Facebook post #047 (Dec 2020)
So, we left 3rd gt-grandparents Charles and Maria Brittain in 1851, he a silver plater. But in the 1861, 1871 and 1881 censuses, they lived on the other side of the Jewellery Quarter, and – somehow – had become chaplain to the workhouse and the asylum!
The asylum had opened in 1850, and would close, as All Saints Hospital hospital, in 2000; all but the entrance block was demolished (pic). This is listed, and provides office space behind the wall of Winson Green Prison, where David Meaden was governor (post 45). Thirty years after it opened, another was built down the road at Rubery. It was here that our unfortunate Samuel Wheaver ended his days in shell shock (post 42).
Birmingham Union Workhouse (pic) was the other side of the canal, and could accommodate 700 adults and 300 children. An infirmary was built in 1887, to a design championed by Florence Nightingale. She had overseen the introduction of trained nurses into the workhouse system: their predecessors were caricatured by Dickens in ‘Mrs Gamp’ (pic). The fear of ending up in the workhouse would have been palpable; our unfortunate Benjamin Weaver (whose descendant married Charles’s) ended his days down the road in the Aston Union Workhouse in 1881 (post 24). The Birmingham site was redeveloped as the City Hospital in the late C20.
Charles and Maria had 14 children, and the church dominated their lives. They sent two of their daughters to the Clergy Daughters School – it had moved to Westmorland since the time two of the Brontë sisters died of TB at the school. One of these daughters later became a school mistress, the other a governess who married a vicar in Canada; another daughter married the vicar of Cleeve Prior, Worcestershire.
One of the sons used his clergy education to become a teacher of the classics. Two others became clergymen, one having started in engineering. Another son founded an Augustine Mission in Fulham, became Canon of Madras Cathedral in India, and ended up as vicar of Whittlebury-cum-Silverstone in Northamptonshire (pic – Ian Rob). Our Charles Edward became a commercial clerk – more of him next week.
If you prefer preachers of the ‘hellfire and damnation’ variety, we have them too. Daniel Lambert (whose grandson married Charles Edward’s granddaughter) had a sister Jane. While Daniel taught at a British school, for pupils of “every Religious Persuasion”, Jane taught at a rival National School, which stressed Anglican religious education.
She was also a lay preacher, and in 1876 in Shropshire, she married a Primitive Methodist minister. “As a preacher, [he] belonged to the evangelical school, preaching a full, free, and present salvation; his sermons were carefully prepared and forcefully delivered.” I found them in Buckingham in the 1901 census, and realised that I’d photo’d his chapel (pic), unaware of any connexion. Then I found a list of his former postings, and that I’d photo’d his chapel at Oswestry too.
