Margaret Annie Wood, mother of Jane Barder and Sally Hows, was born on 6
November 1909 at 14 Marlton Street, Greenwich, daughter of Ernest John Wood
and Annie Freeman Bormond. Marlton Street still exists on the map as a
turning off Woolwich Road: on the ground it is a couple of hundreds of yards
of tarmac leading to a dead end at one of the approach roads to the Blackwall Tunnel. In Margaret’s infancy her family moved to Tooting. Their
house, 249 Lessingham Avenue, was on the Totterdown estate. The London
County Council had lobbied for an amendment to the 1890 Housing of the
Working Classes Act allowing it to build "working class tenements" beyond
its boundaries, and Totterdown, arising from fields in Tooting, was the
first of its well-planned cottage estates. The viability of such
working-class housing depended on planned transport, and the construction of
the Totterdown estate went hand in hand with the electrification of the
tramline from the Embankment to Tooting. The Prince of Wales opened the
tramline and visited the first of the cottages in May 1903. The streets of
1,229 two-storey houses were completed by 1911 but the commons of Mitcham
and Tooting provided the area with a rural ambience. Margaret used to tell
her children about the lavender fields of Mitcham and the large families of
gypsies who frequented the commons in her childhood. They were especially in
evidence, apparently, during the annual festival that was Derby Day in those
times. Tooting and Mitcham were on the route taken by toffs in their
carriages and cars to Epsom Downs, and children such as Margaret and her
brothers would cluster along the route calling to them to "throw out your
meanies". The toffs would respond by scattering small coins as
they passed.
Four Wood children survived to adulthood: Margaret, the only girl, had three
brothers, Arthur, Ted and Joe. Another brother, Ernie, died as a child,
possibly from meningitis. The memory of this brother’s death lived with his
siblings for the rest of their lives, giving the lie to the belief that at a
time when so many children died, each individual death was regarded less
tragically than a similar happening today. Margaret and her brothers were
educated at Franciscan Road School, a typical London County Council school
on the estate and she had very happy memories of school. She had less happy
memories of her first work experiences when, as a 14-year-old, she worked in
a factory owned by Courtaulds on an unguarded guillotine machine, terrified
that she would be one of those who lost fingers or hands. For the rest of
her life she spoke of the cruelty of piece-work in factories increasing
pressure on the unfortunate employees. Luckily she found another job in a
clothing workshop where, for six days a week, she and other young women
finished silk clothes by hand under the close but kindly supervision of Mrs Crowther,
the owner’s wife.
In September 1933 at St Jude’s Church, Brixton, Margaret married Frederick
Cornwell, a Brixton market trader: Fred’s brother, Sid, was already married
to Margaret’s cousin, Dorothy Nye. Fred and Margaret’s first married home
was 15, Loughborough Park, Brixton, a house and road which miraculously
survived not only bombing but also the wholesale demolition of housing stock
around Coldharbour Lane to clear the way for the inner London ring road
which was never built. They were living there when their first daughter,
Maureen, now commonly called Jane, was born in 1934 and when their second
child, Sally, was born in 1936. Later in the 1930s they moved to Bonham
Road, Brixton and then, finally, to 23 Winslade Road, Brixton, their home
when the war started.
Second World War
Margaret was old enough to remember the First World War: the main thing she
described was hunger. As she described it, food was short and rationed by
price rather than by Ration Books. She claimed that as the only girl in a
family of boys, she was always served after her brothers and that there was
never enough for her. Like so many of her generation, she certainly had a
hard Second World War. One night in the 1940 blitz, 23, Winslade Road was
badly damaged by bombs which destroyed their previous home in Bonham Road,
parts of Hayter Road and some houses in Winslade Road. Fred and Margaret and
their daughters were in their Anderson shelter and not injured, but after
they had been got out in the middle of the night by the air raid wardens,
they had to leave their half-destroyed house and make their way through the
mayhem of the bombs to his mother’s house in Coldharbour Lane. Their
surviving belongings were rescued the next day and taken to a Government
store in Coldharbour Lane, from where they were looted. Fred was offered
some of his own possessions to buy back over the next weeks as he stood at
his stall under the arches - an episode that was not uncommon at the time. He and Margaret had refused to allow their daughters to join the mass
evacuation of London’s children at the beginning of the war but, now
homeless, Margaret no longer had any choice, and she and the girls were
evacuated to Accrington in Lancashire. Fred had already received his call-up
papers, and after just one leave to visit his family in Accrington he was
sent off to the Middle East to join the Eighth Army and fight at Tobruk and
Alamein. He became a sergeant and ended the war in Palestine,
returning to England and demob leave only in April 1946.
Margaret’s parents’ house in Bruce Road, Mitcham, was destroyed by a
landmine soon after the Winslade Road bomb and they followed their daughter
to Accrington. Her brother Arthur was in the Navy: his wife, Ivy, and
children, Keith and Beverley, joined the Accrington exile. It was not a
happy experience. Each of the three families was billeted in one room of a
tiny mill house with no inside plumbing. In her first billet Margaret and
her children were not allowed in the house during the day. Accrington folk,
displaying the attitudes of Brookside rather than those of Coronation
Street, mocked the Londoners for cowardice in running away from the bombs.
Margaret decided that she preferred London, bombs and all, and saved from
her weekly Army allowance until she had enough for her fare back home in an
overcrowded train which was frequently shunted into sidings to allow
priority for military movements and troop trains. Her parents, Ivy,
Keith and Beverley, also returned to the familiarity of London.
