St Margaret’s Church, Ditchling, Sussex

THE LIKEMANS

The first of our Likeman ancestors for whom we have definite documentary evidence was George Likeman. In the Year of Our Lord 1766 on 31st December he married Ann Tubbs in St Margaret’s Church in the village of Ditchling in East Sussex, where they both lived. He was 25, and she was 26.

It was two years before James Cook departed from England on his first voyage of discovery, and nine years before the outbreak of the American War of Independence. The French Revolution had begun five years earlier in 1789, and the Reign of Terror was in full swing; but England had been protected from a similar popular revolution by the power of the evangelical religious revival among ordinary people, such as our forebears. John Wesley was preaching throughout the length and breadth of England, and had yet to take the final step of separation from the Church of England. In 1767 the University of Oxford expelled six students for “enthusiasm”, another word for Methodism. This expulsion led directly to the establishment by Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, of a theological college for evangelical clergyman.  This amazing peeress was also responsible for the building of chapels around the country; one of these was in Brighton, and another was in Wivelsfield near Ditchling, in a stately home which still exists called Ote Hall.  Several of George’s grandchildren were later to be baptised there. .  Prior to his marriage, George appears to have been a Baptist, as there is a note in the West Sussex index of non-conformist chapels in Sussex, to the effect that:

St John’s Common is in the parish of Keymer, traversed by the old Roman Road that connects the London –Lewes Road and Stane Street. At that time, even Dissenters from the Established Church would marry in their parish church, or otherwise their children would be regarded as illegitimate. St Margaret’s Church, Ditchling, is substantially a 13th Century construction with later additions, but the interior today is much as it was on that bleak December day in 1766, when George Likeman married his local sweetheart, Ann Tubbs.  

Floor plan of St Margaret’s Church, Ditchling

We do not know anything about George’s parents, but prior to the time of his marriage to Ann Tubbs, but there were already Likemans living in the four villages which lie just over the South Downs from Brighton in East Sussex, where the “Jack and Jill” windmills stand to this day. The villages were Ditchling, Westmeston, Keymer, and Clayton. The name Likeman appears with this spelling in the earliest records, although occasionally Lightman is substituted, especially with the poorly educated or illiterate. The origin of the name is obscure; it is not included in any dictionary of English surnames. Lightman, except as an mis-spelling of Likeman, is not found until the late 19th century, when it appeared as the anglicised version of a Baltic surname, brought by a family of refugees from Latvija. This family is now prominent in England, but they are also uniquely named, and unrelated. A similar surname ‘Lakeman’ is found in the West of England, but it is also distinct and there is no apparent connection with Likeman.

Theories for the etymology of Likeman have included ’Lych’ as in lych-gate (leich in Germanic languages) which means ‘ corpse’. But the earliest members of the family were simple farm labourers, not undertakers. Another suggestion is “Luke’s man”, but the spelling of Likeman is consistent, and Lukeman as a surname is very rare. [i] A Danish origin is also a possibility, remembering that when King Alfred expelled the Danes from England, they left some of their genes and many place names behind them. There is a will in the London Commissary Court calendar for 1793 for a Nicholas Lickman, carpenter on the MS Sea Nymph, but the will gives no clue to his origin or any family.

George Likeman probably came from a large family, and had at least one brother that we know of, John Likeman of Clayton. On 25 January 1757, the year after the birth of Mozart, John was married by licence at St Nicholas Church Brighton, to a spinster of the parish, Elizabeth Bourne, daughter of Matthew Bourne, Elizabeth Bourne was a Quaker, and John may also have been one. Elizabeth Bourne was a Quaker, and John may also have been one.  At that time marriage in the parish church was the only legally recognised marriage, so everyone was married in their parish church whatever their religious persuasion. St Nicholas is the oldest church in Brighton. This wedding is the earliest recorded use of the name Likeman, and the spelling is the same, (although in the parish register John signs himself as “Likman”).  We know that he was George Likeman’s brother from information in the will of his eldest daughter Elizabeth, who was born late in 1757.

