The Almost Attwoods: Three generations from James

By Dave Mullan

For decades, most of the descendants of James Attwood and Emma Ward thought they were part of that prestigious du Bois (“at wood”) family who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066.
Alas, James may have gained the Attwood name when he was three years told and his unmarried mother married a William Attwood.
But this very ordinary beginning might have characterised our family very well. There are very few famous among us. We have had our ups and downs like many others, the great bulk of the family ending up in New Zealand. The story of one of them, Thomas William Attwood, is told in Attwood of Hepburn Creek.
In seeking to record something about every one of the 150 or so of the first three generations after James and Emma we have recorded only the bare bones. But there are some lovely stories of individuals who found life to be an interesting experience. Many were able to remember and write quite significant accounts. The common threads that through are quite remarkable.
There has been a strong thread of evangelical religion running through the veins of this family. And, like most of those who chose to leave England to begin new lives in a far country, there is generally a strong determination to get ahead.
The print edition of 2007 is still available from the publisher. It is much more comprehensively indexed and includes a photo of each of the contributors. But this E-version includes the text of all the offerings that were submitted and may be of no less interest to the contemporary family in various parts of the world.
It is hoped that all who read this book will be encouraged to live with a sense of being part of a larger, wider community than they knew before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dave Mullan
• Release date: Feb 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781877357244

Dave Mullan

Retired Presbyter of Methodist Church of New Zealand. Passionate pioneer in Local Shared Ministry, consultant in small churches, publisher of over 100 niche market books, producer of prosumer video, deviser of murder mystery dinners and former private pilot. I trained for the Methodist Ministry at Trinity Theological College and eventually completed MA, Dip Ed as well. Bev and I married just before my first appointment in Ngatea where our two children arrived. We went on to Panmure and Taumarunui. Longer terms followed at Dunedin Central Mission and the Theological College. During this time I was also involved as co-founder and second national President of Family Budgeting Services and adviser to the (government) Minister of Social Welfare. My final four years were part-time, developing the first Presbyterian or Methodist Local Shared Ministry unit in this country and promoting the concept overseas. Retirement has brought a whole lot more opportunities and challenges. We are now living in our own villa in Hibiscus Coast Residential Village.

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James and Emma

James Attwood, from whom we trace our modest family, came not from London but from Hertfordshire. Allison Attwood, a great-grand-daughter, located the record of a baptism in St Albans Parish Church dated 27 Jan 1833. The information on the baptismal certificate clearly informs us that James Attwood was three years old and was the illigitimate son of Charlotte Attwood of Abbey Parish.

A real Attwood?

On his Police records, James’ parents are shown as William Attwood and Charlotte Attwood so we may infer that she gave birth to James in 1830 and three years later married William. The status of marriage might have entitled the baby to be baptised, taking the name of his adoptive father. But it hardly qualifies him as a genuine Attwood of history.

It is, of course, conceivably possible that the adoptive father was in fact also the biological father and that he and Charlotte married after a respectable gap of three years. But, given the times, it would seem more likely that her parents would have insisted on a wedding on the spot had they known who the father was at the time Charlotte was carrying the baby.

Coat of Arms

In the 1970s, the last member of one of the English family lines, Phil Attwood, purchased a smartly-presented coat of arms of the Attwood family. A newspaper reported that it was mounted on the door of his room in the home where he spent his final days. Having no family of his own he entrusted it to Allison Attwood when she was making the rounds of relatives and family sites in England in 1978. She confirms that it is not appropriate for us to use it as our connection with any Attwoods prior to James’ time would be by his adoption at best. It does not seem likely, therefore, that we can claim to be at one with those Attwoods who trace their ancestry back to the du Bois (at wood) family in France before William the Conqueror.

If we know nothing about his blood lines, we can’t claim much more knowledge of James’ life as a child and young man. At some point after the baptism at St Albans, he went to London, perhaps with family or perhaps as a young man to get work. In the 1851 census there is a James Attwood who was born at St Albans, living at 20 Bloomsbury Square, and employed as a servant. The meagre facts seem to suggest this is our man but his age is given as only 19 whereas the baptismal record at St Albans suggests that he was born in 1830, making him 21 in 1851.

