When housing Armageddon came

This terrace house recently sold for more than 15 times an average teacher’s annual salary

In my last post I looked at the (reasonable) price of country properties in the 1950s. In this post I shall be looking at the history of house prices more generally and how they rose out of reach of people on average incomes.

In 1975 a newspaper reported that the average cost of a flat in London was £10,000, although the price could “spiral in dizzying fashion depending on area”. That average price was almost exactly three times average annual teacher’s salary, making it affordable to those on average salaries. Recently the average price of a flat in London was reported as £466,000, more than twelve times the average teacher’s salary. Writing in the Times in 1977, Derek Darby made the following comments on rising house prices:

 “But one calculating surveyor in a letter to a newspaper recently had even worked out that, assuming prices rise by 10 per cent a year, today’s very modest semi costing around £7,750 will reach the astronomical sum of £140,000 in 30 years. Armageddon will surely strike before that. Won’t it?”

In 1977 that very modest semi cost less than two year’s annual salary of the average teacher. I don’t know exactly when it passed the £140,000 mark, but in October 2015 the average cost of a semi-detached house in England was £176,000, about five times the average teacher’s salary.” But the average cost of a house is deceptive, with prices being much higher in some parts of the country than others (and all parts need teachers or indeed other people on average or lower than average salaries). In Cambridge a perfectly ordinary 1930s three-bedroomed semi-detached house in Highfield Avenue recently sold for £710,000, about two hundred times its price in the early 1960s. Meanwhile teachers’ salaries have risen by a factor of about thirty.

The complete guide to investment by Gordon Cummings, published by Penguin in 1963, includes a chapter on buying a house, not because it was seen as a good way to invest cash (in those days houses were for living in, not for making money from) but simply because it was “the biggest and most important financial transaction undertaken by many people”. The author went on to explain how building societies would normally lend up to three times the borrower’s annual gross income, repayable over a term of 20 to 25 years. The average price of a new house in the early 1960s was about £3,000, almost exactly three times the average teacher’s salary. Mortgage repayments would have taken up about a quarter of the teacher’s salary – within the limit recommended by the guide. The book highlighted the fact that “the post-war shortage of houses has created a scarcity demand which leaves the seller with all or most of the advantages”. But that shortage had not led to rampant rises in prices.

After the second world war you could have bought two cottages, numbers 42 and 44 Glenvilla Road, in Hampstead, London, for a modest total of 3,500, putting at least the smaller, one-bedroomed, cottage within the reach of average teacher. And even the larger of the two, with two bedrooms, cost only £2 a week to rent, at a time when average teacher earned about £8 or £9 a week.

Moving out of London, an unfurnished two-bedroomed flat in a modern purpose-built block in Saffron Walden, Essex could be rented in the late 1940s for £1 6shillings a week, inclusive of rates. If you wanted the flat furnished, the rent would be more than doubled, a reminder that furniture was comparatively expensive in those days. In the early 1950s a large town house in Cambridge for example, divided into 4 flats and a flatlet, came with an asking price of £6,000. Throw in the furnishing, and that went up by a third to £8,000. And in the late 1950s a built in Electrolux refrigerator added £50 (or nearly two per cent) to the cost (£2,600) of a a newly-built three-bedroom semi-detached house with a garage in the village of Shelford, close to Cambridge. In 1957 one prospective buyer turned down the opportunity to buy a large Victorian house in De Freville Avenue, of the type that nowadays sells for more than a million, for £2,600, as she didn’t have enough furniture to put in all the rooms. In these days of buy-to-leave it seems like a missed opportunity but in the days when houses were for living in and furniture was comparatively expensive, it may have made perfect sense.

In Cambridge in the late 1940s, a newly-built three-bedroomed semi with a large garden in one of the less fashionable suburbs, would have cost average teacher little more than a year’s salary at £520-675. Finance was available for those who could put down a deposit of £35 in the form of a loan of £500 to be repaid over 20 years at 14s 9d a week, an amount which would not have made a very large dent in the teacher’s salary. Meanwhile a three-bedroomed Victorian terrace house in Searle Street, conveniently located for the town centre, colleges and parks, could be had for £700, less than twice the teacher’s annual salary. Recently the same house sold for £575,000, more than 15 times the average teacher’s salary.

If a family had two teachers’ salaries coming in, they could have afforded something a bit grander: in 1959 an eight-bedroom house in Cranmer Road was on sale for £5,000, about six times the average salary of a teacher. Last year it sold for £2.85 million, about 80 times the average salary of a teacher.

 

When manor houses were cheap

The Mail on Sunday on 21 December 2015 featured an article by Labour MP Simon Danczuk in which he asked: “has one bunch of sniffy metropolitan elites running the party simply been replaced by another?” According to Simon Danczuk, the answer, as far as Jeremy Corbyn was concerned, was a resounding yes, since he “grew up in a seven bedroom manor house on the Duke of Sutherland’s estate”.

