The Workman Family in England, Part Three

by John Sharpe

This third part of the post on the Workman family’s history in northern England by John Sharpe, who lives in Clifton, where William Workman spent much of this early life, addresses elements raised in email correspondence as this post was being discussed and developed. These include the contact between the emigrant brothers David and William and their family back in Clifton, some context surrounding William’s sole return visit home in the early 1850s, and subsequent visits from David’s sons Elijah and William Henry. Finally, John explains how he came to be involved in his research into the Workman family history. We hope you’ve enjoyed this post and its contribution to a truly remarkable story of how a pair of young men from the remote, rural northern frontier of England migrated across America and ultimately to Los Angeles, itself a remote, rural, albeit, western frontier of the United States. (Good news! We’ve added more parts of the story thanks to John’s additional work, so look for those on the blog!)

Thomas and Lucy Workman lived at Clifton near Penrith from 1811 in a substantial house which had been left to Thomas by his well-to-do late maternal uncle, David Harrison. They had a family of seven children – three girls and four boys. They had lost a young son to fever the year before, and they would lose a seven-year-old son in 1814. Eldest son David left home for America in 1818, followed west by eldest daughter Agnes in 1820 and by second son William in 1822.

Lucy died at Clifton in 1830 and Thomas in 1843, leaving three surviving offspring Lucy (then aged 50), Thomas (42) and Mary (35) still living in the family home. Lucy died in 1850, Mary died in 1868 and Thomas lived to the age of 82 in 1884. Very little is known of the three “survivors” at the old house after their parents died, but Mary was remembered by the family solicitor as a “bright little lady” who was regarded as the most “responsible” member of the family (and head of the household at census time), while her brother Thomas suffered from some sort of long-term mental deficiency which got worse in later life, eventually passing away in the county mental hospital at Carlisle.

But the remaining Clifton family did not forget the three US emigrants, and they always remembered their old home. Letters that passed between them showed how badly missed were David and William in particular. Mary longed for news of her two brothers and never gave up hoping they would return home one day for good.

William returned “home” to Clifton early in 1851, just in time to be “caught” by the national census of March that year. He would have noticed that the old house had been divided into two (probably around 1830) and extended by about fifteen feet at the north end. His journey via Vera Cruz in Mexico, New York and London would have taken several months, and he stayed in England for around six months, visiting the 1851 Great Exhibition in London on his way back to California.

When William first left home in 1822, the country was still suffering the economic after-effects of the Napoleonic Wars. By the time of his return in 1851, Britain was the undisputed Victorian powerhouse of the world, an industrial superpower said to be producing more ironware, coal and cotton goods than the rest of the world combined – the “workshop of the world”, no less. Railways criss-crossed the nation, and the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, while Queen Victorian ruled an Empire that spanned the world. The downside of this national success story was that vast numbers of country people had moved into rapidly expanding industrial towns and cities whose “dark satanic mills” were served by an underclass of people living and working in abject poverty and squalor.

London in particular must have been a revelation to William. Its already huge population had been swollen by the arrival of six million visitors to the capital during the six months of the Great Exhibition. It had all the drawbacks of other crowded English cities as well as a huge extra problem of its own – its sewage disposal, or rather the lack of it. The river Thames was the city’s only means of removing its sewage, and the all-pervading smell in the city was overwhelming. It was not surprising that William got himself a prescription for stomach powders in London.

Among factors which influenced 51-year-old William to make his monumental trip “home” may have been the fact that California was a State of the Union by September 1850, and he had amassed considerable wealth as a rancher in the Gold Rush. He would have learned that his elder sister Lucy was very ill at Clifton – sadly she died in December 1850 while he was still en route – and he wanted to attend London’s well-publicized Great Exhibition of 1851. He would have known that steam propulsion recently had replaced sail across the Atlantic and that the main-line railway had now reached Clifton and Penrith from London, reducing the travel time for the three hundred mile journey from several days to a matter of hours.

William probably would not have noticed much change in the Penrith area since he left nearly 30 years earlier, apart from the arrival of the railway – which was certainly increasing the size and prosperity of the market town of Penrith. Farming was still the main occupation of north Westmorland and the local power in the land was still very much the aristocratic (and indeed autocratic) Lowther family with its seat at imposing Lowther Castle, just two miles from Clifton.

