John Ridout and the Countess

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Prevaricat

In 1818, my x3 great grandfather John RIDOUT married for the second time. He and his wife Martha stayed at 4 Kirkham’s Buildings in the village of Bathwick and over the next few years their children were born: six sons and a daughter, most of who would survive well into adulthood. Five of these children were baptised at the Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel, which is in the Vineyards at Bath. The building has been renovated and now houses the Building of Bath Collection, which is well worth a visit.

Countess of Huntingdon's Chapel, Bath

The children’s baptisms were the first indication to me that John was a non-conformist, or maybe this was Martha’s influence since Sarah’s children had been baptised into the Church of England.

Selena Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, built many Methodist chapels across the country, which she called her ‘Connexion’. The Countess had seen the dark side of Bath’s genteel society: depravity, crime, licentiousness and immorality. With evangelical fervour she sought to save the fallen. As a lady of considerable social standing, the Countess probably hoped to lure the aristocrats of Bath to her chapel but, perhaps inadvertently, she created a fashionable place of worship with a devoted following amongst the socially aspiring lower orders. John and Martha were certainly not well off, but were, perhaps what might then be considered as ‘lower middle class’. For whichever reason was important to them, John’s family worshipped at the Chapel and, over the years, his children were baptised into the Methodist religion.

John remained at Kirkham’s Buildings until a point just before January 1824, which is when his rate book entry is scored through. I noticed that when John’s son Charles died in January 1827, the entry in the parish register showed the family address to be ‘Bristol Road’. An examination of the rate books for that area showed that in October 1824 John was a tenant of 18 Upper Bristol Road, paying an annual rent of £28. But by May 1830, John’s entry in the rate book was again pencilled through and, as he had paid none of his quarterly rate of fourteen shillings, he had probably moved out of the house.

The 1841 census of Bath had recorded John at 4 Trinity Street in Kingsmead and so I took a look at the rate books and found that in May 1830, in Trinity Street, the entry for ‘Mr Morgan’ was substituted with the name ‘John Ridout’. To start with I couldn’t figure out where number 4 was until I paid a visit to the local record office and looked at their map collection.

4 Trinity Street (arrowed). Cotterell map 1853.

Cotterell’s 1853 map (right) shows a rank of houses standing opposite to those few that are left in Trinity Street today; they had been pulled down to make way for the construction of New Street, the proposed route of which is pencilled in on the map above the red arrow.

In 1832, John Ridout voted in the first Bath election and was recorded as the tenant at number 4. The Reform Act of 1832 was a result of much widespread and vociferous discontent with the unfair electoral system. The rumblings had turned to riots, such as those in Bath and Bristol which John’s brother-in-law, William Henry SOMERTON, had so vividly described in his newspaper. John was not a landed gentleman, he was an ordinary working man, but the right to vote had now been granted to those who owned a property or paid more than £10 a year in rent; John paid £24 for his house and workshop so he was one of the few who had the ‘privilege’. Possibly as few as one in seven men in Bath would have had the vote and so perhaps this says a little about John’s financial and social standing. Looking at the censuses over the decades indicates that number 4 was a large house, at one point with as many as eighteen people living there. During John’s tenancy he and his family occupied most of the house themselves and rooms were let to a couple of young men.

In 1837 Martha, at the age of 45, had Joseph, perhaps named after her father, Joseph Somerton. The poor little chap died of typhus fever when he was just two. By 1840, both Martha and John’s second son Henry had died; she of ‘inflammation of the lungs’ and he of ‘dropsy’. John was once more on his own with the children.

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William Henry Somerton and the Bristol Mercury

Posted on February 6, 2011 by Prevaricat

W.H. Somerton's obituary. Bristol Mercury, 1st October 1870

William Henry SOMERTON was baptised at St Michael’s (C of E) in Bristol on the 7th February 1796, one of six children.  His father, Joseph was, according to a contemporary trade directory, a printer. He had worked for forty years on a newspaper called ‘Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal’ which had first gone to press in 1752. 

But Joseph wasn’t the first man in this family to have ink-stained hands – that honour fell to his father William who, on his death in 1804, according to the Dictionary of Printers and Printing by Charles Henry Timperley (1839) was said to have worked ‘upwards of  fifty-three years’ on the same journal.

So, the SOMERTON men had ink running through their veins but William Henry broke the mould. He may have started as a printer but he went on to not only own the Bristol Mercury but write for it too. As his obituary makes clear, William turned this rather passive and not particularly successful newpaper into a vibrant and animated publication. He certainly got his hands dirty. His bold reporting of the Bristol Riots of 1831 was outstanding, published under the rather laborious title of ‘A narrative of the Bristol riots, on the 29th, 30th, and 31st of October, 1831, consequent on the arrival of the recorder, Sir C. Wetherell, to open the commission of assize’. William’s description of Bristol’s bloody, violent response to the rejection of the (electoral) Reform Bill could have been written by Dickens; it is so absorbing.  When William finally put his pen aside in 1857 his sons, Charles and George took over.

Charles, the eldest son by a year was a staunch Liberal like his father. He was educated at Bishop’s College in Bristol and then went on to study at University College, London where he earned a B.A. in 1845. Charles was in charge of the literary side of the business whilst his younger brother George mastered the finances. Close in age, they were close in every other way too, even taking their holidays together. Charles married Sophia COLE, a lady older than himself; the couple had no children. George married Octavia Augusta WILLIAMS, daughter of the Reverend Hugh WILLIAMS, Chancellor of Llandaff but, sadly, she died less than a year after the marriage and George never re-married.  Hence this branch of the SOMERTON family died out as did their involvement with Bristol newspapers.

On 22nd June 1818, my x3 great grandfather John RIDOUT married William Henry SOMERTON’s older sister, Martha, at St Philip and St Jacob’s church in Bristol, affectionately known by the locals as Pip’n Jay.  I know nothing about Martha – women frequently were the ‘silent’ members of sometimes quite prominent families. However, knowing that her brother and nephews were clearly intelligent, articulate, gentle spirited but modest and unassuming men, perhaps tells me something of the woman who married John.  As well as taking on his existing family, she bore him seven children, one of whom was my x2 great grandfather Edwin.  

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