Fearless Females: A Mother

In honour of National Women’s History Month, Lisa Alzo of The Accidental Genealogist has created  Fearless Females: 31 Blogging Prompts to Celebrate Women’s History Month.

March 25 — Tell how a female ancestor interacted with her children. Was she loving or supportive? A disciplinarian? A bit of both?

This is a poem which Rev Frederick William Davis wrote about his mother (and my direct ancestor) Charlotte Davis, nee Aves, the wife of Rev Frederick Davis. She died of tuberculosis, aged 40, in 1858, when Frederick William was 15 years old.

I don't know when the poem was written but it was published in the women's magazine "Hearth & Home" on 30 September 1897, almost 40 years after Charlotte's death. I think it answers all of the questions in Lisa's blogging prompt.

 

Amanuensis Monday - A letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury

A letter which my 2x great grandfather, Rev Frederick Davis, wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Campbell Tait. It illustrates the many obstacles to becoming a clergyman in the mid 19th century, for someone without wealth or connections:

The Manor House
Northfleet
Kent

30 August 1875

My Lord Archbishop,

Two years since, I took the duty of ministering in the fields to the hop pickers at Ospringe, at the instance of Canon Griffin. On that occasion Mr G promised that he would always in future look to me first for such assistance, I having given him & his parishioners complete satisfaction. I was, then, surprized the other day to see him advertizing for such help, & wrote to him. His reply was the enclosed¹.

Now my Lord, for 12 years I have ministered in your diocese, with acceptance to clergy & people alike, in several cases with your Grace's written permission, & never have I given offence but once – to the Churchwarden² at Offham, where I officiated for 4 months – by simply determining to do my duty & obey the law. At the death of the late Rector he desired me to make changes. This I positively refused to do, saying that, as a mere locum tenens, I had neither right nor authority to do so. He then quarrelled with me, and wrote me several ungentlemanly letters.

When in charge of Thurnham last year, I wrote to your Grace, asking you to renew your permission to me to officiate in your diocese, as your former permission had lapsed. Your reply was that I must first produce certain papers, which I could not clearly understand. The ordinary papers for the past three years I could certainly procure when necessary. But it seems to me that your lordship required papers from the diocese in which I was ordained, & from the Bishop thereof.

As I had then only one or two Sundays more employment in your diocese, & I knew not when I should be called upon to officiate therin again – for it has only been at long & distant intervals I have been so – I determined not to trouble your Grace, nor my friends, for papers till occasion should arise requiring them. Had then Canon Griffin sought my services I should certainly have at once complied with your Grace's requirements with great cheerfulness.

I now write to say that I can certainly procure the ordinary papers required by law, which I respectfully imagine are all your Grace can require. But papers from the diocese where I was ordained I cannot obtain for very satisfactory reasons, though I can send you a letter from the Bishop who ordained me, who though being dead yet speaketh. I send you herewith printed papers, the originals of which I can furnish if necessary, which will show you my history, & prove the truth of my allegations.

After serving to the best of my powers the Church, both in my own person & in those of my whole family, for many years, I was strongly recommended for ordination to the late Bishop of Exeter, who ordained & licensed me to the Curacy of S. John's Torquay. At this place I was living, keeping a school. I was a widower with eight children – but doing well with the school. I was to receive no stipend for my curacy – but the Incumbent sent me some half dozen scholars before my ordination on the ground that I trained them as choristers taking them to Church on all occasions.

After my ordination he refused to pay me as before for the scholars holding that I was now as Curate bound to teach & train them. Added to this he was appointed Chaplain to the Cemetery and then insisted upon me taking nearly all the funerals. At Torquay, my Lord, these are, as probably you know, very numerous³ & I can say truly, that nearly every day of my life, Sundays not excepted, I had to walk three miles to the place, & three miles back so that in addition to taking the service, & often waiting, the half of every day was occupied. This naturally told upon my school which descended below paying point.

