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My great grandfather, James Francis (Frank) Roberts, died in 1926. Britain was in the midst of a severe economic depression – the General Strike ended the week before Frank’s death, on May 17. Frank could lay claim to his own share of recession and hard times, but the world he left in 1926 was a very different place to the one he arrived in, seventy-nine years earlier, on 12 October 1847.
He drew his first breath, no doubt in an upstairs bedroom, at number 30 West Square, Southwark, south London (according to the birth certificate, although the 1921 census gives his place of birth as Camberwell).
He was the eldest child of James and Phoebe Roberts, and so was known as Frank, to avoid confusion with his father. He must have been a honeymoon baby, as his birth came just nine months after my great-great grandparents’ wedding.
In the summer of 1849, Frank’s younger sister was born. She was named Phoebe after her mother but, like Frank, was probably known by her middle name – Maria. A second sister, baptised Mary Mason, followed in October 1850.
Farming in the Late Nineteenth Century
In the early 1850s, the family moved to Heath Cottage, Long Road, Dedham, in rural northeast Essex and Frank’s brothers George Witheat and Arthur Mason were born here. Growing up before the 1870 Education Act, which, in 1880, made school attendance obligatory for all children between the ages of five and thirteen, Frank and his siblings’ schooling was perhaps rather rudimentary.
Most large Victorian villages boasted an affluent middle class, consisting of doctors, vets, solicitors, surveyors and wealthy farmers, but, living in the agricultural heartland of East Anglia, the majority of Dedham’s population (1,745 in 1881) depended on the land in some way for their livelihood. Most of the countryside was farmland, worked by labourers, who ploughed, sowed, reaped and harvested the crops, and looked after the horses.
The 1875 Ordnance Survey map for Dedham Heath shows that there were at least twenty-five farms in an area of just four square miles. Hedgerows divided the fields, known by their size – the ‘ten acre’, the ‘thirty acre’ – oak and ash predominated and the hedgerows burgeoned with cow parsley, dog rose, honeysuckle, crab apple and wild damson.
Frank and George both took up farming and by the early 1870s Frank was working a modest twenty-five acres, as well as keeping an eye on his father’s property. In 1872, a report appeared in the local newspaper that a Dedham labourer, John Fenner, was summoned for trespassing in pursuit of ‘conies’ (rabbits), on ‘land in the occupation of Mr James Roberts. ... James Francis Roberts, complainant’s son, stated that early on the morning of the 1st September he was in his father’s grounds when he saw the defendant chasing a rabbit into the “Nursery”.’ Fenner was acquitted but warned he faced a £5 fine if he wandered again onto land that was not his.
The farming was most likely growing cereals such as wheat, barley or oats; crops such as peas or bean, or seeds. Frank entered farming at a prosperous time, but the ‘high farming’ years of the mid nineteenth century were about to give way to an agricultural crisis in the 1870s. A succession of wet summers greatly damaged the quality of the grain harvested and pushed prices up as it became scarcer. As a result the arable areas of Britain were devastated, East Anglia notoriously so. In turn the arrival of massive imports of grain took up the slack and prevented farmers from gaining compensation.
As the crisis deepened so did the unrest, not least among the farm labourers, who were poorly paid for long hours’ work. Thanks partly to the railway and the penny-post, workers were mobilised in the 1870s by the new National Agricultural Labourers’ Union and the Lincolnshire Labour League. Needless to say, the unions were deeply unpopular with employers in East Anglia, who set about breaking their hold. ‘We consider it necessary not to employ any member of the Lincolnshire or any other Agricultural Labourers’ Union,’ declared farmers in northeast Essex, ‘and agree to discharge all members of such Unions after the 4th day of March 1876 giving them a weeks’ notice to withdraw.’
Among the forty-five signatories to this statement (mostly farmers from Dedham, Lawford, Ardleigh and Bromley) are some familiar names: H.W. and W.H. Dunnett, the Coopers of Ardleigh, and Charles Mason of Dedham. It was the same story across the southern counties. By locking out unionised workers landowners gradually forced down membership of the NALU from over 100,000 in 1873 to just 15,000 by the end of the decade.
