THE MEN OF THE BOOKa n a c c o u n t o f t h e Hanchard family in London

The Hanchard Family

This is an account of the one branch of the Hanchard family, Huguenots who settled in London. They came in the early eighteenth century as refugees from religious persecution in France. The story moves across the eighteenth century and the nineteenth until it reaches people that we know in the twentieth century. The events that brought the Hanchard family to England are not long ago if you count by generations.

In the nineteenth century one of the family married a Goodwin and the name Hanchard is perpetuated into the twentieth century by the five children of Ernest Goodwin who took the name Hanchard Goodwin. There is a picture in an old trunk at Old Conduit House in Hampstead of Jack Hanchard Goodwin as a subaltern in the First World War, just returned from the front line running across the fields of Picardie where the Hanchard family lived before the persecutions. There are several Jack Hanchards’ in the story that follows, or at least, Jaques Hanchards’. (NB this was as of 1988 - I believe the house has since been sold)

The persecution of Protestants in France and Flanders did not begin in the eighteenth century. It started with the wars of religion in France in the sixteenth century. The protestants of France were Calvinists - followers of the most austere cult of protestant Europe. The Calvinists refused to recognise priests and bishops, abandoned the use of the confessional and introduced the idea of predestination into Christianity. They also believed in a democratic church-government by elected elders which entirely cut away the authority of the Roman Catholic church. French royal power hinged on the authority of the Roman Catholic church so both Church and state were ranged against French protestants.

The first time the Hanchards Came to England for protection was in the reign of Elizabeth I. Forty nine families in Flanders were sentenced to perpetual banishment in 1567, the Hanquardes among them. These families were given permission to live in Canterbury and a few months later in the same year “Hubberde (Hubert) Anckarde” was noted as a “Duchman” living in London. It has needed a persistent search to establish that the Hanchards of this immigration in the sixteenth century are not the Hanchards who figure in the Goodwin family history, nor, it should be said, who can be claimed as antecedents by anyone bearing the name Hanchard today. In order to exclude these Hanchards of the first incursion from the Goodwin story it has been necessary to find out what happened to them. Scanning the records showed that the Hanchards of the sixteenth century mingled early with the English population, took English wives, baptised their children in English churches and after four generations were indistinguishable from English families.

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Some remained at Canterbury; some meld with the London population; some go to Yorkshire; and one solitary parish entry shows an early settlement in Norwich. In the two hundred years from 1567 we can trace twenty-two variant spellings of their name. At the point where English parish priests, struggling to anglicise a name pronounced either in Flemish or in French by an immigrant with a cockney accent, resort to the spelling Ancker, Anchor and Henshaw we begin to lose the early Hanchards, because they fuse with the English who already bore those surnames. All that we can say is that in London they clustered in the English churches of the most extreme puritan dispensation, especially in Stepney and Spitalfields. St Dunstan’s, Stepney Was one of these, giving some anxiety to the Anglican bishopric of London because of the vehemence of the puritan confession there. It is likely that the Anchor family of Stepney ( founders of the Anchor Brewery in Bethnal Green) derive from the early Hanchards. The second incursion of protestant refugees from France began in 1685 with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict had guaranteed a grudging toleration for protestants in France during most of the seventeenth century.

The act of Revocation allowed the full force of persecution to fall once more on protestants and many histories of the period describe the cruelties inflicted on them.

When the French authorities found that the will of the congregations could not be broken by executions or torture, they began a policy of removing protestant children from their parents. The children were subjected to a prison-like regime within catholic convents and-their parents were not allowed to see them again. The number of French Huguenot refugees who came to England after 1685 greatly outnumbered the Flemish or Walloon refugees of the sixteenth century immigration. Among them was Antoin Hanchard and his brother Estienne. Their names and the names of their children are entered with only one variant spelling -Anchard -in the records of the French Huguenot churches in London. This standardisation” of the spelling indicates that they could read and write. Antoin became an elder of the church in his middle age, suggesting that he was indeed literate.

The consistency in the spelling of the name Hanchard continues unbroken throughout the eighteenth century among all Antoin’s many descendants, and mis-spellings only creep in when the nineteenth century begins.

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It is probably no accident that the decline in Hanchard literacy is contemporary with the decline in living standards of the French immigrant workers in East London. Indirect evidence suggests that the Hanchards were silk-weavers, and that trade was irrecoverably spoiled from 1780 onwards.

