The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  In 1812, when his father died, Charles would have been 13 years old and Elizabeth Digby would have been only 2 or 3 years old. Even if they had been taken in by the Digbys immediately, no romance between the two would have blossomed until several years later. It would have had to start before Charles went to live in Southwark in 1824, when Elizabeth would have been 14 years old. This suggests a relationship with the Digby family and their daughter over some time.

  According to some historians, Charles Henry Harrod was said to have started his working life as a miller in Clacton, the Essex seaside town about 20 miles to the east of Coggeshall. This might seem to corroborate the idea of a longer stay in Essex, and to fit in with the Digby milling activities, but has not been backed up by my research. The idea was suggested in a history of Harrods by Tim Dale about twenty years ago. Dale was probably repeating the story as recounted by another historian, Frankau, who was commissioned to write a history of Harrods in about 1943. Frankau certainly had access to living direct relatives at that time, although Frankau’s history was never published.

  I have researched Clacton’s mills with the help of the Clacton and District Local History Society. There were two windmills in Clacton between 1756 and 1918. The first, at Foot’s Farm, Little Clacton, is thought to have been built around 1808 to cater for the large number of soldiers who were stationed in and around Clacton, prepared for a Napoleonic invasion. It came up for sale in 1813 but I do not know who bought it. It was eventually destroyed in a storm. The second was at Bull Hill Farm in Great Clacton. In 1810, this mill, at what is now Windmill Park in Clacton, was conveyed to Thomas Harding, who owned it until 1845. There were four millers who occupied it as tenants between 1808 and 1823, but there is no mention of Charles Harrod as a tenant or worker. In 1867, it was owned by Charles Beckwith, who built a steam mill. After 1886 the windmill was closed but remained in place, and not working, until 1918 when it was demolished.

  Charles Henry’s son, Charles Digby Harrod, was also involved with the area. He was for a while sent to school in a small village called Edwardstone, 12 miles north of Birch – a school with seven pupils. This would have been an unusual choice for his father, by then a successful grocer in East London. Later in life, Charles Digby purchased the lordship of the manor for Layer Breton, a village close to Birch. It was probably purchased from a close relative of the Digbys, whose family had previously owned the title.

  There were many other ties between the Harrod and Digby family during the later nineteenth century. All in all, it is pretty certain that the Harrod and Digby families had made a close connection with each other at some time before the marriage in 1830.

  A brief look at William’s other children, Charles Henry’s siblings, will help clarify the link between Essex and London.

  Caroline Harrod, the eldest, was born in 1795, in Hartest, just over eight months after her parents were married. Probably par for the course, but she might have been premature. She was baptised privately two weeks later and ‘received’ into the Church two years later with her younger brother. Many religions believe that even newly born babies need to be baptised as soon as possible, especially when not likely to survive, so that they join the religious family and all that entails if they die. They can then be ‘received’ into the Church itself at a later date.

  In 1795 William Harrod was working with the nearby Clare Ride, so Tamah had gone home to Hartest to give birth. That would have been very sensible, considering her husband was probably spending much of his time gallivanting around the county on horseback, chasing ne’er-do-wells.

  Further information about Caroline has been very difficult to find. There are a few Caroline Harrods around in the records, and it was difficult to link any one of them more definitely. One was aged 42 (and if this were the same Caroline, this would be three years out from her birth details, a level of disparity that is common) and married in 1840, at St Peter’s Church, Sible Hedingham, a village 10 miles south of Hartest, in Essex. Another Caroline died, aged 61, in July 1856, in Mile End, in the East End of London. This age would have fitted with her birth, as would the location, but the death certificate, when received, showed she was the wife of another unrelated William Harrod, so was not a Harrod at birth. The most likely candidate was a Caroline Harrod found in the Nonconformist burial records held at the National Archives (now available more widely online). She died at the young age of 26 years, and was buried in 1821 at Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds on City Road, near Old Street in London. The age was correct for her birthdate, as was her religion. She had lived prior to her death in Whitfield Street, just west of Tottenham Court Road.