Ernest and Annie Wood, who had lost everything to the Bruce Road landmine,
were allocated a requisitioned maisonette in Heaton Road, Mitcham and
provided with furniture. Margaret and the girls were given shelter by one of
her many cousins, Julie Kelly, who welcomed them into her council house in
Shooter’s Hill Road, Blackheath, although it was already crowded enough with
her six children. The Anderson shelter was a necessary addition to the three
bedrooms. After some months Margaret was also allocated a requisitioned
flat, in Winterwell Road, Brixton. Requisitioning was the way in which the
government tried to deal with the problem of people made homeless by bombs. Properties which had been left empty were compulsorily taken over and
allocated to those in need. Eventually the Winslade Road house was made
habitable again: and not only Margaret and her children but also her parents
moved back in, minus all the familiar possessions which had once made it
home. There was more bombing, especially the Little Blitz of January to
April 1944, when Brixton once again suffered heavily, and buzz-bombs and
rockets followed towards the end of the war. By now, protection from bombs
was provided by a Morrison shelter, a steel topped cage which filled the
kitchen. The three adults and two children slept in it most nights, and
sometimes spent much of the day crouching inside. Each bomb that fell
dislodged a tin colander which clattered onto the quarry tiles in the
scullery and Annie, the grandmother, would curse as she crawled out of the
Morrison and went outside to replace the colander on its hook. When Margaret
sent her children to school in the mornings she must have wondered whether
they would return and, above all, she never knew from day to day whether her
husband was still alive. She nursed her parents in their final illnesses and
they both died in the house, her father in 1944 and her mother in 1948. Fred
died in 1966 and Margaret then moved to share Brian and Jane’s home until
she died in 1985. In her last hours of painful consciousness in the Trinity
Hospice, Clapham, she insisted that she should sign her pension book for her
daughters to collect the accumulated monies. She did not want "That Woman",
Margaret Thatcher, to get it after her death.
Margaret was a Londoner with relatives throughout South London. Extended
journeys by bus and tram to visit aunts and cousins were a regular feature
of life, as were the "Days Out" to Hampton Court, Fair Green, and Richmond,
which were the equivalent of today’s package holidays to Spanish resorts. There are few Londoners whose family trees don’t reveal some migrants from
elsewhere but Margaret probably had fewer than most.
Ernest Wood’s family
Margaret's parents, Ernest John Wood (always known as Jack) and Annie
Freeman Bormond (Nin), were married on 11 April 1903 at St Mark’s Church,
Clerkenwell. Annie’s address was 6, Granville Square and
Ernest’s was 67, Naylor Road, Peckham. Granville Square is an elegant Islington oasis of
expensive family houses, apparently little changed since it was built about
150 years ago. The 1900 Post Office Directory shows 6 Granville Square
and a number of adjoining houses as "apartment" houses. Not only Annie, but also
her younger sisters, Georgie and Gertie, were married from 6 Granville Square
with Ernest John Wood signing as a witness to Georgie’s wedding. Peckham
resident Ernest’s connection with the area might have come from his
occupation. He was a postman, described on the marriage certificate as
a letter carrier. The Royal Mail had begun to use the old Cold Bath prison, or
Clerkenwell Gaol, as a temporary parcel office in 1877, changing its name to
Mount Pleasant in 1888. The old prison building was finally replaced by a
purpose-built Post Office building in 1890 and then, as now, Mount Pleasant
was the London headquarters of Post Office operations, just a brisk five
minutes' walk from Granville Square. The
63 bus
today, and for generations, has run between Peckham and Mount Pleasant:
perhaps its horse-drawn predecessor did so as early as 1900 and provided
transport for Ernest when he had to visit his headquarters.
He was born in Peckham in August 1874 to Edward Wood and Margaret Seear
(formerly Parker). Clarkson Place, Carlton Grove, his birthplace, is now
buried under Southwark housing estates, although the name Carlton Grove
remains on the map. It is part of a network of streets, running off Meeting
House Lane, just north of Peckham High Street and Queens Road. Peckham had
been largely rural until 1868 when the London, Brighton and South Coast
Railway built stations at Rye Lane and Queen’s Road. This encouraged
the speculative building of the streets of artisan houses which gave way to
the Southwark building blocks of the 1960s and 70s. Naylor Road,
Ernest’s home at the time of his 1903 marriage, still stands as an example
of the kind of streets which surrounded him as he grew up. A
form completed by his father, Edward, requesting a copy of Ernest’s birth
certificate for the purpose of the education act and employment of children,
suggests that Ernest left school in July 1837, aged 13, but in the 1891
census, when the family was living at 95 Meeting House Lane, Peckham,
Ernest, aged 16, was neither a scholar nor employed.
In September 1894, however, he was established as a postman in the
London Post Office, in effect, in those days, a civil servant.
