Rectory Lane Cemetery, Berkhamsted

George Harrowell

d.04/06/1959

A carpenter, part of his father's building firm William Harrowell & Sons.

Relatives

Lizzie Harrowell — mother

• Jane Beaty

George was the third son of Lizzie and William Harrowell. He was born and baptised in Berkhamsted in November 1874. He lived with his parents and siblings at 44 High Street, Berkhamsted. George’s father William was a bricklayer who went on to become a builder who built many of the houses in Victorian and Edwardian Berkhamsted.

By the time George was 18 he was apprenticed to his father as a carpenter and was part of William Harrowell & Sons. His parents moved to Clarence Road around 1900 and George moved with them. By then he described himself as a bricklayer rather than a carpenter. As his brothers married and moved away from the family home to other houses in Berkhamsted, George remained with his parents.

By 1912 George had become part of the wider property-owning activity of the Harrowells. Electoral rolls record him as the owner of two houses in Shrublands Avenue. These were probably ones that the Harrowells had built by that time and he retained ownership of the houses for at least three years.

At the start of World War I George was 40 years old so was not conscripted to the war effort and stayed at home working for his father’s company.

After his mother Lizzie died in 1925 he continued to live in the house at 12 Clarence Road with his father William. By 1926 his sister-in-law Ada, whose husband Frank had died in the war, had moved in with the two men together with her young daughter. This household lived together until William died at the grand old age of 87.

By 1939 George was still in the house but this time with his sister Etta and her husband Ernest Hughes so the house remained in the family and old bachelor George always seemed to have a woman to look after him.

George died, aged 84 on 4th June 1959 at 12 Clarence Road and probate was granted to his brother-in-law Ernest. He is buried with his parents and his brother Harvey in Plot 757.

Lizzie Harrowell

d.30/12/1925

Mother of eleven children by the time she was 42. Four of her sons served in WWI.

Relatives

William Harrowell — husband

George Harrowell — son

Harvey Harrowell — son

Alfred Harrowell — daughter

Frank G. Harrowell — other

• Jane Beaty

Lizzie Harrowell was born Elizabeth Davies in Wilstone, Herts in about 1846, the oldest daughter of John and Martha Davies. John was a farm labourer and their sons worked as wood sawyers. Martha was a straw plaiter, as were their daughters. By the time Lizzie was 14 the family lived in Northchurch, moving later to Gossoms End by 1871.

Family folk-lore held that Lizzie was born in Wales and met her husband in “The Lamb” where she had stopped off on the way between Wales and London driving sheep to market. This was the story that her grandson, Jim Harrowell told to The Berkhamsted Review in 1996. There is no evidence for this and the truth is rather more prosaic.

Lizzie married a brick maker called William Harrowell in 1868, when she was 21. They soon had a daughter, Emily and a son, Harvey and by the 1871 census were living in New Road, Tring. During the next ten years they moved to the High Street in Berkhamsted and had another four children, Alfred, George, Nelly and Charles. Ten years later, in 1891 with the addition of Etta, Frank, Albert and Ethel, they had a total of ten children, still all living at home. William had risen in the world to be a builder and the oldest four children were working. Emily, their oldest daughter was a dressmaker and Harvey, their oldest son, had moved away from manual labour and was a solicitor’s clerk. The other two older boys were following their father and working in the building trade. It must have been a very busy household with five workers, five school children and a 2 year old toddler.

In 1892 Lizzie and William’s eleventh and last child, James was born when Lizzie was 42 years old. So she had spent half her life having children. By this time William was a builder employing a number of men, including some of their sons. He was building many of the houses we can still see in Berkhamsted, including 6 Clarence Road which is where they moved to by 1901. By 1911 they had moved along the road to number 12 and that is where they spent the rest of their married life.

By the beginning of World War I four of Lizzie’s sons were of an age to be recruited for military service. Charlie, aged 34 worked in England as a carpenter in the Royal Naval Air Service. Frank, aged 30 joined the Machine Gun Corps and died at Loos in May 1918. Albert, aged 28 joined up as a private in the Hertfordshire Regiment and died at Ypres at the end of August 1917. Both Frank and Albert have their names on the Berkhamsted War Memorial. James, their youngest child at 22, joined the Kings Royal Rifle Corps as a private and survived the war.

