Subject

Co-churchwarden of Mary Abbots Church, Kensington, August 1817.

British History Online has some houses in nearby Ansdell Street being built for a 'Thomas Chancellor' which we think might well be our Mary Abbots churchwarden: "A stone tablet on the north wall of No. 19 shows it had been built in 1824 for Thomas Chancellor, a jobmaster who owned the site as heir of Jonathan Hamston ... Southward again, Nos 25 and 27 Ansdell Street, together with Nos. 19 and 20 St. Alban's Grove, were also built for Chancellor - here by John Saunders, a carpenter, between 1824 and 1829."

Jonathan Hamston was a carpenter, builder and undertaker who built many working men’s houses across Kensington.

Chancellor's name appears on a short list of people who occupied (but didn't own) messuages on the South side of Kensington High Street. That's not odd but the list is part of an 1826 schedule to 'The Statutes of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 10' which strikes us as strange. We thank Google for putting these documents on-line but when large they are nigh on impossible to find your way around. We think the Act with this schedule may be about demolishing some properties in order to develop an area but if you want to be sure you'll have to do the work yourself.

Also perhaps it is this Thomas Chancellor who is the subject of a recondite discussion in The Gardeners' Chronicle, Volume 3, 1843, on whether, as a coach-master, he is entitled to the term 'Esquire' in a list of jurors. A churchwarden argues that he's been instructed to give that term to everyone who is a "Commissioner of Land-tax".

Some grand Victorian plaques give the term 'Esquire' to some names but not others and we'd always thought there must be complex etiquette rules for this, which would shift over time, until the term was dispensed with altogether, to everyone's relief.