Of all the countries in the world to live in during the 1800s you would expect that the English people would be the most fortunate. By 1850 Britain strode as a colossus on the world political, military, and economic stages. It had extensive colonial possessions, including Ireland, much of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Cape Colony in South Africa, Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana. Its navy was the largest in the world, by design larger than the next two largest navies combined. In 1842 it humiliated the proud Chinese empire, forcing it to cede Hong Kong and to allow the British to ship opium into China.
The ascendance of this geographically small country in the northwest corner of Europe, which in 1700 had a population about one-third that of France and about 4 percent that of both China and India, to the position of power it occupied by 1850 is often seen as being largely the result of the economic advantage brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which occurred in Britain after 1760. Flour mills had been in use for centuries, however, it was the application of mills and the factory system across the textile, iron works, paper and distillery industries that vaulted Britain ahead of the rest of the world. Paper mills in particular will be an important livelihood to the English ancestors in this post.
This post will be my first to explore the ancestors of my wife Debbie’s maternal grandparents, the Clements and Gamwell families. Robert Clements and Peggy Gamwell emigrated from England in 1924, recent enough that tracking their ancestors through Victorian England provides a fascinating contrast from the previous 1850s Swedish croft farms and the pioneers of the American west that formed the previous posts.
We’ll start with Debbie’s great great grandparents (and Robert’s grandparents) William Clements and Ann Elizabeth Cox. William and Ann came of age when England’s eighteenth century agrarian economy was transitioning into a society dominated by the industrial mills of the 1850s. William Clements was born in Norfolk England where several paper mills had existed for decades prior to his birth in 1831. By the age of 24, William had qualified as a papermaker and moved to Wooburn, Buckinghamshire, a village about 30 miles west of London, to take up a journeyman’s position at a paper mill there.
It was while working in Wooburn that William met Ann Elizabeth Cox and their first child, William, was born in 1856.
Much of my understanding of the early days of the Clements’ families is due to Debbie’s Ancestry.com DNA testing and a subsequent opportune message that I received over four years ago from Christopher, a second cousin once removed of Debbie’s, that was the beginning of a long and fruitful correspondence. Christopher lives in Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire in western England. The generous gift of his time and patience has resulted in fascinating genealogical research and the discovery of serendipitous connections between our families, several of which will be presented in this post.
William and Ann were an adventurous family for the time and, after living a couple of years in Wooburn, set out for the Cumberland region of Wales where their second son, George Henry, was born in 1858. The beauty of the region evidently didn’t also provide the necessary employment security for their growing family because they returned to London where William was in charge of a mill in Bromley Road Bow in the Lea Valley. It was here that two more sons were born; Richard in 1865 and Frederick (Debbie’s great grandfather) in 1867.
Paper mills provided the livelihood of not only William and Ann’s family but also their son George. Frederick also worked in the woolen mills for a time.
After establishing his mill career in London, William moved his family in 1868 once more to Monmouthshire, where his managing experience allowed him to find work in the mills near the Wye River Valley of southern Wales. The family established a home in the village of Penalt for several years and increased with three more children, Albert in 1869, Laura in 1870 and Alice in 1871.
In 2009 the Monmouthshire County Council commissioned a report on the Whitebrook Valley Conservation Area to provide an historical appraisal and planning policy development plan for the area. The report details several Whitebrook Valley historical mills, one of which is the Fernside Mill where William was the Papermaker. Here are some excerpts from the report:
As the report states, the coach house where the horse stables and equipment were kept was converted to a private residence in 1979. Here are photos of the current residence:
By 1871 William and Ann’s family of eight children was complete and it appears that they continued to reside in Penalt until around 1880 when their final move was made to Yorkshire. By this time William and Ann were approaching fifty years of age and Christopher has been able to provide the only portrait photograph of the couple from about this age that he obtained from his grandmother Alice (Clements) Duffield after her death in 1941.
Christopher has also provided a photograph of the three eldest children from the same time period:
Here is a family tree showing the children and spouses of William and Ann. The tree also shows the children and spouses of Frederick and Sarah Clements. Frederick is William and Ann’s fifth child and Debbie’s great grandfather. Frederick and Sarah’s third child, Robert, and his wife, Peggy (Gamwell) Clements, are Debbie’s grandparents.
In 1881 the England Census shows the Clements in Elland, a market town in West Yorkshire growing from the textile mills developing in the late 1800s. Frederick, Debbie’s great grandfather, is listed as a fourteen year old cotton piecer whose job would be to mend the spindle threads on a cotton spinning machine. It’s about 15 miles from Elland north to Bingley where seventeen year old Sarah Buttery shows up on the 1881 census as a worsted weaver. It’s not known how they met but their commiserations on the manufacture of cotton versus wool textiles must have given common ground because in January of 1889 they were married just five miles west of Bingley in Keighley.