His application for superannuation, dated April 1934 and involving Public
Money, is carefully preserved in the
Post Office Archives at Mount Pleasant. He retired on 21
May 1934 after 39 years and 8 months' service: he had been earning one
hundred and seventy-four pounds, seventeen shillings and fourpence a year. His attendance record for the previous four years is listed on the form and
shows that he had suffered long periods of sick leave. Indeed he was a frail
person, badly asthmatic, who had spent many months in a Post Office
sanatorium in Kent. He was fortunate that as an established postman he was
entitled to welfare benefits not available to others at that time. It is
possible that his job, and perhaps his frailty, were factors in the family’s
move to the LCC Totterdown estate around 1912. Employment in the civilian
uniformed ranks of society in late Victorian and Edwardian England––postmen,
railwaymen, bus and tram drivers and conductors––was prized for its job
security and status. The Mount Pleasant Archives have produced an
information sheet devoted to "Postal Uniforms–Key Dates", thus signifying
the importance attached to the uniform. In 1872, for example, Good Conduct Stripes,
consisting of horizontal gold lace bars worn on the left breast, were
introduced for London Letter Carriers. In 1914 these stripes were abolished,
but men were allowed to continue wearing existing stripes. In 1910 a
Committee on Uniforms reduced uniforms to six classes, corresponding to six
groups of Post Office grades! The Key Dates continue to 1992 when postmen
were allowed to wear dark-coloured shorts, of a similar length to Bermuda
shorts, in hot weather, and postwomen were provided with uniform culottes
and allowed to wear saris. The uniforms still exist but perhaps
inspire less envy and respect in a more prosperous society.
Ernest was not the only member of his immediate family to qualify for this
status. His father, Edward, and Richard, his grandfather, were both
Bermondsey-born workers in the insalubrious leather trade, but Edward’s sons
did not follow the family occupation, either because of a gradual decline in
the Bermondsey leather trade or, more likely, because of a desire for
something better. The 1891 census shows Ernest’s older brother, William,
aged 20, as an unestablished letter carrier (he later became a postman), and
14-year-old Albert as a telegraph messenger. The nineteenth-century Wood
boys were perhaps introduced to the Post Office by a Joseph Wood, telegraphist by occupation, who was living at 4 Carlton Place in 1871 when
his daughter, Ann, was baptised at St Jude’s, Springhall Lane, Peckham,
Ernest’s baptismal church. It seems probable that Joseph was a relative.
Ernest’s only sister, Margaret Elizabeth, was the first of his siblings to
be born in Peckham. She was baptised at St Jude’s in June 1872 when the
family lived at 18 Clarkson Place: her two older brothers, Edward and
William, had been baptised together at St Jude’s in the January of 1872 when
Edward was nearly 4 and William about 18 months. These delayed baptisms
suggest that their parents must have felt that they were at last settled:
and indeed Ernest, who was baptised at St Jude’s in 1874, the year of his
birth, lived the first 30 or so years of his life in the streets off Meeting
House Lane. This curving thoroughfare, linking the Old Kent Road to
Peckham High Street, pre-dated the nineteenth-century terraces of Edward’s
youth: it still survives, like most of the surrounding streets, in name
rather than architectural detail. Ernest’s grandparents, Richard and Maria Wood, were
living at 16 Meeting House Lane for the 1871 census. In the 1881 census they
were living at 93 Meeting House Lane and by the 1891 census Edward and
Margaret Wood, Ernest’s parents, were living at number 95. After their
marriage, Ernest and Annie moved into his pre-nuptial home, 67 Naylor Road,
possibly with his parents. Their first child, Elliott Arthur, named Elliott
after his maternal grandfather but always called Arthur, was born there and
baptised at St Jude’s in November 1905. Ernest George, the little boy who
died, was also born in Naylor Road and baptised in May 1908. Margaret, as
already mentioned, was born in Greenwich in 1909 and Thomas Edward, known as
Ted, was born in Greenwich, in 1911. By the time the youngest child,
Joseph Albert, was born in 1915 the family had moved to Tooting.
Edward Wood, the children’s grandfather, had died at the age of 58, some
months before Arthur was born, thus leaving Margaret, his wife, a widow for
the second time. In February 1859 Margaret Parker had married Thomas Seear
at St Mark’s, Kennington Road. Lambeth-born Thomas, a
butcher, had died in 1864 at the age of 28, leaving Margaret a young widow
with two sons. These
boys, Thomas, born in Camden Street, Walworth, in 1860 and Henry Kenton Seear,
born in 1863, were Ernest’s much older half-brothers and are listed with the
family living in Leo Street, Peckham in the 1881 census.
Like Edward Wood, their step-father, they were both working in the leather
trade. Margaret herself was baptised at St Mary Newington,
Kennington Park Road, in April 1835. Her parents were Joseph, a
labourer, and Sophia. The family lived in
William Street, Locksfield, an address and locality which have long since
disappeared but which were around Newington Butts. There is no
record of a marriage between Joseph and Sophia at St Mary Newington. The
Mormon IGI index lists just one
marriage between a Joseph Parker and a Sophia, a more uncommon name than
either Joseph or Parker. This took place in September 1827
when Joseph Henry Parker married Sophia Kendrick at St Martin’s Church,
Birmingham. It is possible that these were Margaret’s parents,
but in order to be sure one would have to have evidence of their birthplace
and I have not been able to find them in the 1851 census which would provide
this evidence. The Mormon index does not claim to be all-inclusive and it is
possible that there were other Josephs and Sophias marrying elsewhere in the
country at the relevant time. By 1859, according to her first
marriage certificate, Margaret’s father, Joseph, was dead. When she married Edward
Wood in 1868 at St John the Baptist Church, Hoxton, her father was described
as a soldier, with no reference to his death. A Joseph Parker was a witness
to this 1868 marriage but I assume that he was a brother rather than a
miraculously revived father. A soldier who had died before 1859 could have
been killed in the Crimean War, but he is not listed in the casualty list at
the Public Record Office, now the
National Archives. Perhaps he just died an early death,
like so many subjects of Queen Victoria.
