LIFE GOES ON: AN INTRODUCTION

MY GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

THE SIXTEEN FAMILIES

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

THE WORKHOUSE

WORLD WAR I - I - WORLD WAR II

simonknott.co.uk I home I e-mail

LIFE GOES ON




Dry Drayton pump


The Stearn family: quiet rural poverty on the edge of the city

My Mother's Mother's Mother's Mother's family

The narrative can be read in conjunction with
the Reynolds family tree. You can see places significant to the Stearn 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 Anable families. My direct ancestors are highlighted in bold the first time they appear in the narrative.

My great-great-grandparents Lydia Stearn and Samuel Anable married in the village church at Dry Drayton on the outskirts of Cambridge in the depths of the long winter of 1877. They had both been born in the village, and they would live in it all their married life. They sleep today under the earth of the village churchyard. Despite the encroachment of city suburbia across the fields, Dry Drayton is still 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.

Dry Drayton was a poor, unhealthy parish. The majority of burials listed in the parish records during the 19th Century are for infants and children. The Stearn/Sterne/Starne name appears regularly throughout the 19th Century, as does the name Anable. Indeed, Dry Drayton was such a small parish that there were a small number of family names - along with the Stearns and the Anables you can count the Impeys, the Binges, the Reynolds, the Rogers, the Markhams, the Chapmans and the Hankins in large numbers among the large, poor farm-working families who, throughout the century, intermarry in the registers. These families all knew one another well. They worked alongside each other in the fields, and today many of them lie together with their infants and children in Dry Drayton churchyard. Several of these names can be found on the Dry Drayton war memorial.

Lydia's grandparents John Sterne and Lydia Ivet had been married in the same church on 16th October 1816. My great-great-great-great-grandparents were both recorded as being 'of this parish'. Lydia was born in Dry Drayton in 1792, but John was from Histon, three miles off to the north of Cambridge, where he had been born in 1794. Lydia's would be a short, difficult life. Only two of her eight children would survive infancy, and she herself would die in 1826 at the age of just 34. The only one of the children to survive into old age would be my great-great-great-grandfather.

Fourteen years after Lydia's death, her husband John would remarry. The Dry Drayton parish registers record the marriage on 5th October 1840 of John Stearn, widower of this parish, to Sarah Male, spinster. The wedding must have been carried out with some urgency, for their first child Jacob was baptised in the same church on Christmas Day. A daughter Isabella would follow in 1842, and a son Thomas in 1846, but all three children would die in infancy. Sarah herself died in 1847 at the age of 28. John would live on in Dry Drayton working as an agricultural labourer until his own death in 1866 at the age of 71.

These are the children of John and Lydia Sterne.

    Robert Ivet Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1817 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 16th February. He was named after his maternal grandfather. No burial is recorded in the Dry Drayton registers, but there is no record of Robert at any census and so I think he must have died in childhood before official registration began, and was either missed out of the parish registers or buried elsewhere.

Susannah Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1818 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 22nd March. She was named after her maternal grandmother. She did not marry, and died at the age of 22 in 1842. She was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 17th August, when the register recorded her as being 'of Cambridge'.

William Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1819 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 25th April. He died at the age of six months and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 16th September. Lydia was already pregnant again and would shortly give birth to his brother who would be given the same name.

William Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1820 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 2nd April. He was given the same name as his brother who had died eight months earlier. My great-great-great-grandfather - see below.

John Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1821 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 30th December. He died at the age of three months and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 24th March 1822. Lydia was already pregnant again and would shortly give birth to his brother who would be given the same name.

John Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1822 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 8th December. He was given the same name as his brother who had died eight months earlier. However, John would also die at the age of 13 weeks, and he was buried beside his brother on 9th February 1823.

Isabel Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1824 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 1st February. She died at the age of seven months and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 25th July.

Francis Sterne
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1824, and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 26th December. Francis died at the age of seven months, and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 22nd July 1825. His mother followed him to the grave nine months later.

