Benjamin Charles Partleton (1824-1884)

Part III

This is part III of the story of Benjamin Partleton. Click here to see Part II.

So, before that diversion into the Crystal Palace and Camille Pissarro, we were walking up Portland Road in Benjamin's shoes, and we just passed the Duke of Clarence pub at the yellow arrow in the map below:

We walk under the Portland Road railway bridge and come to the Jolly Sailor pub, which we encountered earlier in this story, at the corner of Portland Road, outlined in purple in the map above.

Below we see the Jolly Sailor in 2011 from the viewpoint of the purple arrow in the map:

Benjamin knew this building; he must have walked past it thousands of times.

If he liked a pint - and since he was in the building trade, there's a fair probability he did - then there's every chance he's been in there.

So let's have a look at a November 1869 advert for this salubrious establishment:

The weary traveller could stay the night at the Jolly Sailor in a 'Good Bed' and, while he slept, his horses would also be rested and fed in the stables. Horse livery for a week was not cheap though - one pound. At this time, as we shall see from evidence later, house-painter Benjamin was earning between one and two pounds a week. 

We can see, circled in red in the price list, that they sell Bass, so I'm tempted to join Benjamin for a bottle of Pale Ale:

Haha, the Jolly Sailor was probably pretty comfortable inside, a roaring fire and boozy camaraderie, and - as advertised - a civil barmaid, but maybe it wasn’t quite as grand as the illustration above, which is a bar at the Folies-Bergère in Paris as depicted by artist Edouard Manet in 1882. I've used this picture because among the fancy bottles of cognac, champagne, and crème de menthe, we spy two bottles of Bass pale ale - I have circled one of them - identifiable by their red triangle trademark.

This is not just any old trademark: it is the oldest Registered Trademark in continuous use in the world...

Left:19th Centuryxxxxxxx Right: 2012 - in Japanx

Formally registered Trademarks came into existence in the UK with the Trademark Act of 1875, but the Bass red triangle was a good deal older than that.

The Bass mark was one of the most famous and recognisable in Britain at that time, often cited in newspapers and books in the second half of the 19th century. Hard to imagine now, because the brand has slowly slipped out of favour until it has all but disappeared, but we might compare it to - let's say - Coca-Cola in our own day:

Left: from 'Bent Not Broken' by George Manville Fenn (1867)

There were two pieces of legislation enacted in Victorian times to protect businesses: the 1862 Merchandise Marks Act and the Trademark Act of 1875, but we shouldn't get the wrong idea here. Irrespective of these Acts of Parliament, it had always been illegal to represent a product as something which it wasn’t, or to steal someone else's trade mark.

That Trademark Act of 1875 came into effect on 01 January 1876, and the Bass brewery - perhaps anxious to prevent someone else mischievously registering a similar mark first - sent an unfortunate employee to stand all night in the freezing cold on New Year’s Eve outside the Registrar’s Office, in order to be first in line.

My research couldn’t validate that amusing story, but there’s no doubt that the Bass red triangle was duly registered... as Trademark No 1 ! Fact.

Below we see a lovely c1870 Victorian beer bottle, such as would be a very familiar everyday object to Benjamin Partleton. But it wasn't the standard business-plan of the Bass brewery to bottle their own beer: no, no, no - not at all. They delivered it to wholesalers and pubs in barrels. They also supplied them with labels, and trusted them to bottle the beer themselves. It says exactly that in the small-print on the label itself if you read it carefully...

Therefore hundreds of Bass's cherished, original, trademark, red-triangle labels went to every Tom, Dick and Harry with a pub.

OK, Bass rationed the number of labels according to the quantity of beer sold, but I can’t help feeling that they were asking for trouble - after all, when handled carefully, those labelled bottles could be re-used dozens of times and refilled with any old rubbish. As a consequence, the company had to be very litigious, even in the era before the trademark was formally registered:

Left: Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 08 February 1871

The defendant was found guilty and punished with a stiff £50 fine.

The brewery didn't need the fifty quid, but they liked to make a big show of 'important' prosecutions to discourage landlords from being tempted into such naughtiness.

That story of 1871 above was nothing new; Bass had been protecting their marks for decades, but the beer was famous, the trademark was famous, and consequently in 1853 multiple miscreants were making bootleg copies of those labels. Bass went after a bunch of them:

Left: Bristol Mercury, Saturday 09 July 1853

The message to trademark transgressors in 1853 was clear; they were being watched. But it didn't stop them.

