Benjamin Annable

[nitramwe]

--- In bellhistorians at yahoogroups.com, Richard Smith <richard at ...> wrote some very interesting stuff, please refer to it if necessary. 

There does not seem to be much known for certain.
My interpretation of the accounts of burials in the parochial registers of St. Bride's church state that on January 22 1756, Benjamin Annable, aged 53, was buried in the vicinity of the church porch.
On page 30 of `History of College Youths', Trollope has it that:
"In the year 1703 a man named Benjamin Annable went to live as a lodger with one, Charles Mathews, in Dove Court, Gutter Lane, a street which runs northward from Cheapside. He had with him his wife Margaret and an infant son just a year old, who was named after his father. The man was a porter by trade and he must have been a steady sort of man and in constant work, for he was still there when he died. In 1713 his wife, who meanwhile had born him another son, married again. Where they came from and where young Benjamin was born, I have not been able to trace. Likely enough it was somewhere in the country, for the name was a rather uncommon one in London."

It seems likely that baby Ben Annable, baptized at Cripplegate on 28 Aug 1702 is the same child, with his parents presumably living nearby, but when his parents apparently split up, it is not clear to me, whether 13 year-old Ben stayed with his father or took off perhaps to Cambridge,with his mum. My guess is that the parents perhaps had originally come from there and mom and her two children returned. BA joined the CY in 1721 when he would have been 18, I don't know if the Society has any specific details of where he was living when he joined, but it might have been Cambridge. 

I know of no peals rung by Annable which were not College Youths
I think his first with them was Grandsire Cinques in 1724, when he rang the 2nd, but within a month he called a peal of Grandsire Caters at St. Magnus the Martyr which certainly suggests that by then he was living in London. Then as now, the CY did not teach, so he must have learned with other ringers...that the Cambridge records do not go back before the rather critical year of 1724 is sad, they might have shed some light on this.

Apart from occasional apparent excursions to Cambridge & to Oxford, most if not all of his ringing thereafter is London based, therefore if he ever worked as a servant of Trinity College, Cambridge, it would have been as a teenager and in his very early twenties.In his lifetime he established such a reputation as a fine ringer that it is not surprising that Cambridge ringers should have claimed at least a bit of him as their own.

That he was a baker was the conclusion first made by Jasper Snowden who had made a lengthy study of Annable's Notebook. I think this was pure speculation based on the fact that the word `baker' appears on the first page of the notebook which also includes Annable's name. 

Trollope seems to expand this when he writes: "He was apprenticed to a baker
" Undoubtedly JAT had also studied the notebook but gives us no indication as to why he thought this to be so.(Is there a Registry of Apprentice Bakers that he might have consulted?) I am not totally convinced because as I recall, the name and the word do not occur together as one might expect but on the page are quite separate, along with a hotchpotch of scribbling; I seem to remember the words 'William' and`Amsterdam Coffee House' also occur along with blotches and other hardly decipherable scribbles. I hope to get up to London soon and take another look at this book. 

He was not considered to be a `gentleman' by Thomas Hearne who, in his diary wrote of Annable being in a company of I think 15, walking from London to ring at Oxford, while a `gentleman' of the same company rode on horseback. I would guess that in all probability, Ben was a tradesman, possibly a baker living most of his life in London. 

Eddie Martin