Mary Johnson and Downes Edwards
Mary Johnson, was born in about 1809 in the then hamlet of Kentish Town. On September 17th, 1831, she married Downes Edwards in her parish church, St Mary at Lambeth (depicted below), where her aunt Ann Meadows had married John Massey Wright.
St Mary at Lambeth
Downes was an engineer born c.1805 in Lambeth, who was living in Brompton at the time of his marriage. His father-in-law, Richard Johnson, had consulted Downes about the provisions in his will for the Johnson children, and so Downes probably naturally slipped into the role of head of the family when Richard Johnson died in 1836. The first census returns for the orphaned Johnsons in 1841 appear to confirm the new centre o family gravity around Downes and Mary Edwards, with Mary’s sister Fanny Johnson living at Elder Cottage in Brixton with Downes’ father, Phillip Edwards, (a banker’s clerk) and his family; and the younger Johnson siblings, Jessica, Emma and Edward Killingworth Johnson, living on a farm in Surbiton, in close proximity to Mary and Downes Edwards.
Downes himself owned a farm on Surbiton Hill, where he lived with his wife and family. In 1840, he took out a patent for an invention which was to make his fortune, and went into business with his brother Henry to create the firm of Edwards Brothers. Downes had discovered a method of preserving potatoes and vegetables, which amounted to tinning vegetables and then transforming them into powdered vegetables which could be reconstituted with water and milk. The contemporary “Dictionary of Arts, Manufacture and Mines', by Andrew Ure, (1858)
