The couple from my sixteen that I’ve chosen for Robin Stewart’s Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge “Why They Matter” are Thomas Joseph Cripps and Ellen Neale, my maternal 2x great-grandparents—
My Father’s Father’s Father’s Mother and Father
Jenny MacKay nee Cripps > Charles Thomas ‘Charlie’ Cripps > Charles Thomas ‘Tom’ Cripps > Charles Thomas Cripps > Thomas Joseph Cripps and Ellen Neale
Note: Throughout my research, the surname appears in multiple forms. Some documents record it with two p’s, Cripps, and others with one, Crips. I have also seen it written as Crisp, Crispe, Cripp, Crip, Crippss, Crippes, Crepps, Creps, and even Cripspe.
The spelling often depended on who was recording the name and what accent they were hearing. In the end, it matters less than you might think. What does matter is being thorough and a little creative when searching the records.
It’s also a gentle reminder not to get too fixed on one “correct” spelling. If we only search for the version we expect to see, we can easily overlook the very person we’re hoping to find. The records don’t always cooperate with our assumptions.
The Moment She Asked for Help
There is a moment in this family’s story that stops me every time I come back to it.
It is 27 November 1861. Thomas has been dead for seventeen days. Ellen is thirty-eight years old, pregnant, and standing before the Poor Law guardians of Bethnal Green with four children at home: Sarah, seventeen; Ellen, eleven; Charles, seven; and Ann, five. She has lived at 7 Thomas Street her whole married life. Now she is there alone, without the man who shared it with her.
The clerk records that she produced her marriage certificate instantly. (cert: proc. inst.) Those words tells us she came prepared. Ellen knew what would be asked of her and she arrived with the proof already in her hand. The record also notes that she had never previously sought relief. Not once in twenty years of marriage, through the deaths of children, Thomas Charles, Esther Ellen, young Thomas, Emma, through the precariousness of a pig dealer’s income, through all of it. Never.
That is not a small thing.
Their Story
Thomas Joseph Cripps was baptised at St Matthew, Bethnal Green, on 1 September 1822, the son of Thomas Charles Crips and Esther Elizabeth Hilliard. His father’s occupation was recorded as Corn Chandler at the baptism, but by the time Thomas Joseph grew up, the family trade had shifted to pig dealing. His father Charles would later be noted as a pig dealer, and Thomas Joseph followed the same path, appearing as a pig dealer in both the 1851 and 1861 censuses, working out of York Place and then Thomas Street, never straying far from the Bethnal Green streets he had known his entire life.
Bethnal Green in the mid-19th century was not an easy place to raise a family. A health inspector's report from 1848 described much of the parish as filthy and overcrowded, with unmade roads, houses subdivided well beyond their means, and almost no drainage or sewerage. Pigs and cows in back yards were commonplace, which goes some way to explaining how pig dealing sustained a family at all. It was simply part of how the neighbourhood lived. The child mortality rate across the East End stood at around 20 percent. Thomas and Ellen would have known that number not as a statistic, but as a reality lived out in their own home, again and again.
Ellen Neale had come from just across the parish boundary, born on Hackney Road in Shoreditch in August 1824. Neither of them had strayed far before they found each other. Thomas married Ellen on 13 September 1841 at the Parish Church of St Matthew in Bethnal Green. Both were minors. Thomas signed his name in the register, while Ellen made her mark, an X, which tells us she could not write. And if the arrival of their first son, George Thomas, just ten weeks after the wedding tells us anything, it is that they were also simply human. Two young people doing what people have always done, and then getting on with it. They were working class, rooted in a neighbourhood from which neither of them would ever really leave, and they built a life.
