Foreward

This account of some members of the Sturge family is written for the occasion of the 1980 “Pilgrimage.” I hope it may be of special interest to the younger generation, who are now so numerous and scattered that they no longer hear the old stories about their forebears on which some of us were brought up.

It is not the story of the whole family, which has many ramifications, but of the “seven Josephs,” father to son, and of the Birmingham branch, the Sturges who later lived at 17 Frederick Road in Edgbaston.

The seventh Joseph had no children, but there are great-nephews and others who carry his name. The fact that the Sturges are so well documented, though they never owned great estates and can claim only one well-known public figure, is due to them having been Quakers - as are many of them today. The Quakers were very troublesome to the authorities at times, but their honesty and good faith were never in question. They were unbaptised, and when their own burial grounds were unavailable some were refused Christian burial. From the 17th century their marriages were recognised as lawful provided they took place openly before witnesses. Meticulous records were therefore kept, in a way found only among the nobility or the landed gentry outside the Society of Friends.

Some of our ancestors may seem harsh and self-righteous. But their beliefs and their Quaker principles meant everything to them, and it is hard for us to imagine the pressures under which they with many others contrived to keep their small Society in being. This helps to explain their single mindedness and occasional rigidity.

I have drawn on a detailed manuscript book compiled by Charles Dickinson Sturge, who died in 1915 aged 82. I am particularly grateful to Edward Milligan, Librarian of Friends’ House, for his help and advice, and also to Dr. David Eversley. I am indebted to my cousin Peter Marshall Sturge for his co-operation; he has studied and written about his own branch of the family, and his daughters belong to the thirteenth generation in direct line from Thomas, father of “Joseph the First.”

Thomas of Gaunts Earthcott

If you travel south from Gloucester and follow the signpost to Gaunts Earthcott, near the Severn Bridge, you will come upon an attractive old manor house, at present at restaurant. Carved on this house you will read “T.S.” and the date 1605. This was the home of Thomas, the first Sturge of whom there is evidence. It is said that his father was John Sturge, or Sturridge in the local dialect, lord of the manor of Frampton Cotterell in the mid-sixteenth century, but Thomas is our first certain ancestor.

The Sturges were yeoman farmers and graziers in the Vale of Gloucester, farming their own land, which was some of the richest in the country, or holding it on renewable leases from the Corporation of Bristol.

The Gaunts Earthcott manor was part of a monastic estate granted to the city by Henry VIII after the dissolution of the monasteries.

Joseph the First

Thomas was the father of Joseph, who also lived at Gaunts Earthcott and was laid to rest in the Hazel burial ground in 1669. Joseph joined Friends “at their first appearance” and was repeatedly and heavily fined, as his descendants were to be, for refusing to pay tithes to the Church. He had six sons: William, Joseph, Henry, Thomas, Nathan and James.

All we know of Henry, apart from the fact that he had a great-grandson “remarkable for his strength, who used to carry coal to Bristol,” is that he seems to have been the first of the occasional “musical Sturges.” One of his descendants, for instance, was accompanied to his funeral by the Bristol City Band, of which he was a member. Another became a well-known maker of violins. Henry’s son, grandson and one of his great-grandsons each bore the name Joseph.

We know rather more about Thomas, a farmer who lived at Olveston Court in the same Thornbury area. He was “remarkably long from the waist down, so that when on horseback he was compared to a pair of tongs bestride the horse. He was noted for sagacity and industry, having saved money while living with his father by catching moles and by hatching magpies, crows, ravens, etc. under chickens and afterwards bringing them up by hand.” Many future Sturges, incidentally, were keen ornithologists.

But the most interesting member of this generation of the family was James’ wife Elizabeth, who became a Quaker in 1654 when she was about twenty. “The fell upon me another great exercise” she recorded, “to leave my habitation to go to King Charles.” In 1670 she wrote him an outspoken address about the persecution Quakers were enduring, and included the strong words “As thou hast been the cause of making many desolate, so will the Lord lay thee desolate.” This testimony she “delivered into his hands with the words “Hear, Oh King, fear the Lord God of Heaven and Earth.” Paleness came in his face and with a mournful voice the king said, “I thank you, good woman.” Elizabeth went unpunished; when she and James, who was a shoemaker, were imprisoned later it was for unlawful assembly.

Apparently there were Sturges in London at this time. We read that William, son of John and Elizabeth Sturge of East Smithfield, was buried at the church of St. Botolph, Aldgate, in 1659.

Joseph the Second

The second Joseph, who died in 1710, lived first at Gaunts Earthcott and later at Littleton near Aust. He and his wife Barbara Williams had four children. In his Will, signed with “X his mark,” he left the Manor House to his younger son Caleb (who lived in fact in a house nearby,) “other grounds” to his son Joseph, five shillings to his daughter Mary (who had four successive husbands) and £5 and his best bed - reminding us of Shakespeare - to his daughter Elizabeth. In “Besse’s Collection of the Sufferings of the Quakers” Elizabeth Sturge is described as having been sent to a prison reformatory with twenty-two others in 1682 for “refusing to deposit a security” because of her faith.

Caleb was an eccentric, “a man who loved to take life easy. Among other occupations which did not meet his taste was chopping wood, and he therefore opened a hole in the back of the kitchen fireplace and passed the end of a log of wood through it, so that by pushing it gradually through he might have a fire without the labour of cutting it up.” He seems to have let his house fall into ruin, and was disowned by Friends for disorderly and unacceptable behaviour.

Joseph the Third 1680 - 1761

Joseph III took over Gaunts Earthcott, that “superior-looking house with gables,” from his father, and his own son Young was to live there until 1772. After that the manor reverted to Bristol Corporation who sold it to defray the costs of riots in the city.

He married Mary Young; of their seven children, six grew up and four lived to a ripe old age. This was by no means typical of the average eighteenth-century family, but one meets it repeatedly in Quaker records. Perhaps plain and healthy living had something to do with it.

