The Soldier's Life For Me: Our family in the service of the Queen

“There is no retreat from here, men. You must die where you stand.”

Sir Colin Campbell addressing Robert Phippen and other soldiers before battle, October 25, 1854

On June 28th, 1838 a 19-year-old girl named Victoria launched an era that has born her name ever since. That morning she rode to Westminster Abbey for her coronation in an ornate carriage drawn by eight magnificent horses, through streets lined with over 400,000 well wishers, visitors, and dignitaries. The entire nation celebrated with street parties and dinners in towns and villages of the countryside and wherever Englishmen gathered overseas.

They had reason to celebrate. At the dawn of the Victorian Era Britain was the most powerful nation the world had ever known. The first industrialized nation, Britain’s factories and foundries in 1838 were the workshops of the world, her goods carried to every corner of the globe on British ships. Her banking system dwarfed any other, financing British enterprise in the United States, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. And even then the sun never set on her still growing empire.

This was the century of relative peace, enforced and policed by British gunboats and regiments, that was known as Pax Britannica.

Yet amongst all the pomp that coronation day, the celebration of all things British, of all things that made Britain great, few understood just how thin the thread on which the British-led global order depended. In 1838, when a voyage to Canada could took a month and to India three, and when letters were six months in the mail, the British Empire and the Pax Britannia depended on a navy of just 25,000 sailors and 9,000 marines, and an army of only 91,000 soldiers, far fewer than are enlisted in the British armed forces today. These 125,000 men were serving on six continents and on every sea, expanding the empire, hunting for slave traders, guarding borders and guaranteeing free access to trade. In 1838 two of them were our ancestors. They and their descendants have served Queen and Country, and King and Country, ever since.

What brought so many of our family to enlist? It certainly wasn’t the money. All through the 19th century a soldier’s basic wage was stuck at around a shilling a day and from this was deducted the cost of food and uniforms. This was less than what even unskilled agricultural labourers could earn. Alan R. Skelley in his book The Victorian Army at Home, quotes a Colonel in 1874 who lamented “You cannot get, or expect to get, respectable men to enter the service upon the wages of a shilling a day when a common mechanic can earn from three to five shillings . . .”

The Colonel was wrong. Amongst the shiftless, unemployed and borderline criminals the army also attracted a few good men. My great grandfather, Alfred Nice, had good prospects and was earning a respectable wage as a blacksmith’s striker when he enlisted. His brother Herbert was working as a Farrier (and continued the same trade in the army). Within five years Herbert had been promoted to Staff Sergeant.

As the popular historian Jan Morris wrote in her book Pax Britannica, “. . . the other ranks of the British Army were still all too often the scum. In many a respectable English home, bowered country cottage or scrubbed tenement of Nonconformists, to admit a son in the army was like confessing a misdemeanour.”

It’s a long told family story that Richard Campbell was disowned by his father when he enlisted in the 17th Lancers in 1888. No doubt the Berryman family were indignant and disappointed when brothers James, John and Harry all signed up, leaving behind their respectable middle class relatives in Chertsey in Surrey.

From there, it seems for much of our family military service evolved into something of a tradition, passed down from father to son. My grandfather Richard Campbell grew up listening to his father’s stories of army life in India and South Africa at the end of the Victorian Era. Richard enlisted at the age of 18 and went on to serve in India himself. My great great grandfather Harry Berryman retired as a Sergeant in the Royal Artillery. His son Hazel Bliss Berryman enlisted in the Royal Artillery in his turn, serving in India and fighting on two fronts in World War I before retiring as a Battery Sergeant Major in 1920. In an interview recorded by the Imperial War Museum in 2000, Hazel’s son Hazel Edgar talked about his father’s love of the military life. With his father’s encouragement he enlisted in the Royal Artillery too, winning a medal for bravery on D-Day, when he landed on a beach in Normandy.

They were all terribly young: Herbert Street, my great grand uncle, had only just turned 14 when he signed up in 1888. He was 4 ft 9 in and weighed 77 lbs. He served one day shy of 25 years, retiring as a Sergeant in 1913. Hazel Bliss Berryman was just 14 when he enlisted too. We have a copy of the handwritten permission note signed by his mother and father that he provided to the recruiting sergeant. Hazel’s father Harry had waited until he was 18 before he enlisted, but Harry’s brother James was just 16 when he sailed with HMS Bacchante to the Pacific in 1860. He celebrated his 17th birthday in Esquimalt Harbour on the west coast of Canada. The other brother, John, waited until he’d turned 21 before joining, but that meant giving up a career as a shoemaker.

The army life was a hard life. All through Victoria’s time it was more likely for our ancestors to die of disease than of gunshot wounds. Consider my 4th great grand uncle Samuel Lang’s experience in the 64th Regiment of Foot, where he served from enlistment in 1825 until discharge in 1846. According to the regimental history, Samuel was exposed to pulmonary disease and eye problems in Gibraltar and Yellow Fever in Jamaica, which took the lives of half the soldiers in the regiment (an English newspaper account in 1835 claimed that so many soldiers were dying in Jamaica that the cost of wood for making coffins had increased 15%). Samuel retired a broken man. His medical report on discharge reported two hernias and a “Chronic Disease of the Bladder with inability to retain urine.”

My 3rd great grandfather William Tanner enlisted in 1825 and served for 25 years until being found unfit for further service, suffering from severe bronchitis and crippling varicose veins in his legs. Another 3rd great grandfather, John Street, served in the Royal Artillery for 22 years, 16 of them in Canada. When he retired he was deaf and an invalid. William’s daughter Catherine married my 2nd great grandfather Harry Berryman in India in 1879, after her first husband, a fellow soldier, died there. Catherine’s first husband wasn’t unique. Statistics show 50% to 75% of all soldiers sent to India between the 1840s and 1850s died there. Harry’s son Hazel served in India in the 1890s where he was hospitalized for scarlet fever, catarrh and swollen lymph glands, and five times for Malaria.

Accidents were common. Hazel Berryman suffered a severe concussion when he was thrown from his horse in 1898. Many of William Tanner’s fellow troopers were seriously injured when they were riding their horses under a railway arch in 1842, in the infancy of rail service, just when a steam engine was sounding its whistle as it passed overhead. The horses panicked, threw their riders and stampeded through the streets of Birmingham.

