John Davies c.1758-1813

Speculation on Early Life, c.1758-1797

John Davies was probably born around 1758[1], although we can only speculate where he was born and who his parents were. All we know of him prior to his marriage in 1797 was that he was educated enough to being able to clearly write his own name, and that he was for some time a gunner in the Royal Navy[2].

The surname Davies is Welsh, so he may have been born in Wales, although people of Welsh descent had of course been settling within England for centuries prior. It may be that if the family had been in England for multiple generations then the name would have been "naturalized" to the more typical English spelling of Davis, so a birth in Wales or to a father born in Wales is arguably more likely[3]. As John ended up in a nautical career, he probably grew up in a port town. If Welsh by birth, he is most likely to have come from the southeastern counties on the Bristol channel, where over half of all Welsh naval recruits were born[22]. His father's name may have been Thomas, since this was the middle name given to John's only son, and does not appear in his wife's family.

A John Davies was baptized in November 1757 at the Independent Chapel on Gosport High Street, son of Thomas and Elizabeth[4]. Gosport was the nation's principle naval base at the time and was known for its large gunpowder store, so it seems like a logical place for a future naval gunner to have grown up[5]. However this is just one among literally hundreds of plausible birth records for a John Davies in England and Wales during the right period, and this is before we account for the fact that many births were not recorded or their records are lost or were never digitized.

Naval records might give us a glimpse into John's career at sea, and also provide other clues such as his age, place of birth and next of kin. Unfortunately for us there seem to be at least a dozen separate people named John Davies on naval records between 1770 and 1800. Some of them can be ruled out as their details disagree with known facts about our John. Others may be him but none of them especially stands out. A quarter gunner named John Davies created a will in 1798, but his wife was not named Edith and he was illiterate, signing his name with a shaky X[6]. A gunner named John Davies was eligible for the Naval General Service Medal with clasps for various actions between 1794 and 1806, but since that medal was struck in 1847 and could only be issued to living claimants, it conflicts with the death date of our John[7].

It is also worth noting that there is no comprehensive list of all navy servicemen for that era. All the records I have found for a John Davies in the navy come from ship's muster lists (which do not survive in complete form for every ship)[8], or from records such as wills, pensions, or medal rolls which were either not compulsory or not applicable to everyone[9][10]. So it is entirely possible our John Davies is missing from the extant naval records altogether[Note 1].

Another problem with finding any early records for John is that the name Davies was sometimes interchangeably spelled Davis[3], with the latter spelling more common in England. While John himself was literate and spelled the name Davies, as would his wife and children, any English-born record-keeper might well have defaulted to Davis.

A final consideration in relation to John's career is that the only evidence we have for him being a gunner in the navy is the marriage records of two of his children. When John Thomas Davies married in 1837, the father's occupation was stated to be "Naval gunner", and this is reiterated as simply "gunner" on Sarah Ann's marriage entry in 1851 (when eldest child Mary Charlotte married in 1817, marriage recording did not give the father's occupation)[2]. However John Thomas and Sarah Ann were aged 4 and 1 respectively when John died, and in any case the evidence shows that he had an onshore job for at least the last seven years of his life[11]. It is possible that by 1837 stories of John's naval career had been embellished or misremembered.

The only corroborating evidence for John being in the navy is the fact that he is described as a mariner on the baptismal record of his first child in 1798. Mariner could then be a catch-all term for virtually any nautical career, from fishermen to cargo ship crew and certainly sometimes including naval personnel[12]. It neither confirms nor denies John's being a naval gunner, but it does confirm he worked at sea.

However, assuming John was indeed a gunner in the Royal Navy, we can infer a few things about his career. In the ranking structure of the navy, a gunner was a single individual on a ship responsible for the ship's guns and gunpowder storeroom with a rank of standing officer, placing him above the petty officers but below the commissioned officers. He was assisted by the gunner's mate and a number of quarter gunners, who held the rank of petty officer. As standing officers kept accounts of supplies it was mandatory for them to be able to read, write and understand basic arithmetic. They would also need to demonstrate their basic capabilities as seamen, and on smaller ships could be called upon to carry out navigational duties in addition to their regular work[13].

John probably had several years of naval experience prior to becoming a gunner, although there was no standard path to that position, with previous ranks of qualified gunners varying from coxwain to purser[14]. A considerable portion of those serving in the eighteenth-century British navy had been impressed (forcibly conscripted), with estimates varying between one fifth and one half of all navy recruits joining this way[15], but these would have become ordinary seaman, not officers, so John was almost certainly a volunteer. If he joined young enough, his career could have lasted over three decades. He was the right age to have fought in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.

