In the previous blog, I told the stories of three children born in the 19th century, based on what I could find out about their lives from their christening mugs. This post will cover the rest of the christening mugs which I have in my collection, but I’ll begin with the odd one out. I bought all but one of mugs as a job lot in an auction some years ago, but there was already one on my shelf, which had been handed down to me through the family. However, when I investigated its provenance, it wasn’t quite what I thought.

The Mystery Mug

I have a decorated mug sitting on the shelf which bears the name of my great grandfather. It’s inscribed Thomas William Picken 1862. But here’s the thing: he was born in 1834. And there’s no one else on the family tree who it could possibly be. So as he would have been 28 in that year, what could this mean? It’s a large mug, good enough for a strong cup of tea rather than the dainty little mugs for children to hold milk. Most of the others that I have are quite small, by comparison. But perhaps it was also a custom to give personalised mugs as birthday presents to adults?

But no – it seems that this is a shaving mug. I found the relevant information on an American website, since there seems to be much more interest in the history of barber shops in the USA than there is in the UK, and hence a study there of the mugs themselves:
Mugs purchased and held at barbershops were customized with the client’s name and often displayed to encourage the customer to return to the barbershop regularly. Most barber shaving mugs were imported from France or Germany undecorated: it was customary to have the mug then hand decorated with the shaver’s occupation and name….
Barber shops sold mugs with the owners’ names on them partly because they thought that shaving rash came from sharing the same soap. In reality, the rash was not a result of soap but of un-sterilized razors. ‘The Sharpologist’

So that’s something new to add to the story of decorated mugs! My great-grandfather Thomas Picken was himself a Chemist & Druggist, and so might have been especially keen to avoid infection. Perhaps it was given to him as a gift, or perhaps he could order a mug from the supplier who provided him with other apothecary jars, which likewise were often ceramic, with beautiful decoration and calligraphy. (Selections below include a Delft jar on the left and a Spanish one on the right)

The Unidentifed Babies

Before I come to the three christening mug stories for this post, I should also pay tribute to those owners who proved elusive to research.

Alas, I cannot trace William Pedley 1848, M. Lightfoot 1855, or Alice Barber born Mar 19 1866! There are multiple possible entries for each of them, and no clues as to the areas of their births. Many different locations for babies of these same names appear in the birth registers, including Yorkshire, Wiltshire and London. Although Alice’s mug has an exact date, the registers only state the quarter year of birth, so it would require applying for certificates for all the Alice Barbers born in the first quarter of 1866 to find the right one.

Below, you can see their very pretty mugs, some of the most charming in the collection

But the good news……is that for all the mugs I have traced, the children lived into adulthood. In the second half of the 19th century, at least one in ten babies died before their first birthday, and older children were vulnerable to infections and accidents. Perhaps this set of babies had a better start in life than some; although not in the top rungs of society, several of those I’ve traced were born into a well-off family, or one where there was solid employment for the father. Although no one in Victorian Britain was completely protected from infection or mishap, the dangers of early death must have been higher for the very poor.

Ronald Arthur Shipstone

Ronald Arthur Shipstone was born on Nov 29th 1880, in Basford, Derbyshire, and he was to become a pillar of society. His father James was a brewer, and the Shipstone brewery became a mighty enterprise, with Ronald Arthur eventually taking its helm as Managing Director. James had at least six children, and was able to call the brewery ‘James Shipstone and Sons’. It ran for almost a century and a half, from 1852 to 1991.

