Sincere thanks are owed to R.J.H. Griffiths for giving me permission to reproduce the article below
Please respect his copyright
The Mortlocks of Meldreth and Melbourn
and their descendants in London and the Antipodes,
and in Hertford and Swavesey;
and the Mortlock China Enterprise in Oxford Street, London.
How many of us know anything about the long-departed worthies after which our town streets are often named? Melbourn in Cambridgeshire sports a Mortlock Road and a Mortlock Close. People with a passing knowledge of Cambridgeshire history may fancy a connection with the Cambridge banker John Mortlock, mayor and MP for that town - and not remembered in that way in his native place. Not so.
If you open the cover of a copy of Walford’s County Families from the early years of this century you may see a half-page display advertisement for Mortlocks’ Pottery Galleries of Oxford Street, London. The Mortlocks who ran this operation from 1796 until it was wound up in 1933 came from Melbourn in Cambridgeshire, and after making their fortune in London returned to their roots as owners of Meldreth Court.
John Mortlock of Melbourn who died in 1764 was the eldest son of the John Mortlock who left a will in Sawston in 1758.
The late (d.1981) Douglas Mortlock lodged a pedigree in the College of Arms about all this (Norfolk 38 f44) but it is believed to contain errors. Unfortunately the way the College operates means that it cannot be directly examined. A likely candidate for John of Sawston - probably the John, wheelwright, who took a property in Pyratts’ Manor, Sawston in 1723 - is a son of the John, carpenter of Brinkley, who married Frances Frost in Weston Colville in 1692; Frances’ brother John mentions un-named sons of his brother-in-law John Mortlock in his 1740 will. When this John Mortlock died, in 1697, he left a will mentioning property in Brandon and Brandon Ferry, Suffolk, which suggests that it is to that place that we should look for his antecedents.
Edmund of Brandon Ferry, who had four hearths in Brandon Ferry in 1672, died there in 1682, annoyingly intestate. His kinsman James had died there in 1654 and had been assessed 5/- for Ship Money in 1640. These two seem to go back via Edmund, innholder of Brandon who died in 1630, to that Edmund’s grandfather Robert who died in Worlington in 1575, who had been assessed as worth £7 in goods in 1568. Robert must surely be some connection of the James born in Worlington in 1570, son of William. Of Robert’s other sons, James became a yeoman in Mildenhall and died there in 1608, and John, yeoman and churchwarden of Worlington, died in that place in 1620, leaving a bequest to charity remembered in a small and primitive brass plaque in Worlington church. There are still Mortlocks in Manor Farm, Worlington, but whether connected I cannot say. This Mortlock line also continued in Brandon, whence it radiated to Bradford in Yorkshire, and was also connected to the Mortlocks of the various Bartons around Lakenheath.
Back to John of Melbourn - that is how he describes himself in his Ely Archdeaconry will of 1764. He had come into land, with its "orchard or close of pasture" in that village through marriage to a widow, Ann Rutland, who was dowered of it by her father Abraham Coe. It will not have escaped the attention of interested parties that there are two Mortlock-Coe marriages also recorded in Suffolk. A Thomas Coe was Mayor of Cambridge in 1833, one of the last mayors of the Manners/Mortlock interest before Reform. Ann’s Rutland sons being presumably covered by their father’s dispositions (in her turn she, rather pointedly, left them one shilling each), John Mortlock of Melbourn left his land to his eldest son, also John (1745-87). Small bequests of money found their way to the other sons, William (1747-1807) and Simon (1749-31), who were otherwise left to shift for themselves, although they were left one-third shares with their sister Elizabeth in what was left by their mother - small parcels of land at "Foulmire" (Fowlmere!) and Melbourn - on that lady’s demise in 1770. John’s will had been written in 1753 when he was already ailing. A witness was Sam Jarman; a Sam Jarman married an otherwise (by me) unidentified Sarah Mortlock in 1784 at Shepreth. The Rachel Mortlock who married Sam Clear there in 1793 may have been her sister. At a guess, these may have been siblings of William and Susannah, children of John’s younger brother William.
This William appears to have been the William "of Royston" who was apprenticed to a Meldreth shoemaker and who ended up siring a dynasty of his own in Shepreth, Meldreth, and Pidley, Hunts. I have written them up later in this narrative. Simon and William had another brother, Thomas, who appears to be the progenitor of the Swavesey Mortlocks, also separately documented. Both these lines were for a while strongly non-conformist, which makes their records difficult to find.
