George Downer (1808-1864) – Royal Marines officer

George Downer (1808-1864) and Mary Ann Stallard (1817-????).
My 3rd great-grand uncle and aunt.

George was baptised on 28 February 1808 at St John’s in Winchester, the son of Charles Downer and Ann Brent. He grew up in the city and then went on to have a successful career in the Royal Marines.

Details of that career are hard to come by but in 1830 he travelled as a Private 3rd Class with the 14th Company Royal Marines on board HMS Ganges, when it was en route to Malta. The Ganges was an 84-gun second rate ship of the line that wasn’t actually taken out of Royal Navy service until 1923!

He married Mary Ann Stallard on 20 April 1836 at St Thomas’s Church in Portsmouth, now the city cathedral. By this point he had been promoted to Sergeant. Mary Ann had been baptised at St Thomas’s on 18 June 1817 to brewer James Stallard and his wife Margaret.

The Hampshire Chronicle of 1 May 1847 reported that Sergeant Major George Downer of the Portsmouth Division had been appointed a Second Lieutenant and Adjutant of the Chatham Dockyard Battalion. The following year, the Dover Telegraph of 7 October 1848 reported, George was given an engraved silver tea service comprised of a teapot, sugar bowl and cream jug by the non-commissioned officers at Chatham as a mark of esteem and regard. Downer thanked them and remarked on the efficiency of unit. The tea service had been made by local silversmith Delacour.

There is, nevertheless, some confusion about George and the Marines because the Hampshire Advertiser of 14 July 1849 reported on a marine also named George Downer, who received 15 months of imprisonment for assaulting a fellow marine with a knife. My suspicion is that there were a couple of George Downers serving in the Marines at the time, especially as other reports referred to him as a gunner.

My George was living with Mary Ann in Christmas Street in Gillingham, near to Chatham, Kent, at the 1851 Census – his job description unchanged. However, the subsequent years proved difficult for the couple as various insolvency hearings were heard – and it’s likely that they relate to his efforts as a pub landlord. The 20 February 1855 edition of the Maidstone Journal reported on one, in which George had promised to pay his creditors in instalments. The Canterbury Journal of 11 September 1858 noted that George, who had been briefly imprisoned for debt, had been before Canterbury County Court owing £576. It’s unclear where the debts came from but the Maidstone Journal of 31 August 1858 noted that he’d been at the Fleur-de-lis Inn in Canterbury, so maybe the pub business had suffered? He was described at the hearings as a retired lieutenant of marines and adjutant at the Chatham Dockyards.

The 1861 Census recorded the couple living at the Salmon & Ball pub at 32 Lamb Street in Spitalfields, Middlesex, with a servant and a couple of visitors including a John Stallard, who I assume was a relative of Mary Ann. His tenure as licensee was brief – the East London Observer of 9 March 1861 reported that Tower Hamlets Licensing Committee had approved the transfer of the licence to him but the 17 May 1862 edition noted that he had handed it on. The pub itself closed early in the 20th century and was demolished to make way for an extension to Spitalfields Market.

It’s more than likely that George was the Captain George Downer who died in 1864 from his injuries after trying to rescue a hat that had been blown off a woman walking in Westminster. He was hit by a cab in the process and never recovered. This man was living in Parliament Street, Westminster, and had apparently been newly promoted to the rank of captain. The London Weekly Despatch of 23 October 1864 was one of several newspapers that briefly reported the incident. What happened to Mary Ann isn’t clear but she was probably the Portsmouth-born woman visiting the Bolt family in Stamford Street, Lambeth, in the 1871 Census. It appears the couple never had children.

Sources: Birth, marriage, death and burial records including civil registrations from the General Register Office, census returns, military and other records at Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast.co.uk and familysearch.org.
British Newspaper Archive (titles in text).
National Archives Royal Navy records at National Archives.