WILLIAM COLLINS JENNINGS (c1808-1860) AND THE SS SOMERSETSHIRE

The first thing I found out about my 3x great uncle William Collins Jennings was that he bought a ship, the sloop Somersetshire in 1835. This article was going to be about that vessel; about the cargo of grain which the ship probably gathered for William, a corn merchant in Bristol; about Captain William Williams who was the ship’s master when Jennings and his partner James Smith bought it from John Jones and William Roberts, two merchants on the far shore of the Severn in Chepstow.

Typical early 19^th century single-masted sloop (this one 37 tons, 41 feet long) – the Somersetshire was 48 tons, 47’ 8” long, 15’ 4” wide, and drew 7’ 6”

Unfortunately I haven’t found any further information about the Somersetshire, or about Jennings’ trade with her; so all that will have to be left to the imagination. In 1836 a schooner Somerset appears in the Lloyds Register of Shipping, based at Dartmouth and sailing between there and Wales, having been built in Bristol in 1827. Is it the same ship? It’s owned by then by Clift & Co, and C. Clift is its master. But with a coppered hull and at 83 tons it has either had a lot of work done to it or is a different vessel.

However in the course of not finding much more about the Somersetshire, I have built up a small picture of the life of William Collins Jennings which makes his purchase of the Somersetshire seem a surprising and reckless gamble. 

Born in 1808, married to Mary Ann Thomas in 1832, William was 27 when he bought the Somersetshire. Two years earlier in 1833, only a year after his wedding, he had been declared bankrupt. Two years after buying his ship, in 1837, he was declared bankrupt again. And on the 9^th August 1843 he filed for bankruptcy once more. He had lost his job, as a clerk with the Great Western Railway, six days earlier; and in 1843 there was no safety net of a welfare state.

The train shed of the Great Western Railway at Bristol Temple Meads station, in an engraving by John Cooke Bourne of 1843 – the railway company was founded ten years earlier

The railway job had lasted three years and followed a three-year period of unemployment since the 1837 bankruptcy. In those six years, the 1843 notice of bankruptcy announced, he lived at eleven different addresses, some for only a few weeks. It was a graphic illustration of the fragility of his economic situation.

For the record, his addresses were:

58 Queen’s Square, Bristol (1 Jan 1837 to 29 Mar 1839)

Aust, Henbury, Gloucs (29 Mar 1839 to 12 Jul 1839)

Redwick, Henbury, Gloucs (12 Jul 1839 to 22 Oct 1839)

14 Wine Street, Bristol (22 Oct 1839 to 11 Nov 1839)

Doctors’ Commons, London (11 Nov 1839 to 30 May 1840)

14 Wine Street, Bristol (30 May 1840 to 24 May 1841)

Weston super Mare, Somerset (24 May 1841 to 8 Aug 1841)

9 Queen’s Square, Bristol (8 Aug 1841 to 1^st Jun 1842)

Belmont House, Bedminster, Bristol (1 June 1842 to 1^st Jan 1843)

Laura Place, Bedminster, Bristol (from 1 Jan 1843)

Queen’s Square, today the elegant heart of Bristol

These addresses raise some questions. From August 1840 the frequent moves could be explained by postings in his work for the GWR. Queen’s Square is today a very elegant address, although it has probably been renumbered since William’s time: the present no. 58 is the Customs House! But the square is also the location of the Sailors’ Refuge, and in 1837 it may have been much less des res following the destruction of much of it in the riots of 1831. Wine Street was also grand – completely destroyed in the blitz of the Second World War, it was in the 1930s a street of fine shops second only to London’s Regent Street in value. 

Wine Street, Bristol, from a magazine article of 1878 about “Old Bristol”

His time at Doctors’ Commons is intriguing. He was still out of work. What could have taken him for six months to London, and to the place where the proceedings of the civil law courts were held? Doctors’ Commons functioned for lawyers specializing in civil law in the same way that the Inns of Court do for practitioners of common law, housing offices and living quarters for its members. Already active in the 16^th century the society was largely obsolete by the 19^th, described by Charles Dickens in David Copperfield as a “cosey, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family party.” It finally fell asleep in 1865, and the buildings in which Jennings seems to have lived were demolished in 1867.

