2 - Introduction. CLICK HERE
3 - The Search for our Roots - i.e. this page
4 - The early Devon Blackmores, Part 1 - brief details of the very early family members. CLICK HERE
5 - The early Devon Blackmores, Part 2 - later Devon Blackmores, in some detail. CLICK HERE
6 - "An interesting Sideline". CLICK HERE
7 - Newspaper items, Gravestones and Memorials. CLICK HERE
8 - INFO EXCHANGE messages seeking or giving further information about Blackmore relations . CLICK HERE
Click here TWINYEO for the latest info about Twinyeo Farm
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The Introduction (page 2) was written from what I already had in my possession or in my own head, and after my brief visits to Devon in 1989 and 1991. Since then I have been doing a bit of research in a not very scientific way and, as before, it is interesting to see how large a part luck has had to play.
I started to research our family history by finding out what I could from the Littleham and Exmouth records. Some entries one would expect to find there are missing - which suggests that some Blackmores, for the relevant period, did not live there. Experience and books on family history tell me that, nevertheless, they quite likely lived near-by as, in those days, people without landed estates tended not to move very far and that, for generations, most families would have lived within quite a small area. Their normal method of travelling would probably have been on foot; the miller's son, for example, in Thomas Hardy's "The Trumpet Major" would never have dreamed of asking his father if he could borrow his horse to meet his friends in a pub four miles away - he walked.
At one time the vicar of Buddleigh Salterton had to walk over to Littleham to take services every Sunday, winter and summer. It was only with the advent of the railways and the pull of the big towns in the industrial revolution (and this mainly affected unskilled workers looking for jobs) that wholesale migration of families took place.
Exmouth has been there for a long time, but really only hit the map when it became a fashionable "spa" town towards the end of the 18th century, many retired naval and military people living there. Mary Ann Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York (the Prince Regent's brother) lived there on an annual income of �12,000, [1] quite apart from what she could pick up from selling army commissions and government posts!
Unfortunately, the town has changed beyond recognition since then. It used to consist of countless little courts and alleys, thatched roofs and cobble-stones. Most of these had to make way for the town improvements in the mid-1800s, the advent of the railway and modernisation since then and, of course, Exmouth received a pounding during the war, so most of the town that our Devon ancestors knew would hardly be recognizable to them now.
The church at Littleham, having Saxon origins, remains the "mother" church, and all burials still take place there, even though Exmouth has its own 19th century "daughter" church. It is important to realise that, although the records mostly refer to Littleham, because that is where the main church was and is, our ancestors almost certainly lived and worked in Exmouth.
I refer below to the IGI, the International Genealogical Index, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons. Astonishingly, it seems to be their belief that your soul can be saved if you are baptised into their church even long after you are dead! They have some 180 million names on their computer in Salt Lake City, and most big libraries have the microfiche cards for the UK section - they only fill a few cardboard boxes. Onto it they have laboriously transcribed as many parish records as they can get hold of, concentrating on births or c hristenings, with a few marriages and deaths, and one or two entries for census returns etc. It is a valuable secondary source of information, but there are huge gaps (Littleham and Exmouth do not feature, probably because the bishop did not allow them access) and there are frequent errors in transcription. The Mormons who go through parish registers are no more accurate than I apparently am in my research!
I have corresponded with various Blackmores who have all been most helpful but of little assistance in tracing our own family. However, by far the greatest piece of good fortune to come my way was a letter from a retired policeman in Taunton, Duncan Furner, who had been put on to me by Oliver Stewart-Liberty in 1991. He had inherited a photograph album with a picture of his great-grandmother and, next to it, a photo of "her cousin, Lady Emma Liberty". He wanted to trace the connection, but the list of family names he was able to give me, including Powell, Young and Wills, was something on which I could throw no lightwhatsoever and I was unable to help, apart from telling him what I then knew of our family history.
When I started to get to grips with my own research, following my retirement, and after getting only a short distance down the course myself, I renewed the contact and sent him a preliminary draft of these notes. By then he had already found out nearly all that I had myself unearthed, and awhole lot more besides.
