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Charles PENFOLD (1844-1894)Tree035:T004

Name:	Charles PENFOLD
ONS Reference:	Tree035:T004
Sex:	Male
Record Id:	6303
Father:	Thomas PENFOLD (1813-1854)
Mother:	Mary GILLARD (1810-1875)

Individual Events and Attributes

Birth	1844	Holborn, London, England
Death	1894 (age 49-50)

Marriage

Spouse	Emily DAVIS (1846-1932)
Children	Emily Louisa PENFOLD (1866-1957)
	Rosa H PENFOLD (1866-1883)
	Charles PENFOLD (1869- )
	Edith PENFOLD (1873-1950?)
	George PENFOLD (1874- )
	Kate PENFOLD (1875- )
	William PENFOLD (1878-1975)
	Grace PENFOLD (1883-1956?)
	Walter PENFOLD (1885-1950?)
Marriage	8 May 1865 (age 20-21)	St. George, Camberwell, Surrey, England

Individual Note

Note From Matthew Penfold:

Whether Charles found life at Uncle George’s unduly restrictive, or how he became acquainted with a bone dealer and his beautiful daughter in Walworth, Newington, south of the Thames, are intriguing but unanswerable questions. Suffice it that on May 8th 1865 he married Emily Davis in the parish church of Camberwell, and brought her back, at least for a time before going south again, to 14 Thornhill Street in Islington, two doors away from the house at No 12 where Uncle George lived. He was of “full age”, if barely so,

and his wife still a minor. His marriage certificate describes him as a “pointer”, if the “o” is not a misreading by the copyist for an “r”, but his daughter’s birth certificate, November 1866, calls him a paper bag maker: the jobs evidently interlocked.

“Pointer” was an occupation in the printing trade. If correctly read, the entry on Charles’s marriage certificate, it is pleasing to note, antedates the earliest reference in the O.E.D. by seventeen years. The job is rather bewilderingly defined (O.E.D., s.v.

“pointer” 7.) as:

Printing. A layer-on who secures the register in printing the reverse side by ‘threading’ the sheet through the point-holes made in printing the first side.

 

Presumably he was such a man, but either he found exact register irksome, or he couldn’t make a living by it, for in 1871, rather alarmingly, he has adopted his father-in-law’s trade and is a dealer in bones. Family tradition says he came into some money which enabled him to buy a cab: since his mother died in 1875, it may have come from her, but we

do not know. If he prospered as a cab-driver, it may only have been for a time, for by 1891 he is described simply as a “labourer”: perhaps by then his cab needed more expensive repairs than he could afford. In 1894, aged fifty, he died.