Introduction
I knew nothing about the Boston family whilst my Grandmother, Eleanor Victoria Newrick (née Tremble), was alive. My mother, Yvonne Patricia Newrick, spoke of ‘Ernie and Ada’, her grandparents, but that was all I knew of the Boston family until I started to research the family tree.
It was during that research that I first glimpsed the deep family connection with the Royal Artillery. Ernie (Ernest Alfred) Tremble (1889-1961) served in the regiment, as did his wife’s father, William, the subject of this article. So did Ada’s brothers, James and Joseph Boston. From there, I found that the Chapmans (William Boston’s second wife’s family) included two generations of Artillerymen and that they had married into another artillery family, the Stubbs.
And so it went on. On the same (maternal) side of the family I also found gunners in the Browns, Fairburns, Hiles, Newricks, Trotter and Wraight families. On the paternal side I found them in the Baileys and the Bowlers. Many had served abroad and fought in Britain’s Imperial wars (principally Afghanistan, China, India and South Africa), and the death toll in action was substantial, particularly in the First World War. Many of these families had a connection to Woolwich, the birthplace and spiritual home of the Royal Artillery for nearly 300 years.
Later, I learned of the Bostons’ origins in Ulster and their migration to Australia and America, including their service in the American Civil War, but the story began with William.
Early Life and Military Service
William Boston was born in 1850 in Magheralin, County Down, Ireland, to James (1806-1879) and Ellen (née Plunket). He came from a weaving community: the greater Magheralin, Lurgan, and Waringstown areas were known worldwide as the “Cambric Trade” center, famed for high-quality hand-woven damask and linen cambrics. However, we know nothing more about his life before the army.
William enlisted in the Royal Regiment of Artillery at Lisburn on 6 July 1868; his profession was listed as ‘weaver’. He was medically examined and passed fit at Belfast the following day, and formally approved by Colonel Grant, Commanding 3rd Brigade Royal Artillery, on 11 July. From Belfast, he was posted to Woolwich, the administrative base of the Royal Artillery, arriving there on 29 July 1868.
William’s early years of service were spent at home stations. After initial postings to Woolwich and Shoeburyness, where an accident on fatigue duty put him in hospital for six days, he served at Guernsey from late1871.
His first confirmed Good Conduct Pay award, at the rate of one penny per day, was granted on 1 July 1870. A second increment followed on 2 July 1871.
He returned from Guernsey in 1873, serving at the Curragh, in Ireland, then Shoeburyness and Portsmouth.
He was appointed Bombardier on 4 September 1874. On 12 October 1875, he married Elizabeth Chapman at the Register Office in Portsmouth. Elizabeth, born in 1854 to William Chapman and Mary Kingsbury, was twenty-one; William was about twenty-five at the time of their marriage.
Posting to India
Within weeks of marriage, William was posted to India. He arrived in Bombay (Mumbai) in December 1875 and was in Delhi by 30 December.
Elizabeth did not remain in England, but followed William to India as an army wife. She joined him at Gwalior, where their son John George Boston was born on 7 April 1877.
Perched atop a sheer sandstone plateau rising over 300 feet above the surrounding plain, Gwalior Fort is an ancient hill fort described by Mughal Emperor Babur as the “pearl amongst the fortresses of Hind.” In the late 19th century, it was a symbol of British imperial authority and regarded as the “key to Hindustan”. Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Britain retained a permanent military presence there, with detachments of the Royal Artillery responsible for manning the fort’s guns.
On 28 September 1877, William re-engaged at Gwalior to complete 21 years of service. The Boston family would most likely have lived in the British cantonment at Morar, around three miles to the east of the fort. Established in the 1840s and substantially rebuilt after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Morar was intended to be the principal British military station in Central India. By the 1870s it contained barracks for European and Indian troops, officers’ bungalows set within spacious compounds, parade grounds, gun parks, magazines, hospitals, churches, messes and administrative buildings, all laid out along broad, tree-lined roads in accordance with British cantonment planning.
Life in the cantonment was highly ordered. Reveille, drill, artillery practice, inspections and maintenance filled much of the working day, whilst evenings might include mess dinners, sport, church parades or concerts organised by regimental bands. Soldiers lived in large barrack rooms, while married men usually occupied modest family quarters nearby. Although the imposing walls of Gwalior Fort dominated the skyline, the cantonment itself was a self-contained British community, deliberately separated from the surrounding Indian towns and villages.
The posting, which was so damaging to William’s health, proved fatal for Elizabeth. She died at Gwalior Fort, India, on 26 August 1878, aged twenty-four, and was buried there the following day.
William was in hospital in the same garrison at the time, one of a succession of admissions attributed to the climate. Their son John George survived his mother by seven months, dying at Gwalior on 1 April 1879.
The Afghan Campaign
The Second Afghan War brought William into active service. He reached Kandahar in January 1879. In the spring of 1880, he marched north with Sir Donald Stewart’s division towards Kabul, and on 19th April the column was attacked at Ahmed Khel by several thousand Ghazi tribesmen, who charged downhill upon it at close quarters. The guns fired at almost point-blank range. The action was over within an hour. William was awarded the clasp for the Battle of Ahmed Khel, and he reached Kabul with the division on 2nd May.
William was promoted to Corporal on 10 March 1880 and was awarded Good Conduct Pay at three pence per day on 4 July 1880. The Afghan Campaign medal roll (WO100/54) confirms his entitlement to the Afghanistan Medal with the clasp for Ahmed Khel.
