The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1874-08-15 00:00:00

THE THING CENTENARIAN.

The Times has published the following letter

Sir,-- On the 24th of April in the year of Grace,
1763 the parish church of the pretty village of Chinnor,
Oxon, was the scene of a ceremony but little noticed
at the time, and not, perhaps, of the greatest interest
to the outside world either then or now, but cer-
tainly fraught with considerable importance to one
individual now living in a small market-town in Hert-
fordshire.

The principal personage on the occasion is a 'wee
mitherless bairn " but a few weeks old, of gipsy pa-
rentage, and whose chief inheritance seems to have
been the nomadic instincts of her race and a constitu-
tion of such steel-like hardness as almost to be proof
against the assaults of disease and time.
The record of the ceremony is found in the parish
register of baptisms for 1763—" April 24th, Eliza-
beth. daughter of Thomas Horam, travailer."
Thomas Horan; traveller, was not likely to make a
very lengthy stay in any one locality, and hence it
is not surprising that some obscurity should rest upon
the earliest years of the gipsy child. Indeed, when
next the curtain rises the scene is changed. The
second act of this drama in humble life that comes
before the notice of the public transpires in the church
of St. James's, at Dover. The principal dramatis
pfrsolue are the gipsy babe (now transformed into a
gipsy bride of twenty-two summers), and Joseph
Leatherland, a private in the Bucks Militia, and
with them a modest retinue of friends and well.
wishers.

A few years are spent g.t Dover, and then the young
couple resume the nomadic life that, though in different
ways, was habitual to them both. For 30 years
they fight the battle of life side by side. Now in
tented camp and now in garrison town, they wander
through the length and breadth of the land, until at
last the soldier dies about the year 1816, at Carrick-on-
Shannon.
After her husband's death the widow returned to her
birthplace and took up her abode with an aged rela-
tive. Years rolled on, and in their train brought
bereavement and trouble to her.

Her eldest son William was returning from a hop-
picking excursion to Kent, when at a short distance
from Hadlow a treacherous bridge gave way beneath
the ponderous vehicle in which he, his wife, and their
young children were travelling, and before help arrived
the whole party were drowned.

In 1830, the death of the relative with whom ahe
lived compelled her once more to beek a new home.
Mainly dependent now upon the exertions and bounty
of others, she dwelt for various periods with those
members of her family who had settled in the neigh-
bourhood of Tring.

It is now nearly 50 years since Betsy Leatherland's
aged form became a familiar sight in the villages of
Hertfordshire as she plodded from place to place seek-
ing to eke out a subsistence from the sale of nets and
other such small industries of her own manufacture.

Her youngest daughter —an old woman upwards of
70—is now living at Chesham, and she herself, the
veteran of five score years and twelve, has for the last
eleven years found a home beneath the roof of some
kind fnends at Tring.
. . . . .

During the present week the bent and withered
form of this ancient dame—the record of whose bap-
tism carries us back to the time when Hogarth
painted and Goldsmith sang, when the names of
Sterne, Walpole, Burke, Fox, Johnson, and Clive
were not mere memories of departed greatness—might
be seen as she toiled among the reapers in the harvest
fields near Tring.

Though decrepit and feeble, the old lady retains her
faculties to a surprising degree; eight, hearing, and
speech are but slightly impaired. She is still able to
employ herself in making nets, which are sold for her
maintenance, and occasionally she will entertain her
visitors with a snatch of song or carol of the olden
times.

Of course, many will doubt the genuineness of this
report of such marvellous longevity. The facts given
are, in the main, taken directly from the lips of the old
lady herself, whose frequent asservation, "I be a tellin'
of the gent the truth," is fully corroborated by the un-
biassed testimony of all the oldest inhabitants in the
immediate neighbourhood. —I am yours, Bcc.,
J. PR:Gorr.
Leighton Buzzard, Aug 7.