Simon’s eponymous uncle was already a grocer in London and Simon jnr went thither and enlisted in the Horse Guards, serving for 19 years and then enlisting for a further 29 in the Life Guards, finally obtaining an honourable discharge for "length of service" in 1817. What sort of form he would have shown in a cavalry charge at that age can only be a subject of speculation. He was certainly a fine figure of a trooper at 5'11" tall even at the age of 67, by which time his hair was grey. His occupation was given as farrier and we can perhaps picture him with his axe and sable helmet plume. He appears to have been the complete chocolate soldier, serving exclusively in the metropolis.
The China Mortlocks
John’s son William made his way to London where, in 1773, he married Elizabeth White. Whether it was he or his son William (1778-1833), who married another Elizabeth (Evans) in London in 1800, who founded the china operation is uncertain. By 1873, and again in 1906, the firm described itself as "founded in 1746"; this cannot have been a Mortlock foundation as the active forebear at that time was John and his will shows him purely as an agriculturalist in Melbourn. Perhaps one of the Williams came into an existing operation via one of the Elizabeths. Certainly the second William is regarded by the appropriate reference books as the founder, which would support a date of 1794 seen on some Mortlock pottery marks. William jnr and both Elizabeths are remembered, together with their children Charles who died aged 8 and Elizabeth who died aged 19, in a tablet on the south wall of Meldreth church.
The company was a merchandising rather than a manufacturing operation. It has been described as arguably the most important china retailer in London in the early nineteenth century. It exercised enormous power and influence over the manufacturers, particularly including Coalport, insisting that the products that Mortlocks sold should bear the Mortlock mark rather than that of the original maker.
Although not a basic manufacturer, Mortlocks, in common with other major London houses, employed independent decorators to finish some of its wares, sometimes on an exclusive basis. These decorators included Robins and Randall of Islington, Thomas Pardoe of Bristol, Thomas Baxter of Clerkenwell who operated as an independent up to 1814, John Powell and John Simms. Besides Coalport made to their order, Mortlocks bought up as much of William Billingsley’s undecorated paste from Nantgarw and Swansea as they could get hold of, finishing it to their customers’ orders, often with a rather overdone result, partly because of the enthusiasm of the decorators and partly because Billingsley’s designs always seemed to borrow from the Brighton Pavilion with mouldings, beadings, animal motifs and acanthus leaves jostling promiscuously for attention. But the customers loved it.
Mortlocks were of course in competition with porcelain produced to order in China and imported by the East India Company and privately by the Hon. Company’s officers. The Mortlock product was of a high quality, with a Coalport dinner service for instance, retailing for 200 guineas - twenty thousand pounds today. A single dinner plate might sell for £8, half a year’s wages for an agricultural labourer. By 1803, almost a century in advance of its formal Royal Warrant, Mortlock was claiming to supply "Her Majesty [Queen Charlotte] and the Royal Family" with "Coalbrook Dale [Coalport] porcelain". In 1825 Mortlock was still advertising his firm as "Colebrook-dale china manufacturers". In the late 1830s Mortlock provided Coalport pieces for Queen Victoria.
In the early years of the twentieth century Mortlocks was first to market with a process to print photographs on porcelain; a complete dinner and tea service, in a mock-Sèvres style, showing photographs of royal residences taken by herself, was commissioned by Queen Alexandra and can be seen (if not by everybody - not publicly on show in 1998) in Windsor Castle. This brought the firm a Royal Warrant of which it was justly proud. Besides Coalport, Mortlocks in 1873 were advertising themselves as retailers for Minton, with rooms at 203/4 Oxford Street and at a newly opened gallery at 31 Orchard Street, Portman Square. They seem to have sashayed up and down Oxford Street; by 1906 they had expanded to three fronts, nos.466-470, whereas, earlier from 1790 (William), through 1811 (John), to 1839 and 1846 (John and Sturges) the firm was relatively static at no.250 (William’s cousin Elizabeth married a corn dealer, John Sturges, in 1812, and William’s son John gave the names Louisa Sturges to his last daughter, who died aged 10 months; she and John and his two wives are buried at Meldreth, together with the heir John George). The Minton connection is probably earlier; Mintons won a major prize at the 1851 Great Exhibition, at which Mortlocks also exhibited and where William Mortlock himself was on the judging panel - which caused no little controversy. The Mortlock stand also featured a Coalport service in the then newly-rediscovered "Rose du Barry", a long-lost Sèvres tint which became popular with super-rich nobility, although the Emperor Napoleon III disappointingly ordered his direct from the manufacturer. Mortlocks traded further afield; they had a stand at the 1873 Exhibition in Vienna. Mortlocks was also noted as a retailer of "Cadogan" teapots which had a sort of patent leaf-avoiding pipe moulded inside.
