John Tune

Shepherd and Dog Inn, Crays Hill, Essex

The photo of the Shepherd and Dog shows, with some certainty, my great-great-grandfather, John Tune on the left, my great-grandmother Rosemary Elizabeth Tune, and an unknown dandy who we strongly suspect is my great-grandfather John Miles, who several years after this photo was taken, married Rosemary. Rosemary was born in 1859, and here she looks around 10 or 12 years old, so the photo is from around 1870.

Mary Ann Tune (Gardiner), John Tune’s wife, was born in 1835, so the Shepherd and Dog was in the Gardiner family at that time, but I don’t know how long before that. As the newspaper clipping says, the Gardiners had been in the area for a long time. (The clipping says that Mary’s mother was a Gardiner, but it was her father. Her mother was, if whoever did the genealogy work is correct, Sarah Ann Bull.) The Tunes were a sailing family (including a pirate who was hung at Old Bailey in 1761), so they were not from Cray’s Hill.

John Tune was friends with John Miles, a tax collector in London. John Miles was severely beaten while collecting taxes from a recalcitrant tax payer, and as a result was rewarded compensation of 2,000 pounds, a huge sum for those days. Using that as capital, he emigrated to Washington state, where his brother Henry was. John Miles married and had several children, but his wife died. He needed a new wife, so he contacted John Tune and suggested that Rosemary come to Washington and marry him, which she did. My grandfather often talked about how strange it was that his father knew his mother when she was a child, and then later married her.

I have a letter that Rosemary wrote later in life, describing her childhood a bit:

“Recollections of my early childhood are very vague and fragmentary. The earliest that stands out most clearly in my memory was a visit with my nurse to a “dame” school taught by an old woman who lived in a thatched cottage in our village. I suppose her qualifications were limited to the teaching of the alphabet, and reading from a primer, and possibly giving pupils instruction in addition and subtraction. Very few of our villagers could read or write at all.
The next thing I remember was the erection of a school house – very ornamental as to red and white bricks, and colored glass windows. I was duly impressed when one of the workmen informed me that the bench he was making was for me and my little friends. I was then five years of age.

Crays Hill School

My mother, being considered the most highly educated “lady” (the term “woman” only being applied to the lowest class of working people) available in the vicinity, was offered the honor of opening our new school as a teacher, which she accepted.
My father was a sea-faring man, and at that time was away on one of his long voyages with his uncle, Captain Porter, who adopted father when a boy of seven.
Mother and I lived with my grandparents in a rambling old house, which had formerly been a Commercial Inn – in our ends- a Hotel for traveling men. In the summer season, my grandparents rented some of the rooms to people from the cities. One family came to us every year for two or three months, father, mother, and four children. I used to look forward to their visits for our old house and grounds were ideal for children. There was a large garden, with all kinds of flowers, and enormous cabbage roses, also fruit trees, and an immense walnut tree. I have never seen a larger one, even in the States. We children were much addicted to climbing this tree and filled in the crooks of the enormous trunk.
There was the kitchen garden where our man-of-all-work raised vegetables. In this garden was a duck-pond, where ducklings disported. Beyond was an orchard and adjoining it, a meadow, at the foot of which was another pond, much larger, which contained fish, and summer visitors spent hours in this peaceful spot under the pollard willows. We children fished with bent pins on the end of a string, but were only successful in landing efts, a species of water lizard.”

Well, that sounds idyllic. I am going to be in London on the first week of May, and if all goes well my wife and I will have lunch at the Shepherd and Dog.