George Brock

George Brock was born on 13 February 1824 at Haxey, in the Isle of Axholme — the flat, watery corner of Lincolnshire where the Brock family had been rooted for generations. He was the son of George Brock, himself a miller, and Sophia Davy, and he was raised to the family trade.

By fifteen he had already left home for it: the 1841 census finds him a journeyman miller, boarding at Hatcliffe; ten years later he is still a miller's man, a servant in George Borman's household at Grainthorpe. In April 1852 he married Eliza Stubbs, a farmer's daughter from Alvingham, in the Wesleyan chapel at Louth — he in his late twenties, she just twenty-one.

Within a few years he had made himself a master. By the mid-1850s the trade directories name him plainly — "George Brock, Corn Miller" — with his own mill at Tetney, on the coast near Grimsby. There he and Eliza raised a large family: eight children between 1854 and 1869, William Henry among them.

The marriage did not run smooth to the end. In June 1866 George placed a notice in the Stamford Mercury declaring he would "not be answerable for any debts" his wife might contract — the public language of a Victorian marriage coming apart. What lay behind it, the records do not say.

He did not grow old. In January 1869, at forty-four, George died of smallpox at Tetney. No doctor had certified the cause; a fellow miller, John Croft, was the one in attendance, and registered the death the next day with his mark. George was buried at once, at St Peter's — the swift burial of a contagious house.

His death undid much of what he had built. Eliza could not keep the mill, and within the year she had remarried and taken the children to Hull, where the sons of a master miller would grow up labourers in the oil mills of a great industrial town. The rural Brocks of the Axholme marsh ended with George; the Hull Brocks began with the widow and children he left behind.