  The proximity of this address to her younger sister, described below, and her Nonconformist religion make her the most likely candidate. If so, it confirms the family move to London in the early 1820s. Her unmarried status at the age of 26 might fit with her previous status as a ‘little mother’ for the family.

  Bunhill, the name of the cemetery, is derived from ‘bone hill’. It was a small, wooded Dissenters’ burial ground in the city. Bunhill Fields was soon known as ‘the cemetery of Puritan England’. William Blake, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe are amongst over 120,000 Nonconformists whose bodies are squeezed tightly together within only 4 acres. Bunhill’s graves are crammed one on top of the other, as was the custom before the 1830s and the introduction of bigger out-of-town cemeteries. It was closed as a site for burials in the 1850s. Following extensive bombing during the Second World War and a subsequent redesign of the damaged area, nearly half of the site is free of tombstones and has been transformed into a garden area for recreational purposes.

  William Harrod, the second child and first son, was born in 1797, also in Hartest. He was baptised privately in 1797, and received into the church sixteen days later with his older sister. As was the fashion, he was given his father’s name. William, his father, was still working in Clare on the date of his son’s birth, but moved to nearby Bury a month later. For the immediate period following the discovery of these baptisms in the Hartest parish records, nothing else was found out about him until the record of a very young William Harrod was found in the same Nonconformist burial records as his sister Caroline, but in a different cemetery. He was buried, aged 1 year and 4 months, in the Countess of Huntington’s Chapel, Spa Fields, in Clerkenwell, not far from Bunhill Fields. Some details about this latter William make him look like the one baptised in Hartest. His age at burial is only one month out from his birthdate and he was Nonconformist.

  Research into the Countess of Huntington produced a torrent of interesting information. Selina Hastings was born into an aristocratic Leicestershire family in 1707. Her marriage to the Earl of Huntingdon in 1728 was a love match that produced seven children before his death after seven years. Selina underwent an evangelical conversion in 1739, and came into contact with many Dissenters including the Wesleys. She gradually assumed a position of influence and used her position to further her religion within fashionable society. The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, as it became known, was one of the most significant of the non-Wesleyan groups within the Revival. It had its own training college and formed a network of chapels across the country, including the Spa Chapel at Spa Fields. Selina died in 1804 and was buried at Bunhill Fields.

  The Spa Fields Burial Ground was one of the most appalling cemeteries in London. Shortage of space led to a rapid recycling of grave space and a lot of suspicious fires, suspected to be the disposal of bodies! Contemporaries described the burning of coffins and body parts, and the sale of bodies for dissection; recycling the space allowed 1,500 bodies a year to go into an area of 2 acres for fifty years. By the time it was closed in 1849, it is estimated that 80,000 bodies had been ‘buried’ there. Lady Huntingdon would have turned in her own grave! Since 1885 the ground has been used as an open space and tennis courts which is now maintained by the council.

  The discovery, some years later, of a brother for Charles Henry named William Frederick, who lived into the m
id 1850s, called into question the connection of the William born in 1797 with the poor young child buried in Spa Fields. Although the birthdate calculated from William Frederick’s death details was a few years different to the actual date (1793–94, rather than 1797), no other William Harrod’s birth or baptism has been found and so perhaps the William buried in Spa Fields was not related.

  Once discovered, the life of William Frederick was traced from the records. He reappears ten years after his parents’ death in London, when he married Nancy Bryant at St Andrew’s, Holborn, in 1822. There were three witnesses, but none of them were Harrods. The following year, William and Nancy were living in Clerkenwell, and he was working as a ‘seal maker’ (probably exactly what it says on the tin). Soon afterwards he became a goldsmith and then a jeweller, living initially in Regent Street and later Southwark. They had four children; tragically, three died in infancy and the other in their 20s. Nancy died in 1829 two months after the birth, and one week after the death, of their last child.

