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Abraham Roberts junior was my 4xgreat grandfather. He was baptised at Antony, Cornwall on 21 October 1764, the son of the ropemaker and merchant Abraham Roberts senior and his wife Rachel.
See tree here. [Incidentally, I have found no family connection with General Sir Abraham Roberts, 1784–1873, an East India Company army officer of some distinction born in Ireland.]
On 6 September 1787 Abraham married the eighteen-year-old Ann Dunrich at Antony/Torpoint:
Abraham Roberts junior, of this parish, bachelor and Ann Downrich [sic], of this parish, spinster married by Licence 6 September 1787 by Bryan Roberts, Minister.
Both bride and groom signed their names while the witnesses were Thomas Netherton and Elizabeth Dunrich. Presumably Elizabeth was Ann’s sister. A Thomas Netherton was at Plymouth Dock around this time, with the convoluted title (from 1785) of First Clerk to the Clerk of the Check of His Majesty’s Yard at Plymouth, as mentioned in The Navy Chronicle, Vol. 15 (1806). If this is him, I don’t know what his precise relationship was to either Abraham or Ann.
Sherborne Mercury, 10 December 1792
Bermondsey
Abraham followed his father’s occupation of ropemaker, taking over the family business at the ropery in Torpoint established by Abraham senior. According to a newspaper notice, this was sold in 1792 (possibly on the death of his father) and by 1793 Abraham had moved on.
With his wife Ann – and I assume their young children Elizabeth and Lazarus – he left the West Country for Bermondsey in London. In 1794 Ann was left £50 in the will of her great uncle. Perhaps this helped them to establish themselves in London?
On arrival in the capital, judging from a later report in the London Gazette of August 1804 (see below), Abraham seems to have first been at East Lane, down by the river at Bermondsey. The rope walks at East Lane were long, narrow sites where strands of hemp were twisted to form the lengths of rope used for the rigging and anchor cables of ships.
East Lane and rope walks, Bermondsey, from Horwood’s Plan of 1792–99. (According to a Thames Tideway Report, the ‘fish pond’ between two rope walks may have been a mast pond for the local shipbuilding industry used to season timbers by sinking them to the bottom of the pond and then drying them slowly to prevent splitting.)
East Lane, Bermondsey, 1826, by John Chessell Buckler. I suspect it would have looked not dissimilar twenty years earlier. Assuming this shows the mansion marked on the above map just to the right of the ‘T’ of EAST (numbered 25), the ropewalks must have run behind these buildings.
Abraham first appears in the tax records in 1793, a little further west from East Lane, paying land tax at Shad Thames. It may be that his place of work was East Lane, as when his son Abraham was baptised in February 1794 he was given as a ropemaker of East Lane, although the baptism was at St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey, closer to Shad Thames. Or perhaps he was at both addresses.
The narrow, crowded thoroughfare of Shad Thames was Bermondsey’s spinal cord, contiguous to the river for a few hundred yards, before snaking through the breweries, wharves and warehouses by St Saviours Dock down to Dockhead. Here could be found shipwrights and chandlers, wharfingers and wine merchants and makers of all manner of maritime essentials, from line and twine to masts, boats, barrels and of course beer, as well as ropemakers and merchants.
With its wharves and river life, this was an obvious destination for anyone connected with the sea or the navy and the hub of what was then the world’s biggest industrial port. Abraham Roberts is not listed in this 1794 directory at either Rotherhithe or Bermondsey, but it may have been compiled just before Abraham set up in London.
[The name was unusual but not unique to my 4xgreat grandfather – as can be seen in this directory, another, unrelated, Abraham Roberts lived not too far away at Maid Lane, Southwark. although he had the very different occupation of baker’s peel maker (i.e. he made wooden shovels used for placing dough in the oven).]
Horsleydown Lane
Four years later Abraham is found just off Shad Thames, at Horsleydown (or Horselydown) Lane. An indication of what the buildings were like in this street is found in the Morning Post of December 1805, when numbers 30 and 31 were advertised for lease, one in the occupation of an unnamed glazier.
They were described as built of brick and timber, the one containing a shop, parlour, four bedrooms, garden and cellaring; the other, larger property containing two parlours and five bedrooms, along with a kitchen, wash-house, garden and cellaring. Each was offered at a rent of £50 per annum, held for forty years. Abraham paid slightly less in 1798: £30 per annum, to Sir William Abdy, who appears to have collected rent on much of the Horsleydown estate.
