The Randall Tree

A name and a trade

The oldest Randall we can name is a man called Henry Randall, and he is a greengrocer. That is the whole of it. He appears once, in a single line written by his son on a marriage register in 1893, in the column headed “Father’s Name and Surname”. No age, no birthplace, no address. The clerk did not write “deceased” beside him, which was the usual practice when a father had died, so he was very probably alive that August — and then he is gone again.

Where he was in 1891 is not known. He has been searched for and not found.

Peckham, and a birth we cannot find

His son — also Henry — was born at Peckham. That much is certain: he gave the same birthplace four times across his adult life, twice in his own handwriting, and never once varied it.

When he was born is another matter, and we do not know. Four records state his age and no two of them agree. He was entered as “21” at his marriage in 1893, which points to 1871 or 1872. The censuses of 1901 and 1911 make him thirty and forty, pointing to 1870. And the census of 1921, which asked for ages in years and months and which he filled in and signed himself, gives fifty-four years and one month — putting his birth in about May 1867, four years before the marriage suggests.

The shop in St Leonard Street

On 6 August 1893, at St Peter’s, Pimlico, Henry marries Ellen Willby. He is twenty-one and already a greengrocer, living in St Leonard Street. She is the daughter of George Willby, a stonemason’s labourer whose own people came from Walpole in Suffolk. Both of them sign their names in a clear hand; neither makes a mark. Two Hawleys witness it.

St Leonard Street ran off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, among Gillingham Street, Hindon Street and the Tachbrooks. It does not exist today. Whether it was renamed or swept away has not yet been established.

By the census of 1901 Henry is thirty and the return records him as a greengrocer and an employer — his own shop, at number 7. There is a servant in the house, Anney Willby, almost certainly Ellen’s sister, and three boarders paying rent. This is a family with a business, a staff and a spare room.

Nine in three rooms

Then it goes wrong, and the census records it without comment. By 1911 Henry is still a greengrocer, but the return calls him a worker. He is no longer his own master and the shop is gone. The family has crossed the river to 450 Garratt Lane in Battersea, where nine people live in three rooms.

Ellen’s portion of the same return records eight children born alive and six then living. Two have died in the intervening decade, and they are not named anywhere.

By 1921 he is a greengrocer’s assistant, working for a Mr Hancock on the Wandsworth Bridge Road. Employer, worker, assistant: his own trade, three descending steps, twenty years. What caused the fall is the largest unanswered question in this history.

The children scatter

The 1921 census catches the household at the moment the children go out into the new century’s industries, and none of them into the fruit trade. Ivy Vera, twenty-one, is polishing gramophone records at the Columbia works in Earlsfield. Lillian, nineteen, makes gas mantles for the Welsbach Lighting Company. Thomas Arthur, sixteen, clerks for a drapery on Friday Street in the City. Edward Joseph, twenty-four, makes cases in Fulham.

And the youngest boy, Alfred William, fourteen years and ten months old, is a hand at a saw mill on Townmead Road.

Alfred

Alfred’s life is short and almost entirely legible. Born in Battersea about August 1906. Out of school and into the saw mill at fourteen. By twenty-five he is an asphalter — hot, heavy, outdoor work — living at 14 Este Road.

On 2 August 1931, at Christ Church, Battersea, he marries Mildred Woodstock. Her brother George signs as a witness. She comes from a music-hall family: her father, John Richard Woodstock, painted scenery for the London Theatres of Varieties at the Islington Empire, her brother followed him into the same trade, and her sister sold tickets at the Grand Palace, Clapham Junction.

In the second quarter of 1939 Alfred dies. He is thirty-two. The death is registered in Lambeth. There is no grant of probate: he left nothing to prove. His son Alan is not yet three.

Winstanley Road, September 1939

Three weeks before the country goes to war, the National Register finds what is left of them. At 101 Winstanley Road — the house the Woodstocks had held for more than thirty years — Mildred is recorded as a widow of thirty-one, working as a sewing machinist.

Beneath her name sits an entry the government still keeps closed, because the person may yet be living. On the family’s record that is Alan. Below them both is her mother Catherine, seventy-three, and against her the enumerator has written that she is incapacitated. Three generations, no man in the house, and the Blitz a year away.

Cornwall

Battersea, with its railway lands and its power station, was heavily bombed from the autumn of 1940. At some point after that, mother and son were evacuated to Cornwall, and Alan was taken in by a family there.

He stayed. Long afterwards, and after the marriage that closes this history, he married the daughter of the family who had taken him in. They live in Cornwall still.

Wandsworth, 1962

In the June quarter of 1962, at Wandsworth, Alan William Randall marries Ann Brydges — and this history joins the other one, the four centuries of Herefordshire record that ends where her surname does.

