Woollcombes Reunited

Welcome to this Family History Website which, on July 8^th 2023, triggered the first, highly successful, Woollcombe Family Reunion at Brockfield Park, York. That Reunion, generously hosted by Charlie and Hatta Wood and organised by Click Mitchell and David Woollcombe, brought together Woollcombes from across the UK and around the world in a delicious lunch, addressed by our host. It was followed by a review of the Family History (see Here). A small group then toured Woollcombe landmarks in Devonshire, including Woolacombe Bay, Ashbury Church, Rumleigh House and Hemerdon Manor.

The Reunion has also resulted in the first major revision of this Website’s landing page: four years ago, the first home page was titled: “A Tale of Two Houses,” explaining that: “…our family is split, quite decisively, between the Ashbury and the Hemerdon Woollcombes. Quite why – and how – it is the purpose of this website to describe.” 

Well if the Brockfield Hall reunion did nothing else, it finally laid to rest that myth that we Woollcombes are a Divided Family.  We are not! There was no acrimonious split: unlike the famous blood feud between the Grangerfords and Sheperdsons in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – famous because no one could remember how it started!  There is no mystery about how the split in the Woollcombe family started. As the Family Pedigree in the Gallery shows below, in the reign of Henry VIII, William and Radegunde Woollcombe had 4 sons: Robert, Baldwin, John and William. John and Baldwin’s line quickly died out – but William married Johan and had 4 x surviving children from whom descended the Ashbury side of the family. And Robert married Emma and their children launched the Hemerdon side of the family.

They were all living close to each other in South Devon, near Plymouth, so probably didn’t even think of themselves as different sides of the family until William’s great grandson, Henry, married Elizabeth Walter in 1694. She was 16-years older than him and heiress to the Ashbury Estate, 30 miles north of Plymouth. They had no children, so the estate passed to Henry’s nephew, John, the Plymouth MP – then to John’s brother, William. Neither of them had any children, so it then passed to Philip who married the daughter of the Bishop of Exeter and they had 3 x children. It was their son, John, a High Sherriff of Devon,  who married Mary Morth from Cornwall and then, together, enlarged the Manor House which stood beside the small Church in the hamlet of Ashbury in the 1750s.  A few years later, in 1790, Plymouth surgeon, Thomas Woollcombe, bought the land around Hemerdon and gave it to his daughter, Maria. She married her cousin, George Woollcombe, and they built Hemerdon House together raising their family there. 30 miles was a long way in those days – so not unnaturally, the two sides of the family drifted apart.  Their sons and daughters would not have grown up together, or even seen much of each other, so it became a useful short-hand when Woollcombe met Woollcombe, to ask “Which side of the family are you: Ashbury or Hemerdon?”  

It will probably continue to do so for generations to come but, at the end of a year that has seen divisions engender so much agony and violence across our world, I hope you will forgive me for asserting an end to the Tale of Two Houses, and claiming that Woollcombes are Re-united.  As we saw with the Tale of Two Bishops in the 2022 Update  (see Here), both sides of the family have produced distinguished figures in the church. A cursory look at this family archive will show you that there have been brilliant examples from both sides of the family who have served their communities, country and planet in the armed forces, the legal and medical professions, as artists, missionaries, adventurers and now international development specialists. Yes – there may have been some Black Sheep too, but I have not come across any. Yet!! 

Rather, I choose to celebrate the careers of people like the man above: Admiral George Woollcombe.  He helped start the West Africa Squadron which, between 1807 and 1860 seized approximately 1,600 ships involved in the slave trade and freed 150,000 African slaves who were being shipped to the Americas. This model of one of the ships he commanded, HMS Victor, sits in the entrance hall of Hemerdon House and further information about him can be found here.  

Also, during the Reunion, I met Philippa Morrison, grand-daughter of the Rev. Edward Percy Woollcombe, father of Bishop Kenneth Woollcombe.  She read me extracts from some of the letters he wrote home while serving as an Army chaplain during the 1^st World War. Philippa’s story of “My Grandpa” can be read here. 

Many, many Woollcombes lived and died in the service of others – a tradition which lasts to the present day with so many of our living family members are engaged in caring professions.  It is those living family members we wish to focus upon. We will note and celebrate as many new arrivals in the Woollcombe family as we can each year and look to find out more about the work of different Woollcombes around the world. As my son told me when I started this archive, “I am not really interested in who begat whom a hundred years ago. I am interested to find out where other Woollcombes are in the world and what they are doing with their lives.”

For me, the fascination lies in how we are all linked in an unbroken chain of DNA going back at least 1000 years. For Woolacombe features in the Domesday book. Woolacombe Tracey was the seat of the Tracey family, famous because Sir William de Tracey was one of the 4 assassins of Thomas á Becket in Canterbury in 1170. This gives rise to the family myth that a Woollcombe held the horses of the assassins while they committed the murder. Also, the name, “Woolacombe,” may not, as many have told me, be related to sheep farmers in a valley. Rather it seems to have been drawn from the presence of wolves in the valley above Woolacombe Tracey. Our ancestors may well have been those who hunted, or protected the aristocracy from, the wolves. 

This Family archive is far from finished: there is a ton of work to do to add known family members, especially on the Hemerdon side. And we need to have more photographs and expanded biographies of Woollcombes, past and present. So if you have time and the interest to help, please contact me:  David@peacechild.org. And I will set you up with the passwords and a training so you know exactly how to add names, photographs and stories to the site. 

And please – encourage your children and grand-children to look at it! Urge them to soak up the rich history that flows through their veins, and the extraordinary genes that they are privileged to carry forward into their lives and the lives of their descendants! 

David R Woollcombe
Keeper of the Woollcombe Family Archive
December 2023