Jesse and Sarah Lambert had ten children:
- 50.1.1 - Benjamin Lambert (1832-1907)
- Married Mary Ann Davies (1837-1905) in Malinslee (now in Telford) in 1855
- Children:
- Sarah Jane Lambert (1857). Sarah died in 1862.
- Rebecca Lambert (1860). Rebecca died in 1877.
- 1861: A puddler, like his father; they lived in Horsehay
- 1871: Still a puddler but now over 200 miles away, in Jarrow co Durham
- Jarrow was founded around an ancient monastery, important in the development of Christianity. 2000 cattle were killed to make the first ever bible in 692. My photos of the monastery are here.
- In Benjamin's time it was a shipbuilding town - this continued until the Great Depression, provoking the famous Jarrow March of 1936.
- In 1881, puddler at an iron works in Stockton; his wife is absent
- Stockton had grown rapidly and blast furnaces lined the Tees from town to sea. Steam trams started running in town from 1881. Less than 60 years earlier the world's first passenger railway journey had taken place here. Around the same time, friction matches were invented here, revolutionising fire starting. My photos of the town are here.
- 1991: widower, labourer in an iron works; lodger in the Stranton district of West Hartlepool. Hartlepool was also then an industrial town, and the third biggest port in England.
- 50.1.2 - Joseph Lambert (1834-1914)
- 1851: Forgeman (age 17); at home
- Married Elizabeth (1839-1917) in 1859
- Children:
- Thomas Lambert (1857)
- Margaret Catharine Lambert (1860)
- Herbert Edward Lambert (1863)
- Joseph Rowland Lambert (1866)
- Laura Jane Lambert (1870)
- Arthur Edward Lambert (1872)
- Sarah Elizabeth Lambert (1874)
- 1861: Puddler. Living on Pool Hill, Dawley.
- 1871: Forgeman, Old Row, Horsehay
- The Old Row is now a listed building. Description and photo here.
- 1881: Night manager at forge. Horsehay.
- 1891: Forge superintendent. Wolstanton nr Newcastle, Staffordshire (40 miles away)
- 1901: Forge manager. Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent (adjacent to Wolstanton). More on this in Chapter 57.2b.
- Etruria was home to Wedgwood pottery from 1769 to 1950. It is now home to the Etruria Industrial Museum, which has a working forge, and the only remaining operational steam-driven potter's mill in the world, amongst other attractions.
- My photos of Stoke-on-Trent are here.
- The forges in Hanley were closed down in 1978 after more than 100 years of continuous operation. The 'Man of Steel' sculpture was unveiled in 1976, as a symbol of the struggle of the workers to keep their jobs.
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| Man of Steel by Colin Melbourne (my photo) |
- 50.1.3 - Sarah Lambert (1837-1903)
- Sarah never left home. After her father died, and her mother became an office cleaner, she also became a servant but stayed living with her mother. In 1901, after her mother had died, she was an office caretaker herself, and her sister Mary Anne lived with her in Dawley. She died two years later and was buried in Little Dawley
- 50.1.4 - Elizabeth Lambert (1838)
- 1881: Domestic servant in Coalbrookdale. I'm glad I looked at this one twice. She was one of six servants at Dale House, Coalbrookdale where the master was William G Norris, a managing partner of Coalbrookdale Works, employing 1800 men.
- "In the latter part of the C19 the day-to-day direction of affairs at the Shropshire ironworks of the Coalbrookdale Company was left in the hands of managers, of whom Charles Crookes, from 1850 to 1866, and William Gregory Norris from 1866 to 1897, were the most prominent." (Trinder). There is more information, and a picture here.
- Dale House is sometimes open to the public. It is the home of Abraham Darby III's original desk, and other family memorabilia. It almost overlooks the Coalbrookdale works, claimed to be the world's biggest foundry in 1851, when they exhibited at the Great Exhibition. Their work included the great gates to the exhibition - still (almost) in situ at Hyde Park - and the 'Boy and Swan' fountain which stood in the north transept.
