Henry Perryman: a parish constable?

The last post was about my ancestor's brother, Alfred Perryman. This one is about their father, Henry Perryman. Coincidentally the year 1842 features again.

Henry and Elizabeth Perryman lived in Buckinghamshire, England at Dorney or the hamlet of Eton Wick just down the road. Henry worked as a servant or agricultural labourer.

By 1842 (the year his son Alfred was in court for some shady dealings involving fish and his younger brother John was sent to jail for dangerous driving*) Henry was 50 years old. This notice appeared in the paper:

Windsor and Eton Express, 1 Oct 1842

It refers to a meeting of ratepayers in Eton for the purpose of agreeing on a list of 17 men in the parish recommended to the justices of the peace to appoint as parish constables. Henry Perryman is the last name on the list. After 1842 (The 'New Constabulary Act' mentioned in the headline above) Chief constables were appointed at the quarter sessions for each hundred and parish constables were appointed by the Justices of the Peace. A Parish Constable was unpaid (except for expenses) and it was an annual appointment. The position was almost obsolete because the Parliament in 1839 passed the County Police Act that gave counties the chance to create paid police forces throughout the country. Prior to this, for hundreds of years, constables had been appointed to help keep order in the parish. The job was actually onerous and unwanted because they could be called on to escort prisoners, collect taxes, police non-attendance at church, police alehouses, watch out for drunkenness, detain fathers of bastard children, appear at inquests and so on.

If the Justices approved Henry's appointment I wonder if this was the first time he had been called upon to act as constable. And I wonder if he welcomed the task. By 1842 his youngest child was 15 so he didn't have a large young family to support so he probably had more time to devote to the task. It would be interesting to have a look at the Parish Chest for the area because that's where the constables' accounts were kept.

Update: My friend Jo has found an article, published a month after the one above, that confirms Henry's appointment to the constabulary.

Windsor and Eton Express, 12 Nov 1842

* Read about it here

Sepia Saturday: Rachel operates the rail gates

Today's theme photo is of a train, and I don't have any old photos of trains in my collection.

'Coach scene with train' a watercolour by A Esam c1880-1900 [State Library of Victoria]

But I do have an ancestor who worked on a train line, or rather, a railway crossing. She operated the gates, closing them when a train was due and opening them to allow the road and foot traffic through. The Rock (formerly called Hanging Rock and Kingston) was a small rural town south of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The Main Southern railway line was constructed in 1880 and the railway station precinct at The Rock today has a heritage listing.

Emily Rachel Young nee Chaundy

My grandmother's grandmother, Rachel Young, after a long and interesting life including moving to Australia from the city of Oxford when she was seven, was living with her daughter at The Rock in New South Wales. Early in the 1900s, in her senior years, Rachel was employed to operate the gates on the railway line.

I'm not quite sure what this entailed, or how busy the line was. It was and is a passenger line as well as a goods line. Some gate operators had to use semaphore to signal to the train drivers, some worked a wheel in a small building next to the crossing to open the gates, some opened the gates manually. Recently I saw a set of old disused crossing gates at Macedon in central Victoria. Were those at The Rock like these? Did she stay on site all day in some sort of hut (with a fire in winter hopefully), or did she just go down to the crossing when a train was due? Were the gates usually shut to road traffic and only opened when there was traffic? (Was there a bell to ring when you needed to cross the tracks?) Or were the gates usually open to road traffic and only shut when a train was due?

Old crossing gates, Macedon, Victoria 2014

Until recently there were manually operated gates at New St, Brighton (a suburb of Melbourne). They've now been replaced by automatic gates - a train crashed through the gates and the government got a bit edgy about the crossing - but I think the locals quite liked their quirky gates.

New St, Brighton

Port Elliott, South Australia c1910 [State Library of South Australia]

I suggest you check out more railway tales over at Sepia Saturday.