New House, New Challenge - 'Copperfield,' Tiverton

New House, New Challenge...

'Copperfield', Tiverton

 

 

 

Moving to a new house last month has opened up new exciting genealogical opportunities. 'Copperfield' is an old Victorian style villa built in 1890 near the canal in Tiverton, Devon and I have been eagerly trying to find out more about the previous occupants of the house. It has a very friendly ambience and I hoped that this was reflected in its past ownership. After a lot of frustrating digging, I have discovered a wealth of interesting detail about its past owners, which has a distinctly international proclivity. It seems apt, that Levi and I should continue this tradition in taking the house on.

‘I just can’t find it, Levi!’

My initial attempts to find out a bit more about the house were hampered by the fact that late-Victorian and Edwardian road names and numbers are very different to today. In fact, once outside the centre of Tiverton, there are no real road names, just the names of houses (‘The Firs’, ‘Rosenheim’, ‘Droon’, ‘The Lodge’, Holne Hill Farm etc.). I tried searching Canal Hill in the 1911 census and found only one house, 2, Penny Larana but I knew from reading the description that it could not be our house. I read through countless census extracts, trying to match up old and modern names with some success, though every entry seemed to skirt around our house. 

Blundell's School, c. 1900

Still, there were some points of interest - the entries for Blundell’s School for 1911 lists all the pupils in their boarding houses (West Lake, Petergate, Old House etc.) and I also found out that the big house I pass on the way to school each morning (now a nursing home) belonged to the Rees-Mogg family! Despite its rural location, there seemed to be a lot of people from outside Devon (mostly London) living in this part of the town, as well as a lot of internationally born people from different parts of the Empire (India, British Guiana etc.) and even Cuba (the de las Casas family were living up in Collipriest House on the edge of town). But with no further evidence to go on, I was resigned to put the project aside and moaning ‘I just can’t find it, Levi!’

Collipriest House, home of the Cuban, de las Casas family

However, when cleaning this weekend, I found a box of documents left by the previous owner which had a number of documents from the 1970s and 1980s. Looking through some of them, I found some interesting information – that the house was previously called ‘Sunnyside’ and was built adjacent to three cottages known as ‘Pennsylvania’. Armed with this information, I returned to the 1911 census and lo and behold, the house was there attached to the three cottages – one of which was 2, Penny Larana (mentioned above). A closer inspection, shows that this is a poor transcription of some decidedly messy handwriting – 2, Pennsylvania. From there, I have been able to trace the house back to the 1891 census. Even with the name, Sunnyside, this was not straight forward and I had to use the nearby house of Cecil Cox (a middle aged man of private means from Hampstead) to help guide me back to our row (his house ‘Mount View’ still stands at the bottom of the road between Canal Hill and Drayman’s Hill). Below I trace the house’s occupants and their families – and boy were they both interesting and unexpected.

The Canal, Tiverton

1891 Census

Our house, newly built, was called Canal Villa; its occupier, a piano forte tuner and music instructor from Berlin called Frederick C. Hindenberg. He was 26, and living there with his son, George (6) and daughter Gertrude (8). Staying at the house was Robert Drake (65) and his wife Hannah (55) and Alice Day, a 21 year old dressmaker from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The neighbouring cottages were occupied by a labourer, a widow of her own means and a gardener. 

The church in Berlin where Frederick was christened

Looking into Frederick C. Hindenberg, I found that he was born Friedrich Clemenz Hindenberg in 1854 and christened in the Sankt Georgenkirche, Berlin, the son of Friedrich Hindenberg and his wife Marie Sophie Auguste. Sometime in the 1870s the Hindenberg family came to London where Friedrich Senior worked as a cabinet maker and piano forte maker in Kensington. Friedrich Junior married Eliza Helena Sherman (the daughter of a plumber from St. Pancras) in August 1877 in St George’s, Bloomsbury, and they welcomed a son Frederick William Hindenberg the following June (ironically, this son was killed fighting the Germans in Egypt in August 1917). Beyond Frederick, George and Getrude, the couple had at least two further children in the 1880s called Helena and Wilfrid. Eliza died in 1887 in Reading where the family had been living and sometime around 1890 Friedrich/Frederick and his remaining children moved into our house. 

