Pettifoggers E-Book

Andrew Griffiths

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 112

Beschreibung

In the 18th century, pettifogger, under-strapper and Wapping attorney were all pejorative epithets for a certain class of disreputable lawyer. My solicitor forebears came from Wapping, but I hope to present sufficient evidence in these pages to acquit them of any charge of pettifoggery or under-strapping.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Foreword

Frontispiece

Cover illustration

Origins

The Fawcetts

Wapping

Articles

Pettifoggers, under-strappers and Wapping attorneys

An unexpected marriage

The brawl in the vestry

The Vestry Clerk election

Stepney

Whitechapel

Camberwell, Vauxhall, Brixton

Overflowing Privies

Elizabeth Ann Bilton

Thomas William Bilton

Julia Driver Bilton

Emma Bilton

Alfred Bilton

Foreword

In the 18th century, “pettifogger”, “under-strapper” and “Wapping attorney” were all pejorative epithets for a certain class of disreputable lawyer.

My solicitor forebears came from Wapping, but I hope to present sufficient evidence in these pages to acquit them of any charge of pettifoggery or under-strapping.

Readers should expect to encounter several generations of Thomas Biltons, but the simplified family tree at the end should help in telling them apart.

Andrew Griffiths in March 2024 Ober-Ramstadt, Germany

Frontispiece

Miniature of Thomas Bilton the elder (1762-1833), painted the year of his marriage in 1790. A lock of his hair is attached to the rear of the frame.

Cover illustration

A potpourri of Bilton memorabilia.

Origins

Imagine finding an old family Bible in an attic with the names and dates of your ancestors inscribed on the flyleaf going back to the mid-18th century, all neat and in chronological order. What a treat for a family researcher!

Unless, that is, he (or she) then spends months, or even years, chasing red herrings up blind alleys, only to find that the information on the flyleaf was wrong all the time.

In my case, it was not a Bible, but a “family register”, which came into my hands through my uncle, Frank Powell. The first entry on the first page, which is reproduced overleaf, states quite clearly that a certain Thomas Bilton, born at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1738, married an Ann Fawcett from Whitby.

The thing to note about this family register is that it was not begun until nearly ninety years had elapsed since the marriage between Thomas Bilton and Ann Fawcett, because the entries on the first two pages were all set down by their grandson using the same pen, up to and including his own mother’s death on the second page, in 1846. Even if he obtained the information directly from his father, who was only eight years old when the first Thomas Bilton died in 1770, the writer of the family register was recording a family legend, not established fact.

The truth is that Thomas Bilton, in all likelihood, was not born in Newcastle upon Tyne and Ann Fawcett was not from Whitby. The supposed year of Thomas’ birth (1738) may well be wrong and he was not buried at St Paul’s Church, Deptford, as the family register claims, but at the other parish church in Deptford, St Nicholas.

There is certainly useful information in the family register as well, some of which I would not have been able to find elsewhere; for example, that the Thomas Bilton who was born in 1797 had a twin brother, who did not survive.

All I can say with certainty about the origins of Thomas Bilton, my 4th great grandfather, is that he came as a young man from northern parts to London, where he married Ann Fawcett in 1760. I did have more luck with tracing Ann’s origins and I will come back to these shortly.

Another fact, which the family register ignores completely, is that Thomas Bilton, despite his youth, was already a widower when he married Ann Fawcett. His first wife was a Mary Stodart, whom he married in the church of Horselydown St John, Southwark, on August 23rd 1757. Thomas was a resident of that parish, but Mary was from Stepney.

Thomas married for the second time at the the church of St George in the East, a parish on the Middlesex side of the River Thames, neighbouring Wapping, on October 19th 1760. Confirmation that we have the same Thomas Bilton in both cases is supplied by his own signature on the forms of marriage, shown here in the order they were written, in 1757 and 1760:

A third example of Thomas Bilton’s signature can be seen on the flyleaf of his prayer book, which is in the possession of a cousin in Australia. This is very similar to the one on the earlier marriage record, and may have been inscribed about the same time.

