Tales of Tunstall, Norfolk

This story started in Tunstall in 1991 and ended here thirty two years later. I emerged from Stoke Newington station in the pouring rain to walk the wet pavements, and avoid the splashes from the flooded crossings, to explore Abney Park Cemetery. As I was early for my appointment I explored gingerly, for the paths were loamy, puddled and slippery. Where among the bare trees and ivy-clad hidden gothic-style memorials would I find what I was looking for? I met up with Haydn who works for Abney Park and Hackney Council. My expectations were low. I thought she might have located a ruinous concealed memorial and together, we would clear the ivy and weeds to try to decipher what was written. I was wrong. Haydn and her colleagues are working on clearing and researching the memorials. They had cleared the way and tidied the tomb of my ancestors. I had not expected it.   

  Here she is, Jane Betsy Skinner of Tunstall in an elegant crinoline. This photograph was taken in Great Yarmouth in the late 1850s, judging from the quality of the image and the style of the dress.      Jane Betsy was born at nine o'clock in the morning at Tunstall on the 21st January 1823.     She had an older sister, Harriett Virtue. All her younger sisters,  Eliza Charlotte, Emma, Charlotte and Louisa were also born at Tunstall. One of their parents, Stephen or Harriott Bately kept a notebook with a pencil record of the date and time each of them was born.     In 1831, Jane Betsy was given a sketchbook for her eighth Birthday. She filled it with her  competent and stylish drawings. They depict rural life, including cottages, distant mills, streams, milking buckets and three-legged stools.    When she was almost nine years old, on 7th January 1832, Jane Betsy and her family were subjected to an armed robbery at Tunstall, re...

  I am still surprised to have ancestors who lived in such a remote area. They left it, because, in common with families all over England, the Inclosure Acts of Parliament stimulated a steady exodus from remote rural villages such as Tunstall. The practice of enclosing land, to make agriculture more efficient, maximise land rents and create areas for the 'recreations' of hunting and shooting, increased the flow of families, like mine, from the land to find employment in the cities.      I was having an email discussion with my co-researchers about the possible impact of enclosures on my Tunstall ancestors. They found maps and allocations in Tunstall and Cantley. They also identified 3rd great grandfather Stephen Bately as being the largest landowner in Tunstall, plus a few additional pieces of land which he enclosed. By extending his freeholds, it is arguable, he could have, inadvertently, contributed to the decline in the fortunes of his descendants at Tunstall. ...

Alfred Neave, above, was married to 3rd great aunt Emma. He came to the rescue when the close relatives of my Tunstall ancestors were in trouble in 1887 . The farmers who married my 3rd great grandparents' daughters took on responsibilities they could never have anticipated. Francis Allard, apparently, didn't recover from the death of his wife Charlotte. His tendency to drink too much alcohol is in many press reports. It makes me think there was more than one person of that name with a drink problem.    Francis Allard and Sherwood William Page were executors for their mother-in-law, Harriet Bately. Apart from that and the friendship of his daughter Ednalenna with Rosa May, who was at his house in the 1881 census, Francis Allard doesn't feature much in our family saga. After all, our lot were tea drinkers. There is one exception, Francis Allard's daughter, Bertha Kett, is listed in my great grandparents address book.    Jane Betsy and her sisters could be maintained i...

  The Moreton Bay took Arthur (57, farmer) and his wife Maud (55), Kathleen (27, home help), Olive (24, domestic), Ena (22, domestic), Arthur (20, clerk), Doreen (18, clerk) and Lucy (14, scholar) to start a new life in Australia in 1926.   Arthur Skinner gave up trying to make a living farming in Norfolk in 1926. He, his wife Maud and his entire family emigrated on the Moreton Bay to Sydney. The farm he left was on the edge of the broads. It was beginning to be easier to make a living catering for visitors in the area than from farming.    Arthur's eldest son, John William Irvine Skinner had preceded him to the Antipodes. He had emigrated in 1912 and served in WW1 with the Anzacs. Fourteen years later, the rest of the family joined him in New South Wales. In Moss Vale, where Arthur and Maud lived, there are a couple of street names which caught my eye. One is Arthur Street and the other Chapman Street, (Maud's maiden name).    At this time, Arthur's sister...

Picture of  Thomas  Moy's coal trucks. Thomas Moy started his enterprise in Colchester. By the 1890s he was organising many more coal agencies and depots in London and the East of England. Photograph supplied by railway historian and photographer J.E.Connor. My Norfolk ancestors from Tunstall moved from remote rural living to urban life. When her cousin Stephen died at Corporation Farm, Thrigby on 5th June 1896, great grandmother Emma Jane and her mother Jane Betsy heard about it at their home in Stoke Newington. Brother Harry heard the news at St Augustine, Norwich. His four children were doing well at the Norwich schools and colleges, especially in physiognomy and drawing.     Harry had been running the farm at Burlingham St Edmund until 1887, when he sold everything and took Mr Rising's advice to file for bankruptcy. After that he worked as a draper. Five years later he became a canvasser (or salesman) for coal merchant Thomas Moy, when Moy's took over f...

This superb picture of reed harvesting in east Norfolk comes from Norfolk Tales, Myths and More The documents and letters kept in my family tell a story of a rapid decline in fortunes and an apparent splitting up. The name and relationships with the Skinners was forgotten or ignored. Investigating this in the 1980s my mother obtained a copy of Jane Betsy's, 2nd great grandmother's, wedding certificate with James Pollard Skinner, 2nd great grandfather. The wedding was in Caister rather than Tunstall, where he and his father were running the farm she had been living on with her parents and sisters.   On the certificate are listed the names of six men, including Jane Betsy's father. It looks as if there was no escape for James Pollard Skinner. He would inherit an obligation to the Bately's from his father and he would take on the further responsibility of a wife and family. Apart from Jane Betsy's father, uncles William Barnard Crow, G.C. Bately, N.O.Bately, John C. No...