Vital Statistics
Edwin John Pinsent: 1868 – 1949 GRO0195 (Warehouseman and Gardener in Bristol, Gloucestershire)
1. Emily Mary Vowles: 1877 – 1912
Married Barton Regis: 1895: Bristol, Gloucestershire
Children by Emily Mary Vowles:
Eric Henry Edwin Pinsent: 1896 – 1959 (Married Catherine Ann Coles, Bristol, 1920)
Josephine Louisa Pinsent: 1899 – 1975 (Married Herbert Charles Henry Nicholls, Bristol)
Leslie Donald Pinsent: 1900 – 1972 (Married Gertrude Martha Nicholls, Bristol, 1929)
Pauline Rose Pinsent: 1903 – 1979 (Married Richard Gay, Bristol, 1924)
Samuel Claude Pinsent: 1904 – 1988 (Married Florence Emily Boshier, Bristol, Gloucestershire)
Alfred Edwin Hope Pinsent: 1906 – 1907
2. Clara Clarke: 1884– 1938
Married: 1919: Bristol, Gloucestershire
Children by Clara Clarke:
Doris Irene Pinsent: 1920 – 1920
Joyce Pauline Emilie Pinsent: 1921 – xxxx (Married Raymond George Richard Jones, 1947, Bristol, Gloucestershire)
Gladys Clara Pinsent: 1922 – xxxx (Married Griffith Sidney Jenkins, 1947, Bristol, Gloucestershire)
Gwendolyn Ruth Pinsent: 1924 – xxxx (Married William Frederick Reeves, 1942)
Ronald Leslie Pinsent: 1926 – 2007 (Married Muriel P. E. Gilbert, 1966, Bristol, Gloucestershire)
Cyril Edwin Pinsent: 1928 – 2003 (Married Irene Phyllis Dorothy Parsons, 1960, Bristol, Gloucestershire)
Family Branch: Bristol
PinsentID: GRO0195
Click here to view close family members.
Edwin John Pinsent was the second son of William Henry John Pinsent by his wife Louisa (née Broad). He was born in the Clifton area of Bristol, belonged to a large family comprised of six boys and five girls. One of each sex died young, so he had eight siblings. The Pinsent family lived in Woodbury Lane (near Blackboy Hill in Westbury on Trym) from the 1870s until the early 1970s, when Edwin’s brother Sidney Pinsent, the youngest of the brood, died.
Edwin’s father, who was commonly known as “Henry” was a gardener by profession and he encouraged his children to take an active part in creative pursuits. He encouraged them to enter plants and show examples of their handiwork when the “Redland and Kingsdown Workmen’s Flower Show and Home Encouragement Society” held its annual competitions in the 1880s and 1890s. The events were “open to all members of the society, the entrance fee being only 2d; comprising bona fide workingmen (labourers or mechanics, not master men) and women, living at Redlands, Durdham-down and Kingsdown” (Bristol Mercury: Saturday 1st April 1882). The idea of the organization was to foster and improve the quality of life of its members. The Pinsent family had considerable success over the years and the small cash prizes they won more than offset their entrance fees!
Edwin first came to notice in 1879 when he was about eleven years old. That year, the “best three (window-grown) plants” category “open to gardeners and gardeners’ wives only”, was won by “Henry” Pinsent. However, his wife, “Mrs. Pinsent”, was for some reason awarded an extra prize. “Henry” came second for his novel window box filled with plants in bloom and Louisa came third for her “blanc-mange” and second for her “pint of lemonade”. Louisa Pinsent also won with her “best window-grown geranium”. Their son, Edwin (E. Pinsent) was granted an extra prize in the same category (Western Daily Press: Thursday 31st July 1879).
In 1882, Edwin won a more prestigious prize given to the “boy or girl who shall best give the teachings of Scripture, both in precept and example, as to the evils of intemperance.” This was probably the family’s Methodist side showing through. Louisa came second with her selection of “dried grasses” that year. It was to become her specialty (Western Daily Press: Monday 3rd April 1882) and she proved hard to beat over the next few years. Although Edwin came from a family with strong Methodist leanings, he had been baptized in the Anglican Church. In fact, “Henry” and Louisa arranged for five of their children (Louisa, Edwin John, George, Emilie, and Josephine Pinsent) to be baptized in St. John the Evangelist Parish Church in Clifton on the same day, 25th August 1876. Louisa (the eldest) would have been nine by then and Josephine Pinsent (the youngest) a few months old. Their still younger children (Lana Florence Mary, Alfred Louie, Beatrice Rose and Sidney) were also baptized at St. John’s, however, independently soon after they were born.