This prayer book, which was printed in London in 1714, displays faded vestiges of other “Bilton”1 signatures, suggesting that it had belonged to one or more members of earlier Bilton generations.

The statement on the flyleaf that “Thos Bilton departed this life March the 18th 1770 aged 32 years” was presumably added later by his son and this may have been the source that his grandson used for the family register. The burial of Thomas Bilton, cordwainer from Flaggon Row, actually took place on March 21st 1770 at the church of St Nicholas, Deptford, which is consistent with the date of death from the family register and the prayer book.

Burial of Thomas Bilton on March 21st 1770, St Nicholas, Deptford

Before continuing the story of Thomas Bilton and his descendants, I need to find a way to differentiate between three generations of Thomases. Wherever there is a need to be specific, the first one (my 4th great grandfather) will therefore be termed “Thomas Bilton the cordwainer2”. His son, the first solicitor and attorney, will be “Thomas the elder” and his grandson, who was also a solicitor. “Thomas the younger”. Thomas the younger was followed by two generations of Thomas William Biltons.

Flaggon Row, Deptford, in the 1880s (Lewisham Borough Archives)

1 Including an “An Bilton”, who may have been Thomas’ mother.

2 Boot and shoe maker. The word is derived from Cordova, the source of the finest leather.

The Fawcetts

In the absence of any certain knowledge about Thomas Bilton the cordwainer’s northern origins, I resume the tale with his second wife, my 4th great grandmother Ann Fawcett, whose family came from Thorpe Willoughby, in the parish of Brayton, near Selby in Yorkshire.

My starting point is another entry in the register book of St Nicholas in Deptford:

Baptism of Ann Fawcett on October 17th 1778, St Nicholas, Deptford

The baptism of Ann, daughter of George Fawcett, mariner in Flaggon Row, is dated eight years after Thomas Bilton the cordwainer had died there. This George Fawcett must have been visiting Deptford with his pregnant wife, because there is no other record of any George Fawcett in or near Deptford, neither baptism of any other children, nor apprenticeship, nor marriage, nor burial, so it is quite plausible that that they were staying temporarily with a close relative there, very likely Thomas Bilton’s widow Ann, for whom no record of burial has yet been found.

George Fawcett was a master mariner from Hull, whose career as captain of the coastal sailing vessels Kingston, Susannah, Africa and Empress spanned the period from 1762 to 1777, and included regular trips between Hull and London. He was admitted as Freeman of the City of York as a mariner by patrimony in 1758 and the first record of him as master of a vessel appeared in 1762, when he captained the Kingston on a voyage from Hull to Leith. The obvious next question is, whether there was an Ann Fawcett of the right age among George’s closer relations, to have been Thomas Bilton’s bride. The answer: yes, there was!

Deptford, in 1761, showing Flaggon Row

John Fawcett, yeoman of Thorpe Willoughby, had died in 1723, leaving three sons and two daughters. The eldest son George, born in 1704, became a butcher in the City of York. He was the father of George Fawcett the mariner, who married Mary Lowthorp in Hull, had at least three children there (besides the Ann in Deptford) and died in Hull in 1798.

The third son was another butcher, Peter Fawcett, who inherited the farm from his father, but the second of those three sons from Thorpe Willoughby was my own 5th great grandfather, John Fawcett, born in 1708.

John Fawcett was sent to London in 1724 to be indentured to a member of the Vintners Company called Nicholas Lambert, who was a wealthy wine merchant with “vaults” near Fleet Street. But John returned to Yorkshire, presumably without completing his apprenticeship, and married Jane Stephenson in Cottingham, near Hull, in 1729. They set up their home in Willerby (not Whitby) a hamlet within Cottingham Parish, where they suffered more than their fair share of family tragedy. All but one of their seven children died in childhood. John‘s last child, Jane, lived only two days and her mother died eleven days after that.

