The Gough Family of Thringstone

Having a sense of identity is probably the most important thing to everybody who lives in modern society. We anchor after a day when communities were real communities and families stayed together for generations. Indeed, many people can trace their families back through many generations in one location.

Many years ago a relative decided to research her family history. Being a cousin she researched it from her perspective and therefore paid no great attention to my direct ancestry. Fortunately for me, my sister became interested in the family history and took up the mantle where my cousin had left off. I had never known my grandparents, but luckily my parents were still alive when my sister decided to do her research. As in so many cases this turned out to be a mixed blessing because family legend and historical fact are very often quite different things. Indeed the family history the way my father told it turned out to be entirely inaccurate although it did contain all the salient facts in a sort of jumbled way. Aunts became cousins; children were credited to the wrong parents; people were absolutely certainly living at an address that didn't exist and cousins were seemingly older than the aunties and uncles who bore them. Sometimes it takes a massive amount of research an d no small personal effort to erase a family legend and replace it with an historical fact.

It would indeed be a massive task to try and write the history of my whole family. They came from far and wide and had many reasons for ending up in Leicestershire. They had many trades and some individuals had to come here after travelling for many years, through many, many places. The more one looks at the facts, the more one realises that it was an almost remarkable chance which brought my parents together. Like everyone else who lives in Leicestershire, the history of my family is not only the history of this country but also the history of the whole world. That is why this country has learned to accept many cultures and given them a real home.

Bearing in mind their massive diversity within my own family tree, when it came to putting pen to paper I decided I must take a particular part of the history of my family, which was not only massively important to my family itself but was also massively important to the community in which they lived at that time. It is for that reason that this small contribution to local history concentrates on the period of the late 1700s and 1800s, and the arrival of my family in Thringstone. I will also be concentrating on one particular surname because that surname is my own and is therefore the most important surname to me, although because of the nature of family research other surnames have to be included as family connections reach far and wide, even within small communities.

As I write at the beginning of the 21st century, there are still a number of my relatives living in the Thringstone area and indeed the name 'Gough' is linked inextricably with the coal mining communities in the north-west of Leicestershire. It is also inextricably linked with other local prominent families and there are numerous references in my family history to the names Wilson, Needham and Tugby.

My story ends with the move from the village of my father into Loughborough after the premature death of his own father and his mother's remarriage.

One of the problems we have had during the research (which is still ongoing and indeed as I write my sister is travelling to Cambridgeshire to chase up another branch of our ancestors) is that the parish of Thringstone has not long existed and until the middle of the 1800s those born in the village and indeed married in the village were listed as Whitwick and therefore we have to rely on good sense and poor census returns to verify the sketchy facts.

The first Gough in the area we have definite knowledge of is one Thomas Gough who married Elizabeth Wilkins in Whitwick in 1799. Thomas and Elizabeth are my great-great-great grandparents and we know little about them except that Thomas claims to have been born locally and that his profession was 'traveller'. This is where the problem starts. There are a number of Goughs in the area at that time and they are all listed as travellers or hawkers. In short they could have come from anywhere and because grandparents or other relatives often brought up the children of travellers, because their natural parents were on the road, relationships between people are sometimes confused and always inaccurately recorded. We assume until otherwise informed that these Goughs were related in some way and had arrived in the area together. We do know that they were variously described as hawkers or travellers and in one case as a 'hawker of spar', which was a locally made ceramic ware during t he mid 1800s. The name is a Celtic name and the majority of Goughs came to the Midlands via Gloucestershire from either Wales or Cornwall. The name Gough translates as Smith, so like many surnames it is attached to a particular trade.

Thomas and Elizabeth had nine chidren, which was not that unusual at the time. Like most families some of the children did not survive into adulthood, we do not know how many of the children survived. It is strange, but when you are researching your family history and you come across a death , you tend to take it quite personally, almost as though you are grieving for that person even though you never knew them. Both my sister and I are deeply moved when we discover an infant death in the family and have almost been in tears when we have read about families that lose four or five children, which was not at all uncommon. What we do know is that in 1814 Elizabeth gave birth to Edward Gough, who was to become my great-great grandfather.

