 
THE WAYMOUTHS : DEVON VENTURERS

By David Waymouth

Published by D C R Waymouth at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 D.C.R.Waymouth

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 HERITAGE AND HISTORY

CHAPTER 2 ENGLISH FAMILY, CELTIC ROOTS

CHAPTER 3 MALBOROUGH –OVER 400 YEARS ON ONE FARM

CHAPTER 4 EXETER:HOME FROM HOME

CHAPTER 5 MAKER JOHN AND ALL WHO FOLLOW

CHAPTER 6 COCKINGTON, ST MARYCHURCH AND THE MARINERS

CHAPTER 7 ODDS AND ENDS, BITS AND BOBS, AROUND AND ABOUT

CHAPTER 8 ROMANTIC POSTSCRIPT

CHAPTER 1 HERITAGE AND HISTORY

This book is about people. Many of them are from one family. Most of are of little importance as the world judges importance. Together they tell a 1,000 year story which is of the essence English. For a generation which has forgotten or never knew its roots, perhaps it will touch some chord. Anyway it's done. These few notes on what it is about and on what it is not about are partly for anyone who may want to pick up where I leave off. They set the scene.

THE WHEN, WHERE, WHY AND HOW OF ONE FAMILY

A cousin drew up a family tree of the Waymouths with over 200 names on it. Although he claimed to descend, through his Glanville great-grandmother, from some Viking brigand turned respectable by becoming a Norman and powerful enough to help William seize the throne of England, he could not find a Waymouth ancestor born earlier than 1727. In my innocence, I wondered why. That is how and why this book came to be written.

As it was primarily for members of the family and only incidentally for a wider audience it will, perhaps, from time to time become a bit 'who begat who'. However I have tried to set the family into its wider context. Going back over eight centuries, as this study does, could cover twenty generations or more. If one zealously tracked back all the male and female lines and if no cousins had married there could be well over 2,000 other family lines to follow back apart from Waymouth should one wish. That is why my main aim has been to show the background, the historical setting, for a family which in many ways is typically English and particularly, peculiarly Devonian.

What I have not yet done is to study the Waymouths of North America, of Cornwall and the rest of England and any of them born much after 1900 and very few after 1800. The American link may be especially important although a recent gene match only shows a relatively modern migration there.

It has been a detective story with too many missing clues but I hope it gives the family a sense of belonging and others an insight in to what made Englishmen the way we are.

DEVON IN THE WEST

For those less familiar with English geography, most of this book is about people who lived in Devon which is something over 200 miles West South West of London in the South of England. Only Cornwall lies between Devon and Land's End. It is the largest county, dominated by the granite uplands of Dartmoor with a fringe of fertile coastal lowland. The Waymouths lived mainly in the southern half of this coastal land and at the time we are looking at this strip contained the five most important towns, Exeter in the East, Totnes, Torquay, Dartmouth and Plymouth round to the West, on the border with Cornwall. All of them with ports sitting on rivers flowing off the moors.

DIFFICULT TO FIND OUT ABOUT WAYMOUTHS

The Waymouths are a Devonian family. Few of them have left any trace other than their birth, death and marriage. In too many cases they have not even done that so that in tackling the hunt for ancestors most Waymouths have a tough job getting back earlier than 1800 and very few get beyond 1700. Record keeping was haphazard and spasmodic. Many sources have since been lost, destroyed or poorly preserved.

PROBLEMS OF UNDERSTANDING

Particular colonies of Waymouths will be looked at in the following chapters but before doing so there are some general points about this family and their times which those unfamiliar with early English history may find helpful.

VERY FEW RECORDS

The first is not obvious to a generation used to the mass of information stored about each of us on computors, often, even usually, without our knowing it. Apart from births, deaths and marriages the fact that we know anything about them means that they had some standing in their community. To be mentioned in the records you had to own something or be responsible for something - or be caught doing something wrong. Even then, most of the records have been lost or destroyed.

VERY FEW PEOPLE

The second will be more comprehensible to a New Zealander than to an Englishman. There were about 2,000,000 people in England in 1500, 4,000,000 by 1600, 5,250,000 in 1650 and then a decline until 1675 to 5,000,000 where it stabilised. Today there are ten times as many. We can watch Waymouths increase and decline to match this general pattern but there weren't very many people and they did not get about very much.

Something else New Zealanders will understand, especially if from Auckland, is that throughout English history about a quarter of the population lived in one big city, London. What happened there did profoundly affect the lives of provincial Devonians even though they were over 200 miles away .London was two or three days travel from Exeter and to get there would have been hard going. So much so that most trade went by sea.

Devon was remote and sparsely populated so any information about Waymouths in a given village or town is more likely than not to be about the same few families in that place. Although in the Bronze Age there had been a relatively large and wealthy population living up on Dartmoor in order to mine the tin that was shipped all over Europe, by Norman times the main settlements were South of Dartmoor, spread out in an arc from Exeter in the East to Plymouth in the West. By the Conquest Devon was already a recognised entity, called Defenascire by the Saxons.

NORMAN DOMINANCE

The Saxons having displaced the Britons, they in turn were displaced by the conquering Normans. Out of 1,000 manors in 1086, only 54 were still held by Saxons. 560 of these manors were held by six Normans. It was they and their successors who held the land which the Waymouths farmed. There are thought to have been 10,000 farms in Devon at this time, most of them small, most of them farmed by a family with few if any paid help. Small fields, isolated homesteads, many of the farms were still little larger even fifty years ago. Today the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union has caused amalgamations and diversification to an agriculture which until recently had changed little throughout the five hundred years and more that Waymouths are known to have farmed in Devon.

ALL IN 500 SQUARE MILES

The South Ham which cover most of this populated area are hilly, well-watered, fertile (much of it is Devon red soil, the best, although, oddly, deriving geologically from ancient deserts) and intersected by deep valleys which end in usable ports - Exeter, Powderham, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Tormoham[later called Torquay], Brixham, Dartmouth, Kingsbridge and Plymouth - and it is home to the Waymouths whether as farmers, traders or seamen. This is the third point: almost all come from an arc not more than 50 miles wide by 10 miles deep.

FREQUENTLY IN THE WARS

The fourth point to note is that, for almost all the time covered in this book, England was at war or recovering from war and, even in times of peace, prosperity was not the norm, pestilence was common. Waymouths were involved whether just being listed on the Muster Rolls with their arms and taxable worth or actually away fighting. There are two Waymouth badges, part of coats of arms, both of which indicate military service. The first is very simple, often a sign of antiquity. It is a black shield with a golden diagonal stripe on which two silver arrows are placed. The crest is a mailed fist grasping three arrows and this is used by all branches of the family.

The second shield is more complex. The top half is again black and separated from the bottom by a black belt which also indicates military action. The bottom half has six alternate white and blue diagonal stripes. Such stripes are sometimes a count of actual campaigns or battles in which the first to bear the arms took part. On these stripes is a swan swimming on waves and one cannot but wonder if there is here a maritime connection. We have no date for either.

We know that Henry the banker, of whom more anon, used the first badge, quartered with his wife's, I think, but whether this was just nouveau riche vanity or preservation of a long tradition we do not know. I would be happy with the latter although money was not short. My guess for the bearers of the second badge would be the Cockington Waymouths and they, too, will be looked at later. The point I believe is that this family were frequently sending sons to war, often to sea but also as soldiers.

Much of the land they farmed was owned by the Earls of Devon, the Courtenays, and their family was by a long way the most powerful in Devon. It would be likely that the Earls would demand military service from their tenants whether engaged on behalf of the monarch abroad or in internal battles such as the War of the Roses. The Careys of Cockington were responsible under Lord Howard of Effingham for the defence of West Country shores against the Armada. It would be inconceivable that his Waymouth tenants could or would want to avoid service and we know that Christopher Waymouth was Master of one of the ships sent to meet the Armada.

IGNORE THE SPELLING

Finally, a trivial point perhaps, but we must ignore the ancients' spelling. I have so far collected over 40 different spellings of the name - much of it by semi-literate clerks trying not too hard to understand the broad Devon brogue they probably despised and which may have still had an extra Celtic overlay.

With these general ideas in mind - (a) very limited information, but if there is any then it indicates a status above the generality, (b) very few people and little mobility, (c) an area of interest only fifty miles long by ten miles wide, (d) a time of war and political and religious flux, not much security and little prosperity and (e) nobody could spell Waymouth right - we can look at the different places and families in turn with the dual purpose of searching out our relations and looking at our heritage as a family.

CHAPTERS' ORDER

The following chapters have been put in the order they are partly for chronological reasons but also to sort out where we are from and where we are not. After a look at our ancient and common Celtic roots, applicable, I believe to all Devonian Waymouths, it seemed best to follow through the two 'certain' family lines, those of Henry of Exeter and Joshua of Snape. These both take us to Malborough and Kingsbridge and establish the farming and Baptist/Quaker roots from which the New Zealand families all grew. Exeter and the move to a wider world follows.

Next there is a chapter on the Maker Waymouths from whom many in New Zealand and some in Australia are descended. This includes some fringe matters which widen our view of Waymouth affairs, particularly dealing with ships and the Navy but also some of the false trails that have tempted others, and me, from time to time. This is designed to save others work rather than debunk attractive theories.

A look at Cockington more or less 'eliminates it from our enquiries' for direct ancestry but describes an aspect of our Waymouth heritage which confirms rather than weakens my belief that Devonian Waymouths are all cousins. It may be of direct interest to the branches who trace themselves well back in time in the Torqauay area.

Other Waymouth episodes in Cornwall and elsewhere in England follow and have, I hope, a tidying up effect. Finally there was a summarising job to do and that is the last chapter, in which I allow my imagination some rein.

The Navy happens to have been my profession so if there seems a lot about ships and the sea that is a foible. Attlee said about Churchill's History of the English-speaking Peoples, 'it ought perhaps better be called 'Bits of English history that have interested me'; I stand convicted in the same terms when it comes to Waymouths. By and large I use the Waymouth spelling that I grew up with but if your name is Weymouth this is for you as well.

Far and away the most important stock of Waymouth records is in the Devon Record Office in Exeter. In the associated but separate Studies Library across the passage is a good collection of the books that contain references and analyses of those records. In the Library there is a marvellous card index which can save hours of speculative browsing. I am ashamed to say that I was too sheeny and too infrequently there to join some of the helpful organisations that keep their libraries for the use of members only so I am sure there are plenty more articles to read and perhaps old documents to pore over: I never ran out of those I could get to see free or in the Record Office. As any family historian knows the International Genealogical Index produced by the Church of Latter Day Saints is a useful but by no means infallible indicator that there may be buried treasure.

Plymouth and Truro Record Offices have less on Waymouths but the Kingsbridge Quaker Minute Book is available to scholars in Plymouth. The British Museum has little and my searches in the Public Record Office at Kew have been minimal and largely fruitless although I know that their naval archives and Customs Port Books might offer much to a patient researcher. My other main source of information however has been countless books, too many to record here, which have given me background feel, I hope, for what was happening around our ancestors as they coped with living through war, famine, pestilence and religious persecution. I have listed some at the back.

Almost inevitably I have come closer to our present time than my original question 'Why nothing before 1727?' but that is how it came out as I worked.

CHAPTER 2 ENGLISH FAMILY, CELTIC ROOTS

KING AETHALSTAN AND THE WAYMOUTHS

Waymouth is a Celtic name and is first reported in the reign of King Aethalstan. The first Waymouths took their name from place rather than occupation or kin.

'Way' is the equivalent of Wye (or Gwy, in modern Welsh) and means 'river'. 'River Wye' or 'River Avon' are linguistically redundant. That Wye and Avon both meant river was not understood by the invading Saxons and later English. 'Mouth' has the usual meaning of reaching the sea but was sometimes used to describe the junction of two rivers. There is a River Avon just West of where most Waymouths were settled but not, as far as I know, a Wye.

The Celtic root of the name and our first encounter with it in Aethalstan's time is deeply bedded in the history of Devon. From the time the Romans left in 410 AD, the Saxons had been pressing Westwards in to Devon not usually as an invading army but just land-hungry in a sparsely populated area. As they did so they drove a wedge between two populations of Britons they called the Welsh and the Western Welsh.

The Celts themselves had been long in occupation, assimilating or, as the gene record now tells us, being assimilated by the indigenous tribes who had lived in Devon on and off since 40,000 BC. The land bridge with the rest of Europe was still just there. The Celts and in particular, latterly, the Belgae spread West from 3,000 BC onwards. The Welsh, Devonians, Cornish and Bretons all spoke the same Brythionic version of the Celtic, Aryan language. Gaelic is a different Celtic language.

Some of these Western Welshmen or Britons retreated West in to Cornwall where they still are, others emigrated to Brittany, in France, where they displaced the native peoples and introduced their language. They called the bits they seized Dumnonie and Cornuaille after the two main tribal groups which today we call Devonians and Cornish. What had been Armorica to the Romans became Brittany.

THE WESTERN WELSH WHO STAYED

Some stayed behind in Devon. Those who stayed mostly came to terms with the aggressors. In many cases they were more cultured than the Saxons and most were Christians, spiritually stimulated by St Patrick's missionaries from Ireland. There was inter-marriage but their legal status was inferior to the Saxons. If you killed a Celt you were fined less than if you killed a Saxon.

Place names in Devon today are almost all of Saxon origin although some are a blend [Moretonhampstead is my favourite] and some, especially in the South Hams, which is a main focus for any study of Waymouths, are still of purely Celtic origin. Such a place is Cornworthy which is one of the places we first hear of Waymouths. It is, I believe, highly significant that in Saxon times the road from Kingsbridge to Totnes was referred to as 'the Welsh way.' Early Waymouths are spread along and a short way beyond the ends of this axis.

EXETER CLEANSED OF 'THAT FILTHY RACE'

The Saxon Kings forced the peripheral local chieftains to swear allegiance to them whether in Scotland, Wales or Devon - they hardly penetrated Cornwall. King Edward the Elder did this and when he died his son Aethalstan put in a special effort in Devon. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that he drove the Britons from Exeter and 'cleansed the city of that filthy race'. This was in the period 928 to 935 - 130 years before the Normans invaded. He held councils in Exeter and made land grants which replaced the old pattern of automatic inheritance and allowed the owner to sell or transfer as he wished.

As the spelling of Saxon is even more wayward than that of the church clerks of later times it is hard to decipher - one version of the name comes out as WAEGEMU[TH]A - but some scholar reckoned this was Waymouth in the making.

WAYMOUTH NOT CONNECTED TO WEYMOUTH

Waymouth as a family name almost certainly has nothing to do with the town, Weymouth, some 60 miles East of where we first find people called Waymouth, although, presumably, it, too, had a Celtic root. That place did not feature much in the records until it gained fame as the place where the Black Death landed in England in 1348 although it had been used by the Normans as one of their ports for Normandy since the Conquest. There are almost no Waymouths noted in Dorset, the county where the town of Weymouth is found.

So we have pockets of Celts in a Saxon-dominated community. As with most minority peoples there would be a strong impulse to stick together and this can survive almost unrecognised as a cultural trait long after the original pressure has disappeared. Given that, for farming people, there is also an economic justification for 'keeping it in the family', it is not hard to envisage the dispersed and to some extent dispossessed Waymouths never-the-less maintaining contact through the generations.

NONE IN DOMESDAY BOOK ?

It is odd that none of them seem to have figured in the Domesday Book of 1086. We get the first James and Samuel enrolling deeds in 1222. From then onwards there are spasmodic references to Waymouths or something akin. There are some who might be ancestors but most probably are not - an example is William Wemmewthe in 1259. He is from Eggesford just South of Exmoor which is also close to Wembworthy from where we get several variants on Wemmeworthi. Wembworthy is also of Celtic origin with worthy telling us that this place was the substantial holding - bigger than a ton or tun - of Wemm or Wemba.

By the 1520s the Waymouths feature all over the South Hams but not at Exeter or Plymouth. There are a few earlier references such as the Waymouth taking of the tenancy of Lincombe farm in Henry VII's reign (died 1509) and in the Manor of Cockington in 1489.

PROBLEMS OF UNDERSTANDING

Particular colonies of Waymouths will be looked at in the following chapters but before doing so there are some general points about this family and their times which those unfamiliar with early English history may find helpful.

Very few records

The first is not obvious to a generation used to the mass of information stored about each of us on computors, often, even usually, without our knowing it. Apart from births, deaths and marriages the fact that we know anything about them means that they had some standing in their community. To be mentioned in the records you had to own something or be responsible for something - or be caught doing something wrong. Even then, most of the records have been lost or destroyed, far too many of them by the Germans.

Very few people

The second will be more comprehensible to a New Zealander than to an Englishman. There were about 2,000,000 people in England in 1500, 4,000,000 by 1600, 5,250,000 in 1650 and then a decline until 1675 to 5,000,000 where it stabilised. Today there are twelve times as many. We can watch Waymouths increase and decline to match this general pattern but there weren't very many of them and they did not get about very much.

Something else New Zealanders will understand, especially if from Auckland, is that throughout English history about a quarter of the population lived in one big city, London. What happened there did profoundly affect the lives of provincial Devonians even though they were over 200 miles away - two or three days travel from Exeter and to get to Exeter would have been hard going. So much so that most trade went by sea.

So Devon was remote and sparsely populated: any information about Waymouths in a given village or town is more likely than not to be about the same few families in that place. Although in the Bronze Age there had been a relatively large and wealthy population living up on Dartmoor in order to mine the tin that was shipped all over Europe, by Norman times the main settlements were South of Dartmoor, spread out in an arc from Exeter in the East to Plymouth in the West. By the Conquest Devon was already a recognised entity, called Defenascire by the Saxons.

Norman dominance

The Saxons having displaced the Britons, they in turn were displaced by the conquering Normans. Out of 1,000 manors in 1086, only 54 were still held by Saxons. 560 of these manors were held by six Normans. It was they and their successors who held the land which the Waymouths farmed. There are thought to have been 10,000 farms in Devon at this time, most of them small, most of them farmed by a family with few if any paid help. Small fields, isolated homesteads, many of them were little larger even fifty years ago although today the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union has caused amalgamations and diversification to an agriculture which had changed little throughout the five hundred years and more that Waymouths are known to have farmed in Devon.

All in 500 square miles

The South Hams which cover most of this populated area is hilly, well-watered, fertile (much of it is Devon red soil, the best, although, oddly, deriving geologically from ancient deserts) and intersected by deep valleys which end in usable ports - Exeter, Powderham, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Tormoham [later Torquay], Brixham, Dartmouth, Kingsbridge and Plymouth - and it is home to the Waymouths whether as farmers, traders or seamen. This is the third point: almost all come from an arc not more than 50 miles wide by 10 miles deep.

Frequently in the wars

The fourth point to note is that for almost all the time covered in this book England was at war or recovering from war and even in times of peace, prosperity was not the norm, pestilence was common. Waymouths were involved whether just being listed on the Muster Rolls with their arms and taxable worth or actually away fighting. There are two Waymouth badges, part of coats of arms, both of which indicate military service. The first is very simple, often a sign of antiquity. It is a black shield with a golden diagonal stripe on which two silver arrows are placed. The crest is a mailed fist grasping three arrows and this is used by all branches of the family.

The second shield is more complex. The top half is again black and separated from the bottom by a black belt which also indicates military action. The bottom half has six alternate white and blue diagonal stripes. Such stripes are sometimes a count of actual campaigns or battles in which the first to bear the arms took part. On these stripes is a swan swimming on waves and one cannot but wonder if there is here a maritime connection. We have no date for either.

We know that Henry the banker, of whom more anon, used the first badge, quartered with his wife's, I think, but whether this was just nouveau riche vanity or preservation of a long tradition we do not know. I would be happy with the latter although money was not short. My guess for the second would be the Cockington Waymouths and they, too, will be looked at later. The point I believe is that this family were frequently sending sons to war, often to sea but also as soldiers.

Much of the land they farmed was owned by the Earls of Devon, the Courtenays, and this family was by a long way the most powerful in Devon. It would be likely that the Earls would demand military service from their tenants whether engaged on behalf of the monarch abroad or in internal battles such as the War of the Roses. The Careys of Cockington were responsible under Lord Howard of Effingham for the defence of West Country shores against the Armada. It would be inconceivable that his Waymouth tenants could or would want to avoid service and we know that Christopher Waymouth was Master of one of the ships sent to meet the Armada.

Ignore the spelling

Finally, a trivial point perhaps, but we must ignore the ancients' spelling. I have so far collected over 40 different spellings of the name - much of it by semi-literate clerks trying not too hard to understand the broad Devon brogue they probably despised and which may have still had an extra Celtic overlay.

With these general ideas in mind - (a) very limited information, but if there is any then it indicates a status above the generality, (b) very few people and little mobility, (c) an area of interest only fifty miles long by ten miles wide, (d) a time of war and political and religious flux, not much security and little prosperity and (e) nobody could spell Waymouth right - we can look at the different places and families in turn with the dual purpose of searching out our relations and looking at our heritage as a family.

Chapters' order

The following chapters have been put in the order they are partly for chronological reasons but also to sort out where we are from and where we are not. Starting with Malborough and Kingsbridge establishes the farming and Baptist/Quaker roots from which the Exeter families grew. Next there is a chapter on the Maker Waymouths from whom many in New Zealand and some in Australia are descended. This includes some fringe matters which widen our view of Waymouth affairs, particularly dealing with ships and the Navy but also some of the false trails that have tempted others, and me, from time to time. A look at Cockington more or less eliminates it from our enquiries for direct ancestry. Other Waymouth episodes in Cornwall and elsewhere in England follow and have, I hope, the same tidying up effect. This is designed to save others work rather than debunk attractive theories.

The Navy happens to have been my profession so if there seems a lot about ships and the sea that is a foible. Attlee said about Churchill's History of the English-speaking Peoples, 'it ought perhaps better be called 'Bits of English history that have interested me'; I stand convicted in the same terms when it comes to Waymouths.

Almost inevitably I have come closer to our present time than my original question 'Why nothing before 1727?' but that is how it came out as I worked. Finally there was a summarising job to do and that is the last chapter, in which I allow my imagination some rein.

I may at times have confused where I thought I was clarifying so that has given me a chance to draw all the threads together from early settlers to the present day. For those in a hurry, I hope it almost stands on its own even although you will have skipped some fascinating details

CHAPTER 3 MALBOROUGH – OVER 400 YEARS ON ONE FARM

We know that there have been Waymouths living in South Devon - the South Hams – at least since the reign of Henry VII who died in 1509. It was at that time that the first Waymouth took over the tenancy of the farm at Lincombe from a family called Danyls. That farm remained in Waymouth/Weymouth hands until the 20th century. To this day there is a Weymouth farming land almost adjacent to Lincombe.

By 1569 Richard Waymouth was the richest taxpayer in Malborough and a Presenter of the Muster for that Hundred. Stephen Waymouth is also listed in the 1569 Malborough Muster Roll as a Billman. ['Hundreds' were areas deemed large enough to supply and finance 100 men for the army when required and Presenters were men of local distinction deputed to list and assess the inhabitants. Richard himself was assessed as G7 which compares with a Lord of the Manor at over G100 and most of the listed residents at G1 or 2. Those, such as Stephen, who bore arms were noted with their skill.]