However, the following year on 21 June a James Attwood signed up with the Metropolitan Police Force, giving his address as Manor Way Lodge, Blackheath Park. This is certainly the founder of our modest clan of Attwoods.

On 11 Jul 1858, he was married in the parish church at Southwark. The bride was Emma Ward, whose family continued in close relationship with the Attwoods for decades.

They appear to have settled in the Lewisham area. We believe Emma gave birth to fourteen children, two dying within their first few days and two probably in childhood. Of the ten children who survived into adulthood, most brought their families to northern New Zealand between 1905 and 1920.

On the registration certificate for the wedding, James’ father was recorded as William Attwood, a grocer and Emma’s was Thomas Ward, a bailiff.

The happy couple both gave Lant St as their address, which may tell us something about their relationship. They are both stated as being of full age; nobody bothered with exact ages at that time. Emma described herself as a dressmaker and James was stated to be a Policeman.

Police Service

The Metropolitan Police Historical Museum archives yielded a copy of his records. With careful precision we are informed that he joined the Force on 21st June 1852 and served for 16 years and 181 days, all in R, or Greenwich Division. His Warrant Number was 3278. He was 5′7″ and had distinctive scars on his right ankle and knee and a birthmark on his left shoulder. He is described as being of medium build, having dark eyes, dark hair and fresh complexion.

This was an honourable profession, though still, as a metropolitan organisation, relatively young. There was supposed to be a policeman for every 900 citizens of London in the 1850s so James would have been a member of a large organisation. It was now well managed and the expected standards of behaviour and performance were somewhat in excess of what they had been in the more informal forces of two or three decades earlier.

Before Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 the duties of police were limited to detection and prevention of crime. But by James’ time the policeman would have taken over the functions of night-watchman, lamp-lighter and fire warden. He would have also provided other public services such as, no doubt, answering Ask a Policeman questions. Recruits for the new force were carefully selected and trained and from the 1830s the occupation became full-time with weekly pay of 16/-.

Thirty years after Peel’s Act created the principles that shaped modern English policing, we can say that James Attwood would have been involved in conspicuous patrolling the streets in uniform to provide a disincentive to criminal activities; he would have been part of a centralised semi-military institution controlled from Scotland Yard; and he would have demonstrated the required personal characteristics of patience, impersonality and professionalism.

The authority of the Metropolitan Police, we are told in an introductory article on the internet,

...derived from three official sources: the crown, the law and the consent and cooperation of the citizenry.

But progress was slow. As crime was reduced in London it spread to other centres and in 1853 only 22 out of 52 counties had police forces. Subsequent Acts of Parliament which had attempted to set up a centralised force managed from London were not successful so that about the time that James was being married there were only 12,000 police in all of England and Wales.

In January 1861 one PC 267 Attwood was fined 5/- and cautioned for some misdemeanor and in May of that year he was fined the same amount again. In the same week he brought a charge into the station while he himself was drunk; his pay was made up to the 11th and he was dismissed from the Force. We are pleased to note that this was not our James who, we trust, was altogether more diligent and sober about his duties.

The census of 1861 records that James—Police Constable—and Emma were living at 48 Old Rd, Orpington, Kent and their ages are shown as 28 and 22 respectively. His birth place is stated as St Albans, and we learn that Emma was born in Lambourne, Berkshire.

Early Retirement

However, the stresses of the job in those days were well known and it is no great surprise to learn that he was retired on the grounds of ill health in December 1868. He was, we are informed none too technically, worn out. He was granted Retirement Certificate No 1 which may be to do with the category of his retirement rather than to the novelty of being the first policeman to perf out (Police slang for retiring on medical grounds).