John's appearance as a mariner in Bermondsey at the time of his marriage does raise some questions. The nearest naval base was the dockyard at Deptford[16], so may have been the home port for whichever ship John was serving on at the time. It is still however a good three miles from Bermondsey. Perhaps, since Deptford was little more than a village at the time, it was easier to find lodging at Bermondsey, which was then the nearest major urban district that side of the river. Then again, his residence at Bermondsey may have been temporary.

An alternative possibility is that with the proximity of the St Saviour Docks and the ambiguity of the term "mariner", John had by this point already retired from the navy and had found work on a small merchant ship[17]. However some of the circumstances around the timing of his marriage and births of his first two children do seem to correlate with the longer, less predictable voyages of a naval officer[18].

One final mystery remains in regard to John's life before his marriage, and that is the question of how he came to know his future with Edith in the first place. Edith Hales was a 22-year-old native of Bermondsey (making her about seventeen years younger than John), the daughter of a wire drawer. Nobody else in the family is known to have had any links to the navy.

Known Events, 1797-1813

John married Edith on 13 December 1797 at the parish church of St Mary Magdalene Bermondsey. They were married by license, and both resident in the parish. The witnesses were Edith's twin sister Sarah and her father Edward[2].

The marriage license had been obtained that same day[19]. The license would have cost around £2[20] (equivalent to roughly £100 as of 2017[21]) and the usual reason for a couple to obtain one was either to marry in a parish where neither was resident (apparently not the case here), or to circumvent the usual three-week wait necessitated by the posting of the banns in a non-licensed marriage. The latter explanation is consistent with John's nautical career, as John may not have had much time ashore between voyages. While it is not clear how long the two had known each other before the wedding, they presumably decided to marry there and then, not knowing how soon their next opportunity might be. However judging by the birth date of their first child in November the following year, they probably got to spend at least a month or two together before John was off to sea again.

John's daughter Mary Charlotte Davies was born 22 November 1798 at Snow's Fields. This is the street on which Edith's father and sister are known to have lived at the time, and indeed this is exactly where we would expect to find Edith living at this time while John was at sea. Mary Charlotte's baptism record on 16 December provides us with our one reference to John as a mariner[11].

We then have a gap of eight years before John and Edith's next child. Navy ships could sometimes be at sea for years without returning to their home ports[23], especially in this period which saw the War of the Third Coalition and the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, and Britain engaging in numerous chases and skirmishes with the French and Spanish fleets across the globe[24][Note 2]. John may have only seen his wife and daughter once or twice during these years. If John was working a merchant vessel instead, he would still have been at sea more than on land, but would have come home at least once or twice a year[Note 3]. We would thus expect to see more children during this period, although it is of course possible that Edith had several miscarriages, or that some children died in infancy before they could be baptised.

When John next appears in the records, his circumstances have changed considerably. Upon the birth of second child Sarah Augusta in September 1806 he is living on Old Gravel Lane in the parish of St George in the East, a relatively prosperous district populated by merchants and tradesmen. His occupation is "porkman"[11], meaning someone who kept and butchered pigs. The enormous London Docks were then still under construction, but Wapping was already a major hub for the loading and unloading of goods from the commercial ships thronging the banks of the Thames[28], This could then lend credence to the idea of John transitioning out of the navy via time in a merchant ship.

Whatever the case, John was clearly now retired from his life at sea, and porkman was to be his stated occupation for the remainder of his life. Now aged almost 50, his exit from the navy may have involved injury, or a decline in health such as hearing or sight loss. If he did not come into the pig business via a spell in merchant service then this may have been a family trade which John had experience in before joining the navy, or he may have had an acquaintance in the business. There may even have been a direct link to his naval career, since imported pork was supplied directly to the Royal Navy[29]. Mortimer's General Commercial Directory of 1819 estimates between £50 and £150 of capital was needed to establish a porkman's business[30], so John had likely saved up a great deal of his navy pay, and perhaps borrowed money from relatives.

