John Paver, ropemaker of Hull (1788-1848) It’s always good to get a few years further back in the search for ancestors and at the same time get certain suppositions confirmed. This concerns my great x4 grandfather Thomas Paver; thanks to the online catalogue at Hull City Archives I now know that he was an Oilman living in Sculcoates, and that he died before 1803; so he is probably the Thomas Paver buried at All Saints, Sculcoates on the 25th December 1800, aged 50. His wife was Ann (probably Ann Smith, there’s a suitable marriage recorded at Welton on the 6th July 1778) and his two oldest sons, George (b. 1785) and John (b. 1788)  were both apprenticed to Benjamin Blaydes senior as ropemakers. George was bound apprentice on the 5th October 1799, but by the time it was John’s turn on the 28th July 1803, Ann, his mother, is a widow. George doesn’t appear in the catalogue again, but John had his apprenticeship transferred twice: the first time on the 6th August 1804, from Benjamin Blaydes, to John Watkin, ropemaker of Hull, and again on the 1st December 1807 from John Watkin (probably as a result of his bankruptcy) to Richard William Moxon Esquire. The Blaydes were an influential merchant and shipbuilding family in Hull for more than 200 years. Their High Street house was built in about 1740 next to their counting house, shipyard, wharves and warehouses. The north-end yard near Blaydes House is one of the oldest shipyards in Hull; from the 17th century sailing ships, whalers and warships were built there. One ship built in the Blaydes yard in 1784 was bought by the Royal Navy and  renamed HMS Bounty. Benjamin Blaydes senior died in 1805; presumably he had not personally overseen the Pavers’ apprenticeships, and as the shipyard owner he passed the responsibility on to ropemakers working in his yard - was one of them John Watkin? Richard William Moxon also seems an unlikely person to oversee ropemaker’s apprentices. During bankruptcy proceedings in 1818 reported in the London Gazette, with his brothers, he is described as a merchant and banker. Presumably, somewhere down the organisation, ropemakers fell within his remit! John Paver married Susannah Sibley on the 27th April 1815 in Sculcoates and they had five children: John Valentine (1816), William (1819), Rebecca (1821), Joseph (1824), and Ann Elizabeth (1827). Susannah died in 1828, and John married Mary Ann Simpson on the 24th January 1831. Mary Ann was the widow of Daniel Hanna, with whom she had two sons, Daniel (1809) and John (1824). In the 1841 census the now reduced family is living in Church Street, Sculcoates, Hull: John Paver, 50, ropemaker journeyman,  Mary Paver, 45,  Joseph Paver, 15, and John Hanna, 15, nailmaker’s apprentice. John Paver had previously appeared at a Church Street address in the Hull poll books for 1830, 1832 and 1833. John Paver died on the 3rd January 1848 n the Sculcoates Workhouse, where his death was registered by James Hayton on the 8th January. He’d been suffering from paralysis for three years, presumably as the result of a stroke. He appears to have had seven siblings, two sisters and five brothers all born in Sculcoates. Of these two brothers were called Thomas so it would seem that the first died in infancy. His brother George probably died in 1845, and so far I have not followed up his sisters or found anything more on his brother James who was born in 1792. His brother William born in 1790 worked as a bricklayer and stayed in Hull. He married Hannah Dick in 1813 and they had seven children. After he was widowed he had a son, born in 1837, with Mary Denton. He was baptised John Denton Paver, but was later known just as John Denton. John Paver’s youngest brother Thomas, born in 1794, married Elizabeth Atkin and moved to Knottingley to work as a potter, where he was joined by 1841 by his nephew, John Paver’s oldest son, John Valentine Paver and his wife Ann Ainley. John Paver’s daughter Rebecca, was also living in Knottingley with her aunt and uncle by 1841, and she remained living with them as housekeeper even after her marriage in 1855 to her cousin Thomas Paver, a mariner and the son of William and Hannah Dick. The Paver headstone in the Wesleyan Burial Ground, Ropewalk, Knottingley shows the family connections:  Sacred to the memory of Elizabeth Paver, wife of Thomas Paver, who died Sep 11th 1850 aged 61 years. Also the above Thomas Paver of South Pottery Knottingley, who died the 2nd day of April 1864 aged 70 years. Also of Rebecca Paver, niece of the above who died July 11th 1877 aged 56 years. John Paver’s son William, born in 1819, went to sea as, eventually, a master mariner, but ended his days back in Hull as a grocer. He died in 1899, after two marriages - first to Mary Ann Aspinall (neé Oxley) then to Emma Ann Ashton. He had one son, Henry, born in Doncaster who worked as a lighterman and died in Hull in 1922. John’s son Joseph was born in 1824 and he left Hull probably shortly after his father’s death in 1848 for by the 4th November 1848 he was in Northampton, where he married his first wife, Jane Kilby, and where his son William Henry was born and baptised at All Saints on the 9th February 1851. The Camplemans and the Pavers J ohn Campleman was a contemporary and friend of Joseph Paver. He was baptised at Sculcoates All Saints on the 30 