It is Edward's family that usually arouses the most interest in people and indeed his story is an intriguing one. Like the rest of his family Edward began his career as a hawker and probably hawked coal or some other essential commodity around the local villages. It could even have been meat because the next time we catch up with Edward in the 1871 census he is listed as a butcher and a farmer. At his death in 1884 Edward left a considerable estate which was valued at £736/15/0. Edward Gough was the 1800s Thringstone version of Richard Branson, a true rags to riches story.

The thing though that most intrigues people about Edward is his children. Edward and his wife Ann Rose, who he married in 1843 in Whitwick had fourteen children, the majority of which survived into adulthood. The ones that elicit most interest are three of his daughters - Faith, Hope and Charity. He also had other children with seemingly biblical names such as Adam and Eve. When we discovered the existence of his son David we became convinced that we were on the verge of discovering a Goliath in the family, but thankfully they seem to have restrained from inflicting this particular burden on their offspring. Our research has shown that the names might not be quite as religious as we had previously thought. It seems that they are all well-known traveller names and although they may have originally come from biblical roots, it is unlikely that there was any particular religious connotation to them when they were given.

Above : John Wilson Gough (1894 - 1930)

Edward's work ethics obviously were passed down to his children and we find them all over the area expanding the Gough empire. Three of his children became butchers and opened shops in Belton, Long Whatton and Ibstock. His son David also moves to Ibstock and we have copies of his apprenticeship indenture to one Samuel J Dean as a butcher and joiner. Edward was obviously quite well off by then as the indenture states that it is he who is funding the apprenticeship, whereas it was usual for local charity to fund it for those who were less well off.

We also know that Edward's son Albert left the village to serve with the Metropolitan Police. He was later pensioned from the police having been mentally ill. His discharge from the force was a pensionable discharge and he was awarded a sum of money to help him resettle. The reasons given to the compensation hearing are that he is suffering from delusions. He returned to Thringstone immediately after his discharge and became the village post master.

The son of Edward who most interests my family though is Benjamin Rose Gough. Benjamin Rose was my great grandfather and was born in 1865 in Thringstone. He was the youngest of Edward's children and married Martha Selina Wilson who was born in North Street, Whitwick in 1871. They were married at Thringstone in 1891 and at the time of his wedding Benjamin was a butcher working in his late father's shop. We don't know a great deal about Benjamin except that after fathering two children by Martha he disappeared from Thringstone altogether and there is no further trace of him until in 1926 each of the children received a small inheritance from their father, who had apparently died in the USA. We cannot verify this as it is a family legend and there is no documentation for it. We would dearly love to know which solicitors passed on the inheritance so that we can find out more about him, but searching for Benjamin Goughs who emigrated to the USA during that period turns up lots of people and we have no way of knowing which one is him or even if any of them are him as he might have travelled under a false name.

The youngest of Benjamin Rose Gough's children was John Wilson Gough. He was born in 1894 and was my grandfather. He married Emma Needham who was known to my sisters as Grandma Pip. He was only 36 years old when he died in 1930, leaving a young family to fend for themselves. My own father was fourteen at the time of his father's death. John Wilson was a blacksmith by trade, having been apprenticed to William Henson Rouse of Swannington. Again we have a copy of the apprenticeship indenture, which was signed by Charity Gough, his aunt, in the absence of his father. John Wilson was a blacksmith in the collieries and died prematurely as a result of silicosis or a similar disease from working in the mines. Grandma Pip died before I was born so I never knew my grandparents and I believe this is one of the reasons why I feel so strongly about finding out about my family history.

My own father Sidney was born in 1916 and has only recently died (Feb 14th 2001). He had some knowledge of his family history, but like a lot of people his knowledge was a ripe mixture of fact and legend.

TOL would like to thank Darryl Gough for taking the time to write this superb article and sharing the results of his research with us. Darryl has offered to update the page as and when more information comes to light, and we look forward to any such additions.

Mr Gough can be contacted via the following e-mail : [email protected]

Another son of John Wilson Gough was the late Albert Eric Gough, highly respected and well known to many in the village as 'Jack' Gough until he passed away in 1992. A member of the Burma Star Association, Jack was also a founding member of the Thringstone Branch of the Royal British Legion following the Second World War.

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