I am putting Golden Dawn members Joseph Clayton, Fanny Clayton and Eliza Craven in a file together.

 

Joseph Clayton was the second person to become a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn at its Horus Temple in Bradford; only Thomas Pattinson got there before him and I’m sure it was Pattinson that invited him in.  This was in May 1888.  Joseph did choose a motto - ‘Tollere velum’ - but his membership may only have been nominal and he was never initiated into the Second Order where you actually tried doing practical magic.  In March 1893 his daughter Fanny Clayton (I shall call her Fanny Isabel) was initiated at the Horus Temple.  She chose the motto ‘orare’ and was a more committed member than her father, being initiated into the inner, Second Order, probably in March 1896.  In September 1895, Eliza Craven joined the Horus Temple, taking the motto ‘Semper eadem’ but never making much progress in the study required to reach the Second Order.  Eliza and Fanny Isabel were sharing a house in 1901.

 

A WORD OF WARNING BEFORE I START: these are my biographies of members of the Golden Dawn who lived in Bradford and Liverpool.  I could have done a much better job of it if I lived in Lancashire or Yorkshire myself and could look at local archives.

 

A further caveat about Joseph Clayton.  Looking in the Freemasons’ Library catalogue, and on the web, I came across books written in the early 20th century by a Joseph Clayton.  This writer is NOT the GD’s Joseph Clayton, he’s a much younger man. 

 

 

THE CLAYTON and CRAVEN FAMILIES

 

I’ve been able to draw on some very well-researched family history websites for some of my GD members, but not for the Claytons or for the Cravens.  From the mid-19th century censuses I have gained the impression that both families had been living in the West Riding of Yorkshire for many years, possibly for centuries.  There was a village called Clayton to the west of the town of Bradford; it’s now a Bradford suburb.  I make the tentative suggestion that Joseph Clayton could trace his family back to that village.  It’s harder to figure out where the Cravens originated and I don’t have enough information for a good guess.

 

The families didn’t help me much: too many Janes; too many Ellens; too many Josephs; too many Elizas; too many surnames!

 

When he was getting married for the first time, Joseph Clayton said his father was a man called William Clayton who lived in Bradford where he was a dealer in glass and chinaware.  As yet there are relatively few directories on the web.  If I’d lived near Bradford I could have looked through many more.  However, I did find one published in 1837 and now transcribed onto a family history website, which listed a Thomas Clayton as a dealer in earthenware, at Providence Street Bradford.  No one called William Clayton was listed in the directory but perhaps Thomas Clayton and William Clayton were brothers or cousins, working in the same business, with Thomas as the senior partner.  

 

William Clayton was married to a woman called Jane; I haven’t been able to find details of their marriage so I don’t know what Jane’s original surname was.  Perhaps they weren’t married.  I daresay they were, but with the Claytons I’m no longer sure.  If a marriage took place, it took place in the mid-1820s because Joseph had four older sisters - Sarah and Mary (who may or may not have been twins), Jane and Isabella.  Joseph Clayton gave information to every census official between 1861 and 1911 consistent with his having been born in 1837.  He had one younger brother, William, who died in childhood.

 

Joseph’s father had died before 1841, probably in 1838 shortly after his younger son was born.  Joseph’s mother Jane took over the business, and was running it with the help of her two eldest daughters in 1841.  In 1845 she got married again, to Martin Beanland, whose family had a building and joinery business in Bradford.  The Beanlands were another family who had been living in the district for a long time: one family history website I found traced them back to the 16th century.  In 1851 Martin and Jane Beanland and Jane’s younger children Jane, Isabella and Joseph, were all living at 144 Westgate in the centre of Bradford; from which both his business and her’s were probably being run.  Joseph had left school and was employed as a plane maker, probably by his step-father’s firm.  My science, technology and IT advisor Roger Wright says that planes were still being made in the 1850 in the same way they had been for thousands of years: the maker built a long, rectangular wooden box and chiseled a groove in it, into which a piece of iron was inserted which had the planing surface on it.  This old method was about to be swept away by the invention (by the American Leonard Bailey) of the cast-iron plane that is still in use for ordinary joinery today; but in the 1850s the skills of the wooden box plane maker continued to be in demand.  I don’t think Joseph Clayton actually hung around to find his plane-making skills being superceded by new technology: in the autumn of 1851, Martin Beanland died and although the firm continued in business for at least another 20 years, probably employing several other members of the Claytons’ extended family, sometime between 1851 and 1858, Joseph left it and Bradford too, to work as a teacher.