November 1823 as the "Illegitimate son of Ann Campleman. Quaker's Court. Single woman." His mother Ann, born in 1803, was the oldest daughter of John Campleman and Elizabeth Hurst who had married at that same church on the 4th November 1802. John’s grandparents had four daughters, two of whom died before their fifth birthday; for Mary who was buried in Sculcoates on the 22nd August 1810 the register entry says ominously “kill’d”. The Hull Packet newspaper of 28th August enlarges on this: Last Tuesday morning, as Mary Campleman, a girl four years of age, was playing on a sledge, which had been raised against the wall, near the brew-house of Mr Marshall, in Milk-street, the sledge fell upon her, and killed her on the spot. John’s grandfather, who was described as a mariner in the parish registers, and who can be found as an Able Seaman on HMS Dolphin in the first decade of the 19th century, died in 1816. John is living with his grandmother Elizabeth at the time of the 1841 census in Wincolmlee, Sculcoates; she is aged 68 and a Manglewoman; John is aged 15 and doesn’t appear to have an occupation, though the entries are so smudged all the details are very hard to read. You can sympathise with the enumerator trying to fit a long name like Elizabeth Campleman into the small space on the form. Elizabeth died in 1849 and was buried at Holy Trinity, Hull on the 21st November; by this time John was already living in Northampton where he had married Sarah Shaw four days earlier. For the purposes of the marriage register John claimed his father to be John Campleman, butcher. The Campleman and Paver families are near neighbours in Adnett Place, Northampton in the 1851 census: John, with his wife Sarah and 7 month old son Frederick, is a seed crusher, while Joseph is an oil miller. Joseph's wife Jane and their son William Henry both died there in 1851. As Hull was a centre for oil milling in the early 19th century, one wonders why the two young men went south. Probably the answer is because they could. What links Hull and Northampton? - the River Trent and the Grand Union Canal. Add to this the fact that Joseph's brother William and brother-in-law/cousin Thomas were watermen living and working along the Humber and the Ouse and it looks like a case of hitching a lift with a family member to seek one's fortune in pastures new. Sadly that is not how it turned out, as tragedy would visit both men to a lesser or greater degree. Shortly after the 1851 census the Camplemans and the widowed Joseph Paver continued their journey south probably along the Grand Union Canal to Brentford then along the Great Western Road to Beavor Lane in Hammersmith. The Great Western Road then was the present Chiswick High Road and King Street. Beavor Lane ran south from it to the Thames, with Albert Terrace parallel in its southern half. Beavor Lane was bisected by the A4, and its southern half (south of the A4 and down to the riverside wharves) is now called Oil Mill Lane - so there's a clue as to where they were working. Just two houses remain in Albert Terrace, numbers 1 and 2, and it is in number 1 that John Campleman and his family are living in 1861: but that is jumping ahead. John and Sarah Campleman had four children born in Hammersmith: Elizabeth in 1853 (she died the following year), Emily on the 18th May 1855 when the family address is 4 Richmond Place, Susan Kate in 1858 and Arthur in 1860. Joseph Paver married Rebecca Greenway in Hammersmith on the 11th June 1853, and they had three children born here: Rebecca in 1854, Harriet Eliza on the 20th April 1855, and Joseph on the 29th September 1857. Harriet Eliza’s birth certificate shows her to have been born in Beavor Lane, so possibly her siblings were as well. Between 1858 and 1859 Joseph and his family moved to Stratford in Essex and in 1861 he is an Oil Miller at the Seed Crushing Mills in Marshgate Lane; living with the family at this time is William Greenway, aged 15, Rebecca's youngest brother who is also working as an oil miller. John and Sarah Campleman are still in Hammersmith in 1861; with their four children, Frederick 10, Emily 5, Susan Kate 3 and Arthur 4 months, they are living at 1 Albert Terrace. Living in the same house are Rebecca Paver’s married sister Charlotte Limpkin and her husband Henry and their two young children, Henry and Frederick. Henry senior is also a seed crusher. Sarah Campleman had been a witness at Henry and Charlotte’s wedding in Hammersmith on the 12th October 1857; and the fact that their son Henry Limpkin was born in West Ham in the June quarter of 1859 suggests that Henry and Charlotte  had initially gone east with the Pavers. Within a year the Campleman family began to move around England as John moved from job to job. By March 1862 he was a foreman at the oil mills in Lowestoft when he appears as a witness at an inquest into the death of a boy who suffocated after falling or being thrown into the meal bin. “John Campleman, foreman of the mills, said that hearing there was a boy in the bin in the meal chamber, he went down to the chamber underneath, and after a little time succeeded in cutting away a larger hole, and let through about two tons of meal into the room below, when the men got deceased out at the top. He was in the meal between fifteen and twenty minutes ... The verdict