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Perhaps ‘Lost at Sea’ would be a better title for
this page: after all, mariner Isaac CAMM was already dead by September 1828,
when his wife Caroline took their son Thomas Pullen CAMM to the church at
Shoreditch St Leonards to be baptised. And I haven’t yet found Isaac’s
burial. Maybe he died on board ship? Poor fatherless Thomas
didn’t have the comfort even of a mother for very long. In October 1839, the
clerk who kept the Parish Apprenticeship Register recorded that the 12
year-old Thomas was an orphan and that the Parish had paid the £6 fee to
apprentice him to tailor James SQUIRE of Islington. Did Thomas like the job,
I wonder? It at least had the advantage of bringing him into contact with his
future wife. He and Maria MURPHY were both lodging with their employer,
master tailor Henry BRIDGE, in Holborn in 1851. A land-lubber occupation
did not save Thomas from an early death, however: he died in 1864, when he
would have been in his thirties. He had already fathered at least three
children, Caroline Maria (1852), Emma Hepzibah (1856) and Frederick George
(1863). Caroline was working as a tailoress in 1881, living in City Road with
brother Frederick and a lodger named Eleanor PAGE. She married carpenter
Charles RANDALL in 1885, but he too was destined to die young. But that, as
they say, is another story... If you have any comments to make on
the information of this page, please e-mail me by clicking here. © D. M. Watton, 2001 |
