The Children of Henry Parsons and Elizabeth Mary Merefield Donne

Henry Parsons was a cousin twice removed of Sidney Parsons. Their most recent common ancestor was William Parsons of Holton who lived from 1751 to 1837.

Henry had been born in 1821 and brought up in comfortable circumstances in the manor house in Charlton Horethorne in Somerset. At the time of his marriage in 1851 his home was Haselbury House in the village of Haselbury Plucknett where he farmed and was a steward to Lord Portman. Elizabeth Mary Merefield Donne, his bride, came from nearby Crewkerne where she and her brother Benjamin lived with a wealthy elderly relative, Anna Maria Susanna Donisthorpe who had adopted them.

Henry and Elizabeth lived for many years in Haselbury Plucknett and all of their children were born while they were living there. In later life they moved a few miles to Misterton where they lived in the manor house which Henry bought from Lord Portman.

Henry Parsons died in Misterton in 1895 and his body was sent to the newly built crematorium at Woking to be cremated.

His wife Elizabeth died 1n 1897 and was buried in Misterton.

Children of Henry and Elizabeth Parsons

Henry and Elizabeth Parsons had five sons and two daughters.

Click on one of the following to go straight to the selected person —

    Henry John Donne Parsons
    Mary Jane Bostock née Parsons
    Charles Merefield Parsons
    Kate Parsons
    Frank Donisthorpe Parsons
    Herbert Parsons
    Robert Maurice Peters Parsons

Henry John Donne Parsons (1851 to 1906)

Henry was baptised in Haselbury Plucknett on the 28^th of January 1852. He became a land-agent and a surveyor and in 1876 he travelled to Adelaide in South Australia where he farmed and was a land agent and valuer for the government. Three years later he married Lucy Jane Taylor who had been born in South Australia. Her father had been a doctor there but had since returned to Taunton. Henry and Lucy’s first three children were born in or near Adelaide but in 1886 the family returned to England. On their return they lived in North Perrot in Somerset for about five years before moving to Exeter where they remained until Henry died in 1906. Lucy then moved to Exmouth where she died in 1911.

Their children were:

• Maurice, Henry and Lucy’s first son, became a property valuer. He married in 1913. In January 1916 he was commissioned as a Captain in the Royal Horse Artillery and in July he was killed in action. He is commemorated in Laventie Military Cemetery, La Gorgue, France.

• Merefield Donne Parsons, travelled to Burma when he was 22 years old where he lived and worked in Rangoon. In 1908 he was killed in an accident in Lahore in modern day Pakistan.

• Cecil Braithwaite Parsons, Henry and Lucy’s third child, moved to South Africa as a young man and lived at Elsenburg near Stellenbosch. Upon the outbreak of war he joined the South African Infantry in which he was commisioned as a lieutenant. He was killed at the Battle of the Somme on the 16^th of July 1916. A newspaper report of his death read “Lieut. Parsons, who was a fine, stalwart officer, gallantly led an attack on a German trench and was the first to sprint over the parapet. He was later found grasping his revolver, with the German officer in charge of the trench also lying dead a short distance away. Lieut. Parsons, previous to going to France, served throughout the German South-west African campaign.”

• Margaret Grace was Henry and Lucy’s first daughter and the first of their children to be born in England. She was baptised in North Perrott in Somerset on the 1^st of April 1888. In 1919 she got married, at her uncle’s house in Misterton, to Carleton Hugh Fenton who was a New Zealander. Margaret and Carleton spent their life together in New Zealand where she died in 1973. Hugh Fenton was a son of the well known Judge Fenton who, in New Zealand, drew up the Native Lands Act and became Chief Judge of the Native Land Court.

• Harold Charles was Henry and Lucy’s youngest son, born in Exeter in 1892. He became a mining engineer and died in Beirut in the Lebanon in 1957. He is buried in the Anglo-American cemetery there.

• Lucy Joyce Parsons, Henry and Lucy’s youngest child, was born in Exeter in 1897. She joined the Diplomatic Service and never married. During the second world war she was employed by the Special Operations Executive and afterwards spent some time at the British Embassy in Bangkok. Upon her retirement she lived in Chelsea where she died in 1977.