When he was seven years old, in 1956, Jeremy Corbyn did indeed move into a former manor house in Pave Lane, on the outskirts of Newport, Shropshire. But the inferences drawn by Simon Danczuk are wrong on several counts.

When the Corbyns bought Yew Tree Manor it was a guest house, not a manor house. The days when the manor house was occupied by the Lord of the Manor who owned land and was an important figure in the parish were long gone.

Also long gone were the days when the land on which the house stood belonged to the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke having sold his Staffordshire estates about forty years previously. And, in any case, ducal estates have all sorts of houses on them from the mansion to the farmworker’s cottage; even if the Duke had still owned the land, it would not have meant that the Corbyns were hob-nobbing with him.

Jeremy Corbyn did of course grow up in a middle-class family. His parents were an engineer and a teacher. The engineer was the son of a solicitor who lived in a semi-detached house in Ealing. The solicitor, Jeremy’s grandfather, had grown up over his father’s tailor’s shop in Lowestoft and had learnt his trade as an articled clerk. So Jeremy’s family came from the ranks of trades-people, artisans and small farmers. In the latter part of the 19th century they had worked their way up, as some people did in those days, into the middle class. Nobody went to Eton. (The article incidentally made no mention of shadow chancellor John McDonnell, the son of a bus-driver from a working class background.)

But did the Corbyn’s purchase of Yew Tree Manor in 1956 single them out as being particularly wealthy? I have no idea of how much David and Naomi Corbyn earnt as an engineer and a teacher, or how much the house cost, but it probably would not have been a vast amount, beyond the means of a fairly average middle class family. In those days medium sized country properties (and seven bedrooms would have counted as medium sized rather than large) did not have a premium on them, and could have been picked up for a relatively modest sum.

Circa 1950, for example, Over Hall, a “Distinguished Period Manor House” on the Essex-Suffolk borders was on the market for £4,200. With nine bedrooms and a long list of rooms including servant’s hall and butler’s pantry, as well as a garage for two cars, seven loose boxes, and a “delightful 16th century cottage” in the grounds, it was considerably larger than Yew Tree Manor House, as well as being much closer to London, and probably therefore rather more expensive. Yet the cost was only about ten times the average teacher’s salary of the day, so not impossibly out of the reach of a teacher and an engineer.

In 2010 Over Hall was on the market for £1,650,000 or about 50 times the average teacher’s salary and well out the reach of all but the seriously wealthy. The house purchases of half a century or more ago should not be judged by today’s prices.

Never mind the bread and butter, what about the baby?

One of the matters under scrutiny during the 1867 inquiry into conditions at Farnham workhouse was the accommodation for vagrants or tramps, and in particular the experience of Frances Hopkins, who had gone into labour whilst locked in the tramp ward. When tramps arrived in Farnham and wanted a bed for the night, they would go to the relieving officer and get a ticket to take to the workhouse. Sometimes the relieving officer would refuse to give a tramp a ticket if, for example, they had been drinking. In fact the tramps didn’t actually get a bed for the night; men slept on straw and women got a mattress, with a rug for each person to sleep under. Workhouse policy was a strict separation of men and women, even married couples, and that, presumably, was why the tramps were locked in the wards. At Farnham the tramps were accommodated in outbuildings, which some likened to oversized rabbit hutches.

Frances arrived in Farnham on the evening of Saturday 29^th July 1867. She had walked the 18 miles from Cobham with her husband Thomas and another man. Frances was given a ticket for a bed, but the relieving officer refused the men a ticket. Frances duly went to the workhouse and was admitted by the master, James Sargent (Jeremy Corbyn’s ancestor). Neither the relieving officer nor the master apparently noticed that Frances was heavily pregnant. Although tramps were given bread in the morning, it was not the custom to give them anything to eat in the evening, an exception being made for any women who asked for bread. The master would later testify that Frances had not asked for bread, although she had  had nothing to eat since breakfast, but had been more worried about her husband and afraid he might be sent to prison.

So Frances was locked in the female tramp ward. The next morning, when it was unlocked, she was found to have been in labour for four hours. The inquiry heard that the master had not given her any breakfast; he replied that, on seeing she was in labour, he had sent her to the lying-in ward where she became the responsibility of the female staff. It was a nurse who had eventually given Frances some of her own supply of bread and butter.

