Remarkable Residents 3: Colley Bedford

He is another resident on our 19th century register whose life shows that having the right connections helped in getting a place in the Charterhouse until well into the 19th century.  Colley Bedford was born in Folkingham, Lincolnshire, in 1789.  He married his first wife, Louisa Kirk, when he was only 17, in Sheffield.  We know nothing about his subsequent work and travels until 1821 when Louisa died in Hull "in the prime of her life" [Stamford Mercury].  By this time Colley was a tailor.

This ad is from the Hull Advertiser of 31 May 1822.  Whether or not he had "just returned from London" is dubious, since he said exactly the same thing in an ad a year later.
In 1825 Bedford remarried, to Sarah East, the daughter of a Lincolnshire farmer.  By the 1830s he had become involved in public life.  In 1833 he was elected Surveyor of the Highways, and also as a church warden for Holy Trinity church.  The latter post was contentious.  James Acland was another man proposed but rejected.  How involved Bedford was with Acland at this stage is not clear, but by 1835 he was on the committee of the Hull Reform Association, Acland's campaigning radical political group.  Another future Charter-house resident, John Jackson, was also involved.  At some point Bedford was elected to the Board of Guardians and on 5 December 1836 he was appointed their auditor.  In 1837 he put forward a motion to eject the man who had been Surgeon to the Guardians for 35 years.  This sparked a move to get him disqualified as a Guardian.

The Board of Guardians were very powerful, administering the Poor Law, overseeing workhouses and other forms of poor relief.  It was meant to be politically neutral but that was clearly impossible.
Bedford also became prominent in Freemasonry, becoming Master of the Minerva Lodge in Hull.  He was also a member of the Brough Hunt, enjoying hare-coursing.
In his business life Colley Bedford had formed a partnership with John Turner Milner, described as a pastry cook, in 1834 or earlier.  In 1840 the partnership was declared bankrupt.  Bedford soon tried to bounce back.  By 1841 he had moved both his business premises and his home to a house on King Street.

By 1845 he was advertising in the local papers again.

(Google does not offer any help with what exactly a "pantelot" was.)  He makes plaintive reference to his four years of  "considerable difficulty" and the "real friends" who continued to support him.  But he could not recover his former prosperity.  In April 1846 his wife Sarah died, "after a long and painful illness, borne with Christian resignation" according to the notice in the local paper.  She was only 46.

The Freemasons stood by him, presenting him in February 1847 with an inscribed arch jewel, a masonic emblem.  But by 1848 Colley Bedford was an insolvent debtor again.  He was discharged in March 1849, but in order to pay off his debts he had had to sell his house and its contents.  There was no way back.
His connections proved valuable.  On 2 October 1851 he was elected to a room in the Charterhouse.  He died on 26 April 1857.