The Line of Thomas Edward Bradley and Ann Jane Chapman: The First Generation

First Generation
		Thomas Edward Bradley (1816-1857) m. Ann Jane Chapman (1817-1899)
2.	i	Thomas Edward Bradley (1843–1927). The key point about Thomas Edward Bradley (the second) is that he married Rosetta Robinson (1842-1928), daughter of Harriett Wombwell and Charles John Robinson. He was thus both nephew and brother-in law of Henry Smale Bradley. And Hetty Jane Owen by extension had a ‘double cousinhood’ relationship with him.  Thomas and Rosetta had seven children. Their timeline is as follows: 1843: Thomas was born at 4 Hill Street, Bow. 1851: Thomas, aged eight was a boarder on the West Ham Lane, Church Street District at a Classical and Commercial Scholary. 1861: Thomas was back living with his family at 4 Richard Street, Bow. 1865: He married Rosetta at the Holy Trinity Church in Mile End Town. He was then working as a licensed victualler in Brook Green, Hammersmith. 1871: Now married to Rosetta, he was living at 12 Baggally Street in Mile End Old Town and was a clerk in the wool trade. 1881: They were living at 14 St. James Road, West Ham. Thomas was now working as a commercial clerk. 1901 and 1911: They were living at 99 Caistor Park Road, West Ham, with Thomas working as a ship’s clerk. Memorial card for Rosetta Robinson, daughter of Harriett Wombwell, from the Box File
3.	ii	Ann Jane Bradley (1845–1891) was born in Bromley St. Leonard. She married Charles Norman in 1866 in St. Mary, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets. They had seven children.  Charles was the elder brother of Edmund Norman, who married Alice Sophia Robinson, the youngest daughter of Harriett Wombwell. 1871: They were living at 4 Elizabeth Cott Fields, Forest Gate, West Ham. 1881: They were living at 55 St James Road, in the same street as Thomas Edward Bradley, above. 1891: They had moved on to 137 Boleyn Road, West Ham. This was the year of Ann Jane Bradley’s death.
4.	iii	Edwin Bradley (1849–????) was born in Four Mill Street (later to become St Leonards Street) in Bromley by Bow. He married Martha Downton in 1876 in Mile End Old Town and they had four children. In 1901 he was living at 35 Hampton Road, Forest Gate and was a Carriers Manager. He was made a Freeman of the City in 1917.
	iv	Louisa Mary Bradley (1850–????). No further information has been located about Louisa Mary or her two younger sisters below.
	v.	Rosetta Amelia Bradley  (1852–????)
	vi	Emma Bradley  (1855–????)

The Children of Thomas Bradley and Elizabeth Hounsell

The children of Thomas Bradley and Elizabeth Hounsell were:

i. Elizabeth Bradley (1814-????). Elizabeth was born in Tower Hamlets. We know nothing more of her.

ii. Thomas Edward Bradley (1816-1857). He was living in Four Mill Street (now St Leonards Street) at the time of the 1851 census with his wife and family and, like his father, working as a baker. He married Ann Jane Chapman in 1840 in Poplar.

The Sun Flour Mills, St Leonard Street. Probably the Bradleys sourced their flour from here.

iii. Maria Bradley (1817-????). She was living with her brother Henry and his family in 1861 in their house in 8 Coborn Street, Bow. She married Francis Benjamin Boyd Fleuret in 1841 St Dunstans and All Saints Church. He died in 1846, and the couple had two children.

iv. Louisa Bradley (1822-????). She married William Jones, a master mariner, in 1844 at St Dunstans and All Saints Church. Her younger brother, Henry Smale Bradley witnessed the ceremony. We know nothing of what happened to them. However, by 1851, Louisa was living with her recently widowed mother and youngest brother Edwin at 59 Canton Street, Poplar. Her husband may have been at sea or already deceased.

v. Henry Smale Bradley (1825-1880). He was a builder’s manager’s clerk in 1851 and was living in Chelsea with his wife and family.   It was this Henry that on the 20th August 1849 at the Shadwell Parish Church married Maria Harriett Robinson, the eldest daughter of Charles John Robinson and Harriett Wombwell.

vi. Edwin Bradley (1831-????) also became a mariner. He too vanishes from the scene after the 1851 census.