For reasons as yet unexplained, the famous author H.G. Wells introduced a character called ‘Bishop Likeman’ into his novel The Soul of a Bishop, published in 1917.  One might assume that he knew, or knew of, one of our illustrious ancestors. But as there has never yet been a bishop in the family, he must have taken a fancy to the name alone. At least he spelt it correctly !

St Nicholas Church, Brighton

The young Elizabeth never married, and she is listed in the Brighton Directory of 1799 as the proprietor of a boarding house at 16 Marine Parade. When her sister Mary Sharp died of typhus in 1815, she took over the upbringing of Mary’s infant children.  Elizabeth’s name occurs frequently in the Quaker records in Brighton, and when she died in 1829, she left a very comprehensive will which names most of her living relatives. Among the beneficiaries are her cousins, William, George, and Thomas, the sons of her late Uncle George. The first executor is her cousin, John Glaisyer, a druggist of Brighton, whose wife Elizabeth must therefore have been the sister of William, George and Thomas.  There was another brother, John, who was alive in 1829 but does not get a mention in the will; perhaps he was not a religious man. Elizabeth Likeman’s sister Rebecca Watkins also left a will, so we are well informed about this branch of the family. Her youngest brother Thomas was the forefather of Kate Walter, who lived in Brighton in the 1990s and used to work in the County Library at Lewes. Kate has been the source of much useful information about the family. We will examine the Brighton families later, but for the moment we shall return to Ditchling, as it is George’s son George who interests us most.                   

In 1794, both George and William Likeman married local girls at Ditchling. George married Mary Saunders. Their first child William, born the following year, was baptised at Ote Hall. Ote Hall Chapel still stands today, and belongs to the “Countess of Huntingdon Connection”. A few of these independent evangelical chapels still exist, although most of the “Connection” later merged with the Congregational Church.

William married Mary Ann Gower, and may have had as many as ten children. At least three of them, Jonathan, Philip and Rebecca were baptised at Ote Hall. The family was clearly non-conformist, yet one of them, Jesse, born 1801, settled in Westmeston and became the parish clerk.  John, born 1798, the same year that the infamous mutiny on the Bounty occurred, moved to Brighton and became a baker. He was the father of the James Likeman who was transported to Australia in 1847 (of whom we shall hear again). Philip born 1802 was the father of William Henry, who served in the Royal Navy for 24 years, and was captain of the foretop on HMS Victory.  In Australia at this time Philip King, Governor of New South Wales, was struggling to contain the activities of the Rum Corps. 

George and Mary Saunders, who were our forebears, had at least five children. Elizabeth, born 1800 at Keymer, married John Lindfield, and among their ten children was another Jesse (1832-1887) who emigrated to New South Wales, and was the forebear of the Sydney dermatologist Ken Gudmundsen; also a daughter Elizabeth, who married her first cousin Thomas Likeman.

The most important of the children of George and Mary Saunders was John, our ancestor, who was born in 1803, two years before the Battle of Trafalgar. John rose from being a simple limeburner and brickmaker in Ditchling to become a house-builder and property owner in Brighton. He was married twice, first to Eliza Slaughter in 1824, and after her death in 1851 to Eliza Pradden, his cook. He left an extensive will, which showed him to be the owner of 24 freehold houses, although the total value of the will in the terms of the day was “under 800 pounds”. His youngest son James entered a partnership with an engineer Henry John Lawson and commenced manufacturing bicycles. To them is attributed the first safety bicycle which employed a chain-drive to the rear wheel. Together they patented several designs, but the partnership was dissolved in 1878.

Much of this movement to the town must be understood as part of the urban drift that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. But there were already Likemans living in Brighton, or Brighthelmstone as it was originally known. Brighton was put on the map in 1783 by the arrival of the Prince of Wales, who later became the Prince Regent, and eventually King George IV.  Society followed, and a rapid expansion of the town took place, including the famous Pavilion. The final stage in the commercialization of Brighton followed in 1841, when the London to Brighton Railway was opened, and the resort became accessible to the population of London.