Ironically, considering they had enlisted in the army, our ancestors seemed to have a lot of problems at sea. Samuel Lang’s two hernias were suffered when he and others in his regiment were shipwrecked off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1843. When my Great Grandfather Richard Campbell sailed home from India in 1893, six of the men in his regiment were so badly injured when a dockyard crane collapsed that limbs were amputated. Two others died during the voyage and the ship almost hit rocks off the French coast during heavy fog. Alfred Nice was en route to South Africa when his troop ship, the SS Ismore, hit rocks off the African coast. Everyone on board was saved, but many horses died and his artillery battery lost all its guns.

It seems a posting to India was a common experience for Victorian soldiers, but the empire was vast, with many opportunities for other foreign service. The records are spotty and incomplete, but we know our 19th century ancestors were in Bermuda, Canada, the Crimea, Egypt, Gibraltar, Ireland, Jamaica, Malta, St Helena, St Lucia, South Africa and Turkey.

This was an exciting experience for people who had grown up in rural villages and in the narrow streets of London’s east end. The hardships of these postings became a part of the excitement, growing with their retelling. Our ancestors left virtually no record of their experiences, but the two who did, my grandfather Richard Campbell and my great grandfather Hazel Bliss Berryman, both believed their years in the army were the richest of their lives (Richard inspired me to go to India myself to trace his footsteps).

Richard’s romantic memories were seconded by others. In his book Old Soldier Sahib Frank Richards wrote of his time as a soldier in India, recalling “Although (we) were hardened sinners we were also great admirers of all things that are beautiful: on many a night we left the Canteen half cut and journeyed down to view the Taj by moonlight, when it looked three times more beautiful than what it did during the day.”

Hardened sinners they were. William Tanner deserted twice, being court martialled and sentenced to three months’ hard labour after the first incident and to 20 days’ solitary confinement after the second. He appears in the Regimental Defaulters Book many times, repeatedly failing to appear for duty, showing up drunk, being insubordinate, and breaking out of barracks for drinking binges. William’s record was rivalled by that of my 3rd great grandfather John Street, who was court martialled four times, serving a total of 226 days in prison, and appeared in the Regimental Defaulters Book six times. John’s son was treated for Gonorrhoea, as was my great grandfather Alfred Nice. Sergeant Samuel Lang was found drunk on duty in Jamaica. He was reduced in rank back to private. The regimental board that considered the discharge of my grandfather’s foster father Bill Hollywell recorded that his character was “Indifferent, has been addicted to drink . . .”

Sometimes, very occasionally, our ancestors went to war.

They were amongst the last to ride into battle on horseback, armed with lances and swords. Others carried muskets and fired canon little different from those of the 17th century. But by the end of 19th century they were learning to use weapons with devastating destructive power, foreshadowing the carnage of the First World War.

My 3rd great grandfather Robert Phippen fought against the Russians in the Crimea while serving in the Royal Marines. He was there on October 25th, 1854, on a high ridge looking down into the “Valley of Death,” witnessing the doomed cavalry attack forever remembered as the “Charge of the Light Brigade.” He himself fought the same day, part of the small force that stood like a rock against a Russian attack in an action witnessed by the war correspondent for the Times of London. It was in describing this action that the reporter coined the immortal term “the thin red line.”

Harry Berryman’s cousin Charles Thick Eves was a medical officer in India during the mutiny there in 1857. My grandmother Eva Race’s adoptive father Walter Race was a medic in Egypt when the British invaded in 1882.

Bill Hollywell rode with the 17th Lancers in the Battle of Ulundi, the final action in the Anglo Zulu War of 1879. This was one of the bloodiest campaigns the British fought in their conquest of South Africa (part of the story of the war is dramatized in the movie Zulu).

The Boer War of 1899 - 1903 was the defining war for our family. More of our ancestors fought in this war than any other, including both world wars of the 20th century. These included Alfred Nice, Richard Campbell, Walter Race, Herbert Nice, Harry Cyril Berryman, Herbert Street and Thomas Lansdown. Between them they fought in every major engagement of this war, which some have recently called Britain’s Vietnam. In the end the Boers were defeated, but at a cost far higher than the British government ever contemplated. Most of the world outside the British Empire believed the British were wrong and the price was the loss of international goodwill.

Our ancestors typically served for 21 years, retiring after they qualified for a pension. In that time they often married and started families, complicating their lives considerably.

John Street sailed with his artillery battery to Canada in 1845. He met and married Margaret Bowers in the city of Quebec soon after he arrived. When he returned to England 15 years later, he had six children under his wing. William Tanner was serving in Ireland when he married Margaret Hickey, a young girl from Cork half his age. He returned to England with two children. Harry Berryman returned from India with a new wife, Catherine, and Catherine’s two children by her first marriage to another soldier.

Robert Phippen joined the Royal Marines in Plymouth. There he met Mary Ann Took, a young widowed mother who was probably a prostitute. She waited for him while he spent six years at sea and a year in the Crimea. Their daughter, Emma, married a soldier too.

Alfred Nice met his wife Mary Wilcox when he was stationed at Horfield Barracks in Bristol. He was posted to the war in South Africa a year after they were married. She wasn’t a faithful wife, bearing a child while Alfred was overseas, but when he returned, Alfred raised the boy as if he were his own.

Our ancestors were loyal to each other even after they retired from the army. When Richard Campbell returned from South Africa to find his wife had passed away, his old friend from the 17th Lancers Bill Hollywell (he who had been “addicted to drink”) provided a home for Richard’s young son Dick. When John Street’s daughter had an illegitimate child (my grandmother), his friend Walter Race and his wife Mary adopted her, keeping her background secret for thirty years.

The authorities weren’t sympathetic to the complications of family life. It was almost impossible for a soldier to take a family overseas. For the first half of the 19th century families were most often split apart, with wives and children left behind at the wharf when fathers sailed away, sometimes not to return for decades. This was an era when the average Private couldn’t read or write, and there were no provisions or encouragement for soldiers to forward their pay back to England to support their families.

This only began to change with the Crimean War in the 1850s, when sympathetic newspaper reports and public concern forced the government to start doing more for military families. Even so, change came slowly. 

Even as late as 1910 Herbert Street was punished for refusing a long term posting in Jamaica, which would have meant leaving his wife and three children behind in England. He had already spent three years on St Helena, a desolate island in the South Atlantic that is so remote that it can still today only be reached by monthly mail ship. He also served a year in South Africa and two years in St Lucia in the Caribbean. Although he had reached the rank of Company Sergeant Major and was described in his service records as a man of exemplary character, “. . . Thoroughly sober and reliable . . .” and “Painstakingly industrious,” he was barred from reenlisting beyond 21 years.

