News on developments in the research underpinning this website. See also the update history on the home page and the library index for a full list of articles. Go the About page for updates on the study and of structural changes to this website.
News Updates 2021
Aug 2021 - Who Was Archibald? Mr and Mrs Houghton (Trixie Skyrme)
Jun 2021 - Ag Lab Ancestors; A Tales of Two Counties: Norfolk and Pembrokeshire
Jan 2021 - My Gap Year; The Huddersfiled Publisher; 200 and 100 Years Ago
August 2021
As noted before I am spending more time on my own family tree rather than on the Skyrme One-Name Study. With ever more records coming online (especially images of parish records and newspapers) I've managed to break quite a few brick walls. However, I do keep tabs on most new updates on the main geneaology websites. For my contribution this month, I am reverting to what I did before, checking newspapers of 150 and 100 years ago. They do say that your ancestors appear in the newspapers only if they were famous or infamous. This month's selection covers the latter.
Who Was Archibald?
My first result for a search of 1871 newspapers mystifies me. It reported Archibald Skyrme of Treherbert in Glamorgan being drunk and disorderly on 17th March 1871. He was fined 20s, twice that of his companion William Jones. But who was Archibald? Of over 3,000 Skyrmes in my database there were only three Archies - one born in 1906 in Blaenavon, and father and son Archie Godfrey Skyrme born in Queensland in 1891 and 1927 respectively. Searches in the normal genealogy sites found none that would fit. Also, there were only a handful of Skyrmes who I could locate in Treherbert, only one who was born before 1871. This was James Skyrme (b1847) originally from Tenby and from the mid-1870s a collier in Treherbert. There were only three Archibalds of any surname around Treherbert at the time. So my theories are: 1) An adopted name; 2) An alias to avoid detection; 3) A middle name. I'm therefore stumped, unless any reader can shed light on who this Archibald was.
Mr and Mrs Houghton
What has this got to do with Skyrmes you ask? Well if Archibald was possibly disguising his real name, then Josephine Ray Skyrme certainly was. This article from 100 years ago says that's what she and her partner in crime a Mr Davies called themselves when they lived together. However, they used yet another alias - Mr and Mrs Maitland - when they stayed in the expensive Lancaster Court Hotel the day after they stole £270 from an office of the father of the third party to the crime, 18-year old mechanic Arthur Marriott of Hereford. Josephine is described as "a smartly dressed single woman of Barton Manor".
Like Archibald, if you look up Josephine Skyrme on genealogy sites, you won't find her. She was the infamous Trixie Skyrme who for most of the 1920s masqueraded as high society girl Josephine O'Dare. In reality she was Theresa Agnes Skyrme, born in 1899, the daughter of agricultural labourer John Skyrme and his wife Mary Riley of Canon Pyon in Herefordshire. Her exploits came to an end in 1927 when she was arrested and sentenced to 4½ years in prison. You can read about her on pages 26-8 of The Herefordshire Skyrmes. There is also a book by Jen Green: Whatever happened to Trixie Skyrme?
June 2021
Another bit of a gap since my last update. The main reason is that I have been working on the maternal line of my own family tree. But the Skyrmes have not been entirely neglected.
Ag Lab Ancestors
Like most of you I have many 'Ag labs' (agricultural labourers) in my family tree. Although my 5xgreat grandfather was one his son apprenticed as a shipwright and our family bible says that "he wanted all his sons to have a trade". So six out of seven also became shipwrights (in Pembroke Royal Dockyard) while the seventh became a tailor.
However, an inspiring course by Pharos Tutors delivered by Janet Few taught me a lot about the life and context of our ag lab ancestors:
- All ag labs aren't the same – there's carters, teamsters, farm servants, dairymaids etc.
- Significant events affected their lives – Depression (1815-35), Enclosure (from late 1700s), Swing Riots (1830), Corn Law Repeal (1846), Agricultural gangs Act (1867), first union (1872), bad harvest years, Return of Owners of Land (1873), the ‘great depression’ (1873-1896)
- Their work varied throughout the farming year – month-by-month changes on different types of farm.