Let’s get back to Benjamin Partleton, quaffing his bottle of Bass - let's hope it's a real one...

The Jolly Sailor which we see above is the exact same building as Benjamin saw in the 1880s, but, wind back the clock a bit, and during the early 1870s he would have seen an older version of the pub being demolished and replaced, so let’s go further back in time and look into that one.

We mentioned earlier that when the railway came to Norwood, in 1839 - when Benjamin was 15 years old, and long before he moved to the area - Norwood Junction had originally been called Jolly Sailor - named after the pub - and we see it under that name, circled in green, in J&C Walker's 1845 map, which also nicely shows the route of new 'Croydon Railroad' :

But when we look at the 1870s streetmap of Norwood, below - the pub, outlined in purple, and the station, circled in green, are not exactly connected very closely:

So, what is the connection? Pub names are, more often than not, rather random. But it turns out that the Jolly Sailor was not named randomly; nor was the nearby pub, The Ship, which is just a few doors up the road on South Norwood High Street, though it’s true that both establishments were being deliberately cute with their 'marine' designations. Really? Ships and sailors in South Norwood?...

The clue lies, circled in blue, in the map above, in which we see the words 'Old Canal'...

... but of course that's impossible; this map was published in either 1814 or 1818, and the world's first passenger steam-railways didn't exist until the 1820s.

In fact if we look carefully, we see that this route is labelled 'Croydon .... Canal' - and it's the same stretch of water we saw labelled 'Old Canal' in the 1870s streetmap of Norwood. The location of the Jolly Sailor is at the point of the red arrow in Faden's map.

This was indeed the Croydon Canal, which had been completed in 1809, and we can trace its former path through South Norwood, as it snaked its way, locked into the 161-foot contour in the landscape in the map below:

As we can see in the map above, the Jolly Sailor pub may be a long way from Norwood Junction railway station, but in 1810, when it was built in the undeveloped countryside in south London, it was specifically located slap-bang next to the brand-new canal.

Its topography now makes complete sense: the pub had a nice strategic position to pick up customers - on a road-crossing where the canal swept eastward to avoid a ridge of land at Norwood. It sat right next to a bridge where the small country lane (that later became Portland Road) crossed the canal. The original Jolly Sailor station was further north - closer to the pub. The station was relocated a little southward and renamed Norwood in 1846, before becoming Norwood Junction before 1856.

At the bottom-left of the map, circled in purple, not far from Benjamin's home on Denmark Road, the 1879 mapmaker recorded another vestige of the old canal - which presumably still had water in it at that time - and the old towpath on its west side. We can project it northwards to the Jolly Sailor section. Its route took it right past the front of the future location of Norwood Junction station, but at a different level.

We get a great view of what the Croydon Canal had looked like, in the 1828 painting below by the wonderfully useful and prolific German artist George Scharf. George, just like Camille Pissarro in a later era, was in England seeking refuge from European wars:

We can see from George's painting that the canal had not been a big one. He chose for his subject a lock - one of 28 along the length of the waterway for the purpose of getting the boats up and down the hills: this part of London is pretty undulating.

Oooh - might that be the Jolly Sailor pub in the picture? Maybe we should pop in for a pint of Bass. If George Scharf had stood at the point of the green arrow in the map below, the positions of the features in the scene all line up with the map. But no, it's probably not the Jolly Sailor, as I understand that the road-crossing at Jolly Sailor was a swing-bridge, not a lock. There were no locks in this section: but there was a wharf nearby, where coal was unloaded, timber was loaded, and bricks from the nearby brickfields were put on barges and shipped elsewhere - but I don't pick up any hint of a busy wharf from this depiction of a bucolic idyll.

One of the canal's main cargo items was timber, and I've no doubt that quite a bit of the Great North Wood disappeared along this route. The canal had been a big investment, but turned out to be a commercial failure, and lost money every year until its closure by Act of Parliament in 1836. 