The family’s military traditions endured into the 20th century. Our ancestors fought in both world wars and in India, and served all through the cold war that followed. I was one of the last of them, and clearly remember British training films of the late 1970s, teaching us how to continue fighting despite the radiation sickness in the 24 hours or so we would have left to live after being attacked by Russian tactical nuclear missiles. Thank goodness we live in a better world today.

Bravery and Babies: The Destruction of the Troopship Alert

Practically forgotten today, the sinking of the troopship Alert in 1843 was in its time considered an astounding story of leadership, widely cited as an example to all soldiers in the British army. This little-remembered adventure is particularly interesting to me because one of the soldiers aboard the Alert when it was wrecked was my 4th Great Grand Uncle, Samuel Lang.

Born the son of a thatcher in Ugborough, Devon in 1804, Sam “took the King’s Shilling” in Plymouth in 1825 (he actually received two shillings and sixpence on enlistment), enlisting in the 64th Regiment of Foot. After training in Jersey he joined his regiment in Gibraltar for three years. The regiment returned to England in 1830, but was then posted to Jamaica in 1834 and from there to Halifax in Canada, in 1840.

Life in a British infantry regiment in early Victorian times was treacherous; not because of the dangers of battle, but rather the risk of disease. The regimental history, written in 1883, records that “After the arrival of the Regiment at Gibraltar, they suffered considerably from pulmonary complaints, particularly when occupying the barracks on Windmill Hill, and subsequently ophthalmic cases were numerous, owing to the arduous services the regiment had to perform at the North Front, where they were much exposed to shifting sands, when strong and often fatal Levant winds prevailed.” It goes on to report on the terrible loss of life in Jamaica to Yellow Fever, which killed off the majority of the officers and many of the men. An English newspaper report from 1835 claimed there were so many deaths amongst the soldiers serving there that the cost of the wood for making coffins had increased by 15%.

In contrast, Sam’s period in Canada was quiet and uneventful. He and the other soldiers in the regiment faced harsh winters, which were a shock after six years in Jamaica, but their only excitement came when they fought the many house fires afflicting Halifax in that time. He must have been happy, then, when he and the rest of the soldiers of the 64th drew up in three ranks on the dock in Halifax on June 30th 1843 to receive a formal farewell from all the town’s citizens as the regiment prepared to sail back to England. The ceremony ended with a proclamation from the mayor in which he thanked the regiment for their service as an unofficial fire brigade. The ceremony over, the first contingent of the soldiers embarked the same day for the voyage back home.

Sam was in the last contingent and had to wait until July 9th, when he and 200 other soldiers and 95 women and children finally boarded the Alert, a 500 ton sailing ship newly built and untested, making ready for its first trip across the Atlantic. It departed Halifax harbour in favourable weather the next day.

The wind strengthened soon after they set sail, and by that first evening, it had blown into a strong gale, accompanied by torrential rain. The passengers had a terrible sleepless night below decks, wet and seasick and cold. Then, according to newspaper reports, at 2.00 AM the ship struck a rock just 80 miles from Halifax.

There was widespread panic on board (“the greatest state of excitement” as the newspapers reported), with the passengers all crowding onto the deck and risking the foundering of the ship. Captain Daley, master of the Alert, and Captain Draper, the officer commanding the troops, struggled to bring calm and restore discipline. They ordered some of the soldiers to the pumps and convinced the rest of the men and their families to go back below decks. Draper ordered all his officers to set an example by staying below with their men.

Daley steered the ship toward the nearest land, which he could just make out in the distance. The water was now coming in so fast that the pumps couldn’t keep up. Soon it was above the knees of the soldiers below decks. It must have been terrifying down there: overcrowded, rolling, dark, noisy, people throwing up, and strange things floating in the rising sea water flowing in through the splintered hull; and yet amongst the soldiers there was now absolute silence and calm. Children and wives may have been crying, but the men uttered not one word until after a long, agonising hour the Alert violently collided with tiny Goose Island.

The force of the impact forced her almost on her side, before she righted herself and started to subside. The newspapers reported that there was now “great confusion” and “excitement among the troops increased to an alarming extent” as the soldiers’ discipline broke again. Believing the ship to be breaking up and sinking, the soldiers and their families rushed for the ship’s boats.

Captain Draper and his officers and NCOs struggled to stem this widespread panic and then to organise the evacuation. Somehow, during that violent night, three soldier’s wives had delivered babies, and now all three were brought up from below and lowered into the boats still on their beds, with their newborns clutched to their bosoms. Other women and children were evacuated too, before the soldiers themselves began climbing down into the boats. For almost two hours they plied the broken ship’s boats to the beach and back, ferrying all the passengers just a handful at a time. The sun had risen over the wreck when the last of the survivors were brought ashore. 

Everyone was forlorn, soaked and cold, but they were all safe. Not a single life had been lost, although now they were shipwrecked on a desolate, uninhabited island just 300 ft wide by 1,500 ft long.

Now Draper kept everyone busy. The sailors made more trips back to the wreck to recover spars and canvas sails and food and water. The soldiers began surveying the island and building cabins with the materials scavenged from the ship. Draper imposed a daily routine and everyone responded well to his discipline.

After ten days the survivors were rescued by the sloop HMS Rose, and by a lighter dispatched from Halifax. As was later reported, they ended their ordeal “without a sick person, or any flagrant breach of discipline.”

This was a remarkable feat of leadership, for which Captain Daley and Captain Draper were later both praised. Many lives would have been lost if the officers hadn’t restored discipline at the height of the confusion. The Duke of Wellington himself claimed that the behaviour of all the troops “throughout the transaction is praiseworthy, and by its result must render manifest to all the advantage of subordination, and the strict obedience to orders under the most extraordinary circumstances in which men can be placed in the performance of their duty in the service of Her Majesty.”

The survivors arrived in Halifax with only the clothes on their backs. The people of that town who had just a few weeks before been thanking these soldiers for their unofficial fire fighting duties, now took up a collection to pay for enough clothing and bedding for their second voyage back to England. The 64th re-embarked on the troopship Premier, for an apparently uneventful 17-day trip to Portsmouth, arriving home on August 22nd, 1843.

Much was subsequently written about the heroism of the officers in this incident, but nothing about the individual soldiers. We can only guess at the role Sam played: the only record is in his medical report on discharge three years later, which reported that he had suffered two ruptures caused by lifting heavy weights during the shipwreck.

For all his sickness and disease and his ruptures, Sam survived into his old age, passing away only in 1875, at the age of 71. No doubt the story of the wreck of the troopship Able won him many a pint along the way.

Was Mary Anne Took a prostitute?

