It was a beautiful warm summer in 1786. The squire, Miles Branthwayt, had recently taken over the running of the paper mill in Taverham. The former tenant of the mill, John Anstead, was now employed as the manager. Anstead had two grown-up sons, John junior and Thomas (both paper makers) and a beautiful daughter, Elizabeth, aged 21. We do not know what she looked like, so in truth we cannot be sure that she was beautiful, but we can tell that she was very dear to her parents. She was also in love with another paper maker, a young man called John Burgess. By harvest time she was expecting his baby.
Her father cannot have been best pleased by this turn of events. In the eighteenth century the normal course for the young couple would have been to get married immediately they discovered the pregnancy, and from the fact that this did not happen we may suppose that Elizabeth’s father would not consent to the young couple’s marriage. The child (baptised Richard) was born early in February 1787, and only then, when it was apparent that the infant was healthy and likely to survive, would John Anstead agreed to the match. That at least is the implication of the sequence of events. Elizabeth became Mrs Burgess in March 1787.
After this inauspicious start John Burgess’s career went from strength to strength. His father-in-law John Anstead died aged 77 early in the next century, and his son John Junior became manager of the mill in his place. However, shortly afterwards, the squire (Miles Branthwayt) also died. His widow did not wish to continue as proprietor of the paper making business and consequently the mill need a new tenant. For some reason John Anstead junior missed the chance to become the operator of the mill (as his father had been) and continue the family tradition.
The mill was leased by a partnership led by the ambitious editor of the Norwich Mercury, Richard Mackenzie Bacon instead. Under Bacon’s leadership it was among the first mills in the world to produce machine made paper. He installed one of the new Fourdrinier machines. John Burgess it was who quickly became expert in operating the new equipment, not the former manager John Anstead. Burgess went on to become effective manager, while Anstead left the area. In the event things did not go well for Richard Bacon, and his business failed; after Bacon was made bankrupt in 1816 it was John Burgess who continued to operate the mill on behalf of the creditors. When the business was acquired by a new owner, Robert Hawkes (a wealthy Norwich merchant), Burgess became his partner. By 1820 he was himself wealthy enough to start buying property in Norwich and Costessey, where he purchased several cottages and the White Hart pub. He was even wealthy enough to rebuild the old pub in the latest Georgian style.
WHITE HART as rebuilt by John Burgess
At the time there was probably no one alive who knew more about making paper by machine than John Burgess, and during the years he was in charge of Taverham mill it prospered. It supplied paper to printers across East Anglia, not only in Norwich but as far afield as Cambridge, where the University Press was a demanding customer. This period was brought to a sudden close in 1830, when the mill was attacked one Saturday afternoon in December by machine-breakers who caused hundreds of pounds’ worth of damage. One of the rioters was identified as having been present on that afternoon, and was brought to trial at the Norwich Assizes, but was acquitted by a sympathetic jury. Less lucky was another man who was transported to Australia where he died.
However Robert Hawkes, the principal shareholder, had already sold his share in the mill to a pair of would-be entrepreneurs. The new partners, with whom John Burgess now found himself the junior partner, were two young men from wealthy local families. Unlike Robert Hawkes, they had no other business interests, and they started to meddle with with things at the mill, where Burgess had previously been free to manage alone. He soon left this new partnership, and instead took the lease on the vacant paper mill in Bungay. It was certainly a come-down in professional terms, since the Bungay mill was engaged in making brown wrapping paper by hand, instead of the machine-made white printing paper that he was experienced in. On the credit side he was at last his own boss.
What about Elizabeth, the young lady who had brought him into her family and so started his successful career? After the birth out of wedlock of their first son Richard, the couple went on to have three more sons. Charles was a healthy boy like his elder brother, but the next son, George, died soon after birth. Infant mortality was high in those days, and old John Anstead’s cautious delay in giving his consent to his daughter’s marriage had made sense from his point of view. It may seem hard-hearted to us but, as he saw it, if his daughter were forced to marry an unsuitable lad merely to legitimise an unborn child, who later died, she would have missed her chance to make a better match, and all for nothing. Of course, had he known how successful young John Burgess was later to become, he might well have had no objection to his daughter’s choice of husband.
Sadly, Elizabeth herself did not live to share in that success. Another son, again christened George, was born in 1795; the boy flourished, but this time it was the mother who did not survive. Elizabeth Burgess, née Anstead, was buried in Taverham churchyard on the 7th of March, aged 30. On a cold spring day, it was a sad (but all too common) end to a love affair that had begun in that hot summer, nine years earlier.
JOSEPH MASON
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