Henry Came Roberts
(1828-1912)
Henry Came Roberts was born in 1828 at Milton, Hampshire, the third son of Lazarus and Mary Roberts. In 1841 he was a thirteen-year-old pupil at the Royal Naval School at Alfred House, St Giles Camberwell, south London, along with his fifteen-year-old brother William Pollard.
Although it may have prepared pupils for such, attendance at the school did not automatically lead to a career in the Royal Navy. Neither William nor Henry joined the service. William trained as a doctor and Henry instead became a government clerk.
Henry may have worked at the office set up for administering the census in Adelphi Terrace, near Somerset House. In 1851 it moved to Craig’s Court, off Whitehall. The offices here were very cramped and many of the staff complained of headaches from the fumes of the gaslights they were burning for much of the working day, which could be as long as ten hours.
The Census Office
Of interest (especially to the family historian) is the appearance of his name among those of temporary clerks appointed by the Registrar General of Births, Death and Marriages, at the weekly pay of £1 10s for one year from May 1846, ‘for the special purpose of arranging in Registration Districts the Returns of the Census for 1841’.
After the 1841 census had been taken, funds were obtained from the Treasury to employ a number of temporary clerks to sort the results in accordance with the new Registration Districts. Henry was only eighteen and so I assume would have been offered a fairly junior position.
He must have made a good impression. Some of the clerks employed on this task were re-engaged for the 1851 census, the experience gained from the arrangement of one census being a great asset in organising the next. And indeed, when the next census was taken, in March 1851, Henry’s occupation was given as Clerk in the Census Office.
His work – in all 106 clerks were employed for the purpose – would have involved going through the enumerators’ books gathered from around the country and recording information on age, jobs and birthplace. This data was collated in tables for a final Census Report.
He would have been at the Census Office for no more than three years. Once released from this, presumably in 1854, clerical work may have been difficult to find. The author of the Report from Commissioners (1875) comments:
On each occasion of closing the Census Office in 1854 and 1874, there were several clerks who after three years’ constant work proved themselves most excellent and well fitted for permanent employment in the Civil Service, whom I regretted much to discharge; some of whom are now almost penniless amongst the thousands unemployed seeking work of that description.
Henry’s lodgings were not too far away, in Albion Place, by Blackfriars Bridge, a short walk over the river. Turning south from here, Henry was also not far from West Square, where my great-great grandfather James lived in the early 1850s. Did the two brothers often meet? If so there would no doubt have been much discussion over their father, Lazarus, and his planned retirement to Plymouth.
The temporary closure of the Census Office in 1854 coincides with Lazarus’s retirement and it is likely that Henry also moved west to Plymouth around the same time, perhaps after struggling to find permanent employment in the capital’s dusty offices. His days in London were over.
Plymouth
Henry must have been in Plymouth by 1857, when, just before Christmas that year, he married a twenty-two-year-old baker’s daughter, Emily Ann Knight, at Devonport.
Henry and Emily lived with their growing family at a succession of Plymouth addresses: 14 Home Park, Devonport (1861), 8 Valletort Place, Stonehouse (1871); 3 Holborn Street (1881). They were typical middle-class Victorians: several young children and a maid-of-all-work also lived with them and for twenty years or so Henry worked as a dockyard clerk in Devonport. Photographs of Henry and his family must have been taken, but I am not aware of any still existing.
In the 1880s and 90s Henry and Emily lived at 3 Holborn Street, which ran between St Johns Road and Alma Place, in the parish of St John.
The houses in Holborn Street comprised seven rooms and a scullery: ideal for a large family. In 1891 they were amongst stonemasons, ropemakers and, next door, a Spanish-born house-painter with the extraordinary name of Primitive Bode).
By the turn of the century, several of the children had left home and Henry and Emily had moved along to number 12 Holborn Street. When the census was taken that year their granddaughter Olive Somerville (their daughter Florence’s daughter) was staying with them.
By 1911 just two of the children (Harriet and Catherine) were living at home. According to the census, Henry, now eighty-three, was born at ‘Sussex, Brightlingsea’ (Brightlingsea is in Essex). He was actually born at Milton in Hampshire but had lived at Brightlingsea as a young boy in the 1830s, when Lazarus was stationed there in the Coastguard. It’s an interesting error that gives a clue to either his elderly memory or, more likely, maybe Emily or one of their daughters – ignorant of his birthplace but knowing he had spent time at Brightlingsea as a youngster (but unsure exactly where in England the seaside town was) – provided the information.