William’s son John seems to have passed the firm to his eldest son John George of Meldreth Court via a Trust deed during his lifetime, probably in 1880 when he made over to him his farmland at Fowlmere (called by him Foulmire, as above probably the original name before some Victorian bowdlerisation). In 1900 the partners in the china firm are shown as JG, JEF, MJR, GBR, GE, EH and JF Mortlock. GBR is Georgina Blanche Rochford Mortlock, John George’s daughter and executor, who died unmarried in Meldreth in 1931. MJR is her sister Mary Jacqueline Rochford Mortlock and JEF is their brother John Edmund Frederick Mortlock. The unravelling of the names and the sisterly sequence is not helped by the census record for the Meldreth establishment, where the two daughters of John George’s first marriage apparently lived separately from the ménage of his second, in London. This names the second girl as "Jinny" whereas she is actually Frances Rochford Mortlock, who married a Mr Meikleham but then, like her elder sister, predeceased their father. These girls were only 3 and 2 years old when their mother died and probably had six years as the twin apples of their father’s eye before the stepmother, and then further rival half-siblings, and worst of all a male heir appeared on the scene.
John George of Meldreth Court is worth a personal mention. Every weekday morning, in his fine carriage with a coachman in a cocked hat before and a footman behind, he would set off for Meldreth station to catch the 8 a.m. train to London - and if he was late, the train would be kept waiting for him. He had enlarged Meldreth Court, initially built in 1772, by adding a wing of servants’ quarters; running the grounds alone required nine gardeners. On Sunday afternoons the local children were allowed to visit his garden, the fountain playing for their benefit and their visits somewhat encouraged by a scramble for pennies thrown in the air by John George when it was time for them to go home. In summer Meldreth Court hosted village fêtes with races and other diversions. Even more generously, in 1853 he gave land to the parish church on which to build a village school.
The china company finally ceased trading in 1933. The other partners in 1900 appear to be the son (George Ernest) and two (of three) daughters (Jessie Fanny and Ethel Hope) (the oldest, Kate Eleanor or Eleanor Kate, familiarly Nellie, had died in 1893) of John George’s brother Charles Anthony Mortlock. Charles Anthony farmed in Caxton, and is buried there where his grave is marked with a cross which can still be seen. He inherited his father’s property at Melbourn, but there is a whiff of a suggestion that his father had doubts about his financial stability or even his probity - he was cut out of the china business, bequests to him are hedged with clauses protecting against bankruptcy, and the executorship went to his female cousin, perhaps to protect generous bequests to her and her sister. Whether Charles Anthony’s children’s partnerships were vested in them directly by their grandfather or via Charles Anthony is not clear.
Ethel Mortlock the portrait painter, who (perhaps) died in 1928, was born in Cambridge although she lived mostly in London. She appears to be the Charles Anthony’s daughter Ethel Hope, born in Caxton in 1876. She was a pupil of Sir William Orchardson who came to London in 1863. By 1904 she had exhibited 29 works at the Royal Academy; her clientèle of sitters included members of the aristocracy and European nobility, including, by her account, the Shah of Persia and the Chinese Ambassador. These last, by failing to pay the £1000 charged for their portraits, landed Ethel in trouble. Strapped for cash she was caught out when the executors of a racehorse owner called Bleakley found IoUs in his effects for hundreds of pounds. Ethel went to court, claiming that these were offset by painting commissions, but the court found against her and she was told to pay up. Now saddled with legal costs, she was caught again when Captain Noel Hoare, her man of business, died and it was found that he had mortgaged to Hoare’s Bank, without her knowledge (she said), three properties in Sloane Street that she had been building. She tried to buy back one of these but lost a £500 deposit when she could not complete, making a bad situation rather worse. Bleakley’s executors now broke her and her examination in bankruptcy in 1901 can be read in the PRO (BT226/14). Her troubles were attributed to extravagance and betting - the Bleakley IoUs were assumed to be in fact gambling debts and the creditors now included all sorts of tradesmen and the Hotel Cecil where Ethel was now living, presumably in some style. She did not help herself by claiming an income of £250 p.a. when individual commissions were on her own account at the £1000 mark as above. Ethel then upped her declared usual income to a still rather modest £800 and claimed to keep no sort of cash book, accounts, or any memoranda. Proceedings closed with Ethel declared bankrupt and a number of people out of pocket. Ethel went back to her easel. She was unmarried and died in 1928. Sadly one can detect other economies with the truth in her bankruptcy papers - forgivably she is described as "thirty" when thirty-five would be nearer the mark, but also there is no mention of her presumably lucrative partnership in the china firm.
