My paternal great grandmother, Ada Kate, was a Gilbey.
Her father, my great, great grandfather, Henry Parry Gilbey, was born at No 11 Windhill, Bishop’s Stortford on 24th March 1824, the sixth child of Henry and Elizabeth Gilbey. His father was from Essex farming stock but at the start of the 19th century took to innkeeping in Stansted. After the Napoleonic wars and the severe economic depression that followed, he was forced to give up his position as landlord of the Bell at Stansted Road and moved to Bishop’s Stortford. Here he started a successful passenger stagecoach service to London, for the most part taking the reins himself, but with the imminent arrival of the railway his business ended in 1841. Forced to sell his home at Windhill he then returned to his former trade and became landlord of the Red Lion Inn at Hockerill. But his term there was short. He died the following year leaving a wife and seven children with very little material or financial wealth.
Henry Parry was sent to school at Christ’s Hospital and started as a clerk for a wine merchant. He went on to be a partner in a wholesale wine merchant, Messrs. Southard, Gilbey, and Co. Meanwhile his two younger brothers, Walter and Alfred, had to make their way too.
Walter was educated at Bishop’s Stortford grammar school, but perhaps influenced by his father’s earlier success he also drove a coach at the start of his working life, combining this with a job as an apprentice to his cousin – a land surveyor. At the age of 19 the opportunity to pursue a more promising career beckoned at Westminster where he worked in a parliamentary agent’s office. But by 1853 Russian expansion and their subsequent occupation of the Crimea, previously controlled by Turkey, led Britain and France to unite in war against the Russians and both Walter and his brother, Albert, volunteered for service as civilian clerks in the Army Pay Department. Still in his early twenties Walter served in Gallipoli but spent most of his time working at a convalescent hospital on the Asiatic shores of the Dardanelles.
Both brothers returned safely to England in 1857 but having little idea of what to do with their lives, consulted their elder brother Henry, by now a prosperous wine merchant, who advised them that an opening existed for the import of wines from South Africa. At that time wine imported from countries other than Europe attracted less import duty. With money loaned from Henry they took over a basement at 372 Oxford Street, London, and advertised in leading publications and the provincial press. The response was phenomenal and within months they had more than 20,000 customers on their books – including the novelist Charles Dickens whose framed cheques were later hung in the director’s luncheon room at Gilbey’s head office in Harlow.
(Extracted from Stortford History)
(To be continued)