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Anthony Marsingall once lived and was buried in Husthwaite where his substantial grave stone can be seen in St Nicholas' churchyard. The inscription reads:
"In loving memory of Anthony, eldest son of the late Samuel Marsingall. Captain R.N. of Taunton, Somersetshire. Who died Sept 1st 1888. Aged 70 years. Gone but not forgotten"
The following article by some of his descendents reveals the background to this fascinating character, for whom no other records have been found in the village.
The photograph [see Gallery/people] was contributed by Anthony’s great-great granddaughter, who lives in Harrogate. It is still not known where the picture was taken, or when, and how Anthony came to be buried in Husthwaite is a mystery.
Anthony Marsingall was born about 1815 in Norton Fitzwarren, a small village near Taunton in Somerset. His father, Samuel Marsingall, was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who had seen action against the French during the Napoleonic Wars before being invalided home in 1810. Both Samuel and his wife, Sarah Buller Marsingall, were natives of Somerset; Samuel’s father, also called Anthony Marsingall, had been involved in the silk industry in Taunton in the late 18th century. Where the family originated, however, is unknown, as is the etymology of this unusual surname. There are numerous records of Marsingalls (albeit with several spelling variations) in Whitby and other parts of Yorkshire dating back to the 1500s, so it may be that the family came from that region. If so, then Anthony’s long journey to Husthwaite was a kind of homecoming, a return to his roots.
As a teenager, Anthony lived for a time with his family in Avranches, Normandy, a charming coastal town that had become a popular destination for English expatriates after hostilities between the United Kingdom and France ended in 1814. By the time he was 23, however, Anthony was back in England. In 1839, he was appointed to the London police force, with a recommendation from the Hon. Fox Maule, MP for Perthshire and Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. The Metropolitan Police Force had been formed 10 years earlier by Sir Robert Peel. Those recruits not formerly in the police, the army, or some government department were typically required to provide at least two letters of recommendation from persons of standing. It may be that Lieutenant Samuel Marsingall had pulled some strings in order to get a recommendation from Maule for his young son.
Anthony’s career as a “Peeler” was short-lived. On 3 December 1840 he resigned from the London police force, less than two years after joining. He subsequently relocated to Essex, where, according to the 1841 census, he was living on Barrack Lane in Romford and working as a superintendent of police. The Essex County Constabulary had started the previous year, one of the first county forces to be organised under the 1839 County Police Act, and its Chief Constable, half-pay naval Captain John Bunch Bonnemaison McHardy (another connection of Lieutenant Marsingall’s perhaps), was looking for good recruits. The original intake had consisted of 100 constables and 15 superintendents. Turnover was high, however. Under McHardy's guidance the Essex County Constabulary became a “... sort of nursery for policemen” as men were appointed and trained in Essex before being “head hunted” by newer police forces in other parts of the country.
Anthony did not stay long in Romford. By October 1841, he was back in London, living at 104 Ratcliff Highway in the East End (not the most respectable address) and working as a tailor. On 15 October he married Louisa Easter Neal, who was 15 years old at the time. Anthony was 25. Louisa was the daughter of Robert Neal, the innkeeper of the Kings Arms on Market Place in Romford. Robert had died in early 1839, leaving a wife, Sarah Ann, and five children. Sarah Ann had remained at the Kings Arms for a short while, but moved with her children to London at around the same time as Anthony. At the time of Louisa’s marriage, the family was living on Berner Street in Whitechapel (the site, incidentally, of one of Jack the Ripper’s murders in 1888). One can only imagine the circumstances of the marriage and the reasons for Anthony’s sudden relocation and change of career.
