Early in November 2021 I was contacted through this blog by Chris Davidson. Amongst the medals awarded to his grandfather, Captain John Davidson, MC, who served with the Royal Engineers in World War One, was an interloper, a medal that had no obvious connection with the rest. It was the Crimean War medal with Sebastopol bar shown in the picture. On the edge the inscription states that it was awarded to ‘Serjt. R. Randle 68th’. Chris knows of no ancestral connection with a Randle family.
Between us we have, however, pieced together, mainly from Ancestry, some of the history of ‘Serjt. R. Randle’. There is a Stafford connection. This post outlines what we know of Richard and the Randle family. We particularly hope that somebody may read it and definitively prove a legitimate family connection with the recipient, Sergeant Randle. Chris Davidson is anxious to pass on the medal to such a descendant.
Richard Randle’s army career
‘R. Randle’ has proved to be Richard Randle. He was born in Foleshill, Coventry, and was baptised there on 25 June 1821, the son of William Randle, a weaver, and his wife Leah.[1] We know nothing at present about Richard’s childhood, but in 1836 he was fifteen years old. At that point he lied about his age by saying he was 18, and by adding those three years he was able enlist in the army. He was drafted into the 68th (Durham) Light Infantry with the service number 1241.[2] His enlistment and service records do not appear to have survived but shortly after his enlistment the regiment was sent to Jamaica and then, in 1841, to Canada. Having returned to Britain in 1844, the 68th was sent to Ireland in 1846 and stayed there during the Famine ‘keeping the peace’. It was dispersed in small detachments around central Ireland before concentrating in Limerick in April 1850.[3]
Richard Randle was certainly with the regiment in Ireland during this period because sometime around 1849-50 he met and married an Irish woman, Catherine. No record of their marriage or her maiden name has been found but in the 1881 British Census she claimed she was born in Westport, Co. Mayo around 1826. Their first child, Julia, was born in Limerick in 1851 but we don’t know whether Catherine had already moved to Limerick from the poverty-stricken west during the Famine or whether Richard had been posted to Westport. She was probably Protestant. Their second child, Roland, was born in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, in 1853, so a detachment of the 68th may still have been in Ireland in that year.[4] The Randles became, therefore, a mixed English-Irish family like many others who ultimately ended up in Stafford.
The regiment was subsequently sent back to England, but Richard and Catherine were parted when the 68th was sent overseas. They had no more children. At the start of the Crimean War the regiment was sent to the Bosphorus, and by September 1854 they were serving in the trenches during the siege of Sebastopol. They were still at that miserable location a year later and that entitled Richard to the Crimea medal and Sebastopol clasp.[5] We don’t know when he finally returned to Britain, but in 1856 he had done twenty years’ service and was entitled to his pension. He was actually discharged in 1858.[6]
As I have shown a number of times in this blog, discharged soldiers frequently stayed on in military life by enlisting for Militia duty.[7] That is what Richard Randle did. He got a posting to the 1st Warwickshire Militia Regiment at their Barracks in Warwick, within a few miles of his birthplace in Coventry. He worked there as a staff sergeant during the 1860s and initially all his family were with him. Sometime in the late 1860s Julia left home and in 1871 she was a school mistress in Ledbury, Herefordshire. She never married and must later have returned home because she died in Warwick in 1875. She therefore had no descendants who could now claim her father’s medal.[8]
The Randles move to Stafford
In 1871 Richard, Catherine and Roland were living in the Barrack Yard, Warwick. They were still in the town, at 29 Park Street, when Julia died in 1875. Roland had attached himself to the Militia staff as a drummer and it rather looked as though he might follow his father and go into the regular army. He didn’t do so, however, and the next thing we know is that by 1881 Roland had changed direction and got a job as an attendant on the insane at the County Lunatic Asylum in Stafford. It was the sort of post sought by, and offered to, ex-servicemen or those like Roland with service links. It says a lot about the ‘care’ offered to mental patients at that time. In 1879 Roland had married a Cheshire woman, Sarah Sutton which suggests he was already in Stafford by then.[9]
Not only was Roland in Stafford but so also were his parents Richard and Catherine.[10] In 1881 they were living at 10 Railway Terrace on the northern edge of town and Richard was describing himself as a Chelsea Pensioner, his days of active service over. Why had they moved to Stafford? Almost certainly because in his last years in the Militia Richard was transferred to the 2nd Staffordshire Militia based at the Stafford barracks in Park Street. Catherine naturally came with him and also Roland, who was then in his early twenties and still at home. Roland must have got the job at the Asylum and then left home to get married. Richard was only about 58 years old but his army career had already come to an end in 1881 when, under the Childers reforms, the 2nd Staffordshire Militia was incorporated as a volunteer battalion in the North Staffordshire Regiment and the Stafford location was abandoned in favour of newly-built barracks at Whittington near Lichfield.
