|
|
The Bellyse Family (“bell – iss”)
BEL00001
|
|
|
The home page of the Farndale family website of which this section is a part |
The Home page of the Baker family part of the website |
The Baker Family directory |
Notes on the Baker family history |
The Baker Family Tree, which is the best way to search the family history |
We explore
here the relationship between the Baker family and the Bellyse Family.
|
|
|
|
Dr John
'Cockfighting' Bellyse
1738 to
1828 Married
Mary Bayley (1747 to 1784) in 1778 Married
Sarah Hayward (d 1803) in about 1785 Married
Margaret Tremlow (d 1810) after 1803 Married
Ann Brown (d 1847) after 1810 Surgeon Known as
‘Cock-fighting’ Bellyse Founder
of the Waterloo Cup for coursing The Lymes,
Woore Road Woodhouse,
Audlem
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
Edward Bellyse B 1779 |
|
Dr John
Bellyse The Younger 1786 to
20 December 1860 Married
Hannah Baker (BAK00101)
on 27 September 1808 at Mucklestone, Staffordshire A surgeon
(July 1828 and 7 June 1841 Dorfold
Cottage, Nantwich, Cheshire Sandy Lane,
Audlem
|
Sarah Bellyse d 1800 |
5 other
children |
|
|
||||||
|
|
Richard
Baker Bellyse 17 May
1809 to 11 January 1877 Surgeon There is
an inscription in the square at Audlem which reads “In memory of Richard
Baker Bellyse, who practised as a surgeon in this town for 40 years. Born
17th May 1809. Died 11th January 1877. In appreciation of a life spent in
relieving the sufferings of his fellow creatures. A man he was to all the country
dear. By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.”
|
Hannah Bellyse b 1810 |
William
Bellyse 1812 to
1813 |
Eliza
Bellyse b 1815 |
Jane Bellyse 1818 to
1833 |
Edwin Swinfen
Bellyse 1820 to
1877
|
Frederick
Chetwode Hoskins Bellyse 1821 to
1880 He presented
the brass eagle lectern at Audlem Parish Church, as trustee for the Hankelow
Estate Married
Anne Kent and later Marianna Burgess |
Henrietta
Louisa Bellyse 1824 to
1880 Married
her cousin, William Baker the Younger (BAK00121)
in 1849
|
||||||
|
|
Lizzie Bellyse b 1831 |
|
|
|
Edith Ann
Bellyse 1853 to
1934 |
Edwin Reginald
Bellyse 1856 to
1924 |
Louisa Bellyse 1843 to
1873 Frederick
Bellyse 1847 to
1901 John Burgess Bellyse 1856 to
1942 |
|
From
Nineteenth Century Audlem by Marjorie Burton, 1873:
There have
been Bellyses of Audlem for
nearly two hundred years. Dr Richard Bellyse has already been mentioned. His
grandfather, Dr John Belyse, King of Cheshire’s cock fighting fraternity, was
born in 1738 and lived to be ninety. His home was the 16th century
house now known as the Lymes.
Once the
home of Cockfighting Belyse, the Lymes stands on Woore
Road.
Audlem, The History of a Cheshire Parish and its five townships, 1997 recalls the renown of Dr John
‘Cockfighting’ Bellyse:
In times long
past Cockfighting was particularly popular in the parish. For this purpose cocks
were prepared in various ways with special diets (largely of wheat meal bread)
and sweating to get rid of surplus fat. When full blown cockerels they were
‘dubbed’, with the cutting off of the comb close to the head, and the clipping
of tail feathers; there thus being less for the enemy’s beak. The claws were
sharpened and spurs of steel fitted. The fights took place in a ring, made with
chairs, tree trunks etc and measuring about five yards square. The two cocks
were first weighed in ‘cock bags’ and introduced about a yard apart. A fight
lasted approximately fifteen minutes and there were usually fourteen of these a
day. A “Main of Cocks” sometimes lasted a week and invariably one was killed in
each fight. Cockfighting usually took place at the Wakes and frequently at race
meetings.
Perhaps the
most colourful Audlem character was the first Doctor John Bellyse, well known
throughout the country as “Cockfighting Bellyse”. Born in 1738 (he died at the
Age of 90 in 1829), he came from an old Yorkshire family of which Lord Fauconberg
was the head. His father had moved to Frodsham and, before coming to Audlem,
the doctor lived at Stretton, near Malpas.
He was
preeminent in Cheshire and was noted for his famous strain of Brown-Red
fighting cocks which he bred on a large scale. He once had one of his game
cocks stolen and the case was sent for trial;. His bird was produced in court
and he was asked to identify it. Directly it saw the doctor, and after he had
stroked it, it became perfectly quiet and stood beside him while he gave his
evidence. The judge remarked that this was proof enough, the man was convicted
and Dr Bellyse returned to Audlem with the bird in triumph. On his arrival the
bells of St James rang out in honour of the event.
He was also
something of a personality, particularly regarding his dress; this apparent
from a description of him taken from the pages of “Silk and Scarlet” on the
occasion of Chester Races.
