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My name is Harry Wells, aged 84, married to Joyce, aged 80, and we live in Foulridge just outside Colne in north-east Lancashire on the A56 gateway to the Yorkshire Dales. However, my roots lay in Norfolk, hence this contribution to the Itteringham website.
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This photograph of a gravestone in Itteringham Churchyard, obtained from the Itteringham Churchyard Survey (Area A ref. AO18) bears this inscription:- |
In remembrance of
Thomas Wells
who departed this life
Dec.22nd 1863
aged 66 years
also
Mary Wells
his wife
who died Feb 19th. 1880
aged 86 years
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Thomas Wells was my great, great granddad and according to different records is variously described as having been an agricultural labourer, a gardener, a farmer &/or a shepherd. Certainly he was a ‘man of he soil’ as indeed it would seem were most of his off-spring. The 1841 census has him living in Church Houses, Itteringham, the 1851 census places him at Mannington House, Itteringham and the 1871 census at 72, Farnhearn, Eynsford, Aylsham. If, as his gravestone suggests, he was 66 when he died that would put his date of birth as 1797 and yet other records place his birth as 7th. August 1794 at Oulton. |
Thomas married Mary ? ( 1794-1880) from Stiffkey, a parish on the north Norfolk coast but I have so far been unable trace either Thomas or Mary’s antecedents. They did, however, go on to produce four children, one of whom as the great-grandfather I never met:-
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Charlotte………………..born 1827
Mary…………………... born 1852
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Gilpen, born Erpingham …......……...1829
Edmund, born Itteringham……………1831-2 |
Edmund grew up in Itteringham as an agricultural labourer and married Georgina ?
My great granddad Edmund and his wife Georgina produced six offspring, three of whom I came to know personally.
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Edmund & Georgina 
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 May 1905 the Wells family assemble for a family funeral.
Edmund (centre) and my granddad Thomas Wells and grandma Alice Wells
(3rd & 4th from the left on the back line) |
A family bible passed on to me bears the heading ’Patriarch’…..Edmund…..on one of the fly-leaves and gives the names and years of birth of all the above. I heard my Dad talk of Caleb, although I don’t know if he ever met him, but I believe that he did meet his Aunt Rhoda at some time. I never ever heard of Edwin but I met ‘Uncle’ Alf two or three times and Uncle Josh lots of times through the 30’s and 40’s.
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The above photo was taken in North Walsham c1938; young Harry (me....I was about 5’8” at the time) is next to the huge frame of the granddad I adored and next to him his brother Alf and my Dad. This was the first time I met Uncle Alf. He and his brother Josh, like many others at that time, ‘ran away’ to sea at a very early age and spent quite a few of their early years in the merchant navy. I don’t know much about what happened to Uncle Alf in the years which followed but I do know that by the time of the Second World War he was a widower living with his wife’s nephew just outside Blackpool. Although he lived a very simple, indeed quite meagre, life he died the wealthiest of the brothers leaving a considerable sum to his Blackpool nephew. He was described to me as a beachcomber, scratching his living ( and a hidden ‘fortune’) from scavenging amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the Ribble estuary.
I’m surprised that I don’t have photo’s of Uncle Josh in my collection because we saw him either in Walsham or at his Walcott home every year when we came down to Norfolk; I do, however, still have very clear mental pictures of he and Aunt Annie in their Salvation Army Officers’ uniforms. What great characters they were; small in stature maybe but of immense stature in their belief and service of their God. Sometimes in life one is fortunate to meet someone from whom sheer goodness, warmth and belief in the best in their fellow men just shines out from them and so it was with the Wells’s of Walcott. Their neighbour, Aunt Annie's sister Helen Pike, was a Brigadier in the Salvation Army and Josh and Annie had long been Envoys, that is preachers with a roving remit preach when and wherever the call came to serve their God in East Anglia. Josh of the whiskery, wrinkled, weather-beaten countenance was the perfect match for the bonneted Aunt Annie and how clearly I can recall how I had to close my eyes and steel myself as I planted my goodbye kiss on her beaming but rather whiskery cheek. Uncle Josh must I think have been one of the early pioneers of caravan sites for adjacent to a couple of clapper-board bungalows he had a collection of redundant
railway coaches and other ‘odd’ buildings which he rented out, mainly to people from around London, as ‘holiday lets’. At the time we ‘townies’ couldn’t understand why anyone would travel all that way to live out a fortnight in ramshackle accommodation with oil lamps, water from a pump and basic outdoor privies. But then, eighty or more years ago what did we know!