 

I think that Joseph Clayton had been educated at a National School; on the grounds that if he had not been, he wouldn’t have found work in one later.  The National Schools were run by the National School for Promoting Religious Education (the NSPRE), which had been founded in 1811 to build and run a school for the children of the poor in each parish in England and Wales.  Although the NSPRE received some funding from central government, the rest had to be found from the individual parish.  Costs were kept down by employing very few paid teachers and using selected older children to teach the younger ones (without pay): the ‘monitor’ system.  The NSPRE was closely associated with the Church of England and all pupils had to attend church on Sundays.  I haven’t read that staff had to do so too but I think it’s a reasonable assumption that this was required of them: so Joseph Clayton must have been a parish-church goer at this point in his life.  Teachers learned their trade by doing an apprenticeship - work in class plus study at home.  I think Joseph’s apprentice-job must have been in Aigburth, then a separate village but now a suburb of Liverpool south of Sefton Park; because that was where he married Louisa Shelcott in the spring of 1858. 

 

I cannot find Louisa Shelcott on any census before 1861; but her marriage registration at St Michael-in-the-Hamlet Aigburth says that she was the daughter of a master mariner, so perhaps that’s not surprising.  Louisa was several years older than her husband but I’ve found in my researches into the members of the Golden Dawn that that’s not so surprising either.

Joseph and Louisa Clayton left Aigburth shortly after their marriage and moved to Northampton: perhaps they had married on the strength of his apprenticeship being over and his having been offered a job in the National School there.  Their son William Charles Edward Clayton was born there in 1859 and on the day of the 1861 census all three were living as boarders in Maple Street Northampton, in the household of Elizabeth Shepherd whose daughter Sarah was also a teacher, probably at the same school as Joseph.  Louisa was pregnant on census day: daughter Cora was born in the summer; but Louisa died either at or shortly after the birth.

 

The dangers of childbirth and the days immediately after it meant that it was not especially unusual, in the 1860s, for a man to be left a widower with very young children.  Within a few months Joseph Clayton left Northampton for the village of Thorpe Hesley, north of Sheffield - I imagine that he left his two children with his mother or one of his sisters, and this was the nearest job he could get to them.  Infants in this situation were very vulnerable, and Joseph’s son William died early in 1862.  Three or four months later, Joseph married Jane Arkell.

 

The only thing I’ve been able to find out about Jane Arkell is that on the day of her marriage she already had one child, a daughter called Ellen.  Ellen Roberts.  On censuses later in the century, Jane Clayton was fairly (but not entirely) consistent about having been born in Liverpool; and having been born around 1840.  In the ‘Sources for the Claytons’ section below I give a blow-by-blow account of my search for Jane Arkell and/or Jane Roberts for those readers who might be interested.  Here I’ll just say that my cautious conclusion is that IF her surname at birth was Arkell, she had not been married before when she married Joseph Clayton; and that she had given her daughter Ellen her father’s surname.  IF her surname at birth was Roberts, she must have been a widow when she married Joseph Clayton; but I can’t find evidence of a first marriage for her, to a man called Arkell.

 

Joseph Clayton and Jane Arkell married in Newington: there’s another puzzle.  Newington was the registration district for London’s South Bank, in the 1860s; if either or both of them lived there, it must have been for a short time only.  Just long enough to get married?  If so, where did they meet?  Perhaps Liverpool, several years before?  Who knows.

 

Joseph and Jane married in London but never lived there.  They set up home in Thorpe Hesley, Jane adding her daughter Ellen to the family and taking on the care of Joseph’s daughter Cora (who was still less than a year old).  Fanny Isabel Clayton was born at Thorpe Hesley a year later, the first child of Joseph and Jane.  In between Fanny Isabel’s birth and that of her next sister, another Ellen (as if there was not enough confusion about names already) the family moved to Liverpool, I suppose so that Joseph Clayton could take up another teaching appointment, perhaps one with rather higher pay.  Joseph and Jane’s daughter Jenny was born in Liverpool in 1867; and then they had no more children until the mid-1870s - at least, none that survived.