Marriage for profit

Some fifteen farms or holdings (and probably many more) were owned or tenanted in the Kingsbridge/Salcombe area by Waymouths between 1600 and 1900. Many of them border on each other. An elaborate web of dynastic marriages between families - Adams, Cornish, Hingston, Jarvis, Lidstone, Rogers, Yeo and Waymouth - and the judicious selection of named lives for tenancies kept the majority of farms in the area in the hands of a quite small group of relatively wealthy and educated yeomen. A usual method of setting the length of a lease in Devon at this time was for it to be for three named lives or 99 years whichever was the shorter, a premium being payable at each renewal. It was common for the eldest son of a farmer to delay marriage until his father died. Younger sons had to make their way in the world if they could not marry a farmer's daughter without brothers!

The Waymouths were small operators compared with the great landowning families of the area like the Courtenays, Seymours, Carys, Carews, Champernownes, Culmes, Eliots, Langworthys and Mallocks but within their own community they were very much to be reckoned with. We find Waymouths as Presenters, as Elders of their church, as generous benefactors, and as men of substance in the South Hams from the start of effective English record keeping at the end of the 15th Century.

Exeter links

We have already looked briefly at the probability that these South Devon Weymouths, in addition to all being cousins, are related to the Exeter Waymouths from which many readers of this report stem. In the Malborough area there were at least nine different Waymouth families registering births between 1600 and 1610. It is impossible to be sure exactly how many but, as the fathers had seven different Christian names, it is possible there even more.

The effect of thirty years of troubles in the Civil that followed can be seen in the reduction of Weymouth births until they recover at the end of the century. It is then, too, that Exeter begins to be colonised by them perhaps as a direct result of the increasing numbers of them. At the funeral of one Weymouth wife twelve of her sons were round her graveside, poor thing.

Joshua of Snape

We have a passably informative history of a Malborough/Kingsbridge branch, written in 1884 accompanied by an excellent family tree. Sadly it shows that line almost certainly not to be linked to us as direct ancestors after 1650 although my guess is that is about when the lines separate. However, they are an interesting family, almost certainly our cousins, and are worthy of mention because of the insight we get in to our non-conformist past. For many years they lived in Snapes Manor, a large stone-built three-storey house with extensive outbuildings and the next door farm to Lincombe.

Although at present this branch of the family start their tree with Joshua, the first Weymouth tenant of Snape Manor, the Quaker records for Kingsbridge show him to be the son of Robert and Agnes Weaymouth (the indeterminate 'A' and 'E' of the spelling should satisfy both branches)

Robert and Agnes' letter giving their assent in 1687 to Joshua's marriage to Patience Light gives a quaint but moving insight in to the Quaker culture of those early days particularly as Joshua may well have been nearly 40 years old by then! Robert and Agnes lived at Batson, possibly at Batson Hall, behind Salcombe and across the creek from Snapes. Batson is another farm tenanted or owned by Waymouths until early last century.

Robert's parents are not known so positively but very likely were Stephen and Abigail who inherited substantial holdings at West Alvington and Malborough from Stephen's father, James Waymouth of Dodbrooke (part of Kingsbridge today). If so Robert's brothers were Stephen and John - both names of interest in our search for links. Maker John(1727) could have been the son of a Robert and Sarah Weymouth of Antony, 3 miles West of Millbrook and the Parish of Maker but I doubt it.

James leaves a fortune

James died in 1637 leaving a small fortune (£1,270 which today, as much of it was in land, might well be £500,000 or even £1,000,000). In the 1595 Muster Roll we find him listed as having a musket and corslats. In 1606 James Weamouth is mentioned in the Will of Alex Farwell of Kingsbridge. In 1613 James was giving three times as much as any of the 47 other contributors to a Dodbrooke charity so he must then already have been one of the wealthiest men in town.

James' Will, proved at Totnes in 1639, gives several other family details. He had a sister Margaret Linnard and brother William with a son William (who, in turn, had a son William). James left a widow who was to receive £10 a year as long as she didn't contest the Will! This may seem surprising now but was not an unusual bequest for its time. He had another son, Robert, whose son was James. This Robert, too old to be Joshua's father, inherited lands round Kingsbridge whereas Stephen got property in Malborough and West Alvington. [A possible ancestor for the Maker Waymouths.]

James cannot resist bragging that some of this land had been bought of Sir Francis Champernowne, an interesting touch as a Francis Champernowne, possibly the sixth son of Sir Francis, was one of the founders of Maine and a Robert Weymouth was an early settler there and of sufficient status to be Executor of the Will of the first Governor, Sir Ferdinand Gorges.

There is a plausible ancestral line back from James, perhaps through Stephen, the Billman, to Richard who is mentioned in the 1569 Muster Roll as the wealthiest man(G7) in and Presenter for the Malborough Hundred.

Whatever their ancestry, we know that Joshua's second son, Francis Weymouth, was given the tenancy of Snapes Manor by his father on his marriage in 1722 to Sarah Adams. Joshua had taken over the tenancy of Snapes from James Adams who had held it since 1648. At the same time Francis also took over an orchard at Batson Hall 'formerly in the possession of Phillip Waymouth, son of John Waymouth of Malborough......' My guess is that John was Joshua's uncle and a possible ancestor of Exeter Waymouths.

Phillip the Baptist

There are few certainties when studying this period and one is bound to make the usual disclaimer about paucity of records. The particular disaster of the German air raids on Exeter and Plymouth, which destroyed so many original documents and, especially harmful to research, virtually every Will, has unquestionably denied us much of value. Having said that, everything we do know points to this Phillip being the same one who was one of the founders and early Elders of the Baptist Church in Kingsbridge in 1640. The Exeter and Dartmouth Waymouths were active Baptists. The Dartmouth records were destroyed in Plymouth in 1941, where they were sent for safe keeping, but in Exeter the Germans did not get a chance as, in 1766, the South Street Baptist Elders 'designedly destroyed' all their records.

Phillip married Elizabeth Hingston in 1639 and they seem to have had John and Phillip as sons and Elizabeth, Sarah and Agnes as daughters. Elizabeth's father was a founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Kingsbridge in 1655 but Phillip remained a Baptist, as he had been, very likely, from the very start of the Baptist Church in Kingsbridge or Loddiswell in 1640. Hingston is another Celtic name.

We know of several other Weymouth marriages with Hingstons, the earliest in 1585 between John Weymouth and Joane Hingston. What is utterly frustrating is that we have no idea whether the reference in the Cockington Will of Mary Waymouth in 1596 to 'Richard Hinxston, my godson..' establishes a link between the powerful shipbuilding Waymouths of Cockington and the equally influential Weymouths of Kingsbridge and Malborough through the Hingstons !

Why Baptists, why Quakers ?

It was for long a puzzle why these relatively prosperous and socially established Waymouths should first become Baptists and then in some cases, 15 years later, join the Quakers. Today we find it hard to understand the religious passions of that time but the Establishment of the day viewed non-conformism much as we viewed Communism in our generation - it was a threat to the whole fabric of Society, challenging even the Divine Right of Kings. The resulting 'sufferings' of Baptists and Quakers were real enough: imprisonment and fines, social ostracism and family division. So why ? I'll come to the serious reasons in a moment but perhaps a more frivolous insight in to the subversive spirit of the South Devonian is found in the inscription on a headstone just inside the little town's church:

Here I lie at the Chancel Door;

Here I lie because I'm poor;

The farther in, the more you'll pay;

Here I lie as warm as they.

Black Rod and the slammed door

The work of Alan Savile on Kingsbridge Nonconformists may help. To quote him: 'Baptists claim that some of their earliest letters of association in England originated in Loddiswell [close to Kingsbridge]. I ..expect that to mean Hatch which was the chief estate in the parish, its joint owners Sir John Eliot and his cousin Richard Langworthy being Lords of the Manor. Sir John was Leader of the House of Commons and Member for St Germans.'

Sir John is chiefly famous for compelling King Charles I's assent to the Petition of Right in 1628 and for the passage of the Three Resolutions in 1629 which got him consigned to the Tower - an event marked each State Opening of Parliament when Black Rod has the door of the Commons slammed in his face as he comes from the House of Lords to summon the Commons. Sir John died in the Tower and his close colleague, John Pym, Member for Saltash, the next constituency to St Germans and across the Tamar from Plymouth, assumed his mantle. This led to the Rebellion, Civil War and eventually to the Restoration. A time of profound upheaval and economic disaster, especially for Devon. Kingsbridge suffered right the way through and in every way - religious persecution, loss of trade, starvation, and disease.

Neighbours think alike

Both Eliot and Langworthy were deeply Puritan, even Calvinist. Any parson appointed by them to churches in their Manors would have to have been of the same persuasion. We have several references to Waymouth holdings near Loddiswell (Phillip passed land nearby to his daughter Elizabeth in 1662). Given the moral as well as temporal authority of men like Eliot and Langworthy it is not so surprising that their neighbours and, perhaps, tenants would respond to their thinking. Kingsbridge and Loddiswell Baptists stuck to their faith during the persecution of Puritans by Archbishop Laud under Charles II. The Baptists were led by Leonard Kent, pastor, Phillip Weymouth and Arthur Langworthy in these difficult years. A local JP called Beare was especially assiduous in harrassing them.

We know that Weymouths were often tenants and even owners of Batson Hall across from Snapes so it is possibly further evidence of their involvement that James Burdwood of Pembroke College, Oxford, rented the Hall during a spell of savage attacks on him and his family for their non-conformist ways. There were many other non-conforming intellectuals who became refugees in Devon at this time, fleeing much as Left wingers fled from Germany in the 1930s, and persecuted by Laud much as they would be by Senator McCarthy in the USA 300 years later.

Quaking wool merchants

So much for the Baptist connection. The Quaker link seems to be through George Fox himself, the founder of the Friends. Fox travelled widely as a wool merchant from Wellington in Somerset where his family are still in wool to this day. Everything points to Robert and the two Joshuas being wool and cloth merchants, too.[So, it should be remembered, was Henry, banker and woolstapler, of Exeter, ancestor of one of the New Zealand branches, although he was a Baptist] With William Hingeston, one of the earliest Quakers, a relation by marriage, it was perhaps inevitable that many of the Weymouths switched to the new form of worship but it is probable that Phillip and his family did not. A John gets a mention as a Quaker, early in the 18th Century, but he may have been Robert's brother rather than Phillip's father. There is always the possibility that the John and Stephen who are noted in Totnes, twenty miles away, at the end of the 17th Century had come from Kingsbridge for commercial reasons. Both were of the kind of standing in Totnes that denotes wealth and influence - John was Mayor twice.

Back to Snapes.....

Snapes Manor

Francis of Snapes gets one mention, before his marriage in 1722 to Sarah Adams, as _'brother of Joshua Weymouth, the Younger, Clothier'_ when he takes over the lease of _'Farthing Mead, Mills, Kingsbridge'_ in 1713. From the frequency of Joshua the Elder's absence from Kingsbridge it may be inferred that they were all in the wool and weaving business and very likely Francis ran the mill while his father and brother sold the products. It is noteworthy that one branch of the Exeter Waymouths were also into cloth although, it has to be said, so were many others in Devon at that time, exporting all over Europe.

Snapes Manor

Quaker quirks

It is perhaps the moment to make a diversion in to less genealogical and much more human affairs. Joshua Weymouth the Elder was a prominent Quaker and one of a group of worthies to whom William Hingeston and John Jarvis conveyed a Society burial plot in Kingsbridge in 1693. It had already been in use by Quakers since at least 1662.

The earliest entry in the Kingsbridge Quaker Register is the birth of William Waymouth of Malborough in 1655. There is much research still to do on that Register and that of the Baptists, I am sure. My own studies, all too brief, have been of the Minute Book of the Elders. The book is of poor paper and having written through it over the years using one side of the leaf they then used the other face despite the frequent blurring and blotching of penetrating ink ! The Elders come across as rather an unpleasant team much concerned with non-attendance at Meetings and 'disorderly' marriages.

In fairness, they were also in the front line of some very harsh persecution known by them as 'sufferings'. They were frequently up before the Magistrates and fined for non-conformity and occasionally imprisoned and this undoubtedly brought out their fervour in quaint ways.

'harmful conversation' = flirting, courting !

The first reference to a Weymouth I noted is in 1708 when two of the Elders are deputed to speak to John Weymouth for 'being deficient in coming to the Meeting'. It had some effect perhaps as he was there three months later. Neither this John nor baby William are known to be connected to Joshua.

In 1709 John Collier was reproved for 'harmful conversation to Mary Brangwin' but next month the Elders agreed the two should marry ! In 1714 Jno Brooking objects to a paper written by him condemning his daughter Sarah. Instead of bringing it to the meeting he 'hath forceably kept back the said paper and will by no persuasion return it...' The meeting ruled that he was 'guided by a spirit of contention which tends to a breach of unity' The next six lines are so heavily scored out that they are illegible - evidently feelings ran higher than Christian compassion. A month or so later Brooking returned the paper but the Elders decided it wasn't good enough. Sarah was to be condemned in the Public Meeting.

'an exercise to the honest hearted among us'

At this same time this entry occurs: 'Whereas Joshua Weymouth and Roger Jervise [he has been in trouble on and off since 1708] still persist **as we are informed** [inserted later - i.e. 'we godly men wouldn't go in such places'] in their ungodly practices as to drinking to excess and other disorders which hath proved an exercise to the honest hearted amongst us...' Two men were told off to speak to them. Joshua was in London so was not spoken to but the Minutes make it clear he would be in trouble if he persisted. A month later, however, Roger, of South Huish, some distance from Kingsbridge, having been 'often admonished in tender love to leave his many disorderly practices in relation to over much drinking and keeping bad company' is formally excluded from the Society.

Romance and the Elders

Six months later Joshua father and son are at the meeting of Elders. Roger Jervise is still not repenting satisfactorily. Joshua Jnr asks the Elders for their aid in arranging a marriage to Jane Elliot May of 'St Austill so called in the County of Cornwall' to whom he seems already to be engaged. St Austell is now a china clay town about fifty miles west from Kingsbridge and evidently had another Meeting of the Society.

The Minutes give us one side of what then happened and the family history another. According to them, a year later the Elders were still dithering about their consent with the comment that Joshua Jnr is to be spoken to about 'ye disorders they have been guilty of from time to time' I also noted that 'she is fixt on a very indifferent foundation as to matters of religion' which may or may not be a reference to Jane. According to the family account she lived at Treganjeevis (every third hamlet in Cornwall starts with Tre-) and initially was as keen as he was. Then she began to accuse him of lack of interest, which was not the case, and stopped answering his letters. Finally the Elders of both Meetings arranged for all to meet first at Plymouth and then at Exeter in an attempt to sort things out. Much correspondence followed but to no avail and the engagement was broken off.

Poor Joshua

The Minute book shows that in 1716 Joshua Snr's absence from Meetings was noted and it transpires that he is not happy that the Elders acted fairly towards Jane and his son - that's why he no longer comes. The Elders won't hear of it and then become spiteful. It is 'publickly reported that Joshua Jnr is of disorderly conversation and also drinking to excess' Next he is reported absent from the Meeting and 'hath been guilty of spending much time in keeping vaine loose and idle company and making wagers on fighting cocks and at cock fighting which we judge inconsistent with the nature of Xtianity' We know that at about this time one Henry Hingston, a Quaker, was making a great deal of fuss about cock fighting and bull baiting in Kingsbridge so Joshua would have been especially unpopular.

'sundry inormities'

In June 1717 he is excluded from the Meeting, Joshua Snr narrowly escaping a similar fate only to be turfed out not long after for 'sundry inormities'! Not long after this Joshua Jnr left the area, first for Exeter where he may have stayed with his sister Mary, the wife of Dr Pugh, and thence to America where he is thought to have died, sadly still unmarried.

'disorderly marriage'

That is not quite the end of Weymouth links with the Quakers. In 1743 we find the following entry which explains much about the norms of Quaker life at that time. 5.4.1743: Two ladies are to 'discourse with Martha, daughter of Willm Burrell' about her disorderly marriage. [The words 'disorderly marriage' seem to have the sense 'marriage to someone who does not accept Quaker disciplines'] 3.5.43: 'Discourse with Martha (now called Frogmorton) not finding her in a penitent frame of mind, it is resolved by this Meeting to proceed against her according to our discipline but as to two others viz Patience the daughter of Joshua Weymouth and Joseph Edwards have been guilty of the same disorderly marriage and having never been discoursed therefore' three ladies are 'desired to discourse with the former' and two gents 'to discourse with the latter.'

Two months later the Elders are told that Martha has been reproved, Joseph has written a letter of apology and Patience has not yet been seen. Nothing more is heard of Patience and although we know who she disorderly married - William Gillard of Shadycombe - we have no clues why he was unacceptable unless it was for not being a Quaker. She had a son, William, and a granddaughter but disappears from family ken which could be another illustration of how divisive to the family these religious differences were.

Some time in the 1770s Joshua, grandson of Joshua Snr, joined the Friends, apparently more as an act of filial piety than from religious conviction. Some of his descendants stayed with them and quite a cluster are buried in the Friends graveyard in Plymouth but the generality of South Hams Weymouths were either Baptists or Church of England, as were the Waymouths of Exeter.

Mother-in-law trouble

On a final, lighter, Quaker note, in 1745 one Margery Brooking was reported to the Elders for rowing with her son in law in the Meeting - interesting in itself because men and women had met separately in earlier years - and, after due deliberation, the Elders ruled that 'the said charge was ill grounded being pretty much the effect of passion and we therefore desire James Chapel to behave, for the future, with more respect and condescension to his said mother in law which we hope will work a perfect Reconciliation between them'. Plus ca change......

The Weymouths of Lincombe

It would be pointless and impossible to try to track all the places where Weymouths lived in the Kingsbridge area. However, using all the different sources I have so far found, I will list the known Weymouth tenants of Lincombe as it shows the tenacity and skill with which yeoman tenant farmers like them held on to their farms generation by generation. By modern standards Lincombe is a small well-watered hilly farm with under half its acreage sufficently flat to plough. For much of the time it was divided in to Higher and Lower Lincombe and it seems strange to us today that such small holdings - perhaps 50 to 70 acres - were adequate for subsistence for the very large families that grew up on them but from the 1884 account it seems they were, if only just.

Today only the Higher Lincombe farmhouse remains. It is a typical three up, three down Devon long house. It is single room width and runs down the slope of the hill suggesting that when first built of stone, probably in the late 16th Century, the downhill room would probably have been a shippen, cobbled, with a central drain to house cattle. It is a pleasant family house today with a modern but sympathetic extension and the Lincombe farmer has built himself a house further up the hill.

Higher Lincombe

All that seems to remain of Lower Lincombe is a creeper-covered fireplace cut in to the hillside. Nearby what is probably one of its barns still stands and is in use. At the bottom of the valley is a yacht marina. To the East is Snapes and, to the North, Collapit. Across the creek is Batson.

Tenants in succession

The sequence of Waymouths at Lincombe starts before 1509 in Henry VII's time but we have no names until 1649 when we know Philip held it and was succeeded by his son Richard. It is possible that Philip was the son of John and therefore the early Baptist. We know that John and then Phillip held land nearby at Batson. By 1688 Owen held it and here we see some of the dynastic marriages - in 1631 Ann Waymouth married Richard Adams while in 1705 Owen Waymouth married Sarah Adams at South Huish, James Adams having taken the lease of Snapes in 1648.

When Francis Weymouth married his Sarah Adams in 1722 he seems not only to have had Snapes but also Lincombe and part of Batson Hall. Sometime before 1758 Higher Lincombe passed to his eldest son Joshua but he died relatively young of a riding accident in 1776 and before his father. When Francis of Snapes died in 1797 he left the lease of Higher Lincombe to his son Francis of Collapit. He in turn sub-let it to his brother Adams (father of Ann, the family historian). In 1805 Adams inherited Collaton from his uncle Nicholas (7th child of Francis of Snape) and moved there until his brother Jacob came out of the Navy in 1815.

Joshua and Catharine's grandson William farmed Higher Lincombe with Jacob Weymouth, while his father Nathaniel, who married Jane Elworthy (probably a Quaker) farmed Lower Lincombe. Nathaniel was succeeded by his son Nathaniel for a time.

Jacob had served in the Mediterranean in the Napoleonic wars as a purser. In 1821 William took over the tenancy after Jacob's death and also farmed Lower Lincombe, renting it from his brother Nathaniel until the latter's death and then from the proprietor, Mr Bastard. Edward Pollexfen Bastard was probably a descendant of Magistrate Bastard who used, a century before, to deal leniently with the dissident Quaker Weymouths when they were charged before him.

Curiously, and perhaps revealing of the Magistrate's true sympathies, Pollexfen was the surname of one of the earliest Quaker families. After Bastard's death in 1835 Lower Lincombe was administered by his Executors until 1843 when they sold it to George Adams of Collaton who continued to lease it to William. William's son James was farming both halves in 1884 and the family stayed on after that. Possibly it was James' daughter as the registers of the time do not show a Weymouth but we know that a great grand-daughter of William's, Jessie Louise Lyncombe Weymouth, was given her third name because she was born in 1912 as the last Weymouth was leaving Lincombe. She is now Mrs Fouche and living in South Africa.

It is a remarkable record. There are other Devon families who have held farms longer and one or two who still do. By any reckoning, over four centuries of stewardship is an honourable if typically stubborn example of Weymouth character!

Other South Hams titbits

Because there is nowhere very obvious else to put them I close this chapter with other South Hams items.

The first is the farm 'Weymouths'. It is in South Huish, West of Malborough and the other Weymouth farms. It was already so called in 1636 when Weymouth Lydstone was baptised there. Subsequently he settled at Kittery in Maine, the early Devon colony founded by Gorges, Champernowne and Shapleigh. He was there in 1662 and we know that Robert Weymouth 'of Dartmouth' was another settler. Robert was named as an Executor of Sir Ferdinand Gorges, first Governor of Maine, who died in 1661. However, Robert was already dead by then. Weymouth Lydstone as a name went on through four generations, the last being born in the USA, I believe, in 1764.

In 1804, in the Manor of Galmpton which is in South Huish, West of Kingsbridge, Obadiah Weymouth was a tenant of the Earl of Devon of part of Weymouths and John Lidstone was tenant of the other part. Adams Weymouth held Weymouths a few years later but I doubt if he was the naval Master, retired. Adams was a usual name for Weymouth boys. As a quirky postscript of the type which gives family history its vitality and fun, Ann Rogers was born at Weymouths and now with her husband Peter Lidstone is farming Ledstone Farm, north of Kingsbridge.

Farming across the river

In that same 1804 list of tenants of the Earl of Devon are William and Nicholas Weymouth who are farming land across the water from Malborough at Portlemouth and Prawle. What I do not yet know is whether any of this was the same land that William of Lincombe's son John Kerswell Weymouth was farming 'at Chivelstone' towards the end of the century before he gave up farming to lead a simpler life - legend has it that he became a tramp !

