When, a couple of years ago, I researched and wrote a family history I started naturally enough with the Westells, my father’s family, but they turned out to be disappointingly respectable. Poring through the 1841 records kept by British census-takers who tramped up and down the streets every ten years asking who was living in each house, their ages and occupations, and where they came from, I found a John Westall — or sometimes Westell, because not everyone knew or cared how to spell their name and census-takers wrote down what they heard — living in Bristol, then a great port in the west of England. He had been born in the village of Chilton Foliat, in the nearby county of Wiltshire, but like so many other rural workers had made his way to the city no doubt in search of work. When the census-taker found him he was a labourer living in the industrial slum of Bedminster, and married to Lucy who had been born in the neighbouring city of Bath. By the time of the next census, in 1851, John had risen in the world to become a dairyman, which could have meant that he milked cows or perhaps drove a horse and cart to deliver the milk, ladling it from shiny metal churns. Among their children was James, then seventeen and a gentleman’s servant. By the census of 1861, James was a beer seller, which probably meant that he sold beer from his home without actually having a pub, and he had married a Bristol girl, Mary Gould. Another ten years, and James was foreman to a corn broker — in Britain corn meant wheat and sometimes oats — and they lived close to the docks where the grain ships docked. Here we begin to see the Westells — by then, they spelled it with an e — struggling upwards toward the middle class.
James and Mary had eight children, among them Henry John, born in 1863, who became my grandfather. Henry was a chemist’s assistant, and it can be no coincidence that he married the daughter of a chemist, Alice Wescombe; presumably, they courted among the pills and potions.
Their only child, my father, carried both their names: John Wescombe Westell, known as Wes. When Wes was born in Bristol in 1890, Henry was still a chemist’s assistant, but sometime in the following decade he went into the insurance business, and as his fortunes improved the family moved from home to better home, and then to a handsome stone house in Weston-super-Mare, a seaside resort about twenty miles from Bristol. Bracing breezes off the mud of the Bristol Channel were said to be good for all manner of invalids. The place was popular enough to draw a quip from the British wit and journalist G.K. Chesterton who declared that he would not give up any bad habit for the sake of an extra six months in a nursing home in Weston. The line was later put in the mouth of that famous fictional barrister Rumpole of the Bailey. Chesterton also remarked with equal perception that journalism was the easiest of all professions.
While the English are often said to be frozen in their class, the Westells in three generations had gone from a labourer living in an industrial slum to insurance manager living in a genteel resort, and securely in the middle class. One reason of course was the industrialization of Britain and the generation of new wealth, but even so the Westells must have had the ambition, energy, and abilities to take advantage of new opportunities. When I look in the mirror I see my father. He grew up in Weston, following his father into the insurance business and enjoying some local reputation as an amateur cricketer. Almost six feet, four inches tall, and built to scale, he was sociable, usually well-dressed, and attractive to women, although absent-minded on occasion: Walking along the main street of our city one day, he was lost in thought but noticed a woman who seemed familiar, and politely raised his hat as he passed; it was his wife. He had the fortitude to take a cold bath every morning, and he dressed his hair with olive oil, which may sound odd until you know that he kept all his hair while mine is rapidly disappearing. Despite physical similarities, I lack all his social skills — I blame that on nurture — but I hope my life will show I have inherited at least some of the genes that lifted my forbears out of the slums.
My mother, Diana Blanche Smedley, lived in Weston, a few streets away from Wes, with her widowed mother and her sister, known as Babs. Her mother, Catherine Blanche, had been born into a family of some distinction, the Woodroffes, and was proud of it. When she died she chose to be buried not with either of her husbands but with two sisters in a village churchyard thick with Woodroffes. The Woodroffe family first appeared in history in the 1300s, but the interesting part of their story began two centuries later when David Woodroffe, a haberdasher — that is, a merchant dealing in men’s clothing — became high sheriff of London in 1554-5. Henry VIII had broken with Rome and established the Church of England in order to facilitate a divorce and remarriage, but his daughter Mary Tudor remained a devout Catholic. When she became Queen in 1553, she began to return the country to Roman Catholicism. That led to the persecution of persisting Protestants, which gave her the terrible name in history of Bloody Mary.
Anyone who saw a few years ago the movie Elizabeth must remember the horrendous opening scenes in which Protestant heretics are burnt. The man in charge might well have been SheriffWoodroffe. In his famous Book of Martyrs, published in 1559, John Foxe reported that Woodroffe conducted several burnings at Smithfield in London, including those of John Bradford, a well known Protestant preacher, and John Leaf, an unfortunate apprentice who somehow got caught up in the hunt for heretics. Having described this gruesome event, Foxe continued:
The said Woodroffe sheriff, above mentioned, was joined in office with another sir William Chester, for the year 1555. Between these two sheriffs such differences there was of judgement and religion that the one (that is master Woodroffe) was wont commonly to laugh, the other to shed tears, at the death of Christ’s people … Furthermore, here by the way to note the severe punishment of God’s hand against the said Woodroffe, as against all such cruel persecutors, so it happened, that within half a year after the burning of the blessed martyr (the reference is to Bradford), the said sheriff was so stricken on the right side, with such a palsy or stroke of God’s hand (whatsoever it was), that for the space of eight years after, till his dying day, he was not able to turn himself in bed, but as two men with a sheet were fain to stir him; and withal such an insatiable devouring came upon him that it was monstrous to see. And this continued he for the space of eight years together.
Foxe described more of Woodroffe s callous treatment of Protestants sent to the fire at Smithfield, but it seems that as a high city official he still received a handsome funeral.
Despite this dubious parentage, or perhaps because of it, Davids son Nicholas became lord mayor of London in 1579-80, when he was knighted, and later the Member of Parliament for London and master of the Haberdashers’ Company, a powerful city guild. In 1570 his son, Sir Robert Woodroffe, bought the Manor of Ailburton (now Aylburton) in Gloucestershire, on the banks of the Severn River shortly before it becomes the Bristol Channel leading out into the Atlantic. There is evidence in stone that he was a good guy: in the village church of nearby Alvington there is to this day a memorial stone, now barely legible:
Here lies Sir Robert Woodroffe Knight, and Marye, his dear wife,
Whose lives were virtuous, just and upright; but Atropos’ cruel knife
Soon cut their thread; the Fate in this being kinde,
Her hasting hence to Heaven s blisse left him not long behinde.
Both sprang from offsprings generous and just, and lying here as one
This sepulchre doth well befit, both covered with one stone.
But, Reader, understand that thou readest not this
At Heirs’ or Executors’ charge, but at a Dwarfe’s of his,
Whose charitie her here maintained, and now they being deade
In grateful memorie, she caused this stone on them be laide.
He died XVII day of May, and she the XIIII day of March, 1609
The faithful dwarfe must have been quite a character, able to turn a neat phrase, refer to Greek mythology — Atropos was a Fate responsible for cutting the thread of life — and afford a handsome stone that has lasted four hundred years.
Sir Robert and his wife died without heir, the manor passed to his nephew Robert, and Woodroffes continued to live in the district, and around Chepstow, just across the Welsh border, for centuries. There was much intermarriage in the clan because, I suppose, there weren’t that many “suitable” families in the area. That