Your monument shall be my gentle verse
That eyes not yet created shall o'er read
And tongues to be, your being, shall rehearse
When all the breathers of your world are dead
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen
Where breath most breathes - in mouths of men

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Monday 24 February 2014

Newcombe Ginn, Police Constable of London d. 1890

Newcombe Ginn was illegitimate, son of Sarah Ginn of Hertford (see post of 17th March 2013) and brought up by his mother and step father, Thomas Clark.  They lived in Cheshunt High Street, Clark being a butcher.  Indeed, when Newcombe married, he gave his father's name as Thomas Ginn, a butcher.

In 1851 Newcombe was staying at the "Haunch of Venison" pub on Cheshunt High Street (below).  Tom Clark's butchers was nearby. This pub was rebuilt in the late 19th century but was completely demolished in the late 1990s.  I knew it well as a child.




In the early 1850s Newcombe went to London, marrying Elizabeth Baker at Islington (living Bryant Place, Caledonian Rd) in 1854 when he described himself as a baker.  Soon afterwards he joined the Metropolitan Police.

There do not seem to be any surviving recruitment/service records for men who joined up at this precise time (a few years are missing) but I know that Newcombe is the only Ginn mentioned in the card index of early Met pensioners in the main search room at the National Archives.  This could throw some light on his career.

                               Met. Police Constable in the 1850s

I have a note in my records that in 1861 the family were at Derby Buildings, St Pancras - this being close to Britannia Street.  In 1871 they were at 87 Stanley Buildings, Old St Pancras Road.

Newcombe retired from the Met during the 1870s, taking his pension and going to work as a railway porter at Kings Cross/St Pancras Station.


He died in 1890.  It is unclear what happened to Elizabeth.  It may well be her who died in Edmonton in 1914.

Newcombe and Elizabeth had five children

James Newcombe - see later post

Elizabeth Sarah - not sure what happened

Amy - married at Islington in 1881

Florence - married at Islington in 1890

William Albert - died infancy

Sunday 23 February 2014

Francis Ginn of Broxbourne d. 1803

Francis was born in Weston in 1758, son of Francis in my post of  9th February 2013 .  The baptism entry is in the register, but not in the IGI.  This caused a problem for at least one researcher of my acquaintance. We are very fortunate in that when Francis married Sarah Young in 1783 and moved to Broxbourne, he was examined by the local magistrates.  This examination (HRO) a copy of which is produced here: cites that he was born Weston and married in Broxbourne and wished to settle there.




The Weston Ginn family, what I call "The Aston Ginns", because they are the remains of descent from William Ginn of Aston's (d.1520) eldest son, had thus split in two.  Both branches continued to use the name Francis in memory of their long past ancestor Francis Ginn (b.1603).

The couple had a large family.  We cannot be certain, but I suspect that Francis had some job concerned with the Victualling trade.  Certainly, his father, and virtually all his sons were.



                    Broxbourne Church in 1807 below and broadly
                                  the same view today above


My guess (and more research needs to be done) is that Francis and Sarah lived in the Hoddesdon/Great Amwell border area, almost certainly on the Gt. Amwell side of Hoddesdon.

In 1803, aged 45, Francis was taken fatally ill. TB is likely.  He was either nursed in - or his body was transported to - Weston, because the Weston register reads “Buried Francis Ginn Labourer, brought from Broxbourne".  There is some question over Sarah's burial entry.  I suspect that she is the Sarah "from Amwell" in the Broxbourne register for 1804.   


Francis and Sarah had a large number of children

Francis - see later post 
 
William - see later post
 
John - married Sarah Dighton illegitimate daughter of Joseph Dighton (a surgeon) at St Geo Hanover Square in 1839.  There is evidence she was brought up by a man called Perry (a publican) who was living with this couple later on.  She was too old to have children.  The couple ran the “George the 4th” public house at Great Amwell; it is still there and my wife and I have had a lovely meal there in the past.  John died in 1864 leaving will/admin to widow Sarah and brother George.


George - see later post

Ann - married Joseph Dighton

Mary -  married George Harknett

Judith - married Benjamin Welch

Sarah - is untraced - she may be the Sarah who died in 1804

James Ginn of Farnham and Tasmania d. 1885

 James, son of William in the last post was born in 1813, and as we have seen his family were not that well off.  The 1830s and 40s were a bad time for all Labourers, food was short, prices were high.  James was a young man, and in 1834 he did a very foolish thing.

 James and his friend Abraham Chapple knew William Skingle, Skingle was a Farmer in Farnham, James and Abe may have worked for him.  I can think of few things more foolish than to steal from someone you know in broad daylight, so have assumed that James and Abe bore some kind of grudge.  Possibly James and Abe felt that they were owed unpaid wages, who knows?

