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Arthur Pilch Roberts was born at Harwich, Essex in 1832 and baptised six months later:
St Nicholas Harwich, born 2 Nov 1832, baptised 27 May 1833, Arthur Pilch son of Lazurus and Mary ROBERTS, Harwich, Lieutenant R.N.
He was one of Lazarus and Mary’s younger sons: eight years the junior of my great-great grandfather James Mackenzie Roberts.
In 1851 Arthur was living with his family in Great Yarmouth, aged eighteen and with no occupation. He appears to have worked for the Post Office shortly afterwards and became a PO clerk in Hull on 16 December 1852. He may well have moved to Devon with his father in 1855, as by 1858 he was a clerk in the Post Office at Exeter.
At some point in the 1850s he met Ann (or Annie) Eliza Search (1834–1911), the daughter of John and Jane Search, a well-to-do middle-class family of 7 Egmont Place, Old Kent Road, south London. How a Post Office clerk from Devon met the daughter of a Bank of England official in London is unknown!
No doubt some if not all of Annie’s siblings attended her wedding to Arthur (her brother Octavius, 1819–1909, was one of the witnesses) at St George’s church, Camberwell in the summer of 1858. Perhaps my great-great grandfather James, who was lodging in London, was also present?
Australia
Like James, Arthur also wound up in the metropolis, although he took a rather more circuitous route to get there. Perhaps he was disenchanted with the dusty claustrophobia of office life, or maybe he was attracted by reports of a gold rush in south Australia. Either way, less than a year after their marriage, Arthur and Annie left England for Australia, sailing from Liverpool on board the Tudor on 22 March 1859, with unassisted passage (i.e. fares were not paid for by the government).
Arthur’s occupation on the passenger list was given simply as ‘clerk’. On 17 July, after a voyage lasting four months – during which the couple celebrated their first wedding anniversary – they arrived at Melbourne, probably Sandridge, the old name for Port Melbourne, where there was a government-run landing pier.
A mail service operated between Sandridge and Melbourne, so perhaps this provided employment for Arthur as a Post Office Agent? Or was he now working as a bank official? In any case, thanks largely to the gold rush, this was the place to be in the 1850s. Immigrants were flooding in, swelling the population of Victoria six-fold, from 77,000 in 1851 to 461,000 by the end of the decade.
The first land was sold at Sandridge in 1850 and the importance of the settlement as the port for the metropolis was underlined when the first passenger railway in Australia opened in 1854, running between Melbourne and Sandridge. In July 1860, after some agitation for self-government, the municipal district of Sandridge was established.
Back to England
Within six years Arthur and Annie were back in England, returning on the clipper Swiftsure with their two infant children, Ida, barely two, and Sydney, just a few weeks old. This was a ‘gold-ship’ (according to The Times) with ‘very superior accommodation’, run by the Green Blackwall Line, the same shipping company that Arthur’s brother Charles worked for. It left Melbourne on 20 May 1865, carrying 282 passengers and an astonishing 71,328 oz (around 2 tons) of gold – the valuable cargo suggesting perhaps that Arthur was indeed in banking, like his father- and brother-in-law. Four months later, in September 1865, Arthur and Annie disembarked at London’s East India Docks.
Back in England, the family settled, for the time being, in the outer London suburb of Croydon, and in 1871 were living at Penrose Villa, Manuel Road (only just built and later renamed Thornhill Road), where Arthur is listed as a secretary to a public company (a bank?). More children arrived in Croydon: Percy Arthur (born 1867), Walter Heathcote (1869), Herbert Gordon (1871) and Grace Delany (1874).
In about 1875 a carte-de-visite was taken of Arthur (and one of his daughter Ida), at the photographic studio of W.H. Mason (of 21 George Street, Croydon). This image (above) – so far the only photograph of any of Lazarus’s children to have come to light – was lost to the family for over 100 years, turning up in Southampton in 2013, the centenary year of Arthur’s death. He appears in the photograph in typical 1870s dress, bearded, with curly hair and similar facial features to his father.