In twenty years of marriage they had at least eleven children. Several did not survive infancy or early childhood. The causes of death recorded on their certificates read like a catalogue of Victorian poverty: whooping cough, inflammation of the lungs, smallpox, phthisis. Most of these are conditions that are either preventable or treatable today. In 1840s and 1850s Bethnal Green, they were a death sentence for the very young. By the time of the 1861 census, the household at 7 Thomas Street held Thomas, Ellen, and four surviving children. Ellen worked as a shoe binder and Sarah, the eldest daughter at seventeen, was a fancy trimming maker. They all worked. By November that year, Thomas was gone, buried on 18 November at the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery, dead at thirty-nine from Chronic Bronchitis.
The following weeks delivered not one more child but two. The Poor Law record notes she was pregnant at the time of her application. She could not have known she was carrying twins. Ellen gave birth to Thomas and Selina on 8 January 1862. Selina died in July, just seven months old, from dentition and diarrhoea, dentition being simply teething. A cause of death that was heartbreakingly common in Victorian registers, yet stops a modern reader cold. We live in a world where babies do not die from teething. Ellen lived in one where they did. Selina was her fifth child lost in infancy, and she absorbed that loss as she had absorbed the others, and kept going. Young Thomas survived and went on to live a long life, which in the context of everything that preceded his arrival, feels quiet extraordinary.
Life After Thomas
Life did not give Ellen much time to grieve. There were children to feed and a household to keep. Charles Moore, a silk dyer, appears to have come into the family’s life quite quickly after Thomas died. By 1863, just two years after her husband’s death, Moore was standing as a witness at the wedding of Ellen’s eldest daughter Sarah, alongside Ellen herself. He was clearly no stranger to the family by then.
The marriage to Charles Moore was not formalised until July 1871, a full ten years after Thomas died, when Ellen took him as her husband at St James the Great, Bethnal Green, again signing with her mark, because some things did not change.
The family that Thomas and Ellen built continued to scatter and grow. One of their sons, Charles Thomas Cripps, born in Bethnal Green in August 1854, is my great grandfather. He didn't get on with his future step-father and left home in January 1870 at fifteen years old, made his way to a seaport, and boarded a ship for Australia. Whatever drove him out, Australia offered something Bethnal Green never could. He was fifteen years old and he made the most of it. He did return briefly to England in 1917 during the First World War, but Australia was his home and that is where he died, in Northampton, Western Australia, in April 1923. The journey, from a terraced street in East London to the red dust of Western Australia, runs directly through Thomas and Ellen.
What did they pass down?
What did Thomas and Ellen pass down to me, their great great granddaughter?
The Cripps name that travelled from the slums of Bethnal Green to the other side of the world. A family that survived. And somewhere in that inheritance, a need to know where I came from.
I am a genealogist and family historian. I spend my days reading family names in parish registers, census records, Poor Law documents and marriage certificates, piecing together lives that might otherwise dissolve entirely into the past. Thomas and Ellen did not know my name. They could not even begin to imagine the world I live in, let alone that someone would one day sit at a computer on the other side of the world, following their lives as they unfolded document by document, reading about a young widow walking into a Poor Law office and feeling the weight of that moment, a woman asking for help for the first time in her life.
That is why they mattered. Recording their story is the least I can do.
Read more about the Cripps (Crips) family over on my family history archive by following this link - JenealogyScrapbook - WeAre.xyz
Sources: Ancestry.com, Poor Law Record, 27 November 1861, Bethnal Green, Middlesex
Ancestry.com, Marriage Register, St Matthew, Bethnal Green, 13 September 1841
Ancestry.com, Baptism Register, St Matthew, Bethnal Green, 1 September 1822
Ancrestry.com, England Census 1851 & 1861
Ancestry.com, Marriage Register, St James the Great, Bethnal Green, 16 July 1871
Gavin, H., Sanitary Ramblings: Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green, 1848
19th-century London, Wikipedia.
There’s power in that story: driven by desire to live. Maybe that’s what the Cripps name means! And to live with joy.
The thought of all the gardens in Bethnall Green with pigs and other livestock in them is a bit mind-boggling. They wouldn't have been very large gardens ... And they were probably very smelly! 🐖 🐖