A century after the Spanish Flu ended in the spring of 1920, the COVID-19 pandemic now has arisen to infect and devastate lives worldwide. Today’s pestilence brings to mind a story from the last one — the story of Helen (née Slonneger) Schrotzberger, a healer from that earlier era.
Helen was born in 1881 in Hamilton, Ohio, the second of three children of Christian K. Slonneger and his wife Emma Mitchell. An 1882 biographical cyclopaedia gave a thumb-nail sketch of her father Christian:
“A history and biographical cyclopaedia of Butler County, Ohio” Western Biographical Publishing Company (Cincinnati, Ohio), 1882
Helen’s mother passed away at age 32 when Helen was three years old and it appears the children were separated and placed with relatives; Helen was living with an aunt and uncle in Illinois and working as a seamstress at age 18.
Meanwhile her father, ever the entrepreneur, worked for a year as a postmaster in Florida, then as an insurance and real estate agent in Indiana.
By her mid-20s Helen relocated to California where she met Fred Schrotzberger and married him in 1908 in Los Angeles when he was 40 and she was 26. Fred and his brother Ted had been in business since 1906 as owners of the Schrotzberger Bros. meat market, working and living together in L.A.
Helen and Fred’s Marriage License. Click on image to see their certificate.
Helen and Fred had a son, Theodore, a year after their marriage. He was undoubtedly named after Fred’s brother, and even considered himself years later as a “Junior” to his uncle, signing himself thus on his World War II draft card.
From son Theodore’s Draft Card of 1940. Click to see card.
By 1913 Fred moved his small family to Glendale on the north side of Los Angeles. An ad from that year in the Glendale directory shows that Helen’s father, Christian K. Slonneger, joined his daughter in California and opened a grocery and meat market with his son-in-law called the Century Grocery & Meat Market, naming Schrotzberger & Co. as proprietors.
From the “Glendale City Directory 1913-1914”
By 1916, Helen and her husband Fred moved 40 miles east to Chino. Fred managed one of the stores in the chain of Weigle Meat Markets, a company he’d started butchering with when he first moved to California around 1904 as shown by this newspaper clip from that year.
It probably felt like a homecoming for Fred. And Helen, too, may have felt particularly at home in the rural farming community where they lived on a tree-lined street in town, reminiscent of the small townships of her childhood in the mid-west. (Chino at a later time became “a popular site for Hollywood crews to shoot ‘midwestern’ settings.”)1
Voter records show Fred registered as a Republican. Helen, however, registered with the Prohibition party, indicating her support for the growing prohibition movement in America. It may also have been a window into her personal sense of sobriety and responsibility.
Now in her early thirties, married, mother of a small son, and reunited with a father who lived near by, life would have looked close to perfect.
Until 1918 rolled around.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic started in February 1918 and ran through April 1920, infecting 500 million people — about a third of the world’s population — and killing up to 50 million people in four successive waves.
The second wave, more lethal than the first, started in August 1918. It may have been about that time that Helen, while still raising their nine-year-old son, volunteered her services at a local emergency hospital.
Unnamed nurse wearing a mask as protection against influenza. September 13, 1918. From the National Archives and Records Administration.
It was a noble and selfless act.
But one that proved fatal.
From “The San Bernardino County Sun, November 24, 1918, page 13
Victims who battled the disease struggled for breath: “their lungs filled with fluid and they suffocated to death.”2 Despite the horror and danger, Helen joined those fighting the disease in her community.
With Helen’s passing she left behind a son and a grieving husband who never found it in his heart to remarry.
In Albert Camus’s novel The Plague there is a conversation between a local doctor in the pestilence-stricken town of Oran and a visitor who has been stuck in its quarantine. The visitor, who has seen a lot of death in his life, says,
“All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
He goes on to add,
“I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it’s a fact one doesn’t come across many of them.”
I thought of Helen Schrotzberger when I read that passage. She was among her pandemic’s “true healers.”
Today we are living through our own plague. Keeping Helen’s compassion and selflessness in mind, we can decide to “not join forces with the pestilences.” In consideration of others in our communities we can mask up, judicially distance, and receive inoculations when they’re available. We can also refuse to join forces with the ‘social’ pestilences of our age: the prejudice, divisiveness, dismissiveness, selfishness, fear, and hatred spread virally through our media and political cultures.
Helen’s husband Fred moved back to Los Angeles after her death, initially moving in with his brother Ted’s family until he got back on his feet. He continued working as a butcher at a grocery store, raising his son, and sharing his home with him until his death at age 76 in 1944. His son Theodore married at age 33, a year before his father’s passing, and had three sons of his own.
Helen, of course, never got to see her son mature or to enjoy her grandchildren. Nevertheless they are her legacy, as was her example of selfless courage and compassion during a pandemic.
End Notes:
1. Wikipedia, “Chino, California,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chino,_California.
2. National Archives and Records Administration, “The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918,” https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/influenza-epidemic/.
Our great-grandfather, William Edward Estall, was born in London’s Shoreditch parish in 1852, the eleventh of Henry and Elizabeth’s twelve children.
Edited extract of St. Leonard’s parish register, Shoreditch, London. Click on image to enlarge.
We know William was poor, based on his living in the impoverished East End. But how poor was he? Was he among the completely downtrodden of the area or was he simply among the common working poor?
We can answer these questions and better define his poverty by looking at some contemporary sources.
Background
William’s father was a silk weaver, a respectable if not particularly remunerative trade. Many working class boys learned their trades from their fathers. Unfortunately William lost his dad at age 13, but even if William had been fortunate enough to learn from his father, it was a trade in severe decline due to industrialization and the lifting of protective silk tariffs, leaving its practitioners and their neighborhoods in poverty. William and his brothers — left without relevant job skills — became general laborers.
In 1871, when William was eighteen, the census recorded him as a labourer, son of a charwoman.
William Estall as a labourer in the 1871 census. His father had died five years earlier, his mother was 62 years old, William was 18 and Ann was 16. Other than that, the census got the information right, we presume.
He tried to improve his career prospects by joining the British Army when he was 22 years old. The plan didn’t work as he’d hoped. He was discharged after four years of a twelve year enlistment due to chronic health issues including colic, contusion, fevers, boot ulcer, epilepsy, inflammation of fluids, and palpitation.
With no apprenticeship, no military prospect, and no education, William again turned to manual labor, working at various times as a builder’s, water-side, dock, ground, and general labourer. These occupations were recorded in census, military, marriage, and his children’s birth records.
His residences around Bethnal Green were similarly recorded, both before he entered the Army and after he reappeared in the parish in 1890 at age 37. [After the Army he lived for the better part of a decade in Lower Sydenham working as a labourer and raising a family with a common-law wife.]
With that background, we turn to Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps of 1898-99, specifically to the map of the Bethnal Green area, to see the conditions of the streets upon which William lived.
Poverty defined by his residences
Charles Booth and his staff walked the streets of London’s working classes between 1886 and 1903 in the company of police officers knowledgeable of their patches, making detailed observations on what they saw and heard. The notes they made were the basis of maps in which streets were color coded for the incomes and social classes of their inhabitants.
Color Key to Booth’s Poverty Maps
Plotting William’s residences, we see that the streets he lived on were mostly color coded light blue. Light blue indicated the street was “Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family.” Based on this, it appears William’s weekly wages fell in that range: between 18 and 21 shillings a week.
Edited extract of Booth’s poverty map with green squares showing William Estall’s habitations (annotated in green) over the years in Bethnal Green. Click on image to enlarge.
Poverty defined by his employment
Further clarifying his income is his history as a labourer. In the late Victorian era general laborers made only about 60% of what an artisan or a skilled laborer such as a bricklayer, carpenter, or mason earned,1 meaning William was on a lower rung of the working class.
William Estall’s occupation in 1891 is shown on his daughter’s birth certificate. Click on image to enlarge.
At the time of our grandmother’s birth in 1891 he worked as a dock laborer which paid around 6 pence an hour.2 There were 12 pence in a shilling so he made half a shilling per hour. Doing the math of an 18-21 shilling weekly income (from Booth’s map) means he likely worked between 36 and 42 hours a week, considerably below the working class average of between 55 and 66 hours a week (five 10-12 hour workdays plus a half day Saturday).