But William’s visit to Clifton after an interval of nearly thirty years must have been the occasion of a very emotional reunion at the old family home by the village’s new railway bridge. One of his main undertakings during his all-too-short time with what remained of his family at his old home was to arrange for erection in the churchyard of the Workman headstone commemorating his parents and the brothers and sisters who had passed away in England and America.

The next American visitor to Clifton was Elijah Hook Workman, who came to the village from Los Angeles in 1879 to settle up what remained of his late grandfather Thomas Workman’s appreciable estate after the death in California in 1876 of Elijah’s uncle (and Thomas’s son) William. Thomas’s youngest son, also called Thomas, was still alive at this time but had the mental disorder which led to his confinement in the local mental institution some years before he died in 1884. As luck would have it, property values were high in north Westmorland at the time of Elijah’s visit, and sale of Workman real estate at Clifton realised well over £2,000, then a considerable sum which would have amply justified the cost of Elijah’s trip from California.

In 1912 Elijah’s younger brother William Henry of Los Angeles visited the old Workman house at Clifton with his wife and daughter. He was followed some years later in the 20th century by other American descendants of the original emigrants, and in 1995 a concerted effort was mounted to establish the full facts of the extraordinary “Workman” UK/US story, in consultation with a suitably qualified resident of Clifton.

But this extraordinary Workman story with its intriguing roots at an English village had its spectacular climax in very different surroundings. It crossed an ocean and traversed the North American continent. What did that entail? And what of the individual who took up the challenge of tracking the progress of these indomitable adventurers from their quiet corner of England and recording the results for posterity?

I have lived at Clifton since 1985 and have long taken a keen interest in the history of a place which saw the last military encounter on English soil, in 1745, as well as producing some people with a keen sense of adventure. My early academic background preceded work experience including middle management in the police service—from which I “retired” in 1993 with ambitions to travel and write.

In 1995, I was approached by two leading American citizens—Judge David Workman of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County and his cousin, retired judge David Furman of New Jersey. The former was the great-grandson of the young man of the same name who began this story of emigration by leaving his home at Clifton for America in the year 1818, joined in 1822 by his younger brother William.

But this extraordinary Workman story with its intriguing roots at an English village had its spectacular climax in very different surroundings. It crossed an ocean and traversed the North American continent. What did that entail? And what of the individual who took up the challenge of tracking the progress of these indomitable adventurers from their quiet corner of England and recording the results for posterity?

John Sharpe has lived at Clifton since 1985 and has long taken a keen interest in the history of a place which saw the last military encounter on English soil (in 1745) as well as producing some people with a keen sense of adventure. His early academic background preceded work experience including middle management in the police service – from which he “retired” in 1993 with ambitions to travel and write.

In 1995 he was approached by two leading American citizens – Judge David Workman of the Superior Court of Los Angeles and his cousin, retired judge David Furman of New Jersey. The former was the great-grandson of the young man of the same name who began this story of emigration by leaving his home at Clifton for America in the year 1818, joined in 1822 by his younger brother William.

The two judges had a keen interest in their English background and had already done appreciable research into it. They had established that their shared ancestry was at Clifton, but the answers to fundamental questions eluded them. Who exactly was their great-great-grandfather? What was his occupation? Where in the village had he lived? His two sons David and William went into business as saddlers in frontier Missouri, but what was their capital? What was its amount and source?

I established an immediate affinity with the two US visitors and took up their challenge, which fitted in well with my existing commitments. The enquiry began with the collected records of the old-established local power in the land, the Lowther Archive dating back to the 13th century. This would indeed produce the answers sought, but it was a very time-consuming process because the monumental Archive had no effective index and there was no computer access. In the end, however, a manual search of original records even located the receipts signed by the two brothers for their respective shares of the original 1814 Workman family trust fund which allowed them to begin their US expeditions in 1818 and 1822.

But it soon became clear that the Workman story loomed large in early US history, and effective research into it would need to extend well beyond England’s shores. A major impetus came in June 1996, with an event in San Francisco to mark the 150th anniversary of the acquisition of Alcatraz Island from the local Mexican authorities by William Workman, by then a hugely successful Los Angeles rancher.

The San Francisco event was the first of my several Workman-related visits to the US, and helpful contacts were established at various points across the country, including Missouri, New Mexico and California – where he met the director and staff of the Homestead Museum. UK archive sources were located in Cumbria and in places like Northumberland, Durham, Liverpool and the London area. The time-consuming Workman research involved much travel but was never a chore!