James
PUPLETT [1815-1887] & Lucy PERRY [1819-1899]
*
James and Lucy Puplett (nee Perry) are the parents of Mary Louisa Puplett.
*
Mary Louisa Puplett married John Hinton Edmonds in 1874, and were the parents
of Ernest
Harry Edmonds.
*
Ernest Harry Edmonds married Mabel Jane Haines in 1810, and were the parents of
Jack Edmonds.
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There are no images of James Puplett or
Lucy Perry still existing that I know of, and they had no sons, and I only have
a single studio photo of one of their daughters (Mary Louisa, shown), which at
best could suggest her mother may have had a somewhat ‘sharpish’ face, but
that’s not much to go on.
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| Lucy Perry's daughter Mary |
After
decades of rummaging through these people’s lives though, you inevitably form
your own idea of what each person may have looked like, and I choose to see
James Puplett as a fairly good-looking man, above average height, maybe a
weakish set of the jaw, a touch of arrogance, while Lucy would’ve been slightly
built, homely, small shoulders, looking a little fragile if taken at a glance,
but this would be covering an underlying durability. Something like that. (Or
possibly nothing like that at all!)
JAMES’
BEGINNINGS
James Puplett appears to have been born on
the 24th of January in 1815, apparently in Thaxted (or nearby Great Bardfield,
about 10km NW of Chelmsford) in Essex, to Daniel and his wife Ann (nee Heald).
Daniel Puplett had been described simply as a ‘Miller’ at his marriage a few
years earlier, but he was then “of Galleywood Common”, which is on the southern
edge of Chelmsford, so I can only assume they moved to the small rural village
of Thaxted soon after, chasing income opportunities, and moved back to
Chelmsford in their latter years.
The
Essex Pupletts had been Quakers for many generations, the name turning up in
that County’s records as far back as the 1500s, while the Healds – also Quakers
– were from the Wigan area in Lancashire, her parents probably moving to the
northern side of Chelmsford in Essex in the early 1800s, where her father was
described as a ‘Farmer’.
The Pupletts were archtypical, solid,
hardworking Quakers, a religion I’ve come to see (having read a heap of Quaker
diaries, letters, wills, and contracts from that time) as being
socially/culturally/spiritually somewhere between Jewish and the Salvation Army
– diligent, frugal, largely self-employed, egalitarian, philanthropic when they
did well (and many were very canny and quite successful), a reputation for
being honest and fair. And they were extremely strong ‘networkers’, with
marriage and business ties that seemed to connect family to family and Meeting
(congregation) to Meeting all over the country, with a very ‘holistic’ approach
to their Dissenter faith, as it influenced every aspect of how they approached
their beliefs, their businesses, and their domestic affairs.
All
of this tended to see them set their own standards of conduct (often at very
costly odds with the Anglican Establishment before the 1700s), to marry within
their own, and to seek out business connections within their own, and this was
to be no exception for James Puplett.
James
would have spent at least a few years in the Thaxted area, with his three years
younger brother Charles (the only two Puplett children to reach maturity), and
then moved to Maldon on the coast, where his father set up a timber business
for many years. James and Charles had a good schooling – the Quakers were very
strong on giving their children a solid education, regardless of sex – and by
the time he was about 14 James was surely deemed by his father to be ready to
begin the serious business of learning a trade, and in May 1829 he purchased an
apprenticeship for his son to the recently established biscuit and
confectionary business of Huntleys at Reading in Berkshire.
Why
dad picked the biscuit baking trade is hard to say. Possibly James had a
leaning in this direction (he stuck with it all his working life) and there
seemed to be a tendency among the Quakers towards business opportunism and
identifying market niches rather than any allegiance to a family ‘calling’ for
it’s own sake – Daniel was a “Miller” (which unqualified suggests a grain
miller) and then a “Timber Merchant”, while Lucy’s dad was an “Iron Founder”, a
“Clerk”, and a “Biscuit Baker”.
But
why they sought out Huntleys over in Reading is easier to say. Huntleys were
Quakers and they were on the way to becoming the best in their field.