Mary Anne Took lived in the 1840s on Barrack Street, one of the most notorious areas in the naval town of Plymouth. This street was described at the time by the more well-to-do as a “rookery” (defined by George Galloway in 1792 as a “cluster of mean tenements densely populated by people of the lowest class”). It was home to beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes, vermin and disease. How did Mary Anne, a widow with a young daughter, find a way to survive?

Born Mary Anne Bartlett in 1816 in Ermington, a rural parish in Devon, my great great great grandmother hastily married John Took, a farm labourer, in May 1840, when she was three months pregnant. She was left widowed with a baby daughter when John succumbed to consumption in September 1841.

What was she to do then? The widow of a farm labourer with a baby girl, she could have relied on her husband’s family for support, or perhaps for parish relief in her husband’s parish of Exbourne. She could have returned to her own family, or even to Ermington, to rely on relief from the parish where she was born. Instead, she chose to move to Plymouth.

We know this because this is where she married Robert Phippen. Serving in the Royal Marines, Robert returned to Plymouth in May 1847 after six years at sea. He married Mary Anne on January 20th, 1848 and sailed again eight days later. Their marriage certificate lists Mary Anne’s residence as Barrack Street, just outside the Royal Marines Barracks gates, in the district of East Stonehouse.

We have to wonder what brought Mary Anne and her baby daughter to Plymouth after her husband died in 1841, and how she survived once she got there. Plymouth was a rough and tumble sea port and army town, known for its pubs, prostitution and disease. Mary Anne became just one of thousands of single women surviving on piece work and charity. If she was like the majority of these single women, she drifted into prostitution whenever a ship returned to port from an overseas voyage, or when a new regiment arrived. Most of these women ended up marrying a sailor or soldier, having children and settling down to raise their families. Some turned again to prostitution when their husbands were sent overseas, not out of choice, but because they had no other means of supporting their children.

Although the city’s middle classes righteously condemned prostitution, the people in Mary Anne’s neighbourhood passed no judgement on the “loose” women on Barrack Street. Her neighbours had their own struggles, and they also did whatever they had to do to survive.

At the time of the 1851 census (after Mary Anne had moved away), 397 people lived in the 26 houses on Barrack Street. The most crowded house, Number 4, was home to 39 people in 13 families. The heads of these families included three charwomen, two soldiers, a pensioner, two seamstresses, a dressmaker, a tailor, a shipwright and a shoe maker. 

Thirty three people in ten families lived at Number 10, even though the main floor was taken up by a beer parlour. The residents included 23-year-old Jane Pedrick, a very enterprising lodging-house keeper whose three lodgers were all single women, one a dress maker, another a seamstress, and the last a laundress. In another room lived an older woman, the wife of a marine away at sea. She had four visitors on the night of the census. One was a 23-year-old unmarried girl, the other three all young unmarried men – two marines and a sailor.

The street was home to some 30 marines and their families, and 16 retired soldiers. Other people were working as masons, carpenters, shoe makers, errand boys and in a dozen other occupations. Businesses were established on the main floors of more than half the houses on the street, including two shops, three bakeries and a total of ten beer houses, probably all catering to the marines in the barracks at the end of the road.

Robert was at sea in 1849, and Mary Ann was alone in Plymouth with her daughter, when cholera swept through the city. It disproportionately attacked the poorest, most crowded neighbourhoods, killing 1,600 people – almost two percent of the population of the city. The epidemic arrived on an immigrant ship that docked in February. It reached its peak in the second week of August, when the disease took 127 lives.

It was no wonder that the epidemic struck Plymouth so hard. The city had some of the worst overcrowding in the country. The cholera spread through neighbourhoods like Barrack Street in hours, leaving a swath of the dead in its path.

Reverend George Prynne, newly arrived in the city, wrote about it afterwards: “For three months we seemed to be living amongst the dying and the dead. A large wooden hospital for the whole of Plymouth was erected in our parish. We set up an altar in the largest ward, in order that everything might always be ready for communicating the dying. As the visitation reached its climax the deaths became very frequent and rapid. I was walking out one morning about nine o'clock. I met a woman hurrying along, and in answer to my enquiry she said she was going to fetch the doctor for her husband who had been seized with cholera. In the evening both she and her husband were in their coffins; the woman had died first!”

Robert spent seven of his first eight years of marriage at sea. He had occasional shore leave, and it was the result of a short visit home that he and Mary Anne had a baby. Emma Elizabeth Phippen was born on October 11^th, 1850, in a room the couple had rented at 57 George Street, a quarter mile from the barracks.

It’s hard to imagine how Mary Anne made it through the first years she was alone. Robert was only being paid a little over a shilling a day and much of this was held back for his rations and uniform, so very little of his money made it back to her. Robert didn’t have his regiment’s permission to marry – such permission was given to only four in a hundred private soldiers – so Mary Anne wasn’t permitted to live in barracks while Robert was at sea. She needed at least three shillings a week just to pay for a single room in the poorer areas of Plymouth. She had two girls to feed and clothe. She was illiterate and had no trade to fall back on.

The War Department expected soldiers’ wives to turn to the parish for relief. This meant going into the workhouse, or, if the parish was generous, receiving a few shillings to continue living at home. Plymouth was notorious for its parsimonious attitude, doing everything within its power, including trying to send families back to the parishes where the women were born, to avoid accepting responsibility for them. At one point the Plymouth Authority simply refused to pay poor relief to soldiers’ wives at all.

Emma was just 21 months old in July 1852 when Robert embarked on HMS Queen for a tour of duty in the Mediterranean. He was gone for more than four years, including a year and a half in the Black Sea, fighting in the Crimean War.

The Black Sea is reached from the Mediterranean by sailing through the Bosporus, a narrow channel of water that divides Turkey into its European and Asian halves. The Crimea is a peninsula that reaches into the Black Sea from the Ukraine. This was Russian territory in 1854, when the war broke out.

The war was a successful attempt by Britain and France to halt Russia’s expansion into the Balkans. They allied with Turkey, which in those days controlled much more of the Balkans than it does today. An attack by the Russians on the Turkish Black Sea fleet gave the British and French the justification they had been waiting for, and they declared war.

This was the first “modern” war, characterised by combined arms operations, new weapons technology, and trench warfare. It set the pattern for the US Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and the Great War of 1914. The Crimean War was also fought at the dawn of modern medicine: new theories of hygiene, surgery and post operative care were all tested in the field. It was a modern war in another way too: two-thirds of the English population was now literate, widely reading the newspapers that vied to be the first to report on events in the Black Sea. The first war correspondents, steamships, telegraph lines and primitive photography all meant a steady stream of timely news eagerly read by a hungry audience ready to analyze every decision taken by the government and its generals.

