Born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, William spent his adult life in London, where he worked as a milkman in the same dairy business as my great grandfather, his brother. William’s marriage to Annie Looker led me to research her intriguing, much-married father, a coffee house keeper of London and later a publican. I believe William served in WW1, their six children born both before and after the war. William and Annie retired to the Isle of Wight in later life. One of their twin sons emigrated to Australia and carved out an interesting role helping other immigrants.

A move to London

Although he was born in St Albans on 23 October 1878, William wasn’t baptised until a month before his fourth birthday. He was one of 13 children born to his parents Jesse and Harriet Ephgrave. His early years featured the loss of younger siblings and a move to nearby Redbourn, where his father continued to work as a baker on the village’s High Street. I know nothing more of his childhood and teenage years. By the time he was 23, he has moved to live with his brother, my great grandfather Frederick Ephgrave, a milk sterilizer, at 174 Culford Road Hackney. The 1901 census describes him as a carman, ie a lorry driver, and he may well have been working for the same dairy business as his brother. Their younger brother Arthur was living nearby at no. 61.

Later that year, William married Annie Louisa Looker at London Colney, Hertfordshire, so had presumably been in Hertfordshire when he met her; research into the life of her father, Benjamin Looker, took me on an intriguing journey. By the time William married Annie, her father was already a much-respected publican in London Colney, Hertfordshire, and was a licensed victualler there for two decades.

Annie was the youngest of four children born to Benjamin and his second wife, Suffolk-born Mary Ann Norman, and grew up in Aldgate, London. Her parents moved to Hertfordshire around 1884 and her mother died at the Swan Inn, London Colney, where her father was licensee, when Annie was just six. Her father remarried two years later, and Annie and her surviving sisters were cared for for a time by his third wife, widow Elizabeth Hancock. She, however, died when Annie was 13. When her father married for the fourth and last time, to Ellen Hammond, Annie was 16. By then, she may already have been working in service, as she was just before her marriage in 1901. The census that year shows her in St Albans, working as a general domestic servant to a Mr Hawes, wine merchant.

Married life and war

Their first child, Stanley Looker Ephgrave, was born and died in London a year after their marriage. They had three more children between 1905-1907: Leonard; Reginald; Gladys. Twin sons Leslie and Norman were born over ten years later in 1919. Was much of that gap the result of William’s service in WW1? In 1911, he was still in Hackney at 113 Beauvoir Road, working as a sterilised milk courier (ie milkman). Medal records for William Ephgrave, a private in the Labour Corps (Middlesex Regiment, the Duke of Cambridge’s Own), regimental number 6515, later 454064, show that this soldier first entered the theatre of war in France on 21 April 1915, and was entitled to the 1915 Star, Victory and British War medals. There is no information on the records to confirm this was ‘our’ William, who would have been 36-7 at the time. I haven’t found anything to disprove it either.

The twins (born 23 December 1919) were almost 18 months old at the time of the 1921 census. The family has changed address again, and are now at 117 Tottenham Lane, Hackney. William is still working for his old employer, Mr Lane, of the Sterilised Milk Company at 178 Culford Road. Their two eldest sons are both apprentices, one to a shipwright and one to a thermometer maker.

Around 1922, the family moved again, to 70 Gunton Road, and this was the address eldest son Len gives when he leaves London for Australia in 1923. Outgoing passenger lists show him, aged 21 and a shipwright, leaving London on 23 October that year aboard the steamship HMS Jervis Bay of the Commonwealth Line. She had been launched the previous year, her main trade being carrying imigrants to Australia. He married an Australian woman, Matilda Amy Elsie Bunce, and they had one surviving daughter as far as I can tell, who is still living in Australia, now in her 80s. When he retired in 1969, he was said to have emigrated from London in 1925. The article describes his work welcoming and helping immigrants from all over the world, and his work at the BHP steelworks in Wyhalla. His descendents still live in Australia.

Extract from article published in the Port Lincoln Times, 4 September 1969 (p10), accessed via Trove
See full article at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/269807280

William’s occupation remained steady throughout the rest of his life. He was described as a milk carrier when his daughter Gladys married Frank Askew in 1931, and a [milk] salesman on son Reginald’s marriage certificate of 1933 (he was a salesman for the dairy). At the time of the 1939 Register, he is a milk salesman, his two youngest sons working as cycle welders. Of these, Leslie married at the end of 1940 (father, milkman) and Norman, in 1941.

Some time after the outbreak of WWII, William and Annie Ephgrave moved to Sandown, on the Isle of Wight. Another Ancestry user descended from William and Annie has shared a photo of Annie with her daughter Gladys, son-in-law Frank Askew and their daughter, said to be taken around 1949, although the location isn’t shown. Gladys looks very much like my grandmother Jessie Ephgrave’s sister, also called Gladys, who was born 13 years later.

On 17 March 1949, son Leonard travelled from Australia to Sandown, staying at the Tenerife Hotel. That May, his younger brother Norman emigrated to Australia with his wife Queenie and young son Paul (a second son, Peter, was born in Australia in 1950, and the family settled in Wyhalla, where older brother Len had been living before his retirement). Len and his wife Matilda and their ten year old daughter ‘Miss V L Ephgrave’, left Sandown on 20 October 1949, heading home to Australia. Less than a month later, his father William died and was buried at Sandown. Annie, his widow, died there almost a decade later, in 1958.