Joseph Huntley was born in 1775 into a
Gloucestershire Quaker family, his father was a headmaster, his mother baked
biscuits in the school oven and sold them outside the school gates where the
coaches stopped, a lesson in enterprise the young Joseph surely absorbed well,
as in 1822 he started making biscuits in a small shop near ‘The Crown’ coaching
inn on the busy London to Bath road in Reading, and each day sold them from a
basket to the hungry coach travellers. As a Quaker, Huntley “…believed in
honesty, self-discipline and hard work, used only the best ingredients, sold
his wares at a fair price, and soon established a good name”. The enterprise in
time would go on to become today’s Huntley & Palmer employing over 5,000 in
the Reading factory, where they pioneered and specialised in upmarket printed
biscuit tins.
In 1829 Joseph Huntley’s son became a
partner in the firm, attending to manufacture while dad managed the business
(mostly wholesale), which was doing well enough by then to take on an
apprentice in what was still only a 4-5 person operation, and at some cost to
Daniel Puplett – £20 down and £15 in a year’s time – this would’ve surely been
a golden opportunity for young James, one he was to (typically as it turned
out) seriously fumble.
Amongst other things James’ Indenture
promised, for the next seven years, that he would –
“…not
waste the Goods of his said Masters nor lend them unlawfully … not commit
fornication nor contract Matrimony … he shall not play at Cards or Dice Tables
or any other unlawful Games … shall neither buy nor sell … shall not haunt
Taverns or Play houses nor absent himself from his said Masters service day or
night unlawfully, But in all things as a faithful Apprentice he shall behave
himself towards his said Masters…”
–
but over the next five years James seemed to have found at least some of these
just a touch beyond him (going by his life yet to come) and by Feb 1834, when
he was about 17, his apprenticeship was terminated “by mutual consent”, which
seems to have put his father understandably offside, and James appears to have
remained in Reading for the next few years, quite possibly working for the
Perry family, who had a retail biscuit business on London Road.
LUCY’S
BEGINNINGS
Lucy Perry was born on the 26th of Sept
1819 in the St Giles parish of Reading, the youngest of the five children of
Thomas and Elizabeth Perry, also solid Quaker stock from the south-eastern
areas of England.
Lucy’s
father Thomas was an Iron Founder as a young man, an amatuer geologist and
nature-lover all his life (a Creationist just before Darwin was to burst onto
the scene), a walker of huge distances, a genealogist, a compulsive recorder,
and a dedicated family man who still wrote in the ‘Old Personal’ of thys and
thees and thines.
Thomas Perry had been born in the East End
of London, but lived and worked in Southampton as a younger man, at 33 married
Elizabeth Harvey (a person with little recorded history that I can find) from
Essex, and over the next five years they had three sons and a daughter in
Southampton and London’s East End, but just before Lucy was born Thomas (who
had gotten into financial difficulties in Southampton) and his younger brother
Joseph had moved to Reading and together set up a small foundry at the corner
of Horn Street and Katesgrove Lane.
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| Reading Berkshire c. 1820 |
When Lucy was 18 the (somewhat rose-tinted?)
“old days at London Road” came to an end when “my Dear Mother was taken from
us”, Elizabeth then only in her mid 50s, and with her father already beginning
to be effected by the asthma and bronchitis that was to dog the remainder of
his days.
Lucy’s
elder sister Margaret (always referred to as ‘Peggy’ in later correspon-dence)
largely took on the role of woman of the house, but eight months after their
mother’s death, in the June of 1839, their brother Alfred (second eldest) left
for South Australia on the ‘Dumfries’, looking to take up farming in the new
colony.
It
seems that by then James Puplett (still only in his early 20s) had become a
significant member of the family business, and on the 30th of Jan 1840 he and
Lucy were married at the local Quaker Meeting in the presence of the usual
entourage of relatives and friends, and before the year was out her brother
Edward had married and moved away to the West Country, and her sister also
married, but to local boy Charles Wickens.
