William Drewery was born in 1848 on the Holbeach Marsh, in the deep fen country of south Lincolnshire — a son of Robert Drewery, an agricultural labourer of Long Sutton, and his wife Elizabeth Lawson of Moulton. The censuses of his boyhood catch the family — the surname still unsettled, Drury one decade and Drewry the next — in the labourers' cottages of the Marsh, and William following his father onto the land: a farm servant at twelve, a lodging farm hand at twenty-two.
In his twenties he did the thing that turned the whole line: he went north. By 1881 he was a farm servant indoors at Bursea House, Holme upon Spalding Moor, in the East Riding; and in November 1882, at St John's church in Hull, he married Martha Batty of Aldbrough — she twenty, he thirty-four though the register says twenty-seven. Martha signed her name; William, a fen labourer's son with no schooling behind him, made his mark. They worked the farms east of Hull — Swine, then Benningholme Grange, where William rose from hind to foreman — and four children were born: Thomas, Fanny, Eliza, and Mary.
Then, near fifty, a second reinvention: by 1901 William was landlord of the Gate Inn at Hive, near Gilberdyke — “Inn Keeper, Own Account.” The inn years hold the family's brightest and darkest days. Little Mary died in 1902, ten years old, and was laid at Eastrington under “Safe in the arms of Jesus.” In 1906 Eliza was married from the inn — a “pretty wedding” the Hull Daily Mail dressed in cream silk and navy blue, her soldier brother Tom home as best man. And in 1912 the same paper reported the Gate Inn's ugliest night: a drunken farmer felled Martha, the landlady, with a blow between the eyes, and struck William down when he went to lift her — “a most brutal and cowardly assault,” said the Howden bench, and fined the man five pounds.
William left the inn for a farm at Sandholme, and worked to the end. He died on 20 March 1927, aged seventy-eight, and lies at Eastrington; Martha outlived him by twenty-two years, and when she followed in 1949 the family added a single word to the stone: “Reunited.”
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-02