Editors looking for new angles soon took up the cause of the women left behind. The plight of army wives sparked the compassion of the public. Benefiting from a wave of charitable donations, the newly created Central Association in Aid of the Wives and Families of Soldiers Ordered on Active Service supported 6,700 families with weekly allowances, clothing, bedding and medical aid. Responding to this wave of popular concern, the War Office implemented a new 6d per day field allowance, encouraging soldiers to remit all of this back to their families. With the Association’s support and the proceeds of the field allowance, Mary Anne might barely have had the money she needed to survive.

Robert finally returned to Plymouth in August 1856. He never went to sea again, spending the last years of his military career at the marine barracks in East Stonechurch, before receiving his discharge on March 4^th, 1864 after 22 years of military service. He and Mary Anne retired to the town of Buckfastleigh, the home of Mary Anne’s father’s family.

Robert and Mary Anne lived well into old age. Robert passed away in 1901, Mary Anne in 1909, at the age of 93. Whatever the circumstances of the first half of her life, they seem to have done her no harm.

Why was Annie Campbell in Dover in 1900?

What the heck was Annie Campbell doing in Dover, Kent in 1900? There are many unanswered questions in our family history, but few are as intriguing as the mystery of why my grandfather Richard Campbell was born in that port on England’s southeast coast.

I have vivid memories of my grandfather, although he passed away in 1974, when I was only a teenager. I was living in Canada then, and saw him perhaps just a dozen times and exchanged fewer than a dozen letters. Yet the strength of his personality, the vividness of his stories (and the stories others told of him) and the perspectives of his worldview are fresh in my mind still.

He was a working class renaissance man, an opinionated self-taught romantic intellectual with a powerful sense of justice and honour. Leaving school at 12, he satisfied his hunger for education through a lifetime of self-learning, reading Shakespeare and teaching himself geometry and mathematics in his 20s; learning to play the violin and joining an orchestra in his 30s; and qualifying as a City and Guilds carpenter in his 40s.

An incurable romantic, Richard revelled in his memories of India in the early 1920s. These were the very best days of his life, days of excitement and adventure, of vibrant colour and raw passion, and he felt strongly the contrast with all the dreary and bleak days that came after.

He delighted in the role he had played as a soldier in the grand epic tale of the British Empire: riding to the relief of the beleaguered British forces in Amritsar after the massacre of protesting Indians in that city in 1919; driving a gun carriage up the Khyber Pass on the North West Frontier during the Third Afghan War; chasing Mahatma Gandhi through the alleys and streets of Agra.

Richard never again experienced that heart-pounding excitement. He returned to a cold, economically depressed England of poverty, inadequate housing and poor health care, where he struggled to find meaningful work. His family - his wife Elsie and his children, Elsie, Richard and Margaret - became the biggest part of his life. He would do anything for them, often scheming elaborate plans to acquire the presents he believed they deserved.

He was a dreamer. Like “Pop” Larkin, the hero of The Darling Buds of May, he always had something on the go: fiddling money at the pub where he worked, or on his milk route; growing tobacco in his back garden and curing it in his kitchen; opening a used electrical goods store; starting a mail order foreign postage stamp company; loan sharking money to Elsie’s coworkers; keeping rubbish bins of home-brewed beer in his hall cupboard; the schemes never seemed to end.

And he dreamed of escaping from England. To Australia, perhaps, or to Canada. He never left, but all his children did. He found it hard to see his family move so far away, but he encouraged them to create their lives somewhere better.

Elsie left him too, in 1953, struck down by a sudden and devastating stroke. He grieved for a year.

Richard was a man of his time, a chain-smoking borderline alcoholic who believed it was his wife’s job to prepare Sunday dinner while he was at the pub. He had an opinion on everything, but his strongest opinions were reserved for foreigners. He didn’t think much of them, or to be more precise, he didn’t think much of them being in London, taking jobs from him and his mates. His most passionate diatribes were reserved for the Irish. They were lazy, hard drinking and undeserving. They belonged back in Ireland. So how ironic that after he died we discovered that he wasn’t English after all. He was, well, Irish.

We were told that Richard’s father had run away from home to join the army, and been disowned by his family (who either ran a pub or owned a construction company). Richard’s mother had died giving birth in the family home while his father was serving in the cavalry in South Africa in the Second Boer War. Richard had then been raised by foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hollywell, in Woolwich, London and had seen little of his father while he was young.

From Richard’s birth certificate we learned he had been born in Dover, his mother’s name was Annie Conroy, and she couldn’t have died in childbirth, because she was the one who had registered the birth. After much fruitless searching back in pre-Internet days, we gave up looking for a record of a marriage of Annie Conroy and Richard Campbell in England.

We had a breakthrough in 1996, when we discovered a marriage in Ireland of a Richard Campbell and a Mary Anne Conroy, which had taken place exactly 100 years earlier.

Here’s what we’ve now pieced together:

Richard’s father arrived in Lucknow in India in 1889, where he was posted to a cavalry regiment called the 17th Lancers. Most of his military career is a mystery, because his documents are missing from “WO97 Chelsea” as the records at The National Archives of 19th century British soldiers are known.

The 17th Lancers returned to England in 1890. Richard was recorded being with the regiment at Shorncliffe Camp in Kent in the 1891 census, although confusingly he gives his place of birth as Lancaster, Lancashire.

The regiment was based in Leeds in 1896, when Richard and Annie were married. Richard gave a Dublin address and listed his occupation as “Servant,” even though he must have still been in the army.

The 17th Lancers were posted to Ireland in 1897, where they stayed until they were sent to South Africa in January 1900 to reinforce the British army fighting the Boers. They sailed for South Africa from Liverpool and London. When Richard was born in July 1900, his father was rounding up the remnants of the Boer army after their defeat at the Battle of Diamond Hill.

Annie took Richard to Dublin where she died three months after Richard was born. When the 1901 census was taken on March 31st, he was being cared for by Annie’s parents, Thomas and Mary.

Richard’s father returned from South Africa in 1902. He retired from the army sometime between then and 1905, when the 17th Lancers were posted to India.

Sometime between 1901 and 1911 Richard returned from Dublin and lived for at least some of the time with foster parents Bill and Margaret Hollywell. Bill had served in the 17th Lancers until 1894, where he must have met Richard’s father. Richard loved them like his own parents, even naming his second daughter after his surrogate mum.  By the time of the 1911 census, father and son were united and living in Plumstead, near Woolwich.