Richard may already have been ailing by 1881, however, and he certainly didn’t enjoy much time in retirement. He died, rather oddly in the West Bromwich area, in 1882.[11] No trace of Catherine has been found subsequently and it seems that Roland and Sarah did not take her in to live with them. Roland continued working at the Lunatic Asylum into the 1900s but died in Sarah’s home district of Nantwich in 1908.[12] He was only 55 years old. We have found no subsequent trace of Sarah.
The history of the medal?
What happened to Richard Randle’s Crimea medal and how did it end up with Captain John Davidson? The obvious answer is that it was inherited by Roland and subsequently passed to one of Roland and Sarah’s children. They may have sold it after Richard and their father had died. None of them would have known their grandfather and they would have had little attachment to his memory. It is, of course, possible that Richard himself either lost it or perhaps sold it if he needed the money. How Captain John Davidson then acquired is still a mystery, however. If anyone reading this can help with these questions and possibly lay legitimate claim to the medal, please get in touch with us.
[1] Warwickshire, C. of E, Baptisms, St Lawrence, Foleshill Parish, Coventry, 25 June 1821, Richard, son of William and Leah Randle, weaver, Carpenters Lane.
[2] UK, Royal Hospital Chelsea, Pensioners Admissions and Discharges, 1715-1925 and 1760-1920, Richard Randle, born 1818, Foleshill Coventry, enlistment year 1836, 68th Regt. Light Infantry.
[4] Roscrea was stated by Roland in the 1881 Census. He consistently said in Census returns that he was born in 1853.
[5] UK Military Campaign Medals and Award Rolls, 1793-1949, Crimean War, 68th Regiment, Richard Randle, Sergt., returns, Crimea, 8 September and 23 October 1855.
[6] UK, Royal Hospital Chelsea, Pensioners Admissions and Discharges, 1715-1925 and 1760-1920, Richard Randle, enlistment year 1836, 68th Regt. Light Infantry, admission 14 December 1858.
[7] See particularly my posts of 31 July 2020 and 19 June 2019 and Chap. 8 of my book Divergent Paths, Family Histories of Irish Emigrant Families in Britain, 1820-1920, (Manchester, Manchester UP, 2015).
[8] Warwick Burial Board, Notices of Interment, Julia Randle, died 8 October 1875. Applicant: Roland Randle. Deaths, Warwick Reg. Dist., October-December 1875, Julia Randle, 6b/449.
[9] Marriages, Nantwich Reg. Dist., October-December 1879, Roland Randle and Sarah Sutton, 8a/476. Sarah was born in Wrenbury near Nantwich and the wedding presumably took place there. In 1871 she had been a servant in Crewe.
[10] This only became apparent when I found them on my database of Irish people in the Stafford Census returns which I constructed directly from the sources in the 1990s. They did not emerge from a search of Ancestry using any possible variation of their names, which shows the fallibility of Ancestry. I was able to confirm my data and their presence by searching the on-line returns for Marston parish directly.
[11] Deaths, West Bromwich Reg. Dist., October-December 1882, Richard Randle, 63 yrs., 6b/449. He kept the fiction of his date of birth going all his life.
[12] Deaths, Nantwich Reg. Dist., July-September 1908, Roland Randle, 2a/200.