John's pigs probably came from Ireland, which exported tens of thousands of pigs to England every year, outstripping the domestic market[31]. The animals would be shipped live and kept in conditions that were overwhelmingly cruel, as well as unsanitary for anyone living or working nearby. A contemporary Bristol shopkeeper whose neighbour slaughtered imported pigs stated the following to a medical inspector:

"Often the pigs coming over in the packet die, and I have seen as many as thirty dead pigs at a time brought into the yard. They are thrown under that shed there until there is time to cut them up, and by that time I have seen the maggots fairly dropping out of them. Then they are cut and I believe made into salt bacon or sold for sausages. The entrails of such pigs are generally too far gone to be of use and they are throw into the dunghill. When the dunghill is stirred up to be taken away - oh, sir! - the smell is awful. We are forced to shut our windows and doors and stuff pieces of cloth into the keyholes, but all this does not keep it out. The entrails of the live pigs killed in the yard are boiled and sold, and give out a very bad smell, but nothing like the others."[32]

This was perhaps an extreme example, and we can only hope that conditions were not so unpleasant where John kept his pigs, although opinions on porkmen tended towards disgust. Compared to other livestock, pigs were well-suited to the urban environment, as their robust digestive systems meant they could eat refuse and industrial by-products such as whey, spent brewer's grain, offal, and rotting vegetables. While this diet made them quite popular with other traders looking to cheaply dispose of their waste products, it did very little to endear porkmen or their animals to the general populace[33].

Besides the stated occupation in his children's baptismal records, we have no particular information on John's business, other than what can be assumed about it given the time and location. Echoing our difficulties in finding information about a specific John Davies in the navy, John even has his doppelgangers in the trade of pig meat, most notably a pork butcher named John Davies operated on Oxford Street from the 1800s to 1820s[34][35]. There is no obvious family connection between him and our John.

The names of John's two eldest children both take a first name from Edith's family, and a middle name recently popularised by the British royal family. Mary was Edith's mother's name, and Sarah the name of her twin sister, although the names were common enough that they could easily have appeared in John's family as well. Charlotte and Augusta were the names of the first and second daughters of George III, which suggests that the Davies family were staunch monarchists who were on some level seeking to emulate the royals.

Sarah Augusta died at three months old. The couple's third child was born in March 1809 and named John Thomas[11], breaking with the naming pattern of the first two children. The name Thomas does not appear in Edith's family, nor in the royal family. It may have been the name of John's father or a brother.

The couple's fourth child was born January 1812 and named Sarah Ann[11]. Again the name middle name of Ann is not one found in King George's family, so might be the name of John's mother or sister. Alternatively it may have been in tribute to Edith's niece Ann Marshall, who died in 1805 at the age of 15 months.

On the subject of names, Edith's sister Sarah and her husband Benjamin Marshall named their two sons Benjamin John and Henry John in 1807 and 1809 respectively. Since there was no John in either parent's family, it's likely this middle name was in honour of our John Davies. The families of the twin sisters seem to have been very close, and John and Edith's son John Thomas would later marry his first cousin, Sarah's daughter Jane.

John died at the age of 55 in early November 1813, still a resident of Old Gravel Lane, and was buried on 9 November at St George in the East[1]. There is some evidence that Edith's brother-in-law Benjamin Marshall became a sort of surrogate father to the Davies children, acting as witness alongside Edith to the marriage of Mary Charlotte in 1817[2]. Although John would be described as a gunner on the marriage registers for his two younger children, his naval career left no apparent legacy in the family. Son John Thomas became a wheelwright. Sarah Ann worked as a governess before marrying a carpenter. Mary Charlotte's husband was a tallow chandler six years her senior. She may have come to know him through her father's civilian job, since a common ingredient of tallow was pig fat.

Notes

1. A remaining avenue of exploration which is not currently available online is the National Archives collection of Gunners' Passing Certificates, 1783-1797 (catalogue reference ADM 6/127) and 1769-1782 (ADM 6/126). I do intend to look at these on my next visit to the archives (hopefully before the end of 2023), and this may shed some light on John's career and origins. However since we know there was at least one other gunner named John Davies around this time, it may still be impossible to pinpoint our John. There also appears to be a gap from 1798 to 1802 where no certificates are available, so if John became a gunner very late in his career it may be that his certificate is lost.
2. I have struggled to find a concise reliable source for typical naval voyage lengths in this period, but timelines of actions for specific ships can give us some examples. The Temeraire left Plymouth after repairs in March 1804, took part in blockades at Brest and Cadiz, fought at Trafalgar and returned to England in December 1805[25]. The Superb was out of her home port for over three years from 1801 to 1804, although this seems to have been regarded as an exceptionally long period. When she was sent back to England, it was more because she needed a refit than any concern that her crew might be feeling homesick[26].
3. Again it has been difficult to find a single concise source for the typical amounts of time merchant seamen spent away from home in this era. However there are plenty of sources for specific voyage lengths. For example, journeys from Britain to Australia could take between 70 and 110 days[27]. If we assume this would be among the most distant destinations merchant vessels would visit, and imagine a particularly difficult voyage with maximum journey times in both directions and an extensive turnaround period of two months in port, a seaman could potentially be away for 280 days. Realistically most voyages would be far shorter than this, although there is a complication in that vessels trading closer to home might stop off in mutiple ports. In any case, the consensus in multiple sources is that the Royal Navy was notorious for keeping its personnel away from home far longer than those on civillian vessels.