His abbreviated work schedule wouldn’t have been of his own choice. As an unskilled manual laborer he was at the mercy of seasonal and economic fluctuations — if ships weren’t available to load or unload cargo, for example, he was out of work. Furthermore, there were more laborers looking for jobs than there was work available. As reported in an 1897 newspaper, “At taking on time [time for engaging men for jobs] at certain wharves, where the foreman would come and stand at the iron gates of the wharf entrance, there would usually be a crowd of from two hundred to three hundred men. Probably seventy or eighty would be required. … The scrambles were frightful.”3
A drawing of men lining a fence looking to work at the London Docks circa 1900.4 Click on image to enlarge.
Nor would William have been favored for steady, full time dock work . . . that would have been reserved for the very fittest. William, being both older (in his late thirties and early forties) and seemingly constitutionally unhealthy, would have fallen into the category of “casual” labor, engaged for a few hours for a particular job.
“This casual labour system became so general that only a small section of port workers had anything like regular employment and the rest had to take their chance of getting a few days or a few hours work as circumstances might call for….” — from “The position of dockers and sailors in 1897″ 5
William, then, was working both for lower wages and for fewer, unpredictable hours than typical working class men. And given that he had several children and a wife to support he may have been on the high side of Booth’s definition of a moderately sized family and the low side of the income spectrum for the light-blue coded streets of his neighborhood.
Poverty defined by his cost of living
According to “Life on a Guinea a Week”6, the average cost of living for a single male clerk in London in 1888 was about 31 shillings a week, which included costs for rent, food, drink, clothes, candles, soap, and miscellany. William’s estimated income of 18-21 shillings would cover only a little over half of that.
Charles Booth described this level of ‘standard’ poverty (18-21 shillings a week) as “means [which] may be sufficient, but are barely sufficient for decent independent life.” He suggested this income level for a moderate-sized family might keep them going, but they were highly vulnerable to illness, accidents, family size increasing and loss of work or hours.7
Given that William was prone to illness, was rapidly growing his family, and worked at unsteady jobs, speculation on my part is that William’s income may have been supplemented by his wife in order to shelter, feed, and clothe the burgeoning family. Sarah was a seamstress before she married William and may well have continued to do some piece work from their flat to keep the family afloat.
William would have been paid with bronze and silver coins, and if he was lucky, they would have jingled in his pocket on the two-mile walk home from the docks.
Bronze penny denominations on left, with silver shilling denominations on right. Click on image to enlarge.
A couple of pence would buy a pint of beer (I’m pretty sure William and Sarah, like most of their neighbors, were imbibers), and 3-6 shillings would pay for weekly rent in working class housing. Food, including bread, vegetables and fruit, flour and sugar, cost about 14 shillings a week for an average clerk, so Sarah had to squeeze the most out of every coin spent at the vendors’ barrows on nearby Green Street. Their clothing was probably mended if not made at home, further stretching their budget.
Though the money was meager, they apparently made do, as there were no records of workhouse visits or outdoor relief (payments to poor people without the requirement to enter a workhouse) while they were married. Perhaps telling, though, is that William was employed for a considerable stretch by the area council, which may indicate he received some informal relief in the form of pay for ground or general labor.
William’s economic vulnerability caught up with him in 1900 when he lost his wife to disease. After her passing he spent over a year in the workhouse hospital for bronchitis. When he got out he dropped his children off with his former common-law wife in Lower Sydenham, undoubtedly in hopes that she would care for them while he returned to Bethnal Green looking for work. The only records we have of him thereafter were three workhouse visits for more hospitalizations and finally his death at age 53 in 1906.
William Estall’s death certificate. Click on image to enlarge.
Taking the measure of William Estall
By Charles Booth’s calculations, 31% of people in London in 1901 were living in poverty and 30% were living in crowded conditions. Considering the streets William lived on (coded light blue) and the size of his family (a wife and up to seven children at home), he fell within the 22.5% of Londoners who were ‘standard’ poor and within the 4.4% of Londoners who were crowded into rooms holding 4 or more people. By that measure, William was poor — but not among the 8% in the very poor or semi-criminal classes. Nor, of course, was he among the 52% who were comfortable or the 18% in the middle or wealthy classes.
Putting William’s poverty into perspective. From Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps. Click to enlarge.
Despite the meagerness of what was in his wallet, William kept a roof over his family’s head and food on the table, no small achievement.
In sum, William wouldn’t be the subject of an abysmal Jack London story or a broken down character in a Charles Dickens novel. He was just a working family man who doggedly made ends meet on low wages and inconsistent hours. Charles Booth concluded that the greatest cause of poverty — accounting for 63% of its occurrence8 — was low pay and irregular earnings. William Estall could have served as the poster boy. Yet he wasn’t alone. He was one of many who survived, maybe just barely, on something under a pound (£) a week on the light blue shaded streets of London’s East End.
End Notes:
1. Arthur Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century, (1900: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England), p. 70.
See also The Victorian Web, “Wages and Cost of Living in the Victorian Era,” http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages2.html
2. Clarion Newspaper Company, “The position of dockers and sailors in 1897 and the International Federation of Ship, Dock and River Workers.”
3. Ibid.
4. George R. Sims, editor, Living London, Vol. 1, (1901: Cassell and Company, Limited, London, Paris, New York & Melbourne), p 171.
5. “The position of dockers and sailors”.
6. The Victorian Web, “The Cost of Living in 1888,” from an article entitled “Life on a Guinea a Week” in The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 23 (1888), p 464.
7. Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics, Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps, (2019: Thames & Hudson Limited, London, England), p 30.
8. Ibid, p 41. Reproduced from a table from Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London, Poverty series, Vol. 1 (1902-03), p 147. The other causes of poverty were small profits (5%), drink (7%), drunken or thriftless wife (6%), illness or infirmity (5%), large family (9%), and illness or large family combined with irregular work (5%).
The infamous Jack the Ripper was a contemporary of our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings.
Jack’s bloody rampage occurred in the autumn of 1888 in London’s East End. At the time Sarah was 28 years old, an unmarried working class mother who was also living in the East End.
Research into Sarah’s life logically invites a look at the story of this famous criminal’s spree — if for no other reason than to get a glimpse into conditions in this sector of London in the late Victorian age.
So it was that I picked up the critically acclaimed book about the Ripper’s victims, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed By Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold. The book examines the lives of the five working class victims, how they grew up, how social conditions affected them and other women of their era, and how their individual circumstances brought them to the impoverished East End.
Their stories provide some insights into Sarah Hutchings’ world as well. Ms. Rubenhold exposes the moral double standards applied to women vs. men, the living conditions in public housing, the difficulties of poverty, and in general the challenges of being a unprivileged woman in Victorian London. The book is a sad, but recommended, read.
The book has another, though indirect, connection to Sarah Hutchings.
A leading newspaper’s interview with the book’s author was written by Sian Cain, who currently lives in the flat that Sarah Hutchings occupied in 1891. The interview is at The Guardian newspaper’s web site.
Sarah Hutchings
As mentioned in an earlier post, an Estall family historian believes Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute — a suspicion based on the fact that she had three children out of wedlock to unnamed fathers while frequently changing residences in London’s impoverished East End.
After reading The Five, I came to realize that Sarah was indeed a prostitute, or at least considered one by many people of her era. Here’s a passage from The Five:
“From the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s through the period of the Whitechapel murders, very few authorities, including the Metropolitan Police, could agree as to what exactly constituted a ‘prostitute’ and how she might be identified. Was a prostitute simply a woman like Mary Jane Kelly who earned her income solely through the sex trade and who self-identified as part of this profession, or could the term prostitute be more broadly defined? Was a prostitute a woman who accepted a drink from a man who then accompanied her to a lodging house, paid for a bed, had sex with her, and stayed the night? … A woman who had sex for money twice over the course of a week, before finding work in a laundry and meeting a man whom she decided to live with out of wedlock? … A young factory worker who had sex with the boys who courted her and bought her gifts? … A woman with three children by three different fathers who lived with a man simply because he kept a roof over their heads? “Some of these women might be classed as professional or “common prostitutes,’ while others might be called “casual prostitutes’ or just women who, in accordance with the social norms of their community, had sex outside of wedlock. But as the Metropolitan Police came to recognize, the lines separating these groups were often so blurred that it was impossible to distinguish between them.”1
Another author, Judith Flanders (The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London), clarifies that “the word ‘prostitute’ was not used entirely the way we would use it today, i.e. to refer only to women who sold their bodies for sex. In the 19th century, many people used it more widely, to refer to women who were living with men outside marriage, or women who had had illegitimate children, or women who perhaps had relations with men, but for pleasure rather than money.”2
Under Victorian mores and definitions, then, it would seem that Sarah Hutchings was a prostitute, though there is no evidence (for example, a criminal record) clarifying whether a professional or moral one.