He was a successful farmer in spite of frequent confiscation of his property in lieu of tithes, often far in excess of the amount he had refused to pay.

Joseph the Fourth 1722 – 1779

In his later years Joseph IV lived at Olveston Court, which he enlarged on his marriage to Frances Player. It was recorded that he was a man of substance, “residing on his own estate of 100 acres of the richest land in England, and was moreover an Elder in our Society.” An interesting detail is that the draught animals on his farm were oxen, horses for this purpose then being rare.

Joseph was carried home to die after a fall from his horse; sixty years later his son John met the same fate at the age of 75 and was brought back to the same house.

There were nine children, Joseph V being the second. Celia married John Clothier, and the youngest daughter Fanny married Joseph Clark, a farmer of Street in Somerset. Their son Cyrus Clark started making sheepskin rugs, and was joined by his brother James (who lived to be 95) who started making some of the skins into slippers. They founded the famous boot and shoe factory from this small beginning.

Joseph’s eldest son, Thomas, broke with tradition, moved to London and became an “oil leather dresser” in the Old Kent Road. With a son of the same name he went into the sperm-whale fishing industry, which made and lost large sums, and in trading with America is said to have “given three fortunes to the Yankees.” For these speculations, which “occasioned uneasiness to Friends,” he was disciplined by the Southwark Monthly Meeting and “displaced from the station of Elder,” perhaps because he had been an over-zealous disciplinarian among Friends himself. James Clark, writing in 1895, adds: “After his son, also Thomas, took control of the business he enforced the strictest economy, and flour then being very dear he did not allow the consumption of pies and puddings.” He and his brothers worked hard to retrieve the family fortunes and their father died a very wealthy man.

Thomas the younger had a grandson, Adolphus, who married an American and emigrated, thereby founding the U.S.A. branch of the Sturges. [Ed. Sylvia Lewin was in error on this point, Adolphus was descended from Nathan, Thomas’s brother.] In its day the whaling company had chartered a ship for an Antarctic expedition and this resulted in one of the four small islands in the Balleny group being named Sturge Island.

Joseph IV had two other sons, Nathan who never married and Jacob, who fathered the Bristol Sturges. Jacob’s wife was a distant relative of his grandmother and had the same name, Mary Young. Their elder son was Young, who was born in 1781 but had a grandson who died only in 1913, and their other son was Jacob Player Sturge, father of Walter and William who have described him vividly. “JPS” was forthright, genial, untidy and less interested in money than were some Friends; he was also more rigid. He would not let Walter read Racine at school because Racine was a playwright, and he was distressed that his grandchildren were taught music and heard it in their own home. “As children,” Walter wrote, “we were dressed in a juvenile Quaker garb of so peculiar an appearance that I dreaded to walk the streets for fear of the jeering, common in those days. Complaining of this, the only comfort I had from my father was the remark that “it was our duty to suffer persecution for righteousness sake.”

Joseph the Fifth 1752 - 1817

Joseph V lived in the parish of Olveston, farming at Elberton and at Sheepcombe. His first wife was Sarah Sargent, and he wrote that in the four years before she died they “lived together in much love, never having, I believe, evil thought or word against each other.”

In 1787, six years after her death, he married Mary, the only child of Thomas Marshall of Kingley - which was a substantial farmhouse on the Earl of Hertford’s estate. Mary was short and slender and undoubtedly attractive; those of us who have seen her beautiful wedding- dress can picture her as a bride. She had had many admirers, some of whom were mentioned in a long poem written to celebrate - or lament - her marriage. She was “a bright, capable woman, a devoted wife, fond of all outdoor pursuits - she taught her son Charles to swim - and was the “stay” of the family; to her the children looked for guidance and from her they derived their philanthropic qualities and literary taste.” Like other women in the family Mary did much to help poorer Friends.

Joseph in his turn was “a very kind husband: nothing was too good for his wife. New Leaze was a costly house and nothing was too good for it either.” This was the new home to which he retired with Mary towards the end of his life. They had had twelve children but our only glimpse of him as a father is that “he used to call his sons at four o’clock, and if on returning at six he found them still in bed he would say, “Thomas and Joseph, are you going to lie in bed all day long?””

As a farmer, we know that “he rode each Spring into Merionethshire to buy black cattle and into Dorsetshire to purchase sheep. These were fattened in the rich meadows round Olveston and sold off; those being kept through the winter were fed only on hay, roots being then not much grown for cattle. The Merionethshire cattle were very wild, and on their arrival had brass knobs screwed on the tips of their long horns to prevent their goring.”

All but one of the twelve children grew up, their combined lifespans totally 675 years. The eldest, Rebecca, never married; Mary married “a bad man” but had fifteen children. Next came Thomas Marshall, a respected wool-stapler in Olveston who later joined his brothers’ firm of corn merchants, working for them in Gloucester. He was “a large, powerfully-made man, full of information and generally popular, though having strong prejudices.” He married Hannah Enoch, and it was one of their sons, another Joseph, who emigrated and established the New Zealand Sturges with his own eight children.

Joseph VI and Charles are described later. Sophia kept house for Joseph except during his marriage; she was perhaps rather strict, as there is mention of her insisting on Greek lessons for visiting nephews supposed to be on holiday. Priscilla married Sam Southall and Lucretia became Mrs James Cadbury.

John was a chemical manufacturer in Bewdley, after an apprenticeship in London, and moved to Edgbaston to start with Edmund the firm of J. & E. Sturge. His children were Lewis and Lucy who married Colin Scott Moncrieff. John died suddenly whilst away from home and was refused Christian burial as being unbaptised. Henry was in business in Bewdley; his brother Charles bought and enlarged the Summer House for him but Henry died when only forty. His daughter married Georges Appia, a well-known French Protestant pastor. Then by his second marriage to his cousin Lydia, Henry became the grandfather of Sturge Moore the poet and George E. Moore O.M., the Cambridge philosopher.

