James Mackenzie Fooks
(1780-1824)
In the 1980s the original of this portrait of J.M. Fooks was apparently in the possession of B. Davis, of Sorrel, Tasmania, the daughter of Eric Vere Fooks. Whereabouts now unknown.
James Mackenzie Fooks was born on 7 December 1780, the son of William and Ann Williams Fooks, and baptised on 7 January 1781 (surname given as Fokes).
He married Jane Berjew (1779–1875) on 2 March 1802, at Bradford Abbas, Dorset. Jane came from a long line of west of England church ministers.
It is possible James and Jane lived in London in the early years of their marriage, as their eldest son was born there, according to the 1851 census.
By 1812 James was a prominent, and popular, builder and surveyor at Weymouth/Melcombe Regis. Before his untimely death he was employing up to ninety mechanics in the town and was described as a ‘most kind master’.
He seems to have drawn up plans for the enlargement of St Mary the Virgin, Cerne Abbas, Dorset, in 1819 (see above).
However he died a relatively young man, following a tragic accident. In 1824, the year he was appointed Surveyor to the Borough of Weymouth, the gig in which he was travelling with his wife between Dorchester and Weymouth overturned and James was fatally injured.
Amongst the mourners at his funeral at Wyke Regis on 28 October 1824 must surely have been his sister Mary Roberts and brother-in-law, Lazarus Roberts.
The burial record confirms his age as forty-four. Ten days before he died he hurriedly drew up a will, dated 18 October. So the accident must have been some while before this; his condition worsened and when it became clear his life was in danger, he decided to make a will. The only family member mentioned in the will is his wife, Jane.
Six months before James’s death, on 2 March 1824, Lazarus and Mary Roberts’s son – James Mackenzie Roberts, my great-great grandfather – was baptised at the church of St Laurence, Upwey. That Lazarus and Mary’s first-born was named after James Mackenzie Fooks, rather than after Lazarus or his father (Abraham), or Mary’s father (William), would suggest there was a particular bond between Mary and James: I am guessing he was her brother. Mary was some twenty-two years younger than James though so maybe he was more of a father figure? Maybe she was raised by James and Jane, at their home, 8 St Thomas Street, Weymouth? When Lazarus and Mary married, in 1823, the first witness at the wedding was James Fooks: there is no mention of her father.
James and Jane Fooks had several children of their own, who (assuming I am correct and Mary was James’s sister) were my great-great grandfather’s cousins, although much older: in fact the eldest were the same age as Mary, their aunt.
After their father’s death in 1824, the family dispersed and all of the surviving members eventually emigrated to Australia and New Zealand, including the widowed Jane Fooks, who died on 15 April 1875 at Tasmania, aged ninety-five.
Some of this information is taken from The Fooks Family Records, by Grahame R. Fooks, privately printed in the 1980s, which traces this line. This in turn draws on dates in a family bible belonging to Catherine Jane Iles Fooks (referenced below as CJIF bible). Although some of the early dates in Fooks Family Records are unreliable, there is no reason to suppose that the transcription of dates from the bible are inaccurate.
Charles Berjew Fooks
Charles Berjew, the couple’s eldest son, was born on 7 May 1804 (source: CJIF bible). He was born in Dorset, according to the 1841 census (although London, according to the 1851 census) and baptised 17 August 1806 at Up Cerne, Dorset. This was his mother’s family parish: Jane Fooks’s father Samuel was the rector here until his death in 1820.
Like his father, Charles Berjew was a builder and surveyor and also a member of the Corporation of Weymouth and, for a while, Alderman of Weymouth. He was listed as a ‘surveyor’ of Park Street, Weymouth and was responsible for several public buildings in the town, such as the Masonic Hall of 1836 and the new Holy Trinity church in the town, built by the firm of Fooks & Fawn – ‘a beautiful example of the pure gothic style’, hailed reporters in August 1836. Charles Berjew was also a merchant, as illustrated in this snippet from the London Gazette:
Weymouth, August 24, 1841.
HAVING this day, by mutual consent, dissolved our Partnership, carried on under tile title of C. B. Fooks and Co. of Weymouth, Merchants, it is hereby further agreed between us, that Mr. Fooks do retain sole possession of the business; and that he pay and receive all debts contracted by us as partners during the period of the said copartnership.
C. B. Fooks.
Joseph Brittan.
On the death of his father in 1824, Charles Berjew became the senior member of the family at the age of twenty. He married an Ann Chandler (1803–79) at Lambeth on 12 October 1826.
It is of note that Joseph Brittan (1805–67, newspaper proprietor and editor, and formerly a surgeon, according to his 1851 census description) married Ann’s sister Elizabeth Mary Chandler and when she died, he married her sister Sophia: creating some controversy. His brother William Guise Brittan married another sister, Louisa. The entire family, Fookses and Brittans, would emigrate to New Zealand to found settlements near Christchurch.