Margaret lived with Richard and his family in the 1930s after Bill died. Richard’s own father became an in-pensioner at the Chelsea Hospital, a retirement home for former soldiers and lived there until he died in 1937.

So many open questions.

How did Richard’s father and mother meet? Why did his father claim his occupation to be a servant on his marriage certificate when he was actually serving in the army? Why did he list his place of birth on the 1891 census as Lancashire when all other documents point to Dublin?

What was the reason for Annie to be in Dover, Kent in July 1900? The 17th Lancers had been in Ireland before they left for South Africa and they’d not been anywhere near Dover. Why did Annie go back to Dublin after Richard was born?

Why did Richard’s father settle in Woolwich and not in Ireland after he left the army? What brought him to travel to Dublin to take custody of the toddler he’d never known? How did he have the courage to be a single father at a time when this was almost unheard of?

And why did Richard take in Margaret Hollywell after Bill died, and yet was content to see his own father go to the Chelsea Hospital?

What kind of relationship did Richard's parents have? Were they living a love story? Will we ever know?

The Nice family in the British Newspaper Archive

Today it’s easy to trace a family through the birth, marriage and death records available online by subscription or for free from various sites. In just a few minutes I can find the records proving that my great grandfather Alfred Nice died in 1952, married in 1899 and was born in 1873. His father, Arthur Nice died in 1899, married in 1863 and was born in 1842. His father, Edward - well, you understand my point.

But to know a birthday or a wedding date is not to know the person - our ancestors weren’t just names and dates. What did they do? How did they feel? What were their personalities? How were they like me, and how were they not? To answer these questions we have to interpret the information in the the birth, marriage and death records and to search for other records to find some insight, however small, into each personality.

Searching for these records is still not easy, despite the power of the internet. Not everything is on line and not everything can be trusted. It can be a tedious job searching for that one name or that one reference that fills in another gap in the jigsaw puzzle.

But now the British Library has began placing its archive of newspapers on line (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), in partnership with brightsolid, the company that owns findmypast.co.uk. Their plan is to scan, index and publish 40 million newspaper pages, with over five million available now. This is a wonderful source of background information for anyone tracing ancestors in the UK. I believe it will soon become one of the most important sites for genealogical research. It’s already on my top ten list.

Let me show you just how significant this source can be by focusing on one branch of my family for the sixty years they lived in one rural Essex village.

Toppesfield sits in an area of gently rolling hills in the northeast of Essex. The church is on a high point where it can be seen from all directions. The only industry in the village and surrounding parish is agriculture, as it has been for hundreds of years. Toppesfield suffered heavily in the agricultural depression of the late 19th century. Its population drifted down from some 1,000 persons in the 1840s to perhaps 600 at the turn of the 20th century. It's been stable since then: the population in 2001 was 533.

The Nice family arrived in Toppesfield in the 1840s, when Edward Nice, a wheelwright, moved here from the nearby village of Belchamp Walter.

Edward had seven children by two wives: Susan Smee and after she died, her sister Rachel. Miraculously for the time, all seven children survived into their adult years.

Edward’s oldest, Arthur, had ten children of his own, one of them my great grandfather Alfred Nice. Arthur’s brother Harry and his sister Clara both married and had children of their own, but the other four siblings, Susan, Alma, Clara and Jessie, remained single all their lives.

All of Edward’s children, except one, and all his grandchildren eventually moved away from Toppesfield. By the 1890s his son Alma was the last of Edward’s family still in the village. The link was broken when Alma died in 1924.

The newspaper coverage of 19th century Toppesfield is remarkably similar to the coverage I see from our local community newspaper here in the small town where I live now: fund raising events, garden parties and the occasional crime. This makes me think we’re not seeing a balanced picture. Certainly the local papers weren’t covering the impact of the agricultural depression and Toppesfield’s resulting slow decline into poverty, or the vast social upheavals that came with the railway, compulsory education and other 19th century changes.

But we still have a rich picture of life in Toppesfield: a farmer fined for allowing two cows to wander on a public roadway; youngsters caught setting hay alight with matches; a farm workers’ union rally controversially aided by the rector of the church; arson, probably caused by agricultural labourers protesting low wages and high unemployment; farm labourers wandering drunk on the highway; and petty theft of all kinds.

And there’s a surprising amount about my family.

The family enters the newspaper archives with an entry from March 10th 1843. The Essex Standard commented on the uncertainty of life, citing the example of Edward’s father, Richard Nice, who suddenly “fell down in a fit and expired shortly after.” Richard had enjoyed remarkably good health and always maintained an excellent character for honesty, sobriety, and industry. He was just 64.

Edward and Rachel must have instilled a love of learning in their children. Three of their four girls became teachers, all rising to be head mistresses. Emily was the only one of the girls to marry, which meant she had to resign her teaching position, but she passed her passion on to her own children: three of her four girls also went on to be teachers, one remaining unmarried and rising to be a head mistress too.

The first of the children to begin teaching was Emily. Her career was meteoric. In 1871 she was a student at the Whitelands Training School in Chelsea, London (one of the most respected teacher colleges in England then and still today) but according to the Essex Newsman, by the time she married in 1876 at the age of 24, she was already headmistress of St. John’s School in Moulsham, Essex.

Clara was next to take up the profession. In November 1882 the Chelmsford Chronicle was pleased to notice Clara’s name in the list of successful candidates for scholarships. She was second on the list in order of merit amongst those who graduated from the two year program at Hockerill Teaching College.

By then she was already teaching. The National School in Toppesfield had been examined on April 5th, 1882. According to the resulting report, “Reading is somewhat weak in the first standard, but elsewhere, and especially in the second and third standards, it is fluent, distinct, and expressive. Handwriting is fairly good. Spelling is fairly accurate. Arithmetic is weak in the fourth standard, but very fair elsewhere. Discipline is good. Singing and needlework the same. The infants are a fairly good class.” The article reporting these results also mentioned that Clara Nice had finished her apprenticeship as pupil teacher and had been engaged as assistant mistress. She would eventually become Head Teacher at the Effra Street School for Girls and Infants in Wimbledon, Surrey. Toppesfield’s National School would continue to set high standards: in 2011 its successor would be recognized as the primary school achieving the highest academic standards on standardized tests in all of England.