The duties of an East Anglian farm bailiff, Bury Free Press, 9 October 1875
Farm Bailiff
Frank would have been familiar with the problems of labour. One sign of change in the latter half of the century was the increasing number of prosperous farmers who entrusted all dealings with their workforce to a bailiff.
The bailiff was a manager or head worker on a farm or farms, and was mainly engaged in the supervision and allocation of duties, superintending the work of agricultural labourers. He was often placed in charge of a subsidiary farm under the direct supervision of the employer, managing the farm in the absence of the farmer. The work involved keeping the farm records, hiring labour and administering the wages, buying stock, cattle and draught horses, and looking after the crop rotation and diseases of animals.
The bailiff may also have been able to buy and sell produce and equipment at market on the owner’s behalf. Wages were about twenty shillings a week. He was often feared by the farm workers. In Lark Rise Flora Thompson describes one such fellow: ‘He would come riding across the furrow on his little long-tailed grey pony ... swishing his ash stick and shouting “Hi, men! Ho, men! What do you reckon you’re doing!”.’
In 1880 Frank was employed as a bailiff to a local farmer and cattle dealer, John Fenner, of Brookside, Dedham (this surely was not the same John Fenner who had been caught trespassing eight years earlier?). His working day would have been a long one, beginning at sunrise. On one occasion, as reported in the Ipswich Journal of 1 June 1880, Frank was in the farm grounds at five in the morning when he caught two men stealing maize – 22 stone (140 kg) of it, valued at sixteen shillings. The pair, Frederick Sharp and John Rowland, appeared at Colchester County Court and were sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour.
Life as a farm bailiff was tough during the 1880s. These were particularly difficult years for Essex farmers and the crisis of the 1870s was now becoming an agricultural depression that would force many out of farming.
In 1881, Frank was bailiff at Down[e]s Farm, Dedham. This must have been William Downes (sometimes Downs), a neighbour in Long Road, listed in the 1881 census as a ‘Seed Farmers Clerk & Farmer of 10 Acres Employ 1 Man 1 Boy’, the ‘1 Man’ being, presumably, Frank.
The seed trade was developed in Dedham from about 1860 by William H. Dunnett, who farmed at Jupes Hill and Hill farms, and for whom Frank would soon be working. William Downes the younger was also heavily involved in the trade. (See here.)
Polly Simson
Across the fields, the ancient Whaley Farm, in the neighbouring village of Ardleigh had been, two hundred years earlier during the Civil Wars, the horse-quarters of a Colonel Whaley. Now it was the home of the Simson family – the widowed Sarah, her son George (a veterinary surgeon, like his recently-deceased father) and daughters Maggie and Polly (Mary Ann).
Polly and Frank were second cousins, Sarah Simson being Frank’s mother’s first cousin.
By 1878, following the death of her father in 1869, Polly was living in London. On Friday, 26 July of that year, exactly forty-two years to the day after her parents’ wedding, Polly and Frank were married, at St James’s church, Clerkenwell. She was thirty-three years old and Frank thirty-one. Polly's address was number 15 Exmouth Street, Clerkenwell: Frank’s was Heath Cottage, Long Road, Dedham. If a wedding took place far from home, it was often only the peer group that accompanied the couple to church, with friends and siblings acting as witnesses. In Frank and Polly’s case these were Margaretta Roberts (Frank’s sister Mary?) and a Harry Kettle.
Bounds Farm, Hungerdown Lane, in 1993
Bounds Farm
In the 1880s Frank, Polly and the family moved to Bounds Farm in Hungerdown Lane, between Lawford and Ardleigh. This property, which comprised eighty-six acres of arable and meadow land, was purchased by the landowner and seed merchant William H. Dunnett in 1887, on the death of John Hudson Cooper. For almost ten years Frank was bailiff here to Dunnett, whose own residence was Stour House, Dedham, built in 1868 (see here for possible connection to James Mackenzie Roberts).
Frank and Polly were at Bounds Farm when the 1891 census was taken, with four of their five daughters, Jessie (aged twelve), Kitty (eight), Alice (six) and Bessie (five). That night, Lizzie (eleven), was at the house of their uncle, the veterinary surgeon George Simson who lived a couple of miles away at Denton Villa, Ardleigh. The girls would walk a couple of miles across the fields to Ardleigh to school each day.
