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Edward John Simson, my great-great grandfather, was born at Ardleigh, Essex in 1807, the son of William and Ann Simson.

At the age of thirty, in 1837, he married the eighteen-year-old Sarah Tayler at St Mary’s church, Ardleigh. The Simsons moved house several times, no doubt to accommodate their growing family. In 1841 they were ‘east of the Bromley road’. By April 1851 they were on the other side of Ardleigh at Dead Lane. 

When the census was taken on 8 April 1861, they were at the Railway Tavern, Ardleigh, on the Bromley road (now, with the arrival of the railway, named Station Road). Edward had the interesting dual occupation of ‘tavern keeper and veterinary surgeon’ and Sarah was ‘inn keeper’. These days, the Railway Tavern is long since closed (Ardleigh Station itself closed in 1965) and the building is now named Tavern House. You can still see it, if you’re quick, as the train rumbles over the level crossing, towards Colchester station.

Like his father, Edward was a farrier by trade, but increasingly a veterinary surgeon by profession. Every farmer in northeast Essex would have had a few cart horses, mostly Suffolk Punches, and some also used oxen to pull the plough; and most well-to-do families owned one or two light horses or ponies. A farrier, or shoeing smith, was therefore an important figure in the village. By the mid-nineteenth century the work of the farrier was often combined with that of veterinary surgeon, whose services included the care and treatment of horses in sickness, as well as in health. 

A range of equipment was available for this. Farrier’s gags were used to force open the horse’s mouth for the administering of pellets or powder; teeth were filed with a hefty rasp or extracted with a chisel (some farriers kept a smaller edition of this, with which they would perform the same service for friends and family); swollen tendons were treated with a firing iron, as was the stump after docking the tail. Bleeding was resorted to frequently, using a fleam and fleam mallet, and was also used to ‘fasten teeth’ in sheep and lambs. Such functions comprised Edward’s daily work around the village and farms.

There is little else to know about Edward: in 1860 he appears to have joined the newly-formed 15th Essex ‘Stour Valley’ Rifle Corps under the command of his neighbour Lieutenant Augustus Paterson (‘late of her Majesty’s 42nd Regiment’) of New Hall. At this time critical articles about England in the French press awakened the nation to its defenceless condition and a ‘home guard’ of volunteer corps was formed. In the long domestic peace of mid Victorian England, it is extremely unlikely Edward saw any military service however.

After the Railway Tavern the family moved to Whaley Farm, Harts Lane, Ardleigh. Back in 1796 this farm was occupied by a Raymond Cooke, overseer, and his family and in 1861 the owner and occupier was Cooke’s grandson, Robert Keable (or Keeble). Keable died in the summer of 1864 and the farm was put up for auction along with the deceased’s ‘live and dead farming stock’ and all his furniture, so it was perhaps then that the Simsons took on the property. The estate, of about ninety acres plus an orchard and garden, also included a ‘double and single cottage’. As the Simsons were not farmers, did they live there?

However, tragedy struck when Edward Simson fell ill with bronchitis and died in the summer of 1869, at the age of sixty-two.

His daughter, Mary Ann (Polly), was my great grandmother.