Wednesday 12th February 2010 - Number 5965

Welcome

to our
Laws Family Register  

Robert Henry Laws

1828-1881

Captain of the Barque 'Woolhampton' 

my paternal Great Grandfather

&

This is Robert Henry's Wife 

Sarah Ann Laws, formerly Fuller

My paternal Great Grandmother

1846-1924

R I P

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Henry Lawes

1595-1662

We have excluded records of living people to protect their privacy (GDPR 2018)
We only show births before 1920 and marriages before 1940.

If you are seeking to find folk after these years you should contact the registrar.

Lord, help me dig into the past and sift the sands of time, that I might find the roots that made

this family tree of mine

Lord, help me trace the ancient roads, on which our fathers trod, which led them through

so many lands, to find our present sod. 

Lord help me find an ancient book or dusty manuscript, that's safely hidden now away, 

in some forgotten crypt. 

Lord, let it bridge the gap, that haunts my soul when I can't find, that missing link between 

some name, that ends the same as mine.

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A CHILD OF THE 1920s, 

AS SEEN FROM THE 1990s

by

John Robert Laws 1921-2008

Part 6.

Until school age, there was not a lot of contact with adults outside the family. One saw the neighbour in their gardens from time to time but it was not till a little later that a family came next door with whom we became friendly. The Kemble’s had five offspring, five daughters for starters the youngest in her late teens, and a son harry a bit older than myself with whom I became quite friendly. For some years we were regular cycling companions. 

The tradesmen were the people who are impressed on my memory. Delivery was the order of the day despite shopping on an almost daily basis. The milkman had an open-backed float with churns in it and would dip the milk out with a long-handled measure into your jug. It was not long till he graduated to a horse and cart with four wheels and milk in glass bottles with cardboard tops but in very hot weather, despite two deliveries a day, you still had to boil the milk soon after delivery before it went off. 

My mother used to tell me that when she lived in Devon as a child they had their own cow and that after milking she would separate the cream which she loved and churn the butter. That was all gone for town dwellers of course, but in the grocers shop the butter would still be scooped up and patted into shape instead of arriving in oblong paper packets. The grocer delivered as well and his man would arrive at the doorstep and jog the memory with a verbal list of commodities delivered in a rapid-fire voice rather like a market auctioneer."Salt - Pepper - Vinegar-Mustard" he would fire away and then take up his list at the same point after he had been interrupted with an item. 

The baker's man pulled a two-wheeled handcart with a rounded top and a leg at the back so that it didn't tip up when he let go. He would delve into this for the loaf you wanted, warm and crusty and certainly not wrapped or sliced! The postman was distinctive in his blue uniform with red piping and his odd little flat hat, almost a helmet. He did not bring a load of junk mail for the dustman to take away again, and what he delivered today had been posted yesterday except foreign parts. 

It is odd to have no memory of a butcher delivering at that time, perhaps my mother preferred to select our meat in the shop. There were certainly butchers boys to be seen on their delivery bicycles with a basket on the front, whistling their way around the streets. Later, in the thirties, we had a butcher who would call early and then would come back with the meat in time for lunch. Going by the name of Sam Collins he was a big beefy fellow with a perpetual grin who was everybody’s friend. 

There were street traders in the twenties as throughout the ages. A muffin man came along the street at weekends ringing his handball with a cloth covering a tray of muffins and crumpets on his head. From time to time a knife grinder would come along with a grinding wheel attached to the front of his bicycle and worked in some mysterious way from the pedals. He called as he came, offering his services and out would come the women with their carvers and kitchen knives to sharpen. Most doorsteps were sandstone anyway so there were plenty who managed well without him. 

In the High Street, there were those who offered oddments from doorways, matches and lemons, spring to mind. Along the gutters the sandwich board men, walked, enclosed in their advertising matter or calls to repentance, sometimes singly sometimes in threes or fours in a straggling crocodile. Occasionally there was an organ grinder on the corner of a side street, winding his handle and his mechanical music would add to the general street noise. There is an impression of noisiness in the High Street. 

Apart from the street traders, there were trams clattering on their steel rails, horses were iron-shod and so were the wheels of most of the carts. Lorries vans and cars were less well silenced and there was even the occasional Steam traction engine. However, there were no motor scooters and the few motorbikes did not roar around.  

One faint memory of Green Lanes is of the buses with their cabs shrouded in wire netting to protect the volunteer drivers during the National Strike of 1926. What a good job there were no television cameras to encourage the attackers.