Henry died aged eighty-three on 5 February 1912, leaving the sum of £413 16s to his widow. The death notice in the Western Daily Mercury gave him as the ‘son of the late Capt. L. Roberts, R.N.’: perhaps, forty years after his death, the last time Lazarus’s name appeared in a newspaper?
Emily died in 1920, aged eighty-five.
The Plymouth familiar to the Roberts family of the Victorian and Edwardian period was largely destroyed during the Second World War .
Henry and Emily had twelve children, of whom three had died by 1911.
All the children were born at Plymouth/Stoke Damerel: Ernest Edmund (1860–1919), Catherine Mary (1865–1945), Charles Gabriel (1867–1921), Florence Elizabeth (1869–1931), Alfred George [Gordon] (1870–1942), Francis Edgar (1872), Sidney Came (1874), Agnes Maria (1877–1944) and Harriet Sophia (1878–1918). (The three who died in infancy were Henry Edward [1859–64], Emily Alice [1861–63] and Ellen Gertrude [1863–68].)
They were my great grandfather’s first cousins, their children my grandmother’s second cousins. There were ultimately no Roberts descendants from Henry’s line however – only three of his children had children of their own and his sons had only daughters.
Henry would have been fifty when Harriet was born. With these infant deaths and the loss of Henry’s brother Edward, and probably Charles too, the 1860s were filled with tragedy for the Roberts family.
Ernest Edmund Roberts
Henry and Emily’s second-born son did not lead a happy life. Ernest Edmund (born in 1860) was at the family home in 1881, aged twenty-one and with ‘no occupation’; but all was not well. The following year he was diagnosed with some form of mental illness.
By the turn of the century he was a ‘pauper patient’ amongst the 200 or so inmates of Blackadon Asylum, run by the borough of Plymouth. Ernest was described as a ‘lunatic 29 years’ – so from the age of about twenty-two (in 1882). He died there in 1919, aged fifty-nine. This was a sad fate that would befall another of Henry’s sons.
Charles Gabriel Roberts
Charles Gabriel (born 1867), was a tailor with premises at 35 Old Town Street, in the centre of Plymouth. There were a number of drapers and tailors along here. Charles must have done well, as by 1911 he was a master tailor and was employing his nineteen-year-old daughter Malvina as an assistant: he possibly employed others in the shop.
He married Eva Louisa Poland in 1889 and they lived at Furze Hill Road, in the Mutley area of Plymouth in 1901, and by 1911 at 66 Alexandra Road, where they were when Charles died in 1921, aged fifty-four. Their daughter Malvina Irene Stewart Roberts married Alan C. Muirhead in 1915.
Francis Edgar Roberts
Francis Edgar was born in 1872, just in time for his grandfather Lazarus to see him. He was known by his middle name, it would appear. In 1901 Edgar was a ‘clerk in club’ (perhaps the Plymouth naval club of which Lazarus had been secretary). Ten years later he was described as a refreshment house keeper, own account.
He married an Emma Maria Cutcliffe in 1904 and they lived at 39 Chapel Street, East Stonehouse, Plymouth in 1911. Emma Maria was described as ‘assisting in the business’, so presumably Edgar ran his own cafe or restaurant in the city somewhere.
Perhaps this business did not go so well, as three years later he is listed in the 1914 Plymouth Kelly’s trade directory as a secondhand bookseller at 83 King Street. This is surely him, although by 1921 it is his wife Emma who is listed as a dealer in second-hand books and running the shop in King Street; Edgar is listed as a ship’s painter at HM dockyard.
By 1939 Edgar was widowed and living in Green Street with his daughter and her family. A Francis E. Roberts died in Plymouth in 1942, aged seventy. This could well be him.
His daughter Ivy Ruby Muriel Roberts was born in Plymouth in 1905 and she married a James A. Reid in 1932. They had at least two children, two of many great-great grandchildren of Lazarus.
Alfred George Roberts
Alfred George, was born in 1870. He was living with the family in 1881, but not in 1891. He was living at 2 Waverley Villas, Devonport in 1901, with his wife Maude Roberts (born in Strand, London), his age given as thirty-four – he was actually thirty-one, but this surely must be him. His occupation was magistrate’s agent in 1901.
When the 1911 census was taken in April that year, Alfred declared himself a political registration and election agent for the Conservative Party in Chatham, Kent – no doubt fresh from the campaign trail for the General Election of December 1910, which gave Asquith’s Liberal Party a narrow victory, but no overall majority. This was a period of national upheaval, with the issues of Irish Home Rule and women’s suffrage dominating. Asquith’s government also brought Britain into the First World War.
