Category: Family History

The Story of Two Newrick Brothers: Thomas William Newrick (1835–1895) & Henry Valentine Newrick (1832–1915)

The Suffolk Coast

On the eastern edge of England, where the county of Suffolk meets Norfolk at the mouth of the River Yare, there is a cluster of coastal towns and villages: Great Yarmouth, Gorleston, Belton, Pakefield, Lowestoft, which face the North Sea across marshes and sand dunes. It was here, in the 1830s, that two brothers were born into the Newrick family: boys who would grow up to cross an ocean, live through a civil war, and build lives on the American frontier.

Henry Valentine Newrick was born on 14 February 1832, Valentine’s Day, in Pakefield, a fishing village just south of Lowestoft. His brother Thomas William Newrick followed on 31 October 1835, born a few miles inland in the market town of Beccles, in the Waveney valley. Their father was John Henry Buttifant Newrick, born in 1806 in Great Yarmouth, just across the river from Pakefield. Their mother was Susanna Weavers, who was born around 1810.

The Newrick name had roots in this corner of East Anglia. John H.B. Newrick’s father, James, had been born in 1772 in Belton, a village close to Pakefield. In fact, the Newrick family tree extends back to James Newark (1695-1171) of Burgh Castle, Suffolk, the writer’s 8th great-grandfather.

At some point, James Newrick  (b. 1772) migrated north to County Durham, where he died in 1830 at Wearmouth, near Sunderland, on the River Wear. This northward move planted the Newrick name in the industrial Northeast of England and established a line of ironworkers and engineers who would later move to Woolwich. Other branches of the family would seed their own emigrant lines to New Zealand and Australia, but John H.B. Newrick’s branch stayed in the Suffolk–Norfolk borderlands until they left for good.

There is one more Suffolk connection to note. In the tiny parish of Sotterley, barely four miles from Beccles, a girl named Louisa Clutten was baptised on 4 January 1839, the daughter of William Clutten and Hannah. She would become Thomas’s wife, thirty years and an ocean later. The proximity of the Newricks of Beccles and the Cluttens of Sotterley, who were close enough to share a market day, makes it all but certain that the families knew one another before either crossed the Atlantic.

Departure

By the late 1840s, the Newrick family had left Suffolk for Croydon, on the southern outskirts of London. The move was part of a broader pattern: Croydon was growing rapidly, its population swelling after the railway arrived in 1839, and it drew workers from across southern England. Thomas was baptised on 8 April 1849 at the parish church of St John the Baptist, Croydon — a strikingly late baptism at the age of thirteen, which may have been due either to the family’s move to a new parish or to a requirement for confirmation.

Two years later, the 1851 census recorded Thomas, now fifteen, as a servant in a Croydon household headed by one Harrietta Nanes, aged sixty-five. He was the only male among six residents, apparently serving as a general domestic in a gentlewoman’s establishment. His birthplace was given as Beccles, Suffolk, and his surname was rendered as “Newick”—a phonetic variant. Of Henry, there is no trace in the 1851 English census. He may already have been in America, or may have been enumerated elsewhere and not yet found.

The family emigrated around 1852. Henry’s 1910 census return lists his year of immigration as 1852 and records 61 years of American residence in 1900. His obituary, published in a Parsons, Kansas, newspaper, stated that he “was born in England and moved to America with his parents when but a small boy” — a description coloured by the passage of decades, since he was, in fact, about twenty. Thomas would have been sixteen or seventeen: old enough to have completed his service in Croydon and to join the family’s crossing. Their sister Caroline, about fifteen, presumably accompanied them. Their parents, John and Susan Newrick, are recorded as “both buried in England,” suggesting they either returned to England at some point or never emigrated—a discrepancy that remains unresolved.

Michigan in the 1850s

The Newrick brothers settled in Michigan, specifically in the central part of the Lower Peninsula, in the country drained by the Saginaw River and its tributaries. This was still largely frontier territory in the 1850s.

Isabella County, where Thomas would be recorded in 1863, had been formally organised only in 1859; its first permanent white settlers had arrived as recently as 1854. Its county seat, Mount Pleasant, was established at the geographic centre of the county in 1860, when the total population was approximately 1,441; roughly half American settlers and half Native Americans of the Saginaw Chippewa nation. The neighbouring county of Saginaw, to the east, was more developed, its economy driven by the lumber trade that would make the Saginaw Valley one of the great timber-producing regions of nineteenth-century America.

Henry married first. In 1858, in Saginaw, he wed Caroline Wilcox, born in 1837 in New York to Oziel Wilcox, a peddler from Connecticut, and Lucy Leete, also of Connecticut. It was a marriage that joined an English immigrant to a woman of old New England stock. Their first child, William H Newrick, was born around 1859; a daughter, Florence, followed around 1862.

Thomas’s movements in this period are less clear. He was recorded in the Third Ward of Mount Pleasant, Isabella County, in July 1863, when the Civil War draft enumerators came calling. He was listed as “married,” aged twenty-seven, born in England. Whether he had married by this date or whether the record is in error remains an open question. No wife or children have been identified for Thomas before his 1868 marriage to Louisa Clutten.

The Civil War

The American Civil War reached the Michigan frontier through the Enrollment Act of March 1863. This was the first national conscription law in United States history, and it required the enrolment of every male citizen and declarant alien between twenty and forty-five. Those aged twenty to thirty-five, married or unmarried, were placed in Class 1 and liable to be called first if a congressional district’s volunteer quota was not met.

On 1 July 1863, Thomas was enrolled in the draft. He appeared in the Consolidated Lists under the name “Thomas Newick”; the dropped-R spelling that American clerks naturally produced. He was classified as Class 1, resident in the Third Ward of Mount Pleasant, within Michigan’s Sixth Congressional District. This sprawling district encompassed Isabella, Saginaw, Bay, Gratiot, Genesee, and numerous other counties stretching into the Upper Peninsula.

The draft was deeply unpopular. Men felt, one contemporary account noted, that being drafted “robbed them of their patriotism and branded them as unwilling defenders of the nation.” In practice, the 1863 draft produced remarkably few soldiers. Of 292,441 names drawn nationally, roughly 190,000 were exempted for disability or hardship, over 52,000 paid the $300 commutation fee (equivalent to roughly $5,000 in an unskilled worker’s wages), and 26,000 furnished substitutes. Only 9,881 men, barely three per cent, actually entered the army through the draft process. In Michigan, “very few were drafted,” as most quotas were filled by volunteers, often incentivised by substantial bounties.

Thomas, it appears, was among the majority who did not serve. No record of military service under any spelling variant of his name has been found. Whether he paid commutation, furnished a substitute, or was exempted, we do not know.

Henry’s path was different. On 26 February 1864 — seven months after Thomas’s enrollment — Henry walked into the recruiting office at Corunna, in Shiawassee County, and enlisted as a Private in Company D of the 3rd Michigan Cavalry. He gave his age as twenty-eight, understating it by about 4 years; he was actually 31, married, and the father of 2 young children. 

The timing suggests that Henry may have enlisted as Thomas’s substitute. The Enrollment Act explicitly permitted substitution, and brothers doing so for one another was not unknown. However, there is no evidence to support this.

The 3rd Michigan Cavalry had been organised at Grand Rapids in late 1861 and served primarily in the Western Theatre — Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Gulf states. By the time Henry joined Company D, the regiment had already seen hard fighting. Henry served through the final year of the war and was mustered out on 17 June 1865 at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, having held the rank of Private throughout. He came through the war alive and, so far as the records show, physically intact.