 

At some point between 1867 and 1871, Joseph Clayton returned to Bradford and took over the family china and glassware business.  Thereby hangs another confused tale.

 

Because of a blip in Ancestry’s census coverage of Bradford in 1861, I can’t tell where Joseph’s mother Jane Beanland was living; nor whether she was still running the family business that year - I suppose she must have been, but I can’t confirm it.  I was able to read that Jane Beanland, her daughter Isabella and her grandson James Clayton were all living together on the day of the 1861 census, and that all the rest of the family were living elsewhere.  Jane Beanland’s grandson James Clayton, was born in Bradford in 1854: he was Isabella’s son but she wasn’t married yet.  It wasn’t until 1865 that she married John Walton, a stuff packer at a woollen mill.  He was six years younger than Isabella, too young to have been James’ father, but he adopted him and James became James Clayton Walton.  By 1871 James was working as a joiner-cum-office boy, probably for the building firm run by the Beanlands.  Where this is leading is that Isabella’s getting married would have meant that her mother wouldn’t have been able to count quite so much on her help in housekeeping and running the china and glassware business, so it was probably at that point that Jane Beanland began to think of handing the business on.  By 1871 she had retired, and gone to live with Isabella, John Walton and James, in Horton. 

 

I get a strong impression that Joseph Clayton did not particularly want to get involved in the family firm.  And of course, although it had been a part of his childhood, he had never gained any experience in managing it by the day.  Now, though, it seems he was the only child left; so he gave up teaching and returned to Bradford to pick up the burden.  How long he carried it for is not clear from what he told the census officials between 1871 and 1911: in 1871 he certainly said that he was a “shopman” dealing in china and glass; but in 1881 he said his shop was selling stationery; in 1891 he told the official he was a confectioner, and an accountant - did this mean he was doing accounts for other people?; but in 1901 he was back to describing himself as a dealer in chinaware; and in 1911 he said he was retired from business as a dealer in china and glass.  Did he do or sell all those things?  At the same time?  If he was a confectioner, who was making the sweets?  The one thing that was more or less consistent about Joseph’s livelihood in this long period was the business’ general location - always on Manchester Road Bradford though not necessarily at the same address. 

 

The births and deaths of several more children punctuated the lives of Joseph and Jane in the 1870s and 1880s.  Their daughter Jenny died in 1873, aged 6.  Then two sons were born to them - Robert in 1876; and Harold in 1878 (he died in 1881).  Oswald was born in 1881 and Joseph and Jane’s last child, Hilda, in 1883.  By the day of the 1881 census, Jane Beanland had come to live with Joseph and Jane and all their children and step-children.  Ellen Roberts, Cora, Fanny Isabel and Ellen Clayton had all left school and all but Cora were both working, bringing money home.  Ellen Roberts was serving in a pub.  Ellen Clayton had gone to work in a woollen mill; the only one of Joseph’s children who did so.  I’ll explain what Fanny Isabel was doing below.  Cora was not doing any paid work; as the eldest daughter (step-daughter in Jane Clayton’s case, of course) she was probably helping with the housekeeping and cooking necessary to feed and clothe such a large household.  Jane Beanland may have needed special care by this time, too.  This appearance on the 1881 census is the last information I have about Cora Clayton: after this, she disappears - I can’t find a marriage or a death registration for her and she doesn’t figure in any later census.

 

Fanny Isabel Clayton was following her father, by training to be a teacher.  Perhaps he encouraged her to do this; at the very least he must have seen that he Education Act of 1870 would lead to more job opportunities for the right kind of woman, alternatives to the physical labour of the factory and the drudgery of domestic service.  The Act was being rolled out throughout England, but gradually, and Fanny Isabel’s training probably didn’t differ very much from her father’s for the same job: training colleges for teachers were still very much in the future.  If Fanny Isabel’s training did follow the usual pattern, it will have begun before she left school, by her being chosen as an older pupil to help teach the younger ones.  On leaving school, which she may have done at the age of 12 (in 1875) Fanny Isabel will have needed Joseph Clayton to sign forms for her, committing her to four years as an apprentice on a small wage.  At the end of the four years, most - but not all - apprentices were offered a job.  Fanny Isabel definitely got work at the end of her apprenticeship, though I don’t know which School Board it was with; I haven’t been able to find out anything about her employer or employers.  I assume it was the Bradford school board at this stage in her life; I think that’s a reasonable guess.