I have said before on this blog that Protestant emigrants from the south of Ireland have tended to be neglected in Irish migration studies. These people were frequently middle class or in artisanal trades such as shoemaking, and their prospects in Ireland were limited even if their immediate sufferings were not as severe as those of the unskilled Catholic immigrants from the west. The Stafford shoe trade attracted migrants from all over Britain and also from Ireland. In the past I have looked in general at the Irish in the shoe trade (15 September 2017) and also at two specific Irish shoemaking families, the Brews (24 March 2015) and the Hamiltons (27 October 2017). The Brews were significant in worker struggles against new machinery in the 1860s whereas the Hamiltons suffered from the decline of craft shoemaking and led a difficult existence in the twilight of the impoverished working class. Both these families came from Ulster, as did another shoemaker, Hugh Woods Gibson, but his story was very different. He came from a secure Presbyterian family and through his religious contacts got off to a flying start in Stafford, ultimately jointly owning his own firm and becoming twice Mayor of the borough.[1]
Fortunes in the volatile shoe trade were often fickle and that is demonstrated by the history of another Protestant Irish family, the Livingstons, the subject of this post. Their history in many ways falls between that of the forlorn Hamilton and prosperous Gibson families. Their origins were modest but they aspired to emulate Hugh Gibson, and for some time apparently succeeded. It all came crashing down, however, and the family left Stafford to try to recover elsewhere.
Tracing the history of the Livingston family who came to Stafford has proved difficult, nevertheless, and a full picture would need much more research in other places. This post sketches an outline of the family’s lives in the mid-19th century. Who knows? A descendant may chance to read it and be able to fill in more details.
The Livingstons come to England
The Livingston (or Livingstone) family were from the Dublin area although their surname suggests a Scottish Plantation origin from the 17th century.[2] The first ancestor we know about is Thomas Livingston who subsequently claimed in the British Census returns to have been born in Dublin in 1769, though generational calculation suggests the real date must have been earlier in the 1760s. His marriage partner is unknown but one of their children was another Thomas Livingston. He must have been born in the 1780s. In 1808 he married Anne Bias in what was then rural Santry north of Dublin city.[3] Anne later claimed in Census returns to have been born in 1795 but she must actually have arrived in the world around 1790. The Bias connection was subsequently seen as important to the Livingstons since the Bias name was given to many of the later descendants. Thomas and Anne Livingston had five known children, all born in Dublin, Henry Bias Livingston (b. 1818), Thomas Bias (b. 1820), Mary (b. 1826), Elizabeth (b. 1827) and Alice in 1832.[4]
Thomas’s occupation was said to be a coal merchant by his son Thomas when he married in 1848, but the older Thomas was not present in the household in the 1841 Census, so he may have already died by then.[5] It seems that he and Anne, or perhaps the widowed Anne, decided in the 1830s to leave Dublin and go to England. Her two sons Henry and Thomas were working as shoemakers, but Dublin was then a depressed city with an overcrowded labour market. Irish shoemakers were already beginning to feel competition from specialist shoe towns in England like Stafford, and there was every incentive for the Livingston family to get out of Ireland.[6] They initially settled in the easiest English destination for them, Liverpool. We know they were already there by 1835 because on 9 November that year the first-born son Henry Bias Livingston married Mary Ann Robinson at St John’s Church in the centre of the city (now the site of St John’s Gardens).[7] His brother Thomas remained a bachelor for another thirteen years, but on 7 August 1848 – at the height of Irish immigration into Liverpool during the Famine – he married Amelia Allen at the same church. The lives of these two married couples were to be interwoven for some years.
The Livingstons arrive in Stafford and most depart for London
Liverpool was not a promising city for ambitious shoemakers to earn and living, and sometime between 1844 and 1848 Henry and Mary Ann moved along the railway line to Manchester. They were living there when their son Thomas was baptised at the Cathedral on Christmas Eve 1848.[8] Soon afterwards they moved again, this time to the rapidly growing shoe town of Stafford.[9] Henry’s brother Thomas probably moved there at much the same time, and in 1851 we find Henry’s family living at 2 Chapel Terrace and Thomas and his wife at 18 County Road fairly close by. Both were respectable addresses for artisans, and they suggest the Livingstons were already able to make a relatively secure living in the shoe trade. Both men were described in the Census as a clicker, a high-status skilled job cutting out the leather for footwear.
