In my last post, I promised to look further at a branch of the fascinating Chamberlayne family, who owned Maugersbury Manor. Here is a potted history of the Ingles family, who were happy farming in Canada, until a distant cousin in England died…

A Canadian farmer, from Peter Reesor's collection.

As was often the case with 18th century gentry families, where one branch of the family died out, another one would inherit the estate, and sometimes take on the original family surname, if theirs was different. This was the case with the Chamberlaynes – not once, but at least twice.

Edmund John Chamberlayne, one time sheriff of Gloucestershire and lord of the manor, died in 1831, without having had any children of his own to inherit. He was therefore succeeded by his nephew, Joseph Chamberlayne Ackerley – his sister’s son. Joseph changed his name from Ackerley to Chamberlayne, becoming the rather grand Joseph Chamberlayne Chamberlayne. He had four daughters, two of whom I believe predeceased him, and none of whom appear to have had surviving children. He also had one brother, who died a bachelor, and two sisters. On his death in 1874, then, his estate was inherited by his second cousin, Henry Ingles.

Henry Ingles was not from Gloucestershire; in fact, he was not even from England. He was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to an Englishman, Charles Ingles.

However, he was brought up aware of his links to England, and in 1851, was listed in the census for Lambeth in south London, where he was visiting Irishman Charles Dod and his family. Dod was the author of the tome Peerage and Parliament, and today, his name is preserved in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion and Dod’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage. Was Henry visiting Dod as a family connection, or in order to ascertain his own position in society as a junior member of a landed family?

Halifax, Nova Scotia, birthplace of Henry Ingles. Photo by Thorfinn Stainforth.

By 1871, the Ingles family had permanently relocated to England, and were living in Shalford, Surrey. Henry had retired and was living off some form of annuity. His three children were still living at home, although Walter was now based at Pembroke College, Oxford, during term time. (he gained his BA in 1874 and his MA three years later).

Henry was also providing a home to his four unmarried sisters, aged between 39 and 56. Mary, Susan and Anne Martha had all been born in Nova Scotia, but the second daughter, Elizabeth, had been born in Winchelsea, Hampshire, suggesting regular travel by the Ingles family between Canada and England. By this point, Henry’s wife seems to have died, perhaps before leaving Canada.

Three years later, Joseph Chamberlayne Chamberlayne died, and Henry Ingles inherited Maugersbury Manor House. He, like his cousin, changed his surname, becoming Henry Ingles Chamberlayne, and all his children followed suit. This meant that Walter, for example, became Walter Chamberlayne Ingles Chamberlayne.

In 1881, the family were esconced at their new family home near Stow-on-the-Wold. Henry was described as a landowner, living at the manor with his children, all still single, and one of his sisters, Anne Martha. His only son, Walter, was now working as a barrister. One might have thought that he was now set in his ways as a wealthy widower – but there was a lot of life left in Henry.

In the summer of 1890, Henry Ingles Chamberlayne, aged 70, married Louisa Grace Marston in Stow-on-the-Wold. Louisa was a 35 year old from Tonbridge in Kent, the daughter of a Jamaica-born vicar. She had had a peripatetic childhood, moving around the country, from Dover to Salford, and had seen tragedy, her mother appearing to have died in childbirth, having her youngest sister Lucy – although her father soon remarried and had more children by his second wife. Now Louisa found stability – and became the new lady of the manor.

Within a year, Henry’s daughters had finally moved out of the manor house, but Walter was still there, a 39-year-old gooseberry in his father’s new marriage.

However, Walter was not simply a daddy’s boy living at home. He appears not only to work as a barrister, but may also have had business interests, the 1897 electoral register listing him as “glover” based at 1 Bridge Street, Westminster (unless there was another Walter Chamberlayne Ingles Chamberlayne, which seems unlikely!).