Its land was bought by the Croydon Railway Company, and when a hearing was held in 1836 to resolve the dispute over how much compensation was fair, the jury came up with an amusing judgement: £40,250 for the land value, and - to the astonishment of the editor of the The Railway Magazine - the princely sum of 1 shilling compensation for the canal's imaginary lost "profits": 

£185,000 of capital was raised by the Croydon Railway against a woefully - or wilfully - inaccurate estimate of £140,000. By the time the railway was completed in 1839, it had bust its estimate more than four-fold, costing £637,875, and the railway, like the canal which preceded it, was a commercial failure

Where it could, the railway had followed the canal bed for its route - but for the Norwood sections we see on this page, that couldn't happen; the wending canal route was unsuitable, so the railway drove through in a straight line, requiring cuttings and embankments to be made, and levels to be changed, and, no doubt, further land deals to be struck.

After 7 years, in 1846, for economic reasons, the Croydon Railway merged with the equally struggling London and Brighton Railway, and when we check out an 1837 list of named depositors in one of the proposals submitted to Parliament for that line, we discover among the keen investors, a young Phineas Isaacson - Camille Pissarro's future brother-in law:

The scheme above - Gibbs's Line - was not selected. Parliament didn't believe the estimate of £950,000 was credible - and they were correct. Phineas was lucky: he would have lost his shirt on this speculation if it had been approved. The rival proposal which became the London and Brighton Railway ended up costing over £2.5 million. This was a phenomenon soon to be known as railway mania - investors sinking their savings into railways, lured by low estimates, believing they couldn't fail. But they did fail. Phineas Isaacson could probably afford the £200 gamble, but - for perspective, to a working-man like our Benjamin Partleton, £200 at that time represented four years' wages.

When Benjamin Partleton had been born - in 1824 - there were no passenger steam-railways anywhere in the world. As he grew up, Benjamin witnessed the explosion of their development during his lifetime, especially as he lived in a geographic area dominated by railways.

So, When Benjamin Partleton came to Norwood in the 1860s, canals were already old hat. Everything was trains, trains, trains. Steam trains:

In the painting above, we are back in Camille Pissarro's shoes during his brief self-imposed exile in Norwood. In 1871 he painted the above view of a steam train exiting Lordship Lane station heading south towards Crystal Palace two stops further on. This was not the Croydon Railway, it was a rival company, servicing the Crystal Palace High Level Station on a different line, a different route, which was unsuccessful and eventually closed in 1954.

Again we can stalk Monsieur Pissarro's movements of 1871... sorry about that, Camille!

Clearly he set up his elevated viewpoint above the rails, on the footbridge at Lapse Wood at the point of the blue arrow in the map below, and breathed the coal-smoke from the train's chimney as it passed under the bridge.

That's the last we'll see of Camille Pissarro, so, since we have been admiring his paintings, and thanking him for showing us Norwood in the 1870s, we should take a look at the man himself, pictured with his wife Julie Vellay in c1877. Julie did not speak English and was unhappy during her brief exile.

Let's get back to Benjamin Partleton again; there's no surviving photo of him, sad to say.

In 1874 his little brother Joseph came to stay.

Joseph had previously been living on the north side of London, so it's reasonable to presume that he might have travelled south to Norwood by train, along the Croydon Railway from London Bridge, circled in yellow in the map below, to Norwood Junction aka Jolly Sailor station, circled in green.

The last station before Norwood Junction was Anerley Bridge, which we see circled in red in the map below...

... and Joseph got a great view of the Crystal Palace as his train passed through the station:

The picture above was photographed by P.H. Delanotte and drawn by artist R. Carrick in 1854 of the newly-constructed palace. The building at that time had no towers - they weren't built till 1855.

We also see the palace has three transverse arches, called transepts, a big glass arch in the middle and smaller ones near each end.

In the 1854 engraving above, at the far end, we see the arch of the north transept, but in 1874 Joseph didn't see it, because it was gone - burned down in a huge fire in 1867, reported in that year in the Illustrated London News by artist M. Jackson:

Below we see what that same scene of desolation had looked like before the 1867 fire. It gives us some insight into the excellent spectacle offered by the Palace to its visitors:

The Crystal Palace TV Transmitter, which we saw on page 2 of this story, stands directly on the spot where those two Egyptian pharaohs used to sit and the giant lilypads used to float. 

Gorgeous spectacle that it was, attracting millions of Victorian visitors, the Crystal Palace was losing money - it always lost money.