One of the details that Kate Walter supplied from the West Sussex Archives was that two of the grandsons of William and Mary Ann Gower, had been convicted at the Assizes and sentenced to be transported. William and Mary had at least eight children, of whom John, the second eldest, was born in 1798.  John became a baker. He married Elizabeth Buckman in 1829, and had eleven children, among them James and John.  John, the elder of the two, although convicted and sentenced seems to have been spared this punishment; at least I have been unable to find any record of it. He was convicted in 1853, in the same year that the Penal Servitude Act abolished transportation. He is probably the same John Likeman who died at Lewes in 1905.

His younger brother James was less fortunate;  in 1847 at the age of twelve, he was convicted at Lewes Assizes of the theft of five shillings from a till to pay for cigars. As he had a previous conviction (for what we do not know) the usual penalty was transportation. He sailed from Plymouth in the Blenheim II on 10 April 1850, and arrived in Hobart 105 days later. He was released in July 1854 on parole, but served another eleven months in Launceston gaol in 1864 for Larceny. Unlike Magwitch in Great Expectations, he did not make his fortune nor return to England. But he rose to a position of trust and respectability at the Launceston Gas Works, and died at St Kilda in October 1927 at the age of 91. His descendants still live in Launceston and Melbourne, but in the last generation they were all girls, and so the name Likeman will soon disappear.

James had three partners who bore him children, but he only married one of them, Mary Anne MacDonald, and only after she had delivered eight of her eleven children by him !  One of these, Louisa born 1870, found her way to the Charters Towers gold-rush, and in 1903 married New Zealand miner called Herbert Currie, who came from Waiuku near Auckland, New Zealand.  Louisa and Bertie married at St George’s Church, Queenton, near the present Charters Towers Railway Station. The church blew down in a storm not long after, and was not rebuilt, but a silver chalice from the altar plate is to be seen to this day in the Charters Towers Museum. The Curries moved to Rockhampton, where Bertie became a bookmaker, and died there in 1915.

As the families of the last century were large, the Likemans gradually expanded, and moved on to London and other places. Most of the details are recorded in our data base, but do not form part of this present narrative. So we return to John Likeman, the successful housebuilder of Brighton and his wife Eliza Slaughter.

John’s eldest son, also called John, was a bookseller, and in 1850 he married Esther Longhurst in the London Road Chapel in Brighton. The Nonconformist tradition continued. Esther’s occupation is listed as “servant”.  We have no idea how she and John met, since Esther’s family came from Shalford, which is near Guildford in Surrey. Her father and grandmother were from Hambledon, which is nearby, and hergrandfather from Cranleigh, also not far away. Probably she was in domestic service: such was the pattern of life in rural England in the middle of the 19th century.

For whatever reason, John and Esther moved to Dorking, near where I went to school, but they did not find happiness there. Their first child John died as an infant.  John Ade was born in 1852, but John senior died of tuberculosis just 3 years later. Shortly afterwards, baby Elizabeth also died of TB. This was the time of the Crimean War.

In 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny, Esther remarried in Park Chapel, Camden Town, to a widower William Ubsdell, who was a grocer.  John Ade was 5 years old. The couple had more children, among them Esther, born in Camden Town near London Zoo in 1859.

Young Esther Ubsdell was married in 1882 to James, the younger son of John Likeman and Eliza Pradden.  He was half-brother to her mother’s first husband. That isn’t quite as complicated as it sounds !  John the builder had nine children by Eliza Slaughter, the second eldest being John the bookseller who had married

Esther Longhurst.  Eliza died in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition and the building of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. As already mentioned, John then married Eliza Pradden, and had 3 more children. One of these was James, who was born in 1857, the same year that Esther Longhurst-Likeman married William Ubsdell.

