Cherry Gilchrist
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Riches and Ruin in Wellington and Hemyock: the story of a wayward uncle

25/11/2016

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In the 1980s I was living on the edge of Exmoor, and often visited Wellington, usually to stock up on food for my chickens from an excellent corn merchant. My mother told me that her family once had a butter-making business in the town, but apart from a vague sense of pleasure that I was coming back to family roots in Somerset, I took little notice. Twenty years later, researching family history, I was amazed to discover that my two times great-grandparents had founded Walker’s Dairy in Wellington, which had become one of the major landmarks of the town. It was still operating under different ownership when I lived nearby, though the only visible sign of the once huge enterprise now is the little estate just off Mantle Street, named ‘Walkers Gate’ in their memory.
 
I was too late to visit the dairy, but I decided to tease out its story, finding not only a successful commercial enterprise generated between two dynastic trading families, the Maseys and Walkers, but also a startling account of seduction, scandal and ruin. The move over the hill, from the rural seclusion of Hemyock to the metropolis of Wellington sealed the fate of more than one member of the family, for better or worse.
 
It was really my great-great grandmother Catherine Masey, born in 1825, who was the power behind the dairy business. She learnt butter-making and butchery early in life on her parents’ smallholding in Hemyock. Family recollections of her fierce drive and thriftiness show that she was a force to be reckoned with. She was also known for boiling up the final scraps of butchery to make foul-smelling chitterlings, which she foisted on other members of the family.
 
In 1844, she married Thomas Walker, son of a local tailor, and they set up in business together in Hemyock. By 1871, this was running as a combined dairy, grocery, drapery, and tailor’s. Many of their twelve children were roped in to help out, and the growing dairy business gradually took over to become the family firm.
 
All was going well for the Masey-Walker family until one of their sons, Edwin, disgraced himself and hit the headlines. I only found the story when I idly searched on a digital newspaper database, and I’m pretty sure most of the Walkers hushed it up as best they could. Edwin Masey Walker had got a local Hemyock girl pregnant, actually a cousin of his, and then abandoned her. He moved over the hill to Wellington to set up his own business and up his social game. Wellington was, after all, more respectable, more on the map than Hemyock deep in the Devon countryside. Jane Salter wrote to him there in distress. Would he not marry her, as he had promised? Did he not love her after all? He coolly advised her to get rid of the baby, and offered her money to do it. Sidmouth was the place, apparently. She had the child though, and now her mother was suing for damages, for loss of her daughter’s services!
 
This might have been just another tragic case of seduction and illegitimacy had not Edwin mounted a robust defence. Mrs Salter senior kept ‘an improper house’ in Hemyock, he claimed, and her daughters joined in the servicing of young men there, who kept late hours drinking and gambling. He brought a witness, John Pursey, to say that he and his friend had ‘been intimate’ with the two Salter sisters ‘scores of times’ in their room – the sisters slept in the same bed! The mud-slinging was vicious: but was Edwin a heartless monster or a victim of a brothel-keeper’s wiles? Did he really abandon Jane because his parents had advised him to marry better (preferably to money, the court case stated) or was it a lucky escape to move to Wellington? The jury was understandably confused, and although Mrs Salter was awarded £50 in damages, the case of perjury against John Pursey, the witness, was dropped on the basis of doubt.
 
In 1870, Edwin Walker was made bankrupt; his business had failed, and he never appeared to prosper again, or to form a stable marriage even though he subsequently had a wife and child. Did the lure of big-time respectability and riches in Wellington prove his downfall? Others in the family succeeded, though. By the late 1870s, Catherine and Thomas Walker had made their own move over the hill from Hemyock into Wellington. They had risen from being country shopkeepers to important dairy owners, and could now afford a villa in Waterloo Road. Two of their other sons, Clifford and Eustace Walker eventually took over the dairy business and both became pillars of society. Eustace became a Justice of the Peace and Portreeve of Wellington, while Clifford built a classy mansion known as the Gables, where the cream of the town gathered for tennis parties on the lawn. They died well-established and wealthy.
 
There were mixed fortunes, then, from Catherine’s butter-making skills. I feel proud to be a part of such an enterprising family, and at this distance in time can be equally entertained both by their achievements and their disgraces.

Captions l to r : Edwin Masey Walker, wicked seducer - Catherine Walker, queen of chitterlings, Walker's Gate, commemorating the dairy in Wellington, Somerset, once owned by my family.
 

