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- Notes on Herbert Alfred Bassett from Rick Glanvill (20 Feb 2008)
Please find attached a photo (late 1920s, Bournemouth seafront, Dorset) of my great grandfather, Herbert Albert Bassett, and his wife Maud Henrietta Campion. Herbert was ‘Pop-Pop’ to us grandchildren as my older brother couldn’t prounounce “Grandfather’ when he was a toddler.
Pop-Pop always told the story that his father was a very wealthy man – clerk of works on several large building projects involving water, including the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames. He kept a stables, including racehorses, and lost all his money ca. 1892 in a two-horse ‘match’ that was supposedly fixed.l Inevitably William’s donkey lost and with it went all his worldly goods.
The loss of all his belongings, including the grand house – possibly ‘Highgate’ in Westhoughton, but we had always understood it was in Streatham, London, broke William’s heart. He died bankrupt two years later. After his death his destitute wife Matilda (of Huguenot background) was helped out, set up in with a small boarding house for thespians in London by the society of which William had been a member. We thought this was the Freemasons, but when I contacted them in the 1980’s they seemed to have no record of him.
Pop-Pop always had an air of aristocracy and was regularly mistaken for George VI before the war. I don’t think he was upset by that. Even when he was living with my grandmother in a rented house in Hornchurch in the 1960s he seemed very posh to me (born in 1960). Slim, beautifully dressed, quietly well-spoken and gentle, smiling bu melancholic. He was other-wordly to us, and had apparently never had a proper job for long. My grandmother was born in Fulham because he had a job on the Thames barges for a short while. Towards the end of his life he worked as a first-aider at the Roneo factory in Romford, Essex.
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Bassett Family Association Database
1875 - 1968 (93 years)