   

My great-great-great-grandfather William Sterne was just six years old when his mother died. He had seen his baby brothers and sisters all taken off, one by one, and at the last he was left alone with his father. Probably, they worked as agriculural labourers and lodged in various Dry Drayton houses of their relatives, but his father John remarried in 1840, and by 1841, when William was 21, he was lodging in the house of William Rutter, another agricultural labourer. Also in the household was William Rutter's daughter Ann, and on Christmas Day of that year William and Ann married in Dry Drayton church. Ann was 18 years old and pregnant, and a few months after the wedding gave birth to their first child, a boy, whom William named after his eldest brother who had died in infancy, Robert. Another son, William John, was born in 1844, but in May 1847 Ann died, at the age of just 24. William was left alone with two infant children, but on 2nd March 1850 he married my great-great-great-grandmother Caroline Kester at Dry Drayton church. For the first time, his surname was recorded with its modern spelling, Stearn. William was a widower of full age, Caroline was 18. Both were of this parish. Caroline was pregnant, and gave birth to their first son John shortly after the marriage. However, John died just six months later.

At the 1851 census, William and Caroline and the two sons from his first marriage were still lodging in the household of William Rutter, his first father-in-law. They would go on to have ten children, most of whom would survive into adulthood. William and Caroline seem to have been haphazard in their observance of church rituals. Their children were often not baptised until several years after their birth, and one of their children appears to have not been baptised at all.

These are the ten children of William and Caroline Stearn.

    John Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1850 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 25th August. He died at the age of six months and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 12th September.

Susannah Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1852 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 16th May. She was named after her aunt who had died ten years previously. By 1871 Susannah was working as a servant in the household of John French, a farmer of Manor Farm, Histon. In 1874 she married Robert Woods at Houghton near Huntingdon. Robert was a bricklayer, and they had four children, Ernest, Florence, Laura and Bertha. Susannah died in 1924 in Cambridge.

John Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1853, but not baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton until 21st April 1856 when he was baptised along with his baby sister Lydia. However, he died in the winter of 1859 and was buried on New Years Day 1860 in Dry Drayton churchyard. After the death of two Johns, William and Caroline seem to have given up on John as an unlucky name. And indeed, all their subsequent children would survive into adulthood.

Lydia Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1856 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 21st April along with her brother John. My great-great-grandmother - see below.

James Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, third quarter of 1857. James's baptism does not appear in the Dry Drayton parish registers, but
his gravestone in Dry Drayton churchyard gives his age as 77 at the time of his death in 1844. James married Rebecca King at Caxton in 1883, and they had eight children, Herbert, Ethel, Edith, Sydney, Gertrude, Bertha and Ada. By 1891 the family were all living back in Dry Drayton. Sydney was killed in World War One when the ship he was on, HMS Foyle, was hit by a German mine. His name is not on the Dry Drayton War Memorial, but this may be because he was by then married and living in Cambridge. James was recorded on the censuses as a horsekeeper on a farm. James and Rebecca died within a year of each other in the 1940s and are buried together in Dry Drayton churchyard. At the time of their deaths, their address was recorded as Rectory Cottages.

Alfred Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1859 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 15th March 1863 along with his sister Elizabeth. He married local girl Fanny Binge in Dry Drayton in 1886. They had three children, two of whom, William and Christopher were still alive at the time of the 1911 census, when the family were living at Childerley Cottage, Knapwell. Alfred was a farm labourer. He died in 1933 at the age of 74.

Elizabeth Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1861 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 15th March 1863 along with her brother Alfred. At the age of 19 Elizabeth was a servant in the household of Ebenezer Wells, a corn and flour merchant of 173 East Road, Cambridge. In 1891 she was in London, a domestic servant in the large household of Cornelius Paine, a colonial broker. Elizabeth did not marry, and died in Cambridge in 1908 at the age of 51.

Alice Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1865. She was baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 20th August. By the age of 16 she was working as a laundress in Grantchester Road, Trumpington. She married William Henry Peters in 1883, probably in Dry Drayton, but the marriage registers were apparently not filled in from 1881-83. They lived variously at Harston, Duxford and Hauxton, and had seven children, Harry, Herbert, Emily, Gertrude, Arthur, Frederick and Walter. Alice died in Cambridge in 1938.

Frederick Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1868, and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 9th April 1875 along with his brother Arthur. He married 17 year old Florence Dilley at Dry Drayton in 1889. Their first son Walter was born just two months later. They would have four further children, Elizabeth, Rose, Harry and Ernest. Frederick was a stud groom at Girton stud farm. Frederick died in Cambridge in 1942.