As well as the main shopping area in Green Lanes there were a few little shops around the railway station. The sweet shop was to me the most important and in those impecunious days many sweet shops kept a halfpenny and farthing box with a selection of sweets at those prices for kids with pocket money. It is a sign of of changing times that as I type this computer throws out the word Farthing as not being in the dictionary.

The dress of the period is familiar from photographs but the black and white of these photos does not tell us how much colours changed. These monochrome photos are perhaps appropriate to the rather drab colours of every day wear. Grey, black and white were definitely favourites except for special occasions. Green was thought unlucky by some though my mother had a brilliant green evening dress for one special occasion. Red tended to be associated with the immoral so one was left with brown and blue and usually dark at that. Even holiday wear was much less colourful, white flannels and a navy blue blazer being about the height of seaside fashion for Pater families. The ladies did much better with flower patterned fabrics. For better or for worse the mini skirt hadn't been invented and bikini was still the name of an unknown Pacific island.

Among the street people with distinctive dress the policeman stood out. A big man in his navy blue tunic and trousers, a leather belt around his middle with a bull’s-eye torch at the rear and his outfit completed with a proper Bobbies helmet on his head and big black boots on his feet for pavement pounding. Just occasionally his whistle might be heard shrilling as he chased some malefactor down the road. More often he was seen but not heard as he came by on foot or on his bike with his rain cape neatly folded over the handlebars.

 Our family doctor lived just across the way in a sizable corner house. I saw him from time to time when I had various childhood ailments but his likeness escapes me. My mother always thought me thin and needing fattening up but rather doubting when the doctor included pork in his dietary recommendations. Anyway I ate like a horse the only dislike I can remember was the kidney in steak and kidney pudding. The doctor had installed a machine for 'sun-ray treatment' and my mother took me over to him several times for a dose of the beneficial light. It was some sort of ultra violet light emission which would now frighten a quack silly today but in small doses probably did neither good or harm.       

The twenties and early thirties were a period of innovation in the home. Discoveries made in earlier decades started to come to fruition as household hardware, consumer durables started to flow into the home. It was only the first wave of course; the flood was released after the war onto the earlier infrastructure.

The first innovation in my world was the gramophone which ousted the piano-player largely on account of the size. I suspect as the reproduction from the brittle single-sided records was less than good. We must have missed a couple of stages in this development as I did not see a cylinder playing phonograph until a friend produced one from a junkshop a year or two later. Nor do I remember a Gramophone with a big horn on top. Ours had the horn hidden away in its polished woodwork and the only music from it which struck a chord in my memory was Toseelli’s Seranade.

The radio seems to have come at the same time as the gramophone not true of course, but a childhood impression. The crystal set was impressive hardware then even if the output that came through the earphones all the way from Daventry, was erratic and to me uninteresting, Fiddling with the ‘cat's whisker’ to try and coax the best reception from the as of yet untamed crystal was much more to my taste.

The crystal set was not with us long; Soon battery-powered sets with varying numbers of mysterious glowing thermionic valves took over with better reception and more to go wrong. Aerial poles sprouted at the foot of most gardens, harbingers of the later ugly skyline rash. Two batteries were needed to work these sets, a large HT battery which just wore out and had to be replaced and a lead-acid accumulator which had to be recharged at the shop down the road, all this power made the use of a loudspeaker possible. It stood on top of the cabinet housing all the bits and its curly metal horn was now really audible.

For me, change began with the coming of electric light, just the tip of the innovation iceberg as the electric supply network built up. In with the electric light came the electric points as we called the outlets, only one in a room to start with, just for a reading lamp perhaps. The radio, which we called the wireless with a wry smile, it had more wires than any other previous domestic item, was now released from the tyranny of the accumulator as mains-powered sets arrived. The voice from the trumpet of your loudspeaker no longer started to fade as the battery power ran down. It is odd to think that a considerably later innovation the replacement of the valve by the transistor, brought back the rechargeable battery but in a small and convenient form.

With the plugging in of the new radios the electric supply had started on its trail of removing chores from the household. The next arrival after the radio was the electric fire which rapidly penetrated into every home with electric supply and brought quick warmth. More flexible than the older gas fire was, it was even more useful before central heating became commonplace.

Following it up the front steps came the vacuum cleaner salesman, the first and probable the greatest beneficiary of the small electric motor in the domestic field, except the housewife of course. No longer were the clouds of dust raised as the bass broom worked its way down the stairs and through the hall to the back door. The volume of dirt in the house was reduced but the battle could not be won until the open coal fire was on the way out.