Frances was delivered of a healthy baby girl, or at least the baby was healthy enough to survive until the 1871 census, by which time she was nearly four years old. On that census the family was staying at Chapel House in Market Weighten, Yorkshire. Thomas was described as an unemployed agricultural labourer, while little Frances Elizabeth had been joined by a younger brother Thomas (born in Poplar workhouse). But  no amount of clicking on Ancestry could conjure up a future for the unfortunate family, except for a possible sighting of the older Frances in Hoxton House Asylum in Shoreditch in 1891 (without a place of birth on the census I couldn’t be certain it was her). Frances had been born in the village of Islip on the outskirts on Oxford, the daughter of shoemaker Samuel Eustace. Her mother died when she was very young; her father remarried and had more children. On the 1861 census, aged 21, Frances was an inmate of the Oxford penitentiary for women, so she was no stranger to institutional life when she gave birth in Farnham workhouse.

The day after Frances gave birth, the master of the workhouse resigned his position. A Poor Law Board inquiry had found him guilty of “improper intimacy” with former inmate Ann Stubble, who had later given birth to a child at Eton workhouse. James Sargent denied the charge, but offered his resignation anyway. The baby, William James Stubble, died in Farnham workhouse aged 9 months in February 1868.

 

The Sargent family: a story of survival

At the end of my last post I left James Sargent (Jeremy Corbyn’s great-great-grandfather) in an unenviable position. The former master of Farnham workhouse was a widower with seven children and he had lost his job and his home. What did the future hold for the James and his family?

During the winter of 1867 James was giving evidence at the Poor Law Board inquiry into the management of the workhouse. The Board’s report was published on 10 March 1868 and four days later James married for the second time. His new wife was 27 year old Sarah Sophia Clarke, the daughter of a Suffolk miller. The ceremony took place in the church of St Thomas in the Liberty of the Bells in London and the witnesses were a local couple, suggesting that this was not a family occasion. In the marriage register in the space for the groom’s profession “clerk” has been crossed out and replaced with “accountant”. The couple’s son, named Charles after his maternal grandfather, was born in August in Farnham. He was followed by a daughter, Marion, who only lived for three months. There would be no more children.

What happened to the children from James’ first marriage? When James remarried, the eldest, Mary Jane, was sixteen. Then came Agnes, Emily, Fanny, Catherine, Frank (sometimes known by his second name James), and Harry who was only five or six. Fanny and the two boys went to live with their father and stepmother. On the 1871 census they are living at 502 Wandsworth Road in Clapham, Surrey. Evidently the Poor Law Board was still prepared to employ James, because he was now the relieving officer for Clapham.

Mary Jane and Catherine headed for the west country from where their father had originally come and where he had relatives. James had been born in the village of Kingswood on the border of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. His parents were cloth-workers and it is not clear how he came, aged just 22, to be master of Rochester workhouse in Kent. Mary Ann, his first wife, came from Yalding in Kent and may have been related to Phyllis Robertson, the matron of the Sevenoaks union workhouse at Sundridge. Perhaps it was Mary Ann who introduced him to a career in workhouses. Or perhaps he had spent time in the army; workhouse masters were often former soldiers. On the 1871 census Mary Jane, aged 19, was a student at the teacher training college for women in Salisbury. Catherine, aged 14, was living with her aunt and uncle who kept the Dog and Badger Inn in Kingswood. Agnes, aged 18, was living and working as a milliner on Lambeth High Street, London, in 1871, but by 1881 the three sisters had been re-united and were living in the National School House, West Street, Wilton, in Wiltshire. Mary Jane and Catherine were teachers, while Agnes is described as a retired draper’s assistant (probably assistant to a retired draper, rather than retired at age 28). Both Mary Jane and Catherine would marry widowers with children. Agnes would marry civil servant Charles Stansfield, who went on to be director of Greenwich Hospital and was knighted in 1922. Agnes, the child of a workhouse master and matron, thus became Lady Stansfield.

Emily, Jeremy Corbyn’s great grandmother, seems to have been left in Farnham when the rest of the family moved away. In 1871, aged sixteen, she was working as a milliner in a draper’s business on the main shopping street, The Borough. She married Arthur Gosling, a commercial traveller, in 1874. It may look as if the family had fragmented but in fact they seem to have maintained their ties. In 1881 Emily was living with her husband and children in her father’s old house at 502 Wandsworth Road, Clapham, her father and stepmother having moved to Eastbourne. Her brother Frank, a railway clerk, was lodging with her. When Mary Jane and Catherine married in 1889 and 1896 respectively, although they were living in Wilton, the weddings took place in Eastbourne. And when Sarah Sargent died in 1925, it was in Wilton, where her stepdaughters were living. Fanny, the sister who had gone to live with her father and stepmother, married a commercial traveller in 1882 and lived in Battersea before moving to Lancashire. The youngest of the children, Harry, joined the merchant navy.