Doctors’ Commons, in an engraving of 1808 by Augustus Pugin Senior and Thomas Rowlandson

William Jennings struggled on. At the census in 1851 he was living with his family in St Martin’s on the island of Guernsey, describing himself himself a “retired” merchant. His wife has no declared profession; so with three children under the age of 15, how was the family getting by? Perhaps Mary Ann had a private source of income. She died before William, who spent his last days in poverty in Hackney. At the time of his death his worldly goods were valued at less than £20, which wouldn’t buy you much of the Somersetshire or any other sloop.

WILLIAM HENRY CASTLE (1810-1865) AND THE STOKES CROFT BREWERY

For Bristol Beer Week in October 2013, the Ashley Down microbrewery rustled up a special brew, Stokes Croft IPA (that’s India Pale Ale for the uninitiated). The brewery is in the St Andrews district of Bristol, and Stokes Croft is the road that leads to it from the city centre.

Stokes Park IPA, specially brewed by Ashley Down microbrewery for Bristol Beer Week 2013

The road was also the site until the second world war of the Stokes Croft Brewery, which stood at the corner of Stokes Croft and City Road. In the 1830s it was run, under the name of Castle & Rees, by two brothers in law: my Carmarthen-born 3x great uncle Thomas Rees and my Bristol-born great great grandfather William Henry Castle. Thomas had married Susannah Capel Jennings and William her younger sister Caroline Collins Jennings.

(A third sister, Henrietta Collins Jennings was the wife of the engineer Thomas Richard Guppy of whom I have written here; and a fourth, Margaret Collins Jennings married William Lambert and inherited a house belonging to her uncle Thomas Collins, about which I wrote last year.)

The last remaining buildings of the Stokes Croft Brewery survive as Bristol’s Lakota Nightclub

William and Thomas also ran, under the name Rees & Castle, the Nursery Brewery on Kent Street in Liverpool, where Thomas had by 1837 made his home. I don’t know when they entered into partnership together. William was already a brewer when he married Caroline in Liverpool in 1837; and perhaps they met through her sister, the wife of his business partner. Thomas Rees was among the witnesses at William and Caroline's wedding.

There was a second brewery on Kent Street, the Mersey Brewery, in which William and Thomas were joined by a third Jennings brother in law, Thomas Richard Guppy. They brewed Mersey porter ale, and had traded as Guppy, Rees and Co since at least 1838 (when Guppy brought a court case against a carpenter for late completion of work on the brewery). But Guppy withdrew on 2^nd March 1840 to concentrate on his engineering career. Castle too dropped out of that operation exactly two years later, leaving Rees in sole charge there.

The brothers in law formally dissolved their Stokes Park and Nursery partnership on 10^th August 1842, but I don’t think there was any crisis. Two small breweries in two cities 180 miles apart probably had little to gain from shared ownership when one partner lived in each city. Thomas concentrated on the Liverpool sites and William took on sole ownership of Stokes Croft.

Stokes Croft at the junction with City Road, c1918 (brewery just out of sight on the right)

The families on the other hand remained very close. William and Caroline Castle’s daughter Emily was visiting her uncle Thomas and aunt Susannah Rees at the time of the 1861 census, and a year later there was a Rees-Castle partnership of a different kind when Emily married their son Lambert Thomas Rees, her first cousin.

By then both men had moved out of brewing and into grain processing. Thomas was a corn merchant and William a rice dresser – cleaning up imported rice to prepare it for sale. The Stokes Croft Brewery went through a series of owners. Foll & Abbott had it in the 1860s when they sold F&A pale bitter ale for a shilling a gallon. In the early 1880s it was owned by Hereford company Harvey & Co, who sold it on to Arnold, Perrett & Co in 1889. R.W. Miller & Co took it on only four years later, and Georges & Co bought it in 1911. Having survived Bristol’s blitz in the second world war it finally closed down in 1948.