But,
more significantly, about this time the whole family seems to have gone through
a period of some kind of financial and domestic turmoil, with James at the
centre of it, and James & Lucy (and the whole family?) had to wind up the
business, with Thomas later saying that James “…acted so unwisely…”, owing
between ₤60 and ₤70 and apparently permanently damaging their reputations with
many in the town, and that “…Lucy is in very low spirits… her lot very
rough…James has been a fool to himself and others…” (even though it was said by
many that he ‘made the best biscuits in town’), and by mid 1841 the family had
scattered and was struggling.
Margaret and her new husband Charlie
Wickens took the girls’ dad under their wing, and with some financial support
from Reading Friends they set up a small biscuit bakery in Edgbaston in
Birmingham, but with Lucy six months pregnant and in poor health, she seemed to
have decided to stay with them until life settled down.
James, out of a job and with no immediate
prospects, left Reading (and his debts?) for nearby Newbury, to wind up the
estate of a relative, and Lucy joined him there, but what then happened is hard
to glean from between the lines of the family’s letters that still exist. Lucy
miscarried, but her sister Margaret was to write “…she always would have it
that the babe would not live…”, and as an indication of the family’s emotional
condition she also later wrote “It was a great trial to all of us and as for
myself as I said at the time I should as soon a thought of myself as her doing
so. I used to call occasionally and about 2 weeks before Father and I called
and had not the slightest idea of anything of the kind at first I would not
believe it I am happy to say the little [I’m fairly sure the word here is
‘baby’] is dead…”
This is an odd thing to write, and
difficult to interpret, but clearly these were dark days for the family, with
James (at least in the opinion of the Perrys) being in the centre of it.
By late in 1841 the Pupletts seemed to
have patched up the difficult start to their marriage and moved to Rayne in
Essex to try to resurrect their lives, with James’ parents and friends helping
them to set up a “…little country shop… [as] bakers as well as Grocers… a nice
& pleasantly situated village 1½ miles from Braintree… of considerable
size, contains a number of very good houses of wealthy farmers & Gentry and
James & Lucy live in a good house having Shop, Parlour-Kitchen &
Bakehouse & Washhouse with 4 good rooms upstairs, a good yard, a large
tumbledown sort of Barn, a stable, 2 pig styes, good pump of excellent water
but no garden except a small strip in front…”, with Lucy sending a detailed
drawing of the place to her father and sister, enclosing a pressed rose from
her new garden, and reassuring them that her health was now good.
A few months later a letter to their
father from the younger son John who, after a short visit to sister, said that
“…Lucy always wished to live in the country… the part they live in is very
beautiful, plenty of wild flowers and birds singing… lay in bed and hear the
cuckoo… has her families of pigs, ducks and kittens to rear (of course she
could not be without a kitten to nurse)…”, but John also adds “… I have not
heard there is any chance of an increase of ‘Little Pupletts’ …” (His emphasis
not mine but he doesn’t elaborate).
James and Lucy seemed to have settled
their problems, as by mid 1842 Thomas wrote that they were “…pleased with
their… pretty trade as Country Grocers, bake 40 or more 4 lb loaves 3 or 4
times a week… [and while] James is much mended, not so much alive &
striving as I would like to see him, doesn’t go about his work in a business
like manner, yet has many good points… [seems to be] in good standing with his
Millers & his Grocer… Lucy very industrious, keeps no female servant, helps
James with the bread, sets in for him & neighbours that bring their dough
to be baked, they live very close and frugal, and seem happy…”
Over the next few years family letters
were about the usual – visits by friends and relatives, John having wages
problems in the sawmill, Margaret losing her first baby, her husband Charles
talking of emigration, Edward doing well enough in the railways and Louisa
having “the first grandchild to live”, Alfred in SA struggling with poor crops
and low wheat prices – but Lucy & James had “…their pony and cart and Lucy
seems to enjoy to have it out and drive over to [a friend] …and sometimes the
two ladies go to Chelmsford and Maldon …”
But, around early 1846, the family seems
to have once more gone through a period of some turmoil and change, starting
with things going bad again for the Pupletts, causing Thomas to write “…Lucy
& James [were] obliged to leave Rayne, for the last year of being there
James got into the sad practice of going of an evening to Braintree and perhaps
not returning home till 12 or 1 o’clk, leaving Lucy alone, when next morning he
was not fit for work leaving Lucy to struggle on as she could… her health &
strength gave way, nor would she say a word of it to us… [we had to be] informed
of it by a young woman who was living near and was a friend of Lucy’s… many of
the Puplett family seem willing to excuse James and heap the blame on Lucy
which is unfair…”
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| Lucy's sprig of fern |
So once more James was out of work, Lucy
was struggling and staying with her father and sister in Birmingham for a break
from her troubles, and it was then that her father gave her a "Memorandum
Book" which still survives, with notes made in it on the seasonal leafing
of oak trees and, tucked in a concealed ‘pocket’ in the back cover, an
exquisitely delicate fern frond that’s now over 160 years old!