Anna died as a baby, but the youngest, Edmund, who married Lydia Albright and became “Gentleman Sturge” of Charlbury, lived to be nearly eighty-five. His daughter Margaret married her cousin Lewis Sturge, then later the widower of her cousin Lucy, Colin Scott Moncrieff (see above.) Edmund’s son John Edmund married Jane Richardson of Newcastle-on-Tyne; their daughters Hilda, Olga (Ball) and Elfrida (Cameron) were all born in Montserrat and later lived and died in Cambridge.

Joseph the Sixth 1793 - 1859

Joseph VI, born at Elberton, was the most eminent of the Sturges and many books have been written about his life of public service. His statue stands at Five Ways in Edgbaston. Strengthened by his religious faith he worked unremittingly in the cause of peace, temperance, adult education and the abolition of slavery. Through it all he was a busy and hard-pressed corn merchant during particularly difficult times.

It seems that he proposed to several young ladies, but the one who claimed the right to accept him was Eliza Cropper, the daughter of an anti-slavery colleague. To his great grief she died in childbirth a year after their marriage. Some eleven years later he married Hannah Dickinson of Coalbrookdale and they had five children (described further on.)

By now Joseph was living and working in Birmingham. The firm which he and his brother ran would have been more profitable had Joseph not declined to sell barley (the “ale corn”) for malting - just as his father at Elberton had refused to grow beans for the Bristol slave traders. He was indeed one of the early teetotallers; beer had been served for breakfast in his childhood as a matter of course, but in his work for the poor he saw the evil effects of drink. On the farm which he leased as a young man, he had watched his flock of sheep being driven away when, drawn for the militia, he would neither serve nor pay for a substitute; so now in Edgbaston he found his own goods and chattels being distrained more than once when he refused to pay church rates, and he organised other non-conformists to help to end this levy.

We envisage Joseph Sturge as being staid and venerable: a promoter of the London to Birmingham railway who withdrew from the Board because trains ran on Sundays, an objector to the building of the Town Hall as a venue for music festivals. But in his younger days he was anti-establishment, a radical, nicknamed “Quaker Chartist” in the days when Chartism seemed to imply as much as Bolshevism later. However, when public rallies for political reform got out of hand, and there were serious riots as London police, sent into Birmingham, set on the crowds, it was J.S. who restored order. Once he failed in this, and three men and a boy were condemned to death. It was enough for Joseph to speak up for them, for their sentence to be commuted to transportation.

His activities were endless. Through his Sunday Schools he gave the impetus to adult education; by donating the first playing field he pointed the way to public parks. He and his fellow abolitionists were the first to organise propaganda and fund-raising campaigns on a large scale. His personal contribution - “off his own bat” according to Lord Brougham - was that he won the freedom of 800,000 negroes, having gone to the West Indies to investigate the apprentice system which followed slavery and found it in many respects just as bad. To prove that slavery was not an economic necessity he set up a plantation in Montserrat and visited it many times. Though the venture failed for various reasons, it laid the foundation of the island’s flourishing lime juice trade.

Joseph worked with Cobden and Bright to secure the repeal of the Corn Laws which kept prices high by taxing imports. He was on good terms with his work-people, often calling on them in their homes. He established a Reformatory for destitute boys and pioneered the probation system. He was among a small deputation of Friends appointed to travel to face the Czar of Russia in an attempt to avert the Crimean War.

Only Joseph Chamberlain held as high a place as Joseph Sturge in the affections of his townspeople during his lifetime. Crowds lined the two-mile route to his funeral, and six thousand youngsters came to a Band of Hope meeting in his memory.

Joseph the Seventh 1847 - 1934

The distinguished old gentleman whom I remember as “Cousin Joseph” was the eldest of five children. He inherited his father’s zeal for good causes but lacked his pioneering genius and his flair for publicity. He was a devoted worker for peace, a magistrate and an educational administrator, but kept out of the limelight. After some years with the firm of J & C Sturge he left to become managing director of the Montserrat Company, where he was much loved by his employees, and he was considered an authority on the West Indies. He also travelled widely, and nearer home he wrote a popular “Saturday Half-Holiday Guide” to the Birmingham countryside.

He lived at Southfield, which became Edencroft, in Wheeleys Road, and later in Hagley Road with two of his sisters. He was unmarried, so with him the direct line of the Seven Josephs came to an end.

His sister Priscilla married William Albright and was a well-known figure in Edgbaston. Kind and generous to others, she was eccentric in appearance as she spent nothing on herself. She came to my wedding in 1938 in a horse-drawn cab. The annual “strawberry party” she gave in her hayfield in Frederick Road is one of the happy childhood memories of my generation.

Another sister, Sophia, was an outstanding character. Energetic and highly intelligent, she filled her life with countless activities for others. She had a commanding presence, and more than one Prime Minister listened to her with respect. Her chief work was for peace, and she seemed to have the entrée to exclusive schools closed to other propagandists as she went about instilling her principles into the young. She had the gift of attracting children by her speeches and writings and by her personality.

Sophia spent much time in Ireland; having learned basketry she went to live in Connemara, for instance, to teach the craft to poverty-stricken peasants. She was over eighty-five when she started her last venture, which was to get books on peace into the public libraries of new housing estates near Birmingham and Liverpool. But all her life the needs of individuals meant as much to her as great causes.