After their move to Eastbourne, sometime between 1871 and 1881, James and Sarah appear not to have been living together or at least not to have spent another census night in the same house. The most obvious explanation is that they had separated, although, since Sarah was on one census a lady’s companion and on the next two she was running a ladies’ home, it is just about possible that they still had a home together but that Sarah slept at the business premises. If they were separated, it would appear not to have been a complete rift; at one stage Sarah moved into a house formerly occupied by James and on the 1901 census James had living with him Sarah’s sister-in-law, the widow of her brother Ophir Clarke, and her daughter.

James died aged 89 in 1918, when his great-granddaughter, Jeremy Corbyn’s mother, was three years old.

The master of Farnham workhouse

Last week (20 September) the Sunday Express had a front page headline: “The evil monster haunting Corbyn’s past”. The “evil monster” in question was Jeremy’s great-great-grandfather, James Sargent, who was master of Farnham workhouse in Surrey and was criticised over conditions in the workhouse in the pages of The Times newspaper and The Lancet medical journal in 1867. (He was exonerated by a Poor Law Board inquiry into the management of the workhouse, but the Sunday Express didn’t mention that.) After a quote from The Lancet referring to Farnham workhouse as “a scandal and a curse to a county which calls itself civilised and Christian”, readers were invited to turn to page 7 to read more extracts from The Lancet report under the headline “Cruel seducer and despot who helped create the Socialist’s family fortune”.

What would James say in his defence? We can have some idea because he wrote a letter to The Times in October 1867:

“My attention has been called to an article in The Times of Tuesday last, in which some strong remarks are passed upon the general management of the Farnham Workhouse, especially during the period of my mastership. It is not for me to defend the Board of Guardians or the Poor Law Inspector; they can effectually protect themselves. But I must ask you to say a few words in my own defence. Your article was written in consequence of the report of the Lancet Commissioner. I have read The Times for many years, and always with the feeling that it was the medium by which every Englishman could have fair play. Has that system been carried out the present instant? The Lancet Commissioner must have furnished his report on ex parte statements. I never saw him, neither was I in the Union when he made his visit. Well, then, is a man to be crushed, to be completely ruined, without an opportunity being given him for defence? I state, Sir, that the report of the Lancet, from which your article was taken, is a tissue of gross exaggerations and falsehood. I write now just that my numerous friends may be aware that I indignantly deny the truth of the Lancet report (so far as I am concerned), and challenge them to prove that I am the monster they have attempted to depict me. I ask that the inmates may be examined as to my treatment of them.”

Underneath the letter the editor pointed out that Mr Sargent had been dismissed from his position for having seduced one of the inmates.

How was it that the Farnham workhouse had hit the headlines? The Lancet was conducting a campaign against workhouses, sending round doctors to make impromptu visits and report on the conditions in them. The medical profession had particular objections to the control that workhouse masters and managers (the guardians) exercised over their infirmaries, with doctors employed on a casual basis. The Times came out in support the medical journal. Twenty years earlier, under the editorship John Walter, MP and opponent of the New Poor Law, the newspaper had conducted a campaign which centred on appalling conditions in Andover workhouse and which had succeeded in bringing down the Poor Law Commission (they were replaced with the Poor Law Board).

When Drs Stallard and Anstie visited the workhouse in October 1867 James Sargent had already lost his place. He had been forced to resign over two months earlier when a former inmate named him as the father of her child – although he denied the charge of immorality. (The baby, William James Stubble, died aged nine months.) The Lancet’s inspectors were shown round by an inmate porter and Edward Powell, the doctor employed by the workhouse, who was not on good terms with the master and guardians.

Things could move quickly in those days. Drs Stallard and Anstie visited Farnham on 12 October; on 19 October The Lancet published their report; three days later The Times published an editorial about The Lancet report. There followed over the next few weeks in The Times correspondence, editorial comment, and reports about Farnham and the Poor Law more generally. The Poor Law Board bowed to pressure and opened an inquiry on 13 November, hearing evidence until the 6 December and publishing a report on 10 March 1868. The report vindicated the management of the workhouse and criticised Dr Powell for exceeding his authority.

Is it fair, even given that the inquiry conducted by the Poor Law Board may not have been exactly impartial, to portray James Sargent as an evil monster? What exactly did Drs Stallard and Anstie find when they visited Farnham workhouse? According to their report, the building was a “perfect marvel of bad construction”, although the vegetable garden was praised. In the infirmary, the rooms were “bare and gloomy”, the toilets dirty, there was insufficient crockery and towels, etc… the food was unappetising. The nursery had a brick floor and only a bench as furniture, although the doctors conceded that the children looked healthy enough. The ward for seriously ill women was under-staffed, with no nurse present at night. The doctors had less criticism of the accommodation for able-bodied paupers, but pointed out that, with the exception of some young women with children, most of the able-bodied inmates were in fact infirm. The next section of the report, presumably on the evidence of Dr Powell, is the one that sets out to destroy the reputation of the late master, James Sargent. “For fourteen years the virtual government of the place has been a despotism on the part of the late master, tempered, however, during the last four years by revolution on the part of the doctor. The master was a large man, with an imposing presence, a confident manner, and a faculty for talking down any mildly remonstrant guardian…. He has finally succumbed to the stroke of fate, and resigned his office, in consequence of a Poor-law inquiry which was held because he (a widower with seven children) had seduced one of the female inmates. The present master and matron would seem to be decent and respectable persons, and they are now actively engaged in cleansing the house from top to bottom.” There followed praise for Dr Powell for his attempts to improve conditions, and criticism of the guardians and especially of the Poor Law inspector who year after year had passed the management of the workhouse as “good” or “satisfactory”.