I have traced the line of the Hanchard family’s connection with the Goodwin family. The three main sources of evidence I have used are the published registers of the French Huguenot churches printed by the Huguenot Society; the records of the French Hospital in Bethnal Green, printed by the Huguenot Society; and the International Genealogical Index.

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Notes on the Hanchards. Antoin Hanchard.

The French hospital in Bethnal Green has the following record: HANCHARD Antoine. Inmate. e. Dec.20, 1760 (L: Dec 22) • ••••d. Feb.2.l76l. RA(Reference a) Aug.2. 1760 “Hanchard -Antoine, age de 78 Ans, ne en Picardie press de St Quentin & refugie pour cause de Religion depuis 60 ans , infirme,& incapable de gagner sa vie -Recommande par Mr Samuel Beuzeville, Ministre de St Jean & Messrs Jean Guillemard & Abr. Hebert, Anciens Demeure chez son Fils dans Long Alley au bout de Skinner Street. (at side) donneBillet d’admission Ie 20e Xbre. 1760”.RI (l):(wrongly entered as Jacob Hanchard).

Antoin also appears in the register of the French Church Spitalfields as having become Ancien(Elder) in 1723 with the note against his name “de Bauvoir(i.e. Beauvais) en Picardie”. There is no note of Antoin’s trade. The likelihood is t hat he was a silk-weaver. His kinsman, probably brother, Etienne, was noted in the French church register as “ouvrier en soie.”

At the time of the application t o enter the Hospital, Antoin was then living in his son’s place in Long Alley at the end of Skinner Street, Clerkenwell. Although Long Alley has been removed, some of the eighteenth century houses of Skinner Street remain. The mistake in making t hi s entry in the records under the name Jacob (i.e. James or Jacques) Hanchard suggests that the writer had a Jacob Hanchard in mind, perhaps Antoin’s son Jacque (sic) also a faithful member of the same church, in Spitalfields. However, the record is not specific about which of his sons - Estienne, Jacque, George or Jean he Was living with. Jaques Hanchard X 1711

Jaques was the only one of his many brothers and sisters who was christened in the Bell Lane French Huguenot Church, a congregation so small and temporary that the Huguenot Society has not published its registers. Perhaps Jaques was a fragile newborn baby, not expected to survive long and he was carried for baptism to the nearest church. Perhaps an older brother or sister had died shortly before he was born -this kind of bereavement often persuaded parents to “try” another church, as if they feared that they had lost the older child because it had not been “properly”baptised at their former place of worship -the survival of a very archaic superstition.

The consequence of having been baptised at Bell Lane was that Jaques was obliged to make a “reconnaissance”at the Threadneedle Street French Huguenot church when he was sixteen years old. This ritual entailed anew member of the congregation producing evidence of good character before being accepted. That Jaques, whose parents and eight brothers and sisters were all members of the congregation at Threadneedle Street, should have been required to undergo this inquisition, throws some light on the way the church at Threadneedle street was being run. Clearly, the elders, of whom his father was one, were sticklers for the letter of the law.

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Jaques/James Hanchard X 1747

With the marriage of this Jaques to Anne Baucher in 1767, the Hanchard family united itself to a family well established in England since the exodus of French refugees in the l560s. The Bauchers are first noted when in 1564 “Adrian Bauchar was suspended from communion (at Canterbury French Huguenot Church in the crypt) for having caused Jacques Dambrine to be arrested on Sunday on leaving the temple to the great scandal of the church and of several English”. A Paul Baucher WaS admitted to the Southampton and Channel Island congregation in 1568, on Easter day.

The Baucher family had branches in several different towns and Anne herself had many brothers and sisters and came from a strongly united family. Anne’s brothers and sisters stood godparents in turn for her children, and she and Jaques Hanchard were regularly recruited to stand godparents to Anne’s nieces and nephews. For example, Gervaise Hanchard was named after Gervaise Baucher, Anne’s brother, for whose children Anne and Jaques Hanchard are registered as “parain et maraine”.

This close knit structure of families and of congregations was the prop which sustained the Huguenots in their precarious livelihood in England.

It has been estimated that 80% of French refugees after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes were silk weavers. The trade in its lower reaches - ribbon weaving and plain silks could be learnt by a child and looms could be hired. The rewards were very low and became progressively more wretched. English weavers resented the newcomers and surrounded them with a thicket of constraints sometimes they were prevented from working because they had not served an English apprenticeship; they were anyway debarred from selling retail, a limitation which could leave them at the mercy of unscrupulous middlemen.

