STORM AND COMPANY
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Historical Introduction to THE PEDIGREE
Robin Hood's Bay - "Bay" to those who belong - comes
into history late. In 1539, the men of Fylingdales parish were
mustered, and among them were several Storms. Jacob Storm listed
John, Matthew, Peter, William, Robert and Bartholomew who were
tenants of Whitby Abbey when it was dissolved at this period, and
"Robin Hoode Baye" was their place of residence, The
name of the village recurred in 1542 on the occasion of another
muster, and among the 82 billmen and archers of "Robynhoyd
Bay" and "Fyllyng Dayll" were William, Robert,
Peter and John Storm. Descent from Scandinavians was commonly
claimed in Bay, and there is some reason to accept this, because
it might apply to much of the North Riding stock. Surnames,
however, do not take us very far back, and most of the typical
Bay names are to be found in the neighbouring countryside as
early as they occur in the village. It may be that enclosure of
lands to make larger farms drove increasing numbers to seek a
living from the sea.
The earliest reference to the name Storm near Fylingdales
comes in 1330, when John Storm of Levisharn took a hind calf in
Pickering Forest; he failed to appear and was outlawed, and his
kinsman William lost bail. There may have been some of the family
among the fishermen, not of Bay but of Fyling, for whom Whitby
Abbey provided a net in 1394. Subsequently, there are a few early
references at Beverley, Hull, Scarborough and York, and the Ripon
area, and many at Howden near Hull until the time of the plague
in that city, in the sixteen-thirties. It might be presumed,
however, from the number of Storm households in Bay before
mid-sixteenth century that the family had been growing in the
settlement for some time. In the absence of accurate information
about origins, members used to refer to the family cheerfully as
"one of the lost tribes of Israel".
The best-known early reference to the village is that made by
John Leland who visited the coast about 1540. He called it a
"fisher townlet" with a "dok". From this
time, the Bay people have often been thought of - not very
accurately - as fishermen exclusively. Occupations are not often
given in the parish register until late in the eighteenth
century, but sometimes they can be gleaned from other sources,
like wills. Nevertheless, a few mariners and masters are to be
found early in the century, and from then on it can safely be
said that "fishing village" was an increasingly
inadequate description of Bay. Scores of careers can be noted,
from apprentice to able seaman to boatswain, and so to mate and
master, in the many vessels that belonged to the village
households. However, Leland in his day saw twenty boats on the
beach, and a document of 1563 concerning Richard Cholmley's
application to purchase land and properties in Fylingdales from
the Crown reveals that there may have been a sufficient
population in the settlement to man this number of craft. There
were some fifty households and the boats were more than likely
the three-man cobles, the type evolved in working from a beach
and thus significant in Bay history.
Many tenancies are listed in 1563, including Matthew Storm's Cow
Close one of the largest holdings in the parish, and the largest
in the village, judging by his rent. A large "close"
like this tends to support the view that reduction of the number
of holdings was forcing people to look seaward for livelihood.
Peter Storm had another close, and a cottage, and among the
occupiers of 28 other cottages were William, Peter, Bartholomew
and two Roberts. This was the most numerous family in Bay.
Bartholomew may have died about 1590 leaving a widow Jane and
children Edward, Robert, Bartholomew, Joseph and Agnes.
It is probably necessary to accept that in the early years while
some Bay people farmed, most fished for a living or mixed the
two. The death of Robert Storm, fisherman, not at Bay but inland
at Fylingthorpe in 1603 suggests this possibility of secondary
occupations. His son had a holding at Bonsidedale on the moor
near Flask, which makes him rather more a farmer than a
fisherman. A little before this, an Anthony Storm also died at
Fylingthorpe
Among other "Bay" names there were present in 1563 -
and before - some of those with which many links were to be
forged by marriage and co-operative employment in fishing and
trading vessels over the next three centuries. These included
notably, Hewitson, Moorsom and Richardson.