 

What and who Fanny Isabel will have taught was governed by the ideologies and stereotypes of the era.  Women teachers taught the infants and the older girls; they did not teach the older boys.  They were paid less at every level than a man.  Expectations of them and their female pupils were low, and based on the assumption that working-class girls would work in the home, either as a married woman in their husband’s home or as a paid servant in someone else’s, in either case doing the same tasks; so that - particularly in years immediately after the 1870 Act - the curriculum for girls concentrated on very basic literacy, sewing and laundry skills.  Even domestic economy and practical lessons in cookery didn’t come in until later in Fanny Isabel’s career; technical skills were not taught at all; and nothing much was expected of girls in the way of arithmetic.  Essentially, if a woman teacher couldn’t teach sewing, she was not likely to keep her job.  I’d like to think that Fanny Isabel had a higher opinion of her pupils’ abilities than that; but she would not have been allowed to make anything of it.

 

As the 1880s progressed, though Joseph and Jane Clayton did have the one last child, the large household of 1881 did begin to break up.  Jane Beanland died early in 1884 at the age of 84.  Ellen Roberts married Bowker Kay in 1888; by 1891 they were owners of the Coffee Tavern in Market Street Cleckheaton.  And by 1891 Fanny Isabel was living with her aunt.

 

In 1856 Fanny Isabel’s aunt Jane Clayton (Joseph’s youngest sister) had a daughter who was registered as Sarah Clayton.  The following year, Jane married Joseph Waring.  Joseph and Jane Waring had no children, which leads me to suppose that Joseph Waring was not Sarah’s biological father.  However, like John Walton, he was happy enough to act as a father to Sarah in all other respects and was probably quite as devastated as Jane was when Sarah died, in 1869, aged 13.  The Warings ran a grocery business in Little Horton from the 1860s to the 1880s.  In addition, at least around 1870, Joseph also did carpentry work and employed one man to help him; perhaps he worked as a sub-contractor for the Beanland joinery and building firm and that was how Jane Clayton had met him.  By 1881, Joseph Waring was no longer doing the carpentry and perhaps that made money a bit tight for him and Jane: on the day of the 1881 census they were renting out some rooms above the shop. 

 

I haven’t been able to find out when Fanny Isabel Clayton first went to live with aunt Jane Waring but I imagine she moved in during 1889, the year Joseph Waring died.  Jane Waring carried on with the grocery business, which - like Joseph Clayton’s business - always been on Manchester Road, so Fanny Isabel hadn’t moved very far from home.  However, I think it was a move that benefited both parties: Jane Waring had a young niece to cheer her loneliness and give some help in the shop perhaps; and Fanny Isabel might have had - probably for the first time - space of her own and a bit of peace and quiet in which to work.  Fanny Isabel probably continued to live with her aunt until Jane Waring died in 1896 and so was there when she joined the Order of the Golden Dawn (I wonder what her aunt made of it).  Fanny Isabel never returned to live with her parents.  Instead - she had been a professional woman for many years now - she rented a house which she shared with a colleague - Eliza Craven.

 

Quite how Joseph Clayton found the time and energy for his intellectual pursuits, in the midst of such a busy household, I can’t imagine; but he was a Biblical scholar, and a theosophist.  Going through the Theosophical Society (TS) Membership Registers, I found evidence to show that he joined the TS during the early 1880s, when it was in its infancy and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was still living in India.  He was a keen-eyed reader of the TS’s members’ magazine The Vahan, and in March 1893 a letter from him was published in it which started quite a debate about how a passage in Romans VII should be understood, particularly the word ‘atonement’, which according to one of those who got involved in the argument, only occurs that once in the whole New Testament.  Joseph’s had written in to report that he had noticed a tendency in recent articles in The Vahan to write of the word as meaning at-one-ment - being together or coming together.  In the face of much criticism from several respondents who disagreed with him at great length and with many classical and other references, Joseph stuck to his guns that it should be translated as something more like expiation - making amends.  I mention this exchange of opinions (in which even the editor found himself obliged to defend his own position) because one of the others who took part in it was also a Golden Dawn member, one much better educated than Joseph Clayton and boy! Did he let him know it.  I will not name this other GD member; he is one of only three GD members that I really do dislike.  My sympathies are all with Joseph Clayton, who probably would have loved a university education but never had the chance of one.  Instead, he had done his best to educate himself.  1893 was the last year that Joseph Clayton paid his membership fee to the TS.  It would have been a sad thing if these supporters of ‘at-one-ment’ had driven him away.