After another six weeks, with little more than encouragement from me, he found out the rest of the story. He even found that a relation of his had a photo of Mary Ann Pinsent Blackmore's grave and a little thought showed it to be in Kensal Green Cemetery. His son has been to see it and, as expected, Henry was also buried there - and his son Harry too. Alas, the tombstone is now in pieces on the ground, and it is impossible to find it in the summer when the long grass has been cut.
On joining the Devon Family History Society you are invited to have your interests listed in their news letter. When mine finally appeared I had a letter from Ronald Blackmore in London. Luck again - he, too, had been researching our family history and had joined the DFHS shortly after me. The timing of his letter could not have been more fortunate, as the main bones of our story had already been unearthed by Duncan Furner, but I was lacking the details. I was becoming more and more convinced that Henry had not gone to London on his own, but probably had the support of other members of the family already living there.
Ronald's story does, to some extent, substantiate my theory and fills in some of the blanks. Ronald turns out to be my fourth cousin, his family being descended from Henry's older brother William, who had left Devon before Henry, and had gone with their older brother James, not to London but to Putney in Surrey. Their brother John's daughter Eliza (Henry's niece) also ended up married to Sam Barret in London, backing up my theory that there may have been quite a nest of them already there - not just called 'Blackmore' but also, of course, married sisters, aunts,cousins and second cousins with other surnames who might be quite hard for us to trace.
Ronald's letter makes sad reading; Henry was fortunate and prospered, but his brother William's line did not have the same luck. It seems that Henry's older brothers William and James, both tailors, went to London and married two Swannel sisters. But William lived in Putney, (which was, of course, a Surrey village then, and not part of London at all) some four miles away from Henry and Mary Ann Pinsent Blackmore, who were at Clapham Rise. There is no evidence that they helped each other in any way, and it may be that they only gave each other moral support. James apparently returned to Devon later. William was a "master tailor" but had financial trouble and went bankrupt in 1829. [2] His son George (1833-?1901) became a conductor on one of the old horse-drawn omnibuses (you had to be able to read and write to get a job as a driver) and then a labourer, ending up in the dreaded workhouse.
Ronald suspects that the demon drink may well have been his undoing. George signed his name on his wedding certificate, but his wife Betsy signed with her mark. George had 11 children, including John Henry (1859-1923 - Ronald's grandfather) who could not write - probably because even if their father could write, their mother could not. Ronald's father William Joseph (1881-1959) had a hard life and ran away to sea before he was thirteen, but was taught to read and write in the Royal Navy and left when he was over 40 with a "good conduct" and a small pension. He put these to good use, opening a small shop in 1936, but the war came and they lost both the shop and two homes to the Blitz and a V1 "doodle-bug" flying bomb. Two of Ronald's brothers also died in the 1939-45 war, but Ronald survived four years in the Royal Navy as a Radio and Radar Mechanic. After the war he entered the Electrical Industry and ended up with the "Daily Express" and three children, who have all done well.
Henry left his unfortunate nephew George nothing in his will, [3] although we cannot be sure that he didn't give financial help during his lifetime. Is this evidence of a family feud? One should not judge Henry harshly for not helping his nephew; in the opinion of countless Victorians in similar circumstances, he had prospered by his own industry and effort and, if his brother did not, that would in his eyes have been due to lack of industry and effort on his part.
So far I have concentrated on Henry, but I wanted to find out more about his wife Mary Ann Pinsent Blackmore - we have photos of them both in Maggie Close's photo album - and was intrigued by the name "Teignyeo" that they gave to their Hampstead house. I had a hunch that I might find out more in Teigngrace, a tiny village south of Bovey Tracey, some four miles north of Newton Abbot. There are two other christenings in the IGI that could possibly relate to Mary Ann, but the baptism in Teigngrace (see below) seemed to be the most likely 'fit' and the name "Teignyeo" strongly suggested that I was on the right track.
So, in August 1994, having another couple of nights free, we went to Bovey Tracey, established ourselves in a bed-and breakfast, and went to see what we could see. In fact, not very much. Guide books explained that there was an interesting local history, as Teigngrace had been the junction point between the old Haytor tramway (running on rails made, not of iron, but of granite sets) and the short Stover Canal leading to Teignmouth and the open sea. The tramway brought granite blocks (from which the old London Bridge was constructed) down from Haytor some 10 miles away.