Consequently the north transept arch was never rebuilt, giving the building an asymmetric - but still attractive - appearance thereafter. It was in this form that Pissarro painted it in 1871:

The north transept fire of 1867 presaged events to come 69 years later, in the greater conflagration which we read about in page 2 of this story.

Let's have another look at Carrick's engraving of 1854:

In the foreground of the picture, we can see another remnant of the old Croydon Canal in 1854, running at right angles under the railway line, as it kinked its way round obstacles in the landscape, traced in blue in the map below.

The picture was executed from the viewpoint of the red arrow in the map:

The next image, painted in naive style by artist B Constable, from the viewpoint of the yellow arrow in the map above, shows Anerley Gardens.

The original is in the possession of Bromley Museum and is claimed to be from c1860... I'm not 100% convinced of that date attribution. I'll leave the gentle reader to make their own mind up on that matter. The garish colours, the style, seem to scream "20th-century!" at me. Perhaps an amateur oil painting essayed from a Victorian photograph?

Anyhoo, in the painting we see Victorian patrons amusing themselves on boats on a surviving stretch of the Croydon Canal, with the Crystal Palace in the distance. The large building in the foreground, at the location outlined in green in the map, was the Anerley Tea Rooms which later became the Anerley Arms pub, which was rebuilt in the later 1800s:

The Anerley Gardens are long gone, and this stretch of water was filled-in and built-upon by 1895.

...but a small nearby section of the original Croydon Canal does still survive - one of only two bits along its whole length that do - seen in the modern photograph below:

The picture above - Betts Park - was taken from Anerley Road, at the viewpoint of the purple arrow in the map below. This straight reach of canal was concreted-in by the council in 1934 which accounts for its preservation.

Another feature of the canal which has survived to the present-day is Norwood Reservoir, now known as South Norwood Lake, which was used to regulate the canal water level. It's at the bottom-left of the map below, shaded in blue:

Benjamin's brother Joseph probably wasn't in much of a mood to admire the scenery as he journeyed across south London to Norwood.

He was very poorly, and was going to Norwood to be looked-after by his brother and sister-in-law during his terminal illness.

We know this because sadly, in April 1874, Joseph died at his brother's house at Denmark Road, aged just 36, of stomach cancer:

Let's move on to the 1881 census:

Once again our mouths form into a wavy line and we raise a quizzical eyebrow. For the third time running, Benjamin and Louisa, who are now 56 years old, yet again have a child in their care in a census.

This time it's a little tiny baby, Beatrice Watson, just 5 months old, and Louisa is recorded as her carer, so we might assume that this is simple foster-care.

But when we search for the birth of the baby, we discover that the situation was not that straightforward:

The plot thickens. The baby is Beatrice Partleton Watson. Clearly she is a family member.

There's nothing for it; I shall have to cough up a tenner and apply for a copy of the birth certificate of baby Beatrice...

Tick, tock, tick tock...

And by the miracle of the internet, it's already a week later and the birth certificate has just dropped through my letterbox in rural Scotland:

Doh.

As usual, with the birth of an illegitimate baby, we learn frustratingly little from this evidence. No father is named. Baby Beatrice's mum was Emma Watson, and since it's more than 120 years before Harry Potter would come to the big screen, I think we can be reasonably sure that it's not the actress who played Hermione in the films.

Emma gave birth to Beatrice at 16 East India [Dock] Road in the East End of London, located in the purple circle in the map below.

Since that house still exists, we can have a look at it, picked out by the yellow arrow in the 2012 photograph below:

In the 1881 census - just 4 months after the baby's birth - Emma Watson was no longer at the above luxurious residence. Her baby Beatrice was safely in South Norwood with Benjamin & Louisa Partleton - who are probably Beatrice's grandparents. I looked for Emma Watson in the 1881 census but there are too many of them, and we never see her again. However, there are later clues that she was the wife - official or otherwise - of William Partleton, Benjamin's 'son' whom we saw aged 15 in the 1861 census. William, it seems, joined the army, probably in India, which explains his absence from all future censuses, and Emma may have joined him.

Baby Beatrice, on the other hand, does show up again in England, ten years later. She's in the 1891 census, aged 10, with a little sister, but without either parent. She is in British army housing in Colchester.

