Newsletter – 17th September 2025
Findmypast offer extended NOW ENDS 30TH SEPTEMBER
England & Wales death records not fit for purpose
Review: Round About a Pound a Week
Sussex added to ‘Lloyd George Domesday’
Save on Ancestry DNA ENDS SOON
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published 2 or 3 times a month. To access the previous issue (dated 9th September) click here; to find earlier articles use the customised Google search between this paragraph and the next (it searches ALL of the newsletters since February 2009, so you don't need to keep copies):
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Findmypast offer extended NOW ENDS 30TH SEPTEMBER
The Findmypast half-price offer has been so successful in attracting new subscribers that they have decided to extend it until the end of this month.
When I was writing this newsletter I came across an article from October 2009 in which I mentioned a Findmypast offer – 16 years ago you could save 20%, and get access to all of Findmypast’s records for £119.95, reduced from £149.95
It was a good deal at the time, but when you consider how much more you can get in 2025 – and for just £99.99 – it demonstrates how amazing the current offer is. Back then Findmypast offered “includes unlimited access to all 8 England & Wales censuses from 1841-1911…. parish records, outgoing passenger records, the National Burial Index, merchant navy crew lists, military records, passport applications, and of course the GRO BMD indexes….”
But back then parish records meant ‘transcribed parish records’ – Findmypast had no parish register images back in 2009. There was no 1939 Register, no 1921 Census, there were no transcriptions of the Scottish censuses, and there were no overseas censuses. There were no Catholic records, there were outgoing passenger lists but no lists of incoming passengers, whilst the military records collection was sparse compared to what we have today. Above all there were no newspapers – which I know have been a revelation for members who have recently subscribed to Findmypast for the first time.
To take advantage of Findmypast’s half-price offer and support LostCousins (at no cost to you) please use the relevant link below, rather than a link you’ve obtained elsewhere:
Findmypast.co.uk – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.com.au – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.ie – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Findmypast.com – SAVE 50% ON 12 MONTH ‘EVERYTHING’ SUBSCRIPTIONS
Thanks for your support!
England & Wales death records not fit for purpose
When civil registration of deaths began in 1837 one of the primary aims was to provide accurate statistics related to cause of death, but over the course of the past 188 years the statistics have failed to keep up as the needs of society have become more complex.
Many of you will remember how the shortcomings of the system were exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic: changes were made, but now research from King’s College, London has highlighted another problem, the under-recording of deaths relating to illegal drug use. According to this BBC article, the number of opioid-related deaths between 2011-22 was more than 50% higher than shown by official statistics, a discrepancy that is attributed to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) not having access to post mortem reports of toxicology results.
Ironically the General Register Office (GRO) was part of the ONS until April 2008, when it became part of the Home Office. According to the BBC report:
The flaw in the ONS system is not present in Scotland, where there are no coroners and where National Records Scotland (NRS) is responsible for collating official statistics.
Unlike the ONS, the NRS does receive more detailed pathology reports, but differences in how deaths are reported across the UK make it difficult to compare.
The opioid undercounting raises further questions about the under-fire ONS, which has been accused of failing on several statistical fronts recently.
The fact that the shortcomings of the death statistics have been highlighted by research into drug-related deaths is happenstance – it could have been research into heart disease or obesity. Cause of death statistics are important because they can reveal trends, whether upwards or downwards, and thereby indirectly influence the direction of medical research and the provision of services.
In the 19th century there were death records which gave the cause of death as ‘visitation of God’ – let’s hope for better records and statistics in the 21st century!
These days if you see a chimney on a new house the chances are that it’s a fake (though it might perform a useful function as a vent). But whilst you might think of fake chimneys as a modern impertinence, an article posted on the Essex Record Office (ERO) blog earlier this month explains that they date back hundreds of years – it’s well worth reading.
You don’t have to have ancestors from Essex for it to be worthwhile subscribing to the ERO blog – the posts are few and far between, but when they come they’re always worth reading!
Magdalene Stuart Robison was born in Australia on Christmas Eve 1865. The daughter of a bank manager, she grew up in New Zealand – the family having moved there in 1868 – and it was in New Zealand that she met the journalist, politician and some-time cricketer, William Pember Reeves, whose parents had moved from Britain to New Zealand in 1857, arriving just 3 weeks before William was born.
