WALTER SHORROCKS’ WILL
Ancestry.com has just made available online a searchable database of UK Wills. I thought then that I would have a try at finding some from my family. And I did indeed find the Will declared in 1906 for my great, great, grandfather Walter.
Walter Shorrocks of The Crescent, Salford (Lancashire) is recorded as dying 8 January 1906, leaving £327 16s 6d to his widow Ann Shorrocks.
Being only human and seeing money at least as one anthropocentric measure of personal value, I immediately consulted the online site Measuring Worth to find out how much that is in today’s money.
Five alternative values were given (indexing from 1906 to 2009)
£26,100.00 using the retail price index
£32,500.00 using the GDP deflator
£137,000.00 using the average earnings
£158,000.00 using the per capita GDP
£225,000.00 using the share of GDP
As an economist, I am afraid I have to be pedantic here and tell you the difference between the measures:
• The retail price index (RPI) shows the cost of goods and services purchased by a typical household in one period relative to a base period. It is best used when the monetary amount is the cost or price of a simple product, such as a loaf of bread or a pair of shoes.
• The GDP deflator is an index of all prices in the economy. It is a good measure for complex products, such as personal computers, or commodities purchased by businesses, such as machinery.
• Average earnings are a logical measure for computing relative value of wages, salaries, or other income or wealth.
• Per-capita GDP, the average share of a person in the total income of the economy, is also indicated in this context.
• GDP, the economy's total output of goods and services in money terms, is the best measure for large-scale projects or expenditures, such as the construction of a bridge or government expenditure on health care.
So, one of the higher figures is appropriate in the case of the money passed on to my great, great grandmother Ann Shorrocks. But the exercise does illustrate the difficulties that crop up in trying to compare statistics on wealth and well-being over long periods of time.
New readers of the Blog will ponder no doubt on how my paternal great, great grandfather had the family name Shorrocks, while mine is Johnson.
More longstanding readers will of course recognize that this is how the Blog started – as a record of my family history research and of the tracking down of a lad who went bad and did a runner, my grandfather Harry.
A BIT OF A BAD LOT – A BIT OF A BAD LAD
In the early part of my life, I was brought up in an entirely female household, as my father had been killed in the RAF in WWII seven months before I was born.
It was not until I was five years old that men really came into my life – in the form of my step-father Horace Darlington and the workers on the farm in Cheshire that Horace managed.
When, over the years I found myself the father of four boys, I decided that it would be nice to be able to pass on something to them about my own father’s family. But information was almost non-existent as my paternal grandfather Harry had died in London a year after my birth and links with the families of my father’s two brothers had frayed.
So what started as a simple challenge became a serious hobby that in turn yielded a significant set of engaging problems – one of which - identifying the origins of my grandfather Harry Johnson became a longstanding challenge (2002-2009) to both my research abilities and patience.
It turned out to be a real ‘Who do you think you are?’ puzzle.
For starters, Johnson is a very common name – it is the second most common name in the USA (with 2.2 million holders) and the tenth most common name in England. It also has alternative spellings (principally Johnston and Johnstone but also rarer name variants like the specifically Cheshire version Joynson). And Harry is not a highly distinctive name as it can stand by itself - and act as a nickname form of Henry, Harold and even Hereward.
The scraps of oral information that I could remember were meagre. My mother had told me that the Johnsons originated in Salford, Lancashire and that there was a tradition of giving the eldest sons the name of Robert. Subsequent contact with my three Johnson cousins (Janice, Robert’s daughter) and Judy and Gillian (the daughters of Eric Johnson) added nothing substantial that could be used in pinning down the family’s origins.
Surprisingly, Robert (or Uncle Bob as he was always known to me) referred to his father as ‘Harold’ Johnson when he submitted details to the War office for the commemoration of my father’s death. In contrast, my father recorded his father as ‘Henry’ Johnson when provided details for his own marriage certificate.
However, when I was able to obtain Harry’s own marriage certificates (recording his marriage to my grandmother Constance Maud Mary Lubbock in 1907 and his re-marriage as a widower to Florence Wood in 1944) he clearly recorded himself as ‘Harry’ Johnson.
It started to seem that some of the facts about ‘Harry Johnson’ were not entirely straightforward – not the least of which was the conundrum that two of his sons differed markedly in their interpretations of his name.
