On this page we recount the stories of some of Grayshott’s people; not the well-known celebrity passer-through such as Tennyson and Bernard-Shaw but the regular folk who helped establish the village and shape its enduring character.

Fred Harris – Motorcycle Engineer and Shopkeeper

For 25 years up to WW2 Fred Harris’ bicycle and motorbike shop in Crossways Road was one of Grayshott’s landmark retailers. But what about the man himself?

Fred was born in 1887, son of Maria and George, a farm labourer. He was one of thirteen siblings – Arthur, Walter, Andrew, Jesse, Charlie, Eleanor, Alfred, Edwin, Wilfred, Sarah, Lily and Alice. They lived in a cottage in Whitmore, up towards the Barford end, where Edwin, Alfred and Lily all died in infancy. They were pretty near the bread-line; in 1884 Fred’s dad lost the family piglet and asked the vicar to appeal for contributions to buy a replacement. Fred went to the village school and by the age of thirteen he was working as a domestic servant whilst still living at home. So far, pretty much a typical Grayshott, late-Victorian valley-dwelling family.

Fred was a clever chap though. A life of servitude was not for him. By his mid-teens he’d got a job as the village postman. It was a good job – secure for life, respectable and pensionable. We have a picture of him, age 21, as shiny as his bike. He must have had legs of steel. He would have had to walk the length of Whitmore to get to work every morning, and if he was unlucky cycle its length back again on his round, and more, then trot home. Six days a week.

He obviously loved two wheels because by 1916 we find him with his own bicycle shop in Crossways Road, where the Sue Ryder shop now is. Everyone needed a bike and Fred sold good quality ones, Raleigh. He had competition from Coxhead & Welch up in Headley Road, but they were general ironmongers and Fred was a specialist. If his prices were right he’d have been selling bikes hand over fist to the village’s growing population. Branded as ‘F Harris and Co’, the name implies that he had a business partner. Perhaps a family member provided some capital to get him going?

In the same month as the advert, July 1916, he was wed in St Luke’s to Ethel Constance Holder. Ethel was born at Iping, down Midhurst way, and worked as a cook for the Newton family of Surbiton. We don’t know how they met, but conceivably the Newton household had visited Grayshott on holiday and Fred courted Ethel over his counter. Fred certainly was on the up – the happy couple honeymooned in Brighton, conveyed there by Fred’s beautiful BSA motorcycle and sidecar combination. These were luxury wheels, very few young men could afford motor transport of any sort, and Fred’s combo was top of the range and bang up to date. He had escaped the grind of rural poverty.

This was in the middle of WW1, just two days after the start of the Somme offensive. News of the horror of that battle hadn’t even begun to filter back home, but down in Brighton Fred and Ethel will have heard the sound of guns across the channel. And Fred was valuable to the army, either as a rider or a mechanic. In August 1917 he was recruited into the Royal Engineers Inland Water Transport and Docks Section. The IWT&D was formed in 1914 to deal with and develop water transport on the canals and waterways of France and Belgium. By the war’s end they had 1,666 officers and 29,436 other ranks, serving on the Western Front, Mesopotamia, Salonika, Mediterranean, Egypt and East Africa, as well as in the UK. Fred was twice lucky – he served as a motor mechanic rather than a rider, and seemingly in the UK rather than abroad. Probably, he was based at HQ workshops in Richborough, Kent. Both factors reduced his chances of copping a premature demise through disease, accident or enemy action.

Fred had obviously graduated some time before from leg-power to the delights of the internal combustion engine. We must guess that he was self-taught, perhaps aided by the plethora of engineering self-help publications that arose during the pioneer motoring years, and maybe he attended classes held at Grayshott’s Village Hall and Working Mens’ Club.

By the 1920s his shop was thriving, with a second one at Liphook. The twenties were a boom time for the British motorcycle industry. There were something like eighty manufacturers in Britain, and it was the ambition of just about every male in the land to own a bike, and girls too. There was a surprising proportion of lady motorcyclists, including our former Queen Mother, who as the Duchess of York plonked around her estate at Glamis on a 799cc AJS and sidecar.

