Anne Holbrook's Bigamist Marriage at 10 Guinea Street | A House Through Time | S3 E2

At 10 Guinea Street in Bristol, a hidden scandal erupts when Anne Holbrook marries a man who is not free to wed. Bigamy, riots and heartbreak reveal the house's true past. Delving into the archives of Number 10, we uncover how Anne Holbrook, daughter of mariner Joseph Holbrook, was marked in her father's will for having "misbehaved and disobliged me and her mother." In 1783, Anne wed by licence to a schoolmaster named James, whose oath claimed he was a widower under a £1,000 penalty if false. His own pamphlets later reveal only a private separation from a first marriage, not a court divorce, making his union with Anne bigamy. The same pamphlets show scandal swirled around both spouses: accusations of "indecencies with the female sex" against James and a vicious slur that Anne was "a common prostitute out of a brothel." Within five months, after "rugged scenes," James fled to Wales, and Anne's second chance at respectability collapsed. She died five years later, her voice lost to others' records. From the same house rises John Curl Haberfield. Apprenticed in 1802 and later a Bristol lawyer, he navigates the fallout of the 1831 Bristol riots and the surge of Chartism in 1839. As mayor from 1837, Haberfield writes to the Home Secretary about fiery torchlit rallies on Brandon Hill led by Henry Vincent. Cautious and calculating, he avoids a repeat of bloodshed; later knighted in 1851, he becomes a six-time mayor of Bristol. The rooms also echo with the life of domestic servant Hester Gray, who toiled alone for the Harris family before marriage took her to Temple Backs. In 1878, after a pub quarrel at the Blue Bowl Inn over her wish to sing, her husband Henry Parsons brutally assaulted her. His sister Elizabeth fell and died on the stairs; Henry was fined just 10 shillings. The inquest took place at Bristol's General Hospital on Guinea Street, laying bare how few protections working-class women had. And we meet William Robert Martin, youthful schoolmaster turned mail-order physiognomist at 10 Guinea Street. By 1876, suffering auditory hallucinations of "voices from the clouds," he was admitted to the Bristol Lunatic Asylum, even penning a plea to Queen Victoria. He died there of tuberculosis in 1887. #AHouseThroughTime #Bristol #10GuineaStreet #AnneHolbrook #BristolRiots #Chartists #History