 

Fanny Isabel, and her much younger brother Robert, were the two children of Joseph Clayton who shared his philosophical tastes.  They, and Robert’s wife Ada, were long-serving members of the the Theosophical Society in Bradford, though Ada didn’t join until after she married (in 1900).  The TS was active in Bradford in the early 1890s, and again from about 1902, but Fanny Isabel’s membership record shows that she joined the TS in the early 1880s, perhaps at the same time as her father, and when the only places where TS members met to discuss theosophy and hear talks on the subject were in London.  The TS had been founded to study the western occult tradition.  It wasn’t until Helena Petrovna Blavatsky went to India in the late 1870s that its teachings and discussions became influenced by Asian philosophy, particularly Buddhism.  I’ve painted a pretty grim description of what Fanny Isabel would have spent her working days teaching.  Her own abilities and interests raced far ahead of the intellectual level expected both of girl pupils and their women teachers.  Surely her involvement in the TS and the GD must have stemmed, at least partly, from a desire to give her brain a challenge, a proper work-out.  By the time she joined the GD she had been teaching hemming and stain-removal for nearly 20 years.  Being in the TS and the GD covered all the options in the early 1890s - Asian thought at the TS, the western occult authors and rituals at the GD - and many of those initiated into the GD were also members of the TS in Bradford, including Fanny Isabel; they were a close-knit group.  Fanny Isabel worked very hard and consistently at the reading required by the GD of those who wanted initiation into its inner (Second) Order, and reached that level in three years (some GD members took twice as long).  At the same time, she and Joseph were members of Athene Lodge, with other GD members like Bogdan Edwards, Eliza Pattinson and Joe Dunckley.  Athene Lodge split off from Bradford Lodge in the mid-1890s but the two lodges got back together in 1902, reforming the Bradford TS lodge, which still exists today.  So close were the GD and the TS in Bradford that the impetus for this getting-back-together may have been the splitting-up into various daughter orders of the GD, in the years 1901-03. Fanny Isabel and Joseph Clayton were not members of either of the GD’s two main daughter orders. CJoseph Clayton doesn’t seem to have joined the reformed Bradford TS Lodge either, but Fanny Isabel did so.  Robert and Ada Clayton joined it a few years later and were very committed members for the next 30 years, both serving as president and Ada running its Ladies’ Sewing Circle (formed in 1914).

 

A daughter lodge of Bradford, Minerva TS Lodge, was founded in 1917 by Fanny Isabel and another ex-GD member, Edward Jonathan Dunn; though its other prime movers - Eliza Pattinson’s daughter and Edward Jonathan Dunn’s wife - had never been GD members.  Miss Pattinson was Minerva Lodge’s secretary from 1917 until her death; and then Fanny Isabel took over the role, probably until her own death.

 

 

Joseph and Jane Clayton were still living on Manchester Road on the day of the 1901 census but their household was much smaller: their daughter Ellen had married in 1895 and their son Robert - now a printer/compositor - in 1900.  Oswald and Hilda were still living at home, but they were working: Oswald was a plumber and Hilda worked in a bakery.  Fanny Isabel was living at 141 Grafton Street Little Horton, with Eliza Craven.

 

I know very little about Eliza Craven.  In 1901, sharing a house with Fanny Isabel, Miss Craven told the census official that she was 34 and had been born in Kirkstall (just north of Leeds).  The only birth registration I could find which came near to fitting that information was for an Eliza A Craven early in 1866; not quite right for the age she gave, but taking a year or two off your age is a common enough habit.  The registration didn’t get me very far: I couldn’t spot a convincing Eliza Craven born in Kirkstall early 1860s-ish on any census between 1871 and 1901.  There were just too many Eliza Cravens: like Clayton, it’s a common surname in Yorkshire and half the female Cravens seemed to be called Eliza.  I looked for the GD’s Eliza Craven in the West Riding but also in Liverpool, because when she was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn she gave an address in the Gillington district of Liverpool.