In 1901, Walter was still living with his father, but now the family had moved out of the large manor house and into the smaller Stow Lodge in Stow-on-the-Wold. Henry was now 81, but still working as a local magistrate. Walter was 51; Louisa five years younger than her stepson. But now the family had extended again; Henry and Louisa had had two children – Emily Hermione Grace Ingles Chamberlayne, born in Maugersbury Manor in 1896, and Rupert Henry Ingles Chamberlayne, born two years later. The manor house was sold to John Henry Hewitt, and the long link between Maugersbury and the Chamberlayne family ended.

Henry died in Stow in 1910, aged 90. His son, Rupert, became a naval cadet by the age of 13, studying at the Royal Naval College in Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

Henry’s older son, Walter, finally moved on, changing career as well as home. He became a Church of England curate, taking a position as curate of Shorwell on the Isle of Wight, and moving into a lodging house. He finally became a clerk, and died, still single, in Leonard Stanley, Gloucestershire, on 28 January 1931. He had been visiting the area from his home, which was now in Bournemouth. His younger sister Laura had died in Northampton in 1916; older sister Alice died the year after Walter, in 1932, in the Stroud area.

Louisa Chamberlayne, Henry’s widow, lived on until January 1938, dying at Hyde Cottage in Stow-on-the-Wold at the age of 83. She left her relatively modest estate to her unmarried daughter Emily Hermione, who died in the Stow area in 1969, aged 73.

The Ingles family went from England to Canada and back again; from the Home Counties to the Cotswolds; and from farm to manor house to lodging houses. Their mobility was unusual for the time; but so too were their lives.

Information taken from www.british-history.ac.uk and www.ancestry.co.uk

Charles Paget Wade - photo from Wikimedia Commons, via Andrew Eason

Charles was born in 1883, and started collecting things at the age of seven. He trained as an architect, but when his father died in 1911, Wade inherited a share in the Wade family’s sugar estates on St Kitt’s.

After active service during World War I, Wade bought the neglected Snowshill Manor near Broadway, in Worcestershire, and started to restore the building and plan the cottage gardens.

However, he was not a traditional man, and having built up a large collection of items from around the world – including eighteenth-century clothes, an assortment of spinning wheels, and so on – he decided to house this mish-mash of items in the manor house, and move into the small Priest’s House in his garden. This, too, became filled with an assortment of objects, but was still infinitely more cosy and liveable in than the main house.

Snowshill Manor

Although Wade and his wife spent a large part of their time in the West Indies, Wade died whilst on a trip home to England in 1956, and is buried here. He had gifted the house to the National Trust five years earlier. His wife, nearly 20 years his junior, died in 1999.

Snowshill Manor is still owned by the National Trust, and is well worth a visit – both for the beauty of the landscape, and the strangeness of the house’s interiors, cluttered with a multiplicity of objects (the National Trust calculates that there are over 20,000). A warning, though – it is not for the claustrophobic or the minimalists!

St Edward's in Stow-on-the-Wold, photo by John Salmon: a memorial to Joseph Chamberlayne Chamberlayne is on an interior wall.

The magnificently titled Joseph Chamberlayne Chamberlayne had returned to his family home of Maugersbury House, near Stow-on-the-Wold, in the summer of 1837, having spent the previous four years abroad with his family.

On his return, he was horrified to discover that he had been associated with the deeds of his brother, Charles Henry Ackerley – and immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the Oxford Journal, in order to publicise his innocence and, in doing so, also publicised his poor relations with Charles.

The Chamberlayne family had owned Maugersbury Manor House for centuries, but when lord of the manor Edmund Chamberlayne had died in 1831, his nephew, Joseph Chamberlayne Ackerley, had inherited the estate – and changed his surname to Chamberlayne, creating the rather strange name of Joseph Chamberlayne Chamberlayne, whilst his brother, of course, remained an Ackerley.

Until February 1835, Chamberlayne and Charles had been in contact – at least by letter – and the former had given Charles a regular allowance. However, at this point, Chamberlayne decided that Charles’ behaviour had displeased him so much that he would discontinue his annual allowance. He also took steps to evict him from a cottage on Chamberlayne’s estates; Charles had occupied it without permission, and then refused to move when asked to. In the end, legal action was needed.