The northern part of Shad Thames, showing Horsleydown Lane, from Horwood’s Plan of 1792–99.
Abraham and Ann seem to have had three more children in Bermondsey between 1794 and 1798:
Baptised 18 Februray 1794, St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey, Abraham, son of Abraham and Ann Roberts, Ropemaker, East Lane. Born 4 February 1794
Baptised 13 October 1796, St John Horslydown, Bermondsey, Mary, daughter of Abraham and Ann Roberts, Gent. Born 17 September 1796
Baptised 19 January 1799, St John Horslydown, Bermondsey, Ann, daughter of Abraham and Ann Roberts, Gent. Born 27 December 1798
The description of Abraham as a Gentleman in the second two baptisms is unexpected, but this must be them. It was a common enough affectation.
By the turn of the century, Abraham had probably been in London for almost a decade, but things were going badly, and were about to get worse. Ann Roberts died in 1801, at just thirty-two, and was buried on 30 May at St John Horsleydown. Perhaps she died in childbirth: May 1801 was just over two years after the birth of her daughter Ann.
The King’s Bench
Meanwhile, in Bermondsey, Abraham’s business was clearly floundering. In November 1802 he was committed to Southwark’s King’s Bench debtors’ prison, owing £567 to one Richard Bath. This is an extraordinarily large amount of money for the time (more than any of his fellow debtors on the same page in the record book and equivalent to a six-figure sum today).
What had happened to the capital raised by the sale of the Torpoint ropery in 1792/3? How did Abraham accrue such debt and how was it paid off (if it ever was: it was notoriously difficult to do so when the debtor was in jail)? Being in debt was not a criminal offence in 1802 but if a trader lacked any assets the debtors’ jail was the usual destination, where they remained until the debt was cleared or their creditor waived it. Rooms in the jail had to be rented at the rate of one shilling a week, unfurnished, and there was a raft of other charges which could only have cast the inmate further into the red.
Richard Bath
And who exactly was Abraham’s creditor? Land tax and baptism records show that Richard Bath (b. 1755?), ropemaker and dealer, resided at Anderton in the parish of Maker, Cornwall, where his children were born (between 1794 and 1802). This is just six miles from Torpoint. There was a rope walk at Lower Anderton called Wood Park.
Did Abraham flee Cornwall because of his debt with Bath? Or was he buying rope from him to sell in London? That seems plausible but unlikely, given Abraham was working as a ropemaker himself.
According to the London Gazette, Bath also had money problems. He was declared bankrupt in 1811, by which time he was ‘late of Anderton, in the Parish of Maker, in the County of Cornwall, Rope-Maker, Dealer and Chapman’. Maybe he had moved to London in an attempt to recover the money he was owed by Abraham?
Rope ground in Commerical Road, and the sale notice
Bath was certainly in London shortly afterwards. In 1817 a rope ground in Commerical Road, ‘opposite Stepney Causeway ... 157 fathoms in length’ was up for sale, along with all fixtures and utensils for ropemaking, ‘by direction of the Assignees of Mr. Richard Bath, Ropemaker, a Bankrupt’.
Horwood’s Plan shows there were indeed extensive covered rope walks here. There is no evidence that Abraham had had any interest in these particular premises, though. According to the 1817 sale notice they were being held for a term of fourteen years from Michaelmas 1816, so only a year earlier, at which point they had been in the occupation of a Samuel Dawson.
It would appear Richard Bath returned to the West Country after this and died at Stoke Damerel, Devon, aged sixty-eight in 1823. Perhaps Abraham never repaid the debt? It looks like Bath’s sons William and Francis Cleave Bath emigrated to New York and continued the ropemaking occupation though.
Death
Whatever the precise reason for his financial difficulties, Abraham spent at least two years in the debtors’ jail. There is an August 1804 London Gazette reference to him as an inmate there, ‘formerly of East Lane, Bermondsey, and late of Horsleydown Lane, both in the County of Surrey, Ropemaker’.
Eighteen months after that, Abraham Roberts died, in February 1806, cause unknown.