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The Kaleidoscope Blogger

17/12/2012

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The Kaleidoscope Blogger

It’s nearly a year since I started this blog, and looking back over the range of posts covered, I’m startled by the variety of themes covered, from riding to family history, to Jubilee celebrations, to ‘going grey’.

Does this mark me out as a shallow butterfly? Or as a woman of many parts? (some of which are going grey). Well, I’ve always written on a spectrum of topics in my books, but the majority have been subjects close to my heart. They’ve been voyages of exploration that I’ve undertaken, sometimes for a particular length of time: my journeys to Russia, fifty-nine in total, took over my life for twelve years.

But there are deep threads that bind this together, and make a whole out of what might seem at first glance to be a disparate collection of subjects. Ancient traditions, and the myths of different cultures and religions have always been at the heart of my interests, along with folk lore, and personal narratives. Even as a sixteen-year-old I was plundering the Birmingham Reference Library for undiscovered folk songs in my spare time (how sad is that?), so I reckon I can claim that it’s ingrained! Methods of developing personal spirituality have been a part of my life since I was twenty: meditation, the cosmic ‘map’ of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the symbolism of alchemy all arrived on the horizon at about that time. Anything learnt and distilled from these traditions does, I hope, feed into what I write and how I teach, in terms of experience and little drops of wisdom that I’ve been given over the years. If spirituality remains completely apart from everyday life and work, it’s not doing its job.

Well, this is turning out to be more serious than I intended! What about the writer who tackles Princess Diana, internet dating, and the social history of shops? One thing leads to another, is all I can really say. Each has a story, and you may find the ‘back story’ in the books. But I only ever tackled one book whose subject held no interest for me (it shall not be quoted here) and it taught me a lesson. If I can’t work up any genuine enthusiasm for a project, best leave it alone, however tempting the offer may be. Though, believe me, for writers, really tempting financial offers are rare – so there’s not usually too much of a dilemma on that score. I love what I write about. But also, the moment may pass, and other themes may start to fire up my imagination. The Russian traveller has come in from the cold.

Sometimes a writer is expected to be a fountain of knowledge on everything she has ever written. The truth is that once it’s down on the page, it may disappear from the mind. I use my own books sometimes for reference.  I was heartened to hear Peter Ackroyd, the noted biographer, say that he moves on with every new book:

‘Once the book is completed I tend to lose interest in it, it’s despatched into the world…I try not to pay much attention to it after its birth in the world… It’s just a question of moving on to the next thing.’

(Interviewer) ‘And do you remember what you’ve researched…?’

’No, I can’t remember at all… It all has to be evacuated in order to make room for the next subject, otherwise my head would be a sort of bedlam of voices characters and which it would be very difficult to control or discipline.’

Peter Ackroyd talking to Kirstie Young on Desert Island Discs Fri 25th May 2012

Oh Peter, I’m with you there!

So, to return to my theme, or my multitude of themes, I’m going to term myself a Kaleidoscope Blogger. Lots of pretty pieces which are forever shifting around, but which can come together to show a pattern. A true kaleidoscope image has a centre, and a symmetry. You can combine the pieces in an almost infinite number of ways, and come up with a different image each time. Order, chaos, colour.

Stay with me! There will be more to come. I may surprise you – and myself – with my next blog.



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The Serendipities of Family History

6/8/2012

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It’s a bright Sunday morning in the Welsh hills when I arrive in Bwlch-y-Sarnau, in search of my ancestors. This hamlet, in the parish of Abbeycwmhir, old Radnorshire, is where my 3x great grandparents came from. Edward Owens worked as a shoemaker until the lure of wider horizons, or perhaps a free pint, tempted him into signing up as a soldier in 1803, to fight in Wellington’s army. He served for 16 years, fighting at the battle of Corunna in the 81st Regiment of Foot, contracting hepatitis during the Walcheren campaign in the Lowlands, and finally sunning himself in Sicily in a veteran’s battalion. His feisty wife Maria didn’t simply sit at home but accompanied him on at least the last leg of his service, giving birth to one of their daughters in Pharo. Much about their life and movements remains a mystery, but we do know that they lived in ‘Blindman’s Cottage’ in Cwm Dhu, close to Bwlch-y-Sarnau, and that Edward’s father John had the cottage before him, with references that go back to 1769.

It’s not the first time that I’ve visited this parish, with its stunningly beautiful hills and valleys, and although I’ve combed the locality for any clues, I still hope to find a trace of something else. I just happened to be in the area on the previous day, so have seized the chance to come on here before I head home.