Just as the Poor Law Board inquiry may not have been impartial, so the doctors’ report may reflect professional rivalries or a more personal animosity between Dr Powell and James Sargent. It is not clear from The Lancet report who had actually been in charge when they visited. Had the “decent and respectable” master and matron taken over in the week between the visit and publication of the report, or had they already been in place when the doctors visited? If the latter, then James Sargent can hardly be blamed for the unappetising food or the dirty toilets. If James, who had been asked to resign two months previously, was staying on until his replacement arrived then perhaps his heart was no longer in it and he had allowed standards to slip a little. [In fact, James had left on 3 October, over a week before the visit from The Lancet doctors.]

Did James Sargent deserve to be described as evil? The Lancet’s report did not contain any allegations of violence towards the inmates and, for what it was worth, he was exonerated by the inquiry of the other allegations. The Sunday Express headline claimed that he “helped create the Socialist’s family fortune”. I wasn’t aware that the family had a fortune, much less that James contributed to it. Perhaps the Sunday Express journalists are ahead of me, but in any case he was unlikely to have made much money from his salary as a workhouse master and there were no allegations of financial impropriety. The possibility remains that he could have been an unpleasant man who lied to avoid blame. Or, as his letter to The Times says, he could have been unfairly made out to be a monster. On the available evidence I find it impossible to decide.*

Or could he perhaps be considered as evil simply for having been part of such a cruel system as the post 1834 workhouse with its test of “less eligibility” designed to ensure that conditions within the workhouse were harsher than the worst conditions of the poor outside it? But then how far does the evil spread – to all those who worked in the institutions, to the guardians who administered them, to Edwin Chadwyk who authored the scheme, to the politicians who voted for it, to the people who approved of it because it kept their rates down? Today we no longer have workhouses but the present system is not entirely benign. Should people who work for ATOS or who administer sanctions for the DWP attract a similar label?

Whatever his character, James Sargent’s prospects were not looking good in 1868. He had lost his job, and the accommodation that went with it. He had lost a son, Frederick, in 1863. His wife had died in 1865, leaving him with eight children under the age of fourteen (the youngest child died in 1867, aged two). His reputation had been destroyed in the pages of The Times. What did the future hold for the Sargent family? Would they, in what The Lancet might have considered a kind of divine retribution, end up in the workhouse themselves? Or would the friends James mentioned in his letter to The Times rally round? In my next post I will look at what happened to the Sargent family in the years that followed.

This week the media has featured shadow environment minister (and vegan) Kerry McCarthy’s comments about people who eat meat. Vegetarian Jeremy Corbyn responded with reassuring comments to meat-eaters. Perhaps The Sunday Express journalists have discovered that two of Jeremy’s great-great-great-grandfathers were butchers.

*The evidence mostly comes from Andrew H. Leah, Hard Times: The Story of the Farnham Workhouse Inquiry 1867-1868, c. 1980, Surrey.

Iain Duncan Smith’s ancestors part 2: not an admiral in sight

In a post last month I suggested that Secretary of State for Work and Pension Iain Duncan Smith might not be telling the truth when he said that Admiral Duncan was his ancestor.

Iain Duncan Smith’s paternal grandmother was the daughter of a George Duncan. Admiral Duncan did indeed have a descendant called George, born at about the right time, but the Admiral’s descendant George didn’t have children. I have now worked out who George Duncan, the father of Anna Duncan and great-grandfather of Iain Duncan Smith, was. He was a doctor and Justice of the Peace (and kept a flock of sheep) in Kyle of Lochalsh in the north-west of Scotland, and, as far as I can see, was not a descendant of Admiral Duncan. Dr Duncan’s parents were George Duncan, born 1808, and Margaret Stephen. George was a customs inspector; Margaret came from a family of Elgin physicians. Were either of them grandchildren of Admiral Duncan? The Admiral’s grandchildren were being born around that time but they do not include a George Duncan or a Margaret Stephen.

