William Rothery of Chelsea declared bankrupt in 1756[3].

Chelsea was then a pleasant village lying alongside the Thames away from the hurly burly and pollution of London. The school was close to the Physic Garden which had been founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and also to the Chelsea Royal Hospital founded under Charles II for retired servicemen, the Chelsea Pensioners. Paradise Row is now known as Royal Hospital Road and Paradise Walk which in 1750 led directly down to the banks of the Thames, is now separated from it by the Victorian houses that front onto the Chelsea Embankment, but in 1749 much of the land next to the Thames was marshy and there were extensive osier beds at Chelsea.

William Rothery, baptised 18 February 1704 at St Martin in the Fields, London, and with an MA from St John’s College Cambridge, married Lydia Rooker in 1749. If the letter is correct this was in May although a Vicar General Licence was issued on 07 Feb 1749. Guessing that if they had a daughter she might be named after her mother I quickly found little Lydia Rothery in IGI, baptised at St Luke’s Chelsea in December 1752, then her older brother George baptised in February 1750. Sadly little George died and was buried in St Luke’s on the 15^th of June 1752.

Further online searching of the National Archive website turned up a number of documents held at the Derbyshire Record Office in Matlock relating to the Perrin family. This included the Will of William Perrin of Vere in Jamaica which left William Rothery, his brother-in-law, a legacy of £500 and named him as residuary legatee in the event that Perrin’s wife and children died. This would have made Rothery an extremely rich man as William Perrin was one of the wealthiest sugar planters in Jamaica. The Will was proved in September 1759 which meant that the legacy to William arrived too late to save him from drink and bankruptcy since he had died in June of that year. However the Will suggested to me that Frances Perrin was probably Frances Rooker before her marriage and I found they had married at St Vedast Foster Lane in London on 22 July 1738 by Vicar General Licence dated the previous day. Between 1740 and 1747 five children were born to them and baptised in Westminster, of whom only William Philp Perrin and Sarah survived to adulthood.

Also mentioned in Perrin’s Will was Benjamin Victor who it turns out is still well known in the history of theatre. Born about the beginning of the eighteenth century he married Mary, another of the Rooker sisters, on 3^rd July 1722 at Charterhouse Chapel, Finsbury by Faculty Office licence issued on 13 June. He began life as a barber and linen draper, but the lure of the theatre proved strong and he moved to acting in and writing plays. In October 1746 he settled with his wife in Dublin as treasurer and deputy manager of the theatre in Smock Alley under Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788). The theatre was moderately successful but closed in 1759 and Benjamin Victor returned to London alone, Mary having died two years earlier. He became Treasurer at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and published a history of the theatre in Dublin and London spanning over forty years that is still consulted by theatre historians today. He married again and died in Charles Street, Covent Garden, on 3 December 1778 and was buried in Bunhill Fields on the 6th. Even today he rates a lengthy entry in the Dictionary of National Biography[4]. Boswell who met him at Thomas Sheridan’s on November 30, 1762, described him as an honest, indolent, conversable man [who] has a great many anecdotes.

Searching for further information about the Rooker sisters I discovered that Jane Rooker had married Mason Victor, Benjamin’s brother, on 11 April 1730 at St James’ Clerkenwell. Mason Victor was a Cordwainer (a shoemaker and leather worker, probably employing a number of men) who died twenty-five years later apparently childless. It seems he disapproved of his siblings since in his Will proved on 26 May 1755 he left only a shilling to his brother Benjamin, a shilling to his sister Elizabeth and everything else to his wife Jane. He was probably buried in Bunhill Fields although the Victor buried at that date is not given a first name. Jane Rooker may have carried on his business in Holborn since when she died in 1787 she left small legacies to two journeymen shoemakers[5]. She too was buried at Bunhill fields.

By 1759 all three surviving Rooker sisters were widows and appear to have been living most of their time in London, although Frances retained interests in Derbyshire, and of course in Jamaica as absentee involved in the management of the plantation on behalf of her son.