Frank was bailiff at Bounds Farm in 1894, according to Kelly’s directory of that year. In the summer of 1897 there occurred the Essex Hailstorm, forgotten now but famous at the time. Hailstones as large as hens’ eggs devastated seventy square miles of Essex countryside centred on Ingatestone, destroying property, livestock, crops and livelihoods – even allegedly driving one farmer to the local asylum – before petering out near Colchester. A relief fund was set up at the request of local MPs, including Charles Gold, Liberal MP for Saffron Walden and for whom Frank’s eldest daughter Jessie worked in 1901.
Whether or not Frank was affected directly by the storm of 1897, when he was probably still at Bounds Farm, it would have had an impact on rural communities throughout the county.
In the summer of 1901, the popular novelist Henry Rider Haggard conducted a survey on the state of farming in England. Passing through Dedham Vale, he stopped to speak to local farmers and others, including Frank’s boss, William Dunnett, and his brother-in-law, George Simson. Rider Haggard’s book, Rural England, paints a depressing picture. Northeast Essex was afflicted by widespread drought that year, and that on top of a poor 1900. George Simson reported that the village pond was habitually seventeen feet in depth: by the spring of 1901, however, there was ‘not a pailful left’.
Prospects for Essex farmers, Rider Haggard reported, looked grim: the drought and the reluctance of young men to enter farming were to blame. ‘[F]arming is no longer what it was in their earlier days,’ he says, quoting George Simson. ‘Where five men were employed, there are now only three, capital is scanty, and tenants take farms larger than they can manage.’ Tenant farmers paid from 30s down to 7s 6d an acre, but saved little or nothing. Beans were short and peas looked ‘very languid’. It was doubtful that rain, if it ever came, would save them.
The story was the same throughout the villages. William Dunnett told the author that only the old men would now work the fields, labour was so short.
Sherbourne Mill
When Rider Haggard visited Dedham Vale, Frank – at fifty-four himself one of the ‘old men’ – was at Sherbourne Mill (also called Shirburn Mill or Lawford Mill), a short distance from Dedham.
Overshadowed by the railway embankment, Sherbourne Mill was (and still is) a timber structure dating from about 1829/30. It was the last overshot watermill in Essex and drew its water from two mill-ponds with an eighteen-foot metal wheel (this was removed in the 1940s to make munitions).
Milling, like farming, was a vicarious occupation in the late nineteenth century and combining a mill with a farming business was not unusual. In about 1895, Sherbourne Mill
passed into the hands of Mr H.N. Dunnett who lived at Stour House further up the hill on the Dedham side of the Shirbrook and had a large seed farm at Dedham. During his ownership the mill continued to grind flour of the best quality with the manager in the mill house, until after the First World War. (Dedham Vale Society newsletter, p. 11)
No miller or millwright is listed at Sherbourne in the 1901 census, so the ‘manager’ presumably refers to Frank, whose occupation there was given as ‘farm bailiff’. He must have moved to the mill at the time Dunnett acquired the property. There was a farmyard attached to it so presumably he had charge of this, too.
With Frank in 1901 are Polly and their daughters, sixteen-year-old Alice (my grandmother) and the youngest, fourteen-year-old Bessie, who was attending Ardleigh school. My grandmother recalled playing around the mill as a child in the closing years of the nineteenth century and collecting watercress from the ponds with her young sisters.
One story in the papers in February 1897 regarded another of Dunnett’s bailiffs, John Denny of Hill Farm, who went to the cottage of one of Dunnett’s labourers, Fred Balls, and shot his wife (although not fatally). It was assumed Denny had subsequently drowned in a pond near the mill, although this later turned out not to be the case. Still, the drama, so close to home, must have been a talking point in the family for a while.
[Frank’s successor in 1911 was another bailiff, Edward Waterman. One of the young apprentices in 1921, Reginald Rolfe, recalled that in his early days at Sherbourne ‘it was grinding only animal foodstuffs but the silk bolting cloths used for dressing the [flour] were still at the mill as was also the wheat stone’ (Dedham Vale Society newsletter, p. 11), so perhaps this was the case when Frank was there?]