Blindman’s Cottage has probably been pulled down, as I’ve already established. On a previous visit, someone told me about a pile of stones thought to be from old cottages at roughly the place indicated by the tithe map as the site of their original home. It’s worth a look, so I trudge through fields, startling sheep and looking for traces of old walls, wells, or anything that could indicate earlier occupation. Nothing. Ah well, it’s still a lovely day – though by now white cauliflower clouds gleam luridly against a horizon the colour of stern Welsh slate. Rain on the way. I walk briskly back to the village with the aim of taking a turn around the Baptist Chapel graveyard before leaving.

Now one thing I noticed  when conducting a survey for my recent book, Growing Your Family Tree, was how often serendipity plays a part in finding new evidence – the chance meetings, the way a book or a document almost falls at random into your hand – and some of these happenstances do seem to occur in churchyards. I’ve combed the graves round the chapel before; this family line has a strong connection with the Baptist tradition, and one of Edward’s sons (also an Edward) became the first in three generations of Baptist ministers, ending with my grandfather. So the chapel of Bwlch-y-Sarnau, which has been known for its radical and influential preachers, is where both Edward the shoemaker-soldier, and Edward the minister-to-be, received their teaching. Surely there must be something here!

I notice for the first time that the graveyard has a clutch of Rees tombs, and Edward the soldier’s own mother is reputed to be a Rees, though we haven’t pinned her down yet. It’s relevant, maybe, so I photograph all the names and dates. Not a lot, but at least something to take from my visit. But just as I’m on the point of leaving, a woman hurries in through the gate, swinging a large key. She’s going to open up! I’ve never seen inside, and although the chapel is an early 20th century rebuild, I’d still like to get a glimpse.

‘I’m only here to pick up the vacuum cleaner – I clean for them, see. And I have to go soon, the car’s playing up and my husband’s waiting and we’ve got to get it looked at. No, I don’t go to chapel here – I fell out with them, ‘ she concludes darkly.

But she beckons me in, moves me briskly towards a faded old photo swinging from a nail at the back. ‘That’s the original chapel, see. There’s the new one going up,’ pointing towards a second photo, hung straight and in a better state of repair. I photograph both eagerly. Not a lot, in some ways, but fellow family historians will recognise the thrill off finding a new little pearl to add to the string – something tangible, and precious, in the chain of associations that build up your ancestry.

She has more, when I tell her the name of the family.

‘Owens? Well there’s only one left hereabouts.’ She gives me the name and whereabouts of a woman who was born into an Owens family, and encourages me to drop in, before moving me briskly out of the chapel, dragging a vacuum cleaner behind her.

Shall I call in? The sky is darkening and I’d like to be on my way. Two and a half hours drive, thunder and floods are threatened. Oh yes then – why not?

There’s always the nervousness about knocking on a stranger’s door. But, as one of my informants said, ‘What’s to lose?’ Possibly your leg, if they keep a savage pit bull terrier, possibly a bit of pride if you’re sent away ignominiously.

I take the car up the long drive (no escape now) and within five minutes I’m welcomed in by a family of three – a lady (my Owens connection), with her husband and grown-up daughter. The daughter has been working on the family tree and gets out her laptop to check names and dates. The mother looks uncannily like my own mother – could such a strong resemblance arise between quite distant cousins? I hope so. We don’t know yet if our families do tie up, as Owens is a relatively common name in these parts, and it can be hard to establish links that may go back more than two hundred years. . It would be great for me to discover new relations and learn their stories, and the interest in their eyes shows that they’d like to be a part of the lineage that I and other cousins  have established.
They have stories of two generations of unmarried mothers, virtually imprisoned in the workhouse, but still holding onto their pride in the family name. I can tell them tales of surviving hardship to travel the world, emigrate to America, to write, minister and teach. I badly want to bring the lives together. But after the warmth of our encounter, it now comes down to the hard graft of looking dispassionately to see if the evidence is there.

Whatever the outcome, it’s been a great day for furthering the quest. Sometimes, if you just trust to the moment, you’ll make unexpected discoveries

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Choosing your Ancestors

9/4/2012

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How do you choose your ancestors?
How do you map out your family history? Do you go up one line of the family, or do you try to discover the whole circle of direct line ancestors whose DNA has influenced yours? What you choose, the heritage which you lay claim to, will affect not just the research you do, but your whole concept of your ancestry. I’ve written about this fascinating challenge in my book Growing Your Family Tree (Chapter Two), but I’ll give a brief outline here. This vital topic is given scant attention, apart from practical considerations of managing your research, but it has a rich significance which everyone involved with family history can explore for themselves.  