As with any prison at the time, deaths in the King’s Bench, either natural or otherwise, were not uncommon. One Richard Whittle, three entries below in the same burial book, was late a prisoner there and was interred the day after Abraham. And four months earlier, as reported in the London papers, a Dutch Jew confined in the King’s Bench for debt ‘threw himself out of a three pair of stairs [i.e. third floor] window, and was killed on the spot’. The friends of anyone dying in prison were routinely called upon to collect any personal effects. And if the prisoner had no friends? ‘It is seldom those who have no friends leave anything,’ replied William Jones, King’s Bench marshal at the time Abraham was there.
The Rules of the King’s Bench, 1814 (MAPCO)
However there is some doubt Abraham did die in prison, as according to the prison record, he was discharged from the King’s Bench.
If that is the case, he may have lived within the ‘Rules’ or liberty of the King’s Bench. Whilst in the jail this allowed inmates to stay beyond its high walls, on payment of a fee – effectively a form of bail or parole. The Rules covered a clearly demarcated circumference of about three miles and very definitely excluded taverns and places of entertainment.
The Report from the Committee on the King’s Bench, Marshalsea and Fleet Prisons (1815) describes how the Rules operated, and also provides a good description of life in the jail.
One reason I think Abraham may have lived within the Rules of the King’s Bench is because his burial record reads: ‘From Mr Thornton’s, undertaker, Borough’. Thornton’s was at 174 Borough High Street, just within the Rules and opposite another notorious debtors’ jail, the Marshalsea. This undertaker handled the funerals of those who had the misfortune to die whilst in or near the King’s Bench, as the report mentioned above explains.
Burial
No one dying in the prison, nor presumably within the Rules, could be buried or removed before a coroner’s warrant was granted, but if the death occurred beyond the prison walls, it is possible the corpse was removed to the undertakers for a coroner’s examination. The coroner was entitled to payment of a guinea, however if the deceased had no friends able or willing to pay the fee, the prison marshal buried the prisoner at his own expense.
‘Where is he buried in that case?’, William Jones is asked in the report.
‘Always in one of the neighbouring churches,’ replies Jones. ‘Mr. Thornton, who is a very respectable undertaker, generally buries them in Newington Church-yard.’
In the case of Abraham it was the church across the road – St George the Martyr, on Borough High Street.
St George the Martyr extended its burial ground in 1744, which must have meant good business for the already wealthy Thornton family. The expanded burial ground was situated a little further south, in Kent Street, where St Saviour’s and St Olave’s School is today and next to where the Lock Hospital for venereal disease once stood. The Lock burial ground, as it was known, was mainly used for pauper burials from the parish and was prone to grave robbing. Like most London burial grounds in the early nineteenth century, it soon become very overcrowded. The Times reported on 25 October 1844 that
[t]here was a huge hole in which the coffins of the paupers were placed along with the disturbed remains of those who had been buried before, heaps of which were thrown up and exposed to public view, within a few feet, too, of houses, while the general distance between the tops of the coffins and the surface of the earth was within about 21 inches. The scene was truly disgusting.
It was closed for further burials soon afterwards and converted into a public park in 1887. In 1967 a limestone tablet was discovered buried beneath the ground with the inscription ‘This Burial Ground laid open & Pallisaded at the Expence of the Parish of St George’s. 1777’. Who knows: Abraham may have been buried here. If so his grave would almost certainly have been a communal one, with no stone to indicate who the occupants were, and given the state of the ground by the 1840s it is unlikely perhaps that his remains were ever undisturbed.
How did Abraham reach such a sad conclusion, so far from home and family?
The Children
And what of his children, now orphaned?
It is likely they had already left London before their father’s death. After Ann died in 1801, the children we know survived infancy – Elizabeth (fourteen), Lazarus (eleven), Mary (five) and Ann (three) – must have been removed to Devon, where according to the Dunrich will provision had been made for their care.
My 3x great grandfather Lazarus entered the Royal Navy from Devonport in 1804, aged fourteen. His story is continued here.
We know Mary and Ann were also in Devon when they married, in 1818 and 1822 respectively, and Elizabeth when she was baptised in 1839.
Although they were all young when their parents died, they seem to have remained close as adults: Lazarus and Elizabeth were both witnesses at Mary’s wedding.
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