Both Frank and Albert were married and had children when they died. Jim Harrowell, the solicitor who founded Harrowell and Atkins in Berkhamsted in 1945, was one of Albert’s sons. Frank’s widow Ada remained in Berkhamsted for the rest of her life and never remarried. Most of Lizzie’s other children also married and set up families so she must have had many grandchildren, most of whom stayed living in Berkhamsted.

Lizzie died at the end of 1925, aged 79 and is buried with her husband and two of her sons in Plot 757.

William Harrowell

d.19/06/1932

An enterprising brick-maker who became a builder of many houses, father of eleven.

Relatives

Lizzie Harrowell — wife

Alfred Harrowell — daughter

Frank G. Harrowell — other

• Jane Beaty

William Harrowell was born in 1844 in Wigginton. His father was Phillip and his mother Ann. He was one of a very large tribe of Harrowells spread across Tring, Berkhamsted, Chesham and the villages around. William’s father was a journeyman carpenter and his mother, once her children had grown, worked as a straw plaiter.

William was brought up in Tring and initially worked as an agricultural labourer. According to his grandson Jim Harrowell, as related to the Berkhamsted Review in 1976, “one of William’s tasks as a young man was that of carting hay to London and returning with loads of soot which were added to local land to improve its texture and fertility.”

When William was 24 he married Lizzie Davies from Northchurch. Within three years they were living in New Road in Tring with their first two children and he had become a brick-maker. By 1881 the couple had moved to live at 44 Berkhamsted High Street and had six children. He was a man with a plan and that was to better himself. During the next ten years he made the change to being a builder employing other men in a company called William Harrowell & Sons. The sons in the title were Alfred and George.  During the existence of this company it constructed houses in Clarence Road, Cowper Road, Queens Road, Shrublands Road and a number of other streets around the south-west core of Berkhamsted. They made their own bricks in their two kilns, one in Cholesbury and one using the red clay found at Shootersway. This was at a time when there were many small brickmakers using the local clays and scattered around the Chilterns. In 2007 The Hospice of St Francis moved into their new premises built over the pit from which the Harrowells dug their clay.

Having built the house, William, Lizzie and their family then moved to 6, Clarence Road where they were living by 1901. Two of their adult sons were living with them, one working for William as a bricklayer and the other as an apprentice. They also still had a couple of younger children at school. Alfred, Charles and Frank had left home and started their own families but were still working with their father in the building business.

In 1903, fifty-four plots of freehold building land in Shrublands Avenue, a new street at the west end of Berkhamsted, were offered for sale for between £32 and £35. William Harrowell was one of the local builders who bought a number of these plots for development.

By 1911 the family had moved further down Clarence Road to No 12, another of the properties built by William. This one was on the end of the terrace and included a coach house at the side so was one of the better houses. He had even given it the name Clarence Cottage and incorporated the date 1897 into the frontage of the property.

Electoral rolls between 1903 and 1915 show William and his four sons Alfred, George, Charles and Albert owning up to nine houses in addition to the ones they were occupying. These were in Clarence Road, Charles Street, Montague Road, North Road, Cowper Road as well as five houses in Shrublands Avenue. Presumably, part of their business was as landlords.

The outbreak of WWI must have been very difficult for the business, as well as for the family. Alfred and George were too old to fight but Charles and Albert both joined up along with Frank and the youngest son James, now also working for the family firm. At the end of the war, only Charles and James returned. Albert died at Ypres in 1917 and Frank at Loos in the following year. So the band of six brothers working with their father was reduced to four. By 1918, at the age of 74, William had retired and Charles was the new head of the building firm.

William and Lizzie lived at 12 Clarence Road for the rest of their lives with their son George, who never married. Lizzie died at the end of 1925 and William seven years later, aged 87.  He is buried with his wife and George in Plot 757.

