Tag: Family history

Charles Morton: A casualty of the Boer War

As you walk through Kintbury church yard toward the gate at the top of the path leading to the canal, pause a while to read the inscription on a stone to your right.

As you walk through Kintbury church yard toward the gate at the top of the path leading to the canal, pause a while to read the inscription on a stone to your right. The name at the top of this particular stone is that of George Morton who died on November 24th, 1885 aged 53. There is nothing particularly unusual about that – however, read on. The inscription below reads:

Also of Charles, son of the above who was killed in action at Vlakfontein, South Africa on Feb 8th, 1901 aged 23 years.

Charles Morton had been killed during the 2nd Boer War, a conflict fought from 1899 to 1902 between Britain and the South African Republic & the Orange Free State. At that time, it would have been very unusual for a soldier’s body to be returned to his homeland and closer reading of the grave’s inscription reveals that it does not say, “Here lies…”. So this gravestone commemorated Charles but does not mark his resting place.

I have tried to find out more about Charles Morton and his family. However, as so often happens when researching local history, my searching has raised far more questions than it has answered. 

Many people wrongly believe that, in years gone by, poorer families rarely ever moved far from their places of birth. Anyone who has spent time studying family history will know this is not necessarily always the case.

Charles’ father, George, named on the gravestone, was born in Daventry, Northamptonshire in 1832 where his father, William Morton, was an innkeeper. By 1851, the Morton family had left Northamptonshire for Fulham where William – presumably embracing new opportunities – was working as a conductor on a horse-drawn omnibus.

I can find no trace of William or George Morton on the 1861 or 1871 censuses but in 1881 George turns up again, far away from the increasingly urbanised streets of Middlesex where he had lived as a child. George is now married to Ellen and they are living in West Ilsley, with their three children: Frederick, who is seven, Charles, two and a baby daughter. George is working as a groom in a racing stables.

At some point in the following ten years, however, the family experienced many changes because by the census of 1891, Charles is living in Kintbury with his mother and stepfather Edward Brooks, a labourer. According to the inscription on the gravestone I mentioned earlier, Charles’ father, George Morton had died on November 24th, 1885.

Like his father before him, Charles took up work as a groom and by the 1901 census he is living in lodgings in Crowthorne, although there is no clue as to what took the young man to work as a “groom domestic” in east Berkshire when similar work would have been available nearer home.

However, by the following year, Charles was even farther away from his mother’s home in Kintbury. As the gravestone tells us, on 8th February 1902, Charles was killed on active service in South Africa.

The inscription on the stone says that Charles died on active service in Vlakfontein, which is in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa – the site of guerrilla fighting during the Boer War. However, the Victorian Society says that Charles was a member of the South African Constabulary who was killed at Syferfontein, also in Mpumalanga Province. It is impossible to say which is correct; the Victorian Society and the gravestone both have February 2nd as the date of death. To confuse matters further, the Forces War Records list two other Charles Mortons killed in South Africa in 1902.

As research has shown, neither Charles’ father nor his step-father were wealthy or in relatively high-status occupations. Many poorer and even middle-income people at the time were buried without gravestones. That George Morton – whose last known occupation was as a groom – should have a gravestone is, I believe, quite unusual for someone of his background at that time.

All this leads me to wonder this: Did someone with the means to have a gravestone erected in Kintbury want to commemorate a young man from the village killed abroad? Whilst some of the great and the good who saw active service are commemorated on the walls inside the church, it was never the custom to put up a plaque to the lower ranks who died in the military. As I have commented above, men of the status of George Morton were very unlikely to have a marked grave. However, by erecting a stone for him, the name of his son Charles could be added below, even though the plot in Kintbury was not his final resting place.

Perhaps someone with the wherewithal to afford a gravestone knew that some seventy years earlier, the Rev Fulwar Craven Fowle had erected a gravestone to working man, William Winterbourne. Perhaps that person felt inspired to do something similar. Perhaps that person was a former soldier. We shall probably never know unless these details are recorded somewhere in the parish records held by the diocese. It would be an interesting search to find out.

I have not been able to find a record of Charles Morton having a Commonwealth War Graves Commission burial in South Africa but it is, of course, pleasing to know that he is remembered in our churchyard.

Thomas Hardy’s poem, Drummer Hodge, written in 1899, was his response to news of the death of young country men, killed, like Charles Morton, in the Boer War:

 They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
     Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
     That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
     Each night above his mound.
 

