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| Stella Rogers 1957 |
The rest of us grandchildren all appear to have settled
within 200 miles of our roots in East London.
But what of previous generations?
Who were the pioneers of long ago, did any of them leave home to seek
their fortune and what prompted people to move?
I left London in 1964, travelled around a bit, returned a
few years later, met Valerie and got a job in a shirt company. When I told Valerie's dad that I wished to
marry his daughter, he said, "I suppose people will always want
shirts." I thought this hilarious
because I had no intention of keeping the same job for life. However, in time, I came to see his point.
Stella's sister, Sally is married to Barry, who has been a
London black-cab driver for years. It is
a difficult time for cabbies in London because of the popularity of Uber
cabs. It seems that even when an
industry has been around for years, it can still come under threat. In recent generations, many industries have
come and gone and not many children have followed their parent's careers.
Going back through the generations: around 1962, my father,
John Lear Rogers (1909), was made redundant from his shirt company after twenty
years. The firm was unable to compete
with cheap foreign imports. My shirt
company brought a revival to the industry with the arrival of ITV and mass TV
advertising; "Rael Brook Toplin, the shirt you don't iron,” the jingle
went, but eventually even Harry Rael Brook's newly resurgent shirt empire
crumbled away. By which time, my dad,
along with most of his generation, had moved out of London in search of work
and a better life.
His father, Ernest Frederick Rogers (1879), was a tram
driver, who, in 1904, drove the very first electric tram in West Ham. He and Ella Elizabeth (1883) moved house
quite a lot when their family were young, albeit just a few hundred yards each
time. Nan, Ella Elizabeth Smith (1883),
was a family hero, bringing up her two younger brothers in dire poverty, but
she was a Smith, and her family has a separate story, (See Fred Smith's book,
Smudge). My dad took me for a ride on
the very last London tram, which trundled into history in 1952, but by then,
Granddad, Ernest Frederick Rogers (1879), had been retired for a number of
years.
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| Emily and John Lear about 1909 |
Great-grandfather, John Lear Rogers (1851) and
great-grandmother, Emily Curtis (1854) are my family heroes. They were born in Plymouth, in the county of
Devon. It was unlikely that John had any
schooling but Emily's father, Silas, was a tradesman, a cooper, working for the
Royal Navy and her grandfather, Richard, received a pension after service in
the Royal Marines and fighting at the battle of Trafalgar. Families of tradesmen had a higher income
than labourers had and would often see the value of paying for some education
for their children. There were many
National schools near to where Emily grew up in Plymouth and in it seems very
likely she had some schooling. Early on
John Lear was a labourer in a quarry but escaped that gruelling work with
employment in a soap factory. The local
vicar recorded him as being a perfumer; however, the registrar was not so
generous and recorded him as being a labourer in a soap factory. Emily was a milliner, making women's hats,
the types with lots of flowers and bird feathers. However, with growing mechanisation and the
decline in the navy after the Napoleonic wars, there was growing unemployment
in Plymouth and John Lear and Emily decided to leave. That was a key moment in our history, had it
been a few years later, they may well have taken advantage of the relatively
inexpensive Atlantic passages on the new steam ships, emigrated to the United
States and none of our present lives would have happened. As it was, instead of travelling to the Wild
West, they went to Custom House, in the Docklands, the Wild East of
London. John Lear, along with immigrants
from all over, took advantage of the boom in international trade and worked in
London's docks. John Lear returned to
stone masonry and worked on building the new docks.
In 1879, whilst expecting their fourth child, their two
sons, Ernest Lear Rogers (1873) and Frederick Richard John Rogers (1875) were
given the wrong medicine by a drunken doctor.
In the morning, Emily found both boys, dead. Despite Britain's most famous pathologist
examining their bodies, the cause of their death was not identified. They were buried in a pauper's grave. Two months later, John, Emily and their
surviving two-year-old daughter, Edith, moved a couple of miles to the north
and John Lear escaped the awful employment conditions of the docks, in which
there was a corrupt scramble for employment every morning. He obtained work as a stonemason, working on
St Andrews church in Plaistow. Four
months after the death of their sons, Emily gave birth to another boy whom they
named Ernest Frederick, after their two lost boys, our grandfather. When too old to lift stones or a hammer and
chisel, John Lear became a lamplighter.
Emily lived until 1926 but John Lear died at the age of 58 just before
lamplighters disappeared forever and the London streets became lit by electricity. My father was born a month after his death in
1909 and was named John Lear, after the old man from Plymouth.
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| West Hoe Quarry, Plymouth, where John Rogers (1808) worked |
That is about it for the Rogers family history of
migration. Before John Rogers (1808)
left Modbury, around 1834, at least seven generations had lived there. In the sixteen hundreds, they were
agricultural workers, living through a time of relatively little change. Even the English Civil War and two battles in
Modbury came and went and the sons of Rogers followed their fathers to work on
the land. Their children would have
worked for the same squire and they would have been buried in the same
churchyard. They had little opportunity
to learn a trade or move away from a life of agricultural labour, whilst their
daughters could look forward to a life of helping their mothers, servitude and
marriage followed by a life of almost constant pregnancy! These families, however, would probably have
had a few animals of their own, which they could graze on common land, and
which would augment their supply of food when times got hard. During the following hundred years, the
seventeen-hundreds, there was relentless land grab by rich farmers, which meant
that successive generations of our ancestors had less common land to graze
their own animals and so became more and more dependent on the farmer's
employment and meagre wages. After the
farmers had taken all the common land, unemployment meant that our ancestors
had to starve or move.
Ernest Frederick Rogers (1879) - Ella Elizabeth (1883)
John Lear Rogers (1851) -
Emily Curtis (1854)
John Rogers (1808) -
Elizabeth Lear (1811)
John Rogers (1779) -
Mary Bardons (1786)
John Rogers (1742) -
Mary Lyndon (1744)
William Rogers (1720) -
Joan Reynolds (1720)
Samuel Rogers (1687) -
Margret Rud
Samuel Rogers (1654) -
Mary Wilcock (1654)
John Rogers (1623) -
Susan Cooker (1619)
Humphrey Rogers (1590) -
Wilmot Soper (1588)