When Margaret and Edward Wood married in July 1868 they both gave 35 Curtain
Road, Hoxton, as their address. Neither they, nor any other Woods, Parkers
or Seears, were at this address for either the 1861 or the 1871 census and
their presence in North London in 1868 is puzzling. When their first son,
Edward, was born, not very long after their marriage, they were back in
South East London, their familiar home ground: the 1881 census gives
Edward’s birthplace as Deptford. It was he and his younger brother, William
Richard, who were baptised jointly at St Jude’s once the family had found a
home in Peckham.
Edward Wood was twelve years younger than his wife and only 21 when he took
on the responsibilities of step-sons and premature fatherhood. Both he and
his father, Richard, were described on the 1868 marriage certificate as
curriers, or leather dressers, and Edward had grown up among the leather
works of Bermondsey. Most social histories of nineteenth century London
describe the national importance of Bermondsey’s leather trade and its
pervasive olfactory presence in the air of this riverside area. Stephen Inwood in his 1998
History of London writes that in 1850 it was estimated
that a third of the nation’s leather-dressing and tanning was carried out on
the Surrey side of London and he quotes Henry Mayhew in "London Labour and
the London Poor" as describing Bermondsey as a parish almost entirely devoted
to leather and its by-products. He has some nice quotes from VS Pritchett’s
autobiography, "A Cab at the Door".
Pritchett as a young man worked as a clerk in a Bermondsey leather factory
between 1916 and 1920 and his descriptions of the workings describe what our
forebears must have taken for granted.
"I liked its pungent smell. I liked watching the sickly green pelts come slopping out of the pits at the leather-dresser’s down the street, I liked paddling among the rank and bloody hides of the market;… At home my family edged away from me: I stank of the trade."
And again:
"There was a daylight gloom in this district of London. One breathed the heavy, drugging, beer smell of hops and there was another smell of boots and dog dung: this came from the leather which had been steeped for a month in puer or dog dung before the process of tanning. There was also…the stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory and smoke blew down from an emery mill….Out of each brass-plated doorway came either the oppressive odour of new boots; or, from the occasional little slum houses, the sharp stink of poverty."
Indeed poverty, as much as leather, dominated the air of Bermondsey. Stephen Inwood refers to Charles Booth’s researches into poverty in the later years of the nineteenth century and summarizes them thus:
"His findings suggested that the worst concentrations of poverty were in the riverside parts of South London, rather than in the East End. Dividing London into fifty districts of roughly equal population, Booth found that the only two districts with over 50 per cent living in poverty… were Southwark and Bermondsey…That part of Southwark between the Borough High Street and Blackfriar’s Road was, in Booth’s view, the worst in London."
Our family lived just outside this "worst" area, but they earned their
livings among the sickly green pelts and the rank and bloody hides.
Edward and both his parents were baptised at St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey. Richard Wood, his father, was born in March 1810, son of Edward Wood, a
fishmonger, and his wife, Sarah. Maria Webb, Edward’s mother, was baptised
at the same church on 16 April 1816, with her brother, William: their
parents were also William and Maria. William Webb was a potato dealer and
the family lived in Bermondsey Street, a few hundred yards from the
Borough
Market, a fruit and vegetable market since 1276. It is tempting to surmise
that the Webb Street which runs off Bermondsey Street suggests an equally
long connection of the Webbs with this area. Edward was born to Richard and
Maria in 1847 but his birth does not appear in the post-1837 Civil Register. Registration was not made compulsory until the 1870s and many families of
the Woods’ age and income found the expense and bureaucracy too much to
handle. He was, however, baptised at St Mary Magdalen on 1 August 1847, his
sister, Margaret, having been baptised there in November 1844. The family
was living in Willow Walk for both these baptisms but they were not there
for the 1851 census. Londoners tended to move frequently in these teeming
streets and they are often difficult to find in the censuses. Willow Walk
still exists, running parallel to the Old Kent Road, almost to Tower Bridge
Road. In Edward’s youth it was lined by leather tanneries which were
replaced by railway marshalling yards, themselves now giving way to a modern
industrial estate. In 1857 Richard and Maria had another son, William, whose
birth was registered. He was born in King Street, East Street (off the
Walworth Road), and they were living at 25 King Street for the 1861 census. Richard was listed as a leather cutter as he was in the 1871 census when
Richard and Maria were living at 16 Meeting House Lane. Edward had married
Margaret three years before, and we have no record of their address in 1871. By1881 Richard and Maria were living at 93 Meeting House Lane and Richard,
aged 69, was still working as a leather cutter. Edward and Margaret were now
also in Peckham, in Leo Street. Edward and his two step-sons were working as
cleaners and bleachers in the leather factories; the five Wood children were
all at school. By 1891, Richard and Maria had disappeared: Edward, still a
cleaner and bleacher, and Margaret, working in a milk shop, had moved to 95
Meeting House Lane. Before 1903 they had moved round the corner yet again to
67 Naylor Road, Ernest’s home when he married Annie Freeman Bormond in April
of that year.