Thomas Newcomen marries

One other Malborough Weymouth farmer is important in linking Exeter, Dartmouth and Malborough. He is Peter who was farming in the area in 1705 when his daughter Hannah married Thomas Newcomen, the inventor of the first effective steam pump and piston. Thomas, and very possibly Peter, before he came in to the farm and moved about 15 miles to Malborough, were fervent Dartmouth Baptists. Their son Elias married another Hannah Waymouth, daughter of Samuel Waymouth, one of the Elders of the Baptist Church in South Street, Exeter and this seems to confirm that the Exeter Waymouths and the Malborough Weymouths were cousins.

To bring our story up to date, when I mentioned Thomas Newcomen and his steam engines to Joan Weymouth, wife of Gerry, an agricultural engineer in Kingsbridge, she remembered being up in the attic of a Weymouth farm as a small girl and trying to read a book on steam engines but having difficulty because the s's looked like fs. As it happens any book by Thomas could have been printed just at the end of the period when those confusingly shaped s's were still being used. A marvellous link with the past and, again, tying Exeter, Dartmouth and Malborough Waymouths together.

In this speculative search for links we have a problem tracing back from Samuel to Malborough as there is no obvious route unless he married quite late - he married Mary Smith in Exeter Cathedral in 1718. Their son Samuel was born the following year with Hannah being baptised in 1722 and marrying Elias Newcomen in 1749. Samuel was apprenticed to a prominent Baptist, Lazarus Mecho, in 1722 as a tobacconist so was probably a young man when he married. There are plenty of Malborough Samuels from 1672 back but none in the later years of the century. It looks as though those 1766 Baptist Elders 'designedly destroyed' the records which could tell us about Samuel !

Then there is a William who just deserves a mention. One can produce a long line of Williams in the Malborough area and early ones were brother and nephew to the rich James who died in 1639. In 1723 William Weymouth of Malborough married an Exeter girl, Elizabeth Clark, also in Exeter Cathedral. It rather looks as though he returned to Malborough with her where they had several children but one William looks like another in the old registers so, again, we have to say 'Not Proven' but it is another link between Malborough and Exeter.

2 + 2 = 6 ?

This chapter has looked at two aspects of the Waymouths: their farming roots and their Baptist and Quaker connections. It has shown a family of yeomen who from time to time became involved in the wider life of England. They had large families and many of their sons will have had to look further afield for work. The evidence we have is that they would have been well educated and their families were rich enough and well enough connected, particularly through their non-conformist friends and relations, to find places for them.

That some of the Exeter Waymouths were related to some of the Dartmouth, Malborough and Kingsbridge Weymouths is evident and referred to in studies of Newcomen and the Baptists of Exeter. That this relationship was still acknowledged in the 19th Century may be evidenced by the fact that one of Francis of Snapes descendants became headmaster of Mill Hill School and my grandfather, William Charles Waymouth, was sent there for his schooling under him. Probably he could have told me if I had asked but I had grown up with the impression that we were a dull middle class family of little interest.

It is my belief that we are all cousins. Whether that is true of the Torbay Waymouths as well is for the next chapter.

Indian Epilogue

Trevor Waymouth, serving with the RAF in India just before World War 2, had a forced landing in the Punjab. It took him two days walking to find the nearest policeman and a chance to tell his squadron where he was. When he gave his name, the policeman said 'Oh ! Sahib, my last Inspector was called Waymouth.' Not having heard of any relations in India, Trevor wrote to his father, Norman, an engineer in the Argentine, asking whether he knew of this Inspector and his family. Norman's reply was, essentially, 'Yes, but we don't talk about them....'

Recently I met the Inspector's son, a retired Army officer, and he is a descendant of Francis of Snape and spelling his name Weymouth. There seems to be nothing murky about his past although an earlier generation might have disapproved because his mother and father were first cousins. Indeed his great-uncle was the headmaster of Mill Hill already mentioned, a scholar and active in the Devonshire Association. His translation of the New Testament in to Modern English early in the 20th Century was good enough to stay in publication until the 1950's.

This was, however, the Quaker part of the family and I wonder whether the reason they were not spoken of was an old division on religious grounds. Being a Quaker - or a Baptist - was socially not quite the thing and the snobbery or prejudice was almost more open between the non-conformist sects. An elderly spinster and missionary Waymouth of my acquaintance commented on some religious unconventionality with a very emphatic 'My God is a jealous God' with all sorts of deprecatory over- and under-tones attached to the phrase. Our generation can be more tolerant.

CHAPTER 4 EXETER: HOME FROM HOME

All roads lead to Exeter

All the way through this account there have been references to Exeter and it is likely that three of the New Zealand branches of Waymouths were based there for longer or shorter periods. Its importance in the history of Devon can hardly be over-stated. It was a strong point controlling the crossing of the River Exe, the trade centre for the richest farming area and an important port until the end of the 17th Century. Even before the Romans came it was a capital for the Dumnonii, the indigenous tribe we would call Devonian today. It has remained the capital city of Devon with a fine cathedral, mediaeval town plan and surrounding Roman, and later, walls.

Early settlers from Bideford ?

The earliest Waymouths in Exeter may have come from North Devon. In 1615 a John Waymouth married a Helen Ford but we have no record of them having children there. John could have come from Bideford. In 1594 an earlier John Waymouth married Jane Davie in Bideford and they then had at least 10 children, two of whom were Johane (1599) and Honor (1603) who may have got married in Exeter. Their other children were John (1594) [before John and Jane got married], Richard(1595), Agnes (1596), Robert(1600), Marie(1602), William(1605), Phillip(1606) and Susan(1610). A full quiver; the wonder is that Jane lasted to 1615 when she died, probably in Exeter. We have only cryptic notes on the contents of her Will to survive after the Baedeker air raid. It was proved in Exeter and shows John to be already dead and that Jane was also known as Bryant. The Will itself was another casualty of the Blitz.

The earliest Waymouth event registered in the North of the county was the marriage of Alse Waymouth to William Poyer of Barnstaple in 1592 although a little earlier there had been one noted at Clovelly, a Carey stronghold and so he may have been from Cockington, the main Carey base. Poyers Farm is now a restaurant to the West of the town, North of the River Taw.

A look at the names used by John and Jane is as suggestive of a Malborough origin as of Cockington and we need to ask what was going on in the area to attract John and other Waymouths from the South. There was the arrival of herring on the North Coast and a growth of cloth exports but it would be some years before tobacco became an important import. Bideford was becoming increasingly involved in the Irish and Newfoundland fisheries. We will probably never know why John went up there.

The move to Exeter

Phillip and a John stayed on in Bideford and raised families and there were other Waymouths in the area at least until 1655. Apart from Jane, the first Waymouth in Exeter after John seems to be Joane marrying John Hilley in 1620. She could be the Johane born in Bideford in 1599 to John and Jane and, if so, Honor Waymouth who married a Cater in Exeter in 1624, might be her sister, also born in Bideford.

Junior officer George

Our next interesting Exeter Waymouth is George. We hear of him in 1661 which was just after the restoration of Charles II. This was a time for royalist revenge and persecution of dissenters, under the Clarendon Code. In May 1661, the officers and men of sherriff Bampfield's regiment presented a loyal address from Exeter. It is virtually a roll-call of the Exeter gentry, headed by Lord Lieutenant George Monck who had been a 'non-political' General and had cautiously manoeuvred everyone in London so that the restoration of the monarchy seemed the only way forward. Monck's reward was to be made Duke of Albemarle by Charles II.

Tax commissioners and Justices of the Peace and their like filled the posts of senior and junior officers in the regiment. Minor gentry such as William Babb, George Glanville, Thomas Suxbitch, James Paddon and George Waymouth became 'ensigns and sargeants'. From being the embodiment of all that was centrist and sectarian during the Commonwealth the militia now became a symbol of county solidarity.

George's origin is unknown but his given name may be significant as he must be a candidate as an ancestor of the Maker branch. The truth is that the records are poor and while we have occasional Waymouths, often John, in Exeter through the 17th Century it was not until 1703 that Martha Waymouth married Isaac Briant and we begin to see clear connections.

Their son, Isaac, married Jane Glanvill. Isaac Bryant's granddaughter was the Sarah Bryant who married the grandson, Henry, of the next important Waymouth, Samuel. She could have been his second cousin once removed or something like that: it is possible Sarah and Henry just bumped in to each other but blood was a lot thicker than water in those times.

Jane's descent through 4 generations can be traced from Nicholas Glanville, an apprentice baker in Exeter in 1576. In 1437 John Glanvill was 'fined' £1 to become a Freeman of Exeter so the Glanvilles had been there since well before the Tavistock Glanvilles who produced a notorious Lord Chancellor and a famous Speaker of the House of Commons who stood up to Charles I. Nicholas is a common name in that family so they likely were cousins. References to Bryants and Glanvilles are of significance to some branches of the family and they will be treated separately later.

Ancestors at last

Our branches first come clearly in to view with the granting of the Freedom of Exeter to Samuel Waymouth, apprenticed to Lazarus Mecho as a tobacconist in 1722. As we shall see, Mecho was, with Samuel, a founding Trustee of the South Street Baptist Church in 1723.

Samuel's family grows

Samuel, married to Mary Smith in Exeter Cathedral on Christmas Day 1718, had a number of children, several of whom claim our attention for various reasons. Those registered were Samuel (1719), John (1721), Hannah (1722), Phillip (1723) and Mary (1725). Allowing for his wife's preferences, this catalogue fits very well with a Kingsbridge/Malborough origin for Samuel which has to be likely anyway with his Baptist commitment. The absence of a registered birth for Henry or of a John born in 1726 rather than 1721 is a vexation, as we shall see. Fortunately Henry gets listed as Samuel's son when he becomes a Freeman in 1752 as an apprentice tobacconist to his father so at least that problem is solved.

John is more of a dilemma. A John was apprenticed to John Clarke as an ironmonger in 1743 when he became an Exeter Freeman. If he is Maker John and [a] we believe his gravestone claim to be 81 when he died and [b] therefore assume that Samuel's first John had died and been replaced, five years later, he would have been only 17 when he became a Freeman. The trouble is that his son John, merchant, became a Freeman in succession to his father John, ironmonger, in 1784. If he had been Maker John's son he would only have been 19. Where we are sure of ages, the Freemen were 21 or over - the age of majority in those days.

Maker John a cousin ?

Infuriating as it is we have to concede that this lot of Johns don't look right. Although we have no births recorded there is a hint that another lot of Johns were contemporary in Exeter and that they were working alongside Samuel's family. It is flimsy, indeed, but Henry Waymouth, haberdasher, died in 1784 and John Waymouth, haberdasher, died in 1785.

What gives us a little hope that we have, in among them, the right Maker John is that in 1788 one of them, merchant of Exeter, sold a house with extensive outbuildings and 18 acres at Anderdon(or Underdon), Millbrook, now in Cornwall, and probably just in the Parish of Maker, to a Mrs Morris. Anderton is less than a mile from Maker Church where Maker John is buried. He did not die until 1807 so the fact that he is thought to have lived round the corner or across the spit at Kingsand, also only a mile from Maker Church, does not weaken the case for him being from Exeter - he obviously wasn't living at Anderdon anymore.

Samuel, however, is our main focus for the moment and then his family. As said earlier, we do not know where Samuel came from although the probability is that it was directly from Kingsbridge or Dartmouth as he seems to have been an active Baptist from his arrival. Although George (1661 Loyal Address) was clearly a citizen of some standing he is not recorded as a Freeman. Presumably he could have been Samuel's grandfather.

South Street Baptist Church

Even before he became a Trustee of the new South Street church, Samuel had taken the lease of some land in Pitt Estate, St Thomas, which is across the River Exe from Exeter, for a Baptist chapel. However, all his children were christened in St Kerrian's, which used to be in North Street, near the heart of Exeter proper, so, presumably, that is where he lived.

South Street Batist Church

Heath's gift to the Baptists

I do not know whether Samuel went ahead with the St Thomas chapel but with a young family and newly in business with Lazarus Mecho he was one of seven men who made an indenture (if that is what one does with indentures - we might call it a conveyance or contract) with Benjamin Heath, Senior, which transfers to them in Trust 'that new brick house intended for a meeting house', 'entered from South Gate Street', on various terms which amount to a duty to return it if ever it ceased to be a Baptist Chapel. There were houses on the plot and these also were given to the church.

Heath was a wealthy Fuller and Merchant, Freeman of the Corporation of Weavers from 1692 and eventually Master in 1715. He had land near Tiverton, a weaving and lace town, and at Rackenford and he left this, the residue and £5,000 to his son Benjamin as well as a further £5,000 between two other sons. That makes him at least twice as rich as banker Henry, of whom, more anon. The family of Sir Edward Heath, former UK Prime Minister, came from the Torquay area and one of his direct ancestors is a Waymouth girl who married a Heath. He has apparently disclaimed any cousinly link to Benjamin although a distinguished Devon scholar believes the families are related.

Trade connections

Samuel and the three Mountstephens were other comparatively wealthy members of the new church and the professions of the other Trustees are instructive. Joseph Stennett is Gent but in fact was the pastor; Robert Prudom, Mercer [not far from Haberdasher ?], Lazarus Mecho, Tobacconist, Samuel Spurway, Sergemaker, Simon Rowden, Fuller, and Mathew Parsons, Sergemaker and, of course, Samuel, Tobacconist. The last three before Samuel were from St Thomas, across the river, which suggests the first project was abandoned. The wonder is that with so many in wool and clothmaking that they weren't Quakers ! We thus get further confirmation of the Kingsbridge connection, I think, but no explanation of why Samuel moved in to tobacco unless it was opportunism - Mecho, a fellow Baptist, needing a successor. The Prudom name appears again later.

Samuel went on to become a wholesale druggist who employed others to collect his drugs and spices. His son Samuel continued the business having first been apprenticed, in 1741, to Abraham Gilberd as a druggist. We have a note that in 1787 Sir Mathew Wood, a well known traveller to strange places, was commissioned by Samuel to procure material for his trade. The recurrence of the apothecary's trade within the family, in different branches and to the present day has sometimes looked like yet another example of how close-knit the family was; on reflection I now think it is accidental.

Hannah the Third

When Samuel, Junior, died his grand-daughter, yet another Hannah Newcomen, came in to considerable property from his Estate so he must have been wealthy. Hannah the Third, Elias' daughter, was born in Dartmouth in 1758, married a Gibbs, possibly the son of the pastor who baptised her at the age of 20 in Kingsbridge, and died in 1818 in Plymouth as the widow of William Prance. She is buried in the Gibbs tomb, next to the Prance tomb, in the burial ground of George Street Baptist Chapel, Plymouth. This type of detail helps us to understand how interwoven were these non-conformist families in an era where it was still not quite the thing not to be Church of England.

Samuel Senior's daughter Hannah seems to have married first George Smith, in 1743, before marrying Elias Newcomen in 1749.

There are references to Samuel as a druggist taking the lease of 196 High Street, Exeter, in 1780 and it was still in Waymouth hands in 1814. By 1796 he or a son, Samuel, was a druggist in Fore Street which is the other side of the North Street/South Street cross roads from High Street. Samuels keep appearing in the records until 1814. One nice little incident, for which I do not have a date, is of one of the Samuels suing Robert Evans, Tawton Bishop, surgeon, for a repeated failure to pay his bills, presumably for drugs.

Merchant's houses

The houses these prominent merchants lived in were a blend to fulfil three functions. On the ground floor at the front they were shops. Above the shop would be two, three or even four floors of the owners' accommodation. Behind the shop and running back some way would be warehousing and workshops with, sometimes, servant and workmen's rooms above and, giving off on to the back lane, stabling and garaging for the owner's carriage. A far cry from the simple three up-three down in which the first migrant younger son of a farmer would have grown up.

Henry the which ?

Henry was apprenticed to his father, Samuel Senior, as a tobacconist, in 1752 and seems to have died in 1784 as a haberdasher. In 1775 his son Henry, married to Susan Bryant, registers the birth of their son Henry. It is a little difficult to be sure which Henry does what in the years that follow but I think that it is H(1) 'of All Hallows' who takes a lease of a haberdashery in Goldsmith Street, parallel to North Street, in 1770. In 1783 H(1) sells the shop to John Bannister and in 1784 John Bannister marries Elizabeth Waymouth in which year H(1) dies. H(2) continues in business until, in 1801, it is taken over by H(3). In 1802 he is joined by John Bannister and then, about 1803 when H(2) died, it is transferred to John Hill who himself died (or, more likely, his son or grandson of the same name) in 1892, still in possession.

Samuel's grandson, Henry [H(2)] may have been a haberdasher but he was many things else besides. Having married Susan Bryant he may have come in to additional money but I have the feeling he was a pretty sharp operator anyway. Being a woolstapler during the Napoleonic war years when uniforms were much in demand would not have been an unprofitable business.

In 1792 he joined three others to set up the Western Bank. The first was Sir Stafford Northcote, 7th Baronet, married to a Baring, and 'not required to attend business' presumably because he was just lending an illustrious name.

Sir John Northcote had been one of the Devon MPs who sided with Parliament against Charles I. He helped raise the parliamentary army in the West. Exeter was attacked 4 times by different sides. Initially for Parliament, the city later welcomed Charles and his family. Cromwell gave them a rough time. One of the Northcote family eventually was ennobled and became Lord Iddesleigh. Northcote is an Exeter name to conjure with - the University theatre is named after them.

Two Kennaways (another Exeter name of note) and Henry made up the four, all of whom contributed £500 as start-up capital.

The Bank opened in 1793 in the house of the 'late Mr Prudom of Fore Street' of whom we have already heard. It is thought that perhaps Henry was living there although by 1796 he was a 'Merchant of Parker's Well'. It traded only until 1798 but there is no suggestion that it went bust and it is supposed that it was absorbed in to Barings - which of course did go bust, eventually, nearly 200 years later! In 1803 a new version of the Western Bank was started by others including Wilcocks and that failed in 1810. It was not helped by the fraudulent presentation of notes from Henry's earlier bank.

Henry died rich

Henry certainly didn't suffer because when he died in 1803 he left a small fortune in the money of those days. In his Will he left his real estate to his wife Sarah and well over £9,000 to his sons, sisters and friends. Eldest son Henry(1775) and second son Frederick(1778) got only £500 each and, although that was a useful sum which would, for example, have bought them large houses, it would appear that they had already had their portion. From my notes it seems that a third son, Thomas Lewis(1781), got nothing.

For his two youngest sons, Bryant(1783) and Samuel(1785), he left £3,500 each in Trusts managed by their elder brother, Henry, and Joseph Banwell of St Leonards which, whether on the South Coast or in Buckinghamshire, is much closer to London than Exeter. This wealth was to allow Samuel to buy a commission in the Life Guards with whom he fought at Waterloo, writing a book about his experiences. He retired as a Colonel and became interested in South Australia, being one of the directors of the South Australia Company and getting a street named after him in Adelaide.

It is only conjecture, but Caleb Bryant does not seem to have managed his money so well. He is said to have been an Underwriter at Lloyds, the shipping insurance syndicate, well before, in the 1850s and 60s, another Waymouth, Bernard, developed the system of inspections remembered today by the phrase 'A1 at Lloyds'. Not only were risks then, therefore, harder to assess but there was also a great deal of fraud and one wonders whether this is how the money disappeared. There is also a story of Waymouth money sunk, almost literally, in the Bridgwater-Tiverton canal which was built just before the railways took away canal trade. Another sure-fire way to lose money is a badly timed investment.

Bryant the builder

At some point we need to look at the Bryants and this seems as good a place as any. Henry the banker married Sarah Bryant but this was not the first touch with the family. We have the cryptic note on the summary of Jane Waymouth's 1615 Will that her alias was Briant. The Will has gone up in flames so we cannot elucidate. It was, however, proved in Exeter and there is some reason to think that two of her daughters accompanied her there. I have found a Jane Davie, born in 1574 to John Davye and Agnes White in Bideford and it was probably she who married John Waymouth there. This leaves the Briant name as probably taken after John's death.

The earliest Bryant Freeman of Exeter seems to be Edward Briant as Anthony Bryant became a Freeman in 1673 as an apprentice apothecary to Edward. In 1703 Isaac Briant married Martha Waymouth. Their son, presumably, Isaac, married Jane Glanvill in 1731.

In 1761 George Bryant, son of Isaac, became a Freeman of Exeter by succession from his father but his trade is given as carpenter. From 1776 onwards George takes a number of apprentices the last of whom, in 1796, is his son, Isaac Bryant of Holy Trinity. George is shown as a builder. Also in 1796, William Bryant of Holloway, Exeter, is listed as a builder. It is not clear whether Sarah is George's daughter or Isaac's or even William's. She married Henry Waymouth in 1775 and we last hear of her living in South Street, Finsbury Square, London in 1811.

Bryant is used as a given name for Waymouths from Sarah's time onwards which suggests that the family held it in some regard. We know of two other Waymouth girls marrying a Bryant. Susannah(b.1802), granddaughter of Maker John, married W. Bryant in 1822 and there is a rather sad little tombstone in Maker graveyard showing Richard Jennings Bryant, aged 4, and Mary Waymouth Bryant, aged 6, children of Susan and Richard Jennings Bryant, dying within weeks of each other in 1842. Susan, or rather Susan Mary, was, I think, Maker John's great-granddaughter, born in Pembroke, according to the family tree, in 1823.

This would explain and indeed justify the perpetuation of the Bryant and Jennings names by her older brother, John, when naming his sons in 1851 and 1862. What it leaves me with, if I have recorded the gravestone correctly, is that Susan having her first child in 1836 when she was 13 or 14 ! Something wrong somewhere. I suppose that if we assume it was another Susan who married Richard but that Richard was the son of Susannah Waymouth(John's aunt rather than sister) who married W. Bryant in 1802 there still could be a potentially materially worthwhile reason for naming his children after his dead cousins. It would, of course, be nice to be not quite so cynical and assume it was done from the highest of affectionate motives. Richard and Susan went on to have two more children so I am happy with the latter explanation !

Henry and Sarah's family in London

It looks as though many of the family had moved up to London by the end of the century and perhaps the 1803 sale of the business in Exeter by young Henry to John Hill was only the final signing off for Henry's family, possibly coinciding with his death. A reason for saying this is that a Henry Waymouth married Sarah Thorpe in 1799 at St Giles, Cripplegate, London and Sarah Thorpe Waymouth, daughter of Henry and Sarah, was christened at St Pancras Old Church in 1827. I have no idea whether this was adult baptism or a generation has been skipped but they do seem connected.

Other London baptisms of the children of Caleb Bryant and Sophia Matilda Waymouth, are Caroline Matilda(1820), Frederick and Henry, twins,(1824) and Samuel(1826), all at St Pancras Old Church.

Other St Pancras Waymouths

We run into other, puzzling, Waymouth baptisms in Old Church in the first half of the 19th Century. Puzzling because we get names we have not heard of in Exeter but living in the same Parish more than hints at them being related. One must hope that Thomas Weymouth registered at the St Pancras Foundling Hospital was not 'one of us'.

