Ponds, Pooles, Tanners - finding the connections between various pub landlords of London and Essex

From a young age, I knew that my great great Grandfather, William Pond, above, had been a pub landlord at the back end of the 19th Century. The story handed down within the family was that he'd he lost his licence following a complaint about a drunk and disorderly. Not quite sure if it was absolutely like that - but the Butchers Arms team were indeed in court in October 1902, accused (unsuccessfully) of permitting drunkenness on the premises. William was just into his 80s by then, and it looks as though the front of house was now run by his daughters Kate and Elizabeth, as shown in this report of the hearing in the Essex Newsman.

Soon after this hearing, William did indeed pass the licence on to his nephew Edward Thomas Pond, and moved to Croydon to live with his widowed daughter Lucy Carter; Kate and Elizabeth went with him. William died in 1904, and returned to the Dengie Peninsula in his coffin to be buried in Stow Maries churchyard.

William's Ponds and related families featured a good proportion of publicans, mixed in with the seedsmen and bakers. William's brother-in-law, William Poole, was landlord of the Saracens Arms at Runsell Green, Danbury. Cousins, the brothers William and Jonathan Tanner, had a pub each in Provost Street, Hoxton, and those establishments were a training ground for another pair of cousins and future publicans, John and Samuel Pond. William's uncle, Izaac Pond, was a publican in Canewdon, on the Southend side of the River Crouch; two of his daughters married publican cousins - Sarah Ann in 1853 to Jonathan Tanner, and Susannah in 1857 to John Pond. All this is commendably set out in more detail and scope by Adrian Taylor's POOLES, PONDS AND TANNERS and the licensing trade, on the London pubs site.

William Tanner, Jonathan Tanner, Izaac Pond and John Pond are all buried at London's first Commercial Cemetery at Kensal Green

One element worth adding to Adrian's survey of the Pond/Poole/Tanners publican dynasty is how the wider family stepped up after Jonathan Tanner's wife, Sarah Ann, died in 1867. In 1871, their youngest children, Fanny and Mary Ann were billeted at Brooks Farm, Woodham Ferrers, with their parents' cousin Mary Ann Gilbert Pond and her husband William Poole, plus daughter Kate, and William's mother Susannah; on the same farm were my great great grandparents William Pond (brother of Mary Ann) and his wife Lucy (William Poole's sister), and younger daughters Kate and Elizabeth.

Fanny and Mary Ann stuck together and in 1881 were working for a drapers and living in the same lodgings in Brixton, Surrey.

Fanny Tanner then became John Pond's housekeeper in Deptford. Mary Ann Tanner married William Elvidge in 1884, and their eldest daughter, Mary Eleanor Fanny Elvidge, lived in John Pond's household and, after John died, with Fanny as her companion in Carshalton, Surrey.

Sarah Ann Tanner (the eldest daughter) stayed with her father and acted as his housekeeper until after he was adjudged bankrupt in spring 1880, being shown on the 1881 census in Deptford with her "out of business" father. In 1891 she is with William and Mary Ann Gilbert Poole in the Saracens Arms in Danbury, and she "boarded" with that family unil Kate Poole died . This information solved a family mystery - a woman known as "Sally" was in some pictures of the Pooles in the 1900s/1910s, but nothing was known about her beyond that. The census records of course solved the mystery.

In Danbury about 1910: Back row Kate Poole, Lucy Carter nee Pond (William Pond's eldest daughter), Walter Joseph Carter; Front Row Sarah Ann "Sally" Tanner, Mary Ann Gilbert Poole nee Pond, Hilda Lucy Carter.

Having pulled all this together by putting together various pieces of the jigsaw without a top of the box picture to guide me, I finally noticed that Mary Tanner nee Pond (the sister of Izaac Pond, mother of William and Jonathan Tanner, and aunt of John Pond, Samuel Pond, William Pond and Mary Ann Gilbert Poole nee Pond) was living next door to William and Mary Ann Gilbert Poole on Danbury Common at the time of the 1861 census, and it was Mary Ann who was the informant shown on her death register entry in 1864.

It's always worth checking on the neighbours!