It is unclear how long Anthony was married to Louisa, or what became of his young wife. A baby girl was born to the couple in East London in June 1843 and died six days later. At some point after that, Anthony remarried, this time to a woman named Caroline Aslett, from Hampshire, who was to be his companion for the rest of his life. Four more children were born, and Anthony’s itinerant career during the 1840s can be traced through the places and dates of their birth: a daughter, Sarah, born in Warminster, Wiltshire in the spring of 1845; another daughter, Ellen Louisa, called “Louisa,” born in the spring of 1846 in Cambridge; a son, Anthony (who went by “Thomas”), born in Ousden, Suffolk in November 1847; and another son, Frederick Samuel (known as “Samuel”), born in Lavenham, Cosford, Suffolk in March 1849.
In September 1846, Anthony joined the Isle of Ely Constabulary, which had been set up in 1841, with stations based in Ely, Chatteris, Wisbech and Whittlesey in Cambridgeshire. His tenure there, however, was, like his other stints as a policeman, brief. He was dismissed just six months later, on 15 March 1847. No reason for his dismissal is recorded. It was possibly the last time that he wore a policeman’s uniform.
By March 1851, Anthony, Caroline and the four surviving children were lodgers in the home of a family in Stokesley, Yorkshire, a market town near Middlesbrough, and Anthony was working as an artist. What brought him there is unknown – perhaps there was a distant family connection – but he was to remain in Yorkshire until his death almost four decades later. Even so, he never settled down. According to the 1861 census, in April of that year Anthony and Caroline were living with another family in Low Ackworth, a village in West Yorkshire, without the children: their two sons, then just 12 and 13, were lodgers with a widow and her children in Low Ackworth, and their two daughters, 15 and 16, were both in service elsewhere. In 1871, Anthony and Caroline resided in Austerfield, near Doncaster; and by 1881, they had moved to Great Ouseburn, not far from Knaresborough.
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During this latter part of his life, Anthony Marsingall worked not only as a painter but also as a photographer, starting in the days when photography was still a relatively new technology but growing in popularity. One of his paintings (or possibly that of his grandfather of the same name), “Sniggling for Eels,” is in the permanent collection of the Tate Museum in London; a sea scene by Anthony jnr was also found. In addition, he may have taken some of the photographs of properties locally - these include the Chapel of Ease at Carlton Husthwaite [see Gallery/misc] and another has recently been identified as St Andrew's Church at Aldborough, near Boroughbridge. Artistic talent must have run in the Marsingall genes: Anthony’s father and grandfather were both accomplished artists, and other descendants later became professional painters and illustrators.
Anthony Marsingall died in Husthwaite on 1 September 1888, and is buried there. At the time of his death, he was an annuitant and no longer had to work, thanks possibly to the legacy of a wealthy relative or former governess. His two sons, Thomas and Samuel, had moved to Nottinghamshire in the 1860s, where they had both married and found work as shoemakers. After a few years in service, Louisa had married a stonemason at the age of 23 and settled in Bilton near Harrogate with her husband and eight children. Sarah, however, remained a spinster, continuing to work as a cook and housekeeper. She was present at her father’s death in Husthwaite, and three years later she was living with her mother in a cottage in Bilton. Caroline Marsingall, Anthony’s widow, survived her husband by seven years; she died on 5 August 1895 in Bilton, where she was buried in the churchyard of St. John the Evangelist.
Chris Bernard, with help from Shirley Dunwell, March 2011
Note about Caroline Marsingall
Anthony's second wife, Caroline Amelia Elizabeth Aslett, was born in Durley, a small village near Southampton in Hampshire. She was baptised in Durley in 1821. Her father, John Aslett, was a yeoman farmer from the village of Hound a few miles away on the Hampshire coast, and her mother, Ann Wilkins, was a bricklayer's daughter from South Stoneham, just west of Durley. Anthony Marsingall was Caroline's second husband; in 1836 she had married a James Winter in Portsea, Hampshire. By 1841, according to the census, Caroline Winter and her five-month-old son, also called James, were living in Durley in the household of Caroline's sister and brother-in-law, without Caroline's husband. Apparently, Caroline left her first son with her sister when she married Anthony Marsingall, for James Winter junior was still living with his aunt and uncle in Durley in 1861, by which time he had learned his uncle's trade as a wheelwright.
Chris Bernard, April 2011