My 5xgreat grandparents Thomas Topper and Elizabeth Selway married at St George, Hanover Square, London, on 12 April 1798. Their marriage lasted 40 years, before Thomas Topper’s death, aged 69, of apoplexy, on 27 September 1838.
Their son Charles
James Topper was born in 1801 and was to become my 4xgreat grandfather. Their
first child, a son, was born a year after their marriage on 20 March 1799. Thomas
Robert Topper was baptised at the church of St Luke, Chelsea on 14 April that
year. His father was a telegrapher for the Admiralty, which in the late 1790s had
established a line of shutter telegraphs which ran between the Admiralty and
Portsmouth (south) and Great Yarmouth (North East). The telegraph
‘line’ – intended to be a temporary arrangement to support communications
during the run-up to the Napoleonic wars - included a base at the Royal
Hospital, Chelsea. This may be why Thomas Topper and his new wife were
based in Chelsea after their marriage.
In 1809, aged 10, Thomas Robert and his younger brother Charles
James Topper were admitted to the Greenwich Hospital School (now the Royal
Naval College buildings) on petition of their father, according to a document
held at TNA. While his brother initially became a Thames Lighterman,
Thomas Robert seems to have followed his father into communications. Ancestry
has digitised copies of UK Postal Service appointment books which show that
on 31 July 1823, Thomas Topper Junr was appointed as a Foreign Letter Carrier,
vice Long, deceased.
I have not found a marriage record for him, but he appears
to have married a woman called Mary. From census and baptism records, I have
found that they had at least ten children between 1826 and 1847. I have not
found a baptism for what appears to be their first child, also Thomas Robert,
born around 1826, but Mary is named as mother of their second child, Mary Ann,
baptised at St John the Evangelist, Lambeth, on 27 January 1828, daughter of
Thomas Robert (Letter Carrier) and Mary, of Broad Walk. Thomas Robert junior
became a printer and had emigrated to South Africa by 1850. His sister Mary Ann
was a witness at his 1848 marriage in Shoreditch (as was sister Caroline and
their father Thomas Robert Topper).
In 1852, Thomas Robert Topper senior gave evidence at The Old Bailey at the trial of John Dempsey, accused of stealing a purse from his wife Mary Topper as they were shopping at Newgate Market:
Also in 1852, their daughter Mary Ann married Thomas Hodgson, a solicitor’s clerk. Her father and sister Caroline were witnesses. By then, her father is described as ‘’Sub-sorter, General Post Office’.
By the 1861
census she and her husband have one son, Thomas, and are living at Trafalgar
Road, Shoreditch. Her father is living in the same house, now a 62 year old
widower, and ‘superannuated sub? GPO’. He
is still with them ten years later at the time of the 1871 census. They
are all still at the Trafalgar Road address, and the Hodgson family has
expanded to three children. Thomas Robert is 72 and ‘a pensioner G. Post
Office’.
Thomas Robert Topper died on 31 May 1872 and was buried at Abney Park Cemetery, one of London’s
‘magnificent seven’ cemeteries. His daughter Mary Ann and her family were
buried there forty years later. Another family tree researcher has posted an
image of his ‘in memoriam’ card on Ancestry:
Of what I know of his and Mary’s other children, Ellen
Louisa married George Holyoake Beaumont in 1855, her father described as
‘Officer in the Post Office’. He also witnessed the marriage. George Beaumont
is described as a Barrister’s Clerk, Managing, on the 1871 census. The
name Holyoak was passed to all their children as a middle name. Two other sons
joined their older brother Thomas Robert in the Transvaal, dying in South
Africa (George Henry and Charles John). Youngest daughter Grace Jemima Topper
did not marry; in 1901 she is shown as housekeeper to an ornamental glass
mounter and his family in Hackney. She died, aged 59, in 1907.
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