A quick look around the churchyard produced a memorial to William Symons who died on 30 December 1933 aged 87. Could it just be that the John Symons who witnessed Henry and Mary
Ann's wedding in London in 1837 was her brother, and that this
William could have been that John's son? And had there been a
farm called "Teignyeo"?
The purchase of a 2½" OS map showed a farm called, not "Teignyeo", but "Twinyeo" - obviously a corruption of the name - between the Rivers Teign and Bovey, at their confluence. Parking by a substantial stone bridge, "New Bridge", a mile or so north of Teigngrace, we walked along the wooded south bank of the River Teign. It was very quiet and peaceful, although there was just discernable a faint, distant noise of heavy machinery, kept from us by the high bank of earth about 50 yards back from the river bank. The river itself is about as beautiful and tranquil a river as you could anywhere hope to see, some 20 feet wide and a foot or two deep, with dense woods on that side and lush green meadows on the other.
According to the map, that was Twinyeo Farm, comprising about 50 acres. So we crossed the bridge, dodging huge lorries rushing over it with horns blaring, and went to find the farm. Walking up an incline the full force of the dreadful din hit us. There far down below us in a huge, really enormous hole - it musthave been all of 200 feet deep (difficult to say - it might have been twice that)and at least half a mile across - was a scene from the inferno. The noise was indescribable. Tiny lorries, 200 feet or more below us, were worming their way up steep inclines in what looked just like a Kimberly diamond mine.
English China Clay have dug up just about the whole length of the River Bovey for white china clay and, not surprisingly, they are very careful indeed about the environment. So the river itself, and the wooded walk along it, are fully protected from the deafening noise and filth by high banks, as are the lush meadows of what used to be Twinyeo, but the farm buildings were demolished some 20 years ago. All that is left is the orchard and half a dozen mighty granite gate-posts that have been salvaged.
I have just, by accident, found out how close to destruction this oasis of tranquility came to extinction. The river was to be diverted so that more china clay could be extracted. It was only thanks to Swampy and his eco-warriors that it was saved - see ECO-WARRIORS SAVE RIVER
What an amazing thing the web/internet is!
Richard Harris emailed this URL to me
KREAG
which I have read with great interest. It features this picture and tells us:-
"Twinyeo Farm, one of the four manors in Kingsteignton mentioned in the Domesday Book was purchased in 1989 by WBB [The quarry company, Watts Blake Bearne] and immediately flattened. No attempt was made to carry out any archaeological survey in an attempt to record one of the most important sites in the history of the parish."
Philip Cole kindly sent me his mother's memoirs of life at Twinyeo Farm as a girl before the war.
In 1926 Dad had the chance to rent a farm of his own, Twinyeo Farm, Heathfield, Newton Abbot. It was pulled down in 1989. Twinyeo Farm
As we were older, Nancy and I slept on our own in single beds. Out of our bedroom window we could see a great row of poplar trees, about twenty. I’d never known such tall trees. The wind used to blow and I always had a fear that one day the trees would blow down on the farm, because they all blew the same way. I used to dread it.
Going to bed in the winter, there was no heating whatever. The bedrooms were freezing. But Mum used to warm a house brick in the oven or fire and wrap it in an old piece of blanket, like a hot-water bottle that we have today.
Mum loved the sweet peas but none of us were allowed to touch them. Dad picked them with long stems. There were two beautiful rows of sweet peas, stretching as far from the patio in our back garden here at Chapel House to the bird stand. They were tended professionally and tied up, four or five blooms to a stem. Today when you buy sweet peas there are only about three blooms to a stem. I had a photograph of me sitting on the swing with a great bunch of sweet peas. Dad got a great bunch and then took them into Torquay. I think they were picked every other day. I suppose that that would have paid for the cigarettes he used to buy.
There was a big border at the back of the farmhouse, which went round the corner, where Dad used to grow beautiful pansies. They called Mum Pansy because they were her favourite flower.