In 1638, the Cholmleys began to dispose of property in Whitby and
Fylingdales by means of 1,000-year leases. This may have been to
encourage settlement and stimulate the economy; it was certainly
an inducement to inhabitants to stay. But there was great social
significance in the development because it conferred a great
measure of independence on the community, and would seem to
explain why so many people appear in the parish register as
householders, as though they were freeholders. The inhabitants
are subsequently to be found paying a few pence a year for their
houses and garths, and a shilling for any dwellings they built on
the latter. The "as- good-as-freehold" tenure continued
into the twentieth century, and was finally removed by
conversions to freehold, long after any payments had ceased.
Freedom to build and extend dwellings can be seen as one cause of
the romantic appearance of the village, which Professor Pevsner
called 'delightful', and it may be coupled in effect with the
erosion of the cliffs which has compacted the village at the rate
of about 90 feet per century.
Social change also arose for other reasons. One was that the
Cholmleys, the lords of the manor, removed from Fylingdales to
Whitby, and sold their house and demesne lands in the parish to
their relatives, the Hothams. Sir John Hotham and his son were
both executed after the Civil War engagement at Hull, and around
1660 only Lady Margaret Hotham remained at the hall. From this
time, the Bay community was increasingly egalitarian in nature -
and the more so because it derived its livelihood substantially
from the sea rather than from having to labour in an influential
landowner's fields. This character persisted, and those who can
remember the village before WW II will recall how it was normal
and common to meet about the place people of vastly differing
economic fortunes but of the same blood.
PHOTO: A Bit Of
News
This circumstance introduces one of the most striking aspects
of this family history, which is the retention in Robin Hood's
Bay of representatives of most of the branches, with the effect
that at the time of the census in 1841, for example, there were
some ninety members present, if those away at sea are included.
With the other must numerous families of Bedlington, Granger,
Harrison and Moorsom, they accounted for nearly half of the
population. There was a strong awareness of indentity among these
people, if the handing down of baptismal names and the use in
baptism of one another's surnames be taken as evidence. The
combined effect of these two factors - the large size of the
family and the common family names - is to create a tangle of
ancestors, a situation many family researchers would envy, up to
the point where the numerous Annes, Elizabeths, Jacobs, Janes,
Isaacs, Matthews, and the rest, have to be sorted out. As Jacob
Storm of the memoirs remarked, nearly a century ago, "The
Storm's pedigree has been the toughest hunt I ever had, and had
it not been for the traditional information for which I am
beholden to my Mother and Grandmother, I should have been out of
the hunt long since .... and you must take the book [i.e. his
record of the family, the first such effort] as we took the old
wooden sailing vessels, viz, with all faults". Despite much
work on the records since his time, notably by his grandson
Raymond, the researcher can still sympathise with his
exasperation. A major difficulty at the outset is that the parish
register begins late, in 1653. There is a transcript for only
half of the years between 1600 and 1640, and the decade 1691.
1700 is incomplete. However, although many of the people in the
scattered entries cannot be built into a continuous history,
intermarriage must secure them as ancestors, sometimes in a
female line but direct rather than collateral, for most of the
family living at the present time, despite the continuing lack of
some detail.
Vital events concerning several of the family are recorded in, or
to be inferred from, documents other than the parish register, of
the early seventeenth century, and these might be starting points
for descents if more evidence is discovered. Robert Storm,
possibly one of the children of Bartholomew who has been
mentioned, married Ellena Poskett in 1606. "Poskett"
was a prominent farming name in Fylingdales neighbourhood. Its
most famous holder was Father Nicholas Postgate of Egton, who was
executed at York in 1679. Robert and Ellena had a son. Edward,
whose wife Agneta bore a daughter Hellen (or
"Hellinor") who married Richard of the important
Hewitson family, but there is no record of children. Joseph
(probably another of Bartholornew's sons) lost his wife in 1633,
a few months after the death of their son, Thomas. The children
of Robert, the Fylingthorpe fisherman who died in 1603, leave
little trace: Henry disappears after his holding at Bonsidedale
is listed in 1638, and William died in 1634; their sister
Elizabeth's marriage to William Huntrods is worth noting, because
her husband's family was one of the best known in the parish -
and so well represented by Williams that it defies sorting out
for much of the time. Sometimes one might be guided by the
recurrence of Christian names. There were in the seventeenth
century several Thomas Storms, and these may descend from one
whose daughter Elizabeth was born in 1617. Again, searching the
registers of neighbouring parishes produces yet another Robert
who married Isabel Chapman at Egton in 1632/3, but he cannot be
safely connected to the other bearers of the name, and experience
of the problem of identity in these years gives early warning
that it would be unwise to link him too confidently with the
Robert, mariner of Whitby, who was buried in 1638 at
Bishopswearmourth.
