The grieving of Henry Webb

Henry Webb, a carpenter who lived on King Street, was standing in his yard when suddenly he fell to the ground and died. Webb had been described as a “man of very full habit, and was subject to become excited with comparatively trifling causes” and it was noted that in the two days prior to his death, he had been excited in his business. The coroner decided his death was from apoplexy.

Henry Webb had been making a coffin to be delivered to a deceased’s home. Why was he so agitated? I have a theory, but it’s a very loose one. Eighteen-year-old Sarah Ann Mallinson, who lived with her parents on Bank Street, died on 19th June 1854. If Webb’s agitation began a couple of days before his death on 23rd June, it’s possible the coffin he was making was for her. Both Mallison and Webb were Quakers, and both were buried in the Friends Burial Ground behind the old Quaker Meeting House on King Street. They no doubt knew each other, and a young person’s death is always more devastating to those who see death often in their line of work.

In that instant of looking down into the casket, Webb surely couldn’t have foreseen that Sarah Ann Mallinson’s death from tuberculosis was just the beginning of the Mallinson family’s dark years. Her brother Edward, died aged 9 the following year after suffering for two years from a “disease of the hip joint”. Ann (Rutter) Mallinson, their mother, died two years later in 1857 due to the poisonous effects of a carbuncle on her face.

The patriarch of the family, Charles Mallinson, was a tea dealer and had built their Bank Street home at no expense spared. We now know this building as the Conservative Club. Another son, Percival Charles Mallinson, who had followed in his father’s business, died of measles at the age of 36. The second-in-line son, Thomas Rutter Mallinson, had not been considered to be the heir apparent, so his training to take over the business was lacking, and he had been more or less shipped off to a boarding school in his youth.

Thomas’s own story of what happened as a consequence could fill a book. Briefly, his first-born daughter died at five months old. His wife died in childbirth, leaving him uncontrollably devastated and their remaining 2-year-old daughter to be raised by her aunts, alternatively maternal and paternal.

Whereas he was once described as a well-dressed and well-spoken gentleman living in Bath, Thomas was soon having problems. He was arrested for theft of umbrellas from a Quaker meeting house, declared bankrupt twice, arrested for public drunkenness and transported to Australia. When he was getting ready to return to England after serving his time, he was then sent to Deniliquin, New South Wales gaol briefly. Upon his return to England in 1886, Thomas was admitted to Southwark London workhouse. His daughter Emma had been living in Essex around this time and it would be lovely to think that she financed his return and was able to see him before he died, aged 53, in 1893.

The remaining son, John Rutter Mallinson, fared not much better. When his wife, Ann Rutter (Drury) Mallinson died in 1883, the Saltford townsfolk were so appreciative of her gracious personality and gospel teachings for the past 23 years, that they subscribed to a nine-foot-tall marble obelisk to be placed on her grave. Devastated over his loss, John announced he was leaving England and sold his home and contents. Either he didn’t go far, or he returned; in 1899 John was admitted to the Somerset County Lunatic Asylum, where he remained and died in 1916.

Mary (Mallinson) Cranstone was the only sibling to survive beyond this, and she was one of the aunts who took in and cared for Thomas’s daughter Emma until Mary’s death at the age of 90. Mary had also taken in and cared for her father Charles before he died in 1872.

Pictured: Henry Webb’s headstone propped up along the wall of the Friends Garden off King Street; now open to the public as the Friends Garden