A Story of Wealth and Connections

My great-grandfather Joseph (1834-1913) married Jane Pickersgill (1847-1887), sister of Leeds Bookmaker “Honest Joe” Pickersgill. Honest Joe made a lot of money from betting, and his five children were afforded all the luxuries that England could offer at the turn of the twentieth century. Joe’s second daughter, Maud (1882-1928), married Harold Nickols Jnr. (1885-1933), the son of Harold Nickols Snr. (1848-1925). The Nickols family owned the Joppa Tannery in Kirkstall, Leeds, and were themselves wealthy and well connected.

Harold senior’s first wife, Harriet Fraser, died in 1898, and in 1908 Harold married Isabella Simson, nee McConnell, when he was fifty-nine, and she was thirty. Isabella, better known as “Belle”, was even then quite a character.

Belle had been born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1878 to William McConnell and his wife Eliza. William was a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary before he became the Clerk of Petty Sessions in Kilkenny, so was very much part of the English establishment in Ireland, despite being Irish himself. Belle had plans, and married wealthy Scottish brewer James Simson (1849-1903) and moved to Edinburgh. James was the part-owner of James Simson and Sons, brewers established in Melrose by his father, also called James, but present in Edinburgh since 1864. Belle lived in the city in some luxury and bore James two children, Jenny and James Jnr. In 1869 James Simson and Sons merged with James Ewan McPherson & Co. to form Simson and McPherson Ltd. In 1900, the Newcastle-upon-Tyne business of Robert Deuchar Ltd bought the Simson breweries, which is most likely why on the Scottish census of 1901 James is listed as “Retired Brewer”.

James Simson died in 1903, and in his Probate records his estate’s value is listed as “Sealed”, and Belle was confirmed as the widow. I don’t know anything about Scottish law, but I suspect that there may have been claims on James’ estate other than any legacy to Belle.

By the time Belle married into the Nickols family, she was probably a wealthy woman in her own right, but her new husband was also very wealthy.

Harold Snr. fathered one child with Belle, Bridget, who was born in 1910. Harold, Belle, James and Jenny Simson, and Bridget, all lived in Seymour Place, Mayfair, London. You don’t need to be a native of London to know that Mayfair is perhaps the most prestigious address in that city.

Bridget, like her mother, had an eye for a wealthy man, and in 1932 she married Charles Allsopp, the Fourth Baron Hindlip. The name Allsopp, particularly with regard to the Allsopp’s Baronial title, rang a bell with me and, with a bit of time spent poring over the Allsopp family tree, I discovered that British TV presenter Kirsty Allsopp is the great-niece of Bridget’s husband, Charles Allsopp. The Nickols-Allsopp marriage, though, was very short lived and in 1934, Bridget married actor Harold Huth.

I’d never come across Harold Huth, but in the world of film he was a well known silent-film and stage actor, film producer, and director. IMDb has reams about him, as does Wikipedia.

Bridget and Harold Huth had two children together, Angela and Patricia, both of whom are writers and both of whom are still alive today. Angela Huth wrote, among other things, the novel “Land Girls”, which was made into a successful British TV series. She also wrote a memoir, which I haven’t read, but I did read an extract from it published in the Daily Mail in 2017. In it, Angela devotes quite a bit of time to her famously dotty grandmother Belle, of times spent with her in her London apartment on Piccadilly, and how she was famously very loose with her money. When Belle died in 1971 she left over £350,000 in her will. However, according to her granddaughter, most of that went to pay off years of accumulated debt.

All of the people I’ve listed do fully qualify to be in my family tree, although the links are tenuous in the extreme. I’ve written it all down partly for its novelty value, but partly as a counter to the vast majority of my family who were from working class stock and lived working class lives; these people were wealthy, but most of the family were not.

Back at the top of the story, with Honest Joe Pickersgill, my great-grandfather who married into that family was a shoemaker by trade, in Leeds. It’s ironic that Joe’s daughter married into the family of a Leeds leather producer, who may well have supplied leather for my great-grandfather to make shoes.

Wealth and connections for sure.