Avonmead, postwar shops and flats on the site of the Stokes Croft Brewery

At 6.1% Stokes Croft IPA is not a beer merely to quench your thirst with, and no doubt much stronger than the ale produced by its eponymous predecessor. But it has strength too in the history carried in its name.

WILLIAM EDWARD ACRAMAN (1799-1874) AND THE SWISS WATCH

In 1820, Daniel Wade Acraman sent his son William (my 3x great uncle) around Europe on the then-fashionable Grand Tour. Daniel had made his money with a foundry started by his father. Daniel himself was about to patent a new kind of chain cable, and under his management the family business would flourish to become one of the biggest in Bristol, where they supplied chandlery for the ship-building industry.

Daniel Wade Acraman’s memorial in St Stephen’s Parish Church, Bristol (photo by Bob Speel )

In time, when William took over the reins, Acramans would themselves become the owners of ships, importing luxury goods from all over the world and exporting British products to the colonies. But for now it was his father’s money which was paying for the cultural completion of twenty-one year old William’s education with a journey through the scenic wonders and architectural antiquities of the old world.

They kept in touch by letter, and a fellow descendent of Daniel’s has sent me a transcription of one of his letters to William during the trip. Mail was nothing new by the early nineteenth century of course, but I do marvel at the logistics. It was by no means certain that any given letter would find its intended recipient in the unreliable travel conditions of the time, and post was generally sent well ahead on the itinerary to await the arrival of the traveller. Daniel’s letter opens with a summary of recent correspondence in case either party has missed anything:

Dear William,

My last was to Naples dated march 23^rd. Concluding you will return to Rome in time for this, I shall direct it there. Yours to your sister and myself of the 22^nd ult. came home safe.

Pompeii, rediscovered in 1748, was why Grand Tourists went to Naples

It’s nice to think that William was in Naples thirty years before his sort-of cousin by marriage Thomas Richard Guppy went there to transform the marine engineering industry in the city. (I wrote about Guppy’s Neapolitan impact here recently – the relationship is tenuous: Thomas married Henrietta Jennings whose sister Caroline married my 2x great grandfather William Castle, whose sister Mary married William Acraman two years after his Grand Tour.)

There’s no mention of Mary Castle in this letter, dated 17^th April 1820, although Daniel does report the impending marriage of a family friend Philip  and, in the same breath, information about a forthcoming Batchelors’ Ball. (Philip may have been Philip Protheroe, later a partner with Guppy’s father Samuel in a soap-manufacturing venture – the Bristol business community was a small and close-knit one.)

Otherwise, the big news is that William is to be allowed to take stock in the family business, effectively becoming a partner. His 80-year old grandfather William Acraman, who started the firm and after whom he is named, has approved!

Acraman’s Store, No.1 Quay, Bristol, built c1830 when the family business was thriving with William Acraman’s involvement

William's father Daniel is only 45 years old but in poor health and unable to make the trip with William as he would have liked. He expresses envy of his son's journey:

The illness I have is so great that at times I am quite done for ... I need not say what joy I should receive if I was with you, but that being impossible I must look forward to the gratification of seeing you safe at home.

William is on his way home, from Naples north to Rome and on eventually, the letter makes clear, through Switzerland, and

I suppose by the time you get home you will know how to value your little bed and English fare, although you must be amply repaid by the sights you have seen.

Daniel has a favour to ask of William during the Swiss leg of his homeward journey.

Your aunt wishes you to buy her a watch about five or six guineas when at Geneva, without a chain, to hang using her Figure of Time. You will do this or not if you find it convenient. Mary [William’s sister] likes her watch and we all thought it quite large enough.

So Swiss watches were already objects of desire in the early nineteenth century.