In any event, on 23rd October 1834, Skingle went to Bishop's Stortford to collect some money.  I have wondered if this was a regular thing, perhaps he went to collect the week's wages for his men.

He was walking hone to Farnham, when James and Abe met him, took his money and fled.

The road from Stortford to Farnham runs from North Street, it passes through Northgate End and then curls north, where it becomes a country lane.  When I visited, in the summer of 1995, the road was overgrown, bordered by fields, and very quiet.  I imagine that in 1834 it was a great deal quieter.

James and Abe were never going to get away with it, of course.  They must have been caught quite quickly, and their case (reported in the "Chelmsford Chronicle") was heard at the Essex Assizes (Lent: 1835).  Jennifer Clark (nee Ginn) has also sent me the snippet from the radical newspaper "The True Sun" (Charles Dickens was a contributor) which is reproduced below.



Abe (at 25) was some four years older than James, but the pair were both dealt with in the same way.  Highway Robbery was a hanging offence, though the sentence was seldom carried out for that crime by 1835.  The pair of them were thus sentenced  to death, allowed to "sweat" for a couple of weeks, their sentence then being commuted to transportation "for the term of their natural lives" (see Criminal Trials Register: National Archives).

James was placed in Springfield Gaol in Chelmsford (illustration)


and in 2014 the following information came to light ("Hertfordshire Mercury") which had been unknown to me in my 25 years of research

 

James was subsequently taken to the Convict ships or "Hulks"  for a few months,  his transport ship "The Aurora" departing in June 1835  arriving in Hobart, Tasmania on 8th October 1835.

                                                           Early Hobart

A description was taken of James on arrival.  In summary he was "a Ploughman; Height 5ft 7ins; Age 22; Complexion Brown; Hair Dark brown; Face Freckled; Native Place Farnham"

He was immediately assigned out to a local farmer, and served out some twelve years before being given a Conditional Pardon on 8th October 1847.  This left him free within the colony, but he could not go home.

In any event, James had no wish to go home, because in 1845 (7th October) he married Jane Cox (a freewoman, from a local land owning family) at St John's Church in Launceston.


It is fair to say that in material terms the court that sent James to Tasmania did him a favour.  Indeed, by the 1840s many convicted criminals preferred transportation, it gave them the prospect of a new life for freed convicts were given land allocations.

By 1860, James had been allocated some 50 acres of bushland at Pipers River, by 1867 owning some 160 acres of land at The Black Sugar Loaf at Westbury, while being the tenant of some 500 more (at the same place) owned by the Crown.  He held this land for the rest of his life.

Jane was born in 1825, at Norfolk Plains, Tasmania.  The couple only had the three children, because sadly Jane died of measles in 1854; she was 29.

James Ginn, "Farmer" died in 1885, aged 71.  The cause of death was given as stricture.

James and Jane had three sons:

George - a farmer, married Sarah Bullock in 1869 and had Elizabeth, Jane, Sarah (d. infancy) and James by her.  Sarah died in 1877 and George remarried Emma Hall in 1883 and had a further child, Emma by her.  George (shown right below with son James) died in 1912, Emma dying the same year.





Arthur Alfred - married Louisa Sturzaker in 1876 and had Arthur (died infancy) Amelia, Hilda, Ethel, Ernest, David, Ella and Rita.  A farmer, Arthur died in 1931 and Louisa in 1932


.

James - there were various family stories about what happened to James, the major one saying that he went blind.  It has recently been discovered that his mother carried a genetic condition called Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) the gene passes down through the female line but the actual disease (which manifests itself with blindness between the ages of 20-30) usually only occurs in males. The majority of people who have  the gene may never suffer from the illness.

James jnr acquired land and appears in various land records until 1878 when he was 26.  It is likely that soon after this he went blind.  The condition comes on suddenly and is untreatable even today.  The likelihood is that he was placed in what was called the "Invalid Depot" in Launceston in Tasmania.  Tasmania suffered from the fact that it had been established as a penal colony, had no welfare system equivalent to the local workhouse provision in England (inadequate as that was) and was run centrally with little compassion or empathy for people who could not look after themselves.  The conditions in the Depot were very poor and run almost on military lines.  Contemporary records of the Depot do not appear to survive, but the fact that the land that James held was put up for auction in 1880 indicates that he died that year - he was 28.

Acknowledgement - I am indebted to my friend Jennifer Clark (nee Ginn) a descendant of James, for the vast majority of what appears here in respect of what happened after James arrived in Tasmania