Arthur – not unlike his brother Henry some twenty years earlier – had now joined that growing legion of aspirational white-collar workers filling the capital’s offices and counting-houses mid-century – and the omnibuses that transported them there – a figure not unlike that lampooned in the Grossmiths’ satire of the 1880s, The Diary of a Nobody .
He was executor for Lazarus’s will, in 1873, which may well have meant a journey to Plymouth, if only to collect the writing desk left to him by his father. It would also have been a rare opportunity for him to see his siblings in Devon at the funeral.
When the 1881 census was taken, Arthur was a forty-nine-year-old bank secretary living at 25 Hatcham Park Road, Deptford, southeast London (or, in those days, Kent). Did he have any communication with his brother (my great-great grandfather) James, still lodging a couple of miles away in Walworth? Maybe.
In 1891 Arthur and Annie were together and living at 62 Leytonstone Road, West Ham. Arthur was employed as a clerk and they were prosperous enough to engage a domestic servant. Their daughter Ida had left for China the previous year.
Separation?
After this, something seems to have happened. By 1901, now aged sixty-eight and listed as a surveyor’s clerk, Arthur was no longer living with his wife or children – at least when the census was taken. He was lodging with a baker named James Dakers, at 14 Morton Road, West Ham.
Annie, meanwhile, was across London, at 274 Crystal Palace Road, in genteel East Dulwich, a late-Victorian suburban development typically aimed at socially mobile members of the lower middle class and their young families. With her were her son Walter, aged thirty-two (listed as head of the household) and her widowed sister, Grace Crouch.
Ten years later, in 1911, Annie was still in south London with Walter and her daughter Grace, at 4A Dunoon Gardens, Forest Hill, Lewisham. The census confirms that she had been married for fifty-two years and had seven children but one had died (Frederick).
Arthur was still in east London. Now aged seventy-eight, he could be found amongst the infirm and unemployed inmates of West Ham Union Workhouse, Union Road, Leytonstone. He is listed as a former surveyor’s clerk and married.
Was there a rift between Arthur and his family? What had happened to separate husband and wife, leaving Arthur in the workhouse while Annie occupied a five-room address across town in the leafy suburbs? West Ham Workhouse was also used as an infirmary. Inmates were admitted to workhouses in the area of their last permanent residence, so this may explain why Arthur wound up in West Ham.
An Ann E. Roberts died in the borough of Lewisham in the winter of 1911, aged seventy-seven (thus born 1834).
Arthur died in 1913 (in the workhouse?), at the age of eighty and was buried on 14 February 1913, at West Ham Cemetery. He does not appear to have been buried with his wife, but rather in a communal or public grave.
Arthur and Annie’s children were my great grandfather Frank’s cousins. Their first three – Frederick, Ida and Sydney – were born during the family’s time in Australia, at Sandridge. There is a possible family connection here. In the 1840s, the solicitor William Samuel Fooks – Arthur’s cousin via his mother – emigrated to Victoria with his family, also settling at Sandridge. William Fooks died here in 1856 but his children continued to live at Sandridge: did they know Arthur?
Frederick Wherland Roberts
Frederick Wherland Roberts was born at Sandhurst, Sandridge, Victoria, in 1860 and died aged just two. Curiously, Wherland is not a family name, as might be expected, but was the surname of the captain of the ship in which Arthur and Annie had sailed to Australia the previous year: ‘Captain [Frederick] Wherland is well known in this port, to which he brought out the immigrant ship Tudor’, read the Melbourne Argus of 29 April 1872. Well known he may have been, but he must also have been particularly important to Arthur and Ann for them to name their first and second sons after him – Frederick also taking the captain’s forename.
In about 1875 Ida accompanied her father to the photographic studio of the Croydon photographer W.H. Mason. She is wearing two medals, although the image lacks enough detail to identify what they are.
Ida White Roberts
Ida White Roberts’s story is the most interesting of this family. She was was born at Sandridge in 1863.