Also in the Chapel Terrace on Census night were Henry’s grandfather Thomas and his mother Anne as well as his sister Alice. They were described as ‘visitors’, but Thomas at least was already there in November 1849 and was the householder when a sweep, Samuel Gilbert, broke into the house.[10] Thomas died in Stafford in 1855 (when he was at least 86), which suggests that Henry and Mary Ann had taken the old man in and that this multi-generational Irish family were well established in the town in the early 1850s.[11] By 1856 Henry was on the committee of the Presbyterian church and in 1860 he was also appointed a member of the Presbytery in Birmingham.[12] After that date all trace of Henry’s family in Stafford or anywhere else disappears until 1871. They were not recorded in Stafford in the 1861 Census but nor have they been found elsewhere in Britain which suggests they completely eluded the Census enumerators. They could conceivably have emigrated for a time but no trace of them has been found overseas either.
All we know is that most of Henry’s family had ended up in London by 1871. In that year Henry and Mary Ann, as well as his mother Ann, sister Alice and two of their children, were living in St John Street close to the Angel, Islington. Henry was still working as a clicker and bootmaker. There is, however, another more interesting fact about that Census return. Henry claimed he was born in Scotland, as supposedly were his mother and sister. One instance of that might be taken as an enumerator’s error, but for the rest of his life Henry claimed a Scottish, not Irish, origin. He was trying to obscure his Irish roots, presumably for political or self-defined social status reasons. Clearly, no pride in an Irish background existed in this family. It suggests that an additional reason for their original emigration in the 1830s might have been their Presbyterian hostility to the rising strength of Catholic nationalism in Ireland led by Daniel O’Connell. Their secure position as beneficiaries in the Protestant Ascendancy was under threat.
Livingston & Co. and civic affairs
Although Irish-born Henry Bias Livingston left Stafford sometime before 1871, that was far from the end of the family’s presence in, and connection with, the town. Henry’s brother Thomas stayed on and built up a significant shoemaking business. In 1861 he was described as a ‘shoe manufacturer’ operating from premises in Bath Street near the town centre and he and Amelia were living at 20 Mill Street close by.[13] By then, however, Thomas’s health may have been failing and he needed to bring someone else into the business. That proved to be his nephew (yet another) Henry Bias Livingstone, his brother Henry’s son, who by this time was in his early twenties. Thomas died in 1863 and young Henry was left to develop the firm.[14] By 1868 he was partnership with someone called Buchanan and running a substantial workshop business.[15] Buchanan seems to have been a sleeping partner with Henry being the operational director, and in the 1871 Census Henry stated he was a shoe manufacturer employing 93 workers. This put him in the bottom place amongst the top twelve footwear employers in Stafford; the average firm then employed 160 men, women and children.[16] The firm may have expanded during the prosperous early-1870s but by 1881 it was back to 90 ‘hands’ and had failed to become a dominant player in the Stafford shoe trade.
That doesn’t mean Henry Livingston became inconsequential – far from it. In the period from 1875 to the mid-1880s he became a big name in local affairs. Like his father, he was active in the Presbyterian church. He was also a representative of the Shoe Manufacturers’ Association in the town.[17] He was also involved in various charitable activities. Then he went into local politics, was active in the Liberal party and was a town councillor in the second half of the 1870s.[18] Like many such local businessmen he became a Freemason, being initiated into the Staffordshire Knot Lodge (No. 726) in 1875. He also served on the School Board as the Presbyterian representative.[19] In all these activities he hobnobbed with the business and political elite of Stafford and particularly with Hugh Gibson, previously mentioned, then the dominant force in much of local politics.
Collapse and bankruptcy
Nevertheless, Henry may have overreached himself and by the early 1880s storm clouds were gathering for the Livingston family. The circumstances of their downfall involved a complicated set of relationships. We have seen how Henry Livingston senior had moved to London and continued working as a shoemaker. He was still there in 1875.[20] Between then and 1881 he, Mary Ann and their daughter Martha made the apparently surprising move to the village of Eyam in Derbyshire where Henry described himself as a ‘clicker and pattern cutter (for boots)’. Why Eyam? The answer appears to be that his son Henry, then at the height of his entrepreneurial success in Stafford, had formed an association with George Thomas Lowndes Dawson. This man was born in Fairfield near Buxton in Derbyshire in 1834 but he became apprenticed to a shoemaker’s workshop in Eyam when a teenager and remained based there for many years. Superficially he continued to portray himself as a shoemaker in the Census returns, but in practice he seems to have been operating an altogether more substantial business, based in both Eyam and Manchester. That is shown by his initiation into the Freemasons in Manchester in 1867 where he was described as a ‘leather merchant’ with an address in the city.[21]
From the 1860s shoemaking businesses needed increasing amounts of capital to acquire premises and machinery and also to sustain cash flow in the very volatile footwear market. Small firms were being squeezed out by competition from the bigger operators, in Stafford, for example, Bostocks (later Lotus Footwear). Entrepreneurs in the shoe trade had a web of social and business contacts, many doubtless lubricated by Masonic connections, and that is what probably brought the Livingstons and the Dawsons together. Although Henry Livingston junior’s business continued to use the family name, George Dawson almost certainly put some capital into it and the two enterprises based in Eyam and Stafford became interconnected. The association depended on Dawson also having secure and adequate capital but that proved not to be the case.