Ronald Shipstone supported many charities, was President of numerous associations, and became a benefactor to various Nottingham hospitals and medical institutions through his will. He married Patty Theodora Woodhouse in 1913, but as far as I can see, had only one child – another Ronald – who died in 1930. Perhaps this lack of heirs is why he distributed his fortune so widely among good causes when he died in 1944. His fortune at his death in 1944 was recorded as £334,065 – approximately £15 million pounds in today’s money. The turnout for his funeral was enormous, according to the newspapers:

‘Large Gathering At Funeral Of Mr. R. A. Shipstone’
A long column of uniformed special constables marched in the funeral cortege yesterday of Mr. Ronald Arthur Shipstone. Commander of the Nottingham Special Constabulary, of Lucknow House, Mapperley Park. Nottingham, who died last Friday, aged 64…There were so many wreaths that a special dray had to be used to carry them, and the concourse of the mourners at the church was tremendous…A guard of honour of special constables was in attendance upon the coffin, which was draped with the Union Jack. Nottingham Journal, 22nd Nov. 1944.

His story is a worthy one. He fulfilled his parents’ expectations, succeeded in business, and became a public benefactor. And that’s where I’m content to leave it, although for anyone interested in further details, a family history website gives more detailed information. At any rate, I have his christening mug, a reminder that this brewing magnate and philanthropist was once a tiny helpless infant.

Joe Singleton

In brief, this is the Quiet Life of Joe Singleton who was born on July 24th 1861, in Halifax, West Yorkshire. Details of his life are scanty, but I can report that he went to school (not all children did), became an iron moulder, then a foreman at his work. He married a woman called Sarah, and lived in Leeds with her and their two children at the time (1901), a boy and a girl. Joe, like Ronald Shipstone, seems to have died in 1944, aged 83. To his descendants, there may be much more to say about Joe, but this is as far as my investigations have led.

W. H. C. Gayner

And finally, in the christening mug collection, we come to W. H. C. Gayner, which opens up a different type of story, one where family history, geography, religion and economics all play a part. I’m pleased to have had this opportunity to delve into these areas, and see more of the background against which his life story unfolded.

Although it can be difficult to research a name with only initials, and especially if there is no date or place of birth, the combination of these three initials did prove enough to identify William Heydon Champneys Gayner, born 11 Nov 1888 in Gloucestershire, and buried in Birmingham in 1949.

As with Emily Cranfield, the questions that surfaced aroused my curiosity. In particular, why did William’s father, John Edward Gayner, move from rural Filton near Bristol to the city of Birmingham? And why or how did he change his occupation from that of farmer to being a manufacturer? This was a big leap, and unusual for the times.

Luckily, a local history website has filled in some of the gaps here, showing that the clash between the non-conformism and the established church played its part. The Gayners were an old Quaker family who had lived in this and the nearby Thornbury area for generations, and there were other Quakers in the area too, such as the Champneys, whose name William also bore.

Although Filton is now an outlying urban district of Bristol, it was at that time countryside. The Gayners worked the land that they owned there, but in common with other staunch Quakers and non-Conformists, they refused to pay tithes to the Church of England. This meant that they were hard hit by fines, which in this case gradually eroded their holdings. The website reveals that William H. C. Gayner’s grandfather, another William, stood by his beliefs:

William GAYNER, (1754-1830) took over both Church Farm and Meadowsweet Farm in 1787, Congyre in 1790 and Late Millett’s Farm in 1792, the first and latter of which were called Upper House and Lower House by his family. His farm products were gradually taken away by warrants for non-payment of tythes. On one occasion in 1783, John Owen II and Benjamin Pierce had to take ten sacks of wheat valued £16 3/6 from Gayner’s farms for the rector, Francis Ward. William Gayner was Filton’s principal employer and kept diaries of work done, mainly telling of the activities of his daymen, carters, oxen and horses and records of his sales and purchases in connection with the farm. (Bristol & Avon Family History Society – Filton area)