Arthur Stearn
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 1872, and baptised at St Peter and St Paul's church Dry Drayton on 9th April 1875 along with his brother Frederick. At the age of thirty, Arthur was still living at home with his mother in Dry Drayton. However, after her death in 1907 he married Harriett Harper in 1908. They were both in their late thirties and lived in Dry Drayton. They do not appear to have had any children. Arthur died in 1930 and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard.

   

My great-great-grandmother Lydia Stearn grew up in Dry Drayton and spent almost the whole of her life there, but at the age of 15 the 1871 census finds her working three miles away as a servant in the household of William Wakeling, a letter carrier, of Victoria Road in north Cambridge. Her sister Susannah was working in Histon, a mile or two to the north, but Dry Drayton was close by, and on 15th December 1877 she was back home to marry my great-great-grandfather Samuel Anable, a near neighbour. Unusually for Dry Drayton in the 19th Century, it does not appear that Lydia was pregnant at the time of her marriage. Samuel was five years older than her, but the families would have known each other well. Samuel was an agricultural labourer, although his father ran a bricklaying business. The Anables were probably better off than the Stearns. They settled down in Dry Drayton, and from the 1881 census onwards Samuel is also shown as a bricklayer.

There was a great agricultural recession in the 1880s, and this was the time of the great break-up of settled rural communities. Samuel and Lydia's was the last generation of Anables and Stearns who would live out all their lives in and around Dry Drayton. Indeed, every single one of their children would leave Dry Drayton, never to return. One of them would be killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

In 1892, Lydia's father William died, and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard.

These are the six children of Samuel and Lydia Anable of Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire. One died in India, another was killed at the Battle of the Somme.

    Francis Anable
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire in the 4th quarter of 1878. He was given the first name of his father's younger brother who had died 12 years earlier. 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'.

In 1896, Francis, calling himself Frank but identifiable as Francis because he is recorded as a 19 year old born in Dry Drayton, presented attestation papers at Cambridge to join the Royal Marines. He was discharged the same year, the reason being given that he was 'unfit'. Francis does not appear to be on the 1901 UK census. However, the Army Returns for India show that on 2nd September 1905 Francis married Ruth Clarke, at the Methodist Episcopal church in Vepery, Madras, India. Francis was a Private in the British Army and gave his address as Fort, Madras. Frank was 27 and Ruth was 21. His new wife was a divorcée and gave her occupation as domestic. The entry in the register is annotated one of the parties is a British Subject, so perhaps Ruth was American. Frank gave his father's name as Samuel Anable. The following year they had a daughter who was baptised in India as Alice Mary Elizabeth Anable. Was there a reason she was given two of the same forenames as Frank's younger sister?

Frank died on the 2nd October 1908 in Madras, and his death was recorded in the 'select deaths and burials in India' list. In 1911, Samuel and Lydia declared that they had had six childen, five of whom were still living. The other five Anable children were all still alive in 1911. I'm still searching for what happened to Ruth and Alice.

William Ernest Anable
Born Dry Drayton 1880. He was baptised along with his older brother Francis at Dry Drayton church on 7th March 1880. William left Dry Drayton for London to work on the railways. He would live in East London for the rest of his life. At the age of 21 he was a railway porter lodging at the Lord Brooke public house in Shernhall Street, Walthamstow E17. This public house is still in business today under the same name. By 1911 he had become a railway signalman, and was lodging with a family not far off at Wood Green. During the First World War, William enlisted as a Sapper with the Royal Engineers, and
his medal record notes that he landed in France on the 21st May 1915, when he would have been 35 years old. He survived the War. In the first quarter of 1938, when William was 57 years old, he married Annie Fraser in Edmonton, north-east London. It does not seem that there were any children. William died relatively young in 1947 in Wood Green, when he was 67 years old.

Alice Mary Beatrice Anable
Born Dry Drayton 1882. My great-grandmother - see below.

Percy Anable
Born Dry Drayton 1885. Percy was still living at home in Dry Drayton at the age of 16 in 1901, but before the next census his life was to undergo an extraordinary change. We find him in 1911 lodging in a house in Coventry Road, Nuneaton in north Warwickshire, where he was working as a coal miner. I have no idea how my great-great-uncle ended up as a miner in the Black Country coalfields. Perhaps one clue is that a miner from Pelsall in Staffordshire, a few miles off, was lodging with Percy in the same house, and Percy's sister Susan had married another miner from Pelsall a few months before the 1911 census.