Presumably the connection with the Likeman family was maintained for or by John Ade, and this may well have led to the meeting of James and Esther.  James and Esther had three sons; the eldest of these was Harry James, the first Likeman to be ordained into the Church of England. This was a significant departure from the earlier nonconformist leanings of the family. In 1905 James and Esther moved to Punnichy, Saskatchewan in Canada, taking with them their youngest son Cecil John, born in 1899. Cecil John served in the 43rd Canadian Infantry (Manitoba Regiment) in WW1, and was killed near Cambrai in October 1918. He is buried in the Mill Switch British Cemetery at Tilloy-les-Cambrai.

Harry James married in 1906 and joined his parents soon afterwards. He was ordained in 1907. He returned to England in 1911, and after moving around for some years took up a living in Halifax Yorkshire in 1923, as Vicar of All Souls Haley Hill. In 1931 he became Vicar of St Paul’s Tiverton. He was appointed Vicar of Easton in Hampshire in 1947 and died there in 1952. He is buried in church graveyard. I first became aware of him when I was at school; one of my friends lived at Sparsholt, not far from Easton, where his father was the vicar, and he remembered the name.  Harry James had a daughter Helen Norah who worked for the BBC, and I once heard a radio play which she had written. I can remember nothing about it, apart from seeing the name in the Radio Times.                  

We know nothing of John Ade’s childhood, nor from which antecedent he was given the name Ade. We do not meet him again until 1879 when, still living in St Pancras, he married Louisa Collins; he gave his occupation as a commercial clerk. This was the year that Gilbert and Sullivan produced the ever-popular “Pirates ofPenzance”, and the year of Lord Roberts’ epic march from Kabul to Kandahar in Afghanistan.

Louisa was born above the Collins greengrocery shop in Chalton Street, Somers Town. The Collins family originally came from Kent; Louisa’s father Edward was born in Canterbury and baptised at St Mary Northgate on 28th February 1819. His parents were Edward Collins and Mary Chambers, who had married at St Alphage in November 1814.  When he married, Edward junior gave his occupation as a paperhanger like his father; later he became a greengrocer.

Louisa’s mother was born Louisa Eliza Mead in 1819. Her parents lived in the parish of St Martin in the Fields, now no longer in the fields but at the bottom end of Charing Cross Road, overlooking Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. They were David Mead, an ostler, and Louisa Elizabeth Pavey.  Louisa Mead was first married to George Collins, the younger brother of Edward, who was a brushmaker.  She had three children before being widowed; the youngest of these children, George junior, was born in 1850. George Collins died of TB in 1851, and baby George died a year later. 

Edward Collins had also been married before. His first wife Mary Ann came from Whitstable in Kent, famous for its oysters as far back as the time of the Romans. They do not seem to have had any children. Edward and Louisa married in 1854 in Clerkenwell, a few months before the famous Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava. They had two daughters, Emma and Louisa, and of course Edward and Charles, Louisa’s sons by her first marriage, continued to live with them. Edward and Louisa both died in 1871.

John Ade Likeman and his new bride Louisa Collins (or Collings, as it is spelt on their marriage lines) left London and returned to Brighton, and there in 1880 the first of their seven sons were born. This is our own particular clan, and my grandfather, John Longhurst Likeman, was the second son. In due course Edward, William and Hugh followed. In 1883 John Ade was declared bankrupt in the County Court in Brighton. At the time he was living at 83 Preston Road Brighton, and his occupation is given as a florist and seedsman trading as the Southern Counties Horticultural Supply Company, and later as a grocer at 84 Preston Road. About 1886, the family moved to Tonbridge in Kent, and there Bernard, Francis and Harold were born.

