My great3-grandparents, John and Martha Gillett, were married at Long Sutton in Somerset in September 1811. John Gillett had been born just up the road in Somerton in 1785. Martha’s maiden name was Isaac and she had been born a year earlier in Sturminster Newton in Dorset, the daughter of William Isaac and Elizabeth Clark. Elizabeth’s younger brother, Joseph, was the father of Cyrus and James Clark, the founders of the firm of C & J Clark, shoe makers, of Street, making them Martha’s first cousins. Martha had a younger sister, Mary, who married William Palmer, a farmer in Long Sutton, and their three sons, George, Samuel and William Isaac, were, with Thomas Huntley, to become Huntley & Palmer, biscuit makers, of Reading. It is remarkable that from such a close circle of families two great business enterprises should grow.
John and Martha settled in Langport, four miles to the west of Long Sutton, where John Gillett carried on a business as a grocer, draper and chemist. He and Martha had ten children, six boys and four girls, and their eldest daughter was Maria, born in 1816, from whom I am descended (click here to see them in my family tree).
When John Gillett retired he built a house in Street. It was called Overleigh and was built of the Blue Lias rock that is found in the area and which has been a singularly productive source of marine fossils such as the ichthyosaur and plesiosaur. Maria’s older brother, Alfred, who had been an ironmonger in Yeovil, later retired to Street and lived in his parents’ former home there. He was a keen amateur palaeontologist and during explorations of the quarries from which the building stone was being excavated, recovered several complete fossils of these prehistoric sea creatures from about 200 million years ago. Some of his specimens are in the Natural History Museum in London and others remain in Street in the care of a trust named after him.
In 1837 Maria married Thomas Simpson, a ‘fustian, nankeen and cotton manufacturer’ from Manchester, where he was in partnership with his brother John; two years later Maria’s sister Ellen married Thomas’s brother William. Maria and Thomas lived in Chorlton-under-Medlock, as it was called then, although the 1851 census shows them at Whalley Range, an up-market and then largely under-developed suburb south-west of the city. Thomas ended his partnership with his brother in 1862 having set up on his own in Preston where he employed 750 people, and lived in style at Hutton Hall, later to be the headquarters of the Lancashire Police. The family and Quaker connections with the Clarks at Street brought Thomas Simpson back to Somerset in 1863 where he advised Maria’s cousins on how to restructure their shoe business. Such family connections were to prove useful again later in the century when my great-grandmother, Emily, Thomas and Maria’s eldest daughter, and her husband Charles Spencer were able to draw upon another cousin, William Isaac Palmer, to help them financially with Charles’s iron foundry business in Melksham (see The Spencers).
The Quaker connection was significant in several of these families. The Clarks were, and still are, members of the Society of Friends, as were the Gilletts and the Palmers. The Simpsons were Quakers too, and came from Greyrigg in Westmoreland, so when looking for marriageable partners it was frowned upon in Quaker circles to look beyond the families of Friends.
