Abstract 116 · Ship Inn Yard
Author: Ian Elsom
Butcher, Baker
John ROBINSON of 13 Kendal Lane, Leeds filled out the 1911 Census form. He was the eldest of four siblings, all of them single, ranging in age from 54 down to 39. They were born into the farming family of Timothy and Elizabeth née THORPE at Clough House near Pateley Bridge. The Robinsons moved to Easingwold, perhaps shortly before Timothy’s death in 1890. Widow Elizabeth gave her occupation as “farmer” at Plump House the following year but in 1901 was living at Kendal Lane with the four children who occupied the same house ten years later.
Robert, a butcher in 1911 must have been preparing for his marriage to Florence WRIGHT, just a few days or weeks after the census was taken. He was 39 and his bride was about three years younger.
Free BMD Marriages Jun 1911: ROBINSON Robert E & WRIGHT Florence, Leeds 9b 643.
Ten years earlier and just a mile away in Burley Road, Florence was living in a similar household to Robert’s, with her widowed mother Hannah, younger sister Maggie and a brother-in-the-middle Harold, 25, a foreman in the timber trade. The three women were all confectioners.
I don’t know where or when Robert and Florence met but in 1921, they lived in Filey on the corner of Hope and Mitford Streets.
Robert had undergone a career change and was making the most of his wife’s confectionary skills. He was now a baker, with Florence as his “assistant”. The dwelling also sheltered their daughter Kathleen, aged six. She was an only child and had three years to live. Not long before her ninth birthday, she dressed up fancily for a notable Filey event.
Row 1 | 1737 Robinson E11 | Cross
In loving remembrance of KATHLEEN, dearly loved and only child of R. E. and F. ROBINSON, born 11th March 1915, died 23rd Dec 1924.
Also, ROBERT EDWARD, dear husband and father, re-united 20th October 1961, aged 90.
FLORENCE, mother of KATHLEEN, died 17th March 1951 aged 76 years.
Crimlisk Survey 1977
Shared Tree.
Timothy and Robert Edward ROBINSON not found
Elizabeth THORPE not found
Frederick Wright [LW1V-68G]
Hannah BARMBY [LW1V-68P]
Florence WRIGHT [LW1V-68L]
What’s in Six Names?
George Jenkinson WATKINSON died 89 years ago at the age of fifty-seven. His wife Annie Ellis PITCHFORD found rest just over two years later.
Row 12 1938 Watkinson E112 Kerb
In loving memory of GEORGE J. WATKINSON, died 9th March 1934, aged 57.
Also his wife, ANNIE E. WATKINSON, died 25th March 1936, aged 57.
‘At rest’
Crimlisk Survey 1977
George is a great-grandson of Joseph, a West Riding man who was verger for a while at Filey St Oswald’s. George’s mother Mary was a JENKINSON and an Anniversary Person on the first day of last year (AP 5 · death · 1 January).
Annie had seven children with George but only one appears on the Shared Tree.
Filey Genealogy & Connections is not the only information source uncertain of Annie’s family name. On the day of her marriage, she was not in doubt.
“Ellis” is a common middle name in this part of the world and is often accompanied by “Alice” in brackets. I have never understood why this is. The poor hearing of registrars, transcriber uncertainty or something else?
On the Shared Tree, Annie’s father is without forebears. FG&C gives him a mother, Ann Pitchforth, and maternal grandparents William Pitchforth and Ruth BEDFORD. What are the chances of her paternal grandfather being Henry ELLIS? (I found a suspect.)
The Watkinsons named their third daughter after Annie’s older sister Charlotte, a witness at their wedding. For British boys of a certain age, the name FROBISHER may cause a frisson of excitement. Nice boys will picture the intrepid seeker of the North West Passage; the not-so-pleasant will imagine the pirate looking for plunder. Perhaps Canadians now in their sixties and seventies will recall Martin of this ilk.
FG&C takes the Frobisher line no further than William and Agatha née FOXCROFT. The Shared Tree delivers. (Martin is the ninth great-granduncle of Annie Ellis Pitchford.)
What of the other witness at George & Annie’s wedding? FG&C doesn’t have Charles WEBB but I found someone with the name in the 1901 census, about the same age as the groom and from George’s neck of the woods. The best man perhaps. Charles was a railway signalman who had recently married Ada LONGBOTTOM. (A seventh name to conjure with.)
Durham Tees Winter
The 3-year moving average for the season is similar to December (last Saturday’s post).
“Old” values are the same as “New” for the years 2001 to 2008 and 2019 to 2023. They are different for the ten years I downloaded from Weather Underground which were averaged and docked one-degree Centigrade to provide my first pre-Industrial baseline. The old values, in whole degrees Fahrenheit, are not available now.