At the side of the farmhouse there was a peach tree; I don’t know whether Dad planted it or not. It never had much fruit on it, but the few on it were really big ones, like the ones you buy today. We children weren’t allowed to touch them. Dad said that those peaches were for Mum.
The other wall in the garden had a fig tree. I absolutely love figs, but Dad didn’t seem to think that they were important. We were able to stretch our arms down out one of the back bedroom windows and we could just pick the figs off the top. It was such a treat for me to go up there and pick a big fig.
On the lawn Dad built a wooden summerhouse with seats round it. We had a brown spaniel called Ruby.
Dad went every week to the Farmers’ Market every Wednesday at Newton Abbot, that was a regular thing; all the farmers did, to buy or sell cattle. Whenever Dad went to market there were certain things he did buy for Mum, but I can’t remember where she got her weekly or monthly grocery. When Mum bought biscuits she bought a whole tin, kept in a big store cupboard in the kitchen. We children weren’t allowed to go to this tin because it was a real treat. I remember one tin, full of custard creams. If no-one was about we’d open the tin and have some.
Dad had an elder brother Billy (William Robert Rowe 1885-1941) who lived nearby at Chudleigh Knighton at a bungalow he’d built, called Calgary, with a smallholding attached. He used to come and help Dad at harvest time. They used to enjoy themselves and play jokes on each other. One day Uncle Billy came into the kitchen, either for a cup of tea, or to take a jug of tea out. He put his hand in his pocket and he jumped because there was a real hedgehog there! That stuck in my mind because I thought, “Oh, What a terrible thing to do!” We didn’t see his three children: Francis, Hilda and Joyce very much.
I often used to go with Dad on a Sunday to see my grandpa Rowe (William Rowe 1861-1935) over at Town Farm, Ideford. I was always puzzled why he had to walk up the stone stairs to get into his back door, and also why he lived in such a big house. He was a lovely man a widower, and had a big black beard. His housekeeper, Miss Leaman looked after him.
We had a big orchard with a lot of apple trees, though I can’t actually remember Dad picking the cider apples. There was a cider room in the farmhouse, cold and dark. It had three big barrels of apple juice, one on one side and two on the other. Dad had a little seat between them, at the top, near the window. For Dad to go and sit down there, perhaps in the autumn, when he’d had a busy day, that was a bit of a treat, to have a jug of cider. The cider was sweet when it was first made, but as it matured, it became rather sour. We liked it as children when it was first made.
Dad had a friend called Mr. G. Wright, manager at the pottery and brick works over the fields. He used to come across every week for some eggs. Mr. Wright also used to come across when Dad’s beautiful sweet peas were coming into bloom, every afternoon, as a relaxation away from the office. His job was to tie up the sweet peas and feed them. Mr and Mrs. Wright lived at Kingsteignton.
Dad had two farm horses and a pony. When Dad went down the fields, raking, he would occasionally let us ride on the horses, just Nancy and I, I don’t remember Ernie. Mum had a little case for us two girls to go down the fields, bought from Woolworth’s, and we took an orange each. Mum had about fifty to a hundred fowl. Dad had a sheepdog, like most farmers, and ours was called Prince.
Sometimes Mum would take us for a picnic at the river bridge near the road, when it was warm. She used to buy these small rolls. Nancy and I had bikes to ride down the long lane to Twinyeo Farm, and Ernie had a pedal car. The three of us were sometimes taken to the seaside at Teignmouth and I have a photograph of Ernie holding a plastic duck on the seashore.
Mum was clever at embroidery, and had been very good at needlework as a young girl. In fact she made all our clothes. She made Nancy and I nightdress cases out of black satin, about a foot square with a flap on, lined with pink silk. Mum also embroidered a design on the front and completed them with binding around. They were beautiful. Sylvia follows Mum for her embroidery skills.
Dad was very good at crosswords. He won quite a lot of money prizes.
Dad didn’t make a lot of milk on the farm, mostly just for ourselves. Next to the farm kitchen was a dairy room where the milk was separated to make butter. There was a sink there too where the farm workers could wash before they came in the kitchen, like the modern equivalent of a laundry room.
