William Batty

William Batty was a man of three villages before he was a man of Hull. Born at Thorngumbald about 1831–34 and baptised at Paull — the mother church two miles off — on 2 February 1834, he was the youngest of the three sons Mum lists for Jonathan Batty and Elizabeth Marritt. The censuses catch him at seven in his father's Paull household, and at eighteen a farm servant boarded in at Newton Garth, Arthur Wilson's 308 acres on the Humber bank. In November 1853, at Aldbrough, he married Eliza Ollivant, a miller's daughter in service like himself — and the register, read at the image, shows both of them signing their names, farm servants who could write.

The Aldbrough years put them on Church Street, next door to Hill Farm; then in September 1864 the roof was sold from under them. Mum found the notice in the Hull & Eastern Counties Herald: two freehold cottages in the Market Place, 'one of which is now occupied by William Batty', to be sold by auction at the George Inn. Within two or three years the family were in Hull — one son, Jonathan, left behind with his Ollivant grandmother — and William was a dock labourer at 4 White Hart Passage off Salthouse Lane, a court household wedged between a laundress, a grocer and the Sailors' Home. Eliza died there in 1876, in her mid-forties; two years later, at St Mary's Lowgate, William — labourer, widower, signing his name still — married Maria Astwood, a soldier's daughter born Maria Bilton at Bassingham in Lincolnshire, herself a widow. By 1881 he was a coal heaver at 47 Lime Street in the Stoneferry mill belt. Maria died in 1883, and from there the record thins: the 1891 census has no trace of him, one line of a twice-widowed lodger easily mangled in an index.

His death has been the tangle of this page, and Mum herself left both answers on it: her page title says '(1834–1901?)', her page body a burial at Holy Trinity in July 1905, aged 74, from Cleveland Terrace, Walcott Street. The registers, read at the image, now decide for her title. The Cleveland Terrace man was a different William Batty — a shipwright born in Hull about 1831, at that exact address with his own family in 1891, still alive on census night 1901, dead in the right quarter of 1905 at exactly 74. No 1901 census entry has been found for our William at all, and the General Register Office has the only fitting death: William Batty, first quarter of 1901, Sculcoates — his family's own district. The 1905 burial is returned to the shipwright, and this page now carries the death Mum's instinct always suspected.

One more thing the records show, worth saying plainly: William aged himself. Twenty-two at his 1853 wedding, fifty in 1881, his stated ages run about three years older than the childhood records allow — the boy of seven in 1841 and the Paull baptism hold the line at 1834. Each census also gives a different birthplace — Paull, Thorngumbald, 'Aldbro'' — the three villages of his youth taken in turn. Through his daughter Martha, married from Providence Square in 1882, this line passes to the Drewerys.