A third sister Jessie successfully passed her entrance examination for Hockerill College in July 1886, winning a first-class scholarship for the two-year teaching diploma program. She figures prominently in the press for more than just her teaching. When she came home for the holidays at Christmas 1887 she took on the challenge of decorating the altar rails in the village church, a job she executed very “tastefully”, according to the Essex Standard. In 1909 and again in 1912 she judged the needlework and drawing at the annual show of the Toppesfield Cottage Garden Society, which was held on the grounds of Toppesfield Hall. By then Jessie was a spinster and the head teacher at the National School in the nearby village of Great Yeldham, so no doubt she was a respected member of the village community.

How ironic then that the sisters’ older brother Arthur, my great great grandfather, appeared before the Heddingham Petty Sessions in November 1885, to be fined 1 shilling, with 4 shillings costs, for neglecting to send his children regularly to school (At the same session young Kate and Arthur Twitchett, niece and nephew of my mother’s grand aunt Ellen Hickford living in the nearby village of Ashen, were each fined two shillings and sixpence for stealing beans and beanstalks with a value of one shilling and sixpence. They were 13 and 12 at the time). Arthur was called before the court again in August 1888 and fined another 1 shilling, with 4 shillings costs, for failing to keep his 12-year-old daughter Lottie in school.

These weren’t Arthur’s first court appearances. He was first called before the Heddingham Petty Sessions on February 13th, 1872, two days after the birth of his fourth child, where he was convicted of stealing three bushels of chaff and two bushels of mangel wurzel (a kind of root beet) from a farmer. He was sentenced to serve 21 days’ imprisonment.

Arthur was caught in another noteworthy event when in 1883 the house where he and his family were living was destroyed by fire. It was owned by his wife Rosavena Hardy’s stepfather James Butcher. According to the Wyyenhoe and Colchester Regatta, the fire was “supposed” to have been caused by a spark from the chimney, which ignited the thatch roof.

James Butcher appears not to have been a very sympathetic figure. He ran the village grocery shop and was also called a higler by some people - a somewhat derogatory term to describe an untrustworthy pedlar - and often came to the attention of the local newspapers.

The first time was in March 1854, when he appeared before the bench to answer to a charge of theft. Then 27-years-old, James was accused of partnering with a 14-year-old farm hand named Jeremiah Hardy to steal half a bushel of beans from a local farmer, James Nunn.

Two weeks before the trial James stopped at Nunn’s farmyard to pick up some fowl he’d purchased. The farm bailiff saw James talking with Jeremiah, who worked for Nunn, and who should have been feeding pigs. He then saw the two disappear into the granary. After James left on his pony and cart the bailiff went into the granary and immediately noticed that some beans were missing.

Nunn found Police Constable Cook and together they went to James’ cottage. James had no objections to PC Cook entering to search the premises, but protested when Cook went to climb into the attic. Upstairs, Cook found a box with various beans mixed together.

James claimed the beans were the remainder of four bushels purchased the previous November from another farmer. When that farmer was called as a witness he confirmed that he had sold the beans to James, but when the prosecutor showed the farmer the beans found in James’ cottage the farmer expressed surprise: “These aren’t my beans; my beans were black, these are white!” which brought laughter to the court.

James then testified that Jeremiah Hardy had indeed given him some beans but only a few - certainly not enough to be considered “theft” - and only to be feed for the birds he'd purchased. His lawyer also argued there was no evidence the beans presented in court were the identical beans taken or received, despite sworn testimony from Nunn to that effect.

James’ lawyer then called up a shop-keeper as a character witness. He would have called another, he explained, but the second one had missed his train and wasn’t in the court.

The Judge summed up by saying that the quantity taken was immaterial - even half an ounce of beans would have been an equal crime, “and with regard to his view of the transaction, how could a man like the prisoner suppose that a boy of 14 had any right to dispose of his master’s property?

“Verdict: Guilty.”

Nunn then recommended mercy for Jeremiah, believing James Butcher had drawn him into the crime.

The Judge responded by saying “the offence of Butcher in teaching a little boy like the other prisoner to steal, was a very serious one. He almost doubted if he satisfied the justice of the case by a sentence of 8 months’ hard labour. With respect to the boy, he should attend with the geatest pleasure to [Nunn’s] recommendation; and hoped a sentence of one month’s imprisonment would deter him from being guilty of similar practises in future.”

James' eight months of hard labour didn’t deter him from all crime. He was back in court in September 1856, charged with “using a pair of unjust scales, 1 ounce deficient against the purchaser.” He was fined 2s. 6d and costs of 9s. 6d., which he paid on the spot.

Fifteen years passed before James again came to the attention of the law. He made history of a sort when he was prosecuted under the Public Health (Water) Act of 1878. This was the first prosecution under the new act in the area, and, according to the clerk of the Halstead Union Rural Sanitary Authority, possibly in all the country.

James owned three cottages in the nearby village of Little Yeldham. The Sanitary Authority twice issued notices to him ordering the provision to the cottages of “wholesome water sufficient for the consumption and domestic use of the inmates.” When he failed to respond to either of these the Authority itself provided this access and passed the cost on to James. Then, in 1881 James was summoned for failing to pay £13 12s., his portion of the Authority’s costs.

In his defence James claimed that one of the cottages was now vacant: the tenant had left without paying him any rent. The clerk of the Authority responded “That is one of the unfortunate results of having cottage property, but it does not affect the question.” James then argued that the cost he was being assessed was too high for the work that had been done. The clerk answered back “Unfortunately for you it has been proved to the contrary.” 

The Chairman of the bench asked James if he could read, as “he appeared to have taken no notice whatever of the notices sent to him.” James claimed that he had been advised to take no notice of them.

The bench found James guilty, ordering him to pay the amount owing plus 12s 6d. for costs. James paid the full amount before leaving the court.

By 1884 James’ son James the younger held an “off” beer license. That year he applied to move it from a cottage on one side of the road to a cottage on the other. There was some question about whether James had complied with the Standing Orders because he hadn’t submitted the license application in writing, but had instead brought it that morning in person. He argued that he only wanted to transfer the license because he needed more room for his growing family, his father owned both properties, and his wife had already moved there. The Committee granted the application.

James passed away in 1892, apparently passing his businesses on to his son. By then the family was well on its way to respectability with only positive stories appearing in the newspapers. For example, in July 1892 James the younger was noted as a major buyer of Shropshire lambs at the annual Haverhill lamb sale and in 1896 the newspapers wrote of James’ support for Toppesfield’s May Day celebrations by providing a wagon decorated to be the May Queen’s carriage for her parade through the village. James’ daughter Daisy appeared in the parade as one of the Queen’s maids.