Edwin John was still competing at the “Redland Flower Show” in 1891. He came third for his window grown potted hyacinth and for his similarly window-grown tulips that year, and his mother was rewarded for her window-grown foliage plants. Several of the elder children seem to have been missing by then. They had probably left home and were in apprenticeships or domestic service.
Edwin was a “cellar-man” of some sort living with his family when he married Emily Mary Vowles, the daughter of a “farm labour” at “Trinity Wesleyan Chapel”, in Barton Regis, in Gloucestershire, in April 1895. They had six children (four boys: Eric Henry Edwin, Leslie Donald, Samuel Claude and Alfred Edwin Pinsent, and two girls: Josephine Louisa and Pauline Rose Pinsent) in the years that followed and all but one – the youngest (Alfred Edwin Hope Pinsent) – lived to maturity and married. The 1901 Census data show that Edwin John (“Edward J.” according to the actual record) was a “warehouseman for a wine and spirit merchant” living with his wife and three children on Raleigh Road, in Bedminster – south of the River Avon in Bristol.
The family may have moved later that year, as a local directory (J. Wright and Co.’s Directory) has them living on Beauley Road in Southville in 1901. The streets are not that far apart. The next census, taken in 1911, shows that Edwin and his wife and family were living in a three-room house at “#8 Albert Villas” in Bristol. Their eldest son, Eric, was fifteen years old and an errand boy for a “grocer.” Their younger, school-age sons and daughters Josephine Louisa, Leslie Donald, Pauline Rose and Samuel Claude Pinsent were, presumably, “scholars.” For some reason, Edwin had changed employment. He as no longer working for the “wine and spirit merchant”: he was delivering milk for a dairy company.
Edwin’s wife, Emily Mary (née Vowles) died in 1912, which left him with a growing family to look after. He responded by moving north across the river to be closer to his own family in Woodbury Lane in Westbury on Trym. Edwin took up his father’s trade as a “gardener” and married Clara Clarke, the daughter of another “gardener.” They married in “Trinity Wesleyan Chapel” in Whiteladies Road, Bristol in September 1919.
Edwin John and Clara and the younger members of his family lived at Highland Court in Clifton in the early 1920s, and that is where the census takers found them the following year. Edwin John was said to be a “wheelchair attendant” employed by “H. Evans, 31 Woodstock Road, Redland’s Assurance Secretary” whilst Clara was, inevitably, tied up with “Home Duties.” Edwin’s son from his first marriage, Samuel Claude, was still a teenager living at home while workings as an errand boy for “Eastman’s Limited, Butchers, Blackboy Hill” – which explains his later choice of occupation. Edwin’s first daughter by Clara, Joyce Pauline Emilie,was, meanwhile, newly born. She was only a month old. This was to be a decidedly blended family. Not only did they have several more children, but Clara was a widow and she brought a twenty year-old son, Ernest James Collins, and two school-age daughters, Margorie Ellen and Florence Edith Collins, into the marriage.
Several of Edwin’s children were launched by the time he remarried. Eric Henry Edwin Pinsent had served in the Armed Forces during the “First World War”. and been discharged in 1919. He had married the following year. His life is discussed elsewhere. Eric’s sister Josephine Louisa Pinsent married Herbert Charles Henry Nichols, in the same “Chapel” that her father had re-married in six months previously. Herbert was the son of a local “tailor.” Pauline Rose Pinsent had, meanwhile, married Richard Gay, a “private” in the “Gloucestershire Regiment” in 1924 and Edwin’s younger son Samuel Claude Pinsent had married Florence Emily Boshier two years after that. Samuel was to become a “butcher” in Bristol. His life is also described elsewhere.
In 1929, Edwin’s other son from the first marriage, Leslie Donald Pinsent, married Gertrude Martha Nichols; the daughter of a deceased “tailor,” in Westbury on Trym. She may well have been Leslie’s brother-in-law, Herbert Charles Henry Nichols’s younger sister. Herbert had married Josephine Louisa Pinsent in 1920. Life is complicated!