References

1. Church of England Deaths and Burials, London Metropolitan Archives
2. Church of England Marriages and Banns, London Metropolitan Archives
3. https://selectsurnames.com/davis/, accessed 2 Jun 2023
4. Registers of Births, Marriages and Deaths surrendered to the Non-parochial Registers Commissions of 1837 and 1857, General Register Office
5. https://localhistories.org/a-history-of-gosport/, accessed 2 Jun 2023
6. ADM 48 – Wills of Royal Navy and Royal Marines personnel 1786-1882
7. ADM 171, 202 – Admiralty, and Ministry of Defence, Navy Department: Medal Rolls
8. ADM 36, 37, 38 – British Royal Navy, Ships' Musters, National Archives
9. ADM 6 / 223-320 – Registers of candidates for admission to Greenwich Hospital and registers of applications to Greenwich Hospital for admission, out-pensions or other relief, 1737-1859, National Archives
10. ADM 29 / 1-32, 34-131 – Admiralty: Royal Navy, Royal Marines, coastguard and related services: Officers’ and Ratings’ Service Records (Series II) 1802-1919
11. Church of England Parish Registers, 1538-1812, London Metropolitan Archives
12. For example the Kentish Chornicle of 24 July 1810 describes a deceased person as "late a mariner in the Royal Navy".
13. Cole, Gareth: Royal Navy Gunners in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, from The Mariner's Mirror Vol.95 No.3 p284-297, August 2009
14. Ibid, p285
15. Caputo, Sara: Towards a trans-national history of the eighteenth century British Navy, from Annales historiques de la Révolution française, Vol.397, Issue 3, July 2019
16. https://deptfordisforever.net/deptfordroyaldockyard, accessed 6 Jun 2023
17. https://www.londonslostrivers.com/river-neckinger.html, accessed 6 Jun 2023
18. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/summer/1812-impressment.html, accessed 6 Jun 2023
19. Faculty Marriage Licenses, Society of Genealogists 20. https://janeaustensworld.com/tag/marriage-licence-in-regency-england/, accessed 6 Jun 2023
21. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/, accessed 6 Jun 2023
22. Dancy, Jeremiah R.: British Naval Manpower during the French Revolutionary Wars, 1793-1802, University of Oxford, 2012; p84
23. https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~pbtyc/genealogy/RN/Engagements.html, accessed 6 Jun 2023;
24. https://militarymaps.rct.uk/napoleonic-wars-1803-15/1805-6, accessed 6 Jun 2023
25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Temeraire_(1798), accessed 6 Jun 2023
26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Superb_(1798), acccessed 6 Jun 2023
27. https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter1/emergence-of-mechanized-transportation-systems/maritime-journey-australia-1788-1960/, accessed 6 Jun 2023
28. https://londonsroyaldocks.com/londons-royal-docks-history/
29. The Pilot (London), 5 October 1811
30. Bennet, David (1996): The Structure of Industry in London, University of Nottingham; p303
31. Kentish Chronicle, 5 September 1815; in an article titled "Monthly Agricultural Report" states that "twenty thousand Irish pigs, from seven to twenty stone each, have been imported near Bristol, and at Newport, within the last six months; and much Irish pork is now selling in the London markets"
32. quoted in Mortimer, Ian (2020): The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain, The Bodley Head; p25
33. Almeroth-Williams, Thomas (2013): Horses & Livestock in Hanoverian London, University of York; p46
34. Holden's Triennial Directory, 1804
35. Robson's Improved London Directory, William Robson & Co., 1820

For a biography of John's daughter Mary Charlotte, click here

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