Family tree post #77. (10 Nov 2023)
I seem to remember a school trip from Olney or Newport Pagnell to Avebury, and my best mate confidently predicting I would move nearby. Truth be known, I am indeed happier to the west, and still feel the pull.
I love the Severn, named two millennia past for a drowned princess, Hafren/Sabrina. I may have mentioned venturing out from Gloucester early one morning to watch the Severn bore. And my most famous relative, Victorian cousin Matthew Webb, learned to swim in the river, and later became the first to swim the Channel (Post #31).
I’ve visited with pleasure each of the towns and cities of the river, but Bewdley sticks in the mind. A riverside pub may well have been involved but I remember walking along the riverbank, looking across to Beale’s corner in Wribbenhall (my pic) and wondering if there was a link to my forebears.
Good news on that front arrived just this week with a message from a DNA connexion with a private tree. She gently corrected a mistake in my tree, but confirmed the relationship to the Beales of Beale’s Corner. (One DNA connexion is not absolute proof, but the records look good too.)
So, Beale’s corner was the location of the Beale family wharf. In post #17 I mentioned that my Little cousins’s business was Thames sailing barges. In similar fashion, the Beales made their fortune with ‘trows’. A trow was essentially a small draft vessel which could venture down the estuary from, say, Gloucester to Cardiff but was also at home navigating the Upper Severn in Worcestershire and Shropshire. Because water levels on the Severn varied dramatically, owners like the Beales had sets of boats: big trows, middle-sized barges and little boats, so they could maximise capacity whatever the conditions.
My direct ancestors in the Beale family dominated trade in Bewdley for generations through the 17th and 18th centuries. The language of the river trade is strikingly similar to my current concerns – I was talking transhipments (by HGV) just the other day! The trows brought upstream everything which wasn’t made locally: textiles, haberdashery, ironmongery, groceries and sugar, booze and tobacco, books and stationery. All the products of early global trade, slavery, and early industrial manufacturing.
Glass from Stourbridge (post #48), especially for the cider makers, pottery from Stoke, salt from Cheshire, and textiles from Manchester went the other way, downsteam to Bristol. Coal was carried, as was metal and all sorts of stuff for recycling.
The Beales were specifically recommended to Abram Darby at Coalbrookdale, so they may have carried goods made by the Lamberts (post #27).
A slow decline started with the operning of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal at Stourport in 1772. The Beales hung on too long, and the last of the line of trow owners, Samuel, was declared bankrupt. His great-nephew, John Beale, joined the East India Company in 1817 in search of a better life (post #62).
In 1861, things were briefly hectic as materials were transported for the construction of the Severn Valley Railway. When the railway opened the following year, river traffic fell precipitously. The 1841 and 1851 censuses show ‘waterman’ still present as an occupation, but it had disappeared by 1861. Towpaths became overgrown, and the river silted up. The last trow of all is preserved at Ironbridge. But the river still has its magic.
Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour’s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save!
Milton (1634)