A Victorian Piano Teacher at work

By 1901, the family were gone, but Friedrich/Frederick’s time in Tiverton had not been misspent. Whilst in residence, he had acquired a new wife some two decades his junior, in the shape of a Tiverton woman, Jessie Sophia Rowe (whom he married in 1892). Thereafter, they moved to Nottingham, where Frederick continued his trade as a piano tuner and teacher. The pair had three children of their own: Annie Grace (1903); Herbert Stanley (1906) and John (1908). Helena and Wilfrid were still living with them in 1911. Both were clearly well educated (Wilfrid was still at school at 15) whilst Helena was a stenographer (i.e. she transcribed speech into shorthand). Perhaps most interestingly is the second Mrs Hindenberg. In 1911, she is a ‘costumier’ (making costumes for the theatre) and one gets the feeling she ruled the roost – recording herself as ‘Head of the House’ and putting Friedrich/Frederick down as ‘husband’. An Edwardian feminist, perhaps?

Edwardian Costumiers at work

1901 Census

Our house is called ‘Warniscombe House’ and the adjacent buildings ‘Warniscombe cottages’ were occupied by local labourers and their families. It was unoccupied during the census, much the pity.

1911 Census 

Our house is called ‘Sunnyside’ and it was occupied by a lady called Frances Bührer. Frances was 38, from Lewes in Sussex, had been married 14 years and was on private means. She was living here with her three children: Charles Robert (6 years old, born in Falmouth); Caroline Maude (5 years old, born in Calcutta, India) and Frances Amelia (4 years old, born in Falmouth). The family also had a live in servant, Beatrice Hellyer (18) from Sampford Peverell. Frances made a note next to the children’s names that their father was Swiss. 

Rangoon, now Yangon, Burma in the 1870s

Once again, the occupants of our house proved to be most interesting. Frances was born Frances Katherine Lungley in 1873, Lewes, Sussex. Her father Robert Brown Lungley was a captain and he and his wife, Hannah Louisa, moved with their daughter to British India where Frances gained a sister, Maud Gwendoline (born 1874, Rangoon) and a brother, Robert Brooke (born 1876, Calcutta).  In 1896, Frances married her husband, Carl Bührer in Calcutta. She was 23, whilst he was considerably older at 37. He seems to have been an importer of piece goods, that is to say someone dealing in linens. Why two of the children were born in Falmouth, I cannot say with much certainty, but one suspects it was connected with his business. Certainly, the couple’s middle child, Caroline, was born in Fort William, Calcutta in 1905 which implies that the family moved to and fro between India and Britain during this period. Both Frances and Carl died in 1923. They were almost certainly living apart at the time, with Frances dying in London and Carl dying in Mt. Abu, Rajasthan, India, later that year.

Fort William, Calcutta

As for their children, I can’t trace the girls any further, but the son Charles Robert Bührer, was quite the jetsetter! In 1930 he left Southampton on the Empress of France for Quebec, Canada. Then sometime between 1930 and 1933 he was living in Yokohoma, Japan with his wife, Rosa (from Rippon, Virginia, USA). He was living in the USA from 1933, where he can be found in the 1940 census working for a petroleum company in Westchester New York, with Rosa, his infant daughter Mary Jane and a servant. By 1949, he was an executive in the petroleum business and was living in Kingston, Jamaica. 

Yokahoma in the 1930s

Up to the present day 

Until 2021 when the next census comes out, I will have to wait patiently for the next chapter of the story of our house. A glance through the records left behind, our house has spent the last 40 years in the hands of (more) Germans, as well as both Irish and English families. With the arrival of myself and Levi (with our international mix of English/Irish and Canadian) the international bent of our wonderful new home seems set to continue.