She travelled to England with her parents in 1865 and was with them in Croydon when the 1871 census was taken. She was ten when her grandfather Lazarus died. As her father was executor it is possible she attended the funeral in Plymouth in 1873.
By 1881 she was living in Villa Road, in the Angell Town area of Lambeth, an eighteen-year-old governess to two of her cousins, Gertrude and Maude. She was under the watchful eye of her aunt Ellen Davey (aka Helen, née Search, her mother’s sister), a school mistress and the widow of Samuel Townsend Davey, who had died ten years previously.
Perhaps Ida became a fervent church-goer in Lambeth, or perhaps the apparent rift in the family forced her to consider her future in London, but her vocation in life was to be a missionary.
On 4 September 1890, as reported in China’s Millions (a publication of the China Inland Mission, the largest band of Protestant missionaries), she departed for China on the P&O steamship Bengal. Her party comprised ‘Mrs. Pruen, returning to her son in China, accompanied by Misses C. Groves, A. M. Lang, Sarah Querry, R. F. Basnett, Ida W. Roberts and Jane Stedman’. Her name is then included in the list of Present Members of the China Inland Mission (1892).
In about 1893 she married a fellow missionary, George Cecil Smith (also hyphenated as Cecil-Smith), at Chung King (Chongqing?).
When the Boxer Rebellion erupted across China in 1900 the lives of the missionaries working there were in danger. Over fifty missionaries attached to the China Inland Mission were killed, although Ida and her husband survived. There are numerous newspaper references from the time, reporting on the crisis, such as (on 19 Sept 1900): ‘Mrs Cecil Smith left Kwei-chow last month and is safe’. Ida seems to have been the author of a short pamphlet, Three Cries from Chinese Lips by Mrs G. Cecil-Smith (Morgan & Scott, 1899). This expounds some typical (for the period) proselytising rhetoric.
In 1909 George Cecil-Smith was back in England, on a recruitment drive, as reported in the The Dominion. The couple are listed in the 1910 China Mission Yearbook, as ‘Cecil-Smith, G and wife, C.I.M. Kweiyang, via Chungking’. (There was also a George C. Smith Girls’ School in Suzhou, Jiangsu Sheng: was this Ida’s husband?)
Protestant missionaries were (unsurprisingly) fairly unpopular with the Chinese, who resented being encouraged to forego their own belief system in favour of Christianity, and the more militant Chinese always posed the threat of danger. In October 1929 The Times reported that Mr Cecil-Smith was kidnapped by soldiers (more likely bandits) at Yungning in southwest Kweichow, the scene of a ‘miniature civil war’. He was later released. Nevertheless, Ida and her husband remained in China. Ida died aged eighty-one in February 1944 and is buried at Kweiyang Fu Foreign Cemetery in Guiyang, ‘Missionary with the China Inland Mission, out of Toronto, Canada’.
Ida and George had three children: John Sydney Arden (1895–1971), a tea planter at Daragaon Tea Estate, Sylhet (now Bangladesh); Frances (1901–72), who married George Henderson; and Edward Paul (1903–64), a noted Canadian radical, labour journalist and soldier who fought in the Spanish Civil War. They were my grandmother’s second cousins.
It is very unlikely the children of Ida Cecil-Smith knew much, if anything, about their grandfather Arthur Pilch Roberts, or their mother’s British family.
Sydney Wherland Roberts
Sydney Wherland Roberts was also born at Sandridge, Australia, in 1865 (the 1921 census gives his place of birth as Bendigo, Victoria) and travelled back to England with his parents the same year.
By 1881, he was working as a bill-broker’s clerk and boarding at the home of a Susannah Tonkin in the Old Kent Road, although in 1886 he was back in east London, at 10 Ferns Road, Stratford, according to Kelly’s directory. At some point before the First World War, Sydney travelled to Argentina, where in 1913 he was the manager of a branch of the Banco de Londres y Río de la Plata (the London & River Plate Bank) in the city of Concordia (see page 10 here)
He returned from Buenos Aires on board the Desado, landing at Liverpool on 21 May 1921. When the census was taken the following month he was in London at 1 Fitzroy Square, a boarding house, although his place of work is given as Concordia, Argentina. He must have married in Argentina, as he is listed as widowed although he had no children under sixteen years of age.