In January 1882 a petition for the liquidation of Messrs H.B. Livingston & Co. was filed at Stafford County Court. It was stated that the firm’s assets totalled £4,122 whereas the liabilities were £7,956.[22] This was only part of the picture, however, because simultaneously a Petition for Liquidation by Arrangement was posted in the London Gazette covering a firm named Livingston and Count in Stafford. It was initiated by G T L Dawson, his son William Henry Dawson and Henry Bias Livingston. At the same time the Dawsons petitioned for the liquidation of their shoe manufacturing business in Eyam. The three men also petitioned for the liquidation of their separate individual estates.[23]
Livingston and the Dawsons were liquidating to protect themselves and salvage their remaining assets but that was not the end of the story for Henry Livingston. In the manner of many devious entrepreneurs today, he immediately reformed his business, shorn of its previous liabilities and many of its workers, and relocated to premises in Browning Street in the north end.[24] He also carried on with his civic and religious activities. In 1886 the Boot and Shoe Trade Journal described his firm’s new ‘Alberta’ boot as ‘remarkably tasteful’ and in January 1887 he was the employers’ representative at negotiations during a strike at the bigger shoe firm of Elley and Co.[25]
It couldn’t last. Yet again, Livingston was trading at the margins and in August 1887 his firm collapsed ‘due to losses arising from the depression of trade and want of capital.’ The receivers were brought in and revealed that this now small business was in a hopeless position. Its liabilities were £1,382-16s-2d whilst its available assets were a paltry £176-17s-11d, a deficiency of £1,205-18s-4d. Livingston was rendered bankrupt.[26]
The aftermath and overview
Henry Livingston had to leave Stafford, his pride undermined and perhaps in some disgrace. His Presbyterian, business and Masonic friends did nothing obvious to support him, though they may have offered contacts to at least get him another job. He and his family moved to the much bigger shoe town of Leicester and in 1891 he was working as a manager in a shoe factory. Ten years later he described himself as an ‘engineer’s traveller’ but by 1911 he had set up on his own as a ‘boot and leather factor’. He died in 1924 leaving effects of £657. He and Harriet (d. 1929) had six surviving children and there are doubtless many descendants today.
What of old Henry Livingston, Henry’s father, one of the original Livingston family immigrants from Dublin? After the collapse of George Dawson’s business Henry lived on as a shoemaker in Eyam with his wife Mary Ann and daughter Martha. Even in 1891 Henry still said he had been born in Scotland, this time specifically Glasgow, so the denial of his Irish origins continued to the end. That came with his death in 1893. Mary Ann died a year later and Martha left the village, though her subsequent whereabouts have not been traced.[27]
The Livingston family’s emigration from Ireland and settlement in England was therefore a complex process, only one element of which took place in Stafford. It was, nevertheless, perhaps the most dramatic part of their story. It throws more light on such Protestant emigrants from southern Ireland and their complex circumstances. It also shows the identity issues that such people carried with them. This blog has shown before that the adaptation of Protestant emigrants from Ireland to their new lives in England was not necessarily as smooth as might be expected, and the Livingston family emphasises the point again.
[1] For the story of Hugh Gibson, see John Herson, Divergent Paths: Family Histories of Irish Emigrants in Britain, 1820-1920, (Manchester UP, 2015), pp. 268-273
[2] The names are interchangeably spelt in the records, though the version without the ‘e’ seems to increasingly predominate over time.
[3] Ireland, Select Marriages 1619-1898, Thomas Livingston and Anne Bias, Santry, 1808.
