Creases and Creaseys

Welcome to the first web blog for the Winteringham family of websites.

One of the most fascinating Winteringham-related Ebay auctions ended on Sunday. It was of a “sampler” - one of those pieces of needlework that was so in vogue for young girls in the nineteenth century and probably well before that. This one though was by eleven year old Winteringham girl, Evalina Evratt, who included her age (11), the date of the sampler (May 14th 1878) and crucially the fact that she was at Winteringham National School. We can find her in the parish registers for both her baptism in December 1866, and her marriage to Charles Altoft when both she and the groom were 24.

I have no idea what price one might expect for a sampler, though this auction rapidly reached into the mid £40 mark, and then gradually worked its way up to £97. And there it stayed until seven seconds before the close when the price suddenly shot up to £141.07, and then £143.07!

I couldn’t help musing what young Evalina would have thought had she known the sampler she crafted so carefully would fetch a price roughly equivalent to what an agricultural labourer of her day would earn in THREE years!

We received an interesting email from Australia this week. It was from a descendant of one of Winteringham’s bobbies - PC 124 Jack Creasey, who apparently was the first policeman to live in Elim House, and who had five children - Joyce, Miriam, Jack, Betty and Geoff. Having lived in the house in the 1950s, I was able to send a few old photos of the gardens as they had been then, because I doubt that they had changed much from the late 1920s to the early 50s. By today’s standards it was a large gardens, some of it very productive, but the Hewde Lane end decidedly stony (giving me an excellent mental picture for Miss Brown’s telling of “the seed that fell on stony ground”!

If anyone has any information at all on Jack Creasey, his wife, or their five children, then it would be most welcome!

Finally today, a reminder that tomorrow (Tuesday 2nd June) sees the June Council Meeting in the freshly revamped Village Hall. Members of the public are always welcome. The meeting starts at 7:30pm.