The Berrys of Westminster — and the Northern Family They Joined

Most of the family history I write about belongs to the North East, but one strand of my tree begins somewhere quite different: in the schoolrooms of Westminster. These are the Berrys, my London family, and their story makes a fascinating counterpoint to the Ferrys up north over the very same decades. The two were tied together by a single marriage — and by a name that travelled the length of England.

A schoolmaster and his wife

At the head of the London line stand Augustine Berry and his wife, (Mary) Maria Deacon — another of my fifth great-grandparents, and exact contemporaries of Robert Ferry, the Ravensworth gardener I wrote about recently.

Augustine was born around 1785 at East Molesey in Surrey, then a quiet Thames-side village near Hampton Court rather than the London suburb it later became. Maria Deacon was born about 1790. By 1816 they were settled in Westminster, where my fourth great-grandmother, Esther Pilgrim Berry was born in 1822.

Records of their life name Augustine as a schoolmaster, and the 1851 census confirms that Maria, too, was a schoolmistress. Augustine and Maria were a teaching couple, who both worked into their sixties.

That partnership tells you a great deal about how they lived. A husband and wife who were both teachers almost always ran a school together from their own home — the classic small private establishment of the age, in which, as was usual, the master took the older boys and the mistress the girls and the younger children. It was respectable work, if rarely lucrative, the household's fortunes rising and falling with the number of pupils at the desks. I haven't yet found the school's name — that waits on the old London trade directories — but its shape is now clear: a family home that perhaps doubled as a schoolroom, run by the two of them side by side.

One address for the family has come to light: Great Smith Street, in the heart of old Westminster — and it is a fitting place for a schoolmaster to have settled. The street runs right along the edge of Dean's Yard, the precinct of Westminster School, one of the oldest and most celebrated schools in England, so the Berrys kept their own modest school quite literally beside an ancient one.

Source: books.google.co.uk

The street's links to learning did not end with him, either. London's first free public library was later built on Great Smith Street, and today — as I was struck to discover — the Department for Education has its offices there, directly opposite where my family once lived. Whether by chance or by the slow gravity of the ecclesiastical and educational quarter that has gathered around Westminster Abbey for centuries, Great Smith Street has been bound up with schooling and learning for a very long time. My ancestors were simply one small part of that long story.

Nonconformists

Family names from this branch point to something important about the family: their faith. Augustine, Esther Pilgrim, Zephaniah, Hephzibah — these are emphatically Nonconformist, chapel-going names, chosen with intent.

A word on what that means. "Dissenters," or "Nonconformists," were Protestants who worshipped outside the established Church of England — Baptists, Congregationalists (also called Independents), Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, Unitarians and others. They met in their own chapels rather than the parish church, and for much of their history they paid for it: well into the nineteenth century, Dissenters were barred from the ancient universities and shut out of many public offices simply for not conforming to the Established Church. Partly in answer to that, they built a vigorous culture of their own, and education sat at the centre of it. Dissenters prized literacy and learning, founded their own academies and schools, and produced far more than their share of teachers; when the great school societies arose in the early nineteenth century, the Nonconformists had their own — the British and Foreign School Society — set up expressly to teach the children of Dissenting families alongside the Church of England's National Schools.

All of which fits the Berrys closely. A Dissenting household that produced both a schoolmaster and a schoolmistress was not an oddity but very nearly a type. I haven't yet identified their chapel, but that world — of chapel, congregation, and self-reliant learning — is almost certainly where this family belonged, and it goes a long way to explaining why teaching ran so deep in them.

The family that climbed

What became of the Berrys after the schoolroom is a very Victorian story of ascent.

Their son, Zephaniah Deacon Berry (1816–1880) — my fourth great-uncle, and Esther's brother — left teaching behind entirely. By 1851 he was an ironmonger, living at 3 Victoria Road in Westminster (the street is now Buckingham Palace Road) with his wife Jane, their children, and a servant. He went on to become a gas engineer, running the Albion Works in Pimlico — and in doing so he caught one of the great rising industries of the age, for gas was lighting and powering the booming capital. By 1871 the family had moved to Buckingham Palace Road proper, and when Zephaniah died in 1880 he was buried at Kensal Green, the grand garden cemetery of respectable Victorian London.

The climb continued into the next generation. His son, Zephaniah Augustine Berry (1845–1903), carried on as an engineer and prospered considerably, leaving an estate of more than £19,000 — a genuine fortune. He served as a Commissioner for Westminster's public baths and wash-houses — institutions that stood on Great Smith Street itself, the very street where his schoolmaster grandfather had lived, so the family's tie to that corner of Westminster reached across the generations. He was also made a Freemason and a liveryman of the Glovers' Company, and even left a colourful divorce in the public record. In three generations the Berrys had travelled from a schoolmaster's modest rooms to the comfortable, civic-minded heart of the Victorian middle class.

The name that went north

Here is where my own line turns away from London. Augustine's daughter — my fourth great-grandmother, Esther Pilgrim Berry — did not stay in Westminster. She married Thomas Graham Ferry, a man born up in Lamesley, County Durham, the son of Robert Ferry, the gardener at Ravensworth. For a while the couple lived in Westminster, where their first children were born through the 1840s, close to Esther's Berry relatives. But around 1850 they did the opposite of so many of their generation: rather than being pulled into London, they left it, moving north to Thomas's native Durham. Their later children were born at Gateshead — among them my third great-grandfather, born in 1857 and christened Zephaniah Deacon Ferry.

That name is the thread that ties the whole story together. There were now, in effect, two Zephaniah Deacons: the London ironmonger and gas engineer, prospering in Pimlico, and his Durham-born nephew, my ancestor, carrying the Berry family's names three hundred miles north into a very different world.

Two families, one timeline

It is the contrast that I find most striking. Across the same span of years — roughly the 1810s to the turn of the century — these two halves of my family lived almost opposite lives.

In London, the Berrys were people of the metropolis: a schoolmaster and schoolmistress teaching the children of Westminster, then sons and grandsons riding the city's industrial and commercial boom into ironmongery, gas engineering, public office, and real prosperity. Theirs was an urban, upward, distinctly Victorian story, and they stayed put — Westminster and Pimlico held them for generations.

In the North East, the Ferrys lived closer to the land and to older rhythms. Robert Ferry gave sixty-six years to the gardens of the Liddells' Ravensworth estate. His son Thomas brought a London bride home to Durham, and the family that grew there took its character not from the capital's gas works but from the region's own trades — moving from plastering into pottery, with two sons modelling earthenware in Linthorpe, home of the celebrated Linthorpe Art Pottery, and a daughter making her living as a vocalist. And where the London Berrys climbed and remained, several of the Ferry children eventually scattered to the very ends of the earth, settling and dying in Victoria, Australia, and in Dunedin, New Zealand.

One family looked inward to London and rose; the other looked outward from the North East and dispersed across the world. They met, just once and decisively, when a Westminster schoolmaster's daughter married a Durham gardener's son — and everything in my own line flows from that single meeting of two very different Englands.