Thomas: The Saginaw Entrepreneur

After the war, the brothers’ paths diverged. Thomas remained in Michigan. At some point in the mid-to-late 1860s, he moved, or prepared to move, from Isabella County toward the Saginaw area. On 28 January 1868, he married Louisa Clutten in Detroit, Wayne County. The marriage record named him as “Thomas William Newricke,” aged thirty (slightly understated), and his bride as “Louisa Clutte.”

Louisa had been baptised on 4 January 1839 in Sotterley, Suffolk, just four miles from Thomas’s birthplace of Beccles. Both were children of the same stretch of English countryside.

Thomas and Louisa settled in Saginaw County, where the 1870s and 1880s were the peak years of the great Michigan lumber boom. The Tittabawassee River, which flowed through the county into the Saginaw River and on to Lake Huron, was the principal highway for floating logs to the sawmills. By 1872, thirty-six mills, some of the largest in the country, operated along the Saginaw River. Thomas positioned himself at the intersection of this economy and the emerging farming country as forests were cleared.

His obituary, published in the Saginaw Evening News on 26 January 1895, recorded three distinct enterprises: he “once conducted a ferry across the Tittabawassee River,” “owned a grocery on S. Porter in Saginaw,” and had business interests “also in Hemlock.” Operating a river ferry in the lumber era was significant work, requiring a county licence and serving the constant traffic of loggers, farmers, and goods. The grocery on South Porter Street placed him in the commercial heart of old Saginaw City, on the west bank of the river.

The 1880 Federal Census captured Thomas at the height of his business activity. On 5 June 1880, he was enumerated in Saginaw City as a retail grocer, aged about forty-two, living with Louisa, whose birthplace was confirmed as England and whose parents were English-born. Four days later, the agricultural census recorded his farm in Saginaw County — shopkeeper and farmer simultaneously, a common enough combination in rural Michigan. His neighbours on the agricultural schedule bore German surnames — Schilds, Knaile, Bytte, Meier, Engel- reflecting the mixed Anglo-German character of the Saginaw Valley’s settler population.

Thomas and Louisa had a child, Nellie Louise Newrick, in March 1874. Nellie was born in Saginaw City and baptised there, probably at St John’s Episcopal Church, the parish where Thomas would later be buried.

By 1887, Thomas had added another role: he was appointed Postmaster of Hemlock City, a small lumbering community in Richland Township, Saginaw County, about fifteen miles west of Saginaw. Hemlock was first settled in 1865, and its post office was established in 1869; by the 1880s, it was a modest but established village along the plank road connecting Saginaw with the farming country of Gratiot County. The postmaster’s compensation of $159.30 reflected a small rural office, probably run from Thomas’s own premises alongside his grocery. In this era, a postmaster appointment was a federal patronage position that signified civic standing.

By 1890, a directory placed Thomas at 1008 Adams Street, west side, Saginaw — probably his grocery, having moved from or supplemented the South Porter Street location. The “west side” placed him on the old Saginaw City bank of the river, consistent with his established roots. He was a man of substance: farmer, grocer, ferry operator, and postmaster.

Henry: Cavalryman, Farmer, Livery Man

Henry’s war ended at Baton Rouge in June 1865. Within five years, he had left Michigan entirely. In 1870, the census found him in Fort Scott, Bourbon County, Kansas — deep in the southeast corner of the state, close to the Missouri border. He was farming, with real estate valued at $1,000. His household comprised his wife Caroline (née Wilcox), son William and daughters Florence and Sarah. The family was joined later by a fourth child, Laura, born around 1872.

Fort Scott was a natural destination for a Union veteran. The town had been a military post since 1842 and played a significant role in the “Bleeding Kansas” conflicts of the 1850s. After the war, it became a railhead and agricultural centre, drawing settlers from across the Midwest. Kansas actively recruited veterans with offers of cheap land and the westward-expanding railroad.

By 1880, Henry had moved from farming into a business that suited a cavalry veteran: he was keeping a livery stable on Carroll’s Plaza in Fort Scott. 

His sister, also named Caroline (born 1837), may have been in the household at various times, potentially contributing to the census confusion that listed his wife’s surname as “Newrick” rather than “Wilcox”.

Tragedy struck in March 1885 when Caroline Wilcox Newrick died, aged forty-eight, and was buried in Fort Scott. Henry, now fifty-three, was left a widower with adolescent and young adult children. His daughter Sarah, then about seventeen, appears to have assumed the role of housekeeper and companion — a position she would hold for the rest of Henry’s life.

On 4 August 1890, Henry filed for a Civil War pension in Kansas, for service with Company D, 3rd Michigan Cavalry. The timing coincided with the Dependent Pension Act of that year, which expanded eligibility to any Union veteran unable to perform manual labour, regardless of whether the disability was service-related. 

In 1896, Henry moved from Fort Scott to Parsons, in neighbouring Labette County, where he would spend his final years. He lived for a time on the Plaza, then near the old county fairgrounds south of the city. By 1900, he was a widowed farmer, renting on Johnson Avenue with Sarah as his sole companion. By 1910, he owned his home outright at 2421 Main Street, making him a man of modest but secure means, living on his own income.

Henry was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans’ organisation that served as a fraternal society, political lobby, and mutual aid network for Union veterans. A 1906 GAR muster roll records him as a member of the Parsons post, aged seventy, born in England, resident at Rural Free Delivery #4.

His funeral service in August 1915 was conducted at home by the Reverend P. H. Chappelear of the Washington Avenue Methodist Church. However, the veterans escorted his body to the cemetery and conducted the service at the graveside. This was a fitting farewell for a man who had ridden with the 3rd Michigan Cavalry half a century earlier.

Henry Valentine Newrick died on 8 August 1915 at his home in Parsons, after a lingering illness, at the age of eighty-three. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, Parsons. His obituary noted that he was survived by two daughters: Miss Sarah, who lived with him, and Mrs Morris (née Florence) of Joplin, Missouri, and one son, W. H. Newrick, an engineer on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, known as the “Katy.” He was, the newspaper recorded, “well known to all of the older residents of this city.”

Thomas: Last Years

Thomas William Newrick died on 25 January 1895 in Saginaw, Michigan, at the age of sixty-one, twenty years before his elder brother. His funeral service was held at St John Episcopal Church, the American counterpart to the Church of England, where he had been baptised in Croydon nearly half a century earlier. He was buried at Oakwood Cemetery, Saginaw, a municipal cemetery established in 1868. His grave, the cemetery records note, has no marker.

His obituary appeared the following day in the Saginaw Evening News. It was a brief notice — recording the ferry, the grocery, and the Hemlock connection — but its appearance in the city’s daily newspaper reflected a man of standing in his community.

Louisa died on 14 November 1892, three years before Thomas, making him a widower at the time of his own death. Their daughter, Nellie Louise, remained in the Hemlock area. In 1893, she married Frank Brooks Cole, the son of another Civil War family. Frank’s father, Captain Frank J. Cole, had enlisted as a Private in Company G, 13th Illinois Infantry, at Dixon, Illinois, on 6 June 1861, mustered in by his own father, Captain George M. Cole. The elder Cole rose from Private through the ranks of the 13th Illinois and the 6th Missouri Cavalry to Captain: Frank’s mother, Susan L. Brooks Cole had been the public librarian at East Saginaw. The Cole and Newrick families had been neighbours in the Saginaw area since at least the early 1870s.

