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THE INSIDE STORY
Anthony Westell
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To return to the Woodroffe history, in 1852 William Edmund Woodroffe, born at Woolaston, a few miles from Alvington, married Catherine (Kate) May Bishop, youngest of fifteen children of an interesting family in the fashionable city of Bath, not far away across the Severn River. Her father, William Bishop, had been part-owner of The White Hart, not only a famous inn but the base for a network of coach lines. An old engraving I found in Bath library shows the forecourt of The White Hart crowded with coaches, which were said to be washed with hot water drawn from springs five thousand feet underground and famous since Roman times. For many years a man called Moses Pickwick owned the inn and the coach lines. According to a local legend he got his name when a lady passing through the nearby village of Wick found him as an abandoned baby — like Moses in the bulrushes — and because he was picked up in Wick, she called him Moses Pickwick. It’s likely that Charles Dickens borrowed the name for his humourous stories, The Pickwick Papers. In one story, the central character, Mr. Pickwick, takes the coach from London to stay at The White Hart and is startled to find that the coach is operated by a Moses Pickwick. Dickens, perhaps, was acknowledging the original Pickwick.
My ancestor, William Bishop, sold his interest in The White Hart around 1850 for £30,000. That may not sound like much and to convert it even roughly into today’s money makes little sense because the quality of life in terms of goods and services that could be bought then was utterly different from anything we can experience. As currency values fluctuate, converting sterling into Canadian dollars introduces another uncertainty. Nevertheless, I have tried (here and in following passages) to make a straight conversion, allowing for inflation and at today’s rate of exchange, but I warn that it is at best a rough guide. So, £30,000 then would be about $4.5 million today. The family lived in a five-storey house on fashionable Pulteney Street, designed to be the most distinguished street in a city of splendid architecture. Jane Austen mentions it in her novel Persuasion, and there were numerous famous residents, including Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert who was secretly married to the Prince of Wales, later George IV; Louis Napoleon, later Napoleonlll of France; Admiral Horatio Nelson’s mistress, Lady Hamilton; and William Wilberforce, a leader of the campaign to outlaw slavery. Like William’s other children, Kate studied “Art, Literature and Music” in Paris, and when she was twenty-five, in 1849, received her share of her father’s estate. It was probably a handsome sum because she in turn gave £1,000 (around $150,000 today) to each of her eight children when they reached twenty-one.
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