Annie Bormond’s family
Annie was living in Granville Square, Islington when she married but she too
was Bermondsey born: her parents, however, were recent arrivals in South
London. On her marriage certificate her father, Elliott Bormond, was
described as a Chief Engineer. He had indeed been a qualified engineer but
he had died in 1892: the marine register of deaths shows that he died of
pneumonia in Buenos Aires whilst First Engineer on a ship called the Anjer
Head. There is plenty of evidence for his marine career. Documents survive
both at the
National Archives in Kew and at the National Maritime
Museum, Greenwich. He qualified as a second-class engineer in May 1864 and
as a first-class engineer in September 1867, on both occasions in London. The examinations demanded considerable engineering knowledge and experience,
both practical and academic, and an engineer’s post was responsible and
reasonably paid. In 1914, not too long after 1892 in those pre-inflationary
days, a chief engineer on a liner would earn around £30 a month, while on a
tramp he would earn about £20. This compares well with Ernest’s post office
salary of £174 a year in 1934. After his examination success in 1864 Elliott
had an unbroken record of voyages until 1872. Most were short, calling at
Mediterranean and Adriatic ports. Between sailings he passed his first class
certificate. From 1870, on the Northumbria, he was on a longer assignment to
Port Said and Bombay and away from England for about 18 months. In 1872 he
did another short Mediterranean trip and there is then a lengthy gap in his
sea-going record. His next journey was not until 1884 and he had only two
more, in 1885 and 1887, before the voyage that ended in his death in 1892. On 25 June 1884 he applied for a replacement certificate, explaining that
his original certificate had been lost at sea when his ship was in collision
with SS Vosscombe of Sunderland and that he had reported the loss to
Southwark Police Station on 25 June 1884. A replacement was issued,
and returned to the authorities after his death.
His well-documented professional career contrasts with the lack of
information about the milestones of his personal life. On the various forms
he completed when applying for examinations and certificates he states his
year of birth as 1835 and his place of birth as Newcastle. 1835 was too early
for the civil registration of births, deaths and marriages, which began only
in September 1837 and I have not found a marriage certificate for him and
Sarah Freeman, Annie's mother. However, because searches of civil and church
records show that there were only a few inter-related Bormonds in England,
concentrated in Northumberland and Durham and adhering to the Church of Scotland
or Presbyterian church, it has been possible to establish Elliott's family
roots.
The earliest sign of a Bormond in the Mormon International Genealogical
index is the 1845 baptism, in Glasgow, of Thomas Bormond, son of William
Bormond and Elizabeth Meason. Bormond is an uncommon name in the UK and it
seems that most branches of the Bormond family grow up, as we did, with a
story that the Bormonds came from France. This might well be true since
there are more Bormonds in French records than in UK records. The IGI lists
2 Bormond marriages in the 1760s. John Bormond married Sarah Walker in 1763
in Alnwick, Northumberland, and William Bormond married Elisabeth Stuart in
Dumfries in 1767. It seems likely that John and William were sons of Thomas. One or other of these marriages produced another William Bormond who married
Catherine Whelis in Alnwick in 1794 and a Joseph Bormond who married
Catherine Bower in 1796, also in Alnwick. The offspring of William and
Joseph and their respective Catherines account for all the Bormonds in
nineteenth century UK records: there are only 15 Bormonds in the national
index of the census. A preponderance of daughters helped to limit the spread
of the Bormond name. Elliott descends from Joseph Bormond and Catherine
Bower. Between 1797 and 1812 they produced seven children, all baptised at
the Clayport Presbyterian Meeting House in Alnwick. One of their daughters,
Agnes, married a cousin, William Bormond, and they lived and produced a
family in Blyth, Northumberland. The 1841 census shows William as a Pitman
at Cowpen Colliery. Joseph remained in Alnwick and worked as a nailer,
presumably a self-explanatory occupation.
Just one of Joseph and Catherine's seven children was a boy, another Joseph
Bormond, born in 1806. His wife was Mary Elliott who was born around 1809 in
Castle Eden, Durham, and, after the obligatory Joseph for their first son,
their second son, born around 1835, was named Elliott, a name which
persisted in that branch of the Bormond family for some generations. Joseph
and Mary made numerous moves in their married life: their children's births
were registered in Gateshead, Middlesburgh, Bishopwearmouth, Bridlington and
York. When the births of his older children were registered Joseph gave his
occupation as 'provision merchant' or 'bacon factor' but when his son John was
born in Bishopwearmouth in 1844 Joseph was listed as Agent for the British
Temperance Society. A book held in the
Livesey Collection of Temperance
History at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston,
PT Winskill:The
Temperance Movement and its workers: a record of social, moral, religious
and political progress (Blackie and Son, 1892) contains much information
about Joseph Bormond who is described as the well-known Northumbrian
Temperance advocate. One anecdote describes how in 1840 he was induced to
settle down at Middlesborough [sic] as a provision dealer, and with all the
energy of which he was capable in those days he gave the temperance movement
his earnest sympathy and support….At this time a large number of excavators
were engaged in cutting the Middlesborough Dock: and it is an interesting
and important fact that the first dock in Middlesborough was cut by teetotal
navvies who signed the pledge under Mr Joseph Bormond and his co-workers.