  Now a bachelor with just one child of 3 years of age to look after, he decided, like his brother Charles, to go into partnership. Together with George Fielding he ran a goldsmith and watchmaker’s business in Nelson Street, Greenwich. Again, like his brother, the partnership did not survive for long. The London Gazette reported the dissolution of their partnership in 1833.

  William Frederick died in 1840 in Gravesend. It was apparent he was just visiting the area when he died, as he was buried a few days later back in Clerkenwell. There is more to tell about William Frederick Harrod’s connection to Charles in the next chapter.

  Charles Henry Harrod, the third child, was born in 1799 in Lexden. The birth coincides with William’s posting to nearby Colchester.

  Mary Ann Harrod, the fourth child, was born in Manningtree in Essex during William’s stay there. She was christened at St Michael & All Angels Church, Manningtree, at the end of 1803. Manningtree is a small town on the southern bank at the head of the Stour River estuary, inland from Harwich. Although Mary Ann is listed in the parish records as the daughter of a Thomas & Tamar Harrod, it seems most likely that this was a clerical error. There is no trace of another Tamah Harrod anywhere, let alone in Manningtree at a time when William was working there.

  Further information about Mary Ann was obtained by the chance finding of a family tree online, which also included Jane Harrod, her younger sister. Mary Ann married William Augustus Press in 1831 at St James, Clerkenwell, in London. It was beginning to look as though all the children had gravitated to London. Both of them were listed as ‘of this Parish’, and their banns had been published there in March that year. William Press was born in about 1810 in Fleet Street, and worked as a mechanical draughtsman, then later in life as a chimney sweep. They lived in St Pancras, and later Finsbury. They definitely had three children, possibly a fourth, all born in St Pancras. Mary Ann is listed in 1861 as a ‘shoe binder’.

  It looks as though Mary Ann died sometime before the mid 1860s, as there is no sign of her after the 1861 census and her husband was alone by 1867. In that year, he was admitted to the Marylebone Workhouse. The early Victorian workhouses were pretty grim places, but they fulfilled a very necessary function in a world without social services and government benefits. As it happened, Marylebone Workhouse, which housed about 1,500 inmates at the time, had a facelift and a new ward built in 1867. The records show that altogether he had three separate admissions to the workhouse.

  His admission in February 1867 shows that he arrived in a cab, ill with pneumonia, destitute and homeless. He gave an address in south-east Bloomsbury. Who sent him in the cab is not known. He stayed for sixteen days and was discharged ‘cured’. He was readmitted from a different address fifteen months later, in 1868, and stayed for seven days, requesting his own discharge. Following the last admission a year later in 1869, he stayed for the rest of his life, dying a remarkable ten years later in 1879.

  Although I have assumed, from the fact that all the Harrod children ended up in London, that they may have remained friends and supported each other, this now seems unlikely. Some were in contact, as you will see later, but Charles Henry’s brother-in-law, William Press, died a pauper whilst Charles was by then a relatively rich man. We all know that families drift apart and fall out, so it is possible there had been no contact between them.

  A little more is known about William and Mary Ann’s second son, John Harrod Press, which raised my hopes of a connection. John started off his working life, according to the 1861 census, as a ‘shopman’ for George Poulter, a grocer in Putney. By 1871, he was a grocer himself in St Pancras, but by 1881 he had become an insurance agent and was living in Wandsworth. He was married with three daughters. Again, one wonders if had fallen out with his father.

  A final footnote to the Press family: A William Press was tried at the Old Bailey on two occasions for theft, in 1826 and 1829. He was found guilty on both occasions and given mercy, with sentences of two months and six months in jail respectively. There are not enough details apart from his age to link him definitely to our William Press.

