John Carpenter of Magdalen Street Exeter

John Carpenter of Magdalen Street Exeter
John Carpenter (b. Teignmouth 1816), husband of Susanna Chamberlain (b.
Broadclyst 1822), worked as a blacksmith and farrier at 33 Magdalen Street in
Exeter; his business is listed in both Hunt & Co.’s Exeter, Bristol & Directory of
1848 and White’s Devonshire Directory of 1850. 

We know he had least eight children: John Henry (b. 1849 in Teignmouth), Isabella (b. 1851, like all her younger siblings, in Exeter), Arthur Duncan (b. 1853), Julia (b. 1855), and then
Maria Margaret (b. 1860), Blanche (b. 1862) and Maud and Eva (b. 1864). 

John married in 1848, when Susanna was 26: it looks as if she, like her eldest sister
Charlotte, put off marriage until the income from her dressmaking had helped to
raise her eight younger Chamberlain siblings in Broadclyst.
John was the fifth child of Thomas Carpenter (b. 1776, a sawyer) and Esther
Towill Edwards (b. 1788*, a dressmaker), both of Teignmouth. 

His eldest brother, Thomas Edwards (b. 1804) and his third brother Henry George 

(b.1818) were both druggists (pharmacists/chemists); his fourth brother, 

William Frederick (b. 1821) was a veterinary surgeon and his fifth, 

Charles Francis (b.1823) a blacksmith, but by 1841 called an ‘assistant’, so possibly in a veterinary practice as well. Thomas Sr.’s family of eight was completed by three daughters
(Anna Maria, b. 1806, Eliza, b. 1811 and Sarah, b. 1813).
Unlike Charlotte in Cardiff, we cannot find Susanna running her own dress shop
in Exeter, but she could have been making clothes for a business in the town (and
at home after she married) – in Magdalen Street alone there was a stay maker**
at no. 48 and a straw hat maker at no. 26, as well as milliners at nos. 3, 17 and 20,
a hosier at no. 31 and tailors at nos. 13 and 25 (see separate post). 

Until he settled in Magdalen Street John must have driven a horse and cart the 15 miles
north to Exeter from Teignmouth (although the railway came in 1846). 

In 1848 he was 34, so may have been a widower when he married Susanna. 

She is still listed as a ‘farrier’s wife’ in the 1871 census, but is not present in 1881; John,
then aged 65, was employing two men, so the business was clearly flourishing,
and there is a census entry for 1901, when he would have been 85 or 86.
In the Post Office Directory of Exeter 1895–6, a John Carpenter (presumably
John’s son, John Henry, aged 44) is still at 33 Magdalen Street but now running a
‘veterinary forge’, so qualified to dispense medicine to and treat sick and lame
horses, not just shoe them. By 1906, no. 33 was again just a ‘shoeing forge’ with a
‘shoeing smith’ called Charles William Pyle, 30 in 1901 and possibly John Henry’s
son-in-law. In the 1911 census he is trading as ‘William Pyle & Co., blacksmith,
shoeing and general smith’, so financially secure enough to go into a partnership.
He almost certainly became an early automobile mechanic, as many blacksmiths
were forced to do as their trade contracted in the face of the mass production of
bicycles and cars and the decline in horse-drawn traffic; his business is still listed
in Besley’s Directory of Exeter & Suburbs 1916–19, so it survived the First World
War He seems to have had at least three children – two sons both called Charles
(b. 1891 and 1898, which implies that the elder son died) and a third son,
Edward Charles (b. 1901). If Charles William is indeed John Sr.’s grandson-in-
law, his business survived for at least 70 years, from a pre-industrial ‘cottage
industry’ to a place in the modern motor age.
* This may be an error, as if Esther was b. 1788 she would have been only 16
when Thomas was born; she seems not to be in the 1861 census.