After stopping contact with Charles, Chamberlayne decided to keep a dignified silence on the relationship, until gossip forced him to go to the press.

Chamberlayne sighed:

“I deeply regret the situation in which he has placed himself, and lest by my silence I should be considered as acquiescing in my name having been so frequently used by him, or as affording him any countenance or support, I have no alternative but to adopt this course of disavowal…” (Oxford Journal, 15 July 1837)

So what had Charles done to his brother? All Chamberlayne said was that the two men’s names had been “mixed up” in public advertisements, and that he had never connived with, supported, or encouraged his brother’s actions.

Intrigued, I tried to find out a bit more about this family, their black sheep, and his dodgy actions.

John Chamberlayne Chamberlayne was the son of barrister John Hawkesley Ackerley and his wife Elizabeth Chamberlayne. He seems to have changed his name from Ackerley to Chamberlayne – creating the rather confusing full name – in the early 1830s, presumably as part of the conditions of an inheritance from his mother’s family (see Gloucester Archives document D1395/II/2/E17 which mentions the change in name).

His brother, Charles Henry Ackerley, had joined the navy in 1810, and was made a lieutenant in 1822.

He seems to have been an eccentric amateur scientist, attempting to merge science and religion through discoveries, inventions, and lectures. He was also had left-wing beliefs, trying to help the poor in his own way. In 1834, he was advertising his newly published book in the newspapers, which aimed to show “safe” plans for vessels navigating the Thames. In 1838, he attempted to enlist the aid of the Lord Mayor of London to help him deliver a lecture on a discovery he had made about Ancient Egypt. He also regularly spoke at working men’s associations, at one, attempting to expose what he saw as a “system of abuse” endemic in British public charities (The Charter, 17 March 1839).

17 years later, in March 1851, the Morning Chronicle recorded that a Captain Charles Henry Ackerley appeared in court charged with killing a Matthew Tingle. Unusually, given the charge, he had been allowed bail, and had stated that he would conduct his own defence when the case reached trial (Morning Chronicle, 3 March 1851). The trial, when it took place, was on charges of manslaughter and assault.

It was the newspaper reports of the trial that shed light on “Captain Ackerley’s character. The Bristol Mercury, on 8 March 1851, reported that the by now retired lieutenant was “well known in London by his eccentric but philanthropic projects”.

Captain Ackerley had, according to the trial reports, visited an Aberdare collier who had been badly burned in a coalpit explosion. He said he was a doctor, was admitted, and proceeded to examine the miner – apparently by sticking a feather down his throat, to “pump gas from his stomach” amongst other things. The poor collier died shortly afterwards, a (real) surgeon stating that if he had not had “rude treatment” from Ackerley, he may well have been OK.

Ackerley frequently interrupted the testimony of witnesses to claim that he wanted to talk about philosophy; and when allowed to enter his defence, produced a series of old books, and then talked for an hour about his medical inventions, Greek philosophy, the New Testament, King Arthur, and Welsh history, until the judge finally forbid him from going on any further. Perhaps the jury were worn out by Ackerley’s monologue, but they very quickly found him not guilty and “the finding was received with loud applause.”

Ackerley seems to have been regarded somewhat affectionately by public and press alike as a great British eccentric. The papers of the 1840s and 1850s recorded frequent court cases involving him, and he always conducted his own defences. In one case, the year before he died, he took his landlord to court for trespass, arguing that the landlord failed to let him move freely around his house. In response, the landlord sighed that, “the captain had been a great trouble”. The judge agreed, and Captain Ackerley lost this fight.

In 1856, the Captain appeared in the Court of Arches in London, offering his views on the meaning of the word “kedge” amongst other things. After lecturing the court, the press noted, “the gallant captain then quitted the court, leaving the spectators not a little astonished at so unusual an interruption of the quiet routine of the Commons.” (The Era, 15 June 1856)

Charles Ackerley died at 1 Laureston Place in Dover on 22 November 1865, leaving an estate worth under £100.