Charles Sturge 1801 - 1888

Joseph Vll was the last of his direct line, and the “Birmingham Sturges” are descended from his uncle Charles. Charles’ father, Joseph V, thought him unsuited to the life of a farmer, and sent him to join his brother, Joseph VI, in Bewdley. Here they were joined by their unmarried brothers and sisters when their mother died in 1819 after two years of widowhood. The corn factors’ firm of J & C Sturge, which they established, became a leading one, although it was to have a chequered history. Both brothers worked very hard, riding or driving regularly to markets in Worcester, Shrewsbury or Bristol, as Bewdley was off the main coach roads. Often the roads were bad, and a 4 a.m. start and a ten hour journey were not unusual - nor was a twelve-hour office day.

But trade had deserted Bewdley, as the result of the opening of the Staffs. and Worcs. Canal. Joseph thought it best to move to Birminham, to Monument Lane, though it was nine years before Charles followed him. This was in 1831, at the time of his marriage to Joseph’s sister-in-law, Mary Darby Dickinson of Coalbrookdale. It was said that there was some opposition to the match from her mother’s family, the Darbys, famed for creating that birthplace of the industrial revolution. Mary was described as “like a flower in her fragility.” Nevertheless, she and Charles had nine children, of whom seven grew up, and she was untiring in the service of others, saying it was “better to wear out than rust out.” She inherited her energy from her mother, who did indeed wear herself out travelling “in the ministry” all over Britain and in North America in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

But as far as the corn merchants’ business was concerned, hard work was not enough. The trade was beset by troubles during the middle years of the nineteenth century, while the battle of the Corn Laws was waged and prices fluctuated and fell. Joseph and Charles were over-generous in their dealings with competitors, gave credit unwisely and incurred huge bad debts and moreover, as has been seen, surrendered the valuable barley trade. At times the firm made large profits, but in 1842 there was a loss of £30,000, then a vast sum, and five times that amount was lost over twenty years. Joseph’s investment in the plantation in Montserrat did not help, not did Charles’ farming activities at Bewdley, but the crux came with cheap import s of American and Canadian wheat. Some months before Charles’ death in 1888 the business had to be wound up. He and his sons had borne the brunt of the firm’s difficulties, in order to release Joseph for public work, and they felt the liquidation to be a bitter humiliation.

Charles and Mary made their home at 17 Frederick Road in Edgbaston. At once he was caught up in politics and social reform, in spite of business preoccupations. His interests were legion, whether he was raising a subscription to pave the streets of Bewdley or allying himself with Joseph not only in the Anti Corn Law League and in the struggle for the final abolition of slavery but also in the education of the poor in Birmingham. Having done much to help that city obtain its first charter as a Borough in 1838, Charles became a founder member of the Town Council and served on it for forty-four years, being elected Mayor in 1862.

He was a magistrate until aged eighty-three, chairman of the Lunatic Asylum Committee for fourteen years, manager of a Reformatory and a prominent figure in many other spheres; his house was a centre for distinguished visitors year by year as friends sought out this robust and genial man. Among those friends were Brunel and Stephenson, and both Joseph and Charles took an active part in the development of local railways. They travelled with the Duke of Wellington on the first passenger train, drawn by Stephenson’s engine “Locomotion,” on the Stockton to Darlington Line in 1825.

Just sixty years after first going to Bewdley, Charles returned there to live in the “Summer House.” This had once been an octagonal observatory, and later Joseph had lived there with the Cotterells; it was bought by Charles for his brother Henry before the latter’s death and was retained as a holiday home. The Severn Valley Railway had been carried between the house and the town in 1857, the company paying £3,850 compensation for a mile of land and providing a private footpath and bridge.

Charles Sturge and his family loved the Summer House, and over the years he took great pleasure in adding to it and improving the grounds, taking a personal interest in each fruit-tree, and acquiring some 150 acres of land to farm. He would get up at five o’clock to walk over his property, coming back punctually for breakfast laden with mushrooms or wild flowers. Children, grandchildren and guests revelled in bathing, boating, fishing, birds-nesting and other country pursuits. Mention is made of a swing in the garden, but Charles would not allow his children to have one attached to a crossbar because it reminded him of the gallows, then in frequent use, which he had to pass on his rides to market. There was an outdoor stove for picnics which was in existence until recently, though the hatchery had gone. This last was an altruistic project whereby fish reared from salmon eggs were regularly released into the Severn; the eggs were sent from Scotland by his son-in-law Edward Pease who later took over the estate.

The eldest of Charles’ and Mary’s children was Charles Dickinson (1833 – 1915.) He and his wife Ellen Clark lived to celebrate their golden wedding but they had no family. He too was active in public and social work, particularly for young people and in the Society of Friends; he was interested in its history and collected invaluable information about his forbears. Then came Wilson, whose story follows. Sarah married Edward Pease of Darlington; their daughter Beatrice married Lord Lymington and became Countess of Portsmouth. Joseph Marshall married Ann Burke, daughter of a plantation owner in Montserrat, and later lived in Charlbury until 1916. Of their four children, Vida Mary became an Anglican nun and died in Malvern shortly before her hundredth birthday in 1975. Ann Dickinson married Jacob Player in Warwick and had six children. Eliza, although nervous and reserved by nature, became a good public speaker in the cause of women’s suffrage and the first woman member of the Birmingham School Board. Of Maria I only know that she was delicate but lived until she was fifty-eight in 1907.

Wilson Sturge 1834-1899

Even as a boy my grandfather Wilson Sturge showed that there was no limit to his spirit and energy, though at school - where he was a ringleader - he suffered an accident which disabled him for a time. He was brought up to ignore cold and fatigue and kept to a Spartan regime all his life. His father Charles would drive a family party out to Bewdley on Saturday evening in an open carriage, returning early on Monday, and there would be long walks and other outdoor activities on Sunday. Birds-nesting was a favourite pursuit and the gardener used to tell how he held the rope while Wilson hung over the Blackstone Rock, with the Severn far below, in search of kestrel’s eggs.

