Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

10 In 1861, Mrs Read is recorded as ‘Jane’ and described as a School Mistress. All the children are described as ‘scholars’. 4 Ann is no longer with the family; now married as Ann Stacey, she is acting as Housekeeper to her father, William Allwork in the High Street. Fast forward to 1871: eldest daughter Jane has no recorded ‘rank, profession or occupation’, but the remainder are all involved in education, Elizabeth and Emily as ‘Morning Governesses’, Arthur as an undergraduate and Walter as an Assistant Teacher at the age of 15. The household is completed by a Housemaid and Kitchenmaid. Neighbours now include an upholsterer and builder and there is a lodging house – all symptomatic of an expanding community whose economic and social profile has been changed by the advent of the railway in 1841. Walter’s elder brother Arthur also entered the teaching profession later, but rather more seriously and longer-term in his case. He shared some of Walter’s early cricketing experiences, but, unlike his younger sibling, had no aspirations beyond club cricket and took himself off to The Queen’s College, Oxford, matriculating in 1869 at the age of eighteen and graduating in 1874 before returning to Reigate and becoming an Assistant Master in his father’s school. By 1881, Jane has left home and there has been upward professional mobility in the case of the other four: Elizabeth and Emily, now both in their early thirties are Private Daily Governesses, Arthur a ‘Schoolmaster’, but with the additional description of ‘Tutor BA Oxford’, and thirty years later Ann is back, but now as Ann Stacey and a widow. Mother Elizabeth Jane has died, so the two bereaved members of the senior generation have now settled for a convenient arrangement whereby Ann, now aged 68, acts as Housekeeper for the family, assisted by a Kitchenmaid and Housemaid. There are eleven boarders at the school, aged from eight to fifteen. Walter, now aged 25 (though recorded as 35 in error on the Census) is a Schoolmaster, although now on the brink of an alternative career which was to bring him rather more fame than teaching. By this time, there is only one school in West Street, referred to in the newspapers as ‘Mr Read’s Holmesdale House’. The blacksmiths, identified in the 1841 Census are still there, Jane Champion, the head of the household, still describing herself as such notwithstanding the fact she is now aged 88. Family Background 4 Census-speak for ‘schoolchildren’, not University academic staff.