Frank Brooks Cole served in the Navy during the Spanish-American War, was a concert soloist at leading American hotels in early life, and went on to become the first president of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and Mayor of Pasadena in 1926. He died around 1943 at their home in Hermosa Beach.

Nellie outlived him by three decades. She moved north to Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo County, to be near their daughter, Susan O’Connor, and died there on 12 October 1974 at the remarkable age of one hundred. Born nine years after the Civil War ended, she lived to see men walk on the moon and was the last link in Thomas and Louisa’s Suffolk-to-Michigan story. She and Frank had five children: Thomas (1894-1984), Maxine Ruth (1896-1985), Franklin Brooks Jr. (1901-1987), Susanna L. (1905-1987), and a daughter who became Mrs Lloyd C. Bauer.

Two Brothers, Two Oakwoods

The brothers’ final resting places were both in Oakwood. Thomas at Oakwood Cemetery in Saginaw, Michigan; Henry at Oakwood Cemetery in Parsons, Kansas. Both men left the same small corner of Suffolk, settled in the same part of Michigan, lived through the same war, and ended their days a thousand miles apart, in cemeteries that share a name.

Thomas was the settler-entrepreneur who put down roots, built businesses, and became a prominent member of his community: grocer, farmer, ferry operator, postmaster, and churchman.

Henry was the soldier-pioneer who moved west, kept a livery stable, and spent his last decades in the company of fellow veterans who had shared the same experience.

Both were ordinary men, but with extraordinary stories.

Sources

• Parish Register, Pakefield, Suffolk — Baptism of Henry Valentine Newrick, 19 March 1832. FHL Film 918521.
• Parish Register, St John the Baptist, Croydon, Surrey — Baptism of Thomas William Newrick, 8 April 1849. FHL Film 994333.
• 1851 Census of England and Wales — Thomas Newick, servant, Croydon. Piece 1601, Folio 122, Page 29.
• U.S. Civil War Draft Registrations, 1863 — Thomas Newick, Isabella County, Michigan. Series Nm-65, Entry 172.
• Record of Service of Michigan Volunteers in the Civil War, 1861–65 — Henry V Newrick, Pvt, Co. D, 3rd Michigan Cavalry.
• NPS Civil War Soldiers & Sailors Database — Henry V. Newrick, Pvt, Co. D, 3rd Michigan Cavalry. NARA Film M545 roll 30.
• Michigan Marriage Records — Thomas William Newricke to Louisa Clutte, 28 January 1868, Detroit. FHL Film 001377622.
• Suffolk County Baptism Register — Louisa Clutten, 4 January 1839, Sotterley. FHL Film 918543.
• 1870 U.S. Federal Census — Henry Valentine Newrick, Fort Scott, Bourbon County, Kansas.
• 1880 U.S. Federal Census, Population Schedule — Thomas William Newrick, Saginaw City, Michigan. ED 315.
• 1880 U.S. Federal Census, Agricultural Schedule — Newrick, Thomas William., Saginaw County. ED 313.
• 1880 U.S. Federal Census — Henry Newrick, Fort Scott, Kansas (livery stable, Carroll’s Plaza).
• The Postal Service, 1887 — Post-Offices and Postmasters, Michigan, p. 539: Hemlock City, T. W. Newrick.
• Directory listing, 1890 — Thomas William Newrick, 1008 Adams, w S, Saginaw.
• U.S. Civil War Pension Index — Henry V Newrick, D 3 Mich Cav, filed Kansas, 4 August 1890.
• Michigan Death Records; Saginaw Evening News, 26 January 1895 — Obituary of Thomas W. Newrick.
• Find A Grave — Thomas William Newrick, Oakwood Cemetery, Saginaw (biography present).
• Find A Grave — Henry Valentine Newrick, Oakwood Cemetery, Parsons, Kansas.
• Church Register, Saginaw — Baptism of Nellie Newrick, 30 March 1874. FHL Film 967179.
• Michigan Marriage Records — Nely L. Newrick to Frank B. Cole, 23 January 1900, Merrill. FHL Film 000967190.
• Death Record — Nely L Cole, 30 March 1874 – 12 October 1974, San Luis Obispo, California.
• U.S. Social Security Applications — Thomas Newrich (father), Louisa Clutten (spouse), Nely Louise Cole (child).
• 1900 U.S. Federal Census — Henry Newrick, Parsons, Kansas (widowed, farmer).
• 1900 U.S. Federal Census — Cole household, Hemlock Village, Saginaw County, Michigan.
• Grand Army of the Republic Muster Roll, Parsons, Kansas, June 1906 — Henry V Newrick.
• 1910 U.S. Federal Census — Henry B [sic] Newrick, 2421 Main Street, Parsons, Kansas.
• Obituary — “Death of Henry V. Newrick,” Fort Scott or Parsons newspaper, August 1915.
• Caroline Wilcox Newrick — born 1837, New York; married Henry V. Newrick, 1858, Saginaw; died March 1885, Fort Scott, Kansas. Research records.
• Imperial Publishing Co., The County of Saginaw, Michigan: Topography, History, Art Folio (Saginaw, 1896). Portrait plate, Richland Township: “12. T. W. Newrick, deceased.” University of Michigan Digital Collections; Library of Congress (LC item 2007626770).
• Imperial Publishing Co., The County of Saginaw, Michigan: Topography, History, Art Folio (Saginaw, 1896). Land ownership map, Richland Township, p. 25: “Newrick Est.”
• Record of Service of Michigan Volunteers in the Civil War, 1861–1865, Vol. 36 (Cavalry), p. 124: Henry V. Newrick, Co. D, 3rd Michigan Cavalry.
• Illinois: Roster of Officers and Enlisted Men — Frank J. Cole, Pvt, Co. G, 13th Illinois Infantry. Enlisted 6 Jun 1861, Dixon, Illinois. Transferred to the 6th Missouri Cavalry.
• NARA, Compiled Military Service Records — Frank J. Cole, Co. G, 13th Illinois Infantry. Film M539 roll 17. Physical description: age 22, 5’8¼”, brown hair, black eyes, light complexion. Residence: Fenton, Whiteside Co., Illinois. Occupation: clerk. Promoted Adjutant, 6 Mo. Cavalry, by order Gen. Halleck, 15 Feb 1862.
• U.S. Civil War Pension Index — Susan L. Cole, widow of Franklin J. Cole. Application 410599, Certificate 323539. Filed from Michigan, 14 Oct 1889.
• Ancestry.com — Susan L. (Susie) Brooks Cole (Feb 1843 – 18 Nov 1919). Born in Illinois; married Franklin J. Cole, 30 Oct 1862, Whiteside, Illinois; died in Los Angeles, California.
• Ancestry.com — Nellie Newrick (30 Mar 1874 – 12 Oct 1974). Born in Saginaw; married Frank Brooks Cole, 1893; died in Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo, California.
• Obituary — Franklin B. Cole, aged 70, former Mayor of Pasadena. Newspaper clipping (undated, c. 1943). Hermosa Beach, California.
• 1880 U.S. Federal Census, Agricultural Schedule — Tittabawassee Township and Buena Vista Township, Saginaw County, Michigan. Page 9.

Researched by Nigel Williams, 2026. The writer is a first cousin five times removed of Thomas and Henry, through the Newrick line of his mother, Yvonne Patricia Newrick.