As a young man, working for his father and uncle in their firm in Birmingham, Wilson would go by train with friends on summer evenings to row on the river or spear fish by torchlight, snatching some sleep in the small hours and returning to a long day in the office. This was a constant practice for several years, and on one occasion he and three others rowed their heavy boat from Gloucester to London Bridge in order to attend Yearly Meeting. In winter there was regular early morning skating on Edgbaston pool.

With his father’s encouragement, when he was twenty-one Wilson and a friend chartered a Norwegian sloop and sailed to Spitzbergen, then rarely visited, and on to Lapland. He bought a bear-cub in Hammerfest and this was kept in a large cage in the Frederick Road garden until too big and dangerous.

Next year he was sent to Italy to buy wheat. During the Crimean War, which was still being fought, J & C Sturge had purchased considerable quantities stored in Black Sea ports as well as in Italy, and its export was not allowed. Wilson went on to inspect the grain, taking ship from Balaclava via Constantinople. Although a pacifist, he stayed for some time with an officer, in his tent, and proceeded to ride across the Crimea the moment peace was declared, the first civilian to enter Russia after the war. A perilous journey through still hostile country brought him to Rostov where he supervised the loading of the wheat; then he travelled with a Russian officer by droshki to Moscow, stopping only to drink tea and change horses throughout four days and nights.

The next expedition, when he was twenty-three, was to Finland with a colleague to report on the distribution of War Relief Funds raised in England because of the British bombardment of Finnish ports. He fitted in a return visit to Norway. By now, it was said, he could make himself understood in half a dozen languages, and in 1871 he was to join a small group of Friends administering a war victims Relief Fund in France after the Franco-Prussian conflict. There he was weakened by a severe attack of scarlet fever.

But meanwhile, Wilson paid a third visit to Norway, in 1859, this tuime with his bride Sara Lloyd on their wedding tour. Sara wrote of this hazardous honeymoon that they had “many unique and delightful experiences.” But a storm at sea imperilled their lives, as did a fire which she herself discovered. “When I went on deck next morning I was surrounded by a grateful crowd who wanted to see the lady who had saved the ship.”

Wilson bought a large house in Moseley, “Springfield,” and this was their home for sixteen years, where their ten children were born, and where he gardened and carpentered and kept birds and pets, sharing these enthusiasms with his family who otherwise found him an affectionate but somewhat reserved father.

Soon, however, the firm of J & C Sturge began to fail as the price of wheat collapsed. “Ever since I can remember,” his son Arthur wrote later, “the motto was that we must do without because trade was bad.” Economising wherever he could, Wilson gave up his horse, and year after year he walked the six miles a day to and from the office. He walked into Birmingham on Sundays too, to teach at an Adult School; he attended it for some twenty years and kept in touch with his students until long afterwards.

Although not a fully committed Friend in some respects, Wilson had shared in many Quaker activities locally, and he often spoke at Birmingham Debating Society where he was proud to remember that he once successfully took on Joseph Chamberlain. But now he put everything aside except his business. When his father returned to Bewdley Wilson and Sara moved into the more conveniently placed house in Frederick Road.

He felt shamed by the liquidation of the family firm in 1887; a sense of failure and loss of integrity haunted him for the rest of his life, although he later had some satisfaction in being able to pay off personally at least the small creditors.

Timber merchants in Liverpool with whom he had traded now asked Wilson to go on their behalf to Poti on the Black Sea. There, acting also as vice-consul, he remained for six years apart from two short visits home; this was in spite of serious lameness which hampered his movements. It was some time before treatment enabled him to walk freely again.

On his return his cousin George Cadbury offered him work, involving more travel abroad. He paid a short visit to Germany to inspect a housing scheme that might serve as a model for the new Bourneville estate.

Wilson Sturge’s next commission was to be his last. In 1898 he was chosen to go to Cyprus to care for a large group of Russian refugees, the sect known as Dukhobors. “So much that he undertook,” wrote one of the Cadburys later, “was what it was difficult to find anyone else to do.” Appalling problems confronted him as he struggled to help his charges, who were decimated by illness in an unsuitable climate, but before long the survivors decided to join companions who had been given asylum in Canada. When they had gone Wilson stayed on alone, getting in their crops and selling their farms; at last all was done, and he spent a strenuous week walking long distances to visit his many friends, apparently in good health. Memoirs and letters describe his popularity, not least among the refugees, and his pleasure in the children and flowers of Cyprus, where characteristically he had made a collection of birds’ eggs and butterflies.

At the end of September 1899 Wilson set sail for home. But at once he became ill, and he was found unconscious in his cabin shortly before his death four days later. The post mortem in Malta, where he was buried, returned a verdict of heart failure.

Two of Wilson’s sons wrote perceptive accounts of their father. Tributes that had poured in recognised “his noble and lovable qualities in a way neither he nor we had any idea of,” and a sense of humour and liveliness of conversation surprising in someone they has thought diffident in company.

And yet one question remains unanswered. Wilson was a sensitive, plain-living Christian gentleman, always ready to accept a challenge and set off on yet another arduous journey. But often there was very little money coming in to the house at Frederick Road. The records of his family’s subsequent careers make no reference to this, but one sometimes wonders what Sara and her ten children lived on.

Sara (Lloyd) Sturge 1831 – 1922

Wilson’s wife Sara was one of the “Lloyds of Dolobran” (in Montgomeryshire) who have been chronicled in many books. The family had moved to the Midlands, where Sara’s great-grandfather Sampson built the substantial house Farm - known as Quaker Lloyd’s Farm - in 1745. It has been lovingly described in the memoirs of several generations. Sara and her nine brothers and sisters, who lived at Wood Green in Wednesbury, used to be driven there after “first day meeting” with their parents Samuel Lloyd and Mary Honeychurch (who were both born in 1795.)

