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Highwaymen in Peckham

Incidentally, I think the family were basically middle class, lawyers, wine merchants etc (I haven't finished the book yet).
 
Nah, the men all seem to have worked in offices and hated it, wishing they were at sea.

I have now finished the book and it's a terrible cliffhanger. She hints at all sorts of financial difficulties and other problems, but it ends at a point where they've gone on a tour of Europe for the sake of her husband's health, and you don't find out what they were :mad:

There are some great bits - I laughed, I cried, there are cannibals, royalty, Irish rebels. I'll type some more up at some point...

It's not massively long, 164 pages but typed really big.
 
RubyToogood said:
Nah, the men all seem to have worked in offices and hated it, wishing they were at sea.

I have now finished the book and it's a terrible cliffhanger. She hints at all sorts of financial difficulties and other problems, but it ends at a point where they've gone on a tour of Europe for the sake of her husband's health, and you don't find out what they were :mad:

There are some great bits - I laughed, I cried, I'll type them up at some point...
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Well didn't she get to travel to France for business (ie. the lace smuggling story)?

Sounds most intriguing. Can't wait for the rest of it:)
 
RubyToogood said:
No, that was her mother.
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Oh right, that's what I thought, that all the stories were as told to her by her mother, but now I realise you're saying it was she who went to Europe and then you lose track of what happened to her yes?

What happened to her mother?
 
Here's a bit more, of local interest. Before her marriage Mary had a trip to France.

On returning to London in Sept, 1841, I found my mother had taken a house in my absence, at Tulse Hill, a new district about 5 miles from London near Streatham and Clapham. I was very vexed at her choice, a horrid little villa as they were all called, detached in a piece of ground not yet laid out as garden, no trees anywhere, all new half made roads. It was named Hanover Cottage after our dear old Hanover House, a most unworthy descendant. We removed from St. Swithin's Lane into the Villa in October.

It could not hold half our belongings. Jane and I shared a bedroom twelve feet square, a similar apartment with a light closet as dressing room for mother and Louie. The rooms on the same floor were alloted to Mrs. John Barton who was to live with us on my Uncle's return to Lima [yes, she does mean Lima, Peru]. The attics for servants and boys. Long narrow sitting-rooms, with windows at each end. How cordially I detested the narrowness of it all, such a great disappointment to us, who had hoped once more, for an old house and shady garden.

Of course, too, all the other Villas were soon occupied but the inmates were not of the kind of society we had mixed in. Many were good, kind people, but we always felt a want. So 1841 ended in a dull uncomfortable loneliness, only brightened when our old friends came. This too was not easy, as no public vehicle then went beyond Brixton church, more than a mile from us, so were all the shops. My Aunt was then with us and by degrees we became used to the place but the house was so new and ill built, there was always some trouble.

In the Spring of 1842 it was proposed to build a church for this district, and all were interested in collecting money for the purpose. People were not so overwhelmed by begging for charities, as they are now, and we collected a good sum. So Christ Church was begun. I never much admired it, though it was correct in architecture. The Rev. Wodehouse Raven was the first Incumbent, and our marriage on the 18th of July 1844 was the first performed in the Church. For a long time the road up to it from our house, was unmade. It was a dark and difficult walk in the Winter evenings.
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Pictures of Christchurch Streatham, which I assume must be the same one as it was built in 1841. It now stands on the South Circular and is technically Streatham. You can kind of see her point:

christchurch2.jpg


christchurch1.jpg
 
RubyToogood said:
Here's a bit more, of local interest. Before her marriage Mary had a trip to France.



Pictures of Christchurch Streatham, which I assume must be the same one as it was built in 1841. It now stands on the South Circular and is technically Streatham. You can kind of see her point:

christchurch2.jpg


christchurch1.jpg
Click to expand...

There's a few posts about that somewhere on here, particularly regarding the window above the entrance
 
Reverend of Christchurch

Rev Wodehouse Berney Atkyns Raven

Birth: 1807
East Dereham
Norfolk, England
Death: Oct. 31, 1890
Streatham Hill
Greater London, England
trans.gif

Vicar of Christ Church, Streatham Hill, and Chaplain to the Earl of Cadogan. He died at the age of 83 years, leaving an estate of £2,074 15s 5d.

Buried in West Norwood Cemetery
 
you might find more documents relating to the family though:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/

it's indexing a lot of the cntents of a lot of the various archives in the country. advanced search gives you options to narrow down results by date range and to a specific region or archive. the one for the local authority that covers that area might be a good place to start.
 
Any idea who John Barton was or what he was doing in Peru?

I've come across a John Barton here

On the other hand, shovelling and sacking bird-shit on the hot and humid Chincha Islands cast a hellish hue on the coolie's existence. Occasionally winds would raise great stinking dust clouds that defiled everything on or near the islands. Coolies were required to fill between 80 and 100 wheelbarrows of guano each day. This amounted to four or five tons that had to be dug, loaded, and then pushed over to the chutes, called mangueras , that fed the fertiliser down onto the ships. Suffering from an inadequate diet – two pounds of rice and half a pound of meat per week – and an infernal setting, many attempted suicide by jumping into the sea or overdosing themselves with opium. To the coolie on the Chincha Islands suicide must have seemed a blessed relief from a life marked by sickness, lashings, unremitting monotony and a pestilential smell. Conditions improved somewhat in the late 1850s when the British in Peru – especially John Barton, the consul at Callao – protested actively against the severest forms of punishment then current on the islands. Not only had floggings occurred regularly, but men had been stretched out in the sun and tied to buoys either to bake or to drown out their disobedience.
Click to expand...
 
