Charles Arthur Bradley

Henry Bradley and Maria Robinson’s second son, was Charles Arthur Bradley, born in 1857 in Mayfair. In 1881, Charles was living with most of the rest of the family with the ancient matriarch from Bristol, Somerset, Elizabeth Ann Hounsell, then aged 87.

Charles had taken up the interesting profession of foreman framemaker (carver and guilder). He has taken some tracking down thereon, but it is presumably him in the 1891 census living in the St Pancras and Camden Down district. He is living with his wife Louie or Louise, or indeed Louisa, and a daughter aged 7, similarly named and just as confusingly transcribed. Charles is recorded as a foreman upholsterer of cabinets. It is most likely also that there is a mistranscription in his marriage certificate, below and that poor, accident-prone Henry Smale Bradley had his middle name changed by the struggling registrar to the much easier-to-handle ‘Smith’.

Marriage certificate for Charles Bradley. The father of the groom is presumably Henry Smale Bradley.

Charles Bradley and Lucy Jane Tothill had one daughter, Lucy Lillian Bradley, born in Pentonville in 1883, and a first cousin of Hetty Jane Owen.

The twist in the tale is that in 1892 a Lucy Jane Bradley married a Frederick George Robinson (1856-1913), the son of George Powell Robinson, and grandson of Harriett Wombwell and Charles John Robinson.

This was the very same Lucy Jane Tothill who had been married to Charles Bradley, whom we must kindly assume had died in the interim.

To complicate the story further, Frederick George was the very same Robinson who had previously married Kate Louisa Bradley, the youngest daughter of Henry Smale Bradley and Maria Robinson (We should perhaps recall at this point that in the 1891 census, Frederick was living next door to the Bradleys, and that Kate Louisa had died the previous year).

In summary, Frederick George Robinson not only married Henry and Maria’s youngest daughter, but also, subsequently, the widow of their second son. Lucy Lillian Bradley was still living with them in 1911, and was working as a milliner. Frederick Robert Robinson (1900-1974) was a son of Frederick George and Lucy Jane.

It is hard to say whether from within her grave, Harriett Wombwell would have been screaming with rage or laughing uproariously. But whenever the Bradleys, normally so prim, ordinary and respectable ran into the Robinsons with their wild Irish, buccaneering travelling menagerie blood, strange things always seemed to happen.