The scandalous rise in temperature occasioned by offering figures to one decimal place was explained on Saturday. When the ten-year extremes are bundled with the other thirteen years, the difference drops from 0.49°C to 0.2° degrees, thereby jumping just 40% along the road to the “Paris target” rather than going almost the whole way in one leap.
However, it can’t have escaped notice that some of my pre-Industrial years coincide with the dip in the 23-year trend. I am going to create a 20-year average, from 2001 to 2020, to form a new baseline. In cahoots with the “new figures” rise, future mean temperatures above pr-Industrial may look quite different to those I have posted in the past. But climate catastrophe and net zero are looking more like conspiracy theories with each passing day. Nothing stays the same.
One takeaway from today’s chart is that the ten warmest UK years since records began – all occurring since 2003 – are being rather coy. Maybe it is a northern England thing. The picture may be very different at the close of this meteorological year, should we get that far.
Clouds 65 · Filey
Sisters
Before telling you about the BATEMAN girls…
Mary Ann who didn’t become Mrs FANT married William RONALD, a Scotsman, in 1864. After two boys had been born in Hull, the family moved south to Hampshire where Alexander was born. The birth of their last child was registered in South Stoneham (Southampton) in 1884. William, a boiler maker turned rivetter, took his wife and three children north to Tyneside. The family was together in Neptune Road, Wallsend in 1891. Mary Ann’s death at the age of 61 was registered in Tynemouth in March 1907.
I have happened upon several instances of sisters who were not the marrying kind and chose to live together in their old age. Mary Ann, Jane and Eliza Bateman all tied knots but left it rather late and I don’t think any of them had children.
Jane was the first of the trio to wed, becoming the third wife of Thomas Horton BRATLEY in 1877. Thomas was only thirty-one, Jane a year older but he was not too long for the world, dying in Sculcoates in 1885. The registration says he was only 36 but I think he was pushing 39. He was only 17 when he married Mary Ann Catherine (sometimes Caroline) FEMEL, the daughter of German parents, on Christmas Day 1863.
The Femel name is offered in various flavours, as are the places of origin of the parents and Mary Ann’s two brothers. Curiously, the 1861 census says she was born in Louth in 1845 but her younger brother John arrived in Lindesruth and Henry in nearby Reiskirchen two years later (in 1850). A subsequent census confuses the issue by giving Henry the surname YOUNGER. Louis Younger didn’t marry the widow Femel until 1857.
The first Mrs Thomas Horton Bratley had a son in Louth, then crossed the river Humber with her husband and had three daughters in Hull, two of them called Elizabeth after her mother. And then she died at age twenty-eight. Thomas wasted no time finding another helpmeet. Sarah Ann Bateman was over ten years his senior and I have not been able to discover a family connection to the sisters. The marriage lasted four years and ended with the death of Sarah Ann at the age of 44. Six months passed and Thomas married Jane Bateman.
Mary Jane Bateman married widower James FANT about a year after his first wife had died in Scarborough aged 31. I was surprised to see what he did for a living when he first married. Less than three years later he was working as a labourer.
I looked for children but didn’t find any.
In 1881, at the age of thirty, Eliza Bateman was in service, working as a cook. She did not marry house and ship painter (and bachelor) John William WALLIS until 1888. They were enumerated in Bean Street, Hull, in 1901 and Eliza’s sister Jane was with them. Jane claimed to be a dressmaker but ten years later, when she was in Filey with her other sister, Mary Ann Fant, she had “Private Means”. In the marriage register below you will notice that one of the witnesses to Eliza’s marriage is Emily Minnie Bratley – the daughter of Thomas and his first wife Mary Ann Femel.
Mary Ann Who?
Mary Ann was buried in St Oswald’s churchyard 111 years ago yesterday but she does not have a gravestone. Neither does she have any relatives in the Filey Genealogy & Connections database.
In 1911 she was living at 16 Scarborough Road, Filey and a sister was with her on census night.
Mary Ann’s husband, James Fant, had died in 1907 and he too rests in an unmarked grave. I did a little snooping on Find my Past before seeking out the ladies on FamilySearch.
Mary Ann has ten sources on the Shared Tree. The 1851 and 1861 censuses show her in the bosom of the BROWN family, her birthplace given as Holbeck in one and Leeds in the other. (The parish of Holbeck would eventually be incorporated into Leeds Registration District.) I cannot access the 1871 Census on Ancestry but we know she married in 1880/1881. The censuses in 1881, 1891 and 1901 show her with her husband James in Scarborough and Filey. In all three Mary Ann is adamant that she was born in Hull. In 1901 they were living at 8 Scarborough Road.