These children all grew up to the east of the Robinson parishes, specifically in in the Bromley-by-Bow and Poplar area. The bakery must have turned over a good profit, and may well have been a major supplier to the docks, since the children as they reached adulthood seemed to have both financial resources and to have been well-educated.

Of these children, Henry Smale Bradley was Hetty Jane Owen’s grandfather, and the other siblings her great uncles and aunts.

The lines of these children will now follow, starting with the rather extended line of Thomas Edward Bradley and Ann Jane Chapman.

The First Bradleys

The first strictly verifiable sighting of the Bradley family in this area comes in 1813 with the marriage of one Thomas Bradley to Elizabeth Hounsell on 21st April in St. Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney, in the borough of Tower Hamlets in the presence, amongst others, of one Edward Bradley. Six children followed, the first three baptised in the same very church, and the last three at All Saints, Poplar.
In the 1841 census the family were all living in Robinhood Lane, Poplar. The houses in Robinhood Lane were originally built as part of the East India dock development and according to the British Survey of History were generally two-up and two down with a washroom at the back. Some had been converted into shops, including a baker’s at number four. This may well have been both the Bradley bakery and home, since we know from the 1841 census that Thomas was a baker.

Robinhood Lane. The Beehive Pub to the right was Number 12. The Bradley home would therefore have been just a few doors away. From: http://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/Poplar/Beehive.shtml

Unlike Maria West up in Stoke Newington who on that very same census day, baldly and quite falsely stated that she was from Middlesex, the Bradleys made no such profession. In fact, we know from later censuses, when the actual place of birth was recorded, that Elizabeth Hounsell was from Bristol.

As for Thomas Bradley, it is hard to say. He died in a madhouse in 1851, just before the census of that same year.  All we categorically know is that he was not born in the County of Middlesex.

A Docklands Interregnum

The docks of mid-nineteenth century London must have been a maelstrom of all manner of different types of human industry and activity. Like any great port area, here would have been a hive of different peoples, languages and vocations. The ships cargoes had to be discharged and made ready for transportation, the ships repaired and refurbished before their next voyages, and their sailors, starved of entertainment after months at sea, would have been carousing the taverns and brothels of the area, whilst awaiting their next embarkation orders.

The port authorities and governing classes would meanwhile have been struggling to bring regulation and system to the docks, as the churches strove to inject some much needed moral guidance into the equation.

The docks would have attracted all kinds of characters – criminals, opportunists, entrepreneurs, employment seekers and more, from all around Britain and far further afoot too. Stories of perilous experiences, of far off countries would be exchanged, and exotic goods of various types dispersed and shown off, even, for example, a pair of boa constrictors that could be shown off for a small fee in the local taverns. From sea and from land tumbled in the under-nourished, the ill, the injured, the widowed and orphaned, the street urchins, and gangs all carousing the area in search of easy pickings, gainful employment, or just some kind of means of hope or survival.

The London Boroughs. Newham was formed out of the old boroughs of West Ham and East Ham. From: http://hidden-london.com/miscellany/london-boroughs-map/

Leaving the docks and heading up Farmer Street, past the birthplace of Charles John Robinson, would have been to walk along a road of seamen and docklanders’ families, a community formed by maritime trade. Farmer Street ran very roughly parallel to New and Old Gravel Lane, and all off these three streets emerged onto the New Ratcliff Highway. Turning left down the Highway would bring you in fairly short order to St. George of the East, birthplace of Harriett Wombwell, and perhaps the location of Richard Wombwell’s chandler’s and grocer’s businesses. A right turn into Betts Street just past St George of the East would be called for you should you wish to do some business with or simply pay a visit to that famous German supplier of wild animals, Mr Charles Jamrach.

Going further north, you would soon reach the Commercial Road, headquarters of George Wombwell’s menagerie emporium, having by then possibly passed by North Street where Harriett and Charles were living in 1841. Further north and to the east lay the parishes of Hoxton, Haggerston, West Ham, Forest Gate, to take just some examples.