Other members of the extended family gained some notoriety too. At a meeting of the Halstead District Board of Governors in October 1881 the Board found that a cousin of Arthur’s, George Allen, was guilty of overcrowding, housing eight adults and three children in a cottage with three bedrooms together amounting to just 2,000 cubic feet in area (if the ceilings were seven feet high, this would mean the three bedrooms would total some 285 sq ft in total, or perhaps just nine feet by ten feet each).

The Medical Officer made a report to the same meeting, noting that “there is still not a proper water supply for the cottages in the Chase-lane below Toppesfield church.” He reported that Scarlett Fever had broken out in Toppesfield in October 1880. Twenty eight cases occured, resulting in three deaths. All the effected cottages were disinfected. He went on to remind the Governors that bylaws are still needed to control drainage and the building of privies and pig styes and then reported that there had been four illegitimate births in Toppesfield in the previous year.

William Allen, another of Arthur’s cousins, was charged in 1871 with the odd crime of stealing a sack of guano, which William denied. The allegedly stolen bag of guano was produced for the magistrate to see. Apparently the magistrate decided that the evidence was strong enough (no pun intended) to justify committing William for trial. There is no newspaper record of William’s trial, but the Criminal Registers for England and Wales, available on ancestry.co.uk, record a sentence of four months.

Arthur’s brother Alma Nice was the only one of Edward’s children to remain in Toppesfield all his life. Born in 1856, he witnessed the transformation of his village and the Essex countryside before passing away in 1924. Alma is an intriguing character. He never married, yet we get a sense that he was surrounded by friends. Although a wheelwright, he filled his life with the kind of cultural pursuits we unfairly attribute to the middle class alone.

It seems that Alma was a man well respected in the village: when in 1884 a ceremony was held to bid farewell to the curate of the parish, the Essex Standard specifically noted that Alma had attended.

He enjoyed singing, acting and dancing. The Chelmsford Chronicle records in 1883 that he sang at a “magic lantern entertainment” organised by Reverend Payne in the village’s National Schoolroom. At the 1886 Boxing Day concert Alma had to sing an encore of his first song and then was called up for a rendition of “The Roast Beef of Old England.” He was a leading member of the church choir, nominated to present a gift on behalf of the choir to the schoolmaster on his retirement in 1893.

Alma appeared at the National Schoolroom in a “capital entertainment” in December 1886. He sang the comic song ‘I can’t make up my mind.’ His sister Clara played the opening piece, a pianoforte solo, which the Chelmsford Chronicle recorded as being “well executed.” Others from the village sang and acted, the Band of Hope Drum and Fife Band played a selection of music and Reverend Payne exhibited a “transformation picture,” showing “first the effects of drink and afterwards of water.”

One year Alma helped organise an especially well remembered concert. The highlight was an operetta entitled “The artful dodgers” staring Alma in one of the title roles. The Essex Newsman records that “Mr. Lansdown and Mr. Nice kept things going right merrily, and the audience was convulsed with laughter from beginning to end. The climax came when the policeman (Mr. C. Hardy) endeavoured to take one of the dodgers into custody, the other in the meantime robbing the policeman.”

There are many other references to concerts and other entertainments that Alma organised and starred in. Clearly he enjoyed the performing arts as much or more as his work in the Wheelwright shop, but he was also a sportsman, a member of the illustrious Toppesfield Cricket Club. The Chelmsford Chronicle records many glorious games. Clearly Toppesfield was the team other villages strived to defeat.

Alma was named in a couple of newspaper stories for other reasons too.

In 1878 he was called as a witness in a court case resulting from the death of a farmhand. George Barker, a beer house-keeper, had been charged with permitting drunkenness on his premises. Now the magistrates at Heddingham Petty Session had to decide if the fatal injuries Robert Turbin suffered when his wagon rolled over and crushed him resulted from drunken driving or from hitching an ungelded “entire horse” to the same shaft as a mare in heat.

A number of witnesses testified that they saw Turbin enter Alma’s wheelwright shop and then leave and enter the beer house. Alma testified that Turbin enquired in the morning about some shafts he was repairing. The shafts weren’t ready so Turbin decided he would wait for them in the village. Turbin returned to the wheelwright shop with his friend Charles Barker, son of the beer house-keeper, at 3.00 PM, but the shafts were still not ready and wouldn’t be ready until the next day.

Robert Hardy testified that he met Turbin at the wheelwright shop on Turbin’s second visit. He, Turbin and Barker left together at 3.20 PM to return to the beer-house to share a pot of beer. Turbin only stayed ten minutes, leaving before the pot was finished. “He was not exactly drunk, but he was under the influence of drink”, so Robert told him to take care of himself, believing he wasn’t capable of handling the horses.

A witness testified that Turbin was definitely drunk - he couldn’t sit steady in the wagon - and another witness saw Turbin driving the horses and wagon, claiming he seemed to be “the worse for beer.”

Alma’s brother Harry Nice testified that at about 4.00 PM he heard someone call out “Whoa!” and heard a noise of chains rattling. Harry rushed out to the road to see Turbin crawling out from under the wagon. The horses had escaped their harnesses and were standing there watching him. Harry helped Turbin home. Turbin died later that evening.

The magistrates took some time to deliberate before finding George Barker guilty, fining him £5 plus costs.

Ten years later, in 1888, Alma was recognised as a hero when he rescued a boy who had fallen into the pond near the blacksmith’s shop. The boy had sunk three times before Alma reached him. Luckily a doctor was on the spot and was able to resuscitate the lad.

Through all these years Edward Nice, the patriarch of the family, quietly raised his children and saw them go on to have children of their own, and then watched them leave Toppesfield one by one for Chelmsford, London and destinations beyond.

Edward only came to the attention of the newspapers once, when the Chelmsford Chronicle recorded his passing in July 1897: “The Late Mr. E. Nice - On Saturday the remains of the late Mr. Edward Nice, wheelwright, were laid to rest in the churchyard. The deceased, who was 74 years of age, had been almost bedridden for two years. The service was impressively conducted by the Rector, the Rev. J.J. Baddeley, and many of the houses in the parish were represented at the graveside. The coffin was literally covered with magnificent wreaths.”

There’s a sad and ironic postscript to the story of the Nice family in local newspapers. I wrote above about Edward’s son Harry discovering the farmhand Robert Turbin in the wreckage of his overturned wagon and helping Turbin to his home, where he died. The Essex newspapers of July 27th 1907 all reported Harry’s death in Chelmsford when he was returning from delivering bread on his baker’s cart and lost control of the horse’s reins. When the horse bolted, the cart hit a kerb and overturned. Harry was thrown from the cart and pinned beneath it. A doctor pronounced him dead on the spot. He was just 46.