A Sparshott journey

My husband’s family name is Sparshott… there aren’t many of them about and most Sparshotts come from Hampshire, my husband’s family from Portsea. While researching his family I came across another family of Sparshotts who, in 1841, were living in the saddest of circumstances.

Henry and Mary Sparshott were living with their one year old daughter in a workhouse in Farringdon Hampshire. Henry had been born in Winchester to Thomas and Martha Sparshott in 1814, but he had married Mary Haynes in Churchill, Oxfordshire in 1838. Henry and Mary had lived in London where their daughter Henrietta was born in 1840.

However, by the time of the next census in 1851, the family’s situation had changed radically – for the better! Henry was now a licensed victualer and cooper (barrel maker) and he and Mary had four more children, Thomas, William, Fanny and Edward and they were living in Alton. They had moved some time in the previous two years to Alton, a pretty little Hampshire town, famous for its hops and barley and its maltings (where malt is made from the barley) It would have been a good place for a man like Henry to ply his trades as a victualer and as a cooper. The Coors brewery company still produces Carling, Grolsch and Worthington there.

Henry must have worked hard, and he prospered; in 1861 he is still a cooper and now able to employ his son Tom to help him. The family have moved back to Winchester where Henry was born, Will is a grocer’s assistant, Henrietta is a mantle maker and Fanny is at home, probably helping her mother. Edward sadly died in 1857, aged only eight.

By 1871 Henry and Mary are living in Jewry street, a very pleasant part of the city of Winchester; Henrietta and William are still at home and they have little Jane Pearce aged sixteen as a servant girl to help around the home. It was here that Mary died in 1875, and Henry in 1879, in greater comfort and wealth than in their earlier lives.

So what happened to their children Thomas became a chaplain; he wasn’t at home in 1871 because he was in the Seychelles with his wife Margaret, a Scottish woman five years his senior. By 1881 he was the personal chaplain to the Marquis of Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) in Nantwich, Cheshire – not bad for the son of a workhouse pauper! They have four children, Margaret (born in the Seychelles) Henrietta (born in Scotland) and Matthew and William (born in Norfolk)

In 1891 widowed Thomas has married Laura who is twenty years younger than he is , only a couple of years older than his eldest daughter Margaret, of whom I will write more later. His two boys are at a boarding school in Halifax, and Henrietta seems to have disappeared. Thomas and Laura have four children of their own, Tom, Nelly and twins Ernest and Roland. His son William is also living with them at their home in Wimbledon.

In 1911 Thomas is still a clergyman and the family has grown, living at home is their eldest son Tom and daughter Nelly, but also Charles, Clare, and Rosalie, (another child had died in infancy) At some point Thomas and Laura move to Hastings where he dies in 1927 aged 85, and she dies in 1939, aged 77.

If we return to Henrietta, the little girl we first met in Farringdon workhouse, aged 1, she,like her brother has an extraordinary change in fortune. She married a widower Charles Johnson who also lived in Winchester, in 1875 when she was thirty-five. He was an accountant and already had a big family, Amelia, Agnes, Charles, Frederick, George, Edward, Alfred and Herbert living at home with him, and another three Henry, Ellen and Emily who had left home… all by his Irish wife Anne from Cork who had sadly died. Henrietta gives him another four children, Thomas, Lucy, Henrietta and Arthur which he supports by working as a house agent and collector of rates and taxes. Their son, Thomas, like his uncle Thomas also becomes a theology student.

Charles died in 1912, aged 79, Henrietta, née Sparshott, died in 1918, the widow of a wealthy accountant. What a journey she had made in her life, from total poverty to the comfort of wealth.