Uncle Josh also ran a small family saloon car which served many purposes. Obviously it took them to all the venues where they were called upon to preach the gospel. It also served as a taxi and he would pick up his ‘caravanning’ clients from North Walsham station and ferry them to Walcott; it also carried him to and from auctions throughout the area. He was an inveterate bidder at auctions and his collection of oddments and oddities grew and grew until his various ‘properties’ at Walcott
were eventually interconnected through labrynths, nea canyons , of these collected items. I doubt if he knew what he owned and what became of it all I know not, though I’ve no doubt that by now many items amongst it all could have become collectors’ items had they survived.
Uncle Josh’s old cars and his driving style became a thing almost of legend as he sat there, upright, with his Sally Army hat perched squarely on his head as he made stately progress down the middle of those quiet pre-war roads at a steady 20 miles per hour. Eventually, in his advancing years, a local police chief (I did hear it said the Chief Constable himself ... though I can hardly believe that) called on Mr. Wells and suggested that it would perhaps be a good thing if he surrendered to the passage of the years by bringing his motoring days to an end. He took this with all the good grace that one would expect of him and instead took to his pony and trap …….and continued to trot, serenely, down the middle of the road to the end of his days.
His ‘lettings’ had all sorts of quaint little names and one … ‘Cozy Cot’... remains in my memory. Re-visiting the area just a few years ago it seemed to me that the road was not in the right place….and of course it wasn’t, as a little investigation showed that the old road and shallow cliffs had disappeared below the waves and much of Uncle Josh’s ‘estate’ with them. One cottage, still bearing the name ‘Pasadena’, helped me to ‘get my bearings’ because I knew at once that, that was the former home where I’d enjoyed many a summer salad and fresh raspberries and cream with Uncle Josh and Aunt Annie.
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My granddad, Thomas George Wells was born in Itteringham in 1871 and to the best of my knowledge lived and worked on the land there until he was eighteen or nineteen whereupon he left Norfolk and went north to work in the shipyards on Tyneside. In 1893, at the age of 22, he married Alice Barritt, a Preston widow who was eight years his senior and mother of a young daughter. I regret that I don’t know how he came to meet and marry a lady from Lancashire but that Lancashire connection would become significant at a later date. My Dad, Alfred Titterington Wells was born to them in South Shields in 1897 and after completing his secondary school education became an apprenticed joiner and cabinet-maker at the then well-known C.W.S. works at Pelaw on Tyne. Thomas’s wife Alice died shortly after my Dad came home from the war in 1919 whereupon my granddad decided to return to his roots in |Norfolk. Back in his native county he met and married Sarah Ann Kerrigan, from Worsted, married in August 1920 and together they set up as smallholders/market gardeners in North Walsham. |
 Granddad Wells |
Every school summer holiday from the time I remember until shortly before I joined the Forces during the Second World War I would join the hundreds of Lancashire folk escaping for a well-earned holiday on the Broads or a week at Cromer or Great Yarmouth, on one of the holiday excursion trains which travelled down through the night on Friday nights in late June and July. As dawn broke I would peer out of the window at the sleep-drawn faces of tenants yawning and stretching at their cottage doors as the morning mist lifted and the rising sun revealed the poppies in all their scarlet glory amidst the fields of corn.
