REYNOLDS family Blakeney Awre (General)

by peteressex , Saturday, October 15, 2011, 12:36 (4799 days ago) @ ivan_elsmore

I have just seen this thread.

By astonishing coincidence I recently learned of a letter in the Forest of Dean & Wye Valley Review in September 2005 which reveals a distant connection between me and the deceased three Reynolds. That letter arose from publication of a postcard written in Pitman shorthand by Mr F L Lott, who apparently was the correspondent's great-grandfather.

He, Frederick Llewellyn Lott, had been a guard on the Severn & Wye Railway and later kept a shop at Tutnalls, Lydney, next door to a house called Clydesdale.
He shared this retail enterprise with his wife. She was the daughter of Mr and Mrs Joynes, who kept the turnpike house at Moseley Green. And she, Mary Joynes, was the daughter of John Reynolds who drowned with his sons. The letter of 2005 said simply that the drowning was in "the channel" but this thread makes it clear that this was not the English Channel but the Bristol Channel or indeed the Severn Estuary.

Mr Lott died in 1946, aged 85, at Bourton-on-the-Water, but was buried at Lydney. And this is why: Mr and Mrs Lott had two daughters, Mildred and Kathleen. Mildred married Oscar Sterrey, of 29 Albert Street, Lydney, who was one of my grandmother's brothers. Oscar and Mildred had two children, one of whom was Bob Sterrey. Mildred then died, whereupon Oscar married her sister Kathleen. Oscar became postmaster at Bourton, as did his son Bob. Fred Lott must have moved there prior to his death, or died there while visiting.

Contact with the Review might get you into touch with the 2005 correspondent, one Harris giving an address in Newent which I can't locate on streetmap, but there might be further information from that source about the accident.

The letter of 2005 also confirmed the existence of the memorial at Blakeney Baptist Chapel. I found this thread while searching for further details of the drowning tragedy. Thus, those who drowned were my father's uncle's wives' grandfather and his two sons.