Mary Jane Bostock née Parsons (1853 to 1936)

Mary Jane was Henry and Elizabeth’s second child. She was born in Lyme Regis in Dorset early in 1853 and baptised in Haselbury Plucknett in November of the following year. She married an estate agent called George Hastings Bostock in Misterton on the 14^th of September 1882. George had been born in Sussex and the wedding ceremony was performed by the Revd. F.A. Bowles who was rector of Singleton and prebendary of Chichester Cathedral. Some years later, when the Revd. Bowles died, he left George a house.

George was living in Iwerne Minster in Dorset when he married and he and Mary lived there for many years. In later life they moved to Windsor in Berkshire. George died there in 1913. Mary Jane moved to Bexley Heath in Kent and later to Ayr in Scotland where she died in 1936.

Mary and George Bostock had two children — Francis Hastings and Mary Barbara:

• Francis Hastings Bostock was born in 1884. He became an officer in the Royal Navy where he was initially a navigator. In 1915 he married a nursing sister called Penelope Mary Hadland Bowling who had served on the staff at the Haslar naval hospital. Commander Francis Bostock died in 1946 in Petersfield in Hampshire.

• Mary Barbara Bostock was born in Iwerne Minster in 1887. She married in Windsor in 1914 after which she and her husband went to live in Canada.

Charles Merefield Parsons (1854 to 1881)

Charles Merefield Parsons was baptised in Haselbury Plucknett on the 2^nd of November 1854 having been born in Lyme Regis on the 24^th of March.

Charles was lost at sea during a storm in Spencers Gulf, South Australia, on the 1^st of June 1881. His parents placed a plaque commemorating him in the church in Misterton in Somerset.

Kate Parsons (1855 to 1933)

Kate was baptised on the 21^st of June 1855 in Haselbury Plucknett. She never married and continued to live with her parents when they moved to Misteron. When her mother died in 1897 she was one of the executors of her estate.

Kate stayed on in Misterton after her mother died, living at the Manor cottage. Her brother Frank sometimes stayed with her.

Eventually Kate moved to Minehead on the Somerset coast where she lived in Beacon Road, a leafy lane on the hill above the harbour. She died in November 1933 leaving a large estate. Her executors were her brother Robert and her nephew Commander Francis Hastings Bostock RN (Retd.).

Frank Donisthorpe Parsons (1856 to 1911)

Frank was born in Haselbury Plucknett on the 5^th of November 1856 and baptised there just over a month later. After attending Sherborne school he became a civil engineer.

When Frank’s father became gravely ill in 1895, Frank was unable to return home because he was on an island off the west coast of Africa with a certain Major Charles George Elers. Major Elers had reportedly discovered an immense find of guano on some little-known islands which proved so profitable that he became known in mercantile circles as “The new Guano King”.

After his father died Frank sometimes stayed with his sister Kate but he eventually settled at the Mill West Milton near Melplash in Dorset, which is between Beaminster and Bridport. This old water-mill was later the home of the well-known broadcaster and naturalist Kenneth Allsop.

Frank died at his home on the 4^th of February 1911 and was buried in Misterton. In his will he left £1000 to his housekeeper Mrs Ada Young (a 46 year old widow who was born in Fareham) and £100 to her 20 year old daughter May.

Herbert Parsons (1859 to 1932)

Henry and Elizabeth’s son Herbert was born in Haselbury Plucknett in 1856. He went to school at Sherborne and became a solicitor.

On the 30^th of November 1886 Herbert married Mary Sortain Hulbert in Camden in London. Mary’s father had been an auctioneer in Bath and had been mayor of that city, but he had died nine years before Mary married Herbert.

Herbert practiced in Storrington in Sussex and in 1895 he was appointed Clerk of the newly formed Thakeham Rural District Council which included Storrington.

By 1901 Herbert and Mary were living in Willesden in Middlesex where they remained until they died.

Herbert died early in the year 1932 and Mary just a month or two later.

Herbert and Mary had four children, two girls and two boys:

• Their son Lancelot was born in 1887 in Mildenhall in Suffolk but survived for less than a year.

• Their second child was a girl, Sylvie Merefield Parsons, and she was also born in Mildenhall. When she was 29 or 30 years old she married Hugh Callan Scott who was a manager. They lived in Amersham in Buckinghamshire. He died in 1949 and she died in 1963. Their son Hubert Scott was a pilot in WW2 and afterwards became an airline pilot.

• Mervyn Merefield Parsons was born in 1889, also in Mildenhall. He moved to Malaysia but upon the outbreak of war in 1914 he joined the army as a private. He was killed in action at Potijze in Flanders in September 1915. His commanding officer wrote to his parents that he had been shot by an ‘unaimed bullet’.