Back to Benjamin... In January 1884, he decided to go on a trip from his home in the suburbs to the East End of London. I'm going to assume for the purpose of our narrative that he was out on a job. Someone in the East End wanted some wallpaper-hanging done.

How did he travel? ...

Clearly, as we can see above, the only serious way to go was by rail.

So, let's join Benjamin on his journey from Norwood Junction / Jolly Sailor, circled in green in the map above, to London Bridge, circled in yellow.

Here's Norwood Junction:

Ok, the above photo was taken circa 1930, Not 1884, but it's just how the Victorian station looked to Benjamin as he set off on his journey.

And it's just how it looks to us now - Victorian stations don't change much - as we see in the 2012 photo below:

Here's that steam train arriving...

The platform we see above is not Norwood Junction - it's Bromley, 5 miles away, but hey - we can't do miracles.

The carriage we see below is 2nd-class...

... of course, working-class Benjamin is going to walk past this one to find a 3rd-class carriage.

So let's step inside with him into a 3rd-class train interior. Here's a Victorian example, restored on the Ffestiniog railway:

Ah, that looks quite nice, comfortable even. He should have a pleasant trip to London Bridge.

To help envisage our journey, let's check out a contemporary view of the interior of a 3rd-class carriage. Benjamin has his wallpapering tools with him. Pastebrushes, bucket, maybe even a folding pasteboard. It's going to be a bit of a squeeze:

The illustration we see above comes from an 1870 publication, Palace and Hovel, or Phases of London Life by Daniel Joseph Kirwan.

Daniel was an American who decided to travel around London and write a book about what he saw. As we can guess from the title, his idea was to experience it all, the good and the bad.

He tried a 3rd-class carriage, and here's what he thought about it:

Left: Palace and Hovel, or Phases of London Life [1870] by Daniel Joseph Kirwan.

Daniel Kirwan wanted to make his book interesting, so he may have dramatised his narrative a little - but I spent 6 months in London recently, commuting between Chiswick and High Holborn - and my own observations resonate with his, in the defensive, vacant faces of the commuters in those crowded carriages.

So, back to Benjamin Partleton, headed towards London Bridge station. He's not been feeling very well all morning - he has a headache; the motion of the train and the general crush is making him a bit giddy, and that cigarette smoke is playing havoc with his wheezy chest... 

Thankfully it was a quick journey. Even 30 years earlier, it had only taken 24 minutes, as we can see below in Bradshaw's Guide (1855). I've used the reverse journey because, in addition to the times, it also shows the prices, and I know the gentle reader will find that interesting: :

The guide we see above was a little early for Benjamin's journey; the price of the 3rd-class ticket, circled in blue, was ninepence. Let's dig out a few coins from his pocket in 1884:

Perhaps by 1884, it might have been more than ninepence: let's say a shilling, which was twelve pence in the wacky, old-money denominations which some of us still remember. There were 20 shillings in a pound.

Shillings, like the example below, were made of solid silver in British coinage of the time:

Was a shilling - or ninepence for that matter - a lot of money? How much was Benjamin earning at this time?

Let's do some snooping in 1880s newspapers to understand the pay of a painter... this guy in 1886 was doing quite nicely, working 6 days a week, and earning more than 6 shillings a day:

London Standard - Saturday 20 November 1886

But in 1881, the bad father in the article below was claiming to earn a meagre 4 shillings and fourpence a day, though, for obvious reasons, he may have been understating his earnings:

Hampshire Telegraph - Saturday 17 September 1881

So, all in all, Benjamin's train journey wasn't cheap.

The train arrives at its destination, and, with some relief, Benjamin disembarks at London Bridge station:

Benjamin lived right next to Norwood Junction station for 25 years. So it's fairly clear, despite the expense, that he must have at least occasionally used the train to go to London - his family all live in the centre of town - and in the late-Victorian photo of London Bridge station above, we see exactly how it looked to him in 1884.

The photo was taken from the viewpoint of the blue arrow in the1875 map below:

Benjamin was headed for the East End; maybe Whitechapel, maybe Limehouse.

Since he's not feeling very well, and he's carrying his tools, he might want to catch the bus. In the photo below, taken in 1887, there's one waiting at London Bridge station, seen, with the refreshment rooms behind it, from the viewpoint of the green arrow in the map above:

So, Benjamin proceeds to the job, gets out his board and paste-bucket, and, despite feeling distinctly below par, starts hanging wallpaper.