In those days there was no driving test. Anyone of fourteen years or older could send an application to their county council, along with five shillings (25p), and receive by return a licence to ride any motorcycle. A lucky youngster with money in their pocket could then roll up to Fred’s shop, purchase their choice of wheels, pop up the road to the Post Office to tax it, then ride home. Quite likely they would end up in the hedge before getting very far, but with hardly any other motor traffic on the roads the chance of a serious mishap on our country lanes was pretty small. The handy little BSA Wedge-Tank in the 1928 photo below would have cost £39-10s new, plus thirty shillings for tax. A second-hand specimen with some miles on the clock, dents in the tank, bent handlebars and Fred’s trademark bald tyre would have been a fiver.

Even then motorbikes were seen as exciting, rebellious and attractively anti-social. Most manufacturers offered sporting models for the scorchers and heavyweight sidecar-haulers for those that survived to become family men. But in reality the majority of customers just wanted something cheap, manageable and reliable to ride to work on. In the 1930 photo below Fred has a nice line-up of just such things, lightweight 250cc sidevalve chuffers that would have been his bread and butter trade.

The pace of technical development in the adolescent industry was astonishing, equivalent to mobile IT today. Every year brought new models with experimental features, new materials and quite often useless gimmicks. Styles went out of fashion quickly, and gritty roads allied to first-generation rider/maintainers meant that machines had a punishing life. Fred’s workshop would have been kept busy and his ingenuity tested. He most likely spent long hours of an evening poring over the trade magazines and manufacturer’s manuals to work out how on earth to re-assemble the contents of the latest 4-speed, foot-change gearbox that some clumsy novice had thought really would live up to the advert’s claim of being ‘unbreakable in the harshest conditions throughout the Empire’.

By this time, although few people realised it then, the writing was on the wall. Between the wars, the largest number of motorcycles on the road was in 1929, with 731,298. They’d been overtaken in quantity by cars in 1925 (a strange thing for us to imagine, but in the twenties about half of all non-commercial motor traffic on the roads were motorbikes). During the Great Depression of the early thirties manufacturers were dropping like flies. Into the thirties, the popularity of small cars such as the Austin 7 and Morris Minor put another nail in the coffins of many more. In 1931 a heavyweight BSA motorbike and sidecar combination from Fred, capable of hauling around a family of four in moderate discomfort, would have cost £100. A little Austin 7 saloon would only have cost only £28 more, and came with an electric starter, a steel top to keep dad’s pipe from going out when it was raining, and a sliding sunroof to let the fug out when not.

The army’s need for motorbikes during WW2 gave a boost to the manufacturers who survived the thirties – BSA, Norton, Triumph, Matchless, AJS – and during the fifties those firm’s big singles and parallel twins for a while reigned supreme upon road and racetrack, but Fred didn’t live to see any of that. He passed away in 1935, only 47 years old. He was one of those who typified the opportunities that the growth of Grayshott offered to those able to grasp them – the son of a poor labourer who became a successful retailer of one of Britain’s great industrial products at its most vigorous period.

Ethel carried on with the shop for a few years, but it became too much of a struggle. Just before the war she sold up and bought a family house in Mowatt Road. She passed away in 1956. Their family maintain contact with Grayshott and in 2020 erected a headstone in St Luke’s in memory of their grandparents.

With thanks to Malcom Moodie for permission to use photographs from his family album.

JC, November 2023

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Captain Edward Unwin, Royal Navy

If you wander in to St Luke’s churchyard, and head towards its south-west corner, you will find, laying flat in the grass, the stone of Captain Edward Unwin VC, CB, CMG, Royal Navy. His memorial is as modest as his courage was remarkable. He served in the Royal Navy from 1895 to 1920, and was awarded the Victoria Cross when Commanding His Majesty’s Troopship River Clyde at the Gallipoli landing in 1915. This is his story.

Edward was born at Forest Lodge near Southampton in 1864. At 14 years of age, after schools at Cheltenham and Malvern, he joined the Merchant Navy’s training hulk in the River Mersey, HMS Conway. It was a tough place, a school of hard knocks, and he once incurred 24 strokes of the birch. After his training he spent 15 years in the Merchant Navy, first going to sea as an apprentice on the Royal Mail ship Roslyn Castle, then with the P&O Company, after which he tried the Egyptian Navy. He eventually transferred to the Royal Navy in 1895, as a lieutenant. He saw active service during the Benin Expedition and the Second Boer war, and developed a new method for the unglamorous but essential process of loading coal. He retired as a Commander in 1909, to live in Southsea.