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| 'Boy and Swan' by Coalbrookdale Co for Great Exhibition (my photo) |
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| Andromeda, cast for the Great Exhibition (my photo) |
- The Coalbrookdale Company built the Horsehay foundries where Elizabeth's father worked - they were closed in 1886, less than ten years after Jesse died. They were amongst the first companies to make iron railways. Later they focused on decorative ironwork.
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| Coalbrookdale ironworks warehouse (my photo) |
- 1901: Elizabeth was a servant to a merchant in Weaverham (ancient home of the Wheaver family), a village near Northwich in Cheshire. My photos are here.
- 1911: back in Horsehay. Living with her sister Mary Ann at 26 Frame Lane, not far from Horsehay Pool.
A note on The Great Exhibition
The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in 1851 was a key point in Victorian history. It was organised as a celebration the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce as a celebration of modern industrial technology and design. Henry Cole, the driving force behind the project, was amongst many other things, instrumental in founding the National Archives (Henry's rat was key...)
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| Map of Hyde Park, showing approximate site of the Great Exhibition |
Hyde Park was agreed as a site but only for a temporary structure. Of the many designs submitted, none was deemed suitable, until Joseph Paxton published a design, inspired by his work on giant greenhouses.
Paxton also had experience in large scale parks, such as the Birkenhead Park, laid out in 1847, which would also turn out to be important.
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| Birkenhead Park Grand Entrance, 1841 for Paxton (my photo) |
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This could, and would, be fabricated from iron and wood on site, using concrete footings and a vast number of identical panes of glass. There is more on Paxton, and his Crystal Palace in Chapter 51.8g.
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Great Exhibition Building Under Construction
(Print from Illustrated London News, For Sale) |
The Exhibition took place in from 1 May to 15 October 1851, and featured 13,000 exhibits of every conceivable kind, including huge industrial textile and printing machines.
Six million people—equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain at the time—visited the Great Exhibition. The average daily attendance was 42,831 with a peak attendance of 109,915 on 7 October. Schweppes sold a million bottles of soft drinks, a relatively new innovation - it included the ginger beer and mineral water mentioned elsewhere. Charles Dickens found it exhausting and apparently dispiriting. Charlotte Brontë has a way with words:
Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.
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| Transept from the Grand Entrance (V&A) |
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| Foreign Department from the Transept (V&A) |
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There is a new virtual tour available from the Royal Parks. Nothing else is left: Paxton met his remit, and the building was removed entirely. Three great elm trees which had been enclosed by the building lasted until around the end of the century.
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Coalbrookdale Gates to Kensington Gardens,
formerly to Great Exhibition
(my photo, taken at night,
on the way back from the Albert Hall!) |
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| Hyde Park, site of Great Exhibition (my photo) |
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However, the event's surplus was used to found the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the Albert Hall all of which are located close to the site of the Exhibition. The remaining surplus was used to set up an educational trust to provide grants and scholarships for industrial research; it continues to do so today.
- 50.1.5 - Daniel Lambert (1841-1927)
- 50.1.6 - Jane Lambert (1843-1931)
- 1861/1871: still at home, aged 17, and a schoolmistress
- I had thought that this would have been at the Dawley National School (which is still going, and still proud of its Christian ethos). However, as a lay preacher, she would have gravitated to the same British School at which her brother Daniel taught.
- Married Joshua Biggs (1849-1927) in Madeley (now in Telford) in 1876.
- Joshua was a Primitive Methodist minister, which probably meant hellfire and damnation, and certainly a lower church than Wesleyan Methodism of the time.
- Update: there is a brief biography and photo here: "As a preacher, Joshua belonged to the evangelical school, preaching a full, free, and present salvation; his sermons were carefully prepared and forcefully delivered."
- Children:
- Lilian Lambert Biggs (1879)
- In 1881, they lived in Back Road, Pool ('Welshpool' to avoid confusion with Poole!), Montgomeryshire, Wales. This was close to the Primitive Methodist Chapel, which had been open since 1870, and was closed before 1940. More here. Their niece Julia Lambert was with them. The bio tells us that Joshua had been posted to Oswestry (chapel; my photos of the town here), Ramsor (Ramshorn) and Crewe before Welshpool. Ramsor was the site of the Primitive Methodists' first camp meetings.