The Victorians liked their walls busy, certainly not to my taste: 

...but before very long, Benjamin gets much worse: one of his eyes droops; his arms become terribly weak, and he can't speak coherently - something is seriously wrong.

He drops his pastebrush - and collapses... 

He's only 59 years old:

Above we see Benjamin's death in the national index.

In the East End, Whitechapel is not so far from Limehouse where baby Beatrice had been born. Is there a connection?

There's nothing for it; I shall have to cough up a tenner and apply for a copy of Benjamin's death certificate...

Tick, tock, tick tock...

By the miracle of the internet, it's already a week later and the death certificate has just dropped through my letterbox in rural Scotland.

He died in hospital. Specifically, he died in the London Hospital, on the south side of Whitechapel Road, so it's the last place Benjamin Partleton saw: 



The photograph we see above was taken from the viewpoint of the blue arrow in the map below: 



Let's have another look at that death certificate: 

The cause of death is given as 'Apoplexy, Oedema of Lungs'. 

This is interesting because, 41 years earlier, Benjamin's dad had died young, aged 43, and his cause of death was; Apoplexy: 



One of the nice things about creating one's own website is editorial control. Writing these pages, sometimes I get to be picture editor, sometimes geographer, detective, art critic, etc etc - and there's no-one to tell me: "Hey - you're not qualified to write about this!"  

In this case I get to put on a stethoscope and play doctor.

When used simply, in Victorian times, the normal, common meaning of apoplexy was that a person had a stroke: blood haemorrhaging into, and consequently placing pressure on, the brain. We see the definition below, in a medical dictionary of 1870. Where qualified, apoplexy can also mean an effusion of blood into other organs. That is not specified in Benjamin's case, but the surgeon also thought it necessary to mention oedema of the lungs, connoting fluid on the lungs. I've no idea if there's a connection between the two symptoms. Probably not, unless it was apoplexy of the lungs not the brain, in which case they are the same symptom. Any doctors reading this? Let's just call it a stroke.

Left: A Comprehensive Medical Dictionary (1870) by Joseph Thomas

Benjamin's dad had also been a house painter, and had died of a stroke when out on what was likely a painting job, at the posh house of a well-known Victorian; Henry Thornton. The similarities are striking, since it looks like our Benjamin was also away from home, and may have been out on a job. Though he's in Whitechapel, his home address is still given as Denmark Road, Norwood, and his occupation in this case is given, not as painter, as it was in censuses and other documents, but as a wallpaper hanger, and it's my guess that this is precisely what he was doing when he suddenly fell ill and was taken to hospital in the East End of London. 

Benjamin's uncle Stephen, also a painter, had died of lead poisoning aged just 33 - caused by lead in the paint. His uncle Tom had died - of a stroke -  aged 35, and his dad had died aged 43. All of these men were house painters and were breathing and touching lead paint every day. Benjamin made it to 59 but I'd be surprised if his death by apoplexy wasn't due in some degree to exposure to lead, although perhaps he was more careful with it. 

So, we must move on to the 1891 census, where of course we find Louisa as a widow, still at South Norwood:

Now 65 years old - not 60 as shown on the census - Louisa was living at Woodside Road, at the southern end of Portland Road, just a little south of our map. She was a 'visitor' - presumably a lodger - at the home of Thomas Olley.

But - meantime - some distance north of London, in Colchester, circled in red in the map below...

...we find little Beatrice Watson, the baby from 1891, now aged 10, circled in blue in the census sheet below:

"Ah don't see no Beatrice Watson, mister", I hear you say, and you are correct, though I don't know why I gave you an accent.

Yes, yes. This was a puzzle for some considerable time. These two little girls appear in an army residence, near Colchester Barracks, without any parents, and no birth certificate exists for either of them. Who are Ellen Partleton and her little sister Florence?

Let's jump forward a decade to see Ellen Partleton's marriage entry:

Aha, we see that she called herself Ellen Beatrice Partleton. Had Beatrice Watson taken her father's surname and become Ellen Beatrice Partleton?