Samuel was a fine, upright man: a zealous if rigid Friend and a devoted if strict father. He worked tirelessly for social welfare in Wednesbury and among Quakers, even though he was beset by anxieties in his grocery and candle-making business and as master of a colliery and three blast furnaces employing over 3,000 people.

It is astonishing to think of the sheer variety of the work in which his wife Mary, my great-grandmother, was involved. In addition to her ten children and her religious and anti-slavery activities and her home economies, she did endless good deeds for the poor, for the wives of her husband’s employees, for deaf-and-dumb children and for the colliery girls for whom she ran a school. And later on she travelled widely in the Quaker “ministry.”

We can only glance here at Sara’s Lloyd ancestors, who were iron masters and bankers. There was Sampson III who had his children inoculated for smallpox in 1767 and who, having been a man of fashion in his youth, later decided to adopt Quaker dress and on seeing his new clothes said his tailor had brought him his coffin. There was Sara’s grandmother, saving up her money until she had eighty golden guineas with which to flee with her twelve children to her own family home in Kendal when Napoleon invaided these shores. It was she who “had a great fear of grieving the Holy Spirit,” and would sit “rapt in heaven-sent thought” regardless of the presence of guests.

Life at Wood Green was so happy that suitors sometimes felt discouraged, but Wilson Sturge, a friend of one of the brothers, persevered. Sara had a serious and spiritual disposition and there were some misgivings about her engagement to the apparently extrovert Wilson. She was soon to be in her element, for she adored children and in thirteen years she had ten, nine of whom were living when she died in her ninety-first year. In a letter to a sister she wrote, “I am knee-deep in children and I never felt so well in spite of five little ones all under six years.” Her principles of child-care were far in advance of her time, and the happiness of young people was as important to her as her religious faith. Long afterwards one of her daughters alluded to it: “Her journals show a loving interest in the details of the play she invented for us, such as schemes to deepen our interest in our pets. There was a diary sacred to the animal kingdom, in which each child had a page for his and her rabbits, guinea-pigs and hens, with details of the hatch of chickens, etc.”

But like her mother, Sara was at the beck and call of the needy of all ages. Every other year she held two Christmas parties in the Birmingham Town Hall; each Sunday there was a children’s Bible Class in her own home; she worked hard for the Ladies’ Negro Friends Society which her mother had founded, and in her eighties she still ran a Bible Reading scheme for sixty cousins as well as the Mothers’ Meeting she had started as a girl. Her house in Frederick Road was a home-from-home for John Bright on his frequent visits to the city. She had once written about her memory of a visit Elizabeth Fry paid her parents, and she had also written: “The summer of the great strike, when the people, famished for bread, mobbed the house daily, was something so terrible that time will never efface the effect of the white gaunt faces and bony out-stretched arms of women filling the entry and almost breaking the door through with pressure as we tried to distribute slices of bread evenly. We had stones thrown at our carriage passing to Meeting.”

There is a small memoir by her sister Mary Pease which echoes this and gives me the picture which I now have of my grandmother - whom as a small child I knew only as an ancient lady with a sweet wrinkled face but an alarming bonnet of shining jet and nodding plume. Mary Pease is describing the happy family circle at Wood Green, which the grown-up children seem reluctant to leave: “At length the eldest son aroused himself to leave, and he took Oakswell Hall. Sara had a great desire to preside there and she did preside, in accordance with her own especial mission. She established a soup kitchen. A woman told me afterwards that she would never forget what she felt as she stood timid and anxious and half-starved at the door and watched Miss Sara with her pale expressive face and graceful form among the poor miserable people around her, and how kindly she came to speak to the newcomers at the door.”

AUNTS AND UNCLES

Of the ten children of Wilson and Sara Sturge all but one, Leonard who was an invalid, either had notable careers or gave valuable service to the community behind the scenes.

Mary Darby Sturge 1862 - 1925

The eldest of this family, “Maida,” became one of the first women doctors at a time when such a profession for girls was looked at askance.

She entered the highest class of the Edgbaston High School for Girls on its opening day, and here she “learnt to think straight” and studied subjects such as geology and political economy. Again, when Mason College, the forerunner of Birmingham University, was founded in 1880 she was one of the first four women scholars and helped to start the Students Union. Maida continued to win prizes and awards when she went on to the Royal Free and other London hospitals; qualifying in 1891 she began her midwifery work. A visit abroad with her father brought her into contact with medical science, or the lack of it, on the European-Asian border, and she returned to England to proceed with work that was to raise the standard both of fever hospitals and the care of women and children.

After giving the Inaugural Address at the opening of the London School of Medicine for Women she came back to Birmingham to private practice and to the Midland Hospital for Women. There were difficulties but her path was smoothed by Dr. Annie Clark, a cousin and herself a respected doctor. Maida pioneered the belief in the value of sleep, sunshine and fresh air in the treatment of illness, and in the importance of preventive medical care. Her years in London had convinced her that the horrors of drink, which was one of the tenets of her family, had not been exaggerated, and later she was to be co-author of a textbook on alcoholism which went into several editions.

Dr Mary Sturge gave precious time and energy to administration and many good causes, such as a home for starving children after the first World war, but she is best remembered, and remembered by countless patients, for the zeal and energy which she brought into the sickroom. This could often be alarming to the household - but the patient got better. Those in need sometimes literally had the food off her table or the clothes off her back. One tribute summed her up: “She was so good, so kind, always ready to help. And so very clever.” And as George Cadbury said at her memorial service, “She always came to the rescue.”

Wilson Henry Sturge 1864 - 1935

Wilson and Sara’s eldest son, “Harry,” spent his life in Birmingham and became well known for his social work and good causes in the City.

He was educated at Bootham School in York, and attended Old Scholars’ gatherings whenever he could.