Having proceeded more than 12 months, & fearing that by getting into pecuniary difficulties I should bring disgrace upon the Church & myself, I petitioned the Bishop, who went thoroughly into the matter, to allow me to leave the diocese to come here, where there was an opening for a school & a prospect of success. With some hesitation, because he desired to make my Incumbent comply with his wishes, he released me giving me the enclosed letter. I was told by the Bishop's chaplain that that letter would satisfy any bishop, which it certainly did Bishop Wigram, when twelve years ago I showed it to him.

Now, my Lord, that Vicar of mine was obliged soon after my leaving him to resign the living, & is now non-est; the senior Curate seceded to Rome, & is now a Romish Priest in that neighbourhood, one Churchwarden is dead, & the other removed to where I cannot find him. Your Grace will now see that I can do no more than send you the letter of the late illustrious bishop.

Why I did not proceed to priest's orders is easily explained. When I came here I had no dependence but a small uncertain school to depend upon for the maintenance of myself & eight children. I was obliged to ? myself heartily with work interests to keep so many persons. Bishop Wigram offered to ordain me priest, if I could get the necessary title⁴. The title I was offered by several - but they could offer no stipend &, moreover, I must reside. Under the circumstances neither would suit, so I went on from that time to the present attending to my work here, & employing my Sundays as you will find from my printed papers.

The school was given up by me after several years in favour of keeping a Temperance Establishment², which I was asked to undertake as being a man likely to carry it on successfully. This has gone well and I have now six inebriates of noble families & lineage. Hence – my Lord – being now 60 years of age⁵, with a great & responsible work upon my shoulders, I have not time to prepare for priest's orders & don't intend to seek them.

But being strong & able, I desire to serve the Church as I have always done, on Sundays, & with such views I seek canonical authority. I remain idle, & to cease officiating somewhere, or somehow, is utterly impossible; therefore, since I am entirely independent of the income I receive from the Church, which has never been more than an average of £50 in my life, I do hope & trust that your Grace will not force me to consider my position & duty in regard to doing God's work by refusing me the lawful & proper authority. I have never done anything to forfeit it, & I always conform to what is the rule of the Church to which I am called.

I would mention that I have two sons clergymen, another to be ordained in September, another at College with a view to orders; a son in law who was an officer in the army, now about to be ordained, that my daughters have been trained to be deaconesses, & that my wife, as the Bishop of Oxford⁶ will tell you, died in doing the Church's work.

With the above before me I must, with all humility, maintain that I have a right to work, with authority, in & for the Church I have so long laboured – & it will be a source of great thankfulness & pleasure to me to receive your Grace's license. If refused, the greatest stumbling block & discouragement of my life will be placed in my way, & I cannot yet see the result.

I write thus strongly because I am hurt by the writing of your Lordship's secretary to Canon Griffin.

I remain, my Lord, your faithful servant,

Frederick Davis

Source

Lambeth Palace Archives, Tait 207, Folio 206.

Notes

1. Now lost.

2. See previous post.

3. Torquay was evidently then, as now, popular with elderly retired people.

4. Appointment to an ecclesiastical living or benefice.

5. He was actually 54!

6. Frederick and his wife, Charlotte, had run the church school in the parish of Tardebigge, Worcestershire during the 1850s, whilst John Mackarness was vicar there.

Googling for Grandma

Googling for Grandma was the title of a lecture by the incomparable Cyndi Howells which I attended on the 2007 Wholly Genes Genealogy Conference and Cruise. Cyndi's excellent lecture equipped me with many new and exciting Google tools for extending my family research into the nooks and crannies of the internet.

In time, I became proficient enough to give my own talk on the subject to our local U3A Family History Group. I hope Cyndi will forgive me for stealing her catchy title. At the end of my talk I invited members of the audience to give me family history subjects, about which they would like to find more information, for me to Google then and there.