A Difficult Life
Sarah worked at various times as a barmaid, a stay former [corset maker], a machinist [sewing machine operator], and a fur sewer. These were low paying occupations, though the last three seamstress-type jobs may have allowed her to work from home while caring for her children.
Copy of birth registration showing Sarah’s occupation in 1889. Click on image to enlarge.
George Rosen’s essay, “Disease, Debility, and Death,” from the book The Victorian City: Images and Realities, addresses the vulnerability of women holding jobs like Sarah’s:
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch! by John Millais, 1876
“The precarious economic situation of women workers, based on low wages, was depressed even further in some trades by seasonal unemployment, particularly in those connection with fashion and dress. Barmaids provided another large contingent of prostitutes, while still others were recruited from among seamstresses, laundresses, charwomen, and factory workers.”3
Sarah also had three children to single-handedly feed, clothe, and attend to while working long hours and making wages likely insufficient to support herself. As explained in Revisiting Dickens, “Neither form of seamstress [individual or dressmaker’s employee] would have earned enough on a regular basis to feed her family. Most couldn’t feed themselves, let alone their children.”4
Saved by the Ripper?
As I read these stories and related them to Sarah’s experiences, a question arose: was Sarah aware of the the widely reported crimes of Jack the Ripper and if so, how did those gruesome articles affect her?
Jack’s murderous spree covered the period from August through November 1888 when he attacked and eviscerated five women. Newspapers at the time covered the murders in bold headlines and graphic drawings. There could hardly have been anyone in London’s East End who wasn’t spooked by the specter of a butchering madman stalking prostitutes.
The Illustrated Police News of 13 October 1888 from the British Library. Click to enlarge.
But it wasn’t just prostitutes Jack victimized. One of the insights in The Five is that Jack the Ripper didn’t appear to be targeting prostitutes per se — Ms. Rubenhold makes the case that three of the five Ripper victims weren’t prostitutes at all. She also points out that there were no signs of struggle or yelling for help, indicating the victims were probably asleep at the time of the attacks. The commonality, then, was that his victims were poor working class women generally sleeping rough (outdoors) on city streets or alleyways easily accessible to attack.
Sarah conceived her last illegitimate child in October, 1888, shortly after a double Ripper homicide. It’s fair to wonder if the Jack the Ripper headlines made her question her safety. There is no way of knowing what stopped her string of illegitimate births — fear of attack, growing maturity, falling in love, a desire for financial stability — but we know that after her third illegitimate child she began a long-term relationship with a man she would marry in 1891, William Estall.
Though there are many unanswered questions, one thing can be said for certain. Jack the Ripper proved to women of his time that it’s better to lose your heart to a lover than it is to a madman.
And his crimes may, just may, have convinced Sarah to take a different path in life.
Sources:
1. Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), p 290.
3. George Rosen, “Disease, Debility, and Death,” from The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, (London: Routledge Degan and Paul, Ltd., 1973), 657.
The Estall family historians Mark and Kim Baldacchino have recently traced the Estall line a generation back from its first London appearance.1
The Baldacchinos believe William Estall, the tallow chandler of Whitechapel of the early 1700s (and our 6th-great-grandfather), was born in Lavendon, Buckinghamshire, a farming community sixty miles northwest of London, to William and Susanna (nee Valentine) Estall.
The junior William and his sister Mary were baptized in Lavendon in November of 1693, they being two of the five or six children in the family.2
Extract from the Lavendon parish register of 1693
Their father, William the Elder, was a farmer/yeoman in possession of horses, cows, sheep, and bees.3 He would have farmed the community’s common field, which wasn’t enclosed until 1801,4 in the company of his neighbors. The family worshiped, though perhaps only intermittently,5 at St. Michael’s church in Lavendon, a structure dating back to the early 11th century.6 In the 17th and 18th centuries the church was the site of several Estall baptisms, marriages, and funerals.
St. Michael’s Church in Lavendon
William the Elder, besides being a husbandman, also exercised his civic duty, appearing on a polling list — one of 25 men in Lavendon — voting for the Knights of the Shire in 1705.7 Exercising his social duty, he would have also had occasion to lift a pint or two at the thatch-roofed inn and pub, now called The Green Man, on Lavendon’s High Street. The pub still stands for anyone interested in rubbing elbows with Estall spirits of the past.
Lavendon’s historic pub, from an 1899 drawing
In the elder William’s will of 1740 he left most of his estate to his son George,8 likely indicating George was the eldest, hence in line for the lion’s share of the estate under the protocol of primogeniture.
William Estall the Elder’s signature on his will
The younger William received one shilling in his father’s will. Although measly, it wasn’t necessarily miserly on his father’s part, as explained below.
An Apprenticeship in London
William the Younger left the farm and went to London in 1709 at around age sixteen to enter an apprenticeship in the Cutlers’ Company,9 a guild of metal workers making swords, knives, and domestic wares such as cutlery, razors and scissors.10 Apprenticeships were expensive, entailing years of training as well as room and board, often under the master’s roof.11 William’s father would have paid a considerable sum for this and would have felt justifiably relieved of further financial obligation, particularly since his son was then living in distant London.
Woodcut of a sword maker’s shop, 1878. The shop William worked would have pre-dated this by 150 years.
An account of apprenticeship found in The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660-1730, provides an appreciation of the adjustment and hardship William endured in his teen years.
“It must have been a fairly traumatic experience for the young apprentice when, at the age of sixteen or so, he arrived with his box of clothes to start his term. For most young men, it was probably the first time they had been away from home and the first that they had seen of the basically hostile environment of the big city. Working conditions varied, but the hours were long, typically from seven in the morning to nine at night with a break of two hours for dinner at mid-day.”12
Apprenticeships typically lasted seven years, and shortly after William completed his (we assume he did, as marriage wasn’t allowed during apprenticeship13 and William married shortly after a typical term) he wed Hannah Skegg at St. James’s church in Clerkenwell, London, in January of 1717.14 It was a short-lived marriage, though, as Hannah passed away a little over a year later, in March of 1718.15 Given the timing of her death, it’s possible she died of complications from pregnancy or childbirth, considering the maternal mortality rate at the time was 10.5 for every 1,000 births.16
William then went through another transition. He moved from London’s north side to its east, marrying Leah Holt (or Hott, the marriage register writing is unclear) in 1721 while in his late twenties at St. Mary’s Church in Whitechapel.17
Extract from the St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, parish register of 1721
At some point he also changed careers. Considering the time and money invested in his apprenticeship, one may wonder why he would leave the cutlers trade behind. There are a couple of possible reasons.
When teenage sons were apprenticed it was typically the parents’ responsibility to “help them choose the particular career that they were to follow, ideally helping them discern their vocation.”18 As he matured, William may have discovered, however, that this wasn’t his natural vocation.
More likely, though, he left the trade because it was in the midst of relocating from London to Sheffield by the mid eighteenth century, where raw materials and water-power were more favorable for steel work.19
Whatever the reason for the switch, William took up the tallow chandler trade (making and selling candles made from animal fat) while raising a family in east London with his second wife Leah. The rest of his story is presented in the on-line book Footprints: The Immigrants, starting at page 89.
From farm to city
That, then, is the prequel, or back story, of the Estall family of London. Like so many of our ancestors, the family began on the farm and migrated to the city. The move by William Estall in 1709 from rural Lavendon (population around three hundred) to bustling London (population over half a million), and from working behind ploughshares to making swords (or perhaps steel utensils), makes this family, the Estall’s, among the earlier converts to urban life in our family’s history.
1. The Estall Family: A One-Name Study of the Estall Surname and Family Tree, https://estall.one-name.net/up/index.htm, accessed 15 March 2020.
2. The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, Buckinghamshire County Council, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England. A copy of William Estall’s will, obtained from the Centre, is in possession of this author.
A transcription of the will can be found at The Estall Family: A One-Name Study of the Estall Surname and Family Tree, “Wills: Will of William Estall died 1740,” https://estall.one-name.net/up/wills.htm, accessed 15 March 2020. In his will William Estall the Elder names five children and another son-in-law, bringing the count to three sons and three daughters. Only two of the daughters are identified by their forenames.
