MY GRANDPARENTS' GENERATION

As I read the history of our family I am struck most strongly by our Christian heritage that can be traced back over so many generations. In each generation most of the family have become practising Christians, and our family seems to have been privileged by a special blessing from God. A prayer was passed on to me by my Aunt Grace. She was a great woman of prayer and kept family photos on a ‘prayer board’ in her kitchen, whom she prayed for by name every day. She prefaced her prayer by the words ‘…that not one of them may be missing in the coming Day of Glory’ a family prayer which was perhaps inspired by Jeremiah 23.4 and Matthew 24.30, and which has been passed down through the generations since Pamela Ann Woods Prior (wife of John Francis Prior) first used it nearly 200 years ago. I imagine we all owe a great deal to members of the family who have been faithful in using this and similar prayers to uphold us all.

One of the occupations which involved several members of the family was the family business founded by John Woods Prior, and re-established by the first of the Ebenezers - Ebenezer Prior Ltd, Woolstaplers and Fellmongers, which had offices and warehouses in Chichester, Bradford, Taunton and Wellington (Somerset). When I knew the business during my childhood they were dealing at the Bradford end mainly with high quality wools such as Southdown and New Zealand Southdown, which the business bought at auctions run by the Wool Marketing Board, graded, sorted and had scoured (washed) by a neighbouring business in Bradford. Then the wool would be sold, often to the newspaper printing industry which required wool for their printing rollers which had to bounce back readily after each revolution of the roller. No man-made fibre at the time could do this so there was a ready demand for the wool, especially as the rollers would wear out every fortnight or so! Other wool was sold to clothing manufacturers in Scotland, and I was the driver for grandpa and granny on two occasions when they did their annual tour of Scotland, which was a joint holiday and business trip. Grandpa could never be persuaded to take a holiday unless there was some purpose to it, and the business tour provided this purpose.

Ebenezer and Emily Prior had 12 children. Most of them continued to live in the Chichester area. There was my great-uncle John who apart from being a director of the family business was a leading member of the Open Brethren and a well-known conference speaker. It was intriguing that one of the woolsorters of E Prior Ltd during the Second World War was a Mr Elliott, who was transferred or loaned to Beavans of Holt, Wiltshire, where he eventually retired due to failing eyesight. By the time I met him at Neston Gospel Hall in 1973 he was completely blind. He had no idea therefore who I was, but as soon as he heard me speak at the Gospel Hall he knew that I was a Prior. Apparently my voice was the same as uncle John’s, whom he had heard speak many times in years gone by. The interesting thing was that by now John had been dead for many years, and I had only met John once in my life, for perhaps half an hour, when I was about 8 years old.

Great-uncle Mark was also well known in the Open Brethren. His son was Peter. His second wife Joyce Shadbolt was the mother of Peter’s wife Elizabeth. Peter got fed-up with the family business – it had too many old men (Ebenezer, John, Bert, Mark, Syd, - all drawing good salaries out of a company which was really too small for such a large number of directors, and dominating the control of the business when Peter and my father should have had far more say. So Peter left, and with his wife Elizabeth went into social work, looking after old lags in hostels for ex-convicts. For this work he was eventually honoured with an MBE

Great uncle Gilbert was known usually as Bert. He remained single all his life. In his later years he lived appropriately at Pryors farm, Nyetimber, near Bognor, a family property which he inherited. He owned a yacht, was rather dapper, and liked to use the family crest on his notepaper!

Uncle Bert

Three of the sisters, Hannah, Rhoda, and Emily Ballard lived at Kensington Cottage in Fishbourne near Chichester where I met them as a child. They and the house had a delightful Victorian feel about them. Hannah and Rhoda were single; Emily was widowed.

Hannah and Rhoda (screenshots from 8mm film)

In 1998 I returned to Fishbourne to see if the house still stood. It is there on the main street, but its surroundings have deteriorated completely as the village has grown; and the area is now almost overshadowed by an awful viaduct which is part of the Chichester by-pass.

Kensington Cottage

The old long-case clock which I now possess used to be at ‘K.C.’ and before that at Donnington Cottage.

Mary married into the Shippam family who were the big meat-paste manufacturers in Chichester, and had a daughter called Everil who was a gynaecologist in private practice.

Jessie married Charles Steinitz. Their son Paul Steinitz became well-known as the founder and conductor of the London Bach Choir.

Then there was Sydney, seen by the others as the black sheep of the family because he was the only one who broke away from the Christian faith. He went off to be a banker in Brazil but returned after the second world war and joined the Bradford branch of the family business. When he saw me he always gave me half-a-crown which I thought was riches indeed (grandpa would only give me a silver sixpence – but much more regularly). He was married but had no children. They gave me a violin when I was a teenager, which is still in the family.

Uncle Syd used to annoy my father because he would get Eddy the general driver and handyman from the business to come out in the car to Saltaire where they lived, to pick up his wife (Aunt Mabel) and take her in to Brown Muffs, a very respectable department store in Bradford, where they would have lunch and she would have her hair done. Father thought it was a misuse of Eddy’s time. (Eddy was a cheerful chap who was always joking. He would wear a peaked cap when driving, and because it didn’t have a badge on it he fixed on a tin Marmite bottle lid to look like a badge. He was the origin of a number of strange sayings which our family used, like calling fish and chips ‘finerks’).