There are descriptions of his preaching to large meetings throughout the
north-east, and his work in the colliery districts of Northumberland and Durham,
especially during the miners' strike of 1844 when he was the agent of the
Northern Temperance Association. His work was apparently reported in the
Northern Temperance Journal published by Mr James Bewcastle of
Newcastle-upon Tyne. He was a founder member of the Vegetarian Society in
1844 and remained a strict vegetarian throughout his life. He was also a
founder member, in 1876, of The Order of Danielites, pledged to abstain from
flesh, alcohol and tobacco. In or about 1855 , according to Winskill, Joseph
settled in London where he became well known as an able, earnest and
laborious temperance and moral reformer, guided by high-toned religious
principles. He is shown in the 1861 census living off the Old Kent Road in
Peckham and appears in the 1864 London Directory running a Temperance Hotel
at 45 Essex Street, the Strand. This was the address that Elliott Bormond
gave when he sat for his first examination as a ship's engineer. Again
according to Winskill, towards the end of Joseph's life a number of his
friends bought an annuity for his old age, but unfortunately the investment
failed and all was lost. This made his last days far from being what they
ought to have been. In February 1889 he fell in the street, broke his arm,
and suffered other injuries. He was taken to the London Temperance Hospital
where he died on 22 March. He was buried in Tooting Cemetery and his
son-in-law, Pastor John Bennet Anderson, Bryom Hall, Liverpool, officiated at
the graveside. Joseph's only listing in the
British Library catalogue is as
the author of an appendix to one of Anderson's works, Bible Teetotalism and
the Voice of Facts; being the substance of lectures delivered in St John’s
School Room, Westminster and other parts of London by John Bennet Anderson,
Home Missionary of St John the Evangelist, Westminster. 2nd edition revised
and corrected, containing important additions, including Testimonies of Very
Eminent Persons, with an appendix by Joseph Bormond. Second edition
published in 1868 by Heywood and Co. Joseph has no gravestone at Tooting
cemetery, now
Lambeth Cemetery, Blackshaw Road. He was buried in a common
grave. So far there are no clues as to which of Joseph's daughters
married the pastor.
When their grandfather died, Annie Bormond was about 16 years old, Annie's
brother, yet another Joseph Bormond, was 18 and their oldest sister, Sarah
was 25 years old. And yet the story of Joseph's mission, or his prestige,
was never mentioned to his great-grandchildren. The only hint, clues which
now fall into place, came from Annie's brother, our Great Uncle Joe. He and
Annie were great friends and we used to see a lot of him, particularly
during the wartime months when his daughter, Julie, shared her shelter with
us. Uncle Joe, a retired ship's carpenter with a gift of the gab perhaps
inherited from his preacher grandfather, used to tell us that there had been
money in the family and that it had been given away by a family member who
had become an Evangelical Christian. Uncle Joe's resentful account of the
Evangelical Christian suggests that he knew a bit about his grandfather's
career and had perhaps heard some gossip about the annuity failure. But the
flimsy nature of his information suggests that even though Joseph Bormond
lived in London from the 1850s onwards, his contact with Elliott's family was
either tenuous or hostile.
It is possible that this resulted from his disapproval of Elliott's
relationship with Sarah Freeman. There is no record that they were legally
married. However Sarah Bormond, formerly Freeman, registered all their nine
children as children of Elliott Bormond, described variously as a steam
vessel engineer or marine engineer. Confusingly, however, she gave the first
seven children the second name of Freeman, as, for example, Annie Freeman Bormond. Annie’s brother, Joseph Freeman Bormond, claimed that this was
because if the family fortune, given away by the Evangelical Christian, were
ever restored it would only go to those called Freeman. He obviously
realised that there was something unusual about the naming, but the more
likely explanation was that Sarah was afraid that they were not legally
entitled to the name Bormond. However, after seven children, in 1878, Sarah
changed her practice and named her eighth child Florence Georgina Bormond. The youngest Bormond child was Gertrude, born in 1881, and she was given the
unlikely second name of Bennett. 1881 was a strange year for names in the Bormond household. The 1881 census shows them living at 250 Lynton Road,
Bermondsey. However, the family head was named as James Barnard, a
44-year-old marine engineer born in Hoxton: Sarah and the children were
listed as Barnards. At the time Sarah must have been heavily pregnant with
Gertrude Bennett Bormond who was born in May 1881 and registered as
Elliott’s child. Elliott gave Lynton Road as his address when he reported
the loss of his engineer’s certificate in 1884: James Barnard, unlike
Elliott, has no entry in the Kew index of ship’s engineers: Elliott had no
recorded voyages between 1872 and 1882. Was James Barnard of Hoxton in fact
Elliott Bormond of Newcastle, for some reason living under an assumed name?
Or was James Barnard merely a lodger, mistaken by the census enumerator for
husband and father? Is it possible that Gertrude's second name, Bennet, was
an indication of conciliation with Joseph Bormond and his son-in-law, John
Bennet Anderson?