On the outbreak of WW1 he was recalled to active duty, where his previous experience saw him posted as Fleet Coaling Officer on the staff of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. Based at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, the Grand Fleet was the Navy’s main battlefleet and consisted of over 30 dreadnought battleships, plus the same again in assorted cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers and gunboats. Jellicoe’s flagship was HMS Iron Duke, a huge vessel, built in Portsmouth, commissioned in March 1914 and carrying a complement of around 1000 souls. Edward’s duty, quartered aboard the flagship, was to attend to the fuelling of the entire fleet, ensuring that nothing was left undone and so allowing the C-in-C to attend to strategic matters. The author once asked the commanding officer of a modern Navy warship how he coped with the responsibility of command. His reply was ‘It’s not the big things that keep me awake, it’s the thousands of little things’. Edward’s task was vital work, requiring diligent attention to detail, and we can imagine he was one of the people whose mind could cope with the juggling of thousands of little things and thus permit his Admiral to enjoy a good night’s kip.

We can also imagine that Edward didn’t find it terrifically exciting, because after several months he requested his own command. He was posted to Malta in February 1915, probably very pleasant after Scapa Flow in winter, where he took command of HMS Hussar. The Hussar was built as a torpedo gunboat in 1894, and in 1907 had been disarmed and put into comfortable semi-retirement as the yacht and despatch vessel for the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, which is how Edwin took charge of her.

Meanwhile, great events were taking shape. Turkey had joined the war on Germany’s side, and their Ottoman Empire directly threatened the Suez Canal, which was Britain’s short-cut to the resources of Asia. A plan was conceived by Britain, France and Russia to force a passage through the Turkish waters of the Dardanelles Straits and the Bosphorous, thus allowing allied battleships to bombard the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (Istanbul) into submission. Whereupon the Ottoman Empire would crumble, the Suez would be safe, and a warm-water passage would be opened to Russia via the Black Sea. That was the theory. In fact, the Anglo-French attempt to force a naval passage in February and March failed, due largely to the effectiveness of Turkish minefields and shore batteries. This was the time at which Edward arrived on the scene.

The allies still believed in their strategy’s potential, and now set about planning a land assault to destroy the Turkish artillery and thus allow clear passage for minesweepers. This became the disastrous action known to history as the Gallipoli campaign. As a boffin-esque logistics officer, Edward might never have expected to encounter with fame, were it not for his command of Hussar. The base for the allied landing preparations was the harbour of Moudros on the Greek island of Lemnos. Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wemyss was tasked with making Moudros ready for that task. Hussar was despatched to Moudros, tied up alongside the former ambassador’s yacht Imogene, and the pair became Wemyss’s Navy HQ. Edward was seconded onto the admiral’s staff and his detailed knowledge of harbour operations soon earned his new boss’s respect.

Initially Edward was responsible for local harbour operations, using lighters (flat-bottomed barges) to shuttle all manner of cargo around the crowded and primitive harbour. He soon became familiar with the unseaworthy character of the lighters and the difficulty of handling them in any sort of adverse weather. In contemplating the landing of thousands of soldiers, guns, mules and their equipment from ships onto a hostile shore, the issue of covering the gap from ship to shore was uppermost in the planners’ minds. In early April a howling gale stopped operations and sank several lighters, which brought home the vulnerability of a seaborne landing to the uncontrollable forces of nature.

The planners’ focus at this time was to devise the most effective means of landing as many soldiers as possible at Cape Helles, the initial assault location. Geography and conventional logistics were dictating the size of the assault force, and the numbers were not adding up. In early April, Edward attended a meeting with his admiral on the SS Arcadian, the HQ ship of General Sir Ian Hamilton, who was commander of the allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, ie the Big Boss. In an account written later, Edward recalled that he sat silent for most of the meeting, and took note of the planners’ idea to land troops in ordinary naval rowing boats. Towards the end of the conference Edward was asked what he thought of the idea. To which he replied, that if the beach was properly defended then not many men would get ashore. In a lightbulb moment, he proposed an alternative – to specially prepare an ordinary ship to enable it to come right on to the beach and then disembark the men by gangways from their protected quarters within. This was too radical for the meeting, which returned to the rowing boat plan. Having thought his idea had been filed in the bin, Edward was afterwards summoned by Wemyss, who had seen the idea’s potential, and told to take any ship in the harbour and adapt it to carry out his plan.