So, Iain Duncan Smith has some perfectly respectable and well-to-do Scottish ancestors, but they do not include Admiral Duncan. I wonder who it was who came up with the story of the naval ancestor. Did it come before or after the name change? Iain Duncan Smith’s father, Wilfred Smith, was a Spitfire pilot during the Second World War. As his memoir (Spitfire into Battle) and entries in the London Gazette make clear, his surname was Smith and Duncan was one of his Christian names during the war. In 1946 he married Iain Duncan Smith’s mother and his name was still Smith. But his children were registered at birth with the name Duncan Smith. Perhaps he thought they would have a better life with a more distinctive surname and chose to add his mother’s name, rather than his wife’s name to Smith. When he published his memoir in 1981 he was writing under the name Duncan Smith.

In Spitfire into Battle, Wilfred Duncan Smith says he enjoyed the war (“The fact is I enjoyed the war”). Writing of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve he says:

“Though we were a mixed bunch of individuals from many different ways of life and social background, the thread that bound us was a love of flying. It did not matter who you were, what your job was or whether your family was well-heeled or not, so long as you were keen to fly every free moment you had.”

Did he perhaps realise that in civilian life it might matter a little more and wish to claim descent from a titled admiral? One of his war-time friends was “Cocky” Dundas, who was genuinely descended from a Scottish aristocrat. Admiral Duncan’s wife was a Dundas (although I don’t know if there was any connection with the Earls of Zetland). Was this friendship perhaps the inspiration for the idea that Wilfred Duncan Smith was descended from the admiral?

It is a shame that Iain Duncan Smith doesn’t follow the example of his genuine Scottish ancestors and care for the sick and poor, rather than firing broadsides at them.

The Corbyns of Lowestoft, drapers and tailors

On Saturday (22 August) The Daily Telegraph published a story about the background of Labour leader contender Jeremy Corbyn. The article recounted how Jeremy’s parents, an engineer and a teacher, bought a seven-bedroom manor house in rural Shropshire when Jeremy was a child. His grandparents were described as a solicitor and a “successful surveyor”, the idea being to give an impression of a privileged, wealthy family background.

But go back a generation and a rather different picture emerges. Jeremy’s great- grandparents include a tailor, a chemist, a stationer’s assistant, a commercial traveller, a milliner, and a Church of England vicar. The story of Jeremy’s ancestors is not one of wealth and privilege flowing down the generations, but of late 19th century social mobility – of tradespeople joining the ranks of professionals via articled clerkships. The son of a tailor became a solicitor; the son of a commercial traveller and a milliner became a surveyor.

The successful surveyor grew up in a modest terrace house in Edmonton, north London. On the 1891 census he is sixteen and articled clerk to a surveyor, living with his father (a commercial traveller whose parents were Essex farmers) and mother (a former milliner) and five younger brothers and sisters. There are no servants, and younger brother Percy aged fourteen is already working as a tracing-paper maker.

The Church of England vicar (the surveyor’s father-in-law) was not an Oxford or Cambridge graduate from a wealthy background. He was the son of a saddler from Masham in Yorkshire. Thomas and Sarah Stott had a large family, mostly boys. Several of the sons followed their father into saddlery, two joined the Inland Revenue, and young Edward became a schoolteacher’s assistant, going on to study at the recently established Durham University. When he married in 1874 he was vicar of St John’s Church in Cubbitt Town on the Isle of Dogs. His wife, Naomi Haldane, was the daughter of a brewer turned librarian and had grown up in Plymouth. The family later moved to Marazion in Cornwall.

While Jeremy’s maternal ancestors came from different parts of the country, his paternal ancestors were all from the Lowestoft and Norwich areas. The solicitor was the son of a Lowestoft tailor, William Corbyn. William’s father George had a draper’s shop on Lowestoft High Street. His mother Anne died when he was a child; a few months later George married one of his late wife’s sisters. William was apprenticed to a relative in Norwich and it was probably there that he met his wife Louisa, the daughter of Norwich publicans turned yeast makers. The couple returned to Lowestoft to run their tailor’s business on the High Street and raise a large family.

The solicitor’s wife, Dorothy Bush, a teacher, was the daughter of a chemist and a stationer’s assistant, both of them from Norwich. The chemist’s parents were farmers in Hethersett and then in Swardeston, the village near Norwich where Edith Cavell grew up. The stationer’s assistant, Louisa, was the daughter of Thomas Thirtle of Norwich, whose occupation on the 1861 census is “estate agent – chiropodist”. Thomas Thirtle’s unusual business combination was not successful; later that year he found himself an insolvent debtor in Norwich gaol. The Gazette described him as “late of No 2 Bridewell Alley, boot and shoe manufacturer and dealer in boots and shoes, chiropodist, rent and debt collector, estate and commissions agent and agent to the Reliance Life Insurance Co. (previously boot and shoes man and dealer, and chiropodist).” Let’s hope Jeremy didn’t pick his economic gene from the Thirtle side of the family.