His inherited love of natural history was a source of lasting pleasure to him. The Birmingham Post wrote: “Mr Sturge will perhaps be best remembered for the efforts he made to bring beauty again to the man-made desolation of the Black Country. Its dreariness lay heavy on the heart of one who was passionately fond of nature. He strongly supported the Midland Reafforesting Association, which carried out several experimental schemes of tree-planting on slag heaps near Wednesbury. He helped to start the Midland Vacant Land Cultivation Society and laboured to form garden clubs in different parts of the city and on waste land in the Black Country.”

Harry Sturge’s staunch work for peace included promoting Esperanto as a means towards international understanding. He was in the forefront of the Adult School movement, as other members of the family were, and he gave much of his life to this - meeting his men’s class regularly on Sunday mornings.

He ran a firm of electrical engineers, and invented a number of successful electric appliances.

He and his wife Lucy Gibbins had three children: Monica, Teresa and Wilson.

Helen Winifred Sturge 1866 - 1941

Winifred was the greatly loved Headmistress of The Mount, the Quaker school for girls in York, for twenty-four years (1902 – 1926.) She joined the staff in 1893 after being educated herself at Edgbaston High School and Westfield College, and after retirement wrote the history of the school with Theodora Clark.

During her headship she almost doubled the number of pupils, by opening the school up to non-Friends and enlarged the premises. She taught geometry (“covering herself from head to foot in chalk”) as well as scripture, raised the academic level to new heights - and was great fun. She provided opportunities for leisure and privacy, and devised a calendar of games, festivals and pageants for some of which she created wonderful prehistoric monsters.

Her retirement was active; she travelled, served on many Quaker committees, kept in touch with countless former and devoted pupils. It was ironic indeed that Winifred Sturge, who had spoken out so much for her faith and for peace, met her death indirectly through enemy action. Her house in Selly Oak received a direct hit during an air raid and she lay for hours trapped in the rubble and never wholly recovered. Yet the weekend before she died (of an accident caused by giddiness resulting from the bombing) she was addressing the Whitsun gathering of Old Scholars at York and returned in hopes of giving her usual lesson at Bournville Women’s Adult School.

Many of her Old Girls were to say she gave them a standard by which had they had tested their actions ever since. “By her own character and charm,” said an official Minute on her retirement, “she made ideals seem practical and goodness attractive.”

Arthur Lloyd Sturge 1868 - 1942

Wilson and Sara’s third son, Arthur, was educated at Stratford-on-Avon and spent many holidays at his grandfather’s in Bewdley. In due course he left Frederick Road to begin what was to be a distinguished career in the City of London. While there, sharing the family interest in further education, he started an Adult School in Tottenham with which he kept up a long connection. He was chairman of the governors of Westfield College for most of its formative years.

Arthur’s second name, Lloyd, was a tribute to his banker forebears, but it was to Lloyd’s the insurance corporation that he devoted his working life. He joined it when he was only seventeen but, as a friend wrote on his retirement more than fifty years later, his personality and ability were soon evident. He served on the committee for many years and was elected Chairman in 1922. By this time he had founded his own underwriting firm, in which he was later joined by his two sons. It was Arthur Sturge who devised the Householders’ Comprehensive Insurance Policy, and motor insurance was among his other pioneering achievements, but his greatest contribution was his foresight in buying land in the City for the building of a new and larger Lloyd’s of London.

During the first World War he raised within Lloyd’s the then very considerable sum of £40,000 for the purchase of a complete ambulance unit for the French Red Cross, and drove one of the vehicles to Verdun himself while the battle there was raging.

The clarity of mind and professional flair which made him “an outstanding Lloyd’s man” were recognised by the award in 1924 of the Lloyd’s Gold Medal. He retired in 1941 and died suddenly a year later; his relatives knew they had lost a friend whose generosity had been unfailing.

He married Jessie Katherine Howard, and built a home at Ashmore, near Salisbury, where the Howards had property. They had five children: Gwendolen, Rhona, Raymond, Brenda and Collwyn.

Philip Maximilian Sturge 1869 - 1935

“Max was the Sturge among the children,” his mother wrote, and as a boy he certainly showed he had his father’s adventurous spirit. This led to pursuits such as climbing tall trees in search of bird’s eggs, then as legal as it was dangerous. These escapades were made possible because Max and one of his brothers lived for a while with their grandfather and aunt at Bewdley, where they went to the local Grammar School.

At thirteen he was sent to a school in Lille to learn French, which he spoke to perfection, and to Stuttgart to study German.

Returning to a business career in Birmingham he acquired a belief in Socialism which lasted many years and became deeply concerned for the poor of the city. He spent his Saturdays taking crippled children to the country, during the first World War he gave much time to the welfare of starving children, to begin with through the Belgian Famine Relief Committee and then at its two Homes in Austria after the war.

Max Sturge remained a Friend although less orthodox than others of his family, and in groups such as the Essay Society his witty contributions gave great pleasure. With George Cadbury junior, Harrison Barrow and many others he was at variance with the Society because of the conservative politics of a considerable number of “weighty” friends.

He became a director of Arthur Holden & Sons, manufacturers of paint and varnish, and in spite of working excessively long hours he also devoted great attention to the welfare of his employees - taking, it was said, Christianity into business life. He instigated schemes for amenities now taken for granted, such as canteens, pension funds and annual pay increases. When he died over a hundred members of the staff asked to attend his Quaker memorial service.

He married Maude Stammers and had three children: Sylvia, Daphne and Philip.

Amy Elizabeth Sturge 1870 - 1943

My aunt Amy was severely crippled by rheumatism, the result of a cycling accident in her youth, but she was entirely lacking in self-pity or fear. Her health had also been undermined as a baby when her father, returning from relief work in France, passed on a fever germ.

She went from the Edgbaston High School to the Birmingham School of Art, and her landscapes and flower paintings were treasured by family and friends. But she gave up art on the outbreak of the first World war. “You must have a mind at peace to paint,” she would say.