At first sight the most intriguing is another Thomas because we know that Henry and Sarah had a son, Thomas Lewis, christened in Exeter South Street Baptist Church in 1781. Their Thomas, not mentioned in Henry's Will, may have died young. But there is this Thomas, married to Catherine Cope in almost the next Parish, St Anne's, Westminster in 1831. This would really allow for a generation in between or make him a 50 year-old when he married. The latter seems less likely as their St Pancras Old Church children were twins, Catherine Clara and Thomas but not until 16 June 1839 and Christopher Cain in October 1840.

Other Waymouth fathers in St Pancras at this time were Charles Francis(and Mary Ann) who must be distinguished from the Charles who married Anna Maria Lucas at Monken Hadley, near Barnet, North of London, in 1830 and is the ancestor of one of the New Zealand branches. There are children born in St Pancras to William, George, Frederick and James Waymouth as well as several Weymouths and a number of Waymouth girls marrying in to other families in this same 1820-50 period.

The point I believe is that we lost track of far more than we realised in the wilful destruction of records by the Exeter Baptists and in the later German fire raids. In one sense it does not matter because at this distance who begat who is not significant but we are deprived of part of our wider heritage. What brought them to this particular part of London in such numbers compared with the rest of the area is beyond guessing unless they were in the building business which would have been busy, even flourishing.

Henry's grandson, Bryant, goes to Australia

Having thus thoroughly confused with this jumble of names where others may have the facts to tell us, it is time to bring Banker Henry's family back in focus for the last time. As I have suggested earlier, Caleb Bryant seems to have lost the money he inherited. It was still enough for him to be able to marry a Miss Sophia Coleridge, daughter of a Colonel and niece of the Marquis of Anglesey. Coleridge seems also to have been an Underwriter at Lloyds so probably he introduced his son-in-law to Lloyds.

They had five children, Bryant(1815), Caroline(1819, died in her 'teens), Henry, Frederick and Samuel. The last three boys all married but only Samuel may have Waymouth successors and nothing is known of them. Bryant however is clearly chronicled by two independent hands and his family are spread through Australia and New Zealand.

Having schooled in Wurtemburg, Germany, at the Moravian Brethren School, Bryant joined Gibbs Houth and Co. and was sent to Valparaiso, Chile where he remained five years. My guess is that Caleb Bryant's money had gone by this time. Speaking French, German and Spanish he returned to become a teacher in London. There he met and married the sister of a school head, Martha Phillips Eady in 1841. Having had Bryant(1842) they moved to Helston in Cornwall, famous for its Furry Dance through the streets, where Josiah Henry was born in 1844. Martha Caroline was also born there, in 1845, but the family had returned to London by 1847 when Sara Fanny was born. It is hard to see why Bryant went to Helston but there is an excellent Grammar School there with a religious foundation so perhaps he went to teach: I have not checked but it could well just have opened in 1844.

In October 1848 Bryant took his young family to Australia by sailing ship, arriving off Adelaide, South Australia, on Christmas Eve 1848. As they had their gear to transport he hired a bullock cart and drove the 8 miles to Adelaide with the three older children stowed in an empty boiler while their mother nursed the baby. He worked as a clerk in the South Australian Copper Company and built a house in North Adelaide. He went off to Victoria for the gold rush in 1852 and, although he got some gold, when he came back he took a Government appointment as Chief Clerk at £300 a year. He and the younger children lived in the office, one of only two weatherboard houses in Adelaide at that time. It was so small that, for a time, the two eldest boys slept in a tent nearby, within earshot of the gaol, the only other wooden structure.

In 1853 they moved to Melbourne where Bryant continued in Government employ, now on £600 p.a., as Accountant to the G.P.O. The children went to school in town and at 13 Josiah Henry started work on £1 a week. After a year he changed job to £60 a year(!) and by 1867 he was Branch Manager in the Colonial Bank. Josiah courted Susan Farrell, sister of a school mate, and they were married in Geelong in 1868 when he would have been 24. They had five children. After a brief hiccough when he tried to start up his own business, Bryant, now in the Union Bank worked his way up as Bank Manager, by 1881 being the successful Manager of the Alexandra branch.

He died in 1918 aged 74 and a year later his widow and some of her family emigrated to New Zealand.

Caleb Bryant's son Bryant married Margaret Morgan and they had two sons, Bryant and Owen but their father died at 43 in San Francisco and I have no further information. Other than births deaths and marriages I have no information on Bryant's other descendants.

Back to Exeter

Going back, at last, to Exeter, however, a John and Lucy Waymouth had had four children by 1770 when Lucy wrote her Will. It might seem reasonable to consider John as the son of Samuel born in 1721 save that his daughters did not marry until 1786 and 87. He is not a Maker Waymouth as we know their details from around 1750 onwards. John and Lucy had two sons, John and George and they must be favourites as the 'J & G Waymouth, Merchants of West Street' recorded in the Exeter Pocket Journal of 1796.

All the clues point to John and Lucy having married at normal marriage age so a guess at the date might be 1764 - well inside the bracket, with all their children's births, of the South Street Baptist Church records that were 'designedly' destroyed. As John gave his younger son the name George this could infer that his father or grandfather was called George and that might fit with the George we saw in 1661 signing the petition of loyalty. And it might not.

Daughter Lucy married William Judgson at Saint Mary Major in Exeter on 12 June 1787. Mary had married a much more noteworthy character, also in St Mary Major, on 24 February 1786. He was the Rev. Timothy Kenrick, aged 28, and already for two years the Pastor of Exeter Presbyterian Church. He had studied at Daventry Academy and was only 24 when invited to take up the post. His uncle was a banker at Bewdley so it looks as though he was not from Devon. He was a Unitarian and from his appointment was constantly in trouble with his Elders. He was described as 'outspoken, honest, democrat and spoke his mind'. Eventually this was too much for 'authority' who passed a Resolution that he should avoid politics from the pulpit.

Mary died in 1792 'much beloved' having borne him five children - in six years, poor girl.

Positively the last Waymouth in Exeter's record seems to be Mrs Mary Waymouth, a butcher in 66 Paris Street.

Confusion still reigns

John and Lucy's family leave us still with a conundrum. 'John Waymouth, Merchant of Exeter', sold a substantial house near Maker in 1788, but the signs are that this John, the one married to Lucy and not to Ann and the only one who shows in the Exeter records, progressed from being an ironmonger's apprentice in 1743, was noted in 1784 as being a merchant when he took over from his father, John, an ironmonger and may have died in 1785 as a haberdasher cannot have been Maker John who was living in the same locality and was likely involved at the Navy's brewery just across the creek from the house at Anderton which 'merchant John' owned. Was he a cousin working for merchant John with a house provided by him ? Could Maker John have been the orphaned son of a brother ( ? George) to Ironmonger John we do not know about ? Frankly, all I can say from the work I have done so far is that it remains unresolved but possibly the best bet. It would explain the sale in 1788 after Ironmonger John's death - not precipitate but 'Perhaps you could find your own place, Cousin, now that your family are away?'

The other New Zealand families acknowledge cousinship with Maker John. Exeter is the base for the Henry Waymouths. It is not clear that it is also the base for Maker John although we have a John Waymouth of Exeter owning the right sort of house in the right sort of place at the right time in Maker. It is to Maker we go next.

CHAPTER 5 MAKER JOHN AND ALL WHO FOLLOW

War, and the Navy calls?

So far we have looked at two branches of early Waymouths and tried to track them in to modern times. Now we need to see how it comes that the Waymouth family of Maker are accepted by the other branches as cousins. Happily we have the fact that, apparently, this is a long tradition with them.

This book started with the puzzle of why the family tree did not go earlier than 1727. A son John was born to Robert and Sarah Weymouth in the Parish of Antony, next to Maker and across the River Tamar from Devonport and Plymouth, on 12 December 1727. Was he destined to be the patriarch Maker John? The date is right, the spelling wrong (and that is unimportant), but I doubt it.

However, as yet we have no record of any other John born in 1726 or 7. The given names of father and son, Robert and John, fit the theory that the various lines join with James(d.1637) in Kingsbridge who had sons Robert and Stephen. Both had sons called Robert.

John died on 22nd April 1807 ' _aged 81 years'_. Today we might say _'in his 81st year'_ : is that what they meant? Times change, but I think this shows that this is probably not Robert and Sarah's boy. However, his wife, Ann, on the stone above him was aged 80 years but, if she was Ann Porter, that is how we would describe her today \- _'in her 81st year'_ or _'aged 80'_. Wrong John, wrong Ann, both or only one ? Another enigma. Anyway it is John and Ann in Maker who start our line.

['Father' Robert could have been born about 1700 and Kingsbridge Robert would have been born about 1600, I estimate. It is curious that, while William and John, good Malborough/Kingsbridge names, are regularly used by this branch, Robert never has figured. Moreover even if we were to accept that Maker John was the son of Robert and Sarah we still do not know what brought them to Cornwall. I have severe doubts but have to admit they are circumstantial, etymological]

Actually, without any evidence, I have for some years wondered whether Maker John was an emigrant returning from Maine having failed to make the grade in the New World. My second favourite idea is that he was the orphaned nephew of the Exeter owner of the house at Anderton, Millbrook, John Waymouth, merchant.

The Cold War of the 18th Century

Plymouth and its naval dockyard, Devonport, had grown enormously since the time of Drake. His decision to continue playing bowls on the Hoe as the Spanish Armada was sighted in 1588 is often quoted as an example of English sang froid but was probably because he could see that there was no way he could get his ships to sea until tide or wind had changed. The building of the weather-shielding breakwater was a long way off. It was, even without it, a very fine port.

There had been war on and off from 1688 to 1714 but the early part of the 18th Century was one of relative peace and even prosperity. The Dutch Navy, our principal allies in the ever more complicated balancing of European power, was in decline. 'Opulence was preferred to defence' wrote a distinguished naval historian about the Dutch. 'Thus a nation whose fortunes and very existence rested upon sea power committed suicide....'

The Fleet in being

The British Fleet was therefore needed even more in the middle of the 18th Century and was much used even if, with 16,000 men, it was only a third the size needed for proper war. Some could still gain employment in its support or in its ships and this may be what drew the Waymouths to the area. The Hanover Kings were not too sure of themselves so they could not commit England to foreign adventures. Diplomacy was the main instrument of foreign policy although British squadrons would be stationed in the Baltic and Mediterranean and at Gibraltar as the threat from the Spaniards and French waxed and waned. Alliances and the strategic marriage of princesses to princes were an equally important part of it. Much of the stress between countries was about the expansion to India, the East Indies and the Americas with trade and colonisation often producing local conflict. From the revolt by the American colonists in 1776 until 1815 Britain was on a war-footing or at war. I have pondered why men working in the Dockyard, as some of the Maker Waymouths did, would choose to live across the River Tamar. Without more research I can only guess.Three possible reasons would be (a) family already there, (b) cheaper land/ housing or (c) an employment opportunity – very possibly in the navy's brewery there which need men skilled in timber.

There is little sign that the family were already there. Robert and Sarah seem to be the first Waymouths to have children in the area. Cheaper land and housing would certainly be a draw. In the days before piped water and drains the available land for housing would be limited - water shortage with wells running dry would be a deterrent to living in Devonport. There may well also have been a good deal of disease, not unrelated, which would give the area a bad name.

Employment there may have been either for small craft construction or at the Insworke Brewery which supplied the Navy with the beer it had to drink at sea because water could not be stored onboard. I do not know when the brewery opened but Maker John's son called himself a 'cooper' in his Will in 1827 and his son was in timber also, apprenticed as a shipwright in the Dockyard and eventually to rise to manage 130 shipwrights and 50 labourers in the rank of Foreman of Shipwrights at the newly reopened Deptford dockyard.

Coopers were very highly skilled craftsmen in wood, making barrels from multiple oak staves all hand wrought without plans or pre-ordained measurement but using only such tools as a draw knife, adze, box chiv (knife, possibly plane or spoke shave) and cruze (a plane for making grooves in the end of staves). Today there is only one Master Cooper left in England making oak beer barrels still by hand and eye.

Tradition has it that Maker John was a boatbuilder and from Dartmouth but I do not know the basis for this. With the Dartmouth Baptist records burnt by the Germans one likely source of information has gone.

West Anderdon: the family seat ?

In 1788, as mentioned in the Exeter chapter, John Waymouth, merchant of Exeter, sold a house, outbuilding and 18 acres to Mrs Morris at West Anderdon or Underdon, Insworke. Anderdon is just to the East of the village of Millbrook much of which probably dates from the 19th Century. Anderdon itself is a small settlement of perhaps half a dozen houses, one of which has the look of the original farmstead which, historically, may have been there since Celtic times as the hamlet's name just means 'the farm of Anders'. It is on a spit of land sticking out in to the creek known as Millbrook Lake. It is a beautiful setting with lovely views across the Tamar to Devonport. The only snag is the term 'West' but there is settlement to the East and maybe the land that went with West Anderdon lay to the West and is where Millbrook now runs. Certainly one can see another farm site to the East and that is what we are looking for, I imagine: Anders or his sons dividing the farm as the numbers grew.

I still cannot work out how to tie in John of Exeter with Maker John but if I had had to pick a likely spot for them to settle in order to make the daily sail or row across the Tamar or work in the Insworke brewery it would be hard to find a better. Maker John died in 1807 in Kingsand, I believe, but as the house at Anderdon was sold in 1788 there is no conflict with the idea that this had been the family home. Nor do the church registers conflict with this idea: only John was having children in the Parish. The timing of the sale might suggest that Exeter John sold after his father died but equally the house may have been too large for Maker John as his youngest, John, was already 23 when the house was sold.

West Anderdon

Still no proof

What cousinly or nepotistic forces were at play, if indeed we are dealing with the right house and the right Johns, we will never know unless letters or legal documents have evaded the flames, moth and rot which have peculiarly afflicted Devonians. The Deed of sale to Mrs Morris tells us little more than I have reported and none of it germane. Whether Exeter John had a business project in the area and housed a cousin John or was under some duty to a deceased brother's family is imponderable.

The idea that Maker John married Ann Porter of Dartmouth is, as far as I know, based on the fact she is the only one available on record with the right Christian name and dates. To a modern generation this may seem absurd but we can but deal in probabilities because the church registrations give no collateral at all - no addresses, no relations, not even witnesses. With plague and its analogues as frequent visitors, the registrar was quite often the victim as well as his parishioners with disastrous results for record keeping.

The Maker family grows

Anyway we are on safer ground after John and Ann's arrival in Maker. If they were married in Dartmouth then there should probably be an extra entry on the family tree. Whether or not they brought daughter Ann, born in Dartmouth 3 months after they married, we do not know but it seems unlikely that it was another John Waymouth registering the birth. In Maker they had christened daughters Elizabeth (15.10.1758) and Mary(21.9.60) before the arrival of John(25.8.65). John died in Maker in 1807, aged 81, Ann having died in 1803, aged 80. The only Ann Porter whose birth is registered at approximately the right time was born on 1.8.1722 and christened at Dartmouth St Saviour which is where the birth of daughter Ann, when Ann was 30, was also noted. So that fits, at least. She would have been 42 when John was born. Their gravestone is at the East end of Maker Church which stands at the top of the hill above Mount Edgcombe equidistant from Anderdon and Kingsand.

There is no indication of what happened to Ann (if), Elizabeth or Mary but John married Mary Penn who was also born in Maker. John and Mary had seven children that we know of and all seem to have been born in Maker. Three died young. John(30.7.1795) grew up, married and had 12 children, Susannah(1802) married W. Bryant and William(22.10.1804) married and had 5 children. We will come back to them. When John died in Maker in 1827 his Will records him as a Cooper. His grave does not seem to be marked. Cooper = Barrel-maker for those too young to have seen wooden barrels. I shall refer to him as Cooper John - something has to be done to distinguish five generations of John.

The Royal Navy

For many of our time the astonishing power of the British Navy for two and a half centuries is now almost forgotten but it was the dominant military force in the shaping of our modern world. England is an island. Totally dependent on trade by sea for its wealth until the opening of the Channel Tunnel, it had learnt the hard way that without a fleet it was just a pawn in the great power struggles of Europe.

Slowly it developed a policy of always having a fleet bigger than any other two powers combined and, some times neglected but always there on paper, this is how it stayed until the end of the 1914-18 war. Even then there were dark suspicions among former allies when the German High Seas Fleet, moored in Scapa Flow after its surrender in 1918, scuttled itself. To the British government it was an embarrassment, to their former allies it looked a bit too convenient: if it stayed afloat it would have been divided out between them, destroying the 'bigger than any other two' balance but on the bottom there was no new threat ! Albion perfide, yet again - except that there does not seem to have been such a conspiracy.

It was in to this tradition that the young Waymouths grew and several of their cousins served in the Napoleonic wars (1793-1815). All those so far identified were from Kingsbridge and Malborough. Adams was a Master from 1799 so must have risen through the ranks before that. We know from the Gentleman's Magazine that he married Catherine Duval, father a Colonel, later a General, at Malborough so either she was desperate or the social status of Masters had risen. As mentioned earlier, they were the technicians who sailed the ship while the line officers fought it and, like ships engineers, not as highly regarded socially. Adams may have retired to Malborough and be the same Adams who farmed Weymouths in 1850.

Richard was a Lieutenant from 1801 rising eventually to Commander while brother John was a Physician in the Fleet from 1793. It is plausible that he got his training in medicine in part from a distant cousin but, possibly, fellow Baptist, Samuel, druggist, in Exeter. He left the Navy with equivalent rank to Surgeon Captain while brother Jacob was a Purser who served at least 5 years in the Mediterranean before, at the end of the war in 1815, returning to his boyhood home, Collapit, too late to see his father, Francis of Collapit, who had died in 1807. Subsequently Jacob farmed Higher Lincombe.

Richard went to school in Gosport, near Portsmouth, and joined the Navy as a Midshipman. As a Lieutenant in the West Indies he was put in charge of two prize ships captured carrying Spanish gold dollars intended to pay their army out there. He successfully sailed them back to Glasgow, the inhabitants cheering him loudly and lighting up the town in his honour. They were all well paid in prize money. 'The Spanish officers and men behaved remarkably well on the voyage home' says Ann Weymouth's 1884 chronicle.

He served for many years with Admiral Legge, afterwards the Earl of Dartmouth, who, in 1813, got him promoted to Commander. He had by then served for a long time with Captain, later Admiral Sir Peter, Richards. H.M.S. REPULSE, in which they were serving, was sent up the Dardanelles to bombard Constantinople[Istanbul, these days]. The Turks fired back and a 5cwt granite shot hit the ship, killing or wounding 20 men. Following his promotion he served in H.M.S THISBE, probably in command, until his ship was paid off after the war ended in 1815. He would then have had to live on half-pay. He, too, came back to Collapit and while attending the Baptist meetings in Kingsbridge he met his future wife, Ann Sprague.

They married in 1818 and moved to Devonport where they had 5 children of whom 3 grew up. Richard was evidently a keen Christian and among many 'good works' wrote the Naval, Military and Village Hymn Book in 1832, the year he died of cholera in Kerr Street, Devonport.

Headmaster of Mill Hill

Dr Richard Francis Weymouth, born in 1822, is the only child of note for this particular work as he became Headmaster of Mill Hill School after it re-opened in 1869 having for some years had an 'Academy for young gentlemen' in Plymouth. He married Louise Sarah Marten in June 1852 and they had 9 children of whom 8 grew up. One, Rosa, married Dr J C Marsden, a surgeon in the Indian Medical Service and they had a boy christened James Weymouth. [This last is extremely parochial - a cousin is married to a Marsden !]

Mill Hill, a second rank Public School, a peculiar English euphemism for, today, a very expensive private school. However it is relevant to our main purpose for it gives us one more tentative indication that the branches kept in touch. My grandfather, William Charles Waymouth, a Maker John descendant, having failed to get in to the Royal Navy because of a poisoned toe - no second chances in those days - was sent to Mill Hill where the good Doctor was still Headmaster. Having retired from Mill Hill, R.F.W. went back to Devon where he was a hard-working President of the Devonshire Association and translated the New Testament in to Modern Speech directly from the Greek and published it in 1902. That translation stayed in print, revised a couple of times by other scholars so it must have been good originally, at least until 1938.

Back to Maker

Having taken this diversion from the direct Maker lines to look at the status of the Royal Navy in the family as a whole, it is time to get back to Cooper John's children. His grandson, John, took his apprenticeship as a shipwright in Devonport Dockyard but in 1815, when 20, the end of the war caused a drastic downsizing, as the horrid modern jargon would put it.

Reconnected to the Glanvilles

Having married Eliza Glanville, daughter of a Maker Master Mariner, in 1820 he may have been attracted by prospects at the new naval dockyard at Milford Haven in South West Wales known as Pembroke Dock. Craftsmen had been recruited since 1816 to go there to build ships for the Navy from the still plentiful supplies of Welsh oak. John and Eliza may even have got married because of the opportunity they saw there \- she was no beauty but propinquity can do wonders. There are two paintings of them, done by John, and they make her look a deal better than the stark brutality of Victorian photography shows her. One delightful detail is that John's coat is shown buttoned in the ladies' fashion demonstrating that he was only using one mirror. I shall call him Inspector John.

They moved to Pater in 1820 where they lived in Prospect Place and then Bellevue Terrace for about 20 years. Bellevue Terrace is a line of what are known in England as town houses - shared partition walls - awkwardly run up the side of the hill. Quite small with, at most, 4 up, 4 down and pretty cramped for their large family. 12 children in all although 3 may not have survived infancy. An interesting bunch and progenitors of many New Zealand and Australian Waymouths.

Glanvilles

There has been much interest in and sometimes misguided interpretation of the Glanville connection.

One myth is that the Waymouths changed their name from Glanville in much the same way that the Viking/Norman invaders had taken the name Glanville when they settled in Normandy. It does not stand a moment's examination because 'Waymouth' was already in use before the Normans landed. This may also be the moment to deal with the other spurious idea that we are linked to the Marquess of Bath because his eldest son is Viscount Weymouth. Their family name is Thynne, they weren't ennobled until the 18th Century and are also Johnny-come-lately invaders rather than native born Englishmen!

We have seen how Banker Henry's children were direct descendants of Nicholas Glanville who had been in Exeter in 1437 when he became a Freeman, as a baker. To be a Freeman then did not imply special recognition as it might today; it was a way of getting exemption, by the payment of a 'fine', from the taxes paid by visiting tradesmen.

Nicholas could have been the son of Nicholas who died at North Tawton, between Exeter and Tavistock where their branch of the family had moved from Wootton Glanville toward the end of the previous century. Nicholas is certainly a name often used by those early Glanvilles. Eliza was 10 generations removed from this Exeter Nicholas on a collateral line.