That accounts for seven of the eight sets of Jeremy Corbyn’s great-great-grandparents. I wasn’t going to mention the eighth couple (the milliner’s parents) but since Jeremy stood his supporters up in Cambridge on Monday I changed my mind. The successful surveyor’s maternal grandparents were a workhouse master and matron. But the disturbing story of the master of Farnham workhouse will have to wait for another post.

Is Iain Duncan Smith lying about his ancestors?

It has just emerged that Iain Duncan Smith’s Department for Work and Pensions, in an attempt to defend benefit sanctions, has been producing fake quotes from claimants.

Does the Secretary of State for Work and Pension also lie about his ancestors? In an interview in 2014 with Paul Waugh entitled “Battle for Britain” and published in The House magazine (the leading publication for MPs and peers) he appears to claim that he is descended from Admiral Duncan, Viscount Camperdown (unless Paul Waugh made that bit up).

“Iain Duncan Smith is admiring a portrait of one of his ancestors on his office wall. Amid impressive oil paintings of seascapes, hangs a sketch of Admiral Adam Duncan, who defeated the Dutch fleet in the Battle of Camperdown in 1797…. But like his naval ancestor, Duncan Smith is unafraid of battle, whether it’s in his personal or political life”

There is a big difference between Iain Duncan Smith’s battle against benefit claimants and the battle fought by his supposed ancestor. In October 1797 Admiral Duncan faced the firepower of 17 Dutch ships of the line. On his flagship alone 15 men were killed and 62 wounded. Iain Duncan Smith though is waging war on women and children (mostly women although men as well) and the sick and hurt (as the Navy called them in Admiral Duncan’s day). But is he really a descendant of Admiral Duncan? No sooner had the admiral set foot back on shore than he was created a viscount – Viscount Duncan of Camperdown – and his eldest son was later created Earl of Camperdown. Therefore his descendants are documented in various peerages and they don’t include Iain Duncan Smith. In fact, the earldom became extinct after three generations, the fourth earl (Admiral Duncan’s great grandson) having inherited it from his elder brother the third earl.

It is presumably through his paternal grandmother, Anna Cecilia Duncan, that Iain Duncan Smith claims descent from the admiral. Iain Duncan Smith’s father, Wilfrid Smith, had a distinguished career in the RAF during World War 2. The London Gazette listed his promotions and awards under the name of Wilfrid George Gerald Duncan SMITH or W.G.G.D. Smith, but at some time in later life he appears to use the name Duncan Smith as a surname, and his children were registered at birth with the name Duncan Smith (nowadays you can give your children any surname you like).

Wilfrid’s parents, Wilfrid Smith and Anna Cecilia Duncan, married in India in 1910. Wilfrid’s father, Alfred Smith, was a Church of England chaplain for the East Indian Railway. The marriage between Wilfrid and Anna took place at the Wesleyan Mission Church, Mysore on 28 March 1910. The groom is described on the certificate as a bachelor aged 29, resident at Mysore and superintendent of Post Office. The bride is described as a spinster aged 32, resident at Siddapore, daughter of George Duncan.

Could Anna’s father have been George Alexander Philips Haldane Duncan, the 4^th Earl of Camperdown? The family had changed their name to Haldane Duncan, but George also went by the name of George Duncan. He appears on the 1871 census living at 39 Charles Street in Mayfair, London, with his brother, the 3^rd Earl of Camperdown, and their mother. His profession is a civil engineer and he is described as unmarried. Ten years later he is at the same address. His sister is now head of household and George is still unmarried. In 1888 he married an American widow, Laura Dove Blanchard, and went to live in Boston. The marriage certificate notes that it was his first marriage. So it looks unlikely that Anna Duncan, born in 1877 or 1878 according to her marriage certificate, is his daughter.

George Duncan inherited the titles of and estates of the Earl of Camperdown when his brother died in 1918. He gave away the estates and, according to The Observer newspaper, wanted to renounce the titles but this apparently was not allowed. On his death in 1933 the earldom became extinct.

Iain Duncan Smith’s wife is by the way a genuine descendant of an admiral, Sir Thomas Fremantle.

PS This post is continued here (Iain Duncan Smith’s ancestors part 2: not an admiral in sight).

A Fish, a Goose and a Buttifant: the Great Fraud at Norwich

At the beginning of June 1874 Josiah Buttifant left Norwich in a hurry, telling trustees of the Norwich and Norfolk Permanent Provident Building Society, where he was secretary, that he needed a short period of relaxation for reasons of health. Josiah was also registration agent for the Conservative party, so was able to enlist the help of Norwich MP John Huddleston to obtain a passport for Spain. When it emerged that about £10,000 of the Society’s funds had disappeared, the MP pointed police in the right direction and a detective from Norwich, accompanied by one from Scotland Yard, set off to Spain. Josiah was arrested in a hotel in Valencia in August and brought back to Norwich. The loss of funds had led to the Society’s liquidation.