As Minister of Labour, William Pember Reeves introduced the Undesirable Immigrants Exclusion Bill in 1894. You can read the text of the bill here, but this summary from Claude.ai highlights the key points:
Main Purpose
The bill aimed to exclude "undesirable immigrants" from New Zealand through strict screening processes and particularly harsh restrictions on Asian immigrants.
Part I: General Immigration Controls
- Mandatory certification: All immigrants required certificates from Immigration Officers before landing
- "Prohibited persons" included: Contract workers, disabled people, paupers, criminals, those with tuberculosis/leprosy, and anyone likely to become a public charge
- Financial requirements: Unmarried adults needed £20, married men £30 plus £10 per child
- Owner liability: Ship owners responsible for taking back and maintaining costs of immigrants who became destitute within 12 months
- Tourist restrictions: Tourists became "prohibited persons" after 6 months unless granted extensions
Part II: Extreme Anti-Asian Provisions
- Tonnage restrictions: Limited Chinese/Asian passengers to 1 per 100 tons of ship capacity
- £50 poll tax: Required for every Chinese or "other Asiatic" passenger (equivalent to thousands of dollars today)
- Business restrictions: Prohibited Asians from working as hawkers or peddlers
- Harsh penalties: Up to £50 fines, 12 months imprisonment, and ship forfeiture for violations
- Broad definitions: "Chinese" and "Other Asiatic" defined very inclusively
Significance
This bill represents some of the most overtly racist immigration legislation proposed in New Zealand's history, directly targeting Asian immigrants with discriminatory taxes and restrictions while applying general exclusions based on disability, poverty, and health status. Its failure to pass likely reflected either practical concerns or some legislative resistance to its extreme provisions.
The bill shows the "White New Zealand" mentality prevalent in the 1890s colonial period.
In 1896 the Pember Reeves family moved to London following William’s appointment as the last Agent General (and first High Commissioner) for New Zealand. There he became friendly with socialists including the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the author H. G. Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb who were all leading members of the Fabian Society.
His daughter Amber was to have an affair with H.G. Wells (a serial adulterer) which resulted in the birth of a child on New Year’s Eve 1909, though by this time she had married the lawyer George Rivers Blanco White, and he was shown as the legal father:
Anna Jane did not learn of her true parentage until the age of 18: bearing in mind that the age of majority was then 21, it’s possible that the timing of the decision was prompted not by her achieving the age of 18, but by the death in October 1927 of H.G. Wells’ wife Amy Catherine, known as ‘Jane’.
Magdalene Stuart Robison, now Maud Pember Reeves, was one of the authors of a 23-page Fabian Society tract published in 1912 under the title Family Life on a Pound a Week (you can view the 1914 reprint here in the digital library of the London School of Economics . The following year it was expanded into a 231-page book which included many of the case studies that she and her colleague Charlotte Wilson had compiled during their survey of the poor families of Lambeth…..
Review: Round About a Pound a Week
I bought my copy of Round About a Pound a Week in January 2003, in the early days of my family history research. It had a profound effect on me, because it described unimaginable poverty in London – not just one of the great cities of the world, but the one in which most of my ancestors had lived in the 19th century.
The 1901 Census had just been published – the families whose daily struggles were recorded in the book were contemporaries of my grandparents. Maud Pember Reeves was still alive when I was born. It was all too close for comfort.
Although I didn’t write book reviews at the time, I mentioned Round About a Pound a Week in my January 2006 newsletter, describing it as an “outstanding description of life in the slums of south London between 1909-13”. In fact, it so affected me that in November 2008 I spent a whole day in the library of the London School of Economics (LSE) looking at microfilmed copies of the notes that Maud Pember Reeves had taken, in the hope of being able to identify some of the 58 families she had surveyed and find out what had happened to some of them.
Note: when William Pember Reeves’ term as High Commissioner for New Zealand came to an end in 1908 he was appointed Director of the LSE, a post he held until 1919.
My quest proved to be impossible in 2008 – the 1911 Census was yet to be released and because the families surveyed would have moved lodgings at least once in the years since the 1901 Census, it was impossible to track them down from the limited information in the records that Maud Pember Reeves had kept. But I still have the notes that I made during my day at the LSE – it’s a project I hope to return to when time permits.
In the meantime I encourage everyone who hasn’t already read Round About a Pound a Week to do so – it’s the only way you can possibly understand how difficult it was to feed and clothe a family with so little money. These extracts will give you a sense of how people struggled:
“Without doubt, the chief article in a 20s budget is bread. A long way after bread come potatoes, meat, and fish….. When a weekly income is decreased for any cause, the one item of food which seldom varies – or at any rate is the last to vary- is bread. Meat is affected at once. Meat may sink from 4s a week to 6d owing to a fluctuation in income.”