Before the year was out he had married the widowed Constance Downes (née Jaeger) at Liverpool, when he would have been fifty-six.
He died in July 1939, aged seventy-four, at Horsham, Sussex. A notice appeared in the London Gazette, announcing that he was a retired bank official and that his executor was his nephew, Percy’s son Allan Stuart Roberts.
Percy Arthur Roberts
The rest of the children were all born in Croydon. Percy Arthur Roberts (born on 12 February 1867) was described as a paper-hanging merchant (with empolyees) in 1891, living at Leytonstone.
In 1901 he was working on his own account as a manufacturer’s agent, presumably in the wallpaper business or similar. He married Ethel Charlotte Newsome (1866–1937) at Croydon in 1892 and in 1901 they lived at Overhill Road, East Dulwich.
In 1911 they were at Springfield, Honor Oak Park and Percy Arthur was a commercial traveller. In 1921 the family were at Glencroft, Queen's Road, Lewisham and Percy Arthur was a commercial traveller in colour and varnish for the paint manufacturers Gross, Sherwood & Heald (Barking).
After the death of his wife in 1937, Percy Arthur was a retired grocer living in Hove, Sussex, with a housekeeper, Ivy L. Harley.
His children were Glynn (born 1894), Marjorie Joy (1895), Allan Stuart (1897–1983) and Arthur Reginald Newsome (1902–87). Percy died in 1954, in Hove, leaving the best part of £8,000 to his sons Glynn and Allan, both also listed as commercial travellers.
Walter Heathcote Roberts and Grace Delany Roberts
Walter Heathcote Roberts was born at Croydon on 25 March 1869 and Grace Delany Roberts, also at Croydon, on 13 April 1874. Neither married and they remained together virtually all their lives. Walter was a thirty-two-year-old corn merchant in 1901, living at Crystal Palace Road, East Dulwich, not far from Percy. Also with him were his mother and his widowed aunt, fifty-five-year-old Grace Crouch (née Search, another of his mother’s sisters), whose husband Thomas Crouch had died in 1897.
By 1911 Walter was a ‘manager of domestic stores’, living in Forest Hill, south London, with his mother and spinster sister. Ten years on, after the death of their mother, Walter and Grace had moved to 131 Grierson Road, Honor Oak, where Walter, aged fifty-two, was still a manager at a domestic stores. This was given as Roberts & Co, ironmongers and ‘oilmen’, at 112 Junction Road, Holloway, over in north London, although there was a branch of this business at Honor Oak Park. He was an employee so this was not his family business. This Junction Road shop is long gone but interestingly the premises are still an ironmongery and builders merchants.
By 1939 Walter had retired and he and Grace had moved to Chichester. Walter died there in 1946, leaving £476 4s 11d to his sister.
Grace died at Chichester in 1951, aged seventy-six.
Herbert Gordon Roberts
Herbert Gordon Roberts (born in Croydon on 6 December 1870) was the manager of a paint works until his retirement. Like his brothers, he was living with his parents at Leytonstone in 1891. Ten years on he was a varnish maker in East Dulwich.
He married Ada Jane Smith on 23 May 1896 and they had at least three children: Edith Ada (born Bermondsey, 1898), Herbert William (born Rotherhithe, January 1899 – perhaps the last of this generation in the family to be born in the nineteenth century) and Dorothy Evelyn (born Durham, 1906).
Herbert Gordon moved from London to Tynemouth at some point in the early twentieth century, where he was with his family when the 1911 and 1921 censuses were taken, working as a storekeeper in a shipyard. In 1939 he was listed as retired, living at Trewhitt Road, Newcastle upon Tyne. He died in 1944.
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