Odds are still stacked against our family as they split apart

A North Norfolk arable farm

Our Tunstall family has completely split up by 1888. My direct ancestors, Jane Betsy and Emma Jane live in a terraced house in London, with my great grandfather Joe Joyce, my four-year-old grandmother May Gertrude and my great uncle Alfred Edward (3), plus a lodger to help pay the bills.

   Mary Ann and Frank Stebbings live in Lowestoft with their two small children, Alfred and Ella. They run a stationers and book shop. Laura and Job Sharpe are working at their ironmongers in Gloucester and have two small daughters Letitia and Elsie. Rosa May is living with her husband, Edward Dennis Ballinger on his farm at Lydney, Gloucester. She is the only one of the Tunstall family involved in farming.

   Jane Betsy's only surviving son Harry Skinner, has left the land. He is a bankrupt. He and his family, wife Emma and children, Mildred, Herbert, Dora, Elsie and Winifred, move to St Augustine, Norwich (picture below). He has taken up shop work again. Sadly, on 8th January 1888, his ten year old daughter, Mildred Louise, who had been doing well at her Norwich school, died.

  The same month on the 31st January, at the age of 69, John Pollard Skinner died in Yarmouth. He had retired from farming. It left Jane Betsy's sister, Eliza Charlotte, a widow. She was his 'relict' and executrix of his estate. At the time Eliza Charlotte lived at 93, St Georges Road, Great Yarmouth. Her husband's death was followed by many auctions and sales, starting with a sale of foals from "Mr Skinner's farming stock" in October. Eliza Charlotte sent some live stock for sale for the Christmas market at the end of the year. T.A. Rising, trustee of the Warnes charity, took out an advertisement for tenders for the farm "in the occupation of the executors of the estate of the late J. P. Skinner," in April 1890. In June, Worship and Rising put three houses, 91, 92 and 94 St Georges Road on the market "by direction of the trustee of the will of the late J. P. Skinner." In September there is a sale of 25 head of horse stock, plant and furniture at Warnes Charity Farm, including foals by "Quicksilver."

   Harry was now the only member of our Tunstall family still living in Norfolk. In February and March 1888 there were notices in The London Gazette for Henry Bately Skinner, bankrupt, farmer of Burlingham St Edmund, to pay off his debt to trustee Alfred Neave, farmer of Ludham, at our Norwich solicitors.

  Being familiar with pounds shillings and pence (and also liking a challenge,) I was able to calculate the amount Harry paid Alfred Neave. According to The London Gazette notice, at 4s/9d in the pound, I worked out he paid £348.10s.11d. According to the bankruptcy case, this was owed by Harry to the fund kept by the Norwich solicitors. This is the money his late father had wished him to put aside to top up his mother's (Bately) annuity. If my calculations are right, it was £1.10s.1d. short of the amount Alfred Neave invested into a mortgage with our Norwich solicitors on 6th December 1887. That information is from the letter from our 'rebranded' Norwich solicitors, sent twenty five years later to great grandmother Emma Jane when she was prompted by a query from the probate department of Somerset House to inquire about it.

    At this time the other trustee of the Skinner and Bately trusts, Sherwood William Page, is busy with the reorganisation of local administration. He is elected the first county councillor for West Flegg in 1888, a position which he holds until his death eight years later.

     Also in March 1888, the former publisher of the Daylight, now out of prison and bankrupted by solicitors' fees when he lost a libel case against him, joined with several other members of the Unemployed Relief Fund. He applied to take out a summons for libel against the Norwich District Visiting Society and the Norfolk Chronicle. The society had published criticisms of his activities in the newspaper: "Certain persons are not entitled to constitute themselves almoners of the general public as an excuse for pursuing their favourite policy of sending round the hat and beating the drum in the manner of other mountebanks."  

   The money lenders are still operating near our Norwich solicitors in Castle Meadows under a different name, the Eastern Counties Advance and Investment Association. The Norwich solicitors' London agent, Martelli of Staple Inn, who made Jane Betsy and Rosa May defendants in the chancery case, returned to his roots in Norwich to get married to Miss Leggatt of Crofton Manor in October 1889. According to the report, they  met on the beautiful Norfolk Broads. Our Norwich solicitor, the one who dealt with Alfred Neave, goes to the sumptuous wedding. The expensive presents are listed in the report, which states the happy couple honeymoon in Paris.

   The other partner of our Norwich solicitors had been on the school board with the publisher of the Daylight earlier in the decade. At meetings of the board, the publisher of the Daylight had accused him of vested interests in handling the property the school board had bought for development. In 1889 the man, who had originally owned the property the school board bought, was advertising pasture land to let at Tunstall.  

   Not all shire hall cases are reported in the Norfolk, press, although the Thetford and Watton Times and Peoples Weekly Journal, published one in November 1890 which interested me.

  The manager of the Eastern Counties Advance and Investment Association is suing a Norwich jeweller for £9. It is his commission for introducing him to our Norwich solicitors. They had reduced their fees to the jeweller for a property transaction, by four guineas. He has paid our Norwich solicitors £17.6s for the transaction, plus the interest due of 3s/9d and didn't see why he should pay the Eastern Counties Advance and Investment Association £9 in addition. The judge remarked "for the plaintiff to charge £9 for doing what he did, why, there are plenty in this court would do the same for less than half that amount."

   It is difficult to track Harry down in the years after his bankruptcy when he and his family lived in Norwich. He doesn't use his full name of Harry (or Henry) Bately Skinner whilst he lives there. He was unsuccessful in a bid to join the St Augustine board of guardians. He starts to work as a canvasser for Thomas Moy, coal merchants, operating from Aylsham Road.

   The fortunes the Skinner cousins of Thrigby are also in decline after the death of their father, as can be seen from the events of the following decade. Picture below of St Augustine, Norwich.