A Staffordshire watch holder of the nineteenth century – the watch sits in a pocket behind the aperture, the dial visible without the need for a chain. Perhaps Mary Acraman had such a holder with a figure of Father Time.

Since, passing through Geneva, William was obviously returning to England by land rather than sea, it seems unlikely that he would get home to Bristol in time for the Batchelors’ Ball on 1^st May that year. Perhaps, if he did, it was there that William Acraman met his future wife. She would certainly have been dazzled by his fresh travellers’ tales.

THOMAS RICHARD GUPPY (1797-1882) AND THE S.S. GREAT WESTERN

Pioneering civil and nautical engineer Thomas Richard Guppy married Henrietta Collins Jennings (1810-1845), a sister of my great great grandmother Caroline Collins Jennings (1815-1876), making him my 3x great uncle Thomas.

Thomas Guppy wasn’t portrayed at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, but his friend and colleague Isambard Kingdom Brunel was, by Kenneth Branagh

The Guppys and the Jennings’s were prominent families in the important British port city of Bristol, for which in 1830 a young Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The bridge used construction techniques devised by uncle Thomas’s remarkable mother Sarah Guppy; and thereafter Thomas and Isambard became lifelong friends and colleagues. The same year that Brunel won the competition to design the Clifton bridge, he and Guppy formed a company to build a railway from the nation’s capital London stretching westwards to its most important seaport Bristol – the Great Western Railway.

The GWR won parliamentary approval for construction in 1832, and was formally founded in 1833 – Thomas was a director, and Isambard the GWR’s chief engineer. Thomas injected large amounts of his own money to fund the project; and during its construction Thomas’s mother Sarah also contributed. Later, after its opening, she proposed the idea that the banks of railway cuttings could be stabilised by planting trees to prevent landslides onto the track.

Sonning Cutting on the GWR, scene of a fatal rail accident caused by a  landslip in 1841 which prompted Sarah Guppy to suggest planting willows and poplars

The first GWR trains ran in 1838, but a casual remark from Brunel at a directors’ meeting three years earlier led to Guppy and him launching an even more ambitious project before the first was even completed. Why, Brunel half-joked, should they stop at Bristol? What if passengers could buy a through-ticket from London to New York? There was at the time no regular transatlantic crossing, and no one at the meeting took him very seriously – except Guppy.

The prevailing view was that no steamship could be built large enough to accommodate sufficient passengers and cargo AND the huge amount of fuel required to carry them all across the Atlantic. A committee was formed to plan a ship, to be called the S.S. Great Western, which could overturn such conventional wisdom. Guppy’s father and mother were both responsible for innovations in ship construction, and Thomas now spent three months himself touring Britain’s great ship-building centres, studying the best techniques of the best nautical engineers in the country.

S.S. Great Western, designed by Guppy and Brunel, fitted by Acraman, on a commemorative Royal Mail stamp of 2004

The S.S. Great Western was launched on 19^th July 1837 (and fitted out in large part by another 3x great uncle of mine, William Edward Acraman of Bristol ships’ chandlers Acraman & Co). After trials the ship made its maiden voyage to New York and back in 1838 in record time – 15 days out, 14 days back (including 24 hours lost for a stoppage at sea). It had consumed only three-quarters of its fuel supply in the process. As his obituary from the Institute of Civil Engineers noted, “Mr Guppy therefore assisted, conjointly with the late Mr Brunel, in the construction of the precursor of Ocean Steam Navigation.”

Thomas learned much from his 1835 survey of nautical engineering techniques; and he built on them many innovations of his own, which he applied to the Great Western’s successors, the Great Britain (1843) and the Great Eastern (1859). These included using copper plates on the hull instead of iron ones, to reduce corrosion; and (for the Great Eastern) a twin-walled, cellular system for constructing hulls which created a lining of buoyant, independent, water-tight compartments. In these he preempted double-hull improvements which were ordered after the catastrophic failure of the Titanic’s rather less successful watertight compartments some 53 years later.