Woodgrange Park Cemetery
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Family History
Amy Jane Clothier 1849 - 1926
Amy Jane Clothier 1849 – 1926
Interred Woodgrange Park Cemetery circa 20th May 1926
My Great Grandmother, Amy Jane Clothier nee Howson died on the 14th May 1926 two days after the general strike a time before the great depression would hit many families leaving the fabulous roaring twenties behind them. Amy Jane Howson life had begun in one of the poorest societies in the mid 19th century on 14th February 1849 into a world very different from the times she would have known in 1926 and long before 14th February had became commercially known throughout the world as Valentines Day.
When Amy Jane was born in 1849 Lord John Russell was Prime Minister along with a young Queen Victoria. 1849 was an important year for education but probably too early for Amy Jane to have benefited from what was proposed as the School Sites Act of 1849 introduced making provisions for granting sites for schools to be built. Amy Jane would see in her own lifetime fourteen Prime Ministers and three Royal Monarchs ruling over the United Kingdom and witness a time of having no electricity to seeing planes fly over the skies of London.
Amy Jane’s mother Mary Anne Jones who had married Joseph Howson at St Mary’s Church in Spitalfields on 13th September 1846 became the young wife of a rope-maker. Joseph and Mary Howson and their young family resided in Love Lane, which seems quite apt name for a place to live, if you were born on Valentines Day. Amy Jane was the second child of this young family having an older brother Joseph Charles junior who had been born in 1847.
Love Lane was in the heart of the London’s East End and a stones throw from the London Docks and the Brunel’s famous Thames Tunnel, which had been the first successful construction having been built underneath a river that had opened in the year before Amy Jane had been born for pedestrians only to use and in 1869 the first train would travel through the tunnel between Rotherhithe and Wapping.
Just five minutes walk from Love Lane and nearer to the docks in Farmer Street a Thomas John Clothier was born six months prior to Amy Jane in 1848, unbeknown to each of the Howson and Clothier families, Thomas was to become Amy Jane’s future husband.
The London Docks in the days when Amy Jane and Thomas Clothier spent their early years growing up was a frightening place for any adult let alone a small child, with high infant mortality being something that was expected and dreaded by any new mother of the area. In the same year when Amy Jane was born, London’s East End saw its biggest outbreak of cholera killing over 14,000 inhabitants. Measles, mumps, smallpox, whooping cough and scarlet fever abounded and were killer diseases in the days before inoculations to prevent such diseases taking hold, children who survived were the lucky ones. Moreover the area had just seen its first outbreak of deadly typhoid (a disease that almost killed my own father some eighty years later when he was only ten years old, only again in London’s East End). Typhoid being caught via drinking dirty water was established and by 1854 the city’s drinking water no long came from the river Thames but it would still take many years before sanitary welfare in London would be considered an important part of every persons lifestyle.
Most housing could only be described as “slums” – the houses had no sanitation beyond a closed cesspit (if the inhabitants were lucky!) and no proper kitchen area to prepare meals. Many families occupied a single room in a house. Cesspits were usually emptied into the street where the rain washed the excrement into the surface water drainage system and carried it a few hundred yards down to the river Thames. It was mixed with dead animals, animal excrement, rotting vegetables. The river Thames was the principal source of drinking water and somehow Amy Jane and Thomas Clothier survived their own childhood but as for Amy Jane’s older brother Joseph Charles junior he died in the later part of 1851. The young Howson family had moved from Love Lane to 119 Cock Hill Ratcliffe earlier in 1851 and Amy Jane was to have a sister Sarah Ann who was born a few months prior to their brother dying.
As Amy Jane grew up, she witnessed the effective end of ship building in London’s East End, which in 1860 caused 14,000 men to be laid off work, crime was rife and the Thames Tunnel became famous as a local haunt for prostitution as it was dry and relatively warm. The Ratcliffe Highway where Cock Hill was part of had a notorious reputation for its well known vice gangs and its numerous opium dens that had also been visited by the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whilst researching his detective character Sherlock Holmes. Even Jack the Ripper is believed to have roamed around the area in 1888. This was the environment in which Amy Jane and Thomas Clothier spent their lives in – being tough was a prerequisite to survival but far from a guarantee.