Two families arriving at the same few square miles of south-west London from opposite directions: hers descending out of Hereford gentry through five generations of city trades, his coming up out of Peckham greengrocery. There is even a moment when they nearly touch. In 1911 the Brydges family lived at 130 Townmead Road, Fulham. Ten years later Alfred Randall worked at a saw mill in the same street. It is a coincidence and nothing more — but they were within yards of one another, forty years before anybody married anybody.

Two Norfolk people go north

On 18 September 1831 the banns were called in the parish church at Thurton, in the Loddon country of south Norfolk, between Robert Wright of this parish, bachelor, and Mary Ann Rowland of the parish of Rockland. They were called again on the 25th and again on 2 October, and on 13 October 1831 they were married in her church at Rockland St Mary by the curate, Richard Lubbock.

Then the register was signed, and neither of them could do it. Robert Wright made his mark. Mary Ann Rowland made hers. So did the witness, Elizabeth Rowland. On the same page a third couple were married that autumn by licence rather than banns, and both of them wrote their names — the whole social gradient of the parish, in one opening of one book.

They settled at Carleton St Peter and had a great many children. By the census of 1851 Robert was forty-seven, an agricultural labourer born at Kirstead, and there were eight of them in the house by the church: Robert, John, William, Martha, Margaret, Mary Ann, Thomas aged three, and Samuel at one. The parish register is exact about Thomas. He was born on 20 December 1847 and baptised on 16 January 1848, and it names his father Robert, husbandman, and his mother Mary Anne.

Robert Wright was buried at Thurton on 29 August 1876, aged sixty-seven — in the parish where he had called his banns forty-five years before.

His son Thomas went a very long way from it, and we know almost exactly how. Some time before 1875 he left Norfolk on his own for Middlesbrough, six hours and a world away, where the ironworks were swallowing labourers as fast as they could arrive. And on 18 May 1875 he came back to be married.

The bride was Chlorinda Spanton, twenty-six, of Blofield — the daughter of John Spanton, farmer, who held twenty acres and whose son was a miller. Thomas gave his own residence as Middlesbrough and his trade as labourer, and named his father Robert Wright, labourer. They were married in her parish church after banns, and her sister or aunt Susannah Spanton witnessed it.

Then they signed. Chlorinda wrote her name in a clear, practised hand. Thomas made a cross. Like his father before him, he could not write.

She went north with him. Two sons were born at Middlesbrough — Robert J about 1876 and Alfred E in December 1877 — and then, between about 1878 and 1880, they came home. By the census of 1881 they were at Hemblington, in a lane containing a bricklayer, an agricultural labourer of seventy-one still working, a widowed vermin destroyer and a charwoman, and not one shopkeeper or tradesman. Their daughter Agnes had been born there. A farmer’s literate daughter had married a labourer who could not sign his name, and this was where it had brought her.

Thirty-five Peterborough Road

On census night 1911 the labourer’s son was at 35 Peterborough Road, Leyton, six rooms, and he filled in the schedule himself. Alfred E Wright, thirty-three, builder’s foreman. His wife Ada Maud, twenty-eight — baptised Ada Maud Wood at Waltham Abbey on 27 August 1882 and known all her life by the second name. They had married in that same parish church, and her father John Wood is named in both registers. Four children: Thomas G seven, Frank E five, Margery two, and Doris at four months. Hackney for the first three, Leyton for the last — the move is dated by the babies.

The marriage column says married eight years, four children born alive, four still living, none died. In a history that keeps turning up households broken early — a house painter dead at thirty-five, a mother dead at thirty-four, an asphalter dead at thirty-two — this is the one that the period left alone.

He stayed. The house appears again in 1921, in 1927 and again in 1932. In a dossier of families that moved every few years across Peckham, Pimlico, Battersea, Southampton and Nairobi, the Wrights of Leyton sat still for over twenty years.

He filled in a census schedule once more, in June 1921, and it is the most detailed of the three. There were now five children — a fifth, Sidney, had been born at Leyton in about May 1913. Thomas at seventeen was a junior clerk in the secretary’s office at Messrs Lipton Ltd, the grocers, on City Road. Frank at fifteen was an apprentice carpenter and joiner to W. S. Sharpin, builder and contractor, of Wellington Road, Bow. And Alfred himself was no longer in building at all: he was works foreman at a cabinet works, R. Eustace & Co, furniture manufacturers of Bethnal Green Road.

Whipps Cross Lodge, No. 4642

His father had signed a marriage register with a cross in 1875. On 9 March 1927, aged forty-nine, Alfred Edward Wright was initiated into Whipps Cross Lodge. The register gives his address as Leyton and his occupation as builders manager. He was passed in May and raised in September. For the whole of his membership the lodge met at the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street Station, which had two purpose-built masonic temples; one of them is still there.

He was Junior Warden in 1937, Senior Warden in 1938 and again in 1939 — and then nothing until he took the chair as Worshipful Master in 1942. The two missing years are 1940 and 1941. A London lodge meeting at a mainline terminus through the Blitz is the obvious explanation, but the register does not say so and neither will this. He was given London Grand Rank in 1956, at about seventy-eight, and remained a member until he died.