It seems that, to a Cotswold landowner in the 19th century, the last thing one would want in one’s family is an eccentric, socialist, scientist, orator and amateur lawyer, getting regular coverage in the newspapers for his latest exploit. Charles Henry Ackerley may have been an embarrassment to his older brother in Maugersbury, and a possibly lethal surgeon to one Welsh miner – but he gave great entertainment to the British public during the Victorian era.

I hope to follow this post up with a further look at the Chamberlayne family of Maugersbury, as my research for this post revealed a fascinating family who came to Maugersbury not only from around the UK, but from across the Atlantic too!

A humorous tale from the crime reports of the Oxford Journal, which although it doesn’t involve a Cotswold native, does involve a Cotswold house of correction!

This piece shows how our ancestors were often fined for misdemeanours – but if they failed to pay the fine, they were given a short spell in a house of correction or bridewell instead. Faced with paying a fine or going to prison, though, some preferred to do neither…at least, until they had no choice!

“Public Office, Cheltenham, Oct. 7 - John Cook, a post-boy from Frocester, was charged by Mr Whitmore, with having negligently driven a chaise against some scaffolding in St George’s Place, by which the lives of the passengers and others were endangered.

“He was fined 2l and pleading extreme poverty, even to the want of ‘a single shilling in the world’ – he was, in default of payment, sentenced to six weeks’ confinement in Northleach house of correction.

“To the last moment he declared his utter inability to pay the fine, and endeavoured, by imposing on the magistrate, R Capper Esq, by his feigned tale of distress, to evade the punishment he so much merited – but when baffled, and the officer was about to apply the manacles, he put his hand into his pocket and coolly produced two sovereigns – saying ‘it would be a bad day for him if he had not a hundred of the same sort.’”

From Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 9 October 1824

Graves at Barnsley

Unfortunately, it was pouring with rain when I visited recently, but hopefully you can still see how attractive the village is!

The church is beautifully simple in style, both its exterior and interior. It has a number of 17th century inscriptions, and its churchyard has some interesting features – a circular arrangement of gravestones and a wooden grave marker from the 19th century are just two of the things that interested me.

Photo by Janez Novak from Wikimedia Commons

I have more sets of photographs under my old name of Journopig on Flickr – I’m aiming to slowly transfer any Cotswold-related photos here to the Cotswold History account.

Any images can be reused for non-commercial use, but please credit them to Cotswold History, with an appropriate link.

There are a couple of gravestones in the churchyard of St Mary’s in Barnsley that share an unhappy similarity; they mark the death of two siblings at similar ages to each other, but in different years.

One remembers Louisa and Charles Poole. They were the children of Barnsley plasterer Robert and his wife Sarah, who seem to have lived next door to the public house in the village.

They had had at least nine children between 1847 and 1866, the last being born when Sarah was in her 40s. Louisa was the eldest.

The couple’s first son, born two years after Louisa, was William. He was the family’s first tragedy, dying some time in the late 1850s, and not reaching 10 years old. Charles, the Poole family’s third child, then became the eldest son and brother to the subsequent children – Jane, Maria, another William, Samuel, Robert, and James.

Third daughter Maria also seems to have died a couple of years after her brother William, dying in either 1862 or 1863, when she was around six years old.

The Pooles then seem to have enjoyed a few years of calm before calamity struck again. Eldest daughter Louisa died in 1867, aged 20; then son Charles died seven years later, aged 22. Both died in the same month – July.

So out of the Pooles’ five eldest children, four died early; sad, but unfortunately not a rarity in 19th century England.

The second grave shows that even if one successfully negotiated the travails of infancy and childhood, one was not safe from the numerous illnesses and diseases that could strike people at will in Victorian Gloucestershire.

This grave commemorates two brothers who died at the same age. They were two of the children of road labourer, and former agricultural labourer, Abel Morse and his wife Mary Jane. They were another large family; they married in 1853, and were soon parents to James, Eliza, Dinah, Mary Jane, Albert, and Thomas. These were the children who survived infancy; it looks like they also lost other children young.