Circle of Ancestors
– This approach means that you set out to trace as many direct-line ancestors as you can. The circle doubles in size at each generation, from 4 grandparents, to 32 at your  3x gt grandparents, and 64 for your 4x gt grandparents. Stop right there, for a moment…the numbers go rapidly off the scale after this point. If you want to lay claim to your ancestry, to get to ‘know’ your forbears, and to sense them in their entirety as a group, then clearly you’ll need to set a limit. For me, 32 is about right. I’ve got just about all of them in place, and each one has a distinct identity, and often a lot more too in terms of personality and life events. I’m happy to take some back to 4x gts or even further if it’s an easy line to follow, or there’s some riddle that I want to solve such as ‘How did this branch of the family end up in this particular place?’

A Direct Line
– The traditional method of genealogy was to trace a direct line of descent, usually through the family name. As most of us come from a patrilineal culture, where taking the father’s name is standard, this tends to reinforce the concept of a male line as equating with  ancestry. There are no rights or wrongs here; every society in the world devises its own kinship system, and where the line of descent is perceived as coming through the father, it tends to strengthen the family identity along those lines. And, of course, it’s easier to research as a rule, in these societies. But it’s by no means universal, and there’s no overriding reason to take either the name or the father’s line as the given.  

You might also, for instance, choose to research the female line, and if you can cope with the successive name changes that are likely to occur with each generation, you may find it rewarding to trace this very physical and genuine line of descent. After all, it’s said that as many as a third of children have a different father to the one listed on the birth certificate! I have a treasured pair of photographs showing five generations of my female line, from my maternal great grandmother to my daughters’ daughters. And I can trace it back another three generations to my 3 x gt grandmother, Maria Adie of Bedworth, in a family of ribbon weavers and miners. There, so far, the trail runs out – unless you know different?

The Family Tree
– It’s great to have a goal to start with, such as following one line, or establishing your circle of ancestors. But as I’ve indicated, you’ll probably want to compromise here and expand there, so the ‘Tree’ form allows you to do just that. Its branches grow vertically and stretch out laterally as well. The Tree itself is a powerful symbol of the family, and in many traditions it’s seen as representing the source of individual human lives, and the spirit of an individual family as well. Modern software makes it easy to ‘grow’ your tree, and to view it in different ways.

Tree, circle, line:
our family history is not just about gathering data; the forms we draw it in are powerful and have a psychological impact too. These are ancient and potent symbols, and go beyond their use in pragmatic diagrams. By contemplating and drawing up family patterns this way, my sense of connection with my family history has deepened, and become full of meaning. And although you will probably use one of these primarily, you’re likely to find that each has value, and that you can move from one to another as your interest develops.

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Five generations of my female line, from gt grandmother Sarah Lee to granddaughters Eva & Martha

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The mother at the centre of the world

11/3/2012

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Meeting the mother stone on Easter Island
On Mother’s Day, in March 2008, I met the ancestor mothers of Easter Island. My husband Robert and I were lecturers on a cruise sailing up the coast of South America, and the ship (Voyages of Discovery) made a six day trip out into the wilds of the ocean to the most remote inhabited island on earth: Easter Island, home of the giant statues, known as the Moai. And more, we discovered.
Since then, I have gradually begun to join up the dots between ‘ancestor veneration’, worldwide, age-old cults of honouring the ancestors, and family history research as we know it today. We too, I now believe, are looking for ways to experience a connection with our ancestors.  

Here’s a shortened version of how I wrote about it in Growing Your Family Tree.

Day two of our brief visit, and something has tickled my imagination in a guidebook: a mention of an ancient round stone representing ‘the navel of the world’. Te Pito Te Henua is one of the other names for Easter Island and that in itself means the navel and uterus of the world, so this stone would therefore be the navel of the navel. Robert agreed: we should try to find it.’

We hired the only the woman taxi driver on the island, mainly because she’d been recommended as helpful. But she turns out to be crucial to the plan.

‘Ah, so you want to go to the place that we visit for energy,’ she says. She takes us over to the north coast of the island, turning down an unpaved road to a small and completely empty beach. Among the rocks above the sea line, a round wall of stones and boulders has been created, about three feet high and eight feet in diameter. Within the circle it encloses, a huge, and beautifully smooth ovoid stone has been placed, like a giant egg. Four similar but smaller stones are set around it at regular intervals, forming a square. It has a Celtic feel about it - we could almost be on the West Coast of Ireland, or in the Hebrides – but here we are, over two thousand miles away from any mainland, and over eight thousand from home.