Farmer (Mr. John Scott Drake Cole, died 1963) and Mrs. Annie Cole (died 1962) were our friends and neighbours at Little Bovey, a mile and a half south of Bovey Tracey. They moved from the farm up to the bungalow, which was built for them, in 1952.
John and Annie had two daughters, Lavinia and Grace. Lavinia, who never married, lived at the bungalow until she died in 1982. She had a ‘midget lady who stayed with her. They were in their teens when I knew them. Lavinia was very clever, not a bit like a farmer’s daughter. She played the piano and she became a schoolteacher. However, she never forgot her farming roots and kept several chickens as well as a small flock of her own sheep.
Grace, who married William Ronald Bond in 1942, was more of a farmer’s daughter, for instance she would go out and collect the eggs. Grace and William had twins in 1947; Marion Grace and Ronald Henry. Marion also became a schoolteacher, but she died in 1985, a year after her husband. Ronald had a daughter, Hilary. One Christmas Nancy and I both had leather needlecases from the Coles, with our initials on. We thought that that was absolutely marvellous. I’ve still got mine now in my workbox, although the initial “J” has worn away.
Mum always talked very fondly about her mother (Ann Townsend, Mrs. Ben Betts, 1860-1931). She visited us from The Midlands once or twice and I remember the striped dress she sometimes wore. She died when I was nine and our farmhouse was so sad. Mum went up on the train to Birmingham for the funeral at Yardley, and something sticks in my mind because it was quite frightening. We had had a lot of rain all over the country and when Mum came back she kept talking about how sad she was sitting in the train all on her own and seeing the cattle floating in the water, drowned because of rising level from the rivers, field after field.
As we got a bit older, Mum was thinking about our education. She wanted us to have better teaching than at the local school in Chudleigh Knighton. Someone told Mum about a teacher who would come and educate us privately. We all got ready, sitting on our chairs but the teacher never turned up. However, a Miss Vera Brooking later came. She was the Chudleigh stationmaster’s daughter, who later married and became Mrs. Adams. She cycled down every morning to teach us from ten to twelve, but I’m afraid she didn’t teach us very much, although she was such a nice person. We never thought that she taught us enough. When we moved to Teignmouth, we had to go to a proper school, of course.
While we were at Twinyeo Farm, Mum had quite a lot of help, people used to come. I don’t know how Mum did it all, really. Aunty Sally used to come occasionally, she was a good friend of my mother’s. He husband was dad’s younger brother Alfred Rowe (1890-1956), who ran a dairy in Torquay at 21 Fore Street, St. Marychurch. They had no children of their own. She always wanted to help. The hot water was carried upstairs to the bathroom and she gave us all a good bath.
At the top of the long lane down to our farm were two cottages, where the farmworkers lived. Florrie lived there with her husband. She used to help Mum in the house and was a really good worker. Her husband worked for dad, I think as a cowman, and I do remember his parents saying to Mum when he was still single, “Oh, we’ll have to buy them a good alarm clock. Now he’s married I don’t want him to be late for milking in the morning.!” That was a joke. They were good workers, the pair of them, very loyal.
I remember talk about the Prince of Wales’s visit to the Heathfield Clay Works in the early Thirties while we lived at Twinyeo Farm, but we didn’t attend.
Mum decided that she wanted us to go to the village church at Chudleigh Knighton. She went out and bought us lovely little prayer books each and the vicar came up and showed us to seats right on the front row. We were quite privileged. I’m sure that I would have felt better further back! We didn’t go to church much because Mum just didn’t have time to take us.
She started to learn to drive our Ford car. In those days there was no driving test to pass. One day she wanted to take us out and Dad told her to be careful reversing the car. Mum reversed into a stone gatepost and bumped it! We children were worried in case Dad was cross. Still, Mum was a good driver, especially as she had no driving lessons, she taught herself, really.
Molly was born at the farm when I was nine and Sylvia when I was eleven. I remember baby Sylvia crying and thinking, “Oh dear, another baby!” I was quite worried in my own mind.
Eventually the owner of our farm wanted it for his son so we left in March 1933 and moved to Teignmouth, where dad bought a dairy in Teign Street.