We often think of them as 'unskilled', but when you consider the tasks they did - such as sowing seeds evenly over a given area - both skill and stamina were required. One thing the course forced you to do was to find the farms they worked on and who they worked for. There is a distinct hierarchy of landowner > tenant farmer > farm bailiff (foreman) > ag lab and my family tree has examples of all of them.
One farm I concentrated on was Corston farm just outside Pembroke. I have mentioned this before where a Thomas Skyrme was killed by an overturned threshing maching and died an agonising death (go to January 2018 news). The person I focussed on was one of his sons - George Skyrme - and his employer the Leach family. Some of the things I know now, but did not before the course, include:
- that Manorbier had 523 acres of arable and 2,783 acres of meadow and pasture in the mid 19th century
- that the Corston estate was over 1,000 acres (I found that it changed hands in 2017 for over £10m)
- that the owner in the late 19th century - Henry Leach - was head of the local hunt and had an estate worth over £34,000 when he died in 1905 (worth over £3m today); he had a brother who was a vice-admiral in the Navy.
- that the estate records are in 72 boxes at the National Library of Wales, and they include day books and accounts - so no doubt my ancestors are listed in some of these.
- that one of George's working colleagues "was tying corn in the harvest field, he was stricken with sunstroke and died in a few minutes"
- discovering what a turnip snuffler, a waggon slipper and a tunpail were
- that there was a breed of cattle called the Castlemartin breed, a variation of the black Pembrokeshire breed that were hardier on the poor land
- etc. etc.
My sources included tithe maps and apportionments, newspaper articles, trade directories, details of farm sales, and more general books such as The General View of Agriculture of Pembrokeshire (1794) and The Book of the Farm, Henry Stephens (1844), both freely available at Google books.
All in all, an eye-opening exercise. So don't just dismiss your ancestors as a single line in a census, but find out more about how they lived and worked.
A Tale of Two Counties
Many of my maternal ancestors come from Norfolk, but doing research on my paternal Pembrokeshire ancestors I found that my great grandfather Shadrach Harrison was born in Barford in Norfolk. This is not far from where some of my maternal ancestors lived in places like Shipdham, Cringleford and East Carleton. Shadrach married a Pembroke girl Ellen Thomas in 1882. The reason for this long distance coupling is not hard to find. Although he started life as an ag lab Shadrach obviously thought there were better things to do in life so he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1878 and moved to London. The Met had responsbility for policing royal dockyards wherever they were located, and that's what brought him to Pembroke where he met his future wife.
However, in my family tree there is another long distance connection much more recent. It was that between my father, a Pembrokeshire boy, and my mother, a Norwich girl. I still haven't worked out how they came to meet each other. Aren't there some things you wish you had asked your parents before they died?
You can download the article that I wrote on these connections and that was published in The Norfolk Ancestor (June 2021) here from my library (0.32Mb PDF).
January 2021
My Gap Year
Apologies for a long gap in updating news of my study. I have two excuses: 1) Unlike previous years in 2020 I had so few queries that led me to research and make new and interesting discoveries; and 2) With a lot of parish registers for Norfolk and Northampton coming online for the first time, I've spent most of the last year pursuing my own and wife's non-Skyrme ancestors. Nevertheless my New Year resolution is to update this website at least once a quarter. So here is my first contribution.
2020 A Year Like No Other?
2020 was a year we would all like to put behind us. The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted day-to-day activities, travel plans (I was in Portugal in March and came back to lockdown), and last but not least closed county archives. The one bright light was that if National Archives records were digitized you could download them for free.