Somehow progress was slow with the electric cooker which did not really become controllable until my childhood was well into double figures. Gas and solid fuel cookers continued to spread dirt in the home but were the easiest and cheapest stoves to use and even now hold material portion of the market.

The only other innovation to compare with electricity was the motor vehicle. It had been invented some thirty odd years before, but development and cost reduction took time, and I was about four years old when my father bought his first car, a bull nosed Morris, built like a tank but a troublesome beast. It was 1925 and there were not a lot of cars on the road, the speed limit was 20 mph and although this lasted very little longer my dad managed to get fined for exceeding it before it was changed. Houses had no garages, and the car was housed about half a mile away where a garage proprietor had a few lockup garages besides his scruffy workshop. The Morris was only used at weekends and holidays and although it was a lovely toy for my dad I thought it a bit of a bore and escaped from it as soon as I was old enough to ride a bike on the road.

Perhaps the most innovative thing about our car was that my mother learnt to drive it, scarcely the done thing at that time. By the time I was ten she had one of her own, a little open topped Singer which was far more to my taste and could be pushed up to 60mph “Don’t tell your father!” 

The road system was getting some improvement in the twenties and a few new roads space was left for a second carriageway, often it got left for another thirty years.

At some point my father changed his Morris for a Chrysler which went much faster, too fast, in fact, to get round the Anglo-Saxon corners of East Anglia, where he wrote it off and landed himself in hospital for a day or two, seat belts were a much later innovation, after that he got a sedate Hillman which lasted the rest of his days. 

Part 9

Extracted from our database today 12th February

1612 - Burial: Roger LAWES-27492, Boxgrove Sussex England
1723 - Marriage: John STICKLAND-25222 and Elizabeth LAWS-25223,                            Swanage Dorset England
1782 - Marriage: James RUTHERFORD-10344 and Ann LAWS-10345,                              Newcastle upon Tyne Northumberland England

1786 - Baptism: Gertrude LAWS-3556, Witchampton Dorset England

1793 - Marriage: Adam RANDS-19940 and Mary LAWS-19939,
1811 - Marriage: Christian BARKER-4966 and Elizabeth LAWS-4967, Norwich               Norfolk England

1816 - Birth: Letticia PEEL-19222, Caldbeck Cumberland England
1826 - Baptism: Eliza Catherine LAWES-12383, Clifton Gloucestershire England

1834 - Baptism: Sarah LAWES-12567, Bower Chalke Wiltshire England

1844 - Birth: Matthew LAWS-16569, (Married)
1847 - Birth: Robert James LAWS-16841, (Railroad Official)  Albany County                   New York United States
1851 - Birth: John William LAWS-25547, (ARMY Acting Sergeant  2767)                         Wakefield West Yorkshire England
1866 - Marriage: Charles Louis KIESBURY-28339 and Matilda LAWS-28338,                 Norwich Norfolk England

1868 - Birth: Lionel Edgar LAWS-11229, (Carpenter)  At Sea
1869 - Birth: Emma L LAWS-42956, 
1872 - Birth: James Henry LAWS-34362 (Teacher) , Balmain New South Wales                 Australia
1880 - Marriage: James Ervin LAWS-50147 and Martita Caroline EGGERS-                   50148, Carter County Tennessee United States
1881 - Birth: Harvey Pierce LAWS-17848, Milford Delaware United States
1882 - Birth: Alfred LAWES-43891, (Engineer Charges Erector)
1885 - Marriage: Valentine LAWS-7252 (Warehouseman in Cotton Mill)  and                   Leah HAMMOND-22121, Kings Lynn Norfolk England

1891 - Birth: Charles Bernard ANGELL-23791, (Teacher)  Malmesbury                            Wiltshire England
1892 - Burial: Martha Lavinia LAWS-6292, (Scholar) South Acton Middlesex                   England (St Mary)
1894 - Death: Joseph CHARTERS-13836, (Farmer 107 acres)
            (My wife's 3rd Great Grandfather)
1895 - Birth: Charles William Griffiths LAWS-3631, (Teacher)  Old Casino Road,
           Ferndale, Grafton New South Wales Australia
1896 - Birth: John LAWS-41585, (Fruit Grower)
1897 - Death:& Death Peter LAWS-19606, Northumberland England
1897 - Birth: Frederick W LAWS-12850, (Market Garden Labourer)
            Horsham Saint Faith Norfolk England
1898 - Birth: George LAWS-43776, (Colliery Fitter)
1899 - Birth: Stella Jessie Waters LAWS-3635, Grafton New South Wales                            Australia
1901 - Birth: Victor George LAWS-11246, (Australian Army) Brisbane                              Queensland Australia
1902 - Birth: Marvin MURPHY-24725, 
1903 - Birth: Florence Elizabeth LAWS-43376,  (Dressmaker)
1904 - Birth: Mary Ann Frances STEEL-20868, Bromley Middlesex England
1907 - Birth: Frederick James LAWS-22685, (General Labourer) West Ella,
            Hull East Yorkshire England