The ship he chose, which went on to become the subject of newspaper articles, jigsaw puzzles and six Victoria Crosses, was an old collier, the SS River Clyde. Despite being in one crewman’s words ‘the dirtiest ship I’ve seen’, the River Clyde was, according to Edward, the only ship in harbour with enough space between decks to carry the required amount of troops. She was also sturdy and in good working order. The fitting-out proceeded rapidly. Edward’s priorities were: to make the ship into a machine-gun armed fortress which would get men right up to the beach; to carry 700 tons of water for immediate use plus a distillation plant for ongoing supplies, and to provide a shelter for immediate treatment of the wounded.

His scheme was to cut four sally ports in each side of the hull, each large enough to pass a fully-equipped man. From these, rope-slung platforms would run along the ship’s sides towards the bows, from where they angled down to a ‘bridge of boats’ made from decked-over lighters. The lighters would be towed alongside the River Clyde until landing, then hauled into position by a flat-bottomed steam barge (the Argyle) and made fast ashore. The Argyle had a hinged ramp fitted to its front to lower onto the beach. Dry boots all round. The key to success was deception and speed. The River Clyde wasn’t a warship, P&O colours were painted on the starboard side (the nearer side to the beach), and it would just keep on steaming until it ran aground. Hopefully the defenders would be taken by surprise, and the charge of disgorging troops would overwhelm them before they could mount an effective defence.

Edward was the plan’s architect and project manager, as well as the ship’s commanding officer. He was described by a contemporary as ‘over 6 feet…broad in proportion…with a voice that roars orders through a megaphone, causing those who are ordered to jump about a good deal quicker…‘ Wemyss described Edward as ‘always cheery…at his best when there is real hard work’. It seems that at 51 years old Edward was an experienced and worldly officer, brought up to the hard knocks of merchant marine, and exactly the right sort of person to carry the job through by force of personal authority.

And the plan worked. At least as far as 5am on 25th April, 1915, when the River Clyde with Edward commanding from its bridge was spearheading the allied assault fleet on Cape Helles. Between the decks were some 2,000 soldiers of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, West Riding Field Engineers, 89th Field Ambulance and two companies of 2nd Battalion, Hampshire Regiment, which latter almost certainly had some of our local lads among its number. Crewing the machine guns on deck were fifty or so men from the Royal Naval Armoured Car Division. The River Clyde’s landing point was V Beach, Sedd-el-Bahr, under the ramparts of an ancient fort.

But the scheme was not without faults, none of which Edward could do anything about. First, the Turkish were not going to be taken by surprise, far from it. They were both expecting and ready for an assault, and beach defences were being thickened. Second, there was no reliable information about the shoreline, or how the beach shelved. Edward just had to hope that he wouldn’t ground until he was within shore-reach of the barge and lighters. Third, there was no time for full rehearsals. The best that could be achieved was to show the troops to their positions and demonstrate the sally ports. Everything would have to work right first time.

Of course, it didn’t. The high command hadn’t based their entire strategy on the River Clyde. It was just an experiment and the planners had indeed continued with their rowing boat preference. As the River Clyde made its final approach, six strings of rowing boats containing the 1st Dublin Fusiliers were towed in by steam launches and then began rowing the final 100 yards. At the same time, Navy warships began to bombard the Turkish defences, which was noisy but ineffective. Fired on a flat trajectory, most of the shells just skimmed across the trenches without exploding. The Dublins were meant to land first, but were delayed by their cumbersome boarding process and an adverse current. To maintain the sequence the River Clyde had to circle, losing almost all speed in the process, and shivered aground 80 yards off the beach, at 6.25 am.

At this point the defenders opened fire, concentrating on the rowing boats. The troops that reached shallow water and leaped overboard became snarled in underwater barbed wire entanglements. Edward watched the Dublins being slaughtered, helpless in the confines of their boats or snagged on wire. Meanwhile, the Argyle was supposed to tow the lighters from the River Clyde’s port side, and bridge the gap between bows and beach. Unfortunately the Argyle’s six Greek crewmen decided not to co-operate, reversed the engines and fled below decks. The Argyle and its lighters began to drift away.