There was, however another Mortlock china enterprise. In 1879 the brothers William and Frederick, sons of a William who died in that year, where trading as china dealers at 18 Regent Street. This enterprise was in business at that address in the father’s hands in 1839 (Pigot’s directory). In 1891 William and Frederick described themselves as "glass and chandelier manufacturers" of 19 James Street "removed to 18 Regent Street" which premises was separately listed by the Post Office as "William Mortlock and Sons". It is possible that the variety of marks, and contradiction regarding the date of foundation, relates to the current reference books not recognising that there were two separate Mortlock china businesses.
The relationships between the principals of the two companies is close. Frederick and William’s father William, sometime Regent Street "china-man", who left £60,000 when he died in 1879, was a son of the 1778-1833 William "of Oxford St". This is provable via their wills and those of their relations, with a little help from IGI. In the will of John Mortlock "of Melbourn" of 1887-9, confirming that provision has been made for his son John George, he nominated as his executrix his spinster niece Clara Louisa, who is clearly identified in the 1879 will of her father Henry, another son of the Oxford St and Meldreth William, as is her sister Fanny, also one of John’s beneficiaries. Henry was a solicitor at Caxton in Cambridgeshire, very near Meldreth and Melbourn which are villages so mutually contiguous as to be almost one settlement. Henry died in 1879. He had played his part in the village as Clerk to the Board of Guardians. Clara Louisa had similarly pulled her weight helping with the management of the village school. Henry’s widow Stephana Ann ran a girls’ school in Caxton, employing Fanny as a teacher. This was a small scale operation and at one point two of the half-dozen or so boarding pupils were Charles Anthony’s eldest daughters. Stephana had reverted to her maiden name of Docwra - which may indicate that she and Henry had separated before his demise. Docwra is an old (and still existing) Cambridgeshire surname which by 1550 had given its name to one of the manors in Shepreth, where in 1548 John is recorded as an adult son of Thomas Docwra. Docwras also have their memorial in a street name in Melbourn.
The fruits of this enterprise and of earlier inheritance were still visible in 1873. The Owned Land survey showed John Mortlock of Melbourn owning 367 acres worth £474 p.a. A John E Mortlock owned 156 acres in "Cambridge" worth £144. This could be the same John and merely refer to some acres outside his main holding. Henry the solicitor owned twenty acres in Caxton worth £64. Acreages worth more than 18 shillings a year, particularly modest ones, can be assumed to bear some useful buildings. As to the Regent Street brothers, Frederick left £43,555 when he died in Norwood in 1915; William became a farmer in Beckenham, Kent, and died there in 1888, at a property called "Tregaron", aged only 52, leaving £39,760. His wife Florence was the daughter of Henry the Caxton solicitor (above). William and Frederick’s sister had married a Stanley Parker, and in the next generation a tribe of Parker Mortlocks found their way back to East Anglia, to landholdings in Worlington, Suffolk where they had Manor Farm. These may however be descendants of William the Chapel Clerk, whom we shall meet shortly.
It looks like Minton, and it feels like Minton (or Coalport) - but turn it over - it may have a Mortlock mark.
