Ordinary people ... or, filling in a few hours ..

Friday is market day here where we live. Each Friday, at 8.15am, we head for the glorious market at Ohoka -- 25 minutes drive away -- and stock up the pantry for the next week ... cucumbers, kale, cos lettuce, carrots, baby potatoes and beef tomato (one does me for a week!), classy avocados, broccolini, berries, fish, salami ... even a home made cottage pie ... not to forget the best rose bushes ever for $25, and every kind of vege seedling you could wish for for just $2 a big punnet ..   Every week, we come home with the boot bulging ...

Of course, by the time we get home, put away out trophies, dive into some lunch ... with its obligatory post-prandial nap attached ... there's not much time left in the day to start on any serious work. And, anyway, at the moment I haven't got any serious work on. For a few weeks. So, I pull a weed, water an acre, and I play ... 'find the C19th folk'.

Today I pulled out three nice looking folk ...

My choices turned out to be, in one case, a well-documented and lofty personage, but I managed to avoid the clergy and the Indian army ...

So number One. Miss Bentley. 1887. But on the back it says Mrs Branagan, so that helped. Fine lookin' gal, ain't she! Black Irish? Jewish? Well, Irish it was ...

Sarah Joanna BENTLEY (b Liverpool 22 January 1869; d 10 Willow Avenue, Lytham October 1946) was apparently the daughter of William Bentley, a house painter from near Rochdale, and his wife Joanna or Anna née Leonard from Stockport. Both were of Irish families, both Catholics, and Sarah was duly christened in Latin ... 

She seems to have had brothers William Henry (1866) and Richard (1876), but -- unless she is the 12yo Sarah working as assistant to and living with an earthenware-seller in Toxteth Park in 1881 -- I don't see the family until 1891, when Sarah is working as a housemaid and waitress for a Dr Wearing in the Wavertree High Street. On 14 July 1893, she became the wife of William Richard Branagan (b 21 March 1867; d 3a Fairfield Crescent, Newsham Park 10 May 1953). Mr Branagan was from a family of workers on the Merseyside Docks, but from a young age he took a job as an assistant to a bookseller. He would remain in the book trade for his whole working life. And Sarah bore him seven children. 

There is no descendant of those seven children alive today. Four of them died as children, eldest son Ralph Reginald Bentley died in the Great War, aged 21 (12 October 1916), and daughter Ursula Marie  (1904-1960) remained a spinster. Only Blanche Eveliune (1901-1998), who wed James Frederick Lindell (1906-1941), had issue. Lindell, a seaman, was killed in a shipboard accident. Their daughter Barbara Marie died in 2016, unmarried. Perhaps that's where the photo came from.

It look me a while to discover  Sarah Joanna died. She and William can be seen in the 1939 census in Fairfield Crescent ... but I imagine she was the Sarah Branagan who died at 10 Willow Avenue, Lytham in October 1946, aged 77. She lies in the Yew Tree Catholic Cemetery, plot 4B 59, if there is a Liverpudlian who would like to visit her.

Number two. William Boyd DAWKINS (b 26 December 1837; d 15 January 1929). I hadn't heard of him, he just looked like a nice old gent. Well, he was a nice old knight: Sir William. Geologist and archeologist. And his impressive story has been told in the DNB and other reasonably reliable volumes. To which I refer you.

Number three. Carefully labelled 'Me aged 4', and Mrs Louisa Bailey née Janes.

Well, I have identified 'Me'. He is Arthur John Marson BAILEY (b Maidenhead 26 June 1913; d 45 Denham Crescent, Mitcham 15 June 1995). How do I know that? Dint of digging ...