But was it really different to pandemics of the past? This question got me looking into the cholera pandemics of Victorian times and the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic of 1918-1919. I wrote two articles for the family history magazines where Skyrmes were mostly located, viz. Pembrokeshire (DyfedFHS Journal) and Herefordshire (Herefordiensis). Although we now live is a more connected world and the virus spreads globally quickly, there were several interesting parallels:
- The virus hit hardest in heavily populated areas – notably in the industrial areas of South Wales
- Each had more than one wave; just as you thought things were improving along came more infections
- There were often mixed or confusing messages from those in authority
- The main exhortations to keep safe were not dissimilar to those of toady, e.g. cleanliness, minimising social contact, well ventilated accommodation.
The articles are to be found in our library but for convenience you can click the links below:
- 'Pandemics Past: Perspectives and Parallels', Dyfed Family History Journal, Vol 13, No 9, pp28-36 (Aug 2020)
- 'A Second Wave: Perspective on Pandemics Past', Herefordiensis (Jan 2021)
The library also contains several new articles that have been published during the last year.
The Huddersfield Journalist and Publisher
The biggest boost to to my Skyrme research during the past year has been the increasing number of newspaper articles coming online, from publications such as The Bromyard News, The Kingston Times and The Merthyr Express. But this is the story of a Skyrme not in the news but who made the news. He was newspaper proprietor John Jame Skyrme, born in 1825 at Cotheridge, just west of Worcester. He was the second of seven children of John Skyrme and Elizabeth James whose ancestors were from other parts of Worcestershire and thence of the Herefordshire branch of Skyrmes.
After serving as a printer's apprenticeship in Birmingham with the Midlands County Herald, we next find him in Yorkshire launching the Hudderfield Chronicle in April 1850 in partnership with Robert Micklethwaite. They cheekily advertised the launch in neighbouring newspapers but an advert just prior to launch was rejected by the Leeds Mercury due to some confusion over payment. The proprietor wrote in response to John's complaint "My wish is always to be on friendly terms with our contemproaries” adding that they would print it the following week.
The Chronicle seems to have been relatively successful though in 1852 the partnership dissolved, but John carried on as “proprieter, publisher and editor" until 1855. Although the Chronicle was published up to 1916, John who had married in the summer of 1850 lived for only a few more years. He had moved to Exeter where he was a sub-editor and reporter of the Exeter Gazette. That newpapper reports on 16 Aug 1858 "Died At His Post". He had been writing a report but a friend who had been called "saw that blood was issuing from Mr Skyrme's mouth. He exclaimed – 'I am dying', fell into his firend's arms, and immediately expired." At least his was a swift and merciful death, unlike to prolonged agony of many COVID-19 sufferers.
Incidentally, he was not the only Skyrme who was a journalist. Percival Vernon Skyrme, born in Hereford 1875 was first a journalist on the Barry Dock News, then the Woking Observer and the Merthyr Times, after which he moved up north to Widnes where he was a frelance journalist.
200 and 100 Years Ago
200 Years Ago This Month
Well almost. On 2nd February 1821 the Carmarthen Journal carried this advert “The Willliam Skyrme, David John, Master, now lies at Carpenter Smith’s Wharf, London, taking in goods for Carmarthen and will sail in a week or ten days”. The William Skyrme is a sloop that I wrote about last year - see the two articles in our library.
100 Years Ago This Month
There is an advert for an auction on Friday 21st January 1921 in which Mrs Skyrme of Upper Cwm, Bredwardine is selling the following livestock: 22 sheep, 3 cows, 1 horse and many implements amongst which are 4 hogsheads, a turnip scuffle, 10 cider hairs, and a Bamford chaffcutter (almost new). I'll let you figure out what these implements are. Also part of the auction is household furniture including a bed stead and chest of drawers.
The person in question was Julia Skyrme (née Price). Her husband Richard who had been born in Almeley, Herefordshire had died in 1910 and she had taken over the farm. The 1911 census shows she was helped by two sons Charles and Arthur. However, in WW1 Arthur who was serving in the machine gun corps was captured at Villers in France in November 1917. After the war he returned to the farm, but perhaps it was getting too much for Julia. After selling up she died just a year later at around the same time that Arthur emigrated to Australia.
If any readers have information about this branch of the Skyrmes I would be delighted to hear from them.