By the 1891 census William is 60, still working as a paper maker and with Ann have three children living at home in Leeds. Albert is 22 and working in a restaurant, 20 year old Laura is a dressmaker, a trade that eventually put her in charge of a gown shop in York. Alice, Christopher’s grandmother, is 19, working as a tailoress, work that she would leave to marry in 1896.
In 1901 Frederick, 34, and Sarah, 38, Debbie’s great grandparents, have moved nine miles from Bingley to Otley where Frederick worked as a machinist for a printing machine company. The couple have three children; Albert 9, Robert (Debbie’s grandfather) 6, and Edith 1. By 1911 Albert 19 and Robert 16 are both apprentice machinists working at the same printing machine manufacturer as their father, Frederick.
In 1914 Robert enlists in the British Army and resides at 3 Lower Daisy Hill, Bramley, Leeds. Robert serves in Europe during World War 1 until his discharge in 1918. On September 17, 1916 Robert marries Mabel Fort Binns. Here is the 1921 census listing Robert and Mabel’s family living at 18 Northcote Terrace, Barnsley, Yorkshire and they have a daughter, Florence Edith and a son, Frederick Laurence. Robert is employed at The Barnsley & District Tramway & Traction Co. as a Motor Fitter Repairer.
In 1920, after the two older boys have left home, Frederick and Sarah move with their youngest daughter Edith and Sarah’s sister Florence to a historic farm house called The White House on a forested hill in south Otley called the Chevin.
When I first started researching Debbie’s family tree thirty years ago, her mother, Maureen, wrote a letter to the husband of her aunt Florence “Edith” (Clements) Jackson for family information to assist in my research. The aunt had died over ten years previous but her kindly ninety year old husband, John Jackson, returned a four page letter from West Yorkshire with names, dates and interesting family stories along with a photograph of Aunt Edith’s parents (and Maureen’s grandparents), Frederick and Sarah (Buttery) Clements outside someone’s family home. In 2019 when Christopher Barff (Debbie’s second cousin introduced earlier in the Clements family discussion), reached out from Shrewsbury I still had that letter and photograph. So, in my first reply to Christopher I sent him copies of both. Here’s the photo (which didn’t have the names that Christopher was able to provide):
In his reply I learned that the photo was taken in the backyard of Christopher’s childhood home, Laura (Duffield) Barff was his mother and Pauline was his sister. He even remembered the day because he just missed the photoshoot because he was late getting home from school. Looking back on the Clements family tree we find the photo contains one of only a few images of Frederick and Sarah (Buttery) Clements (Debbie’s great grandparents on Maureen’s father’s side) and Florence (Clements) Jackson (Debbie’s grandfather’s sister). A remarkable coincidence which turned a photograph into a view of our ancestral past.
We’ve followed the Clements’ family, Debbie’s grandfather’s family, from 1850 through 1900 and now we’ll look at the Gamwell family, Debbie’s grandmother’s side of the family.
I’ve traced Debbie’s grandmother’s Gamwell family ancestors back to the late 1700s and they have all been Yorkshire and Lincolnshire folk living within fifty miles of the city of York. The Gamwells were predominately agriculture laborers (or labourers per the English census) until the late 1800s. Despite England’s growing industrial economy in the 1800s about half of the population relied on agriculture for their livelihood. Unrest caused by agricultural industrialization throughout the 1830s and 1840s was the underlying motive for the burning of haystacks and machinery culminating in the Swing Riots because of consistently low wages and the threat of unemployment. Continuing actions resulted in the establishment of the National Agricultural Labourers Union in 1872.
Many agricultural laborers lived in villages predominantly controlled by major landowners who were their employers, justices and landlords. Life was never easy and most lived in small two-bedroom rented cottages provided by the estate employing them. Families were normally large and children usually helped work the farm and were often boarded out with relatives, or became domestic servants or apprentices. Most cottages had a small workroom/scullery where tools, fuel and boots were stored, and an adjoining allotment where the family could grow vegetables and perhaps keep a pig.
Robert Gamwell, Debbie’s great great grandfather, was born on March 17, 1827, in Thorne on the east coast of England, the fifth of seven children of Robert (b. 1786) and Elizabeth (Green) Gamwell. Robert (b. 1827) married Hannah Cocking in October 1847 in Goole, Yorkshire, England and they had seven children in 14 years where the family worked farms in the Eastoft, Yorkshire region. It is an indication of the hardship of farm life during this time that only four out of the seven children lived past the age of two. Mary and Elizabeth, their third and fourth children are in the burial records at St Bartholomew’s Churchyard cemetery records in Eastoft as having died from croup. Their fifth child, also named Robert, was born in Eastoft in October of 1860 and would become Debbie’s great grandfather.
In 1866 England suffered, along with many other parts of the world, from a cholera epidemic. Although I haven’t found records to confirm that this was the reason for the tragedies that befell Robert (b. 1827) and Hannah’s family during this period, it does fit their circumstances. It was that year, that their seventh child, John, died before his first birthday in 1866 and his father, Robert (b. 1827), died in March of the following year, 1867. At the age of 40 after twenty years of marriage, with her husband and three of her children dead, Debbie’s great great grandmother Hannah must have felt incredibly desperate. Her solution was to bring her younger brother, James Cocking, his wife Alethea and their two children into their household to share the family’s work and living costs.