Meanwhile, the Munsters had exited through the sally ports and were crowding the gangways, in anticipation of the bridge’s timely deployment. They were also being shot down. In just a few minutes Edward’s plan was becoming tragically undone, a nightmare, which his sense of duty and responsibility found unbearable. In his own words:

‘I dashed over the side and got hold of the lighters which I had been towing astern and which had shot ahead by their impetus when we took the beach. We got them connected to the bows and then proceeded to connect them to the beach, but we had nothing to secure to, so we had to hold on to the rope ourselves. When we had got the lighters close enough to the shore, I sung out to the troops to come out’.

In short, he jumped overboard into bullet-flecked water and by muscle power alone attempted to do the work of the steamboat. He forgets to mention that he had to return on board, frozen, where he was wrapped in blankets until he could go back in, against doctor’s orders, to complete the job. He was nipped three times in the face by bullet splinters. In doing this he was accompanied by crewman Able Seaman William Williams, who was shot dead. Their efforts allowed the Munsters to reach shore, all the while lashed by fire. It was absolute mayhem, and although the RNAS machine guns blazed away attempting to suppress the enemy, wave after wave of soldiers were mown down. The beach was a slaughterhouse and the landing stalled.

Edward had collapsed from exhaustion after his time in the water, but seeing the carnage on shore he plunged in again and waded through the surf to organise a lifeboat for the wounded, who were attempting to shelter around a spit of rocks. In his own words again:

‘As the moanings of the wounded lying on the reef under our starboard bow were more than I could stand I got a boat under the starboard quarter as far from the enemy as I could get and, taking a spare coil of rope with me, I got some hands to pay out a rope fast to the stern of the pinnace I was in, and paddled and punted her into the beach, eventually grounding alongside the wounded. They were all soaking wet and very heavy but I cut off their accoutrements with their bayonets or knives and carried two or three into the pinnace. But as her side was rather high out of the water I’m afraid they were not too gingerly put on board, but still they were very grateful. I could not pick up any more so I got on my hands and knees and they got on to my back and I crawled along to the pinnace’.

In other words, he crawled along a beach carrying wounded men on his back, under fire. The most incredible thing isn’t that he did this once, but made three more trips. A witness said that he was ‘standing in the water with a wounded man on his shoulders, lifting him out of the water, in to a boat’. Edward’s leadership encouraged others, and he was joined by more rescuers from his crew. After a fourth trip Edward said he was ‘feeling a bit dicky’. At this point he was forced to stop through physical exhaustion.

The landings were suspended until darkness, at which time more troops poured ashore and established a beachhead. Edward was awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage that day, as were five other crew members; Sub-Lt Arthur Tisdall, Able Seaman William Williams, Seaman George Samson, Midshipman George Drewry and Midshipman Wilfred Malleson. Of the soldiers on board River Clyde, Lt-Col Charles Doughty-Wylie and Cpl Cosgrove both received VCs for their actions later in the battle.

The River Clyde remained on V Beach, as a quay and breakwater. Her holds became a field dressing station. In 1919 she was refloated and taken to Malta. For decades she served as a tramp steamer and was scrapped in 1966.

The story of courage upon River Clyde quickly became a legend. It sprung countless newspaper articles and paintings, including a jigsaw puzzle and a portrait of Edward on a cigarette card. Edward continued his naval service at Gallipoli. In August 1915, for another landing, he was in command of the landing boats at Suvla Bay. Then he was back in December as Naval Transport Officer for the evacuation. He was in the last boat to leave the beach at Suvla. On this occasion a soldier went overboard and Edward promptly jumped in to rescue him. So his time at Gallipoli ended as it began – wet and freezing.

Edward stayed with the Navy throughout the war, eventually retiring properly with the rank of Captain in 1920. He settled for a while in Cheltenham, with his wife Evelyn, who he had married in 1897, and their family. Then at Ashbourne Derbyshire, until 1936, after which they moved to Ling Cottage in Crossways Road. Grayshott and Hindhead were popular places for old jacks to moor up, being mid-way between Portsmouth and the Admiralty. Ling Cottage is gone now, but it was up near Mowatt Road. At that time Kingswood Firs was still the semi-natural ornamental wood and heath of James Mowatt’s old estate, and would have been a beautiful and peaceful backdrop to the Unwins’ final berth.