Of course, people who wish to gain anonymity may be cautious in their disclosure of facts - and indeed adopt more common names that allow them to dissolve into the general populace.
One ‘fact’ did emerge from the early rounds of research. In both of Harry’s marriage certificates he refers to his father (my great grandfather) as ‘Robert Edwin Johnson’ and cites his occupation as ‘Brush Manufacturer’.
This then became the focus of the research – to identify a brush manufacturer / brushmaker with the name of Robert or Robert Edwin Johnson, who had a son with a name that could be related to ‘Harry’ and who was born in or around 1879 (the various certificates supported a birthday in the early part of 1879).
As the research evolved, the internet information sources became steadily more diverse and complete between 2002 and 2009. Initially, the search began with the 1881 Census which was the first to be computerized (FamilySearch.com) and which has a useful search engine that allows search links between an individual (e.g. Harry Johnson) and the head of household containing the individual (e.g. Robert Edwin Johnson).
The obvious starting point was Salford, Lancashire. The search did not yield any plausible results. Subsequently, it has become possible to access all of the decennial censuses for England from 1841 to 1911. Combing them became a very long-term and necessarily tedious task. None of them provides any link to a brush manufacturer named Robert / Robert Edwin Johnson who had a son who could reasonably have been called ‘Harry’.
At some point in 2004, I decided to take a complementary approach and commission a male line ydna test to identify relatives through their internal genetic ‘signature’. I joined the FamilyTreeDNA company’s Johnson – Johnston – Johnstone ‘One-Name’ ydna study which records and collates the results of tests on males who bear the name Johnson and its variants.
While the study focuses on US families (with special reference to the colonial settlements in Virginia), it is reasonable to assume that links could be established with originating families like mine that remained in the United Kingdom. Currently, there are well over 500 test results on the site. There are no results that are at all close to mine (and this also holds true for the results posted on a much smaller UK-only website).
As an after-thought in the light of my growing interest in genetic signatures and pre-history, I posted my ydna results on the general research site ‘Ysearch’. For at least 18 months, there were no matches closer than 10:12. Then, a single 12:12 match appeared with a Canadian with the family name Shorrock (whose family originated in the Blackburn-Darwen area of Lancashire).
Some weeks later, in an idle moment, I punched the name Harry Shorrock into the 1891 Census search engine. The hair of the back of my neck stood straight when I read the results – there was a Harry Shorrocks born 1879 of Salford, Lancashire, whose father had the name Robert Edwin Shorrocks and whose occupation was that of a Foreman Brushmaker!
It subsequently transpired that Robert, his father Walter and his grandfather James were the successive heads of a long-standing brush manufacturing business in Salford.
I then began to seriously consider the possibility that Harry Johnson and Harry Shorrocks were indeed one and the same. To test this proposition, I commissioned a UK-based professional genealogist Antony Adolph (a contributor to the current BBC series ‘Who Do You Think You Are’) to review the evidence. He concluded that it was likely that Harry did in fact change his name prior to marrying my grandmother in London.
Insofar as there was a problem that remained, it revolved around the fact that we had no established birthplace for ‘Harry Johnson’. However, the release of the results of the 1911 census in January 2009 provided the final linchpin for the case when Harry stated that he had been indeed been born in 1879 in Salford, Lancashire.
Searching the 1901 and 1911 censuses we therefore find:
1901
Harry Shorrocks aged 22 born Salford, Lancashire
Harry Johnson No result born Salford, Lancashire?
1911
Harry Shorrocks No result born Salford, Lancashire?
Harry Johnson aged 32 born Salford, Lancashire
So the upshot is simply that Harry Johnson was born Harry Shorrocks and that my family history on the male side beyond 1901 is of Shorrocks ancestors and not Johnsons.
The entries for the 1881 Census show my grandfather Harry Shorrocks (i.e. Johnson) aged 2, living with his father, mother and baby sister Louisa at 309 Eccles New Road, Salford. Harry’s grandfather Walter Shorrocks (Brush Manufacturer) is shown living at 23 Islington Street, Salford with his wife Ann.
It seems then that the family ran a small business in which my great grandfather Robert worked as a warehouseman and his brother William worked as a brush maker.
WHY DID HARRY DO A RUNNER?
Well, the short answer is that I don’t know and may never be able to find out why Harry Shorrocks left Salford around 1905 and melted into the population of South London as Harry Johnson.