There was every inducement to move out of the City of London where the Weavers’ Company exerted its penal disciplines and to abandon French affiliations. Only those who were deeply committed to their faith and who had strong family ties within the Huguenot congregations could continue to live as foreigners, dissenters, and a people apart.

Jaques/James Hanchard X 1768

This Jaques was a young man q t the time of the Napoleonic wars and it gives no surprise to find that after starting as Jaques at his baptism in the Huguenot church at Threadneedle Street, he figures increasingly as James in the baptismal entries for his own children. The French church no longer appears in the family and the children of himself and Rebecca are baptised in “low” churches in Bethnal Green or even in a revivalist” chapel of the “Sion Chapel” type.

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It is likely that this removal from the strict confines of the Huguenot congregation was motivated by his wife, for James had been the child of a French father and mother, and he ended his days applying to the French Hospital, like his grandfather and great-grandfather, Antoin, for relief. It would be interesting to know why two of his children had their surnames spelled either “Heanshead” or”Heinchard”. ‘What can be said with certainty is that these mis-spellings are dictated by a strong cockney accent. In 1841 he applied to the French Hospital on grounds of descent from a refugee ancestor, “Antoine Hanchard de Normandie”.

What is important for the family history is that the story (now inaccurate in its details of Antoin’ s native district in France) was not only current, but also a potential source of money in 1841. His grand-daughter, Louisa Ann Sherwin was six years old at the time, old enough to take notice.

Elizabeth Hanchard X 1807.

We know of Elizabeth only that she married a silk-weaver, for George Sherwin is described as silk weaver on their daughter Louisa Ann’s marriage certificate. It is interesting that Elizabeth’s sister Sarah married a Henry Sherwin some years later, and seems, given the close knit nature of the London silk-weaving community, that the two Sherwins were related.

Louisa Ann Sherwin X 21.9.1835

With Louisa Ann Sherwin the story begins to open out. A few stories survive from what her son, Ernest Goodwin said about her. And also, by the time she was growing up, the conditions of the silk weavers in Bethnal Green and the City were beginning to attract the attention of an army of reporters. Some, like the woman from the Bible Society who brought the printed word, but no material relief, make bizarre but interestIng reading. Lydia of Ranyard, writing in 1862, says that” the district of Bethnal Green is inhabited chiefly by silk weavers” She speaks of the “pitiful sufferings of their poor in the inclement days of winter”. She continues: “In company with our friend the curate we have entered one of their rooms, ascending to it by a dark, narrow, winding, broken stair without landing space. There is scarcely space to stand for the chamber is filled up by three looms and a bedstead…. They must earn their few pence…. or the “pot au feu” will not be kept burning. It is a token of their old descent from French ancestors that this utensil is so often seen amongst the weavers…. “In another passage she speaks of visiting a weaving family where “the woman ‘s dark eyes and expression of countenance bespeak her French origins… “ and of the woman’s son that “he had a face like a Murillo’s peasant boy without its good humour”.

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Later Lydia Ranyard discourses on the decline among the weavers: “In contrast to the mathematical, historical and floricultural societies existing in this district in a past generation, were brought forth many proofs of the religious and moral degeneracy of the people and the heathenism prevailing in these districts at the present.” However, it is interesting to note that the families of French descent, even when they had no book or Bible in their homes, still remembered that their ancestors had been called “The Men of the Book” -a reference t o the Calvinist reliance upon Bible-reading. (The Missing Link or Bible Women in the Homes of the London Poor. Lydia Ranyard. 1862. Tower Hamlets Library.)

With the usual compassion, Mayhew wastes no time writing of moral degeneracy among the poor. Mayhew’s description in 1849 runs as follows: “We knocked at the door of the first house, and requesting permission to speak with workman on the subject of his trade, were all three ushered up a steep staircase, and through a trap in the floor in the ‘shop’. This was a long, narrow apartment with a window back and front, extending the entire length of the house, runLing from one end of the room to the other. The man was the idea of his class, a short, spare figure with a thin face and sunken cheeks. In the r oom were three looms and some spinning wheels, at one of which sat a boy winding quills.

Working at the loom was a plump, pleasant looking girl busy making ‘plain goods’. Along the windows on each side were ranged small pots of fuchsias, with their long scarlet drops swinging gently backwards and forwards as the room shook with the clatter of the looms. The man was a velvet weaver. He was making a drab velvet for coat collars. we sat down on a wooden chair beside him and talked while he worked ….he was to have 3s6d (3 shillings and 6 pence) per yard …up to 1824 the price was 6 schillings “the workmen are obliged to take the low prices…they know if they don’t take the work, others will!”

