Jane's Roots

James (1813 - 1887) was the third son of James and Elizabeth Watkins and he grew up in Devizes. As a young man he must have spent some time in London, because it was there that he married Elizabeth Crabb (b.1808) who was from Beaminster in Dorset. Their wedding was at the church of St Saviour (now Southwark Cathedral) on 14th December 1834.

Fifteen months later, in March 1836, James was back in Devizes where he passed the examination to become an excise man. His entry papers describe him as:

"...a likely man to make a good officer he is healthy and active and not encumbered with Debts is a married man with a wife and child only aged twenty three years of respectable character and well affected to present Government he hath been bred a Linen Draper"

The "present Government" was Whig. Of course, James might have been lying about his political sympathies to get a job, but he was probably being sincere. He had attended a Congregational church throughout his childhood, where the minister was an anti-slavery campaigner, and the Whig government had abolished slavery in 1833. Also the Reform Act of 1832 had probably given his father, James the draper, the vote.

I was disappointed to discover that an excise man was not the same thing as a riding officer and James had not discovered a vocation to hunt down the notorious Wiltshire smugglers known as Moonrakers. In fact, excise men collected the dues payable on home-produced goods, and it was customs officers who chased smugglers.

The assessment that James was a "likely man to make a good officer" seems to have been correct. James spent the rest of his working life in the service, and became a supervisor before he retired. His career took him to Bridport in Dorset (which he probably chose to be close to his wife's family), Burnham in Somerset, and then London, where he remained in retirement, living in Deptford.

James was probably the first ancestor of mine to ever take an examination, and also probably the last for the next 120 years or so.