The
Wickens then finally gave up on Birmingham, and once more with the support of
friends returned to Reading, with Thomas going to live out what would be his
final days with his son John in Finsbury.
Maybe
reading between the lines of her father’s letters, there is a suggestion of his
final inability to excuse the errant son-in-law further, and when Lucy visited
her father and brother in London, and then took a job nearby as a housekeeper
to a family friend, a recent widower with children, Thomas seems to make a
point of mentioning that Lucy is “…very comfortable… [and that]…Jacob has for
some time been working for Alfred Rosling in his Saw Mill, and I believe is
again looking towards taking another wife…”
He
then added “…as to James, on his leaving Rayne, he went to supply his Brother
Charles’ place in a Lawyers Office at Epping, Charles being ill at the time, and
went to Chelmsford to his father’s… Charles’ complaint proved to be a rapid
consumption, he soon was much worse and died rather suddenly… Charles Puplett
was very clever in the office at Epping, much esteemed as a Law Writer, but
James not being capable to fill his Brother’s place, left in a few weeks, came
up to London, then went to Edward to try for a job on the [railway] Line, after
two or three weeks returned to London, where he now is not known…”
This
has an air of we don’t know where he is and we don’t care! Thomas was clearly
not a man ready to once more forgive and forget, and quite possibly never laid
eyes on his son-in-law again, as James and Lucy seemed to have stayed apart for
a year or more, with Lucy remaining close to her own family and their circle of
supportive friends, but in the January of 1847 at his son John’s place in
Finsbury, after a prolonged bout of asthma and bronchitis, Lucy was to write in
her diary “My father… in 70th year…departed this life surrounded by his family
[and was] buried at Bunhill Fields.”
Lucy was by then about 27 and still
childless, and James about 33, and their lives once more entered a new phase.
By the end of 1847 James and Lucy seemed
to reconcile, as they were living together in Cornmarket St in Oxford, with
James giving her an 1848 Diary, in the flyleaf writing “Lucy Puplett with J
Puplett’s dear love, Decr 15 1847”, but whatever enterprise they were in they
were “…not doing well, still, no-one is…”, and by the end of 1848 her brother
John and his wife Priscilla had left for SA, to join Alfred “at Onkaparinga”
(Priscilla was pregnant at the time with their first, the baby was born on
board a few weeks before their arrival at Pt Ad, and was buried at sea), and
Charles and Margaret had sold up in Reading.
On New Years Day of 1849, the three
remaining couples – Lucy (nine months pregnant) and James, Margaret and
Charles, and Edward & Louisa – met at the Puplett’s in Oxford for a few
days. It would be the last time the “English” Perry family would ever be together.
Five days later the Puplett’s daughter
Elizabeth Kate – always called Kate – was born (James was to comment “…and oh
she is a stunner…”), but a few days later Edward wrote to his brother Alfred in
SA that “…Margaret is with Lucy at Oxford… nothing has at present opened for
them, James Puplett’s situation at Oxford very precarious, believe they will
shortly join you in the far South … I will be the only one left … will perhaps
join you too…”. Emigration as a cure for their various ills was firmly on the
minds of them all, and about this time Charlie and James actually made their
application to the Commissioner of Emigration but were told that the lists were
full and no more names would be taken for 4 or 6 months.