However, I have re-established links with my Shorrocks relatives after a rift of over 100 years and they have a vague family memory of him being a ‘bit of a bad lot’.
My own guess is that he was a spoilt young man (he was the first son of an only-child mother) who may have got involved in the local Salford ‘scuttling’ gangs, which in turn led on to drinking, gambling ad womanizing.
Social historian Andrew Davies quotes a social commentator from the 1890s on ‘scuttling’ (Harry would have been 16 years old in 1895):
A "scuttler" is a lad, usually between the ages of 14 and 18, or even 19, and "scuttling" consists of the fighting of two opposed bands of youths, who are armed with various weapons.
Davies himself goes on to comment:
‘In the working-class neighbourhoods of late Victorian Manchester and Salford, there co-existed a range of very different conceptions of what "being a man" entailed. As the principal wage-earners in most families, men claimed the status of breadwinner, stressing their capacity to provide for their wives and children, and thus deriving their standing as men in part from their role within the household.
However, another pervasive conception of manliness centred upon a very different set of virtues, including toughness--expressed both in a man's physical labour and in his everyday public conduct--and the capacity to drink heavily, which earned a man peer recognition, as a "hard" man, or "man's" man.
Of course, the categories of breadwinner and "hard" man were not mutually exclusive. Many men managed to subscribe to elements of both notions of what it meant to be a man, adopting different personas in different contexts. Others, however, were more clearly distinguished either as "family" men or as heavy-drinking, "hard" men, and boys growing up in such districts were therefore faced with quite diverse role models.
For young men in their mid- to late-teens, the status of breadwinner was usually unattainable. Within the family, most were restricted to the role of supplementary wage-earner and were subject to the authority of their fathers. The role of the "hard" man, which was available to them, thus appears to have been especially attractive’.
So Harry may well have been a member of a gang as a youth who later as a young man got himself into more trouble as ‘a stranger to the truth’ with money, and a cad with women.
He was though from all accounts a charming and funny man who was brilliant at his job as a Stockbroker’s Clerk in the City and well-liked as a Surrey cricket umpire.
I am sorry that we can’t have a beer or two together to run through the story and fill in a few details.
POSTSCRIPT - THE CRESCENT, SALFORD
The Crescent is now a busy dual carriageway on the A6 corridor close to Salford University and less than a mile from Manchester City Centre.
It is best known for its famous pub, 'The Crescent'.
This is a Grade II Listed Building built in the 1860's. Here Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels once drank and discussed revolution and the theory of Communism.
The German-born philosopher and communist thinker, Engels, ran a mill in the town for his father in the second half of the 19th century while researching his classic work, The Condition of the Working Class in England.
At that time the Pub was appropriately known as The Red Dragon.
I have mental pictures of my gg grandfather Walter arguefiying in his cups over politics with the two conspiratorial Germans - and of my grandfather Harry being thrown out a few decades later for being rowdy.
The Crescent has now been in the Camra Good Beer Guide for 23 consecutive years, a record for Manchester, and is highly regarded as an institution. There is a unique charm about the place, with its rustic open fire and friendly atmosphere, those who visit for a first time are certain to return.
Up to 10 Real Ales and 3 Scrumpy Ciders available together with a wide range of Continental beers.
Events include:
- Quarterly Beer festivals
- Monday night Quiz from 9.30pm
- Wednesday night = Curry night from 5 - 8.00pm
- Regular live music in the Vault
- Open mic night Sunday fortnightly 7.30pm
Great atmosphere:
A mix of locals, businessmen, lecturers and students from Salford University .... all more than welcome.
Well worth a visit!
PREVIOUS SHORROCKS BLOG POSTS
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2010/04/well-finally-we-can-reunite-two-sides.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2010/02/as-my-great-grandfather-robert-edwin.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2010/01/sir-john-mills-hobsons-choice.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2010/01/my-shorrocks-familys-brush.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2010/01/in-wrath-and-ill-feeling-they-parted.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2010/01/for-those-readers-who-like-genealogical.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2009/12/shorrocks-country-lancashire-mellor.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2009/12/1881.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2009/12/distant-shorrocks-cousins-meet-up-in.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2009/12/nadine-street-salford-coronation-street.html
http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.com/2009/11/harry-shorrocks-alias-harry-johnson.html
No comments:
Post a Comment