Edward seems to have maintained his retirement through WW2. However, he must have been closely in touch with military matters – it’s said that he was friendly with Winston Churchill. Edward had first-hand experience of the most difficult of all military operations – an amphibious mass landing on a defended coastline. He would surely have been aware of the pre D-Day build up of troops in the local camps, and the A3 was heaving with convoys of tanks and trucks heading for the embarkation ports. General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, made his HQ at Southwick, beneath Portsdown Hill. Even closer, at Amesbury School, just over the road and within a comfortable megaphone hail from Ling Cottage, was General Montgomery’s Rear HQ, where he made his final plans for D-Day. It seems very unlikely that these HQs wouldn’t have consulted a VC-holding amphibious landing veteran on their doorstep. So many lessons from the River Clyde informed the preparations and precautions of 29 years later – the need for detailed beach reconnaissance and mapping, deception schemes, specially modified troop-carriers, rapid disembarkation and the ad-hoc drawbridge on Argyle which foresaw the ramped landing craft of D-Day. Even the use of River Clyde as a post-assault jetty was recycled into the Mulberry portable harbours. I suspect that Edward pored over the newspaper reports of June 6th 1944 and had a sense that nothing much is truly new, except for scale.

In 1941 he was asked to vouch for the good character of a neighbour, Edward ‘Buster’ Garner of Beech Cottage, Crossways, to help him into the Navy. Buster had been in the local Home Guard and it seems that he’d rubbed the CO up the wrong way, because the latter sent a damning report on the lad to the recruiting office. Buster’s mum knew Edward and asked him to write a recommendation of good character. Needless to say, the word of a VC outranked that of a Dad’s Army officer and Buster was in!

Evelyn died in 1948 and rests in St Luke’s. Edward passed away on 19th April 1950, aged 86, and joined her there. His family have loaned Edward’s medal group to the Imperial War Museum and his full entitlements are: Victoria Cross (VC); Companion of the Most Honourable Order of Bath (CB); Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael & St George (CMG); East and West Africa Medal, Benin Clasp; Queen’s South Africa Medal, 1914-15 Star, British War Medal; Victory Medal; Officer, Legion of Honour; Order of the Nile, King George VI Coronation Medal.

If you’re interested to know more about the context and after-story of River Clyde then The Wooden Horse of Gallipoli by Stephen Snelling is highly recommended.

JC, December 2023.

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Madame fanny Warr, Shopkeeper

Madame Fanny Warr is one of Edwardian Grayshott’s most fascinating shopkeepers, not just for her suggestively exotic name but because she was one of the village’s most successful traders and prolific self-publicists. We were curious, so we made a little expedition into the archives to see what we could find. Would she be a Francine, Françoise, Fabienne, Fernande ….. Did she grace the salons of the Champs-Élysées; was she perhaps a beauty of La Belle Époque, or did her creations grace the élégante of Antibes?

Nope. She was baptised as Fanny Mallett in 1848, the penultimate of nine children to Mary and John of Hadley Green in Hertfordshire, near Barnet. So that’s one mystery quickly solved – not French. John was a miller of corn in the village windmill, so she was just plain Fanny, the miller’s daughter. Luckily her faux-Frenchness turns out to be one of the less interesting parts of her story.

Nowadays Hadley is almost but not quite absorbed into suburban north London, just by its fingernails clinging to the edge of countryside. In Fanny’s childhood it was entirely rural – her dad’s mill was on the village green, amidst a handful of spring-fed ponds, the church, a brewery, village school, stocks. As tenants of the mill rather than its owner, and with eleven mouths to be fed, we can imagine that her childhood was perhaps not povertous but pretty spartan.

By the age of 13 Fanny was living in London with her uncle, James Allsop, another miller. Her older sister Mary was also living with Uncle James, as his servant. It was quite common for big families to disperse spare children around the extended family, and it seems that Fanny was being well cared for (or at least trained to be useful) because she was at school at a time when most girls of her age would have been sent to work, and education usually had to be paid for. Uncle James turns out to be a bit of a character and instrumental in Fanny’s business success in Grayshott, so we’ll have a quick detour to look at him. This is a good moment to have a look at Fanny’s family tree, below.