Soon after this James Puplett took up an
offer by one of the Whiteheads (steadfast friends and supporters of the Perrys
over the years) to manage one of their branch shops, at West Derby in
Liverpool, leaving Charlie Wickens to take up James’ spot in Oxford, but it
seemed to be with an air of having put the whole idea of emigration on the
back-burner, as Lucy, as diligent as ever, “… took a shop and opened it with an
assortment of stationary and baby linen, also in conjunction with a lady
acquaintance she has opened a day school and at this 1st opening mustered 10
scholars …”, and so looked fairly settled, and by the March 1851 Census James
(36) was described as a Grocer, and Lucy (30) as a Milliner, with their
daughter Kate two by then, and in the January of 1852 their second child Mary
Louisa – always ‘Polly’ – was born.
But in the middle of 1853 they received
the sad news from SA that Lucy’s brother John had died at his home in Mt Barker
at the age of only 38, but whether this was the catalyst or not, by mid 1854
the Pupletts and the Wickens seem to have locked in their plans for emigration,
and there was a round of last visits to old friends and relatives, with her
brother Edward helping with the arrangements but not joining them in what must
have been a somewhat awesome undertaking even in the 1850s, ordinary working
people having little prospect of ever being able to return to England.
SOUTH
AUSTRALIA
On the 13th of December 1854 the two
families – James and Lucy with their two small girls, and Charles and Margaret
with their three girls – left the London docks on the "Duke of
Wellington", and in mid April 1855, with all bridges burned, they pulled
in against the McLaren Wharf in Pt Adelaide and surely surveyed a landscape
starkly different than the one they’d left behind.
(Lucy
kept a complete daily diary of their four month trip out, which is a great read
in itself, full of the big and small things that comprised life aboard just
about every one of these emigrant ships, many days slow and uneventful, some
jumping off the page with life and colour and energy. But most of all it brings
Lucy herself to life, shows her – at least during this time – as happy and
gregarious, and in her own way vivacious, maybe even a touch of a flirt, and
just a little sad when this voyage of a lifetime neared its end. Full text available).
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| Burra as it was in the Puplett's time |
Oddly, there is something of a blank space
for the next five years, and all we know for sure is that somewhere in that
period the two couples went their own ways, the Wickens to live in Coromandel
Valley in the Hills, and by 1859 the Pupletts were in the copper town of Burra
north of Adelaide, apparently renting a place in the new subdevelopment of
Aberdeen (in the middle of town, which wasn’t much even by 1870, as shown) and
setting up once more in business, probably as a Baker and Grocer.
You get the distinct feeling that all
members of this generation of the family had long since lost their
‘Quaker-ness’, and even though Lucy’s own father had been ‘disowned’ by the
organisation as a young man (but probably later reinstated) and her brother
John as well, they were all married in full Quaker tradition and circulated
fairly much only within that faith in England (although if there was ever a
case for eternal disownment for un-Quaker-like activity you would have to think
James Puplett would have qualified many years prior!). But, once in SA, the
Anglicans seemed to have finally won the day, with James (at least) involved in
the local St Mary’s CofE school in Burra, where Lucy could have been a teacher.
But the 1860s were to be troubled times
again for the Pupletts, with James in financial trouble yet again and having to
assign his stocks to his creditors in 1860 to keep them at bay, and in January
1861 Lucy’s much loved sister Margaret died in Coromandel Valley aged only 44,
leaving Charlie with their three girls to raise.
But the Pupletts stayed on in Burra till
about 1865, but by 1869 they were living in the small country town of
Yankalilla just south of Adelaide, although when their daughter Mary Louisa was
baptised into the local Anglican Christ Church as a 17 year old (this was about
the time that Polly ran into the young one-handed John Hinton Edmonds, who was
working in his brother-in-law’s brewery in the town), her father was described
as a “Biscuit Baker of Adelaide”.
I’m
not sure why James was “of Adelaide”, but they seemed to have been in
Yankalilla as a family at that time, as according to one source “…in the 1860s two more schools began
operating… [in the town, one being the] Christ Church Day School .. began in a
cottage occupied by Mrs Puplett, the first headmistress, who gave up her front
room for the schoolroom…”. Another memoir notes that “…when a newly built
schoolroom was opened, Mrs Puplett was headmistress. Her husband the baker had his oven in the school yard and the
smell of the freshly baked bread would rise and torment the children at their
desks…”.