Jarl of the Uplanders to Elizabeth's Judge

Another fifteen generations back finds Ivar, the Jarl of the Uplanders of Norway, as the Glanvilles' earliest recorded ancestor. He was the last of these Vikings, Normans, what you will, to actually live in his own country. One of his descendants, eight generations later, was a commander of the archers at Hastings, another was Lord Chief Justice to Henry II, becoming Earl of Suffolk, and it was his brother from whom Eliza descended. The family were still just outside Tavistock when her line again caught public attention with Sir John Glanville, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and an M.P. in Queen Elizabeth's Parliament. His effigy is on his tomb in Tavistock church and he looks a brute.

Speaker of the House of Commons

His son, also Sir John, was also an M.P. and Speaker of the House of Commons through some of the crucial clashes with King Charles I and is probably the finest of the Glanvilles. He moved to Broadhinton in Wiltshire and from there Eliza's family went to Ashburton, back in Devon, not far from Totnes and it was from there that Roger, her father and a Master Mariner, moved to Maker and Rame.

A Glanville family history suggests that Roger's father was not given to over-straining himself where business was concerned. It seems that Roger had been obliged to earn his living and it was probably propinquity rather than cousinly contact that brought John and Eliza together. The elaborate family tree produced for one of her Victorian children skilfully gives the impression that hers was the senior line by putting it all down the left side of the sheet and it ends with the lovely description of her as Roger's 'co-heiress'. What this meant was that Roger had four daughters and no son!

Timber Inspector John

Inspector John is the nickname I have chosen for Eliza's John because he was promoted to Inspector of Shipwrights at Pembroke and then again to Timber Converter at Devonport, responsible for selecting and cutting timber for use in ships. The family had moved back to Devonport by 1843 when their last child, Albert, later to be a Doctor and die young, was born. John was promoted again when transferred to the newly reopened Deptford Dockyard, becoming Foreman of Shipwrights and in charge of 130 shipwrights and 50 labourers. Both to judge by his career and by his children Inspector John was a remarkable man, making his way despite an unpromising economic outlook and giving them a very good start in life. No doubt Eliza played her part - she looks every inch the matriarch.

When John died in 1868 he was pensioned as a Timber Inspector, a position immediately below the Master Shipwright in rank. He had seen the change from sail to steam and the first iron warships. Did he feel his skills and experience were no longer of any account? He was living at the time at 16 Valletort Place in Stoke Damerel, now a suburb of Plymouth, in a good sized mid-Victorian semi-detached house, very different from the small terraced houses he had occupied earlier in his career. His estate was valued at under £1500, about usual for such a man, particularly one who had eight sons to start in life.

Eliza and her two unmarried daughters, Mary and Emma, were his beneficiaries and lived on in a slightly smaller house in Headland Park, a respectable suburb of Plymouth. His youngest surviving son, Henry, who had a job in the Dockyard, was the only one of their other children still living in Devon. Some had already died, others lived in London, Silas was in the Navy and two had emigrated to New Zealand.

William and Catherine

How did William meet widow Catherine Dubberley (nee Omer)? There are some possibilities. William probably went with Mr Cornish to London who may have been attracted there by London's southward expansion. From the end of the eighteenth century the owners of the large estates and market gardens in the parishes beyond the riverside slums and docks were realising the advantages of negotiating building leases with speculative builders. In Camberwell and Peckham, St George's and New Cross - the last two west and south of Deptford Dockyard - large villas for wealthy London merchants had already been built. By the 1830's smaller houses were lining the main routes out of London. And during the rest of the century the spaces in between were filled with the suburban estates of terraced and semi detached houses seen today from the then new railways which still serve London's commuters.

So we find William marrying Catherine at St Giles Church, Camberwell, both being resident in Peckham Rye. Her father John Omer and Martha Omer were witnesses. He is shown as gentleman and William as cooper. The Omers were not Huguenots as might be expected but descended from a 13thC Canterbury lawyer and property owner. Aged 33, William must have been ready to set up his own business as surveyor and architect in Islington to take advantage of the north and eastward expansion of London. By the 1840's his elder brother's sons were also settling in London. John, the younger, was probably attracted to Islington by his uncle's presence there though he later moved further away to Bethnal Green and then emigrated to New Zealand. Bernard was working in the Isle of Dogs and later lived in Poplar. Then John himself came to Deptford, no doubt with Eliza and their daughters. There must have been much family coming and going in this London dominated by the river and made familiar by Charles Dickens.

I will tie up this line with their children in the hope that others can follow up later generations.

John to New Zealand

The eldest, John, born in Pembroke in 1821, married Ann Blackman and lived in Islington, employed as a druggist and then a merchant's clerk, before emigrating to Auckland, New Zealnd, where he became a Public Accountant. Others are better placed to tell his and his family's story after they got there. I have always regarded his becoming a druggist as further evidence that he was related to Samuel of Exeter but Samuel's business was long closed when John trained. Coincidence or cousinly memory ? There are strong suggestions that John's emigration and change of occupation were linked to some misdemeanour as a druggist and we know that his children had to go cap-in-hand to Uncle Bernard for money to subsidise a large family. It is likely that John was a 'remittance man' – his passage and settlement in New Zealand funded by his successful and childless (within marriage) brother, Bernard.

Bernard makes his way

Bernard (1824) was the next boy and he is quite a character. Probably having taken his apprenticeship as a shipwright, he moved to London where many of his relations had also moved. He found work with a private shipbuilder, Money, Wigram and Sons, at Blackwall on the North bank of the Thames. He lived in Poplar, not far from his uncle William and elder brother John in Islington, and also not far from his workplace. Still there in 1854 he married Jane Umfreville, daughter of a naval officer, but she had no children although the same is almost certainly not true of Bernard if family gossip is accepted.

Bernard joins Lloyds

Bernard's story has been chronicled very well both by Lloyds of London and by John Coates in his 1989 Camden Lecture at the Bath Industrial Heritage Centre so I will summarise his career. Lloyd's Register was the body established in 1834 to survey ships building and in service. Lloyd's Rules were the building and maintenance code which produced the classification 'A1 at Lloyd's' which has gone in to the language. Surveyors visited the ships as they were built and Bernard worked his way up the Surveyor grades, working prodigiously hard and yet finding time to design composite (i.e. iron frames and wooden planking) ships of such class that the tea clipper THERMOPYLAE(1867) ranks with the CUTTY SARK as one of the all-time greats of sailing ship design. She still holds the record for the passage from Australia to England by a sailing ship. This was a time of tremendous change in ship building: in 25 years they went from 90% wood to 90% steel, as big a change and in the same time as aircraft went from wood and wire and canvas to aluminium, titanium and carbon composites.

Bernard was constantly proposing new rules to improve the control over ship construction in ways that would actually make them safer and stronger. In the 1860's he was robustly resisted by the two Principal Surveyors so he suggested that the Waymouth Rules should be given a limited trial on an optional basis but they resisted that too. By 1870 the support for the new rules was so strong that it had to be sorted out and his Rules were put to the Committee of Lloyd's Register who immediately adopted them. The Principal Surveyors went and Bernard become the sole Principal Surveyor and then Chief Surveyor, a new post.

Elected Secretary of Lloyds

The Secretary of Lloyds died suddenly and, putting himself forward only at the last moment at the instigation of the Chairman, Thomas Chapman, Bernard was elected Secretary with a vote of 20 to 3. He was only 48 and now had a salary of £2,000 p.a. having started on £200. He stayed in post for the next 17 years, managing a revolution in ship building as big as the development of aircraft or, in our time, Information Technology. He died in harness, of a heart attack, while actually speaking to the Committee, aged 66, and after 36 years with Lloyd's Register.

Sadly we know little of his touch with the rest of the family and he may even have been seen by the more moral of them as an embarrassment. That he was sometimes generous to those who had fallen on hard times or in to bad ways seems likely and doubtless certain young men or women of ambiguous parentage found themselves an unexpected benefactor offering free passage to Australia to start a new life. The Remittance Man was a very Victorian concept and could have suited his life style as his wife was childless.

Bernard remains, historically, I believe, as important to the growth of Britain as a trading nation and to its pre-eminence in the financial affairs of the world as any of the great entrepreneurs, scientists or engineers who were his contemporaries. He made good ideas work and the Rules he formulated remain, in principle although not, of course, in detail, substantially the same today.

Ebenezer ......

His brothers Silas and Ebenezer were both in the Navy. Ebenezer saw action in the Crimean War at Sebastopol and then emigrated to Auckland where he, too, became a Public Accountant like his brother, John. He married Elizabeth Mullens and they had four sons and a daughter. I hope others can amplify the little I know about them. The daughter does not seem to have married. Harry Percy married Anne Stella Hubbard, emigrated from New Zealand to Australia where their family still are, many around Melbourne. I have no information on Adolphus Glanville other that he was a Company Manager and died in Auckland in 1942. Claude was a rolling stone. He played Rugby for North Island and he trained the first Springbok XV before going to Shanghai to run the Fire Brigade. Died there of pneumonia quite young.

Ebenezer's last son, Norman was an engineer, serving in Mesopotamia as a Captain in the Royal Engineers during the 1914-18 War, and then, after a spell in Canada, worked as a railway engineer in Argentina. His son Trevor was sent to school in England and, having failed to get parental permission to join the Navy, waited till he was of age, taught himself to fly and joined the Royal Air Force. He rose to Wing Commander and then ran the Buenos Aires office of British South American Airways where his youthful encounters with Eva Peron as a barmaid or 'hostess' were to stand him in good stead when having difficulties with the Trade Unions many years later. He returned to Europe where his knowledge of languages brought him management jobs across the continent with occasional employment even in to his late 70s. He had a son, Nigel, an artist, and three daughters, one of whom taught art, a second was a parachute instructor and the third a policewoman at present in New Zealand.

.......and Silas

Silas Waymouth on the other hand stayed on in the Service and rose to the rank of Fleet Paymaster which I believe to be Commander's rank by present equivalence but was probably more like Captain's grade in the level of work he undertook.

Silas seems to have written scrappy little notes about the various distinguished men he met, served with or even just heard about. These were gathered together after he died and printed as Memoirs of the 'late Fleet Paymaster Silas Waymouth'. Probably like most of his middle class contemporaries, Silas was a hopeless snob but he did know some interesting people. When one reads these stories the first reaction may be one of mild irritation that these smoking room yarns should be all that an interesting man could manage but as one keeps at it so he emerges as someone that other people, whether important or not, liked to have around them. I would encourage anyone descended from Silas to get a copy if they can.

Royal friendship

Suffice it for this chapter's purpose that Silas was well known to the Royal family and in particular to Prince Alfred, son of Queen Victoria, later Duke of Edinburgh and ultimately Duke of Saxe Coburg and Gotha, a full Admiral whom he encountered frequently and over many years - they first met in Malta in 1858 when Silas was dining onboard H M S EURYALUS with his friend, Midshipman the Hon. John Manners Yorke, later Earl of Hardwicke and became a Captain R.N. By a quirk of fate Silas' great-great-nephew was to marry Midshipman Yorke's great-great-granddaughter.

Prince Alfred was a 14 year old Naval Cadet and, later, Silas, as an Assistant Paymaster (probably Sub Lieutenant equivalent, aged 21), was presiding over a rowdy dinner ashore in Malta. He put the young Prince on the table to return thanks for the toast to 'The Queen' - a not unusual treatment for the youngest present but not everyone would have got away with it.

Reversing the snobbery for a moment, Silas must have been quite a character to have been elected as a Paymaster to preside over the dinner which was given by all the junior officers of the Fleet to those in H M S EURYALUS; in the naval social hierarchy Paymasters were bottom of the pile and, although they were commissioned officers from 1844, they did not get the same ranks as seamen officers until 1918 with the very last social distinction, the suffix (S) for Supply Branch, being removed in the 1960s or thereabouts.

The work of Paymasters

Before they were Paymasters they had been known as Pursers and they had two main functions. Firstly, as Admiral's Secretaries they were the clerks for senior officers making sure that the Admiral obeyed the Admiralty's rules, had answers to his correspondence provided and generally administered the paperwork. The Chief of Staff was the Admiral's deputy, his Secretary was, approximately his P.A. although the Flag Lieutenant would get most of the errands. Secondly, and alternatively, they looked after the ships stores and money but that was a separate posting and Silas seems to have spent most of his time as a Secretary to a succession of Commodores and then Admirals.

Serving worldwide

He got about in the Navy, spending many years in the Mediterranean and especially at Malta, in the Baltic, where he was present at the capture and destruction of Bomarsund in the war with Russia, the West Indies and at the Cape of Good Hope, presumably at Simonstown although the base may still, then, have been at Capetown.

In 1880 he left the Navy and became Secretary of the Orient Steam Navigation Company where he stayed until 1900. He had married Jane Sutherland Miller in Malta at the Scotch Church in 1862 and they had three children, Arthur(1863), Ernest(1868), and Charles(1871).

Ernest was a Major in the Royal Artillery and Charles a Major in the Dorset Regiment. One of Ernest's daughters married W J A Davies who was a famous Captain of the English XV in the 20s. Charles married a Scott-Dalgleish and their son, Nigel, was another Signals specialist in the Navy. His sister, Charity, was a leading expert in cancer research and settled, coincidentally, in Maine where she headed a research establisment for many years.

Arthur the gunnery specialist

Arthur was the lucky and bright one. Having joined the Navy in 1877, aged 14, on the recommendation of Captain Hugh Campbell, a friend of Silas', he saw action at Suez during the Egyptian War of 1882. He did very well in his professional exams and was then a watchkeeper in H M S CANADA on the North America station in 1884. King George V was a more junior officer in that ship and this was the start of a life-long friendship only slightly spoiled after the King came to the throne by the fact that Arthur was known to keep a mistress and Royal circles did not approve.

Arthur was one of three gunnery experts who transformed naval gunnery and tactics at the end of the 19th Century. The others, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher and Admiral Sir Percy Scott were a good deal older and it was they who forced through the DREADNOUGHT battleship revolution ['We want eight, we won't wait' was the political slogan which won the day.]

Fisher wrote of Arthur 'delightfully elaborating with exceptional acuteness' the merits of 'end-on fire' as opposed to fire on the broadside, the traditional method carried over from the days of sail. Rising rapidly through the ranks he had various sea commands interspersed with gunnery and ordnance posts ashore. When promoted Rear Admiral in 1912 he became the first Director of Naval Equipment. He stayed there until January 1915, six months after the start of the Great War, as he would have called it, when he was given command of the newly formed 7th Cruiser Squadron at Cromarty.

Missed the Battle of Jutland

Sadly, he was invalided from that job within four months and so missed the Battle of Jutland where his training and ideas were put to the test. Although tactically indecisive, partly through defects in the ships but also in the gunnery systems, the manoeuvre by which Admiral Jellicoe turned his huge fleet so that the German High Seas Fleet steamed out of the fog in line ahead to find the whole British Fleet offering their broadside at the leading ships must rank as one of the most effective ever made. It is a curiosity that this was an almost exact reversal of the manoeuvre by which Nelson won the battle of Trafalgar and points up the huge revolution in 111 years since that battle; only material failure and poor communications allowed the Germans to escape, never to seriously challenge again. But we will need to come back to that later...

In August 1915, when he was better, he was appointed as Admiral-Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard where he remained until he retired in January 1917. He would have retired in the next rank higher, Vice-Admiral and in 1920 having already been made a Commander of the Bath(C.B.) he was promoted to Admiral on the retired list. He had also collected Egyptian, French and Swedish decorations.

Keeping Maker in view

As this panorama ever widens to our own time it is difficult to keep a sustained narrative. Let us remind ourselves that we are still dealing with the children of Cooper John, all born in Maker! I don't propose to continue with the rest of Inspector John's family as I know nothing of Henry Waymouth's family who may have died out. He was employed in the Admiralty and lived in later years in Italy. His two granddaughters married naval officers who became Admirals.

William died young as a Lieutenant R.N., Albert died young as a Doctor and the girls' fate has not been recorded except for dear Eliza who married her first cousin William John. This was not approved by some of the older generation and so they got married from her elder brother John's house in Islington. William was 8 years her younger and I fear entrapment. They look a sad couple and their only daughter Kate died in Islington at 12, a pretty but pallid lass. Perhaps the olduns had the rights of it.

Next in line of Cooper John's brood are Elizabeth, who never married, dying in Plymouth aged 75, and Susan (also Susannah) who married Richard Jennings Bryant, said to be a travelling salesman. Whether he was an Exeter Bryant or not has not been checked by me but it must be odds on that he was one of their relatives. They lost two small children in August 1842 but a boy and a girl grew up and married.

First of the architects

Lastly we come to William Waymouth, baptised at Maker in 1804. We know that he was a Surveyor and that by 1838 he and his wife, a widow called Catherine Dubberley who already had had three children had moved to Islington. She was the daughter of John OMER and granddaughter of Roger.

Her sister, Elizabeth, married three times and ended up as Mrs Cushman in Boston, Mass. A descendant, Janet Wolfe in Michigan, has tracked the family back to Kent into the14th and 15th Century with a strong presumption that they are indeed descended from Meister or Magister Omer who was a big wheel among the laymen serving Canterbury Cathedral in the 13C. The reason it is likely is only partly the name. Meister Omer bought land at Ash, behind Sandwich, and all round that area and Ash is where the Omers are found, and only there, 150 years later, still people of consequence, minor gentry marrying girls from the local manors. For years we had a 1736 Bible filled with quaint engravings of biblical scenes which had been given to Martha Omer by her parents in 1816. She never married and I assume she gave the Bible to a nephew or niece and so to me.

The only Dubberley child to have grown up and married, I believe, was Ellen and she married a Grey. I have a family tree for John Omer's family extending five generations but it is a bit tangential to this study and there seems little present day relevance to them in this book.

We find William marrying Catherine at St Giles Church, Camberwell, both being resident in Peckham Rye, her father John Omer - he and Martha Omer were witnesses - is shown as gentleman and William's as cooper. The Omers were not Huguenots as might be expected but descended from a 13thC Canterbury lawyer and property owner who mainly worked for the cathedral. Aged 33, William must have been ready to set up his own business as surveyor and architect in Islington to take advantage of the north and eastward expansion of London. By the 1840's his elder brother's sons were also settling in London. John, the younger, was probably attracted to Islington by his uncle's presence there though he later moved further away to Bethnal Green and then emigrated to New Zealand. Bernard was working in the Isle of Dogs and later lived in Poplar. Then John himself came to Deptford, no doubt with Eliza and their daughters. There must have been much family coming and going in this London dominated by the river and made familiar by Charles Dickens.

Lived in three centuries

Catherine was somewhat older than William having been born in September 1799 and she outlasted him comfortably to die in March 1900 having lived in three centuries. In 1896 she asked Norman, a great-nephew, son of Ebenezer, how old he was. When he told her he was 15 she said she could remember that when she was his age she had danced in the streets with the soldiers returning from the Battle of Waterloo.

Before William married, in 1830, he seems to have taken an apprenticeship as a builder with a Mr Cornish in Exeter and in that capacity was entered as a Freeman of Exeter. I have photographs of a Mr Cornish, by this time in London, in the album kept by William or his wife. Cornish is a good Malborough name and another Waymouth married a Cornish there. Thus we find the loop almost completed again. Mr Bryant, father of Banker Henry's wife, was a builder in Exeter but it is likely he had moved to London for richer pickings. William's sister married a Bryant and William trained as a builder in Exeter. Not proof absolute but circumstantial. Again, a note of caution: one set of photographs of Bryants was taken in Plymouth but that may have been Richard Jennings and Sarah who lived there.

William and Catherine had three sons, William John (1838), Frederick and George(1845) when Catherine would have been close to 46 years old. William John we have already met as he married Inspector John's youngest daughter, Eliza, possibly with parental opposition.

Frederick died young and George followed his father in to building, becoming an architect.

The next architect

George, having grown up in Islington and, no doubt having seen it become ever more just a part of London instead of the elegant village it once was, practised his art in Hornsey - a green field site, in the jargon of today, and on the route of one of the new main line railways in to London which produced a wave of suburban building along these now to become commuter routes. He married Louise Emily Kerby who was, I believe, quite a beauty. Even in old age she has a sweet face. George was less prepossessing with a hangdog, tired expression in many of his photographs, especially as he loses his hair. He looks better in old age.

They had a boy and three girls. William Charles was born at 13 Albert Road, Stroud Green, in 1872. This would have been still a village, half way between Islington and Hornsey on the dry ground West of the Lea Valley which is now a string of reservoirs for London. The following year they had moved North of Hornsey to Edmonton where Edith Annie was born, followed by Ella and then Grace, quite an afterthought, eight years later. Edith Annie died at 28 but Ella married Rev. Joseph Church and they worked as missionaries in India. Grace was also a missionary, unmarried and, I think, also in India.

When my father was doing the second Empire Cruise in H M S DELHI in the early 1920's, a sequel to the flag-showing extravaganza by the Prince of Wales two years earlier, he was embarrassed to receive a telegram from Joseph and Ella which started 'The Churches of Asia salute you'. Although such lifting and twisting of Biblical quotes was a game often played between the Captains of ships over many generations. The frantic mustering of Concordances to find suitable or not so suitable ripostes relieved the long hours of ocean passage in company with other ships.

Charles, as he was known, trained as an architect after he had finished at Mill Hill school where he was capped at soccer(a soft chestnut brown velvet skull cap with gold piping and tassel which has been returned to Mill Hill) I have already discussed the usefulness of the apparent link with Kingsbridge Weymouths in the fact of Dr R F Weymouth's post as Headmaster of Mill Hill.

Charles was awarded first the Bronze and then the Gold Medal by the Institute of Architects and practised, at any rate latterly, in High Holborn on the edge of the City, a short way West (and up-market!) from Islington. During the Second World War he was one of two Diocesan Architects responsible for the care of all London's churches except those, such as many built by Sir Christopher Wren, in the hands of the Fine Arts Commission. He had to deal with 32 of them damaged by German bombs and incendiaries.

It was said that he made three fortunes and lost each of them in a subsequent building slump - two of the slumps would have been during the World Wars, I suppose. He was a speculative builder as well as having a City practice. Barnet, West of Edmonton, and, eventually, the end of a new Underground line but already on a main line in to London was where they and the baby Gordon had moved from Edmonton by 1901 and it was there that he built a number of fine Gentlemen's Residences, all of them featuring his speciality, intricately designed brick fireplaces. Walberswick on the Suffolk Coast was where he took the family on holiday and he built several 'country cottages' for clients there. These are large houses, looking as solid today as when they were built.

He married Winifred Mather, one of the many daughters of E.J. Mather, a fascinating product of the Victorian era. Already actively involved in support of missionary work he was challenged by a friend in 1881 to look at the plight of the 1,500 North Sea fishermen. This he did with great imagination and vigour, establishing the Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen which survives to this day.

Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen

His book Nor'ard of the Dogger, written in 1887 and dedicated to the Queen, who had become Patron of the Mission and given a donation, tells story after story about the life and hardship of those men and how he tried to meet their real needs. Abruptly and without explanation he withdrew from all dealing with the Mission and for years this was a mystery. When my father tackled one of his many Aunts, EJ's daughters, on the subject she would not tell him why.