In 1881, Abel was 60, Mary Jane 49. They had three children still living at home – James, 26, an agricultural labouer; and the younger children Mary, 12, and Albert, 6, both still at school.

But three years after the census was taken, James died, in his thirtieth year. His death was shortly before Hallowe’en, on 28th October 1884. His gravestone is engraved with the inscription, “One step between me and death”.

In 1891, Abel and Mary Jane had their last two adult children at home with them – Thomas, 28, a general labourer, and 22-year-old servant Mary, who was known as Polly. Two years later, though, on 8 May 1892, Thomas died, aged 30. He was buried in the same plot as his older brother James – “absent from the body, but present with the Lord”.

Mary Jane Morse died in 1897, aged 60, but her husband Abel didn’t die until 1908, decades after the deaths of his two beloved sons.

Old Man In The Kitchen by Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre

Yet those who reached adulthood could then go on to live long lives. The local papers are full of stories of Cotswold folk reaching their hundredth birthdays, although the coverage usually implies that this was an unusual feat. One case was a Tetbury local who died in September 1800:

“Died. Lately, at Tetbury, in this county, Ambrose Bennett, aged 106 years and 10 months: he had been a common soldier nearly 60 years, and fought in many battles in the reigns of Queen Anne, George II and his present Majesty.”

(Gloucester Journal, 29 September 1800)

Ambrose was born in 1693, during the reign of William and Mary, and thus lived in three different centuries. With his experiences of battle, his long life must have been a rather interesting one.

Before the establishment of the modern police force in the 19th century, many communities tried to work together to bring criminals to justice.

The Gloucestershire Association for Prosecuting Felons was just one of many similar associations across England, set up to enable the prosecution of suspected criminals, and to reward those who were willing to give information that would lead to a suspect being identified.

Members of the community would subscribe to the association, paying an amount of money into the group’s coffers that would then be used for expenses associated with prosecution. This was necessary; there were charges for warrants to be issued, costs involved in appearing in court as either a prosecutor or a witness, and so on.

The Gloucestershire Association for Prosecuting Felons was formed on 26 November 1795, and it covered the following crimes:

“for apprehending and prosecuting at their [members] expense all and every person and persons, who shall feloniously break open or take from the Dwelling-house , Outhouse, &c of them or any or either of them, or shall steal, cut, destroy, main or damage any of the goods, horses, cattle, sheep, lambs, pigs, corn, hay, timber or other Trees, Implements in Husbandry, or any other thing the property of them or any or either of them within the county of Gloucester.”

These crimes represent the most common ones in the Cotswolds; thefts, often of valuable livestock or farm products; and stealing wood, something commonly done by the poorer members of society.

The association also set out what it would do with suspected felons and how it would reward people, with an interesting scale of payments:

“for more effectively detecting and bring such offender or offenders to justice, a reward of 20 Guineas will be given, on conviction, for any offence for which the person or persons shall receive sentence of transportation for 14 years; a reward of 10 guineas for which the person or persons shall receive sentence of transportation for 7 years; and a reward of 5 guineas for which hte person or persons shall be sentenced to receive any less punishment, to the person or persons who shall discover such offender or offenders; and an accomplice will on conviction be entitled to the same rewards, and proper steps taken to procure a pardon.”

The members of the association were drawn from the upper and middle levels of society, headed by the Earl of Berkeley, with various army colonels, vicars and farmers also represented, from across the whole county.

They met at regular intervals, often in local pubs; in May 1797, for example, they met at the Old Bell pub in Dursley. It wasn’t until 1839 that the Gloucestershire Constabulary was formed – the second oldest rural police force in England. Until that year, local people continued to try and combat rural crime by working together.

“Bourton on the Water, Glocestershire. J. Collet informs the Public, that his school opens again July 24th 1797, on his usual terms, viz 17l per annum, Teaching, Board, Lodging and Washing included. Entrance ONE GUINEA.”

(Gloucester Journal, 26th June 1797)