My Family

Matters

1909c l to r standing: James, Archie and Charlie Mills, seated: Rose and Eadie Mills with Fred Woodnutt

James John Pafford Mills was born within yards of the sea at Portsmouth Point on 14 March 1852.  His parents, James John (a seaman rigger) and Harriett (nee Lemmon) were both from seafaring families and had married seventeen days earlier. He was brought up amid the sights and smells of the infamous slum of East Street, Old Portsmouth surrounded by his close family.

Across the short stretch of water of the Camber Docks was Portsmouth Dockyard and here, as a teenager, James began a seven-year-long apprenticeship to qualify as a skilled shipwright. 1871 found him at the home of his grandparents, James and Mary Mills, at Inner Camber Quay - his own parents’ house was packed with his three brothers, his sister, Harriet, and his maternal grandparents.

Meanwhile, the Tuck family was slowly meandering from Norfolk to Portsmouth via a short sojourn in London. Jeremiah James Wright Tuck had also been a seaman (like his father).  His daughter, Rosina Amelia Wright Tuck, was born in Southwark, south London  in the summer of 1859.  The Tucks were in Portsmouth by the mid-1860s and in 1871 were living at 3 Chapel Row which was just three doors from the main Portsmouth Dockyard Gates. Do we sense that a meeting of two young people is about to happen?

James and Rose (aged eighteen) married on Christmas Day, 1877 at Portsmouth Parish Church. Rose was following a trend set by her sister, Maria Ann Maria, who had also married a shipwright (William Bartlett) four years earlier. William and Maria Bartlett were witnesses at the Mills wedding.

The newly-married couple dropped anchor at 7 Waterloo Street, Southsea (cost £200c) which was part of a newly-built housing project designed for Dockyard artisans.  There, in the late spring of 1879, the first of three sons, James William, was born, quickly followed by Charles Henry (19 July 1880) and Archibald John in late 1882.  

The family was living at 7 Great Southsea Street in 1891 (with Rose’s brother, William Tuck, as a lodger) and had moved again ten years later to 51 Lawrence Road, Southsea. This was their last move and their five-roomed house represented a gradual improvement in the quality of their home.

(Right) 51 Lawrence Road, Southsea

Now, the spotlight turns upon their eldest son, James William. He was not at the family home in 1901. My mother remembered his full name and that he was ‘encouraged to leave’ home because he was an epileptic.  He was known as ‘Boy’, which, to me, seems possibly a little disparaging.  She remembered that he lived in Romsey and that he married someone with the surname ‘Herring’.  All of which seems to suggest that there was some contact for several years between the families.

While trying to trace him in the census of 1901, I found a James W. Mills aged 22, born in Southsea and boarding at 9 Mitchell Street, Melcombe Regis, Dorset.  The clinching proof that this is my great-uncle is that his occupation was given as ‘barber’s assistant’.  With no prompting, my uncle, Patrick, said that James was a hairdresser. In 1911, James was still single and boarding at 26 Bell Street, Romsey’.

James William ‘Boy’ Mills

To balance the apparent mistreatment of their eldest son, James and Rose (pictured disapproving, above) showed great kindness to the young boy shown with them in the photograph at the top of the page.  His name is Fred Woodnutt.  My mother recalled that he was an ‘adopted’ son of James and Rose and that he later married and moved to London.  I have discovered that Fred was actually the son of James’ sister, Harriet Mills, who married George Woodnutt. Fred was born towards the end of 1901 and Harriet died the following summer. It appears that James and Rose generously took him into their family shortly afterwards.

I later discovered that James married Catherine J Mackrell (not Herring - a perfect example of my mother’s uncanny ability to muddle names!) at Romsey in the March Qtr of 1913. The couple had no children.

Mills home-life

Meanwhile, and perhaps in contrast to James William, James and Rose were becoming more and more proud of Charles and Archibald who were forging promising careers in teaching. Charles attended Hartley University College at Southampton and achieved a first class degree.  In 1909, he married a fellow student who was the daughter of a prominent London business man and councillor.  Of the Mills family, only Rose and Archibald attended the wedding.  James detested travel.  Rose (who had to be persuaded to attend) looks distinctly uneasy (see above right) in the wedding photograph: evidently conscious of the social divide between herself and her in-laws.

After seeing Charles return unharmed from World War I and continue teaching and Archibald appointed as headmaster of the Beneficial School, Portsmouth, Rose died from leukaemia on 17 April 1922 at the relatively young age of 64.  She was buried at Highland Road Cemetery, Southsea.

Her grandson remembers her as being very kind, quick-tempered and blunt.  She rarely smiled. She was ‘manly’ and adventurous even ‘going up in an aeroplane’ shortly before her death.  She undoubtedly ‘wore the trousers’ in her household and her husband was subservient to her.

After her death, James moved across the road to 64 Lawrence Road and lived with his son, Archibald and his wife, Nellie. He visited Charles and his family every fortnight.

James died, aged 84, on 19 November 1936 at St Mary’s Hospital, Portsmouth and was buried near his wife.  He died intestate and left an estate worth £363 8s 2d.

A grandson recalls that he was, ‘a small man, deaf and totally bald with clenched hands which were malformed’ (presumably from his shipwright work).  He was ‘lackadaisical and ran to work in the Dockyard - if he was late, he wasn’t allowed in’.

Charles Henry Mills

bn 19 July 1880

Portsea

James John Pafford Mills

bn 14 March 1852

died 19 Nov 1936

Rosina Amelia Wright Tuck

bn 1857c

died 17 April 1922

James William Mills

bn June Qtr 1879

Archibald John Mills

bn 2 Nov 1882

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