Further postings at Morar, Delhi, and Agra in the early 1880s were marked by recurring illness, treated with cinchona, a source of quinine.
William was promoted to Sergeant on 15 March 1882 at the 1st Brigade, Eastern Division. He later endured ninety-four days of erysipelas (a bacterial skin infection) at Landour Hill Station in 1883. Landour was a hill cantonment and military sanatorium, located in the Himalayan foothills above Dehradun.
In September 1885, an Invaliding Board at Landour recommended a change of climate to England. He returned to Woolwich that November.
Return to England and Second Marriage
Back in England, William served at Alderney, Plymouth, and Sandown in 1886 and 1887.
In February 1886, William married for the second time. Confusingly, his second wife, Eliza Ann, born in 1867, shared the Chapman surname with his first wife, Elizabeth, and her father bore the same Christian name, though they were not related. Eliza Ann’s father, William, also served in the Royal Artillery. He was born in 1844 in New London, Canada, and whilst there is no record of his father, his birthplace makes it highly likely that he was also a soldier in the British Army.
William was awarded the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal on 1 January 1887 and promoted to Battery Sergeant Major on 1 September 1889. This was the senior warrant officer grade in a Royal Artillery battery and marked the culmination of a career that began as a teenage gunner at Woolwich. As BSM, he was responsible for discipline, drill, training and the day-to-day efficiency of the battery. He was then transferred to the Banffshire Artillery, almost certainly as a drill and gunnery instructor to the volunteer artillery stationed there.
He was permitted to continue service beyond his twenty-one-year engagement on 4 July 1889, and entitled to Good Conduct Pay at five pence per day from 7 July 1889.
The 1891 Scotland census shows the family at No. 32, Seatown, Cullen, Banffshire. Eliza Ann was aged 23; daughters Elizabeth and Ellen Amelia were aged 3 and 2, respectively; and the Bostons’ baby son, William, was aged 7 months.
Discharge and Civilian Life
William Boston was discharged on 20 March 1894 in Cullen after twenty-five years and two hundred and fifty-seven days. He was awarded a pension of two shillings and eightpence per diem for life, and his character on discharge was recorded as Very Good.
He settled at 61 Kingsman Street, Woolwich, where he lived for the rest of his life. The 1901 census lists him there with Eliza Ann and the children: Elizabeth, Ellen Amelia, William, Ada Mary, James Richard, and Joseph Henry. William was working as Assistant Manager in the Royal Artillery canteen in Woolwich.
Kingsman Street was laid out during the rapid expansion of Woolwich in the second half of the nineteenth century. It lay close to the Royal Arsenal and was built largely to house the thousands of people employed there. Residents would typically have included arsenal workers, dockyard labourers, soldiers and their families, skilled tradesmen and railway workers. The houses were modest two-storey Victorian terraces built very close together, often with tiny backyards and outside toilets. By the early twentieth century the area was extremely densely populated.
By 1911 William and Eliza Ann were running a confectionery business. There were still six children at their Kingsman Street home, including the new baby, Annie Isabel, and Albert Edward, aged 9. Ellen Amelia, aged 12 in 1901, had left home and married. Three of William’s sons would later serve in the British Army: James Richard Boston and Joseph Henry Boston in the Royal Artillery and Albert Edward Boston in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps.
The 1921 census, taken in June of that year, records William at the same Kingsman Street address, occupation: Army Pensioner, Royal Garrison Artillery. Joseph Henry, now twenty-two, was living at home with his wife, Ethel Victoria, and their infant daughter, Joan Ethel, William’s first confirmed grandchild. Albert Edward Boston, aged nineteen, and Annie Isabel, aged eleven, completed the household.
Death
Six months after that census was taken, on 28 December 1921, William died at home. The cause of death was cerebral haemorrhage following influenza (four days) and bronchitis (five days).
The death was registered by his daughter, Ellen Amelia Huish, Plumstead, who had married a fireman, Fred Huish, and was recorded, with a certificate as present at the death. Administration of his estate was granted to his widow, Eliza Ann, in January. William’s effects were valued at £220 16s. 2d.
Afterword
William Boston left Magheralin at seventeen and never returned. The regiment took him to Woolwich, Guernsey, the Curragh, Bombay, Gwalior, Kandahar and Kabul, and it took from him a wife and a son within eight months, in a garrison where he was himself repeatedly in hospital. He came home invalided, married again, rose to Battery Sergeant Major, and spent his last years of service on the Banffshire coast teaching gunnery to volunteers. He was discharged with a character of Very Good and a pension of two shillings and eightpence a day, and he lived out the next twenty-seven years in a terraced house a few hundred yards from the Arsenal.
The Royal Artillery did not leave the Bostons with him. James Richard and Joseph Henry followed their father into the regiment. Albert Edward joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, and Ada married a gunner. The connection with Woolwich, which began with William’s arrival from Belfast in July 1868, would endure.
Sources
- WO97 (Chelsea Discharge Board and Service Records); Medical History Forms F (pages 3–7);
- Statement of Services; Record of Services; Regimental Registry of Marriages
- Afghan Campaign Medal Roll WO100/54
- Long Service and Good Conduct Medal Register, WO102/8
- 1891 Scotland Census (CSSCT1891_42)
- 1901 England Census RG/571 f.190
- 1911 England Census RG/2867; 1921 England Census
- Probate Record, Principal Registry, January 1922
- Ireland, Select Births and Baptisms, 1620-1911
- India Select Deaths and Burials, FHL Film 510857
Researched by Nigel Williams, March 2026. William Boston was the writer’s great-great-grandfather.