3. Ibid.
4. Gilbert Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd., 1907), 271. Available on line at https://archive.org/details/englishpeasantry00slatuoft/page/n11/mode/2up/search/olney, accessed 17 March 2020.
5. Only three of their five or six children were baptized, and the wedding of William and Sarah (Valentine) Estall wasn’t recorded in the Lavendon or surrounding parishes’ registers.
6. British History Online, “Lavendon,” https://www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/bucks/vol2/pp161-165, accessed 17 March 2020.
7. Ancestry.com, “UK, Poll Books and Electoral Registers, 1538-1893, for William Eastall” [database on-line], image 47 of 237, accessed 4 Mar 2020.
8. The Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, the will of William Estall.
9. FindMyPast.com, London Apprentice Abstracts, 1442-1850, for William Astall. Details of the record transcription are: “Astall, William, son of William, Lavendon, Buckinghamshire, yeoman, to John Elton, 24 Feb 1708/9, Cutlers’ Company.”
10. The Worshipful Company of Cutlers, “History,” https://www.cutlerslondon.co.uk/company/history/, accessed 15 March 2020.
11. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660-1730, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp 86, 94, 95, 101. Available on line at http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8489p27k/, accessed 17 March 2020.
12. Ibid, 102.
13. Ibid, 94.
14. Ancestry.com, “London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for William Estall,” [database on-line], Islington, St James, Clerkenwell, 1711-1726, image 5 of 193, accessed 21 Feb 2020.
15. Ancestry.com, “London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for Ann Extell,” [database on-line], City of London, All Hallows London Wall , 1675-1729, image 202 of 218, accessed 21 Feb 2020.
16. National Center for Biotechnology Information, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, “British maternal mortality in the 19th and early 20th centuries,” November 2006, 99(11): 559–563. Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/.
17. Ancestry.com, “London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 for Leah Hott,” [database on-line], Tower Hamlets, St Mary, Whitechapel, 1711-1733, image 184 of 202, accessed 2 Dec 2018.
18. Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, 90.
19. The Worshipful Company of Cutlers, “History.”
If double dating evokes images of romance, be forewarned. This isn’t about romance, though the example of “double dating” below is, sort of. Let me explain.
Double dating — not the romantic kind — was sometimes used to show the difference between a civil year and an historical year in England. England used to observe the civil, or legal, year as running from 25 March to 24 March of the next year … this despite the fact that January 1st was celebrated as the New Year festival.
This confusion finally ended in 1752 with the passage of the The Calendar (New Style) Act.
The act:
• Changed the start of the civil (or legal) year from 25 March (Lady Day) to 1 January.
• Adopted the Gregorian calendar, advancing the calendar by 11 days.
Dates in English parish records prior to 1752 may show dual (or double) dating. Since the civil calendar year ran from 25 March to the subsequent 24 March, dates in the registers from January 1st to March 24th would sometimes show two years to reflect the civil year and the historical year.
An extract from the St. James, Clerkenwell, parish register showing double dating of the William Estall and Hannah Skegg marriage
For example, the parish register of St. James, Clerkenwell, London, records the marriage of one of our Estall ancestors, William, to Hannah Skegg on Jan 21st 1716/17. The date fell in the civil year of 1716 and the historical year of 1717.
Since in our current era we observe an annual start date of 1 January, it makes sense to use new-style (historical) years when dating our ancestors’ life events. Some genealogy programs allow for recording a double date, while using the new-style year for calculating ages. I follow this practice when dating our English ancestors.
Bottom line: Dating was complicated in England’s past. Double dating may have allayed some of the confusion … though perhaps not to modern eyes. All of this, obviously, was before the advent of Match.com — which makes dating simple!
Notes:
• British colonies, including the Americas, were also affected by the Calendar Act.
• Scotland, unlike England, had begun its civil year on the 1st of January since 1600.
Yes, I’m a relic. But that’s not what I’m writing about. (We may get around to that later, time permitting of course.)
Relics serve the useful purpose of reminding us of people, places, or times past.
The year 2019 was memorable, worthy of a relic. My sister and I explored our family history in London, walking the streets and visiting the sites where our ancestors lived going back to our great-g-g-g-g-g-grandparents. And that’s just on our father’s side; on our mother’s side we visited family neighborhoods inhabited by our great-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-grandparents.
The year was also memorable for seeing the publication of my book Footprints, which explored the history of these English ancestors.
So I couldn’t let the year lapse without marking its significance. I wanted a “relic” that honored our visit to London, our English ancestors, and my book publication. A relic that was English, old fashioned, and had a connection to writing.
The solution: an English fountain pen. And I found one with a brand name that stretches back to the years my grandmother, who was born in London, lived there. A pen with a technology our grandmother would have used in her school which we visited. A pen I can use to make notes for my follow-on book.
The pen is an Onoto, or as its engraved barrel says, “Onoto the Pen”.
The Onoto Magna Classic — uncapped
Since I like to name my fountain pens after figures in my family, I’ve named mine “the Estall.” The pen will commemorate the seven generations of Estalls who inhabited London as tallow chandlers, silk weavers, dock workers, general labourers, and lastly as orphans.
Onoto pens got their start in 1905, a year before our grandmother’s emigration to Canada. The London-based company De La Rue started making fountain pens in 1881, predating her birth, and in 1905 they began making the first self-filling fountain pen guaranteed not to leak, which they dubbed the Onoto, in their factory on Bunhill Row in London, not far from where our great-grandfather was born.
My pen doesn’t go back that far, of course. It was born on 12 December 2019. And though it uses an outdated technology (really, who uses fountain pens these days?) it writes far better than modern-day biros (that’s ball-point pens to us Americans). The model I bought, the Magna Classic, is styled after an Onoto model designed in 1937. It may look dated but that’s kind of the point — it reminds me of olde London. It is, after all, going to be my “relic.”
My black and silver Magna Classic has a chasing pattern engraved in its cap and body. My other black pen, a Montblanc 149, is rather plain and stodgy, whereas the chasing on the Onoto gives it some character. In place of Montblanc’s snow-capped top, the Onoto has a carved silver company logo, giving it a unique vibe, if not the prestigious brand recognition of a Montblanc. The pen has flat ends rather than than the rounded ends of the cigar shaped Montblanc, and I’m partial to the flat design which my favorite pen brand Pelikan also uses.
The Onoto and Montblanc both have 18 carat gold nibs. I like the size of the Montblanc’s nib, which is massive, but truth to tell, the writing experience with the Onoto is better. The Montblanc was a pretty terrible writer until the nib was tuned by a professional; the Onoto on the other hand wrote perfectly right out of the box, as smoothly as butter sliding over a hot English muffin. Perhaps that’s because the nib is wet and writes more like a broad than a medium.
The other cool feature of the Onoto is that its nib is a “duo point,” which puts down a medium (I’d call it medium broad) size line when writing in the nib-side-up position and a fine line when the nib is turned over in the feed-side-up position. It’s like having two pens in one. I use the medium side for journaling and notes, and the fine side for entries in my small date book. Medium for daily crossword puzzles, fine for the smaller squared Sunday puzzles. You get the idea.
“Abbey Road” written using the upright medium nib position above followed by the reverse fine nib orientation below.
The Onoto Magna Classic is considered a luxury pen, similar to the Montblanc, though not quite as expensive as its German cousin. The Onoto has hallmarked sterling silver furniture — clip, rings, and buttons on the cap and barrel — as well as a gold nib. Unlike the Montblanc’s piston ink filling system, the Onoto uses a converter, which reduces its cost, though one can buy an optional plunger filler, bringing it more in line with the Montblanc price tag. I’m perfectly happy with a converter system that will prove to be easier to maintain and/or replace over the years.
The Onoto pen is a good size. It’s the same size as a Pelikan M800, which some pen connoisseurs consider the ideal size for a pen. The Onoto has the advantage of a longer grip section, keeping the threads away from fingers. The Onoto’s moderate size also makes it easier to write with than, say, the Montblanc 149 oversize pen.
Our Estall ancestors were not perfect. Nor is my Estall pen. A minor downside is the threading which attaches the cap to the barrel. Most pens are secured with one (Pelikan) or two (Montblanc) rotations of the cap. The Onoto takes four. That could be an issue for a student who is capping and uncapping her pen while taking frequent class notes. By the time the cap comes off, the history professor may be halfway into the next century. But for me who usually writes in longer sessions, cap rotations are not an issue. As a family historian I might even speculate there’s an advantage to stories written with more turns of the screw.