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| Former Primitive Methodist Chapel, Buckingham (my photo) |
- 1911: Burgh Road, Aylsham, Norfolk. More info on the chapel here.
- Jane died in 1931 in Smallburgh nr North Walsham, Norfolk. The bio tells us that this was Joshua's final posting.
- 50.1.7 - Jesse Lambert (1846-1917)
- Married Julia Ann Hodnett (1847-1908) in Liverpool in 1867
- Jesse was a cashier and accountant with the Great Western Railway in 1871, and recorded as a railway clerk in 1881. The GWR and LNWR had taken over the Birkenhead Railway in 1860. More here.
- They lived at 34 Holt Hill, Tranmere, and then at 146 Market Street (view opposite), in Birkenhead proper.
- Birkenhead had stayed agricultural until the advent of steam ferries from Liverpool in 1817; shipbuilding had started at what became Cammell Laird had started in 1829; the street plan had started to be laid out in 2816 and general paving and streetlights had been introduced from 1833. The Mersey Tunnel was opened in 1886, and the Town Hall in 1887. My photos are here.
- 1891: Jesse must have got a job closer to home. They were at Spring Bank, Church Stretton, Salop.
- 1901: 98 Station Road, Kings Norton, Worcs (Birmingham). Accountant for a metal works. The address is marked on the census as the telephone exchange. His daughter's Ada and Florence are employed as telephone operators, and his son Stanley as a telephone inspector!
- 1911: 77 Cartland Road, Hazelwell (now Stirchley), Birmingham (widowed, three adult children at home). The house has been demolished.
- Children:
- William John Baker Lambert (1870)
- Percy Lambert (1872)
- Ada Lambert (1877)
- Florence Lambert (1880)
- Stanley Lambert (1881)
- Jesse Lambert (1884)
- Beatrice Lilian Lambert (1886)
- Leonard Lambert (1888)
- 50.1.8 - John Lambert (1848-1925)
- In 1871, lived with his brother, Jesse in Tranmere: he was an unemployed clerk
- Married Eliza Maiden (1848) in Little Dawley in 1872; no known children
- 1881: 5 Gothic St, Tranmere, with his wife. Clerk
- 1891: 11 Gilroy Rd, West Derby, Liverpool. Jesse's son Jesse was staying with them
- 1901: 158 Boaler St, West Derby. Shipping foreman. Jesse is still there, joined by niece Eliza Barker.
- 1911: 128 Boaler St. Dock board pensioner. Eliza is still there.
- 50.1.9 - Mary Ann Lambert (1850)
- 1871: Housemaid, living at home
- 1881: Living with brother John in Tranmere
- 1891: Back with widowed mother, and sister Sarah in Horsehay
- 1901/1911: Still with sister, now in Wellington; then back in Horsehay
- 50.1.10 - Hannah Lambert (1852)
- 1871/1881: Dressmaker, living at home
- 1891: Domestic servant (upstairs maid) at 64 Wheeleys Rd, Edgbaston with widow of a corn merchant, two daughters and two other servants
- Married Jabez Stead Wilson (1836-1923) in Birmingham in 1893; no known children
- Jabez was an insurance clerk; they lived at 27 Inglewood Rd, Yardley, Birmingham
- 1911: 213 Sweetman St, Wolverhampton. This is 5 miles from where Thomas Merry Barnes was living at the time, and a mile or two from the town centre.
- Wolverhampton was still the bicycle marking capital of Britain at the time. In 1911, Sunbeam spun off from its car and aero engine interests from its cycle marking, into a new listed company. Their factory was on Upper Villiers St, about two miles from Hannah. More here. My photos of the town (now city) are here.
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| Gratuitous car pic (1914 Sunbeam, my photo) |
More on these individuals in
Chapter 57.
Next (Daniel's paternal cousins)
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