Leitmotifs

Harold Eldridge -
son of Charles Albert Eldridge in the 1920s 

As this family history has proceeded, another bleak theme has emerged in ethereal fashion from the haze. Records of crimes committed and punishments imposed started to rear their heads through the murk. In some instances, members of the extended family were directly involved in the cases. In others, the crimes took place in their localities, and were crimes that they would have known about, discussed and evaluated. Then there were crimes, if crimes indeed they were, of a broader more political nature that had far more wide-ranging impacts on society more generally.

I could not help recalling, as this leitmotif began to develop that the son of Charles Albert Eldridge, Harold Eldridge in his capacity as Chief Medical Officer of Wandsworth Prison, occasionally enjoyed lunchtime pints with the famous forensic pathologist, Keith Simpson. These meetings would have given both men plentiful opportunity to share experiences and insights into the science of both crime and punishment. Harold was the supervising medical officer at the last hangings to take place at Wandsworth prison in the early nineteen-sixties, and Keith Simpson obtained minor celebrity after the publication of his autobiography, aptly titled Forty Years of Murder.

What really brought them careering back to mind though was a murder that took place way before the time of either man, back in Kent in 1863, a case in which the primary evidence used came not from witnesses, or hearsay, as was then the norm, but from an early use of forensics. The conclusions drawn from the samples taken were quite sufficient to secure a conviction, and concluded with the very last public hanging ever to take place in the County of Kent, that of one Alfred Eldridge of Canterbury. As can be imagined, it was quite a surprise to find an explicit connection between our own family line and that of the executed Alfred. More of him later.

Alfred was not the first or last member of the extended Eldridge clan to appear in a criminal context, and so as this work began to take shape, a more distinct emphasis was given to crimes committed and crimes chastised, which in itself gives some colour to the surrounding context, and some insight into the values and thinking of the many generations that this work touches base with. 

Looming Shadows

Hetty Jane Owen -
wife of Charles Albert Eldridge

By the time the twentieth century arrived, the old families of Kent  had scattered far and wide. Industrialization was the driving force. And as the British Empire expanded, rural folk whose families had lived in the same areas for generations, were all of a sudden offered new opportunities that spanned almost the entire surface of the planet. Yet, as the great powers of Europe competed relentlessly for prime shares of global resources, they set in motion a train of events that would lead to a terrible implosion, one that would suck in Charles Albert Eldridge and most of his generation into a conflict of a scope and scale never witnessed before. For all the invention, creativity, and brilliance of the nineteenth century Europeans, they had succeeded finally only in bringing ruination down upon themselves. They sleepwalked into catastrophe, their technological and scientific prowess having advanced way beyond their capacity or willingness to use their immense knowledge and skills for the betterment of future generations. Blinded by the twin abstractions of God and Country, and harbouring delusional concepts of higher destinies, the protagonists swept an entire generation of young people into their new paradigm, and then complacently dispatched them to the slaughter-house.

You were lucky indeed if you were able to survive this holocaust, as Charles Albert Eldridge somehow managed to do. It is thanks only to this stroke of good fortune that this story exists at all. One well-directed bullet, and none of us would ever have existed.

As it stands, it is thus a tale of transition from one era to the next, from the harsh but largely predictable lives of earlier generations into the fluid, dynamic, and volatile world of the twentieth century and beyond, with the Great War an ever present shadow looming over events as they unfold.

Eldridges in the 1891 census

Olwen Rose Eldridge,
 daughter of Charles Albert Eldridge

A survey of the 1891 census reveals that: 28% of all Eldridges in England and Wales lived in London, 17% in Sussex, 13% in Kent, 10% in Hampshire, 6% in Middlesex, and 3% in Surrey.

That accounts for over three-quarters of the Eldridge population from a total of 3,504 families, and you would assume that many of them shared a limited pool of common ancestors.

Given these percentages, and the obvious trend of migration to London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is thus more than likely that the Eldridges of Surrey had earlier roots in either Kent - as already suggested, or Sussex, or indeed both.

