🎼🎻Minnie Margaret Horniman🎶

While looking through eBay recently to see if anything interested me—of course, lots of old photos did—I came across this young lady. The seller had written down what was on the back of the CDV except the surname, which he couldn’t decipher.

So I had to know, and I’m so glad I did, as this photo has taken me on a fabulous artistic journey of Minnie and her extraordinary descendants.

It looked like Hor with an i in the middle then ending with an. A huge advantage having a date written on it. It says ‘Taken August 1877 aged 10 years and 11 months‘. So Minnie was born in 1866, possibly September.

I then turned to Find My Past. Civil Birth records, put in Minnie, exact. Then 1866, exactly. Only 1,970 results. Scrolling through to the surnames beginning with H I went through them carefully and then I saw HORNIMAN it fitted what I could decipher and she was born in Lambeth, she also had a middle name M.

It listed the mother’s maiden name as Fairchild. What a great start to the tree. I filled in what I had, and also a connecting record had come up with a marriage for Minnie in the 2nd Quarter of 1889 to either Edward Cross or Charles William Faulkner; it turned out to be Charles.

I fairly quickly found that Minnie’s parents’ names were Charles Robert Horniman, who was born in 1841 in Plymouth, Devon, and Esther Amelia Fairchild. The couple had married on 5 October 1863. Minnie was the younger of their two daughters. The eldest was Esther Amy, born in 1864. She sadly died when she was 15 on 28 August 1880.

Phthisis is an old name for tuberculosis (TB)

Charles had died as a young father on 14 January 1870 in Surrey at the age of 28, leaving Esther a widow with her two young children.

Phthisis pulmonalis, also known as tuberculosis (TB)

As you can see by the death certificate of Charles, he was a Civil Servant.

Minnie Margaret Horniman was born on 17 September 1866 in Lambeth, Surrey. She married Charles William Faulkner on 20 April 1889 in Saint Mark, Regent’s Park: Prince Albert Road, Camden, England. They had four daughters. Minnie died in July 1916 in Hendon, Middlesex, at the age of 49.

Minnie’s husband Charles was a Publisher, he had his own company, and he has several of his works in the National Portrait Gallery, link here; Charles William Faulkner & Co (CWF & Co) I found a short Biography on the The British Museum website; “Print publisher, London. E.C. was founded by Charles William Faulkner as a Christmas card business together with Albert Hildesheimer (q.v.) In 1885, the partnership ended with Faulkner taking over the business, becoming a limited company in 1905. They published family card games, calendars, Christmas and birthday cards, diaries and story books”.

This is just one of his Postcards. By C. W. Faulkner & Co. Ltd.

More info here from Wikipedia: Charles William Faulkner’s company was based at number 79, Golden Lane, London while much of the high-quality printing was done in Germany.

The illustrations were produced by artists including John Bacon, Albert Ernest Kennedy, George Washington Lambert and Ethel Parkinson. The games included variations of traditional games like Happy Families, Snap, Tiddlywinks and the egg-and-spoon race. One popular line was Misfitz – a trick-taking game involving assembly of characters cut into three segments – which was produced with a variety of themes, including Alice in Wonderland.

An image of the Alice in Wonderland Misfitz card game from the Young V & A Collection. Published 1900-1925.

Family

Minnie and Charles‘s four daughters were:

(1) Essie May Faulkner became a Violinist. She was born on 22 March 1890, and she married Thomas Harold Hunt Craxton on 12 December 1914 in Middlesex. Essie died in October 1977 at the age of 87.

Thomas was very interesting. Known as Harold Craxton in his professional life, he was an eminent pianist and teacher.

The Craxton Memorial Trust. http://www.craxtonmemorialtrust.org.uk/ was established in 1971 in memory of Harold Craxton, with the goal of supporting and encouraging young, talented musicians in need of financial assistance. The trust also honours his wife, Essie, and his daughter, Janet Craxton, a distinguished oboist who, like Harold, served as a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

Lots more about Harold and his family and work here: Craxton-Harold.htm including the following information.

Harold Craxton rapidly established himself as an accompanist and, for an intense period, toured the world in the train of the likes of Madame Albani and Dame Nellie Melba. During some concerts for troops, he met a violinist called Essie Faulkner and married her around 1915. It was a highly successful marriage, ending only with Craxton’s death in 1971 (Essie died in 1977). As well as providing him with six children, Essie seems to have had a naturally hospitable disposition, and the Craxtons always found space under their roof for many of the current students and protégés. Ronald Kinloch Anderson, Alexander Kelly, Alan Richardson and Denis Matthews were notable beneficiaries, and I am assured that there were rarely fewer than twenty people at the dinner table. Fortunately, their houses, both pre- and post-war, were large.

As mentioned, the couple had six children:

(a) Charles Timothy 1916-1995, was a test pilot for Spitfires during WW2.

(b) Harold Antony 1918-1999, known as Antony Craxton C.V.O, the BBC’s Royal and state events television director for many years. Described as a legend of outside broadcasting, he produced Queen Elizabeth II’s first Christmas message on TV. The celebration of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 was his 200th royal programme and his last before retirement. He was advanced to CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order)in that year.

(c) Robert Trevor 1920-2019, an electronics engineer, he married Enid Youngman and their son Robert Stephen Craxton was a British Physicist.

(d) John Leith 1922-2009, he was an English painter. He lived and worked in both Chania and Crete in Greece and London. His love of Crete extended to his being one of the British Honorary Consuls there. He died aged 87, survived by his long-term partner Richard Riley. (Info Wikipedia)

More here about John: John Craxton the Artist

(e) Micheal C 1925-2011 “A devoted MP, Councillor and Mayor”

and (f) Janet Helen Rosemary 1929-1981. was an English oboe player and teacher. She married Alan Richardson, pianist and composer, who was twenty-five years her senior and who had lodged with the Craxton family when she was a child. Their musical worlds were complementary.

(2) Phyllis Margaret Faulkner was born in 1892 in St Pancras, Middlesex. She died aged 10 in September 1902 in Kent. Cause of death was Diptheria (Diphtheria is a potentially fatal contagious bacterial infection that mainly affects the nose and throat, and sometimes the skin).

(3) Amy Sylvia Faulkner, known as Sylvia, was born on 4 December 1897. In 1921, she was living with her sister, Essie and her much loved musical family working in Physical Culture at Bostock Brown School Physical Culture.

Sylvia died on 24 June 1972 in Poole, Dorset, at the age of 74.

(4) Margaret Amy Faulkner known as Amy, was born in 1899 in Bromley, Kent. She became an Artist. Amy died on 22 February 1992 in Ealing, Middlesex, at the age of 93.

I’ve only compiled a fairly small tree for the family, direct link to Ancestry tree here: Horniman Minnie Family Tree

This census below is the only one where all the family are together as Phyllis sadly died the following year.

Once again, Find My Past came up trumps when I was looking for the family in 1901. Whatever variations I put in, even neighbours on the same page, didn’t produce this result on Ancestry.

This beautiful church of Saint Mark, Regent’s Park: Prince Albert Road, Camden, England was where Minnie married Charles back on the 20 April 1889.