Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle
Family History
The Highfields and their relations | The Jenkinsons, and the Hadens of Holywell House | George Littleworth Haden, and the Rev. John Thorp
Andrea Paula Dale and her family Clergy in the Family Warwickshire Connection Heraldry
The marriage certificate of Percival Haden Jenkinson and Lizzie Mountain, St John's Church, Heysham, Lancashire, 1 February 1912.
Mark Paul Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle's father's mother was Phyllis Jenkinson. Phyllis was born in Swinton, Yorkshire, on 2nd November 1912, from where a number of their ancestors hail.
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Her parents, Percival Haden Jenkinson and Lizzie (Eliza) Mountain, married at Heysham in Lancashire on 1st February 1912, suggesting that she was a wedding-night baby. Their marriage certificate records Percival Haden Jenkinson as a farmer and his father, John Jenkinson, as a Gentleman.
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The record of electors for the year 1899 for the Township of Rotherham in the Blackburn Polling District of the Rotherham Division of the Southern Part of the West Riding of Yorkshire lists John Jenkinson as the seventh of nine electors eligible to vote on the basis of property ownership. The record confirms that he resides on Fitzwilliam Street in Swinton and is qualified to vote on the basis of ownership of a 'Freehold Dwelling House and Land' at Hill Top in Kimberworth.
Some eight years earlier, in the 1891 Census, John Jenkinson at the age of 29 years, was recorded as living at 79 Fitzwilliam Street, Swinton, and as living on his own means, suggesting that he was financially independent. He lived with his wife, Angelina, their three children, and a domestic servant called Alice Pollard.
The freehold house and land in Kimberworth were not John Jenkinson's sole assets. The register of electors for the Township of Swinton of 1902 reveals that he also was eligible to vote on the basis of ownership of 'Freehold Dwelling Houses' on Church Street in Swinton. In that same year, his father William is an elector owing to his ownership of 'Freehold Dwelling Houses and Land' on Fitzwilliam Street in Swinton. This property is likely to be part of the inheritance received from John Haden, Gentleman, John Jenkinson's grandfather.
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Although accorded the worship of a Gentleman in 1912 in light of his freedom from the need to work, John Jenkinson had not always avoided employment. At the time of his son Percival Haden Jenkinson's birth, he was busying himself as a bus conductor, a far cry from his later gentlemanly status, an occupation shared with the eventual 2nd Lord Teviot. Also, after his wife Angelina died following childbirth in 1893, at 39 years of age, he turned to drink as a source of livelihood and moved down to an inn in Stamford St George in Lincolnshire, the Dolphin Inn, where he was resident for the 1901 census, as the Licensed Victualler. By this time, he had married his second wife, Clara Emma Evinson.
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The census keeper of 1911 chose to record Mr. Jenkinson as a 'Retired Inn Keeper', rather than as someone living on his own means, when he lived off his personal wealth at his mother's nine-roomed house on Fitzwilliam Street at 49 years of age, where they lived in relative comfort. While in Great Expectations Herbert Pocket decries that 'Not on any account' may a gentleman keep a public house, as he tells Pip, he does however concede that 'a public house may keep a gentleman'. John Jenkinson had a young Caroline Plowright, aged 22, running the inn to keep him, before he returned to Swinton to carry on living on independent means, leading to his recognition as a Gentleman one year later in 1912. John Jenkinson was a beneficiary of his grandfather John Haden's will, which provided for him through a trust on the death of his parents. At the time of his own death, in 1930, he was recorded as being 'Of Independent Means', and his own will reveals that he had a half share as beneficiary to a mortgage and a half share in the absolute ownership of some fifteen cottages.
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George Bernard Shaw proclaimed that a Gentleman is someone who 'puts more into the world than he takes out'. This much is clearly the case with John Jenkinson, as a news report on page 7 of the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent from 17 November 1877 revealed.
Saving a young boy's life does go some way to attest to John Jenkinson's character. John Jenkinson's patrilineal lineage traces back through to his direct paternal great grandfather, William Jenkinson, who held a farm in Upper Haugh, Rawmarsh. When this William Jenkinson died in 1861, his 70-year-old wife was left a widow, running what was left of the farm. Their daughter, Mary Lindley, also a widow, supported her mother, Hannah Jenkinson (William Jenkinson's wife and Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle's five times great grandmother). Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle adopted Mary's surname as part of his own to honour this dedication to his five times great grandmother, and to share a surname with his then wife, Lallyalice Lindley, who descended from John Lindley, Parish Clerk of Alverthorpe, Yorkshire. William Jenkinson's maternal grandmother, Jenney or Jane Waters was born in Howden, Yorkshire, where she later married in 1809, and her mother, Catharine Morgan, came from Pocklington. William Jenkinson's line traces back further to a Henry Jenkinson who died in Hemsworth, Yorkshire in 1692. Hemsworth is three-and-a-half miles from Shafton, where the Jenkinsons of Shafton were Yeomen and Royalists, with Anthony Jenkinson of Shafton appearing in the Composition Papers.
The Yorkshire connection is not Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle's only connection to the Lindley family. His second great uncle, Thomas Highfield, married Maria Lindley at Cobridge, Burslem, Staffordshire, England on 6 June 1892. Maria Lindley was the granddaughter of Ralph Lindley, who was a farmer of 43 acres employing one labourer in Butley, Cheshire at the time of the 1851 Census.