References and Sources not mentioned in the text:
Cushion, J "English China Collecting for Amateurs" F Muller 1967
Godden, GA "Encyclopaedia of British Porcelain" London 1988
Messenger, M "Coalport 1795-1926" Antique Collectors’ Club 1995
Butler, Sarah "Meldreth Village" reminiscences, 1972 and 1978
Victoria County History for Cambridgeshire
Correspondence and other contributions, Miss J Reynard and Mr P Mortlock Batchelor
Johnson & Greutzner "Dictionary of British Artists 1880-1904" Collectors’ Club 1976
Wood, C "Dictionary of Victorian Painters" Collectors’ Club 2nd edn 1978
Cambridgeshire Mortlocks in the Antipodes
The family of Mortlock china merchants which haled from Meldreth and Melbourn in Cambridgeshire produced an illustrious descendant in South Australia whose achievements paralleled those of their unrelated namesake, John Mortlock MP the Cambridge banker. Several other members of this essentially Cambridgeshire family also settled in Australia and New Zealand.
The New Zealand Mortlocks
A great-grandson of John Mortlock of Melbourn via two successive Williams (1747-1807 and 1778-1833), Thomas Samuel (1817-1873), was described as "of Wimpole" although he was born at Meldreth and is buried at Clare, Suffolk where his first child and last surviving daughter, Elizabeth Sarah, died in 1906. He had a peripatetic career - he appears in the 1851 census in Kings Lynn, as a "goods manager". Earlier he had lived at Thriplow where his youngest child, Mary Jane, was born in 1843. She, confusingly and for reasons wholly hidden to us, was adopted by her uncle John Mortlock of Meldreth where she is buried in the main Mortlock tomb. Thomas Samuel had married in 1837 in Holy Trinity, Cambridge, Mary, second daughter of Robert Headley of Market Hill, Cambridge. Besides these two daughters they had two sons of whom William Henry was drowned aged 22 but John, born in 1842, emigrated to New Zealand, perhaps suggesting that Thomas Samuel was unable to leave him an English patrimony. John however became well established downunder, and when he died in 1905 he left a considerable progeny.
From this John’s six children and particularly from his son Thomas Samuel II’s eight children are descended a clan of New Zealand Mortlocks including Mr Peter Mortlock Batchelor of Dunedin who has provided me with much of the background, contacts, and genealogical trees which underpin this note (and much other Mortlock material besides). Thomas Samuel II’s son Thomas William of Wellington, NZ (1903-90) inherited his eponymous grandfather’s family Bible and original marriage lines. His son eventually came back to England and worked in London as a solicitor.
The South Australian Mortlocks
Not only did the original Melbourn-born china-man William (1747-1807), as elsewhere related, find a wife and fortune in London but so did his younger brother Simon (1749-1831) later of Hanover Square (both were interred at St George’s but their memorials were obliterated in the Blitz). Simon’s son by his wife Mrs Anne Berry, another William, born in 1789 in London, established himself in the Moat House, Melbourn (later the headquarters of a Scientific Park), and in that village in 1813 married a Mary Newling. Newlings were already active in Cambridge; John Newling was Mayor in 1776. William’s death in 1824, predeceasing his grocer father, orphaned two sons and three daughters. Of these William Ranson Mortlock emigrated honourably from Plymouth, in the Imaum of Muscat, to South Australia where he became by turns a maltster, and, on marriage, a very successful sheep farmer and in 1868 MP for Flinders in the South Australian parliament, earning an entry in the Australian National Dictionary of Biography which celebrates the work he did to improve the breed of sheep in South Australia. All of this nearly didn’t happen: in the traditional Crossing the Line frolics he was thrown overboard and was nearly drowned by the weight of his money-belt. Initially Mortlock was manager of some flour mills in Adelaide, but soon did well enough to purchase his first sheep run, putting in a manager until, the flour mill he was living in having burnt down (an occupational hazard of that trade), he moved out to Port Lincoln. His personal attendant was an aboriginal boy whose life he had saved; he was always firm but considerate towards the local natives. He left nearly £100,000; and in 1901 the Mortlock land holdings covered an area the size of England. The Mortlock Research Library in the University in Adelaide is named for him. His landholdings, in the vicinity of Port Lincoln, stretched from Port Augusta to Tennant’s Creek where the Tennant landholdings took over. His achievements render quite superfluous the effort made by the Australian Dictionary of Biography to link him, quite wrongly, to the banking family.