When the 1841 census was taken, the family was at Park Street, Weymouth but according to the Royal Blue Book, between 1844 and 1851 Charles Berjew Fooks, surveyor, had London offices at 1 Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn. The London Gazette announced that his partnership at this address with Frederick Johnson was dissolved in 1846.
When the census was taken in March 1851, no one was listed at 1 Serle Street (which is wrongly transcribed as Serles Street). The Fooks family were to be found south of the river on census night, vistors at the home of an Elizabeth Harrington, a ‘proprietor of houses’ at 4 Queens Row (Grove Lane), Camberwell. Charles Berjew was listed as an ‘auctioneer and surveyor’.
The Fooks family were in the process of emigrating. A month earlier they had seen off their twenty-one-year-old and recently married son Charles Edward and his new wife. No doubt they were anxiously awaiting news.
Ann Fooks and daughters and the Brittans followed a few months later, sailing from Deal on 21 October 1851, as reported in the Lyttelton Times, 7 February and 14 February 1852:
Arrived: Feb. 5, barque William Hyde, 532 tons, Applewhaite, from London and Plymouth, Oct. 24th. Passengers, Rev. A. Cotton, Mr. Joseph Brittan, Mrs. Brittan, and 4 children, Mrs Fookes, Miss Louisa Fookes, Miss Mary Fookes, Miss Curtis, Messrs. Greenstreet, Alstitt, Moore, Cuff, and –– Cuff, and 88 in the steerage.
Charles Berjew was not with his family for the voyage. One story has it that he escaped debt in England by fleeing first to Australia. He was certainly in Adelaide in December 1851, according to one news report. This recounts that one William Rose was charged with stealing a pocket book from Charles Berjew:
Charles Berjew Fooks deposed to his standing near the Market-place on Saturday in conversation with two or three friends, when Mr. Murray came up and asked him if he had lost anything; to which he replied, ‘Yes; he had lost a pocket-book.’ The prisoner was near enough to hear him, and said, ‘Are you sure you have lost it?’ He (Mr. Fooks), after feeling his pockets two or three times found it in his left-hand coat-pocket. The pocket-book contained three £5 notes, two £1 notes, letters of credit, and other documents, but nothing had been taken from it. He had carried his pocket book in his right-hand pocket for twenty years.
It’s difficult to see what crime was committed here: was this a scam of some kind or a genuine error?
He must have recently arrived in South Australia, perhaps leaving England in the summer of 1851. But why Charles Berjew was in Australia is open to conjecture (perhaps land speculating?). He must have joined his family in New Zealand by October of the following year, when he was signatory to a deed for the lease of land at Christchurch. He was on the Christchurch electoral roll (at Cashel Street) by the summer of 1853.
He didn’t immediately sever all connections with London when he emigrated in 1851 though, it would seem. More recent research has discovered that legal correspondence was still being sent to 13 York Terrace in 1859, to be forwarded on. But why was mail still being sent there some eight years after the family had emigrated? (In 1861 a Mary Rutherford, proprietor of houses, was at this address.)
Charles Berjew continued his chequered career in New Zealand, it would seem. In 1860 he was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to four years hard labour in a trial that was widely reported in the local press. By 1865 he was out of gaol and living at Norwich Quay, Lyttleton, trading once more under the name Fooks & Co, although again facing financial problems.
Charles Berjew Fooks died at his home at Christchurch on 11 September 1875, aged seventy-one.
Charles Edward Fooks
Like his father and grandfather, Charles Edward Fooks, also worked as an architect and surveyor. He was born on 19 August 1829, at Weymouth (or London, according to his obituary of 1907) and educated at ‘Salisbury and Edmonton’. This could be referring to the seventeenth-century Salisbury House in Edmonton, north London, which was at times a boys school.
According to one biography, Charles Edward Fooks was articled to an M. Cooper, architect and surveyor, of Lincoln’s Inn (source: Fooks Family Records). I can find no architect or surveyor named M. Cooper listed in any directory, but Lincoln’s Inn puts him very close to Serle Street and his father’s office.
Charles married Catherine Compton, of York Terrace, Camberwell New Road, on 16 January 1851, when he was described as an ‘architect’ of Camberwell. He had the same occupation as, and was a contemporary of, James Mackenzie Roberts (his second cousin; my great-great grandfather). James lived a few streets away at West Square, Southwark in 1851 so it is tempting to assume that they knew each other and that James and Phoebe attended the wedding.
Charles’s marriage announcement in The Times (17 January 1851), gives his address as Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn. As noted above his father was at 1 Serle Street in 1851, although the family apparently also ran a survey office in Camberwell (source: Fooks Family Records; see also the page on James Mackenzie Roberts). Possibly this was at 13 York Terrace, Camberwell New Road.
Charles and Catherine were not at Camberwell or the Serle Street address in March 1851, nor could they to be found elsewhere. The census had just missed them. They had departed Gravesend the previous month, on board the Steadfast, arriving at Canterbury, New Zealand on 9 June. Catherine became pregnant during the voyage and a son was born at Christchurch the following 31 January.
