XXXV The Old Manor

Page 121	Pocklington	Fred
		Alice Emmy
		Pleasaunce
		Arthur
		Emily Ann	relative
		2 female domestics	unnamed

 Fred and Alice Emmy Pocklington were married by the Bishop of Oxford in Christ Church Cathedral on 2^nd May 1865, and Pleasaunce and Arthur were their first children. However, Pleasaunce had died in Oxford on 30^th September 1867. Frances Emily, later the mother of Penelope (Pen) and Guy Powell, was born in Colchester in 1869 but is not mentioned in the survey.

The errors and omissions suggest that whoever filled in the survey was not closely associated with the family, although other indications point to Fred himself as the originator of the project.

Emily Ann was Fred’s 58-year-old maiden aunt, described in the 1871 census as living on "income from dividends". She died three years later, and in her will left mainly an estate in Swansea. Her beneficiaries included her sisters Ellen and Frances, the wife of the Rev Henry Shortland of Twinstead, and her nephews Frederic and George Henry. She also left money to two old family servants, cook Jane Gladden and parlourmaid Mary Ann Sewell.

Colonel Fred’s diaries provide a fascinating glimpse of life in Chelsworth and elsewhere in those days, beginning in June 1853 shortly before he joined the Army and saw service in the Crimea, and finishing on 5^th July 1914, days before the outbreak of the Great War.

However, this wonderful record deposited by the family in the Suffolk Record Office closes with his service in Mauritius in 1863 and does not resume until 1880 when he was serving in India. We know from his military record that he was posted to Colchester from 1868 to 1870, but the diaries for the period between 1863 and 1880, covering his marriage and the early years of family life, are understandably not available and it is not known whether they have even survived.

Colonel Fred was a prime mover in the building of the new schoolhouse, and his family, together with the rector's and Miss Cautley at Barrards, were frequent visitors to the school.

Both Alice Emmy and her son Arthur died in 1921. Their graves and those of many other family members lie in the South-East corner of Chelsworth churchyard.

The Old Manor had previously belonged to the Rev John Gee Smyth, Rector of Chelsworth and Lord of the Manor of Lindsey, who was related to the Pocklingtons, and who purchased it from Sir Robert in 1818.  However, in her will, his widow Rebecca left only the cottage across the road to her late husband's daughter by his first marriage, Georgina Smyth, and The Old Manor eventually came back to the Pocklingtons through the will of the rector's brother George Stracey Smyth

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