• Hubert Merefield Parsons, Herbert and Mary’s fourth child, was born in 1894. He too joined the army as a private but was promoted to the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, Machine Gun Corps. He was killed in action in April 1918 in Ploegsteert near Hainaut in Belgium.

Robert Maurice Peters Parsons (1860 to 1947)

Robert Maurice Peters Parsons was Henry and Elizabeth’s youngest child. He was born in Haselbury Plucknett on the 23^rd of November 1860 and baptised on the 20^th of March of the following year.

Maurice (as he was known) was educated at Crewkerne School and became a keen sportsman. He was said to be one of the pioneers of rugby football in Somerset and played as a forward for the county. He also hunted with the Taunton Vale Foxhounds.

Like his father and his brother Henry, Maurice became a surveyor and land agent.

Maurice lived at home with his parents until he was over thirty years old and then, in 1894, he married Beatrice Ogilve Barber in the church of St.Saviour’s, Highbury, London. Beatrice was a daughter of a businessman called Arthur Holt Barber who had been born in Liverpool, gone to sea, obtained a master’s certificate, and then become a dealer in sailcloth. By the time Beatrice was born he was living in London and had been made a Freeman of the City.

After they married, Maurice and Beatrice lived at first in Crewkerne and then, after his mother had died, in Misterton. He became a Justice of the Peace, a councillor, and vice president of the South Somerset Liberal Association.

At the end of the Great War Maurice and Beatrice paid for a stained-glass window in the church in Misterton in thanksgiving for the safe return of their son and in remembrance of their four nephews who were killed in France in the War of 1914-18. The names of the four nephews are given in panels in the design of this window as: Harry Maurice Donne Parsons, Cecil Braithwaite Parsons, Mervin Merefield Parsons, and Hubert Merefield Parsons.

Maurice’s wife Beatrice died in 1942. Three years later he resigned from the council due to his increasing deafness, and two years after that he died at his home, the manor house in Misterton.

Maurice and Beatrice had one son and two daughters:

• Arthur Henry Parsons was born in 1895. He joined the Royal Navy as a cadet and advanced to the rank of captain. In 1923 he married Phyllis Margaret Broadbent whose father, Sir John Francis Harpin Broadbent, was a medical doctor and a Baronet. Sir John’s father, Sir William Broadbent Bart, F.R.S, F.R.C.P, had been physician to three generations of the Royal family. Upon his retirement Arthur joined the family firm of land agents in Misterton and eventually retired to Sidmouth in Devon where he died in 1982.

• Elizabeth Barbara Parsons, born in 1896, was Maurice and Beatrice’s first daughter. She married Campbell Thomas Sanctuary in Melplash in Dorset in June 1918. He had been a surveyor in the firm of Sanctuary and Son in Bridport but had joined the Royal Flying Corps. When he married Elizabeth he was a Captain in the recently-formed Royal Air Force. His home address was Mangerton House, Melplash, Dorset which is not far from Milton Mill where Elizabeth’s uncle Frank Donisthorpe Parsons had lived until his death in 1911. After Campbell had been de-mobbed he and Elizbeth lived at his home in Dorset. When war threatened in 1939 he was a special constable with the rank of Inspector. He died in Cullompton in Devon in 1968. Elizabeth died in Weymouth in 1971.

• Beatrice Mary Parsons was born in 1900. She never married and she died in Misterton in 1987.

Return to Sidney Parsons’ Ancestors

You are free to make use of the information in these web pages in any way that you wish but please be aware that the author, Mike Parsons, is unable to accept respsonsibility for any errors or omissions.

Mike can be contacted at parsonspublic@gmail.com

The information in these web pages comes from a number of sources including: Hampshire County Records Office, Somerset Heritage Centre; Dorset County Records Office; Southampton City Archives; the General Register Office; several on-line newspaper archives; several on-line transcriptions of Parish Register Entries; and several on-line indexes of births, marriages and deaths. The research has also been guided at times by the published work of others, both on-line and in the form of printed books, and by information from personal correspondence with other researchers, for all of which thanks are given. However, all of the information in these web pages has been independently verified by the author from original sources, facimile copies, or, in the case of a few parish register entries, transcriptions published by on-line genealogy sites. The author is aware that some other researchers have in some cases drawn different conclusions and have published information which is at variance from that shown in these web pages.