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aged 17 months. Called Phillipa Jane, she died of scarlet fever when she was two and a half.
William Robert had grown up in Devon and Bristol, where his father set up in business in 1841,
(when William Robert was 14). So it seems most unlikely that the two young carpenters met in
Cornwall. The grandparents of William Robert were dead by then, and there were only a
couple of aunts in Calstock who might have given him a home.
What is curious is that William Robert did not follow his father's trade: Richard did, but William
Robert became a carpenter. Was this just his inclination? Or was some other influence at work?
The likelihood of William Robert being apprenticed as a carpenter in St Cleer seems remote.
His apprenticeship was surely done in Bristol, under the guidance, possibly, of his father's
business partner, George Wilkins, who was a builder, it would seem that William the carpenter
of St Cleer met the younger William Robert by chance in Bristol and because they both had the
same trade.
Clearly the two of them became friends, if not associates, as William Robert was lodging with
the other William in Temple Street when he married and not with his parents in Dove Street. But
that was probably because his parents were no longer living in Dove Street, or even in Bristol.
Much is known about the later life of William the carpenter of St Cleer and his wife, Sukey.
They had nine children altogether, and moved to London about 1861. Most of the present-day
London Honeycombes are descended from them.
Very little, however, is known about William Robert. After his marriage in 1849, he disappears
from English records.
But the chance finding of an entry in the 1851 census tells us that he and Emma, his wife, had a
child, a baby girl, in 1850. The entry reveals that Emma Honeycomb(e) and her daughter,
Frances (without William Robert) were living with Emma's widowed mother, Hannah Rowles,
aged 62, in Marine Cottage, Portishead, Somerset. With them were Emma's unmarried brother,
yet another William, aged 21, and a 10-year-old girl, Louisa May, described as a grand-
daughter of Hannah Rowles.
Portishead is on the coast, a few miles west of Bristol and across the River Avon from
Avonmouth. The census details reveal that Hannah Rowles, the mother, was born there, as was
her son, William; Emma, Frances and Louisa Rowles were all bom at Portbury, a tiny village a
mile or two inland and now overwhelmed by the M5. The fact that Emma was living with her
mother indicates either that she and William Robert had separated, or that he was living and
working elsewhere. Or that he was dead.
No record has been found for the birth of Frances Honeycombe, Emma's child. Nor any record
of other children. Or of William Robert's death. But within
18
seven years of his marriage, Emma Honeycombe, calling herself a widow, remarried. This we
know.
What happened to William Robert? The problem about his disappearance is compounded by a
reference to him in a death certificate - not his - in Australia in 1876. In it, William Robert is
listed (as such) as one of his father's children. He is said to be 48, and accordingly alive. But
Emma was a widow when she remarried in 1856.
it is impossible to be sure, but the likeliest explanation for this is that the later reference (20
years later) is an error, caused by an assumption in Australia -not that William Robert was alive
- but that he wasn't known to be dead. He may well have disappeared, and been presumed
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