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
     Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
     The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
     Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
     Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
     Grow up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
     His stars eternally.

(C) Theresa Lock 2024

Olive Emma Witt

Should you turn to look to your left as you walk up the path to St Mary’s Church, Kintbury, you will see a rather unusual grave marker.

Should you turn to look to your left as you walk up the path to St Mary’s, Kintbury, you will see a rather unusual grave marker. Rather than being stone, as are the great majority of grave markers, this one, standing little over three feet high, is of metal, probably tin, and enclosed in a five-sided wooden frame. From a distance it looks a little like a larger version of a Victorian schoolchild’s slate; perhaps this was deliberate , because the person commemorated was  six year old Olive Emma Witt, who died in 1896.

Olive Emma Witt’s grave marker in Kintbury church yard

The Witts were not originally of Kintbury. Olive’s father, Tom, had been born in 1846 at Braemore, Hampshire, where his father, Charles had been an agricultural labourer. Emma Witt had been born in Salisbury in 1850.

At the time of the 1871 census, Tom was working as a gardener in Salisbury and it has to be likely that it was around this time that he met Emma Skeet, the local girl who would become his wife.

By 1881, the Witts had moved north out of Wiltshire to west Berkshire where Tom now worked as a gardener at Elcot. The family had grown: Walter had been born in 1877 and Herbert in 1880.

It would seem that Tom Witt was an ambitious young man – by the census of 1891 he is a farm bailiff at Inlease Farm on the Hungerford Road out of Kintbury where they have been living for at least six years now. Two more children had been born: Charles in 1885 and Olive in 1890. The household must have been a busy and possibly crowded one as the Witts had four young men lodgers: two carters and two ploughboys, all working on the farm.

Some time within the following six years, Tom progressed from being a bailiff at Inlease to a farmer in his own right at Cullamores Farm on the road out of Kintbury towards Inkpen. Very sadly, however, it was here that, on June 10th, 1896, little Olive died. The grieving family put an announcement in the Newbury Weekly News.

The census of 1901 shows Tom & Emma still at Cullamores with Tom described as an “Employer”. The distinction between “Employed” and “Employer” was particularly significant in an age of increasing social mobility, particularly for someone like Tom whose father had been an agricultural labourer like so many thousands of men in the middle of the century. Tom & Emma were coming up in the world.

Herbert, now 20, was working on the farm. Charles, however, had turned his back on farming and at 16 was a carpenter’s apprentice. Walter had left Kintbury altogether, and was now a police constable at Rochester Row Police Station in London.

The end of the nineteenth century saw decreasing numbers of workers employed in agriculture and this national trend seems to have been reflected in the family experience of the Witts. By 1911, Walter was married with a daughter and living in Harrow, Middlesex. He was still with the Metropolitan Police. Herbert, who had previously been working on the family farm, had followed his elder brother into the police force, but for him a force not so far from home as he was in Wantage.

By 1911, Tom was 64 and no longer working in agriculture and no longer himself an employer. Furthermore, he and Emma have left Kintbury and were now living in Newland, Cogges, close to Witney in Oxfordshire. He has returned to his first occupation, that of gardener and on the census is identified as a “worker”.  

The trajectory of Tom Witt’s life experiences would have mirrored those of many of his contemporaries. Born into an agricultural labourer’s family, Tom had improved his life chances becoming upwardly mobile until he could describe himself as a farmer and employer – a distinction which mattered in this ultra class conscious time. By the time Tom and Emma’s sons had been born, universal education would have given them a far better start in life than that experienced by their grandfather Witt in Hampshire, enabling them to join the police force and ensuring their place in the lower middle classes.

We do not know exactly why Tom & Emma left Cullamores farm but it has to be likely that the slump in agriculture had something to do with it. This was a time when many thousands were still leaving the countryside for the growing towns whilst others were emigrating overseas. For Tom & Emma, perhaps the move northwards to Witney was a fresh start away from the world – and the social status – they had lost.

I wonder if they ever returned to Kintbury and to the little grave in St Mary’s churchyard -the journey back then from Witney would have required three changes of train on the Great Western Railway. The forty mile journey across the downs by road would have been slow and unlikely to be completed easily within a day.

Why Olive’s grave marker was of tin rather than stone I do not know. Iron crosses are not unknown in churchyards but a grave marker of tin is something I have seen nowhere else.

But then, any exploration of family history – any family – raises far more questions than it ever answers.

Tessa Lock