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It was not without reason that John Jenkinson gave his eldest son, Percival Haden Jenkinson, the middle name of Haden. It was a name of double significance to him. John Jenkinson's first wife, and Percival's mother, Angelina had the maiden name of Haden. She was the daughter of Thomas Haden, who was recorded as a Gentleman in The Mexborough and Swinton Times of 28 March 1879, and whose father was John Haden, Gentleman. The family were gentlemen farmers who had risen from the yeomanry.
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John Jenkinson in Angelina had in fact married his first cousin, as his mother was Sarah Jane Haden, and her father - his grandfather - was the same John Haden, Gentleman, as was the grandfather of Angelina. John's mother and Angelina's father were siblings. This consanguine cross-cousin marriage meant that Percival Haden Jenkinson had the same great grandparents through two separate lines, his mother's and his father's. Such arrangements were quite common to retain property within a family.
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The Hadens were local landowners in Swinton. They descended from a yeoman line and had worked in farming and butchery before becoming wealthy. In honour of their legacy, their descendant Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle became a Freeman of the Company of Butchers of the City of York. Their seat was Holywell House (sometimes misspelt as Hollywell House or Holly-Well House, owing to its pronunciation). Malcolm G. Plant in Piccadilly: the hamlet states, 'Holywell House was built from stone quarried at Hermit Hill; the dwelling is described as a three-storey high building with extensive oak panelling and ornate stairs.' Holywell House no longer survives, but some of its estate has recently been for sale for offers over one million pounds.
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John Jenkinson sold some of his landholding in Swinton for £2,000 in the 1920s and invested in coal dealing, although lost money through the strikes.
Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle's grandmother's great great grandfather and John Jenkinson's grandfather, John Haden, is recorded as a Gentleman in his Probate record of 1866. This follows a mention in the Swinton entry in Drake's Directory of Rotherham 1862, describing him as 'Haden, Mr John', rather than under any occupational category.
His namesake and uncle, John Haden is recorded in the poll records for Swinton Township for 1841 as a landowner at Holywell House. Holywell House passed onto his sister, Alice, before moving onto his nephew, George.
The earlier polling records of 1832 confirm that John Haden's qualification as a elector was founded on his ownership of Freehold Houses and Land.
He was also styled as a Gentleman when subscribing to the Sheffield and Hallam Bank, as noted on page 2 of the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent on 16 February 1850.
In John Haden's will of 1852, where he is designed as a Gentleman, he left his property, and his personal effects of some £8,000 pounds (a substantial sum at the time), to his sister and his four nephews, also making provision for his niece, as he died childless. The said John Haden is also recorded as a Gentleman on his death certificate. By 1851, Mark Paul Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle's four times great grandfather John Haden was already a landowner, having inherited a farm from his father, so when John Haden benefited from his uncle's will a second time from the passing of his sister in 1860, he was then of independent means, and enjoyed the last six years of his life as a gentleman. Wrightson (1982, p. 9) comments, 'In early seventeenth-century Yorkshire, for example, the lesser gentry generally had estates of between fifty and 1000 acres, the middling gentry, estates of 1000–5000 acres and the upper gentry, estates of 5000–20,000 acres.' The Hadens constituted the lesser or 'parish gentry' on this basis. The family were not armigers, so were held to be gentlemen based on their manner of living, port, charge, and countenance.
Another of John Haden's nephews, George Littlewood Haden, helped his uncle John Haden, Gentleman, on his farm in his youth and this no doubt contributed to him being chosen to take over Holywell House and its related farmland after the death of his uncle's sister, Alice. At the time of the 1861 census, the younger John Haden, Gentleman, was living in Haden's House and managed a proportion of the family's significant property holding, as alluded to in the description of the Enumeration District for the 1861 Census.
Brothers John and George Littlewood Haden are through their mother descendants of a fascinating minister, Rev John Thorp, who founded the Masbrough Independent Chapel.
The Hadens' landholding in Swinton can be traced back to at least the 1780s, with the grandfather of the younger John Haden, Gentleman, namely Thomas Haden, having been a landowner in his own right in 1781, as well as having other interests in land.
A Thomas Haden is also shown to have a landholding of what was once Glebe land in the Wapentake of Staincross in 1784.
This is interesting, as Staincross also features in the Jenkinson family history, as Anthony Jenkinson of Shafton was appointed a High Constable for the Wapentake of Staincross.
So, while Staincross bound together the Jenkinsons and Hadens, so did Percival Haden Jenkinson, in whose person those two families converged, as they also did in his father. Mark Paul Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle bears a white rose on his Coat of Arms in honour of this Yorkshire ancestry.
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Percival Haden Jenkinson barely lived long enough to get to know his daughter, Phyllis Jenkinson, having died as a result of an accident on 8th August 1915, less than three years after his daughter's birth.
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On 4th June 1938, Phyllis Jenkinson, then a 25-year-old typist for Cadbury in Bourneville, married a 24-year-old Chemist, Charles Leonard Highfield, who had also lost his father by this relatively young age.
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Some of the information on this page comes from genealogical research carried out as work towards the Certificate in History of Family and Genealogical Methods at the University of Limerick.