The Society of Friends was her life. In addition to attending Warwickshire Monthly Meeting she was an equally regular attender of Yearly Meetings and at the Meeting for Sufferings (which carries out the day-to-day work of the Society.) She felt a special concern for small outlying meetings, to which she would make long journeys and into which she would have to be carried in her later years. She also took a keen interest in Sibford School and the summer schools at Woodbrooke College.

Amy Sturge befriended anyone she met who was in need. In the cause of Peace she had particularly befriended many conscientious objectors - holding weekly gatherings in the Bull Street meeting house to give moral support to their girl-friends or wives. All this she did with wit and charm as well as with indomitable patience.

Her life of apparent leisure and disability was in fact filled with constructive acts of kindness and with friendships throughout the country. When one returned from holiday it was Aunt Amy who said, “Tell me all about it, door to door,” and indeed someone wrote of her that her greatest gift was to identify herself with others, deeply and permanently.

Edward Pease Sturge 1872 - 1951

An obituary article in “The Friend” summed up the life of my uncle “Ted,” which was long and active even though his delicacy as a child had caused anxiety: “He seemed able to integrate himself into every piece of work that he took up, and he made friends on all sides because he cared. His quiet generosity will long be gratefully remembered.”

His education was at Sidcot School, where he showed the artistic skill that led him to take up cabinet making and designing. For some years he was with the firm of Wigham Richardson in Newcastle; he then joined his brother Arthur in marine insurance, becoming an underwriter at Lloyd’s in 1913.

He too had worked for Adult Schools in Birmingham and this became his permanent interest in London. As a staunch Friend he was drawn into a wide variety of social services and welfare committees, including housing and temperance work, the Lingfield Epileptic Colony and the Wallingford Farm Training School.

During the first World War Edward Sturge, like his two sisters, felt a deep concern for the conscientious objectors, visiting them in Wormwood Scrubs prison. During the second, he journeyed round London oblivious of the bombing. His special interest here was a centre in Hoxton run by Quakers, and street sellers were among the countless enquirers during his last illness.

After many years his bachelor home in Hampstead was transformed into a happy family home, unstintingly shared with relatives and friends, by his marriage to a New York Friend, Grace Tower Warren, and the birth of their three children Maida, Joseph and David.

Sarah Millicent Sturge 1873 - 1963

The last survivor of this generation of the family was Milly, and when she died there was no one to record the details of her many activities.

In 1901, having received some training, she was asked by her sister Winifred to go to The Mount in York and take charge of the newly opened Junior School, where she stayed for ten years. She then kept house and did secretarial work for her eldest sister at Dr. Mary’s busy practice in Hagely Road, Edgbaston.

Later she joined forces with another sister, Amy, who by then was considerably crippled, at Fox Hill in Selly Oak. The two semi-detached houses next door were bought successively for Evelyn and for Winifred on her retirement from The Mount. Here the four sisters lived amicably in three houses and two gardens at the “Aunt Hill,” which was the centre of pilgrimage for visitors and relatives and friends over many years.

Millicent named her home Eta Domo, or Little House, as Esperanto was one of the good causes she supported. Other life-long interests were Peace, Temperance and the Labour Party, and later she took up Anthroposophy. She belonged to various local organisations, to the International Labour Party and to peace movements such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation. But her most personal contribution was for the welfare of conscientious objectors, particularly of course during the first World War when they suffered rejection and imprisonment. One protégé, ill and despairing, later wrote that he had been given fifty years of life in trade and social service as the result of one small kind act by Millicent Sturge in 1919.

Evelyn Sturge 1875 - 1961

The youngest of the Frederick Road family, Evelyn, had many interests, indeed they were world-wide, but her whole life was centred on her Quaker beliefs.

She was educated near home, at Edgbaston High School. She had a keen intellect, but was always delicate and was not able to go on to Westfield College in London as she wished. At times she lived with her sister Maida, and after the family home was given up she lived with her other sisters at Fox Hill. When Winifred’s house was destroyed in the war and her own was damaged, she rebuilt both those houses to make four flats for elderly Friends over whose well-being she kept a neighbourly eye.

Winifred, Amy, Millicent and Evelyn all worked in their various ways for peace, temperance, education and the needs of young Friends. Woodbrooke College was close by and was of particular interest to Evelyn who befriended students of many nationalities. Her distinctive work was for the welfare of refugees and displaced persons during and after two World Wars, at first in Holland on behalf of the Friends’ War Victims relief Committee. Her untiring care in Birmingham for large numbers of refugees from Belgium was recognised by the award of a medal by the Belgian Government. Her work took her to Austria and Poland, and she wrote vividly of a visit to Berlin during the runaway inflation of the ‘twenties. Ardently anti-war, she was a zealous member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and year by year she attended the monthly Friends’ service Council and Meeting for Sufferings in London. All her life she kept in touch with individual refugees.

Evelyn Sturge remembered the feeling she had had as a child of “gaining power” in Meeting for Worship at Bull Street. She was still young when she began nearly half a century’s service as an Elder, and at Bournville her ministry was valued for over thirty years. She was a life-long member of the Warwickshire Monthly Meeting, at which she always tried to be present.

Her faith and courage went hand-in-hand with tolerance and a vivid sense of humour and a gift for personal relationships. She published a perceptive booklet on “The Problem and the Glory of Growing Old,” but to her many young friends and relatives it seemed that her own old age presented no problem.

This photograph of the family was taken in the garden at Frederick Road in 1901 and shows, from left to right, standing: Winifred Sturge, Millicent Sturge, Edward Sturge, Mrs Arthur (Jessie Howard) Sturge, Max Sturge, and Dr Mary Sturge. From left to right, seated: Harry Sturge, Amy Sturge, Mrs Wilson (Sara Lloyd) Sturge with Rhona, Arthur Sturge with Gennie and Evelyn Sturge.