You can stop sniggering right now. This is my paternal great great grandfather I’ll have you know. Yes, obviously someone had a sense of humour. Presumably his parents. Worse still there are a couple of Cannon Balls (no middle names) on that side of my family too. So for Herbert, it could have been worse.
And he had to live with that name for a long time. As you will have worked out, he was 98 when he died. 98.
During that, almost a, century during which Herbert was alive, these are just some of the things that happened …
The United Kingdom passed the Great Reform Act, Slavery was abolished, The Poor Law brought into being Workhouses for “Paupers” in the the United Kingdom, Queen Victoria reigned for 64 years, Edward VII began and ended his reign and George V started his, Joseph Bazelget built London’s sewers, the “Little Ice Age” ends (hold that moment…), The British Empire begins, Abraham Lincoln is assassinated, The Russian Revolution happens, WW1 happens, The Easter uprising happens in Ireland, Adolf Hitler became Führer of the Nazi Party in Germany, powered flight is invented, the combustion engine is invented and Henry Ford manufactures his first car, The Titanic sunk, the Great Depression happened, electricity is invented, telephone communication …
I could go on. You get the picture.
And during it all, there is Herbert living his life in Borough in Bermondsey. Just on the south side of London Bridge by the mighty river Thames.
Herbert was born around 1832 to Herbert Ball and Rebecca Stuart. Herbert Senior was a Tailor and in 1841, he and Rebecca lived at 5, Borough Road, Borough, Bermondsey which is likely to be where Herbert Cannon was actually born.
When he was 8 or 9, Herbert Cannon was living at a private boarding school in Sutton in Surrey. Miles away from Bermondsey. He was the only child and his father probably quite well off so I wonder why he was sent away. The only solution I can find is that, in the middle of the 19th century, “the middling sorts” (those with a trade and aspiring to appear wealthy) started to send their children away for their education just to demonstrate they had the money to do so.
Herbert’s mother, Rebecca, died in 1846 aged just 40, without having had any more children and in 1848, Herbert senior married another woman 15 years his junior and had four more more children with her, one of whom was also called Herbert …
In 1851, Herbert Cannon was back living at 5, Borough Road aged 19, with his father and step mother (only 6 years younger than him) and he had also become a Tailor.
Herbert Cannon Ball married Emma Pickard in St George the Martyr Church in Borough High Street in 1856.
The church is known as the “Little Dorrit church” as this is where Amy – Little Dorrit in Dickens’ book of the same name – was baptised and later took refuge in when her father was in the Marshalsea Debtors’ prison located next to the church in those days and there is a stained glass window in the church dedicated to the story.
Emma Pickard was from Clerkenwell, further east and north from Bermondsey (at that time Clerkenwell would have been a leafy suburb on the eastern side of London and within the boundaries of the County of Middlesex) and her father was a Milliner.
Herbert and Emma continued to live at 5, Borough Road and bring their family up there for the next 37 years until Emma died of heart disease aged 53 in 1888.
Herbert senior, meanwhile, had left for the East End of London, had given up being a tailor and was running pubs with his new young wife whose parents were also Licensed Victuallers (pub landlords), presumably leaving the house to his eldest son, Herbert Cannon.
Herbert Cannon and Emma had 6 sons between 1857 and 1867, all of whose names began with “H” – Herbert (of course), Hugh, Horace (my great Grandfather), Harold, Harry (Harold AND Harry must have led to confusion … just saying) and Heth.
Of these six sons, one was a Jeweller, one a Tailor like his father, one (my great grandfather) was a Builder’s Labourer, one an Insurance Clerk, one a Commercial Clerk and Buyer and one, Heth, died aged just 13 from Meningitis.
Finally in 1870, they had a (presumably much wanted) girl, who was named Rebecca after her maternal Grandmother.
Herbert Cannon continued to work as a Tailor all his life, at one stage, calling himself a “Master Tailor” and having apprentices living in his house which presumably was his shop and workshop too.
In 1872, Herbert Cannon is declared Bankrupt although he continues to live at 5, Borough Road albeit without the servants (including a children’s nurse) and apprentices he and Emma had previously.
Following his wife’s death, Herbert is still living at 5, Borough Road in 1891 with only his daughter, Rebecca. But in 1897, Rebecca gets married (interestingly to a Thomas Wall so her name changes from Ball to Wall …) also at St George the Martyr Church where her parents had married 46 years before and in 1901 Herbert Cannon is living with Rebecca and her family in Croydon. Herbert is still a Tailor despite now being over 70.
Herbert Cannon died in February 1930 aged 98. The cause of death is given as old age and senile decay. Not terribly flattering but unsurprising. Herbert died in a nursing home in Croydon but his usual address is given as Rebecca and Thomas’s house so he had lived with them for 33 years.
Rebecca’s husband, Thomas Wall, was the informant for Herbert’s death and it is to Thomas that Herbert leaves his money when Probate was granted in March 1930. The estate totalled £175, worth about £5,700 today. It was by no means unusual for an estate to be left to a daughter’s husband and not the daughter herself in those days but if I was Rebecca I would have been a bit put out. My consolation would have been that at least it came to Rebecca and not any of her brothers who appear to have done nothing to help her look after their father. I suspect in this, Herbert Cannon was ahead of his time as the usual convention would have been to leave his money to his eldest son.
Four of Herbert Cannon’s sons survived him. Horace (my great grandfather) had died in 1920 and Heth, I have already said, died aged just 13. Herbert Cannon and Emma’s only daughter, Rebecca, outlived her husband, Thomas and all her brothers and didn’t die until 1960 staggeringly, by which time, she was 90.
5, Borough Road was occupied by another family on the 1901 and 1911 census returns but my family had lived there for almost 60 years and possibly before that. I’ve been there. It’s an NCP car park now and I cannot find any drawings or prints of the original house but I imagine it as a fairly grand multi story Georgian house with steps to the front, an imposing entrance hall and a roomy basement where Herbert Cannon conducted his business.
This pen and ink drawing from the mid 19th century shows a building called the British and Foreign Schools which was located in Borough Road. It looks like a genteel sort of place.
So that’s Herbert Cannon Ball. A life well lived I hope and with much seen, experienced and created.
Linda Swinburne Family History Blog 