'Did he run off with his Secretary?' says my father, tongue in cheek. 'Oh! No, nothing like that...' and out it came. Seemingly, he had been a bit casual about paying in and noting donations - not from dishonesty (he had committed far too much of the family treasure to the project for the sisters' good) but just lack of organisation. However he did marry a nurse years younger than himself after his wife died so my father was half right!

His only son Hugh joined DISCOVERY as a Petty Officer and went with Scott to the Antarctic. He trained in taxidermy in order to assist the expedition scientists. He served in the Navy during the 1914-18 War and then went as a Major on the Archangel expedition in 1919. There he won a DSO for taking two small ships in to action against a much larger Russian ship on Lake Onega. He became Secretary and later President of the Antarctic Club or Society and served as a Commander RNR on the Staff of Commander-in-Chief, Western Approaches, Admiral Sir Percy Noble, at Liverpool where my father, Ridley, was Signals Officer and even I, as a Naval Cadet, for a few weeks acted as one of the plotting team.

Architect Charles' children

Winifred's eldest son, William Gordon, was born in Edmonton in 1898. Having served as an officer in the Great War of 1914-18 he went in to teaching. He was a very good hockey player and went with an England touring side to Europe. In due course he became Headmaster of St Lawrence Junior School, part of a Ramsgate, Kent, Public School. While the school was evacuated to Northampton to escape German bombardment from across the English Channel in the 1939-45 War he married one of the teachers in that school, Barbara Lines. They had two children, Christopher and Hilary.

Gilbert Ridley Waymouth - back to the Navy

George, Charles' father, died in Barnet in 1923. By this time Ridley Waymouth, named after one of the Protestant martyrs, confirming the strongly Evangelical bent of his parents, was a young Lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He had been born in Barnet in May 1901 and, and after happy years as Sherborne School in Dorset, he joined the Royal Naval College, Osborne in January 1915 in one of the largest entries of Naval Cadets ever taken. The War had started in August 1914 and after six terms at Osborne, Ridley spent only one term at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, before his term was sent to sea early in September 1917 when he was just 16. He passed out 3rd in his Grenville Term of 120.

He had been appointed as a Midshipman in H M S GLORIOUS and he joined her in Scotland in the Firth of Forth just above the bridge in September 1917. She was one of those freaks of Lord Fisher's genius, a 15"-gunned light cruiser - huge guns for such a ship. Lightly armoured, unlike the battleships and battle-cruisers, she could do 36 knots and had been designed with her sister-ships COURAGEOUS and FURIOUS to go with the battle-cruisers REPULSE (in which Ridley later served) and RENOWN in to the Baltic, relying on their great speed to evade any chasing German battleships. After the Great War she was converted in to one of the first aircraft carriers and saw service as such in the 1939-45 war in which she was sunk by the Germans.

This force went on a number of sweeps into the Eastern reaches of the North Sea and on 17 November 1917 Ridley saw his first action against the Germans. His main recollection was of being terrified by the first firing of one of the after 15" guns as he was alone in the after spotting top and could look well down their barrels when they were elevated to fire at long range. He had no idea of the colossal force needed to drive nearly a ton of shell over 20 miles and no one had warned him. [

By a quirk of chance I had almost the same experience as a Midshipman in QUEEN ELIZABETH (Jellicoe's Flagship in Ridley's time, Flagship still in the East Indies in 1945) when I was the Spotting Officer as we bombarded the Japanese on the Northern tip of Sumatra. Less dramatic, perhaps, as the forward turrets only came round on to the after bearing where I could look down the barrels at the end of our runs. But I remember vividly the cordite smoke, the bits of paper that had contained it and the sickening pause between the bell that told the layer that all the guns were loaded and in line and the concussion as he fired the brutes. I am 'gunnery deaf' to this day.

This North Sea engagement was inconclusive and the Germans withdrew to their harbours as the Grand Fleet approached - Jutland had made them realise that they were not going to win the war in a day but could easily lose it in one epic battle as they nearly had at Jutland. Indeed when, in June 1918, in desperation, the High Seas Fleet was ordered to sea they mutinied. When the war ended they were ordered to sail to Scapa Flow and strike their German Ensigns in surrender. It was after that that they scuttled their ships.

Signal Communications the key

Some of the more thoughtful young officers decided after the War that the biggest weakness in the Navy during the War had been signal communications. One of them was Lord Louis Mountbatten and another was Ridley. Both specialised in Signals with my father passing out top the year after Lord Louis did the same. Although never friends \- indeed Lord Louis was probably responsible for him not being promoted Rear Admiral - they were in the same line of business. Ridley, however, became one of the Navy's experts and had a succession of specialist jobs one of which involved designing the Signals Intelligence intercept system which subsequently he headed.

When War started in September 1939 he had reached the rank of Commander and was in command of a sloop, H M S LEITH [Sister-ship of the WELLINGTON moored to this day on the Thames together with DISCOVERY], on the New Zealand station. He steamed her home and after a spell on convoy work he was brought ashore to create the signals organisation for the Western Approaches Command which was fighting the Battle of the Atlantic. That grew eventually to 16,000 men and women. From there he was promoted to Captain and became the head of Naval Signal Intelligence. From there he was posted to command H M S DELHI. DELHI was a light cruiser in which he had served as a young Lieutenant and met my mother while the ship was visiting Vancouver Island on the Empire Cruise in 1924. She was Gweneth Lilian Rice, an Indian Army Colonel's daughter, and they married in 1926. Three sons and a daughter. Two sons were in the Navy and the other a soldier.

DELHI and Tito's Partisans

DELHI had been fitted out as an anti-aircraft cruiser and formed part of the force which landed troops in Southern France in June 1944. From there she was sent up the Adriatic and went in to Split on the Jugoslav coast two days after the Germans had pulled out. While there the ship was attacked and damaged by German explosive motorboats but more interesting, perhaps, to a modern generation was that he endured from the Jugoslav Communists very much the same treatment as United Nations commanders have endured in Bosnia in recent times. He out-bluffed them by claiming that their actions were contrary to the agreement between Marshal Tito and General Alexander and they backed down but in the meantime he had had his ship's company at 'Repel Boarders Stations', possibly for the last time ever in the Royal Navy. It was a difficult time recognised by the award of a CBE.

He had a succession of interesting naval jobs after the war - Captain of the Fleet, Director of Signals and Senior Officer, Reserve Fleet, retiring in 1951. What he did in retirement however brings us right back to those early Baptist days. He had become ever more concerned about the power of Communism and responded, therefore, to the ideas of Dr Frank Buchman expressed as Moral ReArmament. He felt that the West needed to face the moral challenge of Communism with something better and, as a committed Christian, Buchman's ideas convinced him that it was possible. Until he died he fought to persuade the leaders of Asia, Africa and Europe that Christianity was relevant to modern politics, not just private life. It was not a popular idea especially with men like Mountbatten who was anything but moral in private and public life.

Apart from noting that his sons continued the naval tradition, this brings us to the end of the Maker Waymouths without solving the fundamental problem of their place in the wider family. It is very easy to see possible clues in occupation, religious association and just the fact that the families do seem to have acknowledged and known about each other but a rigorous analysis leaves me persuaded but clear that the case is not proven.

Rev. Charles, Rector of Cadeleigh

Even more of a problem is the Rev. Charles Waymouth who was Rector of Cadeleigh, [between Tiverton and Exeter] and, therefore, Church of England, in 1831 when his son Charles was born there. He and Anna Maria Lucas had married in Monken Hadley, near Barnet, in 1830. Their son, Charles married an Indian Army Brigadier's daughter, Annie Frances Carpenter, and was himself a Captain in the 17th Lancers. Some of their family emigrated to New Zealand while others stayed here. Rev.Charles was connected, as an Executor of a Will, to J&G Waymouth in Exeter but what the connection was has not yet been found.

Mailed fist and three arrows again

It would be nice to believe that this branch's use of the mailed fist and three arrows crest is confirmation that we are all from the same stock. There may be some family records still which would sort this out. I believe we are all distant cousins but I have to warn that our Victorian ancestors were great ones for tracking themselves back in to antiquity and nobility and there was quite an industry devoted to searching back until a female relative with a known ancestral history was found and then, lo and behold, the family tree switched and went back to Cadwallada or Carl the Jarl or Nebuchadnezzar on the strength of this girl's connections. I recently discovered a link to William the Conqueror through one of my Kentish maternal ancestors! Crests and badges were all part of the package for your five guineas. Similar spurious scholarship is foisted on the present day public so beware.

This is true for all of us who call ourselves Waymouth or Weymouth and so I shall only be content when we find the link or prove it does not exist. Meanwhile, we are all cousins, ultimately and in no sense is it truly important whether or where the link should be. What I have found however and I hope others have shared is a new sense of belonging to a history and culture that has done much for the world and which it would be good to see continue to change and develop in to the future, building on the best.

CHAPTER 6 COCKINGTON, ST MARYCHURCH AND THE MARINERS

Home from the sea

No study of Waymouths can ignore those that lived in the area which is now known as Torquay. There are however only the most tenuous suggestions of family ties with the other concentrations of Waymouths. However it is quite possible that it is there that the missing links may yet be found.

When records start properly, in the 1520s, there they are, all over South Devon. Solid citizens, men of local influence, in adjacent Hundreds in an arc from Dawlish round to Malborough and beyond giving the strong impression [Borne out by several documents showing that they owned property widely in the South Hams - not just in their immediate locality] of cousinly connection. We do not find the name outside Devon (except London) for another 100 years.

They are of interest not just of themselves but because many of them went to sea and that is one of the occupations much pursued by Waymouths.

Manorial Will Book

The Mallocks owned Cockington Manor and much else in the Torquay area from early in the 17th Century. In Victorian times a Mallock wrote a history of Cockington, a small but picturesque village behind Torquay, in which he says 'from 1489.....I find the name of Waymouth constantly appearing till 1850.......Tailor Waymouth, an old soldier, died in the cottage on the Chelston side of the iron church and a sister, Molly Waymouth, survived some years after.'

One of the documents the author will have studied is the Cockington Will Book. It is a rare survival from the 16th Century and contains copies of the Wills of residents of Cockington Manor lands who were not rich or important enough to have their Wills proved at the Consistory Court. Manors were required to carry out this quasi-judicial work, and presumably to settle any disputes, but seemingly were not required to forward the books to any central registry.

Shipowners

The earliest Waymouth Will is proved in 1540 and in it John, if my reading of Elizabethan script is right, leaves his ship, the PETER, to his widow Alison and sons William, Richard and Robert. William is assessed in 1569 as the wealthiest man in Cockington after the Manor. When he died in 1578 most of his not inconsiderable wealth (we are talking here of a yeoman rather than a gentleman) is left to his son William and the first item is 'a moitie of ye shippe ye LYON' valued at £50. This may not seem much for half a ship but it is in fact 12 years wages for a farm labourer and in any case probably only notional as it was not passing out of the family - one assumes that son William already owned the other half.

George's chattell

The first item in William's Will, however, is of wider significance as he leaves to his 'sonnes sonne' George his 'chattell to be delivered after the death of my sonne William Weymouth'.

Chattell at this time has three possible meanings: cattle, kettle or a lease. As a lease, possibly of indeterminate length rather than the '99 years or three lives' which became common from around this time onwards, it was a very valuable item and would usually pass to a son, as it does here.

It must, therefore, be quite likely that making this first disposition of his Will to his grandson George, ahead of his bequest of most of the rest of his property to his son, William, means that we should see this as entailing his property rather than a gift of cattle or a kettle. However what George got is not half as important as this context-giving reference to him. George is famous and from this Will Book we now know his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, all of Cockington. There is a minor conundrum in that we have some reason to believe that William had another grandson also called William but he is not left anything in the Will. Three possibilities are: that George had fallen out with his father [he fell out with a good many people] so Grandpa makes sure George does not lose out, that young William was already provided for or that he was not yet born. I'm sure there are other possibilities.

A few years after this George was to begin a series of voyages looking for the North West Passage to China and, most importantly, surveying the East coast of America around Maine. His report on Maine was to lead to the settling of the first successful English colonies in America and directly to the settlement at Kittery in Maine - those earlier plantations further South at Jamestown in Virginia failed.

William the Younger

However before looking at George and his adventures, William the Younger is of interest for his own sake and in giving us the background against which George would operate. By 1569 William was already more well-to-do than his father and we believe was already actively engaged in the Newfoundland fishery as well as pilchard fishing off South Devon. We have already discovered his interest in the LYON which was probably quite a small ship. In 1583 he built the JUDITH [170 tons] which was working the Newfoundland fisheries out of Dartmouth and received a Royal bounty of 5/-/ton in 1584 for her.

In 1589 he owned both the MOYSES [110 tons] and the CRESCENT [250 tons], both of Dartmouth. In 1594 William was paid a bounty by the Queen for the CRESCENT as it was government policy to have more big ships built.

Meeting the Armada

There is however a minor mystery about the CRESCENT. In 1588, the year before, a ship of that name but only rated as able to carry 170 tons with a crew of 40, was taken out of trade by Dartmouth and Totnes to be refitted as a warship to meet the Armada. There are detailed accounts of this work as Dartmouth intended to claim and hoped to be repaid by the Queen when the fuss was all over. Her Master was Christopher Waymouth and the Captain was John Willson. The Captain commanded and fought the ship while the Master navigated and sailed her - perhaps a modern equivalent would be Chief Engineer. Totnes, up river from Dartmouth and an important wool, tin and slate exporting town and still then a port, paid twice the contribution of Dartmouth which was more focussed on fishing and only supplanted Totnes as a port when the River Dart silted up.

CRESCENT, under Willson and Waymouth, would have been in a support role, probably, as she was neither very big nor fitted with more than a few guns. We can imagine her being fitted out with 'castles' fore and aft from which the archers and musketeers would be able to fire from a higher vantage point and, with some protection, even if only from quite thin planks. It would be nice to think of her as having served in Drake's squadron as he was another Devon seaman sailing in the REVENGE, a purpose built and new type of heavy-gun warship.

Even Lord Howard's flagship, ARK RALEGH - later ARK ROYAL, was under 1,000 tons with a crew of 400 many of whom would have been foot soldiers armed either with muskets or bows. Anyone interested and able to visit the MARY ROSE (700 tons) at Portsmouth in Southern England can see both the size of a major warship of that era - CRESCENT definitely was not that, being perhaps one third her size - and, in the museum, the arms, clothing and equipment of such a mixed function warship fitted both with cannon for a stand off fight and soldiers for the grapple-and-board phase of capture.

William's Bounty fleet

Whether William bought the CRESCENT on her return from war and then enlarged her or perhaps built another ship: we do not know. His bounty was ostensibly for new construction but he may have done such a major rebuild as to be able to collect it for the old ship. Unfortunately the Devonians were very unoriginal in naming their ships (and their children.) and two CRESCENTs working out of Dartmouth would not be seen by them as odd.

Even the MOYSES was quite a big ship for that time and to own two large ships sets William apart from the generality. Today we might call the JUDITH or the MOYSES mother ships (they were known as 'sack ships' at the time) shipping out dories and their crews to Newfoundland where they would spend the summer catching, salting and drying cod while the ship itself was hauled out. At the end of the season they would re-float the mother ship, take their fish to Spain and Portugal and collect oranges, wine and iron ore for shipping back to England.

Bristol explorers

William's involvement with Newfoundland was not a sudden or new development although South Devon's interest in it grew rapidly at this time. It was, in fact, Bristol men who first rediscovered the American continent, and, in particular, Newfoundland, at the end of the 15th Century, some ten or even fifteen years before Columbus set sail in 1492. Indeed he and Cabot, both Italians on the make, knew of the Bristolian voyages and interpreted their finds as part of the Asian mainland which had so far only been reached, mainly by the Portuguese, by sailing Eastwards. [Bristol is on the North Eastern corner of the peninsula which contains Devon and Cornwall, Cockington is near enough central on the South coast and a very much easier area from which to sail to America.]

The Bristolians for their part were very cagey about what they had found. The Newfoundland cod banks were a welcome replacement for the Icelandic fisheries from which they had been driven. Their secretiveness was understandable. The Hanseatic League (a number of city states, mainly German) had managed to create a fishing and trading monopoly and, apparently, were able to pressure Kings to conform to it. If they had discovered what the Bristolians were about they could well have interfered as they already had over the Icelandic fisheries. The Bristolians talked of their 'Irish' fishery but brought back Grand Banks cod......

Cabot fooled by Bristolians

Henry VII probably turned a blind eye to the Bristolians vagueness about where they were fishing. Some of them sailed with Cabot and seem to have deliberately kept him South of their fishing grounds so that he ran along the New England seaboard instead. Uninhabited territory, however well wooded and fertile, wasn't the China, Japan and Spice Islands he was looking for so he came back and in 1497 persuaded the King and others to mount a five ship expedition to go even further West and South. The five sailed but only one came back and that because of damage near Ireland. One possibility is that a particularly vicious Spaniard called Hojeda, sent out by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1499, caught up with them and killed them. Perhaps, after two years away, they were already in a low state from disease and scurvy and unable to resist.

As Ferdinand and Isabella were negotiating for their daughter to marry Henry VII's eldest son, Arthur,[she was Catherine of Aragon and ended up marrying the next son, Henry VIII] they would have been keen to suppress any news of this. We have only circumstantial evidence for it in a contemporary map showing English flags in the Gulf of Mexico and a reference, in Hojeda's Royal licence for the 1499 expedition, to the English having been in South America near the mouth of the Orinoco. One can, however, be sure that the Spanish monarch would be very keen to guard his rights under the Papal decree dividing the New World between Spain to the West and Portugal to the East and equally keen not to advertise his methods in doing so. It is also plausible that Henry knew or suspected what had happened but was equally constrained diplomatically. It was an important alliance for him, too.

Development of Devon fishery

So from about 1540 the Devonian proportion of the Newfoundland fishing gradually built up and at the turn of the 17th Century there was a further impetus from the failure of the South Devon pilchard catch and the opening of European markets. Suffice it that William's family were at the centre of this expansion. However, William was not content with local and Newfoundland fishery. As early as 1578 he was a subscriber to Sir Humphrey Gilbert's voyage of exploration and this was carried over to the 1582/3 expedition - there are unsubstantiated claims that William's son George was on that or a similar expedition and it would certainly fit much that we know of him. William is called 'merchant' - not 'yeoman' or 'gentleman' and that probably was a fair description. Gilbert and Raleigh had decided that one way to carry the fight to the Spaniards would be to establish a base in America and they also hoped to find a northerly route to Cathay.

William may well have sent a cousin, John, to fish for herring on the North coast of Devon, firstly out of Clovelly (owned by the Careys) and then later out of the Taw/Torridge estuary based on Bideford(Raleigh was its Mayor) and, even later, Northam (which, for seamen, would probably have meant Appledore). Waymouths lived in the area for 100 years and that about covers the best fishing of that period but it is just possible that this was where their interest in tobacco began. [It is all highly speculative but John's children's names would have been more familiar in Malborough than Cockington possibly ruling out the idea he was there at William's behest but opening the possibility that Cockington and Malborough were maintaining cousinly touch.]

Certainly William was one of the founders with Sir Richard Boyle, later Earl of Cork, of a fishery at Ardmoor, near Youghal, in Southern Ireland in the early 17th Century and indeed he may have been there when his wife died in 1596. The pilchards had moved to Southern Irish waters by 1611 and there were also hake and herring to be caught. This was a big fishery - as many as 400 Devon ships with crews of perhaps 2,400 men in 1623.

Mary's spilchardges

In 1596 Mary Waymouth died at Chilston in the Manor of Cockington. She left a large but not valuable inventory to her son, George, and his five sisters, one of whom was Wilmote Hinxston, and to her godson Richard Hinxston. She made no mention of a husband, forgave various debts but required her Executors to collect from a couple who 'do owe me for one hogshead of spilchardges which one John James sold in Spayne for 14 wells[pounds ?] per thousand wherein were 5,500 spilchardges' and for the money to be paid to her son George Waymouth who in turn is to pay off a debt she owes to William Hinxston .

There is no certainty at this distance but I presume she was the estranged wife of William the Younger as he is listed in 1600 as the first taxpayer of Cockington after the Lord of the Manor, Sir George Cary and we know that he was setting up the fishery in Ireland even later. William also gets a mention in the report of proceedings of the manorial Court Leet. Firstly he and two others are fined 12 pence for failing to repair the ducking stool and a further 20d if it is not done soon. Later the same trio are in trouble for failing to repair the pillory and are fined 10 shillings or 13/4 if it was not done soon. That was a lot of money so one wonders if they received an annual fee and had discreetly forgotten to do the jobs that went with the sinecure.

George the explorer

There is no satisfactory way of dealing with George . He is an enigma. A thoroughly difficult man and yet it was said by Sir Ferdinand Gorges, the founder and first Governor of the Province of Maine, of his meeting with George on his return to Plymouth from his voyage to reconnoitre the New England coast that this 'accident must be acknowledged the means under God of putting on foot and giving life to all our plantations'.

One historian commented 'There was no fanfare. There was apparently not even any announcement - in fact, only two of the colonists have left mention of the date. Yet that sailing [of three ships for America - two of them those that George had used] laid the foundation for the British Empire.' Waymouth, Gosnold and Gilbert (Bartholomew - not Sir Humphrey, and no close relation) between them created so much interest that a number of colonising expeditions were mounted

We have already seen how George would have had the opportunity from boyhood to get to know the Newfoundland coast. He would have known of the exploration of that whole region by Bristol men and he may also have known of the earlier voyages of Eric the Red and others, Vikings from Iceland who went Westward beyond their Greenland settlement to look at the Eastern seaboard and even, briefly, in the unusually warm weather at the end of the first Millennium, to settle there.

In 1630 in a corporate petition Dartmouth said that it had sent an expedition to the New England coast in 1597, five years earlier than any other from England, and George who lived in the area would have known all about the results of that voyage, too, although he does not mention being on it.

The Spanish discoveries further South and West had made it seem very unlikely that there was a Southerly West-about route to China and the spices that were so essential to disguise the foul taste of badly kept meat. Furthermore the Spanish were very determinedly defending their new sphere of influence - the probable murder of Cabot and his crews on the north coast of South America by the Spanish.would have been wholly consistent with the policy of exclusion they had pursued for a century.

In England there was therefore renewed interest in Northerly alternatives whether going East or West. Richard Hakluyt, a wealthy merchant and geographer, had collected every scrap of information he could and was constantly urging and backing fresh ventures. The idea that there could be a route free of Spaniards and Portuguese was very seductive. The Muscovy Company sent the Burrough brothers of Northam, in North Devon, East round North Cape and they had got as far as Murmansk but of course no further - nuclear icebreakers would not be available for another 370 years. Humphrey Gilbert, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were willing to risk Spanish and Portuguese attack as they sought riches in the Americas. John Davis on the other hand had been probing the waters between Greenland and Labrador but without success. The Davis Straits are named after him.

'a people by nature enclyned to great attempts' (Queen Elizabeth I, 1602)

However, when in 1601 George Waymouth approached the Muscovy Company it was with a scheme to find the North West Passage to China. After much dithering, they did not go ahead with it and he took it to the East India Company who agreed to provide two small ships and the money to prepare and provision them. On 2 May 1602 the DISCOVERY (variously 50 tons or 70) and GODSPEED (30 tons or 60) set sail from Ratcliffe, East of the Tower of London on the Thames.