She had married John Wheeldon Byatt, and a decade later we find them in the 1911 census. She's no longer Ellen Partleton, or Ellen Beatrice Partleton. She's now Beatrice Ellen Byatt, as circled in blue below:

From here on, for decades, Ellen uses Beatrice as her preferred given-name on electoral rolls, which I take as a clue that she was indeed, originally, Beatrice Watson. But there is other evidence, circled in green above. Her birthplace is given as... Norwood. This gives us a cast-iron link to her grandparents Benjamin and Louisa - the only Partletons who lived in Norwood, and I'm sure we'll find that the two little girls grew up with their grandparents.

Her dad is always absent: 'army-man' William Partleton, Benjamin and Louisa's unregistered - and probably adopted - son, who is never seen in any census before or after 1861. Ellen is also exactly the same age as illegitimate child Beatrice Watson, born in 1881. Coincidence?

William Partleton is, however, named on the marriage certificate of Beatrice/Ellen's sister Florence - who married a soldier - and we learn that William Partleton was already deceased by 1906:

In keeping with the non-existence of many compulsory legal documents in the story of Benjamin Partleton, there is no UK death certificate for his son William. William was surely in the army and consequently died overseas - probably in India. He has no birth certificate, no marriage certificate, no death certificate and only appears in one UK census. But we know for a fact that he existed, and in these pages, we have built a fair idea of his overall life-history.

Let's move on to the 1901 census, where we again find Louisa, now aged 76:

Hopefully Louisa was still seeing her granddaughters regularly, but she was now living, presumably as a lodger, at the home of gardener James Hayter in South Norwood.

Her place of birth is has always been sketchy in previous censuses but now she leaves us in no doubt. It's 'Kent, New Romney', circled in yellow in the map below:

We can't find a baptism for Louisa, which should have happened in 1825 / 1826. Her given name at birth may have been Louisa or Harriet; her surname may have been Tems, Toms, Tams, Thames. Too many names. Can't find her.

Let's have another look at that census of 1901:

The house where Louisa was living was on Victoria Road, South Norwood, circled in pink in the map below:

And if we recall the Edwardian postcard of Portland Road which we looked at earlier - a photograph taken from the yellow arrow, it is apparent that we can see the turning for Victoria Road, just past the Duke of Clarence pub, at the pink arrow.

So we can safely say that this was a very familiar view for Louisa:

Also apparent in the map below, is that Victoria Road was close to the Portland Road railway bridge:

On 01 May 1891, the Brighton express train from London was crossing the Portland Road railway bridge, when the bridge collapsed.

Below we see it from the viewpoint of the orange arrow in the map:

The building behind the bridge is... the Jolly Sailor pub, though the artist was rather free in his interpretation of its appearance. Louisa would have seen the aftermath of this accident, in which, fortunately, no-one was seriously hurt. But the incident, which was caused by a failure of the cast-iron structure of the ageing bridge provoked a major national investigation into similar cast iron bridges which were all subsequently replaced as a result.

Louisa lived a long time, and finally passed away at Croydon Union Infirmary in 1909:

If you've ever been ill in Croydon, and spent time in the main hospital, you may have been unaware that you were in the Workhouse. The hospital where Louisa died, was - and still is - Croydon's principal hospital facility. It was originally called Croydon Workhouse Infirmary, then the Croydon Union Infirmary. In 1923 it was renamed as Mayday Hospital, which it has been called for most of its life. In 2010 it was renamed as Croydon University Hospital - much more sexy.

But aside from the name-change, Louisa would recognise most of the building today; built in 1885, its Victorian architecture is arguably somewhat cheerless:

At the time of her death, Louisa was residing at 41 Harrington Road which is circled in orange in the map below:

Benjamin Partleton left us with more loose ends than most...

exactly who were the children William and Maryen who have no birth certificates? Most probably they were adoptees; we could speculate that maybe Louisa could have no more children after her first born, baby Louisa Harriet died. And why is there no marriage certificate? maybe they did the modern thing, and just lived together? And where the heck are they in the 1851 census, just a few days after baby Louisa died? And why was Benjamin in Whitechapel when he died? Visiting his adopted son? ... All pure speculation.

And naturally enough, the story of Benjamin and Louisa ends with a bit of a puzzle because on her death certificate Louisa is described as the widow of James Partleton, which we know is wrong, and which shows how easily mistakes are made on official documents, especially on death certificates where the person who has died is hardly in a position to correct the error.

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