“Meat is bought for the men, and the chief expenditure is made in preparation for Sunday’s dinner, when the man is at home. It is eaten cold by him the next day. The children get a pound of pieces stewed for them during the week, and with plenty of potatoes they make great show with the gravy. Bread, however, is their chief food…. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals in the day.”
That 20 shilling budget was not just for food – it also had to cover rent, coal, gas, wood, oil, burial insurance, soap, starch, and clothing. Boots and boot repairs were such a large item of expenditure that many families contributed to a ‘boot club’ (see this 1910 example of a contribution card).
I paid £6.39 for my paperback copy of Round About a Pound a Week in January 2003. As Maud Pember Reeves died in 1953 the original text is now out of copyright, but since the Kindle version of the Virago edition costs just £1.59 in the UK, and the paperback was available for a little over £4 including delivery when I checked just now, you might find it more convenient to buy a copy. Note too that the Virago reprint includes an extensive introduction by Sally Alexander (which is still in copyright).
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.com.au
Sussex added to ‘Lloyd George Domesday’
Around the time that Maud Pember Wells was researching the poor of Lambeth, staff employed by the Valuation Office of the Inland Revenue were valuing land and buildings across the country in order to tax increases in value which occurred as a result of public money being spent on communal infrastructure. See this Research Guide at the National Archives website for more information.
TheGenealogist is gradually putting the maps and valuation books online, and the latest county to be added is Sussex. I can remember the excitement of looking up the house where I live when the Essex records went online, and if you (or your grandparents) lived in Sussex I hope you’re able to experience something similar.
You can secure a £51 reduction on the cost of a Diamond subscription when you follow this link – and you’ll get a free subscription to Discover Your Ancestors online magazine in the first year. Furthermore you’ll pay the same reduced price each year as long as you subscribe continuously – even if the price goes up!
Save on Ancestry DNA ENDS SOON
DNA tests are discounted at Ancestry – it’s an opportunity to get the BEST test for little more than the cost of tests from lesser competitors.
But what makes the Ancestry test better – aren’t all DNA tests fundamentally the same? Here’s the thing: over 28 million people have taken autosomal DNA tests with Ancestry, more than all the others added together – so it’s crucially important to get access to this enormous database.
However, whilst you can transfer your Ancestry results to other companies, Ancestry do NOT accept transfers – a cheaper test from another company is a waste of money if you’re going to end up buying an Ancestry test. I know this from personal experience – I tested with another company in 2012, before Ancestry started selling their test in the UK, and ended up buying the Ancestry test in 2017.
BONUS: if you don't have a current Ancestry subscription you'll be offered the chance to buy a 3-month membership for just £1/$1 when you buy a DNA kit.
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In the last issue there was a fascinating article by LostCousins member Chris Carver about the way that he discovered his connection to Samuel Carver, one of the partners in the prestigious printing firm of Bowles & Carver. Samuel Carver died at Myddelton House, in Enfield, which was owned by the Bowles family, and you may recall me mentioning that my wife had visited the gardens earlier this year with her U3A gardening group. I’m glad to say that Siân has written an article about Myddelton House, with some useful links if you want to find out more about the house, the gardens, and the plants that were bred there…..
Myddleton House was built in 1818 to replace Bowling Green House, on a large estate north of London which had been left to the Huguenot wife of Henry Carington Bowles, Anne Garnault, by her late brother. Myddleton House was named in honour of Sir Hugh Myddleton, who in 1613 completed the New River, a watercourse bringing much-needed fresh water from Hertfordshire into the City of London (King James I rewarded him with a knighthood). The New River was a prominent feature running through the gardens, and was a reminder of the wealth that it had generated – both of the families had invested in the project.
Henry Carington Bowles had only one son, also Henry Carington Bowles, but whilst the younger Henry inherited the estate on his father’s death in 1830, he had no descendants. Under the terms of his father’s will the estate could only pass to a male descendant bearing the surname Bowles, which created a potential problem when Henry died in 1852.
However his older sister, Anne Sarah, and her husband Edward Treacher (1792-1861) had a son, Henry Carrington Treacher (1830-1918). In 1852 the son assumed the name Henry Carrington Bowles Bowles (yes, twice!) to meet the inheritance requirements. In 1856 he married Cornelia Kingdom, and they had three sons.
