Clement William Robert Jones
(awaiting better image)

Norton Green

St Mary's Church, Norton

Chapter 6: Clement and Mary Eleanor Jones

My grandfather, Clement William Robert Jones, the son of William Gresley Jones, and Mary Eleanor Jones, the daughter of John Jones, were married at Fairfield church in the parish of West Derby and Toxteth Park in Liverpool on 7 June 1868. At that date Clement was a grocer living in Hall Lane - I believe with his brother Roger, although I have not been able to prove this. He was 22 years of age. Mary Eleanor, who was 19, was living in Keble Street, off the Prescot Road. She had, however, been living in Liverpool with her uncle Peter Hughes for about two years before her marriage and in July 1866 she and her uncle witnessed the marriage, at St Jude' s Church, of Roger Gresley Jones and her sister Elizabeth. I was told by Edward Jones of Dyserth that originally Roger intended to marry Mary Eleanor. I am sure this story must have had some foundation in fact, but I have some reservations about accepting it because in 1866 Mary Eleanor would have been only 17 years of age and there is nothing to suggest that the two Jones families were acquainted in North Wales. Clement's home in Hall Lane disappeared many years ago when that part of Liverpool was re-developed. But Keble Street was still there when I visited the city in 1973, although the majority of its multi-coloured brick terraced houses were boarded up in preparation for their demolition.

Clement and Mary Eleanor's first family home was in the south-central area of Liverpool at 238 Beaufort Street, which they shared with a Canadian ship's carpenter and his family. Their eldest child Alma Edith was born there towards the end of March 1871 and is shown in the 1871 census return as an infant of eleven days. By then Clement had ceased to be a grocer and was working as a debt collector.

During the following two years Clement once again changed both his address and his occupation. Towards the end of 1873 he was living at 10 Neil Street, Everton, where his second child Gwendoline was born on 23 November of that year. Her birth certificate shows her father's occupation as a commercial traveller, which he remained until the end of his life. The year 1873 was notable for one other reason as well. Both Clement and his brother Roger (who was also a commercial traveller) contracted tuberculosis. Clement survived but Roger died, leaving a widow and three children from whom are descended Edward Jones of Dyserth and his relatives.

Further daughters - Clementina and Nellie May - were born to Clement and Mary Eleanor at different addresses in Everton in 1877 and 1881, respectively. They were followed by my father, Everett, the eldest son, who was born on 17 March 1884 at 21 Eastbourne Street on Everton Brow. This street was demolished during the early 1970s, save for the public house on the corner which still bore the original street name-plate when I visited Liverpool shortly afterwards.

In the years after my father's birth the family were once again on the move: first to Birkenhead, where Franklin the second son was born in 1886, and then to Fairy View, Ruabon Road, Wrexham, where the third son Clement Eyton was born on 15 February 1890. The small group of Victorian houses at Fairy View crossroads on the Ruabon Road are still occupied, but I have not been able to establish in which one the family lived. Later in 1890, however, Clement and Mary Eleanor moved yet again, this time right away from North Wales and Merseyside to County Durham.

Apart from the fact that Clement was a commercial traveller for a firm of biscuit manufacturers, I know nothing about the details of the family's life on and around Merseyside. I assume that my grandparents had little or no money to spare after providing for the needs of an ever-growing family and that it was mainly for this reason that none of the houses they occupied was their own. But it is not clear why they moved so often within the Liverpool area because I doubt whether there was much to choose between the various houses they did occupy. Nor do I know to what extent they kept in touch with their parents and other relatives in North Wales. As I have already mentioned, Clement and Mary Eleanor were present at her father's second marriage in Liverpool in 1875. But I have never heard that Clement was in the habit of visiting Gwaenysgor after his father moved there from Bodlondeb, and the impression one gets is that the children of William Gresley Jones and Anne Daniel were not particularly welcome during the second marriage to Elizabeth Davies. The only other information I have concerns visits to Gwyddelwern and Llangollen when my father was a young boy, My father told me that in his very early years he was taken by his parents to visit my grandmother's relatives at Gwyddelwern (see Chapter 5). He remembered nothing about Gwyddelwern but did remember standing with my grandfather on the famous bridge over the River Dee at Llangollen. I assume - though my father was not able to confirm - that these two events took place on the same occasion while the family were living at Wrexham.