was that the deceased died from suffocation, but by what means he came into the meal, there was not sufficient evidence to show.” Norfolk News, 8th March 1862. John’s daughter Susan Kate died in August that same year and was buried on the 15th August at St Margaret’s in Lowestoft. In early September 1863 John was engaged by Mr George Terry, the proprietor of the Sandwich Oil Mills in Kent as foreman, and on Monday 21st September he was killed in a terrible accident at work. The inquest was reported in the Kentish Chronicle of Saturday 26 September where it was described how: “while in conversation with one of the workmen, close to the steam-kettle, [he] casually introduced his hand to direct loose meal while operations were going on. In an instant it was caught by the whirling knives, and he was violently carried around the machine”. The steam-powered machinery was stopped as quickly as possible, but not only had he lost his arm, his back had also been broken and he died soon after reaching the Kent and Canterbury Hospital. The verdict was Accidental Death, and it is salutary to remember what dangers went with unguarded machinery such as at this mill, where, the jury are informed, “the seed is generally stirred with a stick”. Sarah and the children are mentioned: “The deceased leaves a widow and three young children wholly dependent upon such charitable and benevolent persons as may kindly aid them under this sudden and terrible affliction”. They had only just arrived in the district, and I wonder how much help they did receive? Three-year old Arthur died in the first quarter of the following year, and it was all probably far too much for Sarah and it seems that she went back to her old home in Northampton with her two surviving children, Frederick who was now 14, and nine-year-old Emily. This was not the end of her troubles, for Frederick died in Northampton (where he had also been born) in 1866. Sarah obviously kept in contact with her husband’s old friend Joseph Paver. For when Joseph's wife Rebecca died in Rotherhithe in 1869 where they had been living since about 1863, leaving him with five children under the age of 10, she returned to London and married him in 1870. Her only surviving child, Emily grew up along with the Paver children and considered herself the sister of Harriet Eliza. So much so that in the 1871 census when the family is living at 163 Rotherhithe Street, Emily is Emily Paver, and when she married she named Joseph as her father. This was corrected on the register entry for her first marriage to Charles James Puzey in 1876, but not on her second to Thomas Robert Mason in 1884. Emily’s story runs alongside Harriet Eliza’s so it will be continued on her page. * * * * * * * * * * * * It seems that it is only when tragedy strikes that members of ordinary families make it into the newspapers. Such was the case with the death of William Paver (a great great uncle) on Friday 28th January, 1881. They didn’t even get his name right in the reports, presumably confusing him with his father who was called Joseph. SUFFOCATED   ON   BOARD   A   BARGE.      Mr.   Carttar   held   an   inquest   on   Monday   at   the Feathers,   Deptford,   on   the   body   of   Joseph   Paver,   aged   16,   lighterman’s   apprentice,   of 480,   Rotherhithe-street,   Rotherhithe.   The   evidence   showed   that   on   Saturday   week   the barge   Thomas,   owned   by   Messrs.   Pillow   and   Jones,   Trinity-square,   Tower-hill,   broke from   her   moorings   at   Rotherhithe,   and   drifted   down   to   the   Watergate,   Deptford,   where she   was   secured.   A   man   was   in   charge   of   her   till   Thursday   afternoon,   when   he   was relieved   by   deceased,   who   had   only   had   10   weeks’   experience   on   the   river.   At   three o’clock    on    Friday    morning    the    barge    again    got    adrift,    and    the    deceased    became frightened   at   the   floating   masses   of   ice,   but   a   dredgerman   named   Digby,   in   charge   of   a barge   alongside,   made   all   secure,   and   afterwards   sat   with   deceased   in   the   cabin   for   an hour.   Four   minutes   afterwards   Thomas   Smith,   a   lighterman,   went   on   board   the   barge, and   found   deceased   lying   on   his   back   in   the   cabin   under   the   hatchway,   apparently dead.   He   and   Digby   carried   deceased   on   deck,   and   a   doctor   was   sent   for,   but,   as attempts    at    resuscitation    failed,    the    body    was    taken    to    St.    Nicholas,    Deptford, mortuary.   Mr.   Wickham,   surgeon,   who   had   made   a   post-mortem   examination,   said   his opinion   was   that   deceased   was   suffocated   from   the   foul   gases   in   the   atmosphere   of the   cabin.   The   jury   returned   a   verdict   of   “Death   from   asphyxia,   accelerated   by   the   foul atmosphere   in   the   barge   and   fear   at   the   ice   in   the   river   at   the   time,”   the   Jury   expressing an   opinion   that   so   young   and   inexperienced   a   lad   should   not   have   been   left   in   charge of the barge when the river was crowded with ice. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper: Sunday 6 February 1881

Murray families: The Pavers