WELCOME TO MY HOME PAGE
THE BLACKMORE FAMILY - DEVON - THE EARLY BLACKMORES
The story of the Blackmore family from Exmouth and Littleham,
in South Devon, in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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PLEASE NOTE: Sadly, Yahoo/Geocities are permanently shutting down on 26 October 2009. This means that all web sites on Yahoo/Geocities will cease to exist. So I have started transferring this web site to a new home:
www.blackant.me.uk
where I hope you will be able to find us. I am also taking the opportunity of making a few small improvements. If there are a few teething troubles, please bear with me. Many thanks.
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"I am setting out to do something which I wish my Grandfather had thought to do & that is to set down what I know about our branch of the Blackmore family & also what I know about the Close family, of whose blood we have a double dose."
My Grandfather, Harold Close Blackmore (about 1927)
This is how the site is structured:
1 - Home Page - i.e.this page.
2 - Introduction - pretty dull stuff. CLICK HERE
3 - The Search for our Roots - even duller, except that it includes the latest info on Twinyeo Farm. CLICK HERE
4 - The early Devon Blackmores, Part 1 - brief details of the very early family members, and WELL WORTH READING if you are in any way connected with the family. Includes new information about REV EDWARD SOUTHCOTE which, if true, takes us a long way further back. CLICK HERE
5 - The early Devon Blackmores, Part 2 - later Devon Blackmores, in some detail. CLICK HERE
6 - "An Interesting Sideline"; NOT interesting at all; only of interest to descendants of 'our' Henry Blackmore's cousins. CLICK HERE
7 - Newspaper items about them - interesting, even amusing - and Gravestones and Memorials. CLICK HERE THIS PAGE REALLY IS WORTH LOOKING AT , even if the rest are not! It includes a paragraph on Blackmore clocks.
8 - INFO EXCHANGE messages giving and seeking further information about other branches of the Blackmore family. CLICK HERE
NOTE: I have used a different colour for each page, hoping to help you not to get lost in this web site.
The origins of this web site
My "Notes on the Blackmore Family History" were sitting on a disk, gathering dust, for nearly ten years. When printed out, they occupied 60 pages, and were in the old "Word Perfect" [1] format.
Meanwhile I had, and so far seem to have recovered from, bowel cancer; I therefore decided that something had to be done. So I re-saved it in Word HTML format and just dumped it onto the web, as it was, in one, long, undivided document, warts and all, with the footnotes a shambles. I thought it best to get it onto the web, just as it was, in case it might have been of interest or even use to anyone into genealogy and researching the Devon Blackmore family history - and just in case my luck were to run out. It was a disaster!
However, whilst doing chemo (which was NOT fun!) I found time to divide it into reasonably manageable sections, and sorted out the footnotes. Over the months and years since then I have gradually edited it, eliminated hundreds of 'typos' and spelling mistakes (leaving thousands still extant) and adding photos. The original version has now been given the decent burial it deserved.
Perhaps I should explain that there is also, on disk, a second part to these "Notes", dealing with Henry Blackmore, who went to London and became a fashionable West End tailor, and his family, including my own grandfather Harold Close Blackmore.
Henry is mentioned, in passing, in these 'Notes', but his later life in London is not dealt with here. His daughter Emma married Arthur Liberty, founder of the famouse Regent Street shop and went on to become a 'Dame' in her own right, after Arthur was knighted. But they had no children. As the only direct descendants of Henry Blackmore and his son Harry are my brother Richard and myself, and of course our own progeny, I cannot see any point in putting Henry's story and "The Later London Blackmores" on the web, as it will be of no interest to anybody else.
I am often asked if we are connected to R.D.Blackmore, who wrote Lorna Doone; the answer is, almost certainly not. On the other hand, we almost certainly are related to the Pinsent family, who later became lawyers from Birmingham; my six-year-old grandson used to make particular reference to the rower, Matthew Pinsent, in his prayers "even if it turns out that he is not a distant cousin, after all".
There is, strangely, another link with the Pinsent family. Before I retired, I ended up as the Senior Partner of an old-established firm of solicitors in Leeds called Simpson Curtis. (My mother was a Simpson and her father, Edward Simpson, son of a Methodist missionary called W.O Simpson - "Woe" in the trade! had also been a partner in the firm.) By the time I retired, it employed over 300 people, with offices in Leeds and London, and also an office in Brussels which we shared with our old friends, Pinsents, in Birmingam who also, like us, had a London office. Shortly after I retired, Simpson Curtis amalgamated with them under the name Pinsent Curtis and it has now shortened its name to Pinsents. It is now one of the top law firms in the country.