Introduction

Many families have a story that describes former prosperity or an aristocratic connection that isn’t exactly true but isn’t completely false, either.  The ancestor who owned half the village, for example, turns out to have been the proprietor of a modest farm.

My grandmother ‘Grandma Williams’ (Gwendoline Frances 1903-1991) told my sister and me just such a story sometime in the early 1970s, when we were small children.

In it, our ancestor, The Squire of Nettlebed, had a wife named Annie Andrews and gambled and drank the family fortune away.  He died penniless and was buried in a pauper’s grave. Grandma insisted that we would have been a wealthy family if he had been more abstemious and was strongly opposed to gambling. 

I was curious about this, and after my father died in 1979, his brother, Uncle Peter, a large, loud man who never married, helped me search the graveyard in Nettlebed.  We found nothing to confirm the story. 

This is unsurprising, given there was never a squire in the family, and the man who died a pauper was not from Nettlebed.  However, there were some facts behind my Grandmother’s story.

The Andrews

Frederick Andrews (my 3rd great-grandfather) appears to be the man who inspired the story. He had a wife called Ann, and he died as a pauper, having spent time in at least two Poorhouses.  This is his story.

Frederick Andrews and his twin sister Ann were born in 1827 in Bucklebury, Berkshire, to George (b. 1796), a shoemaker, and Jane (b. 1806, née Lindsey).

His future wife was also named Ann (née Dinch).  She came from the village of Ogbourne St. George, Wiltshire.  They married in October 1847. Five generations of Dinch lived in the tiny Wiltshire village: Ann, her father, Edward, and three previous generations named John. John the Elder was born in 1706.

Ogbourne St. George is best known for its role in deceiving the Germans during World War II: the manor house’s address was used in a letter from a fictitious ‘Pam’ to an equally fictitious but also deceased ‘Major Martin’.  The rationale was that ‘no German could resist the Englishness of such an address’.   

Frederick and Ann Andrews had five children in 13 years: George (1848), Clara (1853), Emma, my 2nd great-grandmother (1855), William (1858), and Henry (1861).

In 1861, Frederick was working as a ‘Grocer and Poulter’, Ann as a charwoman, and his eldest son George was a 13-year-old errand boy. George would go on to work at the Huntley and Palmer Biscuit Factory in Reading for over 20 years. 

Destitution

In 1871, Frederick was working as a ‘Servant Groom’. His son William was working as a Labourer at a Mill, and Henry was still at school.

Ann died in 1880.  Where Frederick was on census night in 1881 is unknown, as he does not appear in the returns. What is certain is that within fifteen months he was in London, sick, and on the parish – as an inmate in the infirmary of Islington Workhouse.  The record states: ‘Andrews, Frederick, aged 55, admitted 8 July 1882, discharged 20 July 1882. Twelve days.’   There is no ‘See old reg.’ against his name, which may mean it was his first time in the institution.  Many entries above him have no leaving date but are marked ‘dead’.

The census of 1891 finds Frederick in The Reading Union Workhouse.  This opened in 1867 on Oxford Road in Reading, to consolidate several local parish poorhouses. It comprised receiving blocks, an infirmary and a fever block.

For its time, it was considered clean and well run, though the rule was that the conditions of the pauper relieved at public expense were that they should be ‘less eligible’ than those of the lowest-paid independent labourer. Eligible is used here in its older sense, meaning desirable or worth choosing.

Frederick was in Reading Union ten years later at the next census, in 1901. He died on the 10th June 1904, aged 76, once again, or still in the Workhouse, of cardiac disease and exhaustion. Whether he remained within its walls throughout all those years, or passed in and out of them, destitute, we do not know.

The Nettlebed Connection

Frederick Foster (1855-1942) married my 2nd-great-grandmother, Emma Andrews, in 1880.  He was born in Nettlebed, as was his mother Emma Dyer (1819-1896).  This is the connection to Nettlebed.

The Real Squire of Nettlebed

Ironically, there was a squire of Nettlebed who endured financial woes during Frederick Andrews’ life.  1894, the manor was bought from the ancestral owners, the Stonors, by H. H. Gardiner, a wealthy London businessman. He was forced to sell in less than a decade after suffering financial losses . Robert Fleming, the Scottish financier and grandfather of Ian Fleming, then bought the estate in 1903.

Bromley and Hackney Workhouses

As I did more research, I found that he was not the only ancestor to have resided in the workhouse.

James Smith (1807-1885), my 4th great-grandfather, an agricultural labourer, was in the Bromley Union Workhouse in 1881 and died there four years later.

Mary Turkington (1845-Bef.1911), my 3rd-great-aunt, was a soldier’s daughter born in South Africa.  Her husband William Turkington (1843-1901) was one of the many men in the family tree who served in the Royal Artillery serving in China during the Second China War from Jan 1860 to April 1861.

At the 1881 census, Mary and William were living in Streatham. Sometime between then and 1885, William and Mary appear to have separated, and she spent time in Hackney Workhouse in June 1885.  In 1891 she was supporting herself by working as a dressmaker and living as a lodger without him.  She had a further spell in Hackney Workhouse in March 1902.  

From Workhouse to Hospital

Finally, I found that the vaccination records of my cousins in the Williams branch of the family from Usk, Wales, were in the Pontypool Union. This was beginning was the beginning of a transition of the institution from Poor Law workhouse to Panteg County Hospital and finally to a free NHS hospital in 1948.

Sources

• England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538–1975 (baptism, Bucklebury, Berkshire, 23 December 1827)
• England & Wales, Christening Index, 1530–1980
• 1841 England Census (Thatcham, Berkshire)
• London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754–1938 (marriage to Ann Dench, St Sepulchre, London, 3 October 1847)
• England, Select Marriages, 1538–1973
• 1851 England Census (St Bartholomew the Great, Middlesex; lodger)
• 1861 England Census (St John, Greenham, Berkshire; grocer and poulterer)
• 1871 England Census (Greenham, St John the Evangelist, Berkshire; servant groom)
• London, England, Poor Law Hospital Admissions and Discharges, 1842–1918 (Islington workhouse infirmary, admitted 8 July 1882, discharged 20 July 1882)
• London, England, Workhouse Admission and Discharge Records, 1764–1921
• 1891 England Census (Reading Union Workhouse, Oxford Road, Reading; general labourer)
• 1901 England Census (Reading Union Workhouse, Reading)
• Death certificate, General Register Office (died Reading Union Workhouse, 10 June 1904, aged 76, cardiac disease and exhaustion)
• England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837–1915
• England, Select Deaths and Burials, 1538–1991
• Web: UK, Burial and Cremation Index, 1576–2014 (burial, Reading, 14 June 1904)
• England & Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837–1915 (Ann Andrews, 1880)
• Victoria County History, Oxfordshire, volume eighteen, Nettlebed (British History Online)
• Peter Higginbotham, The Workhouse: The Story of an Institution, workhouses.org.uk (Reading Union workhouse)
• British Medical Journal, report on Reading Union workhouse infirmary, 1894 (Nursing Commission on Provincial Workhouses

The Newrick Surname

Newrick is a relatively rare English surname.  This is primarily because, unlike the name Smith for example, which developed thousands of times, independently, it probably descends from a small number, or perhaps only a single, founder family in East Anglia. 

 The surname is generally regarded as an East Anglian variant of Newark. In Norfolk and Suffolk, the forms Newark and Newrick were historically used for members of the same families, apparently reflecting local pronunciation at a time when surname spelling was not fixed. The underlying name is locational and derives from Old English elements meaning “new work” or “new fortification”. Its linguistic roots are therefore Anglo-Saxon, although hereditary surnames developed considerably later.