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
Born Dry Drayton 1891. At the age of 19, Susan married Ernest Witcutt, a coal miner, on 23 October 1910 at the parish church in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and went to live with him in his widowed father's house at Norton Road, Pelsall in Staffordshire. Pelsall is today within the Borough of Walsall; interestingly, it is barely six miles from Rugeley, where my grandmother Winifred, Susan's niece, would be married some thirty years later. Their first child Thomas was born in 1911, followed by John, Winifred and William. Susan died in Pelsall in 1967 when she was 78 years old.

Harry Thomas Anable
Born Dry Drayton 1896. When the First World War broke out, Harry was 18 years old. He joined up as a Private in the 11th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, the renowned Cambridge Battalion. He was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916. He was just 19 years old.

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.

   

By the start of the 20th Century, Lydia, Samuel and their family were living in Pettits Lane in the centre of Dry Drayton. Lydia'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 Reynolds. 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 Great Wilbraham, and the family moved on. Another child, Abigail Annie, was born there. By the time of the 1911 census they were still in Great Wilbraham at Valley Farm. In 1914, Tom and Alice were in Hildersham for the birth of their fifth child, Lydia Frances, but when the First World War broke out Tom enlisted as a Private soldier in the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. His brother-in-law, Alice's brother Percy, joined up with him. About this time the family moved to 3 Benson Place off of North Street, Cambridge.

The 1st Suffolks were part of the 28th Division of the Army which was formed at Winchester during December 1914, suggesting that Thomas joined up a few months after the start of the War, but before conscription was introduced. The Division began landing at Le Havre on 16th January 1915, and the 1st Suffolks arrived in March, although Thomas Reynolds's medal record shows that he arrived in France on the 8th of June, two weeks after the burial of his infant daughter Lydia. Perhaps he had been given compassionate leave. Soon after this, the family moved to 4 Shelley Row in the Castle Hill area of Cambridge, where Tom would spend the rest of his life. The exact date is uncertain, but it was after 1916, because in November 1916 the Cambridge Independent Press reported the death of a teenage boy, Reuben Caldecoat, of 4 Shelley Row who was killed in an accident on Castle Hill. Perhaps it was this incident which made the Caldecoat family move.

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
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire 1905 and baptised at St Peter and St Paul, Dry Drayton on 24th December, Christmas Eve. Known by the family as Ciss. Later spelled her name Cecelia. She married Edward Cannell in Cambridge on 26th December, Boxing Day, 1925. After marrying, they lived in North Walsham, Norfolk where they had three daughters. Edward died in North Walsham in 1981 at the age of 80. Cecilia moved to Harlow in Essex, presumably to be with a daughter, and died there in November 1989 at the age of 84. She was the last of the children to die.

Ernest Alfred Reynolds
Born Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire 1907. Baptised at St Peter and St Paul, Dry Drayton on 5th May. Known by the family as Sonny. Ernest lived with his parents all his life, establishing a taxi business in Cambridge from the workshop at the bottom of his parents' garden at 4 Shelley Row. At the time of the 1938 Kelly's Directory for Cambridge he was listed as the householder, but this was probably just so that his taxi business could be advertised. He died of cancer at the age of 38 in 1945, and was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 7th September. The family story is that he contracted his final illness by smoking oil-stained cigarettes in his workshop. Ernest never married, but he was in a long term relationship, and when he died he left his accumulated wealth from the taxi business to his former partner, much to the anger of his mother.

