Alfred Bond: Landowner, Rector and Rascal

This is the story of my mysterious grandmother, Christine Cambridge, who was born in about 1881 and adopted by Daniel and Sandys Rann in Birmingham. Christine never knew her birth parents, but DNA evidence proves that she was the grandchild of Alfred and Georgianna Eliza Bond of Freston in Suffolk.

Alfred received a comfortable income as Rector of Freston, but he was also a substantial landowner in his own right, and seems to have enjoyed the pleasures of a country squire without suffering too much inconvenience at the hands of his parishioners. Georgianna's parents, Joseph Sidney Tharp and Anna Maria Gent, will have provided her with a generous marriage portion, invested to generate an annual income, and she also inherited big wodge of cash from her uncle, George William Gent of Moyns Park.

Georgianna's grave in Freston

Despite all of this, in March 1878, local newspapers reported that Alfred's creditors had arranged a meeting to determine whether or not he should be declared bankrupt. The process moved slowly and Georgianna died that November, before it was resolved. At this point, her marriage portion and inheritance passed to the children, leaving Alfred even harder up than before. 

His situation was going to get worse. In February 1879, Alfred failed to attend a public hearing into his finances, claiming that his eldest son was critically ill. Alfred junior proved him right by dying on the 13th of March but this didn't stop an auction of the contents of the rectory at the end of that month. Alfred failed to attend two further hearings in April and May, but this did nothing to prevent his downfall. He was ejected from the priesthood at the beginning of June, and the church and rectory were reclaimed by the diocese in July.

The trustees assessed Alfred's debts at £22,161 10s and 7d. Taking inflation into account is horribly complicated), and lots of different calculations are available. I'm going to use the relative income measure, which gives a sense of economic status or prestige. Using this measure, Alfred's debts are equivalent to £20.1m today.

He had unpaid bills from solicitors and bankers, and also tradesmen, including tailors, drapers, corn merchants and wine-sellers. He'd borrowed money from his own children and from his wife's uncle and brother, as well as from several fellow vicars. There's no evidence that he'd tried to live within his means, though. His auctioned possessions included 840 bottles of wine, over a thousand books and five different horse-drawn vehicles! 

It appears that Alfred got himself into this mess over at least two decades. In 1858, his brother-in-law, John Manners Gordon Tharp, had borrowed £6k (equivalent to £2.3m today), repayable if and when he inherited Chippenham Park. He'd passed half of that amount onto Alfred on the understanding that they'd split the repayment when it came due. No matter how fond he was of his brother-in-law, Alfred must have breathed a sigh of relief when he died in 1875. John Manners Gordon Tharp had won his gamble by dying before his father, with the result that neither he nor Alfred had to repay the money they'd been advanced.

[Monty Tharp, his brother's heir, disagreed with this view and put in a claim of £11k for repayment and interest (worth almost £10m today) when Alfred was declared bankrupt. The trustees and an appeal judge disallowed it, and this may be part of the reason why Monty left Chippenham Park to a cousin rather than to his nearest male relative, Alfred's eldest son.]

Perhaps inspired by this wheeze, Alfred gave his own anticipated inheritance from his mother as security against a £2160 bank loan in 1862 (worth about £2.3m today), and the following year he borrowed another £6k from his father-in-law (worth about £5.8m today), listing the rectory and other properties in security. A further bank loan for £4600 (about £4.5m) was guaranteed by Alfred's mother and a friend called Charles William Wentworth Fitzgibbon in the same year. These loans were all at 5% interest and Alfred sold off some of his land and properties to pay them off, but he continued to take out further loans too. This juggling act continued for 20 odd years until he ran out of credit and his debts caught up with him. 

Alfred's eldest surviving son, Edward Charles, drew up an agreement in 1880 by which he put his own property in trust to provide his father with £400 a year (worth about £342k, so it wasn't ungenerous). For every £1500 paid back to family and friends, Alfred would receive an increase of £50 in his annual income. Edward's motivations were honourable but he made the mistake of assuming that Alfred would behave honourably too. While he did make some repayments in the first two years, these stopped in 1881. I suspect he'd done his sums and worked out that, unless he lived until his mid-80s, he'd be better off keeping the money he had.

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