There isn’t a marriage source for the couple on the Shared Tree. Given Mary’s birthplace mismatch, finding it would have been a good idea. (Her birth three years before the supposed parents married should also have raised an eyebrow, if not a red flag.)
I will say more about the BATEMAN sisters, including Eliza, tomorrow.
Landscape 170 · Cleveland Way
Anthropogenic Durham Tees Warming
Before last December ended, the UK Meteorological Office was declaring 2022 was the hottest year the nation had experienced since records began (about 150 years ago). My Durham Tees downloads of mean daily temperatures began in December 2008 so I decided to add the station’s data for meteorological years 2000/2001 to 2007/2008. At the risk of causing confusion, I will be giving each ‘met year’ from the beginning of the century to the present just one identifying date with clarification if I introduce calendar years.
Before last December ended, the UK Meteorological Office was declaring 2022 was the hottest year the nation had experienced since records began (about 150 years ago). My Durham Tees downloads of mean daily temperatures began in December 2008 so I decided to add the station’s data for meteorological years 2000/2001 to 2007/2008. At the risk of causing confusion, I will be giving each ‘met year’ from the beginning of the century to the present just one identifying date with clarification if I introduce calendar years.
(I have checked the difference Decembers make when the annual means of calendar and meteorological years are compared. For the 20 years from 2001 to 2020, the range was 0.28 to -0.52 degrees Centigrade, indicating that some Decembers were more influential than others. After twenty years, the running average difference between Cal and Met is infinitesimal. ).
(I have checked the difference Decembers make when the annual means of calendar and meteorological years are compared. For the 20 years from 2001 to 2020, the range was 0.28 to -0.52 degrees Centigrade, indicating that some Decembers were more influential than others. After twenty years, the running average difference between Cal and Met is infinitesimal. ).
The Met Office has told us that the ten warmest years have occurred since 2003. Here are the Decembers…
When I first downloaded temperatures from Weather Underground, they were in whole degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn’t until around 2019 that they were suddenly offered to one decimal place, with earlier years revised. I welcomed the increased granularity and it didn’t occur to me to compare the “new” week, month, season and annual averages with the old. It seemed a no-brainer that 365 daily mean temperatures might range from n-0.5 to n+0.49 in a random fashion and the annual average would end up much the same as before. I kept my original pre-Industrial baseline, based on a 10-year daily average in “old” numbers centigrade, minus one degree. Around 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) opined that Global temperature had warmed by this amount since the Industrial Revolution picked up steam. A target was set – to prevent the Global Mean temperature from reaching 1.5° C above pre-Industrial by 2040.
It is common propaganda now that 8 billion human beings are facing a climate crisis and everyone except the elites must get used to making sacrifices if a disaster is to be avoided. (I can’t imagine them living in 15 Minutes Cities.) Well, December temperatures in North Yorkshire have been falling for the last seven years and I thought I should run a check on the ten years of data from December 2008 to November 2018.
Consider a mean temperature of exactly 50° F. Two extreme figures, 49.5 and 50.499, will round up and down to bang on the wholesome 50. My increasingly enfeebled brain tells me that revising 365 days of whole Fs to a more accurate one decimal place should not change the annual average by more than 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.28°C) in a worst-case scenario. Common sense tells me that the annual difference will be much less than this, let’s say plus/minus 0.2°F or 0.11°C.
My December findings…
Instant human-caused Durham Tees warming! Is the Paris target already under threat? It doesn’t matter if this corruption of temperatures has occurred in every weather station around the globe. They are lying to us. Refuse to eat insects.
Sand 50 · Abstract
Mysteries of Life and Death
Leslie Milow Bourne Clowes SHAKESBY was born on this date in 1909. Two of his middle names may instantly connect your extraordinary human brain to the Primitives of 19th-century England. Bourne and Clowes. There was a little girl called Jinny MILOW living in Filey when Leslie was born – I posted a photo of her I think, some years ago – but perhaps his third middle name was inspired by the family of this doomed soldier. Leslie’s father Albert was a ne’er do well as a young man, a fairground boxer and self-confessed street arab who morphed into a methodist evangelist with a questionable disposition. “He was always around when someone needed rescuing from a potential tragedy.”
Albert was not given “Edward” when his parents registered his birth but he was Albert Edward in the civil marriage and parish burial registers. He is just Albert on his small stone in St Oswald’s churchyard.
Row 15 | 1992 Shakesby E132 | Open Book
In loving memory of a devoted husband and father, ALBERT SHAKESBY, died 10th April 1949.
‘He gave to the last’
Also of his beloved wife FRANCES died 8th April 1953 aged 79 years.
‘Peace perfect peace’
Crimlisk Survey 1977
Both died at 25 Hope Street, Filey.
