Esther Dowdeswell was born and baptised in Lower Guiting, between Stow on the Wold and Winchcombe , Gloucestershire, lying next to the River Windrush which eventually joins the River Thames just west of Oxford. Guyting-Lower and Guiting Power appear to be two names for the same place. In 1712 the Lord of the Manor was John Walker. Nearby “yellow” and “white” limestone was quarried in contrast to the more common Cotswold “Oolite” stone. There is evidence of a settlement here since the Saxons in 780BCE but by 1872 there were only 161 dwellings and a population of 647. It was here that in 1775 her father Thomas Dowdeswell (born around 1753, perhaps in Cheltenham or Twyning) had married Elizabeth (or Betty) Hanse and there are other Dowdeswell families in the area, lying as it does only 15 miles to the east of the civil parish of Dowdeswell, near Cheltenham. Esther, born in 1786, was their 4th daughter (and 5th child) of eventually ten recorded to the couple and most of them seem to have lived to a good age. In 1812 she married William Burrows by Licence in the church at Winchcombe, some 15 miles to the north-west, towards Bishops Cleeve.
Winchcombe is another of those pretty Cotswold villages whose history can be traced back to before the Norman invasion. Situated 6 miles northeast of Cheltenham, Winchcombe Abbey was built around 800BCE for 300 Benedictine monks, and a Mercian king is said to be buried there, although nothing remains of the Abbey today. It was the county town of one of the Mercian Shires under King Offa and in the ninth or tenth centuries it was briefly the county town of Winchcombeshire until this was merged into Gloucestershire, probably by King Cnut in 1017. Although the town wall has long vanished Winchcombe retains much of its medieval layout with a mixture of timber-framed and Cotswold Limestone buildings along its High Street, some dating back to the fifteenth century. Hailes Abbey was built nearby in the 1200s, as was Sudeley Castle in the 1400s where there were regular visitations by royalty and at Sudeley Catherine Parr is buried and Queen Elizabeth held a three-day party to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada. By the mid 1600s Winchcombe was a poor and run-down town known for cattle-rustling and for the illegal growing of tobacco, a living the inhabitants were prepared to defend with billhooks and scythes when the Militia turned up to destroy the crops.
By 1800 the town was beginning to expand once more and in the next 20-30 years the distinctive marketplace and the Town Hall were built, with the new school and the Almshouses being sponsored by the Dent family of Sudeley Castle.
William Burrows was christened in Winchcombe in December 1785, the third of four (first two girls, then two boys) born to William and Ann (nee Adams) who had similarly married by Licence in Wincombe some 34 years earlier in 1778. He married Esther Dowdeswell in 1812. In 1816 he was described as a publican at the christening of his daughter Ann but at the christening of all of his other six known children he is described as a pig-drover. Then at Ann’s wedding in 1835 he is once again a publican, in the 1841 Census he is an agricultural labourer, in the 1851 Census he is a Pig-Butcher, then ten years later once again he is an agricultural labourer. Meanwhile his daughter Ann married Thomas Smith in the Parish Church Cheltenham.
Thomas Smith had been baptised in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire on 25th July 1816, the only child so far identified as being born to William Smith – a Turner in the town, a worker in wood – and his wife Ann (nee Hobbs). One might have hoped that either of Thomas’s parents could have survived until the 1841 census or beyond, but so far nothing has been found or confirmed other than maybe a William Smith (“of Brockworth”, a village between Gloucester and Cheltenham) who married Ann Hobbs in Cheltenham in 1814. For the son Thomas however, we have a DNA link through two of his children, and we have further DNA links through his wife Ann (nee Burrows) who he married on 6th January 1838 in the Parish Church at Cheltenham. Both are shown on the register as living in Cheltenham, Thomas in Sherborne St, the son of William Smith (a Turner), and Ann in Winchcombe Street.
Aged 22 at the time of his marriage to Ann (nee Burrows) in January 1838 Thomas Smith shows on the marriage certificate as a Turner like his father. They moved to Blockley. Their first son, William Burrows Smith, was baptised there in January 1839 as were all of the five other children who followed slowly over the next twenty years, although the 1851 census does find Thomas and William living (briefly?) with their father-in-law William Burrows in Winchcombe. Of the other children, Charles also became a Turner in Toddington before settling in Chipping Campden, Eliza married a local gardener Samuel Matthews and lived in Stratford on Avon for a while, Samuel moved to Summer Lane in Birmingham in the 1870s, Sarah married Robert Gillett a Horse-breaker in Blockley, where the youngest, Harry, briefly also ran The Bell Inn in that village. As for William Smith he married Elizabeth Bearcroft the daughter of the Post-Mistress at Blockley and they remained living in Blockley all of their lives. Possibly like his father Thomas before him William lived in Blockley in order to work as a Carpenter on the nearby Batsford Estate owned by the Lords Redesdale. He was there for 50 years between 1850 and 1900 and would have been very involved in the huge amounts of rebuilding and reconstruction that happened at Batsford during this period. Living in Blockley he would have either walked or ridden a horse just over a mile across country to Batsford Park each day or taken the 3 mile route round by road.
A hundred years earlier the semi-formal landscape had been changed by Thomas Freeman in favour of a more landscaped park but by 1878 plans were afoot and new stables were added. After 1888 when the state was inherited by Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford (Bertie), formerly an Attache in the British Embassy in Tokyo, and things started to change. Bertie instructed the demolition of the old house and the building of a new family home along with many – often Japanese – estate houses. He redesigned the garden to include rockeries, streams and waterfalls, a lake, statues and a hermit’s cave. In the 1890s he instructed the Wild Garden to be laid out planting specimen trees and bamboos with Japanese influences bringing the Park to international renown.
William was still a Carpenter on the Estate in the 1901 census, but by 1911 he had retired and he died a year later. Bertie died in 1916 to be succeeded by his son David Freeman-Mitford who came to live at the house with his famously eccentric daughters, the Mitford Sisters. Although the upkeep of the gardens declined during WW2 the Arboretum was revived from 1956 by Baron Dulverton who donated the 55 acre Park to a Charitable Trust in 1984.
William and Elizabeth had two daughters – Mary Smith married Walter Brock, an electrician from London who had been brought in to electrify the village of Blockley, one of the earliest installations in the country, sponsored by the nearby Churchill family who had only electrified their own London house 3 years earlier. After Blockley the Brocks moved to continue this process in Manchester, and they spent the remainder of their days in the Lancashire area.
The second daughter Annie Smith, in July 1887 appears to have eloped when she was only five days past her 18th birthday when she married Frank Hayes in Balsall Heath in Birmingham. Frank was a Carpenter according to their marriage certificate but their means of meeting is yet to be discovered. Once in Birmingham they raised their family from fire-stations – other than their first born daughter Olive who was brought up in Blockley by her grandparents and only left the village after they had died (Elizabeth in 1907 and William in 1912). Olive married Jack Ellis in September 1911, a local butcher, giving birth to their first son three months later and had moved to Birmingham by 1913.
On retirement in the 1930s Frank and Annie moved from the fire-stations to their own house at 286 Court Lane, Erdington where they stayed until Frank died in 1953 aged 86. Annie (nee Smith) had predeceased him by 12 years, dying in Court Lane in 1941 aged 72.
But Came They All to Birmingham 