James was born in 1823 in Hampstead, again with many siblings, and as a young boy he went to sea, only nine years old. He obviously had some precocious adventures because ten years later he was back in London, at the Dreadnought Seaman’s Hospital, being treated for something rather nasty. Undeterred, upon discharge from hospital he returned to sea, touching land for long enough to father two children but without finding time to marry their mum (who seems to have already had a husband and family anyway). He acknowledged these children – they carried his surname – and the younger, William Edward, become part of his family. By 1855 James seems to have settled to working as a baker and miller at City Basin on the Regent’s Canal. At this time he entered Fanny’s story by marrying her aunt – her mother’s sister, Sarah Fullwood. He soon dropped the baking and became a full-time mill operator. We next hear of him in 1871 as miller employing nine men, living in ‘the house on Stanley Bridge’ in Chelsea. His mill was across the river at Wandsworth, Lower or Causeway Mill, standing at the confluence of the Wandle with the Thames.

This is where we re-join Fanny. In 1871 she and Mary were both still with their Uncle James, by now in their twenties and working as his clerks. Also in the house were Sarah, William Edward (also a miller) and three other employees. Wandsworth and western Chelsea were both industrial areas at this time. The area immediately around the Allsop HQ was largely given over to market gardens and nurseries, and its greenery may have somewhat consoled country-girl Fanny who was by now far removed from her childhood windmill, village green and ponds. But the wider area was grim, industrial, Victorian London – polluted, smelly and dirty. A railway, gasworks, chemical works, oil & grease works and coal wharves all added to the perfumed ambience of the sewage-laden Thames.

James operated the mill in partnership with his brother-in-law George Fullwood. It seems that the Fullwoods and Malletts were milling families and James married into the trade. It was a tide mill, meaning that it was driven from water collected in a reservoir which filled at high tide and emptied via the mill’s wheels at low. It was an ancient method and of low efficiency yet it seems to earn enough money to establish James in some comfortable degree of wealth.

In 1874 Fanny married one Thomas Henry Warr, clerk and son of a farmer. They set up home in Wandsworth, beside the Osier Grounds next to James’ mill. There were several areas along that part of the Thames riverside where osiers – willows – were grown for basket-making. Thomas abandoned clerking and worked as a dairyman. In the way of Victorians, Fanny soon started producing their own copious crop of children – James Henry, Richard David, Berthia, Mary, Anne, Augusta, Charles and the magnificently named William Allsop Cetawayo Warr. The real Cetawayo was king of the Zulu Kingdom who’d visited London the year before William’s birth, when his gentle and dignified manner had been a hit with the British public, including Fanny it would seem.

Meanwhile there had been another romance in the air at Stanley Bridge, between James’ son and Fanny’s sister – William Edward and Mary. They married in 1875 at the Samuel Morcoms Temperance Hotel in Adelaide, Australia. It seems a long way to go – perhaps an elopement? The sense of a family rift is underlined when, following Mary’s death soon after outputting three little Australian Allsops, William Edward returned to England with the children, and re-joined the family firm. William and Mary were sort-of-cousins, not related by blood, only through James’ marriage to Mary’s aunt. As marriage between true cousins was common in Victorian times their union should not have raised eyebrows too far, but maybe it caused a problem between Fanny and Mary?

James did well enough to retire before his 60th birthday. He too relocated to Wandsworth, to Point Pleasant, also beside the Osier Grounds. One gets the impression that Fanny was still very much living under his wing – they were next-door neighbours, virtually an extended family. Point Pleasant though was considerably unpleasant, next to a mainline railway, surrounded by more factories for chemicals, dyes, and coal-gas, and hard up against the dank river and mudflats.

The story started to move in our direction in 1884. Then, without having given up his house in Wandsworth, James was living at Deadwater Hill, Headley, it seems with two of his grandchildren as trustees. He’d also bought a plot at Hazel Grove in Pitfold. At some time he built a pair of cottages in Beech Hill Road, Headley (they’re still there, now called Allsopps) and took 42 plots at the Deadwater allotments. It looks like, along with many other well-off Londoners at this period, he fancied spending at least some of his retirement as a part-time countryman away from urban smoke and grime.

Then, it all went wrong for Fanny. 1885 found her in Hindhead, where her and Thomas’ final child Augusta was born, and died as an infant. Perhaps she was living at Uncle James’ place in Hazel Grove.  It seems that some time after 1884 Thomas Warr did a runner. He popped up in Ealing, alone, in 1886. Later in life he called himself a widower and re-married, Fanny still being very much alive. She also from then on described herself as a widow. It appears that their marriage had foundered. It was virtually impossible for an ordinary woman to get a divorce in 19th century Britain. She not only had to prove that her husband was unfaithful, but moreover that her life was in danger from his violent actions. Most people didn’t bother, they just parted under a fictional bereavement. It seems likely that Fanny had moved down this way to put some distance from Thomas, to make a new start in her supposed widowhood.