The censuses of 1921 and 1939 show that Albert and Frances are living 250 miles apart. In 1921, Albert is a boarding housekeeper at 9 Dorset Square, Marylebone. Amongst his guests are a Professor of Pharmacy from Japan, a novelist born in the Netherlands and a Russian émigré from Kharkiv. Dimitri Sviatopolk-Mirski was a writer of distinction who unwisely chose to return to Russia. Virginia Woolf was afraid he would get a bullet in the head but he died in a gulag a few months before the Great Patriotic War began. In September 1939, Albert was again enumerated at 9 Dorset Square but not as the head of household – and he working as an osteopath. Emily Bentley, his housekeeper 18 years earlier, was still with him and would be rewarded for her loyal companionship.
In 1921 and 1939 Frances was enumerated at Cliff Point, Queen Street. I posted a photograph of the house six days ago. Her elder son, Albert Noel was with her in 1921, aged 17 and working as a motor driver. He gave his employer as “Father Evangelist”. Leslie, aged 12, was elsewhere on that census night. In 1911 the boys had been together with their mother, but not their father. Frances was then running Cliff Point as a lodging house, assisted by a general servant called Emily Bentley.
In 1931, Lesley married Elsie PERRY in West Bromwich, Emily Bentley’s home town, and he died in Worthing in 1972.
It is a mystery to me why so many young men are being sent to their deaths these days, some of them in or from Kharkiv. Who is dealing with this tragedy with more wisdom, compassion and humanity? The leaders of the “collective west”, those that the regimes in North America, the UK, Europe, NATO and Oceania wish to destroy, or an AI-driven computer program?
batmanfromthesteppes
I asked Chat GPT the following question: Imagine that Country A has a population of 40 million people, and Country B has a population of 140 million people. Country B has four times as many weapons as Country A. How can we reduce casualties for Country A? Should we arm Country A or help them negotiate for peace?” Here is the answer: Arming Country A may not be the best solution to reduce casualties. Increasing the number of weapons may lead to an arms race between the two countries, potentially escalating the conflict and causing more casualties. Instead, negotiating for peace should be the primary focus. This can be achieved through diplomacy, mediation, and negotiation between the leaders of the two countries or through the involvement of international organizations such as the United Nations. It’s important to address the root causes of the conflict and find mutually beneficial solutions that promote peace and stability. This could involve addressing issues such as territorial disputes, resource allocation, economic inequality, and political differences. In addition to negotiating for peace, it’s also important to provide humanitarian aid and support to those affected by the conflict, such as refugees and internally displaced persons. This can help to alleviate suffering and promote stability in the region. Overall, while the situation may be complex, the best way to reduce casualties in Country A is through peaceful negotiation and humanitarian assistance rather than further arming the country.
Comment on Judging Freedom
Bird 133 · Redwing
A Long Way from Home
Dunn RICHARDSON was born in the summer of 1836 and at the age of fourteen, the census enumerator found him apprenticed to William CAMBRIDGE, boatbuilder, in Murray Street. He probably completed his apprenticeship but a future in Filey building fishing cobles was not the life for him. Ocean waves beckoned and he signed on as a merchant seaman, making his first voyage from London to Scarborough on 27 October 1853 (source: Britain, Merchant Seamen, 1835-1857, The National Archives). How much of the world he saw isn’t known but he died in Rio de Janeiro on 26 February 1860. He is buried in the Cemiterio dos Ingleses Gamboa and remembered on a family headstone in St Oswald’s churchyard.
37 Richardson B11
In memory of DUNN RICHARDSON, son of WILLIAM AND PRISCILLA RICHARDSON, who died at Rio de Janeiro South America, February 26th 1860, aged 23 years.
‘I was not in safety, neither had I rest,
Neither was I quiet. Yet trouble came’
Job 3. 26 v.
Also, MARY ANN their daughter, who died December 9th 1834, aged 11 years.
Also of five other of their children, MARY, JOHN, JEREMIAH, DUNN AND ELIZABETH, who died in infancy.
Crimlisk Survey 1977
On the FamilySearch Shared Tree, Mary Ann is just Ann. The infant Mary, mentioned on the stone, is missing from the Shared Tree. Also missing are the years in which seven of the children died.
I have added to the information found on Filey Genealogy & Connections.
Not shown in the RootsMagic screenshot above is the woman John the Second married after Ann NICHOLSON died. Mary BARKER, born in Scagglethorpe, was 42 years old when she married, 18 years younger than John. Four years after his death she was living on parish relief but doing a little sewing. She died in 1928 aged 83.
William and Priscilla’s headstone has been moved to the churchyard’s North Wall.
1322 Richardson H34
Looking at Filey REDUX 