Origins: The East Anglian Coastal Belt

The Newrick family’s story begins on the East Anglian coast in the late seventeenth century. The earliest traceable ancestor is James Newark, born in 1695, whose line descends through William Newark (1716–1791) and Robert Newark (1742–1810) before the surname variant Newrick appears in the next generation, with James Newrick born at Belton, Suffolk, in 1772. 

Robert Newark’s son James married Elizabeth Butterfont, born at Toft, Norfolk, in 1774, and it is their children who carry the story north to Wearmouth; Elizabeth died at Sunderland in 1843, having made the journey with her family. The Butterfont name was preserved as a middle name by two of her sons, William Cooper Butterfont Newrick, born at Great Yarmouth in 1800, and John Henry Buttifant Newrick, born there in 1806, a deliberate marker of maternal descent across a generation where parish records were unreliable. The family’s roots in the Suffolk and Norfolk coastal strip thus span at least five generations before the move north.

The First Recorded Newrick

The first recorded Newrick is James, born in 1772 at Belton, Suffolk, a parish a few miles inland from Great Yarmouth. Another branch emerges at Great Yarmouth itself, this time bearing the distinctive middle name Buttifant, likely a local Norfolk surname, with William Cooper Butterfont Newrick born there in 1800 and John Henry Buttifant Newrick in 1806. 

Still further inland, Thomas William Newrick, who would emigrate to Michigan in the 1850s, was born at Beccles in 1835, while Henry Valentine was born at Pakefield, near Lowestoft, in 1832. Bringing these threads together, the family’s roots lie in the Suffolk and Norfolk coastal strip: a zone of mixed arable farming, fishing, and small-scale craft trades.

This was also one of the regions most severely affected by the parliamentary enclosure movement. Between 1790 and 1815, successive Enclosure Acts extinguished common grazing rights across East Anglia, driving agricultural labourers off land they had worked for generations. E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), traces the resulting drift of displaced rural labour toward the industrial north; and John Langton and R.J. Morris, in Atlas of Industrialising Britain (1986), map the flow of that migration along the east coast corridor, from the Norfolk and Suffolk lowlands toward the Durham and Northumberland coalfield. James Newrick’s move from Belton to Wearmouth before 1830 follows that route precisely.

The Durham Interlude: Wearside and the Industrial North

Wearmouth in the first decades of the nineteenth century was undergoing rapid expansion in coal, glass, and above all, shipbuilding. For a rural labourer from Suffolk, the wages on offer represented a transformation in circumstances. After James Newrick died at Wearmouth in 1830, a second generation was already established at Sunderland and North Shields. Charles C Newrick was born at North Shields in 1807, and Nathaniel Aaron in 1814. Later, James Archibald, born at Sunderland in 1826, would move on again to Darlington, where a further branch of the family put down roots and eventually dispersed to New Zealand and New South Wales.

This north-eastern phase set the pattern for further movement within industrial Britain. The Durham generation did not stay put. James Newrick, born in Sunderland in 1832, was a moulder, a foundry worker who cast metal components in sand or clay moulds, and his trade followed the railway frontier. The great railway building booms of the 1840s and 1850s created insatiable demand for iron moulders and engine fitters.

Crewe had been purpose-built by the Grand Junction Railway from 1843 as an engineering and locomotive works town, its population of barely two hundred growing to over eight thousand within two decades, almost entirely dependent on the railway. Oswestry, where James and his family were settled by 1871, was the headquarters of the Cambrian Railways from 1864, with locomotive workshops drawing skilled men from across the north and midlands. Raphael Samuel, in his essay “The workshop of the world” in History Workshop Journal (1977), documents this pattern of skilled iron workers following the railway frontier westward; James Newrick’s trajectory from Sunderland moulder to Oswestry moulder maps directly onto it.

From Oswestry to Woolwich, and the Arsenal

Charles Owen, James’s eldest son, took the next step. Already working as a moulder at sixteen in 1871, he had advanced to engine fitter by 1881, and by the mid-1880s, he had brought his family south to Plumstead, where he found employment at the Royal Gun Factory within the Royal Arsenal complex. To understand why Charles moved, it is important to note that the Arsenal had expanded dramatically from the 1850s onward; the Royal Gun Factory, established in its modern form in 1856, was by the 1880s recruiting specifically for engine fitters and skilled metalworkers, often targeting men with railway engineering experience. 

The pull from the Welsh Marches to Woolwich therefore followed an established recruitment pipeline from the industrial midlands and north. By the 1890s, the Arsenal employed over ten thousand workers, making it the largest single industrial employer in Britain.

What is striking about the Plumstead household is how the Arsenal shaped the next generation. Charles Owen’s sons George, moved north to help establish the Royal Ordnance Factory at Blackburn. He was awarded the MBE for his work there. George’s brother, Richard Oswald, served in the Royal Artillery during the first World War and his sister Mary Ethel married a gunner, Albert Victor Wraight.  Frank and Oscar Brown, first cousins and sons of Elizabeth Newrick, rose to Chief Inspector of Ordnance Machinery.  The world of armaments and ordnance drew James Newrick’s descendants south from Sunderland and held them for three generations.

Emigration

While Charles Owen’s branch moved toward Woolwich, other members of James’s family emigrated in the final decades of the nineteenth century. 

Four of James’s children settled in British Columbia: Elizabeth at Wellington, William also at Wellington, Mary Jane at Comox, and Ada, whose husband, Thomas Balderston, was a coal miner at Fernie in the Kootenay district in 1911, the year after his arrival from England. Elizabeth, William, and Mary Jane settled within a few miles of one another on Vancouver Island, in communities built around the Dunsmuir collieries; the tight cluster has the character of chain migration, one sibling following another to familiar faces and known work. 

James, the fifth sibling to emigrate, went to Queensland rather than British Columbia, settling in Brisbane and marrying there around 1901. Queensland’s Assisted Immigration Act of 1869 had specifically targeted agricultural and skilled industrial workers from Britain, and its emigration agents were active in the north of England through the 1870s and 1880s.

The James Archibald branch at Darlington produced its own emigrant generation. Sarah Ann Newrick went to Dunedin , New Zealand in the 1870s, dying there in 1898; William Malcolm ended his days in Hawke’s Bay, also in New Zealand. Frederick Charles, a photographer, died in Granville, New South Wales, in 1928.

The Suffolk branches went to North America: Thomas William to Saginaw, Michigan, in the 1850s, and Henry Valentine eventually to Kansas. These movements belong to the broader story of mid-Victorian emigration to the United States, driven by industrial recruitment in the Great Lakes iron and steel belt rather than by colonial land settlement.

Summary

The Newrick migration across four generations fits a pattern well documented in literature on British internal and overseas migration (see Secondary Sources below). The first move, from East Anglian agriculture to Wearside industry, was driven by enclosure and industrial wages. The drift through the industrial north and midlands tracked the railway frontier. Moving to Woolwich was driven by Arsenal’s recruitment. Overseas dispersal, to Vancouver Island, Queensland, New Zealand, and New South Wales, followed organised colonial recruitment and chain migration, characteristic of late nineteenth-century British working-class emigration. It is notable that much of the migration was toward known work in established communities, along paths laid down by those who had gone before.

