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marriage is the same as his (Fort Place,
16
off Grange Road), and the witnesses are both Hendersons, Hall and Jane, possibly the
bridegroom's brother and sister
Mary remained in London; antt 26 years later she is listed in the census for teeming
Bermondsey, in 1871.
William's second son, Richard, was the next to marry. His story will be told in full in later
chapters. But in 1847, when William disappears from the Bristol records, Richard was a
mason's apprentice in Carlisle, in the north of England.
In September that year, he married Elizabeth Ryder - twice. The first 'wedding' happened at
Gretna Green across the border in Scotland on Richard's 18th birthday; the bride was 25.
Apparently, the resourceful woman dared the youth to marry her. The union was made official in
November, when they married again in a church in Carlisle.
On this certificate, Richard's father's occupation is given as a stonemason, not a builder, and one
of the witnesses is Richard's older brother, William Robert. All concerned signed the church
register. Perhaps it should be noted that the bride was not pregnant - their first child was born a
year later in October 1848.
What was William Robert doing up there? He was a carpenter by trade and 20 that September.
Did he travel north to be his brother's best man, or was he already working there? The former
premise seems most likely. For we find William Robert back in Bristol in 1849, when he marries
Emma Rowles.
No member of William Robert's family, or hers, witnessed the signing of this register, which was
done by two "regulars'. The wedding took place in the parish church of Temple in Bristol on 29
May. William Robert, we know, was now 21, and a carpenter; Emma was about 24 and is
described as a spinster (no occupation is given). Her father was a farmer; the groom's father
was a mason. The couple's address was 48 Temple Street.
This tittle faci is remarkable, because it was also the address of another William Honeycombe,
who was also another carpenter. He appears as such in the 1851 Census and in severat birth
certificates.
How did this happen? How did two Williams, both carpenters, but of different families, come to
be living in the same house in Bristol in 1849?
They were, in fact, related. The other William was born in St Cleer in 1820 - so he was seven
years older than William Robert. This other William's father, a farmer born and brought up in St
Cleer and also named William, was the son of the John Honeycombe who was the eldest
brother of Robert, the father of William the stonemason. John and Robert were therefore the
respective grandparents of the two carpenters in Bristol.
But how did they meet? For the older of the two carpenters called William did not come to
Bristol until after his marriage in March 1846, in Truro.
17
His bride, Susan Platt Jenkins (Sukey), was 17 or 18 at that time. Their first child was born in
December the following year in Bristol, as were the next five - and between 1847 and 1854
they all lived at 48 Temple Street.
In May 1849, when William Robert and Emma wed, William and Sukey had just one child,
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