MY GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS
KNOTT - I - BOWLES - I - WATERS - I - HARRALL - I - PAGE - I - WISEMAN - I - CROSS - I - CARTER
CORNWELL - I - HUCKLE - I - MORTLOCK - I - MANSFIELD - I - REYNOLDS - I - CARTER - I - ANABLE - I - STEARN
CHRONOLOGY - I - DRAMATIS PERSONAE - I - WHERE PEOPLE CAME FROM - I - CALENDAR
MAP OF ELY - I - MAP OF MEDWAY
MAP OF
CAMBRIDGE AND DISTRICT
WORLD WAR I - I - WORLD WAR II
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The
Anable family: the long Dry Drayton generations
My Mother's Mother's Mother's Father's family
The narrative can be read in conjunction with the Reynolds family tree. You can see
places significant to the Anable family on the site map of
Cambridge and district.
This family story includes material from, and links with,
the stories of the Reynolds, Carter and Stearn families. My direct
ancestors are highlighted in bold the
first time they appear in the narrative.
My great-great-grandparents Samuel Anable and Lydia Stearn were both born in Dry Drayton, and were both from Dry Drayton families of long standing. Despite the encroachment of Cambridge suburbia across the fields, Dry Drayton is still largely rural in character, although the parish does now contain the large new village of Bar Hill to the north on the busy A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon road - where, incidentally, one of Samuel and Lydia's great-great-grandchildren lives with his family.
The Anables lived in the centre of Dry Drayton village, and the family name first appears in the parish registers in the 17th Century. It is an unusual surname; there is also a cluster of double-n, and apparently unrelated, Annables in south Derbyshire. Samuel's mother was a Rogers, and his grandmothers' surnames were Markham and Chapman; these three family names are found in the Dry Drayton registers from the mid-16th Century onwards. Samuel's father, my great-great-great-grandfather William Harrison Anable had been born in in the nearby village of Grantchester in 1823. By 1827, his brothers and sisters were being baptised in Dry Drayton - that is to say, he arrived in Dry Drayton as a small child. He married my great-great-great-grandmother Rachel Rogers at St Peter and St Paul Dry Drayton on 26th October 1845, when his father's occupation was given as a bricklayer. He would become a bricklayer himself, as would several of his sons.
These are the ten children of William and Rachel Anable. The sons followed their father into the bricklaying trade, but three of the daughters moved to Southwark in south London. Three of the children died in infancy.
| Elizabeth
Anable Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1846. There is no baptism for Elizabeth in the Dry Drayton parish records, but she appears with the family as the eldest child on the 1851 census, when her age was given as five and her birthplace as Dry Drayton. In 1861, at the age of 16, she was a house servant in the household of William Moore at 35 Gloucester Street, Cambridge. It seems that Elizabeth may well have continued in service elsewhere, because although she is not immediately apparent on the 1871 census, she married Robert McFeeters at St Mary's church Newington, Southwark in London on 26th July 1877. She gave her address as 9 Bedford Street. In the banns she was described as 'of this parish', while he was described as of Windsor. His occupation was given as a joiner. The witnesses were W WIlliams and MJ Wren. Curiously, Elizabeth and her husband then disappear from the census data, and may well have gone abroad, but Elizabeth may well have been the Elizabeth McFeeters who died at the age of 79 in the 2nd quarter of 1925 at Holborn, London. Maria
Anable Samuel
Anable William
Anable Ann
Maria Anable Susan
Anable Rachel
Anable Francis
Anable Phebe
Ann Anable Ada
Jane Anable |
Samuel Anable, my great-great-grandfather, was born and would live all his life in Dry Drayton, and the same was true for his wife Lydia Stearn, who he married on 15th December 1877. Samuel was 27 years old, and at the time of the 1871 census he was working as an agricultural labourer. His young brother William had followed their father William into the bricklaying trade. Perhaps he showed more aptitude for it, perhaps there wasn't enough work to support both of them. However, by 1881 Samuel was also shown as a bricklayer, living with his wife Lydia and their two young sons Francis and William. Samuel was probably working for his father. In 1891 Samuel is again recorded as a bricklayer, but it seems likely that by this time his brother William had taken over running the family business. Samuel and Lydia now had five children, including the eight year old Alice, my great-grandmother who I would meet in the last years of her life.
