george nottridge
Subject Name : George Nottridge
(b1810 – d 1884)
Researcher : Pauline Sieler
George Nottridge came from a family of nursery labourers, working at the Goldsworth Nursery which was an important part of Woking’s history for over 200 years.
George was born on 27th September 1810, the third of nine children for James and Mary Nottridge. He was baptised at St Peter’s Church, Old Woking, on 28th October.
The Goldsworth Nursery where the Nottridges worked had been established in the 18th Century for the growing of trees and shrubs, specialising in rhododendrons, and later fruit trees, azaleas and camellias. Rhododendrons had been introduced to Great Britain and became popular for game-bird cover on hunting estates. The Woking area in the 19th Century had large areas devoted to nurseries for growing and development of a wide variety of ornamental plants which flourished in the sandy soil, otherwise poor for general agriculture.
The Goldsworth Nursery was one of the most well-known, and in 1828, at the time when 18-year-old George and his father James were almost certainly working there, the editor of ‘The Gardener’s Magazine’, J.C. Loudon, praised the philosophy of nursery owner Robert Donald.
‘The men employed here are not gardeners who have come in to work for a few weeks or months …. but local labourers who know nothing more of gardening than the performance of the operations of nursery culture which they have been taught, and which they continue to perform year after year till they attain a higher degree of perfection in them than professed gardeners’.
Loudon went on to note that Robert Donald had built cottages on his land for his workmen to live in ‘which does credit to him as a liberal-minded man’.
After George’s father James had passed away in 1834, the 1841 Census showed George, aged 30, living in Goldsworth with his widowed mother Mary, 59, and his siblings Richard (27) and Sarah (20). George and Richard were noted on the Census as ‘ag lab’ (agricultural labourers), going in line with the Goldsworth Nursery ‘job description’ in the 1828 Gardeners’ Magazine article.
The 1851 Census showed four of the Nottridge brothers almost certainly ‘labourers’ at the 
Goldsworth Nursery. George was an unmarried 40-year-old, living with brother John, 25, and their mother Mary, 68, in Cripplegate, Goldsworth. This would have been Cripplegate Cottage, now a listed building, in St John’s Road. Also in Goldsworth was brother William and his family, with brother Richard and his wife Lydia close by at January Hill (now Janoway Hill). A fifth brother, James, was a labourer living with his family on a farm next to Goldsworth.
George and his brothers would now have been working for Robert Donald junior, who took over the running of the Goldsworth Nursery following the death of his father in 1848. One of Robert Donald’s first jobs was to be responsible for the landscaping and planting of shrubs and conifers at the Brookwood Cemetery which opened in 1854.
The 1861 Census was the first to confirm that George’s place of work was the Goldsworth Nursery. George, 50, his 35-year-old brother John and their mother Mary, 78, were living at the 200-acre nursery alongside the owner Robert Donald.
Later in 1861, George married Sarah Spong. Sarah was around ten years older, a nurse, and the widow of gardener John Spong who had died earlier that year. Sarah and John Spong were not recorded at the same address in either the 1851 or 1861 Censuses, so they may not have been living as a couple for some time.
George’s mother Mary passed away in Goldsworth in December 1862, aged 79 of ‘general decay of nature’. The health of George and Sarah was soon a cause for concern too, as the Guildford Union Poor Law accounts for the six-month period up to Lady Day (25th March) 1864 showed them receiving relief for ‘own & wife’s illness’. Six years later, George, 60, and 70-year-old Sarah were inmates of the Guildford Union Workhouse. There are no admission records for the Workhouse, but the Poor Law accounts showed that they spent most of the next 12 months there.
At the time of the 1871 Census, George and Sarah were out of the Workhouse, lodging with George’s widowed sister-in-law Lydia Nottridge at January (Janoway) Hill. Lydia’s husband Richard, George’s brother, had passed away just a few weeks earlier. George was noted on the Census as an ‘ag lab’, but it is not known whether this meant he was still working at the Goldsworth Nursery.
George was widowed on 6th February 1877 when Sarah died in the Guildford Union Workhouse aged 77 from ‘old age’. He also lost his sister-in-law Lydia three months later.
George was in the Guildford Union Workhouse when the 1881 Census was taken. Now 70, it seems likely that George spent the rest of his life as an inmate, passing away there from bronchitis on Christmas Day 1884 aged 74. He was buried five days later at the church where he had been baptised, St Peter’s, Woking.
George, along with brothers Richard, William, John and their father James had all worked in the nurseries around Woking.
The Goldsworth Nursery continued in business until it was sold for development in the early 1970s and is now the site of the Goldsworth Park Estate.
December 2020, updated August 2024
Sources
Ancestry.co.uk
Biodiversity Heritage Library BiodiversityLibrary.org
FindMyPast.co.uk / British Newspaper Archives
Government Register Office GRO.gov.uk
HistoricEngland.org
Nurserymen to the World, The Nursery Gardens of Woking and North-West Surrey and
the plants introduced by them EJ Willson
Surrey History Centre, Woking SurreyCC.gov.uk
Woking Borough Council Woking.gov.uk
Woking’s History & Heritage WokingHistory.org
For a full list of references click here.