The first request was from a lady who had recently discovered that her ancestor, William Cooksley, ran a factory in Bristol. Would there be anything about him or his factory online? A Google search on <+Cooksley +factory +Bristol> immediately threw up a hit which stunned us all. William Cooksley's modest Bristol nail making business was mentioned in the pages of Karl Marx's "Das Kapital":

In my experience, this kind of spectacular result is far from unique. I have already blogged about my black sheep ancestor Rev Frederick Davis and his unlicensed lunatic asylum. I first became aware of this story because of Google Books. A search on <"Manor House" +Northfleet +Davis> led me to an article from the German psychiatry magazine Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medizin, Volume 35, 1879. (Google Translate tells me that this is the General journal of psychiatry and psycho-forensic medicine.)

Only a "snippet view" of the article was shown but it was enough to inform me that Frederick had appeared before the magistrates at Rochester, Kent on Friday 29 June to face a charge by the Lunacy Commissioners under the Lunacy Act. From this, I was able to do further research.

Last Wednesday marked a further stage in my Google education, as I attended a webinar by the equally awesome Thomas MacEntee on Google for Genealogists. It is Thomas' fault that I have not blogged since then - I have been too busy trying out all the new Google toys he gave me to play with. But chatting with Cyndi and Thomas after the webinar gave me the idea for a series of blog posts about how Google has helped my genealogy research, of which this is the first. I hope that, as the series goes on, you will learn some new tips and tricks and make some new research discoveries of your own. Please let me know if you do.

Black Sheep Sunday - Rev Frederick Davis

Black sheep embarrass the family whilst they are alive but they make wonderful ancestors. Brushes with the law, financial peccadilloes and sex scandals are the lifeblood of newspapers. Ancestors who got into serious trouble usually got plenty of column inches and those old newspaper articles are gold dust for the family historian.

 

 

My favourite black sheep ancestor is my 2x great-grandfather, Rev Frederick Davis. Not just a bad boy but a clergyman to boot - some years ago a cousin christened him "the pervy vicar" and I'm afraid the naughty nickname has stuck.

 

Frederick was born in Lambeth, Surrey, in 1821. One family story suggests that his father was wealthy but disowned him after an argument. Frederick was certainly well educated but struggled for the rest of his life to establish a financially secure career.

 

At first he worked as a warehouseman. In 1842 he married a schoolmistress, Charlotte Aves, and by 1848 Frederick had also become a schoolmaster, following teacher training at the Church of England National Society's Training Institution in Westminster.

 

Frederick and Charlotte worked as a husband and wife team in a succession of church schools in East London, Essex, Staffordshire and Worcestershire. By 1858 they were running the parish school in St Columb Major,  Cornwall, when tragedy struck. Charlotte died of tuberculosis, aged 40, leaving Frederick with eight children aged two to fifteen.

 

Headstone on the grave of Charlotte Davis, Colan, Cornwall

 

With Charlotte's death the family lost stability. Frederick initially put his daughters into an orphanage run by Anglican nuns at Wymering, near Portsmouth. By 1862 he had moved to Torquay in Devon where, for the first time, he set up his own private school rather than being employed by the Church. On the recommendation of clerical friends, he was also ordained deacon by the Bishop of Exeter and appointed curate of St John's, Torquay.

 

This proved disastrous. The curacy was poorly paid but so busy as to prevent him running his school properly. He lost pupils, fell out with the vicar and, within six months found himself in precarious financial circumstances. Although supposed to remain in the diocese until he was ordained priest, Frederick petitioned the Bishop to allow him to leave his curacy and move to Northfleet in Kent, to take over a private preparatory school based in the old Manor House.

 

The Manor House, Northfleet, Kent

 

Frederick rebranded the school as Northfleet Grammar School, later the Collegiate School, and advertised his willingness to coach young men for entry to the Universities and the armed forces. Some pupils came (two of them later married two of his daughters) but the school struggled and Frederick supplemented his income by covering for clergy absences in various Kent parishes, not telling them that he was only in deacon's orders.