On Xmas Day 1870 the Pupletts and the
Alfred Perrys (Alfred had since married the daughter of the flour mill owner in
Old Noarlunga) got together at Alfred’s farmhouse in Morphett Vale, and it was
about that time James and Lucy (by then in their early/mid 50s) and their two
daughters moved to Virginia, a small town just north of Adelaide on the main
Port Wakefield Road, but once again it would be hard to say why, except that it
may have been seen as yet another business opportunity on this busy north-south
route, where James once more set up a bakery, and “…Mrs Puplett ran a small
private school… with about 12 pupils… a pug and straw building… on Gawler Rd, on
Mr Jarmans property… whose pupils were mainly girls with a few young boys…”
This was to be James’ last move, and the
family seemed to finally put down some kind of roots in the town, living there
for about 17 years. (Back then Virginia would have had few redeeming features,
even today it’s little more than a swathe of Italian- and Viet-descent market
gardens but still featureless and flat flat flat!)
Late
in 1872 their elder daughter Kate (by
then 23) married a William Ridgeway of Smithfield, the ceremony being held in
the Wheatsheaf Hotel – as the town’s Anglican church of St Augustines wasn’t
built till the following year – and nine months later James and Lucy finally
became grandparents.
And then in the January of 1874 Polly
(then 22) married John Edmonds, who was by then a bookkeeper on the Minburra
Stn in the north, although oral history (per grandad Harry Edmonds) would have
it that John “…was something of a ‘black sheep’ [and] this marriage was
apparently without the blessings of the Dutton/Edmonds part of the family… as
Mary did not entirely suit them as a daughter-in-law…”, although there is no
record as to why this might have been the case.
Also in 1874, John and Polly presented
them with another grandchild, but the news arrived from England that Lucy’s
brother Edward had died in Reading, then leaving only Lucy and Alfred of the
original five Perry children.
In the middle of 1877, with Lucy by then
in her late 50s, her school began a five year period of losing her students to
the new Virginia Primary, and the little pug and straw building finally closed
in 1881.
Other than a steady Directory entry of
“James Puplett, Store Assistant of Virginia” through to 1887, there is no other
record of his end days, and on the 4th of June 1887, James died at home aged
72, and the next day the family gathered at the Old Carclew Primitive Methodist
church cemetery at Angle Vale.
I tracked down this cemetery some years
ago – James is in ‘Grave L, SE corner’ – and I found it quite depressing, as
it’s one of the old ones that was set aside fairly early in the history of the
district, it’s way out in the boonies, and has since been left behind by time
and change. It was quite derelict and there was no marker on James’ plot. He
may not have been the most successful (or even the most likable?) person but I
couldn’t help but feel sorry for this ending.
Lucy seemed to have stayed on in Virginia
for a short time, but by 1888 she was living at 115 Jeffcott St in North
Adelaide, presumably supporting her daughter Polly and her five children
(living in nearby Murray St) whose husband John Edmonds was seriously ill and
incapacitated with ‘spinal schlerosis’. In the year that followed both her
son-in-law and her last remaining
sibling Alfred died, and once more Lucy seemed to be adrift.
With limited options available to widows
with no financial resources except to move in with relatives, Polly (her
youngest child Ernest Harry was only 6 when his dad died) moved out to Unley to
be near her recently married eldest daughter, and Lucy – now in her early 70s –
packed up her few belongings and sailed for Albany in WA, where Kate and her
family had been living for a while.
Lucy spent the last eight or nine years of
her life in Osnaburg Street in Albany, and you would love to think that this
once Quaker girl from Reading, who surely would have had the kind of young
dreams we all begin with, was happy in her closing days.
In 1899 only a few months after her
daughter Polly back in SA was to die of TB, after a short illness Lucy had a
heart attack aged 80. She is buried in an unmarked grave in the Albany town
cemetery.
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