Also working as an architect, Charles Edward designed Joseph Brittan’s Avonside residence, Linwood Lodge, in 1857 but by 1861 he was trying his hand at farming, establishing Melcombe Farm at Avonside, near Christchurch; the farm no doubt named after the Dorset town he grew up in (Melcombe Regis was an alternative name for Weymouth). Financial difficulties soon forced him to persevere with his original profession and in the 1870s he settled at Ashburton, where he served as borough engineer for the remainder of his career.
Charles Edward Fooks died on 17 November 1907, commanding a lengthy obituary in the local press. He and Catherine had a large family of twelve children, although tragically three of their infant daughters (Alice Eliza, Ellen and Lillian) died of scarlet fever on three separate days in September 1863. The lives of Charles Edward and his descendants in New Zealand are documented into the twentieth century in local newspaper reports and in The Fooks Family Records.
Catherine Ann Wiltshire Fooks
Baptised with her brother Charles Berjew Fooks on 17 August 1806 at Up Cerne, Dorset and buried five-and-a-half years later, on 6 February 1812 at Wyke Regis (as Catherine Fookes). Wiltshire was her maternal grandmother’s maiden name.
William Samuel Fooks
Baptised 19 April 1808 at Melcombe Regis. William Samuel Fooks was a solicitor in Weymouth. He married Maria Irene Jane Richardson (1806–61), at Wyke Regis, on 8 December 1831. They had several children, born at Melcombe Regis: the typically named Thomas Richardson Mackenzie Fooks (1831–1911), James Mackenzie Fooks (1835–37) and James Mackenzie William Fooks (1839–86). A daughter, Mary Richardson Fooks (1837–1923), married Erasmus Paull of Wallaroo, South Australia, in 1854.
This family emigrated to South Australia in 1840 on board the Waterloo (their name mistranscribed on the passenger list as Tooks), with William’s brother Samuel Berjew Fooks and quite possibly sister Catherine Jane Iles Fooks (see below) and several Cornish mining families – the ship having called in at Falmouth en route – arriving at Port Adelaide on 9 November 1840. Things did not go so well for William however. In 1842 he was charged with stealing 270 ewes, although was found not guilty.
William Samuel died, at Sandridge, Victoria, in 1856. His wife died in 1861.
? James Mackenzie Fooks
Unconfirmed. Possibly born 19 April 1811 and died 28 April 1811 (source: Fooks Family Records). Parish records missing?
Mackenzie James Fooks
Born May 1812? Baptised at Melcombe Regis, 22 July 1812, the son of James and Jane Fooks. Buried at Wyke Regis on 21 November 1812, aged ‘six months’.
James Mackenzie Fooks
Baptised at Up Cerne on 30 January 1814, the son of James and Jane Fooks (‘Builder’ of Melcombe Regis). He died on 13 April 1837, at Weymouth, and was buried at Wyke Regis on 19 April. He was aged ‘twenty-one’, according to the burial record and death notices, where he is described as the ‘third surviving son of the late Mr. James Mackenzie Fooks’, but this must be the son baptised in 1814, so he would have been at least twenty-three. Was this the same person who witnessed the will of Stephen Fooks in 1831, when he would have been seventeen?
Another boy named James Fooks (no middle name given) was buried at Wyke Regis on 10 May 1815, aged ‘nineteen months’ (so born October 1813). Baptism record missing? Was he another son? His birth was too close to James Mackenzie baptised at Up Cerne in January 1814.
Catherine Jane Iles Fooks
Born 25 June 1819 (source: CJIF bible). She was the only surviving daughter of James and Jane Fooks. At the age of twenty she married her cousin, a schoolmaster named John Berjew, at Melcombe Regis, on 11 September 1839. The marriage record confirms her as the daughter of ‘James M. Fooks, Builder’. The following year they emigrated to Australia, on board the Waterloo (along with Catherine’s brothers William and Samuel). The passenger list for the ship includes the names ‘Mr and Mrs Burgen’, which must be them, their name mis-transcribed (as was the Fookses’ name, to Tooks, in the same passenger list, compiled by a ship’s clerk with poor handwriting, no doubt).
In 1846 the Berjews set up the North Adelaide Classical and Commerical Academy and the North Adelaide Seminary, initially charging £1 1s per quarter. Having established themselves, the following year this had risen sharply to £6 6s per quarter for boys over the age of eight.
They had several daughters (the first, Jane Catherine Robinson Berjew, apparently born during the voyage to Australia) and Catherine died at Adelaide on 14 May 1904 (source: Fooks Family Records).
Samuel Berjew Fooks
Baptised 30 October 1822 at Melcombe Regis, Samuel was the youngest son of James and Jane Fooks and emigrated to Australia on the Waterloo, along with his sister and brother (see above). He married Margaret Sarah Westbook in 1847 and settled in Tasmania in 1842, where he changed his surname to Fookes, adding an ‘e’. He was ordained in 1848 and died on 2 November 1892, aged seventy. His son was Henry Samuel Cox Fookes (born 11 January 1848).