 

In 1874 the churchwarden of one of those parishes wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury about Frederick:

Having been prompted to make enquiry concerning his private character in consequence of his having most persistently and impudently attempted to extort more money (to the extent of 4 guineas) than he was entitled to according to my agreement with him, I have ascertained from a most reliable source that he is inhibited by the Bishop of Rochester from doing duty in his diocese.

... Dr Claughton would not have inhibited him, unless there were good and weighty reasons for so doing. I have heard what those reasons are, but would rather not commit them to writing as they are of a most serious and damaging nature. No doubt if Your Grace orders inquiry to be made in the neighbourhood in which he lives quite sufficient cause will be found, to induce Your Grace to take immediate steps to prevent the possibility of his ever performing the duty of a clergyman of the Church of England again.

Archibald Campbell Tait, 1811-1882
Archbishop of Canterbury

The Bishop of Rochester added his own disapprobation:

I have not actually inhibited Mr Davis ... but I do not approve of him. He behaves extremely ill to the Clergyman of his Parish.

Thomas Legh Claughton, 1808-1892
Bishop of Rochester

 

By 1875 Frederick had given up his school in favour of running a home for six wealthy dipsomaniacs (alcoholics). Following complaints that a lady was being detained against her will, the Lunacy Commissioners paid a visit and discovered that one of his patients was mentally ill. In the summer of 1877 he was prosecuted for running an unlicensed lunatic asylum and fined £50.

 

The Archbishop had reluctantly allowed Frederick to continue officiating in neighbouring parishes. On Sunday 16 December 1877 he was returning from taking services when, on a train between Strood and Gravesend, he was alleged to have indecently assaulted a 17 year old servant girl called Rosina Webb. When the case came up for trial in January 1878 Frederick did not appear. Instead, one of his sons wrote a letter maintaining his father's innocence but saying that, as he feared his word would not be believed, he had gone abroad.

 

A warrant was issued for Frederick's arrest and an advertisement in the Police Gazette gives us a description of the man, for whom no known photograph exists:

 

The Police Gazette, 4 February 1878

 

When Frederick fled abroad he left behind him a second wife. Her existence only came to light because her birth and death dates, minus a name, were recorded on a family gravestone in Northfleet churchyard. The gravestone was destroyed in the 1960s but, thankfully, it had been carefully transcribed by an antiquarian in the 1900s. The death date led to the discovery of the name Harriet Davis in the Northfleet burial registers. Her death certificate revealed that she was the wife of Frederick Davis and that she had died of apoplexy in October 1878, aged 60. No record of their marriage has yet been found.

 

Frederick went first to Bruges in Belgium before settling in Dinard on the coast of Brittany in France. Both places had substantial numbers of affluent English residents, so Frederick was probably able to earn a living as a tutor. There was an Anglican church at Dinard and the incumbent, Rev Anthony Francis Thomson, was the father of one of Frederick's old pupils, Anthony Standidge Thomson, later to be his son-in-law. Frederick lived in the pretty seaside resort -  no doubt helping out with services - until his death in 1883.

 

The Quay at Dinard, Ethel Carrick Fox

Sunday's Obituary: Rev Joseph Bentley, 1840-1903

Rev Joseph Bentley was my great grandfather. He was born near Barnsley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1840 and died in Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1903. Joseph was a Wesleyan Methodist minister for 36 years. During this time he served Methodist communities in 17 different places in England, from Durham to Cornwall. The constant upheaval of moving from place to place must have made life very difficult for his wife, Emma, and seven children.

Joseph's obituary appeared in the 1904 Minutes and Yearbook of the Methodist Conference:

JOSEPH BENTLEY: born in August, 1840. He was converted at the age of eighteen, entered the ministry in 1864, and died on August 7th 1903. His life was chiefly spent in the Circuits of rural Methodism, where he laboured with much energy and zeal. He was loyal to our discipline, and endeavoured to inculcate that spirit among the people to whom he ministered. His preaching was generally appreciated, and his genial disposition won him many friends. The end of his life was shadowed by failing eyesight, which created much depression, but his faith in God and his trust in the atonement of Christ were unfailing.