Facebook post #057 (Feb 2021)
1911 census: ‘Keresforth’, Brunswick Road, Kingston, Surrey. The home of Harriet Squire, widow (post 56). The house was named after a hamlet in Barnsley.
At the other end of the country a cousin on the other side of the family, had just become principal of Birkenhead Technical College. He had once filed a patent for safety devices for hitching horses, and went on to be the president of the Chartered Institute of Patent Agents.
At home in Kingston was daughter Phyllis Margaret, a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher at a poor law school. In 1912, she married Albert Clayton at the local church.
Also in 1912, Sopwith built an aircraft factory on a skating rink less than half a mile away from the family home in Kingston. The famous Sopwith Camel biplane (see post #004) was made here in WWI.
Albert and Phyllis lived in Cheadle and had three children. He was an electrical engineer – later a consultant and university lecturer – who wrote several textbooks.
Dad is a retired electrical engineer. Once, while working for GEC, he came up with idea behind a patent involving baking a thermistor into the resin insulation of a motor winding.
Absent from Kingston was eldest son Cecil Edward. He had attended Kingston Grammar School but was then apprenticed in Sheffield, where he settled, although he spent time at both London and Sheffield Universities. He was a keen motorist and built his own motor cycle before 1906 (a contemporary pictured). At the 1911 census, he was 30, and boarding with a scissor manufacturer (and patent holder). He was already a manager at Willford’s, where he would spend his whole career, having started as a fitter. In 1915, he married Dorothy Bingley – they went on to have three children.
Willford’s made railway springs, and it won’t be a coincidence that his grandfather William Green (the ironfounder and patent holder from post 53) had also been in this line of work in Sheffield. By this time the business had been inherited by Henry Green, who had married Cecil’s aunt Annie Squire. Walter Green, cutler and penknife maker named Cecil in his will. At Willford’s, Cecil was ‘entirely responsible for the design and manufacturing side of the business, in addition to the carrying out of tests and inspection of materials’.
Astonishingly, Cecil invented, constructed, and (in 1918) patented a mechanical computer! (a calculating machine for equations with multiple variables, concerning springs). He was Managing Director from 1926 until one day in 1942, when he dropped dead leaving the office for a technical meeting in London. The business was eventually closed by final owners ThyssenKrupp in 2016, after it flooded.
At home in 1911 was middle son, Rupert Henry (whose first name I have inherited as a middle name). He was a 27-year-old engineer’s draughtsman at a steelworks and rolling mill. Kingston is not known for its rolling mills so perhaps this was a visit. During the war, Rupert was a pottery manager. In 1918, he married Vera Paton, daughter of a colliery manager, in Calcutta. The flu pandemic reached India that year, killing at least 12 million people.
A year later, Rupert filed a patent – for a ‘Direct liquid-pressure apparatus. – Solid material such as sand for filling mine workings &c. [later cited in an application for moving rocks and coal] is elevated and transported from a river bed &c. by means of a vessel which is placed in or sunk into the material so that the latter may enter therein, after which water is forced into the vessel to expel the material through a delivery pipe.’ The couple had three children and migrated back to Kingston in 1923. Later, he was a Chartered Structural Engineer, still in Kingston.
Also at home in 1911, was younger son Alfred Eustace, a 26-year-old manager at a paper merchant’s office. He married Elsie Le Brun in 1913 and they had one surviving son, John Rupert Squire, my grandad (post 51). During WWI, Alfred was a 2nd Lieutenant with the Royal Flying Corps.
His duties appear to have been ground-based and technical. He was stationed at Farnborough, where the Royal Aircraft Factory had developed from the Army Balloon Factory (my pic).
This is where Britain’s first military airship was built and where Britain’s first aeroplane flight took place in 1908. It was also home to another famous WWI fighter, the SE5A (my pic).
In 1918, Ivo Little, on the other side of the family (posts #015 and #042) invented and patented gear for anchoring Sopwith Camels to airships.
Alfred had been with H. Reeve Angel & Co at the time of his enlistment, and he stayed with them for his whole career. Harry Reeve Angel had been a commercial traveller and agent in the paper trade, and founded his company in 1912. It served as agent for various papers and art supplies, including Whatman art paper, widely considered to be the finest available.
Jabez Barnard, purveyor of art supplies and paper on the other side of the family, patented the enamel slides shown in post #028 in about 1870.
By 1921, Alfred was a director and shareholder. Angel died in 1934, leaving an estate worth the considerable sum of £43,771. By then, the company’s range had extended to high-grade chemical filter papers. In 1937, (not to be outdone) Alfred patented a filtering device.
In 1974, Reeve Angel merged with Whatman. Last production at the Springfield Mill, Maidstone was in 2014, and it was knocked down in 2018, after 200 years. The successor company still makes Whatman brand products – their filter papers are used in Covid-19 vaccine production.