Louisa JANES (b 15 Brydges Street, Drury Lane, c1848; d Uxbridge 15 July 1918) was a pure product of the public house system. Papa John [Webb] Janes was publican of licensed premises in Brydges Street, mama Harriett Marson (b 22 April 1821; d 7 February1877) was the daughter of a shell-fish monger. Their marriage had had a slight hiccough ..

but they eventually got the niceities of the situation together. Now, when I saw that address, a pub in Brydges St, opposite the stage door of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, I shivered. Because the great Lydia Thompson was also born in a pub in Brydges Street! I hastened to my old notes ... alas, Lydia was born at no12, Louisa at no15. Two pubs within a few doors!? Well, number 15 was the Sir John Falstaff (it is now 29 Catherine St). and to say it was a house of dubious fame is being polite. Yes, there is Mr Janes (as usual, misspelled 'James') in 1846, listed as publican ...  By 1851, John had given up the pub and was working as a brewer's traveller. The 'irregularity' of his marital position had evidently been cleared up, and the couple had been officially married in 1848. Around the same year that they had given birth to a daughter ... not named Louisa, but Clara (14 May 1849).  They would go on to have a bundle more children, but not a Louisa. Curious. Because there is the birth entry Louisa Janes, Strand district, second quarter of 1848 ... 

Well, it seems that while all the subsequent children stayed at home with mum and dad (who swapped beer for fisf, and became a fishmonger), Louisa was brought up, at least partly, by grandmother Marson. In the 1871 census she can be seen with the 80 year-old Ann Leah Marson in Uxbridge. Ann died in 1879, and Arthur Bailey executed her will: connection proven!

On 2 August 1874, Louisa married the said Arthur Bailey. Arthur worked in groceries, as his father had done: I don't know for how many years they had a grocer's shop and sub-post office in the High Street, Uxbridge: but it was decades. Arthur and Louisa had two sons. Arthur Thomas Bailey (1876; d 12 November 1952) and Charles Marson Bailey (1877-1916). Both sons married, but ... look at our photo. Dated 1917. Arthur married twice but not till 1918 (Margery Elizabeth French); so 'me' is not a child of his. Charles had left Uxbridge and the grocery, became a railway clerk in Maidenhead, married Edith Annie Staniford and ...in 1913, Edith (b 20 May 1880; d Maidenhead 15 February 1961) gave birth to the boy in our picture. 

To round off the story, Arthur III became a pharmacist, an analytical chemist et al. He married twice: Jessie W Frey (b 2 December 1919) and subsequently Winifred S Luckett. And there the story and the family seems to end.

Well! I was going to go and water the gardens .... but, guess what. The pump which was working perfectly well last night is now refusing to function!  So while I'm waiting for the Man Who Fixes Such Things to arrive ...

This little picture from the 1860s caught my eye 

It is clearly labelled, so didn't present too many problems ... Moses, Joseph Thomas and Harry, the three sons of Joseph, from Rochdale, and Emma Dickinson from Liverpool. Emma was née Thomas.

Moses, on the left, was the eldest. Born 1852, christened 8 December, seemingly for his uncle, Moses D of Old Swan and a 'victualler' (a pubkeeper), like father Joseph. Moses was educated at 'Mr Botham's Boarding school' in Walton on the Hill before following, ar first, in the family footsteps as a publican. He later took up farming. He married 'of Chirkdale Street' in 1874 Annie Grant, and they would have three daughters (Catherine, Annie, Emma). He died in 1918, and lies in Livepool's Tosteth Park Cemetery, alongside his father and a number of members of the family who died in childhood.

Joseph Thomas must be the one on our right. Looks a bit fey. But he, after also passing by Mr Botham's establishment, took over the publican's role from his father, who died in 1880, and his mother, who died in 1896, most notably for many years at the Black Horse in Walton-on-the-Hill's Rice Lane ...

The Black Horse still exists today .... I wonder if it is the same building ... 'modernised' tactfully?

Joseph married Jane Dawson Clarke (27 July 1884), they, similarly, had three daughters (Emma, Elsie, Barbara), Joseph retired from pubkeeping after his mother's death, settled in Melling, and died in Ormskirk in 1923.

Littlest brother, Harry/Henry (x 24 April 1856) also took a turn in the pub business. We see he and Joseph in the 1881 census being barmen for mother at the Black Horse. He married Jane Thomson (29 April 1881), and produced three sons (Harry Richmond, David Thomas, Osmond Spencer), before an early death, 13 September 1890.

Six girls and three boys ... there must be survivors from THIS family ... but the Pump Man has fixed the exploded pressure tank on the water supply, the heat of the day is fading ... and the flowers are gasping for a drink. 

Actually, so am I ...