Sherbourne Mill, or Lawford Mill, as it would have appeared at the time my great grandfather Frank and my grandmother lived there.
The farmyard attached to Sherbourne Mill (Dedham Vale Society newsletter, p. 4)
The White Horse, Mistley
Despite the bad times, Frank clung on. In 1908 – his daughters by now having left home, with the exception of the youngest, Bessie – he appears briefly as bailiff at yet another of Dunnett’s farms, Jupes Hill, nearby in Manningtree Road, Dedham. Frank was now sixty years of age. With no sons to work the farm, and the ever-deepening agricultural depression, he was ready to abandon farming.
The following year Frank and Polly moved a few miles to Mistley, near Manningtree, where Frank took on the licence of the White Horse beerhouse in the small road leading to The Green, just off the High Street. Unlike a public house, a beerhouse sold only beer, usually only for consumption on the premises. Beerhouses often started off in private ownership but later sold out to breweries who needed to tie houses to sell their beer. The seven-room White Horse was purchased by a London solicitor, James Turner, in 1902 and was the only freehouse in Mistley at the start of the First World War. There is no prior connection between Frank and James Turner that I can see and it is not known exactly why Frank came to make the move to Mistley.
Frank, Polly and Bessie were living together at the White Horse in 1911. The building still stands and is now called White Horse House. It has been many years since it last sold beer; in fact there were attempts to close it before the First World War. When the licence came up for renewal in 1914, the application was met with opposition from a Mr H.W. Jones, presumably a local with vested interests. According to him, as there were three other pubs within 300 yards the White Horse was simply surplus to requirements. However it was Frank’s success as a beer retailer that saved it, as the Chelmsford Chronicle reported in June 1914:
The trade there had increased progressively, and the tenant [Frank] conducted the house very well. At the time it was bought by Mr. Turner the trade was very small, less than 100 barrels a year, but in the five years since Mr. Roberts had been there there had been a steady increase, barrels having gone up to 273 last year, and bottles by almost the same proportion.
No fewer than 304 people signed a petition for the renewal. Frank, and Bessie too, put forward a persuasive argument for the suitability of the premises and the need for the licence. On this appeal the licence was renewed and the beer continued to flow.
Frank remained licensee at the White Horse throughout the First World War, no doubt losing regular customers to the conflict. Some close neighbours received the telegram that all families dreaded, such as Annie Notley of The Green, whose son Sidney was killed in France in 1918 aged just twenty-two.
Mistley High Street, early twentieth century. The White Horse is the building to the right, on the corner of The Green (also just visible in this aerial shot). The two girls standing in front of it are too young to have been my grandmother or her sisters.
A fair on Mistley Green, circa 1900s. This took place each August and doubt would have been of great interest to my grandmother, when she was at home, and her young sister Bessie.
In 1920 the White Horse licence was again up for renewal and once more there were attempts to decline it on grounds of redundancy. But again evidence was provided in its support and a reprieve was granted. Frank’s tenure here was drawing to an end though. Towards the end of 1920 James Turner put the freehold up for sale and at this point the White Horse may have been acquired by Savill Brothers brewery of Stratford, east London.
In 1921 Frank’s address was 2 The Green, which unless the house numbering has changed, is opposite the White Horse. Aged seventy-five, he was still listed as a beer retailer in 1922, but not by 1925, when the licensee at the White Horse, now a fully-fledged public house, was one Harry Brace.
My mother recalled visiting her grandparents as an infant in the mid-1920s, when they lived in a gas-lit cottage on The Green, presumably number 2.
Frank died on 17 May 1926, aged seventy-eight, at Mistley. Polly went to live with my grandparents at Lowestoft, where she died on 12 June 1929.
This photograph of three men was possibly taken ouside the White Horse. I am told the man on the right is Frank. It is the only known photograph of him.
Why and when was this photograph taken? If it was taken in the early 1920s could the man on the left be Frank’s brother Arthur (1855–1940), who would have been sixty-five in 1920?
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