The Riches of Cley
We visited St. Margaret's church in Cley-Next-the-Sea back in November 2020 about half an hour after visiting the sea defences which I wrote about in a previous entry. It is a surprisingly big church for a smallish village and is testament to the financial riches that Cley enjoyed when it functioned as a harbour around the time that the Church was built (1320–1340).
There is a lot to admire about St. Margaret's church and there must be many stories to tell about the building and it's history. On this visit, my attention was drawn to a cluster of gravestones toward the back of the church. As I scanned the inscriptions on the stones, I noticed that six of them had the same surname: "Riches".
I mentioned the Riches patch in St. Margaret's graveyard as I chatted to a genealogist (my dad) about our visit to Cley. Based on nothing but the photo that I emailed him, Dad has been able to follow a sometimes misty trail of clues to piece together a history of the Riches going back almost 300 years. The rest of this entry is the story that he discovered.
You may be able to make out from the photo that some of the dates on the stones are from the 1800s. The UK's Births and Deaths Registration Act was passed in 1836 and didn't come into effect until 1837 which means that, for most individuals born before then, the details on the gravestones provide the best information about them. Fortunately for me, Dad was aware of crowd-sourced web sites such as www.gravestonephotos.com where volunteers can submit gravestone photos so that other volunteers can index the details of the inscription. Their hard work has resulted in an invaluable database that Dad could query for the surname "Riches". He found six:
| Name | Born | Buried | Age | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | John Riches | 1734 | 1794 | 60 | |
| 2. | William1 Riches | 1767 | 1844 | 77 | |
| Mary Riches | 1772 | 1838 | 66 | wife of William1 | |
| 3. | William2 Riches | 1798 | 1872 | 74 | |
| Harriet Riches | 1823 | 1838 | 15 | daughter of William2 | |
| Mary Ann Riches | 1801 | 1833 | 32 | wife of William2 | |
| 4. | George1 Riches | 1828 | 1900 | 72 | builder of Cromer |
| Charlotte Brown (Riches) | 1827 | 1900 | 73 | beloved wife (of George1) | |
| 5. | Mary Riches | 1866 | daughter of George1 and Charlotte Riches | ||
| John William Riches | |||||
| 6. | Edmund Walter Riches | 1857 | 1896 | 39 | son of George1 and Charlotte |
He notes: I have been unable to trace any records (other than the gravestones) for John Riches or William1 Riches (b.1767) but I think it likely that they are the grandfather and father, respectively of William2 Riches (b, 1798).
When he put the information from the gravestones together with what he could find from the census, a fascinating timeline emerged:
1798
William2 Riches was born in 1798 in Runton. He married Mary Anne and in 1823 they had a daughter, Harriet. In 1826, a son James, was born and in 1828 their son George1 was born.
1833
Mary Ann dies in 1833, aged 33 and Harriet died in 1838, aged 15. Both are buried at Cley.
1841
William2 is recorded as living at Runton with James and George1. Both William2 and James are bricklayers.
1849
George1 marries Charlotte Brown Capeman (nee Turner) at Cromer. Charlotte is recorded as being a widow. She was baptised at Hereford in 1825 together with her brother Edward Swann Turner and sister Sarah Francis Turner. (It was not uncommon at this time for a family of children to be baptised at the same time). Their parents were John Mantel Turner and Sarah Ann Turner.
1851
George1 and Charlotte are living in Church Street, Cromer together with Georges’s father, William2. George1 is a master carpenter employing 5 men and William2 is a master bricklayer (also shown as employing 5 men).
July 1st, a daughter, Mary is born to George1 and Charlotte.
1861
George1, Charlotte and William2 are still living in Cromer. Three sons have been born. John W., aged 7 (b.1853), George2, aged 5 (b.1856) and Edmund (b. 1857). All three are recorded as being scholars. George is a master carpenter employing 2 men and William is a bricklayer and also a boat owner. At the time of the Census, it looks as though Mary was visiting the family of Frederick Hawkes, the publican of the Kings Head at Cley. She is shown as being a scholar.
1866
Mary dies, aged 15, and is buried on July 20th at Cley.
1871
The family is still resident in Cromer. George1 is a master carpenter employing 3 men and 2 boys. John and George2 are recorded as being carpenter’s sons and Edmund as being a scholar. William2 is a bricklayer (employing 3 men and 2 boys) and is also a farmer of 10 acres.
1872
William2 dies, aged 74, and is buried at Cley in the same grave as his wife, Mary Anne and daughter Harriet.
1877
George2 Riches (b, 1856) marries Elizabeth Read Watts at South Lynn. Elizabeth was born in 1871, her parents are John and Ann, her father is a builder, and they lived at Windsor Road, South Lynn.
