Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted

Jeremy Benson writes:

“William Lockwood Maydwell Benson was my great grandfather. He and Dorothea had seven children, the third (Edward Geoffrey) being my grandfather. My father, Michael, was the third of Geoffrey’s three sons, and was born in early in 1942, just over a year after William died”.

William was born in Yeovil, Somerset on the 9^th June 1865, the son of Charles Benson, an architect and land surveyor and his wife Henrietta Emily (née Gilpin). who had been born in Hertford.

In 1871, five year old William was living with his parents and brothers and sisters in Martock, Somerset but the 1881 return found him, aged fifteen, as a “scholar” living as a boarder in the house of a widow in Shrewsbury. His cousin Sawrey Brownlow Benson, aged nineteen, as his fellow lodger. It seems likely that they were pupils at Shrewsbury School.

On the 24^th August 1898 William married Dorothea Augusta Willoughby, the twenty eight year old daughter of a medical practitioner, at the parish church of Stoke Newington. William, by then thirty three, was qualified as a solicitor.

The couple lived at 286, Park Road, Hornsey where their oldest six children were born, but by 1910 they had moved to Boldre House, 43, Charles Street,  a substantial eleven room dwelling where their youngest son was born.

Dorothea passed away aged forty eight in 1919 and was laid to rest here.

In the 1939 Register William is recorded still living at Boldre House. He had retired and living with him were his older sister Henrietta F Benson (aged seventy nine), unmarried daughter Dorothy and Miss Marjorie C Plate, his private secretary. (Two other persons were at the house, but of an age not to be visible in the transcript.)

William died 22^nd November 1940 aged seventy five. His sister Henrietta F Benson died in 1943 and was buried in plot 1085.