By 1891 Fanny was living in Bramshott with her children James Henry, Berthia, Anne, Cetaweyo and Gordon. Richard David was away boarding at Hampton Wick Boys School. They were at Old Thorn near Weaver’s Down, which we may know as a country hotel but then was just a regular old farmhouse. Fanny was a needleworker, traditionally a low-paid job of last resort for single mums with children to feed.

There was one less mouth for her to feed after 1893, when James Henry married his true cousin Sarah Ida Allsop, one of the Australian children of Fanny’s sister and William Allsop. The wedding was in Petersfield, and it seems that Sarah Ida was living locally with her granddad, old James. His wife Sarah died at Hindhead in 1895, aged 80, and was buried at St Mary’s, Bramshott. It does appear that the residential focus of the Allsop/Warr tribe had settled in the Bramshott/Hindhead/Headley area.

Then a funny thing occured. In 1898 Fanny wrote to Rev CH Keable at Wrecclesham asking him to buy her needlework.

‘A little longer then what I have been struggling for all these years will be accomplished (the bringing up of my large family by needlework etc). I often look back and wonder I have got this far without income, health, husband or anything that other people have to fall back on; and do feel I have stuck to them through great difficulties’.

She was asking for custom, not begging for money, and no doubt wrote similar letters to nearby parishes. This is where we can first sense her determination – a woman of fifty, seemingly deserted by her husband, and desperate to keep her family together.

Which begs the question – Where was Uncle James when Fanny needed a hand? And who was paying Richard David’s school fees? Whatever it was that caused Fanny so much difficulty in 1898 was resolved the year after when Uncle James died, on 6th January 1899. It’s said that he died on the railway. We can’t find any reference to a train crash, and we wonder if perhaps, aged 76 amidst a winter pea-souper, he wandered onto the tracks close by his Wandsworth house and met his fate.

Whatever happened, his estate was valued at £13,100 2s 2d. That’s equivalent to about £1.4 million today! He’d continued to buy properties, including the Old Rectory at Stone Kent. He left it to Sarah Ida and James Henry, plus enough on top to allow them to live off their own means. William Edward stayed in Wandsworth and became a wharf owner, at the mouth of the Wandle down from his dad’s old mill. Best of all for us, old James left his niece Fanny enough money to start up her own business in Grayshott.

That was the moment when everything came together for her. Working for Uncle James had taught her how to run a business; through needlework she had at least the start of a customer and supplier network, and her children became a workforce. In Grayshott she found a new community with a boom-town commercial mindset and she wasted no time. By 1900 she was established in Victoria Terrace, Crossways Road, selling a variety of fancy goods and stationary. David, Berthia, Chetawayo and Charles all worked for her, a family business. She had three adjoining premises, and advertised as a draper, bookseller and stationer.

Fanny also claimed to have been patronised by Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales. That may have been Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes of Teck, until she became Mary, queen consort as wife of George V. We’ve not found a source for Fanny’s claim, but it might not be unrelated that George and Mary were popular monarchs to the people of Grayshott, who commemorated them with three trees around the village centre. We’d love to find that the princess really did nip in to Fanny’s for the occasional hat or newspaper.

Her empire continued to expand. By 1906 she was also in Marathon House in Headley Road (now Frankie’s Fish & Chips), which had a ceramics gallery upstairs and had become home to the extended family. She had a fifth outlet in Beacon Hill.

Fanny died in March 1915, age 66, and is buried in St Lukes. She’d had a remarkable journey through life, from the miller’s daughter via Victorian industrial London and rural poverty to become a successful, self-employed businesswoman and (allegedly) supplier to royalty. We can hope that she’d achieved what she had ‘been struggling for all these years’, to see her family well set up and flourishing. Chetawayo continued the draper and outfitter’s business in Marathon for many decades, assisted by his sister Berthia. He passed away in 1984 at the wonderful age of 101 years.

JC, December 2023.

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Henry and Hannah Robinson, Shopkeepers

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