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
simonknott.co.uk I home I e-mail
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 William
Sterne William
Sterne John
Sterne John
Sterne Isabel
Sterne Francis
Sterne |
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 John
Stearn Lydia
Stearn James
Stearn Alfred
Stearn Elizabeth
Stearn Alice
Stearn Frederick
Stearn Arthur
Stearn |
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 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. |
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 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 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 Jack
Travers Cornwell Reginald
Trevor Cornwell Edward
Malcolm Cornwell Betty
Katherine Cornwell June
Frances Cornwell Marion
Patricia Cornwell Albert
Paul Cornwell |
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. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||