| Description | Correspondence received by Jeffrey Bevington Lowe (1774-1864) from his brothers and sisters and their spouses, 1803-1849. Despite the tone of the letters, the Lowe family clearly had a strong and loving relationship. Their Quaker religion provided the family members with a very deep faith that permeated all aspects of their life. Although the letters do not reveal which line of work Jeffrey Bevington Lowe was engaged in at Ettington, they do reveal he was far too busy to get away, even for family weddings and funerals; even so he was happy for his family to come visit him in Ettington, where his grandparents also were. The rest of the family were great travellers and visited relatives at Shipston, Tewkesbury, Worcester and Malvern. Holidays were taken by the sea, often for health reasons as all three sisters seemed delicate and the two brothers died as young men in 1808 and 1811.
Mrs Lowe and her three daughters, Anna, Deborah and Elizabeth seem to live in Tewkesbury early on. Brother Hagger Lowe, was engaged in business (possibly as a shoemaker) in Southwark and two other brothers, John and Richard, were serving apprenticeships at Glastonbury and Wellingborough. Other letters sent from Tooley Street and Southwark, where for a time Anna kept house for Hagger before his marriage. Mother seems to have been based for several years at Alton and Ware, which they left in September 1813, moving to a house in Uxbridge where they remained until 1818, when mother moved to Tottenham. By the 1820s , all the daughters were married; mother may have died and the grandparents had certainly passed.
The letters gradually fade away in the 1820s. Elizabeth's husband died in 1826, and Deborah had died by 1831, when her husband James Backhouse set out on a mission to Australia with a Quaker friend, staying there for five years. The last letter in the bundle was written by James Backhouse in Liverpool in 1849.
Jeffrey Bevington Lowe lived until the age of ninety in 1864, leaving £24,282.8.10d (net) on his death.
[See CR1596/649-668 and others for further records relating to land and houses owned by Jeffrey Bevington Lowe and his descendants. See also CR2747/114 in relation to son William Bevington Lowe as an estate agent to the Shirley family of Ettington in mid 1860s.] |