Leslie Donald Pinsent grew up to become a “newsagent” in Westbury on Trym. In June 1937, Leslie and his wife Gertrude responded to the death of Mr. B. S. Hurman, an old-time resident of the community, by sending a wreath to his funeral which was being held in Burnham-on-Sea (Western Daily Press: Friday 25th July 1937).
The following year (1938), Leslie and Gertrude lived on Apsley Road in Clifton, in Bristol (Kelly’s Directory of Bristol and Suburbs) and they were still there when the England and Wales Register was compiled in 1939. Leslie had become a “bricklayer and heavy-worker” by then. Gertrude, meanwhile, had signed up as a “voluntary First Aid Worker” at “Bristol Royal Infirmary” – while also attending to “domestic duties”. Beyond that, I know very little about their life – perhaps other than that Leslie played billiards at the “Vaughan Club” (Bristol Evening Post: Wednesday 4th January 1939)! Leslie had no children that I am aware of, so his life is described here rather than in a separate entry.
Leslie Donald Pinsent, of 4 Belle Vue Cottages, Westbury on Trym, Bristol, died 19th February 1972 and “Administration (with Will)” for an estate valued at £2,692 was granted to his widow, Gertrude. She died at the same address in 1978 leaving an estate valued at £5,571 (Calendar of Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration).
Clara (née Clarke) was thirty-five years old when she married Edwin John Pinsent and they had six children (four daughters and two sons) in the years that followed. Their eldest daughter (Doris Irene Pinsent) died in infancy; however, the others all grew to adulthood and married. Sadly, Clara died in 1938. This, once again, left Edwin with a relatively young, largely teenage, family to deal with. His youngest son, Cyril, was ten years old. According to the England and Wales Register compiled in 1939, Edwin (written as “Edward J.” in the original) was described as being a “widowed old-age pensioner” living on Fonthill Road in the Southmead part of Bristol. He seems to have stayed on in Southmead and was said to have been “formerly a domestic gardener of #49 Fonthill Road” when he died there in January 1949. At one point, he had worked in the “municipal gardens” in Bristol.
Edwin and Clara’s second child, another daughter, Joyce, grew up in Bristol and married a “transport” driver in 1947. The third, Gladys, had a son by an “Aircraftsman” in the “Royal Air Force” and married him after the war. Her younger sister, Gwendolyn, worked in a laundry. Strangely, she had the misfortune to be stabbed in the shoulder in October 1940. The attack occurred as she was walking home with a friend during a wartime blackout. Her assailant was a “young man in black, wheeling a black bicycle and shuffling along as though in heavy boots.” He was “believed to have been afflicted by “moon madness” when he stabbed two young girls under a full moon in the South Mead area of Bristol. The attack “was literally attributed to ‘lunacy.'” Fortunately, she was not badly hurt (Daily Mirror: Monday 21st October 1940). Gwendolyn married a “Corporal” in the “Royal Air Force” in 1942.
That left the two young boys, Ronald Leslie and Cyril Edwin Pinsent. The former died in Bristol in 2007 and the latter died in Yeovil, in Somerset in 2003. They both married and had children, so their lives are discussed elsewhere.
Family Tree
GRANDPARENTS
Grandfather: William Pinsent: 1811 – 1879
Grandmother: Harriet Morgan: 1813 – 1890
PARENTS
Father: William Henry John Pinsent: 1841 – 1923
Mother: Louisa Broad: 1837 – 1926
FATHER’S SIBLINGS (AUNTS, UNCLES)
Emily Pinsent: 1843 – 1848
Sidney Pinsent: 1846 – 1880
Alfred James Pinsent: 1847 – 1848
Laura Emily Pinsent: 1852 – 1906
MALE SIBLINGS (BROTHERS)
William Henry Thiery Pinsent: 1865 – 1915
George Pinsent: 1870 – 1890
Alfred James Pinsent: 1872 – 1873
Alfred Louie Pinsent: 1880 – 1944
Sidney Pinsent: 1883 – 1947
Please use the above links to explore this branch of the family tree. The default “Next” and “Previous” links below may lead to other unrelated branches.