 

Where did Fanny Isabel Clayton and Eliza Craven meet?  If Eliza had been born in Leeds but had grown up in Liverpool they could have known each other from their childhoods.  They could have met later, through the Golden Dawn.  But they could have got to know each other only after Eliza Craven moved to take up a job in Bradford.  How long they lived together I don’t know.  I can’t find Eliza Craven on the 1911 census.  She may just have been travelling during the Easter holidays, of course.  I don’t think she had married.  It’s possible she might have died: on freebmd I saw several death registrations that might have been her, between 1901 and 1910.

 

By the day of the 1911 census, Joseph Clayton had retired.  None of his children had ever had anything much to do with the china and glassware business.  On the contrary - Joseph seems to have gone out of his way to ensure they did other work.  So I suppose it just got wound up, or sold to someone new.  After four or so decades of living on Manchester Road, Joseph and Jane moved to Tichborne Road, presumably as part of Joseph’s retirement.  Hilda was the only child still living at home in 1911.  Oswald had moved out; I think he married in 1905. 

 

Fanny Isabel had moved to Baildon by 1911 and was living at 28 East Parade.  She was there on her own on census day.  She had been promoted: she was a head teacher now and may have been earning as much as £100 a year.  And she might have been beginning to look forward to retiring, with a pension (she was 60 in 1923 but I’m not certain of official retirement ages at that period).

 

Joseph Clayton died early in 1912.  Daughter Hilda married in 1913.  Jane Clayton died at the end of the horrible year 1917. 

 

I hope Fanny Isabel enjoyed her retirement.  She certainly kept up her interest in theosophy to the end.  She died in 1934. 

 

Fanny Isabel Clayton never married.  Was this by choice?  Difficult to tell.  The prevailing ideologies expected all women to marry; marriage and motherhood were seen in Fanny Isabel’s lifetime as not only a woman’s true destiny, but also as her duty to the Empire.  But that all women should marry was quite impossible in England in the late 19th century, with so many young single men emigrating, dying in the armed forces, or simply not wishing to take on the economic burden of wife and family.  Most likely, Fanny Isabel didn’t get married because nobody asked her.  However, there were other reasons why a woman might opt to remain single.

 

 

BASIC SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.

 

Membership of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert.  Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986.  Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888 and 1914.  The list is based on the Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation.  All this information had been inherited by Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden.  Please note, though, that the records of the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh were destroyed in 1900/01.  The records of the Horus Temple at Bradford have not survived beyond 1896 either, but there’s a history of the TS in Bradford on the web (though originally written in 1941) at www.ts-bradford.org.uk/theosoc/btshisto.htm in which a lot of the same people who joined the GD are mentioned.  In April 2012 the History page was updated with the names of all the members at least up to 1941.

 

The members of the GD at its Horus Temple were rather a bolshy lot, and needed a lot of careful management!

 

Family history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk; familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial Families; thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees and family histories on the web.

Famous-people sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female members of GD.  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  Who Was Who. Times Digital Archive.

 

Catalogues: British Library; Freemasons’ Library.

 

Wikipedia; Google; Google Books - my three best resources.  I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.

 

SOURCES FOR JOSEPH and FANNY ISABEL CLAYTON and ELIZA CRAVEN

 

CLAYTON/BEANLAND/WARING IN BRADFORD I have had v little luck w this.

Baines’s Directory and Gazetteer of Bradford published in 1822, transcribed at www.genuki.org.uk.  It covers the surrounding villages as well as the town of Bradford, and has several businesses run by people called Clayton and people called Beanland.

 

CLAYTON GLASS AND CHINA    

My only directory reference was in History, Gazetteer and Directory of the West Riding of Yorkshire, published by William White in 1837: p454 Bradford directory under china, glass and earthenware.  There’s no reference to such a business run by a William Clayton.  The death of a Thomas Clayton was registered in Bradford Yorkshire, quarter April-June 1838; perhaps it was that Thomas Clayton.