For a few weeks I would revel in the so different life of being a country boy, haymaking, collecting eggs, picking fruit and accompanying my granddad on his Friday door to door Round with his produce. I came to know many of those lovely people who would usually greet me with “ Hallo Hairee, yow dewn haire agoyn to see yore grended….” (Pardon my attempts to convey that Norfolk dialect which always sounded so beautiful to me....and still does) When I brought my fiancé down to Walsham after the war she immediately fell in love with Norfolk as much as I have
always been and still remembers fondly that first, wonderful, experience of collecting and feeding off fresh home-grown produce every day.
I’m sure that I don’t need to tell Norfolk folk that life on the land was a hard unremitting grind for people like my grandparents but it was one which never seemed to quell granddad’s smiling good nature and I can see him now, as we went about in the pony and trap, raising his hat and wishing a very cheery, “ Good morning, top o’ the morning….” to everyone who passed by. A special day out for him would be one organised by the sugar beet factories or a visit to Colonel Bartlett’s canning establishment and his one and only day’s holiday per year was to the Crystal Palace in London for the Brass Band Contest which he so enjoyed having been a bandsman himself in his youth.
I saw a different Norfolk in February 1941 when I travelled across the bleak snowbound Fens to attend my grandfather’s funeral; such a contrast to the county which had always seemed to me to be a place eternal sunshine. My step-grandmother Sarah survived the war and to her great joy lived long enough to see all three of her stepgreat grandchildren.
My Dad grew up a Tynesider and after the war, having risen to the rank of Staff Sergeant, he chose to holiday in Lancashire with relatives of his late mother, where he met Alice Edith Neal, born in Dudley in 1897. They married in March 1921 and lived in South Shields for a short time where I, their only child, was born in 1924. Because my mother was homesick they returned to live in Lancashire in 1926 and I was brought up in Nelson, one of Lancashire’s many cotton towns. My Dad, who was a pillar of local Methodist church and a member of the Building Trades’ Federation
eventually becoming a town councillor, then an alderman of the borough and ultimately Mayor of Nelson in 1959. |
Alfred & Alice Wells |
They celebrated their Diamond Wedding in April 1981 and Dad died in September of that year whilst my Mum carried on to the grand old age of 93.
I entered Nelson Town Hall after leaving school before serving four years in the R.A.F. during the Second World War. You will perhaps not be surprised that the local chapel and Sunday School were the centre of my pre-war social life…..the Scouts, the Choir, the concerts……...and it was there that I met the gorgeous Joyce Dugdale when we were both in our teens. We will celebrate our Diamond Wedding in June this year (2008). I changed professions after the war and became a teacher after studying at St. Pauls College, Cheltenham. I spent more than twenty years rising through the ranks and ended my career as and Area Adviser.
To close this edition of the Wells’ saga briefly…... Joyce and I have three children Christine (1950) Shirley(1951) and Ian Ross(1957) who have between them given us nine grandchildren and so far, one great granddaughter.
It is an interesting illustration of the growth in opportunity & the access to education over our two centuries to compare the achieved status of the different generations:-
Granddad Wells learnt to read only in his 20’s & was very proud of his achievement
Dad won a Secondary education; my Mum left school at thirteen to ‘enter the mill’ and told of having to take her ‘school ha’penny’ every week to pay to the School Board.
By contrast their only son (me), his children, grandchildren and their spouses all have the privilege of owning their own homes, being members of professions and sharing between us twelve (Honours) degrees, two ‘masters’ and two Ph.D’s all of which would have been inconceivable, totally unimaginable, to those who went before us.
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This is a photograph of my wife and I, who as I mentioned earlier will be celebrating our Diamond Wedding in June this year (2008). |
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P.S.
I have, so far, been unable to:-
Trace the family beyond 1794
Learn the maiden name or anything about the origins of Mary? of Stiffkey (1794-1880).
Similarly I know neither the maiden name or anything else about Edmund’s wife Georgina? (1832) or her origins. |
Can anyone help? |
| Harry Wells - 16th February 2008 |
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