Enter their brother Richard involved, as a witness, in one of the most horrific murders of the day. Richard had been apprenticed to their father, a noted clockmaker of the same name, and had the Freedom of the City of London in the Clockmakers Company, but the trade had evidently not suited him for by 1759 he was keeping a Grocery business in Water Lane, High Holborn and renting a room in the house of Sarah Metyard.

Sarah Metyard kept a Haberdasher’s shop in Bruton Street, and with her daughter Sarah Morgan Metyard supervised a group of parish apprentices who knitted mittens and purses for sale. These children were bound to a mistress for seven years by their parish to avoid them being a charge on the poor rate, to give them a useful trade and keep them out of the workhouse. When it worked well it was a system that had merits.

Among the apprentices at Bruton Street were two young sisters Ann and Mary Nailor sent there from the parish of Tottenham High Cross north of London. Ann was slow at her work and seems to have been picked on from the outset for particularly harsh treatment. Given less of the meagre food available than the other girls she was regularly beaten, by both Metyard women, with broom handles, shoes and a walking stick. When she developed a whitlow on her finger Mrs Metyard took her to have it amputated. As conditions worsened about late September 1758 little Ann tried to run away, but bumped into the milkman Jeremy Brown who brought her back. At the later trial he said She desired and pressed upon me that I would let her go, and said she should be starved if she staid there. I said, my dear, you will not be starved. She said, pray, milkman, let me go, for I have had no victuals for so long a time (the time I cannot recollect). The daughter and the mother came running down stairs, and desired I would stop her.[6]

The attempted escape led to a severe beating administered by both Metyard women and Ann was then taken upstairs and fastened with a string around her waist and her hands tied behind her back so she could neither sit nor lie down. For three days she was kept without food, only untied at night to go to bed (and once when her sister cut the string, earning a beating for it). At the end of this the other apprentices saw that Ann hung limp from the string that tied her. Sarah Morgan Metyard came and hit her with a shoe, but when she still did not move the mother called for ‘drops’ (probably sal volatile, spirits of ammonia, used to treat fainting) and the dead child was taken upstairs to the garret.

The Metyards then contrived to make it look as if Ann had run away, and after keeping the body hidden in the garret for two months until the smell became impossible, Mrs Metyard cut it up and wrapping the parts in ‘bed furniture’ took them at night to the Chick Lane Gully hole. She had to make two trips from Bruton Street, a distance of over a mile. The other apprentices had no doubt Ann was dead as she had left behind all her four small shifts and her shoes, but they did not dare to say anything. The Watchmen who found and reassembled the body parts and arranged burial had no way of knowing who it was.

Life went on as usual at Bruton Street until about two years later when Richard Rooker came as a lodger. He was so upset at the treatment he saw meted out to the girls that he soon moved out to Upper Hill Street, and feeling sorry for her persuaded Sarah Morgan Metyard to come away as his servant. Later he inherited a house at Ealing (probably on the death of his father) and retired there taking young Sarah with him. They were pursued there by Sarah’s mother screeching abuse, threatening her daughter and generally making life impossible until one day Rooker and his gardener heard screaming and found the mother, who had just dropped the knife she had been holding to her daughter’s throat.

Curious about the references he had overheard Sarah make to the Chick Lane ghost and the gully hole, Rooker questioned his servant and the whole story came out. Believing Sarah to have been bullied into it by her mother, and wanting to deal with her once and for all, he wrote to the Magistrates at Tottenham, where Ann Nailor had come from, and in due course the mother was arrested. Her apprentices were sent to the Workhouse and some days later Sarah Morgan Metyard was also taken into custody. The full account of the trial and the additional information to be gleaned from the evidence of the Ordinary (Chaplain) at Newgate can be read at www.oldbaileyonline.org and in the Annual Register for 1762 (p.132 ff.). Included in the indictment was the charge of also murdering Ann Nailor’s sister Mary aged about eight.

Despite support for the daughter from character witnesses, both were condemned to hang at Tyburn on 19^th July 1762. Gruesomely the mother became insensible and suffered fits on the night before the execution but nevertheless was taken to the gallows and hanged in that state. The daughter attempted to ‘plead her belly’, having been told this would earn her a reprieve, but was examined by a group of ‘matrons’ appointed for the task and found not to be pregnant. She later denied that she had ever had ‘criminal conversation’ with any man although it was widely assumed at the time that she was Richard Rooker’s mistress.