The family's new home in 1890 was at 5 William Terrace, Norton-on-Tees. William Terrace (now part of Hellifield Street) was on the southern outskirts of Norton, just off the road leading to Stockton-on-Tees. Sadly, this move had only just taken place when the youngest child, Clement Eyton, died. He was buried in the churchyard of the ancient Norman church of St Mary the Virgin on Norton Green, in a grave which later also received both of my grandparents and two of my father's elder sisters. However, a further son, Howell, was born in 1891, thus giving a family of four daughters and four sons in all.

The eldest daughter, Alma Edith, married and left Teesside within the following two years and her acquaintance with Norton was thus relatively limited; but my father and his other brothers and sisters remained very attached to the village for the rest of their lives. As Clement himself was often travelling away from Teesside on business, much of the day-to-day control over the family fell to Mary Eleanor and much of the children's early upbringing was fairly formal and conditioned by my grandmother's belief that the Joneses were generally superior to their neighbours. At first the three boys attended a private school run by the Misses Lax in a fine Georgian double-fronted house on the east side of Norton High Street. Later they attended Holy Trinity School in Stockton, and then when my father was about 12 years old he transferred on a scholarship to the newly-opened Higher Grade School. (Frank and Howell may also have gone there, but I have not been able to confirm this.) On the whole my father never regretted his time at Holy Trinity School, although he suffered with most of the other scholars there from a teacher who could only be described as sadisticallv cruel. Life was also made rather. difficult by a running "fued" between the school authorities and Mary Eleanor, who categorically refused to provide written requests for her children to have occasional time off when needed, taking the view that her word as conveyed by my father or his brothers should be sufficient. (I must say my father always had sympathy for the school authorities in these situations) My father did, however, enjoy without reservations his time at the Higher Grade School, which he left in about 1900 to join Craig, Taylor Ltd., a Stockton shipbuilding firm.

Education apart, the family's activities were reasonably varied. I believe my three aunts remained at home with Mary Eleanor until Gwendoline married and Nellie started on a nursing career. Gwendoline was a teacher in the Sunday School at St Mary's Church, as was her future husband William Close: and my father was a member of the church choir when he was a boy in Canon Scott's time. During school holidays the three boys spent many happy hours fishing for minnows and sticklebacks in the numerous ponds that then existed around Norton and learned much of their swimming in the flooded gravel and sand quarries that lay in the fields to the north of the village, In later years my father and Frank used to walk to Wynyard Hall, the house of the Marquis of Londonderry, about three miles north of Norton, to visit two of the housemaids who were employed there, The way led through fields where a false step in the dark winter evenings could easily have plunged them into a stream or deep quarry-pool and a knowledge of the route and of the means of avoiding these traps was thus essential. Finally, it was at Norton that my father and Frank started to play hockey and football for local teams, travelling by bicycle or train to villages in north Yorkshire and south Durham. Howell's particular sport, as mentioned later, was lawn tennis.

My grandfather died at William Terrace on 2 July 1905, aged 59. The death certificate shows his occupation as a commercial traveller and my father as the informant. The obituary notice in a local newspaper described him as "the only surviving son of the late William and Anne Gresley-Jones of Bodlondeb Hall, Flintshire, and grandson of the late Dr William Jones and Lady Gresley (sic) of Liverpool". Despite its obvious inaccuracies, based in part on the confusion of William Gresley Jones with his father Robert Jones the surgeon, this notice is of interest as showing that by 1905 all the other sons of William Gresley and Ann Jones had already died. (The edition of the local newspaper in which the obituary notice appeared is also of considerable historical interest in that it contains full reports of the mutiny which had just taken place on the battleship "Potemkin" in Odessa harbour, one of the forerunners of the Russian Revolution twelve years later.)