Fortune evidently did not smile on the family, and a further move was made to Reading in Berkshire, where Louisa died in August 1899 at the early age of 43. In the month following her death, the young John, who was still only seventeen, ran away to Aldershot and enlisted in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He lied about his age and place of birth, giving the latter as Inverness (a place he could have known nothing about) and claiming he was eighteen.  Perhaps he did not care to be burdened with the bringing up of his younger brothers.  He had a compelling desire to be a soldier, and war clouds were gathering. On October 12th, the Boers invaded the Cape Colony, and the South African War began. John’s fascinating life in described in Chapter Three.

John Ade did marry again, to Lucy Billingshurst from Bristol, but not until 1908; and he did not have any more children (Lucy was 42 when they married, and he was 56, so it was probably just as well). He still states his occupation as a grocer.

Edward John married May Florence George, and had five sons. The eldest, Thomas George, was my father’s first cousin, but a few years older. He was an officer in the Merchant Navy who went down with his ship in the North Atlantic after being torpedoed by a U-boat in January 1941. His daughter Susan (his only child) grew up in America, and married an American diplomat Robert Emmons. After the failure of their marriage she returned to England, where she died in 2011.  Thomas George’s name appears on the Merchant Navy memorial on Tower Hill in London: his ship was the ss Florian, and he was the First Mate.

Clifford Anderson Likeman was the third son of Edward John. He had two children, Martin and Diana. Martin is better known to us as the Reverend Martin Likeman, from Llanstadwell in South Wales, and a Canon of St David’s Cathedral. Martin also died in 2011..

After Edward John and John Longhurst, came William Charles. As we shall learn in the next chapter, WC was responsible for introducing John to his wife Gladys, a fellow student in Reading. William also joined the Army, and became a full Colonel in the Army Education Corps. He served in India during WW2, and I have two letters that he wrote to John during that time. William published a book in 1935 about the battle honours of the various British Regiments, and I have a copy. William had three children, Derek, Keith, and Joan. Derek died in 1965, and his son John William lives in Truro with his family.

The next brother was Hugh Augustus. All that I know about Uncle Hugh is that he was a dentist, and worked in Wales and Hampshire. In 1910 in Leicester he married Ethel Sara Robinson. They had only one child, Robert Hugh, known as "Bobby” born in 1916. Robert trained as a solicitor. He joined the RAF at the beginning of the war, and became a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes. He was posted to No 73 Squadron in North Africa, and was lost over Crete on 24th May 1941. This occurred following an ill-considered and futile attempt to provide fighter cover during the invasion of Crete by the Germans. The squadron was ordered back to North Africa, and Robert and most of the squadron did not make it. He might have been shot down, got lost, or just run out of fuel and crashed into the Mediterranean.  He is commemorated on column 241 of the Alamein Memorial in Egypt (see below).

When Uncle Hugh died, my father inherited the Family Bible from him. I don’t know why he had inherited it; anyway, my brother Peter has it now. My only interest was in the cover, which had family details on it, and that is where I first came across Esther Ubsdell, although it was many years before I discovered that she was the same person as Esther Longhurst-Likeman.

Bernard Victor was the fifth son of John Ade and Louisa. When we were children, he lived at New Malden, which was quite near Sutton, and we occasionally saw him and his third wife Georgina. They must have moved back to Brighton at some stage, as I remember going to his funeral somewhere around Patcham in 1964. In 1911 Bernard was married to Daisy Francis Fuller (1882-1922), and twins Arthur and Vera were born in 1921, but did not survive. In 1925 Bernard married Elizabeth A Kirkham. She died in 1944, and in 1947 Bernard married Georgina Eliza Burgess 1884-1977). I am not aware of any other children.

Albert Francis died before his first birthday – I have not looked for the cause. Harold, the youngest, died at 22, in 1912.  Of him I know nothing at all as yet.  John Ade lived on until 1926, and died in Reading. I presume that he is buried there, but nobody in the family ever spoke of his grave.  John Longhurst had only one child, John William, and John William had two sons, Peter Richard and Robert Kenneth.  In our generation, the name ‘John’ was finally given a rest.

Click here to be taken to Chapter Three - John Longhurst Likeman