Sources for Newrick Origins and Migration

Parish registers and church records

• England and Wales, Christening Index, 1530–1980
• England, Select Births and Christenings, 1538–1975
• England, Select Marriages, 1538–1973
• England and Wales Marriages, 1538–1988
• England, Select Deaths and Burials, 1538–1991
• Norfolk, England, Church of England Baptism, Marriages and Burials, 1535–1812 (Burgh Castle; Caistor-next-Yarmouth; Great Yarmouth)
• Norfolk, England, Bishop’s Transcripts, 1579–1935
• Northumberland, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1938 (baptism of Charles Chicken Newrick, Christ Church, Tynemouth, 3 July 1808)
• Durham, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538–1919 (Bishopwearmouth; burial at Nile Street, 19 December 1830)
• Cheshire, England, Parish Registers, 1538–1909 (Crewe)
• England and Wales, Quaker Birth, Marriage, and Death Registers, 1578–1837 (TNA RG 6)
• England and Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567–1970

Civil registration and probate

• England and Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837–1915
• England and Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837–1915 (including Albert Newrick, Q4 1869, Sunderland, vol. 10a, p. 712)
• England and Wales, Civil Registration Death Index, 1837–1915
• England and Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858–1995

Census returns

• 1841, Bishopwearmouth, Durham (Ballast Hills; Charles Chicken Newrick, agent)
• 1851, Bishopwearmouth and Sunderland, Durham (including the “Dewick” transcription)
• 1861, Lancashire and Crewe, Cheshire
• 1871, Oswestry, Shropshire (Tower Works Street)
• 1881, Oswestry, Shropshire (Middleton Road; not yet obtained, see snag 14)
• 1891, 1901, and 1911, Plumstead and Woolwich, Kent (Elm Street; 36 Purrett Road)
• 1901, Grantham, Lincolnshire
• 1841 to 1891, Darlington, Durham, for the James Archibald branch
• 1841 to 1871, Tynemouth and North Shields, Northumberland
• 1921 Census of England and Wales
• 1939 Register of England and Wales

Emigration, shipping, and overseas records

• UK, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890–1960 (TNA BT 27)
• Queensland, Australia, Assisted Immigration, 1848–1912, and associated agents’ records (James Newrick, SS Sirsa, 1884)
• Canada, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1865–1935 (LAC RG 76)
• Censuses of Canada, 1891, 1901, 1911, and 1921 (Nanaimo, Wellington, and Comox districts, Vancouver Island)
• British Columbia Vital Statistics: births, marriages, and deaths registrations
• Archives New Zealand passenger lists; New Zealand electoral rolls, 1853–1981; New Zealand Births, Deaths and Marriages historical records (Dunedin and Hawke’s Bay)
• New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Frederick Charles Newrick, Granville, 1928, registration 11860)
• Australia Electoral Rolls, 1903–1980 (Reid division, New South Wales)
• United States Federal Census, 1860 onward (Saginaw, Michigan; Kansas)

Apprenticeship, directories, newspapers, and maps

• Indenture of James May Butterfunt Newrick, 8 February 1834, Newcastle upon Tyne
• Durham County Advertiser, January 1834, insolvency notice for James May Butterfunt Newrick, grocer, Bishopwearmouth
• Ward’s Directory of Sunderland and District
• Kelly’s Directory of Kent, Woolwich and Plumstead sections
• Ordnance Survey town plans, Woolwich and Plumstead, 1:500 and 1:2500
• Trove, for Queensland and New South Wales newspapers; Papers Past, for the New Zealand press
• Royal Arsenal Woolwich records, The National Archives (verify the SUPP series in the catalogue before citing)

Compiled trees and indexes

• Ancestry Family Trees
• Geneanet Community Trees Index

Secondary works

• E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963)
• Arthur Redford, Labour Migration in England, 1800–1850, 2nd edn, ed. W. H. Chaloner (Manchester, 1964)
• Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales, 1861–1900 (Cambridge, 1985)
• John Langton and R. J. Morris (eds), Atlas of Industrializing Britain, 1780–1914 (London, 1986)
• Colin G. Pooley and Jean Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (London, 1998)
• John Douglas Belshaw, Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class (Montreal, 2002)
• Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010)

My great-grandfather Edward Williams was born on 10 April 1870 in Usk, Monmouthshire. He was the youngest of seven children of Abraham Williams (1826-1905), a sawyer from Llanfihangel-juxta-Usk and Ellen Rebecca Williams (née Lucas, and also from Usk). Abraham’s father John (1791-1862) had been a cordwainer (bookmaker), and Abraham worked at that trade for the first few years of his working life before becoming a sawyer.

Usk is an old market town in Monmouthshire, set on the river of the same name about ten miles north-east of Newport. A Norman castle stands above it, overlooking an ancient bridge that still stands. The town had prospered in the first half of the nineteenth century, but by the time Edward was born in 1870, its prosperity had faded, and the population had declined due to the agricultural depression.

Edward had two sisters, Elizabeth (b.1850) and Frances b.1868), and four brothers: Henry (b.1853). George (b.1859), Blandford (b.1861) and Abraham (b. 1866).

Abraham and George became sawyers like their father. Through most of the nineteenth century, the sawyer’s trade was heavy manual labour. A log was rolled onto trestles above a saw pit and cut lengthwise by two men working a long framed saw. Abraham senior was probably a pit sawyer. From the 1850s onwards, steam and water driven mills began to take the work, first in the towns and the ports and later in the country districts. Edward’s brothers probably worked in a commercial mill.

Blandford moved to Richmond, Surrey, where he became a bricklayer. Henry made a similar move to Camberwell in the same trade. Elizabeth is difficult to trace, but it appears she moved to London and became a cook, whilst her sister Frances married George James Priddy (1868-1940), a wood turner, and stayed in Wales. Edward grew up in Usk and trained as a tailor.  However, sometime in the late 1880s, he left Usk and moved to London, where he joined the Police.

By this time, policing had become a sought-after occupation, with only about one applicant in five gaining acceptance. Senior Metropolitan Police officers preferred recruits from the countryside to Londoners, believing them healthier, more disciplined, and less likely to face conflicting loyalties when policing their own neighbourhoods. Consequently, only around one in ten Metropolitan Police constables was London-born. A young Welshman newly arrived from Usk would have fitted the profile of an ideal recruit.

Edward was appointed as a constable on 28 January 1889. By 1891, he was living within the police station establishment at West Hill, Wandsworth (V Division), as a serving constable.

Wandsworth was an expanding and socially varied London district whose crime was predominantly ordinary urban crime: theft, burglary, drunkenness, assault, domestic disturbance, juvenile offending and public-order offences. For the constable on the beat, policing consisted of continuous patrol, preventing theft, controlling disorder and managing the daily frictions of a growing population.

Edward married Alice Bowler in 1896, and over the following decade, they had four children: Lawrence (1898), Louisa (1901), Francis (1905), and my Grandfather, Leonard Alfred (1906). By the time Leonard was born, the family was living in Newington, Surrey. In December 1898, Edward transferred to L Division(Lambeth), which became his final police posting.

Lambeth was a tougher beat, as its densely populated streets were subject to far more drunkenness, assaults and public-order offences, and its police court was among the busiest in London.  Street robbery, prostitution, drunken disorder and pickpockets were all likely to have been more common in Lambeth than in Wandsworth.

After 20 years of service, Edward retired from the Metropolitan Police in April 1909 on medical grounds and was awarded a pension of £33 14s 4d per annum. At the time of his retirement, the family was living in Walworth.

