Vital Statistics
Samuel Pinsent: 1839 – 1912 GRO0775 (Upholsterer, Plymouth, Devon)
Sarah Jane West: 1846 – 1931
Married: 1886: Plymouth, Devon
Children by Sarah Jane West:
Rosetta Pinsent: 1868 – xxxx (Married Frank Toms, Plymouth, Devon, 1888)
Eleanor Elizabeth Pinsent: 1870 – 1942
William Abraham West Pinsent: 1872 – 1958 (Married Louisa Bristow, Plymouth, Devon, 1899)
Samuel George Caleb Pinsent: 1875 – 1951 (Married Florence Edith Louise Hill, Plymouth, Devon, 1897)
Lily Hetty Pinsent: 1877 – 1955 (Married William Henry Coles: Plymouth Devon, 1897)
Beatrice Mary Ann Pinsent: 1879 – xxxx (Married Herbert Arthur Veale, Plymouth, Devon, 1910)
Louisa Pinsent: 1882 – 1893
Bessie Pinsent: 1884 – 1918
Thomas Charles Pinsent: 1886 – 1889
Ann Pinsent: 1887 – 1889
Family Branch: Bovey Tracey
PinsentID: GRO0775
References
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Samuel Pinsent was the youngest presumably legitimate son of Thomas Pinsent by his wife Mary (née Mugford). He was born in Bovey Tracey five days before his father died and was brought up with three brothers (John, Thomas and William Pinsent), two sisters (Sarah Jane and Mary Ann Pinsent) and a later illegitimate half brother, George Pinsent – who was born after his father had died and his mother had taken up with Samuel Tapper.
Mary and Samuel never married. Mary looked after her children throughout the 1840s but, sadly, died while in labour in 1850. Her daughter Mary Ann died a few days later. Mary’s elder sons (John and Thomas Pinsent) had left home by then but her younger sons, William, Samuel and George were taken to the “Union Workhouse” in Newton Abbot and that was where the Census takers found them when they made their rounds in 1851.
It cannot have been easy living in the “Workhouse” and it would not have been thought that surprising when the Exeter Flying Post (Thursday 7th February 1856) and the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette (Saturday 2nd February 1856) reported that “Samuel Pinsent” and Thomas Ware were charged with stealing a bag of chaff at Chudleigh and were committed for trial in Exeter the following month.
However, when the details came out, it became clear that it was John Pinsent, a well-known local miscreant from the BRISTOL branch of the family, who was, in fact, charged with receiving the stolen chaff (Western Times: Saturday 1st March 1856). John and his friend Thomas were both imprisoned for ten weeks. Theft was treated as a serious matter in those days. John and his wife Ann had, on one occasion, had the audacity to refuse payment to Pinsent and Co., the local brewers from the DEVONPORT branch of the family (Western Times: Saturday 23rd September 1854). They even got away with it as it was not entirely clear who had ordered the beer. The lives of John and Ann are discussed more fully with the rest of the BRISTOL family.
Most of Samuel’s brothers sooner or later moved to Plymouth and joined the Royal Navy and Samuel was living with his brother John Pinsent – who was a Royal Navy “stoker” and his wife and family on Richmond Street in St. Andrew’s parish in Plymouth when the census was taken in 1861. By then, Samuel was 21 years old and an “upholsterer.” Presumably he had been apprenticed out.
Samuel married Sarah Jane West in Plymouth in 1866. She was the daughter of a “cab-driver” in Plymouth. The Civil Government marriage record says that George “Hind” (sic) of 16 Green Street married Sarah Jane West. Perhaps this is in error; however, it raises the possibility that although Samuel usually answered to the name “Pinsent” he may also have been illegitimate despite being born in his “father” Thomas’s lifetime.
Samuel and Sarah Jane had three sons and seven daughters over an interval of twenty one-years and all but the last two, Thomas Charles Pinsent and Ann Pinsent survived early childhood. They both died of scarlet fever a few days apart in 1889. Sadly, Louisa was the next to go. She died aged eleven in 1893. The other children reached maturity and all but two of them; Eleanor Elizabeth and Bessie went on to marry. Bessie (she was baptized as such) seems to have been was a late daughter who stayed home to look after her parents.