Arthur Attwood brought a wooden trunk to NZ when he came in 1914; it is lined with newspaper cuttings of the 1850s and they appear to relate to James Attwood’s work in the Police Force. Anthony Thompson, of Titirangi, is custodian of this interesting artifact.

Blackheath Rink

While James had been granted a pension of some £230 a year—by no means an inconsiderable sum in 1868—he no doubt had to find paid work. They had about seven children by then, although only four survived infancy and childhood. By the time his son Thomas William was married in 1883 James had become the caretaker of the Blackheath Rink.

This was not your basic handyman job at all. The Blackheath Rink was possibly the first roller skating rink in London when the craze swept over from the USA. Opened in 1876, the rink itself was partly covered in and could provide seating for a huge crowd and was used for concerts and other public events as well as for skating. George Grosmith, the lead in the fashionable Gilbert and Sullivan operas, was among major identities who performed in concerts there. The rink included a resident orchestra, skating instructors and employed professionals to give demonstrations.

We don’t know exactly what James’s role as caretaker was but it would seem to have included a wide range of responsible duties and perhaps also, because of his Police background, a certain amount of supervision of the young blades and their lasses as they engaged in the new roller skating fad. The craze was such that a wag wrote skating rinks and spelling bees were the new foot and mouth disease.

The rink was close to Hither Green and other expansive parklands where all kinds of riotous behaviour was alleged to take place. It is perhaps hoping for too much to imagine that some of the frivolity that is reported about this civic amenity did not find its way into the rink. But no doubt the devout Wesleyan caretaker who’d been in the famed Metropolitan Police was up to handling any situations that arose.

The rink has long since been replaced by multi-storey housing. Perhaps, like so much of this part of London, it was bombed out during the war. The site can still be identified near the Blackheath Railway Station. Some part of the original buildings may remain next to the emergency services buildings at the station end of the wedge-shaped block on which so much trendy entertainment took place 150 years ago.

Daily Life

James and Emma were said to be devout Methodists, taking a full part in the life of the local Wesleyan Church. Their lifelong habits were taken up by most of their children who continued regular church-going of more than a merely formal nature.

Local Trade Directories for two or three years in the 1890s have entries and addresses for various Attwoods. No 2 Turner St is thought to have been the family home but the records are clear that this is not the only Turner St house occupied by members of the Attwood family.

James Attwood and Emma Ward appear to have spent all their lives in the vicinity of Lewisham and Lee in what was often referred to as Kent rather than London in those days.

James died in 1886 when several of his children were relatively young. Emma died in 1915 and was buried with him in Hither Green cemetery. Their shared grave may still be seen there.

1—Emma Elizabeth Attwood—1861-1961

Emma Elizabeth’s life story was happily preserved for us by a comprehensive article published in the local paper in Whitstable in 1961 when she celebrated her 100th birthday. At that time she was thought to be Whitstable’s only centenarian.

The article says that she was the oldest of a family of seventeen children but our understanding is that there were only fourteen. Two boys were born before her but died as infants and two others died as children. She appears to be the oldest of the ten listed as survivors in the Ward Family Bible, being born 17 April 1861.

We are told that she was born in Orpington which was in the Lewisham area where her parents spent almost all their lives. As different birth places are recorded for different individuals it is likely that the family moved about a good deal but evidently remained in this general locality.

She evidently had a very scanty education and probably left school quite early to help with the younger children at home. Later, we are told, she went to a large Victorian farmhouse, which was set in lovely grounds. Here there was a very large family and she helped in the home.

She must have continued her parents’ commitment to the church as the article states that she became the first Methodist deaconess. She was said to have been ordained by Arthur Hancock, President of the Bible Christian (Methodist) Church sometime in the 1890s. However, according to her nephew, Roy North, her ministry was a rather more informal arrangement to assist the local minister. Enquiries at the Methodist Church’s Archives Centre in England do not substantiate the claim that she was the first Deaconess (or indeed, any formal Deaconess) in Methodism but there are some other minor errors in the article and it seems reasonable to assume that a local interviewer may have got the detail wrong. It’s worth noting, however, that deaconesses of the Methodist Church of New Zealand who married were required to resign from the Order and their records tended to be swept under the carpet so it is possible that Emma disappeared from the UK records in the same way. In the eyes of many earnest church people at that time, she would have fallen from her Call.