Thinking about it, I don't know if there'd be any real advantage in trying to get it published. I don't know if we'd actually get any money out of it, what with it having been written by someone else who has been dead for over 100 years. If it was up online for free, at least it'd be accessible to people.

It kind of has Woman's Hour Serial stamped all over it though. They could edit out the dull bits and get through it in a week.

I actually think now she may have been a relative, as she shares a maiden name with my great great grandmother, who lived on Denmark Hill.
 
This looks like the same guy as above

PERU
====

p141 Marriage 11 Aug 1827 Arequipa
James SIMONS, bachelor
Eleanor McCLATCHIE
by [Sidney ?] PASSMORE, Consul
witness Sophia PASSMORE; R PAGE; John Frederick JOHNSON

p143 Marriage 1 Oct 1836 Lima
Henry MOSS, bachelor
Sophia Elizabeth SEALY, spinster
by Belford Hinton WILSON, Consul-General
witness John BARTON; Maria Eliza BROSSE; E MUTZENBECHER; Thomas D SEALY; G C
MILLER
at British Consulate-General, Lima
Click to expand...
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/SOUTH-AM-EMI/2003-12/1072407648
Click to expand...
 
RubyToogood said:
Thinking about it, I don't know if there'd be any real advantage in trying to get it published. I don't know if we'd actually get any money out of it, what with it having been written by someone else who has been dead for over 100 years. If it was up online for free, at least it'd be accessible to people.

It kind of has Woman's Hour Serial stamped all over it though. They could edit out the dull bits and get through it in a week.

I actually think now she may have been a relative, as she shares a maiden name with my great great grandmother, who lived on Denmark Hill.
Click to expand...

They can be brilliant to read as just a resource on the name itself. You could get people from all over the world contacting you and you can build a family tree from that.

Here's an example of a fantastic family history website I came across a few years. Huge amount of research and pictures of various parts of London.

http://partleton.co.uk/index.html
 
I'm not bothered about my own family history, which is fairly well documented on that side, but yes, it'd be a resource for people who were.
 
Pickman's model said:
Although it's possible you know archivists and librarians, few of either profession would advocate taking an archival document (this book) and scanning it on a bog standard scanner. For a start there are risks to the book magnified by the level of experience of the person doing it, plus they'd be unlikely to scan at an archival quality level. scanning done by trained staff and the scanning you suggest are two different things.
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Hate to tell you this, old fruit, but you are the only person who's mentioned a bog-standard scanner.
toggle specifically mentioned a book scanner. You know, the device with the articulated base, overhead scanner and fill-lights?
 
I was feeding gaijinbaby #2 today whilst gaijingirl was swimming, and this extract came to mind. Mary had some ridiculous number of children, and her baby Basil was sent to a wet nurse in Croydon, where her mother was supposed to keep an eye on him.

Early in August we were going for a holiday in Ilfracombe, and before we left London, went down to Croydon to see the baby, as my mother and sisters had gone to the sea. On arriving at the cottage, no one was in the house, it was dirty and wretched, an old cradle stood in the middle of the floor. I glanced at it, thinking it empty, but on looking closer, we saw our poor little Basil, in a heavy sleep, dirty, emaciated, the face of an old man, and hands like bird's claws. We were dreadfully shocked, and I took him up, rolled in a blanket, and we looked for some neighbours, who could tell us more. One woman said "Oh Ma'am go to the public house close by, and the landlady will tell you." So we went, the kind woman cried when she saw us and the baby, she said she knew it was a gentleman's child by its clothes, but the widow never allowed it to be so. We heard how this woman had only pretended to nurse Basil, as she also had her own child, she used to drink constantly, and would take our baby into the public house, and give it gin till it went to sleep.
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(They obviously took him away.)
 
The plot thickens.

I now know why my family have the copy, which is that Mary Woolley was my great great grandmother's first cousin. She died in 1910, well after the invention of the typewriter, and had 43 descendants alive at that time. The memoir states that she wrote it for her children, so I suspect it was typed up at the time (it's quite impressively bound), and copies given to her children. The cousin who I was told had the original doesn't, and thinks she did but lent it to someone. However I suspect she may not have done really, because she's not a direct descendant so there's no reason why she should. Any one of the several billion descendants of those 43 descendants may have it.

One of Mary Woolley's grandsons was this bloke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Woolley
 
RubyToogood said:
The plot thickens.

I now know why my family have the copy, which is that Mary Woolley was my great great grandmother's first cousin. She died in 1910, well after the invention of the typewriter, and had 43 descendants alive at that time. The memoir states that she wrote it for her children, so I suspect it was typed up at the time (it's quite impressively bound), and copies given to her children. The cousin who I was told had the original doesn't, and thinks she did but lent it to someone. However I suspect she may not have done really, because she's not a direct descendant so there's no reason why she should. Any one of the several billion descendants of those 43 descendants may have it.

One of Mary Woolley's grandsons was this bloke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Woolley
Click to expand...

Interesting. Maybe one day you'll find out who has the original
 
RubyToogood said:
I think if the family grapevine doesn't produce, the best way to find out is to just put the thing up on the internet and see what comes back.
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Definitely. Sounds like a good project to do in your spare time. You may find lots of long-lost relations. You may even like some of them :D
 
I'm now immersed in typing this thing up and am about a third of the way through.

I can't be arsed to do loads of historical research to comment on the story, I've got enough on with just typing it up, writing the intro and making the website/ e-book, but what I am going to need ideally is pictures, otherwise the website is going to look a bit dull :hmm:
 
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