The Pinsent family was living on Richmond Street when the 1871 Census was taken. The household then only consisted of Samuel and Sarah Jane and two young daughters, Rosetta and Eleanor – who was only six months old. Interestingly, the 1939 Wartime Register gives Eleanor’s year of birth as 1874. This is clearly a mistake. In 1871, there was also a widowed “seamstress” living with the family.
Samuel’s work seems to have taken him away from home, as the following census (taken in 1881) shows that he was ensconced in lodgings on Castle Street in Totnes. His wife and six children were, meanwhile, living with Samuel’s brother Thomas – who was an unmarried “mason’s labourer” – at 31 Morley Place in Plymouth. Thomas had recently retired from the Royal Navy. His life is discussed more fully elsewhere.
The 1881 Census refers to Samuel’s eldest daughters as being Rosaline and Ellen – which is close enough, I suppose. Perhaps that is what they were called around the house. They, and Samuel’s two eldest sons, William and Samuel, were still “scholars”. Compulsory education up to the age of ten had come into effect in England the previous year. Sarah Jane (née West) had not had the opportunity to go to school. She signed the death certificates for her two youngest children (in 1889) “by mark.”
Samuel and Sarah Jane were still living at Morley Place in 1891. Their daughter Rosetta had married a “carpenter” a few years previously and Eleanor had also moved out. I am not sure where she was that year; however, she turns up as a single, “house-keeper” in the “City Hospital” on Longfields Terrace in Plymouth in 1939 – when the Wartime Register was compiled. She was still a spinster when she died in Totnes in March 1942. Morley Place the family home until at least the 1920s.
Samuel’s youngest son, Thomas, had died in 1889; however, the other two were still around when the Census was taken in 1891. William Abraham West Pinsent, the eldest, was only sixteen years old but he was already a “seaman in the Royal Navy”. He, like so many of his relatives, must have joined the navy as a “boy,” with the intention of enlisting for ten years when he came of the appropriate age – which was, I think, 18. Their next son, Samuel George Caleb Pinsent was an (“errand boy”) in 1891. Doubtless he had caused the family some embarrassment in 1889 when he was caught “scrumping” – stealing apples. He was fined 10s at “Plymouth Magistrates Court” (Plymouth Magistrates Court Summary Convictions: Findmypast). I ask you – what fourteen-years old boy wouldn’t nick a few apples if he had a chance? Samuel and Sarah Jane’s younger daughters, Lily (a “domestic servant”), Louie and Bessie were also living at home in 1891. They were both “scholars.”
Samuel George Caleb Pinsent, married Florence Edith Louise Hill the daughter of a “carpenter,” in 1897 and his sister Lily married a “mason” in September that year. It is worth noting that the name “Caleb” came from the West side of the family, which must have had a formidable non-conformist streak in it. Samuel and Florence had several children in the years that followed. William Abraham West Pinsent married Louisa Bristow, the daughter of a “seaman” in 1899. They had children and their lives are described elsewhere.
The Morley Place house had emptied out a little by the time of the 1901 Census. Samuel Pinsent (“senior”) the “upholsterer” was still there with his wife Sarah Jane and their daughters Beatrice (aged twenty-one) and Bessie (aged seventeen). They were “domestic housemaids” who worked locally. Beatrice went on to married a “bank messenger” who came from London, in Plymouth, in 1910. Presumably he had settled in Devon.
The 1911 Census shows that Bessie was still living with her elderly parents who had been married for forty-six years and had ten children, of whom seven were still alive. Samuel passed away in October the following year (1912). Sarah Jane and her daughter Bessie stayed on in Morley Place. Bessie died of influenza in October 1918, a victim of the pandemic that hit the country that year. Her sister, Rosetta Toms, registered her death.
Sarah Jane, meanwhile, soldiered on. She was living on Mutley Plane in Plymouth at the time of the 1921 census. Sarah died in Plymouth in February 1931. She was eighty-five years old.
Family Tree
GRANDPARENTS
Grandfather: Unknown: xxxx – xxxx
Grandmother: Jane Pinsent: 1791 – 1831
PARENTS
Father: Thomas Pinsent: 1806 – 1839
Mother: Mary Mugford: 1808 – 1850
MALE SIBLINGS (BROTHERS)
John Pinsent: 1831 – 1908
Thomas Pinsent: 1835 – 1884
William Pinsent: 1837 – xxxx
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