john benjamin hatt
Subject Name: John Benjamin Hatt (b 1846 – d 1919)
Researcher: Carol Gomm
GUILDFORD UNION WORKHOUSE PORTER May 1880 – September 1882
SECRETS AND LIES!
John Benjamin Hatt was the porter at the Guildford Union Workhouse at the time of the Census in April 1881, having been appointed to the role in May 1880. This was just one of very many different and varied jobs he was to have in his colourful life.
Prior to his appointment at Guildford, John Hatt was the porter for the Farnham and Hartley Wintney District Pauper School, near Crondall, Hampshire. He was one of four candidates interviewed by the Guildford Union Board of Guardians on 20th March 1880 for the post, following the resignation of Thomas Henry Wragg on 1st February. On this occasion the job went to William Keightley, lately the porter for the Sherbourne Union. Keightley’s appointment was approved by the Local Government Board on 17th April, but Keightley resigned from the post just two weeks later due to ill health.
John Hatt must have impressed the Guardians as at their Board meeting on 1st May it was decided to ask him if he would be willing to undertake the role on a temporary basis. John agreed, commencing on 3rd May, and on 15th May he was made permanent.
As porter, John’s main duties had been clearly set out by the Poor Law Commissioners to Workhouses in 1847.
He would have worked closely with the Master of the Workhouse, assisting him in its smooth operation, and deputising when needed.
As well as the standard duties, the Guildford Union Workhouse also required him to oversee the vagrants, and look after the boys during out of school hours.
John’s salary was £25 per annum with the addition of rations, including £4 11s (£1 2s 9d per quarter) for beer, lodgings and laundry included, an increase of £5 on his previous job.
According to the advertisement placed by the Guildford Union, the porter was to be a bachelor or widower ‘without encumbrance’, though as we will discover, John was not quite truthful.
Early life
John Benjamin Hatt was born on 13th December 1846 at Parsonage Farm, Chalgrove, Oxfordshire to farmer Thomas White Hatt and his wife Elizabeth Baker White, née Panter. 
He was the youngest of three children born to the couple before his mother died in May 1847 when John was just 5 months old.
John’s father re-married in 1850, and four more children were born.
When John’s father died in 1868, he left the bulk of his estate to his widow, with the exception of £550 which was bequeathed to his first three children ‘who were already provided for’ . John received £200. What else he had already been ‘provided’ with is not known.
John’s brother Thomas and surviving half-brothers Joseph and Sidney all went on to become prosperous farmers in Oxfordshire. Thomas was by far the most successful. By 1881, at the same time as John was working as a porter in Guildford, Thomas was on a 970-acre farm, employing 33 men, seven women and eleven boys . When Thomas died in 1926, he left the staggering sum of £107,695, worth over £5.5 million in December 2024.
John, however, was not as successful, with the secrets and lies perhaps starting in 1869.
First marriage – first secrets
On 2nd December 1869 John Benjamin Hatt, occupation ‘dairyman’, married 16-year-old Eliza Ruth Tilley, daughter of a dairyman, in Battersea, London.
What Eliza may or may not have known was that just two months earlier Mary Ann Hatt née Spencer, claiming to be the wife of John Benjamin Hatt, had given birth to a son, also named John Benjamin Hatt, at 20 South Lambeth Road, Lambeth. John, the father, was described as a dairyman on the birth certificate, so there can be no mistaking that it was the same person.
John’s second son, Benjamin Tilley Hatt, was born to John and his wife Eliza in November 1870 at Hook, Surbiton, Surrey. On that birth certificate John’s occupation was recorded as ‘beer house keeper’. However, in the Census just four months later, John was living on his own in Paddington, London, and listed as ‘dairyman unemployed’. His wife Eliza and son Benjamin were at the home of her parents in Surbiton.
The 1871 Census also showed that John’s first-born son, John Benjamin Hatt junior as a ‘visitor’ at the Lambeth address where he was born, but now living with seemingly unrelated James and Susan Russell. The whereabouts of John Benjamin and his mother have not been traced since then.
When John’s second son Benjamin was baptised aged 3 in Surbiton in May 1874, John was noted as a ‘clerk’, so it would seem that he had found himself an office job.
John’s wife has child with a famous architect
In August 1877 Eliza Ruth Hatt gave birth to a son named Cecil Henry Crossland Hatt in Newington, South London. Officially the father was registered as John Benjamin Hatt,
occupation ‘Railway Clerk’, but Cecil was actually the son of William Henry Crossland.
Born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, in 1835, William Crossland was a famous architect. He had come to London in the early 1850s to study under the renowned architect George Gilbert Scott, one of the two architects of the Guildford Union Workhouse.
A member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, William Crossland had a highly successful career, designing many well-known churches and public buildings. He had been widowed in January 1876, the year prior to the birth of Cecil Henry Crossland Hatt. Around that time, he was working on plans for the Holloway Sanatorium at Virginia Water, Surrey, and the Royal Holloway College in Egham, Surrey, both buildings renowned for their exceptional architectural design.
In 1881, while John Hatt was employed as an ‘unmarried’ porter at the Guildford Union Workhouse, his wife Eliza was living as William Crossland’s ‘wife’ at Holloway Cottage, Egham. The children, Benjamin and Cecil, both given the surname Crossland in the 1881 Census, were boarding in Margate, Kent, with their maternal grandmother.
William Crossland and Eliza Hatt would continue to live together for the rest of her life.
Death of John’s son Benjamin
Tragedy struck in December 1886, when just 16, Benjamin, the son of John and Eliza, died at sea. Benjamin had signed up for the Merchant Navy on 26th November as an apprentice, joining the ship ‘Earlscourt’. He had perhaps been influenced by the fact that James Crossland, a nephew of William Crossland, was 2nd mate on the same ship.