I know virtually nothing about the remaining great uncles: John Woods Prior and Richard Henry Prior, though I had some contact with Richard Henry’s son - uncle Dick, who was a squadron leader of spitfires in the war, later a housemaster at Kings School Canterbury, then Headmaster of a school in Nigeria, then came to teach temporarily at Bradford Grammar School just after I had left in 1960, and finally was headmaster of a new school in Oxford. Dick and his wife Joan retired to Shaftesbury.

Dick Prior in the RAF during the war

Dick and Joan Prior with us

Their son Mark is a monk at Taize.They also had a daughter called Hazel. Uncle Dick’s sister was Aunt Peggy, (Margaret Prior) who was headmistress of Ellerslie School for girls in Malvern. After retirement she lived in Long Hanborough and then Woodstock, and in both places was a remarkably strong Christian influence. I attended her funeral in 1999, where the vicar gave a talk in which he indicated that she had been a stronger factor in the growth of his church than he had. She had loads of energy and always had time for people, and of course a great interest in young people. I have no photos of Peggy, but when we visited Malvern some years ago we discovered that there is a memorial garden to her there.

Ebenezer Francis Prior was my grandfather. He was grandpa to me, but affectionately known in the family simply as Eb. As a child he had been brought up in the Calvinistic environment of Providence Chapel, but after coming to live in Bradford he founded a Brethren Assembly whose links were with a branch of the exclusives known as the Kelly Brethren. It was in this environment that I was brought up. Grandpa was a very devout man who loved his bible and his library of Christian books. In my early childhood he and Granny lived at Burley-in-Wharfedale in a large end-terrace house with a substantial garden and a large hen-run. Previously it had had a tennis court at the back, but after the war this had been compulsorily purchased as part of a new housing estate. (Over the years Burley has continued to grow and is a much bigger village now). He would drive each day to ‘the office’ which was then in Cheapside in Bradford where the firm had warehouses and an office which was delightfully Victorian in feel – almost like a scene out of Dickens with high wooden desks and ancient swivel chairs. There was a mini-telephone exchange on grandpa’s desk with old-fashioned ‘eyelid’ indicators on it. The warehouses were piled high with wool, and there was a door on each floor leading out to the crane which would hoist bales of wool on and off the lorries. The painting ‘A bit of old Cheapside’ happens to be a picture of our firm (probably before it was owned by us).

Subsequently the building in Cheapside was demolished and the firm moved into one of our other warehouses (we had three in Bradford) at the bottom of Dyson Street. This building was still standing in 2022, though others nearby had been demolished. It is now called Ruby House and has been converted into apartments

The warehouse and office in Dyson Street

Grandpa and my father with fellow woolmen

Grandpa at the old Wool Exchange in Bradford

Whilst Shippams and Ebenezer Prior Ltd were probably the two most significant businesses in Chichester in the 19th Century, the picture of the Wool Exchange in Bradford in the 20th century indicates that Ebenezer Prior Ltd was in fact only a small part of an enormous wool industry in the North of England.

It is worth noting that the business of Ebenezer Prior Ltd had an exceptionally good reputation. Many businesses drive hard bargains; many are unscrupulous or dishonest, but a deal made with our business could be completely relied upon, and this gained the company and those who ran it a great deal of respect in the local business community.

E F Prior ('Eb') about 1960

On Sundays grandpa and granny would drive to ‘the meeting’ in Bradford which was held in the Sunday school room of the German Evangelical Church. Later on they moved into the church building itself, which the meeting rented, so we had the odd mixture of a very puritanical and simple meeting in a building with stained glass windows and a pipe organ. No instruments were used at the breaking of bread meeting in the morning, but the organ was used at the gospel service in the evening, and as a teenager I was often the organist. The preachers were often really boring (and grandpa for all his enormous enthusiasm was not a gifted speaker, to my way of thinking), so when I was organist I could hide in the organ loft and read a book (usually a worthwhile Christian book, to ease my conscience!) to while away the time between hymns.

Granny (originally Elizabeth Kennedy of Dumfries) had two unmarried sisters, aunts Jean and Jessie, who managed a hosiery shop in Skipton and subsequently in Ilkley. In later life, grandpa, granny, Jean and Jessie all moved into a detached but not very big house in Harden, near Bingley, where they ended their days. Grandpa and Granny’s grave is at Bingley cemetery. When David was little I managed to get a colour slide of four generations of Priors, Grandpa, father, me and David. This was taken in the conservatory at Harden.

My father Jack Prior (Ebenezer John Woods Prior) was born in 1914 and lived first in Great Horton (Bradford) until the family moved to Burley-in-Wharfedale. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and later at Ilkley Grammar School. One of his teachers, Miss Fisher, also taught me when I went to BGS. She was affectionately known to us as Old Ma Fishcakes.

Father had two older sisters:

Norah who married Leonard Thurlow. Their two daughters are Mary and Margaret.

Grace who married Hugh Lockett, and their children are David, Anthony, Merilyn, Gillian and Andrew.