Abigail Annie Reynolds
Born Great Wilbraham, Cambridgeshire 21st April 1910. Baptised at St Nicholas, Great Wilbraham on 5th June. Known by the family as Cad. She married Reginald Lander at St Giles, Cambridge, a short walk from her parents' house in Shelley Row, on 30th June 1929. Reginald Lander's family were partners in a busy Cambridge butcher's firm. They lived variously on Histon Road, Cambridge, at Station Road, Histon and at one point ran the Wheelwright's Arms, East Road, Cambridge. They had three children, two daughters and a son. They were the aunt, uncle and cousins my mother knew best, and she remembered her Aunt Cad and Uncle Reg with fondness and affection. Abigail died in Cambridge on the 26th April 1988 a few days after her 78th birthday

Lydia Frances Reynolds
Born Hildersham, Cambridgeshire 1914. Baptised at St Peter and St Paul, Dry Drayton on 1st November when her father Tom was recorded as a horsekeeper of Hildersham. Lydia died within a year, by which time the family had moved to Cambridge. She was buried 22nd May 1915, aged 12 months, as recorded in parish registers of St Luke, Chesterton, Cambridge. The burial was in Histon Road burial ground. The Reynolds family address was recorded as 3 Benson Place, North Street, Cambridge. This is off of Histon Road. Interestingly, her father arrived in France after his regiment's landing date, suggesting that he might have received compassionate leave because of his daughter's death.

Salonica Ruth Reynolds
Born Cambridge 1916. The family were probably still living at Benson Place, Cambridge. She was baptised at St Peter and St Paul, Dry Drayton on 5th March. Known to the family as Lon. She received her unusual name to remember the fact that her father was stationed at Salonika in Greece for much of the First World War, a much less dangerous theatre than the Western Front. She married Stanley George Impey at St Giles, Cambridge in 1936. Stan was a distant relative of Lon, born at Dry Drayton in 1911 and related through her mother's mother's family. They had two sons. The family lived at 130 Kings Hedges Road, Cambridge. After the death of Lon's father Tom, her mother Alice came to live in the Kings Hedges Road house in what my mother describes as a granny flat. Lon died at the age of 67 in 1983 in Cambridge, after which her husband lived in sheltered accomodation on Arbury Road before his death in 1989.

   

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 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 firstly at Oakington with Stan's parents and then in Castle Row near to Win's parents. In the late 1920s they moved away, first to Barway near Ely and then to Grunty Fen on the other side of the river, before settling in Little Thetford.

These are the nine children of Edmund Stanley Cornwell and Winifred Ellen Reynolds:

    Cecil Thomas Walter Cornwell
Born Colton, Staffordshire on 29th October 1923. Cecil had a learning disability, and lived with his mother for the rest of her life. After her death, he lived in a care home at Toft, Cambridgeshire. He died in his sleep there in February 1990.

Stanley Arthur James Cornwell
Born Oakington, Cambridgeshire in 1925, and baptised at St Andrew's church, Oakington on 27th September. Known to the family as Jim. This suggests that the family were living with Stan's parents at the time. He signed up for the Navy in the Second World War. He was badly injured on 16th September 1942 aboard HMS Warspite. He was just 17 years old. The battleship was taking part in the Salerno Landings off the toe of Italy when it was hit by a German glider bomber.
This photograph shows the ratings being addressed shortly before the battle. Jim is in this photograph somewhere. He never recovered from his injuries, and died in 1946 at the age of twenty. He was buried in Little Thetford Cemetery, and is mentioned on the Little Thetford war memorial.

Jack Travers Cornwell
Born 2 Castle Row, Cambridge in 1928, and baptised in St Giles's church, Cambridge on 4th March. He was named after Jack Travers Cornwell, a 16 year old posthumous winner of the Victoria Cross, who at the time was one of the great heroes of the First World War. He married Edna Martin in Ely in 1954, and they lived at Mepal, Cambridgeshire.

Reginald Trevor Cornwell
Born River Bank, Barway, Cambridgeshire, 0n 28th January 1930, and baptised at St Nicholas's church, Barway on 6th April. Known to the family as Reggie. Married Beryl Dennis at Ely in 1954. Two years later, their father being dead, Reggie gave away my mother when she married. Reggie and Beryl lived at Little Thetford and then at Wilburton, Cambridgeshire. They had three children, two boys and a girl. Reggie died on 16th August 2001.

Edward Malcolm Cornwell
Born River Bank, Barway, Cambridgeshire 1931, and baptised at St Nicholas's church, Barway on 7th June. Known to the family as Malcolm. Married Betty Rudderham at Ely in 1950. They lived at Wilburton, and had five children, four girls and a boy. Betty died in 2015, Malcolm in August 2016.