“He wore a
blue dress-coat with gilt buttons, light coloured kerseys and gaiters, a buff waistcoat,
and a pig tail, just peeing from beneath a conical low-crowned hat, completed
his attire; while a golden greyhound, a gift of his friend Lord Combermere,
lent a tasteful finish to his snowy frill. He was a walking polyglot on
race-horse pedigrees, from the Godolphin Arabian to Memnon. Pre-eminent and
assiduous as he was in his profession, his patients had to show a clean bill of
health during the Chester race week, or give up the hope of having him. The
Stationers Almanac was not truer to the year than his yellow gig with his
fourteen-one “Brown Tommy” to the Hop yard at Chester, on the Saturday
afternoon.
On the Monday
he sallied forth to the Hotel Row, and received a hearty annual welcome from
all the lovers of ‘the Turf and the Sod’, to whom, from his quiet worth, and
his wonderful memory and information on every point, he had become so endeared.
Years wrought no change in the dress. The cockpit began at eleven, and the
in-go ended after one; and then before a Grand Stand arose, he was always to be
seen stationed on Tommy, in the middle of the Roodee, to watch what horses were
doing all round, and armed with a gigantic umbrella. He held the belief that
there were “always so many fools on a race course” and hence he kept the
umbrella to shoot it our in self defence., in the faces of the young blades as
they galloped recklessly across him from the river rails.”
HH Dixon (the
Druid) writing in 1859.
His
knowledge of racing was confirmed by that great writer Nimrod (Charles James
Apperley, born 1778) in an article in the Sporting Magazine regarding the
effects of weight. Taking as an example a race at Newcastle under Lyme where
four horses, owned by Sir John Egerton, Mr Mytton, Sir William Wynne and Sir
Thomas Stanley, resulted in it being impossible to declare a winner in several
heats. Nimrod had high praise for the handicapper, ‘the celebrated Dr Bellyse’,
for his ‘thorough knowledge of the horses, their ages, and their public
running.’
Apart from
his love of cockfighting and horses Bellyse was also fond of Coursing. In the
well known print “The Waterloo Coursing Meeting” he can be seen on horseback on
the extreme right; to be allowed to ride was considered a special favour in
those days.
From Nineteenth Century Audlem by
Marjorie Burton, 1873:
Cocking was then the chosen amusement of the race
mornings, and no one on this point was so great an authority as Dr Bellyse. He
spoke, too, out of the fullness of his strange experience, as he had the
privilege of all the walks on the Combermere, Shavington, Adderley, Dodington,
Peckforton, Beeston, Oulton and divers other estates in Cheshire, Shropshire and
Wales. In some seasons he set up a thousand chickens, of which barely one third
would be reared or fit to produce at an important main. After dinner on the
Saturday of his arrival at Chester, he gave an audience to his feeder, to sound
him as to the conditions of his cocks, and learn his opinion of the forthcoming
main, and not infrequently that functionality would arrive with a couple of
bags slung over his shoulder, and the pets of his fancy inside.,
During the week he would slip away over and over
again from those who wanted to talk to him about weights and watch his own brown-red
champions busy in the pens, scratching at a fresh cut sod, or a spadeful of the
finest gravel fresh from the bottom of the Dee. He would have a hundred cocks
taken up from their walks for Chester, in order that his feeder might select
the best and put them in for training from the Thursday week to the Monday when
the smaller cocks led off in the five day main. His cocks were mainly duck
wings, but latterly he fought more reds, all of them selected from an enormous
number of birds, and always of the finest form and daintiest feather.
Eggs, sugar, candy water, hot bread and milk, barley,
rice and rhubarb constituted the chief part of the dainty fare upon which Dr
Bellyse’s game cocks were regaled when About to do battle for, as it proved in
many cases, the last time in their lives. Dr Belyse died in January 1829, so
did not live to see the battles royal put to an end by Act of Parliament.
As to John Bellyse the Younger, Audlem, The
History of a Cheshire Parish and its five townships, 1997:
The old man’s son, the second Dr Bellyse, inherited
his father’s passion for coursing and, before he retired to Dorfield Cottage,
always kept greyhounds.
Ther young man’s marriage caused tongues to wag in
the district when he eloped with Hannah Baker from Highfields. They went no further
than was necessary and were married at Mucklestone Church. The following
morning, having read the farewell letter, Richard Baker her father, decided
that a visit to the old cockfighter would not go amiss. He found the gentleman
reading by the open window and expressed himself with some force on the subject
of the good doctor’s son. Bellyse waited for a period of silence before
observing “the gander’s as good as the goose, sir” and returned to his book”.
Dr John Bellyse
the Younger undertook a post mortem after a gruesome murder at Hankelow on the
night of 12 April 1812 (Audlem, The History of a
Cheshire Parish and its five townships, 1997)
(The
Crewe chronicle, 10 January 1974)
(Nantwich Chronicle,
9 December 1982)
(Staffordshire
Weekly Sentinel, 25 November 1955)
(The
Hampshire Chronicle, 1 May 1826)
(Bell's
Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 2 July 1826)
(The Newry Reporter, 31 January 1880)
Richard Baker Bellyse
(The Standard, 10 February 1837)
(The Standard, 18 January 1877)
(The Chronicle, 29 June 1994)