James junior was born in 1820 at Dedham, the son of James and Phoebe Mason, and grew up at Brightlingsea. He was at ‘Lodge’, according to White’s Directory of Essex (1848): presumably this was Lodge Farm, a mile or so south of Moverons, where his father farmed at this time and where James junior would have spent his childhood.

A few years on and still unmarried in 1851, he was living at Samford’s Farm, Brantham, with just a groom and house servant for company. He is also listed as farming here in White’s Directory of Suffolk (1855). Brantham church was noted for an altar painting by John Constable, who would have been known to James’s aunt, Sarah Whalley (buried in the churchyard) and grandfather, George Witheat.

In December 1856 James married Jane Carrington, baptised at Chelmondiston, Suffolk in 1821, the third daughter of Maffin Carrington, an Ipswich publican and former farmer. They married at St George’s church, Hanover Square, Mayfair, although they lived at Brantham. Jane was heavily pregnant at the wedding (which might explain why the marriage took place so far from home) and within three months a daughter was born, in the first quarter of 1857, and baptised Mary Jane Witheat Mason. She lived only eight months.

Before his daughter died, James junior himself died, on 19 August 1857 and is buried at Brantham, in a grave next to that of his mother Phoebe:

IN MEMORY OF

JAMES MASON

OF THIS PARISH WHO DIED AUGUST 19TH 1857

IN THE 37TH YEAR OF HIS AGE

ELDEST SON OF JAMES MASON

OF PEETHALL, WEST MERSEA, AND LATE OF BRIGHTLINGSEA

THE SHORTNESS [...] OF LIFE

OH HOW IN [...]

BROUGHT DOWN [...]

LORD IN HEAVEN AND IN EARTH

ALL ON EARTH [...]

ALSO OF HIS INFANT DAUGHTER AGED EIGHT MONTHS

The notice in the local press, amongst reports of recent casualties in the Indian Mutiny, comments that his death was ‘deeply regretted by his family and friends’ and that he died of ‘decline’. This could be tuberculosis (consumption), or perhaps a slow wasting disease. The beneficiaries of his will, written a month before he died, were his father, his wife Jane, his brother George and his brother-in-law James Mackenzie Roberts.

Within twelve months poor Jane had married, given birth and lost both her husband and her infant daughter. She never remarried. Four years on, in 1861, she was living with her younger siblings Martha and Benjamin Carrington at East Bergholt. Ten years on, in 1871, she was at Sudbury with another sister, Emma Carrington, and in 1881, ‘formerly a farmer’s wife’, she was with Benjamin again, now back in Ipswich. Her age is inconsistently given in the census records.