[4] The three youngest are listed with their parents living in the Dale Street area of Liverpool in the 1841 Census. The two oldest boys are known from later records.
[5] Lancashire, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1936, 7 August 1848, St John’s Church, Liverpool, Thomas Livingston and Amelia Allen, shoemaker Ranelagh St., Father: Thomas Livingston, coal merchant.
[6] See my post on 15 September 2017 and Chap. 9 of my book Divergent Paths.
[7] Lancashire, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1936, Henry Livingston, cordwainer, Liverpool and Mary Ann Robinson, spinster, Liverpool.
[8] Manchester, Births and Baptisms, 1813-1901, Manchester Cathedral, Thomas, son of Henry and Mary Livingstone (sic), shoemaker, Manchester, 24 December 1848. The Livingstons’ daughter Martha was born in 1844 in Liverpool.
[9] Their baby Samuel Bias was baptised in Stafford on 2 March 1851. and they were present there on Census day shortly afterwards. England and Wales, Christening Index, 1530-1980, Stafford, 2 March 1851, Samuel Bias Livingston, son of Henry and Mary Ann Livingston.
[10]Staffordshire Advertiser (SA), 3 November 1849. Gilbert got three months in gaol for his crime.
[11] Deaths, Stafford RD, January-March 1855, Thomas Livingston, 6b/3.
[13] Harrod’s Directory of Staffordshire: Thomas Livingston, shoe manufacturer, Bath St., Stafford.
[14] Burial, London Cemetery Co.’s North London or Kentish Town and Highgate Cemetery, Thomas Bias Livingston, 12(?) St John’s St., 30 July 1863, 43 yrs. Also Civil Registration, Deaths, June-September 1863, Clerkenwell, Thomas Bias Livingston, 1b/421.
[15]SA, 22 August 1868. ‘Edmund Beckett, an apprentice of Messrs Livingstone and Buchanan was summoned for absenting himself from work on Monday for the purpose of going to a fete on the Common and returning to work at 6pm in a state of intoxication’. He had to pay 5s compensation to Livingston and his partner. The firm was also listed as ‘Livingston and Buchanan, wholesale boot and shoe mfrs, Bath Street, Stafford’ in the 1868 and 1872 Kelly’s Directories. No record of Buchanan has been identified, certainly not in Stafford.
[16] M. Harrison, ‘The Development of Boot and Shoe Manufacturing in Stafford, 1850-1880’, J. of the Staffordshire Archaeological Society, No. 10, 1981, p. 36.
[17]SA, e.g. 5 January 1878, 27 June 1875, 10 February 1877, 4 April 1879, 29 January 1887.
[18]SA, e.g. 9 January 1875, 16 February 1878, 15 November 1879
[19] United Grand Lodge of England Freemasons’ Membership Register, 1751-1921, Henry B. Livingston, Initiation date 5 August 1875, Shoe Manufacturer, Bath Street. SA, 13 March 1880.
[20]Post Office Directory, London, Henry Bias Livingston, shoemaker, 285 Liverpool Road, N.
[21] United Grand Lodge of England Freemasons’ Membership Register, 1751-1921, Shakespeare Lodge (no. 1009), Manchester, George Thomas Lowndes Dawson, initiation date 31 January 1867, Leather merchant, 96 Cottenham Street, Manchester.
[23]Liverpool Mercury, 8 February 1882. Dawson seems to have gone back to shoemaking in Eyam, but around 1900 moved to Manchester where in 1901 he was a cloth merchant’s clerk living in Chorlton-cum-Hardy. He died in 1911 leaving paltry effects of £103, so he never really recovered from the failure of 1882.
[24] His firm’s address was given as Browning Street in the receiving order, 1887. See reference 26.
[25]SA, 7 March 1885, 27 June 1885, 4 December 1886, 29 January 1887.
[26]SA, 13, 20 and 27 August 1887; Huddersfield Chronicle, 20 August 1887, receiving order, Henry Bias Livingston, Earl St and Browning St, Stafford, shoe manufacturer; SA 1 October 1887, bankruptcy examination.
[27] Derbyshire, Church of England Burials, Eyam: 25 July 1893, Henry Bias Livingston, 75 yrs; 1 November 1894, Mary Annie Livingston, 85 yrs.