Another criticism I’ve read of the pen is its light weight. I didn’t think that would bother me, but based on pen reviews I ordered the optional brass weight in the pen barrel, and my Onoto’s barrel is now the same weight — 21 grams — as the Pelikan M800 barrel. Ideal size, ideal weight.
Burl wood presentation box, including the pen’s “birth” certificate in the lid
Although I don’t put much stock in packaging material, I’d be remiss not to mention the eye-catching, highly polished solid burl wood box the pen came in. It’s relic-worthy in itself and something I’m likely to keep on my desk for years to come.
I’ll always have a soft spot for the year 2019. And now I’ll always have my “Estall” pen to remind me of our trip to London, of our ancestors, and of the year that I connected with them in a very tactile way.
Isabella (née McLean) Campbell is our great-great grandmother. She was born in 1801 on the western coast of Argyll, Scotland, at a remote farmstead called Arichonan. The farmstead was famous for an uprising among its farmers when they were evicted as part of the Highland Clearances in 1848. Two of Isabella’s brothers, Allan and Duncan, were indicted for violence during the uprising.
One of Isabella’s nieces, Sarah McLean, was the daughter of Allan. Sarah was born at Arichonan in 1835.
We’re taking a look at Sarah because she may have played a previously undiscovered role in her Aunt Isabella’s emigration to Canada in 1857.
Sarah with Aunt Isabella in the 1841 census. Click to enlarge.
Sarah first appeared on our radar when we found a Sarah McLean living with Isabella Campbell’s family in the 1841 Scotland census. The child, having the same surname as Isabella’s maiden name, sent us off on a search for a relative (or neighbor) who might logically be staying with the Campbell family. The only candidate we found was Allan McLean’s daughter. The match wasn’t perfect because she was listed as 12 years old when she should have been six. But censuses frequently had errors and this didn’t seem to be an insurmountable one.
Further piquing our curiosity was finding unexpected initials on a sampler that Isabella’s daughter Sarah Campbell made in 1854. The sampler had the initials of everyone in Sarah Campbell’s family, with a mysterious “S McL” thrown in. Considering that Sarah McLean was staying with the Campbell family in the 1841 census, it seemed possible that the initials stitched in 1854 represented Sarah McLean. If so, it also seemed likely that Sarah McLean was in close contact, or even staying with, her Aunt Isabella’s family again in 1854.
Sarah Campbell’s sampler from 1854. Note the circled initials. Click to enlarge.
Considering that Sarah McLean’s parents emigrated to Canada some time between 1849 and 1851 when she was a teenager, it seemed unusual that she would stay behind in Scotland with her uncle and aunts … but census records show Sarah may have been a bit … shall we say … untethered from her family.
The 1841 Scottish census was the first one in which Sarah appeared — and appear she did. She showed up twice in Arichonan, at both her parents’ house and at her grandfather’s next door. Perhaps she was staying with her grandfather while the parents were dealing with her newborn (born the day of the census) sister. But as seen above, she also showed up with her Aunt Isabella Campbell’s family in the adjoining parish. One could speculate she’d been staying with her aunt in the days leading up to the newborn’s arrival so they reported Sarah too.
In the next census, of 1851, we see Sarah twice, but this time on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. She shows up as a domestic servant living with her uncle Duncan (a stone breaker) and aunts Mary and Cathy (provision merchants) at Bellanoch, a short distance from Arichonan, in March of 1851. She also shows up with her parents in Ekfrid Township, Ontario, in the census taken in Canada in January of 1852 . As mentioned earlier, her parents emigrated some time between 1849 and 1851. If they immigrated between the two censuses they too should have appeared in both census but they didn’t. So we don’t know when Sarah emigrated. It may be that her parents reported her as part of their family in Canada even though she had stayed behind in Scotland with plans to join them later. She was sixteen at the time.
Sarah (McLean) Wrightman
We know Sarah emigrated to Canada by the time of her marriage to Harvey Wrightman in Ekfrid Township, Ontario, in 1858 when she was 22. She and Harvey, a laborer, had 10 children and settled in Middlemiss —a small community in Ekfrid near a bend in the Thames river — until their deaths in 1914 and 1911 respectively, both in their late 70s.
Further confusing the subject of her emigration date, we find that Sarah reported different years in the 1901 and 1911 Canada censuses. In the former census Sarah reported her immigration year as 1848 and in the latter she reported it as 1857. The 1848 year is too early because her family was still in Scotland until at least May of 1849 when three of Sarah’s siblings were baptized there.
But it is the reported 1857 immigration year that is really intriguing.
Sarah, and her immigration year, in the 1911 Canada census. Click to enlarge.
If she came to Canada in 1857 she may well have come with her Aunt Isabella’s family who emigrated that same year. This theory would explain how she was still in Scotland in the 1851 census with her uncle and two aunts at Bellanoch; and with her Aunt Isabella at a farmstead called Auchrome in 1854 at the time of the needlework sampler.
(Parenthetically, also living in Bellanoch, at least by 1853, was Isabella’s eldest daughter Effy Campbell who had her first three children there. This small farmstead appears to have been an intersection point for some of the McLean and Campbell families.)
If Sarah McLean did remain in Scotland when her parents emigrated we could assume she stayed in touch with them in the ensuing years, and may even have been the conduit for communication between her father Allan and her Aunt Isabella. This could also explain how, when Isabella emigrated 3,400 miles from Scotland to Canada in 1857, she came to settle only nine miles away from her brother.
We have no way of knowing, but we suspect Sarah McLean may have served as a link between Allan and Isabella. As such, she may have played a role in Isabella’s emigration destination. For if Sarah hadn’t stayed behind in Scotland, Isabella may have lost touch with her brother Allan and could have emigrated elsewhere in Canada, or perhaps even emigrated to Australia where her son Malcolm had moved a couple of years earlier.
It’s an intriguing theory … one which ascribes a vital role for Sarah in the history of the Campbell family and its descendants.
Sarah’s McLean’s Emigration — a Flight of Fancy?
Sarah McLean’s great-great-granddaughter Marsha Vonica shared this bit of family lore:
Queen Victoria
“It has been said in our family that Sarah’s dad Allan was working as a gamekeeper for Queen Victoria when they left for Canada. The queen supposedly wished Sarah well when she got on the ship with her family and gave a bowl to Sarah to take with her. Sarah’s daughter’s daughter Ruby gave the bowl to one of her daughters.”
Given that Allan was a simple farmer or herder in a remote corner of coastal Scotland who’d had a dust-up with the farm’s owner and with the law, it doesn’t seem likely that Queen Victoria would have ever heard of him, employed him, or went to see him off and present his daughter with a farewell token. But it makes for a good story, and who am I to question it? It enchantingly adds another layer of mystery and mythology to Sarah’s life and to the role she played in the lives of those around her.
This article was developed with the assistance of Marsha Vonica, a descendant of Sarah (née McLean) Wrightman. Marsha provided the photograph of Sarah and we co-researched and debated Sarah’s whereabouts over the years.
The point of visiting historical family sites is to connect in a sensory and an emotional way with your forebears. The trip my sister Beth and I took to London this year fulfilled that goal.
Walking neighborhood streets and visiting homes, schools, and churches does a number of things. First, it de-mythologizes the past. Researching ancestors and their environs from afar often renders people and places exotic, bigger-than-life, their images refracted through our own imaginations or the viewpoints of authors and historians. But walking the streets makes the places real and the people more immediate because we have a first-hand setting to put them in. Although we can never hope to really know the ancestors we’ve never met (and let’s face it, how well do we really know the people we do meet?), walking a mile in their shoes at least makes them approachable.
Second, visiting places and walking neighborhood streets helped us to orient places, distances, and times in our mind. We made spacial connections in our brains that mirrored the geography. We know that two blocks away from the birth home of our grandmother was her baptismal church, within earshot of its bells; how close her school was; how tightly the family’s various homes were clustered. It’s like a web of locations is formed in your mind, orienting and unifying a sense of the whole.