By the 1921 census, Edward was still living in London with Alice and their children, within a working household as the children moved into clerical and commercial work. Leonard worked as a clerk at Scotland Yard, while Lawrence Edward held a similar post at the Ministry of Agriculture in Whitehall. Louisa, Ellen and Francis all worked as shop assistants.  Later in life Francis would also become a policeman.

The one photograph we have of Edward appears to be a post-retirement portrait, probably taken in the last decade of his life (1916-1926).  I have the original, and it was the first example I have seen of a portrait that uses pencil retouching over a photographic base.   It was proably a Bromide enlargement reworked with pencil, a technique popular in the early 20th century. Photographers used enlargements on light-sensitive bromide print paper and manually enhanced them with graphite to add artistic depth, fix imperfections, or mimic the painterly look of the Pictorialist movement.

Edward died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1926 at the family home in Archway Street, Barnes, aged 56. Whilst this condition was not uncommon at the time, it was a particular threat to men who spent years outdoors in all weathers.  The policeman’s beat both shaped and perhaps hastened the end of his life.  

Sources

• General Register Office: birth (Usk, 1870), marriage (St George Hanover Square, 1896), and death (Barnes, 1926) entries.
• Census returns, 1871 to 1921 (Wales and England).
• Church of England parish registers (marriage and baptisms), London and Surrey.
• Metropolitan Police service and pension records, The National Archives (MEPO).

Compiled by Nigel Williams, January 2026. Edward Williams was my great-grandfather.

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.

Royal Army Ordnance Corps.

Introduction – The Ordnance Family

My great-grandfather George Newrick (1894-1968) worked as an engineer at Woolwich Arsenal and moved to Blackburn to help establish the new Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) Blackburn in the late 1930s.  He was awarded the MBE for his work there in 1958.  His son, my grandfather, George William Newrick (1915-2004), also worked at Woolwich Arsenal.

Four generations earlier, the Newricks were living in the North East of England, and my 3rd great-aunt Elizabeth Newrick (1835-1926) married Thomas Dixon Brown (1831-1902), a Foreman Fitter from Bishopwearmouth. Thomas moved south to work at the ‘Royal Gun Factory’ (Woolwich Arsenal) and raised two sons who both became Chief Inspectors of Ordnance Machinery for the British Army during WWI.  Frank Brown was appointed in December 1914, and his brother Oscar in December 1915. Those sons in turn raised two Brigadiers, Duncan in the RAOC and Cecil in the Royal Marine Artillery.

By a curious coincidence, Brigadier Duncan Brown died in Victoria Hospital, Deal, Kent, where my mother, Yvonne Patricia Newrick, had her last spell in hospital before her death in 2024.  He was buried at the Churchyard of the Blessed Mary, Walmer, near Deal, known locally as ‘Old St. Mary’s ’, which is located just a few hundred yards from where I lived in as a boy in the 1960s and early 1970s.  This is Brigadier Brown’s story.

Early Life

Duncan Brown was born on 27 August 1896 in Karachi, Sindh, India (now Pakistan). He was the eldest son of Oscar Brown of the Army Ordnance Department and his wife Alice Mary Ann Stephenson. 

Duncan’s grandfather, Thomas Dixon Brown (1831–1902), was an engineer originally from Bishopwearmouth, Durham, who worked as a Foreman Fitter in the Royal Gun Factory at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, the heart of British weapons manufacture. Thomas married Elizabeth Newrick (1835–1926), whose own family became closely associated with the manufacture of ordnance. Elizabeth’s grandnephew, Charles Owen Newrick (1855–1911), was a munitions fitter at the Royal Arsenal, and Charles’s son George Newrick (1894–1968) would later be awarded the MBE for his work helping to establish the Royal Ordnance Factory at Blackburn during the Second World War. 

Thomas and Elizabeth’s two sons both entered the Army Ordnance Department as officers, each with six years’ prior regimental service. The elder, Frank Brown (1862–1944), a Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, rose to Lieutenant-Colonel and received the OBE. He progressed through the ranks of Inspector of Ordnance Machinery and was appointed Chief Inspector of Ordnance Machinery on 8 December 1914, barely four months after the outbreak of war.

Duncan Brown’s Father

The younger brother, Oscar Brown (8 November 1864–1932), Duncan’s father, followed a parallel path: Inspector of Ordnance Machinery 2nd Class from 1897, 1st Class from 1906, and temporary Chief Inspector from 31 December 1915 before being confirmed in the post on 20 February 1917. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order that same year. As Chief Inspectors, the two brothers were jointly responsible for ensuring that the Army’s heavy weapons and the machinery used to manufacture them were properly designed, inspected, and fit for service — a remarkable concentration of expertise within a single family.

Oscar’s career took his growing family across the breadth of the British Empire. Duncan’s younger brothers were born in a succession of imperial postings: Stuart in Colombo, Ceylon, in 1901; Ivor Granville in Queenstown, Cork, around 1906; and Mervyn in Hong Kong around 1910. By 1911, Alice had borne seven children, of whom six survived — suggesting at least one sibling died in infancy, a common sorrow among families following the flag to tropical stations.

By 1911, with Oscar now a Major stationed near Dover, the family was settled at Roslyn, Salisbury Road, in the town. Duncan, then fourteen, was a pupil at Dover College, the school perched above the harbour whose buildings had once formed the Priory of St Martin. From Dover College, he proceeded to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. This was the same Arsenal complex where his grandfather had worked as a fitter in the Gun Factory. He joined in 1914 as war engulfed Europe.

The First World War

Duncan was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, Special Reserve of Officers, on 27 August 1915, his nineteenth birthday. He was posted to the 91st Anti-Aircraft Battery, Royal Field Artillery, and in September 1915 crossed to France with the British Expeditionary Force. He served on the Western Front in France and Belgium until 16 October 1916, when he returned to England.

His second deployment came in October 1917, this time as an Acting Captain attached to a Territorial Force Royal Artillery unit. He served continuously until the Armistice in November 1918, and was promoted to Acting Major on 25 October 1918, just weeks before the guns fell silent. During this second tour, he was wounded twice — both wounds occurring in the intense fighting of 1918, the year of the German Spring Offensive and the Allied Hundred Days. His Army List entry carried the double wound marker (××), official confirmation of his injuries.

For his services, he was Mentioned in Despatches, gazetted on 7 July 1919, and was awarded the Military Cross — one of eighty-nine Old Dovorians to receive that decoration during the Great War.

Duncan Brown was not the only member of his generation to serve. His younger brother Stuart (1901–1971) joined the Royal Navy, qualifying as a Torpedo Officer and serving aboard HMS Enterprise among other ships; by the Second World War he had risen to Acting Commander. His cousin Cecil Thomas Brown (1894–1942), son of Uncle Frank, was commissioned into the Royal Marine Artillery in November 1914 and served aboard several capital ships during the war. Cecil was appointed OBE for his command of HMS Glory‘s Royal Marine detachment during the Allied intervention in North Russia in 1918–19. 

Between the Wars: Iraq and Kurdistan

Duncan’s war did not end with the Armistice. In 1919–20, he took part in operations in Mesopotamia (Iraq), for which he received the Iraq Medal with clasp. He relinquished his Acting Major rank in July 1919 and, after a period of peacetime soldiering, joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in 1923.