The watchmakers of Bexley Heath

The other half of this quarter kept a different sort of bench. In 1881 Mortimer G. Cole, thirty-seven, a watchmaker born in London, was living on the Main Road at Bexley Heath in Kent with his wife Eleanor, a Bexley Heath woman, five children and a servant from Saltash. The eldest was a boy of eight, Mortimer T. Cole.

Ten years later the family was in the Market Place, the household had grown to nine children, Eleanor was being written down as Ellen, and the boy of eight was eighteen and a watchmaker beside his father.

The trooper

He did not stay at the bench. On 9 May 1894, aged twenty-one years and five months, Mortimer Townly Cole stood in front of a magistrate and attested for the 4th Dragoon Guards — regular heavy cavalry. He gave his trade as clockmaker and his birthplace as the parish of Bexley, near Erith. Asked whether he already belonged to any force, he answered yes: the 4th Middlesex Rifle Volunteers. He signed for the full engagement, seven years with the colours and five in the reserve.

This family was thought to have almost no military history. It has a cavalryman, and the paper he signed survives with his name on it twice.

The date is the interesting part. 1894 is the year the 4th Dragoon Guards sailed for India, on what became a fourteen-year posting — the regiment’s first ever, after eighty years of garrison duty broken only by the charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaklava and by Tel-el-Kebir. He signed on in May of that year.

And yet he cannot have gone for long. He married in England about 1899, and his son was born at Streatham in 1901 — while his regiment was still on the other side of the world, and while his seven years with the colours still had time to run.

The answer is that he changed regiments. A second set of service papers has him as 3186 Cole, Royal Horse Guards — the Blues, part of the Household Cavalry, the sovereign’s mounted guard, quartered at Knightsbridge and Windsor. The Household Cavalry does not go to India. He did not come home early from the East; he transferred out of a regiment that was leaving into one that stays, and spent the rest of his soldiering within reach of the woman he married.

Croxted Road, 2 April 1911

Seventeen years after the attestation, on the same night that Alfred Wright was filling in his schedule in Leyton, Mortimer Townly Cole was filling in his at 172 Croxted Road, West Dulwich — seven rooms and a servant. He gave his trade as engineer’s traveller, addressing machines: the watchmaker’s son had gone into office machinery, a business barely twenty years old.

His wife was Emma Louisa, thirty-four, born in Peckham. Their son Roland was nine, their daughter Joan six, and the youngest was Molly Blanche Cole, nine months old. The marriage column reads eleven years, four children born alive, three living, one died. Staying in the house that night were Leonard Oliver Archer, a draper’s traveller from Chigwell, his wife and their two infants — and Archer was Emma Louisa’s maiden name.

Emma Louisa died later that same year, at about thirty-four. Molly was not yet two. This census is almost certainly the last record of her alive.

St Pancras, July 1932

The banns were called at St Pancras on the twelfth, nineteenth and twenty-sixth of June 1932: Frank Edward Wright, bachelor, of St Paul Leyton, and Molly Blanche Cole, spinster, of this parish. They were married in the parish church the following month.

The register gives him as twenty-six and a builder, of 35 Peterborough Road, Leyton — the same house he had been carried into as a baby twenty-one years earlier. It gives her as twenty-two, of 24 Harmood Street, Chalk Farm. His father is entered as Alfred Edward Wright, builder; hers as Mortimer Cole, salesman. And beneath the couple’s own signatures are the two witnesses: Mortimer Cole and Alfred Edward Wright. Both fathers signed for it.

By 1939 Frank and Molly were at Eastern Avenue in Romford and he was entered as a director, surveyor and draughtsman. From an apprenticeship at fifteen to a directorship at thirty-three. The family remembers a firm called A. E. Wright and Sons — though in 1921 Alfred was an employee at a furniture works and Frank was apprenticed to somebody else’s building business, so if the firm existed it did not exist yet.

From a Norfolk field to a boardroom took three generations and about sixty years, and every step of it is named by a record. It was not a straight line: Alfred was a foreman rather than a builder as such, and the material he worked in changed from bricks to furniture and back again. What carried through the family was not a trade. It was the habit of being the man who ran the workshop.

Four days in 1968

Alfred Edward Wright was a member of his lodge until he died, and the register gives the year as 1968. So does the family. What the family adds is the shape of it.

Frank Edward Wright died first. He was sixty-two. Two days later his mother, Maud, died. The day after that, Alfred died, aged ninety. Son, wife, husband, inside four days.

The household that the 1911 census had marked out as the one the period left alone — four children, none lost — held for fifty-seven years and then went in a single week. This last is the family’s account, given by a woman who lost her father and both her grandparents in it, and it has not yet been checked against the three death registrations. It is set down as she told it.