In 1850 William Ranson Mortlock had joined the Australian "squattocracy" by marrying the girl next door, Margaret Tennant, 18-year-old daughter of John Tennant who had emigrated from Scotland in 1839. William and Margaret had four daughters and a son, William Tennant Mortlock, who was sent back to England to read law at Jesus College, Cambridge, and then in the Inner Temple, before returning to manage the family estates and to serve, in succession to his father, as S.A. MP for Flinders. His two surviving sons, John Andrew Tennant, who died without issue, and Frederick Ranson, who never married, lived at Martindale Hall, Mintaro (which William Tennant Mortlock had bought in 1892), and inherited the vast tracts of land referred to above. The palatial Hall lies in the Clare valley, a wine-growing district, and is one of the finest examples of an Italianate country house in Australia. It was bequeathed to the University of Adelaide in 1965, and is known to many as the "girls’ school" in the film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
William Ranson Mortlock’s sister Elizabeth Ann married her cousin Thomas Scruby in Meldreth in 1833. One of their sons, Henry Mortlock Scruby, was encouraged to emigrate to Australia by William Ranson Mortlock, in 1857 when he was 15, after his parents had died, early, of tuberculosis. He has descendants living in Western Australia. There is also a Scruby descendant in British Columbia.
William Ranson Mortlock’s brother Simon’s son by his second marriage, William Doubell Mortlock, contributed two further Mortlocks to South Australia who were living there in 1991.
William Ranson Mortlock had been named for his uncle, Captain (QM) William Ranson of the Life Guards, later a successful and wealthy corn dealer - perhaps helped along by all those hungry horses in Knightsbridge. He had married William Ranson Mortlock’s father’s sister Ann, the couple perhaps meeting through Ann and William’s father Simon’s lifelong service in the Household Cavalry, previously related. One of the Ransons’ sons, John Daniel Ranson, emigrated to Elphinstone, Victoria. His descendant Mrs Margaret Murray was a major contributor to this note.
References:
Correspondence and other contributions,
Mr PM Batchelor of Dunedin, NZ and Mrs M Murray of Victoria, Australia.
Australian National Dictionary of Biography
Cambridgeshire Family History Society Journal, August 1998
South Australian Genealogist vol.16 no.3 July 1989
A Mortlock Family in Hertford
Thomas Mortlock (1761-1832) is listed as a grocer in Hertford in 1792, and seems to have been a Freeman of that town. His father Simon had also been a grocer, in London, and was the second son of John of Sawston. Later, Thomas ran the Wheatsheaf tavern in Back St, Hertford, although later in his life he made it over to his son-in-law Robert Horatio Drummond, who is shown as its landlord in 1822 and 1826.
Thomas’ youngest son, Brian Charles (1800-81), was a builder and also served as an alderman of Hertford. He was married three times.
Mary Call of Arizona contributed to this note and to the associated tree, most of whose details are visible in IGI.
Skirrow and Mortlock, Metal Dealers
Thomas of Hertford’s junior brother William (1780-1838) went to London where he became a road surveyor in Islington. His son Henry was a partner in Skirrow and Mortlock, a zinc and metals merchandising business in north London. The older son, William Joseph, became a brewer’s and tea traveller based on Bishop’s Stortford, before retiring to Stansted Mouthfitchet. This branch of the Mortlocks covered quite a lot of ground, leaving genealogical traces as far apart as Ferndown in Dorset, and Nottingham.
The Swavesey Mortlocks
Mortlock records in Swavesey go back to the marriage of Thomas Mortlock to Sarah Kidman in 1752. Thomas seems to have been one of the sons of the John Mortlock who died in Sawston in 1758; his descendants are thus cousins to the China Mortlocks, the South Australian Mortlocks and the Mortlocks of Hertford and those of Meldreth and later of Pidley, Hunts.
Thomas and Sarah’s son John married a Phoebe Lucas. Phoebe was a dissenter with the result that exact detail of the link to the next generation is fugitive and I am indebted to Mrs Mo Mortlock for filling in several gaps. John and Phoebe’s progeny included a land surveyor, Thomas Lucas Mortlock, who fathered Joseph Frear via his housekeeper Elizabeth Frear. Thomas Lucas owned property in Swavesey and bought Swavesey's first fire engine, and was eventually buried in his own garden with his gig parked on top as a memorial. This however was got rid of when the grave eventually collapsed in the time of a later owner of the property.