1878
John W. dies and is buried at Cley on 23rd October.
1881
The residents at Church Street, Cromer are George1, Charlotte and Edmund W. George1 is now described as a builder and an employer of 17 men and 5 boys. Edmund is a music student.
George2 and Elizabeth are living at Pump Street, Cromer. They have two sons – Walter J., (aged 2) and Archibald G. (aged 1), both born in Cromer.
1889
Edmund marries Lydia Miller, aged 20. Lydia was born at Kings Lynn, the daughter of William (a seaman) and Jane Miller.
George and Charlotte are by themselves at Cromer but with a domestic servant, Agnes Thornton, aged 20.
George2 and Elizabeth are living at ‘Glencoe’, Norwich Road, Cromer together with their children Walter, Percy (aged 5), and Gladys (aged 2) plus two domestic servants and 8 boarders. George is described as being a Builder’s Manager.
Edmund and Lydia are living with Lydia’s mother at South Lynn. Edmund is a clerk.
1896
Edmund Walter Riches dies in 1896 and is buried at Cley on 17th January.
1900
George1 Riches dies on 1st February and is buried on 5th February at Cley. Charlotte survives George1 by only 3 weeks and is buried in the same grave on February 27th.
1901
George2 and Elizabeth are living at 8, Church Street, Cromer with their children Percy (15), Gladys (12), Karl (7), Alan (5), and Donald (3), two cousins, a boarder and 4 domestic servants including a nurse and a governess. George2 is described as being a Builder).
1911
George2 and Elizabeth have moved to ‘The Burlington’, Sheringham. George2 is still described as being a builder but Elizabeth is a Boarding House Keeper. Two of their children are still with them. Gladys is a boarding house clerk and Karl is a poultry farmer. In addition, there are 16 boarders, 9 members of staff and a hospital nurse who is recorded as being a servant. (The Burlington is still on the Esplanade at Sheringham). The Census return also records that Elizabeth had given birth to 8 children of which only 5 were still living.
The building trade endures through at least three generations passing down from William2 to George1 and then to his son George2. The family grows in stature as their building expertise develops from bricklayer to master bricklayer William2 and master carpenter George1. The fact that they have a patch of the graveyard to themselves suggests that they had some influence in the village and George1's ornate stone shows that he must have accumulated wealth during his life.
A few of the Riches lived into their seventies which was a good age for that time. It is sad to read of so many early deaths within the family but the numbers are probably fairly typical for the period coming, as it did, before antibiotics had been introduced.
Reading a little into the birth, marriage and death dates, it seems that William2's marriage to Mary Anne was a devoted one. Though he survived her by 39 years, he never remarried and was buried with her and their daughter Harriet. George1 and Charlotte's marriage lasted 51 years and the fact that Charlotte died so soon after George1 is another indication of an ardent bond between them. The stone inscription "beloved wife" seems to confirm this.
It must have been a puzzle for Dad to find no record of Mary in the Riches household in the 1861 census. Mary had just been born in the previous census and she lived until 1866 so where was the 10 year old Mary? Finding her visiting a friend in the Kings Head pub was a great piece of detective work and helps us to imagine the lives of the family and their interactions with other villagers.
It is interesting that, despite George1 having lived at least the last 49 of his 72 years in Cromer, he was still buried in Cley along with Charlotte who seems to have lived her whole life in Cromer.
George1's youngest son Edmund followed a slightly different path. He, along with his brothers John W. (7) and George (5) and sister Mary (10) is listed as a scholar in the 1861 census despite being only four at the time! Edmund was still a scholar at 14 and became a music student at some point over the next ten years. He was still living with his parents at 24 but, at 32, after his marriage to 20 year old Lydia Miller, he moved in with his wife and mother-in-law in South Lynn. In Lynn, Edmund worked as a clerk but only lived for a further seven years. He too returned to Cley to be buried.
Edmund's brother George2 seems to have had more success by following in the family tradition of building. George2, working under the title builder's manager and Elizabeth working as a boarding house keeper eventually had nine staff working for them at The Burlington boarding house in Sheringham. After giving birth to eight children Elizabeth still found the energy to manage up to 16 boarders. Sadly only five of those children survived their early years. The Burlington operated as a hotel on Sheringham's esplanade until it went up for sale in 2015. The buyers converted it into flats.
I am hugely grateful for all the research that Dad did to discover this story and also to the conscientious volunteers who contribute to gravestonephotos.com and similar resources that put such a wealth of information at our fingertips.
I like to add a music link for each entry to the site. Can I suggest We Are Family by Sister Sledge as the soundtrack to the Riches?
Comments
Post a Comment