The Second Time Round

The remainder of the life and career of Charles John Robinson can be traced episodically through the census returns. In 1841, the family were living in North Street, Poplar, with the exception of their eldest son, Charles, who was staying with his grandmother, Maria West in Stoke Newington. 

In 1851, Charles is listed as a foreman in the West India Docks, whilst in 1861 he seems to be at work with two of his sons, his address being the Pier Gate of the West India South Dock. Harriett Wombwell and her daughters were all safely back home in Stepney on the same day.

The 1861 census marks a last appearance in the census returns for both Charles John Robinson and Harriett Wombwell, but as we know there was still one final act in their personal drama to be played out, when the Irish lands of Maria West once more reared their head, and when the decision of Charles so many years earlier to ignore the technical details of what did or did not constitute a marriage came back to haunt the family. 

With the salacious details of the carryings on of both Maria West and Charles Robinson about to be exposed in the High Court of London (in 1865, according to Harriett’s will) some very interesting family councils must have been held, which unfortunately we are not in a position to report. 

Harriett (presumably) decided in 1864, there was only one thing for it. Taking her ageing husband firmly by the hand (he was seventy-four by this time), he was marched down from their then home at 15 Gainsborough Street to St. Dunstan, Stepney, this time to commit properly and legally to his marital vows through a proper and repeated process of publishing their marital banns, someone having established in the meantime, or at worst ensured, that Mary Weston, was well and truly and properly and definitively deceased. 

Modestly, the couple chose not to trouble the recording church registrar with their ages, and after some icy exchanges, the young registrar seems to have agreed that the column in question could be left blank. It was forty years on from the date of their original marriage. Charles was to die in 1868 to be followed, just three years later, by Harriett. 

Needless to say, neither the details of the second marriage nor the court-case that accompanied it were amongst the documents that had been neatly folded up and stored in Harold Eldridge’s box file.