The only child to reach adulthood was Ann, baptised August 25th 1737 at St Mary’s Church in Cottingham. She lost her mother when she was four, and her father when she was twenty years old, which was in February 1758. Two years later, she married Thomas Bilton in London.

George Fawcett must have brought his first cousin Ann to London on one of his coastal voyages. She could not have travelled with the Kingston, because her London wedding took place two years before that ship was built, but George was presumably sailing with some other vessel, perhaps as mate.

The trading links between the Yorkshire ports and Wapping on the north bank of the Thames, where the Bilton story continues, were very strong.

Wapping

Before beginning our exploration of Wapping, allow me to quickly review what we know about Thomas and Ann Bilton, so far.

Despite following up numerous clues and theories, the location of Thomas Bilton’s birth remains a mystery. He was not baptised in Newcastle upon Tyne, nor is he the shoe maker, who was born in Morpeth in 1729. My theory that he might have been an orphaned “Thomas Hilton”, whose name was corrupted in the records of the Newcastle workhouse, turned out to be equally wrong. My hope is, that a DNA match will one day reveal the truth3.

When Thomas married Mary Stodart in 1757, he was only eighteen or nineteen years old, if the family register speaks truth (this is one reason why I suspect that he was somewhat older than 32, when he died in 1770). Mary Stodart may have come originally from County Durham, where the name is common, but this is pure speculation, and I have not found any record of her burial. Nor have I found any children from this first marriage.

I am certain that Ann Fawcett, who married Thomas Bilton at St George’s Church in 1760, arrived from Hull with her seafaring cousin George. We do know that Thomas died at Deptford in 1770, and his widow Ann presumably continued to live there until at least 1778, when George dropped anchor in Flaggon Row with his pregnant wife Mary. She may have been the godmother of her namesake, the baby Ann Fawcett, who was baptised in Deptford.

From Deptford, we must now hail a waterman and cross the River Thames to the Wapping side, where Thomas and Ann lived before moving to Flaggon Row.

The Director of the Greenwich Maritime Institute once described 18th century Wapping as follows …

“For anyone with a passing interest in London history, mention of the riverside parish of Wapping may possibly conjure up a picture of impoverished working class inhabitants, narrow streets and dangerous alleyways. Such an image owes much to descriptions of Wapping and nearby localities in the later 19th century. There is, however, another, earlier, Wapping to be discovered; a Wapping where wealthy merchants, shipowners and manufacturers had their houses and offices; a Wapping with trading links which reached out across the world; a Wapping of slave plantation owners; a Wapping of government contractors; a Wapping, indeed, even of book lovers”4.

Thomas Bilton, widower, and Ann Fawsit (sic) were joined in marriage in the presence of William and Sarah Jones by William Purkis, the Curate of St George in the East, on October 19th 1760. Bride and groom were both resident in the parish, the banns had been duly proclaimed, Thomas signed with his full name and Ann made her mark. The best man, William Jones, was a cooper, who lived in the street behind the church.

There was only the one child born of this pairing; Thomas, my 3rd great grandfather, who was baptised at St George in the East on April 18th 1762. He was six weeks old when he was introduced to the font and his father’s occupation and the address, Ship Street, were duly recorded in the register. A few pages back, the same parish register documents the baptism of a negro slave belonging to Mrs Humes, in nearby Milk Alley.

Ship Street, the southern end of which was located on the boundary between the parishes of St George in the East and Wapping, no longer exists today and the site is occupied by a modern school.

Thomas must have had some instruction before being articled to Robert Tudman, the solicitor in nearby Sir William Warren’s Square5 and this may have been at Raine’s free school, which was founded by Henry Raine, a wealthy local brewer, in Old Gravel Lane, only a short walk from Ship Street. The building still stands today and there is an inscription over the door: