BRYDGES

A grandmother’s unusual name

Every family history starts with a question, and this one starts with a spelling. Ann Brydges was born in 1937, married Alan William Randall, and died in 2014; hers was the last generation of the direct line to bear the surname. Bridges with a y is an unusual spelling, and unusual spellings are rarely accidents: at some point, somebody chose it, and the choice was kept through every register and census that followed. The question this history answers is who chose it, when, and why.

The answer turns out to involve a doctor, a sheriff, a deathbed, an ambassador, a woman carved in stone at her prayers, and one of the most notorious aristocratic frauds of the eighteenth century. It begins, as these stories usually do, in the last place you would think to look: a rented terrace in Victorian London.

Smoke and river · London, 1842–1907

On 14 October 1881, at 22 George Street in Somers Town, a boy named William Charles Brydges was born. Somers Town lies between three great railway stations, Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. His father Joseph had been born in Southwark in 1842 and died in Poplar in April 1886, aged about forty-four, when William Charles was four. His mother was Rebacca Corrock, born in 1843.

The records place three successive generations in Southwark, Poplar and Somers Town: ordinary London addresses, carrying an uncommon surname. William Charles lived to be photographed, and died in Leamington in 1967, aged eighty-five. His son John James (1907–1977) and granddaughter Ann carried the name to its last generation.

So where had they slid from? The clue was hiding in plain sight, in the middle of a name.

The clue in a middle name · Ledbury, 1807

Joseph’s father was born on 27 May 1807, far from London, in the market town of Ledbury in Herefordshire, and he was christened Joseph Halford Brydges. In the nineteenth century, a middle name like that is rarely decoration. It is a record. Parents gave a son his mother’s maiden surname to bind two families together on the baptismal page — and Joseph Halford’s mother was Alice Halford, born about 1781.

This is the kind of detail genealogists live for, because it cannot easily be faked and it travels. Wherever Joseph Halford Brydges went — and he went to London, dying in Middlesex in 1874 — he carried the proof of his parents’ marriage in his own signature. The trail now pointed to whoever married Alice Halford in the first years of the century, somewhere near Ledbury.

His father was a doctor.

The doctor · Colwall, 1779–1863

Dr William Henry Brydges was born on 1 December 1779 in the parish of Colwall, on the western flank of the Malvern Hills, and died in Herefordshire on 13 March 1863, aged eighty-three. His life spans the distance from the American Revolution to the opening of the London Underground. He married Alice Halford, born about 1781, and their son was born in Ledbury, four miles from Colwall.

And here the story turns, because Colwall was not a random parish. For over a century, the manor house called Old Colwall had been the seat of a gentry family. Their name was Brydges — with the y.

He was not even the family circle’s first physician. Back in the seventeenth century a Brydges daughter, Elizabeth — first the widow of John Dannett of Old Court, Bosbury — had married Dr Bridstock Harford of Hereford, described by the county historians as an eminent physician, whose descendants would matter to this story in a way nobody could have predicted. Medicine, it seems, ran along this valley.

The house under the hill · Old Colwall in its glory

Follow the doctor’s trail backwards and you arrive at a small estate below the Malverns and a family at the height of its standing. Thomas Brydges of Old Colwall, the doctor’s probable grandfather or great-grandfather, served as Sheriff of Herefordshire — the Crown’s senior officer in the county, the man who attended the judges, ran the elections and kept the gaol. For a family of their size it was the summit of provincial life.

Thomas and the generation around him are commemorated in Colwall church itself. A marble tablet on the nave wall reads: “Near this Isle lies interred the Body of Richard Brydges, Esqr., of Old Colwall in this Parish. He died 18th Decbr 1758, ætat. 58”, and beside it, “Also near this Isle lies interred the Body of Thomas Brydges, Esqr., of Old Colwall in this Parish. He died 9th July 1765, ætat. 61.” Matched against the pedigree, Thomas, born about 1704, is the Sheriff himself; Richard, born about 1700, his elder brother, who died unmarried — which places the younger Richard, Elizabeth Prattington’s husband, as the Sheriff’s son. Beneath the two inscriptions the family added a joint epitaph:

Thomas’s son Richard — born about 1755, by the burial register’s reckoning — married Elizabeth around 1773 and kept the estate; six of their children were baptised at Colwall between 1774 and 1782. (The printed pedigrees give his marriage to Elizabeth Prattington as 1748, a date the register series cannot be reconciled with; the family tree’s dating of the couple, Richard about 1755 and Elizabeth about 1754, fits every record.) With the estate came a family obligation then already two generations old. William’s will of 1704 had doled money to the poor of six parishes and settled £200 (very roughly £35,000 today) on trustees to clothe, “yearly upon St Thomas’ day”, the poor, aged and labouring people of Bosbury in coarse cloth, hose and shoes. The charity ran for over a century, and in 1774 it produced a document of rare genealogical value: a receipt, found by the Charity Commissioners among the Old Colwall estate papers, in which Richard acknowledges the charity capital — £150, roughly £26,000 today — in his own words:

Four generations, confirmed by the man in the middle of them. Richard’s “great grandfather” is William of the 1704 will; the chain from that deathbed will down to Richard is therefore proven not by a printed pedigree but by Richard’s own signature. The receipt also fixes his uncle, William of London and Ledbury, as a woollen-draper, and mentions a Rev. John Brydges, clerk, dead by 1774, as the previous trustee.

In the late 1780s, the county records show the family at their broadest reach and their most absent: the chief landowners of both Bosbury and Upleadon were Brydges — Richard leasing the great tithe from the Bishop of Hereford, his kinswoman Mary Brydges at Old Court carrying Bosbury’s highest land tax assessment — yet none of them living in the parish. Richard was buried at Colwall on 29 January 1813, aged fifty-eight, and after his death Old Colwall was sold, passing in March 1827 to James Martin. The sale conditions still listed the family’s standing obligations — twelve coats, twelve pairs of stockings and twelve pairs of shoes for twelve poor men of Bosbury each year, weekly loaves for Colwall and Coddington — and though arbitration first relieved the new owner of them, Martin settled the dispute in 1842 with £150 of capital (about £17,000) and fifteen years’ interest. After some two hundred years, the family and the house had parted; the charity, remarkably, had not finished. Eight Bosbury men received coats from it in 1891, and its successor fund was still distributing St Thomas’ day vouchers in 1984 — two hundred and eighty years after William signed his will and died.

His sister Margaret married John Wilson of Barnard’s Green in Malvern; his elder brother Thomas settled in Malvern. And a cousin, another Elizabeth, lived at Ledbury with her sister Mary, holding stock in the old South Sea annuities — and on 28 August 1804, with the Rector of Pixley among her witnesses, she made one of the most revealing documents in the whole family record: her will.

It survives at The National Archives, and it reads like a map of everyone she loved. Three hundred pounds (call it £27,000) to “my cousin Richard Brydges of Old Colwall”. Five hundred pounds (some £45,000) in trust for Richard’s children. An annuity for his sister Margaret. And then the bequests that tell you who she really was: bread, bought quarterly forever, for the poor widows of Bosbury and Colwall, “those to be preferred who do not receive parish pay”; one thousand pounds (about £90,000) to found a school for the poor children of Ledbury, with a schoolmistress who was to walk them to church twice every Sunday; five hundred pounds towards new pews in Ledbury church; gifts to the Hereford and Worcester Infirmaries.

Then, on 1 December 1806, describing herself as “still of sound mind and memory tho’ extremely ill”, she added a codicil — and one bequest stands out across two centuries. To George Thomas, “the black servant”, she left an annuity of thirty pounds a year for life — about £2,700 a year now, though the truer measure is that it matched a labourer’s entire annual wage, paid every year until he died — adding a hope that he would not leave her sister “suddenly or unhandsomely”. Parliament abolished the slave trade the following spring; her will was proved on 17 June 1807, three weeks after Joseph Halford Brydges was born in the same town.

Set in stone · Bosbury, 1584–1704

Two parishes north of Colwall lies Bosbury, and in Bosbury the family becomes solid: you can put your hand on them. In the churchyard of Holy Trinity stand two chest tombs, once ringed with iron railings that carried the family’s arms, their Latin inscriptions recorded by the county archive. They belong to the two generations that made everything after them possible.

The first tomb holds Thomas Brydges, gentleman, who died on 6 April 1692 at the great age of eighty-nine, and who lies, the stone says, near the remains of his father William Brydges, gentleman. That father is the head of the whole line: William Brydges of Upleadon in Bosbury, born in 1584, in the reign of Elizabeth I, died 1627.

The second tomb holds Thomas’s son William, the first of the family styled of Old Colwall, and it tells a story in a single date. His will, which survives at Kew, is dated 23 July 1704. His tomb records that he departed this life on 23 July 1704, aged sixty-three. Will and death share a date: he made his will on the day he died. The will names his wife Ursula and three sons; the tomb names four, “William, John, Thomas, Richard — four pledges of mutual love”.

How substantial were they by then? The militia assessments of 1663 answer precisely: in Upleadon the two highest ratings, £100 apiece and more than double anyone else’s, fell on the absentee grandee Sir Robert Pye of Temple Court — and on “William Bridges, esquire”. (An assessment of estate for the militia charge, not a bill — the point is the bracket.) Top of the parish, and note the clerk’s spelling: in the official record of 1663 the fashionable y had not yet stuck.

Those sons scattered the family outward in exactly the way gentry families did. William took Old Colwall and married a London merchant’s daughter from Pall Mall. John went to London and the law, rising to Treasurer and Senior Clerk of New Inn, one of the old Inns of Chancery; his memorial inside Bosbury church, carved by the fashionable Worcester sculptor Thomas White, says he “acted with much equity and justice”. Richard, the fourth name on the tomb, is very probably the “Richard Bridges, citizen and mercer of London” who surrendered a Bosbury copyhold in 1707, three years after his father’s death. The gentry of a small county, it turns out, were never only in the county.

And then there is the most arresting monument of all, and it belongs to a woman. William of Upleadon’s widow, Margaret, spent her last years at Larport Court at Mordiford, where the Lugg meets the Wye. On 14 April 1655, aged eighty, she died kneeling in prayer — and her family commissioned a tomb in Mordiford church that shows her exactly so, kneeling forever, with an inscription that spells it out:

The same stone settles a question the printed pedigrees left open: Margaret was the daughter of William Vaughan of Courtfield in Monmouthshire — one of the great recusant houses of the Welsh Marches, a family that clung to the old Catholic faith through a century of persecution and would, much later, give England a cardinal. Whatever Margaret herself believed, the girl from Courtfield who married the gentleman of Upleadon links this family, at its very first generation, to one of the most romantic names on the border.

The borrowed coat · 1662–1683

Now for the mystery of the spelling — because it was, precisely, a choice. The family had always been Bridge, or Bridges, as the parish clerks wrote it. Then, early in the reign of Charles II, they began writing Brydges — Beltz dates the change to the 1660s. Brydges, with the y, was the spelling used by one of the grand names of England: the Brydges family of Sudeley Castle, Barons Chandos, later Dukes. The motive is not on record, but the accompanying fact is: the family also began displaying the Chandos coat of arms, to which they had no established right.

In 1683 the bill came due, and with a symmetry no novelist would risk: the Visitation was held under the authority of Sir Henry St George, Clarenceux King of Arms — grandson of the Richard St. George who had granted the family’s true arms sixty years before. His officers summoned every armigerous family in Herefordshire to prove its right to the arms it displayed. The Brydges of Tyberton and Old Colwall duly entered the Chandos coat — and the herald looked at it, and wrote into the record one of the most quietly brutal sentences in the county’s history:

Nor so reputed by the gentry of the country. Their own neighbours did not believe it. And the herald had spotted the detail that gave the whole game away: above the borrowed Chandos shield, the family were displaying a different crest — their own. You cannot inherit your shield from one family and your crest from another. The crest they actually used belonged to a real grant of arms — and we now know exactly whose. Foster’s index of early grants records it: “Bridge, William, of Bosbury, co. Hereford, by R. St. George” — William of Upleadon himself, the founder of this line, granted his own honest coat late in the reign of James I, in the last years of his life. His shield was argent, a bend engrailed sable, with a chaplet of gold; his crest was the very one his grandsons went on wearing above the borrowed Chandos coat. As a later herald put it with some relish, they had worn the wrong hat on the stolen coat, “as if to preserve the means of the more readily detecting the usurpation”.

A century and a half later the question was formally settled. When a descendant through the female line succeeded to the Tyberton estate and was directed to take the name and arms, the College of Arms investigated the whole matter, proved the family’s true origin from the Jacobean grant to Bridge, and exemplified — formally confirmed — the ancient Bridge coat and crest to the name of Brydges. The verdict, in the end, was double-edged and rather wonderful: not Chandos — but genuinely armigerous all along, under the honest coat their own founder had been granted in person, two generations before the pretension began.

The trial of the name · 1790–1834

There is a final, stranger twist: this quiet Herefordshire family ended up as evidence in one of Georgian England’s most notorious legal dramas. In 1789 the last Duke of Chandos died without a male heir, and a Kent clergyman, the Reverend Edward Tymewell Brydges, claimed the ancient barony of Chandos, alleging descent from a lost younger son. His brother — Sir Egerton Brydges, bibliographer, genealogist and monomaniac — drove the claim through the House of Lords for thirteen years.

The Crown’s investigators fanned out across England. In 1791 a herald’s agent searched the registers of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire — the Chandos family’s “native counties” — and reported finding registers mysteriously “in a mutilated state”. Extracts supplied by the claimant’s side spelled the family name one way; the original registers spelled it another. The Lords rejected the claim in 1803, and modern scholarship suspects outright forgery of a Maidstone register entry. Sir Egerton styled himself “per legem terrae Baron Chandos of Sudeley” to his dying day anyway.

In 1834, George Beltz, Lancaster Herald — Lancaster being one of the College’s six ancient herald titles, the office not the man — published his post-mortem of the whole affair — and needed an example of how families borrow grand arms on no better ground than a shared surname. He chose the Brydges of Tyberton and Old Colwall, laying out the 1683 rebuke in full. It is a strange sort of immortality: this family appears in the literature of English heraldry as the textbook case of the very thing they did. Read from outside, it is a cautionary tale. Read from inside the family, it is something else — the moment their real, unglamorous, well-documented history was placed on the public record forever.

What remains to be found

Honest family history says what it does not know, and says when its proofs are provisional. The line is now evidenced at every generation, but three tasks remain. The first is verification: the 1779 baptism and the 1813 and 1863 burials rest on a volunteer’s transcription of the Colwall registers, and the formal citations are the originals at Herefordshire Archives or their images online — a morning’s work to sight. The second is enrichment: the will of Richard Brydges, proved in or after January 1813, should name all his children and divide what remained; beside it sit the estate sale papers of 1813–1827, whose abstract of title will recite the family’s ownership deed by deed. The third is the deep end: the origins of William of Upleadon before 1584 — and one specific lead, a will of William Bridge in the Canterbury register for 1627, the year the founder died, catalogued among the early charitable wills of Bosbury at The National Archives (PROB 11/152). If that is his, the family’s first document is waiting at Kew under the old spelling. The grant of arms itself is now located: Foster’s Grantees of Arms indexes it to British Library Harleian MS 6179, folio 19b, where the record of the grant to William Bridge of Bosbury can be read — and may recite his parentage. The 1820s investigation papers at the College of Arms complete the set.

What will not be found is the Chandos descent. That door was closed by professionals in 1683, and again in the 1820s, and the closing is itself part of the family’s story.

Four hundred and forty years

Stand back, and the documented shape of it is this. A Tudor gentleman at Upleadon. His widow, carved kneeling at her prayers at Mordiford. A son who lived to eighty-nine. A grandson whose will and death share a single date. A Sheriff of Herefordshire. A testatrix who endowed bread for the widows of two parishes, a school for Ledbury, and a life annuity for her servant George Thomas. A doctor carried to the font at Colwall in 1779 and buried from the same church in 1863. A move to London by 1842, traced through Southwark, Poplar and Somers Town. A charity, signed into being on a deathbed in 1704, still handing out St Thomas’ day vouchers in 1984. And a spelling, adopted in the 1660s and questioned by a herald in 1683, carried unchanged to Ann Brydges, born in 1937, the last of the direct line to bear it.

The family legend claimed noble Chandos blood, and the record refutes it. What the record puts in its place is more durable: tombs at Bosbury and Mordiford, wills at Kew, an entry in the College of Arms, a Lancaster Herald’s book, a receipt in Richard’s own hand, and registers running from Colwall to Somers Town — every generation of the direct line now standing on a document. Four hundred and forty years, in stone, ink and parchment.