It is first and foremost a place for women, our driver tells us. She first of all invites me alone to accompany her into the circle, and seats me on one of the smaller stones, encouraging me to place my hands on the great stone egg in front of me. She sits opposite and does likewise.

‘Put your hands on it gently,’ she says. ‘Relax.’

Women of the island have been coming here for hundreds of years, she tells me. They come to pray for help, for a safe childbirth, and even for the delivery of their babies. The stone is the mother, their mother, and the island’s mother.

‘What do you feel?’

I feel as though the stone is not a stone at all, but an egg with the shell stripped away, and the delicate but all powerful pulse of life moving within its membrane. I sense the women who have laid their hands here, and the ancestral mothers whose spirit is contained within the stone itself. Currents of energy seem to be running up my arms.

I tell her some of this, and she is satisfied. She steps outside the circle and invites Robert to come and join me. Now I can suggest to him how to sit and place his hands, and, rather to his surprise, he also experiences waves of energy.

We leave the enclosure. It’s time to get back to the harbour and board our ship for another six day voyage, back to the coast of South America. Both of us are reflective after the experience, and feel privileged that one of the islanders trusted us enough to teach us about her sacred site. We first met the father of the island in the myriad forms of the Moai male ancestors, but now we have also met its mother, the one stone representing all the female ancestors. 

This is a Mother’s Day that I won’t forget.

From Growing Your Family Tree Piatkus 2010


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Who are your real ancestors?

7/3/2012

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Last night I got an email from cousin Debra in America. We’ve pooled our family history research for years, and share the same 2x gt grandfather. Now the identity of his father Edward Owens of Abbeycwmhir in Wales, is in question; someone on a genealogical forum has cast doubt our right to claim him. It could be very hard to unseat an ancestor I’ve invested time and care in revealing: dear Edward who, as a young married man, threw up his life as a shoemaker in the Welsh Borders to join Wellington’s army and travel to Ireland, Portugal and Sicily. He fought in the battle of Corunna, was awarded a medal, and was finally made a Chelsea Pensioner. And this also – if true – would undermine my delicious 3x gt grandmamma, born Maria Kinsey, who didn’t sit around waiting for her soldier husband to come home, but joined him for part of the time at least, giving birth to a daughter when they were stationed in Sicily. I view Edward and Maria as the restless, travelling ones who started a whole chain of further restless travellers in our family; some emigrated, and my direct line consists of 3 subsequent Baptist Minister grandfathers who moved out of Wales, into England and America. I like to think that my love of new horizons, along with a thirst for new ideas, comes from them.

So what’s to be done, if Edward isn’t my kin after all? It’s true that we don’t have unquestionable proof. But, on balance, I do think we have ‘reasonable evidence’, which I’m about to collate and present to the doubters. It still raises a huge question: what does it mean if your cherished ancestors have to be rubbed out of your tree? When you go gathering up your ancestors, you don’t just gather names and dates. You find real people and their stories, and in some sense, they come alive for you. All the research I did among other family historians for my recent book Growing Your Family Tree confirms that I’m not a sad isolated case in having this experience. And communing with the ancestors has been a part of human culture worldwide since earliest times. There is a kind of link that is forged, and a resonance generated between earlier generations and our present lives.

However, if the evidence against proves incontrovertible, then I’ll have to relinquish Edward and Maria. I think we should never invest quite so much of ourselves in our ancestors that ‘losing’ them diminishes our identity. Facing uncertainty in any sphere – science, relationships, religion – is all a part of the quest for knowledge. In family history, there’s always the issue of whether a father really is a father. I’ve come across studies which say that as many as one in three children are not the product of their named fathers! The links you make, in family history, may sometimes be to the ‘wrong’ people in terms of the DNA. And you may – I may in this case – just have to accept that, and go reconfigure. But in this case, I hope not.

See my article Voices of the Ancestors in the current issue of ‘Mind Body Spirit’ (www.watkinsbooks.com).

And more on the meaning of ancestors in our lives in Growing Your Family Tree.

Footnote – some years later, I can now confirm that we’ve found not only enough family history evidence to claim Edward Owens as our ancestor, but also the DNA to connect Debra and me genetically, which proves our common descent from him. The DNA is shared with a proven descendant of said Edward Owens.


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    Cherry Gilchrist

    Author of books on family history, relationships, alchemy, myths & legends. Life writing tutor teaching for Universities of Oxford & Exeter. Keen on quirky, ancient and mysterious things.

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