| Information for individual 1612 |
Spouse/Children
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| *Thomas BALLANCE (M) | Parents/Siblings
| | Others called Ballance |
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| | | Date | Place | | BirthRecord
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7/8/1749 |
Bethnal Green |
| | | BaptismRecord
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25/8/1749 |
St Matthew, Bethnal Green |
| | | DeathRecord
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20/3/1842 |
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| | | BurialRecord
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25/3/1842 |
Hackney |
| | | YoungPictures
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| | | Life&Work
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| | | Will/Admon
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| | | CensusRecord
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| Born at New Turvil Street, Bethnal Green
Baptism may have been on 25th April rather than 25th August
Birth may have been 6th April rather than 7th August
(David Ballance gives birth as 17th August)
His will is at the London Consistory Court.
FROM DAVID BALLANCE. . . .
Thomas was the first Ballance whose personal appearance we know, as his portrait was painted in old age, and belongs now to John Myres. Note the long, narrow face which often occurs in later generations. He was born in 1749, and brought up to be a weaver. We know from later information that this meant a silk-weaver, as it may have done earlier.
Towards the end of the century his firm was specialising in high-grade black silks. He was apprenticed in 1763 to Francis Rollo, probably his uncle, and was made free of the Weavers' Company in 1770, the year his father died. The following year he married Mary Wood, who may well have been a neighbour's daughter, as the Land Tax entry suggests. But by the end of the year she lay in Shoreditch Churchyard.
When he married again, he chose a bride of French descent, and thereby brought his family into connection with several interesting Huguenot lines. Mary Le Bailly was the only daughter of Matthieu, a weaver and an Elder of the French Church of St Jean in Spitalfields. He seems originally to have come from Cond-le-Noireau, in Lower Normandy, and he was still French enough to make his Will in that language; he had died in 1758. His wife was Marie, daughter of Jean Descarrieres by his wife Esther Dupont.
On their marriage, Thomas and Mary le Bailly moved into a house in Norton Folgate High Street. Here they paid Land Tax on 35 rents in 1780, a considerable property. Mary was the only child and may well have brought Thomas some capital to expand his business. Somewhere here we can see the shift from a master silk-weaver employing a few apprentices and journeymen in his own workroom to an entrepreneur, no longer weaving himself, but financing many looms in poor houses. He would supply the spun silk, pay the weavers weekly by piece-work, and then market the finished silks. Here in Norton Folgate their only child was born on 25 November 1782, and baptised John at the Finsbury Tabernacle on 31 December. This deviation from strict Anglicanism towards Methodism proved only temporary; Ballances of the following century were often evangelically minded, but never dissenting.
Although we know virtually nothing of Thomas and Mary as people, David Descarrieres' journal does give a brief glimpse into the social life of their circle. His sister Anne had married Peter Renvoiz , a baker of Bethnal Green and the owner of considerable house property in the parish, as the Land Tax books make clear. On 26 August 1784, their son, another Peter, was married at Hackney
"to Miss Mary Delforce Daughter of Mrs Delforce of Brick Lane ...... Vintner. The Wedding was kept at the two Black Boys at Hackney, the company composed as follows.
Bride and Bridegroom, Mr and Mrs Renvoiz , father and mother to the bridegroom, Mrs Delforce, mother to the bride, Mr and Mrs Halbourgh, Mr Jacob Delforce, Mrs Tamps and Mrs Descarrieres, David Descarrieres of Brick Lane. Mr and Mrs Smart of Thomas's Street, Mr and Mrs Ballance of Gun Street, Mrs Elizabeth Cullum and her niece Betsy Cullum and little Miss Sarah Perteaux. There was an elegant dinner provided by the Father and Mother of the Bride and Bridegroom as follows: a fine Ham, Boil'd Fowls, Road Ducks, nice French beans, fine Colly flowers & other greens, Apple Tarts, Currant tarts, and other tarts which I have forgot the name of, exceeding good, after dinner some of the Company took a ride in the Carriages some staid at home, others took a Walk, returned about six o'clock, Drank Tea, after Mr Peter Renvoiz senior (Father to the Bridegroom) entertained the company with a song which caused a good laugh, I believe the name of the song was called Sweet Pretty Betty. We went to supper about nine o'clock, & about ten we ordered the carriages to be got ready. Came home thanks be to God all well, & much pleased with our entertainment and Company. Left the new married couple to celebrate their nuptials at Hackney & the Lord bless them both together."
