The important matter of bonds, trustees and furniture...

I have more or less unravelled what has turned out to be the story of the most intriguing complexity. The picture above is of the curio shop in Norwich which we visited in the spring four years ago. Hanging up are fox furs. The fox furs are significant to my sister and I because our grandmother Gertrude May, used to organise whist drives at our house in the London suburbs for political fundraising.
   I now think my older sister was probably asked to keep me out of these fundraising events, because I was an outspoken child and probably upset a few of my grandmother's guests. My grandmother, Gertrude May could be formidable when she was cross. My aunt Nancy confirmed this when I was an adult. Apparently I was in serious trouble for what I announced to my grandmother's guests at her whist drives at the age of four or five. I've always been articulate. Auntie Nancy remembered I explained to her at the time: "I listens, I takes it all in and I lets it all out when I wants to." So, my sister and I, exiled from the whist drives, used to stroke the fox furs hanging on our hall stand, touch the beady little eyes and they exuded whiffs from moth balls. It's a very powerful memory.

  So is the memory of the old fashioned furniture which used to crowd our grandparents room in the semi-detached house seven of us lived in. My grandparents used to sit me on the "tall boy" to keep me out of mischief and to tick me off. It was far too high for me to get down. Cousin Marian remembers, as I do, having dinner and tea at the huge dining table with our family and often other guests too. That dining table was almost big enough to play table tennis on, although when we moved to a larger house, we bought a table tennis table which fitted over it. It was worth crawling under this dining table to explore the legs, with their lioness or panther faces on them. Some of the dark wood dining chairs survive which used to surround the table. They are quite ornate and very old fashioned.

   I mention all this, because furniture appears in my story a bit. It features strongly in Stephen Bately's will for his widow Harriet. When there was a furniture auction at Tunstall, by Messrs Spellman in 1875, I think it likely the pieces belonged to both the Skinners and the Batelys. For example, there were three dining tables. After James Thomas Skinner died September 1887, the furniture, described as 'modern' at his Reedham farm is advertised to be auctioned. Almost at the same time,  Harry auctions the furniture at his farm in Burlingham before he files for bankruptcy on the advice of Mr Rising. In Stephen Bately and his wife Rebecca Skinner's 1895 letter to Emma Jane and Joe in London, the Norfolk Sheriff and Bailiffs are threatening to remove furniture to pay the revenues due, until Mr Rising intervenes and gets the crops and farm implements valued instead.

  Thanks to the findings of my co-researchers, we know the Bately estate was mostly land at Tunstall and included the farm buildings and farmhouse Emma Jane (my great grandmother) and her mother, Jane Betsy, grew up in. There was also some land at Cantley. The letting of these properties was expected to pay for Jane Betsy's and her surviving sisters' annuities according to their father's will. With returns in agriculture diminishing and the increasing remoteness, particularly of Tunstall, this must have been difficult.

   Newspaper reports of Stephen Bately's marriage with Harriet Crow in 1814 describe her as the daughter of John Crow of Wickhampton and one of seven daughters. It could, of course, be a misprint. Instead of banns there was a bond, which had a caveat "harmless and indemnified" for Strachey the representative of the archbishop, should anything be dodgy about the bond. Another sister of Harriet's, Clementine was married by bond too, but I can't find evidence of any other sisters or bonds. Stephen Bately then took out a second bond, for his six daughters in 1840. This time Samuel Crow of Southtown Yarmouth and James Skinner of Tunstall, would guarantee his six daughters, Harriet Virtue, Jane Betsy, Eliza Charlotte, Emma, Charlotte and Louisa would receive a £500 dowry and benefit from the revenues of his estates.

   In his six-page essay of a will, Stephen Bately is keen to negate the 1814 bond in favour of the 1840 bond entirely. As long as his widow and executrix Harriet agrees to do so, she can have a nice little annuity and all his books, plate and (probably) loads of furniture, even if she marries again.

  What do I make of this? I could be wrong, but it suggests to me that not all the daughters of Stephen Bately, who are so carefully enumerated in his will, have the same mother. His, widow, 23 years his junior, knows this (well of course she would), and so do his trustees, William Sherwood Page and Robert Crow the younger of Henham. This could also explain why my Ancestry researches and matches are closer to one of Jane Betsy's sisters, rather than another.