  Jane Harrod, the fifth child, was born in 1809 in Kelvedon whilst her father was working locally at Coggeshall. She also disappears from the records for a number of years. She reappears, aged 20, in 1829, when she marries Samuel Thomas Vernell at All Souls, Marylebone, in London. Samuel, a builder, had been born in Bristol in 1806. They lived all of their lives in the St Pancras and Regents Park areas of London, living at 6 Albany Street, Regent’s Park, for a large part of their lives, then later at No. 28. Rather oddly, frequent newspaper adverts for Horniman’s Tea, a famous brand of the day, list Jane Vernell at 7 Albany Street as one of their stockists. They were comfortably off, some censuses show the odd servant in their house. Albany Street is now a very smart thoroughfare to the east of Regent’s Park, with expensive flats, apartments and small hotels. Regent’s Park barracks are on the northern end of the street.

  They had ten children between 1830 and 1846, five boys and five girls. As often happened, four died in infancy or early childhood. They were a close family, all their children and grandchildren continued living in the same area, and followed various occupations – a plumber, a house painter and a solicitor’s managing clerk. None became involved with their Uncle Charles or the Harrods shop.

  Apart from Charles Henry, none of the children of William and Tamah maintained any obvious connection with their Suffolk or Essex roots. Perhaps Charles had deeper roots there. If he had indeed worked for a while as a miller with the Digby family his marriage to the eldest daughter of James Digby Senior, a pork butcher and miller, and his wife Martha, would have cemented the relationship. Like Charles and his family, the Digby family were Nonconformists. Perhaps they met at the chapel.

  I embark with some trepidation on a description of the Digby family. They were a family of farmers and millers in north-east Essex. The many branches each had large families, often with eight or more children; they were all born and lived in close proximity to each other, and all the siblings called their own children by the same names as the previous generation. What this means to a family history researcher is that you are faced by a bewildering array of ancestors with the same name and similar dates of birth. Confusion is inevitable. It frustrated me for some years. Even in the direct line of the Digbys with which the Harrods were involved, there were eight generations in a row with James as the name of the firstborn son.

  When I was investigating the Digbys, I was in contact with several other branches of the family who were conducting their own research, some still living locally and others as far afield as New Zealand and Scandinavia. We had constructed slightly different family trees as we tried to fit names to families, and I must have set about modifying what I thought was my final family tree at least a dozen times. After I had just finished the final, final version, I came across a small book about the Digby family written by a John G. Digby, another New Zealand descendant. This was quite comprehensive. Most of his detail
matched my own, and reassuringly he had found the same gaps. What his book provided was some flesh to put upon the previously rather bare bones.

  In the 1881 England census, a total of 1,500 Digbys were listed, almost all in Suffolk and Essex. To put this in perspective, there were about 1,000 Harrods in the same census. The Digby family were involved with the Harrods over three generations. Charles Henry married one and gave his children the name Digby as a middle name. Some Digbys were witnesses at his marriage.

  The Digby family probably hailed from Norfolk between 1600 and 1700, although there are traces of them further south in 1550. The Digbys in our story worked and held land in Birch and the nearby villages of Peldon, Lexden, Layer Breton and Layer de la Haye, all in that part of Essex, just south of Colchester and quite near to Kelvedon. They were a very affluent family in the 1700s and 1800s.

  In 1831 the population of Birch was 764 persons. In contrast, nearby Colchester was a town of several thousand people. Birch existed long before the reign of Edward the Confessor, and consisted of two parishes, Great and Little Birch. Today Birch is a rather straggling village spread over an area that merges with Layer Breton and Layer Marney. It is set on gently undulating arable land, rising to the heath at Layer Breton then falling towards Abberton Reservoir and falling further towards the coast in the direction of Peldon.

  For many years the Digbys leased several mills south-east of Colchester and this was their principal occupation, although they also worked as tenant farmers in the area. The mill in Birch was a ‘post’ mill, meaning the whole mill turned on a central post allowing the sails to move into the wind. Birch Mill (which was also known as Digby’s Mill) was built in 1724 and boasted a windmill and a watermill. The Digby family held the lease on the property and ran the mill from 1794 until 1855. The Digbys faced competition from another mill in Birch run by Mr Royce.