William junior, W.C. H. of the christening mug, seen above, spent part of his childhood at Meadowsweet farm, mentioned above. But in 1901, the census records that he was living instead at 81 Kingsdown Parade, Bristol, with three siblings, but no parents. This might seem very strange indeed, but I think this was due to poor census keeping. I actually lived in in Somerset Street, Bristol for 13 years, which is the next street in parallel to Kingsdown Parade. And while doing some house history research, I found that our house and the adjoining one were used in earlier times as a small boarding school. (Ours had been the girls’ house, and had a huge lock on the front door!) Apparently, in the 19th century, Gloucestershire farming families frequently sent their children to Bristol, to get a good education. Facilities were presumably limited in their own areas, and roads in Gloucestershire were notoriously bad, often choked with mud in the winter months. Boarding school was the obvious practical option.The big houses in these two roads, Kingsdown Parade and Somerset Street, were ideal for modest, small schools, serving the yeoman farmers who could afford to educate both their boys and girls there. So my supposition is that the census entry for William is poorly recorded, since it doesn’t indicate a head of the household, as it should, and has failed to mention that this is not a family home but a school boarding house. Probably too, further census research might clarify this, although such schools often came and went quite quickly.

Then, in 1911, William’s parents John and Charlotte have moved with their children to Edgbaston in Birmingham. The family is fully back together again. And I can confirm that a Edgbaston is a very pleasant leafy area, despite being almost central, since I myself went to school there! But there is no more farming for the Gayners, and suddenly John Edward (b Filton) 53 is Managing Director of a Woodturning Company, of which our William is the Company Secretary. Mother Charlotte is 48, sister Elsie Charlotte, 24, a ‘Musical Student and Teacher’, while Helen Lucy, 20, is a bookkeeper. They have 9 rooms in the house at 81 Ryland Road.

What has brought about this remarkable change? Perhaps it was partly the decline in their farming fortunes, but I think it was more likely that they started to sell off their farmland for building. Filton now began to grow: Between the wars, Filton expanded rapidly to become a suburb of Bristol. Terraced and semi-detached housing was built in small estates on both sides of the A38 trunk road. A housing estate was laid out in the 1920s covering much of GAYNER’s land and one of the first roads was named GAYNER Road in recognition of the family’s long association with the parish. (Bristol & Avon Family History Society – Filton area) Eventually, it became the local centre for the aerospace industry and retained a small airfield until 2012. (I had personal experience of this in 1999, when our flight from Bristol to Amsterdam, was transferred to Filton because of fog at Bristol airport. We were bussed from there to Filton and took off from what seemed to be an almost toy-sized airfield!) So the Gayners, deprived of some of their fortune by intolerant and greedy church authorities, must have been pleased to turn the tables and make good money from their remaining land.

Birmingham offered good manufacturing opportunities. There may be more to the reasons why John Edward and Charlotte Gayner chose to uproot to this spot, but cash in the bank and good prospects for enterprise must have driven their decision to a large extent. However, it’s also worth mentioning that other Quaker businesses did well in Birmingham, the most famous example being of course Cadbury’s chocolate empire at Bournville. (When the wind blew in the right direction, we could smell the liquid chocolate on the air as we walked in through the school gates!)

Son William (W.H.C.) served in World War One, in the British Red Cross Soc & Order of St John, and was awarded the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal. In 1920, he married Emmeline Ewell at Eastry, near Sandwich, in Kent. And oddly enough, this is yet another place connected with my life, as Sandwich was where I spent a large part of my childhood.

In 1939, William appears in the National Register as a manufacturer, living at 9 Hintlesham Ave Edgbaston, B’ham. He died 17 April, 1949, leaving £52,507 to his wife Emmeline, to Margaret Ewell Gayner, spinster, and to John Veale Gayner, student. The family had made a huge shift since his childhood in the fields of rural Filton, in Gloucestershire.

And this rounds off my journey through the christening mugs and their stories. I hope they will have engaged you too. Next time you go to an antiques shop or auction, if you spot an object with a name, such as a sampler or a christening mug, give it a little nod of recognition. Here is someone’s personal history, a story that you might be able to tease out if you have the time and the inclination.

Next time….

We are heading into Halloween and I have a couple of spooky posts coming up, on Haunted Dartmoor and Ghostly Topsham. Please join me for a frisson of fear on Oct 31st and Nov 14th.