Two or three years after Clement's death Mary Eleanor moved from Norton to 3 Lightfoot Grove near Holy Trinity Church in Stockton-on-Tees, and she was living there with five of her children around 1912, when my mother and father first met. Shortly afterwards my grandmother made her final move to 38 Sydenham Road, a quiet road of neat terraced houses near Ropner Park in Stockton. One of my aunts told me that this was the first house the family had owned since Clement and Mary Eleanor were married in 1868. It was at Sydenham Road that my grandmother was living when my father and mother were married in July 1915, and it was there that she died seven years later, on 14 August 1922, five days before her 74th birthday. She and my grandfather were buried in Norton with their infant son Clement Eyton.

I never knew my grandfather, as he died eleven years before I was born, and relatively few details of him as a person were passed on to me by the time I became interes ted in the family's history. However, I have an old photograph of him taken when he was about 45-50 years old, showing him as a rather slightly-built man with a neat full beard of brown hair and a semibald head. There is a strong likeness of Robert John Gresley-Jones, his half-brother, whose photograph I have seen in North Wales and (the beard apart) also a marked resemblance to my father in several respects. He seems to have been a person who was prepared to take an independent line, since unlike most other sons of William Gresley Jones he consistently refused to assume "Gresley" as part of a double surname, and none of his children was given a traditional family name. As he was a commercial traveller away on business throughout most weeks, his contacts with his children were less close than those of Mary Eleanor. But my father told me that he was always interested in how they were progressing at school and, later, at work; encouraged them to read widely; and during the earlier years of my father and his two brothers used to promise them sixpence if, on his return at the weekend, they were able to reci te a piece of prose or poetry which he chose in advance. (My father remembered having to earn one of his sixpences the hard way by learning "The Forsaken Merman" by Matthew Arnold, which appealed to him as little as it did to me many years later!) Of my grandmother, Mary Eleanor, I have early memories as being a little white-haired and thin-faced old lady, dressed in black silk with a bonnet on her head, with a Welsh accent and round metal-framed glasses. The only existing photograph of her was one taken at my father's and mother's wedding in 1915, when she looked older than her 66 years. She had a strong sense of "family", both on her own and my grandfather's sides. Her attitude towards small children was somewhat formal and a habit she had of sucking in her cheeks while listening to somebody speaking made her seem rather more forbidding than I believe she really was. Certainly I myself regarded her and my aunts with a fair amount of awe when I was very young, and I was never quite so much at ease with her as I was with my mother's mother.

Alma Edith, the eldest child of Clement and Mary Eleanor, married Walter Turnbull of Sunderland at Norton Church in 1893 and lived on Wearside for the rest of her life. Her family suffered rather grieviously from illness, her husband and two of her three children dying in middle age. I visited her Sunderland home in the early 1920s with my father, while my uncle was still alive, and was fascinated by the fact that her kitchen sink had three taps, one feeding from a rainwater tank on the roof of an outhouse!

The second daughter, Gwendoline ("Minnie") married William Close, a local schoolmaster, in August 1907, and they lived at Skelton House in Darlington Lane, near Norton Church. William was a delightful person of whom my father was very fond, but unfortunately he died in 1923 when only in his mid-fifties. My aunt was very pro-Welsh and I understand she was more attached to her father than she was to her mother. She was rather prim in her manner and "kept herself to herself" in her relations with neighbours: but she was a kind-hearted person beneath the surface. In her younger days my aunt was an accomplished pianist and won prizes for her playing. She died in 1949, aged 75 and during her last illness she was cared for by her younger sister Nellie at Stockton. The house in Darlington Lane where I stayed twice while William Close was alive and visited during my aunt's widowhood, was full of old furniture and books and fascinating oddments such as swords and preserved elephants' feet. Many of these had come from my uncle's family, which had included several, generations of country clergymen; and some of them (including a grandfather clock which I had helped to wind each evening before going to bed) were left to me when my aunt died.

