E i.  Jane Bessie Ball's Family    Home Page   Family History   Ball Family Start     29 March 2007

Born:	20th August 1852	Cornwall: Little Petherick,
Married:	7th April 1877	London: Hanover Square,
Lived:		Cornwall and Northamptonshire:                  Kettering, Wellingborough
Died:	7th Dec 1938	Northants: Wellingborough,

	Contents
A.	Family Recollections
B.	The Search Begins
C.	Distant Ancestors 1600 onwards
D.	Ancestors of Bessie Ball living in Little Petherick 1715 onwards
E.	Family, grandparents & first cousins of Bessie Ball.? 1763 onwards
F.	Bessie and Prideaux Place 1871 onwards
G.	Relatives living near L. Petherick 1841 onwards
H.	Smuggling and Wrecking
I.	Evidence of Ball’s involved in Smuggling
J.	Protestation Returns  1641

A.    Family Recollections

Nancy Tall and Bill Nichols, my mother and uncle, provided the oral information behind this tree.  My mother, Nancy Tall (nee Nichols) believed that her grandmother Bessie (christened Jane) Ball, was born on the 21 August 1852 near Padstow Cornwall and died in 1938 aged 86 at Wellingborough, Northants.  According to Nancy, Bessie was at one stage head nursemaid to ‘lords and ladies’ children at a house just outside Padstow.  Bessie took the family’s children to see Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace and sat in the state coach (the golden one used for coronations). It was presumably there that she met her future husband, Stephen Nichols. Bessie also told her grandchildren that:

Bessie told grandson Bill that two of her uncles were shipwreckers. That the parishioners would leave the church and lure the ships on to the rocks. The leaders were 'the bloke in the large house (where Jane worked) and the vicar'. Whatever was plundered was hidden in the crypt. No evidence supports this 'Jamaica Inn' tale but, as later comments on smuggling and wrecking demonstrate, Bessie would have heard about both activities as a child.

As regards Bessie's meeting Queen Victoria and working as nursemaid in a big house; whilst there is no final proof, the evidence collected suggests she worked for the Prideaux-Brunes who own a mansion on the outskirts of Padstow. The Prideaux-Brunes have had links with royalty since Elizabethan times and would have met Queen Victoria. Bessie and Stephen Nichols lived at Braybrooke and Dingley, Nr. Market Harborough.. See Nichols' family History.

Incidentally, indices of death (Truro record office) and prison (Cornwall Studies Library) sentences included neither Ball's nor Osbornes. If Bessie's 'uncles' were caught wrecking then they were not found guilty - did they 'volunteer' for the Royal Navy (a possibility referred to in the C.S.Forrester, 'Hornblower' books) ??????

To anybody who reads this:
Do visit the church at Little Petherick.  Walk up the lane opposite to Ballaminers passing the cottages where Bessie was born. Step in the footsteps of Bessie, her parents, and grandparents and walk the two mile public footpath between Little Petherick's Church and Padstow.