Betty Katherine Cornwell
Born River Bank, Barway,Cambridgeshire on 1st December 1932, and baptised at St Nicholas's church, Barway on 7th June 1933. Betty contracted polio as a child, and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She spent time at Manfield Hospital in Northampton, and then after 1956 living in the home for the physically disabled at Dorincourt, Leatherhead, Surrey, later the Queen Elizabeth Foundation. She died in Leatherhead in 1987.

June Frances Cornwell
Born Red Fen Lane, Grunty Fen, Little Thetford, Cambridgeshire in 1934. She married Keith Anthony Palmer at St George's church, Little Thetford on 9th April 1955. They lived at Little Downham and had two children, a boy and a girl.

Marion Patricia Cornwell
Born Red Fen Lane, Grunty Fen, Little Thetford, Cambridgeshire on 27th February 1936. She married Graham Knott at St George's church, Little Thetford on 4th August 1956. They lived at Little Thetford and then in Cambridge, and had three children, all boys. Marion died in Cambridge on 30th June 2016.

Albert Paul Cornwell
Born Front Street, Little Thetford, Cambridgeshire in 1937. Known to the family as Sonny. He married Shirley Carter at St Mary's church, Ely in 1957. They lived in Ely and had two children, both boys.

   

Alice's mother Lydia died at the age of 79, and she was buried in Dry Drayton churchyard on 22nd January 1936. She was eighty years old, 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 Ernest 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-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.

Winifred Ellen Cornwell née Reynolds died of a stroke, possibly as a result of the side-effects of an anti-arthritis drug, at Chesterton Hospital in Cambridge in February 1983. She was 79 years old. After a service at Cambridge crematorium, 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.
 
  Birthplace 1881 census 1891 census 1901 census 1911 census married to
  (date registered) age address age address age address age address date of marriage

Samuel


Dry Drayton, Cambs (1849)


31


High Street, Dry Drayton


42


Long Lane, Dry Drayton

 
50


Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton


61


Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton


Samuel married Lydia Stearn on the 15th January 1877 at Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire


Lydia
(Stearn)

Dry Drayton, Cambs (1856)


25


High Street, Dry Drayton


35


Long Lane, Dry Drayton

 
46


Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton


56


Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton


Lydia married Samuel Anable on the 15th January 1877 at Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire

                     

Francis


Dry Drayton, Cambs (1878)


2


High Street, Dry Drayton


12


Long Lane, Dry Drayton

 
I have not found Francis on the 1901 census - he was probably in India.

 
Francis was dead by the time of the 1911 census

 


William


Dry Drayton, Cambs (1880)


1


High Street, Dry Drayton

 
11


Long Lane, Dry Drayton

 
21

 
The Lord Brooke, Shernhall Street, Walthamstow, London

 
30

 
2 Bradley Green, Wood Green, London

 
William married Annie Fraser in the 1st quarter of 1938 at Wood Green, London


Alice


Dry Drayton, Cambs (1882)

     
8


Long Lane, Dry Drayton

 
19

 
Peas Hill, Cambridge

 
30


Valley Farm, Great Wilbraham


Alice married Thomas Reynolds on the 28th November 1903 at Dry Drayton, Cambridgeshire


Percy


Dry Drayton, Cambs (1885)

     
6

 
Long Lane, Dry Drayton


16


Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton

 
25


49, Coventry Road, Nuneaton, Warks


Percy married Elizabeth Duggins in the 1st quarter of 1919 at Nuneaton, Warwickshire


Susan


Dry Drayton, Cambs (1891)

     
2 mo

 
Long Lane, Dry Drayton


10

     
Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton

    
20

   
Norton Road, Pelsall, Staffordshire

Susan married Ernest Witcutt in the 4th quarter of 1910 at Nuneaton, Warwickshire


Harry


Dry Drayton, Cambs (1896)

          
4

 
Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton


14


Pettits Lane, Dry Drayton

 
     
   
     
Ages are as shown on census.
(name) after name indicates different given name on some censuses.
(number) after street name indicates more than one Anable household in that street.
 

 

 

LIFE GOES ON: AN INTRODUCTION

MY GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS - I - MY GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

THE SIXTEEN FAMILIES

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

THE WORKHOUSE

WORLD WAR I - I - WORLD WAR II

simonknott.co.uk I home I e-mail

LIFE GOES ON