There is difficulty with one marriage of the eighteenth century,
concerning a William who married Anna Nightingale in 1714. He was
probably born in the incomplete decade, 1691-1700, and although
one or two guesses might be made about his parentage, there are
no children who can safely be assigned to the couple. He has
therefore been omitted from the Pedigree, but he has not been
forgotten. The same century produces a few interesting
"strays": for example, it would be good to know more
about the Thomas Storm of Bay who, at the age of thirty in 1755,
was a shipmate of James Cook in the Whitby vessel Friendship
On such fragments much might be built if new evidence appears.
Meanwhile it is proposed to start here with rather more
substantial evidence, the first item of which concerns the
household of Joshua. The record for his children begins in 1617,
after a gap in the transcript of the parish register of nine
years (which means that he may have been married for some time
before that). The transcript of the register begins in 1600 and
shows no marriage; therefore Joshua who starts the "family
tree" of "No Male Issue" may have been born before
1580 and thus have been the son of one of the men of 1563, and
perhaps grandson of Bartholomew of 1539. The fifteenth century,
however, remains below the horizon.
Descent from many of the daughters' marriages has been pursued;
those with Bedlington, Granger, Harrison, Helm, Hewitson,
Moorsom, Peacock, Pinkney, Richardson, Rickinson, Robson, Skerry,
Tindale, Todd, Trueman and - naturally - Storm, are of particular
note since they created over a long period of time a highly
integrated group at the heart of society and economy. An effort
has been made to find a place for the names mentioned: no picture
of Bay would be complete without them. Most of them occur among
the owners and masters listed with the vessels in the Appendix.
Not all the inter-relationships can possibly be given, but the
repetition of names in the Pedigree will make the point about
complexity. The intention in respect of the formidable-looking
detail in text and footnotes which this sort of research can
produce has been to give enough information to help descendants
of the group - probably hundreds of them - to see where they fit
in, and to take the matter further if they wish, but greater
importance has been attached to presenting concisely and readably
an impression of the triumphs and tragedies of a doggedly
persistent community of ordinary people.
One of the most engaging and important aspects of the history of
Robin Hood's Bay is the inhabitants' talent for survival as their
own masters. Having little land, they turned to the sea, and by
the middle of the nineteenth century about a thousand people
living there, in what more than one writer recognised as great
prosperity. There still survive some of those who remember the
retired shipmasters of Bay who liked to recall how "this was
once the richest place m the coast for its size" before the
steamers drew people away to Tyne, Wear and Tees. The spirit of
independence is well represented by the words of Henry Matthew
Storm, a member of the Massachusets Senate, known in Boston as
the honest selectman, who has not been found a proper place in
the ensuing pages, but who undoubtedly belongs there, somewhere.
His son Henry Hallgate Storm of Cambridge, Massachusets knew that
his father's people hailed from Bay - but had moved away, and
told how he liked to say that one day he would go back to "a
village in Yorkshire - not Robin Hood's Bay - and stand covered
in the street while the locals doffed their caps to the lord of
the manor, and declare, "I am a citizen of the United States
of America". Anyone who wishes to further the research work
might consider the placing of Henry Matthew (1853-1917), son of
Thomas and Mary Storm, a worthwhile undertaking. See NOTE (1).
But independence is not the whole story. The customary business
arrangement in the fishing a co-operative one: the master - the
person described in this work as "Master Fisherman" -
provided the boat, and his crew were responsible for the gear.
When profits were divided, everyone got a share but the master
took an extra "one for the boat". Thus co-operation was
familiar, and it is to be seen in the shipowning days when
kinsmen and friends put their money together, and a leading
master mariner among them would head the company. Young men
served apprenticeships with relatives, experienced men made their
way to become boatswains and mates of vessels owned by familiar
groups, and then worked to secure masters' berths which would
allow them to earn the means of continuing the cycle of
co-operative involvement. Thus the community kept itself going,
in a way quite different from that in, say, a manufacturing town.