Like the Woods, Sarah and Elliott are difficult to track through their
various moves. They seem to have remained longest at 250 Lynton Road where
they were living for the 1881 census. It was there that Georgina and
Gertrude were born, where 7-year-old Agnes Freeman Bormond died in 1883, and
where Elliott was living when he reported the loss of his certificate. No. 250 Lynton Road has gone but the long road still exists, a mixture of
the flat-fronted cottages such as they would have lived in and post-war council
houses. Sarah Freeman Bormond, their oldest child, was born in January 1864
at 45 Queen Street which is shown on the 1872 Bermondsey map, running
alongside a tannery and ending at the walls of a rag-and-bone yard. When
Elliott sat his examination as a second engineer in May 1864, he gave his
address as 45 Essex Street, in the Strand. In those days, before the Royal
Courts of Justice had been built, Essex Street was not yet the preserve of
barristers; but we know that its No. 45 housed the Temperance Hotel, run by
Joseph Bormond. In 1867 when Elliott sat an examination as a First Engineer
his address was Philadelphia Terrace, Mount Gardens, Lambeth, behind the
Lambeth Palace grounds. Sarah was living at 4 Manor Street, Bermondsey, for
the birth of Joseph in 1871 and of Annie in August 1873. Manor Street led
off Lynton Road, but is now submerged in the post-war Manor Estate. Sarah
and the children were there for the 1871 census but Elliott was on his
travels. The 1891 census shows Elliott and Sarah together for the census for
the only time. They were living in Ivydale Road, Peckham with 4 of their
surviving children. Records do not reveal where Elliott and Sarah met.
Perhaps he came to London in the 1850s with his parents to do the
ship-building training necessary for his marine engineer qualification. Stephen Inwood
points out that until the 1860s London was Britain’s leading ship-builder and
that most of the early pioneering work on steam-powered and iron vessels was
done on the Thames.
Maudslay Sons and
Field of Lambeth were England’s leading manufacturers of marine engines and
they were just one of many engineering companies based in Southwark and Lambeth.
The Freemans
Sarah Freeman was born not south of the river, but in London
Street, Bethnal Green, on 29 May 1839 and baptised at St Matthews, Bethnal
Green, in the November. Her birth was not entered in the post-1837 Civil
Registers. She had an older sister, Emma, born at Union Street, Bethnal
Green in February 1832 and baptised at St Matthew's a month later. Their
parents, Charles and Sarah, both previously widowed, had been married at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, in May 1830. The family is listed in
the 1851 census at 9
North Street, Bethnal Green. Charles, then aged 77, was a silk dyer, Sarah,
aged 59, a laundress, 17-year-old Emma a servant and 11-year-old Sarah a
scholar. The birthright of a silk dyer's daughter in 1839 was no more
promising than that of a leather-worker’s child.
Huguenot settlement in Spitalfields after 1685 had expanded the existing minor silk trade into an
industry which made fortunes for a few, provided employment, albeit sweated,
for many thousands and made a huge contribution to London’s economic life. Like all textile trades it was always volatile, dependent on fashion fads,
threatened by foreign competition and, increasingly, by new labour-saving
machinery. There were widespread riots by desperate weavers in the 1760s,
culminating in the hanging of two of their leaders in Bethnal Green in 1769. Protectionist legislation following this unrest maintained employment
levels, although not wage rates, for a while, but within a couple of decades
the industry collapsed. Again I summarise Stephen Inwood’s account: The 1851
census shows about 21,000 men and women working in the silk industry
compared with about 50,000 in 1824. The 1840 Handloom Weavers’ Commission
found that they were a "Lilliputian" race whose children were "squalid,
wretched and starved." In 1849 Henry Mayhew found the weavers of Spitalfields living in a state of gloomy destitution. Many women, like Sarah
Freeman, the mother, were forced into casual employment as laundresses. 11-year-old Sarah Freeman in 1851 was perhaps lucky not to have been
working, as she might have done in earlier years, in a sweated workshop, but
her family could probably have done with her earnings and her designation as
scholar probably signified her age rather than her participation in
education.
These were the conditions in which an elderly Charles Freeman struggled to
support his second family. He had been born in Allesley, Warwickshire,
between Birmingham and Coventry, and baptised there in July 1773. In October
1795, already a silk dyer, he married Mary Peet at St Dunstan’s Stepney and
their son, Charles, was baptised at Christ Church, Spitalfields in August
1796. Sarah therefore had at least one brother old enough to be her father
and, in those days of regular additions to the family, probably more than
one. Although Charles became a veteran in the silk industry, still working
at the age of 77, his arrival some time before 1795 made him just one more
of the rural migrants so resented by silk workers fighting for a living. Eighteenth century enclosures and agrarian reforms, coupled with turnpike
roads and better coaches, increased the number of dispossessed rural workers
drawn into London in search of work and higher wages.
According to the 1851 census Sarah Conner, the widow who married Charles in
1830, was born in Bexley, Kent. In 1871 she was living with her daughter and
family at Manor Road, Bermondsey, and gave her place of birth as Crayford, a
village which borders Bexley: Crayford had calico and silk printing mills as
late as 1876. Sarah, either alone or with her first husband, presumably left
to find greater opportunities in the Spitalfields area. I have not tracked
down her first 
marriage or her maiden name. A James Conner was born to James
and Sarah Conner and baptised at St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, in March 1818. He may have been another, older, half-brother to Sarah Bormond. After the
1851 Bethnal Green census our next confirmed sighting of the younger Sarah
is the birth in 1864 of her first child, yet another Sarah, in 45 Queen
Street. Sarah, the 59-year-old laundress of 1851, was still working as a
laundress, giving her age now as 73, when she was listed with her daughter’s
family in 1871 at Manor Road. Elliott’s wages as a First Engineer presumably
did not stretch to supporting his mother-in-law as well as his growing
family. The older Sarah Freeman must have died before the next census in
1881: she is not listed with the mysterious Barnard family. The two ages
that Sarah, the laundress, herself gave to census-takers place her date of
birth as somewhere between 1792 and 1798.