Note: the spelling varies between ‘Carrington’ and ‘Carington’ in different records and different generations.
His eldest surviving son, Henry Ferryman Bowles (1858-1943) served as MP for Middlesex and was created Baronet Bowles of Forty Hall, Enfield – an even grander property bought for him by his father – but he too died without male issue. His son-in-law Eustace Parker added the Bowles surname in 1920 by Royal Licence in order to meet the terms of the will of the first Henry Carington Bowles.
Half a century later, in 1973, Eustace’s grandson Andrew Henry Parker Bowles married Camilla Shand, daughter of Bruce Shand, who had won the Military Cross in 1940 and again in 1942, before being captured by the Germans in North Africa towards the end of that year; he spent the rest of the war in a PoW camp.
In 1995 Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles were divorced, though Camilla retained her married name. She married Prince Charles in 2005 and subsequently became Queen Consort in 2022, upon Charles’ accession as King Charles III.
H. C. B. Bowles’ fourth son Edward Augustus "Gussie" Bowles (1865-1954) inherited Myddleton House – the only home he ever knew – in 1918, having already begun to develop the gardens from around 1890. Gussie had gas installed in the kitchen but otherwise managed without electricity or a telephone, despite having a very fragile constitution. An avid collector of plants and fond of travelling to mountainous terrain where the air improved his health, Gussie became a noted member of the Royal Horticultural Society Council and has been described as "the greatest amateur gardener of this country, and the most distinguished botanist and horticulturist serving the Royal Horticultural Society".
Gussie developed the gardens at Myddelton House into one of the finest examples of an English Country Garden in England, collecting rare species and breeding several new varieties of plants, including Bowles’ white and purple crocuses, and the very popular wallflower Erysimum Bowles’ Mauve (there is also a lesser-known yellow variety). Many of his plants were named after friends and people he admired; Miss Jessopp’s Upright Rosemary was one of them.
Gussie never married and on his death in 1954 the house and gardens passed to the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine and the London School of Pharmacy, which grew a range of medicinal plants in the kitchen gardens until 1967. However, while the New River still provides around 8% of London’s water, in 1959 its course was diverted away from the gardens. The original watercourse is marked by an expanse of lawn and an ornate stone bridge which once spanned the watercourse.
In 1968 the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority purchased the house and gardens and they now use Myddelton House as their headquarters. A Heritage Lottery Fund grant enabled recent restoration of sections of the garden, including the kitchen garden and the conservatory, which still houses exotic cacti. The Gardens are free to visit- there is also a tearoom and visitor centre in the stable block.
Gussie wrote several books about plants of special interest to him, and three books about his garden which are culturally important: My Garden in Spring, My Garden in Summer, and (you guessed it) My Garden in Autumn and Winter. The E A Bowles Society website provides more detail on his life, accomplishments and plants attributed to him. Its current president is Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles OBE, his great-great nephew.
For further insight into Myddleton House and Gardens follow this link to the website of the London Historic Parks & Gardens Trust.
With the Autumn planting season upon us in the Northern hemisphere, perhaps now is a good time to consider ordering some bulbs or other plants bred by E A Bowles? Some are rare or hard to find – others are more affordable and just a click away:
Erysimum Bowles Mauve - Perennial Wallflower
Vinca minor (lesser periwinkle) Bowles's Variety
Rosemary Salvia rosmarinus 'Miss Jessopp's Upright'
I hope you were impressed by Siân’s genealogical research skills – a lot of people seem to have struggled to get the Bowles family tree right, and if you look at Wikitree you’ll see that both Henry Carrington Bowles senior and junior are shown as dying in 1852. (Although one or two people have recommended Wikitree to me recently, it’s not a site I could recommend – there are too many careless errors for my liking.)
I was busy cooking on Sunday, making the most of our 12 hours of free electricity (meanwhile Siân was making full use of the washing machine and tumble dryer). Baked apples are a particular treat at this time of the year, but I‘ve also been making apple sauce and apple and blackberry compote (using berries harvested a month back and stored in the freezer).
I don’t know about you, but I used to find that when I was preparing baked apples it was difficult to insert the corer at the right angle – the cooking apples we grow are rarely perfectly symmetrical. Last year I discovered where I’d been going wrong: I was going top-down rather than bottom-up! Turning the apples over made it 10 times easier to remove the core and nothing but the core (I expect you knew about this, but I’m including the tip anyway for those who don’t).
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Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2025 Peter Calver
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