Mayhew goes on to describe a family starving and indeed every written account of the East London weavers tell the same story. We are give the picture of a highly disciplined workforce, fighting a Losing battle for their work. (The Unknown Mayhew - selections from The Morning Chronicle 1849 -50, Edited E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo, 1984. Penguin.)

The descriptions quoted above coincide with the childhood and young womanhood of Louisa Ann Sherwin. In 1862, the year that Lydia Ranyard described her Murillo boy and the pot au feu, Louisa Ann the child of a silk weaver married William Goodwin, the child of another silk weaver who had come to London from Suffolk to work as a “machine cleaner”.

Within two years William Goodwin had joined the police force, 2nd the connection with t he silk trade and the Huguenots was broken, though not forgotten. The couple married in a Register Office, another break with the past.

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The Marriage Certificate runs as follows: “1862 Marriage solemnised at Register Office in the (district of Mile End Old Town in the County of Middlesex. No 181. Nineteenth May 1862. William Goodwin, 27 years, Bachelor, Machine cleaner, 33 Green Street, Wellington Place, (Father’s name and surname) Joseph Goodwin, deceased.(Father’s Rank or profession) Silk Weaver. Louisa Ann Sherwin, 28 years, Spinster, 33 Green Street (Father’s name and surname) George Sherwin (Father’s Rank or Profession) Silk Weaver.”

In 1861 the Census shows that the residents of 33 Green Street (now Bethnal Green Road) were a butcher, his wife and daughter. The house (now replaced by a late Victorian building) was in the occupation of a single family. By 1862, when the couple married, Louisa Ann Sherwin was living there, either as a lodger with the butcher’s family, or with her own family that had taken over the lease.

William Goodwin gives his address as Green Street, and also as Wellington Place, about a quarter of a mile from Green Street. In 1861, the Census records a typical four-roomed house in Wellington place as containing sixteen people, divided into five households. Wellington Place was pulled down in the late 1960s. The adjoining street, Wellington Street with the Wellington Public House, survives. The barmaid at the Public House was born in Wellington Place and recalls that the houses in Wellington Street are identical with those of the old Wellington Place, so it is possible to arrive at a fair idea of the crowding in the small terrace houses in the 1860s.

The new husband and wife made a modest beginning but they had considerable personal assets of an unquantifiable kind. Both derived from non-conformist traditions and inherited the non-conformist rejection of the two scourges of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -drinking and gambling. Both had learned” their families ‘ trade of weaving and William Goodwin had developed a second, mechanical skill in servicing and probably repairing machines ¬probably mechanical looms.

If William Goodwin came to London to better himself, he found the weaving trade in desperate straits. The solution was at hand ¬during the early 1860s the Metropolitan Police was enlarging its recruitment. William joined the Force and was registered as a policeman when their first child was born in 1864.

We do not know whose idea it was f or William to turn his back on the weaving industry, but we do know (because Ernest Goodwin their son said so) that William made his way in the Force because Louisa Ann coached him in reading and writing.

Louisa Ann brought up her children to learn and recite poetry, to read and to value education. Her children were in demand to recite at church evenings and socials and were reckoned to be talented. How did Louisa Ann gain her own education? It is unlikely that she had a formal education, for she spent her childhood sewing buttons on cords as a way of earning a living.

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I my self remember Ernest Goodwin saying two things about his mother - that if she wanted to leave her children for a few minutes she would scatter hundreds and thousands over the floorboards for them to pick up. And that “she would walk miles to save a half penny.” But her connection with the Hanchards was to source of pride to her son. He gave the name Hanchard to five of his children. And when as a child I a asked him about his family he said “We are Flemish weavers, weavers.”

This document is a reproduction of part of informantion sent in 1988 by Flora (Goodwin Daughter of Ernest Goodwin) - The deleted part relates to the Hanchard-Goodwin line. Sources used: International Genealogical Index.Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths, St Catherine’s House,London.Population Census, Sudbury, 1841Population Census, Sudbury, 1851Population Census, Shoreditch, 1871.Parish Records for Sudbury at Suffolk County Archive, Bury St Edmund’s, Suffolk.SJ Stevens, Record Searcher at Bury St Edmund’s gave valuable assistance.

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