Sarah Bormond’s children
Despite the poverty of her childhood and the apparent ambiguities of her
adult life, Sarah Bormond managed to raise eight forceful, interesting
children. Her oldest son, Elliott Freeman Bormond, apparently followed his
father into seafaring, but Annie never had any contact with him in my
lifetime. Joseph, the other son, became a ship’s carpenter and raised his
family in Greenwich. He was always full of news and views, and speculation
about the Bormond family, including his theory that they were descended from
the Bourbon Kings of France! Annie kept in touch with her three older
sisters, Sarah, Emma and Mary, throughout her life. In the 1940s we used to
visit Aunt Sarah in her rooms in Coldharbour Lane where she must have been a
near neighbour of John Major's family. Even in her late 70s she was a tall,
ramrod-straight figure, testament to her calling as a corsetière, working in
Bon Marché, Brixton. At the age of 30, in 1894, she had married a corset
manufacturer, John William Russell, a widower. He was a witness at the
weddings of two of her sisters, Emma and Gertie. By 1901 Sarah Russell,
corset maker, was the head of a household in Granville Square, Islington: her
step-son William Russell, a valet, was living with her. When she died in Coldharbour Lane in 1945 she was the widow of a Mr Knibbs. Emma had married
Edgar Nye, a printer, at St Giles’s Church, Camberwell in 1899: both Edgar
and Emma gave their address as 46, The Grove (now Camberwell Grove). When we
paid our regular visits to Aunt Emma, she lived above a coal office in
Abbeville Road, Clapham, with Aunt Mary. The family tale about Mary was that
she had been the mistress of a rich German merchant who had a wife at home
and who had been interned and died during the First World War. In fact she appears
in the 1891 census living at 21 Keppell Street, Bloomsbury, the wife of
Adolph Strauss, a negotiator of patent agents, born in Prussia. Nine-year-old
Gertrude Bormond was visiting her sister at the time. There is no trace of
Mary or Adolph in the 1901 census but Adolf Strauss Collen was a witness at
the weddings of both Annie and Georgie in 1903, and Mary Collin, perhaps
Mary Bormond/Strauss, was a witness at Sarah's 1894 wedding.
As well as Sarah Russel's household in 6 Granville Square the
1901 census
also shows a household headed by Sarah Bormond at the same address. Annie,
Georgina and Gertrude were still living at home with their mother. Annie was
a sewing machine saleswoman, Georgina was a dress-maker on her own account
and Gertrude was a corset maker. However, Annie's children, Arthur, Margaret
and Ted, spoke as they grew older of their mother and two of her sisters
having performed as a music hall act, The Three Diabolos. As children we
understood that our grandmother had been a piano teacher. There was
certainly a lot of music in the Wood household. Family sing-songs and
everyone performing their party piece, particularly during the war, were
reality, not myth, in this family but we never saw Annie performing on
either the
diabolo
or the mandolin. Clerkenwell was an entertainment centre
in Edwardian days. The Sadler’s Wells Theatre was a music-hall from 1893 to
1906 and there were many other variety theatres in the area. Granville
Square was a convenient address for the three young diabolos to live and
look for work. I have looked through theatre advertisements in the Islington
Gazette at the turn of the century but unfortunately found no trace of our
grandmother and her sisters. Marriage and motherhood intervened before they
became stars. I assume that Annie’s stage partners must have been her
younger sisters, Georgie and Gertie, but as far as I know she had lost touch
with them and we never met them. There was certainly no secret about Georgie’s music-hall past. We knew that she had been a music-hall performer
with her husband, Georgie Royal, along with such names as
Albert Chevalier
and
Gus Elen, and that they later ran a theatrical boarding-house on Brixton
Hill. George Royal could have been a second husband, or perhaps it was the
stage name of John Brown, the actor who married Georgie in 1903. In 1902, Gertie, the youngest sister, had married from the same Granville Square
address as her sisters, Georgie and Annie, a year later. Her husband,
William Figgures, was a carpenter whose family lived in Stoney Street,
Southwark, beside Southwark Cathedral and the Borough Market. His
father, John, was a fruit and potato merchant, as William Webb, Ernest’s
great-grandfather, had been in 1816.
Those of us who descend from the marriages of Woods, Webbs, Parkers,
Freemans and Bormonds are somewhat unusual as Londoners in that so many of
our forebears have roots in London which pre-date the nineteenth century. A
William Wood was a fishmonger in London in 1695: it would be nice to think
he handed down his trade to Edward Wood who was a fishmonger in Southwark
when his son, Richard, Margaret’s great-grandfather, was born in 1810! The
majority of Londoners by the end of the nineteenth century would have had at
least one agricultural labourer as a grandparent, but traces of the Woods
and Webbs disappear into the church records of riverside London, rather than
the parish churches of rural England. Charles Freeman had a rural background
in Warwickshire but he had left there before the end of the eighteenth
century: Joseph Parker, the soldier, might also have had a rural
Warwickshire past but he was in London by 1835 when Margaret was born in
Kennington. The elusive figure of Elliott Bormond, who adds so much mystery
to the family story, might have been of distant French ancestry. He
certainly had a Tynemouth background and that wasn’t nineteenth century
rural. So we can claim to be true Londoners, even if we can’t claim the
bucolic roots of most of our fellow Londoners.
* * * * *
Jane Maureen Cornwell Barder
Wandsworth, London
January, 2000;
revised October, 2005