Third, our ancestors and their stories are internalized more vividly when we visit where they lived. It’s the difference between the two-dimensional experience we get from researching documents, maps, and pictures on paper versus the twelve-dimensional experience of visiting a place. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider the multiple dimensions of height, width, and depth (e.g., how big is the place?); location (where is it, and where in relation to others?); time (historical, as well as transit between places); sensory dimensions of sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch; and the thoughts and emotions imprinted as the memory is formed.
Take for instance the visit my sister and I paid to the Palm Tree Pub in Bethnal Green, a place over which our great-grandmother lived in 1887. I’d seen the pub location on an old map and I’d seen the building on satellite and street views on Google. Those were two-dimensional experiences. On visiting there, however, we now have a strong impression of the place: its location close to the Regent’s Canal (we walked along the canal on the way there); its size; its proximity to other places; its look and feel; the sound of conversations at the tables and bar; the taste of the ale; the Victorian decor. And overlaying these physical impressions were the thoughts shared by the octogenarian barkeep on the history of the neighborhood, as well as the warmth of camaraderie, humor (the owner had a sharp sense of it), wistfulness at being where our great-grandmother called home, and ease at enjoying a pint in a friendly and restful place. Two versus twelve dimensions: you can guess which made the bigger impression, the stronger memory, and brought history more to life.
I feel closer to my grandmother Bessie’s extended family because of this trip. I have a better framework from which to understand their stories. In a sense, the play’s scenery and props have now been added so that the action on stage seems more real.
Along the way I also learned:
• That Bethnal Green is smaller than expected. I had wondered how my great-great grandfather had moved his family so often from its western to eastern sectors, but having been there I realize it wasn’t far at all, just a few minute’s walk. In the words of a local historian, Bethnal Green was an insular world, like a town which some people never left. It was a neighborhood seen from the outside, but it was a universe seen from within.
An 1882 map of Bethnal Green
• Similarly, walking from the parish of Whitechapel to Spitalfields and on to Shoreditch and Bethnal Green — all of which were at one time home to the various generations of the Estall families — was surprisingly easy. I’d previously thought that the family “migrated” over the years from parish to parish, but now I think of it as just moving around the corner. Along the same line, the distance from Bethnal Green to the River Thames, where the East and West India Docks were located, was also a walk-able distance, explaining how our great-grandfather could make a living as a dock worker.
• Our earliest Estall forebears were tallow chandlers, and one of them, John, apprenticed through the Tallow Chandler Company, i.e., the guild. We found John’s entry in the register at the Guildhall Library, but the Tallow Chandler Company’s archivist couldn’t find any other evidence of the family’s association with the guild. She wrote me while I was there, “I’m afraid we have no records on our historical database [other than the apprentice entry] for anyone by the name of Estell or Estall, likely because John and William never became Freemen or Liverymen of the Tallow Chandlers Company, as it was rather expensive to become a member for most tallow chandlers.” This confirmed my suspicion that the early Estall families were not among the poorest in their neighborhood, but neither were they among the most well off.
• Having said that, I also got the sense that the later Estall families lived normal lives of the lower working class rather than the grueling lives of abject poverty portrayed in many accounts of that time and place. The flat where my grandmother was born, for example, was in an attractive brick tenement rather than a dilapidated structure. The pubs over which my great-grandmother lived before her marriage were striking, substantial buildings. The school my grandmother attended is architecturally pleasing and still vibrant. Though most of the other buildings our ancestors inhabited no longer stand, the impression we got from those that do is that these were not places of squalor. The neighborhood may have had many pockets of poverty — this was after all the notoriously poor East End — but our families, though apparently struggling, didn’t necessarily sink into the bottom of them.
• The role of the church in the community, and even in the family, came into focus as we visited the sites of family baptisms, marriages, and burials. Sitting in the same pews, attending a service, and gathering around the same baptismal fonts as did our ancestors gave us a sense of the potential comfort and reassurance of ritual that may have succored our families over the years. Reinforcing that was the way every church we visited still reaches out to the poor of their neighborhoods, offering food and services to the needy. Since our relatives appeared to reach only the lower steps of the economic ladder, the church may have been a place where they felt welcomed and untroubled and even validated.
• Pub culture, past and present, was a real factor of the neighborhoods. This is where neighbors and workmates got together for a pint and socialization. My impression is that our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings, who lived above two pubs at various times, was no stranger to alcohol (she was once a barmaid after all), and her husband William, a general labourer, probably was not either. Whether they over-imbibed is unknown, but with the plethora of pubs in their time, and even the number of well-attended pubs in the present day, they wouldn’t have likely been teetotalers either. London is a pub culture, which knits people together, and to know its pubs is one way to know a neighborhood.
On a side note, in the 10 days we were in London I figure we enjoyed drinks in at least 20 of them. One of the more memorable stops was the Kings Arms in Bethnal Green. This pub, a bit off the beaten path and quite informal in atmosphere, had by far the greatest number and variety of cask and keg ales on tap, displaying a list of them and their origins on a large wall-mounted board. And what particularly endeared the pub to me was that while we were there a tune came on the radio that perked up my ears: the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour after which this vacation and series of blog posts was named.
Beth and I share a toast to our magical history tour at the Kings Arms in Bethnal Green
I learned a lot about the family on this trip and feel even closer to them. It was quite magical.
The Golden Age: A Look at the Anthony Family of London
“John Anthony … was born in England in 1607. He married Susanna Potter and was the founder of the name of Anthony in New England.
“We have knowledge that he took the oath of allegiance and supremacy March 24, 1634, with intent to embark in the ship Mary and John, but was delayed a few days and took passage later on the Hercules, John Kiddy, Master. He had previously lived in the beautiful village of Hampstead, near London, England, and had been an innkeeper as well as having other occupations.”
— Charles L. Anthony, Genealogy of the Anthony Family from 1495 to 1904 (Sterling, Illinois: Charles L. Anthony, 1904), p. 23
Our great-grandmother Anna (née Anthony) McCrie was a descendant of John Anthony (1607-1675), the English emigrant to America in 1634.
While my sister Beth and I were in London we wanted to visit “the beautiful village of Hampstead” to get a sense of the man who began the Anthony line in America and was our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
In truth, the village has grown and changed so much since 1634 that it’s impossible to imagine what it looked like 400 years ago. But we found a couple of ways to give us a hint of John Anthony’s place and time in Hampstead. And of course we found a couple of pubs to toast this ghost of our past.
Since John Anthony was “an innkeeper,” we figured we’d look for an inn that dated back to Anthony’s time. And we found one, the Spaniards Inn, a mile outside of town. The advantage of being outside the village is that the setting is still somewhat rural, as Hampstead would have been at the time. The second advantage is that the Spaniards Inn dates back to 1588 so was in existence during Anthony’s years in Hampstead. When you walk inside the building you can easily send yourself back a few hundred years, what with the rippled panes of glass, the wooden floors, the narrow stairways and the low ceilings. This probably wasn’t the place where John Anthony was an innkeeper, but it provided a good sense of John’s environment.
An empty bookcase echoes with voices of past literary patrons
The Spaniard’s Inn over the years attracted artists and writers from the nearby artistic community of Hampstead. Regulars included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Robert Lewis Stevenson, as well as painters John Constable, William Hogarth, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Inn is mentioned in Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The world’s most comfortable chair
The room Beth and I chose for our alcohol-enhanced channeling and relaxation was small and cozy. It was only the two of us in the quaint, quiet anteroom. The leather chair I sat in was among the most comfortable I’ve had the pleasure to sink into.1 I could have sat there for hours with two or three pints and engaging conversation, probably something the above mentioned writers had occasion to do. I didn’t hear John Anthony’s footfalls on the floors nor his voice behind the busy bar, but I had the sense he would have felt in his element here.
On Golden Pond
Beth’s friendly tree
The other hint of olden times we found in the area was on Hampstead Heath. We walked through a small part of this large nature park to get to Spaniard’s Inn, and we felt miles from bustling London and the hectic 21st century. The greenery was serene, the ponds reflective, and Beth, the plant whisperer, found a tree that spoke softly to us and kindly showed us the way to the 17th century and the rustic inn.
In addition to communing with nature and our ancestor, we enjoyed a walk through the town, doing some window shopping and people watching, stopping for a pastry and coffee at Louis Patisserie, and dining at The Holly Bush, a classic English pub. [Click on photos to enlarge]
Street scene
Alley scene
Latte and a pastry
Too much walking?