A few days later Benjamin and James were aboard the Australia-bound ‘Earlscourt’ when it hit terrible weather off the coast of Swansea. Unable to make headway, the ship became stranded in the dark, with the crew
clinging to masts as the ship became waterlogged. Benjamin died on board in James’ arms on 9th December from exposure.
Eliza was distraught. To help with her grief, William suggested that she realise her dream of being an actress, and by 1888 Eliza was performing on the stage as Ruth Rutland.
Eliza died in April 1892 and was buried in the Crossland family vault in Highgate Cemetery, London, alongside her and John’s son Benjamin.
Life after Guildford Union Workhouse for John
John Hatt remained in the post of porter at the Guildford Union Workhouse from May 1880 for over two years, until on 2nd September 1882 his letter of resignation and request for a testimonial were accepted by the Board of Guardians.
Why he left, and where he went after working out six weeks’ notice is not known, but by 1887 he was back living in Hampshire. In September that year he was fined at the Aldershot Petty Sessions for being drunk in charge of a horse and cart at Crondall, Fleet, a second similar offence in 3 months.
Second (bigamous) marriage
Five months later, in February 1888 John Hatt, age 41, bigamously married grocer’s daughter Alice Louisa Judd, 21, at Crondall. He described himself as a ‘widower’ and ‘coal merchant’ of Fleet, Crondall.
John and Alice’s son Thomas Woodward Hatt was born a year later, in February 1889, at Station Road (now King’s Road), Fleet. On the birth certificate John was recorded as being ‘of independent means’, and at Thomas’ baptism in June four months later, he was maybe surprisingly recorded as a ‘gentleman’.
They remained in Station Road, where in July 1896 their daughter Hilda Rosa Bertha Matilda Hatt was born. On Hilda’s birth certificate John was described as a ‘greengrocer’, but, at her baptism the following year he was ‘retired’.
The retirement did not last as by 1901 the family had moved to Farnborough, with John now working as a general labourer and wife Alice as a laundress. Ten years after that in 1911 they were at Albany Villa, Reading Road, Crookham, Fleet, with John having yet another job, this time as a ‘caddie on golf links’. Alice was still a laundress, son Thomas a gardener, daughter Hilda an apprentice dressmaker. They also had two boarders living with them in the six-roomed property, perhaps for extra income.
John continued to change jobs, although Albany Villa had become the family’s permanent residence. He was a ‘pig dealer’ when his daughter Hilda married in 1915, and a ‘wood merchant’ when he died at home on 19th February 1919, age 73, of senile decay and a cerebral haemorrhage. He was buried 5 days later at All Saints Church, Fleet.
The secrets continue after John’s death
It seems John’s wife Alice and daughter Hilda had also had their own ‘secrets’.
The 1921 Census listed Alice living at 2 Albany Villa, Reading Road, with son Thomas, 32, now a wood dealer.
This Census also revealed that Alice had living with her an older son, 33-year-old John Sidney Brian Judd. John had been born in August 1887 to unmarried ‘servant’ Alice in Winchester, some seven months before her marriage to John Hatt. There was no father named on the birth certificate and the child was brought up by Alice’s parents.
It seems unlikely that John Hatt was John Judd’s father, but he surely must have known about him.
Hilda – a young mother
Also listed at Albany Villa on the 1921 Census were John and Alice’s daughter Hilda and her two children – William Arthur Hatt, age 8, and Cecil Thomas Montague Warman, 5.
William had been born to unmarried Hilda in August 1912. Hilda had just turned 16, and, like her mother’s first child, no father was named on the birth certificate.
Two years later in June 1915, just before her 18th birthday, Hilda married Cecil Thomas Brock Warman, then a private in the Army. Their son Cecil was born three months after the wedding.
Hilda’s third child, Barbara Louisa Grace Warman, was born in July 1917. However, Barbara was not the daughter of Cecil Warman, but of Walter William Deverell with whom Hilda had been having an affair, and which led to divorce.
Final years
Alice and Hilda and a third person were fortunate to escape with their lives when they were mown down by a drunk driver in Old Palace Road, Guildford in October 1933. Alice spent six weeks recovering in hospital, with the trial held in late November revealing that when she was admitted to hospital, Alice had not been expected to survive more than a couple of hours. All three recovered and were out of hospital when the trial took place at which the driver was sentenced to four months imprisonment and banned for life from driving.
Alice passed away in February 1936 aged 69, and, like her husband John, was buried at All Saints Church, Fleet.
Hilda re-married in 1938, although her husband was not with Hilda and her brother Thomas at Albany Villa at the time of the 1939 Register.
Thomas died aged 74 in Farnham, Surrey in 1965, with Hilda the same age when she passed away, also in Surrey, in 1970.
March 2024, updated January 2025
Spike Lives is a Heritage project that chronicles the lives of inmates, staff and the Board of Guardians of the Guildford Union Workhouse at the time of the 1881 Census. The Spike Heritage Museum in Guildford offers guided tours which present a unique opportunity to discover what life was like in the Casual/Vagrant ward of a Workhouse. More information can be found here
Sources
Ancestry.co.uk
BankofEngland.co.uk
FindMyPast.co.uk / British Newspaper Archive
General Register Office GRO.gov.uk
Google.co.uk/Books
HighgateCemetery.org
ProbateSearch.Service.gov.uk
Surrey History Centre Surreycc.gov.uk
Wikipedia.org
Workhouses.org.uk
For a full list of references click here