Clementina ("Tina") and Nellie May remained unmarried and after the family home at Sydenham Road was sold in about 1925 they lived together first in a cottage near Norton Green and later at Stockton. Tina died, aged 55, in 1932. Like her elder sister Alma she was a gentle soul and differed markedly from Nellie May. Nellie was a state registered nurse, and an efficient and forbidding one into the bargain. I believe she awakened some amatory feelings in the heart of a railway signalman in her middle age but nothing came of this; and after living on her own for nearly 37 years she died early in 1968, in her 87th year, as a result of a fall in the snow in her backyard. Even as she lay on what was to prove to be her deathbed in Quisbrough Infirmary, she was still capable of telling the nurses that she did not think the hospital linen was as clean as it should have been! Basically, Nellie was not a happy person. She was mildly obsessed with such things as the Gresley connection: in this respect she resembled some of her North Wales relatives and her knowledge of the true facts was about as deficient as theirs. She was also always anxious that the Jones family should strive to do better than others, and never failed to impress this on me and my brother and sisters when we were young, Nevertheless she had some good qualities, and over the years members of the family had at least cause to be grateful for her professional expertise. She and her sister Tina were buried in the family grave at Norton and I think it is to her credit that in her will she left money not only for cleaning and restoring the grave itself but also for purchasing silver for the church in memory of her parents.

Franklin ("Frank"), the second eldest son, was a draughtsman in the shipyard of Furness Withy at Haverton Hill, and lived first at Hood Crescent, Haverton Hill and later in Imperial Avenue Norton. While I was living at home I often used to visit him and my aunt Eveline (married in 1922) - usually for supper on Tuesday nights - either by tram from Stockton High Street or by bicycle through the back lanes to Norton. He was bedridden for many years following a stroke and eventually died in 1957. He is buried at Redcar. At the time of writing (1978) my aunt is living in an old people's home at Billingham-on-Tees and is now in her 87th year (Eveline Jones, 1890-1983).

Howell, the youngest child of Clement and Mary Eleanor, was the only one born in the north of England. Like my father and Frank, he went into the shipbuilding industry and was a qualified naval architect with Isherwoods. He moved to the London area in the early 1920s and, having married, lived first at Norwood in South London and later at Romford in Essex. My father visited him and my aunt Holly at the time of the Wembley Exhibition and I stayed with them for a short time in 1935, when I first came to London to work. Howell was still living at Romford when he died in 1968. My aunt and her son Robert now live at Bexhill-on-Sea. Howell rose through the ranks to become a Sergeant-Major during the First World War, and during the Second World War he was in charge of the City of London Salvage Corps. A story my father told me about Howell was that when he was in charge of a detachment of soldiers at Gateshead during the First World War one of his men had a door slammed in his face and had his nose all but severed by the metal catch. As no medical assistance was immediately available (they relied on a civilian medical practitioner some distance away and he was quite often drunk) Howell stitched on the nose using local resources which included ordinary machine thread; and from all accounts this emergency treatment was quite successful and the soldier was well pleased with the outcome! My uncle was also a fine tennis player in his youth and competed successfully in the North of England championships immediately before and after the First World War - latterly against players of the calibre of Austin and Gregory.

As most of the children of Clement and Mary Eleanor were either unmarried or childless, the next generation of the family was relatively small in number. And of these, two of Alma's children died in middle age. Walter Turnbull, Alma's surviving child, lives in retirement at Whitley Bay on Tyneside and he and his family are the only descendants of my grandparents who still live in the north of England. And the surname Jones is carried now only by two widowed aunts, my father's family and Howell's unmarried son Robert at Bexhill.

Next: The early Wilsons of Teesside & North Yorks