 

WILLIAM CLAYTON, Joseph’s father, Fanny Isabel’s grandfather:

Even on familysearch I couldn’t find a marriage of a William Clayton to a woman called Jane in the mid-1820s; not even looking outside Bradford.  I may be wrong in assuming William Clayton was dead by 1841; but he must have been dead by the summer of 1845.  These 3 death registrations are possibly him; the age at death was not included in the registration until 1868:

            death William Clayton registered Bradford Yorkshire Oct-Dec 1837

            death William Clayton registered Bradford Yorkshire Apr-June 1838

            death William Clayton registered Bradford Yorkshire Oct-Dec 1838

 

JOSEPH CLAYTON’S SISTERS Sarah Mary Jane and Isabella.  Sarah and Mary are never part of any household with Joseph after 1841; I guess they marry.

           

WILLIAM CLAYTON, Joseph’s younger brother who doesn’t appear on any census after 1841:

I found two possible birth registrations in Bradford Yorkshire: 1 in Apr-June 1839; and 1 in April-June 1840.  A death registration for a William Clayton registered Bradford Yorkshire Jan-Mar 1842 is probably the correct one.

 

BEANLAND

About the Beanlands: at www.tribalpages.com there was a very well researched and presented, exhaustively-detailed list of people called Beanland, all descended from one particular man.  Some people in the list were living at Bingley in 1597/1620.  HOWEVER I couldn’t see anyone called Martin Beanland in this list, so he may not be related to this branch of the family.

 

Evidence that Martin Beanland’s business continued after he died in 1851: The British Architect volume 2 1874 p264 it’s a google snippet so I couldn’t see the name of the building which was the subject of the article but it’s a prestigious one, at Manningham Park, and includes an assembly room, lecture rooms, a library etc.  The architects were Messrs Lockwood and M[I couldn’t read the rest] of Bradford.  Amongst the contractors working on the building were Messrs Beanland, joiners of Bradford.

 

Death of Martin Beanland was registered Bradford Yorkshire Oct-Dec 1851.  Via familysearch England EAS-y 1849274: a very brief burial record for Martin Beanland: he was buried on 14 October 1851, in Bradford, the record didn’t say exactly where.

 

JOSEPH CLAYTON AS A PLANE MAKER

Wikipedia on planes has pictures of ancient ones looking very modern - the design hasn’t changed much!  Wikipedia on Leonard Bailey: born 1825 in New Hampshire; died 1905 in New York City.  In the mid-1860s he came up with a series of inventions including a cast-iron hand plane.  Later his designs were bought by Stanley Rule and Level of Connecticut, now known as Stanley Works, who still make them. 

 

Website www.davistownmuseum.org was founded by H G Skip Brack partly as a museum of tools in history.  He dates Bailey’s series of inventions as beginning c 1858 and says that the first ever plane with a cast-iron body was made as early as 1827.  The museum is in Bar Harbor Maine.  Website has some good pictures.

 

JOSEPH AS A TEACHER: the National School for Promoting Religious Education (NSPRE). 

 

See wikipedia on NSPRE for the general principles on which it worked.  I got further details of how it worked by the day from

 www.barnes113.karoo.net/History/bromley_national_school.htm which has an account of Bromley’s NSPRE, apparently based on its records and including useful stuff like how many teachers were employed at any time, and how much they were paid.

 

JOSEPH CLAYTON’S FIRST MARRIAGE

LOUISA SHELCOTT is born in 1834: Lancashire On-Line Parish Project (see below for more information on this) gives the names of Louisa’s parents as Simon and Maria.

Lancashire On-Line Parish Project at www.lan-opc.uk/Liverpool/Aigburth/StMichael/marriages_1855-60.html

On 10 April 1858 at St Michael in the Hamlet, Aigburth Lancs: marriage of Joseph Clayton to Louisa Shelcott. Source: LDS film 2147881.

 

JOSEPH CLAYTON’S SECOND MARRIAGE

I have to say that it’s very perverse that Joseph Clayton should marry two successive women with rare surnames, and that I shouldn’t be able to find anything much out about either of them!

 

FANNY’S MOTHER, THE MYSTERIOUS JANE ARKELL OR POSS ROBERTS. 

Arkell is a very unusual surname: only about 15 people in England had it in the mid-19th century.  And I still cldn’t find her.  I’ve search everywhere for her.