Turning 70 — now an antique
Our dinner pub
Catching up with a pint
Beth ready to eat
Hampstead was a nice break in our hectic London itinerary, truly harking back to a simpler and quieter time. In a word, it was golden.
The real Golden Age
Although John Anthony was definitely our ancestor, his lineage is not as well documented. There is educated speculation that he came from a line of London Anthony families stretching back to the 1500s, but the link to them is not conclusive and probably never will be, given the paucity of records from that time. Nevertheless, whether true ancestors or merely ones we were willing to adopt, we followed the footsteps of John Anthony’s purported father, grandfather, and great-grandfather (that would be our 11th great-grandfather if true), which took us to the Tower of London and back to the year 1552.
The Tower of London as seen from the River Thames
Mint Street ran between the Tower walls
Derick Anthony (c 1525-c 1599), John Anthony’s alleged great-grandfather, was the chief engraver at the Royal Mint from 1552 to 1596 as well as “Goldsmith Jeweller to Queene Eliz.” The mint was located within the Tower of London at the time, along a street running between the inner and outer walls.
Some of the early dies used for coin making were displayed, similar to the ones Derick would have been responsible for engraving. As explained in the exhibit, “An image was engraved into each die and hardened by heat. The die with the spike [left] was set into a block, and a blank coin placed in-between the two dies. The top die [right] was then hit with a hammer, which stamped the images onto the coin.” As other exhibits showed, mintage was hot, strenuous, noxious, and dangerous work.
Mint workers usually lived within the Tower.2 We stopped in to see the Chapel of St. Peter Ad Vincula where the early Anthony families most likely attended service within the tower walls. One of the guards mentioned that hundreds of skeletons were found under the church floor, many of them from criminals who’d been executed. I silently wondered where Derick was buried and if he may have been among the nameless buried beneath the floor.
[The Anthony story continues below the blue sidebar]
Finding Our Estall Roots
While we were in the area of the Tower we walked through the neighborhood of the first Estall3 families in London, which was located just a couple of blocks northeast of the Tower.
A drawing from the Tallow Chandlers website
From 1723 to 1810, two generations of Estalls lived in a small courtyard off of current-day John Fisher Street. They made their living as tallow chandlers, probably hawking their wares (candles made from animal fat) on nearby Rosemary Lane (now Royal Mint Street), home of the raucous “rag fair” of the 18th century.
Site of the former Angel Court where early Estall families lived
Though no original buildings stand, we paused at the site of the courtyard and walked along the same streets to rub elbows with their ghosts. The area was originally pockmarked with small alleys and courtyards, many of them named after animals and apparently sites of abattoirs or butchers that supplied the fat for our chandler ancestors … and gave the neighborhood a distinct smell. Now the area is primarily housing.
We visited the Tallow Chandler’s Hall in the City to get more background on the trade and view their beautiful, historic building. Their assistant clerk was kind enough to give us a tour and fill us in on the trade of those days.
Street entrance to Hall
Candles overlooking courtyard
Event hall
Alcove
Courtroom to adjudicate disputes
We were advised to visit the London Guildhall library to see the Tallow Chandler register in which John Estall is recorded as beginning his apprenticeship on June 6, 1739. The book was produced after rather extensive instruction on how to handle the fragile pages.
From the tallow chandler register at Guildhall Library,
And we couldn’t leave the area without visiting the site of St. Mary’s Whitechapel Church where the first generations of Estalls were baptized and married. The church is long gone, but Beth and I rested a few minutes in the park that marks the spot where the church once stood.
The next two generations of the Anthony family lived in the area around St. Bartholomew the Great Church, just northwest of the old London wall.
The north side entrance into St. Bartholomew the Great Church
The historic4 Hand and Shears Pub behind St. Bart’s Church. The site of the Anthony home was at the far right near the yellow barricades (original building no longer exists)
The gatehouse entrance to the grounds dates to 1595
Perhaps the most colorful among the Anthony clan was John’s supposed grandfather Francis, son of Derick. Dr Francis Anthony was a quack who specialized in healing patients with arum potable (liquid gold) — whether there was any gold in it is questionable but there was mercury — which was either going to cure or kill the patient. Since in many cases it was the latter, he was frequently in trouble with the Board of Physicians. Francis bought shares in the colonial Virginia Company which were passed on to his son. One may speculate whether these may have sparked an interest in the colonies on the part of his purported grandson.
His son John followed in Francis’s footsteps, also becoming a doctor and enjoying the wealth that arum potable brought. He used some of his wealth in 1628 to help fund the tower than looms over the front entrance.
Plaque to Drs Francis and John Anthony
Beth and I viewed the plaque on a wall in St. Bartholomew’s north aisle honoring the two Anthony family doctors who were buried beneath the church floor in the 1600s. These were the only family plots we found in London.
Views of St. Bartholomew the Great Church
A side window is framed by the massive stone arches in the church
Looking past the choir on either side and down the nave to be back of the church
The front and altar area of the church as seen from midway down the nave
The north aisle, at the end of which is the Anthony plaque on the wall by the window
The upper windows allow light into the old Norman-era church
Angels are carved on the armrests of the choir pews
It was Dr. John Anthony who was supposedly the father of our emigrant John Anthony. It seemed fitting that after visiting St. Bartholomew’s we made the trip by subway to Hampstead to view our emigrant’s departing location.
The Hampstead tube station with the ubiquitous “Mind The Gap” warning at the edge of the platform
And so, over the course of a couple of days, we walked in the footsteps of four generations of London Anthony’s, one or all of whom endowed us with their genes, if not their gold.
1. In a recent biography of Fred Rogers, The Good Neighbor by Maxwell King, the author relates a standing joke between Fred and his wife. “When they were traveling anywhere and were tired and finally got to sit down and rest, one would turn to the other with a mischievous grin and say, ‘Oh, this makes my sweet ass smile.'” After the hours my sister and I walked around London each day, I guess any chair would qualify as the world’s best … and bring a smile to my cheeks. 2. According to the Historic Royal Palaces web site, “By the Tudor period in the sixteenth century, Mint officials were given lodgings on Mint Street, so they could be near their work and keep an eye on security. Many Mint workers lived their lives at the Tower, worshiping every Sunday at the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula on Tower Green.” 3. Our paternal grandmother Bessie Schutze was born an Estall. The original London Estall family, headed by William, who died in 1750, was her great-great-great-great-grandfather. 4. This pub was where in centuries past the London Mayor of London kicked off the Cloth Fair by cutting the first piece of cloth, which some believe was the origin of the modern-day ritual of ribbon cutting.
Font • A receptacle in a church for the water used in baptism, typically a free-standing stone structure.
• A source of a desirable quality or commodity; a fount. Example: “they dip down into the font of wisdom”
— from Lexico.com, in association with the Oxford University Press
My sister Beth and I traveled to London this year in search of ancestral haunts. What we found was ancestral fonts:
• Baptismal fonts in churches where our ancestors were christened, and
• London pubs, those classic fonts of British ale, which were associated with our great-grandmother.
This is the story of finding those fonts.
Shakespeare’s Shoreditch
Our first font, of the baptismal variety, was found in the crumbling St. Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch. We went there because our great-grandfather, William Estall, was born in Shoreditch in London’s East End in 1852. He came into the world on New Inn Yard, a street that has changed many times over the years. In the late 1500s the area housed London’s original playhouse, The Theatre, where Shakespeare cut his teeth as an actor and playwright. The globe map on the right shows The Theatre in relation to New Inn Yard. [Click on it to enlarge.]
William Estall’s birthplace, now gone, would have been where the wooden fencing is behind the tree on the right. The Theatre where Shakespeare began his career would have been where the colorfully painted building stands, on the left.
As we sat across the street from the location where William Estall was born we could see the site where a recent archeology dig uncovered the foundations of the Theatre. It was torn down in 1598 and moved across the River Thames and rechristened The Globe. Likewise, a couple hundred years later William Estall’s birthplace was constructed and that too was later torn down. Though we couldn’t see either structure, we let our imaginations travel back in time to see a pensive William Shakespeare stroll along the lane and a swaddled William Estall being whisked off to the nearby St. Leonard’s church in his mother’s arms.
William Estall was baptized in September 1852. We found St. Leonard’s Church (also known as the Actors’ Church due to its use by The Theatre’s owners and actors), but it was covered in scaffolding and our hearts sank knowing that we wouldn’t be able to see inside it. Beth, however, walked into its soup kitchen for the homeless, and the gentleman running it said he’d try to find a way inside for us.