John’s son John, farmer, baker and mealman, married Mary Moody in 1826, who also worked as a baker. Their children included John (1836) and Thomas Moody (1841), both bricklayers. John built the Hales Road windmill in Swavesey. Unfortunately someone has replaced the cap with a hideous onion-shaped white gazebo - annoyingly the inside is very fine, with pine panelling and a marvellous view across the countryside. The name MORTLOCK (initial destroyed) is clearly marked out in white on the side of the tower, commemorating the rebuild in 1866 as a brick stump mill, replacing a wooden post mill that had burned down. Funerary memorials apart, this is probably the only tangible expression of the Mortlock surname in existence. Now the mill grinds no more but provides a focus for the "Mill Forge" craft shop and a noisy kennels and potentially noisome cattery. John married Ellen Thompson from Lobworth, Cambs, and raised five children in Lincolnshire, ultimately at South Kymo. In the 1880s the family returned to Swavesey where they settled in Mary Moody’s old cottage. Thomas moved to Needingworth, Hunts, where he met and married his Eliza by whom he seems to have had at least thirteen children, of whom the boys went into bricklaying like their father and the girls went, as was predictable, into domestic service. George Benjamin Mortlock, builder, of Milton Rd Cambridge, was part of John and Ellen’s family; Samuel John, builder, of Gloucester St Cambridge, who is remembered on a memorial in St Giles, was the eldest son of Thomas Moody Mortlock. John and Ellen’s son Thompson, a builder in the family tradition, moved to Coventry in 1913, possibly as a result of a fire that burned down a row of cottages at Church End, Swavesey, in that year. He built the Coventry Hippodrome but sadly for us this was knocked down in 1999.
Swavesey produced one of the Mortlocks’ rare professional soldiers. Simon, eldest son of John Mortlock and Mary Moody, enlisted in the 43rd Foot (later Ox & Bucks Light Infantry) at Royston on 25th December 1847. He gave his age as 19 years and 9 months, place of birth Swavesey, and his occupation as schoolmaster. He had grey eyes and red hair and was 5'10¼" on entry - but 5' 11¾" when he left the army (the Army food must have been good). The 43rd was almost immediately ordered to Ireland but in 1851 was sent out to the Cape of Good Hope where it was embroiled in the Kaffir (aka Coffee) Wars of 1851-3, for which Simon became eligible for a campaign medal. Fortunately he had not been sent out in the draft which went down in the Birkenhead. After 3 years and 1 month in South Africa the 43rd was ordered to India in 1853. During the Mutiny the 43rd was involved in the capture of Kirwe and in operations in Bundelkund, neither of which seem to be chronicled in popular histories of the Mutiny. Simon collected another medal but when the 64th Foot was for home he exchanged or was drafted into it, having by then served 6 years and 3 months in India - a total of ten years abroad. The 64th, now part of the Staffordshire Regiment, was stationed in Dover on its return and a marriage is listed there for a Simon Mortlock 1Q62. In 1862 the 64th was moved to Aldershot and a Gunner John Henry Mortlock, Royal Artillery, told the 1881 census taker at Woolwich that he had been born at Aldershot in 1862. Simon was discharged from the Army in 1863, with three Good Conduct badges but five entries against his name in the Regimental Defaulters' Book. He does not ever appear to have been promoted. On discharge from the Army he gave his occupation as "labourer". What happened to him after 1863 is unclear since there is no English record of his death before 1881, but then, as for many others, there is no mention of him in the 1881 census. A Simon married to a Harriett died in Kennington in 1907; this could be him.
More Mortlocks of Meldreth (and Pidley, Hunts)
A second Mortlock clan in Meldreth was headed successively by James (1759-1827) and his son Simeon "farmer and merchant" who died in 1867. James appears to have been the son of William Mortlock, originally of Royston, who was apprenticed to Matthew Prior, cordwainer of Meldreth in 1738. Matthew conveniently dying, in 1755 banns were posted for William and Matthew’s widow Rebecca. One is tempted to romance a saucy Chaucerian vignette of ailing shoemaker, comely wife and lusty young apprentice. However the match would have been also somewhat convenient to secure both Rebecca’s future support and William’s entry into his own business. In the event the marriage appears not to have taken place, as Rebecca seems to have married someone else two years later. How sad and also tantalising - only frail wisps of this intensely personal drama come down to us across a quarter of a millennium. William went on to marry twice and perhaps mixed business with pleasure, so that he could lay his last aside and become a farmer. Various marriages of Mortlocks of an age to be William’s children peep out at us but he seems to have been captured by non-conformity and there are no baptismal records now to confirm the relationships. William himself was a brother of Thomas of Swavesey. William was buried at Melbourn Independent church in 1817. He and his descendants are quite difficult to trace conclusively due to the rather patchy nature of the modern availability of non-conformist records.