One of these days I shall surprise myself and produce a Simpson family history too.
You may also wish to visit www.press-gang.net which tells you about 'RUM, SODOMY AND THE LASH, a Devon lad's Life in Nelson's Navy', a book about Samuel Blackmore, another member of the Blackmore family from Exmouth and Littleham. The book's title comes from an apocryphal saying by Sir Winston Churchill on the value of naval tradition.
Samuel was in Nelson's Navy from 1793 to 1802. Six of those years were spent as an 'A.B.' in the frigate HMS la Minerve under Captain George Cockburn, a protégé and personal friend of Nelson, and he became her coxswain. Samuel even sailed with Nelson himself (before he became an Admiral) for three months in la Minerve. He had quite an exciting life in Nelson's Navy, and he gained the Naval General Service medal, with three clasps. His story will appeal to anyone who likes the Hornblower books by C S Forester.
The book is still available from me, at £12.50 per copy, including packing and postage in the U.K. ALL PROCEEDS (NOT JUST THE PROFIT) GO TO CHARITY.
To obtain your copy, please visit my
PRESS-GANG web site which gives my postal address and tells you how to order the book.
In all, over £7,000 has been raised by the book for various charities - the main beneficiary being BEATING BOWEL CANCER, a charity set up by my fellow bowel cancer victim, the former BBC 'Watchdog' presenter Lynn Faulds Wood. She has, however, now moved on, and I am currently supporting her new charity
LYNN'S BOWEL CANCER CAMPAIGN (charity number 1099455).
Copies have also been given to THE NELSON SOCIETY and HMS TRICOMALEE for sale by them, and £300 or more has also been raised for my local church, Holy Trinity, Little Ouseburn, North Yorkshire.
Dear Me! It's a shame how they turn out.
PLEASE CONTACT ME
Please contact me by e-mail (I clear my e-mail most days) at
My e-mail address is simply my two names, joined together and with no spaces, hyphens etc. at hotmail.com .And please use something like BLACKMORE FAMILY HISTORY in your e-mail 'subject' line, as otherwise your message may get filtered out by my 'ant-junk' filter!
But I eventually recovered !
I still have my owns hair (but perhaps not quite so thick) and teeth !
If you would like to find out more about bowel cancer, also called colon cancer or colorectal cancer, go to my new Bowel Cancer site. or BEATING BOWEL CANCER or COLON CANCER CONCERN or, perhaps best of all, Lynn's new web site LYNN'S BOWEL CANCER CAMPAIGN
Bowel cancer is our second biggest killer cancer. Only lung cancer kills more. In the next 12 months, about 34,000 people will be diagnosed with it in the UK alone. Sadly, in five years time, fewer than half of them will still be around.
And yet, IF CAUGHT EARLY ENOUGH, bowel cancer need not be fatal; it is said that as many as nine out of ten could be saved.
The trouble is that it is not something that people like talking about - not even with their doctors.
As Prince Charles said, it means talking about such things as bums and poos.
If you are in the slightest bit worried, do PLEASE talk it through with your doctor. If your symptoms persit and you seem to be getting nowhere, you are entitled to insist on a simple procedure, a 'colonoscopy', which can soon put your mind at rest. In nearly every case your symptoms will result from something else, but it is better to be safe than to be sorry.
OTHER INTERESTING SITES
You can find Exmouth and Littleham on MULTIMAP
SimonBlackmore - trekking in Chamonix He spent some years climbing in the Himalayas and very nearly got to the top of Everest in 1996.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR VISITING THIS SITE. I DO HOPE YOU FOUND IT INTERESTING, AND POSSIBLY EVEN USEFUL TO YOU.
ANTHONY BLACKMORE
April 2003
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FOOTNOTES
1. A word processing program, Version 5.1, beloved of many, infinitely superior to Microsoft "Word", with the ability to show the user all the embedded formatting codes, which Word cannot or will not do. It ran under Windows 3.1, equally mourned by those who are happy with a saloon car, running on 2 star petrol, rather than a Ferrari on nitro-methanol, which is far cleverer than most of us want, need or know how to use. BACK TO TEXT
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