When Amy Jane was old enough to work, she became a machinist and by 1870 married my Great Grandfather Thomas John Clothier at St Thomas Church in Stepney, the same church that had witnessed her christening some 20 years earlier. In 1871 Amy Jane’s parents Joseph and Mary Howson were residing at 4 Dean Street Shadwell next door to the King of Prussia Public House and the new young married couple Amy Jane and Thomas Clothier were residing at 69 Fern Street Bromley a much nicer area than that of Ratcliffe Highway but this was short lived because the family were living back in Shadwell at number 17 Juniper Street by 1881 where its recorded on the census Thomas Clothier being 32 years old and a Stoker and Engine Driver.
Thomas Clothier came from a family of Coopers who had moved from Frome in Somerset to London’s East End towards the end of the eighteenth century. The marriage certificate was signed by Amy Jane and Thomas, and witnessed with the signatures of Thomas brother Charles, and stepsister, Elizabeth Latreille. It is almost beyond belief that the family could read and write given the conditions in the area at the time. The attendance of these relatives at the wedding tells us of a strong family bond, something that would figure much during the remainder of Amy Jane’s life.
Amy Jane and Thomas moved frequently over the years but invariably in the Ratcliff and Shadwell neighbourhoods. Nine of their eleven children were born in this area and tragically Amy Jane was to witness the death of her first four children: -
Alfred Charles Clothier 1 years of age died 1876 in from croup
George Ernest Clothier 9 years of age died in 1882 through Peritonitis
Mary Ann Ada Clothier 5 years of age died in 1883 to pneumonia
Thomas Joseph Clothier 22 years of age died in 1893 of heart failure
Had Amy Jane lived a little longer than 1926 she would also have seen her daughter Clara Edith who was a young mother herself succumb to cancer at the young age of 28 years leaving two young children and also my grandfather Charles Benjamin to tuberculosis when only at still at a young age of 45 years, again leaving two young children.
The remaining five daughters of Amy Jane lived longer and Jessie, Emily, and Amelia who was fondly known as Minnie, all married and had children. Florrie was childless and Alice never married, but Alice would in time become a central figure for the family. It was Alice who stayed with her mother and father until they both had passed away – when she then moved up to Felixstowe to help her sister Clara’s widowed husband Joseph Stollery to help bring up his children.
The wedding photograph was taken in 1919 and Amy Jane is sitting next to the bride, her youngest daughter, Minnie and her husband Thomas John is to her right. Amy Jane is 70 years old at this time of this photograph and had given birth to Minnie when she was 41 years of age and would have been considered to be a lucky woman having survived childbirth at such an age.
The Clothier family had, at last moved upmarket to Mile End Old Town by the 1900’s as the 1901 census confirms them residing at 63 Broomfield St in the Parish of St Paul’s Bow Common and both Minnie and Florrie had been brought up in Diggon Street being close to Stepney Green. Amy Jane died whilst she and Thomas lived in Bloomfield Street, very close to where their son Charles Benjamin lived with his wife, Ellen my grandmother, they would have been involved on a daily basis with some of their grandchildren, including my own father, the only one to continue the family name of Clothier.
Amy Jane Clothier and her sister Sarah Ann Pendley are believed to be the only family members to be buried at Woodgrange Park Cemetery. Tower Hamlets and East London Cemeteries being much closer to where all family lived it appears that Thomas John Clothier, Amy Jane’s husband is buried in the City of London Cemetery in the same grave as their daughter Jessie, who died within two days of her father with Florrie and Charles who are also buried within the same cemetery. We are now hoping to discover the exact locations of the two sisters Amy Jane & Sarah Ann at Woodgrange Park Cemetery and restore their resting place.
Information of the Clothier family supplied by John Clothier 15/09/2008
Edited by Marion James Secretary of FOWPC 01/10/2008
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