In order to meet her household expenses Hannah made another difficult choice. Agricultural indentured servitude was an increasingly common practice in England after 1833 when slavery was abolished. The typical indentured servant was under the age of 21 and would sign a 4 to 7 year contract that would either pay the family of the young servant at the start of servitude or provide land or other property to the servant after completion of their contract. Although we don’t know the arrangements of the contract, Hannah’s second child, George, isn’t with the family in 1871 and shows up as a servant with a local Barnsley household.
By 1881 the blended family’s circumstances must have still been difficult because sometime in his teenage years, Debbie’s great grandfather, the younger Robert (b. 1860), also became an indentured servant to a household ten miles away from the rest of his family.
Possibly due to his servitude, Robert (b. 1860) didn’t marry until the age of twenty seven in 1887. His bride, Annie Eliza Cox was twenty two. After the wedding the couple started their life together working on a farm in Wadworth, about 25 miles southwest of Robert’s hometown of Eastoft. By 1891 Hannah’s youngest daughter, Mary, is married with three children and Hannah shows up in the census that year as living with her. Here’s a Gamwell family tree showing Robert (b. 1827) and Hannah’s family along with Robert (b. 1860) and Ann’s (who were married in 1887) family. Robert (b. 1860) and Ann’s seventh child, Peggy, is Debbie’s Nana.
By 1895 Robert (b. 1860) and Ann’s family relocated to Mill Farm in Little Houghton, about fifteen miles west of Wadworth. On Mill Farm, Robert moves away from the insecurity of farm labor and begins managing ponies for the local coal mines.
Pit ponies were first used down in the mines in Britain as long ago as 1750. By the early 1900s around 70,000 of the miniature horses worked underground, some even living in stables in the pits. The practice of using pit ponies finally ended in the last decade of the 20th century, after 250 years. The ponies were used to pull the heavy carts of coal, as their small yet sturdy stature enabled them to move through the cramped conditions in the mines. From all accounts that I’ve read the men, boys and ponies who worked together during this period endured terrible working conditions.
Here is a map from 1875 showing Mill Farms proximity from two large coal mines, Houghton Colliery and Dearne Valley Colliery.
Photos of the life of the men, boys and pit ponies that work the mines support the image of a difficult life.
By 1911 Robert and Annie Gamwell’s family had increased to include eleven children, the three oldest boys were also working in the coal mines driving pit ponies, the youngest daughter, Myra, died before her first birthday. Debbie’s nana was ten and attending school.
Debbie’s nana, Florence Martha Gamwell, was always known as Peggy, until she became a grandmother when she would only tolerate the title nana from her grandchildren. Robert and Annie’s family of twelve living in the coal mining town of Little Houghton could not have been an easy life. Robert (b, 1860), his brother George, and their father Robert (b. 1827), all endured contracts of indentured servitude during their life. These facts weighted heavily, but certainly can’t justify, the decision by her parents to contract Peggy, at about the age of fifteen, into a seven year contract of servitude. Peggy spoke bitterly of her involuntary service, especially due to the use of some of the contact proceeds to pay for her sister, Ada’s nursing training. Peggy’s initial service was to the owners of “The Big House” on the Mill Farm property where Robert and Annie’s family lived. Debbie and I were fortunate enough to be able to track down this property during a visit to Yorkshire in 2019 and met the current owner. Here’s are photos of the Mill Farm property:
Here is the 1921 census for Robert and Annie’s family indicating that nine of the children are not married, with the oldest 31 years old, and still living at home, except Peggy, who, as a condition of her servitude, lived on her owner’s property. Robert, age 60, is still working at the Houghton Main Colliery, along with all four of his sons; Ellis 31, Percy 29, Harrison 28 and William 15. Ivy 25 works out of their home as a dress maker, Ada 24 turned her nurses training into a job at Kendray Hospital in Barnsley, Eva 22 and Sybil 13 help their mother, Annie, at home and Doris 19 works at a confectioners shop.
At some point Peggy’s contract was sold to a family in a village called Burley in Wharfedale which is located just a couple miles west of Otley. Here’s the census information from 1921:
We left Debbie’s grandfather, Robert Clements, in 1921 when he was living with his family in Otley, close to where Peggy lived in Burley during this time. We don’t know how or when Robert and Peggy met. The next record we have of Robert is three years later when at the age of 29 he arrives in Canada on the Canadian ship SS Montrose on March 25, 1924. His destination is Calgary, Alberta.
And a little more than four months later Peggy is 24 when she arrives in Canada on the Canadian ship SS Montclare. Her destination is also Calgary.
On December 6, 1925 Robert’s six year old daughter from his first marriage with Mabel arrives to join Robert and Peggy in Calgary.
And Robert and Peggy’s new life in Canada needs another post for all of their stories.