These are the six children of Samuel and Lydia Anable of Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire. They all left Dry Drayton, never to return. One of them was killed at the Battle of the Somme.
| Francis
Anable Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire in the 4th quarter of 1878. His parents had married in St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 15th December 1877. He was baptised along with his younger brother WIlliam at Dry Drayton church on 7th March 1880. Francis was two at the time of the 1881 census, and he was still at home in Dry Drayton at the age of twelve, ten years later. And then, on the 26th December 1895 Frances signed up for the Cambridgeshire county militia at Madingley, and joined the 4th Batallion of the Suffolk Regiment (Cambridgeshire Militia). He travelled to Ely where, on the following day, he was judged fit to serve at his medical examination. He was 18 years and 1 month old. He was 5 feet 6 7/10 inches high, and had brown hair and blue eyes, and what the medical examiner called a freckled complexion. However, his service record has just a single entry, that he attended 'drill on enlistment', but after that there is nothing. Francis does not appear to be on the 1901 census. However, in 1905 a Francis Annable married a Ruth Clarke at Madras in India - could Francis have been posted to India? I have not found his death. In 1911, his parents Samuel and Lydia declared that they had had six childen, five of whom were still living. As the other five Anable children were all still alive in 1911, it must be Francis that had died between 1895 and 1911. I am still looking for what happened to him. William
Ernest Anable Alice
Mary Beatrice Anable Percy
Anable Although
coal-mining was a starred occupation, Percy
joined the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment
at the start of the First World War with his
brother-in-law Thomas, my great-grandfather. His medal record shows that
he arrived in France on the 24th March 1915, when
he would have been 29 years old. This probably
means that he took part in the Second Battle of
Ypres and the Battle of Loos. However, he avoided
the long, relatively quiet occupation of Salonika
in Greece, because his medal record suggests that
he was discharged from service on the 31st
October 1915, as the Battalion was setting sail
from Marseilles. He was probably sent home
because of his importance as a coal-miner. He
returned to Nuneaton, where he married Elizabeth
Duggins a few months after the end of the War.
They had a daughter Elizabeth, who was born in
the first quarter of 1926. Percy died in Nuneaton
in 1953 at the age of 68. Susan
Naomi Anable Harry
Thomas Anable Harry Anable was one of the very first soldiers to go over the top that notorious day, and one of the very first to die. The 11th Suffolks attacked at 7.32 am, and suffered terrible losses. They attacked with the 10th Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment, the Grimsby Chums, at a place known as Sausage Valley, just south of La Boisselle, to the east of the town of Albert. Malcolm Brown, in The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, records that ...within two minutes of zero hour, before they had cleared the front trench, they had been raked by machine-gun fire. The Lincolnshires lost 15 officers and 462 other ranks, the Suffolk battalion 15 officers and 512 other ranks. An artillery officer who walked the ground later found 'line after line of dead men lying where they had fallen'. Chris McCarthy, in The Somme Day-by-Day, notes that the 60,000 pound mine at Lochnagar south of La Boisselle had exploded too early, two minutes before zero hour: There was no surprise, and, ten minutes after zero, 80 per cent of the men in the leading battalion of the first column were casualties.... The 10th Lincolns with 11th Suffolks following received machine-gun fire from Sausage Valley, La Boisselle and the German front line trench, which inflicted severe casualties. On the extreme right a party which tried to storm Sausage Redoubt was burnt to death by flame-throwers and the Lincolns and the Suffolks were unable to cross the 500 yards of no man's land. Harry Anable's is the first name on the Dry Drayton parish war memorial. William Brooks and Allan Tack, also on the memorial, died alongside Harry that sunny morning. None of their bodies were ever identified, and they are remembered, along with almost 75,000 other young men whose bodies were lost on the Somme, on the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval in northern France. We visited La Boisselle and Thiepval in the summer of 2006, but this was before I knew about Harry Anable, and so I will have to go back. In Gallows Piece to Bee Garden, a Millennium memory book of Dry Drayton published in the year 2000, Harry Anable was remembered, by older people talking in the 1960s and 1970s about the First World War, as a quiet and sensitive boy. |
Old William Harrison Anable died in 1893, and Samuel was now working for his younger brother. The family were now living in Pettits Lane in the centre of Dry Drayton. Samuel's daughter, my great-grandmother Alice Anable, had been a nine year old scholar on the 1891 census, at home in Dry Drayton. By the age of 19, she was working as a domestic servant in the household of Mary Cullum, a university lodging house keeper in Peas Hill in the centre of Cambridge. However, two years later she was back in Dry Drayton to marry my great-grandfather Thomas Reynolds, the son of her parents' near-neighbours in the village. The witnesses were Alice's sister Susan and Thomas's future brother-in-law Harry Bailey. Alice was heavily pregnant and heir first child was born just two months later. They called her Winifred Ellen. She was my grandmother.
Alice and Thomas lived in a cottage in Dry Drayton, perhaps even with her parents Samuel and Lydia, and two more children were born, Cecilia Emily and Ernest Alfred. Alice's grandmother Rachel Anable died in Dry Drayton in 1906. In 1908, Tom got a job as a horsekeeper at Valley Farm, West Wratting, and the family moved there. Valley Farm was a huge concern dedicated to raising horses for the Newmarket bloodstock trade. It still exists today, and sits in the western edge of West Wratting parish beside what is now the A11, not far from the Cambridge suburb of Fulbourn. Annie Abigail was born there, and in 1914 the family were living in Hildersham for the birth of Lydia Frances.