Pinning down these links with more precision is another matter, though. In 1891, for example, there were 461 Eldridge branches recorded in Kent, any of whom might have a claim to be hiding the missing link to the Surrey line.

It is part of this particular pursuit to see if any particularly strong candidates for that elusive bond emerged from the fog.




Note: Eldridge statistics generated by Ancestry.Com

Twists and Turns

Charles Albert Eldridge

In contrast to the paternal Eldridge line  itself which seems from the outset to remain obstinately frozen in time in Mortlake, Surrey, in the mid-eighteenth century, the line of Emily Coulter, the wife of Thomas Eldridge, and grandmother of Charles Albert Eldridge can seemingly be followed, albeit with numerous twists and turns and diversions, all the way back to when one Henry Cobbes, a possible x20 great-grandfather of Charles is recorded buying up land in the Romney area of Kent in 1258 during the reign of King Henry III.

The copious lines of descent that emerge on this side of the family are far too large to handle. But, as we shall see, there are a number of indications that the marriage of Emily Coulter and Thomas Eldridge did not arise from some chance meeting, and that the Eldridges of Surrey may themselves have roots in the county of Kent. These possible connections will be examined in some detail, and constitute one of the main refrains of the story. 

In scouring through the Kent parish records and ever-hopefully dipping into the trees of distant cousins in the search for evidence of earlier origins, certain other themes emerged. First of all, before the industrial age stuttered into action, and even for some time after it, families were much less mobile, living for generations in the same localities, and inter-marrying almost exclusively within their communities. However, this commonality noted, they were not entirely static either. As agricultural labourers, which many of them were, seasonal work led them to move quite frequently between villages and parishes, resulting in over time in the dispersal of families throughout the county, and consequent headaches for any researcher interested in stitching those branches back together again. 

Setting the Scene

Charles Albert Eldridge (left) and his elder brother
(Alfred Thomas). Inset, Charles in the Great War.

In the part of this Blog, the central figure was Hetty Jane Owen. In following her genealogical footpath back to North Wales, and further into County Down, Ireland to explore her Anglo-Norman origins, a genuine sense of a composite British identity began to take shape. Hetty Jane numbered amongst her extended ancestral family, the famous Wombwell menagerists, Irish Unionist politicians, Welsh printers, English mariners and more besides. In 1915, she married Charles Albert Eldridge in Blean in Kent. Such marriages, and there must have been many of them, may have been days of joyous celebration but they would necessarily have been streaked with fear and foreboding. All the congregation would have been aware that the Charles would soon be returning to France, and that there was every chance that he might not return. In March 1916, Hetty Jane gave birth to Olwen Rose Eldridge, an authentic child of war conceived in the midst of the thunder, fire, stench and turmoil of the Western Front.

In this second survey, the story resumes, the focus now shifting in its entirety to what would seem to be a tale of a quintessentially English family with broadly Anglo-Saxon and Jutish antecedents, and long-standing roots in south-eastern England. Whilst old family documents from Hetty’s side were always suggestive of a semi-dramatic narrative, the Eldridge archive, or what existed of it, seemed to make no such elevated claims. Furthermore, neither Harold Eldridge, son of Charles, nor his older sister, Olwen appeared to have absorbed much of any import about this side of the family from their father at all. When pressed, the most they could come up with was that they thought that the family originally came from the Wirral.

As we shall see in due course, Charles’ grandfather did indeed live in that area, in Bromborough Pool, to be precise, but neither he nor his ancestral line heralded from the north at all. In fact, his grandfather, Thomas Eldridge, was born in Putney, Surrey, barely a stone’s throw down the river from where Charles' son, Harold Eldridge at one time lived and worked in Wandsworth. Thus, these Eldridges between them had succeeded in just a couple of generations in almost wiping the historical slate entirely clean, thus leaving a fairly daunting task of restoration to their descendants.