Born the daughter of a carpenter in 1774, my 4th great grandmother Lucy Chuter married a gentleman 46 years her senior, became a wealthy widow at 34, but then turned away from her wealth and position in society to become a farmer’s wife at 36. Her legacy is reflected in the lives of two very different families.
Lucy grew up in the tiny rural village of Byfleet, Surrey, the second of eight children to be born to Henry Chuter and his wife Mary. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine Henry was “a man well respected,” but he was still only a tradesman in a time when position and title meant everything.
We have nothing to tell us about Lucy's early life. Sometime in the 1790s she moved to London, but what she was doing there is unknown, and how she met William Eves is a mystery.
William was elderly, twice widowed and wealthy, with large investments in property, stocks and bonds and ownership of five buildings in the London borough of Westminster and three in the genteel suburban village of Clapham, south of the River Thames. The Westminster properties were all clustered just steps from the Houses of Parliament, one of them rented out as a well-known pub called the Westminster Arms. His Clapham properties included a coach house and stables and two large houses. One was his home.
We don’t know how or where Lucy was living when she and William met, so we can only speculate about how their relationship started. William was 71 and Lucy was 24. Was Lucy attracted to William’s money? Was William only interested in a “romp in the hay” with an attractive servant girl?
Lucy gave birth to a son in 1799. William then did something astounding. Were Lucy simply a prostitute he could have ignored mother and child, if a house servant he could have dismissed her, paying her off with no further obligations. But that’s not what William did: he acknowledged the child as his own.
He and Lucy baptised the baby Augustus Eves in November 1799. However, although willing to acknowledge Augustus publicly, it seems William didn’t want the acknowledgement to be very loud, because the ceremony took place in a church in Lambeth, and not in Clapham, where William lived.
What then made William very publicly defy the rigid norms of the day to take Lucy as his third wife? A year after Augustus’ birth he married Lucy in the Parish Church in Clapham.
When Lucy moved into William’s home she began a life unimaginably distant from her roots in Byfleet. Her neighbours included the “Saints”, a group of evangelical Christians led by the Member of Parliament William Wilberforce. They campaigned for all the important social issues of the day, most famously the abolition of the slave trade. Other neighbours included Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen and the first to measure the density of the earth; Henry Thornton, the founder of Sierre Leone; and Charles Grant, chairman of the British East India Company. How did they and their families react to this young woman moving into William's big house? Did they overlook her background and accept her into their circle? How would William's servants have treated her, this girl who had been just one of them before the wedding? And how did William's family react to Lucy's arrival amongst them?
William died at the age of 80 in 1808, the victim of a “decay in nature,” and was interred in the family burial ground.
William’s will is interesting reading, especially for what it says about William’s attitude towards his children, or perhaps their relationship with him in the last years of his life. He left an astounding £1,000 to his youngest son, Augustus, but just £150 to William and £75 to George. He didn’t even acknowledge his four daughters, but did leave £30 to each of his daughters’ four children.
The house in Clapham was left to Lucy. She also had the right to the rents from all of William’s other properties, although he wanted the properties themselves to pass to his children when she died.
William's children must have been furious to learn he had appointed Lucy as his executor. We can only imagine the reaction of his eldest surviving son, William, when he learned he was to receive only £150 and would have to wait until Lucy died before getting his hands on his father's properties. Ironically, he was 20 years Lucy's senior, so the likelihood he would outlive her would have been remote indeed.
Lucy was now just 34, and with her son Augustus probably at a boarding school she was free to enjoy her status as a young financially secure widow in Clapham, perhaps to prowl for another eligible husband even further up the social scale. So why, then, did she return to Byfleet, and why did she two years later marry a farmer from the nearby town of Chertsey?
James Berryman was of stout yeoman stock. His family had been farming in the Chertsey area for hundreds of years, never very wealthy, but not in poverty either. By marrying him Lucy was in a way returning to her roots, as if her interlude with William Eves had never happened.
Lucy and James raised a son James and a daughter Lucy. They were married for 29 years when Lucy died at the age of 65 in 1840. The death must have been mystifying because a coroner’s jury was convened, reporting the cause of death to be an “act of God.”
We have more detail about James’ death five years later. He died from Erysipelas, a streptococcus infection commonly known at the time as “Rose,” because of the colour it turned the victim’s skin, or “St Antony's Fire,” because of its burning heat. He was diagnosed on Sunday, September 28th, 1845. His doctor must have told him the infection was fatal, because James drew up a new will the following day. According to a servant who was present at the time, William succumbed to the disease four days later.
Lucy's two sons, Augustus Eves, and his half-brother James Berryman, led divergent lives and left different legacies.
Augustus became a widely respected doctor, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, remembered for his pioneering operations, his principled stand against blood-letting and his early interest in blood transfusions. He was a prolific writer and a keen observer, authoring a medical text book while still in his 20s, and chronicling his experiments and observations in articles and letters to the British Medical Journal, the Lancet and other journals. His most famous operation is documented in Harold Ellis’ 1994 book Surgical Case Studies from the Past.
One of the highlights of Augustus’ life came on March 7th, 1860, when he attended at Queen Victoria’s court. He was presented to her Majesty by the Earl of Ducie.
Augustus’ children themselves became doctors or married them. One son, Charles Thick Eves, became a military surgeon, with a successful career in India, retiring as a Brigadier and Deputy Surgeon General. A daughter, Maria, married Augustus' medical partner. She and her husband, Charles Templeman Speer, became renowned spiritualists in London. A grandson became a celebrated musician at the turn of the 20th century in London. Slowly, though, Augustus' line withered and disappeared, most of his descendants dying relatively young with few or no children. The last of the line was gone from the record by the early 1900s.
Augustus' half-brother James Berryman became a farmer, like his father, but he wasn’t as successful. He soon gave up farming to become a relieving officer (an official appointed to distribute relief to the poor and to admit them to the workhouse) and then one of the first police officers for the town of Guildford in Surrey. When he died of tuberculosis in 1856 at the age of 42, he left his wife to somehow care for six children - the youngest just four months old.
One of James’ sons, Harry Berryman, enlisted in the army at the age of 18. He had a good career, learning to read and write and learning the trade of blacksmithing and rising to the rank of Sergeant before retiring to run a pub in Buckinghamshire. He was my great great grandfather.
Lucy Chuter’s grandsons Charles Thick Eves and Harry Berryman served in India at the same time in the late 19th century. Harry was then a corporal in the Royal Artillery, Charles a Surgeon Major in the Indian Army. Did they ever meet? Could they ever have imagined that they were cousins?
Lucy’s descendants are now spread through England, Canada and Australia. I wonder how much of her independence and adventurous character live on in them today.
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