When the First World War broke out, Alice's husband enlisted as a Private soldier in the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. Alice's brother Percy joined up with him. The 1st Suffolks arrived in France in March 1915, although Thomas Reynolds's medal record suggests that he disembarked on the 8th of June. The delay may have been because Alice and Thomas's daughter Lydia died in the spring of 1915 when she was just one year old, and he may have been given compassionate leave.
The family moved to Shelley Row in Cambridge, but in France Alice's husband was on the move to more distant shores. The 1st Suffolks left Marseilles for Alexandria in Egypt in October 1915. They were then ordered on to Salonika in Greece, and completed disembarkation on 4 January 1916. Thomas spent almost the next three years encamped at Salonika, a much safer place than the Western Front in France, with just one brief, furious battle at the end of the War. In 1916, Alice's last child and youngest daughter was named Salonica Ruth 'Lon' Reynolds in memory of where her father had been when she was born. After the War, Thomas took a job with the Star Brewery on Newmarket Road in Cambridge as a drayman, delivering Tollemache Ales to pubs in Cambridge and the surrounding villages.
These are the six children of Tom and Alice Reynolds. Unlike their parents' generation, they all stayed close to Cambridge.
| Winifred
Ellen Reynolds Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire 4th February 1904. Baptised at St Peter and St Paul, Dry Drayton on 3rd April, Easter Sunday. Known by the family as Win. My grandmother - see below. Cecilia
Emily Reynolds Ernest
Alfred Reynolds Abigail
Annie Reynolds Lydia
Frances Reynolds Salonica
Ruth Reynolds |
Alice's
father Samuel died the same month as his brother and
employer WIlliam in the spring of 1922, Samuel being buried
in Dry Drayton churchyard 15 days before his brother.
Samuel was 72 years old. Alice's mother Lydia came to live
with them in Shelley Row shortly before she died in 1936
at the age of 80, and was buried in Dry Drayton
graveyard.
Alice's eldest daughter, my grandmother Win, left school
at 14 and worked as a domestic servant. She is pictured
at the age of 15 on the
group photograph of those serving the huge Peace Celebration
feast on Parkers Piece, Cambridge on 9th July 1919. She
was then briefly in service, but on 10th July 1923 she married Edmund Stanley Cornwell, who came
from Oakington, the neighbouring village to her home
village of Dry Drayton. However, Win and Stan married
more than a hundred miles away from Cambridgeshire in
Lichfield, Staffordshire. They were both just 19 years
old. They gave false ages to acquire the certificate, as
one of them had to be of age, that is to say 21 or over.
They were in Staffordshire because my grandmother was
pregnant, and they had run away to get married. Stan's
older sister Ruth lived at Colton on the outskirts of
Rugeley, and she arranged the marriage for them.
Their first child was born less
than three months later. He had a learning disability,
and lived with his mother for the rest of her life.
Winifred's parents never really forgave her for her
pregnancy and hasty marriage to someone of whom they did
not approve. It was only long after her death that the
family discovered that Winifred's mother Alice had also
been six months pregnant when she married Winifred's
father in 1903. Winifred was that child.
Stan and Win returned to Cambridge after the birth of
their first child, and lived in Shelley Row near to Win's
parents. However, they seem not to have got on well with
them, and after the birth of two more children they did a
moonlight flit, first to Barway near Ely and then to
Grunty Fen on the other side of the river, before
settling in Little Thetford. They had nine children
altogether, of which my mother was the second youngest.
Alice's mother Lydia died at the age of 79, and she was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 22nd January 1936. She was the last of the Dry Drayton Anables. The surname does not appear again in the parish registers. None of Alice's brothers had male children, and so the surname died out with the last of them.
Alice's husband Tom died at the relatively young age of 64 in 1944, and was buried at Dry Drayton. Their son Earnest died the following year of cancer. He was also buried at Dry Drayton, probably the last of the Anables and their families to be buried there. Alice went to live with Win's sister Lon in Kings Hedges Road, Cambridge.
Although my grandfather died before I was born, Winifred Cornwell was the grandparent I knew best. I spent the first three years of my life living in the same house as her at Green Hill, Little Thetford in the Isle of Ely. After we moved to Cambridge she would often visit us, and I would go and stay with her. I spent a lot of the spring of 1966 living with her because of complications with the birth of my youngest brother, and there I met her mother, my great-great-grandmother Alice Anable, in the last few months of her life, who had also come to stay.
I remember Win as being a very
comfy, smiling old lady, although she was actually only
in her late fifties when I was born. The thing that
strikes me about her now when I look at her on earlier
photographs is quite how stunningly beautiful she was
when she was young, and that my own daughter, who of
course she never met, looks uncannily like her.
She died of a stroke, possibly as a result of the
side-effects of an anti-arthritis drug, at Chesterton
Hospital in Cambridge in 1983. She was 79 years old. Her
ashes were scattered in the fields near Dry Drayton.
AT A GLANCE: DETAILS FROM REGISTERS AND CENSUS DATA all addresses are in Cambridgeshire unless otherwise stated. |
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