James was variously described as a farmer, corn dealer and rubble dealer. One of his executors in 1827 was "William Mortlock" whom I would identify, for want of any other candidates, as the china-man previously discussed, who was, after all, his cousin. James’ widow, Susannah Brown of Whaddon, died the next year at North End, where also died in 1831 Simeon’s first wife, Martha Batston whom he had married at Shepreth in 1822, five months before the baptism of their first daughter. Simeon’s son James II - by now of Pidley, Hunts - was one of Simeon’s executors. Another was Christopher Wedd, harness maker of Harston, son of Joseph Wedd, saddler of Harston, whose sister Sarah was Simeon’s fourth wife, which lady in widowhood returned to Harston to housekeep for her brother (they ended up in Saffron Walden). Simeon had married Sarah Wedd in Belthorn (where his brother-in-law Rev. John Harding Unwin was incumbent) near Blackburn in Lancashire, towards the end of 1863. An intervening marriage near Knaresborough in 1861 appears to have been terminated too soon for Simeon to reflect his changed circumstances in his will. Unwin dying, he was replaced as Simon’s executor by the new brother-in-law Wedd. Joseph Wedd’s grandson Charles was also a saddler. Of James’ half-sisters, Ann Elizabeth died in Bedford Asylum in 1887 and Mary Ann married an Edward Nash. A senior half-brother William does not appear to have lived to inherit.
James’ full sister Sarah married a Mr Palmer and the couple were the parents of Dr William Mortlock Palmer MD FSA of Linton, born ca.1869, the noted Cambridgeshire antiquary and author of Monuments and Coats of Arms of Cambridgeshire and other works. Dr Palmer was a man of parts and produced his first antiquarian work while at sea as a ship’s surgeon on the India run. A short biographical note on him can be found in MJ Petty’s 1976 Oleander Press reprint of Dr Palmer’s monograph Cambridge Castle.
James II, born at Meldreth in 1839 following Simeon’s second marriage at Meldreth to Mary Ann Unwin, and who died in 1885 at Ely, was a corn merchant in Pidley, Huntingdonshire. He lived in Pidley House and owned premises spread over two acres in that village. He also leased considerable property and so increased his acreage that ultimately he handed over the corn dealing to his younger brother William John. He had at least four sons and three daughters by two wives and was succeeded in his corn business by his eldest son William, born at Meldreth in 1855. The first wife was Caroline Nixon who housekept for her brother Tom, just as Martha Mortlock ("Patti") looked after James. In a double wedding in 1864 at Great Eversden Congregational church the sisters exchanged their brothers to get proper husbands.
James was educated at Great Shelford High Street school. In his forties he took his eldest son James Archibald, who had been educated at Eastbourne College and who later graduated from Cambridge, to visit New Zealand, together with the next son Harold John. When the time came to return, Harold John remained behind in New Zealand and eventually found his way to Perth, Western Australia, where he started a motor cycle import business which, after he had been joined by his two junior brothers, expanded into agricultural machinery and became one of Perth’s leading business enterprises. His father did not however live to know of this success. On the boat coming home he went down with influenza and he died of the resulting pneumonia soon after returning home. Still like his father a staunch non-conformist, he was buried with his first wife at Bluntisham Baptist chapel. Caroline, whose daughter Anne Caroline born in 1874 had only lived for a few months, had died in 1875 following the birth of a further daughter Jessie Mary. James Archibald settled to a teaching career at Halstead Grammar School; he never married.
Of the Perth Mortlocks, Sidney Francis was killed aboard one of his own motor bikes aged 51, leaving seven children, some of whom may have left descendants, but the other brothers’ lines are extinct, as indeed is the entire male line of this family.
The name James is unusual in Cambridgeshire. A James Mortlock had three hearths in Great Shelford in 1672; he may well have come originally from Suffolk.
©2001 RJH Griffiths
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