Harvey Harrowell

12/03/1870 –20/02/1942

Second of eleven children born to a Berkhamsted builder, went into the law, lived mainly in Watford

Relatives

Lizzie Harrowell — mother

• Jane Beaty

Harvey was born in on 12th March 1870 to Lizzie and William Harrowell of New Road in Tring. He was their eldest son and the second of their eleven children. William was an ambitious man and rose from being a bricklayer to running his own company of builders, erecting many of the Victorian and Edwardian houses in central Berkhamsted. Harvey was baptised in Berkhamsted when he was five, at the same time as his younger brother Alfred.

Within the family, Harvey was unusual because he did not enter the building trade and started his working life as a solicitor’s clerk, working for the firm of Penny & Thorne in Berkhamsted. For a man who went on to work in the legal profession, Harvey had a strained relationship with the law in his early life. In the 1891 census he is recorded as being 21 years old, unmarried and living with his parents at 44 High Street, Berkhamsted. Also living with the family is a dressmaker, born in Berkhamsted, 21 years old, also reportedly unmarried and called Mary Jane Lingard. She is described as a boarder within the household.

This sounds fine until you know that Harvey and Mary Jane had married three months previously, by licence, at St Bartholemew’s Church in Camberwell. No family members were present and Mary gave her address as the same as one of their witnesses in Camberwell. In fact Mary Jane had been born and bred in Berkhamsted and, after her mother died and her father re-married, she was brought up by her grandmother in Little Gaddesden where her mother had been born. So we are left to wonder why the marriage took place in such a furtive manner and why they seemingly did not want to make it public. Often marriages of this type were in a hurry or the couple wanted privacy. Perhaps the family did not approve for some reason, although the fact that she lived with them goes against this theory.

The plot thickens when we discover that Harvey and Mary Jane married again five years later. Their banns were read on three consecutive Sundays at St Peter’s in Berkhamsted, each time describing them as bachelor and spinster, then they married on 29th July 1896, the marriage witnessed by Harvey’s young sister Nellie. Strangely enough, Harvey’s brother Alfred had his banns read at the same church that month so they were baptised together and married within a month of each other, albeit that Harvey’s was for the second tome and to the same wife.

The fact that Harvey served as the Hon Sec of the Conservative Sports Club of Berkhamsted gives us clues as to his interests. By 1901 he and Mary Jane had moved away from Berkhamsted and he was serving as a solicitor’s managing clerk in the firm of Camp and Ellis in Watford. In 1907 he passed the preliminary examination of the Law Society then the intermediate exam by which time he was articled to Sydney J Ellis of Watford. By 1911 he was a fully fledged solicitor living in a substantial house in Clarendon Road, Watford.

Mary Jane’s entry on the census indicates that she never had any children but they did have Harvey’s six-year-old nephew, also called Harvey, living with them as well as a maid servant.

By 1919 Harvey, still living and working in Clarendon Road, Watford had also taken a place in premises at 89 Chancery Lane in London. This was a company called Turner and Co with over a dozen solicitors working from the address. By now he was qualified as a Solicitor and Commissioner of Oaths. He acted on house sales locally in Watford but also, from his London address, as far afield as Cornwall.

In his leisure hours played the viola and appeared often in the amateur orchestra of the Cricklewood Operatic Society who specialised in putting on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

For the next ten years Harvey and Mary Jane continued living in Watford. In about 1932 another nephew came to work with Harvey. James was the son of Harvey’s brother Albert who had been killed in the First World War. When James, known as Jim, left Berkhamsted School, where he had been a scholarship boy, he was articled to his Uncle Harvey in London and qualified as a solicitor in 1937. After serving and being injured in the Second World War James started his own legal practice in a cottage in Berkhamsted High Street, on the site of what is now Boots the Chemist. In due course this became Harrowell and Atkins and remains a solicitors’ practice to this day so Harvey’s influence remains in the town where he was born.

The 1939 register at the start of the Second World War shows that Mary Jane had moved to Brighton, perhaps because that felt safer. Harvey remained in their home in Watford and died there in 1942, aged 72. Probate was granted to his brother Charles and his estate was valued at £10,356. He is buried with his parents and his brother George in Plot 757. Mary Jane died in Hackney in 1954.