One cost of the chosen way of life was danger. Any reader of the
pages that follow is likely to be impressed by the frequent
reference to loss of life at sea. Jacob Storm of Leeside, left a
note that helps to put the matter in perspective. Without quoting
his source, he stated that from the beginning of 1873 to mid-May
1880, 1,965 British ships were lost, of which 1,171 were sailing
vessels, and 10,827 lives went with them. Freak weather in the
first six-and-a-half months of 1881 accounted for 919 wrecks on
the British coast; in the previous year there had been 700. The
Bay experience was thus not unusual: the training and the
subsequent life were rigorous and hazardous, and difficult for
both men and dependants. Storm Jameson in Journey from the North
wondered about its effect in his youth on her seemingly unfeeling
and unapproachable father - a shipmaster who had served his time
in sail - when she unexpectedly received from him in his last
years a post-card view of the moors, on the back of which he had
written, "A place of dreams". Perhaps a good word to
apply to these people is that chosen by Jacob to describe John
Harrison, the shipmaster uncle whom he admired and whom he placed
among "the most persevering men of his time".
A necessary note is that since dates of birth are not available
from the register until late in the eighteenth century, those of
baptism have generally been used, but the two are seldom more
than five months apart. The local taste for whimsey used to have
it that children were not presented for baptism until their
parents need not carry them up the long hill to the church, which
leaves the village with a one-in-three gradient. A more
realistic, but unhappily more prosaic, controlling factor was
that in the sailing-ship days, men came ashore at the beginning
of winter, and many births occurred in the following autumn, to
be followed by baptisms before sailing was resumed at the
approach of the next spring. Insurers could obviously influence
the length of the working season: 1st March was a popular
starting date, and many family occasions had to be celebrated by
then.
Mention must be made of a few Storm households at Lythe, a little
north of Whitby, in the later seventeenth, eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. There is no reason to suppose these did not
spring from the Bay stock, and that impression is strengthened by
the popularity of similar names, notably Matthew and William, and
involvement with the sea. It may be that these people were drawn
there by employment in shipping serving the alum industry, of
which there were branches at Peak and Brow near Bay. Many Bay
sailors and vessels brought materials there and took away the
finished product, but the most successful operations in this
North Riding industry were those carried out at Sandsend, only a
mile from Lythe.
Most of the historic trends that have been detected in the
village and its neighbourhood will be discernible in the
Pedigree. Although the lines with "no male issue" -
mostly short - no longer have Storm male representatives. there
are those with a descent that survives to enter the twentieth
century with male representatives. Even in the short descents,
there is evidence of much that will be seen in subsequent
chapters to be characteristic of the community. The main lines -
that is to say those which have been, and still are, best
represented - consist almost entirely of-
(a) the descent of William Storm and his wife, Elizabeth Reachey,
and their eldest son, William,
(b) the exploration of the branches that follow from William and
Elizabeth's son Jacob, and
(c) another branch, John Storm m Jane Moorsom, in which the name
has only recently died out, that exemplifies the familiar
long-term developments and serves to emphasise the great
continuity.
Besides offering evidence of the pattern of trends the Pedigree
adds to the accumulation of personal experiences from which it is
hoped there will emerge not only a picture of a way of life that
has all but vanished, but also reflections of wider themes, one
of these being, for example, the North East's three centuries of
obsession with merchant shipping. It would be unnatural if
complete uniformity prevailed, and the Edward Storm lines deals
with another, separate branch which contains the example of a
rare, deliberate association with the Royal Navy, serving to
emphasise by contrast the great concentration in trading vessels
in previous chapters.
The reader of the notes that accompany the descents may well
consider it a matter of regret that only one of the long
procession of mariners of Robin Hood's Bay thought fit to leave a
record like that of Jacob of Leeside.
NOTE :. Henry Hallgate Storm's daughter,
Mrs Carey Bok devoted much interest to the Curtis Institute of
Music, Philadelphia [1924], endowed and presided over by Mrs
Marie Louise Bok [nee Cords], wife of the publisher and music
Patron Edward William Bok. [See Bok in The New Grove Dictionary
of Music & Musicians. 1980]
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