He had only 34 men in the two ships and provisions for 18 months but he carried a fine illuminated and sealed letter from Queen Elizabeth to the Emperor of Cathay with Spanish, Latin and Italian translations. It introduces George as one of her subjects who are 'a people by nature enclyned to great attempts' and hopes that trade can develop. [This letter was discovered a hundred and fifty years later behind panelling in a London house and was for long in the Crosse family who eventually passed it to Lancashire County Records Office, Preston, where it is exhibited. The Crosse connection is obscure to me but seems to be directly from George himself. Some of them lived at Halberton in Devon but that is near Tavistock, North of Exeter and, for that time, remote from Cockington.There is a suggestion that George's sister married a Crosse.]

Mutiny

George made useful discoveries in those inhospitable waters but as conditions got worse his crews, egged on by Rev John Cartwright, an experienced Muscovy Company agent in the GODSPEED, would not go on and he turned for home. The East India Company were, naturally, disappointed but the blame was laid on Cartwright and George was soon trying to organise another expedition.

In Amsterdam in 1609 Henry Hudson was consulting Plaucius, a Dutch g'...hee neither discovered nor named anything more than Davis, nor had any sight of Groenland, nor was not

so farre north .... yet these two, Davis and he, did (I conceive) light Hudson into his Straightes' wrote Captain Luke Foxe about George many years later and with good justification eographer rather similar to Hakluyt, who showed him Waymouth's logbooks.

Hudson also saw letters and maps from Captain John Smith, who took the expedition to settle Virginia, indicating 'a short route for sailing to the Indies'. Smith was also perhaps the first man to suggest digging the Panama Canal so it was clear that he knew there was no Southerly way round. In 1610 Hudson got London support for the search and sailed in George's old ship DISCOVERY which made, in all, six Arctic voyages as well as shipping migrants to Maine.

DISCOVERY - a tough old tub

DISCOVERY must have been a remarkable ship. We cannot gauge her size precisely because her 'tunnage' related to how many tuns or very large barrels she could stow but by today's ideas she would have been a dumpy tub rather than a sleek greyhound of the seas.

At a guess she was no more than forty feet long but twenty feet wide. Probably she had only one mast and from this would be set a square rigged mainsail and foresail. She may have had a short mizzen mast and mizzen to make her more manageable in high winds and with only storm foresail and mizzen would have been able to withstand Atlantic gales.

As she was victualled for 18 months, that would have taken about thirty of her fifty ton capacity in dried or salted meat and fish and hard tack. Then there was beer in large quantities as no one had discovered how to keep water fresh. The crew would have had very little space in which to live as she would have been very robustly built to withstand the ice as well the pounding of the Northern Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. Her bow space, with massive stem, meeting frames and planking would seem like one huge baulk of timber rather than somewhere to store victuals and the rest of the ship would have been very cramped for the twenty men who made her their home.

To have withstood six Arctic voyages she, perhaps the first of a long line of ships named DISCOVERY, must have been one of the finest ships ever built of timber although so small. The end of her line, the ship which took Scott to the Antarctic, is proudly berthed still on the Thames between the Houses of Parliament and the Tower.

Queen Elizabeth's letter to the Emperor of China

The Jewell of Artes for King James

On his return to Dartmouth in August 1602 George found the old Queen dying and he hastened to complete a book designed to catch the new King James' eye and win him a royal commission. He called it the _'The Jewell of Artes'_ and from its binding it was evidently accepted by the King. It is not known how it comes to be in the British Museum.

It is a strange book divided into seven sections and with many carefully drawn figures and tables. A brief summary of each may convey the catholic interests of an educated if somewhat pedantic sea captain aspiring to higher status.

1.Ideas for improving navigation instruments.

2.Ship design and construction faults and how to correct them.

3.A miscellany of inventions including a rotatable gun turret.

4.Land surveying methods and instruments.

5.Design of forts; mining and countermining fortifications.

6.Studies on gun and gun carriage design.

7.Instruments and techniques for aiming guns and mortars.

Although impressive in its thoroughness the abiding impression is of a nitpicking engineer rather than an inspirational leader. It is easy to see why he was selected only for tasks where his seagoing expertise and previous experience of Canadian waters were important rather than for the command of great national ventures.

George on his travels again

Failing to get a royal appointment George had never-the-less made an impression on several of the most important figures in the revived movement to search out and settle 'plantations' on the Eastern seaboard. Gosnold had come back from there in 1602 laden with furs and the bark of a tree which was then thought to be a cure for many diseases. In 1605 several rich Englishmen, Sir John Popham and Sir Ferdinand Gorges, of the one part, interested in the commercial potential, and the Earl of Southampton, a protestant, and his son-in-law, Sir Thomas Arundel, a catholic, interested in Roman Catholic emigration to a new and unpersecuted world, of the other, sponsored George Waymouth in the ARCHANGEL to make a reconnaissance specifically to locate suitable places to settle.

He found that he was not the only explorer as Champlain, the French founder of Quebec, was at one point within days of crossing his path as they both searched for secure and fertile places to colonise. George's report on his return and Rosier's Relation, a detailed account of the whole venture written by James Rosier, who is thought by some to have been an RC priest, is full of little items like 'here be many coddefishe'. It caused great excitement both in London and in Devon, as did the five Red Indians that George and his crew had kidnapped, possibly when a war party attacked them.

Renewed Virginian settlement

Soon afterwards two companies were formed to develop these new discoveries[although divided in to North and South, it was still named 'Virginia', the name given by Sir Walter Raleigh as early as 1587 when his first, but failed, colony was started] and they had divided between them the colonial rights previously given to Raleigh. He had been imprisoned in the Tower of London by James I in 1603 for 'treason'. The London Company of Virginia, allotted New York to Carolina, as they would eventually be known, was to be the first to get away with three ships in December 1606. Two of them were DISCOVERY and GODSPEED, used by George for his North West passage attempt.

Jamestown's 100 settlers had a miserable time, putting themselves on swampland in the heart of the Powhatan tribe's territory. Eventually, mainly as the result of the efforts of Captain John Smith, they made peace with the Red Indians but despite being joined by a further 900, their numbers were down to 50 by 1610. From then on the colony grew steadily and the establishment of tobacco as a cash crop in 1612, the defeat of the Indians and the use of slaves assured its survival.

A first attempt in Maine

The Plymouth Company of Virginia, with Popham and Gorges as prime movers, had been allocated the coast from Maryland to Maine. Much more directly inspired by George's report, their first expedition in August 1606 in THE RICHARD OF PLYMOUTH was unsuccessful and the second, in May 1607 was not much better. Popham Plantation, on the river Kennebec, which George had discovered, was abandoned after one very hard winter and the deaths in England of Popham and Raleigh Gilbert's brother, Sir John Gilbert, important sponsors of the venture. John Stoneman who had been with George in the ARCHANGEL was the Pilot.

Catholic complications

George's part at this time is obscure. Popham and Gorges' Plymouth Company were in a race with another company led by Edward, Lord Zouche. Within a few months of his return Sir John Zouche, Roman Catholic, entered in to an agreement with George to voyage again to 'Virginia' to settle Sir John and his followers. The settlement would take the form of a seigneury in which George, as Lord Paramount, was to hold as much land as he should select. One report has him getting a grant of 3,000 acres in Maine.

In a letter written by Sir Dudley Carleton in August 1607 it is claimed that George had tried to take himself off to Spain 'with intent as is thought to have betrayed his friends and showed the Spaniards a means how to defeat this Virginia attempt'. He was intercepted and, soon after, awarded a government pension of 3/4d(one sixth of £1)per day, perhaps to persuade him to remain in England. The Zouche scheme having failed George may have felt excluded by Popham, a much older man, although he was a good friend of Gorges. George would have benefited more under the Zouche plan which was a private venture, proprietorship of a feudal type, than under the Plymouth and London Companies' charters which were for the establishment of settlements open to public subscribers. Anyway he had backed the wrong horse so it not surprising he was excluded.

George in the wars

Subsequently we hear of George having a quarrel about shipbuilding standards and then himself building a ship which was, in turn, criticised by the leading ship builder of the day(Pett) whom he had himself criticised. Then he is at the siege of Julich, near the present day Saarland of Germany on which he wrote a detailed report of the various battles and the character of the fortifications. Perhaps he tried out some of his theories from the Jewell of Artes.

He disappears from view in 1612 when his pension stopped so probably he was dead but his influence carried on.

Another group of English Catholics, interested in escaping from religious persecution, were also interested in George's account of Maine. However it was not until 1632 that Lord Baltimore, himself a Catholic, was granted a tract of land around Chesapeake Bay which became Maryland.

George and the Pilgrim Fathers

In 1614 Sir Ferdinand Gorges, still a young man although he had been Governor at Plymouth since the turn of the century, got fed up with the inaction of his fellow West Country merchants' failure to go back to Maine. He commissioned Captain John Smith to start a colony there but instead Smith was captured by the French on his way out. In prison he drew a map of the whole area based on his earlier visits and when the Pilgrim Fathers landed in 1620 they used it to find and settle Plymouth, Massachusets. When they got there they were helped by English fishermen who were based in Maine and even sometimes over wintered there. It is not inconceivable that they may even have been Waymouths or working for the Cockington Waymouths - in 1619 there were 17 Waymouths noted as seamen from that area, the pioneers of the Newfoundland and Maine fisheries. Certainly they were helped by one the five Indians that George had brought back to England who acted as their interpreter and friend.

In 1622 Gorges and John Mason were finally successful in starting the plantation which their charter called the Province of Maine.

(Not long after publishing the first edition of this book I was in touch with an Admiral Weymouth from the US navy. His family settled in Maine in the 17th Century and latterly were potato farmers. His photograph showed a face that could have been the brother of my Great Great Grandfather.)

'those free spirits.....'

So there we have George. Not a nice man, I think, but with a key role in the movement that was to lead to the creation of the Empire on which the sun never set. Perhaps his epitaph should come from Sir Ferdinando Gorges who attributed the inspiration for those early settlements in America to George. Gorges, first Governor of Maine, died in America in Maine in 1661 naming Robert Waymouth as his Executor. As Robert Waymouth having died was no longer available, Major Shapley{or Shapleigh} was ordered to administer in his place. The Shapleighs were a power in Dartmouth at this time and their house in Kingswear just across the water on the Cockington side is still a dominant feature.

The Gilberts, fellow sponsors of the Maine settlement, lived further up the Dart, even closer to Cockington.

Earlier, Gorges wrote of George and his colleagues that they 'thought it better became them to put in practice the reviving resolution of those free spirits that rather chose to spend themselves in seeking a new world'.

George is the last of the Cockington Waymouths of historical note. I have already referred to the possibility that George had a brother and sister. In 1600 a list of taxpayers starts with Sir George Cary and William Weymouth heads the list of citizens below him - it could be George's father, Mary's husband. We know that there was still a William Waymouth in Cockington in 1623 and there is a reference to William, Senior and William, Younger in 1655 and they both paid Poll Tax in 1647. In 1654 a William took the lease of Greenwales Barton from the Mallocks. The name Barton implies a very ancient farming settlement and naturally the older farms were on the better land.

Can any of these Williams be the same William as owned the JUDITH in 1584 ? I doubt it. George Waymouth, 58, yeoman of Cockington, deposed in 1681 that for at least 30 years his father William 'had paid 2d to the Rectory for every hogshead of cider he made and 1d instead of tythes for herbs'. As ever we have isolated facts, confusing facts and no means of sorting them out.

Waymouth mariners by the dozen

There are numerous other Waymouth families in the area, most notably in the parish of St Marychurch, North of Torquay and Cockington. In the Duke of Buckingham's 1619 survey of the mariners of England 14 of them in that one village were Waymouths. Chaucer's description of the Shipman from Dartmouth may help us get a brief picture of a lost breed from which some of us Waymouths certainly descend.

Upon a cart-horse, as he could, he rode,

In cloak of coarsest serge that reached his knee.

A dagger, hanging by a cord had he

About his neck, beneath his arm adown.

The summer's heat had made his hue all brown;

A merry comrade was he, sooth to say.

Full many a wine-cask had he borne away

From Bordeaux harbour, while the vintner slept.

His conscience not too tender scruple kept.

If e'er he fought, and gained the upper hand,

He cast men overboard to swim to land.

As they were very unadventurous in their use of names it is wholly unrealistic to construct credible family trees with so many possibilities. There are however two branches today who can trace their line back to the end of the 18th Century with some confidence. A study of this side of the family is in hand by Michael Waymouth of Hythe in Kent.

John the lawyer

There is a shadowy figure of interest acting as attorney for Rawlyn Mallacke, Esq. He is John Waymouth and is referred to as 'tenant' but I suspect he was in fact what we would now call his Agent. In 1679 he sues Edward Carey, 'late of Tormoham' suggesting that Mallock has just bought Carey's estate, on behalf of Mallock for the church and rectory of Tormoham and the chapel of Cockington with all rights, tithes etc.

Again in 1679, John Weymouth, gent, is suing Elizabeth Lewes of Paignton for £50 left in his Will by her husband Nicholas Lewes to his niece Embline Lewes as the two years specified have elapsed. Elizabeth 'enjoys her inheritance' but refuses to pay up. She defends her case by saying that 'debts ate it all up'. Rather contradicting herself she then says that it was settled on her as part of her £250 marriage portion and was, therefore, not disposable under Nicholas' Will ! Evidently a very Politically Correct lady.

A final reference to John is in 1711 when Rawlyn Mallacke leases a house and land at Great Key, Fleete, which 'belonge to the manor of Torwood[In 1687 much of Torwood manor belonged to Sir Thomas Ridgeway, Bart., Earl of Londonderry]and were lately in the possession of John Waymouth'. Probably John had just died and his boss was letting his retirement home to someone else. Another loose end but I know one researcher believes John was Mallacke's first Factor or Agent.

Links unproven

Other than the Hingston reference in Mary's Will it is hard to find any evidence later than about 1540 suggesting any Torbay link with the Weymouths of Salcombe, Kingsbridge and Malborough. Really the only circumstantial link is the fact that all the Waymouth branches were in frequent touch with Dartmouth throughout the 17th Century but then anyone living in that area had to be - the roads were appalling to non-existent so most everything was moved by sea. Dartmouth was in the same league as Exeter and Plymouth as a port, not far behind Bristol and London and if you were not an elder son inheriting the farm or the husband of an heiress, going to sea was an obvious way of earning a living in Devon and the Waymouths of Torquay were no exception.

For 300 years or so Waymouths fished and traded and explored and, no doubt, were pirates and smugglers and privateers from Devon. Powderham, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Torquay, Brixham, Dartmouth, Salcombe and Plymouth records are peppered with seafaring Waymouths and whether as a direct heritage or not that tradition carried on until only thirty years ago.

CHAPTER 7 ODDS AND ENDS, BITS AND BOBS, AROUND AND ABOUT

Oddments

Inevitably in a search like this one gathers a lot of material of only marginal relevance. Some of it throws life on life in general in Devon and some may actually form part of the main story. It seems a pity to waste it. Just to get the mood right I shall start with a gravestone inscription that fits nowhere else.

Here lyeth the body of

M.Thomas Waymouth who deceased this life

the 20th of November 1679

Tack notes you that parse heare by

And think upon your motalyty

No freedom from the grave or tum

Untel from heven Christ doth come

Now he is gone wee at most follo arter

His wife, his sone and eeke his darters

Cornworthy and Totnes

Cornworthy is a small hamlet on the Western side of the River Dart between Dartmouth and Totnes and it has had its fair share of Waymouths. While it is possible that we are looking at one of them among the three, Richard, William and John who are listed in the 1525 Subsidy Roll for Coffinswell, next door, our first positive listing is of James, an archer, Presenter and moderately wealthy man, in the Muster Roll for Cornworthy in 1569.[There is no reference to Cornworthy in the 1525 Subsidy Roll but the boundaries may well have changed]

James was married to Maulte and they had Peter in 1566, Nycol in 1569 and Valentine in 1571. I guess that they had already had Samuell before 1566 as in 1585 'Samuell Waymouth, yeoman', sold lands in Cornworthy and Modbury(15 miles to the West) in 'tenure of James Waymouth of West Cornworthy dec'd' but Samuell didn't leave the area, I think, as he and Elizabeth had a string of children between 1586 and, possibly, 1612 although that last would have been after a gap of 9 years. Their only boy was Phillip, born in 1597.

Before you get too bored with the family tree details of these Waymouths who do not at first sight have much to do with us let me say that there is a purpose and it has a direct bearing on the elusive link between us and Malborough - by all means skip a couple of paragraphs but for those of a more rigorous intellectual disposition I need to set out the plot. Every happening is in Cornworthy unless said otherwise.

Valentine vagaries

Valentine married Ealse in 1602. He and Calfe(this is where the records make life difficult) had their son Christopher christened in 1609. Meanwhile, in 1607, a Stephen had already married Emett Efford and she bore him a son Peter and in 1610 Valentine was born to them. In 1612 another Peter (possibly the son born in 1574 to Peter Weymouth and his wife Wilmote Compe) married Mawde or Maulte Efford. Valentine and Calse had a daughter Alse also in 1612. [Efford's Close Copse is still marked on the maps of Cornworthy. Perhaps Efford was without a male heir and glad to be allied with another well-to-do family. As there is no Stephen born in Cornworthy at the right time in the records and the name was being used often then by the Malborough/Kingsbridge Weymouths one can conjure with the idea that this is evidence that there were cousinly contacts.]

In 1615 Peter and Maulte Waymouth had a son Peter and, in 1619, Steven. Now it gets confusing: we have two Peters (s.of Stephen, 1607 and s.of Peter, 1615) but only one of them married Marian Yelland in 1635. In 1637 Valentine married Mary Deamond but in 1640

Valentyne married Hester Berry at Stoke Gabriel, just across the river. The Poll Tax for 1647 shows V. Snr and Jnr in Cornworthy and V. in Stoke Gabriel. Snr. seems to have died in 1648 with his Will not being proved until 1653 by his sister Susan Shall. To make Valentine confusion complete, a new Valentine was born to Valentine and Margery in 1649 in Cornworthy.

In 1672 Valentine married Jane Robins and they began a family which was to be based on Totnes and, for a few years, influential there. But more of them anon. First we need to go back to the Peters, cousins, it seems, of the Valentines. Here I will keep it brief, mainly because it is not totally credible although worthy of a look.

Principally Peter

At one time I used to think that it went Peter (b.1566, m.1612 Maulte Efford) = Peter(b.1615, m.1635 Marian Yelland) = John(b.ca. 1638, m.1659 Margery Humphry) = Peter (b.1664) = Peter (b.1692 [St Saviours, Dartmouth, five miles down the river from Cornworthy],m.1716 Mary Wakely) = John (c. 1721[St Petrocks, Dartmouth], m.1752 Ann Porter[St Saviour, Dartmouth] and so begin the Maker Waymouths from which I descend. As our patriarch's headstone shows him to have been born in 1726, that card pile collapses and anyway does not now fit other facts linking him to Exeter.

It leaves us still with a possible connection between Cornworthy, Dartmouth, Exeter and Malborough through Malborough farmer Peter and his daughter Hannah who married Thomas Newcomen, inventor of the steam engine. Knowing that the Newcomens and Weymouths of Dartmouth were staunch Baptists the likelihood is that Thomas would look among the fraternity, or in this case the sorority, for a partner. He was 42 when he married in 1705 and he died in 1729. Elias his second son did not marry Hannah Waymouth until 1749 when he, too, could have been in his forties. He too married a Baptist girl.

Wisps of smoke \- is there a fire ?

Given the Baptist link, the cousinly possibilities and the absence of any suitable Peter registered as born in Malborough, one can envisage Phillip whose son John wanted to migrate to Exeter, or another of the Baptist Waymouths without a male heir, passing on his lease of a farm at South Huish to cousin Peter, fellow Baptist, contemporary and friend of Thomas Newcomen. As we have few Malborough Peters he may have been living and working in Dartmouth until given the offer of his own farm. If so, Dartmouth, Exeter and Malborough are tied in. Cornworthy, while not essential to our story, could also have been a place where the careful arranging of marriage alliances kept the Waymouths in comfortable circumstance and certainly plenty of Peters come from there. As the Steven who married Emmett Efford in 1606 does not seem to have been born in Cornworthy, perhaps he was from Malborough - the process in reverse.

'Political Correctness' a long way off

That last section is imagining gone riot but it is no more than trying to put flesh on bones we already have. Arranged marriages were usual and important economically, especially to farmers. Indeed, marrying for love was seen by some Puritans as a failure of social and moral discipline. In the 17th Century marriage for 'the middling sort' was an economic contract. The Law and theology of the time saw women as of a lower status and they had therefore to bring capital with them as their 'portion'. I could give you an example from the 1920's where this was still working.

Wives stood in for their husbands when they were absent on business or at the wars (we saw how Mary was selling spilchards in Spayne, probably while William was away in Ireland, in the Cockington chapter). A commentator said 'a wife in England is de jure but the best of servants, having nothing in a more proper sense than a child hath................their condition de facto is the best in the world, such is the good of Englishmen toward their wives'.

Stephen Waymouth's Will

Back now to Valentine and Totnes. As ever, records are incomplete and we do not have the dates of birth of all Valentine and Jane's children. What we do have is the Will of their son Stephen who died in 1739 and it gives us much information about the family. He was a wealthy farmer and butcher. We will learn more of his earlier life shortly but for the moment let us stay with the Will. From it we learn of two brothers, Valantine and Richard and four sisters, Susanna, Magery, Emmett and Margaret.

Stephen was by then a childless widower, living in Totnes, and three of his sisters, already in their 60s, were also childless, quite possibly unmarried. Susanna, however, had married Richard Hosking in 1722 and they had three sons, Richard, Valentine and Stephen who, together with Stephen's niece Sarah, daughter of his brother Valantine, already deceased, were to benefit from the inheritance of Totnes Down after Stephen's sisters had all died. [This is how Totnes Down came in to the Hosking family]

Stephen married Sarah Alford and left some of his leased land to his sister-in-law Eleanor Alford and 'cousin' Richard Alford. He left his house in Totnes to his nephew Richard [son of brother Richard ] and 1/- each to brother Richard and niece Dorothy. [This last is quite common practice in old Wills and seems to be 'I haven't forgotten you but you know you have done alright already' - we shall find it in banker Henry's Will when we move on to Exeter] There are many other bequests - £10 to Eleanor and to a servant, Martha Luscombe, together with his wife's clothes, 'to be divided between them share and share alike'. His Executors - classed by him as Gents while he calls himself yeoman - get a mourning ring each but their children do quite well and, in fact, Elizabeth, under age daughter of one of them, was to get the residue when she is of age. Stephen signed himself as Waymouth.