During this time Alfred and Maude lived at 122 Rainham Road, Chatham and were both now going by the double-barrelled surname of Gordon Roberts – or perhaps Gordon was a middle name? Was this an affectation assumed for some political reason? They had no children and Alfred died at Chatham in 1942.
Sidney Came Roberts
The youngest son, Sidney [sometimes Sydney] Came, was born on 2 February 1874, a few months after his grandfather Lazarus died. He attended St John’s School, Plymouth in 1883 and in 1891 was an apprentice hairdresser. By 1901, aged twenty-seven, he was working as a hairdresser, still living at home.
But by 1911 he was, like his eldest brother Ernest Edmund, a patient in the Plymouth asylum, his age wrongly given as thirty-three (he was thirty-seven). He is described as a ‘lunatic 24 years’, so clearly he had been afflicted by some form of mental illness since childhood (1887). Unlike his brother, however, his infirmity did not prevent him from holding down a job, as he was described as a worker and his occupation still that of hairdresser.
That two of Henry’s sons were diagnosed as ‘lunatics’ would surely have been covered up by the family at the time and never discussed.
Sidney was unmarried in 1911, and probably remained so.
Florence Elizabeth Roberts
Florence Elizabeth (born 1869) married Frederick Myrick Henry Somerville (1865–1951) at St Germans, Cornwall on 21 October 1889. The Somervilles were another interesting family in the Plymouth/Stoke Damerel area.
Frederick Somerville was an insurance agent in 1891, and in 1901 was a ‘contractor’s timekeeper’ in Plymouth. Florence and Frederick had several children, all born at Stoke Damerel. Those surviving infancy were: Aubrey Victor (born 1890), Ulrich Lewis Forester (1895–1917), Dora Florence Edith (1895–1961; m. James Talbot 1933), Olive Catherine May (1897), Agnes Hilda Bernice (1899–1965) and Alban Frederick Mark (1903–87). When the 1901 census was taken, the infant Olive was staying with her grandfather Henry at Holborn Street.
From 1904 onwards the Somervilles travelled extensively to various destinations round the world, notably South Africa and South America. During the First World War their address was given as Ferrocarril Antofagasta a Bolivia, Mejillones, Chile. By the start of the war, Britain had invested in 118 railway lines in South America and the companies recruited the staff from Britain. The Ferrocarril Antofagasta a Bolivia (FCAB) operated in the northern provinces of Chile.
They kept links with the UK though. In July 1917, the youngest son, Alban, was baptised at Plymouth St John, when he would have been about fourteen. The same month as Alban’s baptism, Ulrich, a lance corporal in the 1st Batallion Hertfordshire Regiment, was killed in action, aged twenty-three, at the third battle of Ypres (Passchendaele). His body was never recovered but he is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial. Aubrey emigrated to Cape Town, where he married in 1926 (this could be his family).
Florence died in Kensington in 1931, aged sixty-one. Frederick seems to have still been in Chile in 1933 but returned to England at some point as he was at Hill Park Crescent, Plymouth in 1939, where he died in 1951.
Agnes Maria Roberts
Agnes Maria (born 1877) married a Cornish carpenter, Richard Gill, in 1909 in Plymouth. In 1911 she was living at Desborough Road, Plymouth, aged thirty-four, although on census night her husband was lodging with a family at St Blazey, near St Austell. In 1939 they were both at 12 Holborn Street, with Catherine Roberts.
Agnes Maria died on 21 February 1944, when she was living at 22 Radnor Street, Plymouth, aged sixty-six. She left £887 13s to her husband. When Richard Gill died in 1956 he was living in Brunswick Terrace. He left over £2000 (to a Charles Daw, ‘hardware shop assistant’). They appear not to have had any children.
Catherine Mary and Harriet Sophia Roberts
Harriet Sophia and Catherine (listed as Katherine) Mary were still with their father in 1911. Harriet appears to have died unmarried in 1918. Catherine was left alone at 12 Holborn Street, although in 1939 her sister and brother-in-law, Richard and Agnes Gill, were also living there. They had moved by 1944.
Catherine died a spinster, at Plymouth City Hospital on 3 November 1945, aged eighty. She was the last of Henry’s twelve children. Her address when she died was still 12 Holborn Street; she had lived on Holborn Street on and off for almost seventy years. The Western Morning News reported that the house was auctioned in January 1946, for £660.