Richard Rooker died in 1763 leaving his estate[7] to his sisters and to the twin children of widowed Anne Thompson, who I initially assumed was another Rooker sister . And there the story might have ended, until in the National Archives I came across a request made in May 1774 for letters of administration from the three Rooker sisters.

In 1772, with their fellow executor Charles Blackwell, they had obtained control of the East India Bonds that had been left to the twins Ann Elrington Thompson and James Elrington Thompson, born on the 18th May 1759, who were now dead. By May 1774 Blackwell, a Holborn druggist, had gone bankrupt and was no longer a fit person to administer the bonds. The petition requested control be given to the Rooker sisters. It also revealed that the twins were Bastards of Rd. Rooker deceased. In a further twist, I noticed that there was an Ann Thompson who gave evidence at the trial in favour of Sarah Morgan Metyard – was she the same Ann Thompson who was the mother of Richard Rooker’s twins?

And Richard himself? Berrow’s Worcester Journal for Thursday, February 10th, 1763 reported that On Thursday Mr. Rooker was found dead in a Lane near his House at Ealing, dismembered, and his Throat cut in a shocking Manner. This unfortunate Man formerly kept a Grocer’s Shop at the Corner of Water Lane, Fleet Street; and he appeared as an Evidence on the Trial of Sarah Morgan Metyard, who was executed with her Mother, for the barbarous Murder of an Apprentice Girl some Time ago.[8]

At the inquest the following day it was revealed that Richard Rooker had not been himself for some time.

On Friday last the Coroner’s Inquest sat on the Body of Mr. Rooker, who was found dead by the Side of a Ditch the preceding Day on Ealing Common, and brought in their Verdict Lunacy; it appeared on Examination, that he had been disordered in his Mind for some Time past, and once attempted to cut the Jack-Line, that the Weight might fall upon his Head; the Morning of the Day when he murdered himself, he went to his Washer Woman for some clean Linnen, and told her it was the last Time she would wash for him; and then getting himself shaved, told the Barber it would be the last Time; he first dismembered himself, and then cut his Throat, but had not Strength enough to cut the Wind Pipe, however the great Effusion of Blood put an End to his Life.

How much his state of mind had been affected by the Metyard case we will never know.

Frances Rooker’s son William Philp Perrin died in 1820 without having married or ever visited the Jamaican estates on which his huge fortune was based. After the death of their mother the whole residue of the estate went to his sister Sarah who had married Sir William Fitzherbert of Tissington in 1777. Tissington Hall is still lived in today by the Fitzherbert family.

Tissington Hall By Joe Empson (Flickr) via Wikimedia Commons

Both Lydia and Jane Rooker left their estates to their niece Lydia Rothery, and she also inherited £2,500 from her cousin William Philp Perrin in 1820. In 1787 Lydia married Thomas Bunnett and in 1842 Thomas Bunnett of Hanworth, mentions in his Will a bureau and bookcase that had belonged to the late Mr Perrin.

And in answer to the question I started with – how did Lydia Rooker come to have a fortune of three thousand pounds? Almost certainly it was her inheritance from her father Richard Rooker the clockmaker, but until I can find details of his death and his Will this must remain a supposition.

[1] Now published as A Parcel of Ribbons, Anne M Powers, 2012

[2] ‘Social history: Education: private schools’, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 12: Chelsea (2004), pp. 190-195. http://www.british-history.ac.uk

[3] dealer in books book/paper/printing trades(s) Gentleman’s Magazine, March, 1756.

[4] W. P. Courtney, ‘Victor, Benjamin (d. 1778)’, rev. David Goldthorpe, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28271

[5] PCC Prob 11/1156

[6] http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ ref t17620714-30

[7] Will proved 8 Feb 1763, PCC Prob 11/884.

[8] http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dutillieul/ZOtherPapers/NewBWJ10Feb1763.html