1907 - Death: George Washington LAWS-10969, Mendoza, Caldwell County                     Texas United States
1913 - Residence: Herbert Henry LAWS-42766, (Millwright)  Greenwich Kent                 England

1914 - Will Proved: William LAWS-12168, (Tobacconist & Newsagent)
1915 - Death: Samuel LAWS-5543, (Railway Signalman) Ferryhill Durham                        England
1915 - Death: William Frederick LAWS-4999, (Stone Mason employing 2 men in             1861) Southwold Suffolk England

1917 - Death: William Cooban LAWES-21752, (Assistant Cook Merchant                          Marine)
1918 - Residence: Christine B UMBRICHT-27918, (Hotel Bookkeeper)                                  Hunstanton Norfolk England
1918 - Birth: James Kenneth LAWS-23606, 
1926 - Death: John Nicholas  (Railway Wagon & Carriage Examiner)
           Whitby North Yorkshire England LAWS-3672,

1930 - Burial: Percy Charles Willoughby LAWS-4454, (Pathologist)  Highgate                    Middlesex England
1932 - Burial: Alice Elders LAWS-17357, Stockton-On-Tees Durham England
1943 - Death: Gertrude Annie LAWS-31688, (Housemaid & Spinster) Leicester                Leicestershire England resided Birstall Leicestershire England
1945 - Death: Joan Margaret LAWS-36967, Maffia Victoria Australia
1945 - Residence: Herbert J LAWES-33842, (Licensed Victualler & Grocers                     Assistant)  Trowbridge Wiltshire England
1946 - Military: Willie LAWS-16201, (PFC US Army)
1949 - Death: Susie Elizabeth LAWS-19152, 
1949 - Death: Norma Victoria HOLMES-11271, Southport Queensland Australia
1952 - Death: Thomas Edward COUCHMAN- (Kentish Ploughing Champion)                   41989, Horton Kirby Kent England
1955 - Death: James H LAWS-11974, Los Angeles California United States
1959 - Death: Sarah Mitchell (Married) LAWS-25187,
1965 - Death: Julia Evelyn LAWES-305,
1974 - Death: Kate Evelyn  (Widow) ???-6975, Kirkley Suffolk England
1977 - Stillborn: Jody La Moyne LAWS-22277, Monticello San Juan Utah United States but burial Blanding Utah United States
1982 - Death: Alonzo Mason LAWS-22381, Santa Clara California United States
1983 - Death: Robert H SMITH-45188, College Park, Prince George's, 
            Maryland, United States
1985 - Death: Arthur Geoffrey Thurlow LAWS-31746, (ARMY Lt. Colonel)                      Bristol Gloucestershire England
1986 - Death: Frederick Victor LAWES-49515, Shooters Hill Kent England
1993 - Burial: Hilda Isabel LAWS-32102, Chadwell Heath Essex England
1997 - Burial: Albert Oran (PVT US Army) LAWS-16257, Denver Colorado United States
2001 - Death: Phyllis Esther REID-49661, Orleans Vermont United States
2003 - Death: Iva M REES WILLIAMS-11873(F W Woolworth Co) , Americus Kansas United States
2004 - Death: Doris LASHLEY-13253, Alamance County North Carolina United States
2006 - Death: Edna May VITTLE-32651, Truro Cornwall England
2015 - Death: John Bryan LAWS-40885, Washington Durham England

MORE TOMORROW

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sharon Nicola LAWS

2008 Olympics Cyclist

Environmental adviser for Rio Tinto Zinc 

1974-2017

R I P

The content provided on this site is not guaranteed to be error-free 

It is always advised that you consult original records.

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            Member of The Guild of One-Name Studies

THE GUILD OF ONE-NAME STUDIES

www.one-name.org

registrar@lawsfamilyregister.org.uk

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With grateful thanks to Simon Knott 

for his permission to reproduce his photographs on this site 
see 

http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk

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