Family Memories with Fay Hampson Here is my great-great-grandmother, Mrs Hayward, in 1880 with her three daughters, twins Polly and Sally, and Kitty born in 1854, who was my great grandmother. Sally married horse breeder Jack Jones, of Whitegate Farm Wrexham. The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) was so impressed by Jack’s Gold Cup winning horses at the Windsor Horse Show, that he started buying his carriage horses from him. Polly kept a summer boarding house on the North Wales coast. Kitty married Henry Hampson and one of their sons was my grandad Herbert Hampson, of whom I have written at length.
Family memories with Fay Hampson. My grandfather loved fishing, but I never had him down as a hunting or shooting man. Imagine my surprise when, a few months ago, my brother told me that grandad had told him he d had a gun to shoot the awks . Now my grandfather s name was Herbert Hampson, but as a true son of Denbighshire and the Shropshire borders, he took little notice of the initial aitch and often made me laugh by telling me he signed his name Apostrophe dot Apostrophe ampson! The penny dropped! But what hawks did he shoot and why? My brother and I were looking at the photograph shown here, taken in 1910 when grandad was 25, of him and his friends outside their pigeon loft.
Gone fishing. I think I can safely say that the Hampsons were a fishing family. My grandfather, Herbert Hampson, represented Wrexham Borough Council on the Dee and Clwyd River Authority during the 1950s, and I can remember going with him at this time to a trout hatchery, where a tankful of small fish were loaded onto a lorry which we followed to the river Dee and watched them being released to fatten up for a few years only to be caught again! Three of the photos show what must have been the same trip in the late 1920s to the Tanat Valley. They show dad, Jeff, fishing. Then, wearing the same clothes, with grandma, then grandma wearing the same clothes with auntie Lil, who was grandad s sister.