She was fairly consistent about being born in Liverpool c 1840.  Birth registrations for girls with surname Arkell: in the years 1839 to 1841 there’s only 1 registration for a child called Jane: a Jane Elizabeth, registered Tynemouth.  Jane Clayton never says she is Jane Elizabeth to any census official and her death registration is just Jane.  There are no registrations at all for anyone called Arkell in Liverpool or West Derby (the main suburb of Liverpool).  There are very few births at all with this is a rare surname, most of those that there are, are in the Cotswolds.  A 1840 birth registration in Cirencester for an unnamed female could be her I suppose. 

 

Birth registrations as Jane Roberts c 1840: there are some in Liverpool and/or West Derby in the period 1839-41.  Most such are registered in Wales, with some in London.  There was one in Bradford quarter Jan-Mar 1840 but Jane Clayton is only described as being born in Bradford once, and I think that was just a muddle on the census official’s part..

 

There are too many women called Jane Roberts to find her easily but no one called Jane Roberts married anyone called Arkell in the period 1857-1860; if Jane was born c 1840 they can’t have married much earlier.

 

1841 census re Jane Arkell: there are nine infant girls with that name in the UK, all in England.  None is said to have been born in Liverpool.  The only one born c 1840 was born in Oxfordshire where there is at least one family with that surname.  Ditto 1851, still couldn’t see anyone called Arkell answering the description Jane Clayton gave on later censuses.

 

AND ABOUT JANE ARKELL’S DAUGHTER ELLEN FROM A PREVIOUS RELATIONSHIP: information about Ellen on the censuses was consistent about her having the surname Roberts, and being born in Liverpool in 1860.  There is this registration: Ellen Roberts Liverpool quarter Jan-Mar 1860.  I couldn’t find this child, or a mother Jane Roberts or Jane Arkell on the 1861 census.  There’s a birth registration for an Ellen Arkell, Pancras quarter July-Sep 1860, but perverse though it seems, I don’t think this is her.  I’ve found a marriage regstration which is probably her, as Ellen Roberts.  Cautious conclusion: Ellen Roberts was the illegitimate daughter of a young woman called Jane Arkell; and was given her father’s surname. 

 

FANNY ISABEL and ELIZA AS TEACHERS - SOME GENERAL INFORMATION ON WOMEN TEACHERS AND WHAT THEY TAUGHT DURING FANNY AND ELIZA’S LIVES

Using findmypast, I searched the records of the Teachers’ Registration Council, set up as part of the Education Act of 1899 but was abandoned as teachers refused to cooperate with it.  A second attempt to get a TRC going began in 1912 with registration from 1914.   This effort got more cooperation, but as an historical resource it’s still pretty poor: firstly, registration was voluntary; secondly neither the Board of Education nor any local authorities referred to the registration list when deciding who to promote.  Inevitably, registration was patchy.  No one called Fanny Isabel Clayton or Eliza Craven registered with the TRC between 1902 and 1948.

 

London’s Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism 1870-1930 by Dina M Copelman.  London and New York: Routledge 1996.  Of course, not all of this will have applied in Bradford.

 

On what the typical woman teacher would be teaching, and what the elementary school girl pupils would be learning: History of Education volume 17 no 1: a special issue on Women and Schooling, published March 1988.  London, New York, Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis.  Edited by Roy Lowe.  Pp71-82 The Education and Employment of Working-Class Girls 1870-1914, by Pamela Horn. 

 

 

FANNY AND JOSEPH IN THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Membership details from the Theosophical Society Membership Registers which are housed at the

TS headquarters in England, Gloucester Place London W1.

 

For an account of the involvement of Fanny Isabel, Robert and Ada in the Bradford TS Lodge after 1902, see the website in the Bradford Sources above.

 

JOSEPH CLAYTON IN THE VAHAN which was the magazine for members of the TS European section.

The Vahan volume II no 8 issued 1 March 1893 p1 has Joseph Clayton’s letter to the editor; and a note from the editor acknowledging the point Joseph had made. 

The Vahan volume II no 9 issued 1 April 1893 pp1-2 had the replies I’ve referred to above.  Unlike Joseph Clayton who gave his full name, the people who wrote in criticising him only gave their initials: JC and JWBI.

The Vahan volume II no 10 issued 1 May 1893 p1 has Joseph Clayton reply, focusing particularly on the comments made by JWBI. 

There was no more follow up in any future issue of The Vahan.

 

 

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

28 December 2012