George Brock

George Brock was baptised at Beckingham, on the Nottinghamshire bank of the Trent, on 10 March 1788 — a son of Thomas Brock, a Haxey farmer then working the Trent-side parishes, and his wife Elizabeth Clark. (One register miscopied his mother’s name as “Sarah”; his parents’ own marriage entry, and the baptisms of his brothers and sisters, put it beyond doubt — she was Elizabeth Clark of Haxey.) He was born into a family that moved with its work along the river parishes; it was George’s own generation that took up the miller’s trade, and milling would carry the Brocks for the next eighty years.

On 5 December 1814 he married Sophia Davy at Hatcliffe, a few miles inland from Grimsby, where he was then the miller; both of them signed their own names in the register. Over the next fourteen years they had six children — Elizabeth, Mary, James, Mary Ann, George and William — the second of them christened Mary Simonds Brock, after James Simmonds, master of Hatcliffe Mill and, in all likelihood, George’s employer: a miller naming his daughter for the mill.

Then came a run of hard years. In 1828 the baby, William, lived only two days. In 1829 the eldest, Elizabeth, died at fifteen. And in February 1830 Sophia herself died, at forty-one — leaving George a widower in his early forties.

He married again — a woman named Ann, whose surname the records have not yet yielded — and by the mid-1830s the family was living at Balby, on the edge of Doncaster; a son, William, was baptised back at Haxey in October 1835. But this marriage too ended in widowhood: by 1851 Ann was gone.

The census of that year finds George at Haxey, the parish his people always returned to — sixty-five years old, a widower, living alone, and set down now not as a miller but as a labourer. The trade that had carried the family for generations had slipped from him at the last. He died at Haxey on 17 February 1860.

It was his son George, born at Haxey in 1824, who carried the mill and the name onward — east to Tetney, and from there, a generation later, the family would leave the land altogether for the mills and streets of Hull.