This needs some commentary. The bride and groom survived until 1832 and 1842 respectively, though their only son died at the age of eight. Mrs Descarrieres is the writer's sister-in-law, John's widow. Mr and Mrs Smart are her son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary. Mrs Tamps is Thomas Ballance's mother-in-law. The writer refers to himself in the third person; Mrs Cullum is his housekeeper. Five of that company now lie under the great slab, surrounded by chains, outside the west door of St Matthew Bethnal Green; the building of the vault is noted in the journal, being at the instigation of David's sister Ann Renvoiz , who "had laid the first brick ...... some time before she died".
Here, then, is a modest bourgeois prosperity for which most of those present had, I expect, worked very hard. I wonder if the song would have been thought fit for a wedding reception a hundred years later.... .
Thomas inherited property from his mother in 1786, and was admitted to the Livery of the Weavers' Company in 1788. There was probably more to come to him by the death of his mother-in-law in 1799 (though her Will has not been found), and the Descarrieres bequest of 1807 must have been a welcome addition. Yet he was never rich. He died worth £8,000 in 1842, and it must have been his son who had the energy and business ability to become wealthy.
In 1783, Thomas occupied a property in Gun Street that belonged to Benjamin Mills. It must have been a good deal smaller than the house he had left in Norton Folgate, since it was assessed at a modest 15 rents. He lived there until 1794, by which time the assessment had for some reason dropped to five. In that year, he moved to Steward (or Stewart) Street, the wider, parallel street in the Liberty to the west, where he paid 25 rents on the third house from the south (ie Artillery Lane ) end, a property owned by "the Widow Hawker". This was later numbered as 37. It appears from a deed of 1797 in Tower Hamlets Library that the move may have been forced on him by the termination of his lease, but it also seems likely that fortunes were rising and he could afford a larger property. We do not know at which stage Steward Street became a headquarters, a counting-house-cum-residence, and ceased to be a workshop. Fortunately, there is much information on the technical side of the business in John Ballance's examination before the Parliamentary Commission on the Silk Trade in 1832, but most of this relates to a slightly later period than the 1790s. He implies, however, that from his youth the trade in Spitalfields had grown and prospered for both employers and workers until 1826. There were periods of distress, first in 1792-93, when printed cottons were introduced, and secondly from 1816, in the transition from war to peace. Since at least 1806 (and, he implies, earlier) the firm's business had been in black silks of high quality, and also in satins.
In 1834 he drew up his Will, making his son and wife executors, but Mary died the following year. With her, the last close link to French ancestry was severed. Her father, Matthieu Le Bailly, made his Will in French and it had been his mother's Descarrieres grandfather who left Saint Quentin in 1685. She must have been brought up speaking at least some French. It would be interesting to know what the speech of her generation of Huguenot descendants sounded like; the Franco-Cockney fusion may have been weird.
On Mary's death, Thomas made John Heudebourck his other executor. In October 1841, "being very feeble, and living at Clapton" he handed his Will to his son for safekeeping. It was eventually proved in the Consistory Court. He left 8,000 GBP, of which his son received rather more than half; 3,000 GBP went to grandchildren and a few pounds to old staff in Steward Street. Small as his fortune was in comparison with his son's, it may yet have seemed a great deal to a boy who remembered the bar-parlour of The Rose and Crown during the Seven Years' War. No letters or papers of his have survived. One or two references in his grandson John Descarrieres' letters suggest piety of the expected kind, and there is a Deed of 1836 in the Greater London Record Office relating to a piece of land near Pinner, in which he appears as a Trustee of the Village Itinerancy (for providing visiting preachers), which gives the same impression. |
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