Newspapers ran headlines along the lines of “Great Fraud at Norwich”. The first to go on trial that November was William Fish, Josiah’s clerk, who was found guilty at the Old Bailey of “feloniously aiding” Josiah in the fraud and sentenced to 16 months hard labour. The director of the Society was Agas Goose, so William Fish and Josiah Buttifant were accused of embezzlement “of the moneys of Agas Goose and others”. William Fish was described in one newspaper report as “a respectable looking young man”. The following May it was the turn of Josiah Buttifant at the Old Bailey. He pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was tried and convicted of forgery. His sentence was 15 years penal servitude.
Meanwhile an enquiry had been opened into the 1874 election in Norwich. Josiah, the Conservative registration agent, and a long list of others were found guilty of bribery, although the successful candidate, John Huddleston, was found not to have been involved and his career does not seem to have suffered. One newspaper report quoted a witness as saying that Norwich was not worse than other places: “it is only more given to turning up its own dirt”.

Both William Fish and Josiah Buttifant survived their prison terms, although Josiah was no longer a young man and was sent to Princetown Prison on Dartmoor. The 1891 census finds him with his wife Mary in Kynaston Road, Stoke Newington, still an accountant, sharing a modest terrace house with a draper’s clerk and his widowed mother. William Fish returned to his wife and family in Norwich and work as a clerk.

One of Josiah Buttifant’s sons was Sowels Buttifant and, according to some folk on the internet, this branch of the family changed their name to Sewel, with Sowel’s great grandchildren including one John Buttifant Sewel. I have no reason not to believe them, although I have not picked up the trail myself. John Buttifant Sewel was a minister in the Blair government and was created Baron Sewel in 1996. He recently resigned from the House of Lords amid allegations of cocaine use. If the Buttifants changed their name to distance themselves from the embezzler, I wonder if any of them are now thinking about changing it back again.

The four widows of 42 Medina Villas, Hove

Hove was a small village a few miles away from Brighton until development started in 1820s with the construction of the Brunswick estate, followed by the Cliftonville estate in the 1850s. Four streets leading north from the sea were named after places on the Isle of Wight (recently made fashionable by the young Queen Victoria): Medina, Albany, Ventnor and Osborne Villas. Hove proved popular with British people returning from India, who had traditionally favoured places like Bath and Cheltenham.

The 1871 census shows, at 42 Medina Villas, a household of four widows, three of them born in India. The head of the household is 62 year old Fanny Fitzgerald, the widow of John Fitzgerald (Alan Turing’s grandmother’s second cousin). Fanny was the eldest daughter of Mordaunt Ricketts, the East India Company resident in Lucknow. In a previous post I wrote about his marriage to the widowed Charlotte Ravenscroft. Fanny married her stepmother’s brother John, who was an officer in the East India Company Army. John was killed during the Indian uprising of 1857.

The second widow is Fanny’s sister Charlotte Blake, whose husband Muirson Thrower Blake was also an officer in the East India Company army and had been killed in the uprising. In the previous census the two sisters had been alone at 42 Medina Villas, except for four servants; Fanny is described as a lieutenant-colonel’s widow and her sister as a major’s widow. The death of Charlotte’s husband at Gwalior and her own escape, helped by an Indian servant, Mirza, was related in an account by another widow, Mrs Coopland, in “A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior and Life in the Fort of Agra During the Mutinies of 1857”. Charlotte also wrote an account of the escape, although I don’t know if it was published.

The third widow is the sisters’ stepmother, Charlotte Ricketts, at 69 just seven years older than her eldest stepdaughter. Her husband Mordaunt had been sent home from Lucknow after he was accused of corruption, so the couple escaped the uprising. (Charlotte’s first husband, George Ravenscroft, had been murdered in India.) On his return from India, Mordaunt, who was a cousin of the prime minister Lord Liverpool, built a house in Cheltenham and died in 1862. One of the sons of Charlotte and Mordaunt, also Mordaunt, became a magistrate and collector in the East India Company, and was killed in the church at Shahjahanpur in 1857.

The fourth widow is Margaretta Stevens, daughter of Charlotte Ricketts and half-sister to Fanny Fitzgerald and Charlotte Blake. Margaretta, aged 40, was born after her parents’ return to England. Her daughter Margaret is with her at Medina Villas, aged eight.

Ten years on, in 1881, Fanny is alone at 42 Medina Villas with two servants, her sister Charlotte having died in 1879.