George Budgen (1826-1893), Anne Maria Baker (1826-1873) and Margaret Cole (1835-1903)
My 3rd great-grand uncle and aunts.
Baptised on 28 January 1827 in Worth, Sussex, George was the son of agricultural labourer William Budgen and Sarah Rice. In 1841 George was living with his parents at Standing Hall Farm in the village and working as a farm labourer.
He married Anne Maria Baker, who was baptised in April 1826 at Stepney in East London, at St Nicholas’s Church, Brighton, on 1 December 1850. She was the daughter of HM Customs revenue officer Benjamin Baker and his wife Harriet.
The 1851 census showed the couple living in Patcham to the north of Brighton, with George working as a coachman and groom. Several of their children were born there. But by 1861 George was landlord of the Horse and Groom on Islingword Road in Brighton. He remained at the pub for several years, and not without incident.
The Brighton Gazette of 5 September 1867 reported a gruesome tragedy involving a 37-year-old workman, Charles Oakes, who’d been contracted to dig a cesspool at the back of the pub. The inquest, held on the premises, heard from his fellow workman Peter Gibbs. He said that they’d resumed work after being given a drink by the landlord and Oakes, who was sober, had gone down into one of the pits. He then “began to roll about” so they lowered a rope to him, but he was unable to grab it.
Witness Edward Grimes said he assisted Gibbs and another man into the hole to help Oakes. As the paper reported: “When he first got there, deceased was lying with half his body in the heading and his leg on a bar of iron, which went across the middle of the hole. He fell from this position to the bottom of the hole before Gibbs went down.” A medical student, John Harris Ross, was summoned and found Oakes dead. He smelt strongly of sulphuretted hydrogen, the inhalation of which had, he believed, caused death. Gibbs also appeared to be suffering from it. This is the smell we know today as rotten eggs. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death.
The Brighton Gazette of 20 February 1862 reported a somewhat less exciting event: “A most impudent and daring robbery took place last week at the Horse and Groom Inn, Islingword Road. Mr G Budgen, the landlord, gave a ball to his friends and customers, and a bedroom adjacent to the ballroom was used a washing room. In the course of the evening two young men were seen loitering suspiciously in the room, and on the following morning the landlord discovered that the lock of a drawer, containing money, had been picked, and £20 had been abstracted and carried off.”
George’s wife Ann died young in 1873. Various Brighton street directories listed George at the Horse and Groom from the late 1850s to 1874 but there are gaps in the books available both before and after those years. The 1876 Page’s Directory listed George Budgen Jnr at the Horse and Groom, suggesting that one of his sons had taken over as landlord. Today the pub is a cafe-bar known as Village.
George remarried on 8 December 1875 at St Stephen’s in Westminster, London. His bride was spinster Margaret Roberts, daughter of builder John Roberts, who came from Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
George senior had, according to the 1881 census, moved on to become hotel keeper at the Crown and Anchor on London Road in Preston Park, now a Brighton suburb. The Southern Weekly News of 6 January 1883 noted the transfer of the pub licence from George to a new landlord. At the 1891 census he was living at 154 Elm Grove and working as a jobbing gardener. He died on 12 July 1893. Margaret was a cook and domestic servant in Brighton at the 1991 census and died in 1903.
George and Ann Maria’s children were:
- Anne Maria Budgen (1852-1892). Baptised at St Peter’s in Preston, Sussex, Annie married Brighton-born engineer Arthur Every in Wandsworth, now South London, in 1870. They had a child, settled in Battersea but both died young – Arthur in 1882 and Anne in 1892.
- George Budgen (1854-????). Born in Patcham, Sussex, George was recorded as a carpenter in 1871 and married young widow Margaret Cole (nee Jones) in 1876 – by which time he was a publican. I’ve not traced them after this.
- Elizabeth Budgen (1857-1885). Elizabeth married publican Frank James Morton (sometimes Moreton) in St Stephen’s, Westminster, in 1876. He succeeded his father in becoming the landlord of the Morton’s Hotel at Queens Street, Brighton (now called the Hope and Ruin). The couple had children but Elizabeth died young in 1885. Frank remarried and lived until 1938.
- William Henry Budgen (1859-1902). Born in Brighton, Sussex, William married widow Jane Greenhalgh (nee Battersby) in the nearby parish of Preston in 1883. At the time he was working as a glazier. The couple moved to Manchester in Lancashire, where Jane’s father worked as a brewer and William took over as the landlord of the Drovers Inn on Ashton Road in Openshaw. He became a member of the Victoria Lodge of Freemasons in Eccles. Jane’s son from her first marriage lived with them. Both William and Jane died in 1902.
- Alice Budgen (1863-1895). I’ve traced Alice to the 1891 census, when she was a housekeeper in Bloomsbury, London. A death registered in this district in 1895 must be her – there’s no evidence that she survived.
- Henry Richard Budgen (1865-1929). Baptised in Brighton, Henry became a solicitor’s clerk and married Hastings-born Mary Ann Dunk in the Brighton suburb of Prestonville in 1889. She often used the middle name Charlotte after her mother and also went by the name Marion. They raised a family together in the Brighton area but in 1904 she was committed to the Brighton Asylum. Mary Ann died in 1907. A year later Henry married Brighton-born Emily Caroline Gore Clarke and the 1911 census recorded the family in Ilford, Essex. Henry died in Essex in 1929. Emily lived until 1965.
- Arthur Stanley Budgen (1867-1916). Baptised in Brighton, Arthur followed his brother William to Manchester to become a waiter in his pub. He then married Margaret Chadwick there in 1900 and became a beer and wine retailer in Openshaw. She died in 1915, Arthur a year later.
Sources: BMDs and census records at Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast.co.uk and the British Newspaper Archive (titles mentioned in the text). Sussex Family History Group. Pubwiki.