Rowland Tayler
(1824-1906)
Rowland Tayler was born 8 June 1824 at Dedham (according to the census), the eldest surviving son of John and Sarah Tayler. He became a well known Colchester veterinary surgeon and in 1851 he was assistant to William Cross, a ‘corn merchant and veterinary surgeon’ of 67 High Street, Colchester. Rowland’s sister Mary Ann was at the same address, a ‘companion’ to the forty-year-old William and his wife.The occupation of veterinary surgeon was commonplace in the family: not only was Rowland a vet but his sister, my great-great grandmother Sarah Tayler, married Edward Simson, also from a family of vets. And Edward Simson’s mother was a Cross before she married, so it is likely William Cross was already related in some way to the Taylers. And he was destined to be even more closely related (see below).
In 1861 Rowland was lodging in London, at 44 Great College Street, St Pancras, where he was a veterinary student. He eventually qualified from the Royal Veterinary College in London on 29 April 1862, at the age of thirty-eight.
Still in London three years later, he (like his sister Eliza) was living in Clerkenwell, where he married Catherine Phillis Cleland (née May), a thirty-four-year-old widow from Colchester, on 24 October 1865. By 1870 however they were living back in Colchester where Rowland’s practice, Tayler and Prime, was established in Queen Street.
Catherine died in 1875 and the following year, at the age of fifty-two, Rowland was married again, to Elizabeth Maria Cross, the widow of William Cross, in 1851 his former boss! Rowland himself died at Colchester in 1906.
Rowland and Catherine had four children:
Edith Maria (born 1867) married William Shipley, yet another veterinary surgeon, in autumn 1891 and they lived at Great Yarmouth.
Rowland Charles (1868) carried on his father’s veterinary practice and was still at Queen Street in 1911, with his wife Alice Maud (née Ommanney) and their son, thirteen-year-old Rowland Charles Ommanney Tayler: he would have been my grandmother’s second cousin.
Florence May (1870) married a farmer, William Hart Borham, in the spring of 1891. They lived at Langham, Essex.
In 1895 Ellen Louisa (1872) married John Watson, a race horse trainer from Newmarket, and they lived in Palace House and trained at the stables there.