He breezed us by a construction worker who warned against our entry, over debris, down dark stairways, and finally found a door into the unlit church. And there, sitting off to the side, was the font, the very one used to baptize wee Willie.
As we gazed on it, a sense of how fleeting our lives are gnawed at me. The infant William grew into a man, fathered our grandmother Bessie, and passed away. His infant daughter grew into a woman, mothered our father, and subsequently passed away. And here we were, in the senior years of our lives, feeling the smooth surfaces of the font — feeling a connection to one who went before us — knowing that our time too was limited. In a way, the font was like a stone marker — not a headstone commemorating a death, but one commemorating the start of a life and of the string of lives to follow.
Having found Bessie’s dad’s baptismal font, we were also fortunate enough to come across her mother’s. This was when we visited St. Mary Magdalene Church in Woolwich, south of the River Thames. After a morning of contemplating time and the universe via the clock and astronomical exhibits at Greenwich, we took a bus to Woolwich to visit the streets our great-grandmother Sarah Ann Hutchings once graced with her young presence.
Sarah Ann Hutchings’s baptism register from St. Mary Magdalene Church
St. Mary Magdalene Church’s font
The highlight of the afternoon was visiting St. Mary Magdalene Church, the mother church of Sarah and her family. Of course the door was locked, but we rang the bell and were escorted in by a kindly lady running the church’s daycare center who showed us around the inside of the church. My eyes were immediately drawn to the stone font near the front of the church, where our great-grandmother Sarah, her mother, and her grandfather were baptized in 1860, 1838, and 1817 respectively. The church is also where Sarah’s great-grandparents were married in 1804. This building holds a special place in our history.
Interior view of St. Mary Magdalene’s Church in Woolwich
One good font leads to another, and we walked from the church to the nearby pub where Sarah lived and worked as a barmaid at the time of the 1881 census. The Mitre pub is undergoing renovation on the inside but the outside is virtually unchanged from the time Sarah worked there.
The Mitre Pub where Sarah Hutchings worked in 1881
Union Street (now Macbean Street) in Woolwich where Sarah lived at the time of her baptism
Disappointed that we couldn’t have a drink there in her honor, we continued through town along the high street, turned down the lane where she lived at the time of her baptism (Union Street then but today called Macbean), and over to the market square. The market fronts on the Royal Arsenal Gate and the arsenal beyond it where her father, a blacksmith and engine fitter, probably worked. Her ‘step-father,’1 Robert Billinghurst, also worked at the Arsenal, in his later years as a foreman.
The Royal Arsenal Gate then and now
The Royal Brass Foundry building dating to 1717
As was our custom, we took a mid-afternoon break at a pub, in this case the Dial Arch, a former gun factory on the Royal Arsenal grounds, where Beth had a Pimm’s and I had a cask ale. While slaking our thirsts and resting our feet we could gaze at the ornate Royal Brass Foundry where guns were cast from the early 1700s until 1870. This would have been one of a number of buildings where Sarah Hutchings’s father worked his blacksmith trade.
The Dial Arch pub and former gun factory
Also noteworthy about the Dial Arch is that it was the birthplace of the Arsenal Football Club in 1886, which went on to become one of England’s premier teams. A marker in the shape of a soccer ball can be seen in the bottom left corner of the photo.
Our toast to Sarah was delayed but not denied.
The Mitre was not the only pub where our great-grandmother Sarah lived.
Shortly before our trip to London I was browsing historical maps to find an old family neighborhood in Bethnal Green, namely the area where William Estall once lived on Totty Street and Sarah Hutchings later lived on nearby Palm Street. This neighborhood was badly damaged by German bombing during the Second World War [see map at left] and the city decided to turn it into a park. I thought a stroll through the park would be a quiet way to contemplate and pay tribute to our ancestors.
As I was looking at a satellite image I was struck by the presence of a lone building surrounded by acres of parkland greenery and ponds. I switched to street view and saw that the building was the Palm Tree Pub. It looked like it was situated about where the former Palm Street lay. When I looked at the address painted above the door it seemed vaguely familiar and I began digging through Bethnal Green workhouse records to find the address where Sarah Hutchings lived in 1887.
From Sarah’s workhouse exam of October 1887
Amazingly, the address on the building, numbers 24 and 26, showed it was where our great-grandmother Sarah lived in 1887. This was almost like a cosmic sign, the only building still standing in the neighborhood is where Sarah called home for a time. What kismet. Oh, we HAD to have a drink there!
The Palm Tree pub. Beth couldn’t charm her way past the green-clad security guard
Plan B: A pint at the Victoria Pub, established 1876
Our first attempt was thwarted by a security guard who informed us the pub was being used for filming a television show. (It turns out that a few movies and shows featured the pub due to its old-time atmosphere.) But hey, it was mid-afternoon, time for a drink and a sit-down, so we found another nearby pub, this one also from the Victorian age. A kind local patron there heard our story and walked back to the Palm Tree to see if he could get us in (Londoners were nothing if not helpful to us) but the security guard was unmoved. So the Palm Tree was put off for another day.
Delayed, but not denied
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon, after service at the church where our grandmother Bessie was baptized —yet another visit to a family font — Beth and I walked over to the Palm Tree Pub to finally have a toast to our great-grandmother Sarah Hutchings.
When we entered the pub we stepped back in time — 132 years to be exact — to a place where Sarah would have undoubtedly had a pint or two before retiring for the night upstairs.2 Perhaps she even worked the bar.
Alf’s an old-school “cash only” kind of guy
But running the bar today was its 80-year-old owner, Alf Barrett, who served our drinks with a twinkle in his eye and regaled us for an hour or two on the history of the area, including his rotten luck to have bought the pub right before the city demolished the temporary housing erected after WWII (eliminating much of his local clientele) and turned the neighborhood into a park. But Alf, and the Palm Tree, are still standing, and between its jazz music, scarlet lighting, and retro atmosphere, it’s in much demand today. Alf was kind enough to comp Beth a free glass of wine given her winning personality and connection to the site. Sarah Hutchings would have been pleased.
Locals enjoying a pint at the Palm Tree
Alf also helped us understand something about our great-grandfather William Estall. William was a dock worker according to our grandmother’s birth certificate. I assumed he worked the wharves along the canal that runs through Bethnal Green. But Alf was the third person on this trip who said he must have worked the docks by the River Thames. I told him I thought that was too far away, but Alf assured me it’s not — in fact, he worked there when he was a youth. So I’ve settled the issue in my mind: William was one of the hundreds of men who showed up every day for a chance at work at the docks down by the Thames.
The Museum of London Docklands in a former warehouse on the West India docks
Dock workers gather before one of the warehouses, from a photo at the museum
Dock worker equipment on display at the museum
Alf advised us to visit the Museum of London Docklands on the Isle of Dogs to get a sense of their lives. It looked to be hard, physical labor, and except for the “favoured casuals” (day laborers) it was hit or miss to catch a day job.
“The favoured casuals were known as ‘royals’, the aristocrats of the casual workforce. If more men than the royals were needed, then the foreman would select the fittest-looking from among the other casuals. One method of doing this, albeit rarely employed, was to throw brass tickets – the guarantee of entry and work – into the waiting crowds and watch the men scrabble and fight to pick them up. The toughest and best suited for the work ahead would secure a winning place by using their brawn and not their brains. Those who missed out would have to wait until next time.”
— Historical Eye, “Top of the Docks,” https://historicaleye.com
Alf also recommended we partake of the Sunday Roast at the nearby Narrow restaurant on the river at Limehouse. It was a great recommendation: the food was good, the gin and tonic tasty, and the view spectacular.
Gordon Ramsay’s “The Narrow” restaurant on the Thames at Limehouse
Hats off to good ol’ Alf, he was a font of information.
1. Sarah’s mother Harriet took up with Robert Billinghurst shortly after Sarah’s father died. Robert was still legally married at the time and there is no indication that he ever adopted Sarah, she maintaining her birth father’s surname until her own marriage in 1891. 2. Though the original building was replaced in 1935, it was built along the same lines and at the same place as the original according to historical sources.
By 1916, Helen and her husband Fred moved 40 miles east to Chino. Fred managed one of the stores in the chain of Weigle Meat Markets, a company he’d started butchering with when he first moved to California around 1904 as shown by this newspaper clip from that year.
