Recently I decided to take my focus off the ancestors further back in my tree to fill in some details on more recent generations. It’s always good to come back periodically and review what is now available to flesh out the stories of our relatives. So many new sources are constantly being made available! And when it comes to railway tragedies, it is very likely that multiple records will be left.
John Rigby and Charlotte Teague
John Rigby was born in 1837 in Shoreditch to a silk weaver also named John and his wife Sarah Morter (last mentioned here). However, he did not follow his father into the declining silk industry but became a cigar maker. He married Charlotte Teague, the third daughter of Enoch Teague and Sarah Townley in 1861 at Christchurch Spitalfields.
Together they had 8 children, the first three of whom were born in London, the remainder in Leicester. John and Charlotte had relocated about 1868, where John worked and eventually became a foreman in a cigar factory. It is possible he worked with Joseph Carey ‘John’ Merrick, who became known as ‘the Elephant Man’, as they were both working in a cigar factory and living very close to one another during the mid-1870s.
John Rigby Junior and the Railway Tragedy
John and Charlotte’s eldest son, also called John was born in 1862 in Hackney. He too became a cigar maker. Of all the children of John and Charlotte, I had never found what became of John after the 1891 census. At that stage, he too had moved cities, from Leicester to Sheffield, also to work as a foreman in a cigar factory belonging to Messrs J Morris & Son of Whitechapel and Sheffield. He had a wife, Mary Ann (nee Hall) who he had married in 1887 and two children, John and George both born in Sheffield. After that, he appeared to have disappeared in a puff of (cigar?) smoke and I abandoned him for a decade or two. It was now time to see what I could find about his later life.
Once again, the newspapers came to the rescue. They have become my absolute go-to source these days given the accident-proneness of my family!
The reason I hadn’t found John in any later censuses was that he hadn’t lived to see 1901. From the newspaper reports following his death, it seemed that John had become very depressed during 1900. He was convinced that his employers were unhappy with him. He thought that he was about to lose his job (something they strenuously denied at his inquest).
Trip to London
At Easter, he went to visit his father in Leicester, who was determined to cheer him up. John Senior bought railway excursion tickets for himself, John, and one of the younger Rigby brothers to visit London for a few days.
Approaching London, there was a long tunnel at Haverstock Hill. The train carriages were unlit. John took the opportunity of the darkness to smash the carriage window and leap out onto the tracks. His father tried to grab his coat but was unsuccessful. John was then horrifically killed by a train passing in the opposite direction.
The death and subsequent inquest were reported in several newspapers with varying levels of detail. In none of them did it report which brother had been in the carriage with the two John Rigbys.
It is hard to imagine how traumatising this would have been for both his father and this brother, and what impact it may have had on their later lives.
There were three younger brothers of John who were alive at the time – George, Charles and Alfred. Charles was my great-grandfather and I suspect that he might have been the brother on the train.
Why? He effectively became estranged from the family. Although he was still in Leicester in 1901, by 1911 he had moved to Bedworth, by 1915 he was in Coventry, and he ended up in Birmingham by the following year, where he lived out the rest of his (short) life. His father died in 1917, and his will reveals bequests to all of his living children…except Charles.
The rest of the Rigby family remained in Leicester and by all accounts were close to one another. I wonder if Charles somehow got the blame for not saving his brother? Pure speculation on my part and probably unable ever to be confirmed one way or another. Of course that is not the only possible reason for his estrangement from the family, but that’s for another blog post.
Two families with railway tragedies in common
You may remember a railway tragedy in the Swinbourne branch of my family, which I wrote about here. Well, the two families impacted by railway tragedy happened to merge. Charles Rigby married Leah Barnett (nee Swinbourne) in 1916. His brother and her son, both killed by trains. What are the odds of that?