Whitaker, Philip and Anne, Family

Philip and Anne Whitaker had nine children between 1799 and 1814: Alfred (1799-1852), Joshua (1801-64), Edward (1802-77), Philip (1803-45), Emma (1805-11), Anne (b. 1807), John (1810-64), George (1811-82), and Edwin Eugene (1814-80), all of whom appear in the correspondence as well as some of their spouses and children. Alfred, after working in London and Bristol for most of 1816-21, settled in Frome, where he met and married Sarah Waylen in 1823; unfortunately, like Hannah Towgood Wakeford, she died within a year of her marriage. Maria Saffery composed one poem for Sarah’s wedding and another after her death. Alfred’s second marriage was to Catherine (‘Kate’) Mary Woolbert in 1828, and they had four children, including Alfred Romilly (1831-35) and Edith Rose (b. 1835), to whom Maria Saffery dedicated poems in their infancy and childhood. Joshua would, like his father, become a gentleman farmer in Bratton, as would his son, John Saffery Whitaker (1840-1915), one of five children produced by his marriage to his cousin, Jane Saffery, in 1835. Their first child, Anna Jane (1838-1925), was the subject of three poems by Maria Saffery. Philip Whitaker the younger would die in early middle age in 1845, not long after his cousin, William Carey Saffery, in 1843, and his wife, Selina Eliza Pitt Saffery, in 1844, a period of considerable grief for both families. Anne Whitaker the younger was clearly a favorite not only of her mother but also of her aunt Maria, who visited her often at Holcombe after her marriage to Robert Ashman Green in September 1829. Her second daughter, Rosalie Anne Green (1834-1905) received two poems in her honor by Maria Saffery (see Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 5, poems 181, 197). George Whitaker attended boarding school at Frome and then entered Cambridge University, returned to his mother’s original church and taking orders to become an Anglican priest. He served as vicar at Oakington, Cambridgeshire (1840-51), before moving to Toronto, Canada, where he gained considerable recognition as the first Provost of Trinity College (now a part of the University of Toronto). He did not dissolve all ties to his nonconformist upbringing, however, marrying Charlotte Burton, daughter of Richard Burton, Baptist missionary to Sumatra, in 1844. Anne Whitaker’s last child, Edwin Eugene, married Mary Attwater (d. 1865) in 1841. She was the daughter of Philemon (1787-1832) and Eliza Penney Attwater (1789-1877) of Nunton, and granddaughter of Gay Thomas Attwater (1736-92), brother of Jane Attwater. Maria Saffery wrote a poem commemorating her wedding (Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 5, poem 208), another instance of the continuing connections between the families that comprised the original Steele circle (the Attwaters) and that of the later Saffery circle (the Whitakers) and of the role poetry played in celebrating those connections.

Marjorie Reeves examines the records of Bratton Farm and the farming habits of the three generations of Whitaker farmers – Philip, Joshua, and John – in Sheep Bell & Ploughshare (Bradford-on-Avon, UK: Moonraker Press, 1978), pp. 62-65. A large collection of the letters of Anne Whitaker’s children, both among themselves and to her and her husband, Philip, can be found in the Reeves Collection, Boxes 1, 9, 10-11, Bodleian Library, Oxford.