London Underground map showing Docklands and The East End

The trend is clear, and was replicated by Richard Wombwell and other dockland families also. When the opportunity  arose, move and put some distance between yourself and the docks. And if like, Charles John Robinson, the sea was in your blood, and the docks were your life, the message of your wife was likely to be that you either investigate your ‘stay-over’ options, or learn the meaning of the word ‘commute’.

Thus the East End of London straddled Shadwell, Stepney, Limehouse, Shoreditch, Bow, Bromley-by-Bow, Poplar and Mile End, and the residences of the Robinsons were scattered across both the boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Hackney.

Hetty Jane Owen's Robinson Ancestry

The direct line of Hetty Jane Owen through the Robinsons is:

1. Charles Robinson (????) m. Mary Powell (1769-????)
2. Charles John Robinson (1790-1868) m. Harriett Wombwell (1804-1871)
3. Maria Harriett Robinson (1829-1878) m. Henry Smale Bradley (1825-1880)
4. Maria Rosetta Bradley (1860-1945) m. Edward Samuel Owen (1858-1887)
5. Hetty Jane Owen (1883-1953) m. Charles Albert Eldridge (1889-1968)

Note: The parents of Mary Powell (1769-????) may have been: George Powell (????) and Mary

West India Docks in around 1802 by William Daniell. From: http://www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/the-new-london-docks-of-the-early-19th-century/

Borough of Stepney: The Robinsons moved around this area and beyond at a fair pace.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AStepney_Met._B_Ward_Map_1916.svg

Harriett Wombwell and Charles John Robinson in Numbers

Harriett Wombwell and Charles John Robinson had nine children. This resulted in – and here is an insight into the times – an astonishing fifty-five grandchildren. Harriett lived long enough to witness the birth of twenty-seven of them. Harriett therefore has to qualify as a grand matriarch of the first order. Even Queen Victoria only managed forty-two grandchildren.

Of course in the world that Harriett and Charles were born into, large families were the norm. Infant mortality was high, and life expectancy as a whole therefore lower. But even in those times, a little bit of wealth, coming in this case through Irish land rentals, enabled a better standard of living. The majority of the children survived, and once they had passed the age of five, the chances of them then reaching a healthy old age were dramatically increased, one of the major remaining risks being death during or after childbirth. On the evidence of these Robinson lines, any kind of birth control practice in the extended family was either only sporadically observed, or sporadically successful. The family spread far and wide and at an impressive rate.

Ratcliffe Highway, St George in the East, the parish where Harriett Wombwell was born. Note Jamrach’s animal shop across the road. From: https://www.flickr.com/photos/100027183@N07/9805332785

There must though have been an economic price to pay for this fecundity and new found longevity. Even when the Irish lands of Maria West had finally been auctioned off in 1881, Harriett’s legacy was a very divided one, even for her children. With the large families that these children then had, it cannot have taken very long for their inherited wealth to vanish. They were then left to make their own way through life using their own wits. Most – but not all – sought to find their way out of the London docks, and all that dockland life represented. Some of the children put the technical skills they had learned in the area into practice, through carpentry, engineering, and through engaging with emergent technologies such as bicycle manufacturing, radio equipment, and nautical instruments. Others fell back into more working class pursuits becoming plumbers, boiler repairers, and the like. There were branches too who were attracted to possibilities overseas, and who made their way to new lives and new possibilities in the dominions.

What all of them seemed to have in common, by and large, was the view that life in the London Docks was less a romantic idyll than an evil necessity. As soon as the opportunity came to move on, they did so. London, the great seducer, which had drawn into her web, Essex farmers like the Wombwells, and Irish emigres like Maria West, and brought them into contact with stalwarts of the maritime community, such as the Robinsons, was beginning to lose its allure. Many of the later Robinson descendants left London entirely and moved on, to the South Coast of England, even then popular as a retirement destination, to Yorkshire, to the West country, and to the New Worlds of Australia and Canada.