The year before, on a Wednesday in late July or early August 1922, he had married Miss Hilda Edith Birch at the Church of St Peter and St Paul, River, near Dover. Hilda was the daughter of Edwin Birch, an Assistant Overseer and Rate Collector, and his wife Edith Rebecca, of “Beechgrove,” Kearsney, Dover. The couple had met through the Dover connection — Duncan’s years at Dover College and the Brown family’s residence in the town. The 1921 Census had captured him as a “visitor” at the Birch family home, a young officer courting the daughter of the house. His best man was Lieutenant Gordon Brown, R.N., a relative serving in the Royal Navy.

Royal Air Force Service

On 14 October 1927, now a Major in the RAOC, Duncan was seconded to the Royal Air Force in the Middle East as a Temporary Ordnance Officer, 3rd Class. From 9 September 1929, he served with the Iraq Army as Inspector of Ordnance Services. It was in this role that he saw what would prove to be the most distinctive active service of his inter-war career.

From March to July 1932, Duncan took part in operations in the Barzan area of Northern Kurdistan, aimed at suppressing the revolt of Sheikh Ahmed of Barzan, a Kurdish tribal and religious leader who had risen against the Iraqi government. The operations covered a wide area from Diana to Erbil, Aqra, and Suri, extending north to the Turkish frontier. No British Army units were present as formed bodies; British personnel served with Iraqi forces, making those who qualified for campaign awards a particularly small group. Brown’s ordnance expertise was called upon in difficult mountain terrain far from established supply lines.

For these services, he received a rare combination of honours: the clasp “Northern Kurdistan” to his General Service Medal, one of only a small handful of Army recipients, and the Iraq Active Service Medal with clasp “Barzan 1932,” of which only nine British servicemen were recipients. The Iraqi government awarded him the 4th Class of the Order of Al Rafidain, gazetted in the London Gazette on 20 January 1933. His father, Colonel Oscar Brown DSO, died that same year, 1932, having last been recorded living at The Thatch, Dolvin Road, Tavistock, Devon.

The Second World War

Duncan was promoted to substantive Lieutenant-Colonel on 6 June 1939, three months before the outbreak of war. On 24 October 1939, he was appointed Assistant Director of Ordnance Services at the War Office in London, where he served through the fall of France, the Blitz, and the vast expansion of Britain’s wartime forces. He was promoted to Acting Colonel in March 1940 and Temporary Colonel that September.

In August 1941, he was appointed Deputy Director of Workshop Services at the War Office, a key role overseeing ‘the maintenance and repair of warlike equipment’. With this appointment came the rank of Acting Brigadier, confirmed as Temporary Brigadier in February 1942. From October 1942 to March 1944, he served as Deputy Director of Ordnance Services with Anti-Aircraft Command, responsible for ordnance supply to Britain’s entire air defence network; a fitting appointment for an officer who had begun his career in an anti-aircraft battery on the Western Front nearly three decades earlier.

British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) Service

A brief appointment as Deputy Director of Clothing and Stores at the War Office followed in early 1944, before Duncan was assigned to his final and most senior role. By the war’s end, he was serving as Director of Ordnance Services with the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), the force responsible for the occupation of Germany. For his wartime services as a senior Ordnance Officer, he was created a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), Military Division, gazetted on 10 April 1945. The Gazette entry recorded him in his substantive rank of Lieutenant-Colonel (temporary Brigadier), Army number 13981, Royal Army Ordnance Corps.

Duncan’s cousin Cecil had not lived to see the end of the war. Brigadier Cecil Thomas Brown OBE, Royal Marine Artillery, had risen to command all anti-aircraft defences in Ceylon during the critical period of the Japanese advance into the Indian Ocean in early 1942. On 24 July 1942, he was killed when his aircraft, a Douglas DC-2 of No. 31 Squadron RAF, crashed in the Nandi State Forest in North Mysore, India. He was forty-seven years old. The two cousins, both Brigadiers, both engaged in anti-aircraft and ordnance work, had carried the family tradition forged in their grandfather’s Gun Factory workshop into the highest levels of military service.

Death and Burial

Brigadier Duncan Brown, CBE, MC, died on 19 October 1946 at the Victoria Hospital, Deal, Kent, at the age of fifty. He was still serving as Director of Ordnance Services with BAOR at the time of his death. His death certificate records the cause as marasmus resulting from a subphrenic abscess caused by a duodenal ulcer — a prolonged and debilitating illness suggesting he had been unwell for some time, most likely invalided home from Germany. Brown had given 31 years of continuous military service, from his commission on the Western Front at the age of 19 to his death, barely a year after the end of the Second World War.

He was buried at the Churchyard of the Blessed Mary, Walmer, near Deal, known locally as ‘Old St. Mary’s. This churchyard is just a few miles along the Kent coast from Dover, where he had gone to school, met his wife, and been married. His widow, Hilda Edith Brown, was living at 7, The Beach, Walmer, at the time of his death. His mother, Alice, survived him by twelve years, dying in 1958.

Duncan Brown’s medal group, accompanied by detailed research, was subsequently sold through a specialist dealer. The rarity of his Barzan 1932 clasp, one of only nine to British recipients, and the breadth of his service across two world wars, Iraq, and Kurdistan, make it one of the more notable RAOC groups of the period.

Honours, Awards and Medals

Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), Military Division — London Gazette, 10 April 1945

Military Cross (MC) — date of gazette to be confirmed; likely 1918–1919

Mentioned in Despatches — London Gazette, 7 July 1919

Order of Al Rafidain, 4th Class (Kingdom of Iraq) — London Gazette, 20 January 1933

1914–15 Star; British War Medal; Victory Medal

General Service Medal with clasps “Iraq” and “Northern Kurdistan.”

Iraq Active Service Medal with clasp “Barzan 1932” — one of only nine British recipients

Plus Second World War campaign medals

Sources

• London Gazette, Sixth Supplement, No. 37025, 10 April 1945 (CBE announcement)
• Medal Index Card, The National Archives (WW1 service and medal entitlements)
• Army List: Gradation List of Officers (multiple editions, c.1918–1920)
• Army List: Army Ordnance Department, p. 1754 — Chief Inspectors of Ordnance Machinery (showing Frank Brown and Oscar Brown DSO)
• Generals.dk — British and Commonwealth general officers database
• Census of England and Wales, 1911 (Brown family household, Dover)
• Census of England and Wales, 1921 (Birch family household, Dover)
• Dover Express, 4 August 1922 (wedding announcement)
• Biographical summary (from medal auction catalogue, with detailed research)
• Family tree research (Ancestry.com)
• Find A Grave, Memorial No. 35307074 (burial at Blessed Mary of Walmer Churchyard, Walmer, Kent)
• Wikipedia: General Service Medal (1918) — Northern Kurdistan clasp details
• Wikipedia: Dover College — WW1 honours context
• 1891 Census: Thomas D. Brown, Foreman Fitter, Gun Factory, Plumstead (TNA, RG12/539)
• Death Certificate: Duncan Brown, 19 October 1946, Entry 157, Victoria Hospital, Deal; General Register Office, England and Wales. Certified by R.C. Aitchison, M.B.; registered 21 October 1946.
• Research by Nigel Williams on Brigadier Cecil Thomas Brown OBE, Royal Marine Artillery (family and ordnance heritage details)

Researched February 2026 by Nigel Williams. Duncan Brown was the writer’s second cousin three times removed through Elizabeth Newrick (1835–1926). George Newrick MBE (1894–1968) was the writer’s great-grandfather.