She certainly was in some kind of serving ministry for some years and it might well have been with considerable regret that she found herself obliged to resign from stress when she was in her late thirties. However, this might not have been an unmixed blessing; earlier, she had wanted to marry Fred Ward, who was her first cousin on her mother’s side. The family were very much against this match and if they didn’t say in so many words Get thee to a nunnery, the life of a deaconess might have had some extra appeal in such a time of personal frustration.

It was perhaps then that her younger brother Thomas wrote telling her that he had become a saved sinner. This is one of the few pieces of his writing that have survived his interesting life. It is a testimony to the esteem in which he held his sister that he shared this news with her before writing to anyone else, even his mother.

When continuing her ministry became no longer possible, apparently for health reasons, Emma apparently turned again to her Fred and at last they were married in the Bible Christian Chapel, Lee High Rd on 14 Nov 1896. One or two touching letters have been found that seem to relate to this event. Fred bought her a lovely opal and diamond ring in Switzerland; this eventually passed in succession to Nellie North, then Margaret Shearing and finally Roma Stahle who wears it all the time in Melbourne.

Fred was a dairyman and had fine shops in Dulwich and then Turner Rd in Lee, the same locality in which the Attwood businesses were first established. Molly Cullen lived with them and kept the books for the shop.

When the TW Attwood family emigrated to New Zealand in 1907 and their 18-year-old daughter Annie absolutely refused to leave London with them because she was in love with John AC Allum, it was to Emma that the family turned to solve their dilemma. Annie went to live with the former deaconess and her dairyman husband. If it was anticipated that this would make Annie’s infatuation go away that was a forlorn hope. Perhaps Emma judged from her own experience that no spirited young woman should have to wait as many years for marriage as she had done; or perhaps her mature judgment was less of a steadying influence than her brother and sister-in-law had hoped. Whatever the reasons, Annie and John were married in a small ceremony barely five months later. A year or so after that they, too, left for New Zealand with their young toddler Rose.

Emma and Fred remained in England and had no children. In 1928 they retired to Tankerton on the North Kent Coast. The ill health that prompted her to resign her ministry continued to give her trouble and from about the mid 1930s she was chronically ill and an invalid for long periods. The newspaper article says that she had an internal disorder which baffled the medical profession but that she steadfastly refused to have an exploratory operation.

Fred died in 1938 and she continued to live alone in their home. In her eightieth year, she made a home for two World War II evacuee children from Chatham. She had to make up two beds each night on the dining room floor as there was no spare bedroom for them in her modest home. Having no children of her own, she lavished affection on the two strangers, who called her Auntie. In the twenty years that followed, the two people, both married, kept in touch with her and both came from Gillingham to greet her for her 100th birthday. They brought with them the latest baby for her to admire.

At some point, Emma went to live with her youngest sister Nellie and her husband Albert North who were also in Tankerton. She remained with them for almost all of the rest of her life. According to the newspaper article this move made for a dramatic change in her health:

It is said that Whitstable is a place Where health blows right in from the sea. and that statement has been proved correct in the case of Whitstable’s centenarian, for within twelve months of coming to Whitstable her ill health diminished and she began to take long walks. By the end of her second year in the town, she began taking her favourite walk from her home at 44 Baddlesmere Road via Borstal Hill, Wraik Hill and Seasalter Cross—a walk which she maintained until the outbreak of the second world war.

With Nellie and Albert and their family, she made a full contribution to the life of the local church. She was said to be an unusually fine speaker on devotional and total abstinence topics and was a keen member of the local branch of the British Women’s Total Abstinence Union. As Vice-President of the Women’s Fellowship connected with the Tankerton Evangelical Church she found another outlet for her gifts and energies. It was not