In 1805, Horatio Nelson famously pronounced, just prior to the Battle of Trafalgar that ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’. This exhortation however conceals the truth that his fleet and crews were extraordinarily cosmopolitan:

Apart from English, Welsh and Scottish, the Irish were by far the largest contingent with over 3573 men indicating that Ireland was their place of birth. There were over 361 American born sailors. There are examples of Swedes (78), Norwegians (25), Prussians (23), Russians (9), Maltese (25), and Italians (115). From France there were 20, and Spain 8. Even from land-locked Austria there were at least 5. From Canada, particularity Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, 31 men. 17 are listed as born in Africa. They were all probably black although race is not given. Similarly, 123 from the West Indies. Probably all former slaves, now free men and sailors. 

(From: http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/nelsons_navy.html)

Such was the melting pot of Nelson’s fleet. Whether through desperation, compulsion, patriotism, vocation, or simply a sense of adventure, the assorted multicultural fleet of sailors and mercenaries did Nelson proud. For those Robinsons involved, heralding from Shadwell in the heart of the docks, such diversity can hardly have concerned them too much. Indeed, the Docklands population itself would have very much been a mirror of Nelson’s navy.

This was after all, just a part of what it meant to be part of a global trading empire in which movement of goods was accompanied by - as a natural concomitant - movement of people. This is not to say that these docklanders mixed particularly freely. Race, language, religion, colour, education and social class all played a part in the formation of numerous sub-communities within the whole, with the family being a prime unit of operation.

It is fair to presume that the average nineteenth century mariner would not have been awarded too many prizes for a life of temperance, sobriety and abstinence. The taverns and streets of Shadwell must have fairly hummed with scandal, gossip, and knowing looks. But even in such communities there must have been limits. And when Mary Weston – acting perhaps on the presumption that Charles John Robinson was dead, managed to acquire herself ‘three dark children’ in the space of five years, she must have crossed several lines. Blackwood, well over a century later, recording this in the Linen Hall Library would have raised his eyebrows and given a quizzical shake of his head whilst recording the details. For Mary, he wrote very simply ‘public performer?’, his question mark hanging heavily in the air.

In the end though, it is thanks to the amorous but adventurous Mary – with considerable assistance of course from Napoleon - that Charles John went on to meet Harriett Wombwell – and the rest as they say is history – Robinson history, to be precise.

The Line of Alice Sophia Robinson and Edmund G.Norman

First Generation
1.			Alice Sophia Robinson (1846-1918) m. Edmund G.Norman (1847-1906)
		i.	Percy Edmund Norman (1873–????). Percy was born in Mile End.
		ii	Alice May Norman (1875–????). Alice was born in Leytonstone.
	2.	iii	Herbert Leonard Norman (1876–1943) was born in Bow and died in Kingston-upon-Hull. In 1900 in Lambeth, he married Clara Harriett Thomasson (1872-1939). He was a commercial clerk. Around 1903, the family moved to Yorkshire, to Sculcoates in the East Riding. The couple had eight children.
		iv	Sidney Norman (1880–????). Sydney was born in Bow.
Second Generation (second cousins of Hetty Jane Owen)
2.			Herbert Leonard Norman (1876–1943) m. Clara Harriett Thomasson (1872-1939).
		i	Leonard Francis Norman (1901–1981). He was born in Lambeth and died in Beverley, Yorkshire. He married Doris Davidson.
		ii	Alice May Norman (1902–1983). She was born in Southwark and died in Hull. She married Richard Ludders.
		iii	Doris Norman (1904–1982) was born in Sculcoates and died in Hull. She married Harold Copeland.
		iv	Herbert Edmund Norman (1905–1992) was born in Sculcoates and died in Hull.
		v	Muriel Clara Norman (1907–1999) was born in Sculcoates and died in Canterbury. She married Claude Hollingworth.
		vi	Lillian Thomasson Norman (1908–1943) was born in Sculcoates, married George H. Park and died in Holderness in Yorkshire.
		vii	Ivy Louisa Norman (1910–????) was born in Hull.
		viii	Gwendoline Iris Norman (1912–2001) was born and died in Hull.

It may be presumed that many children came from these lines as well.

Alice Sophia in the 1901 West Ham Census