Personal Record

Walter Brown was the father of our grandmother - Annie Moss Brown. The Brown family ancestors lived in the eastern part of Nottinghamshire between Newark and Retford during the 18th and 19th centuries. This 20 mile stretch of fertile land lies on the western side of the River Trent as it meanders north to the Humber. Here, along the old Great North Road, stage coaches conveyed travellers between London and York in 20 hours until they were replaced by the Great Northern Railway in the 1850s, carrying passengers from Kings Cross to York in under 4 hours.

Walter Brown was born in March 1861, the only son of John and Ann Brown. The family lived in York Lane (now York Street) in the village of East Markham, six miles south of Retford. After he left school Walter worked with his father at a mill. In May 1886 Walter married Sarah Elizabeth Heeds at Ordsall, just south of Retford, where the Heeds family came from and where they first set up home.

Walter had three sisters - Annie, Sarah and Judith.

Annie married a Henry Marshall in 1879, both aged 21. They had three boys and a girl but Henry died in 1886 at the age of 28. Annie went on to marry an Edwin Hayes, aged 64, in 1889 and subsequently gave birth to another daughter in 1890.

Sarah married a William Camm in 1883 and they had three daughters but William died in 1887, aged 31. In 1896 Sarah married a Robert Forth and moved to Yorkshire.

The youngest daughter, Judith, married a George Moss in November 1887 in East Markham. Her wedding must have been a deeply emotional event coming so soon after both her sisters had lost their husbands. When Walter’s wife, Sarah, gave birth to a baby girl a few weeks later in early 1988, she was christened Annie Moss Brown.

Very few details about George Moss have been found. The 1871 census records that, at the age of 16, he had been working with his father William in the family’s grocer's shop in East Markham. He had a younger brother Edwin, aged 12, and a sister Annie Elizabeth, aged 3. Shortly after the census was taken, their mother, Ann, died aged 46. The following year Edwin also died. The 1881 census showed that William was still running the shop helped by daughter Annie but the whereabouts of George at this time is not known. He also did not appear with his family in the 1891 census after his marriage in 1887. By the time of the 1901 census, we discover, incredibly, that Judith was now also a widow. She was living at Upton near Southwell with her widowed father John Brown and her two sons: Harrison Moss, born in 1888, and John Moss, born in 1892. When and where George died is not known.

It is interesting to note that Judith’s mother gave her name as Ann Moss Brown in the 1891 census. After she died in 1893, she was buried at Saint John the Baptist Church, East Markham with the name Ann Moss Brown. The significance of the adoption of the name Moss by the Brown family is not fully understood.

The 1891 census reveals that Walter was the tenant farmer of Ruddingwood Farm, two miles south of East Markham near Tuxford. At that time Walter and Elizabeth had three young children - John William (b1887), Annie Moss (b1888) and Alice (b1890) - but over the next 16 years they went on to have four more girls and five more boys.

By the time of the 1901 census, Walter was still a farmer but also the publican of the Boot & Shoe Inn on Village Street at Weston five miles south of East Markham. He employed his eldest son, John William, as a farm worker at the age of 14. (The Boot & Shoe Inn still stands but is now a private residence.) Ten years later, in 1911, Walter and family had moved to 26 Charles Street, Newark. He was then working as a brewer’s drayman delivering barrels of beer to the public houses of Newark.

In the late 19th century Newark had become a major centre for brewing beer comparable with Burton-on-Trent. They both had a good source of water with the right mineral content, good quality barley was grown nearby, and they had direct access to the rapidly expanding railway network. There were two major brewing companies in Newark: Warwick & Richardson and James Hole (no relation) who built the Castle Brewery in the 1870's. It is possible that Walter Brown was employed as a drayman at James Hole's brewery. The last barrel of beer was brewed at the Castle Brewery in 1982.

The reception for the wedding of daughter Annie Moss Brown to John Isaac Hole in 1911 was held at 26 Charles Street, Newark, where their wedding photograph was taken at the back of the house.