Totnes turbulence

This Stephen was a butcher and we do not know when he moved to Totnes from Cornworthy. He would have been only 25 at the turn of the century so we have to look for another Stephen for the next part of the Totnes story and, I suspect, for the Stephen to whom Valantine enfeoffed [handed over the freehold] of Church House, Cornworthy, formerly the property of Sir Peter Edgcombe Kt, in 1679 when his son Stephen - the Stephen of the Will - was only 4 years old. Typically Waymouth and Devonian, we have plenty of Stephens to choose from and I doubt if there is much point in guessing. It is just worth remembering that two Waymouths, Steven and Peter, had married the Efford girls at the beginning of the century which is suggestive of their being related and in the previous century a Peter and Valentine were the sons of James, the Cornworthy Presenter of 1569.[Steven was also the name of one James of Kingsbridge's two sons, the ancestor of Joshua.]

The Waymouths seem to have moved in to work in Totnes in some strength in the late 17th Century.[A small colony of them formed at Berry Pomeroy a few miles outside Totnes and there were very few of them registered in Totnes itself.]In 1685 John Waymouth was the Town Clerk,and had been for some years, when Stephen and twenty others, evidently fed up with the cabal who were running the town, set themselves up as Burgesses and claimed a say in the governance of the town. John led the counter attack with a petition to Parliament to have them un-Burgessed. This was successful and, lo and behold, next year John is elected Mayor of Totnes! Evidently he was still about at the end of the century as he became Mayor again in 1702. Totnes was third after Exeter and Plymouth in importance although with the silting up of the Dart and the increasing size of ships it had been in decline as a port for many years with Dartmouth benefitting as a result.

In 1878 there was a Frederick Thomas Waymouth noted as 'butcher and dairyman' at 38 Fore Street, Totnes, and there is a butcher there, still, today although for how much longer in these days of out of town supermarkets one must wonder.

Dartmouth

One suspects the Waymouths of Dartmouth were often migrant younger sons from all around. Cockington, Cornworthy and Malborough, even Torquay, are all close by and seafaring or trade were the normal routes for those forced off the family farms of 16, 17 and 18th Century Devon. That some of them were active Baptists virtually confirms the Malborough link and we have already looked at the Newcomen 'proof' of this.

That they came, too, from Cornworthy is delightfully confirmed by the birth of Mary Waymouth registered at St Saviour, Dartmouth in August 1718 by her father, Volingtine. We have seen Valentine occurring many times in Cornworthy.

Maker John and Ann ?

It has been believed for some years that Maker John married Ann Porter of Dartmouth in September 1752. The main reason for this assumption, as far as I know, is that it is the only John=Ann marriage of approximately the right date so far uncovered but always we have hanging over us the fact that the Baptist records in Exeter were deliberately destroyed by the Elders. If it is the right John and Ann then there was an elder daughter, Ann, not shown on the family tree, christened in Dartmouth in January 1753 before they moved to Maker. Her sister Elizabeth was christened in Maker in October 1753. So Ann was busy. So was John. I'm not sure what their Baptist brethren would have made of it all - perhaps it was a good idea to move out of the district. Fortunately we do not need to rely on this solitary record so our amour propre remains undisturbed - I am yet to be convinced that the Dartmouth John and Ann are the right ones but they are the best we have.

Somewhere along the line the idea has also grown that Maker John was a boatbuilder and all one can say to that is that his son John was a cooper at Insworke, almost certainly at the brewery, and the woodworking skills are similar. Cooper John's son John was a naval Timber Inspector but that is moving rather out of our present concerns. However, Dartmouth would have been a good place to learn and ply his trade

Plymouth

A couple of boys, George and John, are born to a George in the 1630's in Plymouth but it is not until 1800 that we see signs of a little colony forming. [I could see George and John, moving to Exeter, as ancestors with one of them father to Maker John

Some of the Plymouth colony were Quakers and descended from Joshua of Snape. Although the naval Weymouths were also likely to have been based there and other mariner Waymouths would have come and gone they are not significant to our main story.

Cornwall

Apart from our Maker ancestors who lived in what is today just Cornwall, there is little to link us directly to the Cornish Waymouths other than our common Celtic roots. Just across the boundary River Tamar, Maker was then part of Devon.

.

The 1525 Subsidy for Cornwall throws up a moderately well to do John Waymouth[a G4] but the Waymouths avoided being listed in the Military Survey of 1522.

The first church-registered event seems to be the marriage of Joan Weymuowthe to Thomas Argall, in Madron, for long the parish of Penzance, in 1578. It is probably idle fancy but one of the characters of the early settlement of the American seaboard is Captain Samuel Argall. He was sent up from Virginia to drive out the French who had been settled in Maine by one the principal French explorers, with Champlain, called de Monts. It is my understanding that his family were not from Cornwall but he was a sailor and you know what sailors are.... It would be elegant if a distant cousin was driving out the French in order to make easier the settlement originating with George of Cockington.

For many years there were little families of Waymouths round Penzance and Lands End, both a long way from their Devon cousins if, as one presumes, we all stem from one patriarchal Waymouth. [There has been a proposal that those written down as Wenmouth should be included as Weymouths but it is noteworthy that the International Genealogical Index does not take this view and nothing in my research contradicts their decision. There happens to be a John Wenmouth born at about the right time near Maker but there are quite good indications that Maker John was from Exeter or Kingsbridge.]

St Buryan had Waymouths living there certainly from 1641 and we have one dying there in 1828. In 1641 the people were aroused by the suspicion that Charles I was going soft on the Catholics and all over the country they signed a Protestation addressed to the King asserting their undying loyalty and affection for the King and to the Church of England. The King was not best pleased to have this 'loyal' address! These days such petitions tend to be on daft things like animal rights or re-routing motorways round ancient woodlands but in the 17th Century they were the beginnings of democracy. In St Buryan it was signed by Ephraim Waymouth and in St Ives, round the corner on the North coast, by Thomas Waymouth.

Thomas was ranked fifth in a ship's company of 18 which manned the ELIZABETH of London, Master Thomas Chevers which happened to be berthed there when the Protestation was going its rounds.[St Buryan had a curious status: it belonged to the Diocese of Exeter.]

In 1664 Ephraim gets a second mention in the list of those paying Hearth Tax. For St Buryan it is noted that William Waymouth has just died and that Ephraim is assessed as having one hearth. The only other Cornish Weymouth paying the tax was Edward at the port of Fowey who had 3 hearths. He had been assessed for a Poll Tax of 1/- in 1660. At the next Hearth Tax in 1667 John Wimuth was living with Mary Litellton, widow, with 4 hearths in the best house in the village apart from Lord John Roberts, Lord Privy Seal, who had 44 hearths.

What is puzzling without more research is why St Buryan continued to grow. In 1642 there were 201 males over the age of 18 in St Buryan but I have yet to discover why there were so many. In 1664 there were 91 households, 151 hearths, a small village. By 1801 there were 224 families, 1161 people and evidently able to support quite wealthy Weymouths. There was some mining in the area and that may be the explanation but today it is, frankly, a dump, not even nice enough to attract holiday makers unless they have been deceived by advertisements.

A Henry Weymouth died there in 1816. He had been married to Jane to whom he left a bed, a granny flat and £80, his whole estate being assessed as 'under £600'. Son Ephraim took £120, Mary had a house in Churchtown and £20. She was married to a Gibbs and so Henry had a grandson, William. Sarah was next, married to John Tregurtha, collecting £30 as did Jane, married to Charles Jacka and Margery, married to William Thomas. Ann got £40, William, £10, and Henry was Executor and collected the residue. Eight surviving children and a widow.

John Weymouth, gentleman, died in St Buryan in 1828 leaving an estate valued at 'under £3,000'. He had no surviving son we must assume as he left the lease of his house, freehold of the Earl of Falmouth, to his Sister, £300 to his grand-daughter Elizabeth Weymouth and the residue divided between Mary Weymouth and his daughter, Elizabeth Kelynack, widow of Thomas Richard Kelynack. His Executors were John Pennewan, of Sennen,gentleman and Richard Dennis, gentleman, of Madron which is some way away beyond Penzance.

No connection with the firm next door

Of themselves these men seem of little importance to us but we have another of those minor mysteries here. Was it coincidence that Caleb Bryant Waymouth, son of Henry the Banker, moved to Helston in Cornwall around 1843? Probably. Helston was a long, long way from London in those days which may have been the point of the move; Caleb Bryant had been left a sizeable sum in trust under his father's Will but all the signs are that Bryant, Henry's grandson, was very short of cash by the time he started work and raised a family although he had had a good continental education. In the days before trains and cars it was too far from Penzance and even further to St Buryan for there to be any easy or regular social contact for a working family. Penzance would have been a three hour ride and St Buryan probably seven hours away. The odds are therefore against there being any cousinly benefit from such a move.

The last reference I had to a Weymouth resident in the far West of Cornwall was in 1873 although I had a chance encounter with possibly the last survivor some years ago. He was deeply suspicious of my historical probings, and having invited me to call, then kept me standing in the drive while his wife peeped through the net curtains and he stonewalled any suggestion that he even knew where his family lived or came from. My reception was so unfriendly that I began to doubt whether he even knew who his father was. He was certainly very much more Cornish than Waymouth and I was quite glad that there seemed to be no familial link later than 1500 ! It was so unexpectedly and pointlessly hostile that my reaction as I left was an explosion of laughter, presumably from pent up frustration and embarrassment.

Bristol

Inevitably for a seafaring family, there have been Waymouths in Bristol from time to time. Other than a bequest in Henry the Banker's Will to a Baptist educational charity based in Bristol I have found no evidence that our part of the family - and here I go as wide as all the Malborough/Kingsbridge descendants - have ever been more than transients. There is some evidence for a Torquay/Teignmouth connection, I think.

London

Several of our families were resident in London in the 19th Century, even if only briefly. However there were much earlier migrant Waymouths who lived round the port of London, mainly in Stepney(over 100 registered there between1619 and 1875), East and North of the port area. They are evidence of the continual pull away from the provinces, I suppose. George, the explorer, certainly headed there. So did Henry, the banker, with his family lodging further West in St Pancras. Generally I suspect it was just the carrying on of their seaman's profession that took them to the major trading centre of England, home of about a quarter of the population of Britain at least from Elizabethan times until today.

James of the JOHN

The only one to figure in the history books is James Waymouth, Master of the JOHN of London who sailed for St Christopher on 2nd October 1635 with 33 passengers. They were mostly male between 19 and 30 with only 6 girls, aged 18 - 21. All were migrants and mostly indentured. [I am uncertain which St Christophers we are looking at but, 12 years before this expedition, settlement had started in St Kitts, Leeward Islands which is what St Christophers became, presumably in the same way that Birmingham becomes Brum.]

Bermuda John the gunner

A little earlier than James but also involved with the West Indies in the very first English attempt to colonise them was John Waymouth. The Company of Adventurers of Providence Island were making an eventually unsuccessful attempt to start a colony in Bermuda. In 1632, in among the reports of the various ways they were trying to find ways to make a go of it - tobacco, sugar, silk grass, mulberry trees, bees and fruit trees all get a mention along with the unhappiness of the planters: it is not intended to keep any man prisoner - there are comments on the Island's defences. Why was the last gunner allowed to leave ?; planters to be encouraged to help with the fortifications; ten pieces of ordnance to be supplied and John Waymouth, the gunner, to be paid £40 as wages but for only one year. Together with another John whose report on how to organise a military march is in the British Museum, we again have evidence of the wandering Waymouths and there must be many more whose stories are hidden in the archives. Newfoundland ought to be especially rich but does not seem to be.

Devon dialect

Devon was a long way from London and had its own language. The accident of where printing started decided which of the many Anglo-Saxon languages would prevail. The locals hung on to some of their dialect in to this century[Cornish, a Celtic language, and probably not dissimilar to the language spoken by the pre-Conquest Waymouths, survived to the end of the 19th Century.] The grammar was slightly different but the words were almost incomprehensible to people speaking modern English.

The following jingle was still used in Bideford, North Devon when Trevor Waymouth was a small boy there in the 1914-18 War.

The Appledore volks coms up in thar botes

Bringin' thur eggs and botter

If Oi wuz t' Mayor

Oi do declar

Oi'd tip'n in t' gotter

It gives a vignette of how most of our Devon farmer ancestors would have traded - far easier to go by boat than by packhorse.

Cosi fan tutte

Young man walking young lady home. He was carrying a suckling pig under one arm and carrying the lantern with the other hand. She started snivelling quietly.

Yer, wat be 'bout maakin' awl thick awl scritch ver ?

Wull, I be vrit y'um gwain taak 'vantage o' me

Ow c'n Oi taak 'vantage ov ee ?

Wull, Yu mite ztart kissin' an cuddlin' o' me

Doan't ee be sa maazed gurl, ow c'n Oi be kissin' and cuddlin' uv ee way a zuckin' peg een wan 'and an' a lantern een t'other ?

Wull, I cud 'old th' lantern ver ee.

CHAPTER 8 ROMANTIC POSTSCRIPT

From fact to fantasy

Some may have noticed that, while plenty of Waymouths have been found, crucial links between the different branches are still missing. Our ancestors may have agreed that their families were related but omitted to tell us how and the glass we see them in is still dim.

As far as an amateur historian can manage to, I have pointed out the gaps and inconsistencies. What an amateur may do, which a professional should not, is to guess and I am now going to let my hair down and give it a whirl.

Kent's Cavern, Torquay

The earliest hunter-gatherers, possibly Neanderthal, may have been in Britain by 350,000 BC. In a magical cave of stalactites and stalagmites called Kent's Cavern in modern Torquay there were men like us , Homo Sapiens, dwelling there from 40,000 BC. Their home would have been about ten miles in from the coast of those days, at the centre of the lowlands between Dartmoor and the sea. They had outposts all through the area where Waymouths live today and Kent's Cavern, now close to the sea is only a mile or two from Cockington and St Marychurch, home of many Waymouths.

Ice Ages came and went and so, too, did the hunters but they were back across the land bridge by 8,500 BC and in Devon. Until perhaps 6,000 BC there were seldom more than a hundred of them in the whole Western peninsula. In due course they began herding cattle and deer and clearing land to give them grazing. Perhaps they were a bit like the Masai of Kenya today.

Farming, mining and Dartmoor

By 4,000 BC the Celts were mining and farming on Dartmoor where Weymouths farm still, today. Numbers grew and culture developed. Their stone rows, burial dolmens and hut circles bespeak both a substantial population and social organisation.

Among them, presumably, was a family who came down off the moor and farmed in the South Hams. When, many centuries later, authority wanted to identify and, no doubt, tax them, it was where they lived that distinguished them - 'by the mouth of the river': 'Waymouth' or 'Wymuth' in the Celtic of 930 AD was the name used in a Saxon.land grant (sometimes called 'book land' or Buckland)

South Hams oppression

By this time being a Celt [or, to the Saxons, 'Western Welsh'] was to belong to a subordinate race ruled by the Saxons who had pushed in from the East, filling up all the empty spaces and, no doubt, some that were not so empty. Tenants now rather than owners, some Waymouths stayed put and survived. Other less confident Waymouths may have gone down in to Cornwall to get away from the invaders.

130 years later the Normans supplanted the Saxons and it was to them that the Waymouths now owed allegiance. The skilled combination of rendering service, demonstrated by their entitlement to coats of arms, and strategic marriages helped this politically weak but resilient family to maintain some local status above the meanest. They show up as yeoman farmers who were leaders in their local communities but seldom aspired to be classed as Gentlemen.

Western Welsh cunning

Perhaps because of many generations of subjugation, the surviving Celtic or Western Welsh families in the South Hams seem to have stuck together particularly tenaciously. A quick survey of Malborough Waymouth spouses shows probably all but one or two of them to be of Celtic origin.

Malborough was the site of iron mines and this may explain the local family name Pitts which some Waymouths include in their family tree. There does not seem to be any connection with the Pitt family of Somerset which produced two Prime Ministers.

So by Henry VII's reign we have a close-knit, socially and economically secure family spread in clusters along the axis called by the Saxons the 'Welsh Way'. The extent to which these separate groups still kept in touch with each other is not clear but, to judge by their modern day successors to whom it is of only marginal utility or importance, I think they were good at it. Minorities stick together.

Now, with this historical and cultural setting, we can look at the family links and even fill in some of the gaps with a guess or two. On the evidence we can assume that unless a younger son went to sea, to London or emigrated his family would often know where he was and what he was doing even if they seldom saw him. These cousinly links could sometimes extend many generations and in to modern times. They are crucial to our feel for what might be a right connection. I will attempt a family tree of sorts summing up the analysis that follows.

Was it Richard first ?

I have shown in the chapter on Malborough that many of us can probably go back to Richard who was the wealthiest man in, and Presenter for, the Malborough Hundred in the 1569 Muster Roll. We know of a Waymouth taking Lincombe farm about 100 years earlier and it is sensible to regard him, too, as an ancestor as there cannot have been many cousins and Lincombe is firmly in 'our' hands by the time we know who is holding it.

We can come from, say, 1480 through to 1637 with some confidence because we are dealing throughout with the richest family of Waymouths in the area. Crucial to continuing from there is James' Will of 1637 and this gives us four lines that we should consider.

Cousin Joshua of Snape

Easiest is the line from James through Stephen to Robert and thence to Joshua from whom many of the Weymouths can claim descent. We have followed them through already and it shows a solid core of Weymouth farms and farmers, often with large families. With not enough work or wealth on the farms, younger sons branched in to commerce and went to sea.

We are looking however for three other lines - the one 'starting' with Rev. Charles Waymouth, Rector of Cadeleigh, another leading to Samuel, Henry and so on in Exeter and, the last, that of Maker John. Can James provide all of them or do we need to go back to Richard and his son Stephen, James' father ? I believe we do.

Cousin Samuel of Exeter

We are dealing with Baptists when we look for Samuel. James - Robert - John(1590) \- Phillip - John(1637) - ? - Samuel just about works except that John (1590) is not mentioned in the Will although his putative brother, James, is, getting a house. John would have been nearly 50 when 'grandfather' James died. Perhaps he was dead and his family already provided for: we know Phillip inherited part of Batson.

However the character of James' Will is to mention everyone even if giving them little. Neither can we completely ignore the Samuel, yeoman, who sold lands owned by his dead father James in Cornworthy and Modbury in 1585 and who may have lived on in Cornworthy for some years. However he was not a Baptist as far as I can judge. Therefore, on balance, I favour Phillip's brother Samuell (1603) followed by a son Samuell (1632) as Henry's, and perhaps the rest of us', progenitor. It is fun inventing families and I know some who do it inadvertently !

Anyway there are plenty of Malborough Samuells and we have already, independently, linked Samuel to Malborough through the Newcomens. John, Samuell's father, was not noticed by James in his Will although brother William was. This implies that John was not James' brother so, at best, a first cousin, another of Richard's grandsons.

Cousin Charles of Cadeleigh

Charles remains an enigma and I can only hope someone in his family still has that extra information which will tie him in. Charles is not a Waymouth given name and he is a Church of England clergyman, not Nonconformist. Guessing in his case is fruitless because the gaps are too great. I note that my grandfather was both C of E and called Charles.

As my grandfather and his family were quite willing to look across four generations to find a connection and give shelter to such a 4th cousin over long periods at the beginning of this century so keeping in touch with Charles of Cadeleigh's ancestors would have been normal and natural to them. Charles of Cadeleigh married at Monken Hadley, not all that far from where the architect Waymouths settled. I think all this serendipitous rather than relevant or revelatory but would like to be proved wrong. Recent DNA results suggest that the link may exist although not yet clear.

Cousin John of Maker

Maker John's son, Cooper John, uses John, George and William for his sons' names and this could possibly point us to James' cousin John, Samuell's father as his progenitor. Equally, George in Exeter(1661) could have been the son of a George(1632) in Plymouth who could in turn have been fathered by a George(1603) in Malborough, son of John and Joane. Again, far too many maybe's with little or no collateral except etymology and suitable dates.

We have already explored a number of other Exeter collateral lines in the search for Maker John's parents without success, repeatedly hampered by the South Street Baptists' destructive designIn fairness we cannot blame them for all our ills - the Germans are as much or more at fault. The loss of all those Wills in their Baedeker raid puts a severe strain on international harmony. .[There was a William Weymouth farming Insworke Barton, just opposite Anderdon, across the creek, in 1883, far too late to be of significance unless we suppose Robert to have been his predecessor, by several generations. Today the farm and its house are in a poor way but in its day it was a fine stone-built house not dissimilar to Snape. I mention this only because name, occupation and place conjoin. Date doesn't.]

With Maker John, too, we are, therefore, relying on family tradition. If 8th or 9th cousins still knew of each other's affairs, as in the case of the forced landing in India and the unexpected Indian Policeman Weymouth, who are we to doubt them even if the separation was as great as may be likely. However, the fact that a William, probably Maker John's grandson, went to Exeter to do his building apprenticeship makes me think it was all a lot closer than the records show. My favourite ancestor out of all the possibilities is 1661 George of Exeter - his family would be wanderers like us, leaving few traces. But then when I started out I rather hoped to find we are descended from George the explorer and that is almost certainly untrue. We will probably never know.

Across the world

It is impossible to say whether the branches who are in touch (and for whom this is especially written) all were actually in Exeter but I think it very likely. Joshua of Snapes' line had few touches with Exeter but my guess is that the rest of us did but it took several generations before they all re-converged, this time in New Zealand.

I have heard of a line from Daniel Waymouth, also in New Zealand, and my guess is that they, too, have their roots in Kingsbridge and Malborough where the name was common. However Daniel is also used by Torquay Waymouths. It is only the Torquay and Teignmouth Waymouths who are almost too remote to be able to claim cousinship although the logic of my theory on our Celtic origins suggests that they, too, stem from that primaeval Waymouth who settled by a river junction or tributary mouth and became known as John of the Way Mouth.

Anyone who can claim to come from the South Hams is almost certainly a distant - perhaps very distant - cousin of the New Zealand families. Anyone with his or her roots in Torquay is probably related to anyone else from that area, way back. And, how you spell your name is not in the least important: Weymouth or Waymouth is the quirk of a clerk or the prejudice of a pedant.

'by nature enclyned to the attempt of great things'

It has been fun looking and I hope others will have shared some of my enjoyment of a family who have been the doers of all the things English that have made our history. I am sorry to have had to debunk a number of folies de grandeur but I hope we emerge as an interesting, ancient, busy English family who ventured. Farmers, wool traders, fishermen, ship builders, captains and owners, explorers, colonists, bankers, shop keepers, soldiers, ship insurers, industrialists, scholars and men of the Royal Navy: ordinary people who made something of their lives and still do, all over the world.

Postscript: June 2012

Some of us from the Maker line have taken DNA tests and these have shown up a close link with previously unknown cousins in America. They trace themselves back to the J&G Waymouth brothers of Exeter and migrated to the US via the West Indies in the 19C. My own gut feeling has for long been that the Maker Waymouths are linked to J&G although how remains to be discovered. The DNA seems to confirm this.

David Waymouth has also published

Downton

7000 years of an English village

as a Smashword ebook in aid of the village History Group

A free sample read is available

